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THE

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA:

AN INQUIRY

INTO THE

TRUE RELATIONS OF COMMERCE

TO THE

EVANGELIZATION OF THE WORLD.

BY

WILLIAM AIKMAN,

PASTOR OF THE HANOVER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,“ILMINGTON,DEL

PHILADELPHIA:
PENNSYLVANIA SEAMEN’S FRIEND SOCIETY.

OFFICE AT

THE BIBLE HOUSE, COR. SEVENTH AND WALNUT STs.

Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1863, by the

PENNSYLVANIA SEAMEN’S FRIEND SOCIETY,
in the Clerk’s Ofﬁce of the District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

 

 

 

CAXTON PRESS OF C. SHERMAN, SON dz 00., PHILADELPHIA.

 

 

CONTENTS.

'3 CHAPTER I.
§-\ THE SEA A POWER.

q: L The Ocean and Commerce are not suggestive of each

‘ other—Arabs sailing by the monsoons—Discovery of

the Cape of Good Hope—Ocean Commerce—Unity of

the Sea—The Ocean the organizer of the good or evil

of the nations—Divine order in discoveries—Not acci-

dental, but adapted to the moral condition of the

\Vorld—Progress of maritime knowledge—Ocean

steaming—Improvement in sailing vessels—Physical

Geography of the Sea_-A century of missions.. .Page

CHAPTER II.

COMMERCE THE DISCOVERER AND THE OPENER.

The Commerce which goes on the Sea its power—Com-
merce gives new ﬁelds to the Church—Opens them, and
keeps them open—Christianity peaceful—Commerce
makes peace, and maintains it ......................

CHAPTER III.

THE COLONIES OF COMMERCE.

The direct different from the incidental inﬂuence of Com-
merce—The Portuguese colonies—Rapidity of their
growth—Wide extent—Commercial power—Rapacity
and cruelty—Resistance of the natives—Decline of
power—Condition of India——French Commerce—Mada-
gascar—Spanish Commerce—Dutch Commerce—Injus-
tice and cruelty—The Spice Islands—English Com-
merce in India—Inﬂuence of public opinion on the
Company’s aﬁ'airs-Support of heathenism—Commer-
cial colonies in America ...........................

13

29

_A.._-__.anmn I

Q

iv CONTENTS.

CHAPTER IV.

COMMERCE AND MISSIONS.

The English East India Company an accurate example of

the inﬂuence of Commerce on Missions—Opposition to
English Miss1ons—American Missionaries—Exertions

in England to obtain toleration for Missionaries in India .

——Opposition not personal, but on principle ........ . . .

CHAPTER V.
COMMERCE IN NEW LANDS.

First effect of Commerce on a barbarous people—Sand-

wich Islands—Vancouver’s vi'sit—Tabu abolished—-
Idolatry abandoned—Commerce takes away old super-
stitions—Gives nothing in their place—The crisis of a
heathen people’s history—Commerce introduces vices
and diseases—South Sea Islands—Physical beauty and
health of natives—Visits of ships—Decay of population
——Fie1ds unvisited by Commerce attractive to Mission-

CHAPTER VI.
THE MEN or COMMERCE.

The sailor the man of Commei'ce—Eﬁ'orts in behalf of sea-

men recent—How awakened—Moral surroundings of
sailors—Sailors at the Sandwich Islands—The Church
late in the work for seamen—History of the seamen’s
cause—Origin of efforts in London—Bethels—Work in
New York, Philadelphia, etc.—Mariner’s Church—
“ The Great Awakening” at Sea—Diffusion of inﬂuence
of seamen ........................ ‘ ................

CHAPTER VII.
COMMERCE FOR, THE CHURCH.

Christianity the only hope of the world—Atlantic cable

rejoicings—Commerce belongs to the Church—Arts,
literature and knowledge not enough for the world—
Commerce dependent on Christianity—The Sepoy re-
volt—The great lesson—A religious, but not a religion
propagating state—The Church gives new ﬁelds for
Commerce—Missionaries explorers—The Church to take

69

81

possession of Commerce—Forcing events—The baptism. 118

THE

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

CHAPTER I.

THE SEA A POWER.

THE words commerce and the sea have of late
years connected themselves so closely together that
the one at once suggests the other. We speak of
commerce, and with the term comes up a concep-
tion of the ocean. We think of the wide water,
with itsships, its harbors, its winds and its waves.
It was~not always so. \Vhen the mariner crept
along the Mediterranean, the great sea, the em-
blem of all that was sublime and awful, or hastened
timidly over it ; when the Atlantic was all unknown,
or only dreamed of in terriﬁc fables of wanderers
swallowed up and lost, the word called up far dif—
ferent associations. One might, after a while,
think of galleys and ships, but the ﬁrst thought
would be of long land journeys, and the caravan,

stretching over miles, with the slender line fading
1 as , , . ( 13 )

_,._~.-.....sm I

ll MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

atpeither end in the distance; hot sands, and not
ocean waves; the camel, that “ship of the desert,”

with its uneasy swing, and not the gliding or the
tossing of vessels, would be before him. Then
commerce meant the land track by Baalbec, Da-
mascus, Tadmor in the Wilderness, and Babylon,
with India so far away that men only wondered at
its exhaustless riches, admired its gorgeous fabrics,
but never thought of seeing its golden mountains.
The Ishmaelite, going down to Egypt with his
merchandize, and coming slowly in the View of
the shepherds watching their ﬂocks, and passing,
after his halt, on his way, was the type of com-
merce in those early times.

So it was through all the rise and fall of empires,
for thousands of years the same, up to the time
when that restless and energetic race, the Arab,
began to seek other paths, and make the sea the
road over which he could reach the distant lands
with which he trafﬁcked. Then the Indian Ocean
came to be known, and commerce began to assume
to itself the idea of the sea. But, even then, it
was the ocean, not in its broad expanse, but as it
touched the land.

The observant trader had learned to make the
track of the monsoons, and soon turned them to
his service. He noticed that one half the year the
wind blew steadily from the southwest, and for
the other half from the northwest. In the spring
09 summer months he would put out with his
spices and his fruits from his peninsular home,

MOltAL POWER OF THE SEA. 15

and be blown by the stormy wind over the Ara—
bian sea, till he found his port in India ; then he
would wait till the fall or winter months were
come, and again commit himself to the sea to be
wafted back by the now dry and gentle winds
which had turned in their circuit.

So it was that by and by commerce began to
mean the ocean traﬂic of the world. But it was
not till the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope,
that the ocean assumed the place it now holds.
That immediately opened a new way of communi-
cation between Europe and Asia, and gave a new
character to commerce. Here, too, the agency of
the Arab was potent. He was the unwitting
cause of the extension of ocean commerce, even
as he had been its originator. The grasping folly
of Arabian traders, who would brook no rival, and
permit none to use their thoroughfares, compelled
the nations of Europe to look for some other way
to India, than by the Red Sea and over Arabia; and
so they pushed out through the straits of Gibraltar,
and crept carefully down the shores of Africa.
The enterprise of the Arabs had given a new idea
and a world—wide. stretch to commerce ; their
shortsighted selﬁshness, while it snatched the great
result from their own hands, enlarged and gave it
to the world.

One voyager after another would venture into
the unknown and dreaded Atlantic, and after
having gone a little farther south than he who had
been before, would come back, covering his ill-

16 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

fortune with tales of difﬁculty and even impossi~
bility. After a time, one bolder, but more unfortu-
nate in his half-success than the rest, lay battling
with storms and mutiny off the cape, which made
the turning-point to the land of gold and gems, and
was compelled bitterly to turn back.

What Bartholomew Diaz had seen, Vasco De
Gama passed, and the path opened at once and
forever round the continent. The ocean was
lifted from the place where it was only the object
of undeﬁned awe and terror, to a new position of
attractiveness and interest in the minds of men,
and became, as it‘is now suggestive of, the wprld’s
trading-path. Now, when we speak of commerce,
the white sails of ships, the smoke and dash of
steamers, the blue waves and the boundless stretch .
of sea present themselves.

The mariner’s compass and the quadrant have
raised the landmarks of travel from the earth, and
placed them in the heavens, they have made them
ﬁxed and certain as they were never before. Now
the voyager can push out from the land, and the
sea is the ever-levelled way over which he may go.
Here is no road to be kept in repair: once charted
out, with the eternal stars and the undecaying
sun to show the path, it remains the highway of
the nations, and broad enough for them all. N OW
the commerce of the world goes upon its bosom,
and without it would have almost no existence at
all. In this way the sea has, in these later times,
grown to be a power; whatever of inﬂuence there

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 17

is in commerce upon the world, belongs to the
ocean.

There is that in its very nature Which suggests
its moral power. The ocean is one vast system,
bearing different names indeed, yet so intimately
related in all its parts that it is a unit. The frozen
waters of the Arctic or Antarctic, the tepid
waters of the mild Paciﬁc, and of the storm-vexed
_ Atlantic, belong each to the other, and make one
unbounded whole; they are one in the strictest
possible sense ; not only do they glide insensibly
into one another, but each is a part of the other,
the same drops going in the lapse of months to
make up the bulk of every sea. The mighty sys-
tem of oceanic circulation accomplishes it. It is
_ like the circulation of the human system: the
blood disc circling this moment in the brain,- shall
in. a little While he imparting life to the foot; that
which gives color to the lip shall soon be playing
in an air-cell of the lungs, or be gushing from the
heart, orbe giving ﬁre to the eye, or strength to
the muscle of the arm. It is a part of one great
system. The blood is the ocean Of the body; the
ocean is the life-blood of the vvorld. With its
wonderful system of currents it is kept in per-
petual movement and perpetual life. These cur-
rents ﬂow like the veins and arteries, in eVery con-
ceivable direction : they are surface currents;
they are under-currents; they ﬂow side by side;
they ﬂow above and below each other; they dip
down; they rise again; they cross and Wind in

18 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

mazy tracery, till the ocean is a net-work of life
in unceasing ﬂow. 'Thus the waters are mingled
up. Each drop makes a part of a related whole.
It may be lifted on the Wings of the atmosphere,
and borne in ﬁeecy clouds over the land, but by
and by it will come back again and join hands
with its brother drops.

We may then take the sea as a symbol of the
unity of the race, and of the faith which is des-
tined to cover the earth. The words of promise,
“ as the waters cover the sea,” have in their signiﬁ-
cance more than a simple prevalence of the gos-
pel,—they mark the oneness of the faith and hope
it inspires. 7

But it is not simply a unity in itself, and typiﬁes
that of the race, but it actually unites the people
of the earth. It has become the bond which now
holds the nations together. Above all other
things it makes the people one. However men
may foolishly talk of different origins of the races,
and contend for diverse parentage and creation,
the sea makes them one, and, ﬂowing by every
shore, tells that they cannot be kept apart.

It was not so in other centuries. Time was
when the ocean was the barrier which shut the
nations from each other. Men might scale moun;
tains, and struggle over thirsty deserts, but they
looked out upon the heaving sea, and felt that
they were forever and hopelessly separated from
all beyond. There might be brethren there, but
they could not stand side by side. But now the

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 19

land has become the Separator, the ocean the
Uniter: it links not only opposite continents, but
the sides of the same continent, sundered by the
wide stretch of intermediate soil. A thousand
miles of sea are shorter and easier than a thou-
sand miles of land.

Nor is this a matter of merely speculative inte-
rest, rather in it lies a fact of immeasurable signi-
ﬁcance. The sea binds the nations together, it
brings them side by side, and their life, like its
currents above and below, will mingle and gain a
new intensity and power from the union. The
ocean is the organizer and multiplier of all the
good or ill that is done on earth. Wickedness'or
goodness may be bad or good enough when it is ‘
insulated and stands only in individuals; you have
made it potent when you have brought those indi-
Viduals together in a mass, and given them facili-
ties of combination.

The law is alike in the moral and the physical
world. The pestilence, whether propagated like
an epidemic or a contagion, goes uniformly along
the grand lines of travel. 80 it was with that
awful scourge of the race in these later times, the
cholera. It had its birth in the plains orjungles
of India, but it advanced in its inexorable march
over the earth on the track of caravans, along
the base of mountains, by the banks of rivers, till
it spread slowly but steadily overEurope, and then
reached across the Atlantic, and found its earliest
victims in the ports where the old world ﬁrst

20 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

touches the new. 80 with the plague, it revels
not in secluded hamlets, where the people see
each others’ homes by the ”smoke curling in the
distance, but in the city where human habitations
stand close together, and men touch each other.
The quarantine is necessary to interrupt the con-
tinuity, and break up the fatal contact.

So insurrections grow, and revolutions have
their birth and get their triumphs in cities, be-
cause men are near together, and the movement
is propagated from heart to heart. Liberty has
been born again and again, and almost always in
towns and cities. Perhaps histor' furnishes no
instance where a great revolution has begun or
culminated elsewhere. Cities have achieved and
prOtected the liberties of Europe and America.
They are the centres of power, not because of the
naked force of numbers alone, but because the
numbers are together, and the movement, what-
ever its nature may be, ﬂows easily: the chain is
complete, and the electric shock leaps at once from
link to link.

Very much is said, especially since these facili-
ties of intercourse have increased, about the im—
mense beneﬁt Which they confer, and men exult
in them as an unmeasured good in themselves to
the world. No mistake could be greater, no con-
gratulations more ill—timed. Whether they be a
blessing or an unmeasured curse depends wholly
upon what goes along these new avenues of commu-
nication.-~ In times of pestilence streets are bar-

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 21

ricaded, that communication may be cut off; the
quarantine compels the vessel to anchor far from
the shore, that its crew may not touch the people.
So there may be states of society and conditions
of men when rapid movements and open ways of
intercourse could be not only not a good but an
untold calamity. It is what goes by means of
them that makes these facilities as good or ill;
they may be a blessing, they may be a curse.

The order of the development of these means of
intercourse between the people of the world is
most instructive. In the ﬁrst ages they were few
and difﬁcult. So they continued to be, and we can
see the wisdom of God and the timely adaptedness
of His providence in it. The great discoveries are
not mere happenings, the periods of time when
they were made point at the guiding hand of God.
In the discoveries which have had a bearing on the
matter before us, this most strikingly appears.

Suppose, for example, the railroad, the tele-
graph, or the ocean steamer had been known and
in use when the armies of the Assyrian poured
over the more western \nations; or suppose Alex-
ander, that “ he-goat” that touched not the earth
in the swiftness of his movements, could have
availed himself of them; or suppose the Roman
Eagles could have been borne on them, or that the
'Saracens or Ghengis Khan could have made them
tributary, how would the woes of earth have been
insupportable. It groaned and ran red with blood,

and was wet with tears as it was. But happily the
2

22 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

mariner’s compass was not known, steam still hid
itself in its ﬂeecy wrapping, electricity had its se-
cluded home in the thunder-bolt, the sea re-
mained a terrible unknown. So the nations were
not together, and the destruction was limited.
Babel became early necessary to scatter the race,
and the ocean was to keep them asunder, here was
an abyss over which they could not go, and only
one-half the globe at a time was cursed with its
scourges.

Our own continent gives tokens of vast anti-
quity, and we have evidence that whole races,
mighty in power and high in civilization, have been
swept away. Who can tell what the other conti-
nents were spared in being cut oﬁ‘ from it by the
wide stretch of the ocean? It would seem that there
was enough of destructive element at work among
these ancient inhabitants gradually to annihilate
each other, and leave coming times to speculate
on their very existence. But in the wisdom of
God, and by the order of His providence, the
oceans were the conservators of the earth, they
hemmed in and conﬁned the bloodshed and wars
of each hemisphere. The depravity of men was
insulated like leprosy in a lazaretto, though, alas,
the lazaretto held whole continents within its
walls. Seclusion was aimed at as totally necessary.

So it was in later times. In the fourteen cen!
turies before the discoveries of the mariner’s com-
pass and the Cape of Good Hope, of what beneﬁt
to the world would have been any increased facil-

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 23

ities of intercourse? Northern hordes swept down
fast enough upon the devoted provinces of Rome,
and the desolation spread rapidly and far enough
with them as they were. Sometimes the ruin was
mitigated because the tramp of the hosts and the
rumble of their chariot wheels could be heard in
the distance, and ﬂight could anticipate their com-
ing. Nor was there Virtue enough or goodness
left in the decaying people to counterbalance the
harm which more rapid means of transit would
have multiplied. Rome sunk in sloth, and crime
had nothing to give to the world

Of what use would these facilities have been in
the middle ages? It would have been only, if pos-
sible, the more rapid spread of darkness and not
light. The civilization of feudal barons was not
of such a kind that the earth need have coveted
it, the lawlessness of nobles and the abject misery
of the common people was pestilent enough with-
out being spread abroad. The subtilties of the
schoolmen, and the Cloister-life of licentious, glut-
tonous monks, did not make the kind of Christi-
anity that was worth diffusing, or that would make
the world happy.

But when the ocean became to the world a medium
of communication, the time was marked. and emi-
nent. Itwas justwhen those other great discoveries
and inventions were made which distinguished the
ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries as the most illus-
trious of human history since the birth of Christ.
The mariner’s compass came into use in Europe

24 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

about the beginning of the fourteenth century, the
art of printing* was discovered about the middle,
the Cape of Good Hope near the close, (1487,) of
the ﬁfteenth, and the Reformation was in its full
tide during the ﬁrst quarter of the sixteenth cen—
tury. The consentaneity of time in these events,
each of which alone made an epoch, was not by
chance, but the movement of God. His inﬁ-
‘nite Wisdom and divine goodness are displayed
not less by his concealments than by His revela-
tions, and not more by His givings than His with-
holdings. His eye marks the fulness of time, and
there is neither impatience to anticipate it, nor in-
dolence nor thoughtlessness to let it slip when it
has come. When the world was in a state to avail
itself, for its good, of new and enlarged means of
intercommunication, then, and not before, they
were given.‘ N ow the civilized world had some-
thing to hand abroad; here was an awakened civ-
ilization and a genuine Christianity to be given ;
here were arts and dawning sciences to be diﬁiised,
things worth imparting, and so the highway to
all lands began to be opened up.

Nor is the progress of ocean-life and maritime
adventure less significant. The Church was slow to
understand her work, and slow to make use of
what her Master had put in her hands; and so,
after the ﬁrst rush of discovery was over, there was

 

* As in the case of printing, the Chinese seem to have had the
mariner’s compass perhaps eight centuries before.

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 25
little or no advance made in the making the sea
available for the service of men. But just in pro-
portiOn as the true life of the Gospel has been
more and more developed in the Church, just in
that proportion has the ocean been made tributary.
This century, and especially the last twenty-ﬁve
years, have been signalized by many wonderful
facts, and not the least among them is the
knowledge which has been gained of the ocean,
and the skill by which its winds and waves have
been brOught under the control of man, or at'least,
by which he has learned to avail himself of their
irresistible power. ,

In the year 1837 the ﬁrst organized and persist-
ent attempt was made to establish regular com-
munication by steam between Europe and Amer-
ica;* but now, in a little more than twenty-ﬁve
years, the smoke of the steamer is seen 011 every
sea; it drifts over icebergs, and ﬂoats under the
equatorial cloud-ring; the dash of the wheels is
heard in mid-ocean, and even disturbs the peace-
ful lagoons of the Paciﬁc islands ; the sailor ﬁnds
himself almost independent of winds, and quite
above the inﬂuence of calms, and his voyages sud-
denly shortened from weeks to days.

Great as have been the advances made in navi-
~ gation by means of steam, a scarcely less remark-

 

* An American steam vessel, the Savannah, made a successful
voyage to Europe and back, twenty years before the Sirius or
Great Western anchored in the harbor of New York.

2*

26 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

able progress has been made in the construction '
of sailing vessels. Their whole build has been
changed; the dumpy galleon has given place to
the sharp clipper, and the vessel huge in our re-
collection has dwindled to a mere cock-boat be-
side the gigantic craft which glide over every
sea. .

Even more important have been the remark-
able discoveries which have been made, or rather
made available, in respect to the physical geogra-
phy of the sea itself. A whole world of facts
have been developed so that a new department in
geography has almost been created. Accurate
observations of ten thousands of seamen have
been scientiﬁcally reduced, and, what in these
days is coincident with discover', have been
made efﬁciently serviceable. The great currents
and the prevailing winds of the ocean have been
mapped out, and voyages have become no more
merely blind experiments and rude guessings, but
matters of almost certain calculation; and, indeed,
the Whole science of navigation has received such
additions, that now the intelligent mariner, wil—
ling to avail himself of its helps, can make his
voyage, aside from the disasters of storms, with
almost the certainty of the traveller on land, and
can shorten many days its time.* So the ocean

* Before the construction of Maury’s “ Wind and Current
Charts,” the average passage to California from New York was
183 days, but it has since been reduced to 135 days. The sail-

' MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 27

has become known, and its forces have come
more and more under the control of man. .

