— 
 
 REV. DR. HERRICK’S 
 
 SERMON AT THE FIFTY-SIXTH ANNIVERSARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 AMERICAN SEAMEN’S FRIEND SOCIETY. 
 
CHRIST FOR THE SAILOR— THE SAILOR FOR CHRIST; 
 
 A DISCOURSE BEFORE 
 
 THE AMERICAN SEAMEN’S FRIEND 
 
 SOCIETY, 
 
 AT ITS 
 
 
 FIFTY-SIXTH ANNIVERSARY, 
 
 SABBATH EVENING, p 1AY 4 T H , 
 
 OO 
 
 OO 
 
 RY 
 
 
 Rev. S. E. HERRICK, D. D., 
 
 PASTOR OF MOUNT VERNON CHURCH, BOSTON, MASS., 
 
 IN THE BROADWAY TABERNACLE, SIXTH AVENUE AND 34TH STREET, 
 NEW YORK CITY. 
 
 FROM T II E ROOMS OF THE SOCIETY, 
 
 80 WALL STREET, NEW YORK, 
 
 1884. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
SERMON. 
 
 Mark iii, 9 . — “And lie spake to his disciples, that a small ship should wait on 
 him.” 
 
 Aside from the evident convenience which would be secured by our 
 Lord for the purpose of teaching the thronging multitudes that press- 
 ed about him on the sea shore, there is a touch of propriety in the 
 command, which I do not remember to have seen 7ioticcd by any of 
 the commentators upon this passage. In the verse just preceding -we 
 are told that a great multitude came to him from the region about 
 Tyre and Sidon. And it was for the purpose of teaching these 
 men that he commanded the attendance of a small ship. Tyre and 
 Sidon, the two great cities of Phoenicia, were renowned beyond all 
 others of the ancient world for their maritime commerce. The whole 
 lives of these men were associated with the sea, with sailors and with 
 ships. Not improbably many among them had been or were even 
 then men of the sea. Not improbably the suggestion was present to 
 the mind of the Master that a bond of sympathy and kindly feeling 
 might be established between himself and them, should they see him 
 speaking from a boat as his pulpit. They would take the truth more 
 kindly at his lips were he to speak to them as a sailor to sailors. 
 Then as now, sailor’s heart warmed to sailor’s heart. The men of 
 Tyre and Sidon would be sure to give respectful hearing to the man 
 of Galilee, when they discovered that like themselves he was no 
 stranger to the pains and perils of the seaman’s life. Even as the 
 sailors of Boston thirty years ago loved Father Taylor, or as their suc- 
 cessors, in later days, believed in Peter Larsen. 
 
— 4 — 
 
 I am jealous of those petty methods of interpretation which read 
 large meanings into the most trivial incidents of the Gospel story, 
 and therefore I notice this matter simply as an interesting coincidence, 
 without putting upon it any special emphasis. But I do not think I 
 shall be transgressing the limits of sober exegesis if I seize this command 
 of our Lord that a small ship or boat should wait upon him, that he 
 might more conveniently pursue his evangelistic labors, and deduce 
 from it as my theme for this occasion, — The importance of making the 
 sea ivith its forces, moral and material, auxiliary to the extension of the 
 kingdom of Christ. 
 
 From the beginning the Gospel has sought the alliance of the sea. 
 Our Lord’s personal labors when upon earth were confined to a 
 small and comparatively insignificant territory. And yet in those 
 labors the sea of Galilee with its shipping and its sailors played no un- 
 important part. Lying as it did, a fair sheet of water some fourteen 
 miles long and half as many broad, in the very heart of Palestine, 
 without its boats and sailors it might not have been a serious obstacle 
 and hindrance to his work, though with them it served as a most 
 ready and helpful medium of communication. It was a little sheet of 
 water, to be sure, and its ships were small at largest, but we must not 
 allow our modern ideas to do injustice to the Galilean fishermen and 
 their seamanship. They were the skilled sailors of their day. The 
 lake was not contemptible, its storms were not gentle breezes, its dan- 
 gers were not inconsiderable, its vessels were not mean. Josephus 
 narrates a sea fight which took place on the lake, conducted on the 
 part of the Romans by no less a commander than Vespasian himself. 
 Its sailors, rough, hardy, weather-beaten men like our own mariners, 
 were the Lord’s generous helpers and furnished a large proportion of 
 his chosen disciples. When a few years later he took his departure, 
 the disciples to whom he had committed the continuance of his work 
 with the command, “ Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel 
 to every creature,” found a broader sea to be traversed, lying, as its 
 name implied, in the heart of the world as it was known to them. 
 The little lake of Tiberias gives place now to the Mediterranean. 
 For Capernaum and Bethsaida and Tiberias and Chorazin, they had 
 now Corinth and Alexandria and Thessalonica and Rome. In the 
 broader promulgation of the Gospel the fishing-boats of Capernaum 
 and Bethsaida must give place to the corn-ships of Alexandria and 
 the transports of Romo. Gennesaret was girdled by Judaism. The 
 Mediterranean introduced its navigators to the nations of the earth. 
 To and fro across that inland sea passed the great apostle to the Gen- 
 
