country. They liked to live in pride and comfort in the towns, with
their comfortable congregations round them, admiring them; but they
had no fancy to go out into the deserts, to seek and to save those
who were lost. They were bad shepherds, greedy shepherds, who were
glad enough to shear God's flock, and keep the wool themselves: but
they did not care to feed the flock of God. It was too much
trouble; and they could get no honour and no money by it. And most
likely they did not understand these poor people; could not speak,
hardly understand, their country language; for these Galileans spoke
a rough dialect, different from that of the upper classes.

So the Scribes and Pharisees looked down on them as a bad, wild, low
set of people, with whom nothing could be done; and said, 'This
people who knoweth not the law, is accursed.'

But what they would not do, God himself would. God in Christ had
come to feed his own flock, and to seek the lost sheep, and bring
them gently home to God's fold. He could feel for these poor wild
foresters and mountain shepherds; he could understand what was in
their hearts; for he knew the heart of man; and, therefore, he could
make them understand him. And it was for this very reason, one
might suppose, that our Lord was willing to be brought up at
Nazareth, that he might learn the country speech, and country ways,
and that the people might grow to look on him as one of themselves.
Those Scribes and Pharisees, one may suppose, were just the people
whom they could not understand; fine, rich scholars, proud people
talking very learnedly about deep doctrines. The country folk must
have looked at them as if they belonged to some other world, and
said,--Those Pharisees cannot understand us, any more than we can
them, with their hard rules about this and that. Easy enough for