060. The Drowned Lads

The Drowned Lads

Deu_33:13 : ’93The deep that coucheth beneath.’94

Switzerland has the glaciers of Mont Blanc as a crown for her brow and Lake Geneva for an emerald on her right hand. In the Swiss rail-train, we are told that we must look out for the bridge where, as he emerges, there suddenly dashes upon the eye of the traveler one of the most extraordinary scenes of beauty and grandeur in all Europe. In the twinkling of an eye appears Lausanne, seated on her throne of three hills, with thirty-five thousand population; her cathedral, nine hundred years old, with apsed chapels and Byzantine capitals; her museums, distinguished the world over for the finest specimens in minerals and animals and shell-fish; her terraces and gardens, bewitching with aroma and luxuriance; her schools, which, by the rarest opportunity for culture, invite the youth of America and of all the world; Lake Geneva, deep, yet the clearest of waters, traversed by steamers crowded with passengers from all lands, and fishing-smacks here and there hauling out trout and pike and perch and salmon; and sail-boats going out from the castles on the beach, occupied by gentlemen of fortune. This sheet of water, skirted by mountains, Jura and the Alps, some green with verdure, some white with snow, some cleft with streams, crystalline and arrowy, the chalices of the floods emptying into this great bowl of the mountain. On the banks of this lake Gibbon, Rousseau, and Voltaire studied, and Byron dramatized, and John Kemble, the tragedian, lies buried and Rothschild built his mansion and ten thousand men and women, far better than any I have mentioned have gone up and down, adoring the God who lifted the hills and sunk this great inland sea. May you all live to behold the Alps, cloud-turbaned, looking down into the mirror of beautiful Geneva!

One summer day, two lads of our own city, and much of the time of our own congregation, pushed out from Lausanne on those exquisite waters, on a pleasure excursion. It was in the leisure of school-hours. A sudden storm swept over the lake, capsizing that boat; or there was a defect in the vessel, and those precious lives were emptied into a watery grave. You say that they ought not to have gone where there was danger. I reply, where will you go and find no danger? You go down the street, a scaffold may fall on you. You go to the park, the horses may become unmanageable. You take the rail-train, a switchman may turn the track the wrong way. You stay at home, the lightning may strike through the roof or miasma may come in through the open window. Dangers stand round us everywhere to press us to the tomb.

There is great health for a student in rowing with the oar, and great exhilaration in the spreading of the sail; but the lake that you stroke and fondle, thinking it harmless and asleep, sometimes proves treacherous to the yacht, and springs upon it like a panther, clutching it down with wrathful, overmastering strength. So that Moses, in the text, graphically and truthfully describes the fatal slyness of river and lake and sea when he says, ’93The deep that coucheth beneath.’94

The particulars of that sad event have not yet come to us; but never, through the coral caves of the Atlantic and amidst the gardens of sea-weed and along by the hulks of the wrecked shipping, could a more fearful message travel the submarine cable than that which came briefly announcing that two American students at Lausanne, Switzerland, had ended their mortal life in Lake Geneva. Such a transition is the easiest and most painless of all modes of getting out of this life. After one minute of submergence, generally, consciousness is gone. The Navarino sponge-divers cannot bear to stay under the water more than two minutes, notwithstanding all their experience; and yet persons who have been resuscitated tell us that the mind at such a time acts with wonderful velocity. And so I suppose these dear lads had time to think of home, and the sadness of the parental hearts whom they expected to join again in October. God decreed otherwise, and may his omnipotent grace soothe the bereaved and the desolate.

