IF When I was a boy in my own country, I used to notice that when the clouds were gathering and a storm threatened, the
^ C. Jerdan, Messages to the Children, p. 73.
• D. Davies, Talks with Men, Women, and Children, v. p. 446.
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shepherd would go round the shoulder of the hill and fetch all the sheep that happened to be on the stormy side back under the shadow of a great rock, so that, when the storm at length raged, the sheep were all safely sheltered. The sheep had not the sense to find that place out for themselves, and though the shepherd had done that scores of times for them, yet they never thought of doing it without his aid. ^
2. It is not written, " All we like wolves, like tigers," but " All we like sheep have gone astray." We do not usually associate the thought of something so silly, so whimsical, so essentially harmless as a sheep with the awful deeps and dis- obediences of the human heart.
In this assertion of the prophet there is not so much as a hint of hereditary tendencies forcing themselves into uncontrollable action, of innate devilry in man manifesting itself in a species of Satanic concert ; it simply amounts to a matter of pitiable moral weakness. Like sheep, like simpletons, have we gone astray. Whether he is right or wrong, this is what the writer says. And it is worth our while to think, to take in the fact, that the prophet-poet uses the word " sheep " in this highly-wrought passage, rather than some word that connotes a very different force, as in tiger, wolf, or snake. If we settle it in our mind that men in large numbers go wrong, not because they must and cannot help it, but because they are fools and will not help it, the conviction may not do much for our natural conceit, but it will probably serve a useful purpose in a more important direction.
A sheep does not intentionally go astray. It nibbles itself astray. It puts its head down to the grass, and begins to eat, and eat, and eat, and at last looking up finds it has wandered far from the flock, and is lost. It was so absorbed in feeding, that it paid no heed to its whereabouts. Men become thought- lessly absorbed in something or other, and never call halt to look around to ascertain in what direction they are tending. Men get their heads down making money. It absorbs all their energies and all their thoughts, and almost unconsciously they wander far from the shepherd into moral and spiritual perdition. Minor fascinations ensnare us until we forget or ignore the fascinations of our Lord. The sheep of God's pastures stray
' D. Davies, Talks vnth Men, Women, and Children, v. p. 445.
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away in thoughtless absorption, and become lost in the regions of wild beasts and night. "When He hath found it He layeth it upon His shoulders." He takes us in our moral impotence, and carries us.
(1) Many estimable people are travelling on through life without a suspicion of offence, doing what others do and judging as others judge — like sheep ; and it never occurs to them to ask if their world has room within it for the Cross, in which they yet profess to believe. Actually they do not need it and they do not understand it. Walter Bagehot, in one place, speaks of those " gentlemen who revolt from what is coarse, are sickened by what is gross, hate what is ugly. . . . The law in their members does not war against the law of their mind. They live within the hedgerows of polished society, and they do not wish to go beyond them into the great deep of human life." And then, abruptly, he adds, " These are the men whom it is hardest to make Christians." Paul went everywhere, as he says, to Jew and Grentile, testifying the repentance which brings men to God and the faith which casts them on the Lord Jesus Christ ; but what have some men to do with repentance or faith ? They want to go on as they are, for they have not reaKsed, as this man did, the shame and scandal of the selfish life when once it is seen alongside of an existence more nobly managed. It is still by seeing Jesus Christ in the mystery of His passion that men come to see themselves.
Oft when the Word is on me to deliver
Lifts the illusion and the truth lies bare; Desert or throng, the city or the river.
Melts in a lucid Paradise of air, —
Only like souls I see the folk thereunder,
Bound who should conquer, slaves who should be kings, — Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder.
Sadly contented in a show of things; —
Then with a rush the intolerable craving
Shivers throughout me like a trumpet-call, —
Oh to save these ! to perish for their saving, Die for their life, be offered for them all ! ^
1 F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.
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(2) The reason, we are told, why men do certain things and follow certain paths is not folly but fate. That one man works out his salvation, and another his damnation, is not the wisdom of one or the foolishness of the other, it is the necessity of both. It is the accident of having brains and will, or not having them. The theory which has heredity and the accumu- lation of heredity as one of its essential levers, has taken possession of the popular mind and imagination as never before perhaps in the history of thought. " It has fixed attention on the law in its purely physical aspects, and has made men feel more keenly the difficulty of giving it a moral interpretation consistent with individual freedom." This goes far to explain the change that has come over the working classes during the last quarter of a century in the estimate of the chances and possibilities of their lives.