the one true Church; we, however, understand by the nets the simple idea of instrumentality. When Christ appointed His followers to be fishers of men, He specified for their use no mode of instrumentality, singly or in detail, and nothing was included in His metaphor but the general conception of taking fishes. A fisherman has to go through great varieties of experience when on water; he may be out on many an adventurous voyage, or many a stormy sea, through many a black and blustering night; when on land he may have to creep, or hide, or watch through many a weary hour in the leafy covert or reedy river. Some kinds of fish are to be taken by spear, some by line, some by net-hand-net, or draw-net, or basket-net.

It was the silver-tongued Henry Smith who said, 'He that is a piscator hominum had need to have many nets, and observe time and place and calling, and fit all words before in his mind, lest he lose his bait.'1 He must never try to angle for a whale, or to harpoon a trout.

'You must,' says Izaak Walton, 'be the scholar of the fish before you can be his master.' You must, we may add, know all about his whims and caprices, all about his food, all about his whereabouts; and wisdom answering to this is wanted in the fisher of men. Further, the sign

1 Henry Smith's Sermons (p. 349, 4to).

*

suggests that the work of the spiritual fisher is rather one of skill than of violence-that he must

draw, not drive. It suggests that in the one case, so in the other, 'the man must not put himself forward; and that he should not be seen at all." Yet, further, it suggests that our spiritual work must be done by ourselves, and not by proxy. As the fisherman works with his own head and his own hand, so let each one put his own honest personal force into what he does for Christ. When, for instance, a man is called to be a preacher, let him preach his own sermons; obeying the charge, 'Fish with your own hooks.' 2

After all, there is one remarkable term used by Christ in His declaration to spiritual fishermen which has no analogy in the craft of him who toils in the water. He toils for his own advantage, not for the advantage of the fish; ne takes it for death, not for life; but the word used by our Saviour to Peter, literally rendered, means, 'Fear not, for thou shalt take men alive.'s

1 See Dr. Thomson's account of modern fishing at Gennesaret, in The Land and the Book, 1862, p. 400. 2 C. H. Spurgeon.

'Thou

3 Ζωγρεύειν, from ζωὸς and ἀγρεύω, to take alive. shalt take men, and take them for life, not for death. Those that were wandering at random through the salt sea waves of this wide world, among its deep, unquiet waters, full of

Christ spoke, by this great act, to disciples who were at the point of acute extremity and blank bewilderment, to revive them when they had well-nigh lost heart, and to bring back the fresh sense of what they were, and what they had to do; the incident was to wake up with overwhelming force the memory of that early day in the life of their discipleship, when He set them apart to be fishers of men. 'Once a fact, always a fact.' These orders, in the case of every Christian, are indelible.

2. The act may also have been intended to cheer them, and all desponding workers, by foreshowing the final success of all work done for Christ. Between the two miracles we detect a similarity, yet a difference. Regarding them both as signs, we think that the scene of fulfilment in the one case is earth, in the other, heaven. Commentators, especially monks, Romanists, and ritualists, have always regarded the nets in the first miracle as figuratively representing the Church in its present condition; we have already hinted that in our own belief the nets do not

whirlpools and fears, the smaller falling a prey to the larger. Thou shalt gather into one, embracing them all within the same folds and recesses of the Gospel net.

And they shall at length be drawn up to shore, out of the dark and gloomy waters into the bright, clear light of day' (Augustine).

represent the Church, but the idea of that instrumentality which the Church employs in God's work; but we must be allowed to conjecture that the whole of that first miracle had reference to the work and success of the Church in its present condition only; you will observe that when the miraculous draught had been taken, the boats were still out on the deep; that the 'nets broke'; that the fishers did not therefore take all the fish they had tried to take; and that there was no attempt to count the number taken. In the second case, no nets were broken; that there was no fear of sinking; that when the toilers reached the land they brought their richly laden nets with them. Soon shall we graze the ground, and strike upon the eternal shore; then all who have laboured in the great cause shall rejoice in the sea-harvest of souls; then, for the first time in all history, will the statistics of the Church be complete, perfect, exact and trustworthy, as were announced when the man, having counted the fishes caught that morning, said, 'Just one hundred, fifty, and three.'1

1 The fathers and writers of the Middle Ages find wonderful meanings in this number of the fishes. Augustine says there are ten precepts in the Decalogue, and seven operations of the Holy Spirit ; these make seventeen. But the series, 1+2+3+3, up to 17, is exactly 153 :—' Sic adde, et invenjs

'Therefore that disciple, whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, It is the Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fisher's coat unto him, for he was naked, and did cast himself into the sea.'

We are prepared to think that there was in the aspect of Him who stood upon the shore a something indescribable, quite unlike that of one who was only an inhabitant of this world. Raphael evidently felt this, and tried to express the idea in the cartoon which has this scene for its subject. It was owing to this mysteriousness of look, perhaps, that Jesus was not at once identified. Even when at length He was known, this knowledge appears not to have been by optical perception, such as when we recognise old, familiar features; and our conjecture is encouraged by the Greek verb used in the account of His first miracle, and also of this, His last; used as if to intimate the nature of the discovery in both cases, and also the relation between the two. In the first, it is said that He manifested forth His glory'; in the second, it is said, 'Jesus manifested Himself again to the

numerum sacrum fidelium atque sanctorum in cælestibus cum domino futurorum.' Sermo cclviii. 4. Theophylact suggests that the Gentiles may stand for a hundred, the Jews for fifty, whilst the doctrine of the Trinity is obviously indicated by the three.