Death on Board the Ship

Isaiah xl. 6. The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry 1 All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.

This Sabbath reminds us of a melancholy occurrence on board the ship, during the week that is jus past. Our number is diminished. One of the ship’s company is missing and gone. He has made his last voyage, and gone to his long home. He was used to being here, and worshipping God with us: but he lies low now, and sleeps in the deep sea. But a little while ago, he had as good a chance of living as any of us; but he is gone, and the place which knew him, knows him no more. No mother’s kindness comforted him on the bed of languishing; no mother’s hand was there to wipe the cold sweat of death from his brow. He had no relatives to bear him to the quiet grave-yard; no church-bell tolled for him; and there was no consecrated servant of God, to stand by and say, “We commit his body to the dust.” It was a seaman’s funeral; we were all his kindred, because he was a seaman. He was one of us, and we mourn that he has left us never to return.

What shall I say to you in view of this mournful event? “The voice said. Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field!”

Seamen are sometimes looked upon as a sort of infidels, or atheists. But it is not so. We see for ourselves, that “verily there is a God that judgeth in the earth.” The “sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.” There is no such thing as chance, or what we call accident in the world. What was not known to us, is known, and foreknown to him. What we sometimes call chance, or accident, is but the wise ordering of his providence. We would not be without the consolation of knowing that his hand, though unseen by us, directed all the circumstances that ended in the death of the departed companion of our voyage. “Behold, he taketh away; who can hinder him? who shall say unto him, What doest thou?” The Giver of life is the Preserver of life; and when he no longer preserves it, wherever they are, on the land or on the sea, men must fall under the stroke of death. Every man has “his appointed time” on the earth; his days are measured; there is a limit to them which he cannot pass. Death more commonly comes to men in an unexpected time and way; and this shows us how absolutely our days are in the hands of God. Let us rejoice that it is so; let us rejoice that we have a Father in heaven who watches over us, who cares for us, and who holdeth “our soul in life,” as long as it is best for us to live. “The Lord reigneth, and let the earth rejoice!”

Ah! “what shall it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” Give him all the world; yet he must die. Fill his coffers with gold and silver; store his treasure and crowd his warehouses; give him all that every climate and country can yield; yet he must die. And it is no trifling matter to die. Who is there that does not think of it with dismay, and to whom the prospect of putrefying in the dark grave, or wasting away amid the waters of the ocean, is not a gloomy prospect? Yet this is not what makes it so solemn a thing to die. It is because death puts an end to this day of grace, and this space of repentance, and introduces the soul into the immediate presence of its Maker, and to an unalterable eternity. Death ends all the happiness of the wicked, and all the sufferings of the righteous. The body and the soul are then separated, the body to “return to the earth as it was, and the spirit to God who gave it.” This will be a delightful interview to a good man; but to a wicked man it will be awful beyond thought. O who of us is prepared for this solemn event? Whose account is ready? Which of us has engaged the Friend of sinners to help him at that great Day, when we appear before a holy God? What transactions has your faith had with that great Advocate, in order to secure him then to plead your cause? The great work of life is not yet begun with the man who is not thus prepared to die.

There are no doubt more deaths on the land, than on the sea, because there are not so many who traverse the seas, as live on the land. Yet what an uncounted multitude have died at sea, and found the foaming wave their winding-sheet! What a mighty sepulchre is the ocean! Millions upon millions lie strewed over these unfathomable channels; fleets and armies sleep there; the young, the brave, — the gallant officer and the hardy mariner, here rest side by side in these vast valleys, of which the solid land of our globe is but the higher surface. It is not a darker, nor more gloomyreceptacle of the dead than the more silent grave-yard; yet is it a dark and gloomy home. It is a silent dwelling, where men of war are quiet, where the sons of mirth and music are brought low; where the boisterous tempest and the cannon’s roar is not heard; where man is forgotten, and his name and his memory perish from among the living, and he is heard of no more, until that Day when the sea shall give up its dead.

