University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.
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—

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 billowlike
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
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 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 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 or
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 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.