NOW consider what have been the moral forces
at work in the civilized uworld during this time.
If we were to characterize morally the last ﬁfty
years, beyond all others we should call it The
Era of Missions. Missions may be said to have
had their second birth at the close of the last
and the beginning of the present century. The
Church has been awake as never before to the
idea, which indeed is the fundamental law of
her life, that she is aggressive, and must convert
the world. From year to year the feelingmore
and more possesses her, that she must aim,-and
work steadily to bring the world to the feet of
Jesus Christ. Simultaneous with this awakened
determination, as we have seen, has the sea car-
rying the commerce of the world, become the
great means of communication between the na-
tions. It is as if the fact would force itself upon
our thought, that when the world was in a state
to make rapid intercommunication a good, the
means of intercourse should at once be multiplied
and made available. Nor should we fail to no-
tice the striking fact, that the two nations which,
above all others, have the commerce of the world
in their hands, are the nations which have a Pro-

ing directions have shortened the passages to California 30 days,
to Australia 20 days, and to Rio Janeiro 10 days—Maury’s Play<
sisal Geography of the Sea.

28 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

testant and evangelical Christianity to impart.
When there is something to give'to the people
of the earth, when it becomes desirable that they
should mingle more together, then the ocean be-
comes more and more the facile means by which
it is to be accomplished.

Such, in former ages, the sea was not, because
the good of the race demanded its separation.
The sea was a power for good, because it held the
race apart. Now that it has become, in the provi-
dential arrangements of God, the uniter of the
people, we maybelieve that it will be ultimately for
their good, still a beneﬁcent power. Whether it
has already been so since the ocean has become
the pathway of commerce is worth our attentive
inquiry; an inquiry interesting in itself, and im-
portant, as exhibiting the true ground of hope for
the future.

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 29

C

CHAPTER II.

COMMERCE THE, DISCOVERER AND OPENER.

THE Christian loves to believe that every dis-
covery, or advance in art, or science, or literature,
will be made, sooner or later, to do service for
the Church of the living God. We should rightly
expect that a power so great as that of ocean com-
merce would be used by Him for this purpose.
*So it will be. The evident order and design of
maritime discovery, and the development of com—
mercial intercourse between the nations, looks to-
ward that point.

Yet we must not too hastily adopt the opinion
that commerce does necessarily tend to the ad-
vancement of religion, or the good of mankind.
The sea is a moral power; but, as we have already
hinted, it may be equally a power for evil as for
good. We fear that it has been too readily be-
lieved to be the latter. That it has, however,
done much toaid the Gospel, cannot be doubted,
and a proper estimate of its better inﬂuences is
important to a right understanding of those of an
opposite character. We propose in this chapter
to suggest some of the processes by which com-
merce has helped the Church in her work. I

30 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

In speaking of commerce, we mean, of course,
all the trafﬁc and mercantile intercourse of the
nations; and in attempting to estimate its bearing
upon the welfare of the world, We must be careful
to separate it from other inﬂuences which may lie
near it, and may be readily taken for its own.
This is not always done; and thus much of good
and, it may be, much of harm is imputed to the
inﬂuence of commerce, which should in justice be
set down to the account of far different forces. It
has a distinct character and elements of power, and
these are what we are at present concerned with.
It must not, as it easily may be, confounded with
religion. Missionaries have sailed in the ships
of commerce, and have been carried to their
ﬁelds of labor by the men of commerce, and the
inﬂuence of the one may be easily passed to the
account of the other. They must be kept distinct.
We seek to know their relation, and we may see
it in one very important particular, viz. :

Commerce has given ﬁelds in which Christianity
may work. All the great discoveries of new lands
have been the result of attempts to widen the do-
main of trade. When the route to India overland
was closed up by the barbarous hostility of the
Arabs, commerce sought to reachrthe desirable
ﬁeld by-other roads, and men began to sail out‘
' into the ocean; some westward to reach, in that
direction the eastern shore, as they hoped, of India;
some southward, to ﬁnd if possible, some channel
of the sea which might lead them to its western

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 31

shores; some northward, so as to come upon it by
going around the northern coast of Europe. India
was the goal, and India may be said to be the oc-
casion of the discovery of all the new lands which
have become known to the world within the last
three hundred years. The name WEST INDIA,
which still marks the islands between North and
South America, is an enduring monument of the
motive which led to their discovery. Columbus
sailed to the west that he might reach the lands
of spices and of gold; and when the land heaved
up at last- to his anxious eye, he thought he saw
the wished-for bourn. Such was the impression
which he carried with him home. India became
the name of the new land, and the better know-
ledge which was obtained afterward, could only
partially remedy the error by adding “west” to
the term. In this way Central and South Ame~
rica became known. to the world, _7
With the same object in View, the Cabots directed
their way to the north and west, hoping that as
an opening had failed on the route which Colum-
bus and his immediate successors had pursued,
they might ﬁnd one in this new direction, and thus .
the continent of North America was discovered. ‘
It was the pursuit of “the northwest passage ”——a
pursuit which has been followed up perseveringly
every century since, and attained in name only
lately, which has been the occasion of almost all
the discoveries of new lands on this continent.
India was the goal after which Bartholomew Diaz

82 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

sailed when he skirted the western shore of Africa,
and at last found himself oﬁ‘ the headlands of South
Africa. Bafﬂed with storms, and forced to return
by the mutinous spirit of his crew, he called it
“ Cabo ole todos Z03 Tormentos ;” but his King, John
II., believing that at last the discovery of the true
route to India was at hand, gave it the name of
the Cape of Good Hope. As in the case of the
West Indies, the name will point out forever the
aspirations which ﬁlled the minds of men in those
days. Soon after, Vasco De Gama, more success-
ful than Diaz, passed round the Cape, and sailing
toward India, made known the east, as his prede-
cessors had the west coast of Africa.

In the same pursuit of new countries for trade,
the islands of the Indian Archipelago-and the
groups of the Paciﬁc, became known. ‘They re-
mained in their isolation and solitude until the
eager eye of commerce sought them out. In this
way commerce has made them known to Chris-
tianity, and told her where there were people for
her work. .

The restless spirit of trade has thus been em-
ployed in the service of religion. It has not been,
as we shall see, an intentional service, yet it has
done the great work of revealing the greatness of
that “FIELD ” which the divine Saviour told his
disciples was for the Church’s labor. We cannot
readily see how, except through that far-reaching
enterprise which inspires the commerce of the
world, these unknown lands could have become

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 33

practically known, or how the different and widely-
separated portions of the earth could have been
brought together. The explorations of travellers
may reveal the fact that a new country is in exist-
ence and that certain races of men have their ha-
bitation there, but the revelation is simply a matter

of curious interest at the ﬁre-side or beside the
table where the traveller’s tale is read. Marco Polo
penetrated far into Tartary, in the thirteenth cen-
tury, and gave curious and truthful accounts of
not only that region, but of more distant China
and Japan, and even Madagascar and the coast of
Africa; but they all remained as though they were
not in existence for centuries afterward.‘ In later
years, Bruce made his way to Abyssinia, but came
back to, be called a liar, because he told of
lands and men his countrymen had never seen,
while the distant places and people remained as ,
much as before isolated from the rest of the world.
The Landers traced up the Niger far towards its
source ; Barth, in these more recent times, reached
Timbuctoo, and Livingston crossed the continent
of Africa; but the facts revealed are just like the
discoveries of the telescope, unless commerce fol-
lows in their track. So it has ever been. Mere
exploration does not usually put the lands within
reach of the Church. But commerce does. The
freighted ship is the result of discovery, and it is
the sickle which reaps the fruit of it. The repeated
VOyages which familiarize the nations with each
3

34 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

other, become the means by which Christianity
reaches the nations. .

This work of discovery is not all that commerce
has done in aid of religion. It has done more
than merely make known new lands, it has opened
them to the Church. It has forced the necessity of
intercourse upon those who have been most un-
willing to have it, and this intercourse has opened
the way for the entrance of the gospel. It is true
that this has been. the case'only in more recent
years, and it was very different in other days, yet
the fact ought not to be overlooked or denied.
Take as striking examples the cases of China and
Japan. Here were nations which for centuries
had systematically and with determination with
drawn themselves from the community of the na-
tions, and most carefully shut out Christianity.
The door of extreme exclusion was closed and
double barred. The teachers of religion might in
vain attempt to ﬁnd an entrance. But the keen
eye of commerce is ﬁxed upon their commodities,
and she must have them in trade, and will take
no denial. She will not consent that her ships.
shall go everywhere else and pass these harbors
by and not dare to enter. As the nations will
not listen to the peaceful persuasion of merchants
and barks, commerce calls in the aid of govern-
ment, and diplomatists with armed vessels ac-
complish the work. Treaties are forced upon the
people, and they are treaties of commerce; the
walls are thrown down, the barred gates are ﬂung

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 35

open, and men come and go at their will, while
among the throng the missionaries of the cross
can mingle, and bear in their priceless treasure.
Never before in the history of the world was the
all potent sway of commerce so manifest. No
other inﬂuence could possibly have accomplished
this result. Even national honor, mighty as it may
be, and exacting as it is in its demands, would not
have been, as indeed it was not in other days, sufﬁ-
cient to bring it about. Could commerce have
gained her ends as well by submitting to be shut out
and even insulted, the exclusion would have been
borne, as it was for manyyears. Thus, for example,
when the half dozen ships of the Dutch were per-
mitted, under every circumstance of national hu-
miliation, to trade near a single port in Japan, and
the insults were taken in abject meekness, while the
country from which they came was treated with
contempt and its government ignored, it was
simply an exhibition of how strong the demands
of commerce are. When once an English sailor
was surrendered to certain death in Canton, not
because he was guilty of crime, or because his
captain believed him guilty, but simply because
the government store-houses were closed, and the
Chinese refused to trade till he was given up, it
'showed that not only national honor, but the life
even of a citizen, was little worth beside the inte-

rests of commerce.
. Citizens might be murdered, national dignity
trampled upon, the missionary of religion might

36 MQRAL POWER or THE SEA.

seek in vain for a place of entrance, and not a
step be taken. But when once commerce/becomes
thoroughly dissatisﬁed, and resolves to have a
wider ﬁeld for her operations, then ships, and can-
non, and armies are called into service, and the
separating walls must go down. They have
fallen, and the highways are opened everywhere,
and religion may go in the path while commerce
leads the way, with governmental power to pro-
tect them both.

It is a fact of no mean signiﬁcance that, for
the most part, the protection which governments
have aﬁ'orded to their subjects in distant lands
has actually been much more freely given to the
merchant and the trader than to the missionary of
religion. It might make a curious ﬁeld of in-
quiry to ask why it has been so, and upon what
grounds there has been this distinction made : that
it is a fact is very clear”. Until a very few years
the missionary of religion has been placed upon
footing entirely diﬁ'erent from that of an ordinary
citizen. The trader does not lose his citizenship,
but practically the missionary did; his property
might be destroyed, and even his life threatened,
if not taken, and his own government would not
busy itself with his case. This has been too sadly
true in former times, and itis a matter of rejoicing
that it is so no longer. The injustice of the ne-
glect is but too clear: It would be difﬁcult to
show that a man by becoming a missionary abro-
gates the claims which he has upon his country,

'O

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 37

and may no longer claim its attention, or Why the
man who goes abroad to propagate religion and
morality should be regarded with less favor than
he who deals in indigo or silk. But the matter
has of late been placing itself in its true position.
Still in the past, generally, the care and protection
which has been given to the lives and property of
missionaries has been given incidentally and as it
has come in with that of the simple merchant or
trader. The shield has been thrown over com-
merce and has covered religion because it happened
to stand closely at its side. Yet it has been so
thrown, and the propagators of Christianity have
reaped, though it may have been but incidental-
ly, the beneﬁts and care which commerce has
claimed.

In considering the aid which has been afforded
to religion by the commerce of the world, we
must not overlook the fact which has become so
patent and emphatic within the last quarter of a

century, that commerce has been the paciﬁeator of the
nations. The facilities of intercourse which have

multiplied themselves so mar vellously have b1 ought
them not only together but into sympathy. It .
has not been a me1e empty intermingling, but the
mutual interchange of productions has brought
out more and more clearly the mutual depend-
ence of the people of one nation upon those of
another. They have intermingled on terms ne-
cessarily of friendly intercourse and, by means of
3 *

38 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

tratlic, in such a way as compelled the exercise
more or less of conciliatory and kindly relations.

In former ages, when men were more widely
separted, and had less to do with each other in
commercial intercourse, there was little or no
opportunity for this, and their contact was likely
to be simply a collision. There was no common
bond of fellowship and interest between them to
soften the asperities of language, or to calm the
elements of strife. But when the merchant has
his correspondent in other lands, when the ship
with its treasure is passing between the people,
and with every voyage is creating some new bond,
or strengthening some old one, everything which
might be calculated to alienate the people is seen
to be a thing Which must be removed speedily as
possible.

How strikingly has the history of our own coun-
try, in its relation to Great Britain, illustrated this ‘
point. Within twenty years there have been, at
three times at least, occasions which made a long
continual war almost unavoidable. Indeed, though
these nations are connected by the most intimate
possible of ties, yet for a time the cloud of war
hung dark and heavy, and seemed ready to hurl
down its thunderbolts. In any other age the na-
tions would have girded themselves into a sangui-
nary and protracted conﬂict, the same causes of
irritation would have made \such a result wholly
unavoidable.

We may, indeed, point with emphasis to the

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 39

power of prayer, called out on both sides of the
Atlantic, invoking the help of God to avert the
storm, and believe that the conﬂict was warded off
because He heard the supplications; but we may
see as clearly the means by which, in His divine
providence, the prayer was answered. It was be-
cause commerce had linked the people together.
Mere social intercourse and friendly relationship,
or mere relationship of blood, would not have been
enough; a common language, a common litera-
ture, nay, even a common Christianity would not
have been sufﬁcient to have prevented war. These
all were in full play, and some of them were felt
in a vastly stronger degree when, twice before,
the nations rushed together in deadly strife. So
they would again had the Atlantic been as wide
as it was ﬁfty or eighty years ago. But the stormy
sea had been narrowed, and a bridge of ships was
stretched across it, and the people were, in thou-
sands, passing to and fro; almost daily they heard
from one another ; the misunderstanding of to—day
could be corrected to-morrow. And more than
this, commerce had planted her houses on either
side, and the names were one; one partner in a
commercial factory was on one side, another on
the other; the manufacturers of the one people
received their material from the other; the market
and the consumer were found alike on both. The
ties and the interests were too strong; the strife
would be a house divided against itself, and it
could not be permitted. So it was, that while the

40 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

stupidity and the obstinacy of men in high places,
the folly of diplomatists, and the eagerness of ar-
mies might have brought on the conﬂict, there
was a power back of them, and mightier than
them all. It was the power of commerce. Com-
merce was king. The commercial interests of the
people rose above every other consideration,
compelled an acquiescence in their claims, and
the voice must be listened to. This it was that
created a calm and clear atmosphere in which
troublesome questions could be reviewed, and a
necessity that they should be settled. In other
times national honor would have been the all-im-
portant matter; now national interest and com-
mercial good decided the case.

This must be more and more a prevalent force
in any future question of war among the people of
the earth. We may well be in doubt whether the
last most desolating war with Russia would. ever I
have occurred had there been closer bonds of com-
mercial intercourse between that power and those
with whom it was warring. When the people are
more and more closely united, when their daily
thoughts and plans and calculations are based upon
careful considerations of each other’s condition,
and when the interest of each is seen to depend
on the healthful prosperity of the rest, causes of
alienation are limited in their effect, and war,
which at once cuts off all intercourse, must, ex-
cept in cases where a judicial blindness hides the
interest and a moral paralysis destroys the reason-

./

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 41

ing power of the people, be more and more im~
possible. All the means then, which promote in-
tercommunication and rapidity in exchange of
thought and productions, tend directly to make
the world a peaceful world. The ocean steamer
is the harbinger, and the sea itself the bond of
peace on the earth.

It is humiliating, yet but too palpably true, that
the selﬁshness of Commerce is all that has kept
this country, during the two years of unhappy civil
war, from being involved in a conﬂict with Great
Britain. We have seen how national honor, and
all the obligations of friendship and comity have
been thrown aside ; how all the old traditions and
rules of right and humanity, which have been
their boast for half a century, have been spit upon ;
how an abiding and rancorous hatred of our insti-
tutions has found vent in the utterances of her
public men, how gladly and rtjoicingly she would
see our nation go down in utter and ﬁnal ruin;
and yet, notwithstanding all, the peace has been
kept. Who would venture to suppose that it
would, had there been no mighty self-interest at
work? England has sent her pirate steamers, built
in her shipyards, furnished with her war-material,
manned with her seamen and artillerists, and no-
thing but the fear that her commerce would suffer
in some future day, has prevented her swarming
the ocean with them. Commerce is all that, to-
day, (1863,) keeps the peace between these nations.
There is selﬁshness and hatred enough in her heart

4‘2 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

to hurl her ﬂeets and her armies against us; noth-
ing but the fear that her merchant ships would be
idle, and her workshops be stilled, holds them back.
It is sad to be compelled to confess it; we had
come almost to believe that moral principle and
religion had grown strong enough, and especially
that her old utterances and active hostility to
slavery would have made her our friend in this
gigantic struggle with the slaveholders’ rebellion.
But we have seen these all thrown to the winds ;
the selﬁshness of commerce is more potent; hoping
to be rid of a rival, she longs to destroy us, but
fearing to injure herself, she withholds her hand.
It is a spectacle sorrowful enough, and one that
future times will blush at.

Christianity is not only a thing of peace in itself,
and its triumphs are triumphs of peace, but its
spread is accomplished only in times of peace.
WVar puts at once a period to its progress. Amid
all the deadly and itiziliciOIIs passions engendered
by this dreadful business the pure principles of
the gospel have no play, and ﬁnd no ﬁeld for their
exercise. This is seen on a small scale in thepetty
wars of barbarous tribes. The missionary may be
prosecuting his work with promise of large suc-
cess and hopeful of hastening results, but the strife
puts an end at once to labor and to hope. The peo-
ple have no time and less inclination to attend to
the matters of religion, every bad passion is
roused up, and human nature, averse enough in
itself to it, now turns away from it in disgust. Nor

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 43

can the missionary take up his work where it was
left. It takes time and long waiting before the
ground which has been lost can be retaken, be-
fore the ear of the people can be gained again, and
still longer before the vicious results in their
hearts and lives can be overcome. So it is on a
larger ﬁeld, and between nations. War at once
paralyzes not only a people’s commercial, but
their Christian activity. It at once separates the
nations. It ﬁlls them with thoughts and feelings
utterly contrary to all that religion gives birth
to. Nor do its evils cease with the subsidence
of the strife. It leaves ailong train of not only
personal misery, but of degradation and crime.
Perhaps, never were the morals of the people
of our own country at a lower point than after
the two great and most just wars in which we
have been engaged with Great Britain. But not
only so, it at once shuts up the ﬁelds for the
spread of Christianity, and makes the effbrts of
even peaceful nations of no avail. We have
seen how of late the war in China, and the more
recent civil war in Syria, have removed the ﬁeld,
or closed it up from our own missionaries.

The point, however, need not be dwelt upon that
Christianity requires peace for its work. It has al-
ways stood still in time of war. It is indeed true
that God, in his wonderful providence, has made
use of the commotions among the nations, and
has often and especially of late, overruled and
made the ravages of war to promote the spread of

44 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

evangelical Christianity; but it has been only his
sovereign power making the adverse things to
further his cause. For her true light to shine, she
needs an unclouded sky. Her triumphs are found
in times of peace, and not of strife.

Whatever, then, promotes the unity of the peo-
ple of the world, and links them together in peace-
ful bonds, tends directly to help forward the be-
nignant sway of religion. Commerce, above all
other causes, does this. It seizes upon not simply
the good that is in men and turns it into service,
but—and here is the wonderful power in the pro-
vidence of God—it nihkes use of the lower but
more powerful motives which inﬂuence men, it
appeals to self-interest and compels them to be at
peace, not because they hate the wrongs of war
but because they cannot afford to bear its results.
It leads them to brook injuries and excuse errors
not because they are forgiving, but because trade
will be interrupted and business suspended. Com-
merce must have the highways of the sea ever
open, and she will not have them barred up, she
does not love to have the nations separated. So
she stands side by side with religion, and has a
common end and a common interest, though from
very different motives, in the peace of the world.

Such is the incidental but legitimate and natural
relation of commerce to religion. It discovers,
it opens and holds open ﬁelds in which the
Church may labor; it promotes an atmosphere of
peace and social prosperity in which Christianity

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 45

loves to exert her power, and where she gains her
best triumphs. We say this is the legitimate and
natural inﬂuence of commerce upon religion ;
had it been understood from the ﬁrst, and had the
wickedness of men not perverted this power from
its true course and design, it would have ever been
the handmaid of Christianity, it would have
aided its advancement and its aid would have
been direct and cumulative. But such it has not
been. It has been incidental, whenever it has been
good. We shall be left in no uncertainty as to its
true nature, when we seek to trace the direct and
immediate effect of this great power on the ad-
vancement of religion. It will be seen that if
commerce has helped the Church, the help has been
an accident. Religion has availed herself of facili-
ties which she has found and possessed, but which
were not voluntarily given her.

46 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

CHAPTER III.
THE COLONIES or COMMERCE.

