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- 3084
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:47:28.078Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 3029
- text
- XXI
If in vain the good chaplain sought to impress the young barbarian with
ideas of death akin to those conveyed in the skull, dial, and
cross-bones on old tombstones; equally futile to all appearance were his
efforts to bring home to him the thought of salvation and a Saviour.
Billy listened, but less out of awe or reverence, perhaps, than from a
certain natural politeness; doubtless at bottom regarding all that in
much the same way that most mariners of his class take any discourse,
abstract or out of the common tone of the workaday world. And this
sailor way of taking clerical discourse is not wholly unlike the way in
which the pioneer of Christianity, full of transcendent miracles, was
received long ago on tropic isles by any superior _savage_ so called--a
Tahitian, say, of Captain Cook’s time or shortly after that time. Out of
natural courtesy he received but did not appreciate. It was like a gift
placed in the palm of an outstretched hand upon which the fingers do not
close.
But the _Indomitable’s_ chaplain was a discreet man possessing the good
sense of a good heart. So he insisted not on his vocation here. At the
instance of Captain Vere, a lieutenant had apprised him of pretty much
everything as to Billy; and since he felt that innocence was even a
better thing than religion wherewith to go to judgment, he reluctantly
withdrew; but in his emotion not without first performing an act strange
enough in an Englishman, and under the circumstances yet more so in any
regular priest. Stooping over, he kissed on the fair cheek his
fellow-man, a felon in martial law, one who, though in the confines of
death, he felt he could never convert to a dogma; nor for all that did
he fear for his future.
Marvel not that having been made acquainted with the young sailor’s
essential innocence, the worthy man lifted not a finger to avert the
doom of such a martyr to martial discipline. So to do would not only
have been as idle as invoking the desert, but would also have been an
audacious transgression of the bounds of his function, one as exactly
prescribed to him by military law as that of the boatswain or any other
naval officer. Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of
Peace serving in the host of the God of War--Mars. As such, he is as
incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why, then,
is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the
cannon; because, too, he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek
to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but force.[7]
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Footnote 7:
There is an author’s note in the margin of the MS. reading:--_An
irruption of heretic thought hard to suppress._
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- title
- XXI