His
authority assumes more of the parental character; and kinder
feelings exist. Godwin, though an infidel, in one of his novels,
describing the relation in which a tutor stood to his pupil, says that
the conviction the tutor was under, that he and his ward were both
alike awaiting a state of eternal happiness or misery, and that they
must appear together before the same judgment-seat, operated so upon
his naturally morose disposition, as to produce a feeling of
kindness and tenderness toward his ward, which nothing else could have
caused. Such must be the effect upon the relation of master and common
seaman.
There are now many vessels sailing under such auspices, in which
great good is done. Yet I never happened to fall in with one of
them. I did not hear a prayer made, a chapter read in public, nor
see anything approaching to a religious service, for two years and a
quarter. There were, in the course of the voyage, many incidents which
made, for the time, serious impressions upon our minds, and which
might have been turned to our good; but there being no one to use
the opportunity, and no services, the regular return of which might
have kept something of the feeling alive in us, the advantage of
them was lost, to some, perhaps, forever.
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