The religion of Charles Dibdin’s sailors ebbs and flows like the sea, and that even in one song. Take, for instance, ‘Poor Jack,’ which has been praised on the very ground of its religious beauty. In the first verse Jack has more comfort than faith. He is careless, on the chance of others caring for him:-- Avast! nor don’t think me a milksop so soft To be taken for trifles a-back; For they say there’s a Providence sits up aloft, To keep watch for the life of poor Jack! In the second verse Jack has heard the chaplain palaver one day, ‘about souls, heaven, mercy, and such.’ It was, Jack says, as unintelligible to him as high Dutch. Nevertheless, Jack got at some instruction from the reverend gentleman:-- For, he said, how a sparrow can’t founder, d’ye see, Without orders that come down below; And a many fine things that prov’d clearly to me That Providence takes us in tow. For, says he, d’ye mind me, let storms e’er so oft Take the topsails o’ sailors a-back, There’s a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft To keep watch for the life of poor Jack. In the next verse Jack is worldly again. When Poll is ‘sniv’ling and piping her eye’ at the idea of parting from him, he says tenderly--and we can hear the voice of T. P. Cooke saying it--‘Why, what a damn’d fool you must be!’ Then comes the change in his religious philosophy:-- Can’t you see the world’s wide, and there’s room for us all, Both for seamen, and lubbers ashore? And if to Old Davy I _should_ go, dear Poll! You never will hear of me more. What then? all’s a hazard!... &c. Perhaps he ‘may laughing come back,’ and he supports this doctrine of chances by means of the doctrine of election, in the figure of the cherub up aloft with his protective power over Jack; and which cherub, in the last verse, is commissioned, at the end of all things, to ‘look out a good berth’ for the same theological sailor. To be sure, such loose theology was to be expected in sailors who had such chaplains to teach them, as Dibdin delineates in another of his songs, ‘There’s nothing like grog’:-- T’other day, as the chaplain was preaching, Behind him I curiously slunk; And while he our duty was teaching, As how we should never get drunk, I show’d him the stuff, and he twigg’d it, And it soon set his rev’rence agog; And he swigg’d, and Nick swigg’d, And Ben swigg’d, and Dick swigg’d, And I swigg’d, and all of us swigg’d it, And swore there was nothing like grog!