whom He gave them;
To shepherds, made meek a-caring for sheep,
He told of a Christ sent to save them.

"O love of the sheep, O watch in the night,
And the glory, the message, the choir;
'Twas shepherds who saw their King in the straw,
And returned with their hearts all on fire.

"When Christ thought to tell of His love to the world
He said to the throng before him,
'The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep--'
And away to the cross they bore Him.

"O love of the sheep, O blood sweat of prayer,
O man on the cross, God-forsaken;
A shepherd has gone to defend all alone
The sheepfold by death overtaken.

"When God sought a King for His people, for aye,
He went to the grave to find him;
And a shepherd came back, Death dead in His grasp,
And a following flock behind Him.

"O love of the sheep, O life from the dead,
O strength of the faint and the fearing;
A shepherd is King, and His Kingdom will come.
And the day of His coming is nearing."[1]

Coronation Gift.

Christ is crowned. Not in any vague far-fetched meaning, but in the
plain common-sense meaning of the word, He is _crowned_.

For crowned means put in the place of highest power, with full right to
exercise that power at will. And when the crucified Jesus went up that
Olivet day, before the astonished eyes of the disciples, into the
sightless blue, on the cloud, He was received in the upper world by the
Father. And He was lifted up into the place of highest honour and
greatest power. He sat down at the right hand of the Father.[2]

He had said it would be so. Breathing the air thick with bitter hate on
the night of His trial, He had quietly said to the Jewish rulers that
even so it would be, bringing at once about His person the bursting of
the storm of hate.[3] Now His unfaltering trust in His Father has its
sweet reward.

The Holy Spirit poured out on Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, was
the gift of the _crowned_ Christ. The rushing sound as of a mighty wind
that filled all the house, the tongues of flame plainly seen, the bold
talking to the crowds of foreign Jews of God's mighty power, the
faithful witnessing about the crucified Jesus in the city that hounded
Him to death, the convinced crowds openly declaring at the peril of
their lives their belief in the despised Jesus, the strangely rare
unselfishness even in money matters, and the winsome graciousness of
spirit that marked, not only th