ANNUAL SERMON 
 
 BEKORE THE 
 
 flmepi6an Seamen’s Ppiend SesietY. 
 
 AT ITS 
 
 SIXTY-SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY, 
 
 Sunday, JVIay 12, 1895, 
 
 Rev. W. H. P. FAUNCE, 
 
 IN THE 
 
 FIFTH AVENUE BAPTIST CHURCH, NEW YORK CITY. 
 
 AMERICAN SEAMEN’S FRIEND SOCIETY, 
 
 76 WALL STREET, NEW YORK,. 
 
 1895. 
 
SERMON- 
 
 The abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee. — Isaiah lx: 5. 
 
 All through the Bible sounds the Hebrew dread of the sea. The 
 coast line of Palestine is a solid rampart of sand which seems to 
 begrudge the smallest intrusion of any bay or gulf. Over that ram- 
 part Israel looked with wonder on the navies of other peoples, 
 but during most of their history they had none of their own. 
 The Bible has two great sea stories — the story of Jonah and the 
 shipwreck of Paul, and they are tales of gruesome terror, hair- 
 breadth escape and miraculous interposition. Israel’s first experience 
 with the briny deep was when driven into it by Pharoah’s chariots, 
 and from the awful morning when they saw the mailed and gleaming 
 corpses of Egypt washed up on the strand to the final glad cry of 
 Patmos, “ there was no more sea,” the Bible writers show the terror 
 of an inland race in the presence of the insatiate and ungovernable 
 ocean. “ Sorrow is on the sea,” says Jeremiah; “ it cannot be quiet.” 
 Isaiah describes it as “the troubled sea which cannot rest, whose 
 waters cast up mire and dirt.” “ Wherein,” says the Psalmist with 
 a visible shudder, “ wherein are things creeping innumerable, both 
 small and great beasts.” The sailors in the Bible never sing at their 
 work, but they in cowardly fashion fling overboard the prophet, or 
 in the famous New Testament voyage they try to lower the boat 
 secretly and escape by leaving the ship’s passengers behind. The wise 
 Agur in book of Proverbs, among the four things too wonderful for 
 him, names “the way of a ship in the sea.” It is not strange that 
 the aged John, looking off from his rocky islet on the tossing billows 
 that shut him away from all he held most dear, saw in heaven a river 
 eternally flowing, but saw no more the rebellion and turbulence of 
 the “salt, unplumbed, estranging sea.” 
 
 Yet the splendid height of Hebrew prophecy is indicated in such a 
 declaration as I have read to you this morning. Looking off over the 
 flashing western sea, broken by the purple sails of Tyrian traders, 
 and by the strange shaped vessels peering above the horizon from 
 many a distant nation, the prophet cries to land-loving Israel, 
 “The time is coming when the abundance of the sea— its commerce, 
 its spoils, its ships, its sailors — shall turn to thee and acknowledge 
 thy God! ” 
 
4 
 
 Most of us landsmen publicly share Israel’s feeling about the 
 ocean. We admire it most when we are not on it, and are firmly per- 
 suaded of its exceeding beauty when seen from the shore. We let our 
 school-boys declaim Byron’s pompous “Apostrophe,” but we incline 
 to agree with Shakespeare in the Tempest: “Now would I give a 
 thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground.” The abund- 
 ance of the sea is to us an abundance of mystery. We never look off at 
 the dim blue horizon line without feeling that we touch infinity. It is 
 “ a gray and melancholy waste.” As a keen observer writes: “The 
 sea remembers nothing. The mountains give their lost children 
 berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die. The 
 mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquility; the sea has a 
 fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie about like 
 huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon, but safe to 
 handle; the sea smooths its silvery scales until you cannot see their 
 joints, but their shining is that of the snake.” When we look upon 
 the ocean we think of all its buried treasures, sunken wrecks, and 
 unmarked tombs. Down in its mysterious depths are strange, bril- 
 liant growths of weed and moss and sponge and slow-waxing coral. 
 There are marine fruits of gorgeous color and indescribable sheen, 
 there are tropical luxuriances of vegetation, marine jungles where 
 water-snakes glide in and out and huge fins flap lazily in warm bays, 
 aud gigantic eyes stare out of uncouth heads, and mammoth forms 
 lie lazily on sandy bottoms or burrow in the slimy ooze; and there, in 
 the “ sunless retreats of the ocean,” at a distance miles below the 
 surface, where the temperature is nearly zero, grow the hardy flora 
 and fauna of the arctic region; and everywhere on the ever moving 
 sea-floor in the “ living infinite of the sea” the great mass of infuso- 
 rial life which is hardly life at all but which affects all the life of the 
 globe. When the ship Challenger put down her .dredge and brought 
 up from five miles below living creatures with eyes and head, we 
 began to realize the enormous range of life in that aquarium which 
 covers nine-tenths of our world. 
 
 And the abundance of the sea, which is to have its jiart in building 
 up the kingdom of God, is an abundance of power. All our con- 
 tinents have been hewn, cut aud polished by the sea. There is not a 
 spot of earth that has not at some time been at the bottom of the 
 ocean. The crests of Andes and Himalayas were once under salt 
 water, and all mountains carry the shells or the abrasions of their 
 former oceanic home. The sandstone out of which we build our 
 houses was once the sea-floor, and all our Eastern States bear the visible 
 seratchings of the great bergs which once floated over submerged 
 
r> 
 
 America. And the ocean is now at work along every continent, ter- 
 rible in its power to eat out the shore or batter the cliffs into pebbles. 
 When tempest “scourges the toiling surges,” when the north-easter 
 flings landwards some mighty wave with a pressure of many tons to 
 the square inch, no piece of shore can remain intact. The waves 
 belabor the strongest cliff with a blast of sand and sharp stones, so 
 that in some parts of England seventy or eighty feet of shore sink out 
 of sight each year. 
 
 But the abundance of the sea is not simply in its blind forces, but 
 in the men who traverse its surface, drink in the exhilaration of its 
 salt air and share its love of freedom and greatness. Those who have 
 read Captain Mahan’s recent book on the “ Influence of the Sea 
 Power in History,” know with what a masterly hand an American 
 sailor can sketch the power of the sea in moulding human life. The 
 ocean is the life-giver of the world. Wherever it cannot penetrate, 
 as in Siberia and Africa, the land stagnates and dries up. Wherever it 
 can insert its sinuous arms, as iu Greece and England, there is a virile 
 progressive people. Wherever the sailor has gone, there have gone free- 
 dom, civilization, commerce and knowledge. In all history the cities 
 by the sea, Tyre, Carthage, Venice, Genoa, have held the destinies 
 of nations in their keeping. Genoa and Venice carried the armies 
 of the Crusaders to the land of the Holy Sepulchre, and brought 
 back the shattered remnants of soldiery laden with treasures of art 
 and literature which were scattered over Europe to become the seeds 
 of the Rennaissance. To shut up any nation into itself means the 
 petrefaction of a Corea or a China. The sea is the highway of the 
 nations, the chief bond of human brotherhood. A little time ago we 
 saw moored in the Hudson the models of the three frail pinnaces 
 which Columbus steered to San Salvador, and we realized the glory 
 of the men who with so little did so much. The best blood of that 
 day went into sailing, and the keenest minds and stoutest hearts of 
 the age were wrestling with the problem of the sea. Holland snatched 
 her soil from the domain of the deep, and then made the baffled ocean 
 carry her products round the world. Twenty-five hundred ships 
 rode at anchor in the harbor of Antwerp until the Dutch were hum- 
 bled by the power of Spain. 
 
 England would be in barbarism to-day if it were not for that enor- 
 mous fleet of little boats that grated on the beach at Hastings in 
 1066 and poured forth 60,000 Normans under William the Conqueror. 
 As he slipped and fell upon the shore, he sprang up, his hands full 
 of wet sand, and changing the accident into happy omen, cried, 
 “See, I have taken possession of England with both my hands,” 
 
6 
 
 type of that race that have ever since grasped every difficulty “ with 
 both hands earnestly.” 
 
 Then followed the noble sailors of the “ spacious times of great 
 Elizabeth,” the chivalrous Ealeigh, the audacious Magellan, the 
 intrepid Drake, the latter knighted by the queen herself on the deck 
 of his own vessel. The mariners of England have carried her name 
 and fame into every corner of the earth. They have planted colonies 
 in all longitudes, have made her morning drum-beat heard round the 
 world; in time of war beating back her foes, in time of peace filling 
 every sea with her snowy sails. 
 
 In our own history let us not forget that whatever we think of a 
 sailor’s life to-day we are the sons and daughters of seafaring men 
 and women. English and Dutch alike mastered themselves in mas- 
 tering the sea. It was fortunate for early New England that the sea- 
 barrier kept the cowards and drones at home. The Mayflower brought 
 only heroes and heroines to a heroic task. The great whaling indus- 
 try created and nourished a venturesome and hardy race. When the 
 Devolution came it won victory on the sea which made possible vic- 
 tory on the land. The tea-party in Boston harbor gave the inspira- 
 tion for Lexington and Bunker Hill. When Paul Jones lashed the 
 Bon Homme Richard to the Seraj)is and conquered her in very sight 
 of the British coast, he sent a thrill through Europe, and reinforced 
 every American regiment. In that great struggle for independence 
 it was the American sailor that compelled a recognition ol the rights 
 of neutrals and modified international law; and when Cornwallis sur- 
 rendered it was the sight of the allied fleets in the harbor which com- 
 pelled the deed. 
 
 In our Civil War some 75,000 sailors were enrolled in our naval 
 force, a large part of them from the merchant marine. In Arctic ex- 
 ploration no names have gained surer immortality than those of De 
 Long and Greeley. To-day the White Squadron' of our country pro- 
 tects the American citizen wherever he may wander. It shields the 
 missionary as he braves the islands of the sea, it gives safety to the 
 traveller, and often has brought a Christian message to pagan shores. 
 That Japan which is now leading Asia into light heard its first Prot- 
 estant hymn in 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into the harbor 
 of Yeddo, read from the open Bible on the capstan the one hundreth 
 Psalm, and lined out the words : 
 
 “ All people that on earth do dwell 
 Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.” 
 
 Yes, my friends, though our American shipping has now decayed, 
 and we, absorbed in internal development, may have neglected the 
 
7 
 
 sea-power, we must not forget that we arc the sons and daughters of 
 a seafaring race, and through all our history its noblest episodes, its 
 most heroic daring, its greatest victories have been associated with 
 the sound of the sea. The salt breeze has been to our people the 
 breath of liberty, the sea has been a bulwark of defense, and from 
 our Norse forefathers down to the brave crew of the Monitor who in 
 a single morning saved themselves and the nation, the race has seen 
 no nobler men than some of its naval commanders. 
 
 Less conspicuous, but often none the less brave, are the common 
 sailors, who face all weathers in the ordinary commerce of the world. 
 When the winter storm drives us to our glowing firesides, we do well 
 to think of those sailors who cling frost-bitten to the icy rigging, and 
 amid snow and hail and blackness of midnight wait with unutterable 
 longing for a friendly gleam from the shore. Out of the great army 
 of three millions of sailors from all parts of the world hundreds are 
 killed each year in the contest with wind and wave. Had they died 
 in the army we should decorate their graves each year, but the dead 
 sailor gets only the canvas shroud, the hasty prayer beside the plank, 
 the plunge, and the unvisited tomb. 
 
