CHAPTER 9

  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 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 in 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 apprenhension 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. Frightened 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 lookest 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 upwards, 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 bare 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 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 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.