But one of them, when he heard the great words of his envied companion, “Forgive them; for they know not what they do,” suddenly fell silent. That prayer was so new for him, summoned him to emotions so foreign to his nature and all his life, that it carried him back at one stroke to his almost forgotten childhood, when he also was innocent, and when he knew there was a God of whom one could ask for peace as poor men beg for bread at the rich man’s door. But in no canticle could he remember hearing any such prayer as this, so extraordinary, so paradoxical in the mouth of one who was at that moment being killed. And yet those impossible words found in the thief’s withered heart an echo of something he would have liked to believe, above all at that moment when he was about to appear before a Judge more awful than those of the law-courts. This prayer of Jesus’ found an unexpected echo in his own thought, a thought beyond his power to formulate or express, but which now seemed to him luminous in the darkness of his fate. Had he really known what he was doing? Had other men ever thought of him? Had they ever done for him what they could to turn him from evil? Had there ever been any one who really loved him? Had any one given him food when he was hungry and a cloak when he was cold, and a friendly word when suddenly temptations laid siege to his lonely and dissatisfied soul? If he had had a little more bread and love, would he have committed the actions which had brought him to Golgotha? Was he not also among those who knew not what they do, distraught by poverty, abandoned among ambushed passions? Were they not thieves like him, the Levites who trafficked in the offerings of the faithful, the Pharisees who cheated widows, the rich men, who by their usury drained dry the veins of the poverty-stricken? Those were the men who had condemned him to death; but what right had they to kill him if they had never done anything to save him, and if they, too, were tainted with his guilt? All these thoughts went through his distracted heart while he waited to be fastened to the cross. The nearness of death—and what a death!—this unheard-of prayer of the man who was not a thief, but who was suffering the penalty of thieves, the hate which deformed the faces of the men who had condemned him also, moved his poor, maimed soul, and inclined him to emotions unfelt since his boyhood, to emotions the very name of which he did not know, but which were very like to tenderness and repentance. When they were all on the cross, the other thief, although suffering terribly from his pierced hands and feet, began again to insult Jesus. He also began to vomit out the challenge of the Jews, “If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.”