Part 8

(1) And the first secret of successful fishing is _variety of method_. There are some of us, no doubt, who do fish on our holidays in the literal sense, and we know how again and again in the salmon rivers we have tried fly after fly. And yet in our fishing for men we often tie ourselves down to one monotonous kind of method, never thinking of varying it. But if we have found one method fail, surely we might try another. Why should we be tied down to one particular humdrum method if it has been tried for years and failed? Of course, there are certain things which must be the same. We have no right to complain for a moment of what some people call the monotony of Mattins and Evensong for ourselves. Mattins and Evensong are not at all monotonous. I remember thinking, when I made that promise which everyone makes when they are ordained, of obeying the Prayer-Book and saying Mattins and Evensong every day, that it would be a kind of slavery to me. But, on the contrary, I find it a chain that binds me about the feet of GOD. The lessons in these services are four "letters from heaven" every day, as Canon Liddon called them. We have spent an immense time in Convocation--nine years--in considering what variations in the authorised services of the Prayer-Book may be admitted, and we have almost agreed upon a supplementary book which will give an immense variety to the service: a great many more antiphons, a rewritten preface to the Confirmation Service, the Marriage Service carefully revised, and some things definitely sanctioned for the Church at large which we have used under provisional sanction in this diocese. We hope to have the new supplementary book out at the end of the war. Think, for instance, of the Psalms. Has not the Great War revealed to us the depth of the Psalms--"the war-songs of the Prince of Peace," as they have been called. The war has given to many a new meaning which we never saw before. And think of all the needs of the sick of the parish, and our personal needs, all to be woven into these beautiful services which we use every day, and which seem to bind us to the feet of GOD. If any of you have drifted away from your regular use of Mattins and Evensong, or if you have not started it in your own churches, make a resolution to start it from to-day. When your people hear the bell ring, that will tell them that at any rate the clergyman is at his prayers.

Of course, we do not want our beautiful services to be altered in substance; but we may have variations sanctioned by authority. In fishing for men we are not bound by one method. If we find that one method does not succeed, we must try another. I have already sanctioned in the diocese a shortened form of Evening Service. For those not reached by services in church we must have open-air services. People will listen at the windows in the little square or street in which they live. There must be, too, special services for such organisations as Boy Scouts and Church Lads' Brigade. For the ordinary Sunday-School we are now able to have new methods provided by experts for the diocese. Then, if the Sunday-School system does not seem to suit your particular parish, try catechising in church. I am only suggesting--it is not for me to lay down this or that rule as to what is to be tried. My point is this: With the HOLY SPIRIT guiding you, and with the inventiveness of love, you will be able to bring out of your treasure things new and old. Although one of the oldest things in the world, the Church is yet the youngest. We never grow old, and, acting with the inventiveness of youth, we ought to be thinking out new plans and new methods all the time; and while I am speaking upon the inventiveness and freshness of the successful fisherman, I need not say that I shall be only too happy to sanction almost any new experiment you may wish to make in fishing for men, if you will submit to me the prayers you think of using, and if I think the suggested method consistent with the teaching of the Church to which we both belong.

(2) Then there must be, too--every true fisherman knows this--a _ripple on the water_ for fishing, best of all a light breeze in the morning. That means that it is a fishing-day. And do you not know what I mean when I say that there seems to be no ripple on some parishes at all? The whole of the surface of the parish seems as dull as ditch-water--no ripple, no fish. If there is no sense of expectancy, no keenness, no enjoyment, no happy spirit, among the workers, there will be no fish. I would like you to ask yourselves whether there is such a ripple in your parish, or whether it is all very dull and dead. And I would like to ask anyone who seems to recognise that there is nothing going on, and that there has been no catch, yesterday, to-day, or the day before, to ask himself if he cannot go back and create a ripple in the parish. When you think over how that ripple is to be created, of course, it can only be by the power of the HOLY SPIRIT brooding over the waters, as He originally brooded over the waters and brought cosmos out of chaos. I believe the chief way, if I may reduce the metaphor to prosaic terms, the chief way must be by constantly praying for the parish and the people, that the HOLY SPIRIT may come and stir the dulness by creating a spirit of expectancy and a joy in the work. When you are obviously enjoying your work yourself, and making the Sunday-School teachers and the workers enjoy it, you may expect a ripple in the parish. Joy in the work is a most attractive thing. There must be the joy throughout the parish, among clergy and workers; the curates and the Vicar must be at one, with no friction between them, and they and the workers a real band of brothers and sisters all fishing in the same waters. Pray very earnestly for this. I shall not bring in more at this point about the necessity for intercession. Remember that it is the parish priest who is perpetually praying for his people individually, and teaching his people to pray, who is the most successful. In my experience it is the praying parish that has a ripple on the surface. I see a wonderful quantity of fish caught in a parish of that kind.

