WHAT ARE THE SEAS ABOUT?
The deeper one goes into the subject of world democracy the more one is convinced of the necessity of calling to one's aid the help of true religion in formulating a world consciousness.
Walt Whitman, whom many may regard as somewhat unwise in some of his utterances, was absolutely right when he intimated that world democracy could not be formulated without religion.
And today there is nothing that is going to help people so effectively to grasp and feel at home with the ideal of an essential union of the nations, as the modern teaching of the immanence of God. If we are a part of the whole world, and if God is in the seas as well as the flowers and hills then we will not dread them, for they are our inspiration and helpers.
Not only does the teaching of the immanence of God in the seas help the nations into closer fellowship. But what is more than that, it helps the soul of man to find in the waters a purpose. The seas themselves seem to be up to something.
No man felt this secret of nature with keener appreciation than the late Prof. J. J. Blaisdell of Beloit College, Wis. For in one of his lectures, the notes of which, I still have, he says:
"Nature is expressive of a purpose. And no one has gotten the good of nature until he has got the momentum of the mighty work that it is working. Its face is steadily set forward. It is not static. It is not a current running down. It is an achievement. When you stop and think of it you are led to reflect that its onward movement is so stupendous toward the working out of a far off divine event that if you should throw yourself across its track you would be annihilated in a moment.
"I have stood on the shore of Lake Michigan on a stormy day in December and the rhythm of that lake seemed to be the echo of the march of the universe treading its victorious way into the future. It is about something—its face is steadfastly set to go to Jerusalem. The firmness of great souls is but its child and copy; and responded to, it is the breeder of great souls.
"Now until we become alive to the expressiveness of purpose in nature, a purpose expressed in feeling and ready to lackey man in his pilgrimage, we fail to understand nature and lose much of the blessedness of living in this world.
"And my simple question is, how comes about this expressiveness? Why, simply there is a person who is projecting himself through this embodiment and it is the revelation of him, just as our friends' ways express the person of the friend behind them."
How grand are those words! And how helpful to men who desire the very co-operation of the seas in fulfilling their plans in unifying the races! For if Prof. Blaisdell was thus inspired with the thought of the co-operation of the waters of Lake Michigan with the historic purposes of man, what should the true freeman feel as he looks out over the Pacific? I can only tell you what I have felt in the words on the following page:
THE ALTRUISM OF THE SEA
Free from the intrusion of littleness,
Standing on the shores of our great Western Sea,
My groping thoughts, O sea,
Now grapple with thy tempestuous waves.
My ecstatic soul argues with thy gales for an interpretation of the message flowing clean and strong from the "million-acred meadows" of the out-lying seas.
My straining ear listens to the clamorous, reiterating almost uninvokable voice of thy tides.
For able to speak to man, like brooks and flowers,
I am inquiring, what you are about, the knowledge of your place in the amelioration of the world?
* * * * *
And lo, now nature's cord is struck,
The secret word is caught,
And this is what I hear
As again I plead, "thou are not a purposeless, lifeless plangent deep.
O great sea, who's purpose doest thou fulfill?
What are thou almightily about, what doing?"
* * * * *
"Doing!" seems to murmur its sustained voice with its rhythmic storming of my soul,
"Doing! I am doing what man is doing, what the nations are evolving, what the eternal, creative spirit living within me is urging,
I am resolutely moving—crest, wave, tide and ponderous deep in sympathy with world harmony, toward democracy.
Moving from ponderous deep, tide, wave and crest toward distant lands.
Eager—so providenced—to carry to all pagan shores,
The ships, the statesmen and the life giving trade winds of democracy."
* * * * *
* * * * *
And then looking outward and skyward, the God of our sea going fathers, the spirit of the very God of Hosts, awoke this stronger message to my thought:
"Fear not, O sons of Pilgrims
For the waters engulfed not Columbus' freemen when they sailed a shoreless sea,
Nor was the Mayflower immeshed in the black jaws of an angry deep.
And yours are ships of fate!
He who omnipotently palms the oceans pilots them.
To let them pass—O ships—to bear them safely on,
The tides, the storms and the winds are stayed.
* * * * *
"Move on, move on befriended by an illimitable peace.
Move on, move on to every slave desecrated shore!
Move on, the harmless, but forward momentum of these tides will take you on and on.
For the Creator worketh hitherto and they must work.
For He hath given "to the sea His decree."
Move on to Hindu, Confucian and Teutonic shores.
O ships of freemen, sail on!"
"Winnow me through with thy keen, clean breath
Wind with tang of the sea."
—Ketchum.
