Moby Dick

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 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 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--