There is in this event a new illustration of a very old lesson. You tell me nothing but a stereotyped thing when you tell me of life’92s uncertainty. I have heard that a thousand times from ministers and prayer-meeting talkers and Sabbath-school teachers; and when you make that observation, I open my eyes no wider, nor does my heart beat quicker; but when you tell me that a boat flung two beloved lads into a watery grave, then I am stunned by the telegram, and compelled to read the truth written by pen of lightning stretched up from under the sea. How quickly our life comes, and how soon it goes! We pass along a perilous cliff, and we almost hold our breath and balance ourselves lest we fall off and, getting beyond the pass, we thank God for our deliverance, but perhaps lie down and die in the smooth plain beneath. Many a man has gone through three or four battles unclipped of bullet or sabre, who has had his life at last dashed out on the icy pavement in front of his doorstep or by the snapping of a whiffletree. You go two thousand miles in an express train unharmed, to lose your life at the hands of a reckless hackman in your own village. These two lads of whom I am speaking went through three thousand miles of stormy Atlantic unharmed, to find their death on a lake that they might have sailed across in thirty minutes. When we picture our exit from this world, we are very apt to think of a soft couch and a shaded room and careful attendants; but many of us will never have anything like that. It will be a rush and a plunge and a leap and a fall and the world flashes out and eternity flashes in!

You tell me that this lesson of life’92s uncertainty is appropriate only for the old, for the emaciated, for the sick. Ah, no! these lads did not come crawling down to the boat, they did not come on crutches, they were not fagged out. They came bounding into the boat, elastic, ruddy, robust. They expected to live seventy years. Their lungs sound, their hearts beating with healthful pulsation, their limbs lithe, their clear eye taking in the sheen of wave and the frown of crag and the azure of sky, they sprang to their places in the prow or stern with shout and laughter. They had no premonition that they were to go. So it will be with many of us. You pay a certain amount of money, premium for life insurance, that, when you are gone, your family may get relief from it; but what life insurance company would dare to say to a man, ’93You will live a year’94 or ’93You will live six months’94 or ’93You will live a week’94 or ’93You will live a day’94 or ’93You will live an hour’94 or ’93You will live a second’94’97and warrant it? I come to this platform strong and well, but that is no assurance that I shall go off alive. To-morrow morning you cross the ferry in good health; that is no assurance that you will come back without being helped. Our physical organism is such a delicate, intricate, elaborate piece of Divine mechanism that if but the little finger of disaster touch it too roughly it crushes into ruin. God, as if to show that you cannot depend upon physiological appearances, lets some invalid crawl on to eighty-five years of age, kept up by tonics and plasters, and helped by spectacles and ear-trumpets and canes, while there are thousands, muscular, roundly developed, and athletic, who drop dead under apoplectic stroke. Feel in your pockets and bring me out, if you can, a document rightly signed and sealed warranting you to get through this night alive. I saw plunging into Lake Geneva the River Rhone. It came on with swift uproar, and you could tell some distance back that it was coming on to that plunge. But who can tell at what moment, at what day, the river of our life shall empty into the deep, wide, infinite future? All the heavy shipping that goes out of New York goes through the ’93Narrows’94; but by what different tack! to what different harbors!

One of the most fascinating excursions in Switzerland is to the Castle of Chalons, in the midst of those very Genevan waters. History and poetry tell us that Bonivard, the hero, was chained in that castle six years; and you can see the bolt and ring by which he was fastened and the circular depression in the ground where he tramped about. After a while a flotilla came down and he was freed; but he heard them coming before his shout of deliverance mingled with their shout of victory. Yet here, my friends, we go tramping around in this earthly prison-house, chained to a body from which we cannot get free, not knowing at what moment the forces of the great future may break in upon us to shatter these manacles of flesh, and disendungeon our immortal spirit, until the prisoner of Chalons shall become the victor of the skies.

Do you not feel that we walk amidst a vast uncertainty, not knowing what peril may swoop from above or what deep may be crouching beneath? Suppose you had been with those boys in that boat, would you have been ready? It was well for them that they were children of the Covenant’97’94I will be a God to thee and to thy seed after thee’94’97and that they were praying boys, in their Brooklyn home kneeling down with their mother and praying aloud, not ashamed to let the world hear any more than to let God hear. When the boat became unmanageable, and they were trying to haul in sail, they would not have had so good an opportunity for spiritual preparation as they had in their calm Brooklyn home, where they were not ashamed to acknowledge Jesus! Many of you may go out of life just as suddenly. Whether by flood or fire or earthquake or lightning flash or colliding rail-trains or a fatal slip on an orange peeling in the street, I know not; but you will have then no time to repent, and you will have no time to pray. If all the churches and cathedrals of the world should then go crying unto God in your behalf, it would not do you any good. All the preparation a man makes for the great future, he has to make this side the sharp line that divides the two residences.

