.. < chapter ix 23  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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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