I am standing upon the foreshore

I came across this again recently. I was first aware of it when Vernon Higham read it at Dr Lloyd-Jones's funeral in 1981 (see here). He read it from Lorraine Boettner's book Immortality. I can't remember how Boettner introduces it but it appears to be (not by Victor Hugo a some say) but by the Dutch American educator and preacher Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933). Ironically he was one of Machen's early opponents. He refused to listen to Machen in 1923 as he felt his preaching was "bitter, schismatic and unscriptural". That fact puts me off a bit as well as the sentimentality but it is biblical.

I am standing upon the foreshore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to meet each other. Then someone at my side says, 'There, she is gone.' Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and just as able to bear her load of living weights to its place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her; and just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There, she is gone,' on that distant shore there are other eyes watching for her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, 'Here she comes'.