Do you know that I never travel the sea that I am not pervaded by an
antagonistic and contradictory frame of mind that sets itself against
all the popular and religious ideas of it. The ocean impresses me with
neither the majesty nor the power of God. Indeed, it does not impress
me with God at all, but to the contrary, gives me a sort of undefined,
painful unbelief. To me, somehow, there is no other side of the ocean.
And looking out on its boundless space, covered with the blue vault
lighted by millions of worlds and floating over, to me, bottomless
waters, I feel so lost in space, such an infinitesimal atom, that the
doctrine of the sparrow that falls seems a chimera, and a God
inconceivable. I wonder if this is not so with others. I wonder if all
of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge in our own
hearts where alone we can hear the voice of God, and where, at any
hour or in any scene, we can find an instant answer to all our doubts.
There is but one spot on the ocean that leads me to a sort of a fanciful
realization of a future life. It is that red one made by the setting
sun, especially if we be off shore, and the birds are flying landward.
The roseate bridge thrown across the water, swinging with the waves,
the intense and silver bright-ness of the centre of the arc framed in
the evening clouds that roll around it, and the gleaming wings of the
birds, as they flash across the disc and disappear in the shining
centre on their way homeward, somehow bring to my mind the gates ajar
and the souls flying from earth to their final rest. There may be
beautiful pictures to come after this life; if there are, sunset at
sea is as near as our mortal minds can yet come to them.




OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN VI