Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and runs through unmeasured, uncounted cycles of years. When, therefore, we say that the earth is founded upon the seas and established upon the floods, we declare that the earth is kept in its place by the wonder of Divine power which gives stability to the ocean, holds the stars in the firmament and controls every particle of matter in the universe. To the inexperienced voyager nothing seems more capricious and utterly without law and order than the winds and the waves. To him the ocean seems the home of the most anarchical and ungovernable power. There he is, plunging and ploughing his way over the level and limitless expanse of the waters. There is nothing to be seen but the blue dome of the sky above and the blue plain of the sea beneath. No situation in the world is better fitted to produce the feeling of utter loneliness and desolation. To be sure, the ship itself may be full of life and motion and power. The number of human beings on board may be large enough to make it seem as if home and society and the common relations of human kind were all there. But when the voyager looks away from his floating habitation, above, below, around, and asks,
Where am I ? and whither am I going ? and what has become of the great world of business and life and thought which so lately surrounded me ? then he begins to think how louely a thing is a solitary ship upon the boundless desert of the sea. The sky above and the waters beneath present the same aspect for successive days.There is no landmark, no fixed object in sight to tell him that he is making progress in any direction or that he will ever gain a safe harbor. He does not need to be a very sensitive man to ask, Whence shall we derive the prophet’s vision, the superhuman science with which to find the connecting chain binding…
