One evening in conversation with me, he compared the English and the Americans to Jacob’s vine, which, planted on one side of the wall, grew over it and hung its boughs and clusters on the other side,—“but it is still the same vine, nourished from the same root!”
On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the sermon was preceded by a long prayer in behalf of an afflicted family, one of whose members had died or been lost in a whaling expedition to the South Seas. In the midst of much that was exquisitely pathetic and poetical, refined ears were startled by such a sentence as this,—“Grant, O Lord! that this rod of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to the edification of their souls!”
Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the Divine Comforter might be near the bereaved father “when his aged heart went forth from his bosom to flutter round the far southern grave of his boy!” Praying for others of the same family who were on the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms, “O save them! O guard them! thou angel of the deep!”
On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency of the moral principles without religious feelings, he exclaimed, “Go heat your ovens with snowballs! What! shall I send you to heaven with such an icicle in your pocket? I might as well put a millstone round your neck to teach you to swim!”
He was preaching against violence and cruelty:—“Don’t talk to me,” said he, “of the savages! a ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage of savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun’s heat, groping in the sun’s light, a straggler in paradise, an alien in heaven!”
In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the pulpit and down the centre aisle were filled by the sailors. We ladies, and gentlemen, and strangers, whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged on each side; he would on no account allow us to take the best places. On one occasion, as he was denouncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and other vices of more civilised life, he said emphatically, “I don’t mean _you_ before me here,” looking at the sailors; “I believe you are wicked enough, but honest fellows in some sort, for you profess less, not more, than you practise; but I mean to touch _starboard_ and _larboard_ there!” stretching out both hands with the forefinger extended, and looking at us on either side till we quailed.