bread alone, but by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, and are much safer
in doing His bidding than in struggling anxiously to make a livelihood.

And if we carefully read our own experience, might we not see, as
clearly as the Apostles that morning saw, the utter futility of our own
schemes for bettering ourselves in the world? Is it not the simple fact
that we also have toiled through every watch of the night, have borne
fatigue and deprivation, have abandoned the luxuries of life and given
ourselves to endure hardness, have tried contrivance after contrivance
to win our cherished project, and all in vain? Our net is empty and
light at the rising sun as it was at the setting. Have we not again and
again found that when every boat round was being filled we drew nothing
but disappointment? Have we not many times come back empty-handed to our
starting-place? But no matter how much we have thus lost or missed every
man will tell you it is much better so than if he had succeeded, if only
his own ill-success has induced him to trust Christ, if only it has
taught him really what he used with everybody else verbally to
say,--that in that Person dimly discerned through the light that begins
to glimmer round our disappointments there is all power in heaven and
on earth--power to give us what we have been trying to win, power to
give us greater happiness without it.

But this being so, it being the case that our Lord came this second time
and called them away from their occupations to follow Him, and showed
them how amply He could support them, they could not but remember how He
had once before in very similar circumstances summoned them to leave
their occupation as fishermen and to become fishers of men. They could
not but interpret the present by the former miracle, and read in it a
renewed summons to the work of catching men, and a renewed assurance
that in that work they should not draw empty nets. Most suitably, then,
does this miracle stand alone, the only one wrought after the
Resurrection, and most suitably does it stand last, giving the Apostles
a symbol which should continually reanimate them to their laborious
work. Their work of preaching was well symbolised by _sowing_; they
passed rapidly through the field of the world, at every step scattering
broadcast the words of everlasting life, not examining minutely the
hearts into which these words might fall, not knowing where they might
find prepared s