Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the Divine Comforter might be near the bereaved father “when his aged heart went forth from his bosom to flutter round the far southern grave of his boy!” Praying for others of the same family who were on the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms, “O save them! O guard them! thou angel of the deep!”
On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency of the moral principles without religious feelings, he exclaimed, “Go heat your ovens with snowballs! What! shall I send you to heaven with such an icicle in your pocket? I might as well put a millstone round your neck to teach you to swim!”
He was preaching against violence and cruelty:—“Don’t talk to me,” said he, “of the savages! a ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage of savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun’s heat, groping in the sun’s light, a straggler in paradise, an alien in heaven!”
In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the pulpit and down the centre aisle were filled by the sailors. We ladies, and gentlemen, and strangers, whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged on each side; he would on no account allow us to take the best places. On one occasion, as he was denouncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and other vices of more civilised life, he said emphatically, “I don’t mean you before me here,” looking at the sailors; “I believe you are wicked enough, but honest fellows in some sort, for you profess less, not more, than you practise; but I mean to touch starboard and larboard there!” stretching out both hands with the forefinger extended, and looking at us on either side till we quailed.
He compared the love of God in sending Christ upon earth to that of the father of a seaman who sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope of the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his voyage, and missing when his ship returned to port.
Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used the figure of a mariner, steering into port through a narrow dangerous channel, “false lights here, rocks there, shifting sand banks on one side, breakers on the other; and who, instead of fixing his attention to keep the head of his vessel right, and to obey the instructions of the pilot as he sings out from the wheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the helm, and walks the deck whistling, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket.” Here, suiting the action to the word, he put on a true sailor-like look of defiant jollity;—changed in a moment to an expression of horror as he added, “See! See! she drifts to destruction!”
One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor congregation an idea of Redemption. He began with an eloquent description of a terrific storm at sea, rising to fury through all its gradations; then, amid the waves, a vessel is seen labouring in distress and driving on a lee shore. The masts bend and break, and go overboard; the sails are rent, the helm unshipped, they spring a leak! the vessel begins to fill, the water gains on them; she sinks deeper, deeper, deeper! deeper! He bent over the pulpit repeating the last words again and again; his voice became low and hollow. The faces of the sailors as they gazed up at him with their mouths wide open, and their eyes fixed, I shall never forget. Suddenly stopping, and looking to the farthest end of the chapel as into space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation, “A life boat! a life boat!” Then looking down upon his congregation, most of whom had sprung to their feet in an ecstasy of suspense, he said in a deep impressive tone, and extending his arms, “Christ is that life boat!”
