341. The Gardens of the Sea

The Gardens of the Sea

Jon_2:5 : ’93The weeds were wrapped about my head.’94

In all our theological seminaries, where we make ministers, there ought to be professors to give lessons in Natural History. Physical Science ought to be taught side by side with Revelation. It is the same God who inspires the page of the natural world as the page of the Scriptural world. What a freshening up it would be to our sermons to press into them even a fragment of Mediterranean seaweed. We should have fewer sermons awfully dry if we imitated our blessed Lord; and in our discourses, like him, we would let a lily bloom, or a crow fly, or a hen brood her chickens, or a crystal of salt flash out the preservative qualities of religion. The trouble is that in many of our theological seminaries men who are so dry themselves they never could get people to come and hear them preach, are now trying to teach young men how to preach, and the student is put between two great presses of dogmatic theology and squeezed until there is no life left in him. Give the poor victim at least one lesson on the Botany of the Bible.

That was an awful plunge that the recreant prophet Jonah made when, dropped over the gunwale of the Mediterranean ship, he sank many fathoms down into a tempestuous sea. Both before and after the monster of the deep swallowed him, he was entangled in seaweed. The jungles of the deep threw their cordage of vegetation around him. Some of this seaweed was anchored to the bottom of the watery abysm, and some of it was afloat and swallowed by the great sea-monster, so that, while the prophet was at the bottom of the deep after he was horribly imprisoned, he could exclaim, and did exclaim in the words of my text: ’93The weeds were wrapped about my head.’94 Jonah was the first to record that there are growths upon the bottom of the sea, as well as upon land. The first picture I ever owned was a handful of seaweed pressed on a page, and I called them ’93The Shorn Locks of Neptune.’94 These products of the deep, whether brown or green or yellow or purple or red or inter-shot of many colors, are most fascinating. They are distributed all over the depths, and from Arctic to Antarctic. That God thinks well of them, I conclude from the fact that he has made six thousand species of them. Sometimes these water-plants are four hundred or seven hundred feet long, and they cable the sea. One specimen has a growth of fifteen hundred feet. On the northwest shore of our country is a seaweed with leaves thirty or forty feet long, amid which the sea-otter makes his home, resting himself on the buoyancy of the leaf and stem. The thickest jungles of the tropics are not more full of vegetation than the depths of the sea. There are forests down there and vast prairies all abloom, and God walks there as he walked in the Garden of Eden ’93in the cool of the day.’94 What entrancement, this subaqueous world! Oh, the God-given wonders of the seaweed! Its birthplace is a palace of crystal. The cradle that rocks it is the storm. Its grave is a sarcophagus of beryl and sapphire. There is no night down there. There are creatures of God on the bottom of the sea so constructed that, strewn all along, they make a firmament besprent with stars, constellations and galaxies of imposing lustre. The sea-feather is a lamplighter; the gymnotus is an electrician, and he is surcharged with electricity, and makes the deep bright with the lightning of the sea; the gorgona flashes like jewels. There are sea anemones ablaze with light; there is the star-fish and the moon-fish, so called because they so powerfully suggest stellar and lunar illumination. Oh! these midnight lanterns of the ocean caverns; these processions of flame over the white floor of the deep; these illuminations three miles down under the sea; these gorgeously upholstered castles of the Almighty in the underworld! The author of the text felt the pull of the hidden vegetation of the Mediterranean, whether or not he appreciated its beauty, as he cries out: ’93The weeds were wrapped about my head.’94

Let my subject cheer all those who had friends who have been buried at sea or in our great American lakes. Which of us brought up on the Atlantic coast has not had kindred or friend thus sepulchred? We had the useless horror of thinking that they were denied proper resting-place. We said: ’93Oh, if they had lived to come ashore, and had then expired! What an alleviation of our trouble it would have been to put them in some beautiful family plot, where we could have planted flowers and trees over them.’94 Why, God did better for them than we could have done for them. They were let down into beautiful gardens. Before they had reached the bottom they had garlands about their brow. In more elaborate and adorned place than we could have afforded them, they were put away for the last slumber. Hear it, mothers and fathers of sailor boys, whose ship went down in hurricane! There are no Greenwoods or Laurel Hills or Mount Auburns so beautiful on the land as there are banked and terraced and scooped and hung in the depths of the sea. The bodies of our foundered and sunken friends are girdled and canopied and housed with such glories as attend no other necropolis. They were swamped in life-boats, or they struck on Goodwin Sands or Deal Beach or the Skerries, and were never heard of, or disappeared with the City of Boston or the Ville de Havre or the Cymbria, or were run down in a fishing-smack that put out from Newfoundland. But dismiss your previous gloom about the horrors of ocean entombment.

When Sebastopol was besieged in the Crimean war, Prince Mentschikoff, commanding the Russian navy, saw that the only way to keep the English out of the harbor was to sink all of the Russian ships of war in the roadstead, and so one hundred vessels sank. When, after the war was over, our American engineer, Gowan, descended to the depths in a diving-bell, it was an impressive spectacle. One hundred buried ships! But it is that way nearly all across the Atlantic Ocean. Ships sunk not by command of admirals, but by the command of cyclones. But they all had sublime burial, and the surroundings amid which they sleep the last sleep are more imposing than the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum with walls encrusted with precious stones, and built by the Great Mogul of India over his Empress. Your departed ones were buried in the Gardens of the Sea, fenced off by hedges of coralline.

The greatest obsequies ever known on the land were those of Moses, where no one but God was present. The sublime report of that entombment is in the Book of Deuteronomy, which says that the Lord buried him, and of those who have gone down to slumber in the deep the same may be said’97’94The Lord buried them.’94 As Christ was buried in a garden, so your shipwrecked friends, and those who could not survive till they reached port, were put down amid iridescence’97’94In the midst of the garden there was a sepulchre.’94 It has always been a mystery what was the particular mode by which George G. Cookman, the pulpit orator of the Methodist Church and the Chaplain of the American Congress, left this life after embarking for England on the steamship President, March 11, 1841. That ship never arrived in port. No one ever signaled her, and on both sides of the ocean it has for fifty years been questioned what became of her. But this I know about Cookman, that whether it was an iceberg, or conflagration mid-sea, or collision, he had more garlands on his ocean tomb than if, expiring on land, each of his million friends had put a bouquet on his casket. In the midst of the garden was his sepulchre.

But that brings me to notice the misnomer in this Jonahitic expression of the text. The prophet not only made a mistake by trying to go to Tarshish when God told him to go to Nineveh, but he made a mistake when he styled as weeds these growths that enwrapped him on the day he sank. A weed is something that is useless. It is something you throw out from the garden. It is something that chokes the wheat. It is something to be grubbed out from among the cotton. It is something unsightly to the eye. It is an invader of the vegetable or floral world. But this growth that sprang up from the depth of the Mediterranean, or floated on its surface, was among the most beautiful things that God ever makes. It was a water-plant known as the red-colored Alga, and no weed at all. It comes from the loom of infinite beauty. It is planted by heavenly love. It is the star of a sunken firmament. It is a lamp which the Lord kindled. It is a cord by which to bind whole sheaves of practical suggestion. It is a poem all of whose cantos are sung by divine goodness. Yet we all make the mistake that Jonah made in regard to it, and call it a weed. ’93The weeds were wrapped about my head.’94 Ah! that is the trouble on the land as on the sea. We call those weeds that are flowers.

