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- CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE CHAPLAIN AND CHAPEL IN A MAN-OF-WAR.
The next day was Sunday; a fact set down in the almanac, spite of
merchant seamen’s maxim, that _there are no Sundays of soundings_.
_No Sundays off soundings,_ indeed! No Sundays on shipboard! You may as
well say there should be no Sundays in churches; for is not a ship
modeled after a church? has it not three spires—three steeples? yea,
and on the gun-deck, a bell and a belfry? And does not that bell
merrily peal every Sunday morning, to summon the crew to devotions?
At any rate, there were Sundays on board this particular frigate of
ours, and a clergyman also. He was a slender, middle-aged man, of an
amiable deportment and irreproachable conversation; but I must say,
that his sermons were but ill calculated to benefit the crew. He had
drank at the mystic fountain of Plato; his head had been turned by the
Germans; and this I will say, that White-Jacket himself saw him with
Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in his hand.
Fancy, now, this transcendental divine standing behind a gun-carriage
on the main-deck, and addressing five hundred salt-sea sinners upon the
psychological phenomena of the soul, and the ontological necessity of
every sailor’s saving it at all hazards. He enlarged upon the follies
of the ancient philosophers; learnedly alluded to the Phiedon of Plato;
exposed the follies of Simplicius’s Commentary on Aristotle’s “De
Coelo,” by arraying against that clever Pagan author the admired tract
of Tertullian—_De Prascriptionibus Haereticorum_—and concluded by a
Sanscrit invocation. He was particularly hard upon the Gnostics and
Marcionites of the second century of the Christian era; but he never,
in the remotest manner, attacked the everyday vices of the nineteenth
century, as eminently illustrated in our man-of-war world. Concerning
drunkenness, fighting, flogging, and oppression—things expressly or
impliedly prohibited by Christianity—he never said aught. But the most
mighty Commodore and Captain sat before him; and in general, if, in a
monarchy, the state form the audience of the church, little evangelical
piety will be preached. Hence, the harmless, non-committal abstrusities
of our Chaplain were not to be wondered at. He was no Massillon, to
thunder forth his ecclesiastical rhetoric, even when a Louis le Grand
was enthroned among his congregation. Nor did the chaplains who
preached on the quarter-deck of Lord Nelson ever allude to the guilty
Felix, nor to Delilah, nor practically reason of righteousness,
temperance, and judgment to come, when that renowned Admiral sat,
sword-belted, before them.
During these Sunday discourses, the officers always sat in a circle
round the Chaplain, and, with a business-like air, steadily preserved
the utmost propriety. In particular, our old Commodore himself made a
point of looking intensely edified; and not a sailor on board but
believed that the Commodore, being the greatest man present, must alone
comprehend the mystic sentences that fell from our parson’s lips.
Of all the noble lords in the ward-room, this lord-spiritual, with the
exception of the Purser, was in the highest favour with the Commodore,
who frequently conversed with him in a close and confidential manner.
Nor, upon reflection, was this to be marvelled at, seeing how
efficacious, in all despotic governments, it is for the throne and
altar to go hand-in-hand.
The accommodations of our chapel were very poor. We had nothing to sit
on but the great gun-rammers and capstan-bars, placed horizontally upon
shot-boxes. These seats were exceedingly uncomfortable, wearing out our
trowsers and our tempers, and, no doubt, impeded the con-version of
many valuable souls.
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