The Shepherd and His Flock

Conspicuous among the literary characteristics of the Bible are its truthful and loving pictures of nature. Prophets and Psalmists, though drinking their inspiration at a nobler fount, seem to revel amid the glories of the outer world. They fetch their grandest and sweetest imagery, — they illustrate and enforce their noblest lessons, from its fields and forests, its woods and streams and rivers. Even its animated tribes — not less than rock and mead, and flower and tree — become, in their hands, consecrated teachers, ministers of truth, interpreters of God.

Were we to select, amid these symbols, one of more frequent recurrence and interest than the rest, it would be the constant and ever-varying representations given us of the Shepherd and the Sheep. Every thought, indeed, of the Hebrew of old was interwoven with pastoral life. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Amos, were Shepherds. The sheepfold was the prominent object in the landscape; the “pipings of the flocks” was the everfamiliar music. We need not wonder, therefore, to meet the favourite image at every new turn in the inspired Volume. The flock are now browsing on the green pastures, and reclining in tranquil repose by “the waters of comfort:” now following the footsteps of the guiding iD Shepherd; now sprinkled in groups on the mountain side; now gathered in some sheltered hollow, or under -the shadow of rock or terebinth, as a defence from the noontide heat: now a trembling lamb is seen in the Shepherd’s arm; now the bleat of some wanderer is heard on some distant crag; or the Shepherd is rescuing it with his crook from perilous height, or swollen torrent, or ravening beast: now he is standing, in the gray twilight, by the wicket-gate, to pen his fleecy charge; now, under the starry heavens, he is watching, in solitary vigil, the entrance of the fold. When the sacred writers seek, amid finite things, the noblest emblem of the Infinite, it is this — “The Lord is my Shepherd.” The Bible may be almost said to begin and end with Shepherd picturings. It is a pastoral scene which meets us at the gates of Eden: we see Abel, with the firstlings of his flock, outside the portals of Paradise lost; and one of the last and most touchingly beautiful of inspired delineations, is that within the gates of Paradise Eegainecl, when, under the same familiar figure the Great Shepherd is still represented as “leading and “feeding” God’s Ransomed; conducting them from fountain to fountain of living water amid the pastures of the blessed. In no less than three of His Parables, besides other incidental references, Christ Himself has thrown an imperishable interest around the Shepherd and his Flock* These Divine pictures are photographed in

* Those who are curious, sestnewcally and archseologically, as well as theologically, may spend some pleasant hours in the library of the British Museum in inspecting a few rare volumes, in which the preponderance, in early Christian art, of the symbol of the Good Shepherd and the sheep is forcibly shown and illustrated. As it has been remarked,” This emblem every heart. Few among us, I believe, can look, with a Bible-loving eye, even on a flock of sheep reposing in one of our own quiet valleys, or scattered over one of our green mountain sides, without having suggested thoughts and memories of unutterable sacreclness. How much more tenderly may we enter into the feelings thus expressed by

has been unceasingly repeated under every possible aspect, and may be almost said to have been worn threadbare.” Tertullian incidentally mentions it as being even painted on the commnnion-cups or chalices of glass in that early age. Conspicuous among tte works referred to may be mentioned, “‘Bosio’s Roma Sotteranea, (folio,) Roma, 1651,” (see also De Rossi’s recent volume;) Munter’s “Sinnbilder an der Alten Christ,” (Altona;) and Didron’s “Iconogr. Chretienne; or, The History of Christian Art in the Middle Ages.” The author had marked several of the designs therein embodied, principally taken from rude frescoes and bas-reliefs in the Catacombs, which he thought at one time might appropriately have been incorporated in these pages: (one of the frescoes is believed to be as early as the third century.) On second thoughts, their quaintness deterred him. The spirit of all of them has*been caught up and idealised in the beautiful frontispiece facing the title-page of this book. The most salient portions of the last-named of the above works have been translated for the English reader in one of the volumes of “Buhu’s Illustrated Library,” from which we cannot do better than quote the following condensed description: — “The figured monuments in the Catacombs,” says Didron, “the sarcophagi, and more especially paintings in fresco, constantly present the figure of a Shepherd, youthful, beardless, clad in a short tunic, striped with two longitudinal bands. ‘He is standing, and bears upon his shoulders the sheep that had been lost, and that he loved. At his feet are the faithful sheep browsing, or lying down. In one design, taken from a fresco, the Shepherd has in his right hand a Pan pipe of seven reeds, whilst with the left heliolds the sheep securely on his shoulders.” .... “In other drawings given by Bosio,” adds the translator, “the Shepherd holds the lost sheep more or less firmly on his shoulders, and seems more or less in fear lest it should a second, time escape. In p. 391 of ‘Rom. Sott.,’ the sheep is seated affectionately on the shoulder of the Shepherd, who, from its being so weary and so rejoiced to return to its fold, does not fear that it will again endeavour to escape. The Good Shepherd himself seems sometimes more weary than at others of the burden which he bears upon His shoulders, or with the journey He has made in order to recover His lost sheep; but, a recent traveller in Palestine: —” It was while riding through the low hills covered with this vegetation, and coming out on the blighted flats of the Dead Sea, that one of those pictures passed before me which are ever after hung up in the mind’s gallery among the choicest of the spoils of Eastern travel. By some chance I was alone, riding a few hundred yards in front of the caravan, when, turning the corner of a hill, I met a man coming towards me, the only one we had seen for several hours since we had passed a few black tents some eight or ten miles away. He was a noble-looking young Shepherd, dressed in his camel’s-hair robe, and with the lithesome, powerful limbs and elastic step of the children of the desert. But the interest which attached to him was the errand on which he had manifestly been engaged on these Dead Sea plains from which he was returning. Bound his neck, and with its little limbs held gently by his hand, lay a lamb he had rescued, and was doubtless carrying home. The little creature lay as if perfectly content and happy, and the man looked pleased as he strode along lightly with his burden; and as I saluted him with the usual gesture of pointing to heart and head, and the ‘Salaam alik!’ (Peace be with you!) he responded with a smile and a kindly glance at the lamb, to which he saw my eyes were directed.

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