To another little boy, the
first sight of the sea brought this thought, "How great God, who made it,
must be!"
It is delightful to live, as I did when a child, within sight and sound
of the sea; but I suppose it is only those who really live upon the world
of waters, sailing away in a swift ship, day after day, for thousands
of watery miles, and seeing nothing but the two oceans, "the blue above
and the blue below," as that same sailor-song says, who can really know
anything of its vastness. How strange it must seem, to be neither a fish
nor a bird, and yet to live as it were between sea and sky; each morning
finding yourself farther away from land, each night lying down to be
"rocked in the cradle of the deep," and to hear the wash of the waves
as the boat cuts her way through them, and the sighing of the wind, not
through the trees on the lawn, but among the sails and ropes of your
floating home!
I have sometimes thought that the sight of "water, water everywhere,"
during a voyage of three months, must make one more ready to believe what
we are told by those who have done what they can in the way of weighing
and measuring--that upon our globe "water is the rule, and dry land the
exception"; and also that, although we read in geography books about the
five great oceans, yet the ocean is really one, for it "embraces the whole
earth with an uninterrupted wave." As we think of this wonderful wave which
thus girdles the earth about, constantly breaking against the shore, yet
always flowing back again, at its appointed time, into its own place, we
may well remember that THIRD DAY of Creation, when "God spake, and it
was done; He commanded, and it stood fast"; when "He gave to the sea His
decree, that the waters should not pass His commandment.
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