Moby-Dick or, The Whale / Моби Дик, или Белый кит. Книга для чтения на английском языке

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog – in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner toward the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy: —

“The ribs and terrors in the whale

Arched over me a dismal gloom,

While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,

And lift me deepening down to doom.

I saw the opening maw of hell,

With endless pains and sorrows there;

Which none but they that feel can tell —

Oh, I was plunging to despair.

In black distress, I called my God,

When I could scarce believe him mine,

He bowed his ear to my complaints —

No more the whale did me confine.

With speed he flew to my relief,

As on a radiant dolphin borne;

Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone

The face of my Deliverer God.

My song for ever shall record

That terrible, that joyful hour;

I give the glory to my God,

His all the mercy and the power.

”

Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah – �And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.

’

Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters – four yarns – is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sea-line sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God.

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