Here is another strange thing.  Christ knows more about the management of their own business than they do.  They had toiled all night and caught nothing; is not that a significant description of many human lives?  “Children, have ye any meat?” asks that quiet Voice from the shore, and they answer “No.”  Is not that yet more pathetically significant?  All the heartbreak and disappointment of the world cry aloud in that confession.  Oh, I could fill an hour with the mere recital of the names of great and famous people who have toiled through a long life, and as the last gray hour came over their dim sea of life, “brackish with the salt of human tears,” have acknowledged with infinite bitterness that they have caught nothing.  Listen to the voice of Goethe, “In all my seventy-five years I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being;” to the confession of our own famous poet,

  My life is in the yellow leaf,
    The flowers, the fruits of love are gone;
  The worm, the canker, and the grief
    Are mine alone.

to the ambitious and successful statesman who says, “Youth is folly, manhood is struggle, old age regret”; to one of our most brilliant women of genius in our own generation, wife of a still more brilliant husband, who cries, “I married for ambition, and I am miserable.”  Surely there is some tragic mismanagement of the great business of living here.  Oh, brother, is it true of you, that after all the painful years happiness is not yours?  You have no meat, no food on which the heart feeds, no green pasture in the soul, no table in the wilderness, and the last gray day draws near and will find you still hungering for what life Has never given you.

Learn, then, that Christ knows more about the proper management of your life than you do.  “Cast your net on the right side of the ship,” speaks that quiet Voice from the shore.  And you know what happened.  And it is so still.  Just because Christ stands among the common things of life, He knows most about life, and, above all, He knows where the golden fruit of happiness is found and where the secret wells of peace.

And to some of us whom God has called to be fishers of men the issue is yet more solemn.  We have the boat and the nets, all this elaborate organization of the Church, but have we caught anything this year?  Where is the draft of fishes?  Where are the men and women saved by our triumphant effort?  I will make my humble confession this morning, that for five-and-twenty years I have cast the net, but only lately have I found the right side of the ship; only lately have I discovered how easy it is to get the great draft of fishes by simply going to work in Christ’s way.  I do not believe in the indifference of the masses in religion; the indifference is not in the masses, but in the churches.  You will never catch many fish if you stand upon the shore of cold respectability and wait for them to come; launch out into the deep