Shepherd." He says they looked on that figure and it conveyed to them all they wanted. And then he adds sorrowfully that "as ages passed on 'the image of the Good Shepherd' faded away from the mind of the Christian world, and other emblems of the Christian faith took the place of the once dearly loved figure."
"Instead of the good and gracious Pastor, there came the omnipotent Judge, or the Crucified Sufferer, or the Infant in His mother's arms, or the Master in His parting Supper."
All these later presentments of the Divine Saviour emphatically are beautiful and true, but they are not what the first Christians especially dwelt on. These loved to think of Him first and chiefest as "the Good Shepherd who gave His life for the sheep."
Among the many pictured figures of the "Good Shepherd" in the catacomb sepulchral galleries, the Shepherd is occasionally represented with a kid or a goat in place of a sheep in His loving arms: "And other sheep I have which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and there shall be one fold, one shepherd." The catacomb theology, as expounded by the catacomb teachers, went beyond even these gracious words, when it represented the creature on the shoulders of the Master, as not a lamb but a kid—not a sheep but a goat. These Christians of the first day were persuaded that their Master's mission on earth was "not to repel but to include, not to condemn but to save; they believed in His tender compassion and boundless charity."[1]
This sweet and loving view provoked the indignant remonstrance of the stern Tertullian (circa A.D. 200). On this harsh
- ↑ Dean Stanley (Christian Institutions) calls attention to the curious fact that the popular religion of the first two centuries, as shown in the catacomb witnesses, ran, in some particulars, in different channels from the contemporary writers whose reliquiæ have been preserved, and also from the paintings and writers of a later period; for instance, the "Good Shepherd" is very little alluded to even by the writers of the second and third and fourth centuries; e.g. Irenæus and Justin, Athanasius and Cyprian. If we come down much later, scarcely any notices of the "Shepherd" occur in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas; none in the Tridentine Catechism; none in the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles; none in the Westminster Confession.
