CHAPTER 9
The Sermon
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authorityordered the scattered people to condense. "Star board gangway,there! side away to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard!Midships! midships!"
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches,and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again,and every eye on the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded hislarge brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes,and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneelingand praying at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continualtolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog--in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn;but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas,burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy--
The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom.
I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell-- Oh, I was plunging to despair.
In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints-- No more the whale did me confine.
With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God.
My song for ever shall record That terrible, that joyful hour; I give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power.
Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled highabove the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued;the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible,and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said:"Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapterof Jonah--'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'"
"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--four yarns--is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cableof the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deepsealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet!What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly!How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surgingover us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters;sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what isthis lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it isa two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men,and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men,it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin,hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment,repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joyof Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this sonof Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--which he found a hard command. But all the things that Godwould have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in thisdisobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still furtherflouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinksthat a ship made by men, will carry him into countrieswhere God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth.He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that'sbound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheededmeaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no othercity than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men.And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water,from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in thoseancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the mosteasterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshishor Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that,just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates,that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God? Miserable man!Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouchedhat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling amongthe shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had therebeen policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicionof something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck.How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise,or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf withtheir adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he findsthe Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo;and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin,all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods,to mark the stranger's evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vainhe tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays hiswretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the marinershe can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way,one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed a widow;"or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad,I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah,or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runsto read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharfto which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coinsfor the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a descriptionof his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill;while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles.and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so muchthe more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected;but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it;and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised,they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.
"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly makingout his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmlessquestion mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again.But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish;how soon sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked upto Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner doeshe hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance.'We sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered,still intently eyeing him. 'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for anyhonest man that goes a passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab.But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent.'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the passage money how much is that?--I'll pay now.' For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if itwere a thing not to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paidthe fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context,this is full of meaning.
"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detectscrime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless.In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travelfreely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper,is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain preparesto test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly.He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented to.Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the sametime resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold.Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions stillmolest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit.Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage.'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary;I need sleep." "Thou look'st like it,' says the Captain,'there's thy room.' Jonah enters, and would lock the door,but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there,the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something aboutthe doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within.All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth,and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead.The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole,sunk, too, ben
eath the ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heraldingpresentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold himin the smallest of his bowels' wards.
"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightlyoscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharfwith the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all,though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity withreference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself,it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung.The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berthhis tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus farsuccessful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him.The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, "straight upward,so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'
"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed,still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungingsof the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tagsinto him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turnsin giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed;and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him,as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound,and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestling in his berth,Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.
"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables;and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish,all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends,was the first of recorded smugglers! the contrabandwas Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden.A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break.But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her;when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard;when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and everyplank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head;in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep.He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers,and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale,which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him.Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship--a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep.But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear,'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!' Startled from his lethargyby that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumblingto the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea.But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leapingover the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship,and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft,till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face fromthe steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonahsees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beatdownward again towards the tormented deep.
"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all hiscringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known.The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicionsof him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referringthe whole matter to high Heaven, they all-outward to casting lots,to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them.The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how furiously theymob him with their questions. 'What is thine occupation?Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now,my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager marinersbut ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not onlyreceive an answer to those questions, but likewise another answerto a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer isforced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lordthe God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!'Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God then!Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession;whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but stillare pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy,since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,--when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and casthim forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake thisgreat tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him,and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain;the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raisedinvokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly layhold of Jonah.
"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east,and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him,leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of sucha masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he dropsseething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-toall his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison.Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly.But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts, upon his prison.Then Jonah prayed unto learn a weighty lesson. For sinfulas he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance.He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all hisdeliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of allhis pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple.And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance;not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shownin the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for hissin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance.Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah."
While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed armsseemed the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolledaway from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye,made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that wasstrange to them.
There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned overthe leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless,with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing hishead lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility,he spake these words:
"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his handspress upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be minethe lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye,and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and siton the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen,while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lessonwhich Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God. How beingan anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and biddenby the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of awicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise,fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by takingship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowedhim down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings torehim along 'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depthssucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrappedabout his head,' and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet--'out of the bellyof hell'--when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones,even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering coldand blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towardsthe warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth;and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the Lordcame a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears,like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean--Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, s
hipmates?To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to thatpilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom thisworld charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pouroil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal!Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be falsewere salvation! Yea, woe to him who as the great Pilot Paulhas it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!
He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then liftinghis face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes,as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates!on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight;and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woeis deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?Delight is to him--a far, far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth,ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to himwhose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this basetreacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him,who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroysall sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senatorsand Judges. Delight,--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledgesno law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seasof the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keelof the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his,who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I die.I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own.Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is manthat he should live out the lifetime of his God?"
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face withhis hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed,and he was left alone in the place.
Moby Dick; Or, The Whale Page 10