Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me.

 

[Old Thunder]

"I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.

 

[Old Thunder]

"And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God.

 

[Old Thunder]

"How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Ninevah, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa.

 

[Old Thunder]

"But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.

 

[Old Thunder]

"As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along 'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped around his head,' and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.

 

[Old Thunder]

"Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet -- 'of out the belly of ****' -- when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulfed, repenting prophet when he cried.

 

[Old Thunder]

"Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten -- his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean -- Jonah did the Almighty's bidding.

 

[Old Thunder]

"And what was that, shipmates?

 

[Old Thunder]

"To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!