so-called bad; perhaps--he smiled a little at his own cynicism--those
who were caught and those who were not.

There came to him these words of a poet of whom he used to be fond:

In men whom men pronounce as ill,
I find so much of goodness still;
In men whom men pronounce divine,
I find so much of sin and blot;
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two, when God has not.

When God has not! He turned and looked out at the sullen sky,
returning--as most men do at times--to that conception of his
childhood that somewhere beyond the clouds was God. God! Did God
care for the boys of the State Reformatory? Was that poet of the
western mountains right when he said that God was not a drawer of
lines, but a seer of the good that was in the so-called bad, and of
the bad in the so-called good, and a lover of them both?

If that was God, it was not the God the boys of the reformatory had
been taught to know. They had been told that God would forgive the
wicked, but it had been made clear to them--if not in words, in
implications--that it was they who were the wicked. And the
so-called godly men, men of such exemplary character as had been
chosen to address them that afternoon, had so much of the spirit of
God that they, too, were willing to forgive, be tolerant, and--he
looked out at the bending trees with a smile--disburse generalities
about the open arms of the world.