- The Captain of Souls

THE ENGLISH POET, WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY, has had a world of abuse heaped upon him by some indignant Christians who bitterly resent his having said in plain words what practically everyone believes:
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Although the prevailing tone of the poem is arrogant and defiant in a frightened sort of way, I think we would do well to be charitable toward its author, a man whose heart knew nothing of the softening influences of the love of God, a lifelong cripple who was moved to strike out blindly at whatever it was that, as he saw it, gave him such an unfair deal. His ill-humored bugling at the heavens above has more than a trace of bravado and wishful thinking. And yet his lines about being the captain of his soul and the master of his fate are true.
Charles Wesley said much the same thing in a hymn that has been sung by virtually every church in the English-speaking world:
A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify;
A never-dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky.
Only those who deny the freedom of the human will could object to Wesley’s lines. Certainly God has given each of us a soul, and just as certainly He has charged us to see that it is saved. Peter’s words to the multitudes at Pentecost convey this idea: “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation” (Acts 2:40). Who can doubt that Peter conceived his hearers to be responsible for their own spiritual condition? To think otherwise is to read into his words meaning that is surely not there.
Waiving for a moment the technical distinction between the captain and the pilot of a ship, we can see how each man is the captain of his own soul. As soon as the ship has slipped her mooring and is out on the bosom of the deep, the captain alone is responsible for her. The whole expanse of the seven seas is before her. “Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go” (James 3:4).
But we do not like to think that we are responsible for our own souls. It is a disconcerting, even terrifying thought. We are so weak, so ignorant, and the sea is so vast and cruel. “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (John 14:5) Thomas exclaimed, and in so doing gave expression to our own feelings. We don’t even know where the harbor is—how can we hope to reach it? And yet we are responsible—how can these things be?
The answer is that while we cannot pilot our ship safely into the harbor ourselves, we can choose to put our vessel into the hands of One who can. God has given us our free will in order that we may choose the right pilot. He has also provided the Pilot, Jesus Christ our Lord. We only need to acknowledge our own ignorance and cry out in faith,
Jesus, Savior, pilot me
Over life’s tempestuous sea;
Unknown waves before me roll,
Hiding rock and treach’rous shoal;
Chart and compass come from Thee:
Jesus, Savior, pilot me.
God has given each one a will of his own. The difference between a Christian and an unsaved person is not that one has a will and the other does not. No, both have wills. The difference is what they do with them. The sinner wills to run his or her own life, and that is the essence of sin. Christians are Christians because in faith they surrendered their will to the will of God and turned their soul over to Jesus Christ. Tennyson understood this when he wrote,
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.
The conclusion of the matter is that the fate of every man has a master and the soul of every man has a captain. It is either the man himself or Another whom he has chosen. The difference can be stated in a few words, but the mighty eternal outworkings of it could not be written in a thousand books. Heaven and hell, life and death, happiness and woe hang upon the decision—Christ or me? Poor Henley. He was so right, yet so frightfully, tragically wrong.