nscious shame of our enemy; until the debt is paid by acknowledgment
and we are complacent once more in the knowledge that justice has been
done to us at last. On the contrary, the only forgiveness that is
supernatural, and which, therefore, alone is meritorious, is that which
reach out to men's ignorance and not their knowledge of their need.

THE SECOND WORD

_Amen I say to thee, to-day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise._

Our Divine Lord, in this Second Word, immediately applies and
illustrates the First and drives its lesson home. He shows us how the
rain of mercy that poured out of heaven in answer to the prayer He made
just now enlightens the man who, above all others present on Calvary,
was the most abjectly ignorant of all; the man who, himself at the very
heart of the tragedy, understood it less, probably, than the smallest
child on the outskirts of the crowd.

His life had been one long defiance of the laws of both God and man. He
had been a member of one of those troops of human vermin that crawl
round Jerusalem, raiding solitary houses, attacking solitary travellers,
guilty of sins at once the bloodiest and the meanest, comparable only to
the French _apaches_ of our own day. Well, he had been gripped at last
by the Roman machine, caught in some sordid adventure, and here,
resentful and furious and contemptuous, full of bravado and terror, he
snarled like a polecat at every human face he saw, snarled and spat at
the Divine Face Itself that looked at him from a cross that was like his
own; and, since he had not even a spark of the honour that is reputed to
exist "among thieves," taunted his "fellow criminal" for the folly of
His "crime."

"If thou be the Christ, save Thyself and us."

Again, then, the Paradox is plain enough. Surely an educated priest, or
a timid disciple, or a good-hearted dutiful soldier who hated the work
he was at, surely one of these will be the first object of Christ's
pardon; and so one of these would have been, if one of ourselves had
hung there. But when God forgives, He forgives the most ignorant
first--that is, the most remote from forgiveness--and makes, not Peter
or Caiphas or the Centurion, but Dismas the thief, the firstfruits of
Redemption.

I. The first effect of the Divine Mercy is Enlightenment. _Before they
call, I will answer_. Before the thief feels the first pang of sorrow
Grace is at work on him, and for the first time in his dreary life he
begins to und