I would suppose, in a similar way, that the man known to history as the ‘good thief,’ who, after defending Jesus against the jeers and castigations of the other criminal who was executed with them, at Golgotha, appealed to the mercy of Christ, and was promised it, had not led an entirely honorable life before that moment, to have ended up as a prisoner of Rome, condemned to death; and that he managed to say what he said through an effort of will that ordinarily he wouldn’t have been capable of, and for which he found the resolve only in his last hour, when his mortality asserted itself to him, and had a clarifying effect.