582 Perverted Scripture. 
ceeded from one who was not experimentally, as well as 
mentally, a Christian. He said, “Lord, remember me 
when thou comest into thy Kingdom.” Was this the ex- 
clamation of one who for the first time cried aloud for 
mercy? Itrather sounds like the prayer of one who knew 
that he should not ask in vain. St. Luke is the only evan- 
gelist who gives an account of the words that passed 
between the malefactor and the Saviour. St. Mathew says 
both of them jeered Him, and St. Mark says that both 
reviled Him. St. Luke does not intimate that the repent- 
ant malefactor did in any way or at any time jeer at or 
revile the Saviour, but, on the contrary, states that he at 
once rebuked his fellow-malefactor for so doing. St. Luke 
alone records the incident, and we may fairly take his 
record as our guide. Now, it seems to us that from that 
account it is impossible to suppose that the malefactor was 
suddenly converted or became suddenly repentant. The 
words of the malefactor to his fellow sinner, and his sup- 
plication, point to previous conversion and repentance. 
But there was the other malefactor, and he did not sup- 
plicate for or receive an assurance of mercy. Why not? 
Both malefactors were in the same condemnation. Both 
were in the throes of a painful and torturing death. Yet 
one repents and the other does not. Not that, at least it 
so seems to us, the impenitent malefactor disbelieved in 
the power of Christ. It appears to us that there was more 
of passionate earnestness than of jeering in the cry, “If 
thou be Christ save thyself and us.” At the supreme 
moment one malefactor clamours for an escape from imme- 
diate death, whilst the other prefers a last prayer before 
the great change. 
We do not find anything in the conduct of the repentant 
malefactor to justify the theory that he was converted and 
made repentant only in the hour of death. We can see no- 
thing in the conduct of the un-repentant malefactor to jus- 
tify the theory that he had been all his life a careless sinner, 
but, on the contrary, it is manifest that he had thought on 
religious topics, that he dreaded death, and it is all but cer- 
tain that he at sundry times in the course of his guilty 
career had soothed his troubled conscience with the promise 
that when the hour of death came he would repent. 
We hold then that it is a perversion of Scripture to assert 
that the forgiveness of, to use the common phrase, “the thief 
on the cross” is an encouragement for them who think that 
a life of conscious wrong-doing will be expiated by a dying 