— 5 — 
 
 tiles until he knew all its ports, was familiar with its prevailing winds, 
 could read its signs of storm and calm, until he was as expert a mar- 
 iner as he was in making goat-skin tents, and in the time of peril 
 could counsel the sailors with wisdom better than their own. “ 1 hrice 
 I suffered shipwreck,” lie exclaimed , — “ a night and a day I have been 
 in the deep.” 
 
 For centuries the Mediterranean was the highway of Christianity, 
 and Mediterranean sailors shared with the apostles the honor of spread- 
 ing its triumphs. The churches were few that were formed without 
 their aid. The large ships waited upon Christ and his Gospel as the 
 small ones had done upon the sea of Tiberias. To Gaul, to Spain, to 
 Africa the corn-ships carried along with the bread which perisheth, 
 the bread which endureth unto everlasting life. And even to Britain 
 the Roman war-ships along with the legions of the empire carried the 
 soldiers of the cross. Then, when after the long night of the Middle 
 Ages had passed away, and the revival of letters was followed by a 
 reformation of religion, and discovery had unveiled a new world to 
 the cupidity of commerce, and there were broader seas to be crossed 
 and greater dangers to be braved, the voice of the man of Galilee was 
 again heard making a corresponding demand that a ship should wait 
 upon him. And then came along with the gold seekers and fortune 
 hunters the pious Catholics exploring our inland lakes and rivers, the 
 Dutchmen of the New Netherlands, the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the 
 Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, the Huguenots of Oxford and New 
 Rochelle, the Scotch and North Irelandersof the middle colonies, until 
 out of the varied elements the genius of Christianity built up a Chris- 
 tian nation, and another grand step was taken in the conquest of the 
 world to Jesus Christ. Again history expanded her horizon, the 
 globe was circumnavigated, and the vast insular world of Australasia 
 was opened up to commerce and to religion by the courage and enter- 
 prise of European sailors, — a wilderness of utter darkness and degrad- 
 ation when discovered, — but thanks under God to sailors’ fortitude 
 wedded to Christian zeal, sparkling on the bosom of the Pacific, to- 
 day, like a baldric of island gems glowing with the radiance of heaven. 
 
 The lines of Tiberias have swept on and out until the little inland 
 lake seems to have taken in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Pa- 
 cific. Capernaum and Bethsaida have taken to themselves Alexan- 
 dria, Rome, London, New York, San Francisco, Honolulu, Queens- 
 town. But once more that mighty voice is heard calling for a ship 
 to aid Him in His work, and now, where the farthest east and the re- 
 motest west meet on the shore of the Pacific, — in Yeddo and Yokohama, 
 
— 6 — 
 
 in Pekin and Canton, the sailor, obedient to the call, has at last girdled 
 the world with the story of the cross. 
 
 I have no doubt that in “ Simon Peter and Andrew his brother, and 
 James the son of Zebedee and John his brother,” our Lord discerned 
 peculiar features of character which adapted them to the work of 
 Apostlesliip. But does not the history of Christianity and its progress 
 for eighteen hundred years, in the light which it reflects upon His 
 choice of these men, make it abundantly evident that He contemplated 
 at the outset the perpetual alliance of the sea and its forces with the 
 work of His Kingdom? How absolutely indispensable has the sailor 
 been at every point of new departure! What a debt do we owe him! 
 What a debt does all the world owe him! Without the intervention of 
 his self-sacrificing service the Gospel itself must have been confined to 
 the narrow region of its first publication, or at best to those adjacent 
 territories which might have been reached by the Apostles’ footsteps. 
 