THUS far we have been considering the incidental
inﬂuence which commercial intercourse has had
on the spread of Christianity in the world. It
has made known new lands: it has opened and
kept them open. In this way the power of com-
merce has been a power turned to the service of
the Church, and it has been for the furtherance of
the gospel in the earth. Over its inﬂuence the
Christian may rejoice and see clearly the hand of
the Author of Christianity.

But when we seek to trace out the direct and
immediate effect of this power upon the spread of
the gospel, the case appears in a wholly different
aSpect. Commerce has, indeed, in the past done
a work of preparation. It has bridged seas, it has
levelled mountains, it has discovered and explored
continents, it has made avenues broad and open,
so that in the coming time the gospel may run
very swiftly. But all this has not been in accord-
ance with the designs of commerce, but in spite of
them.

We propose to test this assertion by considering
the inﬂuence of commerce both where- it transiently

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 47

touches a people, and where it has ﬁxed itself in
regular establishments. T/ee Colonies of Commerce
and Commerce in new lands, will exhibit our point.

The history of commercial colonies and estab-
lishments will enable us to trace the inﬂuence of
commerce through long periods, and in different
places. Such a View only can conduct us to safe
conclusions.

It would be instructive and entertaining to con-
sider, the history of ancient commerce and its
moral eﬁ‘ect upon nations affected by it, and to
discover the reason why the Jewish people were
so carefully shut out from traffic with such a na-
tion, for instance, as the Egyptians; but the lim-
its which we have marked out for ourselves in
this essay give us another starting point.

We have been, and are considering the in-
ﬂuence of modern commerce, especially since the
time when the ocean has been its great vehicle.
The discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, as be-
fore, is the point from which we may take our
departure, and we will naturally be led to con-
sider the colonies of that nation which was the
foremost and the ﬁrst of Europeans in commerce,
the Portuguese, the nation which opened the
ocean round the continent of Africa, and made
the sea What it is to the commerce of the world.

The discovery of the Cape of Good Hope
solved the problem which had so long bafﬂed the
energy and enterprise of commercial Europe,—a
way by sea to India. The Portuguese, whose

48 MORAL rowan or THE SEA.

navigator had wrought it out, were not a people
to suffer the new found road to be untravelled,
and it was not long after De Gama had landed
on those golden shores, that they were not only
on a full tide of trade, but were the most favored
merchants on the coast. A few years were suﬂi—
cient to give them a kingdom on the new conti-
nent. The Mahomedans had for centuries en-
grossed the trade, but this new and Christian
power came in and, with facile energy, crowded
them out of the markets, usurping the place
which they had so long occupied without a ri 'al.

The new comers did not, however, rest in mere
commercial or mercantile transactions, but co-or—
dinately with them, and as a part of them, at
once proceeded to establish themselves as a power.
They formed treaties with the people independ-
ently of the sovereigns of the country, and in a few
years had not only the whole commerce of the
Indian coast in their hands, but were a consoli—
dated power, the native princes acknowledging
the King of Portugal for their lord.

A succession of able, energetic, but bad and
unscrupulous men, such as seemed destined, in-
deed almost without an exception, to curse every
land discovered in this century, very quickly
established their sway. Wherever these bold
navigators, who were princes and governors as
well as sailors, landed, they founded colonies,
and built more ﬁrmly the gorgeous fabric, sprung
up as by magic, of the nation’s conquests. They

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 49

erected fortresses for the protection of their fac-
tories, ’ formed commercial establishments, and,
by the force of their arms, subjugated the richest
provinces to their authority, turning their wealth
into a golden stream, ﬂowing toward the far-off
land which had sent the adventurers out. In
forty-four years from the doubling of the Cape.
of Good Hope, in 1542 they had taken possession
of Ceylon; they had conquered Malacca, to which
merchant ships from Japan, China, the Philip-
pines, Bengal, Persia, Arabia, and Africa resorted,
and had compelled by the terror of their con-
quests, the most powerful princes of Farther India
to seek their alliance. They had acquired posses-
sion of the Moluccas, and with it the spice com-
merce full of wealth; they ruled from the Ara-
bian to the Persian Gulf; nearly all the ports and
islands on the coasts of Persia, and India soon fell
into their power; they held the whole coast of
Malabar to Cape Comorin; they had settlements
on the coast of Coromandel and the Bay of Ben-
gal; Ceylon was tributary; they had factories in
China, and even the pOrtst'Of Japan were opened
to them.

For sixty years they had almost the monopoly
of the trade in these new regions, and they held
undisputed commercial control over the richest
portion of the earth. Here was Commerce in a
place of exalta’tion, and almost unlimited power.

But how was it conducted? The ﬁrst voyage

was made with a company of armed ships, and the
, 4 * ., ._

50 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

commerce began with war and bloodshed. The
Pope had partitioned the world, eastern and west-
ern, which Spain and Portugal had discovered,
between these two powers, and India fell to the
share of Portugal. The expeditions went out not
so much as traders as conquerers. The commer-
cial intercourse with the natives at once took its
character from these ideas, and from the begin-
ning little or no regard was had to the claims of
honor or justice. The appropriation of their
wealth was aimed at, and the means by which it
was to be reached were of small account. “The
succeeding Portuguese commanders continued to
act as if they believed (perhaps they did believe)
that the Pope’s bull gave them an undoubted
right to plunder and tyrannize over all princes
and nations who were not Christians.” “But
these free traders seldom scrupled to defraud
those who traded with them, if they felt strong
enough to do it with impunity, and frequently pr0~
cured their cargoes entirely by plunder.*

With such an inception and progress, it can
readily be imagined what was the inﬂuence of
such commerce upon the people to whom it came.
Its dominion was obtained only through bold, and
often revolting acts of cruelty. The Portuguese
bombarded the most powerful cities on the Indian
coast; they burnt the ships of their enemies in
their own ports; that they might make use of in-

* Macphcrson's History of European Commerce, pp. 21, ‘26.-

MORAL POWER or THE SEA? 51

ternal dissensions to extend and perpetuate their
own power, they instigated the inferior princes
to rebel against their sovereigns, and even ruled
by the terror of their name, where these native
princes were not nominally submissive. Every
thing of order and well being was made to bow
before the grasping spirit of gain which ﬁrst
prompted their expeditions. Avarice and the
love of plunder soon became the only motives of
their enterprise. The great power which was
gained by the ability of the men who at ﬁrst laid
its foundation was used after awhile by those who
were inferior in talent, and superior only in crime.
Whatever of honor the nation had was sullied,
and the name of Christian became a stench.

This abuse of power awakened the resistance
of the natives. The strangers had brought them
only woes innumerable, and their former divi-
sions among themselves were laid aside that they
might unitedly shake off the yoke which lay so
heavily upon them. A very few years sufﬁced to
bring the, power of the Portuguese to an end,
great as it had been at its culmination. The hold
which the government at home had upon its ser-
vants was gradually lost. Some commanders made
themselves independent; some became pirates,
and extended their ravages along the coast; others
joined the native princes who had regained their
power, and through the length of their dominion,
or what once was theirs, insubordination, coni-
motion, pillage, robbery, and murder prevailed.

52 MORAL powm or THE SEA.

“It would be tedious and disagreeable to relate,
or to read accounts of the interminable wars in
which the rapacity, the bigotry, and the lasciv-
ious tyranny of the Portuguese involved them-
selves and all the nations of India.”*

This was all that Portuguese commerce had
done for India. It had a fair ﬁeld and boundless
success, but it was only an unmeasured curse.
Whether the same commerce in other regions
did a better work, the history of the Azores, of
the Guinea coast, or of Brazil, may answer.

The history of French enterprises may assist us to
understand the inﬂuence of commerce. Take, for
example, the island of Madagascar. The Portu-
guese, soon after the doubling of the Cape of Good
Hope, had founded colonies there, and had con-_
ducted them in the same manner as in India, and
had reaped the same results. The natives, not
able to bear their rapacity and cruelty, had, after
awhile, risen against them and swept them off in
a general massacre. The fruits of their commerce
was too deathful to be endured. About the time
that the Portuguese power reached its height in
India, Cardinal Richelieu granted a patent to the
“French East India Company,” and in the year
1642, it proceeded to take possession of Mada-gas-
car and to establish factories protected by fort-i-
ﬁcations. These last seem to have been always
necessary. However peaceful and benignant and

* Macphcrson’s History of European Commerce, p. 30.

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 53

redolent of good commerce may be, it evermore
carried with it, by a sort of grim necessity, forts
and powder and cannon-balls. The subsequent
history very soon showed that no mistake had been
made as to the usefulness of these appliances. A
colony having been formed, and the natives in
great numbers having been induced to enlist in
its service, their labor was, with that infatuated
duplicity which has almost uniformly possessed
the founders of commercial colonies, rewarded by
selling them as slaves by the French governor to
the Dutch governor of the Mauritus. But the
trade was of no beneﬁt to the purchaser. The
same cupidity which prompted the crime, packed
the poor victims so closely in the vessel, that the
larger part died on the passage, and the remainder,
on their arrival, ﬂed to the woods.

The lesson was not lost upon the Malagasy, and
they trusted no more their foes, but whenever a
ship cast anchor in their ports, the frightened in-
habitants ﬂed away from the shore. “This was
commerce l" exclaims a writer before us, and this,
we add, was what it did for the gospel in Mada-
gascar.

The after history is to the same import. The
ﬁrst governor—Pronis was his name—who had
endeavored to promote commercial enterprise by
selling the natives, was succeeded by a second——
Governor Flacourt—Who thought that commerce
could be extended by ﬁre and sword; and after him
other governors produced the old system of outrage

54 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

and oppression; and, as we may easily believe, their
work produced the same misery and alienation.
In the year 1667, the Company appointed the
Marquis De Mondeverque to the command of all
their settlements beyond the equator. He seemed
to have a better appreciation of the demands of
true wisdom, or at least humanity, and he took
pains to soften the justly-provoked natives, and
gain their good-will. He was rewarded by ﬁnding
them ready to meet his kindness with kindness
and even faith and obedience. In 1670, the Mar-
quis was succeeded by another Viceroy, a Gov-
ernor le Haye, who returned to the old way of
the ﬁrst governors and ordered all the ehieftains
to submit to France, or abide the issue of arms.
They accepted the alternatives, chose the latter,
and the French went down before their fury.
Commerce had made another trial, and here was
its end.

In 1792, the National Assembly‘of France sent
‘ M. Lescallier on a mission to ascertain the feeling
of the Malagasy towards Europeans, probably with
the idea of reviving their extinct colonies on the
island. He reported that “Europeans have hardly
ever visited the island but to ill—treat the natives,
and to exact forced services from them; to excite
. and foment quarrels'among them for the purpose
of purchasing the slaves that are taken on both
sides in the consequent wars; in a word, they have
left no other marks of having been there, but the

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 55

effects of their cupidity.” An ofﬁcial, but sad
comment on commerce in that land.

Perhaps, could we get at the secret causes of
the sanguinary cruelty of Queen Ranavalona, and
her terrible persecutions of Christians on the
island, we should ﬁnd that it had its origin in a
deadly hostility to Europeans, a hostility engen-
dered by the remembered wrongs and outrages
which their commerce had inﬂicted upon her peo-
ple. , The violence and cruelty and avarice of the
merchant factors not only bore its bitter fruit at the
time, but, it may be, sowed the seed whence has
”sprung the stake and the sword of the executioner.

In this survey, we need scarcely look at the his-
tor r of Spanish enterprises of commerce. Indeed,
strictly speaking, notwithstanding all the remark-
able activity of that people in the sixteenth cen-
tur r on the ocean, their bold discoveries and ex-
plorations of new countries, they can hardly be
said to have had a commerce over the sea. After
the ﬁrst discoveries of Columbus, the one thought
of the acquisition of precious metals became not
only the incentive to new discoveries, but the sole
object of every enterprise sent abroad. The idea
of trafﬁc was swallowed up by an insatiate desire
after gold and silver. Conquest and plunder corn-
passed Spanish thoughts of commerce. Hence, cu-
riously enough, we look in vain over all the Spanish
settlements and colonies owing their origin to this
people which ever had any marked commercial
character. Settlements were made indeed, and

56 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA;

colonies were originated, but none of them be-
came great marts of trade, or, if they did, their
establishment was but momentary. Spanish set-
tlers quickly blended themselves with the natives,
and sunk down into merely agricultural life.

The commercial business which Spain cultivated,
was to send out mail-clad men with powder and
cannon-balls, to wring as much as was possible of
gold and silver and gems from the conquered peo—
ple, freight home rich galleons with them, and
bring back in return more armed men and new
cargoes of powder and cannon-balls.

Should, however, any one be inclined to seek
for the moral inﬂuence of Spanish commerce, such
as it was, upon the world, there are chapters dark
enough and bloody enough in Mexico and Peru,
and on every continent and island where the
Spanish ﬂag has been unfurled. Every voyage
had its origin in cupidity, and where it did not
end in disaster, had its. successful issue in the
groans and slavery and death of people to whom
it was directed.

“Te might turn for information on the pointbe-
fore us to another of these maritime nations the
Dutch, and seek for their moral and religious in-
ﬂuence upon the people with whom they came in
contact. Their commercial power was built upon
the ruins of the Portuguese and Spanish dominion
in the East. When Spain united, as she did, her
enterprises and power with those of Portugal in
those newly discovered regions, the effect was al-

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 57

/'

most at 'once to bring them to an end. Spanish
thirst. of gold overlooked every thing which had
even the semblance of healthy commerce, and bad
as had been Portuguese abuses, they grew worse
when they were multiplied by Spanish avarice and
Spanish sloth. The shrewdness and sturdy energy
of the Dutch quickly entered upon and took pos—
session of pretty much all that their predecessors
had gained and held for a hundred years.

The nucleus of Dutch East Indian commerce
was the Island of Java, where treaties of com-
merce were made with the native princes by the
ﬁrst expedition sent out in 1595 by a company of
merchants. The hatred of the natives to the Por-
tuguese, from whom they had suﬁ'ered so much,
greatly aided the accomplishment of their enter-
prise, and in about seventy years the Moluccas,
Japan, Malacca, Ceylon, the Celebes and the most
important places 011 the coast of Malabar were in
their hands.

But it was only to re-enact precisely the same
scenes which had marked the commercial domin-
ion of the rivals whom they had dispossessed.
Fortresses and armies were, as before, the stabil-
ity and the prepagating power of their trafﬁc. They
traded with the natives, and made every barter a
new way of entrance to political domination.
Those who had at ﬁrst welcomed them as deliv-
erers from oppression, and who had given them
friendly reception and many privileges, soon found

that they. had exchanged one yoke for another still
, 5

58 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

-.

more grievous. It was but too apparent that ava-
rice and extortions, under the name of commerce,
was the impelling spirit of these new comers, even
as they had been of those who had preceded them,
and that the same desolation and destruction of
peace and independence followed in their footsteps
which had marked the progress of Europeans ever
since their ships made their appearance on the
coast. V

The Dutch, like the Portuguese, were engaged
in perpetual war with the natives, both on the
islands and on the continent; indeed, wherever a
settlement was formed, it became the centre of op-
pression and bloodshed. ‘

In the Moluecas, those remote and unfrequented
islands, their outrages were especially gross and-
oppressive, and the fruit of their commerce might
be seen in its perfection of iniquity. The inhabit-
ants had been treated, it would seem, with the
utmost cruelty when under the Portuguese, but
their rivals came in only to carry their oppression
to more outrageous lengths. For a hundred and
ﬁfty years they held the soil as exclusively their
own, and the inhabitants as little better than
slaves. Indeed, on the islands of Banda the na-
tives were massacred because they would not be-
come slaves, and the whole island was divided
among the whites, who brought in slaves from the
neighboring islands to till the land. That they
might bring the wretched natives more entirely
under their control and absolute dependence, they

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 59

refused to permit them to enter into any manu-
facturing pursuits, did not allow them even the
free cultivation of the land, prevented all improve-
ments, and stood in the way of everything which
might tend to better their condition, or even to
supply their absolute wants.

But the grasping spirit of commerce was not
content with the complete subjugation and oppres-
sion of the people. Spices are and always have
been the only important product of these islands,
hence their other name, the Spice Islands. That
they might the more readily have the monopoly of
this lucrative trade, they compelled the natives on
all the islands except Banda and Amboyna, en-
tirely to destroy the spice trees, and to enter into
stipulation to root them up every year, so that
they might be wholly extirpated. To make the
matter certain, they erected strong fortresses on
various islands, and the governor, each year, with
a squadron of twenty or thirty ships, went among
them to see that no trees were planted, and that
the destruction was complete. Such was Dutch
commerce, ruinous to the poor inhabitants, and
. dreadful even to the very land from which it took
away the only important product spared them by a
parsimonious climate.

It has not been necessary to pause and trace in
words the inﬂuence which such commerce might
have had upon the spread of Christianity. It was
a commerce of nominally Christian nations, but
its Whole bearing upon the people cursed by it

60 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

was to make them loathe the very name by which
their oppressors were called, and spurn in unut-
terable disgust the religion which they called their
own. From the ﬁrst waking of oceanic commerce,
such were its execrable fruits wherever it came,
whether it was in America or Africa, or Asia, or
the islands of the sea. It came to regions sunk in-
deed in barbaric heathenism, but comparatively
peaceful and happy. Welcomed in simple~hearted
kindness, it at once blighted with its poisonous
breath every shore on which it trod. Oppression,
cruelty, devastation and death followed every tra-
der; discord and war brooded round every factory;
where the wretched natives were too feeble to
sweep their enemies away, they groaned under an
insupportable burden of woes. _

If we turn to the only other great maritime
power, we shall have a scarcely less melancholy
recital. The history of English commerce is writ-
ten in the same sombre lines. We may take In-
dia as the type. It is not necessary, perhaps, to
pursue the history of its enterprise in the East in
detail. It is afamiliar tale and an interesting one,
the growth of that most gigantic commercial cor-
poration which the world ever saw—“ The United
Company of Merchants of England trading in the
East Indies,” for such is the modest title by which
it is known in law, one which but dimly shadows
the imperial sway which it wielded for nearly a
hundred and ﬁfty years.

In attempting to calculate the inﬂuence of En-

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 61

glish commerce in India, there is present an ele-
ment which was not found in the cases of the
other commercial nations. No one can doubt that
the people of India are better governed, and s0-
cially happier under the English Government than
when under the sway of their native princes. Lite—
rature, and science, and agriculture, have been
given to them. But let it be carefully borne in
mind too, that these results of civilization, and
whatever melioration of the condition of the
people may have taken place, have all come to
pass within the last sixty years. This fact has a
meaning. Foreign missions have sprung up almost
wholly Within that time. There has been going out
from Great Britain and this country a mighty
religious inﬂuence exerted directly upon the
people of India, and from the former a moral
power has shaped unconsciously, in part know-
ingly, the government of India. Until within a
very few years, the East India Company had exer-
eised its authority with little regard to public
opinion in Great Britain. Its power was so great
and its ﬁeld so remote that it was difﬁcult to ob-
tain accurate knowledge of its movements or bring
to bear upon it any inﬂuences which could be
felt. Through all its former history the religious
sentiment of the people at home was totally ig-
nored and even scorned and trampled upon. But
the power of pious men in the churches has made
wonderful advances, and has more and more

asserted its claims, and in such a manner that it
5 5(-

62 MORAL‘ POWER or THE SEA.

has been impossible to disregard them. The mis-
sionaries sent out from the churches at home, have
not only carried with them their own moral and
religious power—this, however great, has been but
the least in its bearing upon the Company-—but
they have multiplied lines of sympathy and thought
which hold the attention and awakened solicitude
of the whole nation. They have brought Indian
affairs to the hearths and the place where men
are accustomed to give the most serious and en-
lightened conside *ation—the place of prayer.
\Vhen India was a year away, and news of its
affairs was scanty in amount, uncertain in its cha-
racter and old when it came; when no one except
those immediately concerned in the commercial
interests of the Company had any special reason
to be acquainted with its affairs; when the natives
were regarded only as far-oﬁ' barbarians who
were not within reach of the Gospel, commerce
could pursue its own way and work out its legiti-
mate results. But when earnest and cultivated
men of every Christian name were bound to the
distant peninsula by ties of kindred and religious
sympathy, everything which concerned the gov-
ernment of the country and the condition of the
people became a matter of deepest interest ; abuses
easy in other times now became impOssible, and
the whole shape of the administration was more
or less moulded by a power wholly unfelt before.
We must, therefore, when we seek for the inﬂuence
ofEnglish commerce upon India, endeavor to elimi-

MORAL power. or THE SEA. 63

nate those inﬂuences which do not properly belong
to it. In the case of other nations no such care
is needed. With them commerce stood alone un—
trammelled, and its workings can be estimated at
once and Without the possibility of mistake.

