3. It is perfectly congruous with the habits of fishermen and the character of the instruments which they employ. As fishers drop the net over a certain space, and, without making any pretence of discriminating between good and bad, drag all within that space to shore; so the invisible agents whom God employs in his universal administration, whether laws or angelic spirits or both combined, make no distinction between good and bad, when by successive castings of the net, as it were, they enclose section after section, generation after generation of human kind, and draw them slowly, silently, but inevitably to the edge of this life, and over it into the unseen world. I scarcely know in the whole range of nature an analogy more true and touching than this. When you allow that the angels cast and draw the net as well as divide its contents, the incongruities disappear, and the picture starts into life, true to the original. The fishes, enclosed within the net when it is first thrown out, but still swimming in the sea, not aware that the net is round them, are intensely like a human generation, with the sentence of death hanging over them, yet living and moving freely, and looking for many days. As the circle of the net grows narrower the fishes gently give way before it, and so enjoy for a little longer the sensation of floating at liberty in the water; and it is not until they touch the ground that they become thoroughly alarmed. The struggle then is sudden, earnest, short, unavailing. Thus are mankind, without respect to their vice or their virtue, indiscriminately drawn to the margin of this world's life, and, willing or unwilling, thrown into an unknown state beyond. 4. If any struggles are made against the encircling net during the slow, solemn process of drawing--any efforts on the part of the captives to leap out into freedom, they are made, not by one kind in displeasure at being shut up with another, but by every kind indifferently in displeasure at being shut up at all. Like the indefinite terror of mute fishes when they feel the net coming closer in, is the instinctive alarm of human beings when the hand of death is felt gradually contracting the space in which the pulses of life are permitted to play. I shall now notice and endeavour to estimate the principal objections, as far as I am able to anticipate them, which may be urged against the interpretation that I have suggested. 1. The Lord at another time, in calling some of his apostles, said, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men" (Matt. iv. 19). He did; and I think it is by a mistake in instituting an analogy between that fact and this parable that interpreters have been led into a wrong track.