Hawaii - James Michener [110]
"But we had to take Mrs. Hale below decks," Cridland protested.
"The work of the Lord required you to be present topside," Abner said stubbornly.
"But she . . ."
"Others could have cared for her, Cridland. Next Sunday I shall give you your Bibles. I am going to preach from Psalms 26, verse 5: 'I have hated the congregation of evil doers; and will not sit with the wicked.' When I have finished my sermon, I shall hand each of you his Bible." Then he recalled what he had said earlier and, staring at Mason, asked, "But have you earned your Bible? I thought you were to have brought another soul to God."
"I am about to do so," Mason reported happily. "I have been reading the tracts you gave us to one of the older men. He had led an evil life, but last trip on a whaler he was swept overboard and was saved only by a miracle. Of late, he has been weeping very much and I shall keep talking with him. Perhaps by next Sabbath . . ."
"Good work, Mason," Abner replied, and although another might have thought it strange that the religious ardors of the two sailors were not dampened by their disappointment over the Bibles, particularly when their dereliction arose from their humane treatment of a woman, and she the wife of the minister himself, Abner Hale was not surprised. As he pointed out to the young men: "The Lord is a jealous master. You cannot approach Him at your determination, He tells you when you may come into His presence. And if you have been faithless in even small things, the Lord will wait until you have proved yourself worthy." For Abner knew that easy salvation was never appreciated; Cridland and Mason already treasured their forthcoming Bibles doubly because they had once failed to attain them.
If Abner's first Sunday sermon was something of a failure, his second was a stunning success, marred only by the fact that his wife Jerusha was unable to witness it. He had got her to breakfast, had forced a little cold pork and rice into her racked body, and had even carried her limply onto the deck, but one look at the wallowing waves put her stomach into gyrations, and she was hurriedly taken below by Amanda Whipple and Mrs. Quigley. The intellectual highlight of Abner's sermon came when he spent fifteen minutes on the congregation of evildoers that the devil had thrown together aboard the "hamferdite" brig Thetis. Like all the missionaries, he called it a hamferdite, not knowing exactly how to pronounce, spell or define the longer and more accurate word, since it was in none of the mission dictionaries. But according to Abner, few ships that had ever sailed the Atlantic knew such a congregation of evil, and his catalogue of what these sailors lounging idly on deck had perpetrated in their short and unspectacular lives was terrifying. The dramatic climax, of course, came when he announced to his startled missionaries and surprised ship's crew that God had been at work even in this den of vice and that three souls had already been saved, whereupon he produced Cridland, Mason and a beat-up old whaler with bad legs whose catalogue of sin actually surpassed Abner's conjectures. Some of the old man's friends, who had spent time ashore with him in Valparaiso, Canton and Honolulu, expected lightning to play upon the waves when he touched the Bible that Abner extended him. Captain Janders shuddered and said to his first mate, "Mark my words, Mister Collins, you'll be up there next week."
That Sunday the noonday meal was an unalloyed triumph. Captain Janders said it was one of the best sermons he had ever heard afloat, although he was satisfied that Reverend Hale must have been talking about some other ship, and Mister Collins confessed, "It's a strange phenomenon, but no matter what the ship, the closer it gets to Cape Horn, the more religious everyone becomes. It's as if all aboard sensed at last the futility of man in the face of God's awful power. I'm not sure that I would be even a moderately Christian man, which I hold myself to be, if I had never rounded Cape Horn." Captain