In this instance we are not left to speculate on the
probable inﬂuence of a commercial establishment.
From the very first commercial gain was the sole
object of all the policy of' the Company, and every
other thing of whatever nature, moral or religious,
which did not help this f'orx and was ignored, and
all which stood or seemed to stand in its way,
’ however it might concern the physical, not to
mention the spiritual well-being of the people,
was energetically thrust aside. For a century at
least of their sway, while the Church slumbered
over the heathen world, not an effort for the
moral, scarcely an effort for the social advance-
ment of the people was made or seemingly
thought of by the Company. It was linked in
with idolatry up to the latest hour of its existence ;
it did not make an attempt, as we shall see, to
abolish the suttee; it attended to its coffers; it
extended its doniinions, we will not say by what
rapacity and injustice,* but. gave no care or thought
for the millions of souls under its dominion.

But as if this indifference was not enough, as
soon as an opportunity offered, it took a position '

 

* Burke accused the Company “ of having sold every monarch,
prince. and State in India, broken every contract, and ruined
every prince and every State who had trusted them.”

64 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

antagonistic to the eﬁbrts made by Christians in
England and America to send the Gospel to India.
Of this direct opposition we shall speak at large
in the next chapter. It is enough here to say that
English commerce, with all the incidental and
more or less powerful inﬂuences of a protestant
Christianity which it could not wholly escape, was
the same in its general results as all other com-
merce. The East India Company was ﬁrst merely
a commercial enterprise, but as in each of the in-
stances which we cited, it at once built itself up
by political and military power. Here, as before,
ﬂeets of war vessels, armies, fortresses were the
means by which it was propagated. The slow and
healthful progress of trade was not dreamed of,
but from the very beginning it was one long,
steady tramp to absolute domination over the
people to whom its merchants came. It crowded
out and overcame its rivals only to perpetuate the
same wrongs, in kind if not in degree, against the
conquered people.

Looking over the whole history, we may ask,
with British Christianity speaking from the hearts
and in the utterances of men whose opinions and
wishes could not be put aside, and with all the
permeating power of present missionar r commu-
nities dotting the peninsula with their stations,
what has English commerce done for India? The
revolt, so awful 'in its atrocities, and so threaten-
ing in its lightning progress, and which is not even
to-day known to be wholly suppressed, gives back

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 65

an emphatic answer. After a century and a half
of possession, gradually extended and consoli-
dated, the result upon a very large portion of the
people over whom its authority has been exercised,
has been to inﬂame them with an implacable ha-
tred of the European name and religion, and with
an intense desire to exterminate the whole race.

We may be pointed to the civilization, the arts
and the sciences given to India by commerce, but
still it will appear that, however these may be
there Christianity has not been helped, and it may
be a question whether, throwing aside all religious

inﬂuences which have gone out, it would not be

easier to evangelize India, had commerce never
set her foot on that peninsula. That God, in his
inﬁnite wisdom, will turn this power into his ser-
vice we doubt not; that He has already, we be-
lieve ; but it has been contrary to and in spite of
the design and the legitimate results of commer-
cial enterprise.

How much, even at this late day with all the
vast force of public sentiment and the incalculable
power If the press bearing upon it, this commer-
cial government has at heart the progress of Chris-
tianity may be seen from an almost startling
statement made by the Rev. Baptist Noel, of Lon-
don, in his recent work on India. He asserts, and
no doubt authentically, that there were, at his '
writing, in the Madras Presidency, 8,292 idols and .
temples, receiving from the Government an an-
nual payment of $450,000. In the Bombay Pre-

66 MORAL rowan or THE SEA.

sidency there are 26,589 idols and temples under
state patronage, receiving grants to the amount of
$150,000, to which must be added the allowance
for temple-lands—giving a total for the Bombay
Presidency of $450,000. In the whole of the
Company’s territories there is annually expended
in the support of idolatry by the servants of the
Company the large sum of $850,000.” Such is the
tribute which commerce, through this great Com?
pany, up to the last year of its existence, paid to
h eath enism .

The utter disregard of the moral welfare of the
people, and the entire prostration of every other
interest before that of commerce, may be seen from
the way in which the horrid rites of the snttee
were regarded by the Company. It was not until
the year 1829, under Lord Ben tick, governor-gene'-
ral, one hundred and twenty-one years after the
establishment of the East India Company on its
late footing (in 17 08) that this shocking self-im-
molation was abolished. Until that time the
Government had not only permitted i.t———provided
the act was voluntar ',-—but so regarded it by law,
that the sacriﬁce was performed under the eyes
and according to the directions of its own oﬁicers.
Notice was to be given to the magistrate, “who
was required to see that the suttee was public, and
that all the requisitions of the law were fulﬁlled.”*

To complete this rapid glance at the colonies
which commerce has planted and where of course

 

*Enc. Amer. Art. "Suttee."

MORAL rowan or THE SEA. 67

its continued effects might be felt and marked, we
Should perhaps refer to the colonies in our own
land. These were not commercial colonies, and
there is something strikingly peculiar in the great
fact that they were not. Such settlements were
indeed attempted, but there is scarcely an excep-
tion to the statement, that every one which had its
origin in merely a commercial design, was a
failure.*

The well-laid plans of the accomplished and
energetic Raleigh are striking instances. Though
carefully projected, and wisely carried forward, in
' each case resulted only in disaster. It would seem
that the providence of God had a special care over
the settlement of this land, destined, as it was, to
be the home of a Christian people, and protected
it so that it should not be cursed by the crimes and
persistent evils which evermore accompany merely
commercial enterprises. The colonies started for
purposes of gain, went down in famine and dis-
ease; those which oppressed Christians founded
amid tears of regret and exile and because they
sought a home where unmolested they might wor-
ship God, those stood. \Ve may look the world
over, and mark it-——C’0mme7‘ce plants no Christian
colonies.

Nor need we wonder at it. Commerce has

._______-_._—____._.~__._.____._—____._. _.

* “ Whether Britain would have had any colonies in America
if religion had not been the grand inducement, is doubtful.”
Hutchinson’s History, quoted by Palfrey. History of New England,
p. 181. See also, id. p, 308.

68 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

brought the nations nothing of good, because it '
had nothing to bring. It is of the earth earthy.
Look at the principles of trade, not What they
should be, not even what they are theoretically,
but what they are in fact. Confessedly gain is
the grand moving principle and it ﬁnds its issue,
under the bad power of selﬁsh hearts, in deliberate
advantages taken of the ignorance and weakness
of others. The history of commerce in new coun-
tries, has been uniformly a barter of little for much ;
it has been carried on, for the most part, by men
who were led by no higher motive than personal
advantage. Commerce has her own ends to gain:
she has sought them and has found what she
sought. She has carried to the nations what she
intended to carry. We may not accuse her of
falsehood or treachery: she has been true to her-
self; she has had a power, and she has used it
for herself, and not for religion.

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA; 69

CHAPTER IV.

COMMERCE AND MISSIONS.

IN tracing the history of commerce, we are not
left to mere inference as to the probable result of
an actual contact of it with efforts to evangelize
the world. Christian Protestant missions have
been planted in lands where commerce was exert-
ing its natural and unfettered inﬂuences. We
propose to inquire What has been the feeling and
the action of commercial enterprises toward mis-
sionary labors and missionary men.

It will not be easy, or indeed practicable, to ﬁnd
a number of illustrations. We may, as we shall
see in another place, ﬁnd examples too easy and
frequent of the acts of individuals, but we would
rather, for our generalization, take some organized
commercial power existing long enough to have
and to exhibit a settled policy. Only such a one
would be a competent illustration.

Such organizations we readily found when
viewing the subject in the light of the history of
commercial colonies; and were we now treating of
the spread of merely nominal Christianity, they
could be had in abundance. But when we speak

of Christianity, we mean Protestant evangelical
6

70 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

Christianity, and especially not the base perversion
of it which the Papal Church aﬁbrds. It would
not be diﬁicult to show that this is a sort of religion
which may be eminently assisted by commerce.
”When brandy and priests go hand in hand, and
bayonets force the one equally with the other upon
a heathen people, the three great powers, govern-
ment, religion and commerce may be said to work
together for the spread of Christianity; but it is
not a beautiful exhibition, nor one over which a
Christian man will rejoice.

WVe have, however, one example at least, which
has in it every incident necessary for an accurate
illustration of the point before us, in the English
East India Company. Vile need no other. If com-
merce anywhere or under any circumstances
would of itself favor Christian missions, it would
be in India, under the Company’s rule; if not
there then nowhere. Here was a commercial com—
pany of vast powers and almost unlimited control
over the people it governed. It was free to pursue
any line of policy that might seem most in accord-
ance with its true spirit and design; indeed, no
example could be wished more perfectly to meet
the case as an illustrative argument.

The Church of God, after a deep slumber of
many centuries over the great commission of her
Lord, at last awoke to the call which a heathen '
world was making upon her sympathies and her
efforts. In the providence of God the continent
of India, now for many years under the control of

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 71

the British people, became the scene of these new
labors for the spread of the gospel of the living
God. V

Those apostolic men, Cary and Thomas, arrived
and commenced their labors toward the close of
the year 1793, and were the ﬁrst, systematically,
to attempt the establishment of a mission in India.
For a few years they persevered in their work with
amazing energy and great success, seeming not to
attract the notice of the Indian government. The
project of evangelizing aheathen continent was so
gigantic and seemed so chimerical to even Chris-
tians in England, that it is not surprising that at
ﬁrst they should meet with no interference from
the authorities, who must have looked upon the
Whole thing as a mere dreaming of religious zea-
lots. But when, after a time, their efforts, through
translations, the printing press, and the preaching
of the gospel, began to tell upon the people,
when converts were baptized and churches gath-
ered, and when the haughty Brahmins began to
be alarmed and complain, the case was altered.
Here was an element clearly working upon the
people, and was, in its direct tendency, a disturb-
ing element; and if those who stood at the head
of the people were alienated, as they would doubt-
less be, the commercial prosperity, if not the po-
litical power, of the Company, must necessarily
receive a check. Inﬁdel, and of course prejudiced
Europeans, at once set themselves to propagate
the most‘false and slanderous reports concerning

7’2 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

the movements of the missionaries, and for several
years subsequent to 1806 they were exposed to the
greatest trials and hinderances from the Indian
Government.

Nor was the opposition conﬁned to India, but
the same reports were sent home to Great Britain,
with falsehoods of fact and inference magniﬁed by
distance and malignity, and soon kindled an in-
tense hatred to missionary operations on the
ground that their success could only be attended
with great danger to their Eastern possessions.

In the providence of God there was a man in
England strong enough to breast the storm and
roll back the tide. Andrew Fuller at once, with
characteristic zeal and power, issued his “Apology
for Christian Missions in India,” and its arguments
were so convincing, and its appeals so urgent, that
the Government at the India House, dismissed the
complaints lodged against the missionaries, and
refused to interfere with the propagation of Chris-
tianity in India. The triumph of the friends of
missions was complete, and no general or syste-
matic opposition to English efforts was again at-
tempted.

How great a forcehhowever, of public sentiment
and moral power was necessary to secure even
nominal toleration to missionaries, and have per-
mission to pursue, under careful and annoying
restrictions, their work, may be seen in the fact
that a clause in the renewed charter of 1813, grant-
ed them, was secured only by the strenuous ex-

MORAL POWER. OF THE'SEA. 73

ertions of Wilberforce, Thornton, Fuller, and
others, backed by nine hundred petitions, and the
names of half a million of British Christians.

The Act of the British Parliament just referred
to, went into operation in 1813, and, while it con-
ceded in words all that the friends of missions had
asked, declaring that it was the duty of Great
Britain to promote Christianity in India, and that
persons having that object in view should be al—
lowed to reside there, yet it made the missionary
subject to the local Government acting in con-
formity to the principles which the natives had
previously asserted, and liable to be sent away at
any time for any violation of them or of the laws
then in force in India. It made it necessary for
those who wished to avail themselves of the privi-
leges of laboring in that country, to obtain the
permission of the Directors in London, or of the
Board of Control. Such limitations bore heavily
upon missionary operations, and indeed, the ﬁrst
application of missionaries for leave to go to India
under this new charter, was refused by the Direc-
tors, while those who were already there, were
expressly excluded from the beneﬁts of whatevei’
favorable provisions might seem to be in the char-
ter. Still, the force of public opinion was such that,
as intimated above, no general opposition was
again seriously persisted in.

Opposition to the labors of British Christians
was overcome, but not so that directed against the

labors of men sent out from America, On the 17th
6* \

74 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

of June, 1812, Messrs. Nowell and Judson, with
their wives, arrived at Calcutta, having been sent
out by the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions. The storm impending over the
heads of English missionaries, and which had threat-
ened to sweep them and their work away, burst in
all its fury upon these ministers of the gospel from
a foreign nation. They were almost at once or
dered to return home in the same vessel which
brought them; and so strenuous was the order,
that they were told that the vessel could not be
permitted to depart without them. Earnest re-
monstrances of Christian friends in Calcutta and
Serampore, who had welcomed them with great
affection, were made with the Government, and
their solicitations so far prevailed that they were
unofﬁcially informed that perhaps the stringent
order would not be enforced if they would prom-
ise soon to leave the country. Permission was
afterward granted them to leave by any convey-
ance. ‘

It were a long and a piteous tale to relate the
wanderings and the sufferings of these devoted
'men and their fragile but heroic wives, “ of whom
the world was not worthy.” They heard that they
would be received on the Isle of France, and that
possibly they might ﬁnd an opening for missionary
labor on the neighboring island of Madagascar.
The only vessel sailing thither was so crowded
that it could take but two passengers more, and
Mr. Newell, with his Wife, to whom the quiet of a

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 75

home was becoming every day more important,
were compelled to leave Messrs. Judson and Nott,
and embark, after they had been in India scarcely
more than a month and a half. The voyage was a
tempestuous one ; and for more than a month they
were driven up and down in the Bay of Bengal, until
the vessel was forced to put into Coringa in dis-
tress, with the poor invalid wife prostrated with a
fever. Again they set sail ; the homeless wife he-
came a mother, and after ﬁve days committed the
bodyof her little one to the deep. The land at
length was reached, and the husband carried to
the shore his wife, sinking under the steady ap-
proach of consumption, and borne down by accu-
mulated hardships, disappointments and sorrows.
She died there a few days after their arrival.

It would seem that the gentle spirit, and the
fading life of Harriet Newell would have over-
borne the stern commands of selﬁsh interest, as
we may readily believe and as there is reason to
suspect, it moved the heart of the authorities; but
the behests of commerce were too mighty, and
must be obeyed. One might pause at this spec-
tacle,——a gigantic company, a government, with a
continent and 50,000,000 of men under its con—
trol, persecuting relentlessly to the death a Chris—
tian missionary and his dying wife. But com-
merce was above humanity.

Commerce occasioned American missions in
Burmah, but it might well wish the record of it
lost. Judson and his wife with very great difﬁ-

76 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

culty, and only through the secret help of a
friend, whom they never could discover, escaped
being sent to England. They do, however, es-
cape to the Isle of France, but only to ﬁnd that
orders have preceded them, “ To keep an eye on
the American missionaries.” They cannot go to
Madagascar; Burmah seems closed against them;
at last they sail for Madras. But there they ﬁnd
that the friends who had come out from America
after them were subject to the same persecution
of the Government, and they dare not land.
They inquire for some vessel to sail soon to
almost any heathen land over which the East In-
dia Company have no control, and one is found
to go at once to Rangoon, in Burmah. On this
they embark, as on an ark, after weary tossings
on the ﬂood of waters, hoping that it would bring
them to a home. It did, and they found a resting
place in a heathen land, beyond the reach of a
government whose name was Christian. The early
history of that mission will forever stand a melan-
choly monument of what commerce demanded in
the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth century.

It is not necessary to dwell on the case of Hall
and Nott, though we cannot forbear giving the
following extract from their address to the Gov-
ernor, at the time when they were ordered to re-
turn to America: “ We entreat you by the blood
of Jesus, which he shed to redeem them. By all
the principles of our holy religion by which you
hope to be saved, we entreat you not to hinder us

it

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 77

from- preaching the same religion to these perish-
ing idolaters. By all the solemnities of the judg-
ment day, when your Excellency must meet your
subjects before God’s tribunal, we entreat you
not to hinder us from preaching to them the gos-
pel which is able to prepare them as well as you
for that awful day.” The words and the occasion
together may rightly cause a thoughtful man to
stand a moment. A marked and instructive inci-
dent this,——religion pleading with commerce, beg—
ging .her with many tears not to turn her out of
the land. We may think of it, but pass on.
While these determined efforts were made to
exclude the American missionaries, as strenuous
exertions were put forth by friends in the United
States and in England to obtain entire toleration
for them from the Company. The result was,
the provisions in the amended charter, to which
reference has already been made. But so little
help did these give the American missionaries,
that when the correspondence forwarded by the
authorities at Calcutta and Bombay, giving an
account of all their transactions with the mission-
aries was laid before the Board of Directors, a
resolution was under consideration, “censuring
all their civil and ecclesiastical servants who had
abetted the missionaries, and requiring the re-
moval of the American missionaries from the
Company’s possessions in India,”* and was actu-

 

* Tracy’s His. Amer. Board, p. 49.

78 moan. POWER OF THE sm.

ally about to pass, when the venerable Charles
Grant opposed it by a laboriously prepared docu-
ment. His argument defending the missionaries,
and proving that the Government in India had
mistaken the extent of its powers, and had trans-
cended the laws, not only of Great Britain, but
the law of nations, was successful, and dispatches
were sent to Bombay authorizing the Governor
to permit them to remain.

This was the ﬁrst opening of continental India
to Christian missions, and it was obtained not as
a gift, but a spoil wrung from the unwilling hand
of commerce by a public and Christian sentiment
too mighty for it to resist. The battle had been
fought and the victory was won; but won only
by prayers and tears, and amid sufferings and
death. As we look back upon the history, we
may admire the unshrinking heroism, the un-
wavering perseverence, the holy energy, and sera-
phic devotion of the missionaries, while we mark
how commerce, left to herself, feels toward the
work of God and the souls of men.

It may he said that this opposition of the Eng-
lish East India Company was peculiar to itself
and the circumstances of the case, and cannot be
taken as a true exponent of the relations of com-
merce to the spread of the Gospel in the world.
\Ve might reply, that all the prevalent reasons
which led to the persecution of the missionaries,
and their attempted expulsion from the countr *,
were wholly commercial reasons. They were not

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 79

personal at all. Indeed, the edicts were carried
out at an immense sacriﬁce, as we have every
reason to believe, of personal feeling by those
who considered themselves compelled to execute
them.

It was thought that the progress of Christianity
would probably endanger the prosperity of the
Company, by exciting the opposition of the hea-
then, with whom its business was conducted. It
was considered, as it was in fact, to be solely a
mercantile and commercial concern, and as such,
its interests were to be guarded, and all other in-
terests were subservient. Here was the true,
and, confessedly, the only reason for the persist-
ent efforts made to expel the missionaries, and
bring their work to an end. That these efforts
were not successful was not because they were
willingly abandoned, but because they were re-
sisted and overcome.

Had Christians in England been less inﬂuential,
less able, or less determined; or had the mission-
aries been less devoted, less courageous, or more
easily discouraged, India to-day would be with-
out a station or a missionary. It was not because
commerce wanted them, but because she could
not keep them out.

That time has demonstrated the mistake and
the folly of the utter neglect of Christianity by the
East India Company, there is, we suppose, at this
day no question; but it was an error which was
never corrected: it lived with the Company up to

80 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

the time when, by the late act of Parliament, its

political powers ceased. That the mistake will
not occur again, we hope; but history shows that
it was a part of the very idea of commerce, ﬁrst to
ignore religion, and afterwards, if it stOod in the

way, to trample upon it. Missions have lived and
grown in spite of commerce.

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 81

CHAPTER V.

COMMERCE IN NEW LANDS.

\VE pass from the consideration of commerce as
it exerts its inﬂuence through colonies and esta-
blishments, and propose to look at its effects as it
touches more transiently new lands.

It would seem that the visits and the intercourse
of an enlightened with a barbarous people, must
be productive of good; certainly that the degraded
habits and superstitions of savage life must give
way to the better knowledge and practices of civili-
zation. Such is the fact. The enlightenment of
civilized nations, the new arts which they make
known, the new implements of agriculture or
manufacture which they bring, and the enlarged
conceptions which they necessarily induce, must,
after a time, bring about a change. Commerce
mingles up the nations; their thoughts and feel—
ings must mix, and as in chemistry, the stronger
element will be prevalent. The grosser forms of
heathenish darkness will be affected by the better
light which is brought from civilized lands. _

The Sandwich Islands are perhaps the most
striking example of this with which we are

acquainted. It is well known that when the mis-
7

82 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

sionaries sent out from this country arrived at those
islands, they found a people no longer heathen,
but who had, a little while before, cast away and
destroyed idols and abandoned idol-worship.

