may
have grieved Him, He is ever ready to pursue our wanderings, and to seek
until He finds us. He does not stop to consider the enormity of our guilt,
or our unreasonableness, or our ingratitude, but He seeks us. He does not
pause to take an account of all He has done for us, of the many graces He
has given us, of the tears and blood He has shed in our behalf; but He
goes after our straying souls, and He will not be appeased until He
restore us. God does not will the death of the sinner, but that he be
converted and live.(23) He knows all our frailties and our diverse
temptations; He knows how alluring are the things of sense to a nature
perverted like ours; He knows how easy it is for us, blind and ignorant as
we are, to forget Him and our dearest interests, and to obey the call of
other voices; all this He understands, and He has pity on us. "He knoweth
our frame, He remembereth that we are dust."(24)

To bring us back, therefore, when wandering, and to restore us to the
circle of His chosen flock, our Saviour has made ample provision. Through
those divine mediums of grace--the sacraments of His Church--He has arranged
to succor all our wants and to cure our various infirmities. The
sacraments of Baptism and Penance, in particular, were instituted to raise
our souls from death to life, and to heal our spiritual wounds. Baptism
may be aptly compared to the door of the sheepfold. It is the gate through
which men must enter into the fold of Christ, it is the entrance to His
Church. It clears away the guilt and stain of original sin, and restores
the soul from a state of enmity to the friendship and grace of God. None
can really belong to Christ, none can be of His true fold who have not
entered by way of the door, who have not been baptized. Many there are who
pretend to belong to Him and think themselves of the number of His flock;
they speak of Him as their Master and Shepherd; they pretend to be doing
His work; they call Him Lord and preach in His name; but they have not
entered by the door of the sheepfold, and He knows them not. Like thieves
and robbers, they have climbed up some other way, and they neither know
Him, nor does He know them, neither can they understand His voice. Baptism
is the entrance, it is the door, to the fold of Christ.

And as it is through Baptism that our bountiful Lord first recalls us from
the ways of sin and makes us members of his flock, so in the sacrament of
Penance He has provided a m