It is easy enough to decree and lord it over, it is not so easy to feed. And food is what a flock explicitly needs. It can live without edicts, it cannot live without food. Observe, also, the pronoun "my" sheep. The flock was not Peter's, it was the flock of Peter's Lord. The flock does not belong to the under-shepherd; it belongs to the chief shepherd. And did not Peter himself--and that is one reason why his letters are never read in the Romish Church--very strongly denounce the very things which it is asserted that Christ had invested him with: lordship over the Church, a separate hierarchical priesthood, and refuse such honors as are freely given to his successor? As Luther has well said: "Popery never drew its doctrine from the Bible, but uses it as a means to thrust upon the world an audacious system which has its origin somewhere else." Nor can we leave entirely unnoticed the difference the Lord makes between His people,--"Feed my lambs," and again, "Feed my sheep." Some of Christ's flock are lambs, lambs in years. Perhaps there are more lambs than sheep, more true members of Christ in the nursery and in the Sunday-school and in the Christian day-school than in the assembly of the adults, and these we are to feed, and it becomes those who are invested with the sacred office, and those who are supporting the sacred office, to dispense to them wholesome and health-sustaining spiritual food. Our responsibilities in this respect are great, and all the greater because the more secular knowledge would crowd out religious, the many things that are now regarded needful, and set aside "the one thing needful." "Feed my lambs," and, "Feed my sheep," says the Chief Shepherd. See that they get the proper food and get it in proper proportion. And "My sheep;" we are not always to remain lambs. Christian life is a growth. First the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear. First babes, and then we need milk; afterwards adults, and then we need meat. Alas! that, like the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, we are sometimes constrained to complain "that many of you who ought by this time be teachers, are yet needing again that one teach them the first rudiments of the oracles of God, having become such as have need of milk and not of solid food."