Discipline and Other Sermons

Be sure of this, that if seamen, as a class, had been superstitious, they would never have done for science what they have done.  And what they have done, all the world knows.  To seamen, and to men connected with the sea, what do we not owe, in geography, hydrography, meteorology, astronomy, natural history?  At the present moment, the world owes them large improvements in dynamics, and in the new uses of steam and iron.  It may be fairly said that the mariner has done more toward the knowledge of Nature than any other personage in the world, save the physician.

For seamen have been forced, by the nature of their calling, to be scientific men.  From the very earliest ages in which the first canoe put out to sea, the mariner has been educated by the most practical of all schoolmasters, namely, danger.  He has carried his life in his hand day and night; he has had to battle with the most formidable and the most seemingly capricious of the brute powers of nature; with storms, with ice, with currents, with unknown rocks and shoals, with the vicissitudes of climate, and the terrible and seemingly miraculous diseases which change of climate engenders.  He has had to fight Nature; and to conquer her, if he could, by understanding her; by observing facts, and by facing facts.  He dared not, like a scholar in his study, indulge in theories and fancies about how things ought to be.  He had to find out how they really were.  He dared not say, According to my theory of the universe this current ought to run in such a direction; he had to find out which way it did actually run, according to God’s method of the universe, lest it should run him ashore.  Everywhere, I say, and all day long, the seaman has to observe facts and to use facts, unless he intends to be drowned; and therefore, so far from being a superstitious man, who refuses to inquire into facts, but puts vain dreams in their stead, the sailor is for the most part a very scientific-minded man: observant, patient, accurate, truthful; conquering Nature, as the great saying is, because he obeys her.

But if seamen have been forced to be scientific, they have been equally forced to be religious.  They that go down to the sea in ships see both the works of the Lord, and also His wonders in the deep.  They see God’s works, regular, orderly, the same year by year, voyage by voyage, and tide by tide; and they learn the laws of them, and are so far safe.  But they also see God’s wonders—strange, sudden, astonishing dangers, which have, no doubt, their laws, but none which man has found out as yet.  Over them they cannot reason and foretell; they can only pray and trust.  With all their knowledge, they have still plenty of ignorance; and therefore, with all their science, they have still room for religion.  Is there an old man in this church who has sailed the seas for many a year, who does not know that I speak truth?  Are there not men here who have had things happen to them, for good and for evil, beyond all calculation? who have had good fortune of which they could only say, The glory be to God, for I had no share therein? or who have been saved, as by miracle, from dangers of which they could only say, It was of the Lord’s mercies that we were not swallowed up? who must, if they be honest men, as they are, say with the Psalmist, We cried unto the Lord in our trouble, and he delivered us out of our distress?

And this it is that I said at first, that no men were so fit as seamen to solve the question, where science ends and where religion begins; because no men’s calling depends so much on science and reason, and so much, at the same time, on Providence and God’s merciful will.

Therefore, when men say, as they will,—If this world is governed by fixed laws, and if we have no right to ask God to alter his laws for our sakes, then what use in prayer?  I will answer,—Go to the seaman, and ask him what he thinks.  The puzzle may seem very great to a comfortable landsman, sitting safe in his study at home; but it ought to be no puzzle at all to the master mariner in his cabin, with his chart and his Bible open before him, side by side.  He ought to know well enough where reason stops and religion begins.  He ought to know when to work, and when to pray.  He ought to know the laws of the sea and of the sky.  But he ought to know too how to pray, without asking God to alter those laws, as presumptuous and superstitious men are wont to do.

Take as an instance the commonest of all—a storm.  We know that storms are not caused (as folk believed in old time) by evil spirits; that they are natural phenomena, obeying certain fixed laws; that they are necessary from time to time; that they are probably, on the whole, useful.

And we know two ways of facing a storm, one of which you may see too often among the boatmen of the Mediterranean—How a man shall say, I know nothing as to how, or why, or when, a storm should come; and I care not to know.  If one falls on me, I will cry for help to the Panagia, or St. Nicholas, or some other saint, and perhaps they will still the storm by miracle.  That is superstition, the child of ignorance and fear.

And you may have seen what comes of that temper of mind.  How, when the storm comes, instead of order, you have confusion; instead of courage, cowardice; instead of a calm and manly faith, a miserable crying of every man to his own saint, while the vessel is left to herself to sink or swim.

But what is the temper of true religion, and of true science likewise?  The seaman will say, I dare not pray that there may be no storm.  I cannot presume to interfere with God’s government.  If there ought to be a storm, there will be one: if not, there will be none.  But I can forecast the signs of the weather; I can consult my barometer; I can judge, by the new lights of science, what course the storm will probably take; and I can do my best to avoid it.

But does that make religion needless?  Does that make prayer useless?  How so?  The seaman may say, I dare not pray that the storm may not come.  But there is no necessity that I should be found in its path.  And I may pray, and I will pray, that God may so guide and govern my voyage, and all its little accidents, that I may pass it by.  I know that I can forecast the storm somewhat; and if I do not try to do that, I am tempting God: but I may pray, I will pray, that my forecast may be correct.  I will pray the Spirit of God, who gives man understanding, to give me a right judgment, a sound mind, and a calm heart, that I may make no mistake and neglect no precaution; and if I fail, and sink—God’s will be done.  It is a good will to me and all my crew; and into the hands of the good God who has redeemed me, I commend my spirit, and their spirits likewise.

This much, therefore, we may say of prayer.  We may always pray to be made better men.  We may always pray to be made wiser men.  These prayers will always be answered; for they are prayers for the very Spirit of God himself, from whom comes all goodness and all wisdom, and it can never be wrong to ask to be made right.

There are surely, too, evils so terrible, that when they threaten us—if God being our Father means anything,—if Christ being our example means anything—then we have a right to cry, like our Lord himself, ‘Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me:’ if we only add, like our Lord, ‘Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.’

And of dangers in general this we may say—that if we pray against known dangers which we can avoid, we do nothing but tempt God: but that against unknown and unseen dangers we may always pray.  For instance, if a sailor needlessly lodges over a foul, tideless harbour, or sleeps in a tropical mangrove swamp, he has no right to pray against cholera and fever; for he has done his best to give himself cholera and fever, and has thereby tempted God.  But if he goes into a new land, of whose climate, diseases, dangers, he is utterly ignorant, then he has surely a right to pray God to deliver him from those dangers; and if not,—if he is doomed to suffer from them,—to pray God that he may discover and understand the new dangers of that new land, in order to warn future travellers against them, and so make his private suffering a benefit to mankind.

This, then, is our duty as to known dangers,—to guard ourselves against them by science, and the reason which God has given us; and as to unknown dangers, to pray to God to deliver us from them, if it seem good to him: but above all, to pray to him to deliver us from them in the best way, the surest way, the most lasting way, the way in which we may not only preserve ourselves, but our fellow-men and generations yet unborn; namely, by giving us wisdom and understanding to discover the dangers, to comprehend them, and to conquer them, by reason and by science.

This is the spirit of sound science and of sound religion.  And it was in this spirit, and for this very end, that this Ancient and Honourable Corporation of the Trinity House was founded more than three hundred years ago.  Not merely to pray to God and to the saints, after the ancient fashion, to deliver all poor mariners from dangers of the seas.  That was a natural prayer, and a pious one, as far as it went: but it did not go far enough.  For, as a fact, God did not always answer it: he did not always see fit to deliver those who called upon him.  Gallant ships went down with all their crews.  It was plain that God would not always deliver poor mariners, even though they cried to him in their distress.

Then, in the sixteenth century, when men’s minds were freed from many old superstitions, by a better understanding both of Holy Scripture and of the laws of nature, the master mariners of England took a wiser course.

They said, God will not always help poor mariners: but he will always teach them to deliver themselves.  And so they built this House, not in the name of the Virgin Mary or any saints in heaven, but, with a deep understanding of what was needed, in the most awful name of God himself.  Thereby they went to the root and ground of this matter, and of all matters.  They went to the source of all law and order; to the source of all force and life; and to the source, likewise, of all love and mercy; when they founded their House in the name of the Father of Lights, in whom men live and move and have their being; from whom comes every good and perfect gift, and without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground; in the name of the Son, who was born on earth a man, and tasted sorrow, and trial, and death for every man; in the name of the Holy Ghost, who inspires man with the spirit of wisdom and understanding, and gives him a right judgment in all things, putting into his heart good desires, and enabling him to bring them to good effect.  And so, believing that the ever-blessed Trinity would teach them to help themselves and their fellow-mariners, they set to work, like truly God-fearing men, not to hire monks to sing and say masses for them, but to set up for themselves lights and sea-marks, and to take order for the safe navigation of these seas, like men who believed indeed that they were the children of God, and that God would prosper his children in as far as they used that reason which he himself had bestowed upon them.

It is for these men’s sakes, as well as for our own, that we are met together here this day.  We are met to commemorate the noble dead; not in any Popish or superstitious fashion, as if they needed our prayers, or we needed their miraculous assistance: but in the good old Protestant scriptural sense—to thank God for all his servants departed this life in his faith and fear, and to pray that God may give us grace to follow their good examples; and especially to thank him for the founders of this ancient Trinity House, which stands here as a token to all generations of Britons, that science and religion are not contrary to each other, but twin sisters, meant to aid each other and mankind in the battle with the brute forces of this universe.