I see in this event that hilarity and gladness cannot keep back the fatal attack. When three or four students are together, and in such a tonic and exhilarating air as that of Switzerland, there is mirth and exuberance unbounded. They did not see the soft paws of the wave reaching up around the gilded boat, nor did they imagine that the deep lay couched beneath, ready to spring upon them. I believe in mirth and in boating and in pleasure excursions; but I want you to understand that gladness and hilarity of surrounding cannot keep back our last moment. It may come treading over rose leaves; it may come keeping step to the thrum of the harp, while hands are clapping, while feet are bounding, while all sails are set over a glassy sea. So it came when the Arctic and the Vesta, mid-Atlantic, struck. So it came when the Austria burned on the high seas. So it came when Richmond Court-house fell. So it came when the Ville du Havre sank. ’93In such a day, and in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometh.’94 Oh, this bell of warning that rings tonight has not attached to it a short rope that any sexton may seize, but a twisted strand of wire three thousand miles long, and the red fingers of the lightning pull it until it rings from continent to continent, ’93Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work nor device nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.’94 What a voice for the youth of my congregation’97the voice that comes from Lake Geneva tonight! Young people do not like anything dull or stupid. Neither do I, and I do not blame them for that; but there is nothing tame in this event. It comes with a great thrill, and it seems that your body and mind and soul must feel the shock.

They had every prospect of living. Just look at their pictures. See what broad shoulders they had, what stout chests, what ruddy cheeks, what grand foreheads. ’93Oh!’94 you say, ’93if they had only known how to swim, it would have been all right.’94 They could swim; they could outswim you. They were as familiar with the water as many with the land. They were splendid swimmers. Their father had taught them how to take this exercise. But they were too far from shore, or the boom struck them, and they are gone. They had no power to stand up against a lake one thousand feet deep. Their father, who had often been with them on the water, was not there. He could give them no relief. But I think that he who walked Lake Gennesaret walked Lake Geneva, and that they are safe. O man! O woman! when your last moment comes, you want something more than a human arm to help you. No one but Jesus then; no one but Jesus now.

They had brilliant prospects. In Germany, in Paris, and in Switzerland they had studied, at the fountain-head, those languages through which comes so much of the culture and refinement of the world. The gates of knowledge and of success were open before them, but they died at the gates, and all the plans for earthly welfare ended then and there. Do not build too much upon this world. It is a glassy surface, with a thousand feet of graves beneath. Do you think you can sail that craft and clew down the topsail-yards and haul out the reef tackles? A sudden squall may come, and you will go down, unless there be a Christ sleeping in the hinder part of the ship, ready in the nick of time to rise up and hush the wind and silence the sea. I believe the Son of God was in that tossing boat, and that when these lads cried out, in their extremity, ’93Master, save us, we perish!’94 I think then and there he came to their spiritual and immortal rescue.

Let us pray God he will comfort those who are waiting for more minute tidings of this event. The tongue of the cable seems to have been palsied with the tidings, and it does not talk plainly. I wish their bodies might be found. It would be a satisfaction, though a sad satisfaction, to have them here in one of our own cemeteries. As the mother said to me a few hours later, it would seem like tucking them away in bed safely for the night. But if God shall deny these parents this, it will make no difference to the lads and the archangel’92s trumpet that wakes up the sea will wake up also the lake. And, after all, they can find no grander place to sleep than where they are sleeping now; the shadows of Jura and the Alps blanketing them in their slumbers, while vast, majestic Mont Blanc bends over them snow-white, the only fit type of the great white throne before which they and we shall be assembled.

Before they went away, on the finger of one of the lads was placed a gold ring with the inscription, ’93God bless you’94; and on the finger of the other lad was placed a gold ring with the inscription, ’93Remember father and mother’94; but God your Father would this night put upon your soul immortal the signet-ring of his everlasting affection. Will you wear it?

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage