272 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



phant must have filled their souls with peace and nerved 

 their hearts Avith fresh courage. In the hymns of Vedic 

 India, noble though they often are, is there aught to 

 compare with it ? Has the pastoral age produced any- 

 thing more affecting or more sublime ? 



All through its history the pastoral age continues to 

 furnish materials for religious instruction. It supplied 

 Jesus with one of His tenderest parables, and made of 

 Christ Himself the Good Shepherd. " Feed My sheep," 

 He commanded Simon Peter, chief of the Apostles, and 

 the loftiest of Christian painters has made the scene of 

 the injunction immortal. It has given rise to a religious 

 sect known as " the sheep-calling Baptists " in Alabama. 

 It is the theme of many a hymn besides the one INIr.Sankey, 

 the American musician-revivalist, rendered so potent in 

 effecting conversions. Alas ! it is also the refrain of 

 the despairing song shouted by Kipling's "gentlemen 

 rankers." 



" We are lost sheep v^ho have gone astray ; 

 " Baa, baa, baa ! " 



A mythology could readily have sprung up in the 

 sunbaked deserts of Australia. " What were clouds in 

 the Riverina," writes Rolf Boldrewood, " but the heralds 

 of prosperity, or its sjaionym, the Rain-King, but the 

 lord and gold -giver of all the sun-scorched land ? "* 

 And precisely such feelings of exasperation and rebellion 

 as are expressed m one of the Vedic hymns come (we 

 are told) into the minds of the dwellers in drought- 

 stricken Texas, t and also (I am informed) into the hearts 

 of the Australian up-countrymen, as, day after day, 

 they see clouds drift across the sky and shed never a 

 drop of rain. To the desolate squatter, threatened with 

 ruin, the columns of dust, or moving cloud-pillars, 

 seemed the abodes of evil genii. And when we read 

 of men dying in the beds of dried-up creeks, or again, 

 in time of flood, of " the hungry, surging rush " of " the 



* Boldrewood, The Sqiuitter''s Dream, chs. xii. xxv. 

 ■\ Ragozin, The Story of Chaldea. 



