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THE WRECK OF THE "SCHILLER."

"They ran the ship aground; and the forepart stuck fast, and remained unmovable, but the hinder part was broken with the violence of the waves." -Acts xxvii., 41.

YAUGHT in a typhoon! Before yet the chronometer was invented, a vessel is cracking to pieces on the coast of a Mediterranean island. The cargo of corn is spoiled, and, worse than that, two hundred and seventy-six passengers are beside themselves with terror. At the first bump of the ship, every thing was in consternation. She went on, bow first, and the waves cried, "Come, let us tear this old hulk to pieces!" The sea beat against the stern, and dashed the spray clear over the deck, crowded with af frighted passengers. Rudder, yards, mast, bulwark, knocked away. Every thing going to demolition. "They ran the ship aground; and the forepart stuck fast, and remained unmovable, but the hinder part was broken with the violence of the waves."

There are some points of striking analogy between that wreck and the one which stunned our ears a few days ago. Both vessels carried freight and passengers. Both were crowded with-people-the one with two hundred and seventy-six on board, the other with three hundred and eightyfive on board. Both were caught in the grip of a tempest. From both the sailors tried to escape in small boats, giving no chance to the passengers. Both lost their reckoning. Both went aground in the night.

The Schiller started from our port on the 28th of April, bound for Plymouth, England, and Hamburg, Germany. It was the popular season for transatlantic voyage, and the people went on the ship: invalids in search of health, pleasurists expecting merriment in foreign capitals, merchants on commercial errand, artists bound for the picture-galleries of Dresden and Florence, adopted citizens going back to visit the land of their nativity and the graves of their fathers. They had gone three thousand miles of voyage successfully, and expected on the morrow to wake up in the calm English harbor. Some of them were sleeping, and dreaming of home, of wife, of child, and others of mountains and cities beyond the sea. A dense mist comes upon the ocean. The storm hallooes amidst the rigging. Yet all seems safe. Two men on the lookout. Two men at the wheel. Two men pacing the captain's bridge. Yet all the time making for the rocks. Oh, stop her before she strikes! One turn of the wheel will save the ship. The howl of the storm drowns the tolling of the fog-bell in Bishop Rock Light-house. Still on and on, until, without a moment in which to give warning, or wake up the passengers from their berths, or swing the small boats from their davits, that vessel of three thousand six hundred tons burden strikes the rock, once, twice, three times, four times, and goes down! Between the first plunge and the last the rockets are flung, and the guns are sounded, and a few passengers clamber up in the rigging; but there is no safe retreat there, for soon the mast, with its cluster of precious human life tangled in the cordage, begins to bend and reel in the gale, and then cracks, and with awful plunge dashes into the sea. Meanwhile the captain makes a brave attempt with loaded and firing pistol to keep the life-boats for the passengers. He

gathers some of them up on his bridge; but, after having done all he could for the saving of the people on the ship, he wraps himself in a winding-sheet of surf, and lies down. beside them in that great democracy of sepulture. Beautiful women and swarthy men and sweet children, side by side, are dead. There she lies, the Schiller, under a mound of blue seas, the jutting reef the tombstone, buried in the place where lie the skeletons of the Thames steamer, and the Duro, and the English Admiral, waiting for the day when the sea shall give up its dead. Let the waves tramp up the sad beach in solemn procession, and two continents uncover the brow over this burial of the Schiller with three hundred and forty-two passengers, without any warning gone out to meet their God.

Let us learn, first, from this disaster what a sad thing it is for people to lose their reckoning. Captain Thomas, through the report from the log-book, which recorded the distances and courses sailed, judged that he was at least two miles off from the Scilly rocks; but he did not really know where he was. He mistook, and that mistake flung hundreds of souls into the eternal world, and the whole civilized world into mourning. So there are those here to-day who have lost their reckoning. They know not where they are. They say, "So many miles have I voyaged since I was launched on the ocean of life, and so many miles more will I voyage before I get to the coast of eternity." Part of their calculation is right, and part of their calculation is wrong, and they have lost their reckoning. They know not how they stand toward God or their Bible, or their duty or heaven. They are sailing on thoughtlessly, when they may be within two minutes of the reef. Alas that men should make a mistake for eternity! now running on one

rock, now running on the other rock; and, with the quad.rant of God's Word in their hand, by which they might have calculated the latitude, in an evil hour, their watchfulness asleep in the cabin, like the corn ship of the text, or the Schiller of last week, going aground, one shivering horror. Oh, slow your engines! Throw out your bower anchor! Stop stock-still until you find out where you are —near what reef, by what coast, on the verge of what shipwreck! There is only one channel leading into the celestial harbor, and that is not a wide channel. "Narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." God forbid that any one of us should lose our reckoning.

Again, I see in this disaster what a dense fog can do. This calamity was only half a mile from Bishop Rock Lighthouse. It is a granite structure, one hundred and fortyseven feet high, and has one of the best and brightest dioptric lights, a multiplication of refracted rays. When the sun sets, the keeper strikes that light, and it blazes all through the darkness, and in ordinary weather throws out its glow fourteen miles upon the sea. "Well," you say, "there might have been some excuse for a vessel going on those rocks in Queen Anne's time, as the vessels did under the brave Sir Cloudsley Shovel, when nine ships of the line broke to pieces, and two thousand soldiers perished, for then there were no lights on the rock. But how was it possible," says one not conversant with all the circumstances, "that a steamer should have been ruined there within half a mile of Bishop Rock Light-house?" Oh, there was a fog on the sea. Captain Thomas, and First-officer Hillers, and Second-officer Pollman could not see a quarter of the length of that steamer, and if there had been fifty

light-houses on the rock they would not have done any good.

Here I get a hint of the way men lose their souls, driving into ruin; for there are scores of men in this day, and institutions, whose whole business seems to be to create a great spiritual fog. Men and women do not go on to death a-purpose; it is because they are cheated, they are deceived, they are mystified, they are befogged. We have in this day the Herbert Spencer fog about life, which, he says, is "the combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondences with external co-existences and sequences!" We have the Huxley fog about protoplasm. We have the Darwinian fog about the anthropomorphous origin of our race, and our dear old. grandfathers, the gorilla and the chimpanzee. The fog of Materialism, the fog of Pantheism, the fog of Rationalism, the fog that Strauss and Shenkel and Renan have thrown. all around the head of Christ. Any thing but believe that God, by his power, made the worlds, and that the Bible is plenarily inspired, and that Christ is the omnipotent Son of God come to save sinners. There is one funeral that these wiseacres would like to attend, and be both pall-bearers and grave-diggers, and that is the decease and burial of the Lord God Almighty. They do not think the universe is large enough for Him and them, and so they are trying to crowd Him back, and crowd Him off the precipices of the universe, and, in trying to do so, they create a great spiritual fog, and the hundreds who went down on the Schiller were as nothing compared with the thousands and the hundreds of thousands who, in this great philosophical vaporing, have been wrecked suddenly and forever. One hour after the vessel spoken of struck in the English Channel.