The Blacksmith

(If you’re looking for more Moby Dick answers, check out my post: “All Your Moby Dick Questions Answered!”)

Stories of self-destruction abound. I recently told a biblical one in an eight-part sermon series on Samson earlier this year at Covenant Church. But tucked away in one brief little chapter in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a story of self-destruction so powerfully and succinctly told I wanted to share it with others. The story is of a blacksmith named Perth who was sailing on the Pequod in the hunt for the white whale. In chapter 112, Melville describes Perth’s late-in-life failure:

“He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family’s heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shriveled up his home.”

Here is a man successful in his life and business, only needing to finish well but instead he stumbles and falls to ruin. Worst of all, it was he himself who let the robber into their house that stole everything from them, and that robber was alcohol. Everyday and little-by-little alcohol took a little bit more from this man and his family until there was nothing left. Melville describes the steady decline:

“The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!”

Many falls and failures are not sudden but rather slow declines that are largely imperceptible. Over time they are obvious, but in the moment it’s just another drink, just another day off, just another way of coping with the pressures and challenges of life. An early death would seem to be preferable to bringing this kind of ruin upon ourselves and our families as Melville writes:

“Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.”

How many men who’ve thrown it all away on the homestretch of their lives know all too well the complaint Melville makes here? “Why God did you allow me to live long enough to throw it all away?”

Brothers, let us live our lives in such a way that we need not lament the fact that death did not come sooner. Let us be vigilant to keep a close watch on our lives and our teaching so that we do not find ourselves taken captive by any sin, all of which have the capacity to consume our lives and ministries. May the blacksmith’s story remain in the pages of a beautiful piece of literature and never be brought to life in our own families.