“All flesh is grass, and the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.” Let us not contemplate the death of one of our company without bringing the thought home to our own bosoms, that we ourselves are dying men. “It is apjjointed unto men once to die.” The sentence never will be reversed. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return.” Just as certainly as we are sinners, and have broken the law of God, we must die. “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death hath passed upon all men, for that all sinned.” There is no discharge in this war; we feel the seeds of death within us now; and though we should live long, and banish the thought of dying from our minds, yet must we harness ourselves for the conflict, and meet this king of terrors, — this last enemy of man. “Man dieth and wasteth away; yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth down and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.”

No man is prepared for death, who never thinks of death until it comes. We would have you be prepared for it; and that you may be so, would urge you to make your peace with your offended God, through that Saviour who is “able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by him.” There is but this one way of life, and this one way of being prepared for death. “The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” By his death he conquered death; so that all who believe in him, and love him, and obey him, shall through him have the victory. He himself invaded the territories of death, and conquered him in his own domains. He was a sojourner with him for a while, but he broke the bondage, and thus became mighty to save. “I,” says he, “am the resurrection and the life; if a man believe in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” What a day will that be, when the same voice of the archangel and trump of God, that shall open the sepulchres of the earth, shall also reach these deeper tombs of the sea, where the proud waters have, for so many ages, closed over the dust of men, and they shall come forth — they that have done good to the resurrection of life, they that have done evil to the resurrection of damnation! Monuments of marble cannot hold them there; these sunken rocks of adamant, washed by the waters of a thousand centuries, cannot hold them here; when his voice thus penetrates the earth, and agitates the ocean.

Dying man! you may not live -ever to witness such another scene; to weave the shroud, and cast into the sea another of your shipmates. You yourself may be the next that shall be committed to this grave of waters. Your name may stand first in death’s commission, though you put far away the evil day. You may think he will come late, but God may send him early. You may not reach the end of your voyage, before the voyage of life is over. Yet, yourself may be the least prepared to die; the least acquainted with God’s holy word, the most thoughtless and hardened, the most wicked and profane. You know not when the time of your departure shall come; yet you live as though you would spin out the thread of life to a lengthened old age. There may be but a step between you and death; yet you boast yourself of to-morrow, and instead of being awake and in earnest, in order to be prepared to die, put far away the evil day, as though the thought of it were too painful to be endured. Could your departed shipmate rise up from the bosom of the sea, and once more address you, what would he say? Would he not rebuke you for this thoughtlessness? Would he not tell you, that all that the word of God teaches you of that vast eternity, where his immortal soul now dwells, is sober reality? If he has made a happy exchange of earth for heaven, and is now numbered with those holy and happy beings who have entered into the kingdom of God, to go no more out; would he not say, “O, strive to enter into the streight gate, and come up hither?” And if he died in his sins; if, when death knocked down his earthly tabernacle, and called his trembling spirit away beyond the reach of mercy and of hope, and consigned it to its dreadful doom, »never to be relieved, and never to come to an end — would he not beg and beseech you not to do as he has done, and come to that place of torment?

Nothing is more unwise than to expect to live a long time in the present world. It was not made for any one to live In a long while. It is a dying world — the land of the dying, and not the land of the living. That land of the living stretches far away beyond the horizon of this world. It is a mighty continent that has no horizon and no shore. It has no sun and no sea; earth and sea are there passed away, and the Lord God is the light of it, and the Lamb its glory. Death will introduce you to it, if you are prepared for his coming, and can die in peace. Friends will not weep for you then, as one who lived without God, and died without hope. No one will then say of you, “Good for that man if he had never been born.” You yourself will forever bless God that he gave you being, and made you acquainted with his Son. And though his wise providence has not determined your residence on the earth among the rich, or the learned, or the powerful, yet will you remember all the way in which he has led you with eternal thanksgiving and praise. You will magnify him, that his grace could so abound toward the chief of sinners; and though your allotment on the earth has been amid storms and hardship, you will then rest from your labors, and “serve him day and night in his temple.” The rest will be the sweeter for all your toil; the sky more tranquil for every storm; the crown the brighter for every cross. Through death and the grave, then, look forward with hope, with delight, to that holy and blessed world, where no want will remain to be supplied, no danger to be averted, no sin to pollute, no sorrow to sadden; where the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne shall feed you, and lead you in green pastures and by the still waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from your eyes. May God Almighty bless you, and give testimony to the word of his grace, for his name’s sake! Amen.