by God's miraculous protection of him and his, both in the Straits of
Magellan, and in his battle with the Galleon; and last, but not least,
upon the rock by Celebes, when the Pelican lay for hours firmly fixed,
and was floated off unhurt, as it were by miracle, by a sudden shift of
wind.

Ay, smile, reader, if you will; and, perhaps, there was matter for a
smile in that honest sermon, interlarded, as it was, with scraps of
Greek and Hebrew, which no one understood, but every one expected as
their right (for a preacher was nothing then who could not prove himself
"a good Latiner"); and graced, moreover, by a somewhat pedantic and
lengthy refutation from Scripture of Dan Horace's cockney horror of the
sea--

"Illi robur et aes triplex," etc.

and his infidel and ungodly slander against the impias rates, and their
crews.

Smile, if you will: but those were days (and there were never less
superstitious ones) in which Englishmen believed in the living God, and
were not ashamed to acknowledge, as a matter of course, His help and
providence, and calling, in the matters of daily life, which we now
in our covert atheism term "secular and carnal;" and when, the sermon
ended, the communion service had begun, and the bread and the wine were
given to those five mariners, every gallant gentleman who stood near
them (for the press would not allow of more) knelt and received the
elements with them as a thing of course, and then rose to join with
heart and voice not merely in the Gloria in Excelsis, but in the Te
Deum, which was the closing act of all. And no sooner had the clerk