178. The Lightning of the Sea

The Lightning of the Sea

Job_41:32 : ’93He maketh a path to shine after him.’94

If for the next thousand years ministers of religion should preach from this Bible there will yet be texts unexpounded and unexplained and unappreciated. What little has been said concerning this chapter in Job from which my text is taken, bears on the controversy as to what was really the leviathan described as disturbing the sea. What creature it was I know not. Some say it was a whale. Some say it was a crocodile. My own opinion is, it was a sea-monster now extinct. No creature now floating in Mediterranean or Atlantic waters corresponds to Job’92s description.

What most interests me is that as it moved on through the deep it left the waters flashing and resplendent. In the words of the text, ’93He maketh a path to shine after him.’94 What was that illumined path? It was phosphorescence. You find it in the wake of a ship in the night, especially after rough weather. Phosphorescence is the lightning of the sea. That this figure of speech is correct in describing its appearance I am certified by an incident. After crossing the Atlantic the first time and writing from Basle, Switzerland, to an American magazine an account of my voyage, in which nothing more fascinated me than the phosphorescence in the ship’92s wake, I called it The Lightning of the Sea. Returning to my hotel, I found a book of John Ruskin, and the first sentence my eyes fell upon was his description of phosphorescence, in which he called it ’93The Lightning of the Sea.’94 Down to the post-office I hastened to get the manuscript, and with great labor and some expense got possession of the magazine article and put quotation marks around that one sentence, although it was as original with me as with John Ruskin.

I suppose that nine-tenths of you living so near the sea-coast have watched this marine appearance called phosphorescence, and I hope that the other tenth may some day be so happy as to witness it. It is the waves of the sea diamonded; it is the inflorescence of the billows; the waves of the sea crimsoned, as was the deep after the sea-fight of Lepanto; the waves of the sea on fire. There are times when from horizon to horizon the entire ocean seems in conflagration with this strange splendor, as it changes every moment to duller or more dazzling color on all sides of you. You sit looking over the taffrail of the yacht or ocean steamer watching and waiting to see what new thing the God of beauty will do with the Atlantic. It is the ocean in transfiguration; it is the marine world casting its garments of glory in the pathway of the Almighty as he walks the deep; it is an inverted firmament with all the stars gone down with it. No picture can present it, for photographer’92s camera cannot be successfully trained to catch it, and before it the hand of the painter drops its pencil, overawed and powerless. This phosphorescence is the appearance of myriads of the animal kingdom rising, falling, playing, flashing, living, dying. These luminous animalcules for nearly one hundred and fifty years have been the study of naturalists and the fascination and solemnization of all who have brain enough to think. Now, God, who puts in his Bible nothing trivial or useless, calls the attention of Job, the greatest scientist of his day, to this phosphorescence, and as the leviathan of the deep sweeps past, points out the fact that ’93he maketh a path to shine after him.’94

Is that true of us now, and will it be true of us when we have gone? Will there be subsequent light or darkness? Will there be a trail of gloom or good cheer? Can any one between now and the next one hundred years say of us truthfully as the text says of the leviathan of the deep, ’93He maketh a path to shine after him?’94 For we are moving on. While we live in the same house, and transact business in the same store, and write on the same table, and chisel in the same studio, and thresh in the same barn, and worship in the same church, we are in motion, and are in many respects moving on, and we are not where we were ten years ago, nor where we will be ten years hence. Moving on! Look at the family record, or the almanac, or into the mirror, and see if any one of you is where you were. All in motion. Other feet may trip and stumble and halt, but the foot of not one moment for the last sixty centuries has tripped or stumbled or halted. Moving on! Society moving on! Heaven moving on! The universe moving on! Time moving on! Eternity moving on! Therefore, it is absurd to think that we ourselves can stop, as we must move with all the rest. Are we like the creature of the text, making our path to shine after us? It may be a peculiar question, but my text suggests it. What influence will we leave in this world after we have gone through it? ’93None,’94 answer hundreds of voices; ’93we are not of the immortals. Fifty years after we are out of the world it will be as though we never inhabited it.’94 You are wrong in saying that. I pass through an audience looking for some one whom I cannot find. I look for one who will have no influence in this world a hundred years from now. But I find the man who has the least influence, and I inquire into his history and I find that by a ’93yes’94 or a ’93no’94 he decided some one’92s eternity. In time of temptation he gave an affirmative or a negative to some temptation which another, hearing of, was induced to decide in the same way. Clear on the other side of the next million years may be the first you hear of the long-reaching influence of that ’93yes’94 or ’93no,’94 but hear of it you will. Will that father make a path to shine after him? Will that mother make a path to shine after her? You will be walking along these streets, or along that country road two hundred years from now in the character of your descendants. They will be affected by your courage or your cowardice, your purity or your depravity, your holiness or your sin. You will make the path to shine after you or darken after you.

