Now, beneath this triumph of the ocean--the triumph that leaves the land in fragments whilst the sea itself sustains no injury--there lies a deeper significance than at first appears. Job saw it. No elusive secret, lurking in the universe around him, escaped his restless eye. 'The waters wear the stones!' he cried, and it was a shout of victory that rose from his heart when he said it. 'The waters wear the stones,' he exclaimed, 'and Thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth.' It is the death-knell of the material. It is the triumph of the eternal. A little child looks upon the great granite cliffs, and it seems impossible that the lapping waves can ever pound them to pieces. But they do. And in the same way, Job says, man seems so impregnable, and the world so mighty, that it appears a thing incredible that God can finally prevail. But He shall. The quiet waters conquer the frowning cliffs at length. The walls of Jericho fall down. This is the victory that overcometh the world.
And so here on this battle-field where the land and the sea fought for mastery, I find Job sitting, and he interprets for me the paean that the waves are singing. It is the laughter of their triumph. 'The waters wear away the stones.' That was the heartening message that gave to Spain one of her very greatest teachers. St. Isidore of Seville was only a boy at the time. He found his lessons hard to learn. Study was a drudgery, and he was tempted to give up. The huge obstacles against which he, like the waves at the base of the cliff, was beating out his life seemed adamantine. So he ran away from school. But in the heat of the day he sat down to rest beside a little spring that trickled over a rock. He noticed that the water fell in drops, and only one drop at a time; yet those drops had worn away a large stone. It reminded him of the tasks he had forsaken, and he returned to his desk. Diligent application overcame his dullness, and made him one of the first scholars of his time. He never forgot the drops of water, dripping, dripping, dripping on the rock that they were conquering. 'Those drops of water,' says his biographer, 'gave to Spain a brilliant historian, and to the Church a famous doctor.'