Many a descriptive verse has strengthened our attachment to the pastoral scene, and many a well-wrought picture has occasioned it to glow like a reality in our ideas.
But far more impressively than these causes can possibly affect, has the word of God endeared the subject to our hearts, and sanctified it to Christian experience.

Who does not look back with love and veneration to those days of holy simplicity, when patriarchs of the church of God lived in tents and watched their flocks?
With what a strength and beauty of allusion do the prophets refer to the intercourse between the shepherd and flock for an illustration of the Saviour's kingdom on earth! The Psalmist rejoiced in the consideration that the Lord was his Shepherd, and that therefore he should not want.

The Redeemer himself assumed this interesting title, and declared that "his sheep hear his voice, he knows them, and they follow him, and he gives unto them eternal life." Perhaps at no previous moment was this comparison ever expressed so powerfully, as when his risen Lord gave the pastoral charge to the lately offending but now penitent disciple, saying, "Feed my sheep." Every principle of grace, mercy, and peace, met together on that occasion.
Peter had thrice denied his Master: his Master now thrice asked him, "Lovest thou me ?" Peter each time appealed to his own, or to his Lord's consciousness of what he felt within his heart.

As often Jesus commited to his care the flock which he had purchased with his blood.

And that none might be forgotten, he not only said, "Feed my sheep," but "Feed my lambs," also.
May every instructor of the young keep this injunction enforced on his conscience and affections,--I return to little Jane.
It was about fifteen months from the first period of her attendance on my Saturday school, when I missed her from her customary place.