Note 76 — XXII. THE LOST SHEEP.

“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 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.[76]