Pitched up on the beach of society are children without home, without opportunity for anything but sin, seemingly without God. They are washed up helpless. They are called ragamuffins. They are spoken of as the rakings of the world. They are waifs. They are street Arabs. They are flotsam and jetsam of the social sea. They are something to be left alone, or something to be trod on, or something to give up to decay. Nothing but weeds. They are up the rickety stairs of that garret. They are down in the cellar of that tenement house. They swelter in summers when they see not a blade of green grass, and shiver in winters that allow them not one warm coat or shawl or shoe. Such, a city missionary found in one of our New York city rookeries, and when the poor woman was asked if she sent her children to school, she replied: ’93No, sir, I never did send ’91em to school. I know it, they ought to learn, but I couldn’92t. I try to shame him sometimes (it is my husband, sir), but he drinks and then beats me’97look at that bruise on my face’97and I tell him to see what is comin’92 to his children. There’92s Peggy, goes sellin’92 fruit every night in those cellars in Water Street, and they’92re hells, sir. She’92s learning all sorts of bad words there, and don’92t get back till twelve o’92clock at night. If it wasn’92t for her earnin’92 a shillin’92 or two in them places, I should starve. Oh, I wish they was out of the city. Yes, it is the truth; I would rather have all my children dead than in the street, but I can’92t help it.’94 Another one of those poor women, found by a reformatory association, recited her story of want and woe, and looked up and said: ’93I felt so hard to lose the children when they died, but now I’92m glad they’92re gone.’94 Ask any one of a thousand such children on the streets: ’93Where do you live?’94 and they will answer: ’93I don’92t live nowhere.’94 They will sleep to-night in ash-barrels, or under outdoor stairs, or on the wharf, kicked and bruised and hungry. Who cares for them? Once in a while a city missionary or a tract distributor or a teacher of ragged schools will rescue one of them, but for most people they are only weeds. Yet, Jonah did not more completely misrepresent the red algae about his head in the Mediterranean than most people misjudge these poor and forlorn and dying children of the street. They are not weeds. They are immortal flowers. Down in the deep sea of woe, but flowers. When society and the Church of God come to appreciate their eternal value, there will be more C. L. Braces and more Van Meters and more Angels of Mercy spending their fortunes and their lives in the rescue. Hear it, oh, ye philanthropic and Christian and merciful souls; not weeds, but flowers. I adjure you as the friends of all newsboys’92 lodging houses, of all industrial schools, of all homes for friendless girls, and for the many reformatories and humane associations now on foot. How much they have already accomplished. Out of what wretchedness, into what good homes. Of twenty thousand of these picked up out of the streets and sent into country homes, only twelve children turned out badly. In the last thirty years an army of the vagrants that no man can number have been lifted into respectability and usefulness and a Christian life. Many of them have homes of their own. Though ragged boys once and street girls, now at the head of prosperous families, honored on earth and to be glorious in heaven. Some of them have been governors of States. Some of them are ministers of the Gospel. In all departments of life those who were thought to be weeds have turned out to be flowers. One of those rescued lads from the streets of our cities wrote to another, saying: ’93I have heard you are studying for the ministry; so am I.’94

I implead you for the newsboys of the streets, many of them the brightest children of the city, but no chance. Do not step on their bare feet. Do not, when they steal a ride, cut behind. When the paper is two cents, once in a while give them a five-cent piece, and tell them to keep the change. I like the ring of the letter the newsboy sent back from Indiana, where he had been sent to a good home, to a New York newsboys’92 lodging house: ’93Boys, we should show ourselves that we are no fools, that we can become as respectable as any of the countrymen, for Franklin and Webster and Clay were poor boys once, and even George Law and Vanderbilt and Astor. And now, boys, stand up, and let them see you have got the real stuff in you. Come out here and make respectable and honorable men, so they can say: ’91There, that boy was once a newsboy.’92’93 My hearers, join the Christian philanthropists who are changing organ-grinders and bootblacks and newsboys and street Arabs and cigar girls into those who shall be kings and queens unto God forever. It is high time that Jonah finds out that that which is about him is not weeds, but flowers.

As I examine this red alga which was about the recreant prophet down in the Mediterranean depths, when, in the words of my text, he cried out: ’93The weeds were wrapped about my head,’94 and I am led thereby to further examine this submarine world, I am compelled to exclaim, what a wonderful God we have! I am glad that, by diving-bell and ’93Brooks’92 Deep-Sea Sounding Apparatus’94 and ever improving machinery, we are permitted to walk the floor of the ocean and report the wonders wrought by the great God. Study these gardens of the sea. Easier and easier shall the profounds of the ocean become to us, and more and more its opulence of color and plant unroll especially as ’93Villeroy’92s Submarine Boat’94 has been constructed making it possible to navigate under the sea almost as well as on the surface of the sea, and unless God in his mercy banishes war from the earth, whole fleets of armed ships will yet far down under the water move on to blow up the argosies that float the surface. May such submarine ships be used for laying open the wonders of God’92s workings in the great deep and never for human devastation! Oh, the marvels of the water-world! These so-called seaweeds are the pasture fields and the forage of the innumerable animals of the deep. Not one species of them can be spared from the economy of nature.

Valleys and mountains and plants miles underneath the waves are all covered with flora and fauna. Sunken Alps and Apennines and Himalayas of Atlantic and Pacific oceans. A continent that once connected Europe and America, so that in the ages past men came on foot across from where England is to where we now stand, all sunken, and now covered with the growths of the land. England and Ireland once all one piece of land, but now much of it so far sunken as to make a channel, and Ireland has become an island. The islands, for the most part, are only the foreheads of sunken continents. The sea conquering the land all along the coasts, and crumbling the hemispheres, wider and wider become the subaqueous dominions. Thank God that skilled hydrographers have made us maps and charts of the rivers and lakes and seas, and shown us something of the work of the Eternal God in the water-worlds. Thank God that the great Virginian, Lieutenant Maury, lived to give us ’93The Physical Geography of the Sea,’94 and that men of genius have gone forth to study the so-called weeds that wrapped about Jonah’92s head and have found them to be coronals of beauty, and when the tide receded, these scientists have waded down and picked up divinely pictured leaves of the ocean, the naturalists, Pike and Hooper and Walters, gathering them from the beach of Long Island Sound, and Dr. Blodgett preserving them from the shores of Key West, and Professors Emerson and Gray finding them along Boston Harbor, and Professor Gibbs gathering them from Charleston Harbor, and for all the other triumphs of algology, or the science of seaweed. Why confine ourselves to the old and hackneyed illustrations of the wonder-workings of God, when there are at least five great seas full of illustrations as yet not marshaled, every root and frond and cell and color and movement and habit of oceanic vegetation crying out: ’93God! God! He made us. He clothed us. He adorned us. He was the God of our ancestors clear back to the first sea-growth, when God divided the waters which were above the firmament from the waters which were under the firmament, and shall be the God of our descendants clear down to the day when the sea shall give up its dead. We have heard his command and we have obeyed: ’91Praise the Lord, dragons and all deeps.’92’93

There is a great comfort that rolls over upon us from this study of the so-called seaweed, and that is the demonstrated doctrine of a particular Providence. When I find that the Lord provides in the so-called seaweed the pasturage for the thronged marine world, so that not a fin or scale in all that oceanic aquarium suffers need, I conclude he will feed us, and if he suits the alg’e6 to the animal life of the deep, he will provide the food for our physical and spiritual needs. And if he clothes the flowers of the deep with richness of robe that looks bright as fallen rainbows by day, and at night makes the underworld look as though the sea were on fire, surely he will clothe you: ’93O, ye of little faith!’94 And what fills me with unspeakable delight is that this God of depths and heights, of ocean and of continent, may, through Jesus Christ, the divinely appointed means, be yours and mine, to help, to cheer, to pardon, to save, to emparadise. What matters who in earth or hell is against us, if he is for us? Omnipotence to defend us, Omnipresence to companion us, and Infinite love to enfold and uplift and enrapture us. And when God does small things so well, seemingly taking as much care with the coil of a seaweed as the outbranching of a Lebanon cedar, and with the color of a vegetable growth which is hidden fathoms out of sight as he does with the solferino and purple of a summer sunset, we will be determined to do well all we are called to do, though no one see or appreciate us. Mighty God! Roll in upon our admiration and holy appreciation more of the wonders of this submarine world.

My joy is that after we are quit of all earthly hindrances we may come back to this world and explore what we cannot now fully investigate. If we shall have power to soar into the atmospheric without fatigue I think we shall have power to dive into the aqueous without peril, and that the pictured and tessellated sea-floor will be as accessible as now is to the traveler the floor of the Alhambra; and all the gardens of the deep will then swing open to us their gates as now to the tourist Chatsworth opens on public days its cascades and statuary and conservatories for our entrance. ’93It doth not yet appear what we shall be.’94 You cannot make me believe that God hath spread out all that garniture of the deep merely for the polyps and crustacea to look at.

And if the unintelligent creatures of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, he surrounds with such beautiful grasses of the deep, what a heaven we may expect for our uplifted and ransomed souls when we are unchained of the flesh and rise to realms beatific. Of the flora of that ’93Sea of glass mingled with fire,’94 I have no power to speak, but I shall always be glad that, when the prophet of the text, flung over the gunwale of the Mediterranean ship, descended into the boiling sea, that which he supposed to be weeds wrapped about his head were not weeds but flowers. And am I not right in this glance at the Botany of the Bible in adding to Luke’92s mint, anise and cummin, and Matthew’92s tares, and John’92s vine, and Solomon’92s cluster of camphire, and Jeremiah’92s balm, and Job’92s bulrush, and Isaiah’92s terebinth, and Hosea’92s thistle, and Ezekiel’92s cedar, and ’93the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,’94 and the ’93Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley,’94 and the frankincense and myrrh and cassia which the astrologers brought to the manger, at least one stalk of the Alg’e6 of the Mediterranean? And now I make the marine doxology of David my peroration, for it was written about forty or fifty miles from the place where the scene of the text was enacted. ’93The sea is his and he made it! and his hands formed the dry land. Oh, come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture.’94 Amen.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage