ion of a fisherman catching fishes in the sea. This conception in
the abstract contains nothing incongruous with the labour of the
apostles. As long as you abide by the bare general term "fisher," the
analogy, as applied to "apostle," is obvious and the meaning easily
recognised; but the moment you descend into the details of a net, and
the mixture of good and evil, you plunge into inextricable confusion, if
you persist in maintaining an analogy between the detailed process of
fishing and the labour of apostles for the kingdom of Christ.

The general conception of fishing, as it appeared to the mind of speaker
and hearers on the margin of the Lake of Galilee, diverged into two
dissimilar branches as soon as it descended into practical detail. The
fishermen prosecuted their avocation sometimes with line and baited
hooks, sometimes with boat and nets. Fishing with line and hook, a
process of watching, selecting, discriminating, whereby the fishes are
one by one enticed and taken, readily spontaneously leaps up before the
imagination as a line parallel with the work of an evangelist, bent on
winning souls; but fishing by the draw-net absolutely refuses to be
fashioned into an analogue of the evangelistic work. The Lord in his
teaching said that fishers were like apostles; but he never said that
the process of fishing by the draw-net resembles the efforts of his
ministers for the conversion of the world. Of the two methods of fishing
which were familiar to the parties, one is in some of its main features
analogous to the new employment into which Jesus called the twelve, and
the other is totally dissimilar. When I read, therefore, that an apostle
is a fisher of men, I shall think of the selecting, discriminating
method of casting a hook into the water; and when I learn from this
parable that the separation between the good and bad of the net's
contents upon the shore represents the separation between good and bad
men by the ministry of angels in the unseen world, I am not compelled--I
am not permitted to believe, contrary to all analogy, that the Church
encloses all, like the net, without an effort, a hope, a desire to
discriminate, and that the ministers of the Church, like the fishermen,
drag their brothers unwilling out of the world to the judgment-seat.

2. But has not the Lord said in this parable, as in all the rest of the
group, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net that was cast into the
sea? He has; yet the fact