The Brookhaven leader., 1891-05-28
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
a Discourse Directed to Prevailing
Theological Disputes.
The Nets OF Christian Fishermen shoult
be Mended with Threads Of Patience
and Forbearance Inst cad of Dog
matte Denunclation.


lyn tabernacle, taking for his text:
James the son of Zebcdee, and John, his
brother, In a ship with Zebedee, their IA
fher. mending their nets.-Matthew iv., 81.
81 go a-fishing," cried Simon Peter tC
his comrades, and the most of the apos'
ties had hands hard from fishing tackle.
The fisheries of the world have always
attracted attention. In the third cen
tury the queen of Egypt had for pin
money four hundred and seventy thou
and dollars received from the fisheries
of Lake Moeris And il the time should
ever come when the immensity of the
worlds population could not be fed by
the vegeta blcs and meats of the land,
the sea has an amount of animal life
that would feed all the populations of
the earth and fatten them with a food
that by its phosphorus would make a
generation brainy and intellectual be-
yond any thing that the world has ever
imagined. My text takes us among
the Galilcan fishermen. One day Walter
Scott, while hunting in an old drawer,
found among some old fishing tackle
the manuscript of his immortal book
there as no worth, and who knows but
that to-day we may find some unknown
wealth of thought while looking at the
fishing tackle in the text
1t is not good day for fishing and
three men are in the boat repairing the
broken fishing nets If YOU are fishing
with hook and line and the fish will
not bite, it is good time to put the
angler apparatus into better condition.
Perhaps the last fish you hauled in was
so large that something snapped. Or if
you were fishing with net, there was
mighty floundering of the scales or an
exposed nail on the side of the boat
which broke some of the threads and
let part or all of the captives of the
deep escape into their natural element.
And hardly anything is more provok-
ing than to nearly land a score or a
hundred trophies from the deep,
and when you are in full glee
of hauling in the spotted treas
ures, through some imperfection of
the net they splash back into the wave.
That is too much of trial of patience
for most fishermen to endure and many
man ordinarily correct of speech in
such circumstances comes to an intcn-
sity of utterance unjustitiable. There
fore no good fisherman considers the
time wasted that is spent in mendng
his net Now the Bible again and again
represents Christian workers as fishers
of men, and we are all sweeping
through the sea of humanity some
kind of a net. Indeed, there have been
enough nets out and enough fisherman
busy to have landed the whole human
race in the kingdom of God long be-
fore this. What is the matter? The
Gospel is all right and it has been a
good time for catching souls for thou
sands of years Why, then, the fail
ures? The trouble is with the nets,
and most of them need to be mended.
propose to show you what is the mat
ter with most of the nets, and how to
mend them. In the text old Iebedee
and his two boys, James and John,
were doing good thing when they sat
in the boat mending their nets.
The trouble with many of our nets
is that the meshes are too large. If a
fish can get his gills and half his body
through the network, he tears and
rends and works his way out and leaves
the place through which he squirmed a
tangle of broken threads. The Bible
weavcs faith and works tight together,
the law and the Gospel, righteousness
and forgiveness. Some of our nets
have meshes so wide that the sinner
floats in and out and is not at any mo-
mcnt caught for the Heavenly landing.
In our desire to make everything sc
easy we relax, we loosen, we widen
We let men after they are once in the
Gospel net escape into the world and &C
into indulgences and swim all around
Galilee from north side to south side
and from east side to west side expect
ing that they will come back again
We ought to make it easy for them tC
get INTO the Kingdom of God and as
far as we can make it impossible for
them to get out The poor advice
nowadays TO many is: go and dc
just as you did before you were cap
tured for God and Heaven. The net
was not intended to be any restraint or
any hinderance. What you did before
you were Christian, do now. Go to
all styles of amusement read all the
styles of books, engage in all the styles
of behavior as before you were con-
verted." And so through these meShes
of permission and laxity they wriggle
out, through this opening and that
opening, tearing the net as they go, and
soon all the souls that VIC expected to
land in Heaven, before we know it are
back in the deep sea of the world. Oh,
when we 60 Gospel fishing let us
make it as easy as possible for souls to
get in, and as hard as possible to get
out.
Is the Bible language an unmeaning
verbiage when it talks about self-denial
and keeping the body under and about
walking the narrow way and entering
the straight gate and about carrying the
cross? Is there to be no way of telling
whether a man is Christian except by
taking the communion chalice on sacra-
mental day? May man be as reckless
about his thoughts, about his words,
about his amusements, about his deal
ings after conversion as before con-
version? One-half the Gospel nets with
which we have been scooping the sea
have such wide meshes that they have
been all torn to pieces by the rushing
out into the world of those whom a
tighter net would have kept in. The
only use of net is to keep the fish from
going back to where they were before
and taking them where they could not
n