Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice ofunassuming authority ordered the scatteredpeople to condense. "Starboard gangway, there!side away to larboard—larboard gangway tostarboard! Midships! midships!"
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots amongthe benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women'sshoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on thepreacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across hischest, 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 continual tolling of a bell in a ship that isfoundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; butchanging his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation andjoy—
"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 high above the howling of the storm. Abrief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, foldinghis hand down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of thefirst 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 strandsin the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealinesound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in thefish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; wesound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea isabout 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.
