hat after this,
our little time of trial, we are to reign with Him in everlasting glory!
Of a certainty we are a favored people and a royal race, for we belong to
God. He has purchased our souls by creating us, He has come down from
Heaven to redeem and buy us back from the enemy to whom our race in folly
had surrendered itself, He has borne our sorrows and our sufferings to
make amends for us and to teach us the way to life, and finally He has
given His own life for our salvation.

Since, then, God has created us, it follows that He must have had us in
His mind from everlasting, because nothing that is, or can be, is
unforeseen by Him. From the remotest dawn of eternity, therefore; from the
very beginning of the eternal years, He saw us as He sees us now, clearly,
distinctly, lovingly. We did not exist from eternity as we do now, but we
were present to God before we were to ourselves, He saw us mirrored in
Himself. And when, in time, He called our race into being and endowed it
with life, we know what happened. This human nature of ours which He had
loved from eternity, and favored in time with existence, turned its back
upon its God and strayed away to sin and death. This was the disobedience
of our first parents, and in their sin we all have shared, for the very
reason that they were our parents and responsible for us as well as for
themselves. We became a ruined race, deserving punishment, fit for
perdition; and yet God did not give us up. He followed after us, as it
were; He pursued us, as a shepherd pursues his chosen flock, until finally
He led us back to His fold, and to pastures of rest and plenty.

It was not enough for God's goodness to give us the gift of life, and to
endow us with understanding, will, and freedom; it did not satisfy His
bountifulness to make our life fair here on earth, and to enable us to
reap much of the joys and pleasures with which even this world abounds--no,
far more than all this has He wished and prepared for His elect, for the
souls who belong to His flock. It was nothing less than Himself, Heaven
and its rewards, that the eternal Father had in store for us when He
called us into being. In order, therefore, that we should not lose our
destined crowns through the guilt and wounds of original sin, He provided
for us a remedy, He sent us a Saviour, who was His only son, our Lord
Jesus Christ.

Now since it is to Christ, the Saviour, that the spiritual meaning of the
Shepherd Psalm r