“But this man prays to God to ‘forgive them.’
“Strange! Strange! He must be different from the rest of us. I am sorry that I said one word against Him when they first hung us up here. What a difference there is between Him and me!
“Here we are, hanging on two crosses—side by side; but all the rest of our lives we have been far enough apart. I have been robbing and murdering, but He has been visiting the hungry, healing the sick, and raising the dead. Now these people are railing at us both. What a strange world is this!
“I will not rail at Him any more. Indeed, I begin to believe He must be the Son of God; for, surely, no son of man could forgive his enemies this way.”
That is what did it, my friends.
This poor man had been scourged and beaten and nailed to the cross, and hung up there for the world to gaze upon; and he was not sorry for his sins one single bit—did not feel the least conviction on account of all that misery. But when he heard the Savior praying for His murderers that broke his heart.
I remember to have heard a story, somewhere, of a bad boy that had run away from home. He had given his father no end of trouble. He had refused all the invitations that his father had sent him to come home and be forgiven, and help to comfort his old heart. He had even gone so far as to scoff at his father and mother.
But one day a letter came, telling him his father was dead, and they wanted him to come home and attend the funeral.
At first he determined he would not go, but then he thought it would be a shame not to pay some little show of respect to the memory of so good a man after he was dead; and so, just as a matter of form, he took a train and went to the old home.