It is said that Vancouver, who visited the islands
in 1794, when engaged in that perpetual but fruit-
less work, the discovery of a northwest passage,
gave the King Kamehameha much excellent ad-
vice, and before leaving said to him: “There is
a God above in heaven, and if you desire to wor-
ship him, when I return to England I will entreat
his majesty to appoint for you a clergyman; and
when he comes you must renounce your tattoo sys-
tem, which is false. There are no earthly deities.”
The king died without carrying out the recom-
mendations of the circumnavigator; but he is said
to have on his death-bed advised his chiefs to
throw off the tattoo system and the old idolatry.
The foreign residents whom commerce brought,
had ridiculed the absurdities of both, and by their
inﬂuence had loosened their hold. This, together
with the dying request of the king, and the gene-
ral license which occurred at the ceremonies at-
tending his funeral obsequies. helped the matter
forward, so that upon the coronation of the new
king, he set an example of a deliberate and ﬂag-
rant violation of the tattoo, which was quickly
followed by almost the whole people. With the
tattoo system fell the old idolatry; and very soon,
and before the arrival of the missionaries at the
islands, the natives had demolished the temples of

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 83

the false gods, treated the idols with contempt,
throwing them into the ﬁre and the sea. The
people were no longer idolaters. Here was a sig-
nal instance of the power which commerce may
exert; for we may, With some latitude, speak of
the voyage of discovery of Vancouver, a captain in
the British navy, and the chance residence of a
few stragglers from civilized countries, as the re-
sult of commercial enterprise. Perhaps history
presents no instance so remarkable as this, but
we may take it as an extreme example of the effect
of free inter-communication between civilized and
» barbarous people.

At ﬁrst glance this may seem to be a matter of
no measured importance, and it might be set to
the account as an unalloyed good of commerce it-
self. Yet a little consideration, perhaps, will make
us pause before making such an estimate. To re-
move an old superstition from the mind may not
in itself be a thing of good at all. Whether it be
so or not, will depend entirely upon what you
have given to supply its place. - If you have rooted
out a had only to make room for a worse error,
you have done evil only. A false religion is better
than a rank and pestilent inﬁdelity. We must
ask, then, what has commerce to give in the room
of the forms of error and superstition which she
undermines and destroys? Her history gives the
answer—she has nothing. She may pluck down,
she may persuade the people to trample their idols
in the dust, but she gives nothing in their place.

84 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

The point of time in a people’s, history when
they have forsaken old forms of religion, is one of
utmost interest and peril. The unclean spirit has
gone out of the man: it is a momentous question
whether an angel presence shall now come in, or
whether the demon shall return with seven other
spirits more wicked than himself. Commerce
may exorcise the unclean spirit, but it leaves the
house swept and garnished, only, it may be, to
welcome a more dreadful possession.

Missionaries in foreign lands recognize this fact,
and no such pathetic appeals come back for help,
and no such strenuous exertions are made as when
under some inﬂuence, a people are found break-
ing away from their old religions. They know
that then is the crisis moment, and upon what the
people have given them then and there, will de-
pend the good or the ill of their religious revolu-
tion. In the case before us of the Sandwich Islands,
by the wonderful providence of God the American
missionaries arrived at the crisis moment. A bat-
tle between rival factions, which decided the
abolishment of idolatry, had just been fought,
and the people were without a religion, and were
ready to receive whatever might be brought them.

Had not these missionaries arrived precisely at
that time, we know too well what would have been
the condition of this impressible people. There
were inﬂuences about them already at work which
would have made their revolution only a curse.
Most of the foreigners then at the islands were

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 85

sailors of the lowest caste; some had been put
ashore probably as too vicious to be endured on
shipboard; some were deserters, and the great
body, far removed from the restraint of civilized
life, and shut out from the observation of the
world, were living in open and unblushing vice,
more degraded, if possible, than the heathen
around them. What their inﬂuence would have.
been is easy to see. The opportune arrival of the
missionaries seems to have been ordered in accord-
ance with the fact, that not a moment was to be
lost. Had they not come then, the result which
. we have traced remotely to commerce, would have
been only endlessly disastrous.

This is the most favorable view which we can
take of the workings of commerce upon aheathcn
people. It has a tendency to show them the false-
hood and folly of idolatry, and to destroy it, but
whether this shall be well or ill for them depends
upon a power without, and distinct from com-
merce. When we consider some other of its re-
sults we shall ﬁnd no mitigation of the evils which
it brings.

Commerce has always introduced the vices and
diseases of civilization, and superadding them to
the vices and diseases native among the people,
has intensiﬁed their destructive power. Diseases
unknown to savage life follow in the track of the
trader so that the medical or scientiﬁc man might,
were there no other evidence of his having visited

the shore, be certain of his presence. Indeed, it
7*

8'6 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

would seem as if noxious insect or vermin life
gave in some places the same evidence.

It has become almost an axiom in the history of
colonial settlements, that the aboriginal inhabit-
ants must fade away before the immigrant.
Whenever one of the modern maritime nations
has been able to throw into a new country a num-
ber of persons large enough to bear any consider-
able, we might say, any appreciable proportion to
the native population, the process of decadence
immediately sets in and goes forward with scarcely
a pause until, if time enough be given, the race
becomes extinct. Where natives are so nume-
rous that the new comers are lost like rain—drops
in the ocean, the eﬁ‘ect is not so marked, and may,
indeed, be scarcely seen, as for example, in India
or China. Here the teeming populousness of the
country in its vastness receives and absorbs the
new inﬂuence, and though it may have its usual
and legitimate effect, it is so comminuted and
diffused that it cannot be traced.

A fairer and a striking illustration may be found
in the history of the Paciﬁc Islands. They be-
came known to the civilized world during the
later half of the last century. The only inter-
course which they had with it was commercial, for
it was more than ﬁfty years before the Church
made any attempt to reach them with the Gospel.
During this time they were left to the unmixed
inﬂuences of commerce, and here, if anywhere
the true workings of this power may be seen, for

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 87

they can be noted in their separation from all
other forces.

They are seen; but what a picture they pre-
sent! At their discovery, to the excited appre-
hensions of the voyagers, they were paradises set
in the quiet ocean ; and subsequent and better in-
formation but conﬁrmed the impression. Perhaps
nowhere on earth were there to be found more
perfection of physical well-being.* We speak, of
course, of the greater groups, such as the Society,
Marquesas and sandwich Islands. The climate
was wonderfully healthful; the air pure and in-
. Vigorating, fed with new life every hour from the
all-surrounding ocean ; the sun shone mildly,
making an endless spring-time without its lassi-
tude and a perpetual summer without its oppres-
sion; the earth brought forth spontaneously all
that was necessary for human subsistence; no
ravenous beast roamed in the forests; no poison-
ous snake or venomous insect infested the ground ;
there was nothing in earth or air to mar the health
or prevent. man from enjoying animal life to its
full, except What might be found in the depravity
of his nature.

That existed, indeed, in some of its most ter-
rible forms of infanticide, murder, and cannibal-
ism, but yet destructive as these inﬂuences were,
they did not prevent the health and the increase
of the races. Physically they were a very noble

 

* See Stewart’s " Visit to the South Seas.”

88 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

people, degraded beyond expression, and lost m0-
rally, but yet a physically happy and prosperous
people.

But discovery made them known, and soon
commerce reached them. They were far-away
islands, ocean-sundered from the rest of the world,
and the men of commerce could do what they
would without fear or shame. They sowed their
seed, and it was quick to spring up in the rank
and luxuriant soil.

Almost the ﬁrst ships that visited them left be-
hind the most loathsome diseases of civilized
life, diseases which were previously wholly un-
known, and any fresh arrival, with but rare excep-
tions, brought new fuel to feed the ﬂames which
speedily spread among the people. The vessels,
while they remained in the harbors, were ﬂoating
houses of pollution, to which the natives were al-
lured; on them scenes like the midnight revels
of the cities of the plain were enacted, and from
them the debased and polluted victims went back
to speed disease and death for generations to those
who had not themselves come in contact with the
foreigners.* The ships often left on the islands

 

* The natives on one of the islands which the Vincennes, a.
U. S. sloop of war, visited in 1829, were intensely surprised at
the order which the commander, Capt. Finch, gave at nightfall,
that all the females should'leave the ship. They seemed unable
' ‘ to understand it, and when compelled by gentle force to leave,
they dropped themselves into the sea, with many expressions of
surprise, and the chief said laughingly, as they took leave to

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 89

wretches reeking With licentiousness, profanity,
and drunkenness, to spread and perpetuate the
bad work, and when they did not, the very air
remained tainted with the moral pollution and
their diseases to be propagated with ever accele-
rated rapidity.

As far as we can learn, the intercourse was in
general without one redeeming quality, it brought
crime and utter ruin, and not a single beneﬁt.
Commercefound them debased indeed, but left
them lower sunk in pollution and shame, or rather
clung to them, dragging them ever downwards
into deeper depths. It found them a vigorous,
healthy and increasing race, it made them with
awful celerity nations of drunkards, a people
stricken almost to a man, with the most loathsome
forms of disease, a race dying out like sheep smit-
ten with the rot.

Such were they when the Church sent her mis:
sionaries to them. But, alas! she sent them too
late. The stream of death was ﬂowing in too
vast a volume and with momentum too great for
even the inﬂuences which she brought. She
might, and under the mighty power of God’s
spirit she did convert the souls of the people, but
she could not keep their bodies from sinking into
the grave ; she could only retard the forces which

enter their canoes, “ This is a strange ship.” “ And I doubt not,”
adds Mr. Stewart, from whom we quote, “ it is the ﬁrst in which
they have ever known any restrictions to be placed on the great-
est 1icentiousness.”——Visz't'to the South Seas, Vol. 1, p. 280.

90 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

were hurrying the race with frightful rapidity to
extinction. At this late day, after forty years of
most marked and wonderful success in these Pa,-
ciﬁc Islands, although the people have become
civilized, and as a people religious, yet the decay
still goes on, more slowly, scarcely less surely,
both in. the Sandwich Islands and the Society
Islands, and doubtless in all the groups which had
early intercourse with foreigners.

There is, we are aware, a class of writers, who
have endeavored to insinuate, if not assert, that
the decay which is going on so rapidly in, these
islands, and the numerous and enormous evils
which are so prevalent, are the result of those ef-
forts which the religious world has been making
for their evangelization. Such men as the author
of “Typee” and “Omoo,” however, are not ori-
ginal. Their accusations are stale, as the animus
of them is evident. “That this is we shall have
occasion to speak of in another place. They tell
us that the missionaries found the people peaceful,
healthful, happy, since they have come among
them, the poor natives have sunk rapidly in dis-
ease and death; the inference being, if the asser-
tion is not made, that the melancholy fact was
caused by the coming which they deprecate.

Just a little knowledge and honesty would en-
able one to see how directly contrary to truth are
all such statements. So far from the presence of
missionaries accelerating, least of all causing the
dc .‘adence of the people, it alone saved them from

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 9]

speedy extermination. Had missionaries not come
when they did, a few years would have seen those
islands almost without an inhabitant. They alone
retarded, though they have not been able to ar-
rest the fatal progress of the people to ﬁnal extinc-
tion. It was commerce, not religion, that brought
the death. * It was commerce, under the lead of
men hating religion, wandering over the ocean in
pursuit of gain or guilty pleasure, which threw a
blight over the fair scenes they so much delight to
depict. The more glowing the pictures which they
paint of sensuous and sensual delight, of joyous
and paradisaical bliss, the more frightful do they
make the destructive elements which discovery
and traﬁic have brought to the unhappy islands.

* If argument and facts were not lost upon these writers, such
language as the following, written long ago as 1831, would have
silenced them: “ Let those who are disposed to treat the mission~
ary scheme as an ambitious project or fanatical conceit, ﬁnd a
name for that unorganized but unremitted action upon heathen
countries on the part of brutal seamen and unprincipled 00111-
manders, which is daily spreading pestilence, both physical and
moral, among thousands upon thousands. The opponents of this
plan are in the habit of assuming that the question at issue is
between converting them and letting them alone. THEY WILL‘NOT
BE LET ALONE. We are to choose between two opposite and in-
consistent measures, two conﬂicting modes of operation on the
heathen. If one fails the other triumphs. While the one is sus—
pended the other is at work. Admit that the idea of preaching
to the savages is pregnant with absurdity . . . . is not this as
tolerable as that all the vices of the refuse of society should be
transported hither? Is the tyranny even of austere ascetics
worse'than the tyranny of proﬂigates, the tyranny of drunkenness,
the tyranny of lust ‘.’”——Amerioan Quarlcrly Review, Sept, 1831.

92 MORAL rowan or THE SEA.

These facts are now so clearly seen, and so
deeply felt, that missionaries are impatient to reach
the remote and unfrequented islands before com-
merce has had an opportunity to come there.
They know too well the inevitable result of the
contact of natives with the ships of commerce.
They do not welcome, they fear the facilities of
intercommunication which it makes, and dread
the inﬂuence which it brings when it comes alone.
We may quote the pathetic words of one of those
devoted and secluded missionaries of the Amer-
ican Board on one of thepMicronesian islands,
Mr. Stuges: “We are grieved to hear that Span-
ish Catholics are on the island of Yap, and it
is most likely they are also on the Pilus. This
stirs up anew our longings to get into some of
those western islands. J ap or Yap is a ﬁne island,
and densely peopled; the natives are mild, indus-
trious, and anxious to learn. There are some
spots, and precious they are in our eyes, where
commerce has not been—dear islets, where the touch
of the “beach comber” has not left its contagion.
To these spots we wish to go. ‘Will not our friends
at home furnish us the means of [ore-occupying Vir-
gin soil? Surely, if they knew how important it
is to make haste, they would have a vessel here
for us at once I” * .

A few'months later, Dr. Peirson, writing from
the same mission about a little group of islands,

it Missionary Herald, February, 1858.

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 93

called Musgrave or Marshall’s islands, and urging
the importance of a mission to them, uses the fol-
lowing as an argument for prompt action on the
part of the American Board of Missions: “As
there are no Whites on these islands, it is very de-
sirable that a missionary should be established be-
fore they get a foothold. The people are very quick
to learn our ways; very, observing, and have great
tact at imitation.” “" \Vriting of another island,
Pitt’s Island, he says that on their visit they found
“the people, men, women and children, sadly
given up to drunkenness. All this evil has come
upon them from whites, who taught them to manu-
facture the grog. Captain Handy says it was com-
menced in 1849. Until within a year or two the na-
tives did not drink it, but made it to sell to whites
who visited the island. They are now destroying
themselves. They say sixteen have hung them-
selves within ﬁve months.” T Here it would seem
that commerce had brought a market, taught
them to supply it, and afterward to make them-
selves Victims of rum and suicide. A terrible com—
ment the passage is, in a few words, upon the
often-boasted beneﬁts of increased facilities of
intercommunication.

In a general letter from this mission, they say:
“It is not possible for us to explore among these
' islands without opening ﬂoodgates for the evils of
a licentious commerce. No sooner is it known

*Missionary Herald, March, 1858. TId. p. 88.
8

94 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

that missionaries are planning to take possession
of an island, than wicked men rush in and oppose
us in our work. You will readily see the import-
ance of taking possession of every spot as soon as
possible, before the people are corrupted. So im-
portant does this seem to us on the ground, that
we have consented to divide our forces, leaving a
brother to labor alone on an island, and breaking
up another promising station that we might have
men for manning new ﬁelds.”* Mr. Snow, writing
from Strong’s Island, one of the Micronesian
group, says: “I have just ﬁnished taking the
census of the island again, and ﬁnd there are now
830 inhabitants—518 males, and 312 females,
making a population of males to females of about
5 to 3. 'VVhen I took the census about two and
half years ago, the population was a few over
1100. This shows that our people are diminish-
ing at a rapid rate. But the war has had some
hand in the diminution the past year. When
the books are opened there will be a scene re-
presented from these islands of the Paciﬁc Where
ships have been accustomed to touch, at which
so-called civilization will hang her head and call
upon the rocks and mountains to fall upon her
and hide her shame from the gaze of the assem-
bled universe.” T

These quotations might be multiplied almost in-
deﬁnitely, but they are enough. We have pre-

 

*iId. June, 1858. 11d. April, 1859.

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 95

ferred to make them from recent documents, for
if these things are true now after all the Christian
inﬂuence which has been exerted upon the sailor,
and the wide-spread inﬂuences of the Church over
missionary ﬁelds, the same must have been true in
an intense degree in other days. It is simply an
emphatic testimony that the eﬂ'ect of commerce
is still what it ever has been, that it does worse
than nothing for the people to Whom it comes.

So destructive is this inﬂuence that a thought-
ful man feels a tinge of sadness at times when he
h ears of the new ﬁelds which commerce is explor-
ing and entering. There have been a multitude
of congratulations exchanged of late upon the fact
that China and Japan have been thrown open to
commerce. It is a question Whether it is athing of
' » joy or grief. The opening may be a blighting
curse; and it will be if the Church has not the
zeal and the self-denial to enter the new ﬁelds.
When we read, as we have, of drunken sailors, on
almost the ﬁrst visit of our war ships, wandering
along the beautiful walks of a Japanese village,
and, in their maudlin folly or mischief, polluting
the fountains, and being put under arrest by the
authorities, and almost creating a collision be-
tween themselves and the natives, we pause, and
are greatly doubtful Whether we should rejoice 0r
weep over Japan open to commerce. Looking
over the past, knowing the history of commerce
and its useful work, the tears are easier than the
smiles. At least we cannot blame, perhaps we

96 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

shall admire, the far-reaching wisdom which built
. the walls and double—barred the gates to keep the
foreigners away. *

‘3‘" These words were written four years ago. The last advices
from Japan, giving the melancholy recital of impending hostili-
ties between the Japanese and the English Government, give a
deeper emphasis to them. Well may the correspondent of a daily
journal close his letter with———“ Let us hope for peace to thrice
unhappy Japan, who, in an evil hour, not of her own seeking,

opened her long—closed doors to such troublesome guests.”—New
York Tribune, August 28, 1863.

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 97

CHAPTER VI.

THE MEN OF COMMERCE.

WE have hitherto been considering commerce
as one great system of inﬂuence upon the world,
and have been endeavoring to trace its bearing
upon the moral and social well-being, and espe-
cially its relation to the spread of Christianity.
We have endeavored to separate it far as possible
from contingent forces, and mark its legitimate
results as a system. This system is world-wide,
and takes in a thousand minor elements to com-
pose it. The producer who grows the material
from the soil, the manufacturer who fashions the

raw material into fabrics, the merchant who seeks
' a market, the consumer who furnishes it,—-all are

parts necessary to make up the vast whole which
we call commerce. It is concerned with human
wants, with human caprices, with human super-
stitions, with the grain which feeds, with the jewels
which deck the forms ofmen, as well as the san-
dal-wood which burns before their idols; it clothes
them with its goods, it gives them medicines for
their diseases. It is the mighty medium through
which the widely-sundered, parts of the earth touch
each other. ‘
8 -)C-

93 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

\Ve have considered the system as an inanimate
thing, aside from the character of those who are
engaged in it. We mean that class of men whose
business has been to carry on the work of com-
merce. Strictly speaking, the term “men of com-
merce,” would embrace all those who are engaged
in commercial pursuits, whether on land or sea:
the merchant in his counting-house, directing the
lading of his ships, and ordering their voyages, is
more truly a man of commerce, than the master
who navigates them to their ports. Yet we may
speak correctly when we call the sailor the man
of commerce, for commerce gives him his business,
and makes him what he is; and although, in eX-,
treme strictness, we cannot mingle up his charac—
ter and inﬂuence with that ofcommerce, and speak
of the one in the same terms with that of the other,
still so closely is the mariner connected with the
movements and the effects of commerce, that
whenever we attempt to follow the one, the other
immediately comes into view.

We propose, in the present chapter, to consider
the character of sailors, and their inﬂuence. In
doing so, it will not be necessary to go over a very
wide ﬁeld, or far back into history. Up to within
a comparatively few years, this large class of men
occupied but little of the attention of the world.
The nature of their business cut them in a great
measure off from the knowledge and the sympa-
thies of other men. Their stay on land was brief,
and their absence protracted; their habits were

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. .99

such that, even when on shore, they mingled little
with others; so that in fact little was known
of them, and less was cared for them. Indeed, in-
quiries into their condition and character, and in-
terest in their behalf, has been awakened since
the time when Christian missions have sprung
vigorously up; and the fact that their inﬂuence was
felt in new and distant parts of the earth, and was
found powerfully affecting the progress of Chris-
tianity, has been no inconsiderable inducement
to keep it alive, The solicitude which the Church
feels now for the sailor, is the returning power of
p a solicitude roused up far away in other lands—an
anxiety not more for him than for the cause upon
which his character and inﬂuence bears so strong-
ly; and, curiously enough, the strongest appeals
which are made for the sailor, are now drawn from
the bearing which his presence has upon distant
and heathen nations.

For the most part, the men who have manned
the ships of commerce, have been drawn from
classes of society where Christian inﬂuence has
been little prevalent; and if here and there a child '
of pious parents became a sailor, it has been usu-
ally the wayward, restless boy, who could not
brook the restraints of home, and who took to the
sea to escape them. He is, by the very nature of
his employment, separated from the thousand
means which restrain men on land, and the thou-
sand inﬂuences which tend to elevate and convert
them; He is thrown among associates with whom

100 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

he must mingle on the most intimate terms of fel-
lowship, and who are often vicious and degraded.
He cannot insulate himself from them: they are the
family in whose bosom he must dwell, and whose
companionship he must accept. There is nothing
on ship-board to cultivate whatever may be good
within. The men who command him are fre-
quently hardened, if not brutalized, (where they
are not, is an exception to a general fact,) and the
discipline of the ship has little in it to ennoble the
man. The ship furnishes him no closet, except it
may be the silence of his own heart as he lies in
his berth, or the rocking main-top to which the
pious sailor has often climbed to ﬁnd one.

