That was the Shepherd of the flock; He knew
The distant voice of one poor sheep astray; It had forsaken Him, but He was true,
And listen'd for its bleating night and day. Lost in a pitfall, yet alive it lay,
To breathe the faint sad call that He would know; But now the slighted fold was far away,
And no approaching footstep soothed its woe. * An Apostle of the North: Memoirs of Bishop Bompas, 175.
ST. LUKE XIX. lo 391
Oh! would He now but come and claim His own,
How more than precious His restoring care! How sweet the pasture of His choice alone,
How bright the dullest pa oh if He were there! How well the pain of rescue it could bear,
Held in the shelter of His strong embrace! With Him it would find herbage anywhere,
And springs of endless life in every place.
And so He came and raised it from the clay,
While evil beasts went disappointed by. He bore it home along the fearful way
In the soft light of His rejoicing eye. And thou fallen soul, afraid to live or die
In the deep pit that will not set thee free, Lift up to Him the helpless homeward cry.
For all that tender love is seeking thee.^
^ Many a time it is in strange places that Christ comes upon His own. One tells of her finding in an artless story. Her heart had been touched but not melted, till one day in the garden she saw an apple tree in blossom, and as she stood under it she was flooded with the thought of the love of God. So it became true of her : —
Beneath the apple tree
There I espoused thee,
There I gave thee my hand.
And there thou wast redeemed,
Where thy mother was betrayed.
Another heart, also stirred by desire, resolved at last that she would read her Bible straight through till she found her Saviour. At last she came upon the words, " I am the way," and there her wanderings ended. She had been found. A saint tells how the Shepherd found her in an Andalusian convent, where the fountain was the only moving sounding thing in the dead noon-day silence, when there was not a breath to stir the lemon tree or pomegranate bush. Of another, it is told that he was found out by his Master while committing robbery. Another was found by Jesus Christ when he was breaking the heart of his old mother by mockeries of religion. A preacher, well known in his day, was found when listening to an old melodrama that ended with a sailor's drinking a glass of gin before he was hung, and saying for his last words, " Here's to the prosperity of the British nation and the salvation
1 F. W. Faber.
392 CUR DEUS HOMO
of my immortal soul." Down went the curtain, and down went the man, for he ran home with all his might. He had been struck to the quick by the words, " the salvation of my immortal soul," and in his chamber Christ found him.^
^ After the lecture in the dissecting-room in the Glasgow University one day a student, usually all vivacity and chatter, was observed by his friend to be very silent. Asked why, he said, " A curious thing happened in the laboratory to-day. Pointing to the body on which we were working, the professor suddenly said, ' Gentlemen, that was once tenanted by an immortal soul.' " The young man had never had a thought like this about the bodies he was dissecting before. So Christ startled the world. He came into its dissecting-rooms and operating theatres, its laboratories of industry, its barracks and camps, where men were holding life cheap and exploiting thousands, for the sake of gain or fame for the few, and He said, " Gentlemen, every man and woman, ay, and little child on earth, is an immortal soul and of infinite value to God the heavenly Father." . . . That was Christ's discovery of the individual to the surprise and astonishment of the world.^
4. He comes to save the lost. It is interesting to discover that the word " salvation " as first used by Jesus did not have a distinctly religious meaning. He used it of those whom He healed of bodily sickness. "Daughter," said the Master to the invalid woman who pressed through the throng to touch the hem of His garment, " be of good comfort ; thy faith hath made thee whole." And it is written in St. Mark's Gospel, " They laid the sick in the market places, and besought him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment : and as many as touched him were made whole." " Made whole " in these verses translates the same Greek word as is sometimes translated " saved." Saved folks were folks who were made whole, filled full of health, fulfilling their purpose. Up to this day, Zacchseus had been like a sick man, just a fragment of a man, a man who was able to use only a part of himself ; just as a sick man is a man who cannot use his eyes, or his limbs, or his head, or whatever part of him is afflicted. When the sick man is made whole he lives through all his being ; he no longer uses only a portion of his body ; every organ fulfils its functions perfectly. Zacchaeus's conscience was