Why should they point out to us on some mountain two rivulets, one of which passes down into the rivers which pour out into the Pacific Ocean and the other rivulet flowing down into the rivers which pass out into the Atlantic Ocean? Every man, every woman, stands at a point where words uttered, or prayers offered, decide opposite destinies and opposite eternities. We see a man planting a tree, and treading the sod firmly on each side of it, and watering it in dry weather, and taking great care in its culture, and he never plucks any fruit from its bough; but his children will. We are all planting trees that will yield fruit hundreds of years after we are dead, orchards of golden fruit, or groves of deadly upas. I am so fascinated with the phosphorescence in the track of a ship that I have sometimes watched for a long while, and have seen nothing on the face of the deep but blackness, the mouth of watery chasms that looked like gaping jaws of hell. Not a spark as big as the firefly; not a white scroll of surf; not a taper to illuminate the mighty sepulchres of dead ships; darkness three thousand feet deep, and more thousands of feet long and wide. That is the kind of wake that a bad man leaves behind him as he plows through the ocean of this life toward the vaster ocean of the great future.

Now, suppose a man seated in a corner grocery, or business office among clerks, gives himself to hilarious scepticism. He laughs at the Bible, makes sport of the miracles, speaks of perdition in jokes, and laughs at revivals as a frolic, and at the passage of a funeral procession, which always solemnizes sensible people, says, ’93Boys, let’92s take a drink.’94 There is in that group a young man who is making a great struggle against temptation, and prays night and morning, and reads his Bible, and is asking God for help day by day. But that guffaw against Christianity makes him lose his grip of sacred things and he gives up Sabbath and Church and morals, and goes from bad to worse, till he falls under dissipation, dies in a lazar house and is buried in the potter’92s field. Another young man who heard that merry scepticism made up his mind that ’93it makes no difference what we do or say, for we will all come out at last at the right place,’94 and began, as a consequence, to purloin. Some money that came into his hands for others he applied to his own use, thinking perhaps he would make it straight some other time, and all would be well, even if he did not make it straight. He ends in the penitentiary. That scoffer who uttered the jokes against Christianity never realized what bad work he was doing, and he passed on through life, and out of it, and into a future that I am not now going to depict. I do not propose with a searchlight to show the breakers of the awful coast on which that ship is wrecked, for my business now is to watch the sea after the keel has plowed it. No phosphorescence in the wake of that ship, but behind it two souls struggling in the wave; two young men destroyed by reckless scepticism, an unillumined ocean beneath, and on all sides of them blackness of darkness. You know what a gloriously good man the Rev. John Newton was, the most of his life, but before his conversion he was a very wicked sailor, and on board the ship Harwich instilled in the mind of a young man infidelity and vice’97principles which destroyed him. Afterward the two met and Newton tried to undo his bad work, but in vain. The young man became worse and worse, and died a profligate, horrifying with his profanities those who stood by him in his last moments. Better look out what bad influence you start, for you may not be able to stop it. It does not require very great force to ruin others. Why was it that many years ago a great flood nearly destroyed New Orleans? A crawfish had burrowed into the banks of the river until the ground was saturated, and the banks weakened until the flood burst.