 But large as has been the sailor’s service to the Gospel, it might 
 have been and ought to have been far greater. He has carried the 
 apostle, the missionary, the church to their advancing conepaests. 
 He ought himself to be the apostle, the missionary, the church. In- 
 deed our Savior seems to have contemplated not merely alliance, but 
 identity. He made sailors themselves to be His first Apostles. In 
 the beginning the sailor and the Apostle were one. Hid not our 
 Lord not only anticipate this, — that the continents are to be saved by 
 the way of the sea, — when He made sailors the first evangelists, but 
 did lie not mean to teach His church this lesson for all time, that this 
 important class of men must first be saved and utilized if she would 
 most speedily and effectively save the world? Let the church learn 
 tliis lesson, the very first that her Master taught, and not the least 
 important. Let her go to the ships to find her missionaries, as 11c did. 
 
 For a missionary the sailor is, by virtue of his very calling, — an apostle 
 of some sort, with a roving commission. Sailors are the common 
 carriers, not of one world only, but of three worlds. Three millions 
 there are of this apostolic class of men. What a mighty force 
 if it were but inspired with loyalty to one common purpose! Moving 
 over every sea, touching every shore, striking with some sort of 
 moral impact, as ceaseless as that of the tides of ocean itself, the life 
 of every land beneatli the sun. 
 
 Indeed the analogy is a close one between this ever recurring moral 
 influence and the hygienic value of the ocean tides. Think for a 
 moment of that movement, grand, silent, mysterious, by which twice 
 every twenty-four hours, now while we wake and now again while we 
 
— 7 — 
 
 sleep, the unresting sen heaves its mighty tide upon our shores. That 
 rising flood by its silent but resistless influx fills our docks, creeps up 
 our creeks, sweeps up all our river-mouths, insinuates itself into all 
 the tortuous windings of our shore-line, floods our marshes, covers our 
 unsightly flats, bringing healthful purity, literally “ the salt of the 
 earth ” with every visitation, and in exchange bearing away our pollu- 
 tion with every retirement. The tides are thus doing for us incessant- 
 ly what the heaving lungs do for the heart’s blood. Without this 
 ceaseless ebb and flow every continent of earth, every island of the sea 
 would be girdled or fringed with corruption and death. 
 
 But the ocean has other tides than these, — tides as ceaseless, as in- 
 visible. Would that they were as pure and wholesome! The rising of 
 the waters to-day is not more certain than that a fresh wave of human 
 life will come in upon us, bringing, probably, not purity but death. 
 Some portion of these three millions of sailor-lives is now sweeping 
 silently into our harbors. It will wind through our border streets. 
 It will settle into every slum and fill every purlieu of darkness and of 
 vice. It will leave the seeds of disease. It will dissolve the founda- 
 tions of virtue. It will strike more deeply the stains of shame and 
 dishonor. It will imbrute sensibility and petrify conscience. And 
 tfiNfall of the tide to-night is not more certain than that this wave in 
 its mission will take with it a charge of poison as deadly as it brought, 
 not to mse it in the deep sea but to bear it to other shores, there amid 
 other scenes to still “ work out all uncleanness with greediness.” And 
 this ebb and flow is going on ceaselessly. Two thousand men, more or 
 less, here in Xew York to-day, as many more to-morrow, some going, 
 others coming, not all impure, not all bad; many of them, thank God, 
 pure, honorable, good, life-givers wherever they go; but all out upon 
 a mission, all apostolic, every one morally dynamic beyond human 
 estimate or conception. 
 
 Xow, because the sailor is such a moral dynamic, he ought to be 
 secured to the Kingdom of Christ. Suppose every sailor’s heart were 
 charged with the grace of God, and every sailor’s life were true and 
 loyal to Jesus Christ. Suppose this incessant tide which rolls upon 
 every shore were saturated with the purifying salt of Christian love, 
 every ship a “ Morning Star,” the combined fleets of the nations the 
 navy of the Kingdom of God, with Jesus Christ for Lord High Ad- 
 miral. The sailor’s life speaks in every language if his lips do not. 
 Christian virtues, like Pagan vices, do not have to be translated in 
 order to be understood as they pass from land to land. The beauty 
 of the Lord appeals to every eye and impresses all the sons of men. 
 
— 8 — 
 
 Suppose that every Christian land should make it its first endeavor to 
 renovate and Christianize its own mercantile marine, what an immense 
 Foreign Missionary work would be immediately and effectively accom- 
 plished! The commerce of the United States alone employs half a 
 million sailors, one-sixth of the whole sailorhood of the globe. Why 
 should not the Christians of the United States see to it that these 
 men are evangelized and so do a great stroke of both Home and Foreign 
 Mission work at once? 
 
 “ Can it be done? ” do you ask? This Society whose anniversary 
 we are celebrating to-night is doing that very thing as rapidly as the 
 Christians of America supply the means. It is leavening, — if you will 
 allow me to use the word, Christ-ening, — the forces of the sea. It was 
 content in former years with meeting the sailor as he set his foot 
 upon the dock, giving him a Christian welcome, shielding him from 
 the sharks and harpies of the shore, conducting him to clean and 
 comfortable quarters, providing for his physical and spiritual necessi- 
 ties for the brief period of his life on land, and then bidding him God- 
 speed in his new departure. And this was much. But it has learned 
 the art, of late, of going to sea with him, of accompanying him with its 
 counsels and its comforts into every latitude, of speaking its friendly 
 words to him when half the world away from home and church, in the 
 loneliness of the watch, in the peril of the storm. In a word it is 
 sending to-day 400,000 chaplains in more than 8,000 vessels goingand 
 coming between the sea-ports of all countries. These chaplains speak 
 to the German, the Dane, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Italian, 
 as well as to the English and American sailor, and to each in his own 
 tongue wherein he was born. They consume none of the ship’s sup- 
 plies. They take on no airs of superiority. They are promoters of 
 peace. They dispel ennui. They awaken the best feelings and affec- 
 tions of the men. They know how to be familiar without being ob- 
 trusive. They stand on terms of equal intimacy and confidence with 
 captain, crew, and cabin-boy. They inevitably soften and humanize; — 
 more, they Christianize. It has been my good fortune to fall in with 
 many of these silent, but mighty chaplains, after long voyages, and I 
 have reverenced them. As they have often come into port in well- 
 worn and sometimes tattered uniform, weather-beaten, water-stained, 
 honorably scarred, fragrant of oakum and tar, still more have I rever- 
 enced them. They have uttered no boastful words of their doings 
 and their dangers as I have grasped them by the hands, but they have 
 been eloquent to the eye, of noble duty done, of Christly service per- 
 formed, whose only record was treasured up in sailors’ hearts and in 
 
— 9 — 
 
 the book of God’s remembrance. These 400,000 chaplains arc doing 
 a mighty work at an insignificant outlay. They are changing the 
 quality of the moral forces of the sea. They are renovating and 
 cleansing those perpetual tides. The Sailor’s Library was a heaven- 
 born thought. Multiply these chaplains a hundred fold and the 
 promise will speedily bo fulfilled, — “The abundance of the sea shall 
 be converted unto Thee.” 
 
 Another consideration which forces upon us the importance of mak- 
 ing the sailor auxiliary to the extension of the Kingdom of Christ is 
 to be found in the fact that sailors as a class are peculiarly adapted 
 to be the Apostles of Christianity. They are so adapted by the nature 
 of their calling as well as by virtue of their opportunities. The sailor 
 is brought face to face with God as other men arc not. No narrow 
 horizon shuts down upon his vision. No petty, noisy activities, no 
 turmoil of the town, no murmur of the street shatters the profound 
 and protracted silence in which his life is passed. The utter loneli- 
 ness of day after day, and the watches of the night lighted only by 
 the silent stars are transfused with the felt presence of the Deity. On 
 the deep as nowhere else, “day unto day uttcreth speech and night 
 unto night sheweth knowledge.” No speech, no language, yet all 
 eloquent of the mysterious, ineffable presence, which made the 
 Psalmist to cry out, “ The sea is His, and He made it.” “ If I take 
 the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
 even there shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold 
 me.” The sailor feels this, though he could not, it may be, express 
 it. Among no other class of men is the religious feeling so strongly 
 developed. Accordingly, if a wicked man he is proverbially super- 
 stitious, if a good one he is proverbially devout. Sailors as a class 
 believe in God. They can not otherwise without doing violence to 
 their sensibilities. It is difficult to make them atheists, unless you 
 can keep them on shore long enough to make them forget the sea. 
 They know the thunder of His power. They have seen the terrors of 
 the Lord. They have heard His footsteps who “ walketh upon the 
 wings of the wind.” They are correspondingly accessible to the mes- 
 sage of His love and grace in Jesus Christ. It is a portion of my 
 pride of which nothing but death will ever divest me that I am the 
 son of a sailor, and that among sailors my happy boyhood was passed. 
 I know them, I have preached to them. There are no other such 
 audiences. They have been subdued by the majesty of nature. They 
 are reverential, submissive, cliild-like. They need and want no 
 dialectics, no clatter of logic, nor pomp of rhetoric. The simple 
 
— 10 
 
 story, told straight out from the heart, of Him who shared with the 
 sailors in the toil, and the tempest, and then gave His life for their 
 salvation, takes them captive, and they make as noble disciples now 
 as they did at the beginning. Convert a sailor in Boston or New 
 York, or on board his ship, and he is a Christian the world over. 
 
