Luke 15:9

9. Her friends and her neighbours Here the Church is perhaps a Church; we have a picture of the union of the various sections into which the universal Church must of necessity be divided; and it is a common rejoicing over the conversion of sinners and the triumphs of the cross.

Rejoice with me Just as these Scribes and Pharisees ought to have rejoiced with Jesus when stupid Jewish wanderers, or senseless Gentile outcasts, listened to his gospel and renounced their sins. This joy of the Church over the converted sinner is pictured forth by Jesus to show these doctors of the Jewish Church that if they are of the true Church they will rejoice too.

Which I have lost For the Church has lost every soul that is lost. Every soul is redeemed by Christ. Every soul is met as it enters probation with the saving power of the atonement, and is truly an heir of heaven. Every soul enters life a proper member of the Church; of which membership baptism is the true recognition. And if the soul be left unconscious, as a piece of metal, of its own worth, and become hard in sin, and buried in darkness and dust, with the image, not of the blessed Redeemer, but of the gods of heathenism, which are but forms of the devil, it is the Church who lost them, and the Church who may rejoice when she has found that which she had lost.