Making Shipwreck by W. T. Bartlett

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 21, 1903

Making Shipwreck

By W. T. Bartlett

W. T. BARTLETT

If you have ever seen a shipwreck, you will be better able to understand why Paul should speak of some who went astray as making shipwreck of faith. He himself knew what it meant. “Thrice,” he says, “I suffered shipwreck,” and this was written before the shipwreck which occurred on the voyage to Rome, described in Acts 27.

A few weeks ago I was walking by the seashore, near one of our Western ports, when I was surprised to see before me the stern half of a large steamer lying propped up on the beach. There seemed to be nothing much the matter with it, except that one half was missing, and the iron plates were jagged and rough where the ship had been divided. Some of the iron masts had been taken out, and lay, with heaps of rusting chain, on the pebbles. The bulk of the great vessel towered high above me, and it seemed a thousand pities that so much valuable material, which had taken so much skill and strength to put together, and which ought to be plowing its way to distant lands in the service of man, should be lying rusting there, a broken wreck.

On inquiry I learned what had brought the steamer to its end. It had been purchased by a foreign merchant, and was just leaving for the port where he lived, with a heavy load of machinery. The pilot had been warned that the water of the dock in which the vessel had been lying, had washed out for itself a narrow channel for some distance, pushing the sand to either side, so that it would be unsafe for him to attempt to turn the steamer until he had gone straight ahead for some distance. For some reason this warning was not sufficiently regarded, and soon after leaving the dock an attempt was made to turn the steamer, with the result that it grounded on one bank of the sandy channel.

No one thought the mishap would prove serious, expecting to float off with the next tide. Being so near the shore, the pilot put off in a boat, and went back to his friends for a few hours, but during his absence, the tide ran lower, and the steamer, not supported by sufficient water, and heavily laden with machinery, broke in halves on the bank, so that when the pilot returned, his vessel was in two pieces.

It seemed a small mistake to make, but it was a very great one when it came to be measured by its consequences. Yet how many people are treating their lives, which are much more valuable and important than many ships with their cargoes, as if it were a small matter to take them into dangerous places. All around us are the poor, broken lives that have made shipwreck, some seemingly empty and worthless, but others laden with precious merchandise, and when we come to inquire how it is that these will never reach their desired haven, we generally find that it is on account of some small thing that could have been got over very easily if any one had known that it was so important. It needs only a little leak to sink the largest and finest ship ever floated, and it needs only a little carelessness to bring to a hopeless ruin a life that might have been filled with the glory of God, and have been a blessing to many.

Paul might well think of a shipwreck when he thought upon the lives of those who had failed because they had left off to be conscientious, for it does not matter how rich a cargo is carried, or how powerful and magnificent the vessel, or even how numerous and skillful the men who guide it, if there is not the most careful attention to the chart and the guide-marks, all the rest will not save the vessel from shipwreck. The ship that I saw had hardly begun her voyage, yet she needed as much watchfulness as if she had been long on the journey. The evil always comes just when we are not watching for it, so we must watch always, from first to last, if we would endure unto the end.