efers in a particular manner, it is in Him especially, and
in His earthly life, that we discern and find fulfilled the chiefest
qualities of the good shepherd. As God, we see, He has, indeed, been our
shepherd from the beginning, creating and endowing our nature, and
providing for us unnumbered benefits, temporal and eternal. But it is in
His human nature, in His character as God and man, that He draws nearest
to us and proves unto us in ways most gracious that He is, in truth, our
loving Master and the Shepherd of our souls. Marvelous, assuredly, has
been the goodness of God to create us at all; and still more marvelous
that He should have destined us for a participation in His own eternal
blessedness; but in no way has the heavenly Father so stooped to us, in no
way has He so manifested His utter condescension towards us, as in the
abasement of His Only-begotten Son, "who, being in the form of God,
emptied himself, taking the form of a servant."(4) For let us reflect that
to raise our race from its fallen state and restore it to the divine
good-pleasure, it was not necessary that the Second Person of the Most
Holy Trinity should have come down to earth. Such extraordinary means were
not of necessity to bring us back to Heaven's smile and favor. As by a
simple act of His omnipotent will God had called the world and us and all
that is out of nothingness in the beginning, so again by a single wish of
the same divine will He could have restored us, from a condition of
bondage and sin, to the realms of grace and peace. And even when the Son
of God did condescend, in accordance with the will of His Father, to
clothe Himself with our nature and visit our blighted sphere, how simple,
really, He could have made our redemption! How easily could He have
blotted out the handwriting that was against us, and presented our tearful
world, all smiling and glad, to the arms of His eternal Father! Yes,
Christ could have made our redemption easy. He could have paid our debt to
God in a thousand different, simple ways, had He wished it so. One drop of
His precious blood, one tear of His eye, one sigh of the Sacred Heart
would have sufficed to redeem innumerable worlds like ours.

But the Saviour wished it otherwise. He was our Shepherd and He loved us,
His deceived and wounded sheep. He was with the Father when we were
planned and made. He it was, in truth, who made us, for He and the Father
are one.(5) He, therefore, knew our nature, since