THE PASTORAL CULT 271 



that has adorned the Christian faith. It furnished 

 Christ with one of His tenderest parables, out of which 

 grew the conception of Christ Himself as the Good 

 Shepherd. 



If we ignored the pastoral state, truly says Professor 

 Patrick Geddes, " we should be losing sight of a main 

 fount of spiritual power." Some have even maintained 

 that down the pastoral hillsides first trickled the slender 

 stream of the rehgious life. We now know that religion 

 has lowher beginnings. Long before man has domesti- 

 cated the sheep or the ox, it strikes its roots in the grave 

 and blossoms over the tombs. None the less, the pas- 

 toral age is the great watershed of rehgions. On this 

 side and on that it has poured down the faiths of Chaldaea 

 and Palestine and Arabia, of ancient India and modern 

 Scotland. On all of them it has left its stamp. In 

 Hebrew times God was already a shepherd -god. Three - 

 fifths of the Psalter are understood to have been com- 

 posed after the return of the Jews from Babylon, but 

 the grand old Twenty-third Psalm is believed by Ewald 

 and other equally authorised critics to be of pre-Exilic 

 origin. Though it belongs to the pastoral period, it 

 has formed the consolation of hundreds of generations 

 in ancient Canaan and modern Europe and all over the 

 world. Is it quite obsolete in free-thinking Australia ? 



" The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want. He 

 maketh me to lie down in green pastures : He leadeth 

 me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul : He 

 leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's 

 sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the 

 shadow of death, I will fear no evil : for Thou art with 

 me ; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. Thou 

 preparest a table before me in the presence of mine 

 enemies : Thou anointest my head with oil ; my cup 

 runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow 

 me all the days of my Ufe : and I will dwell in the house 

 of the Lord for ever." 



Sung on the bleak hillsides of Scotland by persecuted 

 Covenanter or Cameronian, a psalm so quietly trium- 



