Billy Budd: Sailor

by Herman Melville

marplot

he was about to ejaculate something hasty at the sailor,

But for anything deeper, I am not certain whether to know the world and to know human nature be not two distinct branches of knowledge, which while they may coexist in the same heart, yet either may exist with little or nothing of the other.

Be it parenthesized here that

The austere devotee of military duty, letting himself melt back into what remains primeval in our formalized humanity, may in the end have caught Billy to his heart even as Abraham may have caught young Isaac on the brink of resolutely offering him up in obedience to the exacting behest.

Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War -- Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas.