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How to Fish for Men

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 24, 1872

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 40, No. 15.

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How to Fish for Men.

By Rev. Dr. Ballard

1. Improve your time. All being ready, put out your line at once, and keep it out every moment possible, as you cannot tell the minute when you may take a big fish. Hold forth continually, in season and out of season. Only yesterday, a young lady just converted wrote to me, “Do you remember in your letter to my brother, urging him to a Christian life, that you added, ‘I think your oldest sister is a Christian?’ That troubled me. I knew I was not a Christian, and I knew that I ought to be one.” Keep out your line.
2. Be sure to keep your float whirling lively and bright. Make the truth fresh and attractive. Turn its bright sides to men's hearts. If you can add a bright feather from the wing of fancy, it will be all the better.
3. Row often over the same ground. The fish that is not quite ready to take hold this time round may spring for it the next. No matter if other more expert fisherman than you have been over the ground before you. God may give to those hitherto indifferent an eye to your hook. Be careful about saying, “There are no fish to be caught there.”
4. Be prepared for some disappointments. Now and then your hopes will be greatly raised only to be greatly dashed. You may reel a splendid fellow to the boat's side, and, just when you are sure of him, off he will slip from the hook, and you will lose him. You will sometimes be sure a man is stepping into the kingdom, and the next you know, he is in the deep water of worldliness or skepticism.
2. Finally, be patient. This is the supreme, indispensable quality in a good fisherman. A fisherman's patience is proverbial the world over. You must learn to fish the whole day without taking a single fish, or even having a bite, and yet consider that you have had a good time, and go at it again, light and cheerful, the next day. Above all things, be not weary in well doing if you would catch souls.—Rev. Dr. Ballard.