 A little time ago New York was raising a fund for the families of 
 six brave sailors who once belonged to the Dutch steamship Amster- 
 dam. “Common sailors” men called them, bronzed and brawny 
 young tars of thirty years perhaps, with littles homes and wives and 
 children in Holland, simple, humble men who never dreamed of 
 fame. But one day they sighted the wrecked ship Maggie E. Wells 
 with fourteen men clinging to the rigging, and when Captain Stenger 
 called for volunteers to man the life boat, seven young sailors sprang 
 forward. Down into the tempestuous, seething caldron of the sea 
 they were lowered, and with just one thought for the dear ones in 
 Holland they manned the oars. The boat was capsized, broken, and 
 six brave fellows were seen no more. The fourteen and the six were 
 gone, the life-boat lost, and “nothing came,” says the newspaper, 
 “ of this noble work of mercy and sacrifice.” Ah, be sure that much 
 has come of it to all the three million who do business in the great 
 waters. “ So shines a good deed in a naughty world,” and the deeds 
 of the common sailor give us a glimpse of an ideal humanity and of 
 Him who laid down Hi3 life for His friends. 
 
 And when we cross the ocean ourselves it is the sailor to whom we 
 are indebted every hour. We pace the deck in the sunshine, but 
 below the decks is a small city of men at work for our comfort. The 
 old fashioned shipbuilder is out of date, and the huge leviathan of 
 the Atlantic liner is a matter of most skillful engineering, of mighty 
 
8 
 
 castings and forgings, of huge plates and girders against which the 
 sea has no power. It becomes a floating world, gorging itself with 
 coal, flinging billows of spray from its bow, leaving its white wake in 
 the sea and its dark line in the air, and dropping below the horizon 
 as if it were a huge bird and did but skim the sea in its flight. 
 
 And this evolution of the ship ought to mean the growth of the 
 sailor. He becomes in many cases an intelligent leader, a master in 
 navigation and mechanics, and worthy of greater honor and esteem 
 than ever before. I shall not forget the first time that I approached 
 the shores of America after a long absence. The weather had been 
 rough but suddenly cleared away, and we were pacing the deck on a 
 cloudless evening with a full moon in the sky, thinking of the “ home, 
 sweet home ” we soon should greet again. Some one cried, “ The 
 pilot ! ” The captain sprang to the bridge and every passenger to the 
 ship’s side. There it was, the gleam of a snowy sail low on the dim 
 horizon, as if the wing of a dove had flown out from the land to meet 
 us. For two days through the storm that pilot boat had sailed up 
 and down to find us, and we, thinking only of home, gave a hearty 
 greeting and thought no more of the sailor. 
 
 The development of the ship ought to be the development of those 
 who man it. It ought to mean, it does mean that henceforth for 
 weal or woe the sailor is to take a still larger part in moulding our 
 civilization, shaping national character and life. There are two 
 classes of men to-day who are delegates-at-large to all mankind, the 
 railroad men and the sailors. Both of them have been sadly neglected 
 and forgotten by the nations whose progress is possible only through 
 their devotion. The half million American sailors are scattering the 
 seeds of our national life all round the globe. They are unaccredited 
 ambassadors to every port, they represent us to the antipodes, and 
 the Christianization of the sailor would be one of the swiftest means 
 to the Christianization of the globe. Long enough have we sent 
 missionaries and whiskey in the same ship, long enough have we 
 landed at pagan ports three or four missionaries to preach Christ and 
 thousands of neglected sailors to preach self-indulgence and sin. 
 Little will it avail to load American ships with tracts and Bibles, so 
 long as the same ship carries western vices to the children of the east. 
 When Admiral Foote was dining with the king of Siam he asked a 
 blessing at the table. The king in surprise inquired if the bronzed 
 old sailor was a missionary. “Sir,” answered the bluff admiral, 
 “every Christian is a missionary.” If every sailor was a missionary 
 carrying Christ into the crowded ports of all the earth, we should 
 have the mightiest evangelistic agency the world has yet seen. These 
 
0 
 
 three million potential apostles ask no salary from the church at 
 home, they need no training school save the tossing brine, but if they 
 wore disciples of Christ then the blessed inspiration of their faith 
 would illumine the region that sits in darkness and girdle land and 
 sea with a broad belt of Christian light. Simple, unsophisticated 
 men, brave and brawny and true, like the first apostles of Christ 
 whose training school was the sea, these men are the advance guard 
 of civilization. If bad, they will corrupt the earth ; if good, they 
 will sweeten and purify all lands, lie who makes the winds 1 1 is 
 messengers waits to make each flying ship the herald of His great 
 evangel. 
 
 “ God bless her, whereso’er the breeze 
 Her snowy wing shall fan, 
 
 Aside the frozen Hebrides 
 Or sultry Hindustan ! 
 
 Her pathway on the open main 
 May blessings follow free, 
 
 And glad hearts welcome back again 
 Her white sails from the sea! ” 
 
 Now there are three things we can do for the sailor: 
 
 1. We can surround him when on shore with wholesome, strong, 
 Christian influences. The sailor is perforce away from home, and 
 home is to most men the anchor of the moral life. The uplifting 
 power of womanhood is the strength and safety of manhood, and he 
 who leaves behind him mother, sister, wife, often leaves God at the 
 same time. Many a true, brave tar, as he trims his sail to the breeze, 
 “ thinks on the woman that loves him the best,” but the “harbor 
 bar is moaning,” the duty is calling and all the tender ties that bind 
 us into goodness are left at the hoisting of the anchor. And when 
 he enters the foreign port, camping out in some miserable lodging 
 house, his wages perhaps withheld, or plundered from him by land- 
 sharks, unnoticed by the churches, unwelcomed by respectable and 
 sleek Christianity, ever welcomed by saloon and vile den, is it any 
 wonder that he often succumbs to evil ? The worst sights I have ever 
 seen in New York were in walking late in the evening through some 
 streets where special welcome is offered to sailors from every land 
 under heaven. And one of the happiest sights in the city is the 
 Sailors’ Home at 190 Cherry Street, under the auspices of the Amer- 
 ican Seamen’s Friend Society, where a Christian welcome is given 
 to every tar, where strong hands help him into nobler life, and from 
 which missionaries go forth to visit incoming vessels with the message 
 of the gospel. The thing the sailor most needs on shore is the touch 
 of Christian home-life. 
 
10 
 
 2. We can follow him at sea with substantial sympathy and aid. 
 The system of loan libraries which has been devised by the American 
 Seamen’s Friend Society is as ingenious as it is praiseworthy. 
 Many of us believe in the “ chapel cars” by which the gospel is being 
 preached to-day in hundreds of western towns, the car being attached 
 to the rear of any train and side-tracked at any station. But better 
 than to build a chapel-ship is it to make every ship a chapel. Forty- 
 three books, placed in a vessel bound on a long cruise, constitute a 
 silent uplifting force no man can estimate. They bind the sailor to 
 the shore, they set before him ideals of purity, temperance, integrity, 
 they stimulate intellectual and moral life, they persuade him that 
 God has not forgotten, that the church has not forgotten him. New 
 York State has recently established a series of portable libraries, by 
 which the regents of our State University will send a small case of 
 books to any town in the State where serious educational work is 
 undertaken. What the Empire State is now doing the American 
 Seamen’s Friend Society began to do in 1S5S. 
 
 3. And we can also quietly resolve this morning that henceforth 
 we will cherish a strong personal interest in the life of the sailor. 
 Perhaps we have ignored one of the most potent influences of our time. 
 Perhaps we have taken from the sailor food and furnishing and fabric 
 from every quarter of the globe, and have done nothing for the sailor 
 save to pay him a pittance and provide him a saloon in which to lose 
 it. We go to Europe in the summer without one throb of sympathy 
 for the men who carry us. Let us realize they are flesh and blood, 
 some of them the best the world has seen. Let us visit when we 
 can, the Home at Snug Harbor where the aged graduates of the sea 
 pace up and down with eyes on the horizon, as if the shaded walk 
 were the deck of the forecastle and the solid ground were rolling in a 
 stiff breeze. Let us cherish the organization in whose name we meet 
 to-day, not the sailor’s patron, or the sailor’s master, but the sailor’s 
 friend. From the ranks of the American sailors whose fathers steered 
 over the wintry sea, fought with immortal valor in our revolution and 
 civil war, are to come some of our leaders in the twentieth century. 
 Out of the men who pace the quarter-deck in many a blinding squall, 
 who have wrestled with the hurricane and gazed undaunted into the 
 deep when it is made to boil like a pot, out of the hardy manhood, 
 scarred and weather-beaten, but patient, courageous and victorious, 
 out of that manhood which binds us in ever stronger bonds to the 
 other nations of the world, are to come many of those who shall 
 control the destiny of our Ship of State and fill the future with 
 strength and beauty. 
 
11 
 
 Many of us have paused in Westminster Abbey by the tomb of Sir 
 John Franklin, bearing the inscription of Tennyson’s noble verse: 
 
 “Not here; the white North has thy bones; 
 
 And thou, heroic sailor-soul, 
 
 Art passing on thy happier voyage now, 
 
 Toward no earthly Pole! ” 
 
 May we so help the sailor that when North or South shall claim his 
 body, (Jod may receive his soul! 
 
1828 
 
 meritan 
 
 m\m\ s 
 
 1895 
 
 Mr. CHARLES H. TRASK, President. 
 
 Mr. JAS. W. ELWELL, Vice-President. 
 
 Rev. W. C. STITT, D.D., Secretary. 
 
 Mr. WM. C. STURGES, Treasurer. 
 
 Capt. David Gillespie, 
 
 Rev. Edward B. Coe, D.D. LL.D., 
 “ A. G. Vermilye, D.D., 
 
 “ Chas. Cuthbert Hall D.D., 
 “ J. A. B. Wilson, D.D., 
 
 “ Chas. A. Stoddard, D.D , 
 
 “ Norman Fox, D.D., 
 
 Trustees : 
 
 Mr. Wm. A. Booth, 
 
 “ Wm. E. Stiger, 
 
 “ Enos N. Taft, 
 
 “ Chas. K. Wallace, 
 “ John Dwight, 
 
 “ Jas. P. Wallace. 
 
 “ W. I. Comes, 
 
 Mr. Elbert A. Brinckerhoff, 
 “ Frederick Sturges, 
 
 “ A. G. Agnew, 
 
 “ Daniel Barnes, 
 
 “ Samuel Rowland, 
 '* Geo. Bell, 
 
 W. Hall Ropes. 
 
 There are nearly three million seamen afloat. The American 
 Seamen’s Friend Society aims to do them good. 
 
 It gives annual aid to chaplains laboring in their behalf, in 17 for- 
 eign and 14 domestic ports. 
 
 It places loan libraries for seamen’s use on vessels leaving the port 
 of New York. Up to December 1, 1894, 10,146 libraries have been 
 sent to sea; about two libraries for every working day for thirty-six 
 years. 
 
 seamen can board and be comparatively protected from vicious sur- 
 roundings, and where shipwrecked and destitute sailors are cared for. 
 
 It publishes the Sailors’ Magazine for the friends of seamen, 
 the Life Boat for Sunday Schools, and the Seamen’s Friend for 
 seamen. 
 
 It distributes on vessels the publications of the American Bible 
 Society and the American Tract Society. 
 
 Through its agents and efforts sailors are befriended, enlightened, 
 comforted and blessed. The record of its work in all the years of its 
 existence has cheered both the philanthropist and Christian. 
 
 Your church is requested to take an annual collection for this 
 work, and to send it to the Treasurer, at No. 76 Wall Street, New 
 York. Publications containing facts for sermons will be sent to 
 pastors on application. 
 
 It provides a Sailors’ Home at 190 Cherry Street, New York, where