Psalms 104:25

So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable.

The sea’s inhabitants

Since the psalmist’s days our knowledge of the grandeur of the seas, and of their marvellous fulness of life, has been vastly extended. The discovery of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans made the Mediterranean, that seemed to him a “great and wide sea,” a little inland lake. Modern science has explored all the waters of the earth, and revealed to us the wonderful forms that exist even at the most enormous depths in the sunless abysses. The last great “Challenger” Expedition round the globe brought home treasures of knowledge, and opened up new fields of speculation, which have engaged the profound interest of naturalists ever since. Recent years have made us almost as familiar with the productions of the deep as with those of the dry land, and have taught us that there is no field so rich in illustrations of the Divine wisdom and power as the “great and wide sea.” Fishes as a class partake of the grace of the waters. They are adapted to its motions. They are moulded by its requirements. A ship is built to suit the conditions of its home on the mighty deep, and is therefore the most compact and well ordered of man’s works. And so a fish has the most exquisite adaptation and concentration. Fishes are in the sea what birds are in the air, amongst the most elegant of God’s creatures. They have similar beauty of colour and shape, and exhibit the same wonderful provisions and contrivances of Divine skill. (H. Macmillan, D.D.)

Life in ocean depths

It used to be an axiom that there was no life in the sea beyond a certain limit of a few hundred feet. It was learnedly and conclusively demonstrated that pressure and absence of light, and I know not what beside, made life at greater depths impossible. It was proved that in such conditions creatures could not live. And then, when that was settled, the “Challenger” put down her dredge five miles, and brought up healthy and good-sized living things with eyes in their heads, from that enormous depth. So, then the savant had to ask, how can there be life? instead of asserting there cannot be; and, no doubt, the answer will be forthcoming some day. We have all been too much accustomed to draw arbitrary limits to the diffusion of the life of Christ among men. Let us rather rejoice when we see forms of beauty, which bear the mark of His hand, drawn from depths that we deemed waste, and thankfully confess that the bounds of our expectation, and the framework of our institutions, do not confine the breadth of His working, nor the sweep of His grace. (A. Maclaren, D.D.)