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EPUB ISBN: 978-0-908327-14-0
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The original publication details are as follows:
Title: The voyage of life : eight addresses on some aspects of it
Author: Waddell, Rutherford
Published: N.Z. Book Depot, Wellington, N.Z., 1927
THE VOYAGE OF LIFE
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
INCLUDE
BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD.
THE BUILDING OF THE SHIP.
AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR.
KILLED IN ACTION.
UNTIL THE DAY DAWN.
OLD CHRISTMASES.
MY PATHWAY TO CHRIST.
THE ROMANCE OF GOD.
IN THE DOLDRUMS—
Cheerio for the Discouraged.
THE FIDDLES OF GOD.
2nd Edition.
Of these all are sold out except the last four, of which a few copies still remain.
SOME PRESS NOTICES.
Some 28,000 of Dr. Waddell’s publications have been sold. Dr.Fitchett of Melbourne, the well-known Author and Editor, says of Dr. Waddell’s publications : “If published as a complete series they would make a Library rich in literary charm and richer still in spiritual insight and power. . . . Few writers of the day have so vivid a vision of spiritual things, a literary style so sword-edged and clear.”
“He has Lamb’s love of books and humanity and the true Essayist’s art of browsing about a subject in an enlightening way.” —Auckland Star.
“ The high thoughts, the pure English and the splendid literary style of this author.” —Otago Witness.
“ In reading this book one feels the fresh breeze of the heath In his face and hears the music of the streamlets and the leaping of the trout.” — Australian Christian World.
“ The student of these essays will be interested In many things, and, first of all, by the wonderful range of reading manifest in the writing. No narrow-minded theologian is here, but a man who is sensitive to every wind and who keeps open wide the eyes of his soul.” —Otago Daily Times.
“ The volume is full of wisdom and good advice, and no whit the worse for the bit of fun introduced.” —Lyttelton Times, Christchurch.
“It Is the work of a helpful optimist and a scholar.” —Wellington Evening Post.
“ Under this quaint title the doyen of New Zealand essayists, Dr. Rutherford Waddell, has published a collection of nine essays. Our readers will be well pleased with the lilt of ‘The Fiddles of God.'”— Feilding Star.
BY DR. WADDELL
THE VOYAGE OF LIFE
EIGHT ADDRESSES ON SOME ASPECTS OF IT
BY RUTHERFORD WADDELL
MA., D.D.
Author of "The Fiddles of God,” "Behold The Lamb of God,” etc.
“Like unto ships far out at sea,
Outward and homeward bound are we.”
Longfellow.
N.Z. BOOK DEPOT
(N.Z. BIBLE AND BOOK SOCIETY)
7i WILLIS ST. WELLINGTON
48 PRINCES ST. DUNEDIN
49-jx ESK ST. INVERCARGILL
Made and Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd.. Frome and London
IN MEMORIAM
M. C.
’Tis human fortune’s happiest height to be
A Spirit melodious, lucid, poised and whole ;
Second in order of felicity
To walk with such a Soul.
Foreword
This book needs an explanation and apology.
A good many years ago I was induced to publish a booklet containing four addresses from a series on “ The Voyage of Life ” which I had recently delivered, the proceeds of which were in aid of a new Sunday School building fund. It ran through several editions. A second series followed for the same purpose and with a similar fortune. Both booklets have been long out of print, but every now and again requests come to the publishers or to myself for copies of them. Because of this my publishers have for some time past been anxious to re-issue the booklets, but I have been unwilling to comply. “ Any one who reads the addresses,” as I wrote in the Foreword to the first series, “ will not wonder at that. I intended the whole series of the addresses to be simply the plain practical putting of commonplace truths. Plato says that all writing needs its father to help it out, to explain it, to defend it. But this is particularly true of spoken addresses such as these ; they must necessarily lack that literary grace and precision of statement that we have a right to look for in a book that appeals to the public. To take them away from their original environment, from an expectant audience and the personality of the speaker, is to capture the body without the spirit; and the body without the spirit is dead.”
That apologia written many years ago only gains additional force with the lapse of time. I have an uncomfortable consciousness that I can hear candid critics and clerical brethren saying with the appearance of the present volume,
“ Here is this fellow Waddell offering again to the public another book, a book of sermons—sermons such as they may hear any Sunday in any average pulpit of the Dominion.”
7
Foreword
15
The sting of this lies in its truth, and my critics are probably quite right. But I have the excuse that a public of considerable numbers seem to care for what I write. Moreover, lam no longer in active service. This is the only way left to me now to try to say a word for the Master to whom I owe everything, and pay my final debt to life.
I have compromised with my publisher in the matter of publication. Only four of the addresses that appeared in the original booklets are included in the present volume. Sea-sickness, Ships that Pass in the Night, Crossing the Bar, and Coaling Stations on the Voyage of Life. None of the others have ever been printed before.
I may anticipate the criticism of incompleteness which is likely to be made regarding my treatment of the subject by saying that only a comparatively small number of the total series appears here. Perhaps I had better print the remaining titles : The Building of the Ship ; Dropping the Pilot; Outward Bound; Sea Mysteries; In the Trade Winds ; The Tragedies of the Sea ; In the Doldrums; Contrary Winds; Euroclydons; What to do in the Euroclydons ; The Shipwrecks at Zion-geber ; The Derelicts of the Sea; The Evolution of the Ship ; In Commodious Winter Havens ; Lost within Sight of Harbour and Home; No More Sea; A Sea of Glass mingled with Fire.
I have tried to acknowledge my indebtedness to various writers, but no doubt, as I said in my Foreword to The Fiddles of God, readers will find phrases and suggestions that have crept in unconsciously to me.
The wind that woos the Rose
Her fragrance whispers in his heart
Wherever hence he goes.
RUTHERFORD WADDELL
“ Dreamtiiorpe,”
Broad Bay,
Dunedin.
Contents
PAGE
I The Sea, Ships, Life 11
II Sea-sickness 21
111 Ships that Pass in the Night 41
IV Coaling Stations on the Voyage of Life. 57
V Sailors’ Food 75
VI Breakers Ahead 87
VII Doing Business in Deep Waters 97
VIII Crossing the Bar 111
I have the profoundest distrust of any religion that is cut off from the Sea.
Db. J. Rendel Harris.
Where lies the land to which the ship will go ?
Far, far ahead is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from ? Away
rar, far behind is all that they can say.
A. H. Clough.
Youth embarks with a thousand sails on the ocean wave,
Age draws silently home in the one little boat that saves.
Schiller.
THE SEA IS HIS AND HE MADE IT.
O Maker of the mighty deep
Whereon our vessels fare.
Above our life’s adventure keep
Thy faithful watch and care.
In Thee we trust, whate’er befall,
Thy sea is great, our boats are small.
We know not when the secret tides
Will help us or delay,
Nor where the lurking tempest hides.
Nor where the fogs are gray.
When outward bound we boldly sail,
And leave the friendly shore,
Let not our heart of courage fail
Until the Voyage’s o’er.
When homeward bound we gladly turn,
O bring us safely there!
W T here harbour lights of friendship burn
And peace is in the air.
Beyond the circle of the sea
When voyaging is past
We seek our final Port in Thee,
O bring us home at last I
In Thee we trust, whate'er befall,
Thy sea is great, our boats are small.
Henry Van Dyke.
The Sea, Ships, Life
I
The abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee. — Isaiah lx. 5.
Jane Welsh Carlyle, in one of her brilliant letters, said that if she had had anything to do with compiling the English Prayer Book, she would have included a very special petition for those who go down to the sea in ships. It is always a perpetual wonder to me why anybody chooses the sea as a profession, or what in the world induces people to go as sailors, stewards, firemen, etc. The broken rest at night, the stuffiness and stinkiness, sometimes of even richly furnished saloons, but above all of the steerage accommodation and the sailors’ berths, might be enough to repel anyone with an average nose or stomach. But it does not. Some strange fascination as of a vast rattlesnake, which the sea often looks like, draws men irresistibly to it. But, why ?
“ What is it makes a man follow the sea ?
Ask me another,” says Billy Magee.
“ Maybe it’s liquor and maybe it’s love,
Maybe it’s likin’ to be on the move . . .
What is it makes such poor id jits as me
Follow the sea—follow the sea ?
Jiggered if I know,” says Billy Magee.
n
19
The Sea, Ships, Life
But it is not only the Billy Magees whom the sea fascinates, it does the same for landsmen. In holiday times, three out of four people go to the seaside. The very children are away to it every chance they can get. Why ? Billy Magee does not know why he goes to it, curses it, and quits it, and comes back to it again.
Perhaps one reason is that there is an element of chance of surprise in the sea that is not on the land. One never knows what one will come across, sailing it, or wandering along its shores. Another reason may be its vastness. Man likes the appeal of the vast, the immense. It was this aspect of it that amazed and awed the early world. The ancient dwellers by the shores of the Mediterranean felt this fear. What lay beyond their land-locked sea they knew not. Their wise one taught them that the sun, moon and stars rose out of it and descended into it again ; that it had once flooded the land; —that it was infinite, out of it all things had come, and to it again would all things return. The first daring explorers were the Phoenicians, creeping on from point to point, feeling their way from Cyprus and Greece and Italy to Spain, But it was not till Columbus and Magellan and Balboa appeared that the ocean’s vastness opened out. These mighty explorers must have been men of iron. Magellan forging his way through the Straits that bear his name shed tears as the majestic ocean beyond burst upon his gaze, and Balboa wading waist deep, sword and shield in hand, into the
The Sea, Ships, Life
20
Pacific claiming it for Spain : Spain that can claim nothing there now save sad memories. And greatest of all, perhaps, Columbus with his poor cockle-shell of a ship, with his ignorance of what was ahead of him, bewildered with the trade winds, and standing up bravely to his fainthearted and mutinous crew.
They sailed and sailed as wind may blow,
Until at last the blanched mate said,
“ Why now, not even God Himself would know
Should I and all my men fall dead.
These very winds forget their way,
For God from these dead seas is gone ;
Now speak, Brave Admiral, speak and say ”
He said, “ Sail on ! sail on ! and on ! ”
To-day we have mapped it out save a little portion about the North Pole. But in depth its vastness still amazes us, and man, as I have said, loves vastness, and the sea makes its appeal to that.
And then its beauty. What can one say of that, how describe it ? Frank Bullen speaks of “ the miracle of a fine day at sea,” The miracle ! It surely has a magic beyond words. And then the beauty of its music from the thunderous roar of its billows out in the deep to the soft crooning of its wavelets along the shore. It turns the pebbles “ as if with a rake to look for something,” as Ruskin puts it, “ then stopping a moment down at the bottom of the bank and coming up again
21
The Sea, Ships, Life
with a little run and clash, sighing all the while as if it would rather be doing something else.”
And there is also the beauty of its terror; for terror has a certain fascination about it. The growth of a cancer is as beautiful scientifically considered as the growth of a crocus. The genial author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, discussing whether he would like to live by the mountains or the sea, turns the sea down. “You can domesticate the mountains,” he says, “ but the sea is fierce naturally. The sea remembers nothing. It licks your feet, its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened.” Or take the testimony of a man who lived on it, and in a measure loved and has written of it with graphic power, Joseph Conrad. “ All the tempestuous passions of mankind’s young days, the love of loot, of glory, the love of adventure and the love of danger, with the great love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power, have passed, like images reflected from a mirror, leaving no record on the mysterious face of the sea.” As Byron put it long ago, it “ goes forth dread, fathomless and alone.” And so there emerges what we may call the glamour of the sea ; and how it has kept calling, calling to men, and they have been so responsive. Even a land-dweller can hardly look steadily at the leaping waves from the ship’s side without almost losing consciousness. They seem to beckon and call “ Come, come,” and he feels a kinship with
The Sea, Ships, Life
22
them so strange and impelling as to sometimes make him almost desire to leap overboard and lose himself in the sea’s immensity.
Then there is the mystery of the sea. It is steeped in mystery like its own saltness. Its very saltness is a mystery. How does it preserve a uniform saltness in spite of evaporation, in spite of the fact of fresh water pouring into it at the rate of 13,000 cubic miles every year? Then there is the mystery of its motions, up and down of the wind, undulatory of the movement of the earth, its tides answering the pull of the sun and the moon. Then there is the mystery of its covering four-fifths of the earth, the abode of man who is a land animal, and nearly seven-eighths of it salt water, which is death to him. Again there is the mystery of its contents ; what lies away miles deep in its bosom—perhaps there the secret of life itself. That was the idea of the ancients. Oceanus w r as the parent of the gods, from whence all things spring. The very earth itself, as we know, is but the transformation of minute organism ; and there is the protoplasm, the origin of life. The sea is filled with it, lives upon it, perhaps is bred from it. Who knows ? All life, man included, came up from the sea. This may be the secret of its fascination for him. Some remnant of ancestral memories stored up in the dim recesses of his nature, answers to the long, sweet, strange, mysterious glamour of the sea as an .Eolian harp to the wandering winds. The sea, the origin of life ! There we come within sight of
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The Sea, Ships, Life
the fact that suggests these addresses, and in a measure justifies them. Whether or not it is the origin of life, it is certainly an emblem, a symbol, an allegory of it. So men in every age have interpreted it. Longfellow’s lines are typical:
Like unto ships far out at sea,
Outward and homeward bound are we.
In the mystery and magic of its tides, terrors, beauties, calms, storms, waves, w r aters and fifty other things, they have found it to be a mirror of human life. And in the ships that go and come in their variety, evolution, launching, equipments, pilots, captains, sailors, etc., they have read messages for the individual afloat upon the great sea of life. Sings Kipling:
The liner she’s a lady, and she never looks nor ’eeds
The man o’ war, her husband, and ’e gives her all she needs,
But oh ! the little cargo boats that sail the wet seas round,
They are just the same as you and me a’plying up and down.
And why not ? Why should we not have this double aspect of the sea and the ship ? Go down to the shore to adapt an illustration of Dr. Hugh Macmillan’s. Look at one of those little rock pools full of pellucid water two or three feet deep, white pebbles at the bottom, green and crimson and golden, seaweed fringing their sides. Look
The Sea, Ships, Life
24
at it from a particular angle and in the proper light, and you gaze down into the deep blue sky and see the snowy and amber clouds overhead, and over-arching trees, like long, fringed eyelashes over a laughing eye, mirrored in its depths. The little rock pool becomes a vision of glory, deep and capacious as the heaven itself and fdled with the brightest shapes of aerial beauty. Look at it from another angle and you see nothing of all this, neither sapphire sky nor golden cloud nor shadowy tree, nothing but dull, hard skies and grey and colourless water.
But is not the one picture as real as the other ? Is not the vision of beauty as true, nay, truer than the vision of steely stones and leaden-col-oured skies ? And why should we not find in the sea and in the ship a parable on a vaster scale, similar to that of the little rock pool—a vision, an emblem, an allegory of life ? We know that the final end and use of everything are never merely physical or utilitarian; —they are moral and spiritual. After you have exhausted the scientific, geographical, commercial purposes of the sea —or anything else —there remains, like the rock pool vision, a use for it that is ideal, spiritual, divine. Emerson reminds us that “ nothing is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service.” Air is for breathing, but it can be framed into words and that become the revealer of souls. St. Paul used the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, as a Hebrew poet had done before him as an allegory of the
T.L.
B
25
The Sea, Ships, Life
presence and power of God in man’s salvation. Christ was constantly doing similar things. One has only to recall the story of the Brazen Serpent, the manna, Jonah, etc., to be reminded of this. The Hebrew poets found, like Byron, the sea, not only to be a parable of life, but in particular the mirror of the Divine. “ Thy way is in the sea and thy paths in the deep waters.” “ The waters saw thee, O Lord; they were afraid.” .. . No doubt liberty of allegorizing has its dangers, but there are far greater dangers from the pedantic temper and prosaic matter-of-fact life, that lacks a generous appreciation of the many-sidedness of the revelation of God in the world. And so we plead justification, if any be needed, in interpreting seas and ships as emblems and symbols of the voyage of human life, over the sea of time.
The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Seas, the hills and the plains;
Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns.
“ The abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee.” It is a singular thing that the Biblical writers make so little of the sea. Since God made so much of it, covering four-fifths of the earth with it, it might appear He would desire us to do the same. But it seem as if His chosen people had even a dread of it. To them Islands were a kind of God-forsaken places. “ The isles shall wait for Thee.” Christ indeed found in the sea once at least a balm for His
The Sea, Ships, Life
26
disappointment. When men turned from Him we read, “ The same day He went out and sat by the seaside.” And one of the things that makes heaven for His beloved apostle is that “ there is no more sea ”in it. So in our text. The prophet foresees a coming time when the sea shall lose its terrors, when its vast possibilities shall be realized. “ The abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee.” The symbol of fear, says G. W. Matheson, “ shall become a symbol of glory. The waves shall waft joy to them. The foam shall freshen them ; the breezes shall brace them ; the storms shall strengthen them; the expanses shall exhilarate them; the roar shall become rhythmic. The element which once was simply waste shall become the emblem of fulness and beauty.”
And the sea is an emblem of the sea of life, and that is what we hope to suggest to our lives through these addresses. “ The abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee.” And when was that to be realized ? When the Messiah came —so the pious Jew dreamed. And in the main he was right. It is only in Christ that life is redeemed and renewed, that its abundance is converted to use and beauty. Even the scientific study of the sea points to that. For is not the vital element in sea water the sunshine ? Drink and food themselves, as we shall see in a later address, become life-giving and life-enrich-ing only as they are the carriers and transmitters of sunshine. Without the sun’s heat, we are told, the sea would become a mass of frozen water;
27
The Sea, Ships, Life
without its energy, the gases which it holds in subjection would explode and blow the whole of the earth to smithereens. And so with human life. Christ the Sun of Righteousness is its vital breath, its native air. Empty it of Him and a similar fate sooner or later befalls it, as befalls the sea when the sun is withdrawn from it. “ The abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee.” That is what we aim at in the following addresses —to show how through Him life attains its wealth and glory in its voyage from the port of Time to the haven of Eternity.
Sea-sickness
II
Ecclesiastes i. 1-18
I do not purpose taking any one text of Scripture, for no single text will cover the whole of what I have to say, but, as I go on, no doubt dozens of texts will suggest themselves to you.
We are to consider this evening, in our study of the Voyage of Life, Sea-sickness. It follows very naturally on the subject of this night week—• “ Outward Bound ” —it is usually the next stage.
Many people have been wondering how I was going to get a sermon out of that, yet it is the easiest of the whole series, and the simplest. But it is very difficult to start. In all the others hitherto, I was able to introduce myself by quotations from writers of one sort and another ; but it is a curious thing that I cannot get one on “ Seasickness.” Nowhere in literature, so far as I can recall, does any notable author attempt a description of sea-sickness, with the exception, perhaps, of Mark Twain. Mark Twain, you remember, describes the malady in his Pilgrims Abroad. The second day, or was it the first ? after they were out, he stood at the gangway door to be gracious and say “ Good morning ” to every one
28
29
Seasickness
who came up, but one after another, as he met them at the door with “ Good morning,” shot past him, speechless, with their hands upon their waists, and all he could get from them was, “ Oh, my 1 ” It is no wonder that writers do not attempt to describe sea-sickness. It is impossible to put in words your deepest feelings. You may attempt to describe a sunset, or a great scene in Nature, but you feel ashamed after you have put down the words. They are so thin and unequal to the feelings that you have and the visions that you saw. So it is of other things. So it is of one’s feelings about music. So it is of the deepest sorrow or the deepest joy. Silence, we feel, is the most befitting. I suppose that is the reason -why nobody tries to describe sea-sickness. About as near as you can get to it is the expressive phrase that met Mark Twain from one and another, “ Oh, my ! ” Where others have not made the attempt, therefore, neither shall I. My business is not to describe it, but to interpret it in the light of the voyage of life. And the interpretation is very simple and very easy. I said that the sea was the emblem of the great sea of humanity—or the sea of life—and sea-sickness is typical of life-sickness. So there we get our subject.
Is not that common ? Call witnesses. Mr. Froude writes of Carlyle : “ Every day he told me that he was weary of life, and spoke wistfully of the old Roman method of ending it.” John Stuart Mill reports of his father : “He thought human life a poor thing at best. He would
Sea-sickness
30
sometimes say that if life were made what it might be by good government and education, that life might be desirable. But he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm of that possibility.” Harriet Martineau writes to her friend, Mr. Atkinson: “ You must feel at once,” she says, “ how earnestly I must be longing for death —I, who never loved life, and who would, any day of my life, have rather departed than stayed.” Testimonies of that sort could be multiplied by hundreds. And these are confirmed by our modern literature. I doubt if there has ever been, since the era before Christ came, an age in which life-sickness is so prevalent and so pronounced. The bulk of the novels deal with the subject, and I should think the large majority of their authors write as if they believed that life was not a joy and a blessing, only something to be endured as well as possible. Take, for instance, one who is in the very front rank —Thomas Hardy. This is what he writes in one of his books :
“ ‘ Did you say the stars were inhabited, Tess? * ‘ Yes.’ ‘ All like ours ? ’ ‘I don’t know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like apples on our tree —splendid some, and some blighted.’ 4 Which do we live on, Tess —a splendid or a blighted one ? ’ 4 On a blighted one.’ ”
44 On a blighted one." So in our poetry. The same note is struck there. You have it, singing its low monotone all through Matthew Arnold, who is, perhaps, the most characteristic poet of our age.
Here it is again in this sweet, winsome, pathetic, sad little poem :
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Sea-sickness
Earth mother dear, I turn at last,
A homesick child to thee.
The sunset glow is fading fast,
And soon I shall be free
To seek the realm, dim and vast,
That thou provid’st for me.
I am so weary, Mother dear,
Thy child of dual race.
Who, gazing past the starbeams clear,
Sought the Undying’s face.
Now I but ask to know thee near,
To feel thy large embrace.
Tranquil to lie against thy breast,
Deep source of voiceless springs ;
Where hearts are healed and wounds are drest,
And nought or sobs or sings,—
Against thy breast to lie at rest,
A life that folds its wings.
Some day I may—for who can tell ?
Awake no longer tired,
And see the fields of asphodel—
The dream’d of, the desired, —
And find the heights where He doth dwell
To whom my heart aspir’d.
And then —but peace awaiteth me,
Thy peace, I feel it near :
The hush, the voiceless mystery,
The languor without fear.
Enfold me close ; I want but thee—
But thee, Earth mother dear.
And so I could go on quoting, endlessly almost,
Sea-sickness
32
in the spirit of that. So much in general, then, about life-sickness. But the specific point I want you to notice is that sea-sickness is always early on the voyage. It begins after the “ Outward Bound.” And the meaning of that is that life-sickness is mostly a disease of youth. It is most persistent among young men and young women between the ages of sixteen and twentyfive. Nearly all young lives—especially poets—are pessimistic. It was a wise insight that led Shakespeare to make his chief pessimist a young man. It is Hamlet who says, “ God ! how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.” It is Hamlet who is constantly fingering the problem : “To be, or not to be ; that is the question ? ” And that is true to nature, and the reason is manifest. Youth is quick to see the disease, but impatient of the slowness of the remedy. It does not realize that great truths and great causes have to be defeated again and again, trampled into the dust scores of times, before their day of triumph comes. Hence, it is like children ; it sees the end clearly, the means dimly, or not at all. And so youth is inclined to be despondent, and the despondency may go on into sourness and cynicism. But my point is that if you want to find pessimism, if you want to hear the sharpest and most sorrowful words, if you want to discover the most unfriendly criticism of life and people, you will get it from young men and young women between the ages I have mentioned.
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Sea-sickness
But to come back to sea-sickness again. You may distinguish two stages of it, or two kinds of it. There is one kind in which you get very bad, in which you are violently ill. I shall not describe that further. For those who know it, it is not needed, and for those who do not know it, my words would seem needlessly extravagant. But that is the form of sea-sickness that, after all, is the most desirable. You get over it soonest. And it is so with life-sickness. Those who take it very badly at the beginning are most likely to throw it off later in life. Better that those who do not believe in the creeds and customs and conventionalities of life should violently oppose them, should be earnest and vigorous in their denunciation of them, than that they should thoughtlessly acquiesce in them. A great writer has said: “ I write it with hesitation, but I verily believe that a bold and fearless sail into the wild agonizing storm and darkness of atheism may be a better thing for a man’s soul than the constant tacking about indifferently between religion and its doctrines.” That is one stage. It is good to get right bad and be done with it. It is good to get right bad in your life-sickness, to be earnest and vigorous in the form that it takes, and get over it the sooner.
There is another stage. I speak of it with some feeling, because it is usually my own. It is the stage in which you are not violently sick, but just sickish —if you know what that is. It is something like what Dickens in one of his novels says of a certain hypochondriac woman. If you
Seasickness
34
asked her how she was to-day, she would probably reply, “ Well, I think there’s a pain in the room somewhere, but I could not exactly say that I have got it.” Now, that is the stage of sickishness. And so people deal with life and its duties in that way, not in the violent, outrageous, vigorous way, but in the sickish way—in a dawdling, dull, languid, discontented, querulous, weakly, fault-finding way. I read a passage in Ecclesiastes for you that describes that sort of existence. But let us take another description of it. Those who have read Thackeray’s Pendennis will perhaps remember that in a chapter entitled u The Way of the World,” he describes exactly the sort of character that I am striving to paint for you. Warrington says to Pendennis : “ You are six-and-twenty years old, and as blase as a rake of sixty. You neither hope much, nor care much, nor believe much. You doubt about other men as much as yourself. Were it made of such pococuranti as you, the world would be intolerable ; and I had rather live in a wilderness of monkeys, and listen to their chatter, than in the company of men who denied everything.” And Thackeray himself goes on to explain the character thus : “ The lamentable stage to which his logic at present had brought him is one of general scepticism and sneering acquiescence in the world as it is. The tastes and habits of such a man prevent him from being a boisterous demagogue, and his love of truth and dislike of cant keep him from advancing crude propositions, such as many loud reformers are constantly ready with. . . .
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Sea-sickness
It was not in our friend’s nature to utter certain falsehoods, nor was he strong enough to protest against others except with a polite sneer.” That is something like what I mean by the sickish stage on the sea of life.
Now, seasick men and women are not pleasant spectacles, not by any means. We do not care to be in the same cabin with them if we can help it. That is the reason why everybody wants to get a cabin to himself on board ship. And neither are life-sick men and women —men and women such as we have hinted at, such as we have tried to describe in the sickish stage. They are not bracing, rousing, inspiring companions. On the contrary, they are wet blankets. They act upon life as the magnetic island, in the Arabian tale, upon ships. As they came near it drew out the clamping irons, and the vessel fell asunder even in summer seas. Hence we should be anxious to see them cured.
We ought, perhaps, to discuss causes first. But lam not out after causes at present. I want rather to discuss cures. I want to be as practical as I can in these addresses. And so I am not going to describe the subtleties of the causes of sea-sickness, even if I could. _ I am going speak of cures. That is what is needed. \ v ell, the cures are many ; nearly as many as the people who go to sea. I know of only one effective cure, and it is positively effective, and I will make you a present of it. What is it ? Don’t go to sea. That is the one cure for sea-sickness that works perfectly. But in lifc-sickness, that cure will not
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work. Why ? Because we have got to go on the sea whether we like it or not. We were not asked about being born into this world. We are here, and have got to accept it. We are on the sea in spite of ourselves. And so in this sphere we have got to put that cure aside. “ Why, Mary, how pale you are looking,” said a mother to her little girl as she came into her cabin. “ Yes ! ” replied Mary, “ I was very sick, but I just unswallowed myself and lam better.” That is a fine poetic way of describing both sea-sickness and its cure. Like all sicknesses, it is due to an abnormal consciousness of self. If we can get rid of that —if we can “ unswallow ” ourselves, we shall be on the highway to recovery. How is it to be done ? I was looking up a medical book to find out what cures were given for sea-sickness. I shall mention one or two of them. First, I found that opiates were suggested. Opiates! In one of my early voyages, an experienced seaman advised me to take whisky-and-soda or a bottle of champagne. I tried it, but once was enough. The cure was worse than the disease. That is half a lifetime ago and I have not tried it since. Then the medical book goes on to advise, in bad cases, chloroform, morphia, etc. These act temporarily, paralysing the nerves of the stomach. So you keep well. And in the case of life-sickness, the same thing is done. Men and women, tired and weary, take opiates —try to live by deadening life. The opiates may be gross, like whisky or opium. Millions to-day are doing that, drugging life by opiates, whisky, opium, and
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scores of other things. But that is casting out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. That plan is ruinous. Here is another cure for sea-sickness that I got —the power of the will. The Power of the Will 1 Make up your mind that you will not be seasick, and you will not. That is what a lady told me the other day. She said that is what she did. She made up her mind that she would not be sick, and she was not. Well, there is great virtue in the power of the will. In these days, much emphasis is laid upon it, and rightly, I suppose. Half our illnesses, ■we are told, are due to lack of will-power. Professor Anderson, of Yale University, has shown by an experiment that by willing through the mind, you can change the centre of gravity of the body, you can increase the brain weight, you can make blood flow to the limbs —all by simply willing. Hence, we are being told now that weights, dumb-bells, etc., are not necessary for athletic exercises. All that you have to do is to put the mind and the will into it.
And all that but brings us back to this Book here. How the Bible seems to be ahead of every advance 1 When discoverers arrive panting and perspiring on some hill-top of truth, they find the Biblical writers there waiting for them to come up. Did you ever notice how the Bible puts emphasis upon this will-power ? “I will love the Lord,” “ I will be glad in the Lord,” “ I will go in the strength of the Lord,” “ I will rejoice in the Lord,” “Ye will not come to Me that
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ye may have life,” “ Whosoever willeth to do His will shall know His doctrine,” “ Whosoever will, let him come,” and so on and so on. Yes, we are only beginning to realize the power of the will. As a great writer puts it: “In the viewless realm of man’s consciousness, in the moment when he says I will, whether it be like Columbus to explore the sea, like Loyola to found an order, or like Paul to evangelize the heathen, or like Christ by linking His will with God to redeem the world, in all such cases there is evolved, we know not how, a force compared to which Niagara is a child’s toy.”
But the will must have a motive to induce it to act, and to act vigorously and continuously. I repeat, it must have a motive. Dr. Johnson says : “ I have spent forty years of my life in making futile resolutions.” It is so with most of us. Failure of will, futile resolutions hang upon us like the weight of broken wings that can never be lifted. Now, we want motives — a motive strong enough to arouse and energize the will. For instance, suppose I say to you who are here to-night to meet me to-morrow morning at five o’clock at the church for half an hour’s prayer. How many, do you think, would come ? How many would have will-power enough to turn out of a warm bed to come to this cold wintry church for that purpose ? I fear I would have all the praying myself. But suppose I were to say to you, if you would be here to-morrow at 5 a.m., there will be waiting for each of you a cheque for £l,OOO, how many of you would be
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here ? Why, you would be tumbling over each other an hour before that and the church would be crowded to the doors. That is the power of a motive behind the will. We are told, that when the ship is sailing on quietly, and the sick people are all down in the cabins, suddenly, there is a grating sound, and then there is a crash. The ship trembles. Everybody jumps up. Aye, everybody. The sick people, the seasick people, with the rest, they rush up on the deck when the ship strikes like that. That is the power of the will when you get a motive strong enough behind it. Well now, what motive can be put strong enough behind the will in this matter of lifesickness ? We shall begin with yourself, for, as a Highlandman once said to me, “ No one is a great one.” Well now, begin with yourself, your own personal danger in the matter of sea-sickness. I read again in my medical book, “ Probably, no derangement of organic function causes a greater amount of suffering and is more frequently fraught with real danger to health, and even life itself, than sea-sickness.” Perhaps some of you did not know that before; it is fraught with danger to health and even to life itself. And lifesickness, that state or condition of feeling that the writer of Ecclesiastes describes —that listless, joyless, sullen, cynical, critical, fault-finding, ease-loving, Hamlet, Byronic, Pendennis, Lotus life—that is at once a peril and a shame.
Shall I prove that by the words of great writers ? If the students who are here will read
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in their Chaucer, “ The Persones Tale,” they will find that old poet dealing with it in a wonderful way. Or if they read Dr. Paget’s book. The Spirit of Discipline (the introductory essay “ Concerning Accidie ”), they will get a wonderful insight into it. And if, along with these, they will read their Dante, seventh canto of the Inferno and the eighteenth of the Purgatorio, they will have still further light. But I am going to quote you the authorities of two other authors, I like to quote men who cannot be called biassed in any way in the interest of religion. The first I shall summon is Shelley. Shelley says : “ They who love nothing on this earth, and cherish no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies of their kind, rejoice neither in human joy nor mourn with human grief, they, and such as they, have their appointed curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. . . . They who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.” That is what Shelley says. I have already referred you to Thackeray, and I am going to read you now Thackeray’s judgment upon Pendennis, whose character we got a moment ago. This is the great novelist’s judgment on it : “If seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest farther than a laugh; if, plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to pass groaning past
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you unmoved ; if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on your balcony, and smoke your pipe, out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward.” Now, if I had said that, you probably would not have believed me. You might have set it down as pulpit rhetoric, but Thackeray says it, and Shelley says it, and neither of them can be called prejudiced in religion. And, mind you, these are not mere opinions of this or that man. They are founded on physiological and psychological facts. Thus Professor Gates, of Andover, says that tempers of that kind “ generate injurious compounds which poison the mind, ruin the body, and destroy the reason.” And in a book, by a well-known writer, Orison Sweet Marden, I read that moods of this sort are “ psychological devils. The poisons they generate are deadly in the extreme.” That is what psychologists and physiologists say about that kind of character. But sometimes a man’s will is more easily moved by the danger he puts others in than by his own. A man will endure many things for himself, but if a thing touches his wife, or child, then he will drop it.
And so I come to a second motive wherewith to reinforce the will. And it is this : The Seasick Man or Woman is a Nuisance. They are a peril to others as well as to themselves. I suppose in this respect I am like the rest of people. I like to get a cabin to myself, and will even pay
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a little more for it if necessary and I have the cash, because I want to be conveniently and comfortably sick, and I want nobody else to see me, and nobody else to be sick about me. When I was coming over from Sydney a few weeks ago I did manage to get a cabin to myself, but, to my dismay, when I got to Lyttelton, I found there was another man coming in. I did not object because I could not reasonably do so. It so happened, however, that this man was dead drunk. Now sea-sickness is bad enough, but seasickness and rotten whisky mixed together would be too much for an archangel. So I represented matters to the steward and he had pity upon me and cleared the other man out. Well now, we are all touching each other. We are closer to each other than the closest in the cabins of any ship, and we are all influencing each other on the voyage of life. And if the soul be such as we have described —seasick ; that is, life-sick—-i.e. gloomy, sour, sullen, indolent, selfish, querulous, fault-finding, ease-loving—how that affects others 1 How it deadens and darkens their lives ! You do not need to be told the effect of such characters. Sailors know when they are in the neighbourhood of icebergs. The air grows thin and chill. So there are life-sick men and women that produce the same effect. They chill, they cloud, they darken, they make sullen and glowering the whole atmosphere and those who are in it.
Now, are these motives enough to make the
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will get on its feet and act ? If they are, then the next question is : “In what Direction should the II ill act ? ” Let me suggest one or two tilings that the will should do. First, I made a discovery when I was coming over from Sydney this last time. \Micn I found the sea-sickness coming on (and I need not describe the symptoms of it further), I grasped myself tight round the waist, and, curiously enough, I was saved from the more violent ’form of it. And medical authorities say that the reason is this: Seasickness is caused by bile flowing down, not where it ought to go, into the stomach, but into the intestines; you tie a bandage tightly round the middle, it restores things to the normal condition. Is it hard to see the significance of that in lifesickness ? Xo, it is quite easy. You have it in St. Paul's words, “ Mortify, therefore, your affections which are upon the earth.” Mortify —do them to death. How do you mortify a thing ? If I tie a string tightly round my finger, and keep it there some time, what happens ? The finger mortifies, drops off. Well, take these moods that come over you. tie something about them that kills them. Mortify ? Overcome evil by good. Choke gloom and indolence by light and work. You all know of Robert Louis Stevenson. He writes in one of his letters about the paralysing influence of ill-health. “ I have never at my command that press of spirits necessary to strike out a thing red-hot. A certain languor marks the whole.” That is Stevenson's own judgment upon his work, but I do not sup-
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pose that anybody will agree with him. There is no languor apparent in his work. None whatever ! How did he attain that ? You know the ill-health that he had to battle against all his life. How did he manage to keep the shadow of it out of his work ? Let me read it to you from one of his own poems :
If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved among my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If gleams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked at my sullen heart in vain—
Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake.
Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
Choose Thou before that spirit die.
A piercing pain, a killing sin,
And to my dead heart run them in
That is, in other words, “ Mortify your affections.” Or if you turn to the poems of his great companion, W. E. Henley, Henley, as you know, suffered also the malady of ill-health for years, but he never gave in. His poems are as bracing as the air of the Alps, and sometimes as icy. Thus he writes in one of them :
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul.
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In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of Chance,
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
That is the spirit that helps us to get over lifesickness.
There is a second thing that the will must do. It must, by hook or by crook, get you upon deck. Need I describe that process—the process of getting you upon deck ? It is mighty hard: that slow tottering up the stairway, the reel and the swirl and the feeble grip and weak knees — in one word, the whole “ Oh, my ! ” of Mark Twain’s concentrated there. Yes, it is a terrible business, but it is good. It is the best I know. Once on deck, comfortably settled down on a chair, everything is different. By and by, things begin to change with you. The clean, sweet, fresh salt-edged air; the blue expanse; the merry, mad-racing waves ; the magic, and music, and the mystery of the ocean; the helpful hands, and joyous voices, and glad, gay life about you; these gradually do their work, and you get on top of your illness. “On deck 1 ” “On deck ! ” It is an American slang phrase for the top of life, for getting out of the slum, and the smells, and the whines, and the worries of the bowels of the ship. On deck ! Aye, and get on deck in your ship of life. Keep up in the clean, high air, in the lofty visions, in the wide and far-reaching thoughts and feelings and
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work. Read the books that help you to do that. Mind you, the literature that does not do that, the literature that tends to lead you down and keep you in the cabins of the ship, in the narrow, close, stuffy atmosphere—that literature is abundant. Beware of it. Make friends only of that which carries and keeps you up high where the sky is lofty, and the outlook vast, and the vision wide. Dr. Dale says of his father, that he “ lived under the benignant sway of a succession of great truths following one another like the constellations in the heavens.” That is why Dale became the man he did. You cannot fight seasickness down in the evil-smelling atmosphere, in the cramped cabin, along with other sick people. Neither can you fight life-sickness there. Beware of trying to cast out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of devils, that is, of dealing with your temptations and vices on low grounds of prudence. Dr. Watkinson says : “If you have a vice, convict it at Sinai, arraign it at the bar of judgment, make it ashamed of itself at the feet of Christ, blind it with Heaven, scorch it with Hell, take it into the upper air, where it cannot get breath, and mortify, choke it, for
Chok’st thou not him in the upper air,
His strength he will still on the earth repair.”
There are some who develop the worst in us. Marguerite, in Faust, says that when Mephistopheles was near she could not pray. Her love for Faust was chilled. He drew the best out of her. But there are others that put the best into
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us, that make life strong, and vigorous, and inspiring. Not long ago, there was a letter in the paper recommending, as a cure for seasickness—what do you think ? To hum a tune with regular and prolonged cadences—a hymn tune, for instance. The writer says that it was wonderfully successful with him, and warmly recommended it. I do not know whether that is true of sea-sickness or not, but for life-sickness it is. And there is only One who strikes the great keynote, who can put the new song into our mouth, and set our feet to the magic march of the victor. It is He whom Carlyle calls the real Orpheus —the Lord Christ. Set your life to the music and the march which He lifts before you. Let Him play upon the keys of your soul. That is, after all, the true cure for life-sickness. Get to know Him, love Him, follow Him, work for Him, make Him your dearest and best comrade, and then you shall come to realize how true is the experience of the poet when he sings :
Oh, Friend, my bosom said,
Through thee above the sky is arched;
Through thee the rose is red.
All things through thee take nobler forms,
And look bevond the earth.
The mill-round of our common fate
Appears a sun-path in thy worth.
Me, too, thy nobleness hath taught
To conquer my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
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Matthew vii. 1-2.
Philippians ii. 15.
I am to speak with you this evening on “ Ships that Pass in the Night.” One who is a first-rate authority, speaking of lights at sea, says that, “ whether they be the beacon rooted upon the rock, or tossing on the surge, they are one of the most romantic of maritime things.” Anyone who has ever seen Sydney Harbour at night will realize the truth of that. The multitude of ferryboats with every variety of light—red, green, blue, orange, passing and repassing in endless succession—those who have seen this have seen one of the most striking and beautiful sights that it is possible to behold.
But it is away out in mid-ocean that one feels the surprise and charm of ships that pass in the night. You will be glad that I should withdraw myself in order that a master hand may paint the picture for you. W. Clark Russell, in The Middle Watch, writes : “ Imagine yourself at sea with me, away on the wide ocean, the stout swift steamer under our feet, and the waters dark
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and wild around. The sparks swarm like fireflies, and the strong wind comes with a note of raving in its cry as it sweeps over the metal bows of the powerful structure, whose stem cuts its very heart in twain. Suddenly, there is a loud cry. It is the look-out’s report of a ship’s light three points on the port bow ; and hardly has the shout been re-echoed when there looms up close to leeward the outline of a great fourmasted ship, heeling towards us under reefed topsails, and a topgallant sail or two, the water white as milk along the beams, the wind whistling through the shrouds and backstays. The red light gleams and vanishes almost in a breath. The great fabric swings past on the hurling of a sea slant, with a sound all about her like the dulled roll of a peal of thunder. In a minute, the night has swallowed her up astern, and where you looked for her towering heights you see nothing but a star low down glittering green in a narrow rift of indigo. Or it may be the triangular lights of a steamer, the white flame above showing clear above the wan red and dimmer green of the side-lights. They grow clearer and clearer as they come, till the movement of the helm leaves the green and the white visible only, and presently the whole ship shows with a kind of leap out of the blackness, and her illuminated ports as she flies past seem like a band of fire streaming along her side, with a curl of white wave to smother the golden tips of reflection in the dark and foamless water beyond.” That is the vision of ships that pass in the night.
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In another part of this book Mr. Russell has a chapter on the direst of all sea perils. What is it ? It is ships running into each other at night. And that peril is constantly growing. It is constantly growing because the sea is getting more and more crowded with shipping. Every newspaper, almost, reports something of that kind. In last night’s Star, for instance, I dropped casually upon no less than two. In the case of the Arawatta collision, a witness swore that the Ingeberg (the vessel that has gone down) “ had had no lights out after leaving New Zealand, but only a candle in the light-house made fast with a bit of string.” That seems almost incredible. Then, away up in North America, there was a collision with the steamer on which I once travelled down from San Francisco when I was returning to the Colony seven years ago. Sonoma. She ran into another steamer through some confusion of lights.
What is the safety, then ? The first and supreme condition of safety, both for your own vessel and that of others, must be, of course, to make sure that the lights are burning, and that you are following the rule of the road.
And so there emerges our first duty. Out on the Voyage of Life we must look to our lights ! What tragic disasters happen because of the neglect of that! The disasters on the sea that we read of in the newspapers are nothing to
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the disasters that take place on the sea of life, because of this negligence. Parents, for instance, do not keep their lights burning before their children, and the home is wrecked. Employers in business fail to keep their lights clear, and their servants are contaminated. Young men and young women quench or cover up their lights, and their comrades go astray in the darkness. Christian men and women, lit by Christ, set by Him on hill-tops, on high places to influence, to warn and to direct, are unfaithful, and so voyagers on the sea of life lose their bearings, grow confused, and are driven or drift to doom. You know that hymn, I suppose, in Moody and Sankey’s collection : “ Let the Lower Lights be Burning.” Do you remember the origin of it ? It was this : Mr. Moody describes how one wild night, a vessel rocked and plunged through the storm, just near Cleveland Harbour, like the Kawatiri the other morning over on the Tasmanian coast. The Captain said to his pilot, seeing only one light high up in the lighthouse—- “ Are you sure that is Cleveland Harbour ? ” “ Yes,” said the pilot, “ quite sure.” “ Where are the lower lights ? ” said the Captain. “ Gone out, sir.” “ Can you make the harbour ? ” “We must, sir, or perish.” With a strong hand and a brave heart, the pilot stood by the wheel, but, alas, in the darkness, he missed the channel. There came a crash and a plunge, and the sea swallowed them all.
My brothers, God will take care of the great high lighthouse—Christ. That light never goes
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out. It is the lower lights—it is you and I that we need to watch and trim.
Let the lower lights be burning,
Send a gleam across the wave,
Some poor fainting, struggling seaman,
You may rescue, you may save.
“Ye are the light of the world.” “ Among whom ye shine as lights.” “If the light that is in you be darkness,” how tragic for others as well as yourself that darkness may be.
But the second and main thought on which I want to put emphasis and develop out of the ships that pass in the night is this : You are aware that the line is taken from one of Longfellow’s poems, in “Tales of a Wayside Inn.” You are aware also, many of you, I dare say, that the line is used as the title of a celebrated novel —and very clever and once very popular —Ships that Pass in the Night, by Beatrice Harraden. You get in that book a picture of one of the big sanatoriums on the continent of Europe. All sorts and conditions of folk meet and mingle there —the sick and the healthy, people worn out with suffering, invalids, doctors and nurses attending to their wants, and friends coming and going who are sound and well. Out of this mixture come criticisms, judging of one another, walks, talks, flirtations, funerals. It is a little world, a miniature of the big world, and the purport of this book is this : To show how little we know
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of each other, how we meet and pass in life just as ships meet and pass each other in the night. And what sorrows and what tragedies arise out of our misreadings of each other’s motives, actions, character. “Every one is lonely,” said the disagreeable man. (That is the title he had earned for himself from the people there who knew him.) He said it to a girl whose one ambition in life had been self-culture but whom illhealth had thwarted in her aims and left sour and sad. “ Every one is lonely, but not every one knows it,” The girl replied: “ Now and again the knowledge comes like a revelation, and we realize that we stand practically alone, out of every one’s reach for help and comfort. When you come to think of it, too, how little we are able to explain ourselves 1 W'hen you are wanting to say something that was burning within you, have you not noticed, on the face of the listener, that unmistakable look of non-compre-hension which throws you back upon yourself ? That is one of the moments when the soul knows its own loneliness.”
The soul knows its own loneliness—how true is that 1 How little we comprehend of each other. What is it for the most part but the outside. Even to our best beloved, we cannot —sometimes, we dare not —say all we feel. The very words we use have such different meanings to different persons. They have no fixed and universally recognized connotation. Feelings, love, hope, fear, hate, passion, desire —there is no common measure of these. They are full of
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vagueness. Each mind attaches its own meaning to them, and no two will be alike. If we knew r what exactly these stood for, as we do when we say twice five are ten, it would be all right. But we do not. And so it comes about that we have no perfect medium for exchange of thought. We talk and communicate, but we are quite well aware that there are vast spaces separating us often from each other. With these mysterious deeps in the soul that we cannot fathom ourselves, that we cannot reveal to any other, are we not like ships that pass in the night ? We see the forms of each other, we can tell the shape, size, name, appearance, impression of the passing vessel; we can look at the faces that look back at us, catch a message at times, hear their “ hail ” and their “ farewell,” and then the dark takes them again. Thus it is with the vast majority of lives that we casually meet. George Eliot truly says: “ Even those who dwell in the same house, and sit at the same table, are often far off from the deep human soul within, full of unacted good, and unspoken evil.”
And now I want you to draw an inference from that. The inference is this : The impossibility and folly, the cruelty, the tragedy of judging people as if we know them all thoroughly. If we are only like ships that pass in the night, if we know so very, very little of each other, how can we have the right or ability to judge each other ? We may judge actions—we may condemn this as bad, or praise that as good, but
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the actions give us no real ground for saying that the doer is bad or good. For you cannot penetrate the motives, the passion, the heart, the temptations that prompted the deed, and until you are able to do that fully, your judgment is almost sure to err. And yet how we go on thus judging people, labelling them, passing them, to the left or right, as if we were God’s spies, and were omniscient; not merely forming an opinion in our minds of each other, but pronouncing it unhesitatingly and often harshly. Is there anything so unjust—often so cruel and so tragic ? What troubles and miseries have been brought about by these thoughtless, inconsiderate judgments of others. People do it sometimes for no better reason than to show their cleverness, or to keep up a flagging conversation at an afternoon tea or an evening party, or to give utterance to some spice of malice that is in us against another. Our conversation tends so to turn upon people rather than on ideas. Our intellectual resources are often so few that we are forced to talk about persons instead of principles, or books. So we are constantly passing judgment upon our fellows. And what follows ? Why, first of all, when you have thus judged another, you have shut the door against ever really knowing that other. You interpret all their after-actions in the light of your fixed opinions and you are often led into criminal blunders about them.
Literature is full of revelations of that kind.
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What wrongs critics have done to authors of books I Take, for instance, the celebrated instance of the Brontes. A few weeks before Emily Bronte’s death, and when her health was beginning to fail, Charlotte read them an article out of the North American Review. She thought it would amuse them. Ellis—that is Emily Bronte—was described as “ a man of uncommon talents, but dull, brutal and morose.” “ I wonder,” says Charlotte afterwards, “ what they would have thought if they could have seen Ellis as I saw her that afternoon, drawing her impeded breath as best she could, and, alas, piteously pale and wasted.” That was “ the man of uncommon talents,” and “dull, brutal, morose.” And of Charlotte herself, a reviewer in even a Christian journal spoke of her as “an alien it might seem from society and amenable to none of its laws.” What must the critics think now of these brutal words, when the veil is lifted from that Haworth vicarage, and we see the wonder and worth of these three gentle but dauntless women ? And that is a picture of what is constantly happening. There is a French proverb to the effect that “ to know all is to forgive all.” That is too absolute —it is not wholly true. But what is true is this —that usually if you only know perhaps what “ Claudius Clear ” (to two or three of whose essays I am indebted for some of the suggestions offered here) calls the “ one more fact,” it would change our whole estimate of a man or a woman. “ I have long ridiculed that man,” said a friend to another friend,
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relative to a third. “ I have long ridiculed that man for his extreme parsimony, and now I find that he is penniless, because of his most generous efforts to save another from ruin.” That is typical of what is constantly happening in life. If we only knew a little more, we should see, in nine cases out of ten, how unjust and unwarranted are the greater part of our harsh judgments about others. For instance, if I may be pardoned a personal allusion. I sometimes wonder what people who do not know my infirmity think of me. Occasionally I get a hint. Recently, on the golf-links, a gentleman said to a friend : “ That’s a gruff and glum old customer I passed on the hill up there. I said good day to him twice and he never took any notice.” His friend explained to him who I was and that I was deaf. I sit silent at an hotel table at dinner, I travel in a railway train, and I do not join in the conversation. I seem, no doubt, to people to be a reserved, moody, morose, grumpy old fellow. They do not know that I am deaf. That is the one fact more that would very probably alter their judgment of me.
