l8 I GO A-FISHING. 



ermen before he called them to be his apostles. There 

 is nothing to forbid, but much to fortify the idea in the 

 account which Luke gives us of his entering into the 

 ship of Simon, and asking him to push off from the shore 

 while he taught the people ; and still more in the subse- 

 quent incidents, when, like one who had often been with 

 them before, he told Simon to go out into deep water 

 and cast for fish. He may indeed have been a stran- 

 ger, who impressed Simon now for the first time with his 

 noble presence, and won him by his eloquent teachings, 

 but I incline to the thought that this was far from the 

 first meeting of Jesus of Nazareth with the fishermen of 

 Gennesaret. Nazareth was not far away from the sea. I 

 remember a morning's walk from the village to the sum- 

 mit of Tabor, whence I first saw the blue beauty of that 

 lake of holy memory. How his childhood and youth 

 were passed we know not ; but that he wandered over 

 the hills, and walked down to the lake shore, and min- 

 gled more or less with the people among whom his life 

 went peacefully on until he entered upon his public mis- 

 sion, can not be doubted. 



It is one of the most pleasant and absorbing thoughts 

 which possess the traveler in those regions, that the child 

 Christ was a child among the hills of Galilee, and loved 

 them with all the gentle fervor of his human soul. Doubt- 

 less many times before he had challenged the fisher on 

 the sea with that same question which we anglers so fre^ 

 quently hear, " Have you taken any fish ?" He may have 

 often seen Peter and the others at their work. Perhaps 

 sometimes he had talked with them, and, it may well be, 

 gone with them on the sea, and helped them. For they 

 were kindly men, as fishermen are always in all countries, 

 and they loved to talk of their work, and of a thousand 