(3) Then think what is the cord or line by which the fish are caught. "I will draw them with the cords of a man," by human influence, by _personality_. Now this question of personality is a very difficult one. Dr. Newman is said to have stated that he dreaded personal influence. Well, of course, it is quite easy to see what he meant. He dreaded such personal influence in religion which is used to make people simply like us or to draw them to ourselves and to leave them there--that is to say, he dreaded a misuse of personal influence. So misused, no doubt, personal influence is a dangerous thing. But that does not alter the fact that people are drawn to CHRIST by personal influence, and that we must use our personal influence if we are to be successful fishermen for CHRIST.

And that brings me to this personal question: Is there anything in ourselves that puts people off? I wish to be perfectly frank. Is it not a fact that we clergy sometimes do put people off by our manner and appearance? Even the smallest thing is important if it is going to spoil the line or cord that is to draw people to CHRIST. I believe we put off people more than we know by carelessness about our appearance, or manner, or matters of that kind. So much depends on us that we cannot take too much care of our personality. We should see to it that when people meet us they can see the attractiveness of goodness in us, and be drawn to our LORD because they are first attracted to His representative. And do ask yourselves--I might seem to be personal if I went into details: Is there anything in my manner that is spoiling CHRIST'S work so that He cannot fish with me, cannot draw others through me? Is it because I am not humble enough, or is there something in me, some unattractive feature or characteristic, that is spoiling the fishing?

(4) And then, of course, there must be the _hopefulness of the fisherman_. The true fisherman is nothing if he is not hopeful. "Master, I have toiled all night, and caught nothing; nevertheless, at Thy word I will let down the net." The true fisherman never knows when he may be successful; he is always expecting something at the last moment, and he manages to infuse hopefulness into his fellow-workers; he hopes that there is going to be good fishing in the day or the night. I had a rather touching illustration of the value of hopefulness in a little hospital near where I was spending a holiday. Five sisters, friends of mine, who really managed the whole hospital, sent a telegram from the village asking if I could come and see one of the young soldiers, whom they could make nothing of. He was absolutely in despair. He had lived a bad life, and I think it was the presence of these five good girls who were nursing him that made him feel the contrast between his life and theirs, with all its purity and goodness. The contrast brought him to repentance. Still, he thought it was too late to change. He could not be forgiven. I went to the hospital. There he was, a young man about twenty-eight, really in despair. It took me a long time to get any hope in him. At last, when he had gone into his whole life, and I had given him absolution, and had a prayer with him, I saw a sort of hope come into his face. The change was extraordinary. He said: "Will you pray with me again, Bishop?" In all my experience I have not very often been asked like that to pray again with a man. They are generally shy, and satisfied with the first prayer. I prayed with him a second time. He wrote me afterwards a charming letter, asking me to send him a Bible and Prayer-Book, which I did. What that man wanted was hope, nothing but hope; he was in despair about himself. "GOD shall forgive thee all but thy despair." We shall never catch a man like that unless we can infuse into him that glorious hope which we have ourselves. I persuaded him that he was not too late, and he was saved by hope.

Now do let us carry back the hopefulness of the fisherman to our parishes, whatever may have happened in the past. Many of you have been in your parishes very many years, and no doubt sometimes you have felt very despondent. Start again to-morrow as if you had just begun. Though you have toiled all the night and perhaps caught nothing, cast your net on the right side of the ship, and the next five years will be the most fruitful years your parish has ever had. People will notice a different spirit about yourself. Try a completely new method, and you will have a wonderful success. There will be a ripple on the water which there has not been before. Be hopeful about it, and then, if you have to stay on in the same parish five or ten years more, it may be a wholly different story from what it has been up to now.

(5) In the next place, a successful fisherman must have a _very deep faith_. Of course, the ordinary fisherman must have some sort of faith. The good fisherman believes certain things all the time he is fishing. He believes in the laws of the wind, studies them, and acts according to them. He sets his sail according to them, if he is fishing in the sea, and he knows that he must do so if he is to reap of the unfathomable harvest of the sea. He believes in all these things, and on a stormy coast he must be a man of great faith, dealing with great unseen movements and powers all round him. He learns their laws, and he knows that if he acts according to those laws he is successful as a rule. But do you not see that we are just like that ourselves? Really we are in touch with all kinds of unseen powers and movements. We have to believe, for instance, in the salvability of every soul in the world; we have to believe that every soul is meant for the Gospel, and the Gospel is meant for every soul. We have to believe in that man in the worst slum of our parish; we have to realise that the Gospel is fitted for him and he is fitted for the Gospel. No one has ever been found yet who could not be made into a bit of a saint in time. And the Gospel, tremendously deep as it is, is also so simple that the simplest can understand it. That is the wonderful thing about it. We have to believe in it--intensely believe in it; we have to believe in the wonderful power of these tides of the SPIRIT sweeping round a parish and working wonders; we have to believe in the influence of the unseen wind that blows over it and to pray often: "Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon them."

