the voyage out to america described in the last chapter included an instance of the extraordinary behaviour of the established church at sea, which deserves special mention as it is still repeated.
there is an offensive rule on board ships that the service on sunday shall be that of the church of england, and that the preacher selected shall be of that persuasion.
several of the twelve ministers of religion among the passengers of the bothnia in 1879 were distinguished preachers, whereas the clergyman selected to preach to us was not at all distinguished, and made a sermon which i, as an englishman, was ashamed to hear delivered before an audience of intelligent americans. the preacher told a woful story of loss of trade and distress in england, which gave the audience the idea that john bull was "up a tree." were he up ever so high i would not have told it to an alien audience.
the preacher said that these losses were owing to our sins—that is the sins of englishmen. the devotion of the american hearers was varied with a smile at this announcement. it was their surpassing ingenuity and rivalry in trade which had affected our exports for a time. our chief "sins" were uninventiveness and commercial incapacity, and the greater wit and ingenuity of the audience were the actual punishment the preacher was pleading against, and praying them to be contrite on account of their own success. the minister described bad trade as a punishment from god, as though god had made the rascally merchants who took out shoddy calico and ruined the markets. it was not god that had driven the best french and german artists and workmen into america, where they have enriched its manufacturers with their skill and industry, and enabled that country to compete with ours.
the preacher's text was as wide of any mark as his sermon. it asked the question, "how can we sing in a strange land?" when we should arrive there, there would hardly be a dozen of us in the vessel who would be in a strange land; the great majority were going home—mostly commercial reapers of an english harvest who were returning home rejoicing—bearing their golden sheaves with them. neither the sea nor the land were strange to them. many of them were as familiar with the atlantic as with the prairie. i sat at table by a toronto dealer who had crossed the ocean twenty-nine times. the congregation at sea formed a very poor opinion of the discernment of the established church.
on the return voyage in the gallia we had another "burning" but not "a shining light" of the church of england to discourse. he was a young man, and it required some assurance on his part to look into the eyes of the intelligent christians around him, who had three times his years, experience, and knowledge, and lecture them upon matters of which he was absolutely ignorant.
this clergyman enforced the old doctrine of severity in parental discipline of the young, and on the wisdom of compelling children to unquestioning obedience, and argued that submission to a higher will was good for men during life. at least two-thirds of the congregation were american, who regard parental severity as cruelty to the young, and utterly uninstructive; and unquestioning obedience they hold to be calamitous and demoralising education. they expect reasonable obedience, and seek to obtain it by reason. submission to a "higher will" as applied to man, is submission to arbitrary authority against which the whole polity of american life is a magnificent protest. the only higher will they recognise in worldly affairs is the will of the people, intelligently formed, impartially gathered, and constitutionally recorded—facts of which the speaker had not the remotest idea.
who can read this narrative of the ignorance and effrontery, nurtured by the established church and obtruded on passengers at sea, without a sense of patriotic humiliation that it is continued every sunday in every ship? it is thought dangerous to be wrecked and not to have taken part in this pitiable exhibition.