M oiteni M iracle Valentine Burke's Redemption
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Note.— The story of Valentine Burke has many times been told with more or less accuracy. We have often heard Mr. Moody tell if in a thrilling way. No man is better qualified to give a full and authentic account of Burke’s life and conversion than Rev. C. E. Paxson of Richland, Mo., and his story is here presented, with a photograph from the rogue’s gallery in St. Louis and one taken sometime after his conversion.
TOURING one of Mr. Moody’s evangelistic cam paigns in the city of St. Louis many years ago, there lay in jail at that place a burly Irish man, about 40 y e a r s of age, named Valentine Burke. His pic ture had long dec orated the Rogues’ Gallery of the
ber, having gotten the impression that religious people were mostly hypocrites, and at any rate such things were not for him. His only variations from a life of crime were when he had kept a saloon for a brief period on the St. Louis levee and when he had worked in a silver mine in Socorro, N. M., for a short time in an emergency. He then was charged with- a crime for which he expected to have to serve another term in the penitentiary. A NEWSPAPER CONVERT He had been placed in charge of the prison library and thus had the first oppor tunity to see the daily papers—one of which announced that it would publish ‘Mr. Moody’s sermons in full, as a new departure in journalism at that time. One morning as Burke opened the paper his eye was caught by a heading, “The Philip pian Jailer,” and there followed Mr. Moody’s sermon on that theme. Burke said afterward: “If I had known it was a sermon I would not have read it, but as I knew so many jailers I was interested, and thought one of them had gotten into trouble and
Chief of Police of that city, and he had served sentences in jails in many States. He was a member of the aristocracy o f1 burglardom, for be it known that there are upper and lower _circles among thieves as well as elsewhere, and Burke’s specialty was the robbing of banks, and he would have scorned to associate with a sneak- thief or a pickpocket. Nominally a Roman Catholic, he had never heard the gospel of the grace of God. In fact he never had been in church so far as he could remem
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