Agra: November 1, 1813.
It will be of use for you to know that when he left Cawnpore in 1810 to seek change of air I was with him, and persuaded him to leave in my hands a number of memorandums he was about to destroy. They were sealed up, but on his death, being opened, they proved to be journals of the exercises of his mind from January 1803 to 1807 inclusive. They seem to me no less worthy of publication than the journal of Mr. Brainerd, if more books of that kind should be judged necessary. Since the beginning of 1807 Mr. Martyn favoured me with almost a weekly letter, in which his various employments and engagements for the furtherance of the Gospel in this country are detailed, with occasional very interesting remarks. This correspondence ceased on my being ordered by our Commander-in-chief to assist Mr. Martyn in the duties of the station of Cawnpore, when I took up my abode with him from June till his departure, October 1. Other letters passed between us after that time, and it is my intention to send you copies of all the above correspondence, together with his private memorandums. The latter, with copies of Martyn’s letters from February to July 1807, were sent off this day to Mr. Thomason in Calcutta, to be forwarded to England by the first opportunity, and the copies of the remaining letters shall follow as soon as may be. Of course I have omitted to copy what seems purely personal: yet much remains which you will perhaps judge unnecessary for publication, and will exercise your own judgment on that head. All the extracts seem to me, however, to cast light on the progress of missionary work in this land, and may perhaps be thought interesting to those who take a concern in Indian affairs. These extracts give so full a view of Mr. Martyn’s character that nothing remains for me to add. Only I may say a more perfect character I never met with, nor expect to see again on earth. During the four years we were fellow-labourers in this country, I had no less than six opportunities of enjoying his company; the last time for four months together, and under the same roof all the time; and each opportunity only increased my love and veneration for him.
I conclude the above intelligence will plead my excuse for writing to you without previous introduction, and I was anxious it should reach you through the nearest channel. Your brother in Calcutta has told me several times of your welfare, and during beloved Martyn’s life I used to hear of you sometimes. Your person, whilst a student at King’s College, was well known to me, and your character admired, though I had not steadiness of principle sufficient at that time to imitate you, and consequently had no pretensions to an acquaintance with you, though I often greatly desired it. To that ‘Father in Israel,’ Mr. Simeon, I owe all my comfort on earth and all my hopes respecting eternity: for through his instrumentality the seeds of grace, I trust, were, during my residence at Cambridge, especially during the latter part of my residence, implanted in my heart, and have influenced, though alas! unsteadily, my after days.
Lydia Grenfell was of course consulted as the work made progress, but none of her letters to Martyn have seen the light.
1815, December 26.—Wrote this day to Mr. Simeon. I have reason to search into my heart and watch the risings of pride there, both respecting the notice of this blessed saint, and the avowal to be expected of my being the object of so much regard from another still more eminent in the Church of Christ. I have ever stood amazed at this, and now that in the providence of God it seems certain that my being so favoured is likely to be made known, vanity besets me. Oh, how poor a creature am I! Lord, I pray, let me be enabled to trace some evidence of Thine eternal love to me, and let this greater wonder call off my thoughts from every other distinction. But how do I learn that in the whole of this notice my thoughts have not indeed been Thine, O Lord, nor my ways Thy ways? How much above all I could have conceived of have been the designs of God! I sought concealment, and lo! all is made known to many, and much will be even known to the world. It is strange for me to credit this, and strange that, with my natural reserve and the peculiar reasons that exist for my wishing to have this buried in silence, I am nevertheless composed about it. But, Lord, I would resign myself, and all things that concern me, to Thy sovereign will and pleasure. Preserve me blameless to Thine eternal kingdom, and grant me an everlasting union with thy servant above.
