Editorial September 29, 1906 Issue

"FISHERS OF MEN."

John B. Willis

The story of the call of the Galilean fisherman to the Christian ministry, as told in the fourth chapter of Mathew, is characterized by great simplicity and suggestiveness. "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." This single sentence sufficed for their summons and their authorization, and yet in its very brevity it gives increased emphasis to the essentials of their new life-work; namely, conformity to the Christ-ideal, and utilization of that practical wisdom which has so largely to do with the success of Christian as well as commercial enterprises.

The life aims, the motives, the activities of these humble fisherman were all to be changed, exalted, and yet they were to remain fishermen, bring into everyday use for Christ all the alertness, the courage, the patience, the endurance, and the skill in adjusting means to ends which they had acquired in their many years of seafaring experience.

The ministry of love must be effected through the hand-grasp of brotherhood. It can be fulfilled by the Christlike man alone. It is much easier to join a well-named and noble-intentioned society, and make a, generous subscription to the furtherance of its ends, than it is to manifest the Christ-ideal in all our relations to others, and the unideal state of mankind at the opening of this twentieth century is explained in large part by the fact that the great body of Christian believers have thus sought to delegate their ministry ot others. Christian Science denies the legitimacy—yes, the possibility—of this transfer of Christian responsibility, and the emphasis it lays upon the call for every believer not only to "know the truth" which makes free, but to bring it into demonstration before men in the personal overcoming of sin, disease, and death,—this gives Christian Science both its present-day uniqueness as a religious teaching and its supreme advantage in winning men.

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