\Vhen on shore, the inﬂuences into which he
usually and naturally falls, are simply worse than
those which surround him in his ship. The port
is most generally a strange one, and he comes
among those who have no interest in him, except
it maybe to obtain as much as it is possible of his
hard-earned wages. He is plied with all those al-
lurements of intemperance and Vice which prover-
bially cluster round the precincts where the sailor
ﬁnds his boarding-house. What these inﬂuences
are, may be seen in any port. The writer is fa-
miliar with them, under perhaps the most favora-
ble circumstances. Let one walk through the
streets which lie near the wharves of a large port,
and see the character of the houses and of the per-
sons there, and he will not wonder at the preva-
lent character of seamen. The low groggery

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 101

which usually makes a part of the boarding-house,
the seat by the door occupied too often by women
who stare you shamelessly in the face, tell you
to what a home the sailor comes when his voyage
ends in a Christian city. What it is when that
voyage ends in some foreign and heathen port,
we can imagine, and the pictures which are sent
back of beastly vice and deepest degradation, leave
us no room to mistake.

This is true, after more than thirty years of
Christian labor among seamen. We shall have

occasion to speak, in another place, of the results
1 Of these labors. We merely hint them now to
give a deeper coloring to the fact of the low moral
condition of the sailor before they were made.
When he was left an easy prey to all these dis-
astrous inﬂuences, without one which was favor-
able, we capnot wonder that wherever he went
his presence was pestilential, and that those who
were laboring in heathen countries should have
looked upon it as a thing to be dreaded, a mighty
hinderance to their work.

The concurrent testimony of missionaries in
every quarter of the globe looks toward one point
in this matter; but perhaps some of the most
striking examples of their inﬂuence may be met
with in the history of the Paciﬁc Islands, to which
we have referred in another connection. These
were remote enough and separated from the rest
of the world sufﬁciently to free those who visited
them from the control of public sentiment. and

102 MORAL POWER OF THE sEA.

the restraint which surround men like an atmo-
sphere in Christian lands, and to allow them to act
out their cherished plans and the natural impulses
of their hearts and lives. They did so, and the
result was shocking to our common humanity.
These islands became the shores upon which the
stream of their depravity, pent up on their long
voyages, was let out, and the sailor seemed to feel
that here he might revel in shame without fear or
bounds. The visit of every ship, with but rare
exceptions, was the signal for the pouring out of
a ﬂood of licentiousness, like the irruption of the
island volcanoes. The poor degraded heathen
were allured to the ships, and these became the
scene of unbounded and unblushing debauchery.

When the missionaries came and their inﬂuence
began to be felt upon the people, a barrier was at
once thrown up against these crimes, and they were
brought almost to an end. Under their teaching
the evils and the iniquity of such practices was
made apparent, and the native rulers were easily
persuaded to enact laws which should prevent them
in future. In the case of the Sandwich Islands,
which we may take as an example of others, this
work was done in one of these, at that time, long
intervals between the arrival of trading or whaling
vessels. When the ships returned, and expected,
as they had been accustomed, to ﬁnd the same
wide and open ﬁeld for their crimes, they were
perplexed and surprised to discover that some great
change had come over the people; instead of the

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 103

usual canoes ﬁlled with fallen and shameless
women, they met with only men who had come
for purposes of trade, and not a female visited
their decks. It was not long before the cause of
the change became known to them—they could
trace it at once to the ministers of religion who
had been teaching religion to the islanders.

The discovery was the signal for the perpetra-
tion in some instances of a series of outrages
which will forever disgrace the history of com-
merce in these islands.

On one occasion the crew of a whaleship, with
the connivance of its captain, surrounded the
house of Mr. Richards, one of the missionaries,
and threatened to take his life and his family’s
and destroy his property, unless he would promise
to exert his inﬂuence to have the law, which the
chiefs had enacted forbidding females to visit the
ships for immoral purposes, repealed; and the
mission family was saved from their fury only by
the intervention of an armed force of two hundred
men sent by the chiefs to protect them. On an-
other occasion a mob of sailors went to the house
of Mr. Richards with the determination to kill
him. At this time as before the conduct of the
natives and these nominally Christian foreigners,
stood out in glaring contrast. The house of the
missionary was guarded by the natives, though
they could not prevent the marauders from pi]-
laging the tents of the people and destroying their
property. They did not however obtain their

104 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

principal purpose. The Governor of the island

was absent, and the place was in charge of a

female chief. Unable to protect the, people, she

directed the women to ﬂee with her to the moun-
tains, and they did. “All the females from a town
of 4,000 native inhabitants,” exclaims the narrator,

“ﬂeeing from the Violence and lust of sailors from

Christian lands 1 ” *

These were extreme cases, but they mark the
nature of that opposition which is readily awak-
ened whenever missionary enterprise has been
powerful enough distinctly to be connected with
the restraints which are laid upon Vice by‘the
advancing morality of the people. That the same
outbursts of Violence have not occurred elsewhere
in as marked a manner, may be safely imputed to
the fact- that elsewhere the moral power of the
missionary has not been felt or recognized rather
than any better disposition on the part of licen-

, tious crews.

As we have'seen in a former chapter, the inﬂux
of commerce is a thing greatly dreaded by mis-
sionaries in new lands, not only from its utter
negation of good, but from the bad inﬂuence
'which the sailors almost invariably carr 7 with
them. In the mind of a heathen people there is
of course no such discrimination made which
’marks the difference between the true believer
in Christ and one who comes from a Christian

tr‘

)2

'9

31.4,

 

A * Encyclopaadia of Missions.—-Newcomb.

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 105

land. They have been accustomed to judge of a
man’s religion by his nationality, and decide upon
the one at once by the other. The sailor from any
one of the commercial nations, comes from a
country which bears the name of Christian, and
he calls himself and is known by it in distinction
from all other religions. The missionary of re-
ligion comes under precisely the same name and
from the same land, and stands, in the mind of
the people, on the same platform. He comes
usually after the sailor, and must by the necessity
of the case have placed to his account whatever
characteristics the sailor has succeeded in attach-
ing to the name of the Christian. The grand
maxim of our Lord is as natural as it is true:
“By their fruits shall ye know them,” and all
men, whether enlightened or barbarous, at once
determine the character of a religion from the
life of its professors. Especially is this true in
regard to Christianity. The teacher of this reli-
gion comes to a pagan people and aims at nothing
less than a total supplanting of the religion which
he ﬁnds by that which he brings. His work is to
persuade the people to exchange, cast aside their
own for his religion. It is at once put in com-
parison, and some of his strongest appeals» are
drawn from the beneﬁcent and elevating tenden-
cies of Christianity. Just atthis point the inﬂu-
ence of the sailor, which has been antecedent to
his own, comes in with fatal force. The preacher

tells of the power of the religion of Jesus to lift
9

106 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

and reﬁne the man; of its efﬁcacy to change the
heart and make the life holy; of its inﬂuence to
restrain the passions of men and nerve them to
purity and benevolence toward men and devotion
to God; and with the picture comes up before the
mind of the hearer those who long before the
coming of this missionary he was accustomed to
see and recognize as Christians from Christian
lands. If he shall think of them as a race, look
at their history and endeavor to mark what has
been the character and result of their whole inter-
course, he ﬁnds it to be one long drawn scene of ‘
extortion, of robbery, and often of unbounded
cruelty and blood; he ﬁnds the people to whom
the commerce which these men have brought has
been oppressed and ruined, and lands which other-
wise were fair and comparatively happy, have been
cursed with a seemingly incurable blight; he ﬁnds
that in every instance and in every land the com-
mercial nations have been invariably Christian
nations, and the men of Commerce have been, of
course by their nationality,.0hristian men; he
hears the teacher of this religion proclaiming the
canon of its founder, “By their fruits shall ye
know them,” and how can he escape the inevitable
inﬂuence that these facts so plainly force upon
him? What must that religion be which bears
uniformly such fruits? Or if he be a man inca-
pable of learning the facts of the history and
unable to make large generalizations, there is
before him the life of the individual illustrators

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 107

of Christianity in. the form of the sailor who has
been visiting, it may be, his country for genera-
tions. But What an illustration! He sees him-
even at the best one who makes gain the main
object of his pursuit, and for the most part one
ready for any form of vice. As a class he sees
them addicted to drunkenness, and Willing to go
to any length in debauchery; he sees them not
only falling readily into the vices native to the
soil, but bringing with him new and unusual
forms of sin ; he sees him often running to greater
lengths of crime than those to which he has been
accustomed, and descending to deeper depths of
degradation and wallowing in more ﬁlthy pollution
than even the heathen whom he visits, and it is
not wonderful that he turns away in disgust from
a religion with whose profession and with whose
name all this is associated. It has not been the
experience of one‘missionary or of a few, but of,
perhaps, every one who has ever labored where
commerce has been before him, to hear the taunt-
ing answer to his teaching :—“ Behold your fellow
Christians I if Such be the fruits of your religion,
we want it not.”

In every such case the teacher of religion ﬁnds
that he must contend not simply with the igno-
rance and prejudices of heathenism, but with its
intelligence and its sense of right. There is a
preliminary work of defence to be done before he
can make an advance upon the enemy. Instead
of at once entering upon his appropriate work of

108 MORAL POWER on THE SEA.

aggression, of urging the doctrines of the cross
upon the people, he ﬁnds himself compelled at the
‘ outset‘ to clear his own character, and put him-
self right before them. He is in the place of sus-
picion, and to him clings all the bad prestige of
the wickedness of his countrymen and his co-re-
ligionists. This is not the work of a day. It may
be that commerce has for many years been at
work, and by all its dealings and through all the
life of its men been educating the people to con-
nect rapacity and extortion, licentiousness and
crime with the name of Christian; and the impres-
sion of a century will not fade out at a word. It
is hard to get the true idea of Christianity as a
spiritual religion before the mind of.» a heathen,
and perhaps still harder to impress him with the
utter difference between the name and the thing
itself. Indeed, it is only by the spectacle of a life
in contrast with all their former experience, that
the result is reached at all. Words are ineffectual
here, teaching is of no avail, the facts stand outin
ever vivid impressiveness, and their voice claims
and engrosses the attention. The lives of men
who have borne the name, and who have exhibited
their own character and life, tell to them what the
thing itself is. It requires often years of holy
living, of disinterestedness and benevolence, to
convince a heathen people that what the teacher
of the Gospel asserts is true, and that all who come
from Christian lands are not Christian men; and
during them he himself is upon trial.

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 109

The opposing power which the wicked life of
the hundreds of thousands of sailors who have for
years been visiting the places where missionary
efforts are being made, is simply incalculable. It
has been a perpetual, steady inﬂuence tending to
paralyze by its secret power, when it does not de-
stroy by its open violence, the labors of self—de-
nying ministers of religion for the spread of the
Gospel. '

The day perhaps is past when commerce shall
be entirely divorced from Christianity, and when
it shall dare directly, as a system, to oppose its
propagation; it is probably past when it shall feel
at liberty to pursue its own ends without care for
the moral condition of the people to whom it
comes. The days of old Spanish rapacity and end-
less butchery, of Portuguese and Dutch extortion
and cruelty, of English selﬁshness and misrule
are over; probably they will never return; com-
merce has learned too well ever to forget that it
must not, and it cannot, pursue to success even
its own ends except by the aid of Christianity ; but
still there yet remains the mighty opponent of the
Gospel in the lives of wicked men, the servants
of commerce. \Vhat has affected commerce as a
great system has not yet reachedthis element of
evil. Here emphatically we may talk of the mo-
ral power of the sea, 'of the men of the sea.
That moral power is yet to be moulded and made
eﬂicient for the Gospel. The men of commerce,

the sailors of commerce, must ﬁrst be converted
9*

110 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

to God before commerce can ever become an
efﬁcient ally of religion.

The Church has been late in awaking to this fact,
and has suffered many years to pass in utter ne-
glect of this great power. The ﬁrst efforts in be-
half of seamen began in London in the year 1814,
and in New York in 1816; up to that day, as a
class, they seem never to have caught even the
casual attention of Christians. In the providence
of God efforts were made to reach and beneﬁt
them in these two ports distant from one another,
without any concert of action. In London the
awakened anxiety of a sailor himself was the ori-
gin of all those meetings, often extraordinary in
their character, and from the circumstances in
which they are held, deeply interesting—the Be-
thel Meetings. A stranger, he had entered a place
of worship, and was observed during the service
to sit weeping bitterly as if stricken with the
arrows of God’s word. He was followed by a pious
man, who discovered him to be a sailor belonging
to a vessel then lying in the Thames. It was
found on further inquiry that there was a little
band of praying seamen who were accustomed to
meet together on their vessels for the purpose of
devotion. Christian men from the shore became
interested in the fact, and joined in the circle of
prayer, and soon the prayer-meetings on ship-
board were known as “ Bethel Meetings,” and the
blue ﬂag with its star and dove became the signal
of their being held—a ﬂag which perhaps of all

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 111

others appeals most touchingly to a Christian in a
strange land.

In New York attention was directed to the sailor
ﬁrst in 1816, by the efforts of a city missionary,
Rev. Ward Stafford, who, while laboring among
the destitute population in the eastern portion of
New York, had his sympathies enlisted in behalf
of the thousands of sailors visiting that port, and
who were almost wholly out of the reach of the
ordinary means of religious inﬂuence. He pro-
cured a school-room and commenced preaching to
them, and the station subsequently grew into a
church, “The Mariner’s Church,” which has ever
since been a point of peculiar interest, and from
which inﬂuences for good have gone out all over
the earth. The erection of this church was soon
followed by efforts to establish similar ones in all
the large ports of the country; in Philadelphia *
in 1819, by Rev. Mr. Eastburn ; in Boston by Rev.
Dr. J enks, in 1818; and, in a short time, it led
to the systematic endeavor to plant them in the
ports of foreign countries to which seamen resort.

These efforts, though begun at a late day, yet
have been followed by marked results for good,
not simply on the moral and religious, but the
physical condition of the sailor. He is no longer
the neglected and forgotten being that he once
was; he is followed by the prayers and sympa-
thies of thousands of Christian hearts. Homes

* See Appendix.

11:2 MORAL rowan or THE SEA.

prepared for his use, are opened to receive him
when he comes on shore; the chapel is waiting for
his attendance, and a minister set apart for his ser-
vice, meets him, and now,——what once would have
been an anomaly too good almost for belief—a
godly sailor is found on almost every ship which
sails from our ports, and the meeting for prayer
and praise has become too common to attract our
notice. »

Especially has this been true since the close of the
year 1858 and beginning of 1859. p The wonderful
revival of God’s work which Will mark the mid-
dle of this century, and which has spread its ef-
fects over the earth, was peculiar in its power
over seamen. Perhaps in no case has the ‘power of
prayer, which this great awakening seemed de-
signed to illustrate, been more clearly evident. It
touched the sailor on land, andled hundreds there
to ask the way of salvation; it came upon him in
mid—ocean, and in far-oﬁ‘ lands evoked the same in-
quiries. The simultaneousness and the pervading
power of the divine inﬂuences in this great work
of God were, perhaps, nowhere more manifest
than on the sea. While the people of God in this
land were rejoicing in the glorious manifestations
of the Spirit’s presence, and lifting up their sup-
plications for those far away on the ocean, a spirit
of prayer was, in many an instance, awakened on
shipboard, and while the sailor knew nothing
of the means Which the people of God were em-
ploying on his behalf, and ignorant of any unusual

MORAL rowan OF THE SEA. 118

movement in the Church, he was led anxiously to
seek the salvation of his soul ; the ship beCame a

.‘ Bethel, the house of God, and the gate of Heaven,
and the voyage, began in thoughtlessness, perhaps
in profanity, ended with songs of devout praise;
the forecastle, just now the scene of folly, and
echoing with low jests, became vocalvwith humble
prayer to God, and the sailor came to his port
thinking that his has been apeculiar case, but met
others who had a like experience, and he found
that what met him far away on the lonely ocean,
was only the same mighty power of God’s spirit

. at work in its majesty on land and sea, covering
the globe with its life-giving beneﬁcence.

As a class of men, there is, we may safely assert,
no other Whose moral character bears more di-
rectly upon the work of God in the world. ‘We
say, as a class ; others on the land may have their
circle of inﬂuence bounded by the restrictions of
home and neighborhood; these have for their home
the earth-encircling ocean, and their inﬂuence,
like its waters, meets and mingles around the
globe, touching every ‘continent and island with
its restless motion. No other men have an oppor-
tunity such as they, to give a universal testimony
for God. A converted sailor is a priceless boon
to the Church.

We have given instances, and dwelt upon the
disastrous inﬂuence which they have exerted in
heathen lands, but it is pleasant to know that while
this has been too uniformly the fact, yet there

11$ MORAL pownn OF THE SEA.

have been all along, cases of an opposite character;
and while, for the most part, the missionary has
had cause only to mourn over the coming of the
sailor, he has sometimes found it strengthen his
hand and help him forward in his work. And when
such instances have occurred, the inﬂuence has
been so benign and powerful that we can well im-
agine what it shall be when it becomes common.
When a pious captain, with a godly crew, comes
into the harbor of some far-off missionary station,
not to open anew ﬂood—gates of iniquity, not to
bring drunkenness and debauchery in their train,
but to give emphasis to the teaching of the men
of God, and unite their voices with his in prayer
and praise to their common Master, it brings to
the gospel a double power, a new weight to the
instructions which have been given, it adds the
life-giving force of a holy example. It tells that
Christianity is the same all over the earth; the
same elevating, sanctifying, good-imparting thing.
When the day comes when pious sailors shall
man the ships of commerce, there will be going
out a propagating power of good which, it may be,
the world as yet has never seen. We need not
dwell upon the peculiar characteristics of the sailor,
so often insisted on, his boldness, his generosity,
his earnestness; these have, we think, been made
too much of ; so much indeed, as sometimes to ob-
scure the fact that, as a class, they are degraded
and brutalized. We need not dwell or; these
. to arrive at the value of their inﬂuence on the

- MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 115

gospel in the world. We have simply to consider
that here are hundreds of thousands* of energetic
men visitng every portion of the earth, and, by the
peculiarities of their business, certain to exert a
marked inﬂuence wherever they geyt speaking
the various languages of the people to whom they
come, and representing the Christian nations
which have sent them forth; and what we have
seen to be an evil in the past, will appear an im-
measurable blessing when it becomes a good in
the future.

We may imagine what the power of their in-
. ﬂuence would be in missionar r ﬁelds if the arri-
val of each ship, instead of bringing a club of
drunken and licentious men, ready for any scene
of riot or iniquity, should give to the Christian la-
borers a band of praying men who should swell
the little circle of those who call upon God, and
whose voices should be heard in exhortation or
prayer among the people, and whose godly eX—
ample should illustrate the doctrines which had all
along been taught. The instances where this has
been realized in fact, have been, it is true, very
few; yet they have occurred, and their benign and

 

* The census of the sea is almost impossible. It is estimated
that there is at least half a million of men engaged in the marine
of Great Britain and the United States alone.

1- The leisure which the sailor has when in port; the opportu-
nities which are alforded him for social intercourse; his pay
partly, at least, in his hand, all give his visit an especial signi-
ﬁcance.

116 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

beneﬁcent effect have been such as to make the

Christian long and pray that they might be multi-
plied.

It is this which gives a signiﬁcance and value. to
all eﬁ'orts on behalf of seamen beyond their own
individual conversion. The mighty army of those
who go down to the sea in ships, whose lives are
in perpetual peril, who are exposed to temptations
perhaps beyond the lot of ordinary men, claims of
itself, the warm sympathy, and demands the efﬁ-
cient labor of the Church of God; but their vast
inﬂuence, so prevalent and so diffused, touching
the work of God at its tenderest point, where im—
pressions are at once easily made, and almost inef-
faceab‘le, give them an additional importance which
cannot be overrated. In this View the “Sailor’s
Home,” which has become an institution in the
great ports of the world, the result of the labors of
various societies for the beneﬁt of seamen, be-
comes a praying station for the scattered soldiers
of the Church ; the seamen’s chaplain stationed in
the various ports of foreign lands, becomes a re-
cruitiug ofﬁcer to enlist them for the war. The
Church cannot afford to neglect this work of
caring for the sailor, and she must not do it ineﬂi-
ciently. She must surround him with inﬂuences
adapted to his case when at home ; she must pro-
vide the Bible and religious books and inﬂuence
for him on ship-board; she must follow him over
the deep by her perpetual intercessions; she must
go before him, and be ready to meet him when he

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 117

arrives in foreign lands, and when he steps on
shore must take him by the hand and at once lead
him within the hallowed circle where her power is
felt. By these means, and under the promised
power of God’s spirit, he will be led to Christ and
kept in the way ; and when commerce carries him
to heathen shores, he shall bring an atmosphere
of good about him. Happy will that day be when
the missionary on lonely Paciﬁc islands can look ‘
out over the sea and- hail the white sails of the
ship with joy unmingled with a misgiving; when
he shall know that they waft to him only friends
and brothers. We believe that the day is not far
distant. God is on the deep. His blessed spirit
broods over the waters as once He brooded over
chaos, and dead souls are quickened into life. The
Church may well look forward to the day when
every ship shall be a Duff or a Morning Star, and
every crew a band that preaches Jesus Christ.