 I have spoken of the debt which the Christian world owes to the 
 sailor for its very Christianity. God’s unspeakable gift has come to 
 every race upon the globe by the hands of the men of the sea. But 
 there is an ever accruing indebtedness, which we owe to them for our 
 civilization apart from our Christianity. What human ministry to 
 our daily wants is so wide-spread and so minute as theirs! What a 
 barren life would ours be without that ministry! The furnishings of 
 our homes, the provision of our boards would fall back into primitive 
 rudeness and meagerness but for their perpetual assistance. Every 
 cup of coffee has been set upon your breakfast table, and again every 
 cup of tea at night, at the risk of a score of sailors’ lives. The 
 very commodities which the pioneer of the prairies counts among the 
 necessities of his existence, as well as the luxuries which garnish the 
 life of the city and the town, arc the fruits of his daring and fidelity 
 in our behalf. 
 
 The wide range of foreign merchandize which any country gathers 
 into its marts of trade and distributes again among its citizens is the 
 evidence and the measure of its civilization. At the same time it is 
 evidence and measure of something more that we do not often think 
 of. It is the exponent of great dangers braved. It is the evidence 
 often of great suffering cheerfully borne and mcagerly recompensed. 
 It is the measure of high hardihood and courage on the part of the 
 ten thousand toilers of the deep. From the time when the ships of 
 Tyre brought silver, and gold, and ivory, and apes, and peacocks to 
 the court of Solomon, to the last merchantman that brought her 
 nargo of spices into the harbor of San Francisco or New York, sailors 
 have toiled at the ropes, by day, and trod the deck in nightly watch, 
 and encountered windy storm and tempest, to procure what would 
 minister to the landsman’s comfort, or gratify his taste. Like Virgil’s 
 bees they are gatherers of honey, but not for themselves. You would 
 not know your own home to night, if you were to go back to it from 
 this place to find it stripped only of what sailor’s toil had brought. 
 You have not paid for these things when you have simply given their 
 monetary value in exchange for them. A large part of the debt still 
 remains uncancelled. You owe a debt of sentiment, of feeling, of 
 gratitude. Commerce may recognize no such obligation, but equity 
 
— 11 — 
 
 docs. Selfishness may refuse to discharge it, but generosity and 
 Christianity cannot. 
 
 And apart from this actual and ever accruing indebtedness I re- 
 member that we have been and may be again dependent upon these 
 men for a more momentous and urgent service. While I have been 
 preparing this discourse, and, indeed, almost daily for many years, I 
 have had occasion to pass and re-pass a noble monument on Boston 
 Common, at whose foot there stand the cfligies of the American 
 soldier and the American sailor, who joined hands a score of years 
 ago at the call of patriotism for the salvation of our Country in her 
 time of peril. I remember that when that fearful war broke out our 
 lean and impoverished navy could muster but about 8,000 men. 
 During the war that number was swelled to 75,000. And whence 
 came that extra 07,000? Largely from our mercantile marine, — our 
 common sailors. Hatteras, Port Royal and Hampton Roads, Don- 
 elson, Island No. Ten, Memphis, Vicksburg, Mobile, New Orleans, 
 bear witness to the bravery and devotion of our common sailors, who 
 were found as ready to hazard their lives for our safety in war as they 
 ever had been for our comfort in peace. Nor under like conditions 
 would they be found wanting now. Common sailors, indeed! We owe 
 them no common debt. We owe them what money never measured, 
 — we owe them the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Two-fold, then, is the necessity which confronts us. The sailor 
 needs the Gospel, the Gospel needs the sailor. I plead with you for 
 each that you will give to it the other. On the one side I see these 
 3,000,000 of our brethren, with no homes but their hammocks, with 
 no Sabbath-rest breaking for them the monotony of the year, with no 
 cessation of care, and no domestic retreat, and no unbroken repose 
 when night stops the plow, the shuttle, and the hammer upon the 
 land, — with no church-fellowship and no place of social prayer, — 
 their lives passing away like their own swift ships, before the blasts of 
 exposure, hungering for a Heavenly Presence in the ship as once the 
 timid sailors hungered for their Lord on Galilee, — and on the other, I 
 see their Lord and ours making the same demand now, as of old, 
 upon His disciples in His longing to reach the world, — that the “ship 
 should wait upon Him.” 
 
 Let ms obey, my brethren, and give the Gospel to the sailor, that the 
 sailor may be given to the Gospel, and Christ may “see of the travail 
 of His soul and be satisfied! ”