June 8

I Was In Prison And You Came To Visit Me

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ ”

Matthew 25:34-36

The king referred to in this passage is, of course, the Lord, and the verses go on to explain that reaching out to those most in need is reaching out in love to the king himself. Elizabeth Fry did this, and she was honored by kings. Indeed, when Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, visited England, he requested a meeting with her. She was an uncommon woman, and her deeds of kindness were known worldwide. After John Randolph, a Virginia legislator, had traveled to London and visited such places as Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, Parliament, the Tower, and Summerset House, he insisted that they “sink into utter insignificance in comparison to Elizabeth Fry” and the “miraculous effects of true Christianity” she had wrought at Newgate Prison. *

Elizabeth was born into a wealthy family in 1780, and in her late teens converted to Quakerism. At the age of twenty she married a wealthy Quaker merchant and dedicated the remainder of her life to Christian philanthropy. During the early years of her marriage, in addition to bearing eight children, she spent her days working in the London slums, helping needy families who needed food and medicine. But as hopeless as the conditions were in the streets, they were even worse, she discovered, in the prisons.

In 1813, Elizabeth approached the governor of the Newgate Prison with a simple request: “Sir, if thee kindly allows me to pray with the women, I will go inside.” The request was granted; her life was irrevocably changed. There she found hundreds of women and their children crowded into four filthy rooms. They slept on the cold floor and begged food from people outside the window bars. They were foul-mouthed women hardened by their circumstances, but Elizabeth looked at them through eyes of love. And she knew that the task ahead of her would involve far more than prayer.

In the years that followed, she organized a movement to help female prisoners that instigated massive reform in the prison system. She was a regular visitor who brought her humanitarian outreach behind the prison gate. But she brought more than material goods. She shared the gospel with these women, preaching from her favorite passages in Isaiah and the Psalms or from the Sermon on the Mount. The result, according to one observer, was a miraculous transformation of these “most depraved . . . wretched outcasts” who have been tamed and subdued by the Christian eloquence of Mrs. Fry” ⁸