Lewis was struck by the men’s extraordinary isolation of mind; you may not understand his thought now, but, when you visit the North Sea, the meaning will flash on you. Isolation—­that is the word; the men know little of the world; they are infantine without being petty; they have no curiosity about the passage of events on shore, and their solid world is represented by an area of 70 feet by 18.  They are always amusing, always suggestive, and always superhumanly ignorant of the commonest concerns that affect the lives of ordinary men.  When your intellect first begins to measure theirs, you feel as if you had been put down in a strange country, and had to adapt your mind and soul to such a set of conditions as might come before you in a dream.  I, the transcriber of this history, felt humiliated when a good man, who had been to sea for thirty-three years on a stretch, asked me whether “them things is only made up”; them things being a set of spirited natural history pictures.  I reckon if I took Mr. Herbert Spencer, or Mr. Grant Allen, or Mr. Lang out to the fleets, I could give them a few shrewd observations regarding the infancy of the human mind.

There was a fair amount of room for a religious service, the men packed themselves into their places with admirable and silent politeness, and the yacht was transformed into a mission hall.  As to the fishermen’s singing, one can never talk of it sufficiently.  Ferrier was stirred by the hoarse thunder of voices; he seemed to hear the storming of that gale in the cordage once more, and he forgot the words of the hymn in feeling only the strong passion and yearning of the music.  Then Fullerton and Blair prayed, and the sceptic heard two men humbly uttering petitions like children, and, to his humorous Scotch intellect, there was something nearly amusing in the naive language of these two able, keen men.  They seemed to say, “Some of our poor men cannot do so much as think clearly yet; we will try to translate their dumb craving.”  Charles Dickens, that good man, that very great man, should have heard the two evangelists; he would have altered some of the savage opinions that lacerated his gallant heart.  To me, the talk and the prayers of such men are entrancing as a merely literary experience; the balanced simplicity, and the quivering earnestness are so exactly adapted to the one end desired.

Blair’s sermon was brief and straightforward; he talked no secondhand formalities from the textbooks; he met his hearers as men, and they took every word in with complete understanding.  When I hear a man talking to the fishers about the symbolism of an ephod, I always want to run away.  What is needed is the human voice, coming right from the human heart:  cut and dried theological terms only daze the fisherman; he is too polite to look bored, but he suffers all the same.  I fancy Blair’s little oration might be summed up thus:  Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty