The priest, I learned, had told the first men on their arrival that he was there to fulfil his functions only, though he abhorred their actions and could have no dealings with them. This he had announced at their first Mass, and he had till now preserved that attitude, never suffering himself to discover by closer contact the cause of the sufferings that stirred his anger.
The following day I put myself down to see him, and during the course of the morning he visited me.
“You wish to see me,” he said. He was exceedingly kind and courteous.
“Yes,” I said; “I wish to congratulate you on the fact that you are not here in prison with us.”
“For preaching sedition, or at least reading seditionary stuff. You recall the epistle you read yesterday? I think it was misapplied, mind you. You were exhorting us to do just what we had done, and had been thrown into prison for; but you read it all the same, and deserve congratulation. Do you remember:
‘Be ye doers of the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves, for if a man be a hearer of the Word, and not a doer, he shall be compared to a man beholding his own countenance in a glass. For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was. But he that hath looked into the perfect law of liberty, and hath continued therein, not becoming a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work; this man shall be blessed in his deed.’
“That’s sound talk; every word of it applies; and we are blessed in the deed, though we are in prison all the same.
In that connection you think over that phrase about the man who looked into a mirror, and presently forgot what manner of man he was, till he became a doer of the Word after having looked into the perfect law of liberty. I thank you for that epistle; and I congratulate you that you are not in prison.”
Afterwards he moved among us intimately and always. He made it his business to know each man personally, and there was scarcely a man to whom he did not endear himself. In very literal truth he spent himself and his substance for us all. He got into touch with the men’s families at home, and reassured both man and family as to the state of the other. During those days, indeed, he lived his life with us, and every man turned to him as to a brother. What he said to me of his opinion of the men may pass; but I subsequently heard that he said publicly in his chapel in the town that if his hearers wished to know what faith was, what religion, what principle and truth, he would commend them to look in the jail. He had his convictions and emotions as an Englishman; we had ours as Irishmen; but there is no man who was at Stafford Jail for his convictions and emotions who does not cherish with affection the name of Father Moore.