But I find here a man who starts out in life with the determination that he will never see suffering without trying to alleviate it, and never see discouragement without trying to cheer it, and never meet with anybody without trying to do him good. Getting his strength from God, he starts from home with high purposes of doing all the good he can possibly do in one day. Whether standing behind the counter, or talking in the business office with a pen behind his ear, or making a bargain with a fellow-trader, or out in the fields discussing with his next neighbor the wisest rotation of crops, or in the shoemaker’92s shop pounding the sole-leather, there is something in his face and in his phraseology and in his manner that demonstrates the grace of God in his heart. He can talk on religion without awkwardly dragging it in by the ears. He loves God, and loves the souls of all whom he meets, and is interested in their present and eternal destiny. For fifty or sixty years he lives that kind of life, and then gets through with it and goes into heaven a ransomed soul. But I am not going to describe the port into which that ship has entered. I am not going to describe the Pilot who met him outside at the ’93lightship.’94 I am not going to say anything about the crowds of friends who met him on the crystalline wharves up which he goes on steps of chrysoprasus. For God in his words to Job calls me to look at the path of foam in the wake of that ship, and it is all a-gleam with splendors of kindness done, and rolling with illumined tears that were wiped away, and a-dash with congratulations; and clear out to the horizon in all directions is the sparkling, flashing, billowing phosphorescence of a Christian life. ’93He maketh a path to shine after him.’94

And here I correct one of the mean notions which at some time takes possession of all of us, and that is as to the brevity of human life. When I bury some very useful man, clerical or lay, in his thirtieth or fortieth year, I say, ’93What a waste of energies! It was hardly worth while for him to get ready for Christian work, for he had so soon to quit it.’94 But the fact is that I may insure any man or woman, who does any good on a large or small scale, for a life on earth as long as the world lasts. Sickness, trolley-car accidents, death itself, can no more destroy his life than they can tear down one of the rings of Saturn. You can start one good word, one kind act, one cheerful smile, on a mission that will last until the world becomes a bonfire, and out of that blaze it will pass into the heavens, never to halt as long as God lives.

There were in the seventeenth century men and women, whose names you never heard of, who are today influencing schools, colleges, churches, nations. You can no more measure the gracious results of their lifetime than you could measure the length and breadth and depth of the phosphorescence following the ship of a great ocean liner 1,500 miles out at sea. How the courage and consecration of others inspire us to follow, as a general in the American army, cool amid the flying bullets, inspired a trembling soldier, who said afterwards, ’93I was nearly scared to death, but I saw the old man’92s white moustache over his shoulder, and went on.’94 Aye, we are all following somebody, either in right or wrong directions. One day I stood beside the garlanded casket of a Gospel minister, and in my remarks had occasion to recall a snowy night in a farmhouse when I was a boy, and an evangelist spending a night at my father’92s house, who said something so tender and beautiful and impressive that it led me into the kingdom of God, and decided my destiny for this world and the next. You will probably, before twenty-four hours go by, meet some man or woman with a big pack of care and trouble, and you may say something to him or her that will endure until this world shall have been so far lost in the past that nothing but the stretch of angelic memory will be able to realize that it ever existed at all. I am not talking of remarkable men and women, but of what ordinary folks can do. I am not speaking of the phosphorescence in the wake of a Campania, but of the phosphorescence in the track of a Newfoundland fishing-smack. God makes thunderbolts out of sparks, and out of the small words and deeds of a small life he can launch a power that will flash and burn and thunder through the eternities. How do you like this prolongation of your earthly life by deathless influence? Many a babe that died at six months of age, by the anxiety created in the parents’92 heart to meet that child in realms seraphic, is living yet in the transformed heart and life of those parents, and will live on forever in the history of that family.

