r from the Father's
home, feeding on the husks of swine; but who, while yet in the vigor of
life, felt the touch of the merciful hand and heard the sound of the
loving voice, leading them, calling them back to God, back to the "beauty
ever ancient and ever new." Such souls as these, it is true, constitute
one class of erring, but repenting sinners; but there is another class
whose plight is far more pitiable. They are those long-delayed, but
finally repentant sinners, men and women who have lived their lives away
from the Church and its sacraments, who have grown old and gray in the
sins of their youth, and now, at the last, when death is coming, are
moved, by a special grace from Heaven, to weep for their sins and wasted
years before they enter their eternal abode.

For each and all of these how important it is that the Shepherd should
stand at the door of the fold and bind up their wounds with His tender
grace before they pass through the portals of death! Scarred and wayward
children, victims of evil circumstances, creatures of vanity and of folly,
they realize at the end how impotent they are, how helpless in the
presence of the coldness of death to redeem or make sure the years that
are fled, unless He draw near and assist them who has sustained them in
life, and who is at once the author and the master of both life and death!

But for all, without exception, the need of the Shepherd is imperative at
the end. The victory, the happy issue of life's struggle, "is not of him
that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy."(71)
All may run, all may strive, indeed, for the prize of eternal life, but
none can be sure, short of the mercy of God, that he will be saved; none
can merit this crowning glory of life. Whether young or old, whether
favored or neglected, whether innocent or guilty, whether the life has
been dowered with special blessings and never known the stain of grievous
sin, or whether it has been eked out amidst deepest misery and defiled
with hateful crimes, the same uncertainty for all remains as to the manner
in which the end shall come. Men may reason and conjecture, from what they
see and know, that this one or that is in God's favor, and shall so
persevere to the end; that the members of a certain family, or class, or
station in life, are sure to be saved, and shall never fall short; but
that those of another class or condition shall, on the contrary, die as
they have lived, in th