10

118 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

CHAPTER VII.

COMMERCE FOR THE CHURCH.

/

As we look over the past of commerce, and ask
what it has done for the world, the prospect is
dark, and the answer sad. It has been a power
great and extended, it has discovered lands, it
has opened and made them accessible to the
Church of God; but when we look for what it
has done to elevate, reﬁne, ennoble the race,
when we would see what it has done for the
moral good of the world, we must turn sadly
away; the light is only darkness, shaded only
here and there with deeper gloom, but all dark-
ness. After centuries of power and opportunity,
it has failed to meet one of the great designs of
God for the moral good of the world. It has
abused its privileges, turned them into harm,
ever widening and destructive. ' Instead of help-
ing forward the spread of Christianity, it has ever-
more stood in its way; sometimes hindering it by
its chilling indifference and fatal example, some-
times by its active, malignant opposition.

But we must believe, we know, that this shall
not always be so. This power, like every other
power of earth, shall, by and by, be turned into

O

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 119 __

the service of the Church, made subservient to
her interests, and shall help forward her ﬁnal tri-
umph. Prophecy indicates it in such a passage
as, “Surely the isles shall wait for me,and the
ship of Tarshish ﬁrst to bring thy sons from far,
their silver and their gold with them unto the
name of the Lord thy God, and to the Holy One
of Israel” (Isa. lX. 9); where the ships of com-
merce are represented as engaged in bringing
the sons of the Church, with their treasures, to
heighten her glorious beauty. The whole course
of Divine providence, in recent years, points di—
rectly to the rapid fulﬁlment of these promises.
We propose in the present chapter to glance at
these indications of God’s providence, and attempt
to trace the lesson which they furnish.

The history of commerce has taught this, if no—
thing more,——it cannot do the world the good it
needs. The world is slow to learn, and the
Church herself almost as slow to realize, that
Christianity is the only moral power which has any
eﬁicz’ency at all to make the world morally better.
The idea that commerce, and civilization, and art,
and education, and literature are enough to ele-
vate and sanctify the earth has so possessed the
thoughts of men, and infected their language,
that it is diﬂicult to think or speak of their in-
ﬂuences in any other way. A few years since,
this land was ﬁlled with huge rejoicings over the
successful laying of - a submarine cable from con-
tinent to continent, and sermons were preached,

1‘20 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

and Christian congratulations were interchanged
because that here was a new and wonderful facil-
ity for intercommunication formed, and, of course,
it must help forward the gospel, and extend its
power in the world. We fear that there Was a
vast amount of thoughtless and empty joy, and
men were glad over-they knew not what. So-
berer thoughts at least should have mingled in.
Whether the cable, then seemingly successful,
were to be a good to the world, would depend
wholly on what should go over the cable, on how
much of moral and religious power was at either
end. If the Church of God were alive enough to
use it for his glory; if she had burning zeal
enough to make it the medium of the communi-
cation of her life; if she could make that life
vibrate with the subtle ﬂuid which traversed it,
it would be well. But if spiritual death, or sleep,
were on either shore, what would it avail for the
world, though it should lie in its shelly bed never
so safely; though the lightning leaped over it
never so swiftly? No, nothing shall ever do the
Church’s work. She may, she must, take posses-
sion of all other powers; she must make them
tributary to her; she must use them for her ser-
vice, but never can she leave her work to be done
by them. This is her high calling—the renova-
tion of the world; and both the voice of God’s
Word, and all the events of history, tell it to her.

Perhaps no more signiﬁcant lesson has been
taught the world of late by its history than this——

\

MORAL POWER OF. THE SEA. 121

that commerce is a power which belongs to the
Church, and which she must take into her posses-
sion. It is as if events were so shaped as to force
the fact upon her attention, as if she and the
world had been equally unwilling to recognize it.
In former times, the idea that commerce depended
at all upon Christianity for its prosperity, was not
dreamed of ; Christians might dimly believe it,
but the world has only just now began to perceive
it to be a fact.

As we have seen, commerce all along has felt
itself and its interests wholly aside and independ—
ent of religion, and has acted toward it as if it
lay wholly beyond the circle of its care or regard.
It was a matter which could be ignored.

And more than this, commerce has felt that
these interests were not only separate, but oppos-
ing; that the prevalence of religion was not com-
patible with the extension of commercial power,
and that the one rose s0 transcendently above
the other in importance that Christianity must at
once yield its claims, and consent to be shut out
from whatever land the supposed good of com-
merce seemed to require. The ground was taken
Without dispute or thought of doubt, that all be-
longed to commerce ; that her interests were ﬁrst
and paramount, and were as separate and inde-
pendent of religion as they were important. If,
in her wisdom and benevolence and goodness of
heart, commerce could give some aid and encour-

agement to Christianity, she might do it, and the
10* ../ ' ‘

122 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

Church ought to be thankful for the favor; and
when it was denied ought not to murmur. It
was a favor to be grateful for, but not claimed.
The suggestion, that commerce was dependent
upon religion, and could not do without her aid,
would have been laughed at as an absurdity too
Wild for answer.

But how wonderfully is all this reversed!
Never before has the Church stood on such a
vantage ground as to-day. We might allude to
the conviction which seems forcing itself upon
minds unlikely to feel it, that something more is
needed for society than mere education and re-
ﬁnement; that schools, and a free literature, that
books and teaching are not enough for the wants
of the world. The multiplying evidences of law-
lessness and crime, of dishonesty and vice, not-
withstanding all the advances in educational
appliances; the new and reﬁned forms which
knavery assumes; the turning of the most beau-
tiful of arts, and the prostitution of the discoveries
of science to the service of counterfeiting and
stealing,* compel men to consider whether, after
all, something more and better than these is not
needed for the world. The sweep of the times
bear even the most unwilling to the conviction,
that religion, with its high morality, and its power

 

* When photography is made to copy bank notes, and the
electrotype to prepare base coin, and chloroform to help the
burglar, we may pause and rejoice with some questioning at the
discoveries of science, if religion does not equally advance.

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 123

over the hearts and lives of men, must come in
and mould them to her life, or else even the very
advances of the times must be only iniquity ad-
vancing in subtlety and reﬁnement. But in no
ﬁeld has this fact been so clearly exhibited as in
the matter immediately before us.

Without calling attention to minor points, such
as the openings which missionary labor presents
to commercial transactions, and the various in-
ﬂuences for good which these labors throw around
them, we may take the history of India as the
signal example of the entire and absolute connec-
tion and dependence of commerce upon Chris-
tianity. The English East India Company has
occupied a place such as no other has in the his-
tory of the world, and may be taken as the most
extended and perfect illustration of the working
of commerce in its best forms, such as has no-
where else appeared. It has had time enough to
perfect its works, and remedy its errors as they
appeared. Two centuries of experience taught it.
It has had unlimited power to carry out all its
carefully matured plans. It has had boundless
resources at its command. It has had in its ser-
vices the intellects of some of the ablest minds
of one of the ablest nations. It has, at times, had
forits servants the noble, and the wise and good;
we may, therefore, look upon its work, as a
whole, as the highest result of commerce. If
commerce were independent of religion ever, or
in any place, here it would be found. We have

1:24 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

already seen what was the determination and de-
sire of this Company through all its history in
regard to Christianity,—a simple but entire sever-
ance of all connection between them. This was
continued without interruption to the time when,
so clearly evident was it that this Company was
unequal to the high trust which it had of govern-
ing India, that the common sentiment of all men _
demanded that it should cease to exist.

But what was the result of this determination?
It is written in disaster and blood, and speaks in
tones of horror such as the world has never heard.
There are now and then lessons taught to the
world of such a character and with such emphasis
that they never need to be repeated; they are
learned once for all, and such a lesson has been
given in the history of the British East India
Company. To understand it is not necessary here
to detail the terrible incidents of that great Revolt
of 1857—9, which has already made the name of
Sepoy, once the bulwark of Indian supremacy, a
synonym of demoniac cruelty. It will make at
once a very prominent and very bloody page in
the history of this century. Nor is this the place
to enter into any discussion of the causes of this
revolt. Different theorists, looking at the facts from
various stand-points, and equally qualiﬁed to give
a correct judgment, assign very different ones.
At this early day, so near to the events themselves,
it is perhaps impossible to arrive at'a true state-
ment of the case. We must probably wait till

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 125

the secret history of the whole affair shall be, if
it ever is, developed.

But whatever diversity of opinion there may be
in regard to the moving causes, there are certain
facts which are clear enough and of such a nature
to furnish us teaching for all coming time. Here
was a country wonderfully rich in resources and
population, consolidated, to a greater 'or less ex-
tent, under a strong government, proving itself,
indeed, strong enough by its own arm‘ to keep
down an uprising empire till help could arrive,
exercising its sway over a docile people for at
least a century and partially for two centuries,—
a country advancing slowly but certainly in all
the elements of civilization, and yet, at a certain
moment, a sudden outbreak occurs in a northern
province, and at once with telegraphic speed half
the peninsula is in arms and pauses at nothing
in the determination to rid itself of its hated rulers.
It spares neither age nor sex nor character, but
sweeps in one common butchery all that bear the
name of European. A spark seems to have caused
the explosion, but the train and the magazine were
there before.

The government was exclusively commercial in
its design, and had pursued its great ends with
what wisdom and care it possessed. Leaving out
of the question the one thing, Christianity, which
is, of course, the thing at issue in this discussion,
the government of the East India Company was
confeSsedly an eminently wise one. It had of late

126 MORAL POWER. or THE SEA.

cared much for the social and moral well being
of the people ; had as carefully as possible avoided
irritating measures; had yielded to prejudices and
granted favors. Indeed, the difﬁculty which those
who hate and desired to destroy the Company
found in fastening the blame of this great insur-
rection upon it, and the varied nature of the reasons
which they assign for it, suﬁiciently attest the fact
of the desire which it had to promote the good of
the people under its sway. In this regard, indeed,
the English East India Company stands immeasur-
ably above and beyond comparison with any other
great commercial corporation that ever existed.
Who would think for a moment of comparing its
government with that of either Portuguese or
Dutch over the same regions! They were only
vast systems of cruel oppression and rapacity with
scarcely one redeeming quality ; this while its
extension has been marked with wrong and fraud
and cruelty, yet in its administration has been as
a whole we might almost say benignant,——at least
it has tended of late to the social elevation and
happiness of the people, and been marked by much
that should claim the admiration and approval of
the world.

Yet in the face of all this it is still true that there
was that in its government which had not only
not gained the affections of the people, but, in at
least one half of its dominions, had ﬁxed a sullen
determination on the ﬁrst opportunity and at all
hazards utterly to destroy it.

P7

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 12!

There was some fatal omission. That omission
we believe to have been the Christianity which,
through all its protracted season of power, had
been slighted 0r frowned upon. Brahm-inical pre-
judices and Mahommedan intolerance had been
cared for and guarded well, but Christianity had
been left to care for itself when it was not hindered
and punished. If it was in the way, as it usually
was, it was not welcome; at the best it was simply
tolerated. The Company persecuted sometimes
its own ofﬁcers, civil and military, because they
were Christian men. It would do without Chris-
tianity: it did and was nearly undone.

As if to point out so emphatically that the whole
World should see without the possibility of mistake
where the error had been, the provinces and the
only provinces which remained unshaken during
the insurrection, were those in which missionary
labors had been most successful and abundant,
and where Christianity had the most wide-spread
, power. These were, indeed, all that saved India
to England. Had the presidencies to the south
and east joined in the revolt, its salvation would
have been impossible. However men may explain
the fact, there it stands—that those parts of India
were most faithful where the gospel of Jesus Christ
had the most power, and that the very classes most
under the inﬂuence of the Company and most
courted and caressed by it were the ﬁrst to throw
off their allegiance. As a Commercial Corporation
it did all it could for them, and designedly and

128 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

deliberately withheld Christianity; and the end
was disaster and ruin, only prevented by Christian
soldiers and the faithfulness of Christian men.
The common consent of mankind seems to have
determined, with a uniformity which is wonderful
as it is universal, that here, just here was the fatal
error of the government of India; so that without
one solitary dissenting voice in England, a total
reversal of the whole policy in regard to religion
has been demanded; and so clear has been the
case that not an objection has been raised against
it. The world sees that even for its own safety
commerce cannot do without Christianity; it can-
not with impunity be a Godless thing; it must

connect itself with higher interests than mere
commercial advantage, or else court its own de—

struction. That it had not in; India been able to
disconnect itself wholly from these higher Chris-
tian inﬂuences was indeed its salvation. In spite
of all the ofﬁcial hinderances perpetually thrown
in the way of religious movements and the exer-
tions of God-fearing men, there was a leaven of
Christianity found in the Indian Government;
not indeed because it desired it, quite the contrary,
but because converted men in the providence of
God were among its oﬁicers, and as individuals
employed their inﬂuence as Christians. It was
impossible for this not to be the case. The gov—
ernment had its home and origin in a Christian
nation where the power of religion was felt, and

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 129

this power could not but ﬁnd its way after a time
into the conduct of the administration.

There were two bands of noble Christian mis-
sionaries here and there over the great peninsula,
who were giving their lives to the work of spread—
ing the religion of the cross among the people.
Their example and the power of their simple
presence was exerting a perpetual and powerful,
though it may have been hidden and denied,
effect on all the movements of the Company.
However much ofﬁcially it might endeavor, as it
did, to discourage Christian aggressive labor, and
even frown upon and indeed persecute those in its
own employ who attempted to make or become
converts, yet the power of prayer could not be
hindered, and the actual conversion of souls could
not be prevented; and so there were found in the
army holy men of God, soldiers of the cross as
well as of the government; in its civil employ
devoted men, who cared for souls as well as mer-
chandize and proﬁts. This saved India, and this
alone. ~That commerce has any hold there, that
she has not lost all, she may give thanks to Chris-
tianity, which in her folly and wickedness she
once tried to drive out, and which she always
feared, and of which she would gladly have been
rid.

As if the lesson was intended by God to be so
plain that all men should at once and forever
understand it, the one man to whom above all

others England owes her present possession of
11 '

130 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

India, stands before the world and will go down
to posterity pre-eminently as a man of God; his
holiness outshines his generalship’; his heroic
energy is eclipsed by his supreme devotion to
Christ. The name of Havelock will give point
and condensation to the great instruction of this
insurrection, so that men will not forget that the
success of commerce and its safety rest at last upon
the help that the religion of the Bible gives it.
The truth conveyed by this great example will,
we think, be lasting and world-wide. The day
of great commercial corporations with political
powers has nearly passed away; this, one of the
few that yet remain in existence, has just gone, the
rest will soon follow, and commerce will settle
back into its true and normal position and will
conﬁne itself to its own work. Its history has
shown that it is not a governmental power. The
two great functions of trade and government can-
not be united in one corporation. This arises
from the very‘nature of the things themselves.
The spirit of commerce is the spirit of gain, of
self-aggrandizement, not necessarily selﬁsh or sub-
versive of the interests of others, but the contrary;
in its true intent building up the prosperity of all
the parties concerned in it; but still self-interest
is the principle which moves it. It is just this
which should, above all others, be kept out of
view in a government. Apower which is wielded
for itself and to build up its own interest, has the
prime elements of despotism in it. It is for this

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 131

reason that however wisely its affairs may be
administered, yet, when commerce governs, there
must always, as in this case, be an element of
discord and weakness present. Henceforward,
probably, commerce will more and more detach
itself from the function of government and pursue
its legitimate business; and just here, it seems, is
the point where it shall come in as an assisting
power to the Church.

The day 18 too fai advanced now for religion to
look for help fiom the civil arm. No lesson is
more clearly conveyed by history, however diﬂicult
it may be for men to see it, than this ;——Christianity
neither wishes nor can receive any aid from gov-
ernment. It does not ask that kind of power to
help its extension. It has always been damaged
whenever it has received it. We believe that the
attention of the Church needs to be kept to this,
especially in Great Britain. There is danger now
of a reaction which may be more disastrous, if
possible, than the evils which were lately deplored.
The Indian Government has been brought to an
end, and the great e110r of its administration has
been pointed out and seems, however theie may
be conﬂicting opinions on other points, to be
accepted as a fact that its inﬂuence was not used
to aid the progress of Christianity, and that hence-
forward the moral and religious well being of the
people must be cared for as it never has been in
the past.

The danger now is that too much will be e3:-

132 MORAL POWER or THE SEA.

pected and demanded of the government which
has assumed the management of the affairs of
India; that since Christianity was ignored and
opposed in the past, that now in the future it shall
be built up and extended by the arm of govern-
ment. This cannot be, and must not be. No
impression could be more disastrous upon the
native mind than that the powers Which rule
them are not less religious than civil; that the
authority of the land designs to force its Christian
belief upon them. It would be the death-blow
of religious progress. There is an instinct in
every man’s breast that tells him that the affairs
of his soul are his own, and lie quite outside the
jurisdiction of any power less than God, and
which revolts at the beginning of an invasion of
this sacred domain. So it would be in India.
Every thinking man, and India is full of such,
would array himself with double determination
against a religion backed by such power.

There is, by whatever means it may have been
caused, a deep and deadly animosity to the gov-
ernment which prevails over them. It will require
years of care and benignant exercise of authority
to wear out this hostility. That it will be done
we do not doubt, but in the meanwhile this ele-
ment of hatred must not be attached to it. The
government must appear to the people strong,
indeed, but benevolent and impartial in its strength,
the friend and protector of every man in his best
rights and interests. Christianity must ask no aid

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 133

from its power, nor even seem to rest. upon it for
support.

On the other hand, just as clearly must it appear
that the government is a Christian government,
founded by a Christian state, and administered on
Christian principles. It is not, and it must not
seem to be a government of no religion, a godless
government. Here has been the mistake. The East
India Company seem never to have understood that
there is a golden mean between a religious govern-
ment and a government which propagates religion;
that it was possible to exhibit a state controlled by
' Christian ideas, and yet a state which does not use
its power to force them upon the people. Had it
entered into these thoughts, the terrible events of
1857 would never have occurred. The lesson,
however, has been learned at an awful cost, but
it will probably not need repetition, and is of un-
told value. Henceforward God will be honored
as He has not been honored in the past.

The past, indeed, of India, has been an insult
to the majesty of God; a nation who owned Him
as their God, and had been built up under His
fostering care for a thousand years, held for a
century a hundred millions of men under their
power, and yet deliberately and systematically
ignored the existence of God, gave more honor
and pay to ten thousand idol temples a thousand
fold than to one of His,* and by word and act told

 

* See statement of Rev. Baptist Noel, page 65.
11 *

134 MORAL POWER or THE sunk ,

the millions that Jehovah was nothing to it. The
crime was heaven—daring, and it is not wonderful
that, jealous of His honor and loving the souls of
these myriads, He should have sent His stroke
upon it. We may believe that the wicked mistake
has been seen, and will be corrected, and that in
the future the English government of India will
exhibit in all. its legislation and acts, the fact that
it emanates from a people whose state rests on the
Bible, and to whom the God of the Bible is the
supreme object of reverence and service. This is
what the common sense of heathen men them-
selves must see to be consistent, and it will com-
mend itself to their acquiescence. And when they
see that still it does not attempt to force men to
the belief of the Christian religion or to the prac-
tice of its Observances, but leaves them free to
follow the demand of their own consciences, and
protects them in every right, it will have a hold
upon their regard such as was forever impossible
under its former policy. This much the Church
may and must claim; if she be wise, she will ask
no more.

As intimated above, the extinction of the civil
and political functions of the East India Company,
and its reduction to a merely trading corporation,
leaves commerce to pursue its legitimate work and
exercise its naked inﬂuence; and thus whatever
of Christian inﬂuence it may have in the future
will be exerted along its track, as it never could

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 135

have been put forth when it was closely united
and a part of the machinery of government.

That such a Christian inﬂuence will be exerted
we cannot doubt. These occurrences have placed
Christianity in a position of acknowledged inﬂu-
ence such as it never had before. Men see what
is due to its fostering care, and how impossible it
is to do without its aid. As the true principles of
commerce are more and more fully understood,
\ the. more clearly evident will the intelligence and
the uprightness of Christian principles seem neces-
sary for its progress. '

We have dwelt thus at length on the history of
the East India Company, because it gives the most
extensive and best possible illustration of the prin-
ciples which we think involved in the relations of
commerce to the spread of religion in the world.

