Article May 17, 1919 ISSUE

Dominion over the Sea

CECIL HARCOURT-MORRIS

The sea has always played a large part in human affairs. Primitive man, uninstructed in modern ship construction, seamanship, and navigation, must have felt himself utterly at the mercy of any storm at sea, and his ignorance kept him in a state of awe and dread of it. To him the sea stood for all that was evil, and thus in the Bible we find it used time and again to typify that monster of inharmony, the great red dragon, or the abode of the powers of darkness. For instance, in the first chapter of Genesis we find the sea used to indicate the mental chaos which exists before the light of Truth dawns on mortal thought. Thus we read, "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." This is, however, immediately followed by the cheering declaration that God is ever present even when error seems to fill all space, for the text goes on, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

The first recorded sea experience is that of Noah with the flood. In the Glossary of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 592) Noah is thus defined: "A corporeal mortal; knowledge of the nothingness of material things and of the immortality of all that is spiritual." This knowledge lifted him above the torrents of sensualism of his day. Mortal mind, being unable to comprehend anything beyond the cognizance of the physical senses, could conceive of this deliverance only as an ark lifted above the earth by the very waters which destroyed all else. The account of this ark is the first record we have in the Bible of any form of ship.

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