We are met together here to thank God for all gallant mariners, and for all who have helped mariners toward safety and success; for all who have made discoveries in hydrography or meteorology, in navigation, or in commerce, adding to the safety of seamen, and to the health and wealth of the human race; for all who have set noble examples to their crews, facing danger manfully and dying at their posts, as many a man has died, a martyr to his duty; for all who, living active, and useful, and virtuous lives in their sea calling, have ended as they lived, God-fearing Christian men.

To thank God for all these we are met together here; and to pray to God likewise that he would send his Spirit into the hearts of seamen, and of those who deal with seamen; and specially into the hearts of the Royal the Master and the Worshipful the Elder Brethren of this Ancient and Honourable House; that they may be true, and loyal, and obedient to that divine name in which they are met together here this day—the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the ever-blessed Trinity, the giver of all good gifts, in whom we live, and move, and have our being; always keeping God’s commandments and looking for God’s guidance, and setting to those beneath them an example of sound reason, virtue, and religion; that so there may never be wanting to this land a race of seamen who shall trust in God to teach them all they need to know, and to dispose of their bodies and souls as seemeth best to his most holy will; who, fearing God, shall fear nought else, but shall defy the dangers of the seas, and all the brute forces of climates and of storms; who shall set in foreign lands an example of justice and mercy, of true civilization and true religion; and so shall still maintain the marine of Great Britain, as it has been for now three hundred years, a safeguard and a glory to these islands, and a blessing to the coasts of all the world.

SERMON IV

GOD’S TRAINING

Deuteronomy viii. 2–5

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments or no.  And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.  Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years.  Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee.

This is the lesson of our lives.  This is training, not only for the old Jews, but for us.  What was true of them, is more or less true of us.  And we read these verses to teach us that God’s ways with man do not change; that his fatherly hand is over us, as well as over the people of Israel; that we are in God’s schoolhouse, as they were; that their blessings are our blessings, their dangers are our dangers; that, as St. Paul says, all these things are written for our example.

‘And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger.’  How true to life that is!  How often there comes to a man, at his setting out in life, a time which humbles him; a time of disappointment, when he finds that he is not so clever as he thought, as able to help himself as he thought; when his fine plans fail him; when he does not know how to settle in life, how to marry, how to provide for a family.  Perhaps the man actually does hunger, and go through a time of want and struggle.  Then, it may be, he cries in his heart—How hard it is for me!  How hard that the golden days of youth should be all dark and clouded over!  How hard to have to suffer anxiety and weary hard work, just when I am able to enjoy myself most!

It is hard: but worse things than hard things may happen to a man.  Far worse is it to grow up, as some men do, in wealth, and ease, and luxury, with all the pleasures of this life found ready to their hands.  Some men, says the proverb, are ‘born with a golden spoon in their mouth.’  God help them if they are!  Idleness, profligacy, luxury, self-conceit, no care for their duty, no care for God, no feeling that they are in God’s school-house—these are too often the fruits of that breeding up.  How hardly will they learn that man doth not live by bread alone, or by money alone, or by comfort alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.  Truly, said our Lord, ‘how hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of heaven.’  Not those who earn riches by manful and honest labour; not those who come to wealth after long training to make them fit to use wealth: but those who have wealth; who are born amid luxury and pomp; who have never known want, and the golden lessons which want brings.—God help them, for they need his help even more than the poor young man who is at his wit’s end how to live.  For him God is helping.  His very want, and struggles, and anxiety may be God’s help to him.  They help him to control himself, and do with a little; they help him to strengthen his character, and to bring out all the powers of mind that God has given him.  God is humbling him, that he may know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God.  God, too, if he trusts in God, will feed him with manna—spiritual manna, not bodily.  He fed the Jews in the wilderness with manna, to show them that his power was indeed almighty—that if he did not see fit to help his people in one way, he could help them just as easily in another.  And so with every man who trusts in God.  In unforeseen ways, he is helped.  In unforeseen ways, he prospers; his life, as he goes on, becomes very different from what he expected, from what he would have liked; his fine dreams fade away, as he finds the world quite another place from what he fancied it: but still he prospers.  If he be earnest and honest, patient and God-fearing, he prospers; God brings him through.  His raiment doth not wax old, neither doth his foot swell, through all his forty years’ wandering in the wilderness.  He is not tired out, he does not break down, though he may have to work long and hard.  As his day is, so his strength shall be.  God holds him up, strengthens and refreshes him, and brings him through years of labour from the thought of which he shrank when he was young.