We are, as a matter of fact, working amidst unseen and tremendous forces. We talk about the power of GOD. The power of GOD! Why, He keeps the whole universe going, twenty million suns always moving on through space. He alone knows whither they are going. Twenty million burning suns! look at the power of that; think what power that alone implies! and then think of the saving power of one drop of blood shed upon the Cross, when you consider Who it was that hung there. Think, again, of the wonderful influence, the downrush of the SPIRIT: some of you have seen it in missions; we believe in it at every Confirmation. We are really in touch with most tremendous powers. If we had more faith we should be better fishermen. Therefore we do want a stronger faith in our LORD Himself, always at the heart of our work, a real living faith in a living LORD with us all the time.

(6) And then, sixthly, we must fish for men _one by one_. Of course, we can have great concerted movements. I shall never forget a midnight march through Westminster at half an hour after midnight on a Saturday night. We swept like a net, bringing quite twenty young men out of every public-house. As we counted them in the church school, we could see that most of them were three-quarters drunk. We could see what would be prevented if the public-houses of London were shut earlier, as, indeed, they now have been during the war. It has benefited Russia greatly that she has abolished the whole vodka traffic. We could not take pledges that night from those men: they were not in a condition to make them; but the Church of England, with all her great organisation, ought to be able to prevent that sort of thing, and catch these souls one by one. Here comes in the need of personality; we must talk to each of these young men, provide somewhere else where he may spend his evenings, and remember that you can only catch fish one by one.

(7) And the last point of all is that, to be successful, the _fishing-fleet must be kept together_. You really are a fishing-fleet, and not merely individual fishing-boats. When a deanery is kept together, it shows a brotherhood, a cohesion, which is a very beautiful thing to see. To a large extent you are such, but, still, even the best-worked deanery can resolve to work more together than they have done, in happy co-operation, the clergy and people of each parish taking an interest in another's parish, rejoicing in its successes and praying for it in its troubles. If the whole deanery meets regularly for united intercession, this must have a great effect upon the mission work in the district. It must have an effect also upon mission work among the heathen for the Church at home to feel part of the same fishing-fleet as the Church abroad, the workers in one ship beckoning to their partners in the other ship to come and help them.

Well, then, take back with you these simple thoughts which I am trying to put before you as your Bishop and fellow-priest. Pray to be made more keen, more alert, more active and enthusiastic messengers. Pray to be skilful, patient, thorough, good physicians, and kinder celestial surgeons. And, perhaps above all, pray to be hopeful, faithful fishermen; go out together as a fishing-fleet on the great ocean, believing in all the possibilities which lie beneath the surface; realise the presence of your Master directing from the shore the whole fleet. And then at the end of all things, in the morning of the great day, you will have a harvest of souls to draw to the shore to His feet.

III

TO GIRLS

WHAT A GIRL CAN DO IN A DAY OF GOD[23]

[23] An address to two thousand girls in Nottingham.

When I think of all the vast influence exercised by those in this hall, I feel inclined to say what Bishop Selwyn said in the midst of Eton Chapel--"You can turn the world upside down."

But, before I say anything of my own, I want to emphasise what has already been said to you, with regard to the influence at the Front of those who are here at home. As I went down behind the firing-line in 1915, and held seven or eight services a day, before each service began I invariably said one thing from end to end of the line. I said: "I have come here, boys, before we have any service, to bring you the love from home of your mothers, your sisters, and your sweethearts." And you saw the soft look that came into those boys' faces while the guns were firing--and sometimes an aeroplane was guarding the service for fear the Germans should not be able to resist a target of four thousand men, and a Bishop in the middle--you would know what they think of home, and how you have got the heart of the Empire in your keeping. One of the boys who has died the death of honour wrote home to his mother: "I have come here, mother, for one purpose--and that is, that you and the sisters shall not be treated like these Belgian women have been."

