hem he must move
in-shore. Getting now a nearer view, he descries some new features of
the danger. These lines are crossed and knitted in a manner all unlike
the sea-weed threads that streamed so long and straight and loose in the
tide-way. A secret foreboding of some unknown doom arises: the alarmed
captive, having now no further room to retire, darts wildly sea-ward,
and is caught in the inevitable meshes of the encircling net. After a
moment of violent but feeble struggle, he is laid still and dumb on the
shore.

It is a picture touchingly, terribly exact of our own state. The net has
been spread around us: the sharp knitted lines gradually approach and
touch us. Shrinking from the clammy contact as we would from living
snakes, we retire before them, and still find room. But the lines appear
again, always on the same side. Our space grows narrower as we recede,
from year to year, from week to week, from day to day, until at length
we graze the ground and strike upon the eternal world.

That net cannot be removed or evaded; but it may be changed, so that you
would not fear its approach. When we become new creatures in Christ,
death approaching us becomes a new creature too, as the image in a
mirror changes with the object that stands before it. This dreaded net
becomes like a warm, soft, encircling arm, pressing a frightened infant
closer to a mother's breast.

2. Good and bad alike are drawn in company toward the shore, but the
good and bad are separated when they reach it.

No lesson can be addressed to men more touching, more piercing than
this. Nor is its penetrating power diminished by any deficiency of
authority in the word that presses it home. It is the word of the Lord;
not spoken in parables, but expressly given as the meaning of the
parable that had been spoken. Its force is not weakened by any quiver of
doubt in the Christian brotherhood as to the Master's mind. All
Christians hear this word and understand it alike: the whole assembly,
when they hear it, bow the head and worship. On the authority of our
Redeemer, and in terms so transparent that they afford no room for
doubt, we learn that on the shore to which we are silently, surely
moving, a separation infallibly exact and irrevocably final will be made
between the evil and the good. As to the positive punishment into which
the impenitent will be cast, while I simply receive all the words of the
Lord, I shall take care not to obtrude many of my own.