And so it is in the more intricate relations of existence. John Wesley tells in that wonderful Journal of his about a man who used to excite his anger. He thought of him contemptuously as covetous. Once when he gave what seemed to Wesley a ridiculously small subscription, the latter spoke sharply to him. The man quietly replied : “ I know a man who at the week’s
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beginning goes to the market and buys a pennyworth of parsnips and takes them home to boil in water, and all that week he has only the parsnips for his meat and the water for his drink.” “ Who is the man ? ” asked Wesley. “ I am,” was the reply. And Wesley adds : “ This he constantly did although he then had £2OO a year that he might pay the debts he had incurred before he knew God. And this was the man that I had thought covetous.” It was likely revelations of this sort that led Wesley towards the end of his life to write : “ The longer I live the larger allowance I make for human infirmities. I exact more from myself and less from others.” It is an excellent resolve.
One of the last sermons preached by lan Maclaren had for its subject, “ Mystery, and a Call for Patience.” “ Consider,” he says, “ what a mystery is over us all. What a hard thing life is ! In the midst of the darkness, and in the fact of the hardness ought not we poor humans to come as close as we can to each other ? If I had my trial to-day, you had yours. If you had your temptation to-day, I had mine. The whole of us here are people of like passions and sufferings ; let us help one another for the Cross’s sake, for God’s sake and for our own sake. Let us be merciful to each other. Let us comfort one another. Be merciful to the man next you this week. He also, as well as you, is fighting a hard battle.”
Some of you, I know, will expect me to quote to you the lines of Scotland’s great poet —lines
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that every one should hang up in his memory, and look at dav by day :
Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentlier sister woman,
Though they may gang a kennin’ wrang,
O m m C O To step aside is human,
and so on. I will not quote the remaining verses, for they must be known to you all. But I will give you a similar testimony from a not less eminent poet —Wordsworth. Some of you will remember his poem “ Paint Rash Judgment," but you may not know how it got the name. It was in this way : The poet and two friends one bright harvest morning saw in the distance a man angling on Lake Grasmere. They instinctively start to blame him severely for thus wasting his time instead of working and securing something against the coming winter. When they came near they discovered he was a poor, wornout, old peasant trying in this way to gain a pittance of food for his immediate need. They felt rebuked for their harsh judgment —
Nor did we fail to see within ourselves
What need there is to be reserved in speech,
And temper all our thoughts with charity.
Xow. I want to make one further application of what I have been urging. I have been saying the vovagers upon the sea of life are like ships that pass in the night. Therefore, it behoves us, knowing so little of each other, to be patient, and tolerant, and uncensorious.
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Well, now, there is One other that we pass on the Voyage of Life. We pass Him and repass Him, and pass Him again, every hour of the day. Who ? God. And in reference to Him, I make the same claim with more unbounded confidence. Relative to Him, we are like ships that pass in the night. He is veiled in mystery. His way is in the sea, His paths in the deep waters, and His footsteps are not known. Well, what then ? Men misjudge Him. They look at His work. They say that “ Nature is cruel and a blunderer. Why does He permit pain if He is good ? Why do I suffer if He loves ? Why am I left to doubt about Him if He wants me to know ? Why does He not answer my prayers if He hears ? ” and so on, and so on. Thus, we deal foolishly and unjustly with Him, as with our fellow-man, I say, foolishly, for think, think. If I cannot make myself known to you, or you to me, with any thoroughness—if on this voyage we poor finite creatures are to one another as ships that pass in the night—do you not see how absurd is the claim that the Eternal should explain Himself and His doings to us ? How could He make plain to our feeble finite understandings all the infiniteness of His great purposes for His Creation ?
But, consider again: in the midst of this mystery, are there not signs enough to give us prima-facie evidence of His wisdom and His love ? I was speaking of the revealing power of the one fact more, of how it would alter our judgments of every man. Well, now, apply that to God. Let Him have the full benefit of the
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one fact more. See how that would work out. When, for example, three centuries ago (to take only one of a thousand illustrations), the Mayflower left Britain with its freight of saints, driven out by persecution across unknown seas, the critics said : “ Where now is the evidence of Divine wisdom or Divine love in such a cruelty as that ? ” They got no answer then, but we have it. What is it ? America. America is the answer. That “ fatal and perfidious barque, built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark,” turned out to be God’s way of seed-planting, for a new world of liberty and of power. America is the one fact more “ that confutes and confounds blizzards of scepticisms.”
So is it always. One of our greatest writers was in despair over the death of his son. The doctor said to him, “ If you knew what I know, vou would be very thankful that your son died/’ “ How can that be ? ” said the father. “If he had lived.” replied the doctor. “he would certainly have Income hopelessly insane, and that in a very short time.” The one fact more, you see, unties many a knot in human and divine mvstery. “ I wish I had five minutes with God.’’ said a child to his mother after the mother had been explaining something to him which still was not very clear. " I wish I had five minutes with God.” Ave, five minutes with God would solve most of our mysteries. It is because we spend so little time in His company and communion that life seems so encompassed by them.
We feel often, as a quaint old sailor puts it
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in Norman Duncan’s Doctor Luke : “ Eeod ! they’s times when we think He fair bungles His job. He kills us and he cripples us, an’ He starves us, an’ He hurts our hearts ; an’ then, Davy, we says He’s a dunderhead at runnin’ a world. Why, says we, we could run it a sight better if we was able t’ make one. But the Lord, Davy, does His work in a seamanlike way, usin’ no more crooked backs and empty stomachs an’ children’s tears an’ broken hearts than He can help, ’Tis little we knows about what He’s up to.” Just so.
“ Lord, Thy judgments are a great deep,” said the old Hebrew poet. Yes, and we all say “ Amen ”to that. And what then ? Very often, then, you hear murmurings, scepticisms, cynicisms, mockeries, blasphemies. But turn over to the end here of the book. What do you find on the last pages of His Revelation ? “For thy judgments are made manifest.” And what then ? Look up and see. “ And I saw, as it were, a sea of glass, mingled with fire, and them that had gotten the victory over the beast and over his image. And they stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God. And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are Thy ways, thou King of Saints.” To the true believer, the one fact more is heaven, and —and—well, there is nothing more to be said. Murmurings, scepticisms, sorrowings, mysteries, all are hushed in the music and march of the
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great new song of those who walk upon the sea of glass. Five minutes there will solve and settle —Uh, how much I And so
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread,
Are big with mercy, and shall break,
In blessings on your head.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace.
Behind a frowning providence,
He hides a smiling face.
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IV
Ephesians vi. 10-20.
Hebrews xii. 3, and x. 25.
Isaiah Iviii. 13-14,
Luke iv. 16,
Hebrews iv. 12.
Ephesians vi. 18,
These passages of Scripture will form the keynote of what follows. Let us see how. A great steamer is a magnificent spectacle—a wonderful triumph of mind over matter. And yet its forthgoing depends upon matter, upon those black, ugly-looking lumps of coal that are shovelled into bunkers. The speed, the efficiency, and the safety of the steamer is all a question of carrying the best coal, and having convenient places to procure more. And that is especially so with ships of war. In the Spanish-American war Admiral Cervera lost his fleet —had it bottled up in the port of Santiago, because he had to go there to get coal. It is the business of Governments to provide coaling stations for their fleets. To fail in this is treachery to their nation. So is it in the Voyage of Life. Its forces fail at times ; the driving power, the strength and inspiration of life flag and fade and need fresh supplies every now
67
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and again. Life requires coaling stations just as certainly as the steamers do. And not only coaling stations but coal of the best quality. And coaling stations are provided, and there are coals tested and proved by experts. I want to put some of these before you this evening, and I want to urge you and myself to make use of these coaling stations.
The first, of course, is this day—Sunday. That is the best known of the coaling stations on the Voyage of Life. Man is like a six-day clock. Every week he works. He runs down by Saturday night. He needs to be wound up. That is the design of Sunday ! Ido not like the name. It is a heathen name, and obscures the significance of the day. The proper name is the Lord’s Day—“ The Lord’s Day, commonly called Sunday,” that is how it is put in English law. But I shall continue to call it Sunday, because you know that name best. It was made expressly for man’s needs. It is a coaling station on the Voyage of Life. If a man misses it, or misuses it, he is bound to suffer —to suffer physically, to suffer mentally, and to suffer spiritually. Experience testifies to that. It has been demonstrated over and over again. Men think they can make laws. They cannot. Laws are not made by us, they are only discovered. Men can make legislation, but the Creator made the laws —the eternal laws —and man’s business is to find them out and adjust his legislation to them. The French Revolutionists thought they could do
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away with the seventh day. They said, “We shall set apart every tenth day.” What happened ? They ruined the nation nearly. Then they said later on —the French people—that they would make no provision for Sunday. Men might do what they liked on it—work as much as they chose. What happened ? France is frightened by the decay of manhood in the State, and she has been compelled once more to enact one day in seven as a day of rest. It is a significant fact that countries that pay no regard to Sunday—Continental countries —are either dwindling away or re-enacting ordinances forbidding work one day in seven.
I draw the working-men’s attention to the fact that Sunday is their day. As sure as it becomes a day of pleasure it will be bound to end in a day of work; and when it becomes a day of work the end of our Empire is not far off. The tendency now is to turn it into a day of pleasure. Cycling, motoring, golfing, football, cricket—these are threatening to invade the Day of Rest. Governments run trains when they can get the chance. They run them, they say, upon humanitarian grounds. Excuses are made that they are exceptional, occasional. Mr. Moody tells the story of an employer—a worldly minded employer —who was wanting one of his men to work occasionally on the Sunday. “ Does not your Bible say,” he urged, “ that if an ox or an ass fall into a pit on the Sabbath Day, you would lift him out ? ” “Yes,” said the man, “ but if the ass had the habit of falling into the
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same pit every Sabbath I would either fill in the pit or I would sell the ass.” That is right. But if a train or tram line needs repairing, or a railway station, it must be done on Sunday. Why ? Because it is the cheapest time. Because if it were done on a weekday traffic would be interfered with, and then men’s money-making would be hindered. And, for the sake of that, we must violate a law of God ! We are even tempted ourselves to curtail the Sunday rest because of some clamouring weekday work. lam told that there are offices in this town —if you go downtown now you will find men in these offices working —stealing the Seventh Day from God and their fellows. Rest assured that that is not the way to save time —it is the way to waste it, and to waste yourself into the bargain. It is the way to poverty, and not to wealth. Let me read you what Lord Macaulay once told the British House of Commons on this subject. He said ; “We are not poorer, but richer, because we have, through many ages, rested from our labour one day in seven.” (What does one day in seven mean in fifty years ? It means about seven years of rest. Yet America and England are the wealthiest countries, although they have given up all these years.) “ That day is not lost. While industry is suspended—while the plough lies in the furrow, while the Exchange is silent, while no smoke ascends from the factory —a process is going on quite as important to the wealth of nations as any process which is performed on business days. Man —the machine of
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machines—the machine, compared to which all the contrivances of workmen are wortliless—man is repairing and winding up, so that he returns to his labours on Monday with clearer intellect, with livelier spirits, with renewed corporal vigour. Never will I believe that what makes a nation stronger, and healthier, and wiser, and better can ultimately make it poorer,”
No, it cannot. I have said that not only do we want coaling stations, but we want the best coal—coal tried by experts, tested in the experience of great captains on the voyage of life. How the New Testament writers realized this and put emphasis on the coaling station of the Sabbath Day ! But I will call two witnesses from outside it and from ourselves, for I have time for no more. Many of you regard Lord Beaconsfield as one of the greatest of statesmen. Beaconsfield said of the Sabbath : “I hold it to be the most valuable blessing conceded to man. It is the corner-stone of civilization.” We do not all believe in Beaconsfield. Well, we shall take his great opponent, Gladstone. Those of you who have read Gladstone’s life know that he spent the last days of it in writing a plea for the Sabbath. His own example gave emphasis to that. His daughter says that from Saturday night to Monday morning “he put away all business of a secular nature. He kept to his special Sunday books and thoughts. He never dined out on that day, unless to cheer a sick person or a sorrowful friend, and he never travelled on Sunday,”
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Those are the testimonies of two of the greatest statesmen in our history. Now I will give you the testimony of one of our great litterateurs, George Gissing. In The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft he writes : “ There was a time when it delighted me to flash my satire on the English Sunday. I could see nothing but antiquated foolishness and modern hypocrisy in this weekly pause from labour and from bustle. Now I prize it as an inestimable boon, and dread every encouragement, every encroachment, upon its restful stillness. ... If it goes, with it will vanish that habit of periodic calm which even when it has become so largely void of conscious meaning is, one may safely say, the best spiritual boon ever bestowed upon a people. . . . No loss among the innumerable that we are suffering will work so effectually for popular vulgarization.” And, finally, I will give you the testimony of one whom many regard as the greatest preacher of modern times —the late Dr. Alexander Whyte, of Edinburgh. In his handbook on “ The Shorter Catechism ”he says: “-Perhaps there is no surer sign of a falling Christian than a growing neglect of Sabbath Day ordinances, and an indolent, profane use of its priceless hours. There is no bulwark that parents can build up round their children’s religion and morality like a well-kept Sabbath Day, and there is no surer sign that a young man is declining from faith than when he begins to find his own pleasure and do his oAvn work on the Lord’s Holy Day. And conscience ever fastens with a peculiar poignancy on the
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breaking of the Sabbath Day. It is as if she instinctively saw that that day was a stronghold and tower of strength.” And so the old-fashioned verse has a deep and profound significance—a significance which it behoves us all to ponder :
A Sabbath well spent brings a week of content
And strength for the cares of to-morrow;
But a Sabbath profaned, whatsoever be gained,
Is a certain forerunner of sorrow.
Ah, but just here comes the problem : How is the Sabbath to be well spent ? Well, how are we to determine that ? We shall get at it very simply in this way. Tell me, what do you think of Christ ? Christ asked that once from His disciples. “ Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am ? ” and they told Him. Then He said : “ And you, what is your opinion ? It doesn’t matter what other men think. Whom say ye that I am ? ” Now, I want to ask, what is Christ to you ? Shall we say that He is at least your Teacher—that He is your example ? I suppose all here will admit that. Very well, how did Christ spend Sunday ? Luke tells you. “As His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath Day.” As His custom was. It was not an exception, as it is with many of His socalled followers to-day —it was His custom.
And so there we come to the second coaling station on the voyage of life that I want you to consider —Worship. In these days the custom of many people is to do the opposite of what Christ
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did. It is their custom not to go to church. “ Do you go to church ? ” asked a man of a boy. “ Yes, sir, I am not old enough to stay away yet, sir.” I once asked another man, “ What church do you go to ? ” “To Greenfields Church.” Yes : a lot of people go to “ Greenfields Church.” There is a big drift away from the Church, but I do not think it is bigger than in other days. There never was an age in which there was not such a drift, but the temptations of to-day are greater, I suppose. We have got to set our face against it. We have got to use the Church as a coaling station or we shall suffer. General Grant was once visiting Paris. The President of the French Republic sent him an invitation as a special mark of distinction to attend the Sunday Racing Festival in Paris. General Grant replied : “ It is not in accordance with the custom of my country, or the spirit of my religion to spend my Sunday in this way.” I believe it took about as much courage to send that message to the President of the French Republic as to fight the battles of the American Civil War. Yes, it requires a deal of courage to act like that. But what then ? It is only dead fishes that go with the stream. Living fishes go against the stream. Well, let us realize that, and follow our Lord's example—“ As His custom was. He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath Day. How easily He could have argued Himself out of going into the synagogue. What was the synagogue ? What were the people there ? What were the sermons ? What was the music ? What was the attraction ?
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Nothing—less than nothing to Him, But, “as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath Day.”
But Christ, mind you, never does anything, or asks you and me to do anything that is merely arbitrary or dependent on His will. No ! What He asks will be found to have a necessity deep in the roots of our very being. The Church, with its prayer and praises, its reading and its study, its meditations, its communions, is one of the great coaling stations on the voyage of life. Religion has been called the “ open air of the soil.” Yes; think of what it takes you up to, and on what heights it places you. Heights of thought: God, Eternity, Heaven, Hell, Righteousness, Holiness, Christ—what heights are these! If a man does not go up into these heights often—once a week at least —he is bound to go down. Read the Psalms. How often the writers refer to the value of these coaling stations. One of them says, speaking of the mystery and difficulties, of life that “ they were too strange for me till I went into the sanctuary ” ; “ The Lord shall out of Zion send the rod of His great power ” ; “ The Lord shall bless thee out of Zion,” and so on. How often is that verified ? I was telling you the other evening about James Smeaton, the great artist so praised by Ruskin, whose Letters recently created a literary sensation. He writes in one of them : “ Help from the sanctuary ! It does come somehow. Take tonight, for instance, I went to chapel filled with plenty of dark, gloomy, vexing suggestions, all
V.L.
£
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sore. I came away calm, sweet, fresh, and all my cares gone—rejoicing in the God of my salvation.”