I am going to put the message at the very highest at once. I have never found young people fail to rise to it. I am going to put upon your lips, as your resolution, no less a resolution than was on the lips of our Lord Himself, our great High Priest, just before He went to His own death--"For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth." I say High Priest, because I am going to put this one single thought before you as describing the function which girls are to discharge in a Day of GOD, and that is, they have got to be priests of GOD.

Now, that may seem to you a strange thing to say, but before I have done I shall have failed indeed if you do not believe it. I am always trying, in London, to unite all the great Christian bodies in common action. We fight as one family, side by side, against evil, sin, intemperance, and impurity. Every year all the denominations in London elect me chairman of the London Temperance Council and of the Public Morality Council, and it is by focussing the whole of the Christian thought of London that we are as strong as we are, when we tackle night clubs, and living pictures, and other abominable evils, and destroy them in the name of the LORD. I say that because I believe fully that if everyone understood what the teaching about priesthood was it would take away much misunderstanding, and I believe would join together many Christian bodies divided to-day. _There is only one Priest in the Universe, and that is_ JESUS CHRIST _Himself_. But He says Himself that the Church is His body. Therefore, the whole of the Church is the body of a Priest. Those of us who are called priests are ordained as organs of a priestly body. We act in the name of the body, and therefore the idea that we are setting ourselves up above this or that person is wholly wrong, because we act as organs, as hands and feet--as it were--of a priestly body. And mark you, the Church is the great company throughout the world of all baptized persons, baptized by whoever baptizes them.

If you think that out, you will see what a powerful idea this idea of priesthood is. Have you ever seen a priest ordained? I wish sometimes, though I am afraid you would fill the whole dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, that you could come some day and see what to me every time is a most touching sight: you would have seen those young men, thirty perhaps, as were there at a recent ordination, brought up before the Bishop, who has other priests standing round, and then on the head of each, as he kneels in front, we all lay our hands, and I say, "Receive the HOLY GHOST for the Office and Work of a Priest in the Church of GOD." A young girl said once, "Do you mean to say every clergyman I see has been through all that?" But now, if that is so, why do I look round on you and say you are young priests of GOD? Why? Because you are part of this priestly body. You are joined to the one great High Priest, and therefore you, whom GOD knows one by one, are known and named and called. Of course in the Church Confirmation is the ordination of the lay priest, and if you are confirmed, I am going to tell you five things you are expected to do.

1. The first is to be _girded_. I have more to do in my life, and naturally so, with young men and boys than I have with girls and women, but that very reason gives me an added authority in speaking to you, because I know what their difficulties are. I speak, constantly, to as many young men as there are of you girls; I say, knowing what difficulty they have at their age to control their passions, that it is like ruling a horse. A horse is a splendid servant, but a vile master. When you have got the bit in your horse's mouth and the reins in your hand, a horse is a splendid servant; but let him off at full gallop, with the reins round your feet and the bit in his teeth, then he is a terrible master. So it is with the boys. They have got to be on the horse with the reins of GOD's Commandment in their hands, and the bit of self-control in the mouth, then their bodies are glorious servants. What you young girls as priests have got to do is to help those boys and young men in the very flower of their lives not to do anything which is afterwards a stain upon their conscience. You can rally round them and, if you are young priests, can help them.

There are three things of priceless value a young girl has on her side in doing this. The first is her natural modesty. Why are we so afraid of bad companions breaking down a girl's modesty, and why are we so afraid of rough horseplay soiling the purity of her soul? Because it is spoiling her first great gift, her first great power. It is just that naturally beautiful modesty a girl possesses with which she is meant to help every young man. That modesty is meant to help her to be self-controlled, and to help him to be so too. Then she has a most wonderful power of self-sacrificing love. I say to the young men, "Never take advantage of the trusting love of a girl"; but to you I say, you have that beautiful power of true love. It is that power of sacrifice and self-sacrificing love which is your great asset to the world. Never soil it, and never spoil it, or let it be dragged down by anyone. And you have a naturally religious nature. Those three things, those three splendid things, you have got with which to gird yourselves. Allow anyone to rob you of them, and you have lost your strength. Keep them and you have the first great quality of a true priest of GOD. Gird yourselves with modesty, unselfish love, and natural and supernatural religion.

2. And when the young priest has so girded herself, the next thing she has to do in discharge of her priestly office is to _offer up every day an oblation of prayer and praise to_ GOD. He is looking for it every day. Do you remember the story contained in a poem by Browning of a cobbler boy who used to praise God at his work every day? He was wafted away to another sphere, and there was silence in the workshop, and GOD said, "I miss my little human praise."

Make then your second resolution, that, having girded yourself, you will never fail to offer to God this sweet incense of prayer and praise, and do it perfectly openly. Don't be ashamed of it being known you do it.