The Wreck of the “Schiller”

“They ran the ship aground; and the forepart stuck fust, and remained unmovable, but the hinder part was broken with the violence of the waves.” — Acts xxvii., 41.

CAUGHT in a typhoon! Before yet the chronometer was invented, a vessel is cracking to pieces on the coast of a Mediterranean island. The cargo of corn is spoiled, and, worse than that, two hundred and seventy-six passengers are beside themselves with terror. At the first bump of the ship, every thing was in consternation. She went on, bow first, and the waves cried, “Come, let us tear this old hulk to pieces!” The sea beat against the stern, and dashed the spray clear over the deck, crowded with affrighted passengers. Rudder, yards, mast, bulwark, knocked away. Every thing going to demolition. “They ran the ship aground; and the forepart stuck fast, and remained unmovable, but the hinder part was broken with the violence of the waves.”

There are some points of striking analogy between that wreck and the one which stunned our ears a few days ngo. Both vessels carried freight and passengers. Both were crowded with people — the one with two hundred and seventy-six on board, the other with three hundred and eighty-five on board. Both were caught in the grip of a tempest. From both the sailors tried to escape in small boats, giving no chance to the passengers. Both lost their reckoning. Both went aground in the night.

The Scldller started from our port on the 28tb of April, bound for Plymouth, England, and Hamburg, Germany. It was the popular season for transatlantic voyage, and the people went on the ship: invalids in search of health, pleasurists expecting merriment in foreign capitals, merchants on commercial errand, artists bound for the picture-galleries of Dresden and Florence, adopted citizens going back to visit the land of their nativity and the graves of their fathers. They had gone three thousand miles of voyage successfully, and expected on the morrow to wake up in the calm English harbor. Some of them were sleeping, and dreaming of home, of wife, of child, and others of mountains and cities beyond the sea. A dense mist comes upon the ocean. The storm hallooes amidst the rigging. Yet all seems safe. Two men on the lookout. Two men at the wheel. Two men pacing the captain’s bridge. Yet all the time making for the rocks. Oh, stop her before she strikes! One turn of the wheel will save the ship. The howl of the storm drowns the tolling of the fog-bell in Bishop Rock Light-house. Still on and on, until, without a moment in which to give warning, or wake up the passengers from their berths, or swing the small boats from their davits, that vessel of three thousand six hundred tons burden strikes the rock, once, twice, three times, four times, and goes down! Between the first plunge and the last the rockets are flung, and the guns are sounded, and a few passengers clamber up ill the rigging; but there is no safe retreat there, for soon the mast, with its cluster of precious human life tangled in the cordage, begins to bend and reel in the gale, and then cracks, and with awful plunge dashes into the sea. !Meanwhile the captain makes a brave attempt with loaded and firing pistol to keep the life-boats for the passengers. He

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gathers some of them up on bis bridge; but, after having done all he could for the saving of the people on the ship, he wraps himself in a winding-sheet of surf, and lies down beside them in that great democracy of sepulture. Beautiful women and swarthy men and. sweet children, side by side, are dead. There she lies, the jSckiUer, under a mound, of blue seas, the jutting reef the tombstone, buried in the place where lie the skeletons of the Thames steamer, and the jDuro, and the English Admiral, waiting for the day when the sea shall give up its dead. Let the waves tramp up the sad beach in solemn procession, and two continents uncover the brow over this burial of the Scldller with three hundred and forty -two passengers, without any warning gone out to meet their God.

Let us learn, first, from this disaster what a sad thing it is for ieoph to lose their reckoning. Captain Thomas, through the report from the log-book, which recorded the distances and courses sailed, judged that he was at least two miles off from the Scilly rocks; but he did not really know where he was. He mistook, and that mistake flung hundreds of souls into the eternal world, and the whole civilized world into mourning. So there are those here to-day who have lost their reckoning. They know not where they are. They say, “So many miles have I voyaged since I was launched on the ocean of life, and so many miles more will I voyage before I get to the coast of eternity.” Part of their calculation is right, and part of their calculation is wrong, and they have lost their reckoning. They know not how they stand toward God or their Bible, or their duty or heaven. They are sailing on thoughtlessly, when they may be within two minutes of the reef. Alas that men should make a mistake for eternity! now running on one rock, now running on the other rock; and, with the quadrant of God’s Word in their hand, by which they might have calculated the latitude, in an evil hour, their watchfulness asleep in the cabin, like the corn ship of the text, or the Schiller of last week, going aground, one shivering horror. Oh, slow your engines! Throw out your bower anchor! Stop stock-still until you find out where 3*ou are — near what reef, by what coast, on the verge of what shipwreck! There is only one channel leading into the celestial harbor, and that is not a wide channel, “Narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” God forbid that any one of us should lose our reckoning.