Aye, even when men have given up church, yet the memory of days when it was their custom acts often as a sanctifying influence upon them. Carlyle, in his Autobiography, writes about the place where he was brought up. “ They had built a little meeting-place at Ecclefechan, roofed with thatch.” And he goes on to say that “ this little meeting-place, this heath-thatched home and its worshippers was a real church. They were the blessing and the saving of many. On me, too, their heaven-sent, pious influence will rest and live,” Just so. History is full of testimonies like that. Aye, and of the opposite kind. Some of you will have seen Hogarth’s famous series of pictures, “ The Rake’s Progress.” Where does Hogarth begin with the rake’s progress ? He begins with the picture of an idle apprentice playing marbles on the tombstones during Divine service; and that apprentice ends at last, in these pictures, on the scaffold. You may laugh at that, of course, and its Sunday School storybook crudeness. For, indeed, few who sail past the coaling station of the Church may ever come to so tragic an end. Ah, but there may be an ending more tragic, because more hopeless, than even the scaffold. It may be the ending of the fool —of the man of whom Christ drew the picture in that terrible parable, the picture of the rich retired farmer. Yes ; be sure of it, no man can neglect the Church that Christ founded, its
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worship and its ordinances, without seriously impairing his powers for the Voyage of Life. Why, the word indicates that to you. What is it ? Worship —i.e. worth shape. Look at the bodies that you see in the streets, the crooked, twisted, hunch-backed bodies—what shapes they are! And if you could only see men’s souls, there would be a worse sight. What shapes they would be ! Emaciated, starved, stunted, dwarfed, dwindled —multitudes of them would be that. And that would be because they are not taking in spiritual supplies at the coaling station of the Church. Worship is meant by the Creator, as the very etymology of the word tells you, to give you worth shape—a true manlike, Godlike form. “ Therefore forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.” The late Archbishop Magee has pointed out that there is a special and supreme importance attaching to these words because it is almost the only statement in the New Testament that contains a direct and positive command for public worship. The reason no doubt is that there was no need for such. You do not require to tell a hungry man to get food, and the early Christians would turn to fellowship and communion as a matter of course.
But if it be remarkable there are so few positive commands, it is certainly very significant where this one is inserted. It is preceded by a command to love and good works : it is followed by one of the most solemn warnings in the whole range of the Bible. Thus the writer would indicate that the inspiration for love and good works is
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found in obeying the injunction, “ Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together,” while the failure to do this leads to apostasy and spiritual ruin. See to it, then, that you do not allow yourself to become stunted and dwarfed spiritually by the neglect of worship, by failing to use this coaling station of the Church on your Voyage of Life.
I will mention a third coaling station—the Word of God. How that has proved itself such for so many spent and weary sailors on the Voyage of Life! There are dead books and living books. If I may use an illustration of my own, I had in my library some 5,000 volumes —an accumulation of, say, forty odd years ; and I suppose that not one-tenth of these are living books, “ And of all dead things,” says the Primate of Ireland, “ a dead book is the most wretched. The exploded system of logic, the volume of verse with no music in it, the volume of sermons between whose divisions no man can ever see the light of Heaven,” aye, of all things, these are surely the most wretched. Dead books ! But the Bible is not that; it is the livest book in the world to-day. It has marched through the ages full of sap and life. It has been translated at this moment into over five hundred different languages, and not one-third of these languages were written till the Bible took them up. Why is that ? Because there is something in it that fits the average human nature. De Quincey divides literature into books of know-
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ledge and books of power. The Bible is both, but chiefly a book of power, of energy, of inspiration. It is the sword of the Spirit; it is “ quick and sharp. It pierces even to the severance of soul from spirit, and penetrates between the joints and the marrow and it can discern the secret thoughts and purposes of the heart.” It is the weapon by which the Eternal flouts His foes and guards His friends. How history verified that 1 Yes, and modern life too. Lord Cromer, who left Egypt with a record behind him that no other Governor has ever surpassed, what does he say was the secret of his success ? He says it was the Book of Proverbs. He read that book every day of his life. Charles Dana, the late Nestor of American journalists, told a body of students that a thorough acquaintance with the Bible was a pre-eminent qualification for success in journalism. Napoleon put the Bible among the political books in his library. The editor of a great New York daily, in answer to a question of a young man as to the best books for business, informed him that the best single treatise is the New Testament. Next to that is the Proverbs.
But the Bible has a supremer use than to put success into business. It is the coaling station of the soul. It is the storehouse where you find the resources that quicken and reinforce a believer’s moral and spiritual life. What countless illustrations of that history supplies I lam tempted to give you one I read the other day, Stopford Brooke in one of his sermons tells this
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story. He says (I am giving the substance of what he says) he knew a man who drifted deep down into sin and guilt; so deep that one night he went down his garden to blow out his brains. As he went, he heard the distant barking of a dog, and he saw the moon rise up over the dark yew tree at the end of the path. He stopped. Something seemed to lay hold of him, keep him back from executing his dread resolve. Analysing afterwards the cause, he found it to be this : the barking of the dog and the rising of the moon above the yew tree brought back to him an hour in his childhood. It was an hour when, in the dusk of a day long dead, he sat one night with his mother in the garden of his old home. His father had just died, and the boy was wondering and fearing in the shadows. And his mother said : “ When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the floods, they shall not overwhelm thee.” That little touch of Christ’s hand, those strong triumphant words hid away unconscious in the depths of his soul saved him in that wild hour from wrecking his own life and the lives of others. Saturate your souls, my brothers, and the souls of your children, with the thought of this immortal Word. It will be the saving of you and them. Aye, it will be this:
By the instructive thought which lies
In faithful hist’ries duly read,
By words that, sought for to make wise,
Give God instead.
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By song the stricken soul which calms,
By all that poetry of tears,
Pathetic solaces of Psalms
Outliving years.
By all that broad prophetic ocean,
Which not with separate currents thin,
But with one long unbroken motion
To Christ sets in. . . .
Here is no touch of rust or moth—
All that is old Divinely new,
All new Divinely old, and both
Divinely true. . . .
Glory to God for such a light
Of God the Holy Ghost the crown—
The Sun that shines by day and night
Nor goeth down!
And that suggests the transition to the last coaling station that I shall mention—God. “ By words that sought for to make wise give God instead.” That is the secret of the Bible’s power. The words are God-pregnant. As Christ Himself explained, “ they are spirit and they are life.” And they are meant to lead to Him. Their use is to do that. And so the last coaling station is God in Christ. For Christ and God to me are all one. Aye, here is the great power-house of the world. Here is the source from which its strength streams out.
They were talking in the city last week about some failure of the Waipori electric energy, some
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break somewhere, snapping the current; and your lights go out, and your trams stop in the streets, and business ceases, and darkness comes on. And the great source of spiritual energy is God, God in Christ. And you tap that source by prayer. “ Pray always,” says one who knew of what he was talking, with all sorts of prayer. That keeps up the connection. When prayer stops, the inflow of the Spirit and energy stops also. The current is snapped, the channel blocked, and the power and inspiration of life are lessened. And we live in an age of hurry, of swift, fierce push and drive. We are bound to be worried, worn, faint in spirit. Behind the smiling faces of how many the whole head is sick, the whole heart is heavy. What we need to do often, always, is to sail in on the wings of prayer to the great coaling station of God in Christ.
Straight to Thy Presence get me and reveal it—
Nothing ashamed of tears upon Thy feet;
Show Thee the sore wound and beg Thy hand to heal it,
Pour Thee the bitter, pray Thee for the sweet.
Then with a ripple and radiance through me,
Rise and be manifest, O Morning Star;
Flow on my soul, thou Spirit, and renew me,
Fill with Thyself and let the rest be far.
Yes, if that be so, then w r e can steer out again into the very teeth of the storm. For you have a driving power within you that will enable
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you to do business in the deepest and greatest waters.
So, my brothers, look to it that you do not neglect these coaling stations on the Voyage of Life —the coaling stations of the Sabbath, Worship, the Word of God, God in Christ. There are lots of other coaling stations offered to you by the world —pleasure, work, money, property, knowledge, and Ido not know how many. But mind ! You want to get the best coal. You do not want to put in slag, stuff that will not drive, that will only clog your engines, and break down your machinery. No, you want to put in the best coal —coal tested and tried by experts through the ages. Many are forgetting that. Many are going to wreck because they do. And the sorrow of it is, that they do not know it. The drowning man—it is a curious thing, but they say that a drowning man never cries out, he sinks silently. All that he does is to throw up a hand, and then he goes down into the devouring deep. So with souls ! They go down, and make no sound. Steamships may carry supplies of coal that may last them for weeks, but you cannot do that. No, you need fresh supplies every day, every hour. The Japanese Fleet conquered the Russians—why ? Because they never left the base of their supplies ; because they kept in constant communication with their coaling stations. And the Admiral of the Russians, with that unpronounceable name, lost his fleet because he could not do that. It is the
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same in the Voyage of Life. If you are to conquer the enemies there, you must be constantly taking in fresh supplies and fresh supplies of the most approved kind. You must keep in direct touch with these great tested coaling stations — the Sabbath, the Church, the Bible, God in Christ. If you do not, then, like the Russian Fleet, the powers of your life will be scattered to all the winds. If you do not, then you are bound to sink in the sea of life, “ like the Armada’s pride and spoils of Trafalgar.”
Sailors' Food
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John vi. 48-54.
This is an ever-recurring question. Our position as a nation depends on our navy, our navy depends on our sailors, and our sailors depend on food. Every now and again the problem comes up. The troubles of the sailors, their discontent and their mutinies usually turn on their food. Without proper food a ship goes to wreck. And on the Voyage of Life it is the same. Everything turns on the food, its quantity, its quality, its accessibility, and its suitableness. Sailors’ food : that includes more than bodily provisions. The proof is that we may have abundance of these and yet be hungry. Carlyle said that you might give a shoeblack all the lollies and all the lollie shops in the world and yet you cannot make the shoeblack happy, because he has a soul as well as a stomach. The materialists say man is a composition of oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. But can you keep the mind on oxygen, or love on carbon ? The contents of our food and the constitution of the body are an equation. As Mr, Peyton in his fine book The Memorabilia of Christ pointed out, that food is a nutriment only as it corresponds to similar elements in the body.
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But what is there in common between nitrogen and hope, or carbon and affection ? You cannot make an equation between elements like these, and your materialism is an irrelevance and a nonsense—and so there is another part of us that needs bread—what we call the soul, the life that uses the body. This is a reality, is indeed, we may say, the one eternal reality. How to find the food for it is the supreme business of life.
Sailors’ food! The food of sailors on the Voyage of Life. What is it ? We need not beat about the bush, spend time and logic analysing and criticizing. The answer is simple and this is it. “ I am the living Bread that came down from heaven of which if a man eat he shall hunger no more.” What is the verification of that ? We get the answer by asking another question. What proves bread to be food ? It is when it equates itself to the needs of the body. What are the body’s needs ? They are two —replacement and heat. First, replacement. The body is constantly wasting; its flesh and forces are continually decaying. You eat bread : it turns into blood ; the blood builds up new cells, carries the old and worn-out ones away. It is doing that every hour, every minute. There is a similar wasting process in the spiritual part of life. It is being consumed in the same way as the body. We call this consumption sin. Sin is the generic term. Break it into its specific elements and it appears as crime, as evil, as wrong, as worldliness and godlessness, with all their multiform develop-
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merits. We are tempted and yield. We live selfishly, we neglect prayer, we insult conscience, we disobey the Divine word. We are both in the world and of it. We yield to its spirit. We lose touch with the Eternal through our absorption in the seen and the temporal. These and the like waste the spirit life as fevers waste the body. That waste goes on every day. No one can replace that waste but Christ. Why do I say that ? Because history says it, because universal experience says it. “ I am the bread of life,” He demonstrates the truth of that by supplying the spiritual hunger of life by replacing the waste and consumption which it is daily incurring.
But a second function of food is to generate heat. Heat is a mode of motion. All food must have in it the power of supplying heat to the body. Without heat the body would lose energy and therefore the capacity of work. With every motion of a muscle, beat of a pulse, message of a nerve to the brain, heat is expended. That has to be replaced. That is another function of food. It proves itself food by its capacity of supplying this. Christ does the same. He gives warmth, fire, energy, inspiration to life. You have only to look at the nations that most fully assimilate Him. They are the strong, forth-going, vanguard nations of the world. So with the individual life. Whenever it feeds upon Him, and in proportion as it does, it catches heat, it becomes energetic, it is set on fire and it sets others on fire also. He baptizes with the Holy Ghost, with a strong, pure,
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righteous spirit, and the baptized flames with zeal, with hope, with faith, with joy. We recall here Matthew Arnold’s fine sonnet:
’Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead,
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited.
I met a preacher there I knew, and said,
“ 111 and overworked, how fare you in this scene ? ”
“ Bravely,” said he, “ for I of late have been
Much cheered by thought of Christ, the Living Bread.”
Multitudes more will bear similar testimony. Thus Christ demonstrates the truth of His saying, I am the living Bread, by His adaptation to the two fundamental needs of the soul—repair of waste, and generation of heat and energy.
But to do this, bread must be eaten. What underlies that ? Adopting an illustration of Phillips Brooks. Here is a starving man, his legs totter, his body is bent and shaken. You may straighten him up by propping him against a wall or bracing him with lathes and ropes. That is strength outside him. Or you may give him bread —he eats it: it becomes strength within him. Here is a starving soul. You can bring Christ to it from without. That is, you can seek to brace it up to its duties and its endurances by laying about it Christ’s laws and commandments and hopes and fears. These are strength without
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you. Or Christ Himself comes and dwells within you and so fulfils you with His own life and spirit that duties and endurances may be accepted and performed with the power which He Himself hath. This is food. This is what bread means. Bread outside you is useless, even tantalizing. Bread inside you is power—power not as a prop to a tottering wall, but as food eaten and assimilated by a starving man. Christ outside us is much, is great. He is pardon, justification, the unchanging and eternal manifestation of God’s love and grace. He is the perfect example, the supreme ideal, the everlasting Son of the Father. He is the staff we lean on, the rock we stand on, the life that leads us, the Master that we obey. He is all that and more outside us, but that is not all, nor the greatest. He is the bread of life. He incorporates Himself with the believers. He is the pattern, but He is also the power. He is the way, but He is also the life of our life. He is our wisdom and righteousness and redemption, but He is also our sanctification. He is the spirit that enters in and mingles with and moulds and renews and inspires our spirit. This is His unique revelation. This is a claim that no other religious teacher makes. This is what He means when He says, “ I am the Bread of Life.”
But bread must be broken before it becomes food. The bread you ate this morning was the outcome of sacrifice. The elements of it were scattered all over the world. They existed in nature since the creation, but they had to be
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collected, concentrated, unified. God is the true food of man. He is everywhere in the world. But He had to be gathered up, concentrated, put in accessible form before man could comprehend or utilize Him as food. This was Christ. But that is not enough. The corn and wheat on the hillside are not bread. They are only its possibilities. The seed dies to reproduce itself. The harvests have to be cut down, threshed, crushed, ground in a mill, fired in the oven before they yield up their energy and power to us. Bread is thus the emblem of sacrifice in nature. The cross is on the very seed of corn and wheat. “I am the bread of life.” Christ is the reality to which that universal symbol bears witness, for nothing is complete in itself in nature. It is a type and prophecy of Christ, the bread of the soul. “ The bread which I will give you is My flesh which I will give for the life of the world.” “ This is My body, broken for you.” Every bit of bread rightly understood conducts us to the Cross ; and the Cross is the emblem on the flag of Christianity. It is not Christ as a pattern, an example, a good man, a llevealer of the Father. It is Christ bruised, broken, crucified that becomes the real feeder of these sin-wasted and wave-worn souls of men. “ How can this man give us His flesh to eat ? We do not know. Christ does not tell us. Do we stumble at that ? Why should we ? The bread you ate at your tea this afternoon — can you tell how it is turned into blood and bone and sinew and muscle ? No, nobody can. Digestion and assimilation are mysteries that no
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science can explain. It can explain the changes, can trace these from stage to stage. But the secret force, the chemical agency, the vital something, call it what you will, by which the crude elements of wheat, the carbon, gas, water and earth are turned into bone and brain and will and thought—that is an absolute mystery. “ How can this man give us His flesh to eat ? ” Christ does not explain it. But what then ? Simply that here we come on a law that governs all highest experiences. The law is that you cannot explain experimental truths till they are lived in action. And so of Christ. You must love Him ere He shall seem worthy of your love. You must accept Him and do what He tells you, or you will never understand or prove His truth.
That brings me to the next point. Though we cannot explain how He does it, we can and must explain the condition under which He does it. That condition is faith.
Faith is one of those words that Lord Bacon calls “ Bed-ridden truths.” What is faith ? First. It is belief —it is intellectual assent to a proposition. So of Christ’s words the beginning of faith is to yield assent to them. But that is not enough. Suppose lam ill. I consider the claims and qualifications of various doctors on every side. I decide on one, I call him in. He diagnoses my disease and prescribes medicine. So far so good. But that is not enough. I must trust him and take his medicine, otherwise he is
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no use to me. Or suppose I want to go to Sydney or Melbourne. I pick out a boat, I find that it sails on a certain date. I secure my ticket. I go down to the wharf. But that won’t take me to Sydney or Melbourne. I must get aboard the boat as the ultimate end of all. And that is what faith is. It is an embarking belief. It is acting upon my mental conviction. That is where most stop short, and show that their faith is only a half faith. We want an embarking, a taking and an appropriating faith. “I am the Bread of Life.” Then why are you ever hungry ? Why do you feel want ? Why are you hag-ridden by care or sorrow ? Why do you dread the future ? Why do you fear the past ? Do not Christ’s promises cover everything ? His promises ! “ The words that I speak unto you are spirit and are life.” Do you wonder at that ? Why should you ? There is the bread you ate to-day. What is it in it that gives life to the body ? The material part, carbon, gas, water and earth ; yet if a man diets himself on any of these, he will starve.
