The Sermon
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority
ordered the scattered people to condense. "Star board gangway,
there! side away to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard!
Midships! midships!"
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches,
and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again,
and every eye on the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his
large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes,
and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling
and praying at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual
tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog--
in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn;
but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas,
burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy--
The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
And lift me deepening down to doom.
I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell--
Oh, I was plunging to despair.
In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints--
No more the whale did me confine.
With speed he flew to my relief,
As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God.
My song for ever shall record
That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power.
Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high
above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued;
the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible,
and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said:
"Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter
of Jonah--'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'"
"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--
four yarns--is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable
of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep
sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet!
What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly!
How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging
over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters;
sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is
this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is
a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men,
and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men,
it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin,
hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment,
repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy
of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son
of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--
never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--
which he found a hard command. But all the things that God
would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--
and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.
And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this
disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further
flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks
that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries
where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth.
He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's
bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded
meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other
city than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men.
And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water,
from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those
ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.
Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most
easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish
or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that,
just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates,
that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God? Miserable man!
Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched
hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among
the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.
So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there
been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion
of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck.
How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise,
or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf with
their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds
the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo;
and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin,
all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods,
to mark the stranger's evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain
he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his
wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners
he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way,
one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed a widow;"
or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad,
I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah,
or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runs
to read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf
to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins
for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description
of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill;
while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,
prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles.
and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much
the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected;
but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it;
and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised,
they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.
"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making
out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless
question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again.
But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish;
how soon sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up
to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does
he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance.
'We sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered,
still intently eyeing him. 'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any
honest man that goes a passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab.
But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent.
'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the passage money how much is that?--
I'll pay now.' For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it
were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paid
the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context,
this is full of meaning.
"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects
crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless.
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel
freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper,
is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares
to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly.
He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented to.
Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same
time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold.
Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still
molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit.
Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage.
'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary;
I need sleep." "Thou look'st like it,' says the Captain,
'there's thy room.' Jonah enters, and would lock the door,
but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there,
the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about
the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within.
All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth,
and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead.
The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole,
sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heralding
presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him
in the smallest of his bowels' wards.
"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly
oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf
with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all,
though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with
reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself,
it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung.
The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth
his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far
successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.
But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him.
The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.
'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, "straight upward,
so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'
"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed,
still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings
of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags
into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns
in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed;
and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him,
as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound,
and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestling in his berth,
Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.
"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables;
and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish,
all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends,
was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband
was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden.
A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break.
But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her;
when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard;
when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every
plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head;
in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep.
He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers,
and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale,
which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him.
Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship--
a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep.
But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear,
'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!' Startled from his lethargy
by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling
to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea.
But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping
over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship,
and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft,
till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.
And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from
the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah
sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat
downward again towards the tormented deep.
"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his
cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known.
The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions
of him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring
the whole matter to high Heaven, they all-outward to casting lots,
to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them.
The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how furiously they
mob him with their questions. 'What is thine occupation?
Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now,
my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners
but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not only
receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another answer
to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is
forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lord
the God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!'
Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God then!
Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession;
whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still
are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy,
since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,--
when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast
him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this
great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him,
and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain;
the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised
invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay
hold of Jonah.
"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;
when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east,
and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him,
leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such
a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops
seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to
all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison.
Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly.
But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts, upon his prison.
Then Jonah prayed unto learn a weighty lesson. For sinful
as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance.
He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his
deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all
his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple.
And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance;
not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.
And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown
in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.
Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his
sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance.
Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah."
While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,
slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,
when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.
His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms
seemed the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled
away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye,
made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was
strange to them.
There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over
the leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless,
with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his
head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility,
he spake these words:
"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands
press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine
the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye,
and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.
And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit
on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen,
while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson
which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God. How being
an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and bidden
by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a
wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise,
fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking
ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.
As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed
him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore
him along 'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths
sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped
about his head,' and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.
Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet--'out of the belly
of hell'--when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones,
even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.
Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold
and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards
the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth;
and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the Lord
came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears,
like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean--
Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates?
To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that
pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this
world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour
oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!
Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal!
Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!
Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!
Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false
were salvation! Yea, woe to him who as the great Pilot Paul
has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!
He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting
his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes,
as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates!
on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight;
and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe
is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?
Delight is to him--a far, far upward, and inward delight--
who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth,
ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him
whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base
treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him,
who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys
all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators
and Judges. Delight,--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges
no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.
Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas
of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel
of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his,
who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath--O Father!--
chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I die.
I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own.
Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man
that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with
his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed,
and he was left alone in the place.
