I will begin by relating an incident in the sea-faring experience of
Dr. Lyman Beecher, who preached in my pulpit one Sabbath soon after
returning from England, and related this incident, using it to enforce
the text: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God,
through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He said that while a storm was raging,
he heard a lady enter a room adjoining his and address some one in
these words: “Mary, how can you be sitting there in your rocking-chair,
as though nothing was going to happen? Do you know that we may all be
at the bottom of the sea in five minutes? Stir about and do something.
Pray do not sit there rocking and singing.”
He recognized the voice as that of an English lady who was on her way
to Canada, her husband connected with the government. Mary was her
serving maid.
Mary said, “Please, madam, I have done everything which you told me to
do; is there anything else which you think of?”
“No,” said the lady, “but I cannot bear to see you so peaceful, humming
your tunes when the ship is breaking up.”
“The men have done all they can to save themselves and us,” said Mary,
“and I see nothing to do but pray and wait.”
“‘Pray and wait,’” said her mistress, “on the point of going down! I
am raving distracted, and you are as calm as a clock. Why don’t you
scream, and show some feeling, and not sit there like a statue?”
“What good would it do to scream?” said Mary. “God can hear us whisper;
He is looking on the ship and on each of us, and He hears every
petition.”
“Oh,” said the lady, “I would give the world to feel so. But it is too
late to pray. I cannot think; I shall die crazy.”
Mary said, “When the storm began I was reading in the fifth of Romans:
‘Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ.’ I felt calm; my peace is made with God through
Christ; that text keeps me from screaming. If I die, I shall go to God,
for Christ has made peace for me with Him.”
With such words Mary composed the agitated mind of her mistress; when
suddenly the sun broke through the clouds, and though the waves were
fearfully tempestuous, the ship rode them safely; Mary’s Saviour had
said to them, “Peace, be still.”
If there were hours when we might have been made afraid, it was not in
gales, nor in the raging of the sea; but in some peaceful, moonlight
night, when everything was beautiful to the eye, we saw that we might
have reason to tremble. If the insidious current should take the ship
and prevent her from passing a certain headland, we might be stranded
on a desolate coast and see the ship piled up, a helpless thing,
in the sands, and ourselves left to the horrors of want. We would
be passing a forlorn place in the China seas, for example, and the
current might prove more than the wind could overcome; we might be
swept round a point where we heard the surf roar on the beach, and it
might depend on a favorable change of wind in a few moments whether we
should drift into deep water and go round another point, or whether
that spot was to be the graveyard of our noble vessel. At such moments
life re-appears to you with its long-forgotten passages, and the future
seems filled with pictures of woe, such, perhaps, as you had never
seen, even in dreams. At times like these, you have experience of
the special care of God, are made to feel the practical value of the
doctrine of a particular providence, you receive instruction in the
nature of prayer, learn more lessons in faith than years of ordinary
experience can furnish, and deep convictions of the privilege and duty
of childlike confidence in the Almighty, such that you are persuaded
a thousand temptations to unbelief cannot overcome.--them. There are
paradoxes in one’s feelings in times of imminent danger. It is easy
at these moments, strange as it may seem, to forget your own possible
loss and sorrow, and lose yourself in thinking of your ship, of which
you may have felt so proud, and which, having borne you half round the
globe, must, perhaps, now bury her stem or stern ignobly in the sand,
all her rich panelwork being made of no account by the waves breaking
ruthlessly in through the rent sides, the spars and sails left free to
be the sport of the tempest, and soon her freight melting away in the
surge. You feel that you would sacrifice anything short of life itself,
to prevent such disaster. And when suddenly the wind comes round the
headland, and you find that you have met a favorable breeze, and the
ship goes safely again on her way, you wonder at yourself, perhaps, for
rejoicing in her deliverance equally with your own, and you fall to
repeating passages of the hundred and seventh Psalm, with thanksgiving.