ning this along with Olshausen, it owns also that the angels who
separate the good from the evil at the end of the world are angels, and
does not with him explain them away into the human ministry of the
Gospel.

3. It is perfectly congruous with the habits of fishermen and the
character of the instruments which they employ. As fishers drop the net
over a certain space, and, without making any pretence of discriminating
between good and bad, drag all within that space to shore; so the
invisible agents whom God employs in his universal administration,
whether laws or angelic spirits or both combined, make no distinction
between good and bad, when by successive castings of the net, as it
were, they enclose section after section, generation after generation of
human kind, and draw them slowly, silently, but inevitably to the edge
of this life, and over it into the unseen world. I scarcely know in the
whole range of nature an analogy more true and touching than this. When
you allow that the angels cast and draw the net as well as divide its
contents, the incongruities disappear, and the picture starts into life,
true to the original. The fishes, enclosed within the net when it is
first thrown out, but still swimming in the sea, not aware that the net
is round them, are intensely like a human generation, with the sentence
of death hanging over them, yet living and moving freely, and looking
for many days. As the circle of the net grows narrower the fishes
gently give way before it, and so enjoy for a little longer the
sensation of floating at liberty in the water; and it is not until they
touch the ground that they become thoroughly alarmed. The struggle then
is sudden, earnest, short, unavailing. Thus are mankind, without respect
to their vice or their virtue, indiscriminately drawn to the margin of
this world's life, and, willing or unwilling, thrown into an unknown
state beyond.

4. If any struggles are made against the encircling net during the slow,
solemn process of drawing--any efforts on the part of the captives to
leap out into freedom, they are made, not by one kind in displeasure at
being shut up with another, but by every kind indifferently in
displeasure at being shut up at all. Like the indefinite terror of mute
fishes when they feel the net coming closer in, is the instinctive alarm
of human beings when the hand of death is felt gradually contracting the
space in which the pulses of life are permitted to play