A recent apologist for the captain of a lost steamship submitted that the destruction of that fine vessel was what is called in the old-fashioned language of a charter-party, “the act of God.” Less partial critics, on the other hand, affirmed it to be the act of the folly and madness of man,—the term quoted belonging to an age when they who go down to the sea in ships had not learned the irreverent practice of imputing to the Deity the direct consequences of human rashness. “Let us, if we can, amend this folly; or, if we will persist in it, let us at least take the blame upon ourselves.” They that go down to the sea in ships have, however, in all ages, though not so much one people as another (English for instance as Italians), been prone to waste in wailing outcries to patron saints the energy that, in peril of wreck, they might have expended to better purpose. The “Colloquies” of Erasmus give a lively sample of this run-to-waste invocation. The last of the heroes of La Vendée, Charette, while still a youth, sailed from Brest in a cutter which lost its mast, and was in imminent jeopardy of going down; the sailors, on their knees, were praying to the Virgin, and had entirely given up all notion of exertion, “till Charette, by killing one, succeeded in bringing the others to a sense of their duty, and thereby saved the vessel.” Lord Broughton describes a scene of the kind, in a Turkish ship of war: the Greeks on board called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Allah; the captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling his passengers to call on God: he rung his hands, and wept aloud, and being asked what he could do, said he could do nothing. “Could he get back to the main land?” “If God chooses,” was his answer. “Could he make Corfu?” “If God chooses.” One thinks of the testy old patrician’s rejoinder in “Coriolanus” to the tribune’s exclaimer, “The gods be good unto us!” “No; in such a case the gods will not be good unto us.” In Scott’s tale of the Crusaders, “I will vow a golden candlestick to the Holy Sepulchre—a shrine of silver to our Lady of Engaddi—a pall, worth one hundred bezants to Saint Thomas of Orthez,” cries the Queen in extremity.—“Up, up, madam,” says Edith; “call on the saints an you list, but be your own best saint.” In “Ivanhoe,” again, when the Grand Master forbodes the contingent extinction of his order (the Templars), “Now may God avert such a calamity!” says the Preceptor. “Amen!” rejoins the Grand Master, with solemnity, “but we must deserve His aid.”