2. While knowing us perfectly, the Good Shepherd has an entire sympathy with each of us. He is not a hard guardian, who keeps us in order without understanding our difficulties. He is touched, as the Apostle says, with a feeling of our infirmities. His true Human Nature is the seat and source of His perfect sympathy; to which the image of a shepherd, if taken alone, would do less than perfect justice. Nothing that affects any of us is a matter of indifference to Him. He is not interested merely or chiefly in the noble, or the wealthy, or the intellectual, or the well-bred. Wherever there is a human soul seeking the truth, a human heart longing to lavish its affection upon the Eternal Beauty, there He is at hand, unseen yet energetic, entering with perfect sympathy into every trial, anticipating, in ways we little dream of, every danger; not indeed suspending our probation by putting us out of the way of temptation, but with each temptation also making a way to escape, that we may be able to bear it.b

3. For this sympathy is not a burst of unregulated affection; it is guided by perfect prudence, by the highest reason. In the days of His earthly Ministry this was especially remarkable. He dealt with men according to their characters and capacities. He did not put new cloth on an old garment, or new wine into old bottles. He did not ask His disciples to imitate the austere life of the followers of the Baptist: He knew them too well. The days would come for that by and by. He did not at once unfold to them all the Truth He had to tell about His Own Divine Person, about His kingdom, about the means of living the new life. These truths would have shocked them, if prematurely announced. “I have

many things to say unto you," He said, "but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit, when He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He shall guide you into all truth." Those who were yet in the infancy of the Christian life were fed with milk; strong meat was reserved for others who knew more and could bear more.b

So it has been ever since. If we have enjoyed opportunities, or have been denied them, this has not happened by chance. The Great Shepherd of the sheep has ordered it. He has proportioned our duties, our trials, our advantages, our drawbacks, to our real needs-to our characters. We may have disputed His wisdom, or we may have made the most of it. But it is not the less certainly a characteristic of His government. "As thy days, so shall thy strength be," is a promise for all time.

4. Above all, as the Good Shepherd, Christ is disinterested. He gains nothing by watching, guarding, feeding us. He seeks not ours, but us. We can make no addition to His glory: He seeks us for our own sakes, not for His. He spent His earthly life among the villages and hamlets of a remote province, when He might have illuminated and awed the intellectual centres of the world. He spared Himself no privations in His toil for souls. So absorbing was His labour, that He had at times no leisure so much as to eat. Persecutions, humiliations, rebuffs, sufferings, could not diminish the ardour of His zeal. And He crowned all by voluntarily embracing an agonising death, in order to save His flock. Once for all, eighteen centuries ago, He gave His life for the sheep. But His death is just as powerful to deliver from the jaws of the wolf as it has ever been.

a St. John xvi. 12, 13.

c Deut. xxxiii. 25.

Self-sacrifice, such

b Heb. v. 12-14.
d St. Mark vi. 31.

as that on Calvary, does not lose its virtue with the lapse of years: the Precious Blood is to-day as powerful to save, as, when warm and fresh, It ebbed forth from the Wounds of the Crucified. For It is, as an Apostle says, "the Blood of the everlasting covenant;"a and the Great Shepherd of the sheep has been raised from the dead that It may plead for us perpetually in the courts of heaven. We look up to Him on His Throne, and here in His temple we sing, day after day, that "we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture." Do we mean it? We kneel day by day, and confess that we have erred and strayed from the Eternal Father's ways, which are also His, "like lost sheep." ." Do we mean it? Have we yet returned to "the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls"? Do we endeavour to know Him, as, whether we will or not, He certainly knows us? We need a Guide through the embarrassments of life: do we recognise one in Him? We need a Physician for our moral wounds; a source of strength in our temptations; a rule and measure of holiness; an arm to lean on in the valley of the shadow of death. All this He is, and much more; but have we any practical knowledge of His being so? When He has fixed His eye upon us at some turning-point of life; when He has reached out His shepherd's crook, and beckoned us to follow Him, have we obeyed? No doubt faithfulness, submission, courage, perseverance, were necessary on our part. But did He not merit these very graces for us? And has He done so much for us; and shall we do nothing-nothing-for Him?

e

Or if this has been with us as He would wish, are we now associating ourselves with His work? As we all may join in the intercessions of the Great High

a Heb. xiii. 20.

c General Confession.

b Ps. xcv. 7.

e Ps. xxiii. 4.

d I St. Pet. ii. 25.

Priest, so we all may work under the guidance of the Good Shepherd. How many a work of mercy in the Church of God has that gracious and tender Figure inspired, which else had been denied to poor suffering human beings! By our individual exertions, and by strengthening the hands and hearts of His ministers; by doing our best to raise their ideal and standard of work and life; by entering with sympathy and humility into cases of misery and ignorance which might well have been our own; we may all of us, laymen as well as pastors, women as well as men, simple and unlearned as well as lettered and wise, have a part in promoting among our fellows the knowledge of that Redeeming Love, which is the glory of our Divine Master Jesus, and our own only ground of hope for time and eternity.

VOL. II.

K

SERMON XXVIII.

REVERENCE.

REV. I. 17, 18.

And He laid His Right I am the First and the

And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead.
Hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not;
Last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive
for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.

THIS

HIS is St. John's account of what happened when he saw our Lord Jesus Christ, some forty years at the least after the Ascension, in the island of Patmos. St. John had been banished there by the Emperor of the day, and, according to the tradition, was condemned to labour in the mines. But the time of persecution was to him, as it has been so often to others, a time of spiritual blessing. When exile and suffering have detached the sympathies from the world of sense, the soul looks upwards, is endowed with a keener insight, pierces the clouds, beholds, as never before, the Unseen. The vision in Bethel was enjoyed by Jacob while he was being persecuted by Esau. The vision of the burning bush was vouchsafed to Moses when he was flying from the face of Pharaoh.b The vision of God on the chariot of the Cherubim was granted to Ezekiel when he was a captive on the a Gen. xxvii. 41-45; xxviii. 10-22. b Exod. ii. 15; iii. 1-22.