.

I shall now notice and endeavour to estimate the principal objections,
as far as I am able to anticipate them, which may be urged against the
interpretation that I have suggested.

1. The Lord at another time, in calling some of his apostles, said,
"Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men" (Matt. iv. 19). He did;
and I think it is by a mistake in instituting an analogy between that
fact and this parable that interpreters have been led into a wrong
track.

Some expositors have made a similar mistake in regard to the parable of
the leaven, and the one error will throw light upon the origin and
nature of the other. Observing that the Lord in another place represents
the doctrines of the Pharisees and the Sadducees as a leaven, some have
concluded that the leaven in the parable also must point to the spread
of error, and have expounded it accordingly. All judicious critics,
however, clearly see and distinctly explain in that case, that the
leaven which was in other instances employed to represent the diffusion
of evil, was in the parable employed to represent the prevalence of
good. Although leaven in one of the Lord's discourses pointed to
hypocrisy and unbelief, they teach, and teach correctly, that leaven in
another of his discourses points to the progress of saving truth.

The same discrimination should be exercised here. It is quite true that
the Lord at one time, and in one discourse, compared the ministry of
apostles in winning souls to the labour of fishers in the ordinary
exercise of their craft; but that does not prevent him from employing at
another time the universal sweep of the draw-net to represent the
silent, slow, and sure encompassing of human kind, which draws them,
good and bad alike, by instruments and agencies which they do not see
and cannot resist, from this troubled sea of time toward the shore of
the unknown eternity. Because the conception of capturing fishes in the
Sea is at one time in the Lord's discourses employed to indicate the
benevolent labour of the Gospel ministry, it does not follow that you
are compelled to construe that conception in the same way wherever it
occurs, although the circumstances manifestly render the application
incongruous and contradictory.

Let it be observed, moreover, that when the apostles in respect of their
work are called fishers of men, not one feature in the process of
fishing is specified in detail. Nothing is introduced but the general
concept