"shipmates, god has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. i have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for i am a greater sinner than ye. and now how gladly would i come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living god. how being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked nineveh, jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his god by taking ship at joppa. but god is everywhere; tarshish he never reached. as we have seen, god came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’