1816, January 28.—I feel an increased thankfulness that God has called me to live free from the many cares which fall on all in the married state, and for the peculiarly favourable circumstances He has placed me in here. The privilege of watching over my mother in the decline of life, the charge of a sweet child, the occupation of the schools, and a portion of this world’s goods for the use of the poor,—all, all call for more thankfulness and diligence. Lord, help me to abound in both, and with and above all I have peace and hope in God through Jesus Christ, in a measure—though unbelief often robs my soul of both. Oh, let me seek the grace of steadfast faith, and I have all I want or desire.
April 21.—Thought with delight of my loved friends, Mrs. Hoare and H.M., both before the Throne, led by the Lamb to living fountains of waters, and all tears wiped away from their eyes. Oh, I long to be there; yet I could willingly forego the joys of heaven if I might, by suffering or labours here, glorify my Lord and Saviour.
June 30.—Often have I thought, when desirous of pursuing a more consistent deportment, and of introducing spiritual subjects: ‘How can I appear so different before those I have been so trifling and merely worldly in all my intercourse with?’ The death of my esteemed and beloved brother in Christ, H.M., I thought would have been the period for my maintaining that serious watchfulness so essential to my enjoyment of God; but no, I have been worse since, I think, as a judgment for failing in my keeping my resolution.
In 1817 Lydia Grenfell’s Diary records the visits of such men as Mr. Fenn, ‘who came to preach in the great cause of the Church Missionary Society,’ and of Mr. Bickersteth, who at Penzance ‘stated what he had met with in Africa.’ The author of many immortal hymns, Francis Thomas Lyte, ‘opened his ministry’ of two years in Marazion at this time, to her joy and spiritual growth. She notes on August 31, 1817, that his hymn ‘Penitence’ was sung for the first time.
Marazion: March 6, 1819.
Received, a few days since, Mr. Sargent’s Memoir, and reading only a few pages has convinced me that, without a greater resemblance in the spirit to our friend, I never can partake of that blessedness now enjoyed by the happy subject of it in the presence of his Saviour. It is chiefly in humility, meekness, and love I see the sad, the total difference. This may be traced to a departure from the fountain of grace, Christ Jesus, to whom, oh, may I return, and I shall be replenished.
October 14.—Indulged a wandering imagination, and am sad in consequence. This season I ought to deem a sacred one. Oh, that, in my remembrance of Thy blessed ... and servant, I could entirely forget what feeds my vanity. Lord, help me to check all earthly sorrow at the recollection of his many sorrows, for were they not the appointed means of fitting him for his present felicity, and of manifesting Thy grace, by which Thou art glorified? I would make this season one of serious preparation for my own departure, and what does that preparation consist in?—faith in Jesus. Oh, strengthen it in me, and by following Thy blessed saint in all virtuous and godly living I may come to those eternal joys prepared for those that love Thee.
1820, June 25.—Oh, what a heaven for a creature, who has no strength, or wisdom, or righteousness, like myself, to be fixed in, beholding the glories of Jehovah manifested in Him who is my Saviour and my Lord. Gladly would I part from this dull clod of earth and come to Thee, and reach the pure pleasures of a spiritual state. There, there dwells the blessed Martyn, who bows before the throne, of a glorious company of saints, washed with him, and clothed in spotless robes. Oh, (that) I may be brought to them.
December 5.—Thought of the holy martyr, so humble, so self-denying, so devoted, and of his early-accomplished prayer for the heavenly country, where he dwells perfect in purity and love. Oh, to be a follower of him as he followed Christ, and to walk in the same paths, influenced by the same holy, humble, heavenly principles, upheld by the same arm of omnipotent grace, till I too reach the rest above.
1821, January 23.—Elevated rather than refreshed and humbled in worship to-day. Imagination has been too active and unrestrained. The remembrance of past events, in which that blessed saint now with God, H.M. (? figured), has been filling my mind. This should not be. This is not communion with him, now a glorified spirit, but merely the indulgence of a vain, sinful imagination. I would turn from all, from the most holy creatures, to the Holy One, and the just; spiritual, and moral, yea, Divine glory and beauty I may behold in Him, who is the chief among ten thousand, and altogether lovely.
