THE BUILDER OCTOBER 1916

TRAVEL SKETCHS
BY JOSEPH FORT NEWTON

ON THE SEA

Prompt to the minute, on June 17, at noon, the Philadelphia moved from her
pier and slowly turned to the open sea. The orchestra was playing, the decks
were crowded, and perhaps a thousand people were waving farewells--among them
a good Brother Mason who was kind enough to come and bid me good bye. It was a
scene not soon to be forgotten. Surely, there is something infinite in every
parting, and never more so than when the Sea is to separate us. Soon
individual faces faded and we could only see the handkerchiefs fluttering
signals of goodwill--handkerchiefs wet with tears.

New York, seen from the harbor, is a great picture indeed, albeit made less
vivid by a haze of smoke and fog that hung over it. Suddenly the sun broke
through the mist, and it seemed like a fairy city seen in a dream --a land of
fairy cliff-dwellers ! No wonder Poole wrote his story of The Harbor and the
romance of it. But the picture does not remain long, save in memory where our
pictures hang. Dimmer and dimmer it grows, until at last it is a blur, and
then a thin blue line, and finally it fades. No one may put into words his
feelings at such an hour, when for the first time he leaves his native land
and turns to the great open sea !

And the Sea! For an inlander like myself, it is a thing of wonder, at once a
fact and a figure, a symbol and a parable. Like sky, like sea. If the sky is
gray, so is the sea. If blue, the sea is blue--such a dark, rich blue. But it
was very gray when we set sail. Soon a fog fell over us and we could hardly
see the boat that met us to take our pilot off. And that fog-horn is
terrifying ! What would life be if all our dangers made that much noise.
Perhaps they do, only we do not hear the warnings.

But the fog soon lifted, like a curtain, and revealed the Sea ' The Sea ! the
Sea ! so wide and grand, stretching away into infinity--yea, "The Sea is His,
and He made it." All day long the great words of the Bible about the Sea kept
coming to mind, with new meanings I had never guessed before. Truly that old
Book is like a harp which says for us what our poor, dumb words cannot say.
"There is sorrow upon the sea; it cannot be still," what words they are as one
looks out over those restless, reinless waters. And there came also those
other words, so freighted with meaning just now, "and the sea gave up the dead
that were in it." But best of all the line of the Psalmist, "Thy way, O Lord,
is in the sea."

Really, if I were a rich Pagan instead of a poor Mason, I would build a temple
to the Sea. It is so strong and deep, so patient, merciful, and gracious, to
ship or soul that bravely casts loose upon its mighty promises; so variable
and cruel to the unpiloted and unseaworthy. It is a great burden-bearer. It
cannot be overloaded. It cannot be broken down. It never grows weary. It never
needs repairs. Also, it is a great physician. It rests the eye with its
overpowering vastness of outlook. It calms the heart with its greatness and
its never-ending music. It speaks to the mind of that Divine abyss over which
the mystics brood but never fathom. It responds to every mood--now sad, now
glad, now quietly meditative; it answers every call of the imagination, and
can preach more sermons than all preachers. Besides, it is a great teacher. It
lays its mighty law upon the restless spirit and tells us to stop sputtering--
be still, listen, and know. And as we listen, the sighs of human care are lost
in the murmur of its many waters. At last Restlessness, cut off from its
supplies, surrenders to Rest.

Why did St. John leave the Sea out of his vision of heaven ? He foresaw a time
when "there shall be no more sea." Why so? No doubt the exile on the Isle of
Patmos, longing for the fair city of Ephesus, the scene of his ministry, and
hungering for the sight of familiar faces, grew weary of the imprisoning sea.
Sundered by leagues of tumbling waves from those he loved, he dreamed of a
world where there would be "no sea." But it is not so now--not so much so at
least. Once the symbol of separation, the sea has become a bond of union
between lands and peoples. Once the dread of daring sailors, who, despite
their dread, braved its dangers and discovered its paths, it has become the
servant of man, yielding to the quiet power of intelligence. The sea of which
Homer and Virgil sing is the unknown, untamed sea. We today sail a sea whose
ways, waves and winds are an open book, and whose forces have been converted
into beneficent ministries.

Still, Matthew Arnold speaks of "unplumbed, salt, estranging sea," by which he
meant the awful isolation of each soul in an unfathomable universe. More often
in English poetry--and indeed in all poetry, since Homer, that has in it the
sound of the sea--the tidal rhythms of the sea, its measured waves and its
immeasurable horizons, have been the great symbols of the Divine depth and
mystery; just as the stars round off the three divisions of the Divine Comedy
of Dante. The music of this deeper and more eternal sea rolls through all
great poetry, and nowhere with more melody than in Shakespeare, who caught the
very cadence of that unfathomable sea whose waves are years and whose depth is
eternity.

How can a man be irreligious on the Sea? Are we not, all of us, now and
forever, out on the bosom of the deep, with the infinite above, beneath, and
about us? We feel secure enough indeed, thanks largely to the cheerful
company, the dear faces, the duties and pieties of the day. Still, when at
times we look over the edge of the boat, up starts a primitive terror which
only faith can allay. Religion is a thing of the depths and for the depths.
"Have mercy upon me, O Lord, my boat is so small, and Thine ocean is so
great,"--in that cry of the old Breton fisherman we have the profound instinct
which lies at the heart of faith. Reason may serve us in shallow waters, but
when life takes us beyond our depth, as it so often does, faith saves us.
There will be companies of believing souls, so long as there are deep,
unplumbed places in this life of ours.

But here I am a-preaching, as usual--from force of habit, no doubt. Yet there
are worse things one could be guilty of. Moreover, I cannot help it. Last
night I sat up on the upper deck of the ship near the prow, at midnight, long
after others had gone to bed - except, of course, the guzzlers in the saloon.
It was a clear cool night of stars, and the great sea lay spread out beneath.
It was a still and holy hour in which the sea and the stars told me many
things. Never did the great old words, "What is man, that Thou art mindful of
him ?" come home with such awful majesty of simple truth to subdue the heart
and still it. And yet, never did I have a more vivid sense of the greatness
and worth of the soul as in that solemn trysting time. Then the ship bell rang
out the hour, the watchman above cried, "All's Well," and I went to my couch
knowing that if I sank it would be not into the sea, but beyond it !

Thus and so our good ship of Brotherly Love sails on and on, out over the blue
rim of the world. Again and again one turns away from the Human Comedy on
board to the mighty Sea whose lonely waters drift and sing! How indifferent it
is to our human doings and undoings, how deaf to our jabbering gossip, its
white caps suggesting shining teeth showing in laughter at our vanities. It
knows nothing of the greatness of Kitchener, and buries him as quickly as it
does the poor stoker dropped into a vast and wandering grave. Merciful when we
obey her, merciless when we disobey, she lulls us to sleep at night as if the
ship were a cradle rocked by an unseen hand. I have fallen in love with the
Sea. As long as I live its mighty waters will whisper to my heart of "that
immortal sea which brought us hither," and will receive us to its bosom "when
that which drew from out the boundless deep, turns again home." Whatever
betide, it is enough to know that

"There is a wideness in God's mercy,
Like the wideness of the Sea."
At Sea, June 22.
