at Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and,
therefore, what he did when he was upon earth, he is doing now, and
will do till the end of the world. If we will believe this, and
look at our Lord's doings upon earth as patterns and specimens, as
it were, of his eternal life and character, then every verse in the
gospels will teach us something, and be precious to us.

The people came to hear Jesus in a desert place; a wild forest
country, among the hills on the east side of the Lake of Gennesaret.
'And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with
compassion toward them, because they were as sheep having no
shepherd: and he taught them many things.'

And, what kind of people were these, who so moved our Lord's pity?
The text tells us, that they were like sheep. Now, in what way were
they like sheep?

A sheep is simple, and harmless, and tractable, and so, I suppose,
were these people. They may not have been very clever and shrewd;
not good scholars. No doubt they were a poor, wild, ignorant, set
of people; but they were tractable; they were willing to come and
learn; they felt their own ignorance, and wanted to be taught. They
were not proud and self-sufficient, not fierce or bloodthirsty. The
text does not say that they were like wild beasts having no keeper:
but like sheep having no shepherd. And therefore Christ pitied
them, because they were teachable, willing to be taught, and worth
teaching; and yet had no one to teach them.

The Scribes and Pharisees, it seems, taught them nothing. They may
have taught the people in Jerusalem, and in the great towns,
something: but they seem, from all the gospels, to have cared
little or nothing for the poor folk out in the wild mountain
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