And so the man learns that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; that not in the abundance of things which he possesses, not in money; not in pleasure, not even in comforts, does the life of man consist: but in this—to learn his duty, and to have strength from God to do it.  Truly said the prophet—‘It is good for a man to learn to bear the yoke in his youth.’

After that sharp training a man will prosper; because he is fit to prosper.  He has learnt the golden lesson.  He can be trusted with comforts, wealth, honour.  Let him have them, if God so will, and use them well.

Only, only, when a time of ease and peace comes to him in his middle age, let him not forget the warning of the latter part of the chapter.

For there is another danger awaiting him, as it awaited those old Jews; the danger of prosperity in old age.  Ah my friends, that is a sore temptation—the sorest, perhaps, which can meet a man in the long struggle of life, the temptation which success brings.  In middle age, when he has learnt his business, and succeeded in it; when he has fought his battle with the world, and conquered more or less; when he has made his way up, and seems to himself safe, and comfortable, and thriving; when he feels that he is a shrewd, thrifty, experienced man, who knows the world and how to prosper in it—Then how easy it is for him to say in his heart—as Moses feared that those old Jews would say—‘My might and the power of my wit has gotten me this wealth,’ and to forget the Lord his God, who guided him and trained him through all the struggles and storms of early life; and so to become vainly confident, worldly and hard-hearted: undevout and ungodly, even though he may keep himself respectable enough, and fall into no open sin.

Therefore it is, I think, that while we see so many lives which have been sad lives of poverty, and labour, and struggle, end peacefully and cheerfully, in a sunshiny old age, like a still bright evening after a day of storm and rain; so on the other hand we see lives which have been prosperous and happy ones for many years, end sadly in bereavement, poverty, or disappointment, as did the life of David, the man after God’s own heart.  God guided him through all the dangers and temptations of youth, and through them all he trusted God.  God brought him safely to success, honour, a royal crown; and he thanked God, and acknowledged his goodness.  And yet after a while his heart was puffed up, and he forgot God, and all he owed to God, and became a tyrant, an adulterer, a murderer.  He repented of his sin: but he could not escape the punishment of it.  His children were a curse to him; the sword never departed from his house; and his last years were sad enough, and too sad.

Perhaps that was God’s mercy to him; God’s way of remembering him again, and bringing him back to him.  Perhaps too that same is God’s way of bringing back many a man in our own days who has wandered from him in success and prosperity.

God grant that we may never need that terrible chastisement.  God grant that we, if success and comfort come to us, may never wander so far from God, but that we may be brought back to him by the mere humbling of old age itself, without needing affliction over and above.

Yes, by old age alone.  Old age, it seems to me, is a most wholesome and blessed medicine for the soul of man.  Good it is to find that we can work no longer, and rejoice no more in our own strength and cunning.  Good it is to feel our mortal bodies decay, and to learn that we are but dust, and that when we turn again to our dust, all our thoughts will perish.  Good it is to see the world changing round us, going ahead of us, leaving us and our opinions behind.  Good perhaps for us—though not for them—to see the young who are growing up around us looking down on our old-fashioned notions.  Good for us: because anything is good which humbles us, makes us feel our own ignorance, weakness, nothingness, and cast ourselves utterly on that God in whom we live, and move, and have our being; and on the mercy of that Saviour who died for us on the Cross; and on that Spirit of God from whose holy inspiration alone all good desires and good actions come.

God grant that that may be our end.  That old age, when it comes, may chasten us, humble us, soften us; and that our second childhood may be a second childhood indeed, purged from the conceit, the scheming, the fierceness, the covetousness which so easily beset us in our youth and manhood; and tempered down to gentleness, patience, humility, and faith.  God grant that instead of clinging greedily to life, and money, and power, and fame, we may cling only to God, and have one only wish as we draw near our end.—‘From my youth up hast thou taught me, Oh God, and hitherto I have declared thy wondrous works.  Now also that I am old and grey-headed, Oh Lord, forsake me not, till I have showed thy goodness to this generation, and thy power to those who are yet to come.

SERMON V

GOOD FRIDAY

Hebrews ix. 13, 14

For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

The three collects for Good Friday are very grand and very remarkable.  In the first we pray:—

‘Almighty God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross, who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost ever one God, world without end.  Amen.’

In the second we pray:—

‘Almighty and everlasting God, by whose Spirit the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified: Receive our supplications and prayers, which we offer before thee for all estates of men in thy holy Church, that every member of the same, in his vocation and ministry, may truly and godly serve thee; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.  Amen.’