Westminster Sermons / with a Preface

by Charles Kingsley

sound rule of logic which lawyers know well. What St Paul meant, I believe, is most probably this: that Adam, by sinning, lost his heavenly birthright; and put on the carnal and fleshly likeness of the animals, instead of the likeness of God in which he was created; and therefore, sowing to the flesh, of the flesh reaped corruption; and became subject to death even as the dumb beasts are.

Be that as it may, we know—as certainly as we can know anything from the use of our own eyes and common sense—that long ages before Adam, long ages before men existed on this earth, the animals destroyed and ate each other, even as they are doing now. We know that ages ago, in old worlds, long before this present world in which we live, the seas swarmed with sharks and other monsters, who not only died as animals do now, but who did devour—for there is actual proof of it—other living creatures; and that the same process went on on the land likewise. The rocks and soils, for miles beneath our feet, are one vast graveyard, full of the skeletons of creatures, almost all unlike any living now, who, long before the days of Adam, and still more before the days of Noah, lived and died, generation after generation; and sought their meat—from whom—if not from God?

Yes, that last is the answer—the only answer which can give a thoughtful and tender-hearted soul comfort, at the sight of so much pain and death on earth—In every unknown question, to take refuge in God. And that is the answer which the inspired Psalmist gives, in the 104th Psalm—“The lions roaring after their prey do seek their meat from God.” And if they seek it from

God, all must be right: we know not how; but He who made them knows.

Consider, with respect and admiration, the manful, cheerful view of pain and death, and indeed of the whole creation, which the Psalmist has, because he has faith. There is in him no sentimentalism, no complaining of God, no impious, or at least weak and peevish, cry of “Why hast Thou made things thus?” He sees the mystery of pain and death. He does not attempt to explain it: but he faces it; faces it cheerfully and manfully, in the strength of his faith, saying—This too, mysterious, painful, terrible as it may seem, is as it should be; for it is of the law and will of God, from whom come all good things; of The God in whom is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. Therefore to the Psalmist the earth is a noble sight; filled, to his eyes, with the fruit of God’s works. And so is the great and wide sea likewise. He looks upon it; “full of things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts,” for ever dying, for ever devouring each other. And yet it does not seem to him a dreadful and a shocking place. What impresses his mind is just what would impress the mind of a modern poet, a modern man of science; namely, the wonderful variety, richness, and strangeness of its living things. Their natures and their names he knows not. It was not given to his race to know. It is enough for him that known unto God are all His works from the foundation of the world. But one thing more important than their natures and their names he does know; for he perceives it with the instinct of a true poet and a true philosopher—

“These all wait upon thee, O God, that Thou mayest give them meat in due season.”

But more.—“There go the ships;” things specially wonderful and significant to him, the landsman of the Judæan hills, as they were afterward to Muhammed, the landsman of the Arabian deserts. And he has talked with sailors from those ships; from Tarshish and the far Atlantic, or from Ezion-geber and the Indian seas. And he has heard from them of mightier monsters than his own Mediterranean breeds; of the Leviathan, the whale, larger than the largest ship which he has ever seen, rolling and spouting among the ocean billows, far out of sight of land, and swallowing, at every gape of its huge jaws, hundreds of living creatures for its food. But he does not talk of it as a cruel and devouring monster, formed by a cruel and destroying deity, such as the old Canaanites imagined, when—so the legend ran—they offered up Andromeda to the sea-monster, upon that very rock at Joppa, which the Psalmist, doubtless, knew full well. No. This psalm is an inspired philosopher’s rebuke to that very superstition; it is the justification of the noble old Greek tale, which delivers Andromeda by the help of a hero, taught by the Gods who love to teach Mankind.

For what strikes the Psalmist is, again, exactly what would strike a modern poet, or a modern man of science: the strength and ease of the vast beast; its enjoyment of its own life and power. It is to him the Leviathan, whom “God has made to play in the sea;” “to take his pastime therein.”

Truly this was a healthy-minded man; as all will be, and only they, who have full faith in the one good God, of whom are all things, both in earth and heaven.

Then he goes further still. He has looked into the face of life innumerable. Now he looks into the face of innumerable death; and sees there too the Spirit and the work of God.