What, then, is the vital element in the food ? It is sunshine. Wheat, corn, flesh of animals, all are food because of the sunshine. Break up the sunshine, abstract it from them, and these cease to be food. They become mere dirt. The material elements, water, gas, carbon, earth, are all there after you extract the sunshine, but the vitality is gone. They are no longer foods. They are poisons now. They must be cast out ol the body if the body is to live. “ The words that I speak unto you are spirit and are life.”
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When we store these words in us and act upon them, they become vital. They become this because Christ Himself is in them, because they are filled with spiritual sunshine, the Sun of Righteousness. They are germs, nests, reservoirs of the divine life. It is locked up in them as the solar light is locked up into the wheat and corn, and it does for the spiritual part of us what these do for the bodily. He who takes these words of Christ’s and feeds on them and assimilates them, embarks upon them, throws himself out upon them as the ship commits itself to the sea, enters into life and life more abundantly. This is faith. It is a tremendous power, and yet its power is not in itself. It is in its Object. An old Scotchwoman was introduced to another as a woman of great faith. “ No,” she said, “ little faith, but a great God.” That is why the New Testament describes the heroes of faith as those “ who wrought righteousness and obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.” It will be the same with us if we exercise the same faith.
“I am the bread of life.” How the bread problem is at bottom the problem of the world. It is this explains all the migration of the world. It was the bread problem started Abraham westward, and took Jacob down into Egypt and so created the Jewish race. It explains the migra-
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tions of the Greeks and the Hindoos. It was the torch that lighted the flames of the French Revolution and changed the whole face of Europe. And it accounts to-day for the peopling of America, and for our presence in this Dominion and in Australia. It was the Corn Law agitation that through Bright and Cobden saved Britain from social destruction. It is the question of food that lies to-day behind all the industrial unrest of the moment. Yes, at bottom, the bread problem is the problem of the world. Christ was once asked to solve it, as every leader of the people must be asked to solve it, for it is imperative. It demands an answer from every political aspirant and failure is doom. Christ replied that it could only be solved by man putting first not his body but his soul, by getting food not for the stomach but for the spirit. “ Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these other things will come right.” It is the same still. If a man is to live a true enduring life the primary consideration must be the soul. He must feed it, and the rest will take care of itself.
But this is what man is slow to learn. In spite of failures and disasters he still persists in catering for the lower and letting the higher take care of itself. And yet the higher will not thus be set aside, it will demand food, it will demand it imperiously and it will have it of some sort. If it does not get the right kind it will take the wrong kind and poison itself. That is the meaning, that is the significance of all the social evils that beset us, of drink, of gambling, of lust and
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lechery, of the abnormal absorption in pleasure. These things are all manifestations of the hunger of the soul, seeking for food but seeking it in the wrong places. They are the spectacle of men and women turning away from the living bread, from the Cross of Christ, and wearing themselves out in the effort to live from the husks and chunks which the world supplies; growing old and yet mumbling still the schemes and thoughts and aims and ambitions that have no sap or succulence. How is it with us ? Christ calls Himself the bread of life, the living bread which came down from heaven. Have you no appetite for Him ? Are you hungry ? When a man has no appetite for food he is in a bad way. When a man is in the condition of not desiring food, it is a sign of disease. He must recover his appetite or he will soon die. Have you any appetite for the bread of life ? Have you any hunger for the truth which Christ brings ? For the thoughts and passions and modes of living which He manifests ? If you have not you had better look to it, for your state is critical: the soul is diseased. Your spiritual being is either starving or being destroyed by foods that are unnatural and unfitted for it, foods that do not feed, bread that will not give that fife which is life indeed, and so we must look to it. “I am the bread of life.” So we must pray like those of old : “ Lord, evermore give us this bread.” So if we would carry through the voyage of life successfully, we must have the sailors’ true food, and there is none but One who can supply it—“ Except ye eat the flesh of the
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Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.”
Oh Jesu ! Wounded more
Than bursted grape or bread of wheat,
The life of life within our souls ;
The cup of our Salvation sweet.
Oh heart 1 that with a double tide
Of blood and water maketh pure;
Oh flesh I once crushed upon the Cross,
The pledge of our salvation sure. . .
Come, Bread of Heaven, and feed upon our souls,
And with thee Jesu enter in,
Come, Wine of Life, and as we drink
Thy precious blood wash out our sins.
Breakers Ahead!
VI
Acts xxvii. 27-29.
That is a sound that sends a shiver through the listeners on a ship hammered by the storm, and drifting on a starless night through a wild, unknown sea. Breakers ahead ! At that cry every man leaps up, knowing well that danger is at hand. That was the cry that rang out one night on this doomed ship in which Paul and his comrades were sailing. Fourteen days they had been drifting before the storm. A miserable time it was, and had it not been for Paul, it would have been unendurable. On the fourteenth night, above the howling of the storm, the sailors thought they heard a more terrible sound—the roar of breakers on the beach. It is always a startling horror to the mariner, and specially so when his vessel has become unmanageable in his hands. They strained their ears and eyes to make sure. Then they heaved the lead, and their fears were confirmed. They were rapidly drifting inshore. Added to their other miseries here was a new one : the certainty of their desolate hulk being hammered to pieces in the darkness of the night on some iron coast. In the face of this new danger, enveloped as they were in the blackness of the midnight sky, all they
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could do was to anchor the vessel and pray for the morning; which they did with all speed and earnestness. Breakers ahead ! Let us transfer the scene from the printed page to human existence, from the Adriatic Sea to the sea of life, and see what it may yield us.
Here, for instance, is a young woman who believes pleasure is the one need of existence, pleasure of the senses. Everything is made to minister to these : food, dress, dances, amusement, reading, companions, theatres, races, and what not. And as she floats about over this sea, she hears time and again warning voices. They sound perhaps out of her own life. She has been living for pleasure, and she is surprised some day to find how
Pleasures are like poppies red;
You pluck the flower, the bloom has fled
“ She that liveth for pleasure is dead while she liveth.” It is perhaps brought home to her through the shadow of death, perhaps through pain that runs its fire along all her nerves, and she has no retreat, no citadel of thought or faith or life in which she can take refuge and be at rest. Or it may be she is made conscious of this in discovering some day that she is growing hard-hearted, that she is losing her finer sensibilities, and love and sympathy, and tact, and delicacy, and self-denial of which she was capable in her early days. She makes the discovery now that these are no longer hers, or she learns it
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through the fatal fall of a companion, the lapse of a friend into some lower life —some deeper shame —into a life, if not of vice, yet of shallowness and ignobleness. These are warning voices. They are the cry of “ Breakers Ahead ! ” from the outlook of her life.
Or here is a young man. He gives himself to, what shall we say ? the friendship of fast companions and then the excitement of the wine cup or the gambling table, and then further on to the -wiles of the strange woman whose “ house is the way to hell going down to the chambers of death.” He, too, hears at times the cry of “ Breakers Ahead ! ” It comes up from his own body, from headaches after a “ night out,” from a flushed face, from trembling nerves and unsteady hands. He is startled one day to find that he is coming to like drink for its own sake. He began by liking it for what it brought him, fun and fellowship. Now he likes it for itself.
Then nights and suppers deemed divine
Symposia of Falernian wine,
And siren songs that turn to swine
Who list to hear.
To these he greatly does incline
Both heart and ear,
At first with shame; but soon he fell
A willing captive to their spell,
And grows a taproom oracle
To yokels fuddled,
Or mad with fiery drink, or well
With beer bemuddled.
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Brealcers Ahead!
Or, perhaps, he feeds his senses or seeks his pleasures in cooler and more calculating, but not less damnable, ways. The love of money takes hold of him ; the question how it is to be got sinks to a secondary consideration. The point is to get it, to “ get rich quick.” Gambling appears an easy method. It has its risks, but no matter, he may be the lucky one. And so he gravitates to where the bookies and totalizators congregate. There are protests and prickings of conscience, dim murmurs of breakers ahead sounding along the dark shores towards which he is steering. He has still in better moments a lingering conviction that what Charles Kingsley said is true : In social life, in club, in college, in the counting-house or on the street, the willingness to give or receive money on the mere turn of a chance is a token of the decay of manliness and self-respect. It has an inherent baseness about it which not to feel shows a deteriorating soul.” His conscience utters its protest. His liner sensibilities sometimes chafe against it. He sees now and again through the darkness visions of coasts iron-bound and strewed with the wrecks of lost lives. It is the warning sound that his vessel is getting amongst the reefs, it is the loud, clear call from the outlook posts of life: Breakers Ahead I
Or yet again this warning call may come up from the life that is losing itself among the means of existence, that is becoming absorbed in getting and spending—in things seen and temporal. Time was when it cherished larger
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ideals, when it lived not for self but for God and for man, when it found leisure and pleasure in worship and prayer and quiet Sabbath reading and fellowships that ministered to moral growth, among thoughts and companions that stirred its spiritual aspirations. But now these things are left behind like a river that has left behind the green, high, sunlit hills and is losing itself and choking itself in the hollows and the sand drifts of the lower levels. “ I remember,” says Russell Lowell, “ passing once in London where demolition for a new thoroughfare was going on. Many houses, left standing in the rear of those cleared away, bore signs with the inscription ‘Ancient lights.’ This was the protest of their owners against being built out by the new improvements from such glimpses of heaven as their fathers had, without adequate equivalent. I laid the moral to heart.” And in many a life these ancient lights which take in the blue of heaven and keep the vision clear into the spiritual world are being built out, but the encroachment does not take place without protests being made, without warning voices intimating: “ Breakers Ahead ! ” It were well if, like Russell Lowell, we too could say : “ I laid the moral to heart.”
So, again, these breakers ahead may be heard in lives which are losing their faith in God and the final triumph of right and purity and goodness. You remember that beautiful, but sadly pathetic, poem of Matthew Arnold in which he refers to this decay of faith. Maybe he is
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Breakers Ahead !
writing his own experience. I am referring to “ Dover Beach.” He is standing listening to the grating sough and roar of the tide as it girds the sand and grinds the shingle and chafes the pebbles and brings the eternal note of sadness in. And then he goes on to find in this a type of the ebb of faith :
The sea of faith
Was once too at the full,
And round earth’s shore,
Lav like the folds
Of a bright girdle furled ;
But I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind
Down the vast edges drear,
And naked shingles of the world.
Lovely music, but poor comfort; splendid symbolism but sorry inspiration for duty; and yet some of us may perhaps hear that melancholy murmur of faith withdrawing from our lives. We may try to fill the vacancy that it is leaving. We may be conscious that there is nothing to compensate for its loss, conscious that its failure is bringing the “ eternal note of sadness in.” Well, what is all this but a warning cry of danger, the sound of breakers ahead !
And yet once more there is the sea of Time. We are all out on that; we are all voyaging somewhere ; and soon the end will come. Aye, some of us indeed are having clear warnings
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given; others hear whispers and hints that they are “ drawing near to some land.” When Columbus was sailing towards his great discovery, he had intimations of it long before he saw it. Now and again branches of tress, flowers, weeds, birds, all came drifting by, and so he knew there was land ahead. And similar tokens come to us as we sail the sea of Time. Comrades who started with us drop away into the dark; the vacant chair, the silent voice, the hand that can be clasped no more : we know all that. The years, how quickly and silently they steal away! “ What a transient business is this life,” writes Robert Burns, “ very lately I was a boy, t’other day I was a young man, and I already begin to feel the rigid fibre and the stiffening joints of old age coming fast over my frame.” And he was only thirty-seven.
Yes, so it is, and some of us know it. There are warning voices, low but firm, that tell us we are drawing near to some country. The grey hairs, the readiness to shun the steep and take the leveller road, the easy persuasion to see a doctor when sickness comes, the inability to laugh aside illness as we used to do in earlier days, the graving of time upon the brow, the slow failure of memory.
The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,
The heart less bounding at emotion new,
And hope once crushed less quick to spring again
All these and half a score other things whisper
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to us that we are drawing near to some country. They arc the sound of waves that break and beat upon the shore not far ahead of us.
And what then ? How shall we prepare ourselves for the coming emergency ? Take soundings ! That is the first resort of skilful seamanship. Take soundings. Ask yourself the meaning of all these omens on the sea of life. Pause, think, say to yourself: Where am I ? whither am I going ? Perhaps you have been drifting without any thought, perhaps like this ship here you have set out on some doubtful voyage in spite of warnings from apostles and prophets of God, and are now driven by winds which you cannot control towards shores that threaten disaster to your character. No matter. As long as there is life there is hope. Take soundings ! Above all things, stop drifting. Put away thoughtlessness ; you have only one life. It is too serious a stake to be tampered with. It is madness to allow yourself to be heedlessly done to death by the teeth of reefs and rocks on which others have perished. Take soundings. Ask yourself seriously : Is what I am seeking worth the risk I am running ? Hark to that solemn voice uttering its warning question out of the very breakers ahead of you. “ What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? ” Take soundings. Yes, and there is no time to lose. Twenty fathoms, fifteen fathoms, shallowing fast. Twenty years, forty years, sixty years —how swift they are going ! How soon the
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voyage will be over! With the large majority of us the better part of life is already gone, the sands of time are running rapidly out. “ The shipmen deemed they drew near to some country.” Yes, and our shipmen tell us the same thing. They tell us w r e are approaching that dim, weird, strange, unknown shore of Eternity towards which all ships are bound. Yes, shortly we shall be there. But how ? A wreck ? A wreck I
Long rolling surges of a falling sea
Smiting the sheer cliffs of an unknown shore,
And by the fanged rock, swaying, helplessly
A mast with broken cordage—nothing more.
Is that how we are to meet eternity’s dawn ? If not, then let us take soundings, for God’s sake let us not drift ignorantly, foolishly, thoughtlessly towards it.
But there is another thing the sailors did. They dropped the anchors. They realized their danger : the sounding surge smote upon their ears, and in a moment every anchor was out, and they prayed for the dawn. Do you hear the breakers on the sea of your life ? Then out with the anchor and stop the drifting. What anchor ? The question gives me leave to say the one final word which sums up everything, the one word without which all I have spoken is mere wind and spindrift. It is Christ. “ Which hope we have,” says the apostle, “as an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast and which entereth within the veil.” Which hope ? What hope ? Christ.
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Christ is the anchor of the soul; anchored to Him you are anchored to safety; you are anchored to a perfect human life, to God’s appointed way of salvation. Nay, more. You are anchored to that very God Himself who hath “ measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, who maketh the clouds His chariot, and rideth upon the wings of the wind,” Here is the secret of life’s peace and power. Is it not so ?
Look ! on that doomed ship of the Adriatic one man only of the whole crowd had courage and comfort. One man only could look into the eye of the storm and hear the thunder of the breakers upon the iron rocks without a shade of fear. That man was Paul, and here was the secret of his courage and his comfort. “ Whose I am and Whom I serve.” He w T as anchored thus in Christ. The billows might beat and the storms roar, but he could be calm, for he knew whom he believed, and was confident that no harm could come to him on ocean or on shore. Yes, so it is, united to Christ by the bonds of faith expressing itself in love and obedience : thus, and only thus, can we make our voyage across the ocean safely and prosperously. Thus and only thus does there come
Peace to the soul of the man on its breast,
As the wild waste darkens around him,
As the stars die out, and the night wind
Brings from afar
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.
May such faith and issue be ours !
Doing Business in Deep Waters
VII
“They . . . that do business in great water s . . . see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep.”
We shall think of five kinds of deep waters in which people see the wonders of the works of the Lord in these wonders of the deep—Thought, Doubt, Sorrow, Sin, Death.
First, Thought. How superficial is our thought! What multitudes never get below the surface of things—dress, pleasure, business, gossip, chaff, the next wedding, the last dance.
Along the brim of life to skim,
Not in its depths be sinking,
With jest, a smile, time to beguile,
Not bore one’s self with thinking.
To touch and go and to and fro,
To gossip, talk and tattle,
To hear the news and to amuse
One’s world with endless prattle*
That is the staple occupation of thousands. With another class, business, trade, absorbs all attention. There is a great deal of intellectual
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thought, but it does not get into the deep waters. One might suppose, as Dr. Watkinson says, that the scientist who fathoms the ocean’s depths or the star-sown spaces of heaven has gone deep, but it is not so. With all his parade of telescopes and spectroscopes he has only got a little way below the surface if he misses the Creator. “ The Lord in the beginning has laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the works of His hands. They shall perish, but Thou remainest; they all shall wax old as a garment; as a vesture shalt Thou change them ; but Thou art the same and to Thy years there is no end.” Entirely superficial is a science that does not reach down, or up, to this. Christ saw that the lily had its roots in eternity and that its splendour was a reflection of the glory of God, and the grandest science is shallow until it finds Him who laid the foundations of the earth, and reared the pillars oi the sky. How disinclined men are to do business in the deep waters of religion ! Multitudes never give a thought to the things of the soul. Even those who do, how short is the time they devote, how superficial the depths they go. Take yourself, for instance. What books did you read last week ? You read newspapers, a magazine or two the latest novel, the comic papers, and such like Take church, for instance. All the rage is foi short sermons —fifteen minutes or twenty, with £ leaning towards the grace of less.
Sir Henry Irving tells the story of a younj curate who had unexpectedly to preach before tin Queen. In distress he went to Irving for counsel
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Irving advised him to see Lord Beaconsfield. He did. Beaconsfield said, “If you preach half an hour the Queen will be bored ; if fifteen minutes she will be pleased ; if ten, delighted.” “ But, my lord,” replied the curate, “ what can any preacher possibly say in ten minutes ? ” “ That will be a matter of indifference to Her Majesty,” was the bland answer of Beaconsfield. And there are multitudes like Her Majesty—multitudes. Like the man who was describing to the parson what a blessing Sunday was. “ Why,” he said, “ sir, I goes to church and I puts one leg over the other, and I thinks of nothing,”
Thoreau writes : “ We can hardly speak of the soul without blushing, having starved it almost to a shadow. An ordinary man will work every day for a year shovelling dirt to support his body or a family of bodies, but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. Yet have we not an everlasting life to get ? Is not that the only excuse at last for eating and drinking and sleeping, or even carrying an umbrella when it rains ? ”
A Chicago doctor was recently declaiming against the evils of quick lunches. He declares that half the suicide cases are due to these ; as also most of the dyspepsia, gloom, and moroseness of life. Quick lunches of religion are even more harmful; they produce spiritual dyspepsia. They leave those who indulge in them a prey to every new fancy religion, or quack theology, that the changing winds blow about. How different with those who do business in the deep waters of
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thought regarding God and the soul! What comfort and light and joy and strength they discover. In California an earthquake shook the surface, but the silver miners deep down knew nothing of it, and when we do business in the depths of thought relative to God and His ways with men, we escape many of the troubles and disasters that shake the earth about us and above us. All our lives are lacking in the symmetry, the security, the sobriety, the steadfastness, which ought to be theirs, because we so seldom do business in the deep waters of thought.
Then there are the deep waters of Doubt, How many are doing business there. The truth is that no earnest man or woman can escape doing business in the waters of doubt; for the world is full of mystery, full of things that compel us to pause or question. And the deeper the nature, the more serious-minded the soul, the greater will be the waters of doubt in which it will be called to do business. At bottom, a great deal of what is called stoical agnosticism is merely a polysyllabic way of writing pride. Men are kept from surrendering their life to Christ by what they are pleased to call the claims of reason. But pared to the quick it will often be found that the claims of reason are only another form for self-conceit or pride ; the refusal of the human will to yield itself up humbly to the divine.
Ruskin says, “ Of all the vices, pride is the most destructive, seeing it is the undermost and original vice of all.” But what works and won-
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ders of God are often discovered by those who do business in the deep waters of doubt, by those who are in earnest in the search for truth. Somebody has written a book on the “ Sceptics of the Bible.”
The Sceptics of the Bible ! What do we not owe to them. Take Job, for instance. The whole book of Job may be called a Drama of Doubt. The Psalms, dozens of them, are the stories of men doing business in the deep waters of doubt. There is Nicodemus—in doubt about his faith and life. He puts his pride in his pocket and slips away by night to have a talk with Jesus. What comes out of that doubt of his ? The immortal third chapter of John. Then there is Thomas with his doubts. Think of what his doubt has brought out for us in his interviews with Christ. So it has been all down history. Tennyson is a type of multitudes. His immortal poem “ In Memoriam ” opens with a picture of the graveyard and a lonely man, in gloom, in bewilderment, doing business in the deep waters of doubt. For seven long years he battles amid the billows till at last faith takes him firmly by the hand and leads him up to that “ God who ever lives and loves.” And so out of the deep waters of doubt he has given us the noblest poem in the language. Two warnings are needful here, however, All doubt is not necessarily good, for it is not always honest. Be sure that you love the truth; and the test of that will be : Are you ready to make all the sacrifices that it might necessitate to transmute it into duty ? And second, for all
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propositional truths, the way to truth is doubt, but for all truth about a person, the way to truth is just the opposite: it is by trust/love and obedience that you come to know them, and since Christianity has a Person at its centre, that is the way into its heart.
Next there are the deep waters of Sorrow. We have all got to do business in them, some of us all the time, all of us some time. For those who call themselves Christians, that is the very meaning of their name. It means, if we understand the word aright, those who are disciples joined to Christ by faith. To be united to Him is to be united to the Cross. So Christ sets His mark upon us all. “ They were all baptized into the cloud and the sea. That, says Dora Greenwell, “is the register of all God’s chosen ones, the pledge of their initiation into the covenant whose promise, whose reward, whose very beatitudes are sufferings.” Yes, they have got to do business in deep waters of sorrow. But what then ? That is only one half of the truth. Open your Bibles and read them. First of all, note the number of those who have done business in these waters. What a crowd of them there is I Why what is the whole Bible almost but just the story of such lives. Look at the Psalms. How full they are of such experiences. “ The waters compassed me about even to the soul. The depths closed me round about.” “ Thou hast cast me into the deep, into the midst of the seas, and the floods compassed me about.” “ All thy waves and billows have
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gone over me ” — all of them. But what then ? Listen to the promise. “ When thou passest through the waters, I wall be with thee, and through the floods, they shall not overflow thee.” Was that promise kept ? Yes, gloriously kept. See what it means. “ When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.” When thou passest through —yes, they did not escape the waters, but they got through them ; and that was better. They received power to do that. And observe the form in which the power came—“ I will be with thee.” Turn up life after life as it does business in the deep waters and see how that promise was fulfilled. Take one illustration— St. Paul. There he was on a vessel that was doing business in deep waters, in the Adriatic. What does he say when the trembling shipload of people turn to him ? He said, “ The Lord stood by me.” Then look away to the end of his life. All have gone from him. As he listens in his grim prison cell to the tramp of the departing friends, is he lonely ? No. Why ? “ Howbeit the Lord stood by me.” “ When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.” Is not this the secret of his desire for fellowship in Christ’s sufferings ? Why does he say that he “ takes pleasure in bonds and afflictions ” ? That he “ glories in tribulation ” ? Why, but just because it gives him a new experience, a more vivid vision, a closer grip of the reality of the Lord Christ in his life.
Is it not so everywhere ? Your child never loves you, never understands your love for it in the heyday of happiness ; it is only when it is
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allowed to do business in deep waters that it gets a glimpse of what love means, and sacrifice and motherhood. And so we never know the reality, the nearness, the presence of our Father God until His waves and billows go over us, till every prop and stay of life falls from us. Then prayer is no longer a form and God a name and Christ an ideal. No, they step out of the shadows—they cease to be theological terms. We know then how precious is the promise : “ When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.” We even understand something of what is, until then, the impossible words of Paul about “ glorying in tribulation,” and counting all things but loss to know “ the fellowship of his sufferings,” and when you come out of the Bible, and read the Bible of history and daily life, it is the same. Generations of men set their seal to the truth — “ When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.” Here, for instance, is Wordsworth confessing :
I bent before Thy gracious throne
And asked for peace on suppliant knee,
And peace was given—nor peace alone,
But faith sublimed to ecstasy.
But until we do business in deep waters, we can never know it. The greater and best part of the Bible is a sealed book. Nay, lift up your eyes to heaven itself. Those that are arrayed in white robes, who are they and whence came they ? “ These are they that came out of great tribulation.” Yes, “ though now they be quiet and
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have attained the peace which passeth understanding. Yet they once did business in deep waters, saw the white teeth of the storm furies and sailed through the very throne of death.” Assuredly they that do business in the deep waters of suffering see the works of God and His wonders in the deep.
Then there are the deep waters of Sin, Sin is not a popular word. We soften it down a bit by giving it other names : crookedness, unwisdom, foolishness, ignorance, sowing wild oats, fast life, and what not. We are busy attempting to “ draw the teeth of the old enemy of man and leave him with a pair of harmless gums.” We need to go back to the Bible to learn the devastating power of this foe. No, lam wrong. We need not go so far, we need only go to life. Life of every day. We need only read the newspapers, or the latest novels ; we need only listen to what doctors and nurses tell us, to what we know in homes not far off from any of us, homes that may be called pocket copies of hell. Yes, men have still to do business in the deep waters of sin ; and here again they see the works of God and His wonders in the deep. What works and wonders do they see ? They see, for instance, the wonders of forgiveness. We think forgiveness is an easy thing. That is because we have never sounded the depth of what forgiveness really is. It is because forgiveness costs us so little that we think it costs God little too. It bubbles up out of our good nature, out of a genial disposition, tolerant
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of evil because it is too lazy to take sides with goodness. But not so did the Bible writers think of it. To them it is the wonder of wonders. It fills them with amazement. “Oh I the depth of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out.” And they are right; and when a man is doing business in the deep waters of sin, he comes to know it. And there are more men and women there than we suspect. lam not thinking of the openly profligate lives.
I am thinking of those like the elder brother in the parable who have never wandered away into the far land. The grace which keeps them at home clean and pure is just as wonderful as that which received the returning sinner. A lady was trying to get a returned soldier to narrate some of his experiences. He was disinclined to do so. She pressed him, “ Surely you must have had some very wonderful experiences. Now tell us what struck you most.” “ Well, madam, the thing that struck me most was the number of bullets that missed me 1 ” Exactly. “ The mercy which shields the innocence of youth and childhood from canker and contamination,” as T. G. Selby writes, “ is just as infinite as that which washes white the scarlet stains of repentant profligacy.” Those who are kept through life in consistent outward obedience to the commandments are under obligations of gratitude and love as deep and as manifold as the obligation resting on those who are as brands plucked from the burning. They too, equally with the latter, see the works of God and
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His wonders of forgiveness. But they only realize this when they have a vision of the Cross and all the Cross stands for. For it is only when that vision comes to us that we really know what sin is. Of course, if we keep away from the Bible and from its doctrine of sin, we shall come to think of sin only as a sort of skin disease ; a pimple on the outside of life instead of a canker at the heart, and of forgiveness a something as easily accomplished as wiping the figures off a slate. But when a man comes to know that the first and great commandment is to love —“ to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength, and thy neighbour as thyself,” he is quite conscious that he has broken that commandment times and ways without number, and when the Holy Spirit takes him in hand and convinces him that sin is unbelief in Christ, and that the wages of sin is death, then he is gradually led on to perceive that the hymn he sings does not exaggerate :
Ah ! mine iniquity
Crimson hath been,
Infinite, infinite,
Sin upon sin,
Sin of not loving Thee,
Sin of not loving Thee,
Infinite sin !
Then he comes to see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. Then he comes to see the work and wonder of forgiveness, free, full,
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made sure to him by the death of the Son of God, and he sings with a new power and passion :
Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood :
Hallelujah ! What a Saviour !
He who does business in the deep waters of sin, he sees the works of God and His wonders there ; His works and wonders of forgiveness. And how complete is this forgiveness. Think of the wealth of words'and images with which it is asserted. “ Blotted out” and “ taken away,” “ washed out,” “ purged,” “ covered,” “ cast behind into the sea of forgetfulness,” “ remembered no more for ever,” and so on. It is a bewildering wonder this, to think of the completeness of the forgiveness ; to think how when a man commits himself to God’s ways and plans of redemption his sins are transmuted—they are included in “ the all things ” that work out good. See this white paper : once it was filthy rags, only useless waste, now it is white as snow. That is what Christ can do with the stained and soiled lives. Look at them up yonder when He has finished His work on them :
All these once were sinners defiled in His sight,
Now arrayed in pure garments in His praise they unite.
Unto Him who hath loved us and washed us from sin,
Unto Him be the glory for ever, Amen.
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And finally there are the deep waters of Death. We have all got to do business there. Time will not permit me to dwell upon this. I will put all I want to say in an incident that Mr. Moody used frequently to relate.
In the American Civil War Moody was attached as a chaplain to the hospital at Murfreesboro. He had been very busy, unable to get any rest for two nights. On the third he had lain down to get a sleep, and about midnight a message came asking him to go to see a wounded soldier who was very low. He went and asked what he could do for him. The soldier said : “ I want you to help me to die.” Moody replied: “ I would bear you in my arms into the Kingdom of God if I could, but I can’t.” Then he tried to tell him the Gospel. The man shook his head, said that was no good for him. “He can’t save me, I have been a sinner all my life.” And Moody went on to repeat promise after promise, but without effect. Then he said he wanted to read him the story of an interview Christ had one night with a man who was anxious about his eternal welfare. So he read him a part of the third chapter of St. John, and as he read, the man’s eyes became riveted on him and he seemed to be drinking in every word of it. When he came to the words “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life,” the soldier stopped him and asked, “Is that there?” “Yes,” Moody replied. “Well, I never knew that was in the Bible. Read it
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again.” Leaning on his elbow on the side of the cot, he brought his hands together tightly, and when Moody had finished he exclaimed, “ That’s good, won’t you read it again ? ” Slowly Moody read it a third time. “ When I had finished he closed his eyes and slowly repeated it to himself— ‘ as Moses —lifted up—the serpent in the wilderness—so must the Son of Man be lifted up—that whosoever—believeth in Him—should not perish—but have eternal life.’ ‘ That will do,’ he said, ‘don’t read any more.’” He lay back on his pillow and seemed to sink into a quiet sleep. Moody went away, and when he came back in the morning the soldier had passed in “ to where the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle flags are furled.” The nurse told Moody that as the end drew on she heard him saying to himself the words —“ that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish.” “ Give me a great thought to die with,” said Richter. Here is not only one to die with but to live with—“ as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” That will do —don’t say any more.
VIII
Crossing the Bar
“ Woe unto us! for the day declineth, the shadows of the evening are stretched out.” — Jeremiah. vi. 4.
“ The Master is here, and calleth for thee.” — John xi. 28.
“ Now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face.” — 1 Corinthians xiii. 12.
I am to speak with you this evening on “ Crossing the Bar.” I need hardly explain what a bar is and the necessity of getting across it safely, but I may explain to you what it means in the Voyage of Life.
. ~ j — 0 - The long journey is nearly over. The terrors of sea and storm are almost past. The harbour is in sight. One last obstacle has to be encountered. We call it Death. That is how we interpret Crossing the Bar in the Voyage of Life. It is passing through the mystery of death. The title, as you know, is borrowed from Tennyson’s well-known poem. lam going to take that poem and let it suggest to us the fact and the significance of Crossing the Bar in the Voyage of Life. I think it is well suited to do that.
The poem was written, his son tells us in his Life of Tennyson, when the poet was eighty-one
in
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years of age—just a year or two before his death. His son writes : “ It was an October day when we came from Aldworth to Farringford. Before reaching the latter he had the poem in his mind, and after dinner he showed it to me. I said to him, ‘ That is the crown of your life,’ and he answered, ‘lt came to me in a moment.’ ” “ The crown of your life! ” It surely is. Let us hear it.
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me !
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
But such a tide as, moving, seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark !
And may there be no sadness of farewell
When I embark.
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
The general idea of the poem is quite plain. The noiseless indrawing of the ebb tide back into the ocean is a magnificent image of the soul’s quiet parting from earthly life and going out into the Invisible. In Tennyson’s poem the ship is bound outwards. That is how Paul also inter-
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preted his departure. In my address the ship is coming in home, but for all three of us “ Crossing the Bar ” means the same thing. It is the soul crossing the bar of death and launching forth again into another sea which is yet not another.
Now, let us analyse the poem. Ido not like to do it, but sometimes a crushed flower gives out a sweeter perfume ; so if we have to mangle the poetry its meaning may cling to us the more. We will consider
The Facts of the Poem,
The Prayer of the Poem,
The Hopes of the Poem.
First, the facts. What are they ? “ Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me.” “ Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark.” Come and look in at this window. It is late in the autumn afternoon. It has been a day of glory, but it is wellnigh over. The sun is going down; the wondrous blue is dying out of the sky ; the breath of a pale mist is creeping up from the valley below. The hills put on their purple garments to look at this strange white stillness. There is not a sound in the air. All nature seems to be watching and waiting. And now it is twilight, and the evening star shines out. Others also steal slowly into the sky and peep in through the big mullioned window. Then the October moon, for it is an October in England, sails up and floods the room with light. On the bed only there is deep darkness.
V.L.
u
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Star-rise and moon-lit peace,
The last “ clear call ” has come,
And silver fingers on the pale brow’s fleece,
Beckon the Master home.
Thus Tennyson passed. Thus his prayer for Crossing the Bar was realized.
And a day similar to that comes to all of us. I do not mean in its details but in its general outline. I mean the day when the sun of life is near the west. It is the day when voices are silenced and slippered feet move softly about the room. The doctor looks in for the last time, and says he can do no more, and goes away. There is a hush in the house, and the light falls on the bed and on the thin hands on the coverlet “ plucking aimlessly at the invisible flowers of death.” But dull unnoticed there. For “they that look out of the windows are darkened.” The cistern wheel moves “ discordant on its axis. Life like a spent steed is pressing to the goal.”
“ Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me.” You remember how Bunyan tells ol the call that came to one after another of his pilgrims, on the last page of his great allegory Thus it came to Christiana : The post arrived with a letter for her from her Master. The con tents were : “ Hail! I bring thee tidings that the Master calleth for thee and expects that thoi shouldest stand in His presence in clothes o: immortality within these ten days.” And f similar call comes to one after another, to Mr Ready-to-Halt, Mr. Feeble-mind, Mr. Despond
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ency, Mr. Standfast, Mr. Greatheart, and all the rest, and they passed over. Yes, we have all to do that. “ One clear call for me.” Clear. There have been hints, dim, uncertain, faintly heard in earlier years. These were calls, unnoticed, unheeded, perhaps. But the day comes when the call is “ clear,” when even we cannot mistake it, when there is no doubting its reality, when the trite commonplace, “We must all die ” changes into the acute consciousness “ I must die, and that soon,” and death grips us and his fingers are inexorable. And as we watch the light fading some day we shall muse with ourselves and say, “ To-morrow success or failure won’t matter much to me. The sun will rise, the earth grow bright, and the myriads of mankind will go to their work and their pleasure, but I shall be out of it all. I shall have neither part nor lot in all that happens beneath the sun.” “ Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me.” “ Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark.” These are the facts of the poem relative to Crossing the Bar.
Now let us look at the prayer of the poem.
“ May there be no moaning of the bar, when I put out to sea I ” “ May there be no sadness of farewell, when I embark! ” No moaning, no sadness of farewells. These are the contents of the prayer. What makes the moaning of the bar ? The bar. And what makes the bar ? Two things. It is made first of all by drift carried down by the river as it has rolled slow-footed,
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by thorpe and town, through hushed autumnal marches to the sea. Sand and mud and rubbish gathered as it has passed along are met and arrested by the incoming tide. The river is forced to deposit its detritus there before it can mingle its waters with the great ocean. So bars are formed. Hence the moaning of the bar. Is not that a picture of life, of its bar and of its meanings ? “ May there be no meanings of the bar.” Where will these moanings come from ? Where but from the bar; and how the bar is formed we have seen. And it is so in life. It is what we have brought down with us, out of the past, that makes the moaning because it makes the bar. It is all those multitudinous might-have-beens that lie upon us with the weight of broken wings that can never be lifted. It is all that we sum up in that little, bitter, trite unfathomable word “ sin.” Sin, the concentrated essence of all the evils, wrongs, errors, meannesses, crookednesses, that crowd the bygone days. And they moan, and moan, and moan, as the soul looks out beyond into the infinite, as it fronts where the pale w r astes widen around, and the night wind brings up murmurs and scents of the infinite sea. Oh, the moanings and moanings that come up out of that past! Put your ear to the years of your own life, to the centuries beyond, and you hear them, hear them, hear them incessantly.
I have just said that the bar is made, not only by the silt brought down by the river or tidal way, but by the arresting action of the sea in
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front. And so a man’s past is confronted by his future. Why is it that we cannot forget the past and have done with it ? Why is it that a man blames himself for wrongs done and not because he cannot write poetry or grow ten feet tall ? It is because he holds himself responsible ; it is because in that future there is a Judgment Throne and a God who “ makes Himself an awful rose of dawn.” And the light of these fall on his past and blacken every blot. “ Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance.”
“ Where have you been, my brother ?
For I missed you from the street ? ”
“ I have been away for a night and a day
On the Lord God’s judgment seat.”
“ And what did you find, my brother,
When your judging there was done ? ”
“ Weeds in my garden, dust in my door,
And my roses dead in the sun.”
Yes. When life has seen the Lord God’s judgment seat that is how it looks. Its past, and its future make the moanings of the bar when it comes to the last great crisis of its existence.
Now, I need not stress how absolutely essential the removal of a bar is to our civic well-being. Bars can be removed. How can it be done ? By dredging the accumulation away and increasing the inflow from the ocean. And that, too, is how it must be done on the Voyage of Life. But can it ? That is the supreme question. Yes.
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How ? God in Christ does it. Hear what Professor Lindsay writes in his volume on the Reformation : “ All down the stream of mediaeval life men and women have been yearning to get near God, but their yearning came out in different questions, and in each succeeding revival probed deeper. Pope Gregory asked, ‘ How can I be separated from the world ? ’ St. Francis, the founder of the Franciscans, asked, ‘ How can I be like Christ ? ’ The mystics sighed, ‘ How can I have inward fellowship with God ? ’ Luther asked, ‘ How can I have the sense of pardon and know that God has forgiven me my sin ?’ ” And Professor Lindsay comments : “ They are'all feeling the same difficulty ; they are all yearning for the same peace, only each generation of revivalists gets nearer the heart of the problem till at last Luther and the Reformation put the question of pardon, and, therefore, of sin, in the very forefront and so got to the root of the matter.” Let us get rid of sin, they said, let us get forgiveness and then we have separation from the world, imitation of Christ, fellowship with God.” Yes, that is right. Sin is fundamental. Once you are rid of it you are rid of the whole bar of life. Now, sin reports itself in the life as guilt, as blameworthiness, as remorse for the past. Well, Christ rightly apprehended silences that moan.
In D. L. Moody’s Biography a story is told to this effect: “He had been preaching in Boston. After the evening service a fine-looking young fellow came up the hall, and said, * I would like
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to speak with you, Mr. Moody. I have often heard my father speak about you.’ ‘ Who is your father ? ’ I asked. ‘ Edward Campbell.* ‘ What,’ said I, ‘my old Sunday-school teacher ? ’ I asked him his name. He said it was Henry. His age ? Seventeen.” “ I put my hand on his shoulder,” says Moody, “ just as his father did on my shoulder, and it made the turning-point of my life, and I said to him, ‘ Henry, are you a Christian ? ’ ‘No, sir.’ And as I talked to him with my hand on his shoulder the tears gathered in his eyes. ‘ Come,’ said I, * Henry, I will show you how you can be saved.* So I began and quoted promise after promise, and I prayed with him, but he did not seem to get light. At last I read to him the 53rd of Isaiah, ‘ “ All we like sheep have gone astray.” Do you believe that, Henry? ’ ‘I know that is true,’ he said. ‘ “We have turned everyone to his own way.” Is that true ? ’ ‘ Yes, sir, that is true. That is what troubles me. I like my own way.’ ‘ But there is another sentence yet, Henry: “ The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” Do you believe that, Henry ? ’ ‘ No, I do not, sir.’ ‘ Now,’ I said, ‘ why do you take a verse of God’s Word and cut it in two and believe one part and not the other ? Here are two things against you and you believe them, and here is one thing in your favour and you won’t believe that. What authority have you for serving God’s Word in that way ? ’ ‘ Well,’ he said, ‘ Mr. Moody, if I believed that I should be saved.’ ‘ I know,’ said Moody, ‘ that
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is exactly what I want you to do. But you take the bitter, and you won’t have the sweet.’ So I held him to that little word, ‘ He hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.’ ” Yes, that is the secret and the seal of pardon, pardon, not on account of anything we have done or can do, but of what He has done. That, as Professor Lindsay says, is the heart of the problem. It is a wonderful, it is an absolutely inexplicable experience till you pass through it. But it is real. Conscience has no power to forgive sin, but once it is made to apprehend the gift of the salvation of God in Christ it feels itself free, the horror of guilt slips off, like a troubled dream when we wake, and it stands up and sings :
“ He maketh the rebel a priest and a king,
He hath bought us and taught us this new song to sing,
Unto Him that hath loved us and washed us from sin,
Unto Him be the glory for ever, Amen ! ”
Thus the bar is removed. Multitudes of every age and of all ranks set their seal to the fact. But sin is more than guilt on the conscience, it is a power in after life. When, however, the bar is broken up the constant and tremendous inflow of the ocean prevents its re-formation. And so w r hen the Sinner’s guilt is assumed by Christ He incorporates Himself with the sinner and the constant inflow of His life through the channel of faith breaks “ The power of cancelled sin and sets the sinner free.” And so for those
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who thus take God’s way there are no meanings of the bar as they put out to sea. Nor any sadness of farewells either. What makes the sadness of a farewell ? It is the thought, isn’t it ? that death may be the end ? Tennyson, you remember, when struck down by the death of Hallam, described himself hovering about the ship that brought the coffin back from Vienna and moaning,
“Is this the end ? Is this the end ? ”
Then later on in the same poem when his faith steadies itself and gets on its feet again another fear comes. He has seen that it is not the end. But may not my friend be so changed, that if I should see him he would have gone so far beyond me that we could be companions no more ? Whittier, you remember, in his sweet little poem, “My Playmate,” touches on the same terror. He traces the joys of their early days together, the fun and frolic, the tears and the gladness, and then they separate. Years divide that happy time from now, but Nature is the same and brings back the memory of it.
The lilies blossom in the pond,
The bird builds in the tree,
The dark pines sing on Ramoth hill
The slow song of the sea.
I wonder if she thinks of them,
And how the old time seems,
If ever the pines of Ramoth wood
Are sounding in her dreams.
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But he can be sure of nothing about her except
The moaning of a sea of change,
Between myself and thee.
These are the things that make the sadness of farewells. Is there any solace ? Yes.
And that brings me to the third point , the hope of the poem.
“ When that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home.” Home. That lies beyond the bar. How do we know ? We are dependent again wholly upon Christ. Principal McCosh, of Princeton, when he was professor in Queen’s College, Belfast, was called upon by Lord Ashbourne. Lord Ashbourne said to him, “My heart is broken. I lost my dear wife, the apple of my eyes. Carlyle was a great friend of mine. I went to him and asked him what to do to get peace, and he told me to go and read Goethe’s ‘ Wilhelm Meister.’ I did so, but I found nothing to comfort or inspire. I asked him again, and he gave me the same advice. Do you know what Carlyle meant ? ” McCosh said he did not know what Carlyle meant. And it was not in the power of Carlyle or of Goethe to give the balm that his soul needed. “ Wilhelm Meister,” you remember, is the story of a young man who got tired of business. He joined a strolling theatrical company and did not succeed at that. After various experiences he ended by marrying a rich lady and becoming a large landed proprietor. Such a story, told even by
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a genius, will not fill with peace a broken heart. No, there is only One that can do that. It is Christ. And His word for death is “ Home.” And it is just the word we need to deliver us from “ the sadness of farewells.” And Christ gives it. You remember that was what He said, in substance, to His disciples the last night He was with them. There had come to them the sadness of farewell, and He, to comfort them, told them, “ I am going home, but I will come again for you and take you with Me.” How do I know that is true ? First, because Christ is a witness bearer. What is a witness bearer ? In a court of justice a witness testifies only to what he has seen and knows. He states facts, not opinions. And so of Christ, He is not a philosopher, arriving at truths through logic and suggestions. He is not a speculative thinker, giving happy guesses or doubtful opinions. He is a witness bearer, stating at first hand facts that He has seen and knows.
When Carlyle’s own wife died they tried to comfort him with hopes and opinions regarding immortality. Carlyle said: “If you were God there might be comfort in what you are saying, but if you are not what do you know more than Ido myself ? ” That is just the point. Yonder, to adapt an illustration by Lyman Abbott, on a dark and desolate coast a ship strikes on the rocks and goes to pieces. Some of the passengers get safe to land, but they do not know where they are. By and by a light is seen, and a man bearing a lantern emerges out of the wood.
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“ Where are we"? ” lie tells them. He says, “ Beyond those hills there is a town.” “ How do you know ? ” “ Because I live there. I come from there. My home is there. And if you come with me and follow on I will take you there too.” And they go, and going they know. They verify his words. That is Christ. He has not grown up out of us, a poor wanderer like ourselves on the trackless seas. No; He comes from the other side ; from the side of the Father and the Home Eternal. He is a thoroughly accredited witness bearer; and that is why I feel it is safe to believe Him.
But there is another reason for the faith in Him, relative to the Beyond. Men and women have found Him true in earthly things —in this temporal life. Hundreds of His promises have been realized here. And thus actual experience in the present life leads us to trust Him for what is hidden in the Invisible. If I find a hand with four fingers pointing outward and one missing I infer that the missing one would point outward too. If I find ninety-nine apples on one side of a tree sweet and good I infer that the hundredth apple on the hidden side of the tree will be sweet and good too. And so those who have the Galilean Pilot on board die well. There is no moaning of the bar, no sadness of farewells, when they put out to sea. No. Listen to them. “ Thanks be unto God Who giveth us the victory.” “ I see Heaven opened.” “ Where is thy sting, O death ? ” “ More than conquerors.” “ Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown
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of righteousness,” and so on, and so on. When Catherine Booth was passing over the bar she said, “ When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee.” And He was. The surprise of death to the believer in Christ will be the surprise of home. And if home is across the bar there need be no sadness of farewells. No, it is only then that we can sing with Christina Rossetti:
The goal in sight ! Look up and sing,
Set faces full against the light,
Welcome with rapturous welcomings
The goal in sight.
So we come to the last hope. “ For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place the flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face when I have crossed the bar.” Who is the Pilot ? Tennyson said He was “ that Divine Unseen who is always guiding us.” It is not stretching the poet’s faith too far to say that he meant Christ. At any rate, we mean that w r hen we speak of the Pilot here. “ Face to face.” On life’s voyage we had hints of His presence; we had read of Him, discerned Him dimly in calms, in sickness, by the wash of the sea, in the wail of the wind, in the ruin and riot of storms. He has come and gone in our Voyage of Life like a vision, like a flash, like a dream —vague, mysterious, unrealized. But, then, all that is over. “ Face to face.” When the bar is crossed, and the screens of flesh drop down, then they see His face. But do you want to see His face ? Do you ? Do you ? You may know what it is to have a friend
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in a distant land. You have never met him, but he has been kind to you beyond words. He has sent you money in your need, sympathy in your sorrow, cheer and light in your darkness. But you have never seen him, only seen a photo of him. And some day you go to visit him. You wonder what he will be like, how he will receive you, what he will say to you, what look his face will bear when you see it. And Christ ? His face ? What memories will crowd into that look of yours upon His face —memories of what He was on earth, of what He did for men in life, and for you, the face that was spat upon, slapped on the cheek by malignant fists, marred more than any man, the face that was thorn-crowned, hung on the Cross, lay dead in the grave.
Is this the face that thrills with awe
Seraphs who veil their face above ?
Is this the face without a flaw,
The face which is the face of love ?
Yea, this defaced, a senseless clod,
Hath all creation’s love sufficed,
Hath satisfied the love of God,
This face—the face of Jesus Christ.
What is this face to you ? Is it anything ? Is it all ? It ought to be. Why ? Because it makes heaven. Christ makes Home , so He says. He does not describe Home except just to say, “ You shall be with Me.” That is all. Heaven is in that for those who know Him. Why not ? There is always one in the home on earth that makes the word sweet. It may be a father, or
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a mother, or a sister, or a brother. “ The many make the household, ‘ but only one the home.’ ” So Christ, with that extraordinary self-assertion of His, the proof of His witness-bearing character, identifies Himself with that Home. Others, no doubt, will be there.
Your mother’s tones shall meet you still,
E’en sweeter than they were,
And the false love that broke your heart
Shall be forgotten there.
But not of star or sun is born
The beauty of that shore,
There is a Face that we shall see,
And wish for nothing more.
Shall it be so ? If it be, then all is well. When James Gilmour, of Mongolia, lay dying, the day before the end he was very restless, and somewhat wandering in mind, wanting to rouse himself for a supposed journey. His biographer tells the story thus : “ ‘ Where are we going ? ’ he asked. ‘To heaven,’ I answered, ‘to see the Lord.’ ‘ No,’ he replied, ‘ that’s not the address.’ * Yes it is, Mr. Gilmour,’ I answered. ‘We are going to heaven. Would you not like to go and see the Lord Jesus ? ’ Then he seemed to take in the meaning of my words, and reverently bowed his head in assent; his lips quivered ; his eyes filled with tears ; he was quieted like a weary child who had lost his way and finds on inquiry that only a few more steps and he will be at rest and home. So He bringeth them to their desired haven.”
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Sirs, Christ is the great Pilot and Captain of life. Be sure that you take Him on board from the very start of your voyage. You can do it anywhere; you can do it to-night. Some take Him on board only when the bar is to be crossed at the last moment. It can be done then. Thank God for that. One w r as so saved that none might despair, and only one that none might presume. But what a peril and a disgrace thus to wait ! The best time to do it, if not already done, is now. Then He will be with you in the last great crossing. He will break up the bar with all its perils. There will be no moanings, no sadness of farewells. No. Here is what by the grace of the Lord Christ, it is likelier to be :
No “ moaning of the bar,” but down the tide,
The worn sails filling free,
The stately spirit barque in fearless pride
Stands out to sea.
Star-set and silver sleep ;
The night wind freshlier blows,
As through the pathless silence of the deep
The great ship goes.
No “ sadness of farewells,” but from the skies,
Like music faint and far,
One gathering shout of triumph swells and dies
Beyond the morning star.
Printed in Great Britain by Butler 5: Tanner Ltd., Fromc and London
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/books/ALMA1927-9917502103502836-The-voyage-of-life---eight-addre
Bibliographic details
APA: Waddell, Rutherford. (1927). The voyage of life : eight addresses on some aspects of it. N.Z. Book Depot.
Chicago: Waddell, Rutherford. The voyage of life : eight addresses on some aspects of it. Wellington, N.Z.: N.Z. Book Depot, 1927.
MLA: Waddell, Rutherford. The voyage of life : eight addresses on some aspects of it. N.Z. Book Depot, 1927.
Word Count
32,548
The voyage of life : eight addresses on some aspects of it Waddell, Rutherford, N.Z. Book Depot, Wellington, N.Z., 1927
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