Eden and for Calvary; this globe
supplies the fulcrum whereon all God's government leans. The Redeemer
came not to the largest world, but to the lost world: "even so, Father."

"He took not on him the nature of angels." In aggregate numbers they
may, for aught we know, be the ninety and nine, while we represent the
one that strayed; but though all these shining stars were peopled
worlds, and all their inhabitants angels who kept their first estate, he
will leave them in their places in the blue heaven afar, like sheep in
the wide moorland, and go forth in search of this one shooting star, to
arrest and bring it back. It is his joy to restore it to law and light
again. Rejoice with great joy, O inhabitants of the earth! the Saviour
Almighty has passed other worlds and other beings, some of whom do not
need, and some of whom do not get, salvation,--has passed them and come
to us. He has taken hold of the seed of Abraham, that we who partake of
Abraham's sinful flesh may partake also of Abraham's saving faith. There
is much in this mystery which we do not know, and in our present state
could not comprehend; but we know the one thing needful regarding
it,--that "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners."[76]

[76] "Should not that great and glorious Shepherd, whose millions of
bright sheep fill the universe, leave these millions in order to
seek the slightest, poorest, most infirm of those who need his care,
and without that care would utterly perish; does not his boundless
love require him to go after it?" Stier, after quoting this sentence
in reference to the parable from Kurz, _Bibel und Astronomie_,
remarks, "This is a thought quite permissible in itself, but as an
exposition of what Eternal Wisdom has spoken, it is not valid."
Here, however, the learned critic has incorrectly apprehended the
state of the question. A secondary relation is as real in its own
place as a primary. It is quite true that the parable, under the
picture of the one sheep that strayed and the ninety-nine that
remained on the pasture, points directly and immediately to two
distinct classes of human kind; but it brings up as legitimately,
although more remotely, the distinction, governed by the same
principle, which has in God's universal sovereignty been made
between the human race on the one hand, and angelic spirits on the
other. One expositor may legitimately confine his view to the more
immediate