THE NET IS SPREAD

Among the autobiographies that I handle with peculiar reverence and affection there is none that I have read more frequently and quoted more tellingly than the autobiography of Dr. Thomas Guthrie. Every page is peppered with striking, suggestive, or amusing records.

To-day it suits my purpose to turn once more to the passage at the beginning of the book in which Dr. Guthrie describes his first school. The teacher was a weaver, who plied his shuttle while he instructed his pupils. The schoolroom was the weaver’s workroom, sitting-room, and bedroom. The loom occupied one corner; a bed stood in the second; another bed monopolized the third; and a table the fourth, The scholars could sit where they liked, so long as they did not block the door! The thud of the loom punctuated the drone of the lessons. Yet the good man did his well. Having mastered the alphabet, each child passed at once into the Book of Proverbs.

In olden time, Dr. Guthrie tells us, this was the universal custom in the schools of Scotland, and he laments its discontinuance. The Book of Proverbs, he points out, abounds in pearl-like epigrams, couched in words of a single syllable, Nowadays, when children reach that stage, they are made to write Tom has a dog, or The cat is good, or The cow has a calf, Silly trash! snorts Dr. Guthrie, contemptuously; and he argues that the children would find it pleasant to write and easy to remember the stately and impressive maxims in which the Book of Proverbs is so amazingly rich. It is one of those musical strings of monosyllables that engrosses my attention to-day. It occurs in the very first chapter of the book: ‘In vain the net is spread in the sight of any bid.’

The net is spread-spread wilfully and deliberately. The horrible thing does happen. Depraved men and women, not content with having lost their own souls, take a fiendish delight in compassing the eternal destruction of others. They resemble those wreckers on the Cornish coast who moved along the jagged cliffs at night, imitating with their lanterns the movements of a ship’s light, in order that captains out at sea, thinking it safe to sail into waters in which another vessel was riding safely, would be snared on to the hungry reefs, exposing their valuable cargoes to the rapacity of the plunderers.

There are sceptics who, forgetting or ignoring the cruel loss that they themselves sustained when they jettisoned their faith, do everything in their power to insinuate doubt and uncertainty into the minds of those happy believers whose hearts rest serenely in the eternal certainties. There are drunkards who, instead of entreating others to be warned by their own degradation, take a hideous delight in beguiling sober men into the path that has led to all their wretchedness. There are gamblers so lost to all shame and all compassion that they seek to lure into their exciting but ruinous ways decent men who have hitherto taken pride in earning their money by honourable toil. And there are moral lepers who, having acquired a filthy mind and a lecherous imagination, are only happy when, by means of their ghastly conversation, they are smearing the slime of their own defilement over the pure and wholesome lives around them.

Thus the net is sometimes spread with calculating and dastardly purpose. Men, and even women, sink to the level of spiritual wreckers; they become the decoys and destroyers of their own kind. But, much more often, the net is spread carelessly, thoughtlessly, almost innocently. Let me recall an incident that came under my own notice years ago.

On a sharp, frosty morning in the year 1886, two men occupied the little works office of the Pinkerton Potteries. The head office of the company was in the city; but in this diminutive building such books were kept as related directly to the machinery and manufactures, Lionel Renfree, the clerk, was a dark, well-dressed man of about forty. George Hadley, the manager, who was sitting beside the fire sorting out some papers of his own, was at least twenty years older-short, stout, and grey. It was pay-day. Lionel had just returned from the bank in the city and had shot an immense heap of glittering gold and shining silver on to the desk, preparatory to counting out the individual amounts indicated by the figures in the squares on the pay-sheet. At that moment he suddenly thought of something that necessitated a brief visit to the engine-room.

‘I’m sorry, George,’ he said, I shall have to run across to the works for a minute; do you mind sitting at my desk till I return?’

‘Why, what on earth are you afraid of?’ retorted the manager. ‘There’ll be nobody coming in or out but young Harry, the office-boy; and, surely to goodness, you can trust him, can’t you?’

‘Absolutely,’ replied Renfree. ‘But, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to sit around all the same. I’ll explain later. Shan’t be long!’ And he was gone.

In the afternoon, when the cash had all been distributed and the two men were gathering up their papers in readiness for departure, Renfree reverted to the subject.

‘You seemed surprised’, he began, ‘that I asked you to watch the money whilst I was away. Well, I’ll tell you what I had in mind.

It wasn’t that I don’t trust Harry; I do; he’s as honest as the day, But I’m always haunted by the memory of a thing that happened in the old days when you were cashier and I was the office-boy. ‘My father died when I was a baby. My mother’s health failed shortly afterwards, and we were in desperate straits. It was a wonderful relief when I was appointed, from quite a crowd of candidates, to be office-boy here. It eased the strain quite a lot. But my mother needed medicines and delicacies that I found it impossible to buy.

‘Then, one pay-day, you left me alone in the office with all that pile of gold and silver. I thought of all that I could do if just one, or perhaps two, of those bright sovereigns were mine. For a minute or two my fingers fairly itched to take the money. The theft, I thought, would never be discovered, The deficiency would be attributed to a mistake at the bank. Nobody would suffer through the taking of it to anything like the extent to which my mother was suffering for the want of it.

I actually took one or two steps towards the desk; and then, suddenly, regained possession of myself. But, for just that one horrible moment, I hovered on the brink of hell. To this day I never shoot out the money from the bag without a cold shudder running down my spine. If I had done it! If I had been convicted as, sooner or later, I certainly should have been! It would have killed my mother and ruined me. Not for worlds would I submit Harry, or any other boy, to such a temptation, That was why I acted as I did. Forgive me if, to you, it all sounds a bit queer!’

