till the great ship took the final plunge, in the knowledge that
the seas round about were covered with loving and yearning
witnesses whose own salvation was not assured.

When the roll is called hereafter of those who are "purged
of pride because they died, who know the worth of their days,"
let the names of the men who went down with the Titanic
be found written there in the sight of God and men.


THE OBVIOUS LESSON

And, whatever view of the accident be taken, whether the
moralist shall use it to point the text of a solemn or denunciatory
warning, or whether the materialist, swinging to the
other extreme, scouts any other theory than that of the
"fortuitous concurrence of atoms," there is scarcely a thinking
mortal who has heard of what happened who has not been
deeply stirred, in the sense of a personal bereavement, to a
profound humility and the conviction of his own insignificance
in the greater universal scheme.

Many there are whom the influences of religion do not move,
and upon whose hearts most generous sentiments knock in
vain, who still are overawed and bowed by the magnitude of
this catastrophe. No matter what they believe about it,
the effect is the same. The effect is to reduce a man from the
swaggering braggart--the vainglorious lord of what he sees--
the self-made master of fate, of nature, of time, of space, of
everything--to his true microscopic stature in the cosmos.