up under these three heads--they cannot be too simple: I. The Lord is a
Shepherd; II. The Lord is my Shepherd; and, III. if that be too feeble a
figure to meet the fugitive and hunted life of man, the Lord is my Host
and my Sanctuary for ever.

I. _The Lord is my Shepherd_: or--as the Greek, vibrating to the force of
the original--_The Lord is shepherding me; I shall not want_. This is the
theme of the first four verses.

Every one feels that the Psalm was written by a shepherd, and the first
thing that is obvious is that he has made his God after his own image.

There are many in our day who sneer at that kind of theology--pretty,
indeed, as the pearl or the tear, but like tear or pearl a natural and
partly a morbid deposit--a mere human process which, according to them,
pretty well explains all religion; the result of man's instinct to see
himself reflected on the cloud that bounds his view; man's honest but
deluded effort to put himself in charge of the best part of himself,
filling the throne of an imaginary heaven with an impossible exaggeration
of his own virtues.

But it is far better to hold with Jesus Christ than with such reasoners.
Jesus Christ tells us that a man cannot be wrong if he argues towards God
from what he finds best in himself. _If ye then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts to your children: how much more shall your Heavenly Father
give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him? What man of you, having an
hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine
in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?
Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth
not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find