and narrower sphere; but another may as legitimately take
a wider range, provided he make and mark the necessary distinctions
as he proceeds; as one inquirer in physics may limit his speculation
to the solid body of this globe, while another, under the same
general designation, may, with perfect logical exactness, include
also the atmosphere that surrounds it.

Having noticed cursorily that grand characteristic feature of God's
universal government to which the principle of the parable is
applicable, we proceed now to examine more particularly the recovery of
lost men by the Lord our Redeemer, to which the lesson of the parable
is, in point of fact, specifically applied.

1. The shepherd misses one when it has strayed from the flock. The
Redeemer's knowledge is infinite; He looks not only over the multitude
generally, but into each individual. When I stand on a hillock at the
edge of a broad meadow, and look across the sward, it may be said in a
general way that I look on all the grass of that field; but the sun in
the sky looks on it after another fashion,--shines on every down-spike
that protrudes from every blade. It is thus that the Good Shepherd knows
the flock. Knowing all, he misses any one that wanders. He missed a
world when it fell, although his worlds lie scattered like grains of
golden dust on the blue field of heaven,--the open infinite. When the
light of moral life went out in one of his worlds, he missed its wonted
shining in the aggregate of glory that surrounds his throne. With equal
perfectness of knowledge he misses one human being who has been formed
by his hand, but fails to hang by faith upon his love. The Bible speaks
of falling "_into_ the hands of the living God," and calls it "a fearful
thing" (Heb. x. 31); but an equally fearful thing happened before
it,--we fell _out of_ the bosom of the living God. He felt, so to speak,
the want of our weight when we fell, and said, "Save from going down to
the pit." But the omniscience of the Saviour does not stop when it
passes through the multitude, and reaches the individual man; it
penetrates the veils that effectually screen us from each other, and so
knows the thoughts which congregate like clouds within a human heart,
that he misses every one that is not subject to his will. When the
mighty volume is coursing along its channel towards the ocean, he marks
every drop that leaps aside in spray. It is a solemn thought, and to the
reconciled a