Again, I see in this disaster luhat a dense fog can do. This calamity was only half a mile from Bishop Rock Light-house. It is a granite structure, one hundred and forty-seven feet high, and has one of the best and brightest dioptric lights, a multiplication of refracted rays. When the sun sets, the keeper strikes that light, and it ‘blazes all through the darkness, and in ordinary weather throws out its glow fourteen miles upon the sea. “Well,” you say, “there might have been some excuse for a vessel going on those rocks in Queen Anne’s time, as the vessels did under the brave Sir Cloudsley Shovel, when nine ships of the line broke to pieces, and two thousand soldiers perished, for then there were no lisjhts on the rock. But how was it possible,” says one not conversant with all the circumstances, “that a steamer should have been ruined there within half a mile of Bishop Rock Light-house?” Oh, there was a fog on the sea. Captain Thomas, and First-officer Ilillers, and Second-officer Pollman could not see a quarter of the length of that steamer, and if there had been fifty

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light -houses on the rock they would not have done any good.

Here I get a hint of the way men lose their souls, driving into ruin; for there are scores of men in this day, and institutions, whose whole business seems to be to create a great spiritual fog. Men and women do not go on to death a -purpose; it is because they are cheated, they are deceived, they are mystified, they are befogged. We have in this day the Herbert Spencer fog about life, which, he says, is “‘the combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondences with external co-existences and sequences!” We have the Huxley fog about protoplasm. We have the Darwinian fog about the anthropomorphous origin of our race, and our dear old grandfathers, the gorilla and the chimpanzee. The fog of Materialism, the fog of Pantheism, the fog of Rationalism, the fog that Strauss and Shenkel and Kenan have thrown all around the head of Christ. Any thing but believe that God, by his power, made the worlds, and that the Bible is plenarily inspired, and that Christ is the omnipotent Son of God come to save sinners. There is one funeral that these wiseacres would like to attend, and be both pall-bearers and grave-diggers, and that is the decease and burial of the Lord God Almighty. They do not think the universe is large enough for Him and them, and so they are trying to crowd Him back, and crowd Him off the precipices of the universe, and, in trying to do so, they create a great spiritual fog, and the hundreds who went down on the Schiller were as nothing compared with the thousands and the hundreds of thousands who, in this great philosophical vaporing, have been wrecked suddenly and forever. One hour after the vessel spoken of struck in the English Channel,

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the fog lifted, and the survivors saw J3isliop Rock Liglithouse; and I would that to-day a fresh gale from heaven might sweep earth and sky of all philosophical obscurations, and that the dioptric light of God’s Word might flash its illumination across all kingdoms. Oh, come out of the speculative fog, man! Take the Bible for all you ought to know and can know. Come out of the darkness, and sit in the sunlight of our glorious Christianity. Stop your religious guessing. When in this day I see people all around me drenched and soaked and floundering in the dense mist of modern skepticism, I am put more in love than ever before with the comfortable religion of the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh that these wiseacres would come and sit down for half an hour, and study and absorb the three first questions and answers of Brown’s “Shorter Catechism,” which some of us learned at four years of age! — “Who made you? God. Who redeemed you? Christ. Who sanctified you? The Holy Ghost.” May the Sun of righteousness scatter the fog.

Again, in the recent disaster I find an illusiration of ivliai is vicarious sacrifice. Captain Thomas might have got off to the land safely, in all probability. There were two small boats that reached the shore. Why did he not take one of them at the very beginning of the disaster? Why did he not take some buoyant part of the ship and float to a place of safety? He might have said, “No man can reimburse me for the loss of my life. This is a time when every man must look out for himself” No. He staid there amidst the hurricane, pistol in hand, determined that the women and the children should get into those life-boats, and no one else. And I hear the crack, crack, of the fire-arms, and I hear him crying out, “Stand back now, and let the passengers be saved! Stand back!” And then I see him gathering some of the sufferers on his bridge, and then I see him going down for still another errand in their behalf, when a wild surge sweeps him off into the merciless Atlantic. All the survivors agree in stating that a brave man perished that night. Come, ye who do not know what the pulpits mean when they talk about vicarious sacrifice. It means one dying for others. It means Captain Thomas dying for the survivors of the jSchiller. It means the Lord Jesus Christ dying for 3’ou and me. Christ knew that we must go down without His interposition. He might have gone safely back to heaven, saying, “I have done enough for that race. I can not afford to die on that wretched cross;” and the ang-els of God would have taken him by the arms and lifted him into the sky. But no. There he stands in the midnight hurricane of God’s wrath against sin, looking off upon our foundering souls, and he launches the life-boat, and tells us to be off for the shore, while he expires. Christ sinking, that we might rise; Christ dying, that we might live. For the first ten million years heaven will not get through talking about it. And yet — amazing fact! — we will not get into the life-boat, though it has come; and we see the oars pulling away, taking from us our last chance, and we will not leap into it. The tears and the sufferings and the dying anguish of the Son of God, so far as we are concerned, a dead fjiilure; and, instead of pleading for us at the last, because of our outrage thereof, demanding our complete and eternal overthrow! It is marvelous that Jesus died. There is only one marvel that comes anywhere near equaling it, and that is our rejection of his mercy. Oh that, this morning, God’s Spirit would show the people of this audience how thorough is the ruin of a man who will not have Christ!

