Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1893 — MERMAID'S DOMAIN. [ARTICLE]

MERMAID'S DOMAIN.

The Mighty Deep and Its Klorxl Wonders. rJWH’f'TWphmUion* in the Rihmrxlw Gardao* and ills Impraaaiona—pr, Talmtga'a Serinna; in his sermon Sunday fomoon in the Brooklyn tabernacle, as in many other discourses, Rev. T. De Witt Talmage took his hearers and readers through an untried region of thought and found a subject for most practical gospelization in “The Gardens of the Sea. ” The text selected was Jonah ii, 5, “The weeds were wrapped about my head,” “The Botany of the Bible, or, God Among the Flowers,” is a fascinating subject. I hold in my hand a book which I brought from Palestine, bound in olive wood, and within it are pressed flowers, which have not only retained their color, but their aroma. Flowers from Bethlehem, flowers from Mount of Olives, flowers from Bethany, flowers from Siloam, flowers from the valley of Jehoshaphat, red anemones and wild mignonette, buttercups, daisies, cyclamens. camomile, bluebells, ferns, mosses, grasses and a wealth of flora that keeps me fascinated by the hour, and every time I open it it is a new revelation. It is the New Testament of the fields. But my text leads us into another realm of the botanical kingdom. Although I purposely take, this morning, for consideration the least observed and least appreciated of all the botanical products of the world, we shall find the contemplation very absorbing. In all our theological seminaries where we make ministers there ought to be professors to give lessons in natural history. Physical scidhce ought to be taught side by side with revelation. It is the same God who inspires the page of the natural world as the page of the scriptural world.

That was an awful plunge thqt the recreant prophet Johah made when, dropped over the gunwales of the Mediterranean ship, he sank many fathoms down into a tempestuous sea. Both before and after the monster of the deep swallowed him he was entangled in the seaweed. The jungles of the deep threw their cordage of vegetation around him. Some of this seaweed was anchored in the bottom of the watery abysm, and some of it was afloat and swallowed by the great sea monster, so that while the prophet was at the bottom of the deep after he was horribly imprisoned he could exclaim and did exclaim in the words of my text: “The weeds were wrapped about my head.” Jonah was the first to record that there are growths upon the bottom of the sea as well as upon the land. The first picture I ever owned was a handful of seaweeds pressed on a page, and I called them “The Shorn Locks of Neptune.” These products of the deep, whether brown, or yellow, or green, or purple, or red. or intershot of many colors, are most fascinating. They are distributed all over the depths and from Arctic to Antarctic. That God thinks well of them I conclude from the fact that He has made 6,000 species of them. Sometimes these water plants are 400 or 700 feet long, and they cable the sea. One specimen has a growth of 1,500 feet.

On the northwest shore of our country is a seaweed with leaves 30 or 40 feet long, amid which the sea otter makes his home, resting himself on the buoyancy of the leaf and stem. The thickest jungles of the tropics are not more full of vegetation than the depths of the sea. There are forests there, and vast prairies all abloom, and God walks there as He walked in the garden of Eden “in the cool of the day.” Oh, what entrancement, this subaqueous world! Oh, the God given wonder of the seaweed! Its birthplace is a palace of cystal! The cradle that rocks it is the storm. Its grave is a a sarcophagus of beryl and sapphire. There is no night down there.

Hear it, mothers and fathers of sailor boys whose ship went down in our last August hurricane! There are no Greenwoods or Laurel Hills or Mt. Auburns so beautiful on the land as there are banked and terraced and scooped and hung in the depths of the sea. The bodies of our foundered and sunken friends are girdled and canopied and housed with such glories as attend no other Necropolis. When Sevastopol was besieged in the Anglo-French war, Prince Mentchikof, commanding the Russian navy, saw that the onlv way to keep the English out of the harbor was to sink all of the Russian ships of war in the roadstead, and so 100 vessels sank. When, after the war was over, our American engineer, Gowan, descended to the depths in a diving bell, it was an impressive spectacle. One hundred buried ships! But it is that way nearly all across the Atlantic ocean. Ships sunk not by command of admirals, but by the command of cyclones. But they all had sublime burial, and the surroundings amid which they sleep the last sleep are more imposing than the Taj Mahal, the mausolem with walls incrusted with precious stones and built by the great mogul of India over his empress. Your departed ones were buried in the gardens of the sea, fenced off by hedges ofcoralline. The prophet not only made a mistake bv trying to go to Tax-shish when God told him to g > to Nineveh, but he made a mistake when he

styled as weeds these growths that enwrapped him on the day he sank. A weed is something that is useless. It is something you throw out from the garden. It is something that chokes the wheat, it is something to be grubbed out from among the cotton. It is something unsightly to the eye. It is an invader of the vegLetable or flora! world. But this growth which sprang up from the depth of the Mediterranean or floaty cd on its surface was among the most beautiful things that God ever makes. It was a water plant known as the red colored alga, and no weed at all. It comes from the loom of infiuit& beauty. It is planted by heavenly love. It is the star of a sunken firmaament. It is a lamp which the Lord kindled. It is a cord by which to bind whole sheaves of practical suggestion. It is a poem all whose cantos are rung by divine goodness. Yet we all make the mistake that Jonah made in regard to it and call it a weed. “The weeds were wrapped about my head.” Ah! that is the trouble on the land as on the sea. We call those weeds that flowers. Yet Jonah did not more completely misrepresent the red alga about his head in the Mediterannean than most people misjudge the poor and forlorn and dying children of the street. They are not weeds. They are immortal flowers— down in the deep sea of woe, but flowers. When society and the church of God come to appreciate their eternal value, there will be more C. L. Braces and more Van Meters and more angels of mercy spending their fortunes and their lives in the rescue. Hear it, O ye philanthropists and Christians and merciful souls —not weeds, but flowqrs. I adjure you as the friends of all newsboys’ lodginghouses, of all industrial schools, of all homes for friendless girls and for the many reformatories and humane associations now on foot. How much they have already accomplished! Out of what wretchedness; into what good homes! Of 21,000 of these picked up out of the streets and sent into country homes, only twelve children turned out badly. In the last thirty years a number that no man can estimate of the vagrants have been lifted into respectability and usefulness and a Christian life. Many of them have homes of their own—though ragged boys once and street girls, now at the head of prosperous families, honored on earth and to be glorious in heaven. Some of them have been Governors of States. Some of them are ministers of the gospel. In all departments of life those who were thought to be weeds have turned out to be flowers. One of those rescued lads from the streets of our city wrote to another saying: “I have heard you are studying for the ministry. So am I.” As I examine this red alga which was about the recreant prophet down in the Mediterranean depths when in the words of my text he cried out, “The weeds were wrapped about my head,” and I am led thereby to furtherexamine this submarine world, 1 am compelled to exclaim, what a wonderful God we have! lam glad that by diving bell, and “Brooks’ deep sea sounding apparatus,” and ever improving machinery we are permitted to walk the floor of the ocean and report the wonders wrought by the great God. These so-called seaweeds are the pasture fields and the forage of the innumerable animals of the deep. Not one specie of them can be spared from the economy of nature. Valleys and mountains and plants miles underneath the waves are all covered with flora and fauna. Sunken Alps and Apennines and Himalayas of Atlantic and Pacific oceans. A continent that once connected Europe and America, so that in the ages past men came on foot across from where England is to where we now stand, all sunken, and now covered with the growths of the sea, as it once was covered with the growths of the land England and Ireland once all one piece of land, but now much of it so far sunken as to make a channel, and Ireland has become an island. The islands for the most part are only the foreheads of sunken continents. The sea conquering the land all along the coasts and crumbling the hemispheres, wider and wider become the subaqueous dominions. Thank God that skilled hydropraphers have made us maps and charts of the rivers and lakes and seas and shown us somethimg of the work of the eternal God in the water world. i There is a great comfort that rolls ; over upon us from this study of the i so-called seaweed, and that is the demonstrated doctrine of a particular Providence. When I find that the Lord provides -in the so-called seaweed the pasturage for the thronged marine world, so that not a fin or scale in all that oceanic aquarium suffers need, I conclude He will feed us, and if he suits the algae to the animal life of the deep He will provide the food for our physical and spiritual needs. And if He clothes tne flowers of the deep with richness of robe that looks bright as fallen rainbows by day and at night makes the underworld look as though the sea were on fire, surely He will clothe you, “O ye of little faith!” And what fills me with unspeakable delight is that this God of depths and heights, of ocean and of continent, may through Jesus Christ, the divinely appointed means, be yours and mine, to help, to cheer, to pardon, to save, to nnparadise. What matters who in earth or hell is against us if He is for us? Omnipotence to defend us, and omnipres-

ence to companion us and infinite love to enfold and uplift and enrapture us. My joy is that after we are quit of all earthly hindrances we may come back to this world and explore what we cannot now fully investigate. If we shall have power to soar into the atmospheric without fatigue I think we shall have power to dive into, the aqueous without peril, and that the pictured and tessellated sea floor will be as accessible as now is to the traveler the floor of the Alhambra, and all the gardens of the deep will then swing open to us their gates as now to the tourist Chatsworth opens on public days its cascades and statuary and conservatories for our entrance. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” You cannot make me believe that God hath spread out all that garniture of the deep merely for the polyps and Crustacea to look at. And if the unintelligent creatures of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic oceans He surrounds with such beautiful grasses of the deep, what a heaven we may expect for our -uplifted and ransomed "souls when we are unchained of the flesh and rise to realms beatific. Of the flora of that “sea of glass mingled with fire” I have no power to speak, but I shall always be glad that when the prophet of the text, flung over the gunwales of the Mediterranean ship, descended into the boiling sea, that which he supposed to be weeds wrapped about his head were not weeds, but flowers. And now I make the marine doxology of David my peroration, for it was written about forty or fifty miles from the place where the scene of the text was enacted. “The sea is His, and He made it, and His hands formed the dry land. Oh, come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God. and we are the people of His pasture.” Amen.