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Table of Contents
Chapter 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, ..
2 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 ..
3 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 ..
4 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 ..
5 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 bowel's 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 ..
6 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 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 ..
7 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 ..
8 awaiting him; and the
whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like 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 ..
9 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 ..
10 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. ..
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