Chapter 38

THE CHAPLAIN AND CHAPEL IN A MAN-OF-WAR.

The next day was Sunday; a fact set down in the almanac, spite of
merchant seamen's maxim, that _there are no Sundays of soundings_.

_No Sundays off soundings, _indeed! No Sundays on shipboard! You
may as well say there should be no Sundays in churches; for is
not a ship modeled after a church? has it not three spires--three
steeples? yea, and on the gun-deck, a bell and a belfry? And does
not that bell merrily peal every Sunday morning, to summon the
crew to devotions?

At any rate, there were Sundays on board this particular frigate
of ours, and a clergyman also. He was a slender, middle-aged man,
of an amiable deportment and irreproachable conversation; but I
must say, that his sermons were but ill calculated to benefit the
crew. He had drank at the mystic fountain of Plato; his head had
been turned by the Germans; and this I will say, that White-Jacket
himself saw him with Coleridge's Biographia Literaria in his hand.

Fancy, now, this transcendental divine standing behind a gun-carriage
on the main-deck, and addressing five hundred salt-sea sinners upon the
psychological phenomena of the soul, and the ontological necessity of
every sailor's saving it at all hazards. He enlarged upon the follies
of the ancient philosophers; learnedly alluded to the Phiedon of Plato;
exposed the follies of Simplicius's Commentary on Aristotle's "De Coelo,"
by arraying against that clever Pagan author the admired tract of
Tertullian--_De Prascriptionibus Haereticorum_--and concluded by a
Sanscrit invocation. He was particularly hard upon the Gnostics and
Marcionites of the second century of the Christian era; but he never,
in the remotest manner, attacked the everyday vices of the nineteenth
century, as eminently illustrated in our man-of-war world. Concerning
drunkenness, fighting, flogging, and oppression--things expressly or
impliedly prohibited by Christianity--he never said aught. But the most
mighty Commodore and Captain sat before him; and in general, if, in a
monarchy, the state form the audience of the church, little evangelical
piety will be preached. Hence, the harmless, non-committal abstrusities
of our Chaplain were not to be wondered at. He was no Massillon, to
thunder forth his ecclesiastical rhetoric, even when a Louis le Grand was
enthroned among his congregation. Nor did the chaplains who preached on
the quarter-deck of Lord Nelson ever allude to the guilty Felix, nor to
Delilah, nor practically reason of righteousness, temperance, and judgment
to come, when that renowned Admiral sat, sword-belted, before them.

During these Sunday discourses, the officers always sat in a circle round
the Chaplain, and, with a business-like air,