THE WHITE WHALE 43 
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 he 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 masthead 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 hidden 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 slantr 
ings 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. Y$t 
even then beyond the reach of any plummet — ‘out of the belly of hell’ 
— when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost hones, even then, 
God heard the engulfed, 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 multi- 
tudinously 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 
dishonour! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be 
