he shipmaster for your information.
Just as--if you be a reasonable man--you will go for your information
about this world to the builder and maker of the world--God himself.

And lastly; you would try to learn the judgments about the ship: and what
would they be? The results of good or bad seamanship; what happens to
ships, when they are well-managed or ill-managed.

It would be too hard to have to learn that by experience; for the price
which you would have to pay would be, probably, that you would be wrecked
and drowned. But if you saw other ships wrecked near you, you would form
judgments from their fate of what you ought to do. If you could find
accounts of shipwrecks, you would study them with the most intense
interest; lest you too should be wrecked, and so judgment overtake you
for your bad seamanship.

For God's judgment of any matter is not, as superstitious people fancy,
that God grows suddenly angry, and goes out of His way to punish those
who do wrong, as by a miracle. God judges all things in heaven and earth
without anger--ay, with boundless pity: but with no indulgence. The soul
that sinneth, it shall die. The ship that cannot swim, it must sink.
That is the law of the judgments of God. But He is merciful in this;
that He rewardeth every man according to his work. His judgment may be
favourable, as well as unfavourable. He may acquit, or He may condemn.
But whether He acquits or condemns, we can only know by the event; by the
result. If a ship sinks, for want of good sailing or other defect, that
is a judgment of God about the ship. He has condemned her. She is not
seaworthy. But if the ship arrives safe in port, that too is God's
judgment. He has tried her and acquitted her. She is seaworthy; and she
has her reward.

How simple this is. And yet men will not believe it, will not understand
it, and therefore they wreck so often each man his own ship--his own life
and immortal soul, and sink and perish, for lack of knowledge.

For each one of us is at sea, each in his own ship; and each must sail
her and steer her, as best he can, or sink and drown for ever.

For the sea which each of us is sailing over is this world, and the ship
in which each of us sails, is our own nature and character; what St Paul,
like a truly scientific man, calls our flesh; and what modern scientific
men, and rightly, call our organisation. And the land to which we are
sailing is eternal Life. Shall we make a