Renfree need not have apologized. Many a man has been led into theft and drunkenness and vice and shame by amiable and well-meaning people who, spreading nets without realizing that they were spreading them, multiplied the sorrows of a world that already had sorrows enough.

The net is spread! The familiar proverb admits of two distinct interpretations, each differing widely from the other. The first an d most common interpretation is that it is in vain to spread the net whilst the bird is looking on: he will then be too wary to be snared in its meshes.

The second interpretation, championed by Dr. W. L. Watkinson and others, is that it is in vain to give the bird warning by spreading your net under his very eyes; he is so stupid that he will go into it just the same.

These two interpretations, diverging widely, nevertheless agree in one important respect. They agree in declaring that the bird that enters the net, after having watched the trapper spread it, is a very stupid bird indeed.

And men are stupid. Sin is a silly thing. It is its crass stupidity that intensifies the bitterness of repentance. The. prodigal feels that it is such a senseless business to have trudged long and weary miles to share the husks of the swine when he might have lived like a prince in the father’s house,

I should like to discuss these two interpretations of the proverb with a great congregation of young people-young people in their teens. Nobody under thirteen or over nineteen would be admitted. I should thus include all the senior scholars in our great schools, I should lay the two interpretations before them and ask their opinions.

‘But’, I should say, in summing up, ‘whether you regard the proverb as meaning that, seeing the net spread, the bird would be too cunning to be caught, or as meaning that, seeing the net spread, the silly bird would nevertheless fly into it, one thing is clear: you are the birds, and, at this stage in your lives, you are watching the nets being spread!’

‘You are old enough now’, I should say, ‘to see the drift of things: you read the newspapers: you walk the streets with your fresh young eyes wide open: you listen to the conversations of your elders: you know what’s what.’

‘You may not’, I shall admit, ‘thoroughly understand the working of all the traps that are being laid for you, but that matters little. The point is that you see clearly that traps are being laid for you, and you see what and where they are. From your secluded position on the green bough you are watching the spreading of nets. Surely, surely, surely you will not be stupid enough, as soon as the coast is clear, to fly into them!’

‘You young people’, I shall say in conclusion, ‘have already learned, not merely from your parents and teachers, but from your own observation of men and things, that the way of transgressors is hard and that the wages of sin is death. You know perfectly well, young as you are, something of the havoc and the heartbreak caused by drink, by gambling, by vice, and by sin in every shape and form. If, therefore, seeing what you have seen, reading what you have read, hearing what you have heard, and knowing what you so very well know, you deliberately seek entanglement in the snares being spread for you, what fools you young people must be!’

I may be mistaken; but I fancy that, in addressing that vast audience of senior girls and boys in this tone of voice, I shall be accorded a very attentive and very respectful hearing.

One other thing is clear, whichever way you interpret the proverb. And that other thing is the practical thing. Whether through their misfortune or their fault, many unhappy birds are actually caught in the nets; and it is our mission in life to set them free. The glory of the everlasting gospel is that it offers to snared birds the possibility of a glorious escape. That is why Christ died upon the Cross; that is why the Bible was written; that is why the Church exists. All the world over, and all the ages through, the Church is a singing Church; and that universal melody is like the gay outburst of the birds in an English grove to whom the torn meshes of the nets strewn around them bear witness to the perils from which, with ruffled plumage, they have lately been delivered.

‘We are escaped!’ cried the Jews, as they exultantly re-entered Jerusalem and gave way to transports of gratitude and delight. ‘The snare is broken and we are escaped!’

‘We are escaped!’ cried old Theodore Beza, his hair white with the snows of eighty winters, as he went up to the ancient church at Geneva after the long agony of persecution and oppression was past. ‘The snare is broken and we are escaped!’ And to this day that noble psalm is chanted by the people in that historic shrine on the anniversary of that memorable deliverance.

‘We are escaped!’ cried William Knibb in announcing to the slaves of Jamaica the victory of the abolitionists. ‘The snare is broken and we are escaped!’

‘We are escaped!’ cried the dying McCheyne. In the collapse of his frail body, a strange darkness had overtaken his mind. He asked to be left quite alone for half an hour. When his servant returned, the young minister’s face was radiant and his voice triumphant. ‘I am escaped!’ he exclaimed, joyously. ‘The snare is broken and I am escaped!’

Said I not truly that the harmonies of the Church resemble the melody of birds in an English grove whilst the torn and tangled snares lie all around? One only Hand could snap those snares and set the panting, fluttering, frightened creatures free. And that pierced Hand can break the toils of any imprisoned spirit, introducing it to a life of limitless activity and of rapturous song.

In one of his volumes of essays, Mr. A. C. Benson tells of a pleasant experience which, to-day, I shall weave into a parable. He was strolling, he says, through a charming English village lying just under the wold. He thought the thatched and white-walled cottages, with their colourful and fragrant gardens, extremely fascinating and restful. The people, too, seemed singularly attractive, Sitting in the shelter of a rose-covered porch, with a long row of bee-hives close at hand, was a frail little lady, looking dreadfully ill and worn. Near the open door of another old-fashioned dwelling, a motherly body was busy about her household tasks; whilst, on her way back from the quaint little shops that clustered round the ancient church, a comely young woman was crooning softly to the baby that beamed up at her from its perambulator. There were men, too, looking honest, sensible, and in every way interesting. Mr. Benson coveted a chat with these clean, wholesome village folk, and wished that he could peep into their dainty homes, but he had no excuse for intruding upon their privacy.

-F.W. Boreham