Title:  Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862

Author:  Various

Release Date:  April 21, 2004 [EBook #12107]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A magazine of literature, art, and politics.

* * * * *

Vol.  IX.—­May, 1862.—­No.  LV.

* * * * *

Man under sealed orders.

A vessel of war leaves its port, but no one on board knows for what object, nor whither it is bound.  It is a secret Government expedition.  As it sets out, a number of documents, carefully sealed, are put in charge of the commander, in which all his instructions are contained.  When far away from his sovereign, these are to be the authority which he must obey; as he sails on in the dark, these are to be the lights on the deep by which he must steer.  They provide for every stage of the way.  They direct what ports to approach and what ports to avoid, what to do in different seas, what variation to make in certain contingencies, and what acts to perform at certain opportunities.  Each paper of the series forbids the opening of the next until its own directions have been fulfilled; so that no one can see beyond the immediate point for which he is making.

The wide ocean is before that ship, and a wider mystery.  But in the passage of time, as the strange cruise proceeds, its course begins to tell upon the chart.  The zigzag line, like obscure chirography, has an intelligible look, and seems to spell out intimations.  As order after order is opened, those sibyl leaves of the cabin commence to prophesy, glimpses multiply, surmises come quick, and shortly the whole ship’s company more than suspect, from the accumulating data behind them, what must be their destination, and the mission they have been sent to accomplish.

People are beginning to imagine that the career of the human race is something like this.  There is a fast-growing conviction that man has been sent out, from the first, to fulfil some inexplicable purpose, and that he holds a Divine commission to perform a wonderful work on the earth.  It would seem as if his marvellous brain were the bundle of mystic scrolls on which it is written, and within which its terms are hid,—­and as if his imperishable soul were the great seal, bearing the Divine image and superscription, which attests its Almighty original.