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"And where is Cadiz, shipmates?

"That's the opinion of learned men.

"By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz.

"There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here.

"He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish.

"He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this earth.

"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him.

"And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

"But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do -- remember that -- and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.

"As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God -- never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed -- which he found a hard command. What do you see?

"As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hardheartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah.

"Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me a pilot of the living God. Am rather blind from being so often below the sun. Whaling is hard labour.

"But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Back in port, I see?

"We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us!

"How billow-like and boisterously grand!

"What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly!

"Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sea-line sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet!

"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters -- four yarns -- is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures.

A brief pause ensured; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah -- 'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'

Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm.