as regarded murder, theft, adultery?  The steady gaze followed the youth’s impetuous answer, and then came the recommendation to sell all that he had and give to the poor—­“and, Come!  Follow me!” At this, we read in a fragment of the “Gospel according to the Hebrews” (preserved by Origen), “the rich man began to scratch his head, and it did not please him.  And the Lord said to him, `How sayest thou, “The law I have kept and the prophets?” For it is written in the law, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”; and behold! many who are thy brethren, sons of Abraham, are clad in filth and dying of hunger, and thy house is full of many good things, and nothing at all goes out from it to them.’  And he turned and said to Simon, his disciple, who was sitting beside him:  `Simon, son of John, it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.’” We need not altogether reject this variant of the story.

But it was more than the physical needs of the multitude that appealed to Jesus.  “Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe,” says Teufelsdroeckh in “Sartor Resartus”, “comes of his Greatness, it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.  Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack happy?” We read in a passage, which it is true, is largely symbolic, that one of Jesus’ quotations from the Old Testament was that “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Luke 4:4).  Hunger is a real thing—­horribly real; but it is comparatively easy to deal with, and man has deeper needs.  The Shoeblack, according to Teufelsdroeckh, wants “God’s infinite universe altogether to himself.”  In the simpler words of Jesus, he is never happy till he says, “I will arise and go to my Father” (Luke 15:18).

This craving for the Father the men of Jesus’ day tried to fill with the law; and, when the law failed to satisfy it, they had nothing further to suggest, except their fixed idea that “God heareth not sinners” (John 9:31).  They despaired of the great masses and left them alone.  They did not realize, as Jesus did, that the Father also craves for his children.  When Jesus saw the simpler folk thus forsaken, the picture rose in his mind of sheep, worried by dogs or wolves, till they fell, worn out—­sheep without a shepherd (Matt. 9:36).  Every one remembers the shepherd of the parable who sought the one lost sheep until he found it, and how he brought it home on his shoulders (Luke 15:5).  But there is another parable, we might almost say, of ninety and nine lost sheep—­a parable, not developed, but implied in the passage of Matthew, and it is as significant as the other, for our Good Shepherd has to ask his friends to help him in this case.  The appeal that lay in the sheer misery and helplessness of masses of men was one of the foundations of the Christian Church. (The Good Shepherd, by the way, is a phrase from the Fourth Gospel (John 10:11), but we think most often of the Good Shepherd as carrying the sheep, and that comes from Luke, and is in all likelihood nearer the parable of Jesus.)