The present EJdystone Light -house stands very firml, but that was not the character of the first structure that stood on that dangerous point. There was an eccentric man by the name of Henry Winstanley’, who built a very fantastic light- house at that point in 1696; and, when it was nearly done, he felt so confident that it was strong, that he expressed the wish that he might be in it in the roughest hurricane that ever blew in the face of heaven. And he got his wish. One November night, in 1703, he and his workmen were in that light -house, when there came down the most raging tempest that had ever been known in that region. On the following morning the people came down to see about the light-house. Not a vestige of the wall, not a vestige of the men. Only two twisted iron bolts, showing where the light-house had stood. So there are men building up their fantastic hopes, and plans, and enterprises, and expectations, thinking they will stand forever, saying, “We don’t want any of the defenses of the Gospel. We can stand for ourselves. We are not afraid. We take all the risks, and we defy every thing;” and suddenly the Lord blows upon them, and they are gone. Only two things left — a grave and a lost soul.

But I learn, also, from this sad providence how near 2^eople can come to a liappij destination and yet not reach it. They expected next day to be in Plymouth harbor. Only a few more pacings of the deck by the captain, and then the four blades of the screw would cease their revolutions, and the steamer would stop. Almost in, and yet those people did not live to see Plymouth harbor. They landed at the bottom of the sea. So men sometimes come very near the harbor of God’s mercy, but do not quite get into it. They expected to land; we expected they would land; but they strike on some fatal hinderance, and perish. Last Sabbath there were in this house persons who were almost Christians who never will be fully Christians. They got along just so far, and then some violent jerk of resolution stopped them. They thought religion would not be dignified to them, or they thought that it might disorganize their worldly business, or they thought they might compromise their reputation among some of their friends, or they thought they had got on so far toward the religious hope that they were saved. No, no. Remember the Schiller! Paul saw two boats, and one was called AltogeiJier, and the other was called Almost, and he saw the Altogether go into port, flags flying, and he saw the Almost founder at sea. Not quite a Christian, is to be no Christian at all. To lift one’s hand toward Christ, and yet not to take hold of him, is to be a castaway. Some of you, some time ago, wept over sin. I saw anxiety on some of your countenances. Your lips moved as if in prayer. I thought you were going to be saved. I have changed my mind. You disastrously stopped. You struck a reef Remember the Schiller!

Again, I learn that when our time is up ive have to go. Those people were sure of a safe arrival. Every thing promised it. They were in as stout an iron steamer as ever goes across the Atlantic. It had seven water-tight compartments. There were eight small boats on the side. They had a skillful and long -experienced commander. Yet the Lord decided that between ten o’clock at night and five o’clock in the morning three hundred and forty-two souls should pass out of life, and he executed that decision. And so the time of our exit out of tLiis life is appointed. You can not tell mine, nor I yours. The whole thing is uncertain, and I am glad it is. If we knew the year and the day when we were to leave this life, we would be disqualified for work, and we would be saj’ing, “Now we have another year less to live, and another week less to live, and another day less to live,” and we would be nervous and morbid, and a nuisance to ourselves and to others. But while it is uncertain to us, it is not uncertain to God. He has appointed the time. The utmost prudence on our part can not avert it. When that moment comes, we may be on the land, we may be on the sea; but a message from the next world will be put into our hand, and though nobody else can see it, we will see it, and read it, and respond to it, and tramp away. The call will be so inexorable that we must be off. And yet we act as though we had an infallible life-belt that would hold us up in any wave. We act as if we were more invulnerable than Achilles, even the heel encased. “We do not realize that our final moment is coming toward us as straight as a bird ever flies. We feel cool and unconcerned and indifferent, as though we had a thousand years to live on earth, and the nine hundred and ninety-ninth would be as favorable for this work as any of its predecessors. Meanwhile, our comrades and best friends are dropping around us like slacked lime — everj’- afternoon, between two and five o’clock, the processions going toward the cemeteries, and we not realizing that we will, after a while, be silent leaders in some such procession. So near eternity, and yet no fittedness. Startling warnings passing out of mind. The shriek of the /ScJiilk)’, like that of the Arctic and the Atlantic and the Ville du Havre, forgotten. The trouble is, we do not realize that the very poorest hour in which to equip ourselves for eternity is tjie last hour. Of all the thousands and thousands of hours in our whole life, there is not one so poorly fitted for this work as the closing hour; and yet we choose the poorest out of all for this preparation. What chance had those people to pray on that vessel, awakened suddenly out of sleep, the waves of the ocean dashing through the gaping sides of the steamer? Some of them, indeed, got a few moments by clambering up into the rigging; but, alas if they put off the work of the soul’s salvation till that moment when, in undress, they swung in the ratlines on the careening ship until the smoke-stack fell, and the foremast fell, and the mainmast fell, and there was a plash, and a gurgle, and all was ovei! How much better, my brother, it would be for you to prepare now for that eternity which may any moment break in upon you as suddenly as it did upon them! Unless your heart is radically changed by the grace of God, and Christ is your personal Saviour, the plunge of the ScliiUer in the English Channel was- only a feeble type of the deeper going-down of your immortal spirit. Why not now repent and believe, and pray and live? This disaster demands your arousal. Wake before it be too late. Remember the Schiller/

160 EXASFERATIXG COMFOltTEES.