The preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last,
folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: ‘Beloved shipmates, clinch the
last verse of the first chapter of Jonah — “And God had prepared a great fish to
swallow up Jonah.”‘Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters — four
yarns — is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures.
Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant
lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s
belly! How billow- like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over
us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the
slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah
teaches? Shipmates, it is a two- stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful
men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a
lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly
awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the
deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son
of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God — never mind now
what that command was, or how conveyed — which he found a hard command. But all
the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do — remember that — and
hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we
must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the
hardness of obeying God consists.
‘With this sin of disobedience in him,
Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a
ship made by men, will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but
only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks
a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded
meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the
modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates?
Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have
sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.
Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the
Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to
the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then,
shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh!
most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye,
skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening
to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there
been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong,
had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no
baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag, — no friends accompany him to the
wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the
Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to
see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from
hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in
vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his wretched
smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent.
In their gamesome but still serious way, one whispers to the other — “Jack, he’s
robbed a widow;” or,”Joe, do you mark him; he’s a bigamist;” or,”Harry lad, I
guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the
missing murderers from Sodom.” Another runs to read the bill that’s stuck
against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five
hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a
description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all
his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands
upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face,
only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but
that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the
sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he
descends into the cabin.
‘”Who’s there?” cries the Captain at his busy
desk, hurriedly making out his papers for the Customs — “Who’s there?” Oh! how
that harmless question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee
again. But he rallies. “I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail
ye, sir?” Thus far the busy captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man
now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he
darts a scrutinizing glance. “We sail with the next coming tide,” at last he
slowly answered, still intently eyeing him. “No sooner, sir?” — “Soon enough for
any honest man that goes a passenger.” Ha! Jonah, that’s another stab. But he
swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. “I’ll sail with ye,” — he says,
— “the passage money, how much is that, — I’ll pay now.” For it is particularly
written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this
history,”that he paid the fare thereof” ere the craft did sail. And taken with
the context, this is full of meaning.
‘Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates,
was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it
only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can
travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped
at all frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah’s
purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it’s
assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same
time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah
fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He
rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and
Jonah is put down for his passage. “Point out my state-room, Sir,” says Jonah
now. “I’m travel-weary; I need sleep.” “Thou look’st like it,” says the Captain,
“there’s thy room.” Jonah enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains
no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to
himself, and mutters something about the doors of convicts’ cells being never
allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws
himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting
on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. then, in that contracted
hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship’s water-line, Jonah feels the heralding
presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the
smallest of his bowel’s wards.
‘Screwed at its axis against the side, a
swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over
towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame
and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with
reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made
obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and
frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place,
and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.
But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the
ceiling, and the side, are all awry. “Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!” he
groans, “straight upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in
crookedness!”
‘Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his
bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of
the Roman race- horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as
one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying
God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe
he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death,
for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore
wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning
down to sleep.
‘And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her
cables; and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all
careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded
smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. but the sea rebels; he will not bear the
wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now
when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars
are clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling,
and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah’s head; in all
this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and
raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the
far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the
seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship —
a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened
master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, “What meanest thou, O sleeper!
arise!” Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his
feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But
at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks.
Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs
roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.
And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in
the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high
upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep.
‘Terrors
upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the
God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more and more
certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by
referring the whole matter to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for
whose cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah’s; that
discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions. “What is thine
occupation? whence comest thou? thy country? what people?” but mark now, my
shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is,
and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but
likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited
answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
‘”I
am a Hebrew,” he cries — and then — “I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath
made the sea and the dry land!” Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear
the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession;
whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For
when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the
darkness of his deserts, — when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and
cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this great tempest
was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save
the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand
raised invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of
Jonah.
‘And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the
sea; when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is
still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He
goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce
heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and
the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like the Lord out of the fish’s belly.
But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah
prayed unto learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and
wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He
leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of
all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here,
shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but
grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is
shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates,
I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him
before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to
repent of it like Jonah.’
While he was speaking these words, the howling
of the shrieking, slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the
preacher, who, when describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm
himself. His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed
the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his
swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers
look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.
There now came a
lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more;
and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed
communing with God and himself.
But again he leaned over towards the
people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest
humility, he spake these words: ‘Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you;
both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the
lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to
me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from
this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you
listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which
Jonah teaches to me as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed
pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those
unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the
hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty
and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never
reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down
to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along”into the midst
of the seas,” where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down,
and”the weeds were wrapped about his head,” and all the watery world of woe
bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet — “out of the
belly of hell” — when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even
then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake
unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale
came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air
and earth; and”vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;” when the word of the Lord
came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten — his ears, like two
sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean — Jonah did the
Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the
face of Falsehood! That was it!
‘This, shipmates, this is that other
lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom
this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the
waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please
rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!
Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be
true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great
Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!’
He
drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them
again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly
enthusiasm, — ‘But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a
sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is
deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him — a
far, far upward, and inward delight — who against the proud gods and commodores
of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him
whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world
has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth,
and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the
robes of Senators and Judges. Delight, — top-gallant delight is to him, who
acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to
heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the
boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal
delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with
his final breath — O Father! — chiefly known to me by Thy rod — mortal or
immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s,
or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that
he should live out the lifetime of his God?’
He said no more, but slowly
waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling,
till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.
-
written by Herman Melville
