Surely, there never was sorrow like unto His sorrow, and yet in its darkest crisis He has eyes and heart for this one other's sorrow. Far from Him, as the east from the west, is any of that selfish thought and selfish seclusion which grief and pain so often work in the unsanctified heart, aye, and in the best of us. What a lesson of practical love it is! What a message--especially to those who are called to suffer with Him for the souls of men--comes streaming from those words spoken to Mary. The burden of the people's needs, the care of the Church, the awful responsibility of ministering to souls--these things, sacred as they may be, cannot excuse us in neglecting the hungry hearts of our own flesh and blood, or in forgetting the claims of those of our own household. Dear friend and comrade, in _your_ sorrow, in your sore trial of faith, in _your_ Calvary, take to your heart this revelation of the heart of the Son of Man, and be careful of the solitary and heart-bleeding ones near you, no matter how humble and how unworthy they may seem. II. _His Words to the Thief_. "_And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To-day shall thou be with Me in Paradise_." The crucifixion of the two robbers with Jesus was a sort of topstone of obloquy and disgrace contrived by His murderers with the double object of further humiliating Him in the eyes of the people, and of adding poignancy to His own agony. The vulgarity and shamefulness of it were the last touch of their contempt, and the last stroke of His humiliation. There was a kind of devilish ingenuity in this circumstantial way of branding Him as a malefactor. And yet in the presence of this extremity of human wickedness and cruelty, Jesus found an opportunity of working a wondrous work of God; a work which reveals Him as the Saviour, strong to save, both by His infinite mercy and by His infinite confidence in the efficacy of His own sacrifice. "_To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise_." Eyes and heart for the _sorrowful_ He had, as we see; and now ears, and hope nigh at hand, for the _sinful_. No word of resentment; no sense of distance or separation between the spotlessness and perfection of His character and this poor lonely convict--but a strange and wonderful nearness, now and to come. "_With Me_," He says--"_With Me in Paradise_." Ah! this is the secret of much in the life of the Son of God--this intimate, constant, conscious nearness to sinners and to sin! He had sounded the depth of evil, and, knowing it, He pitied, with an infinite compassion, its victims; He got as near as He could to them in their misery, and died to save them from it.