REV. DR. COE’S 
 
 SERMON AT THE FIFTY-FOURTH ANNIVERSARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 AMERICAN SEAMEN’S FRIEND SOCIETY. 
 

 V 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE GOSPEL AND THE SAILOR: 
 
 A DISCOURSE BEFORE 
 
 THE AMERICAN SEAMEN'S FRIEND 
 
 SOCIETY, 
 
 AT ITS 
 
 
 FIFTY-FOURTH ANNIVERSARY, 
 
 SABBATH EVENING, MAY 'JTH, 
 
 Ol 
 
 oo 
 
 oo 
 
 BY 
 
 
 Rev. EDWARD B. COE, D. D., 
 
 IN THE COLLEGIATE REFORMED DUTCH CHURCH, FIFTH AVENUE AND 48TH STREET, 
 
 NEW YORK CITY. 
 
 FROM THE ROOMS OF THE SOCIETY, 
 
 80 WALL STREET, NEW YORK, 
 
 1882. 
 
SERMON. 
 
 1 Kings xviii : Itf . — “And (he) said to his servant, ‘Go up now, look toward the 
 sea.’ ” 
 
 It was in expectation of a blessing to be received that this command 
 was spoken by the prophet to his servant. For three years and a half 
 no rain had fallen within the dominions of that weak and wicked king 
 who “did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all 
 the kings of Israel that were before him,” and “the famine was sore 
 in Samaria.” But the idolatrous worship which had been established 
 on a scale hitherto unexampled, by the proud and fierce Phoenician 
 princess whom Ahab had raised to the throne, had received at least a 
 momentary check when Elijah summoned the four hundred and fifty 
 prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Astarte to a solemn 
 test of their power in the sight of all Israel on the slopes of Mount 
 Carmel. The result of that contest had been the complete discom- 
 fiture of the ministers of Jezebel; the people had risen against them 
 and slaughtered them at the foot of the mountain; the king was terri- 
 fied into submission. It was time that the plague of drought and 
 famine should be stayed. The prophet of Jehovah, whose ear detected 
 at last the “sound of abundance of rain,” retired to the higher soli- 
 tudes, where he had so long dwelt, and while he bowed himself in an 
 unusual attitude of importunate prayer, he sent his «ervant to a still 
 loftier eminence with the command “Go up, look toward the sea.” 
 He went, and saw only the burnished surface of the Mediterranean, 
 overarched by a cloudless sky, in which the sun was slowly sinking, a 
 merciless orb of fire, toward the west. Again and again he obeyed the 
 
4 — 
 
 prophet’s word and still on all the wide horizon his eye discerned no 
 token of the long-desired storm. But “it came to pass at the seventh 
 time, that he said, ‘ Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, 
 like a man’s hand.’” It was the answer to Elijah’s prayer; it was the 
 harbinger of the long-sought blessing. And while the king’s chariot 
 flew toward Jezreel, the heavens above grew black with clouds, the 
 forests of Carmel shook in the sound of the advancing tempest, and 
 there was a great rain. 
 
 Not so much in the hope of discovering there the sign of a blessing 
 to be received, as for the purpose of finding there a work to be done, is 
 the church of God called in our day, by His providence and by His 
 Spirit, to “ look toward the sea.” Not with the eye of the geographer, 
 who seeks to trace the course of its currents and the laws of its tides; 
 who observes its power to modify the climates of the globe and to ex- 
 hale from its heaving surface the vapors, which, descending again, 
 gladden the earth with showers and streams; not with the eye of the 
 explorer, who endures its hardships and braves its perils that he may 
 plant his foot on some untrodden shore or unveil the icebound secrets 
 of the poles; not with the eye of one who longs for a larger liberty of 
 thought or life and who looks out with eager gaze upon the sea, 
 toward lands which offer to every comer an equal chance and a wide 
 career; not thus, nor vet solely with the eye of one who sees in the 
 ocean a stupendous display of the power and majesty of Him, who 
 holds its waters as in the hollow of His hand, and who rouses them as 
 He listeth or saith, “ Peace, be still ” ; but with the earnest and rever- 
 ent regard of those who desire the fulfillment of the prophecy that the 
 abundance of the sea, as well as of the land, shall be converted unto 
 Him who is Head over all things, — so the church may well direct its 
 thought to that vast domain, which affords an inspiring field for 
 Christian labor and from which only the first fruits of the harvest 
 have yet been gathered in. 
 
 As we stand then, to-night, looking forth upon the ocean, what do 
 we behold? 
 
 At first sight only a barren waste of waiters, surrounding the con- 
 tinents and covering three-fifths of the surface of the globe. It is a 
 pathless and desolate expanse, which seems designed to check the in- 
 tercourse and to defy the authority of men. No cities are built on its 
 heaving and treacherous breast; and the bustle of human life, the roar 
 of human activity, ceases at its edge. The realms of space above our 
 heads are hardly more appalling in their silence and their solitude, 
 than the boundless ocean-plains, where no living thing appears, to 
 break the oppressive stillness with its movement or its cry, and only 
 
wave chases wave from end to end of the horizon. No harrier of 
 mountains, lifting their snowy summits to the clouds, would seem to ar- 
 rest the progress and mock the power of mankind, like this great wall 
 of water which the almighty hand has reared around the nations. 
 
 But man has conquered the sea, and if you observe it again, you 
 will perceive that it is not a barrier to keep nations apart, but a bond 
 to bring them near and to unite them together. The trackless ex- 
 panse, at which we were just now looking, is furrowed by a million 
 keels. The cunning of the human mind has traced upon it a network 
 of paths, along which the commerce of the world swiftly and safely 
 moves. Its dreary solitudes are bright with sails, and the music of 
 human voices has broken the spell of silence which had settled upon 
 it: science and daring have robbed it of its terrors and have brought 
 it into subjection to the human will. It has become a great and free 
 highway, over which thought and wealth may pass from land to land. 
 It has made all the nations neighbors and widely sundered peoples 
 familiar friends. To traverse it is no longer a matter of desperate 
 adventure, it is an incident of a holiday. It has been explored, mapped 
 out, subdued, and the voyage across it, which was once involved in 
 hardly less uncertainty and peril than that in which a soul sets forth 
 upon the unknown ocean of another life, is now an experience of which 
 almost every detail may be anticipated and of which the end may be 
 predicted to an hour. When forty-six years ago the French astrono- 
 mer sent word to all the observatories of Europe that on such a night, 
 at such a point in the heavens, a new planet might be seen, it was 
 rightly held to be a marvelous example of the power of the human 
 mind. But it is a hardly less signal display of man’s mastery over 
 nature, when, after pushing steadily forward for many days, through 
 sunshine and storm, through mist and darkness, on the North- Atlantic, 
 the captain of the vessel in which you are sailing says quietly to you: — 
 “At nine o'clock this evening, in that direction, you will see the light 
 on Fastnet Rock.” The ocean has been tamed and civilized and made 
 a part of the habitable globe. 
 
 And so you will observe, in the third place, if you look toward it, 
 probably three millions of men who have their home ujion it. 
 Three millions of men, — it is the population of a state, and they liter- 
 ally live upon the sea. They are strangers on the shore; their homes 
 are the forecastle and the deck. On the land they are idle, awkward, 
 uneasy. They are readily distinguished from other men by their 
 peculiarities of manner and bearing and speech. They seem to be only 
 lookers-on amid the bustle of business life, in which they do not share. 
 They have no place among the jostling crowds to whom the empire of 
 
— 6 — 
 
 the laud belongs. If there is somewhere on the solid ground a cottage 
 which they call their own, and a loving group of human hearts, to 
 which from afar their affections turn, it is only at rare and distant 
 intexwals that the sxglit of these brings gladness to their eyes. The 
 home of the sailor is the ship to which he belongs; his element is the 
 wide, rolling sea. There, night and day, amidst hardship and peril, he 
 does his work and lives his life. Privation is his constant comrade, 
 and he is intimate with danger. While you and I are enjoying the 
 shelter of our comfortable dwellings and quietly pursuing our peaceful 
 avocations, he is fighting the wintry blasts and wrestling with the sav- 
 age waves. Ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clad, — his existence is a perpetual 
 battle with the great natural forces against which he is disputing the 
 empire of the sea. 
 
 And yet it is not some strange amphibious race which is condemned 
 by fate to this stern mode of life. They are our neighbors and our 
 brothers. Almost every nationality is represented among the seamen 
 of the globe, but the greater number of those w T ho have chosen the 
 ocean for their home, belong to that hardy northern stock, from which 
 Ave too are sprung. The blood that is in their veins is that adventur- 
 ous blood, which, Avhile the Homans were cautiously feeling their way 
 from headland to headland of the Mediterranean coast, made the Nor- 
 man sailors masters of the Atlantic from the Straits of Dover to the 
 Pillars of Hercules. The same strain of hardihood is in it still, which 
 made the Scandinavian prows the first to touch the shores of the New 
 World. The language of the ocean is theTangnage that avc speak or 
 some other that is closely allied to this. And thus the Avelfare of the 
 toilers of the sea appeals to us, as it can appeal to no other race but 
 that to which avc belong. 
 
 It appeals to us also as the Avelfare of a class of men comprising vari- 
 ous degrees of intellectual force and culture. It is xvell for us to free 
 our minds from the false impression that the sailor is taken, to begin 
 with, from the lowest stratum of society, and is still further imbruted 
 by the life that lie leads. “You might as well,” so it used to be said, 
 “you might as Avell preach to the mainmast as to him.” And the 
 common seaman is, indeed, often, a man of coarse manners and of rude 
 intelligence, debased by heartless and cruel treatment to a condition 
 which may avcII make humanity shudder and society tremble. Put 
 it is not such men only, to Avdiose care the commerce of the Avorld is 
 entrusted. And the thorough scientific knowledge, the calm and 
 practised judgment, the ability to meet an unexpected and perilous 
 emergency Avith skill as avcII as energy, — in no field Avhatever of human 
 activity are these qualities shown, more conspicuously or more often. 
 
than in practical seamanship. By the side of the sailor who works 
 only with his hands, we must consider the sailor who works with his 
 
 brain. 
 
 But both masters and men seldom fail to exhibit certain qualities of 
 character whose charm we instantly and universally recognize. You 
 will certainly anticipate me in puttingrowm/c first among these. There 
 is, of course, something in the continual presence of danger, which 
 blunts the sensibilities and makes daring a matter of habit rather than 
 of principle. And yet no man but one who is constitutionally bold 
 would expose himself thus to the incessant dangers of the sea. I said 
 the ocean had been conquered, and yet how often it claims its terrible 
 revenge from those who seek to assert their mastery over it. Take this 
 single fact into consideration, that “ the average life of the seaman is 
 hut twenty-eight years, his actual sea life only eleven,” and what a 
 story it tells of the perils to which the sailor bids constant defiance. 
 The records of war are not so full of acts of calm and heroic daring, 
 as are those of man’s great battle with the ocean. And they exhibit 
 this not only in the form of a stolid indifference to danger in the per- 
 formance of duty, but in a self-forgetful exposure and sacrifice of life 
 in the generous effort to save others who are perishing. Let me tell 
 you, for example, the story of Arthur McKee. He was second mate of 
 the bark Low Wood, which, on the 20th of last October, sighted 
 another British bark in distress in mid-Atlantic. In the tempest her 
 cargo had shifted, spars and sails were gone, she was on her beam ends, 
 sinking, and the sea which was running high made a clean breach over 
 her. All her boats were stove in, and the wretched crew, huddled to- 
 gether behind a sail which, for a little, kept off the wash of the waves, 
 were awaiting death. To the call for men to try and reach them from 
 the Low Wood, the first mate with four sailors answered immediately in 
 their one commodious and useful boat. But it swamped before the 
 eyes of both crews, and the five men sank to the fate from which they 
 went to save the others. For two days and nights the Low Wood tried 
 to work closer to the sinking vessel, and when at last she was success- 
 ful, the question rose, who, if any one, would go from her, in a small 
 boat fit only to hold three men, in another perilous attempt at rescue. 
 And that is what, — with the memory of their drowned comrades freshly 
 before their minds, — that is what McKee and two seamen did, bringing 
 the shipwrecked crew in two trips, safely to their own vessel, through 
 the boiling waves. And that instance of heroism is not alone, — it is 
 matched, as you know, by a thousand others in the annals of the sea. 
 
 To courage and generosity must be added simplicity, also, as a char- 
 acteristic of the sailor. It is in intercourse with men that a man be- 
 
— 8 — 
 
 comes cunning and treacherous, not in contact with nature. The sea- 
 man is frank, — almost childlike in his confidence. And here is the 
 source of his gravest perils. They are not on the sea; that at most can 
 only kill the body; they are the temptations which destroy both body 
 and soul upon the shore. Think of him as he comes in from a long 
 voyage, to find himself the prey of men, whose brutal lusts are set on 
 fire of hell and who have reduced robbery and outrage to a system. 
 Better, — a thousand times better, — for him, to fall into the gaping and 
 hungry waves than into the welcoming hands of those who coin his 
 weaknesses into gold, and then, when they can make no further profit 
 from him, sell him like a slave. My Christian friends, the infernal 
 traffic in the bodies and souls of men is not yet extinct; it is still going 
 on in dens of infamy, in this and every other city of the world. And 
 that which makes him the easy victim of wrongs at which we justly 
 shudder, is partly the fact that law and humanity and religion look on 
 with folded hands, while he is fleeced and drugged and delivered over 
 to his fate. 
 
 Do I say that he is exposed to peculiar temptations? The wonder is 
 rather that lie is not more swiftly and more irretrievably ruined. Cut off 
 from all the influences by which human character is refined and ele- 
 vated, living a life of perpetual exposure and toil, often cast out and 
 betrayed by society itself which he has enriched by his labors, what 
 more can you expect of the sailor than that he shall be brutal and 
 vicious? How can you hope to recover and save him? And yet there 
 is no class of men who respond more prdmptly to the efforts that are 
 made, in Christian love, to bring them to a better and nobler life. 
 Many of them have gone from Christian homes, and the seeds of truth, 
 the germs of good, which there were planted, though long buried out 
 of sight, are living still. The thought of a father’s faithful counsel, 
 of a mother’s tears and prayers and yearning love, is awakened again, 
 and under a sudden rush of deep and tender feeling, the hard heart is 
 melted as an ice-bound stream is loosened into life in the warm breath 
 of the Easter sun. The voice of sympathy, of advice, of remonstrance, 
 of kind and earnest appeal has a strange power upon ears that have been 
 long accustomed to the stern word of command or the false word of 
 treachery. Then the life of a sailor is a series of crises. At one mo- 
 ment he is quietly floating under a clear sky, over the gently undulating 
 waves. And again the ocean is churned to foam and his ship is plung- 
 ing madly through the storm. And again he is fiercely clinging to 
 some fragment of a wreck, amidst the howling and hungry billows, or 
 drifting alone toward madness and death, with nothing around him 
 but the black waters and nothing above him but the cold stars. Or 
 
— 9 — 
 
 again you find him staggering back to self consciousness again, after a 
 career of dissipation, in which he has dishonored his manhood and de- 
 stroyed his self-respect and is afraid that he has lost his soul. Do you 
 wonder that a man whose life is filled with such tremendous experi- 
 ences as these, is prepared by them to welcome the light and strength, 
 the peace and pardon and purity, which only the gospel brings? Do 
 you wonder that he will seize upon the hope set before him in Christ, 
 as such a man once said, “ with a death-grip?” Do you wonder that 
 he will sav, as another exclaimed, when, the day after his conversion 
 he was asked if he should not write to his wife in England of the new 
 life that he had found, — “ Write to her! why, bless you, no! — a letter 
 would be far too slow forme, — I’ve cabled her already: — ‘Saved, Body 
 and Soul! ’ ” 
 
 But I must ask you to consider, once more, not only the accessibility 
 of the sailor to the influences which seek to promote his welfare, but 
 the vast harm which he is capable of doing, if neglected. To himself, 
 first of all; for of all men that saying is truest of him, that he is his 
 own worst enemy. The very qualities, which attract us to him, his 
 reckless daring, his open handed generosity, his artless confidence, — 
 these, with the alternations of hard labor and idleness, of privation and 
 self-indulgence, of imminent peril and joyful escape, which compose 
 his brief but eventful life, — they make him peculiarly defenseless against 
 the temptations that beset him, and if you leave him to himself, you 
 leave him to his ruin. It is sometimes said that the church ought to 
 labor not for special classes of men, but for mankind at large. It is 
 true enough in general, but here is a class of men who are set apart by 
 the very conditions of their life, as distinctly as those who inhabit a 
 particular continent, or those who use a particular language. 
 They must be reached and saved, if they are to be saved at all, 
 by special efforts which are intelligently adapted to their special 
 needs. And so their peculiar isolation in the midst of mankind 
 and the singular bonds which unite them to each other give them a 
 mutual influence of extraordinary strength. There is probably no kind 
 of organization in which the power of one man over others is more 
 conspicuously shown, than the compact and exclusive association of a 
 ship’s company. A contagious fever has no fairer field for its fatal 
 work, than that which is bounded by the bulwarks of a ship and the 
 same is true of the contagion of a bad man. It acts night and day 
 corrupting the minds, perverting the consciences, destroying the souls, 
 of those who cannot escape from it and have little power to resist it. 
 
 And such a vessel carries an infection, which is worse than a pesti- 
 lence, into every port where it touches. You send your missionaries 
 
— 10 — 
 
 round the globe to try to convert the heathen to Christ. They take 
 the .Bible in their hands and labor to lift benighted races to a purer 
 faith and a better life. And a drunken and licentious crew of sailors 
 from Liverpool or from New York will undo in a week the work of 
 months. Those for whose salvation by the truth of the gospel, you 
 have been giving your wealth and offering your prayers, will say to the 
 Christian teachers whom you have sent to them, — “If this is Christianity 
 we will have nothing to do with it.” The labors of the missionaries of 
 the cross are perpetually baffled and foiled by the influence of seamen 
 whose lives are an argument of incalculable force against the religion 
 of the lands they represent. 
 
 But on the other hand, save the sailor, and I might almost say, you 
 have saved the heathen world. You have turned a great energy which 
 is otherwise employed for the diffusion and promotion of evil, into a 
 force for the extension of the kingdom of God. You can save the sail- 
 or by the help of God’s Spirit, and make his lips, which before had 
 hissed with blasphemies, tuneful with words of love and praise. You 
 can transform him from a drudge, a serf, a creature but little higher 
 than the brutes, into a pure, devout, and prayerful man. Y on can 
 bring into the service of Christ and of his gospel the courage and en- 
 ergy which are in him by nature, and that lidelity to duty and that 
 habit of immediate obedience, to which the discipline of his calling has 
 trained him. You can make of him a missionary of the cross, — to those, 
 in the first place, with whom he sails. I confess that I am astonished, 
 in spite of all that we might naturally expect from the mutual influ- 
 ence of seamen on each other, under the peculiar conditions of their 
 life, — I am astonished at the records which abound in the publications 
 of this Society, of the work which, over and over again, has been ac- 
 complished by one godly sailor among his comrades on the sea. A 
 ship in mid ocean transformed into a temple; words of praise and prayer 
 and joyful testimony of love to Christ from lips which had long been 
 familiar only with profane and ribald speech; tears of penitence 
 on faces where it had seemed as if vice had set its ineradicable stamp; 
 hymns instead of oaths; services of worship instead of convivial gath- 
 erings; till it seemed, says a captain, describing such an event, “for 
 the past two months it has seemed as if God himself was in the ship.” 
 So on board a United States steamship bound for China, “more than 
 three hundred assembled, morning and evening, for prayers. Officers and 
 men were melted to tears by a scene such as they had never witnessed 
 before. Sailors were preaching Jesus and imploring their shipmates 
 to come to Him for eternal life.” That is the result which God's Spirit 
 has many times wrought amidst the solitudes of the ocean, under no 
 other eye but llis. 
 
— 11 — 
 
 And the Christian activity of such a ship’s company is not confined 
 to the decks where they work and speak for Christ. r l heir arrival in 
 port only opens to them new opportunities of doing good to those with 
 whom they stand at once on a common footing of confidence and sym- 
 pathy. And many a soul that had wandered far beyond all influences 
 of a Christian civilization has come to the knowledge and love of the 
 Savior, through the ministry of some Christian sailor, telling his 
 simple story and urging his heart-felt appeal. 
 
 Am I not right then, my friends, in saying that God is calling upon 
 us by His word and His providence and II is Spirit, to “ look toward the 
 sea ” as a field where we are to work for Him. It is, in many respects, 
 a peculiar field. It requires a special organization that it may be 
 properly cultivated. You cannot trust to the churches established on 
 the land, and hope that, when he is in port^the sailorwill find his way 
 into them. You must have your Sailor’s Homes to shelter and protect 
 him, and your Bethels inviting him to hear the word of truth. You 
 must adapt vour methods to his peculiar character and to his peculiar 
 mode of life. You must above all seek to follow him with your influ- 
 ence when he has gone beyond the reach of your hand and of your 
 voice, and by means of books, which he can read and will read, seek to 
 preach to him the gospel when he is in the mood to be arrested and 
 impressed by it. 
 
 It is an urgent field. I have said that life is short at sea, and those 
 who are to-day within the range of our influence, may soon pass forth 
 to that long voyage from which there is no returning. A\ hatever is to 
 be done for them must be done quickly. And with the growing com- 
 merce of the world, must grow also the zeal and ardor of Christ s 
 people to make its servants His messengers and to gather the abundance 
 of the sea into His garners. 
 
 It is an inspiring field, exhibiting great results in the past and 
 promising still greater results in the future. The work which the 
 Seamen’s Friend Society has accomplished in the fifty-four years of 
 its history is one which no words or numbers can set forth. On the land 
 and on the water it stands for the rights of the sailor. It does not 
 say: “ He is poor, helpless, miserable; pity him.” It says He is a man, 
 and a self-denying benefactor of other men; give him his 'due.” By 
 the toil of his hands and at the peril of his life he is weaving the web 
 by which the nations are bound together; it is he who brings from 
 every quarter of the globe the materials of your industries, and w'ho 
 widens the range of your knowledge and your activity till it embraces 
 the world. Without him commerce would cease, and enterprise perish 
 and the progress of mankind be everywhere arrested. Then give him 
 
his due. He has a right to keep the scanty wages that he earns. See 
 to it that he is not made the victim of organized piracy on shore. He 
 has a right to the comforts and decencies of life, when he is for a little 
 while on land. Provide for him a place where he may be suitably 
 lodged and fed and honestly treated. He has a right to the tree of 
 knowledge, which is no longer forbidden to any man.' Put a library in 
 his cabin, that its humanizing and refining influence may go with him 
 wherever he sails. He has a right to the word of life. Send abroad 
 your chaplains to the great seaports of the world, that they may meet 
 him on his arrival and speak to him of the love of Christ. This is the 
 least that society owes to him, and it is the noble endeavor of this 
 Society to see that, so far as its resources extend, the sailor receives his 
 due. 
 
 We are passing through a period of great and often alarming combi- 
 nations in the trades; and the face of many a capitalist has grown pale 
 at the threat of his workmen, “ Give us an advance in our wages or we 
 will shut up your factory.” Suppose, for a moment, that the men of the 
 sea should combine against the church and say, “ Pay us what you owe 
 us. Give us the gospel, for want of which we are perishing, or we will 
 leave your ships to rust and rot at their wharves.” How long do you 
 think it would he before there would be a chaplain in every cabin and 
 a Bible in every hand? Let us see that the sailor has his rights, not 
 because lie demands them, but because it is our privilege and our duty 
 to secure them, for the love of humanity and for the honor of Christ!