ay more and more come home to us; great our need to pray for an
ever fuller measure of that Spirit of Christ, Whose first work it is "to
convince the world of sin," to make men realise its true character and
its inevitable issue.

III
THE SECOND WORD

"Verily I say unto thee, To-day thou shall be with Me in Paradise."
ST. LUKE XXIII. 43.

We judge of any power by the results which it effects. We gain some
knowledge of the power of steam by its capacity to drive a huge mass of
steel and wood weighing twenty thousand tons through the water at the
rate of twenty knots an hour. There we have some standard by which we
can gauge the force which sends our earth round the sun at twenty-five
miles a second, or that which propels a whole solar system through space.
But we may apply the same method, of estimation by results, to the powers
of the moral and spiritual worlds. Judged thus, it was indeed a
stupendous power which was exerted by Christ from the Cross. For what
result can be more amazing than the reversal, at the last, of the
character slowly built up by the habits of a lifetime? It is, of course,
useless to speculate on the antecedents of the robber (not "thief") who
turned to our Lord with the words, "Jesus, remember me when Thou shalt
come into Thy kingdom." We know only what is implied by the word
"robber" or "brigand," and the fact that he had joined, with his fellow-
sufferer, in the mockery of our Lord. But the words thus addressed by
him to Christ, in their context, represent the most wonderful
"phenomenon" of human life, a genuine and thorough-going conversion. And
the power which wrought that stupendous result was the patience and
forgiveness of Jesus Christ. The weak things had, as so often since,
confounded the strong. In His matchless forbearance, in the prayer for
His executioners, the royalty of Christ our Lord was disclosed, and the
"title" over His head was vindicated.

1. First then, we learn from the Second Word the Mind and Will of God
towards penitence. There is no interposing of delay. Forgiveness is
instantaneous. No pause intervenes between the prayer for pardon, and
the pardon itself. But, that instant response was to genuine "change of
mind," not to the repentance which is merely regret for the past, still
less to a cowardly shrinking from a deserved punishment, but to a
definite act of the man's will, repudiating sin, and ranging himself on
God's side. The reject