If this be the opportunity of ordinary souls, what is the opportunity of those who have especial intellectual or social or monetary equipment? Have you any arithmetic capable of estimating the influence of our good and gracious friend now at rest’97George W. Childs, of Philadelphia? From a newspaper that was printed for thirty years without one word of defamation or scurrility or scandal, and putting chief emphasis on virtue and charity and clean intelligence, he reaped a fortune for himself and then distributed a vast amount of it among the poor and struggling; putting his invalid and aged reporters on pensions, until his name stands everywhere for large-heartedness and sympathy and help and highest style of Christian gentleman. In an era which had in the chairs of its journalism a Horace Greeley and a Henry J. Raymond and a James Gordon Bennett and an Erastus Brooks and a George William Curtis and an Irenaeus Prime none of them will be longer remembered than George W. Childs. Staying away from the unveiling of the monument he had reared at large expense in Greenwood in memory of Professor Proctor, the astronomer, lest I should say something in praise of the man who had paid for the monument. By all acknowledged a representative of the highest American journalism. If you would calculate his influence for good you must count how many sheets of his newspaper have been published in the last quarter of a century, and how many people have read them, and the effect not only upon the readers, but upon all whom they shall influence for all time; while you add to all that the work of the churches he helped build, and of the institutions of mercy he helped found. Better give up before you start the measuring of the phosphorescence in the wake of that ship of the Celestial Line. Who can tell the post-mortem influence of a Savonarola, a Winklereid, a Guttenberg, a Marlborough, a Decatur, a Toussaint, a Bolivar, a Clarkson, a Robert Raikes, a Harlan Page, who had one hundred and twenty-five scholars, eighty-four of whom became Christians, and six of them ministers of the Gospel?

With gratitude and penitence and worship I mention the grandest Life that was ever lived. That ship of light was launched from the heavens nearly 1,900 years ago, angelic hosts chanting, and from the celestial wharves the ship sprang into the roughest sea that ever tossed. Its billows were made up of the wrath of men and devils, Herodic and Sanhedrimic persecutions stirring the deep with red wrath, and all the hurricanes of woe smote it, until on the rocks of Golgotha that life struck with a resound of agony that appalled the earth and the heavens. But in the wake of that life what a phosphorescence of smiles on the cheek of souls pardoned and lives reformed and nations redeemed. The millennium itself is only one roll of that irradiated wave of gladness and benediction. In the sublimest of all senses it may be said of him, ’93He maketh a path to shine after him.’94

But I cannot look upon that luminosity that follows ships without realizing how fond the Lord is of life. That fire of the deep is life, myriads of creatures all a-swim and a-play and a-romp in parks of marine beauty, laid out and parterred and roseated and blossomed by Omnipotence. What is the use of those creatures called by naturalists ’93crustaceans’94 and ’93copepods,’94 not more than one out of hundreds of billions of which are ever seen by human eye? God created them for the same reason that he creates flowers in places where no human foot ever makes them tremble, and no human nostril ever inhales their redolence, and no human eye ever sees their charm. In the botanical world they prove that God loves flowers, as in the marine world the phosphori prove that he loves life, and he loves life in play, life in brilliancy of gladness, life in exuberance.

