The form in which they loved best to think of this Almighty Saviour was as “the great Shepherd of the sheep”—the Shepherd of the First Epistle of S. Peter—the Shepherd of S. Luke and of S. John.[142]

A great and eloquent writer[143] in one of his most suggestive works does not hesitate to speak of what he terms the popular religion of the first Christians as the religion of “the Good 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.”[144]

This sweet and loving view provoked the indignant remonstrance of the stern Tertullian (circa A.D. 200). On this harsh protest of the great African Father Tertullian, Matthew Arnold founds one of his most touching poems:

“He saves the sheep—the goats He doth not save:

So spake the fierce Tertullian.

But she sighed:

The infant Church, of love she felt the tide