Bab Bab 9 · The Sermon.

Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered

the scattered people to condense. “Starboard 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 world-wide 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 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 wrestlings 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 fall 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

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 dropped 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.