into the knowledge of the truth, carrying the weak in His bosom, bringing back again the lost by repentance, binding up the wounded with His words of consolation, feeding all souls that follow Him with the food of eternal life, folding them within the pale of salvation. What the Church does on earth, it does in His power and name; and He, through it, fulfils His own shepherd care. This, then, is the external ministration of His goodness.

2. But once more. His love and care are shewn not only in the external and visible provision which He thus made beforehand for the perpetual wants of His flock, but in the continual and internal providence wherewith He still watches over it. The whole history of His Church from the beginningthe ages of persecution, and "times of refreshing ;" the great conflicts of faith with falsehood, and of the saints with the seed of the serpent; the whole career of His Church amid the kingdoms of the earth and changes of the world, are a perpetual revelation of His love and power. He has been gathering in His sheep one by one,- apostles, prophets, martyrs, saints, the pure and the penitent, the scattered and outcast, drawing them into His one visible fold, and gathering them still more closely and intimately to Himself, bringing them within the folds of His pavilion, and into the fellowship of His peculiar visitations. All that

the Father hath given Him shall come to Him. "I am the Good Shepherd, and know My sheep." "I know them;" "and I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand. My Father, which gave them Me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand."

The mystical number of His flock is written in the book of life; and He is ever fulfilling it; ever saying, through all the course of His Church, that which, while on earth, He spake of His elect among the Gentiles; "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold;" some not entered yet, some not born into the world; "them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd."

Is not this the way He has been dealing with each one of us from the time of our regeneration? Is not our whole life full of the tokens of His pastoral care? See how He has sought us out, and brought us to Himself. Although we were outwardly within His fold, yet for how many years were we in heart and in reality altogether lost, wandering in follies, plunged in deadly pitfalls. With what unwearied search did He follow us through all our blind and crooked paths. We met His eye at every turn, and beheld Him at

1 St. John x. 14, 27-29.

2 St. John x. 16.

every winding of our evil way. Perhaps there is hardly one of us who does not feel, on looking back, that he is not able to find the ultimate and true cause of his conversion to God in any of the apparent motives which turned him from the sin in which he was persisting. If we had been left to ourselves, why should we not have held on our original course without turning at all-nay, with confidence and settled obstinacy, with perpetual deterioration and darkening of soul? What was it that turned us at one time, when we would not be turned at another? Why then, and no sooner; and if not sooner, then why at all? Why, but that the Good Shepherd had found us at length; that having never left off to seek, He had overtaken us at last. He had been always seeking; but we refused to be found.

And, surely, the same is true even in those that live religiously. Even after we were found, and our hearts turned towards the true fold; who is there that knows the difficulty of repentance,— that is, of returning from error, and from wandering without God in the world, and does not feel that, if he had been at any time left to himself, he would have sunk down by the way, or been beguiled aside, or even turned back again? What has forced us clean away from habits which, by their perilous allurement and subtil dominion, had a

hold upon our very heart's will? What has borne us through the difficulties of humiliation, self-denial, chastisement of the flesh and spirit, through the difficulties and dangers of repentance, but that the Good Shepherd had laid us upon His shoulders, and bare us, all willing and yet unwilling, to our home and shelter? And so in like manner with all His servants. How is it that they have not fainted in the way; nor fallen behind the onward march of the true flock that follows Him; nor lacked pasture, strength, light, refreshment, consolation? How is it that none have ever been "able to pluck them out of His hand?" All the schisms and heresies of proud and evil men; all the baits of the world; all the bribes of this corrupt life; all the seductions of earthly pleasure; all the attractions of ease and sloth; all the powers of darkness, have spent themselves in vain against the Hand that covers His elect. He has kept and folded us from ten thousand ills, when we did not know it in the midst of our security we should have perished every hour, but that He sheltered us, "from the terror by night and from the arrow that flieth by day"—from the powers of evil that walk in darkness, from snares of our own evil will. He has kept us even against ourselves, and saved us even from our own undoing. Surely, though He had not taken to Himself this loving and

blessed Name, our own lives would have taught us to call Him the Good Shepherd.

Let us, then, meditate on this Name of love. Let us read the traces of His hand in all our ways, in all the events, the chances, the changes of this troubled state. It is He that dispenses all. It is He that folds and feeds us, that makes us to go in and out to be faint, or to find pasture-to lie down by the still waters, or to walk by the way that is parched and desert. He hath said, " I know My sheep;" not their number only, but their needs; their particular state, character, temptations, trials, dangers, and infirmities. I know them what they are, and what they must suffer and do to enter into the everlasting fold. And not only does He know His sheep, but He "calleth His own sheep by name." By that new name which in baptism He gave to them; a type of the new name which He will one day give the "name which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it." In this is expressed the familiar and intimate knowledge He has of our most hidden and secret condition of heart, of our joys, sorrows, losses, desires, fears, and hopes, of all our varying moods of mind, and all that makes up our very selves. He knows all-as we know those nearest

He knows all.

and most beloved-and far more deeply and intensely still-by the divine intuition of His eyes,