ontinually moving and blowing, therefore
continually fresh, and continually carrying in it rich food for plants
from one country to another. There are other reasons why the winds blow,
which I have not time to mention now; but they all go to prove the same
thing.--How wisely and well the Psalmist said, "Praise the Lord upon
earth ye rivers and all deeps. Fire and hail, snow and vapour, wind and
storm, fulfilling His word" (Ps. cxlviii.).

Another use of the sea, again, is the vast quantity of food which it
gives. Labouring men who live inland have no notion of the wonderful
fruitfulness of those seemingly barren wastes of water, or how many
millions of human beings live mostly on fish. When we consider those
great banks of Newfoundland, where fish enough perhaps to feed all
England are caught every season, and sent over the whole world; our own
herring fisheries, where thousands of millions of fish are caught
yearly--and all the treasures of food and the creeping things
innumerable, both small and great beasts, of which the Psalmist speaks;
when we consider all this, we shall begin to bless God for the sea, as
much as for the land.

"There go the ships," too, says the Psalmist, in this 104th Psalm, "and
there goeth that leviathan, whom Thou hast made to take his pastime
therein." This leviathan is no doubt the whale--the largest of all
living things--often a hundred feet long, and as thick as a house. And
yet even of him, the monster of all monsters, does God's Word stand true,
that He has put all things under man's feet, that all things are in
subjection to man--the fish of the sea, and whatsoever walketh through
the paths of the sea. For even the great whale cannot stand before the
cunning of man--God has taught man the means of killing even it, and
turning it to his own use. The whalebone which we use, the oil which we
burn in lamps, comes from the bodies of those enormous creatures which
wander in the far seas like floating houses, ten thousand miles away.

But again, it is promised in the Bible, that in the new heavens and new
earth there shall be no more sea. When the sea has done its work, God
will have done with it--and then there will be no more division between
nation and nation--no more long dangerous voyages from one country to
another.

And strange to say--the sea is even now at work bringing about this very
thing--destroying itself--filling itself up. Day by day the sea eats
away its own shor