And so I am led to believe that he loves our life if we fulfil our mission as fully as the phosphori fulfil theirs. The Son of God came ’93that we might have life, and have it more abundantly.’94 But I am glad to tell you that our God is not the God sometimes described as a harsh critic at the head of the universe, or an infinite scold; or a God that loves funerals better than weddings; or a God that prefers tears to laughter, an omnipotent Nero, a ferocious Nana Sahib; but the loveliest Being in the universe, loving flowers and life and play, whether of phosphori in the wake of the Majestic, or of the human race keeping a holiday. But mark that the phosphorescence has a glow that the night monopolizes, and I ask you not only what kind of influence you are going to leave in the world as you pass through it, but what light are you going to throw across the world’92s night of sin and sorrow? People who are sailing on smooth sea and at noon do not need much sympathy, but what are you going to do for people in the night of misfortune? Will you drop on them shadow, or will you kindle for them phosphorescence? At this moment there are more people crying than laughing; more people on the round world this moment hungry than well-fed; more households bereft than homes unbroken. What are you going to do about it? ’93Well,’94 says yonder soul, ’93I would like to do something toward illumining the great ocean of human wretchedness, but I cannot do much.’94 Can you do as much as one of the phosphori in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, creatures smaller than the point of a sharp pin? ’93Oh, yes,’94 you say. Then do that. Shine! Stand before the looking-glass and experiment to see if you cannot get that scowl off your forehead, that peevish look out of your lips. Have at least one bright ribbon in your bonnet. Embroider at least one white cord somewhere in the midnight of your apparel. Do not any longer impersonate a funeral! Shine! Do say something cheerful about society, and about the world. Put a few drops of Heaven into your disposition. Once in awhile substitute a sweet orange for a sour lemon. Remember that pessimism is blasphemy, and that optimism is Christianity. Throw some light on the night ocean. If you cannot be a lantern swinging in the rigging, be one of the tiny phosphori back of the keel. Shine! ’93Let your light so shine before men that others seeing your good works may glorify your Father which is in Heaven.’94 Make one person happy every day, and do that for twenty years and you will have made seven thousand, three hundred happy. You know a man who lost all his property by an unfortunate investment, or by putting his name on the back of a friend’92s note? Go and cheer up that man. You can, if God helps you, say something that will do him good after both of you have been dead a thousand years. Shine! You know of a family with a bad boy who has run away from home. Go before night and tell that father and mother the parable of the prodigal son, and that some of the illustrious and useful men now in Church and State had a silly passage in their lives and ran away from home. Shine! You know of a family that has lost a child, and the silence of the nursery glooms the whole house from cellar to garret. Go before night and tell them how much that child has happily escaped, since the most prosperous life on earth is a struggle. Shine! You know of some one who likes you, and you like him, and he ought to be a Christian. Go tell him what religion has done for you, and ask him if you can pray for him. Shine! Oh, for a disposition so charged with sweetness and light that we cannot help but shine! Remember, if you cannot be a leviathan, lashing the ocean into fury, you can be one of the phosphori, doing your part toward making a path of phosphorescence. Then I will tell you what impression you will leave as you pass through this life and after you are gone. I will tell you to your face and not leave it for the minister who officiates at your obsequies. The failure in all eulogium of the departed is that they cannot hear it. This, in substance, is what I or some one else will say of you on such an occasion: ’93We gather for offices of respect to this departed one. It is impossible to tell how many tears he wiped away; how many burdens he lifted; or how many souls he was, under God, instrumental in saving. His influence will never cease. We are all better for having known him. That pillow of flowers on the casket was presented by his Sabbath School class, all of whom he brought to Christ. That cross of flowers at the head was presented by the Orphan Asylum which he befriended. Those three single flowers’97one was sent by a poor woman for whom he bought a ton of coal, and one was from a waif of the street whom he rescued through the midnight mission, and the other was from a prison cell which he had often visited to encourage repentance in a young man who had done wrong. Those three loose flowers mean quite as much as the costly garlands now breathing their aroma through this saddened home, crowded with sympathizers. ’91Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; they rest from their labors, and their works do follow them.’92’93 Or if it should be the more solemn burial at sea, let it be after the sun has gone down, and the captain has read the appropriate liturgy, and the ship’92s bell has tolled, and you are let down from the stern of the vessel into the resplendent phosphorescence at the wake of the ship. Then let some one say, in the words of my text, ’93He maketh a path to shine after him.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage