what is natural, but ennobles it. To turn water into wine, and what is common into what is holy, is indeed the glory of Christianity.

The ascetic life of abstinence, of fasting, austerity, singularity, is the lower and earthlier form of religion. The life of Godliness is the glory of Christ. It is a thing far more striking to the vulgar imagination to be religious after the type and pattern of John the Baptist, to fast, to mortify every inclination, to be found at no feast, to wrap ourselves in solitariness, and abstain from all social joys: yes, and far easier so to live, and far easier so to win a character for religiousness. A silent man is easily reputed wise. A man who suffers none to see him in the common jostle and undress of life, easily gathers round him a mysterious veil of unknown sanctity, and men honor him for a saint. The unknown is always wonderful. But the life of Him whom men called " a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners," was a far harder and a far heavenlier religion.

To shroud ourselves in no false mist of holiness: to dare to show ourselves as we are, making no solemn affectation of reserve or difference from others: to be found at the marriage-feast to accept the invitation of the rich Pharisee Simon, and the scorned publican Zaccheus: to mix with the crowd of men, using no affected singularity, content to be “creatures not too bright or good for human nature's daily food:" and yet for a man amidst it all to remain a consecrated spirit, his trials and his solitariness known only to his Father-a being set apart, not of this world, alone in the heart's deeps with God: to put the cup of this world's gladness to his lips, and yet be unintoxicated: to gaze steadily on all its grandeur, and yet be undazzled, plain and simple in personal desires: to feel its brightness, and yet defy its thrall: this is the difficult, and rare, and glorious life of God in the soul of man. This, this was the peculiar glory of the life of Christ, which was manifested in that first miracle which Jesus wrought at the marriage-feast in Cana of Galilee.

XIX.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD.

"I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep."-John x. 14, 15.

As these words stand in the English translation, it is hard to see any connection between the thoughts that are brought together.

It is asserted that Christ is the good Shepherd, and knows His sheep. It is also asserted that He knows the Father; but between these two truths there is no express connection. And again, it is declared that He lays down His life for the sheep. This follows directly after the assertion that He knows the Father. Again, we are at a loss to say what one of these truths has to do with the other.

But the whole difficulty vanishes with the alteration of a single stop and a single word. Let the words " even so" be exchanged for the word "and." Four times in these verses the same word occurs. Three times out of these four it is translated "and,"-and know my sheep, and am known, and I lay down my life. All that is required then is, that in consistency it shall be translated by the same word in the fourth case: for "6 even so" substitute" and :" then strike away the full stop after "mine," and read the whole sentence thus: "I am the good Shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine as the Father knoweth me, and as I know the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.

At once our Redeemer's thought becomes clear. There is a reciprocal affection between the Shepherd and the sheep. There is a reciprocal affection between the Father and the Son; and the one is the parallel of the other. The affection between the Divine Shepherd and His flock can be compared, for the closeness of its intimacy, with nothing but the affection between the Eternal Father and the Son of His love. As the Father knows the Son, so does the Shepherd know the sheep as the Son knows the Father, so do the sheep know their heavenly Shepherd.

I. The pastoral character claimed by Christ.

II. The proofs which substantiate the claim.

I. The Son of Man claims to Himself the name of Shep

herd. Now we shall not learn any thing from that, unless we enter humbly and affectionately into the spirit of Christ's teaching. It is the heart alone which can give us a key to His words. Recollect how He taught. By metaphors, by images, by illustrations, boldly figurative, in rich variety-yes, in daring abundance. He calls Himself a gate, a king, a vine, a shepherd, a thief in the night. In every one of these He appeals to certain feelings and associations. What He says can only be interpreted by such associations. They must be understood by a living heart: a cold, clear intellect will make nothing of them. If you take those glorious expressions, pregnant with almost boundless thought, and lay them down as so many articles of rigid, stiff theology, you turn life into death. It is just as if a chemist were to analyze a fruit or a flower, and then imagine that he had told you what a fruit and a flower are. He separates them into their elements, names them and numbers them: but those elements, weighed, measured, numbered in the exact proportions that made up the beautiful living thing, are not the living thing-no, nor any thing like it. Your science is very profound, no doubt; but the fruit is crushed, and the grace of the flower is gone.

It is in this way often that we deal with the words of Christ, when we anatomize them and analyze them. Theology is very necessary, chemistry is very necessary; but chemistry destroys life to analyze, murders to dissect; and theology very often kills religion out of words before it can cut them up into propositions.

Here is a living truth which our cold reasonings have often torn into dead fragments-"I am the good Shepherd." In this northern England it is hard to get the living associations of the East with which such an expression is full.

The pastoral life and duty in the East is very unlike that of the shepherds on our bleak hill-sides and downs. Here the connection between the shepherd and the sheep is simply one of pecuniary interest. Ask an English shepherd about his flock, he can tell you the numbers and the value; he knows the market in which each was purchased, and the remunerating price at which it can be disposed of. There is before him so much stock convertible into so much money.

Beneath the burning skies and the clear starry nights of Palestine there grows up between the shepherd and his flock an union of attachment and tenderness. It is the country where at any moment sheep are liable to be swept away by some mountain-torrent, or carried off by hill-robbers, or torn by wolves. At any moment their protector may have to

save them by personal hazard. The shepherd-king tells us how, in defense of his father's flock, he slew a lion and a bear: and Jacob reminds Laban how, when he watched Laban's sheep in the day, the drought consumed. Every hour of the shepherd's life is risk. Sometimes for the sake of an armful of grass in the parched summer days, he must climb precipices almost perpendicular, and stand on a narrow ledge of rock where the wild goat will scarcely venture. Pitiless showers, driving snows, long hours of thirst-all this he must endure, if the flock is to be kept at all.

And thus there grows up between the man and the dumb creatures he protects, a kind of friendship. For this is, after all, the true school in which love is taught-dangers mutually shared and hardships borne together; these are the things which make generous friendship-risk cheerfully encountered for another's sake. You love those for whom you risk, and they love you; therefore it is that, not as here where the flock is driven, the shepherd goes before and the sheep follow Lim. They follow in perfect trust, even though he should be leading them away from a green pasture, by a rocky road, to another pasture which they can not yet see. He knows them all-their separate histories, their ailments, their characters. Now let it be observed how much in all this connection there is of heart-of real, personal attachment, almost inconceivable to us. It is strange how deep the sympathy may become between the higher and the lower being: nay, even between the being that has life and what is lifeless. Alone almost in the desert, the Arab and his horse are one family. Alone in those vast solitudes, with no human being near, the shepherd and the sheep feel a life in common. Differences disappear, the vast interval between the man and the brute: the single point of union is felt strongly. One is the love of the protector: the other the love of the grateful life and so between lives so distant there is woven by night and day, by summer suns and winter frosts, a living network of sympathy. The greater and the less mingle their being together: they feel each other. "The shepherd knows his sheep, and

is known of them."

The men to whom Christ said these words felt all this and more, the moment He had said them, which it has taken me many minutes to draw out in dull sentences: for He appealed to the familiar associations of their daily life, and calling Himself a Shepherd, touched strings which would vi brate with many a tender and pure recollection of their childhood. And unless we try, by realizing such scenes, to supply what they felt by association, the words of Christ

will be only hard, dry, lifeless words to us: for all Christ's teaching is a Divine poetry, luxuriant in metaphor, overflowing with truth too large for accurate sentences, truth which only a heart alive can appreciate. More than half the heresies into which Christian sects have blundered, have merely come from mistaking for dull prose what prophets and apostles said in those highest moments of the soul, when seraphim kindle the sentences of the pen and lip into poetry. "This is my body." Chill that into prose, and it becomes Transubstantiation. "I am the good Shepherd." In the dry and merciless logic of a commentary, trying laboriously to find out minute points of ingenious resemblance in which Christ is like a Shepherd, the glory and the tenderness of this sentence are dried up.

But try to feel, by imagining what the lonely Syrian shepherd must feel towards the helpless things which are the companions of his daily life, for whose safety he stands in jeopardy every hour, and whose value is measurable to him not by price, but by his own jeopardy, and then we have reached some notion of the love which Jesus meant to represent, that eternal tenderness which bends over us-infinitely lower though we be in nature-and knows the name of each and the trials of each, and thinks for each with a separate solicitude, and gave Itself for each with a sacrifice as special and a love as personal, as if in the whole world's wilderness there were none other but that one.

To the name Shepherd, Christ adds an emphatic word of much significance: "I am the good Shepherd." Good, not in the sense of benevolent, but in the sense of genuine, true born, of the real kind—just as wine of nobler quality is good compared with the cheaper sort, just as a soldier is good or noble who is a soldier in heart, and not a soldier by mere profession or for pay. It is the same word used by St. Paul when he speaks of a good, i. e., a noble soldier of Christ. Certain peculiar qualifications make the genuine soldiercertain peculiar qualifications make the genuine or good shepherd.

Now this expression distinguishes the shepherd from two sorts of men who may also be keepers of the sheep shepherds, but not shepherds of the true blood. 1. From robbers. 2. From hirelings.

1. Robbers may turn shepherds: they may keep the sheep, but they guard them only for their own purposes, simply for the flesh and fleece; they have not a true shepherd's heart, any more than a pirate has the true sailor's heart and the true sailor's loyalty. There were many such