The Shepherd And His Flock

Originally Published in 1870

"We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way." Isaiah 53:6

Mournful is this opening picture. It is composed of no quiet pastoral scene with verdant meadows and glassy waters—the watchful sheep reposing under the loving eye and guardianship of their Shepherd. Shepherd and fold are forsaken. Bleak desolate mountains or rugged wilds, stretching interminably on every side, are covered with the scattered flock! 

The Bible contains many impressive descriptions of our state of alienation from God. The star wandering from its central sun—"wandering stars." The prisoner bound in fetters of iron pining in his dungeon. The vessel driven from its moorings plunging in the tempestuous sea. The prodigal, self-exiled from the joys and amenities of home, feeding on the garbage of the distant wilderness. But we question if any figure more simply yet more graphically delineates the natural estrangement of the heart than that of the stray sheep. There is not only conveyed the idea of our lost condition, but the tendency to wander further and further through the bleak dreary wastes of an ever-sadder ruin. The sheep is proverbially the most helpless of animals. Others, by the power of natural instinct, can succeed in avoiding danger; or, if they lose their way, they can retrace it with ease. The sheep can do neither. When once it has wandered from the Shepherd's eye, and from the footsteps of the flock, instinct seems to forsake it; is incapable of return.