When traders scouted religion and slandered
its ministers in the South Sea islands, and with
lies, and deceit, and cruelty, and lieentiousness
cursed the people to whom they came, they insanely
thought that they were pursuing their own inter-
ests; but when ship after ship was taken and
burnt, and crew after crew was cut off and eaten

by the treacherous and revengeful savages, the
fatal error was understood, and henceforth they
knew how to welcome and appreciate the benign
and civilizing inﬂuences which ﬂowed in with the
extension of Christian missions. And this is but
a type of what is becoming more clearly evident
every day; the lands where Bible religion has its

136 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

best sway are the lands for commerce to pursue her
vocation, and as it gains inﬂuence and extends its
power over the people, they give a wider and a
better ﬁeld for her work. Christianity, in convert-
ing the inhabitants of the Sandwich and the South
Sea islands, gave an ocean world to commerce.

The former relation of commerce to Christian-
ity, in the advancing providence of God, has well
nigh been reversed in these latter times. Once,
and till of late, it was commerce which gave new
lands to the Church, now it is the Church which is
‘ opening and giving new ﬁelds to commerce. For years
past, the most efﬁcient and successful discoverers
and explorers have been missionaries of religion.
The best contributions that have been made to the
geography of the world, for the last quarter of a
century, have been made by them. We need
scarcely mention as an example the name of Liv-
ingstone, whose tireless energy, kindled by love
to Christ and to souls, carried him, the ﬁrst civil-
ized man, across the continent of Africa and ranked
him the ﬁrst of African explorers.

The labors of this noble man give a most striking
and beautiful example and illustration of the way
in which the great powers we are considering are
related to each other. He stands before the world
as a missionary of the Christian religion, and his
great design is to reach with it, in the most efﬁ~
cient and speedy way, the benighted inhabitants
of those regions, and bring them under its inﬂu~
ence. He has, as we think no other missionary

MORAL POWER OF THE. SEA. 137

had before him, seized upon the idea that com-
merce is‘ the most efﬁcient means within his reach
to aid in this design. He does not mistake or fall
into the vulgar error that commerce with its attend-
ant elevating and civilizing inﬂuences will do the
work he has in view; that it will enlighten and
prepare the way for the gospel; he does not put
it in the place of the gOSpel, nor rest upon it at
all as the power which will regenerate the people.
He has gone before, and he goes now, preaching
the gospel, and looks to it as that which alone can
give life to men; but at the same time he has
steadily in view, in every journey, the entrance
and the progress of a legitimate commerce. This
he believes will, above everything else, aid the
great design he has at heart. \

He ﬁnds a commerce there, if commerce it can
be called, in its lowest and basest forms, the source
of misery and crime; he seeks to supplant it by a
nobler and a better,—to exchange the sale of hu-
man beings, of rum and trinkets, for that of the
necessaries and comforts of life, to stimulate the
mind and energize the character by bringing them
into contact with Christian men; to lift them up
by the combined power of the gospel and a Chris-
tian commerce.

Livingstone is, at the present writing, prosecut~
ing his explorations under a government commis-
sion, and by its assistance. We know of no other
instance which so perfectly illustrates the true re-
lation and the legitimate working of these great

138 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

forces, government, commerce, and Christianity,
each pursuing its own work in its own Way, nei-
ther stepping out of its true province, and yet all
working hand-in-hand with perfect harmony. It
is only another of the many instances in which it
demonstrated that they may labor together, and
each promote the other and the common interest;
and it adds another proof to the fact so manifestly
taught of late, that the true and lasting success of
commercial enterprise is connected with the pro-
gress of the gospel in the world.

This will appear more and more fully every
year, and commerce will be led by motives of self1
interest to gain the assistance of Christianity, and
be anxious to lend whatever aid it has to give to
help forward its work. In this way it is that com-
merce, considered as one great system, is brought
into an intimate and dependent relation and is
made tributary to Christianity. It may not be,
and is not fully seen, it is not acknowledged, but
every year makes it mere evident, and by-and-by
it will be practically acknowledged everywhere.
Even now commerce has ceased to assume those
pairs of superiority and patronage to Christianity
which were so usual a quarter of a century ago.
Individuals may hate the purity and restraint of
the gospel, and may endeavor to hinder as they do
slander its working; but the system of commerce
acknowledges practically each year mere fully its
obligations.

To see the progress of the times in this matter,

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 1239
and the advances which the Church has made, we
have only to think of the repetition of the scenes
which marked the ﬁrst contact of Christian mis-
sions in foreign lands with commercial enterprises
and institutions. The lofty tone would seem now
simple insolence, and the outrages be only impos—
sible. The Church has passed out from the low po-
sition which she once occupied, and the movements
of the age have lifted her to a place of inﬂuence-
so marked that the relation has changed between
them, and the dependence is reversed. The time
_ has gone by when the servants of Christ can be
ordered to depart in the ship that brought them,
or be driven from place to place till the grave
welcomes them to its home, or when they abide
at the will or caprice of commercial authorities.
Such a review is encouraging to the Christian, and
while clearly the work has been but begun, and
the power of commerce cannot be said to be given
’to the Church at all as yet, still it affords promise
of good in the future; the advance is so manifest
and so great in so short a time, that we may readily
believe that by and by it will be a power freely
imparted and largely used.

Nor does a consideration of the work of God
of late in the Church point to less hopeful results.
Christianity will take possession of commerce just
as it does of any other power of the world; not
by allying itself to it or mixing itself up as an
equal with it, but by impregnating it with its prin-
ciples and imparting to 'it the power of its life.

140 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

It will take hold on the fountains of commerce
and cleanse them. In this aspect the recent work
of God in this country has, we think, a deep sig- _
niﬁcance. It seems to have had a marked relation
to commerce, as though God intended to br rmg the
inﬂuences of His Holy Spirit to bear upon this
w011d-wide power.

The G1 eat Awakening, as it has been appropri-
ately called, of 1858, had its issue out of the com-
mercial reverses and disasters of the previous year.
These were of a marked and peculiar character,
and the commercial history of the time is perhaps
without a parallel. In the midst of business buoy-
ancy and prosperity, without a single sign betoken-
ing a change, a small cloud rose in the horizon,
and in an instant it overspread the whole heavens.
The failure of a single banking establishment
created a panic which went with electric speed
over the land, and soon as ocean steamers could
communicate it, over the whole world. There was
not a spot 011 earth which had any connection with

commerce which did not feel the shock. Every-
thing at once went down before it. The business
world, a moment since full of life and activity,
was now prostrate. A blow so mighty and of such
wide-spread power had never been felt before.
But whence came it? With the ﬁrst awakening
consciousness men began to inquire the origin of
all this desolation. But this was as mysterious as
the blow had been destructive. Like lightning
from an unclouded sky the thunderbolt had fallen

MORAL POWER OF THE SEA. 141

before a sound was heard, and whence it came no
man could tell. To this day there is as wide a
diversity of opinion as at the ﬁrst. No sufﬁcient
cause has yet been assigned. In other commercial
disasters the causes might be pointed out: insane
speculations, followed by great ﬁres sinking mil-
lions of dollars out of the world in a night, might
be given in answer, but these would not do now;
here was the strange anomaly,—— the commercial
world trembling in alarm and .in ruin with its
coffers full of gold.

The only reason which can be furnished, we
believe, is that which the devout Christian who
recognizes the hand of God in the affairs of men,
is in the habit of giving—it came from God, and
for a special purpose. The events of the subse-
quent months give the interpretation. It is as if
the great God would place His hand so signally
upon the business world that all men should be
compelled to recognize His being and His power.
The means accomplished the end. Never has there
been an acknowledgment of God so spontaneous
and so universal. Before, men might have be-
lieved that God ruled over the lives of men, and
was the great Arbiter of health and disease,-—that
He governed the nations and appointed their rise
and fall; now, they saw that He was as supreme
in the world of commerce, that a touch of His
hand could turn, without a visible cause and in a

moment, smiling prosperity into blackest ruin.
12 I

1-12 MORAL-POWER OF rnn SEA.

GOD IN COMMERCE, is the interpretation of the
history of those years.

The revival which succeeded was as signiﬁcant
and to the same point. It was peculiar in its dis-
tinction from all previous revivals in the ﬁeld over
which it swept, and the ‘classes which it affected.
Other revivals have prevailed for the most part in
inland towns and rural districts, and have reached
largely the inhabitants peculiar to them. This
began in commercial centres, and, if one place
can be selected as a starting point, where the
work was so instantaneous and universal, in the
largest seaport on the continent; and its "most
wonderful triumphs have been in great commer-
cial cities. It was a revival of religion among
business men, and in this it differs from all that
preceded it. It brought out a spirit of prayer and
effort among this class of persons, among whom
as a class it has never before been exhibited. The
business men’s prayer-meetings, held in the busiest
parts of the cities, and at a midday hour, from
which radiate perpetual streams of personal labor,
are a type of the work. It went into the count-
ing-room, and sent its inﬂuence through all the
channels of commercial life. No one will indeed .
pretend to say that it has had much more than a
barely appreciable inﬂuence upon the habits and
rules of the business world. 'The transactions of
trade are doubtless but. little governed by Christian
principles, and there is much yet to be learned,
and still more to be practiced by Christian men;

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 143

yet this work of grace has had a mighty power
which will be silently, and therefore, perhaps, se-
cretly, moulding them. “Te may hopefully take
this revival of religion as the beginning of an
inﬂuence which is destined to pervade the com-
mercial world. We may believe that thus God
will purify the sources of commerce and so bring
it as a power completely and directly in subser-
viency to his cause. _

Such will one day be the case. The world
belongs to the Church, and God will give it to
her. Commerce is a vast power in the earth, and
He will give it to her to hold and use for Him.
It has hitherto been a power which stood above
and aloof from the Church, when it has not been
arrayed in active hostility against her; but the
providence of God and the advances of time have
gradually forced its dependence upon Christianity
to its notice, and the spirit of God has by His touch
made it to feel the power of God. There is then _.
much that is hopeful. We may justly look for-
ward to the time when it shall lay all its resources
at the feet of Christ. The great problemi‘s: How
shall commerce be taken possession of by the
Church of God, how be made best to help for-
ward the evangelization of the world? It is a
problem not solved yet. Possibly it has in it a
reconstruction of the whole theory of modern
Christian missions.

When we see what God hath wrought, and
how vast are the advances which the Church has

144 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

already made toward the great possession of the
power of the sea; when we see the changes which
a few years have made, and the indications of
providence in the spiritual world, surely there is
enough to awaken prayer that the time may
speedily come when the abundance of the sea
shall be given to Christ. But while she prays
there is a necessity laid upon her to stir up her
own life to a higher and a holier activity. If we
have been in any measure successful in this little
book, we have shown that in this thing alone lies
any hope for the world from the power of the sea.
If it\ is pervaded by the moral power of the
Church it shall be well; if it be not, then it is a
thing to be dreaded and deplored, and the
thoughtful Christian will only tremble and be
ﬁlled with anxiety at every new advance which is
made in bringing the earthy together.

But God has shown by the history of the past
what he can do, and in it has given promise of
what he is willing to do. He has shown of late
by the wonderful movements of his Holy Spirit
what he is ready to do. It is for the Church now
to be, awake and earnest, to be by his grace
abreast of his providence. Let it be her aim to
have life enough to impart to the world, vitality
enough to send through the opening channels of
communication. Let her not be too- anxious to
have them opened.

There is such a thing as forcing providence, or

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 145

rather wilfully aiming at a ﬁxed result and reso-
lutely accomplishing it, and then calling it the
providence of God. Individuals do it every day. ‘
Men without faith* in God are evermore doing it.
Yet it can never be done without disaster. The
man urges events, and surrounds himself with
circumstances for which he is unprepared, and
responsibilities which he is unable to meet. Yet
he‘cannot control the events in their inexorable
progress; they have in themselves a power which
makes new combinations and shapes new events
v and destinies; they tramp onward, brush past, or
trample him under their feet while they rush for-
ward to results which he dreads. So, too, may
there be this running before the providence of
God and this pushing events out of their place in
the movements of nations. It may readily be a
matter of doubt whether in those great events of
the year 1858, the opening of China and Japan
to the commerce of the world, this very thing has
not been done. The commercial world has been
rejoicing, and the religious'world has been join-
ing in the gladness that the walls of centuries had
fallen down; they have overlooked the possible
injustice of the transactions which have brought
the result, have scarcely questioned whether or

 

* The “out of place” (drému) men doing things, out of place
because without faith in the often slow movements of God.
2 Thes. iii. 2. , ’

12*

116 MORAL rownn OF THE SEA

not any nation has not‘a right inherent in itself
to exclude those Whom it knows or supposes will
bring only evil and not good to the people; they
have forgotten the right and'the justice, and re?
joiced only in the success of a darling scheme;
the question recurs to a thoughtful man, has
there been no wrong committed? or if no wrong,
have we waited for the logic of events? have we
waited for the movements of Divine providence :'
Are we not before the time?

A few years will tell in tones not to be mis-
taken or misunderstood. Possibly the Church
may take up a lamentation over what she sings
to-day. Whether or not she shall depends on
what she herself is willing to do. One thing she
may know without a shadow of a doubt :~—If she
does not enter the open ﬁeld at once; if she goes
not hand in hand with commerce, these years
shall be years memorable only for sorrow in
China and Japan. The history of centuries, of
every century, of every nation, tells one story,——-—.
Commerce in itself brings no good to the nations, it but
multiplies and intensiﬁes the evils which exist.

There is to us something inexpressibly solemn
in these openings of the world by commerce. We
know the teachings of the past, and we know that
to be opened is not to be blessed. We pray, the
Church prays, that the walls of seclusion may be
taken down, and that the nations may be brought
together; she prays, and the answers are given,

MORAL POWER or THE SEA. 147

and we ask tremblingly, are they not answers
which the awe-struck psalmist in his praise to
God as the hearer of prayer recognized, “By ter—i
rible things in righteousness wilt thou answer us,
0 God of our salvation; who art the conﬁdence
of all the ends of the earth, and of them that are
far off upon the sea.”* The Church has prayed,
butis she ready to go in and possess the land?
May it not be, what if it should be, that she has
been asking like the Israelites, the great Lord to
open the way into the promised possession, and
‘ God has in answer to her prayers brought her to
the borders of the land, and now she stands idly
there halting and ’refusing to enter in, and will
stand halting and refusing till she is told to turn
back to the wilderness again, and wait till an-
other generation better and more faithful than
she shall arise? One thing is certain, the doors
for weal or woe have been forced open, commerce
with keen eye, and grasping hand, and cold and
«selﬁsh heart is stepping in; Vice and crime and
disease will follow after, then woe, thrice woe if
the Church linger behind. If her life be so low,
if she be so sunk in earthliness and forgetfulness
of God that her power is gone, she had better never ‘
have prayed. She has come before her Lord like
the two disciples who prayed and knew not what
they asked. If she listen well she shall hear the

* Ps. lxv. 5.

O

l

148 MORAL POWER OF THE SEA.

voice of the Master saying, “ Can ye drink of the
cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the bap-
tism that I am baptized With ‘3” the baptism of
self-denial and of suffering?‘ Happy, happy the
Church if she be able to answer back, “We are
able.” She will learn What the gift is as the
time advances; the self-denial and the suffering
will come, but the conquest and the possession
shall be hers, and she shall sit on the thrones of
the earth.

1X I’]?IEII§ I) I Ii.

PHILADELPHIA BIBLE ROOMS, }
OFFICE or THE PENNSYLVANIA SEAMEN’S FRIEND SOCIETY.

To the Christian Public, and the Friends of Seamen :

IN presenting the operations of the Pennsylvania Seamen’s
Friend Society, the attention Of the reader is directed to an
important and extensive work in which this Society is now
engaged, not because of the diﬁ'erent character of its Chris-
tian benevolence, but from its strong claims and vast extent.

In the course of events, the providence'of God has cast upon
this Society (during the prosecution of this unhappy civil war)
the work of furnishing our seamen with religious reading.
Our attention has been called to the necessity of supplying
Government vessels with good books, as the only means of
grace which many of their crews could enjoy. After enter-
ing upon this duty, the number of vessels in the Government
employ increased so rapidly, as to place a vast number of sea-
men Of different grades, with much idle time upon their hands,
employed as they are often for months in blockading the same
port.

By a liberal benevolence we have been enabled to supply
eighty-seven vessels with suitable religious libraries, placed in
neat book-cases; and have thus far supplied every Govern-
ment war vessel and transport which has left this port since
July, 1861.

Thus led, step by step, we inquired after the merchant ves-
(149)

150 APPENDIX.

sels, and ascertained that, since the death of the lamented sea-
man’s friend, Rev. Mr. Ripley, no particular attention had
been given to these vessels, except by the distribution of a few
tracts and Bibles. And we have now also undertaken the
work of supplying every merchant vessel leaving this port
with a collection of selected religious books. The object com-
mends itself. The good already done, and to be done, is in-
calculable. The operation is simple and economical. N 0 ex-
pense attends this work after the ﬁrst cost of the books and
case, except in placing them on board of the vessel, and ex-
changing them for other books, when read through by the
crew.

The Pennsylvania Seamen’s Friend Society has now, for
more than nineteen years, been actively engaged in promoting
the temporal and spiritual interests of the sons of the ocean.

In the year 1846 the Society was enabled, through the lib-
erality of the friends of the cause, to purchase an eligible
property in South Front Street, to be ﬁtted up as a Sailor’s
Home. The original cost of the Home was $10,000. An ad-
ditional sum of $3,657'44 had been expended in necessary re-
pairs and alterations, making a total sum of $13,657'44, which
have been paid by the subscriptions raised for that purpose.
The house is substantial and commodious, and the improve-
ments which have been made render it a desirable retreat for
those who toil upon the deep. It will accommodate about one
hundred. The rooms are comfortably furnished, and a good
library is provided for the use of boarders. It is conducted
entirely on Christian principles, a family altar being erected
there, and a public religious service held weekly. Since its
establishment more than 14,000 mariners have shared its
privileges. The inﬂuences exerted there have led many to
sobriety, and an experimental acquaintance with the truth as
it is in Jesus. Eternity alone will fully reveal the moral and
religious results.

The smiles of a gracious Divine Providence upon past eﬁ‘orts
encourage hope for future success; and when we present the
objects of our exertions—men togwhom we owe so much for

APPENDIX. 151

our wealth, our luxuries, our country’s defence, and the spread
of the gospel of peace throughout the world—every friend of
humanity, of his country, and his God will cry out, ,“ Go on
with your noble work, for we bring you ample means.”
Very sincerely, S. BONHOMME,
Acting Corresponding Secretary.

The Sailor’s Home, No. 422 South Front Street, is still suc-
cessfully sustained by this Society, oﬁ'ering a good and safe
boarding-house for the sailor on shore.

Oﬂice at the Bible Rooms, NNV. corner of Seventh and Wal-
nut Streets, Philadelphia, Where donations may be sent.

OFFICERS.

President.

ARTHUR e.‘ COFFIN.

Rev. Albert Barnes,
5‘

Wm. Bacon Stevens, D. D.,

“ John Chambers,

“ H. A. Boardman, D. D.,

“ J. H. Jones, D. D.,

“ T. W. J. Wylie, D. D.,
“ E. ‘V. Hutter,

“ J. W'heaton Smith,

“ J. H. A. BombergeI, D. D.,

“ Goldsmith D. (1.1r10“
“ J B. Dales, D D.,
“ James Challen,

“ Richard Newton, D. D.,

“ N. W. Conkling'.
“ J. W. Talmage.
“ F. R. Harbaugh,

Treasurer.
JOHN H. ATWOOD.

Vice-Presidents. .

Rev. A. Longacre,

“ James M. Crowell,

“ Jos. Castle, D. D.,

“ W. P. Breed,

“ T. Brainard, D. D.,

“ S. E. Pearre,

“ J. F. Berg, D. D.,

“ A. A. Reinke,

“ R. C. Matlack,

“ E. E. Adams,
Capt. T. Turner, U. S. N.,
Joseph Cabot, Esq.,

S. Morris Waln, Esq..
William “'elsh, Esq.,
Thomas C. Hand, Esq.

Recording Secretary.
JOHN M. HARPER.

Acting Corresponding Secretary.

Thoma Wettson,

Samuel H. Perkins,
Charles Wnrts,

D. W. C. Moore,

Charles Kingsbury, M. D.,
G. W. Fohnestock,

David W. Denison,

Capt. E. Turley,

“ T. Rogers,
Albert F. Damon,
Isaac Sulger,

C. C. Lathrop,

Directors.

REV. S. BONHOMME.

Alexander “ hilldin,
Edward L. Clark,

R. G. Stotesbury,

.George H. Bur-gin, Jr., M. D.
Norris T. Cummings,
Henry D. Sheu',erd
Benjaﬁnin Orne,

Henry N. Paul,

Washington L. Atlee, M. D.
Georg e 0. Ta ylor,

Thomas F. Blackburne,
Benjamin A. Farnum.

Executive Committee.

Samuel H. Perkins,
Charles Wurtz,

Capt. T. Rogers,
“ E. Turley,
C. C. Lathrop,

l

 

G. W. Fahnestock,
Henry D. Sherrerd.

House Committee.

D. W. Denison,
Alexander Whilldin,
G. W. Fahnestock.

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