October 18.—I have now survived my beloved friend eight years. Eight years have been given me to be prepared for that world of blessedness he has so long entered upon. Alas! I seem less so now than at any period.
1822, October 16.—The remembrance of the event of the day has been rendered useless by my absence from home a great part of it. It should be the occasion for renewed self-dedication, of more earnest prayer, and of humiliation; for the recollection of being the cause of increased sufferings to Thy saint, O Lord, is cause for constant humiliation. I would realise death, and look to eternity, and to that glorious Saviour, for whom the blessed subject of my thoughts lived only to serve and honour. Oh, never more shall I have intercourse with the beloved friend now with Christ, but by faith in Christ. Lord, help me to use the recollection of our earthly regard to promote this end.
October 19.—My birthday (forty-seventh) follows that of the anniversary of the death of Martyn.
December 31.—Read dear Martyn’s sermon on the Christian’s walk with greater enjoyment and unction than has been vouchsafed unto me for a long season. The holy simplicity of the directions, and persuasive motives to walk in, as well as receive, Christ, had influence in my heart.
1823, January 11.—Placed in my room yesterday the print of dear M. Felt affected greatly in doing so, and my tears, which seldom flow in the presence of anyone, I could not restrain before the person who was fixing it.[98] With the Saviour now, and the Saviour, doubtless, was with him in his greatest agony, even the agony of death—this thought will be the more familiar to me by viewing the representation of Christ’s Crucifixion, now placed over the picture of His servant. I trust, by a prudent and not too frequent sight of both, I may derive some advantage from possessing what is so affecting and so admonitory to me, who am declining in religious fervour and spirituality. Thus may I use both, not to exercise feelings, but faith. I cannot behold the resemblance of M. but I am reminded that God wrought powerfully on his soul, meeting him for a state of purity, and love, and spiritual enjoyment, and that he has entered upon it. His faithfulness, and diligence, and self-denial, and devotedness; his love to God, and love for souls; his meekness, and patience, and faith, should stimulate me to earnestness in prayer for a portion of that grace, through which alone he attained them, and was what he was.
January 19.—Read dear Martyn’s sermon on ‘Tribulation the Way to Heaven,’ with, I trust, a blessing attending it.
1825, October 16.—The anniversary of dear H.M. gaining the haven of rest after his labours. Oh, how little do I labour to enter into that rest he enjoyed upon earth.
1826, April 2.—God, the ever gracious and merciful God, Thee would I bless and everlastingly praise for granting me the favour of hearing ‘the joyful sound’ of His rich love, and abounding grace by Jesus Christ, this day, and by a messenger unexpected, and beloved as a friend and brother. The text was that I once heard preached from by the blessed Martyn, whose spirit I pined to join in offering praises to God after sermon: ‘Now then we are ambassadors for Christ.’
June 18.—My friends gone to heaven seem to reproach me, that I aim not to follow them, as they followed Christ. The beloved Martyn, the seraphic Louisa Hoare, and my dear[99] Georgina’s spirits are employed in perpetually beholding that God whom I neglect, and remain unconcerned when I do not delight in or serve (Him). Oh, let me be joined to them in the sweet work of adoration and praise to Him who hath loved us, to Jesus, our one Lord and Saviour. Amen.
So ends the Diary of Lydia Grenfell, the eight last years of her life afflicted by cancerous disease, and one year by a clouded mind.[100] To the manuscript ‘E. H,’—that is, her sister, Emma Hitchins—added these words: ‘This prayer was answered September 21, 1829;
The motto on her memorial stone in the churchyard of Breage, where she lies near another holy woman, Margaret Godolphin, first wife of Queen Anne’s prime minister, is ‘For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee.’
[88] We must not forget the boyish ‘Epitaph on Henry Martyn,’ written by Thomas Babington Macaulay in his thirteenth year (Life, by his nephew, vol. i. p. 38):
These lines reflect the impression made on Charles Grant and the other Clapham friends by Henry Martyn’s death at a time when they used his career as an argument for Great Britain doing its duty to India during the discussions in Parliament on the East India Company’s Charter of 1813.
[89] Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, and an Account of a Visit to Sherauz and Persepolis, by the late Claudius James Rich, Esq., edited (with memoir) by his widow, two vols., London, 1836.
[91] Missionary Researches in Armenia, London, 1834.
[92] It is a custom in the East to accompany travellers out of the city to bid them God speed, with the ‘khoda hafiz shuma,’ ‘may God take you into His holy keeping.’ If an Armenian, he is accompanied by the priest, who prays over him and for him with much fervour.
[93] The Nestorians and their Rituals in 1842-1844, 2 vols. London: Joseph Masters, 1852.
[94] New York, 1870, 2 vols. 12mo. Also published by John Murray, London, 1870.
[95] Mr. Rich, British Resident at Baghdad, who had laid this monumental slab, was evidently ignorant of Martyn’s Christian name.
[96] Professor W.M. Ramsay’s Historical Geography of Asia Minor, 1890.
[97] ‘Paucioribus lacrymis compositus es.’—Tac. quoted on this occasion by Sargent, Memoir of Martyn, p. 493.
[98] Her niece writes of her when she received the news of Henry Martyn’s death: ‘The circumstances of his affecting death, and my aunt’s intense sorrow, produced an ineffaceable remembrance on my own mind. I can never forget the “upper chamber” in which she took refuge from daily cares and interruptions—its view of lovely Mount’s Bay across fruit-trees and whispering white cœlibes—its perfect neatness, though with few ornaments. On the principal wall hung a large print of the Crucifixion of our Lord, usually shaded by a curtain, and at its foot (where he would have chosen to be) a portrait of Henry Martyn.’—The Church Quarterly Review for October 1881.
[99] An authoress, and member of the Gurney family, who died in April, 1816.
[100] Her Title of Honour, by Holme Lee, in which an attempt is made to tell the story of Lydia Grenfell’s life under a fictitious name, is unworthy of the subject and of the writer.
BAPTIZED FOR THE DEAD
Henry Martyn is, first of all, a spiritual force. Personally he was that to all who came in contact with him from the hour in which he gave himself to Jesus Christ. To Cambridge student and peasant alike; to Charles Simeon, his master, as to Kirke White and Sargent, Corrie and Thomason, his admiring friends; to women like Lydia Grenfell, his senior in years and experience, as to children like his cousin’s at Plymouth, and David Brown’s at Aldeen; to the rude soldiery of the Cape campaign and the East India Company’s raw recruits as to the cultured statesmen and scholars who were broadening the foundations of our Indian empire; to the caste-bound Hindu, but far more to the fanatical Arab and the Mohammedan mystic of Persia—to all he carried the witness of his saintly life and his Divine message with a simple power that always compelled attention, and often drew forth obedience and imitation. His meteor-like spirit burned and flamed as it passed across the first twelve years of the nineteenth century, from the Cam to the Fal, by Brazil and South Africa, by Calcutta and Serampore, by Patna and Cawnpore, by Bombay and Muscat, by Bushire and Shiraz and Tabreez, to the loneliness of the Armenian highlands, and the exile grave of the Turkish Tokat.
From the year in which Sargent published fragments of his Journal, and half revealed to the whole Church of Christ the personality known in its deep calling unto deep only to the few, Henry Martyn has been the companion of good men[101] and women of all the Churches, and the stimulus of the greatest workers and scholars of the century. The latest writer, the Hon. George N. Curzon, M.P., in his exhaustive work on Persia (1892), describes him as ‘this remarkable man, who impressed everyone, by his simplicity and godliness of character,’ though he ascribes the ‘effect in the short space of a year’ as much to the charm of his personality as to the character of his mission.
Perhaps the most representative of the many whom Martyn is known to have influenced was Daniel Wilson, of Islington and Calcutta. When visiting his vast diocese in 1838 and crossing the Bay of Bengal, Bishop Wilson[102] thus carefully compared the Journal with corresponding passages in his own life:
It is consoling to a poor sinner like myself, who has been placed in the full bustle of public business, to see how the soul even of a saint like H. Martyn faints and is discouraged, laments over defects of love, and finds an evil nature still struggling against the law of his mind. I remember there are similar confessions in J. Milner. It is this which explains the seventh of Romans. Henry Martyn has now been in heaven twenty-six years, having died in his thirty-second year. Dearest Corrie was born like myself in 1778, and died in 1837, aged fifty-nine, and after having been thirty-one years in India. He has been at home now a year and five months. When, where, how, I may be called hence I know not. The Lord make me a follower of them who through faith and patience have inherited the promises. In H. Martyn’s Journals the spirit of prayer, the time he devoted to the duty, and his fervour in it, are the first things which strike me. In the next place, his delight in Holy Scripture, his meditations in it, the large portions he committed to memory, the nourishment he thence derived to his soul, are full of instruction. Then his humility is quite undoubted, unfeigned, profound, sincere. There seems, however, to have been a touch of natural melancholy and depression, which was increased by one of his greatest mistakes, the leaving England with his affections tied to Lydia Grenfell, whom he ought either not to have loved or else to have married and taken her with him. Such an ecstatic, warm creature as Henry Martyn could do nothing by halves. Separation was martyrdom to such a tender heart. But, oh, to imitate his excellences, his elevation of piety, his diligence, his spirituality, his superiority to the world, his love for souls, his anxiety to improve all occasions to do them good, his delight in the mystery of Christ, his heavenly temper! These, these are the secrets of the wonderful impression he made in India, joined as they were with first-rate talents, fine scholarship, habit of acquiring languages, quickness and promptitude of perception, and loftiness of imaginative powers.
Henry Martyn’s Journal holds a place of its own in the literature of mysticism. It stamps him as the mystic writer and worker of the first quarter of the century of modern missions (1792-1814), as his master, Robert Leighton, was of the more barren period that ended in 1688. The too little known Rules and Instructions for Devout Exercises, found among Leighton’s papers, written with his own hand and for his own use, was Martyn’s ‘usual’ companion, with results which made that work[103] as supplemented by the Journal, what the De Imitatione Christi and the Theologia Germanica were to the more passive dark ages of Christendom. At the close of the eighteenth century the young and impulsive Cornish student found himself in an age not less, to him, godless and anti-evangelical than that which had wrung from the heart of at least one good man the hopeless longing of the Theologia Germanica. He had seen his Divine Master crucified afresh in the person of Charles Simeon, whom he possibly, as Sargent certainly, had at first attended only to scoff and brawl. He had been denied a church in which to preach the goodness of God, in his own county, other than that of a kinsman. In the troopship and the Bengal barrack even his official authority could hardly win a hearing from officer or soldier. The young prophet waxed sore in heart, as the fire burned within him, at the unbelief and iniquity of his day, till his naturally sunny spirit scorched the souls he sought to warm with the Divine persuasiveness. He stood really at the opening of the Evangelical revival of Christendom, and like William Carey, who loved the youth, he was working out his own side of that movement, but, equally like Carey, he knew it not. He was to do as much by his death as by his life, but all he knew in his humility was that he must make haste while he lived to give the millions of Mohammedans the Word, and to reveal to them the Person of Jesus Christ. The multitude of his thoughts within him he committed to a Journal, written for himself alone, and rescued from burning only by the interference of his friend Corrie.
The mysticism of Martyn has been pronounced morbid. All the more that his searching introspection and severe judgment on himself are a contrast to the genial and merry conversation of the man who loved music and children’s play, the converse of friends and the conflict of controversy for the Lord, does every reader who knows his own heart value the vivisection. Martyn writes of sin and human nature as they are, and therefore he is clear and comforting in the answer he gives as to the remedy for the one and the permanent elevation of the other. Even more than Leighton he is the Evangelical saint, for where Leighton’s times paralysed him for service, Martyn’s called him to energise and die in the conflict with the greatest apostacy of the world. Both had a passion to win souls to the entrancing, transforming love they had found, but unless on the side against the Stewarts, how could that passion bear fruit in action? Both, like the author of the De Imitatione, wrote steeped in the spirit of sadness; but the joy of the dawn of the modern era of benevolence, as it was even then called, working unconsciously on the sunny Cornubian spirit, kept Martyn free alike from the selfish absorption which marked the monk of the Middle Ages, and the peace-loving compromise which neutralised Leighton. The one adored in his cell, the other wrestled in his study at Newbattle or Dunblane, and we love their writings. But Henry Martyn worked for his generation and all future ages as well as wrote, so that they who delight in his mystic communings are constrained to follow him in his self-sacrificing service. Beginning at March 1807, let us add some passages from the Journal to those which have been already extracted for autobiographical purposes.
I am thus taught to see what would become of me if God should let go His strong hand. Is there any depth into which Satan would not plunge me? Already I know enough of the nature of Satan’s cause to vow before God eternal enmity to it. Yes! in the name of Christ I say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’
Employed a great deal about one Hebrew text to little purpose. Much tried with temptation to vanity, but the Lord giveth me the victory through His mercy from day to day, or else I know not how I should keep out of hell.
May the Lord, in mercy to my soul, save me from setting up an idol of any sort in His room, as I do by preferring a work professedly for Him to communion with Him. How obstinate the reluctance of the natural heart to God. But, O my soul, be not deceived, the chief work on earth is to obtain sanctification, and to walk with God.
O great and gracious God, what should I do without Thee? but now Thou art manifesting Thyself as the God of all consolation to my soul. Never was I so near Thee; I stand on the brink, and I long to take my flight! Oh, there is not a thing in the world for which I would wish to live, except because it may please God to appoint me some work. And how shall my soul ever be thankful enough to Thee, O Thou most incomprehensibly glorious Saviour Jesus!
I walk according to my carnal wisdom, striving to excite seriousness by natural considerations, such as the thoughts of death and judgment, instead of bringing my soul to Christ to be sanctified by his spirit.
Preached on Luke xii. 20—‘This night thy soul,’ etc. The congregation was large, and more attentive than they have ever yet been. Some of the young officers and soldiers seemed to be in deep concern. I was willing to believe that the power of God was present, if a wretch so poor and miserable can be the instrument of good to souls. Four years have I been in the ministry, and I am not sure that I have been the means of converting four souls from the error of their ways. Why is this? The fault must be in myself. Prayer and secret duties seem to be where I fail; had I more power in intercession, more self-denial in persevering in prayer, it would be no doubt better for my hearers.
My heart sometimes shrinks from spiritual work, and especially at an increase of ministerial business; but now I hope, through grace, just at this time, that I can say I desire no carnal pleasure, no ease to the flesh, but that the whole of life should be filled up with holy employments and holy thoughts.
My heart at various times filled with a sense of Divine love, frequently in prayer was blessed in the bringing of my soul near to God. After dinner in my walk found sweet devotion; and the ruling thoughts were, that true happiness does not consist in the gratifying of self in ease or individual pleasure, but in conformity to God, in obeying and pleasing Him, in having no will of my own, in not being pleased with personal advantages, though I might be without guilt, nor in being displeased that the flesh is mortified. Oh, how short-lived will this triumph be! It is stretching out the arm at full length, which soon grows tired with its own weight.
I travel up hill, but I must learn, as I trust I am learning, to do the will of God without any expectation of any present pleasure attending it, but because it is the will of God. Oh, that my days of vanity were at an end, and that all my thoughts and conversation might have that deep tinge of seriousness which becomes a soldier of the cross.
To the women preached on the parable of the ten pieces of silver, and at night to the soldiers on Rev. i. 18. Afterwards in secret prayer drew near to the Lord. Alas! how my soul contracts a strangeness with Him; but this was a restoring season. I felt an indignation against all impure and sinful thoughts, and a solemn serenity of frame. Interceded for dear friends in England; this brought my late dear sister with pain to my recollection, but I felt relieved by resolving every event, with all its circumstances, into the will of God.
Read an account of Turkey. The bad effects of the book were so great that I found instant need of prayer, and I do not know when I have had such divine and animating feelings. Oh, it is Thy Spirit that makes me pant for the skies. It is He that shall make me trample the world and my lusts beneath my feet, and urge my onward course towards the crown of life.
Spent the day in reading and prayer, and found comfort particularly in intercession for friends, but my heart was pained with many a fear about my own soul. I felt the duty of praying for the conversion of these poor heathens, and yet no encouragement to it. How much was there of imagination before, or rather, how much of unbelief now; seeing no means ready now, no Word of God to put into their hands, no preachers, it sometimes seems to me idle to pray. Alas! wicked heart of unbelief, cannot God create means, or work without them? But I am weary of myself and my own sinfulness, and appear exceedingly odious even to myself, how much more to a holy God. Lord, pity and save; vile and contemptible is Thy sinful creature, even as a beast before Thee; help me to awake.
Some letters I received from Calcutta agitated my silly mind, because my magnificent self seemed likely to become more conspicuous. O wretched creature, where is thy place but the dust? it is good for men to trample upon thee. Various were my reveries on the events apparently approaching, and self was the prominent character in every transaction. I am yet a long way from real humility; oh, when shall I be dead to the world, and desire to be nothing and nobody, as I now do to be somebody?
Throughout the 18th enjoyed a solemn sense of Divine things. The promise was fulfilled, ‘Sin shall not have dominion over you.’ No enemy seemed permitted to approach. I sometimes saw naught in the creation but the works of God, and wondered that mean earthly concerns had ever drawn away my mind from contemplating their glorious Author. Oh, that I could be always so, seeing none but Thee, taught the secrets of Thy covenant, advancing in knowledge of Thee, growing in likeness to Thee. How much should I learn of God’s glory, were I an attentive observer of His Word and Providence. How much should I be taught of His purposes concerning His Church, did I keep my heart more pure for Him. And what gifts might I not expect to receive for her benefit, were I duly earnest to improve His grace for my own! Oh, how is a life wasted that is not spent with God and employed for God. What am I doing the greater part of my time; where is my heart?
Sabat lives almost without prayer, and this is sufficient to account for all evils that appear in saint or sinner.
I feel disposed to partake of the melancholy with which such persons (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) close their lives. Oh, what hath grace done for us! The thought sometimes bursts upon me in a way which I cannot describe. It is not future bliss, but present peace, which we have actually obtained, and which we cannot be mistaken in; the very thing which the world seeks for in vain; and yet how have we found it? By the grace of God we are what we are.
Truly love is better than knowledge. Much as I long to know what I seek after, I would rather have the smallest portion of humility and love than the knowledge of an archangel.
At night I spoke to them on ‘Enoch walked with God.’ My soul breathed after the same holy, happy state. Oh that the influence were more abiding; but I am the man that seeth his natural face in a glass.
This last short sickness has, I trust, been blessed much to me. I sought not immediately for consolations, but for grace patiently to endure and to glory in tribulation; in this way I found peace. Oh, this surely is bliss, to have our will absorbed in the Divine Will. In this state are the spirits of just men made perfect in heaven. The spread of the Gospel in these parts is now become an interesting subject to you—such is the universal change.
Perpetually assaulted with temptations, my hope and trust is that I shall yet be sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of my God. ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’ When I really strive after purity of heart—for my endeavours are too often little more than pretence—I find no consideration so effectual as that of the exalted dignity and infinitely precious privileges of the saints. Thus a few verses of 1 Eph. are more influential, purifying, and transforming than the most laboured reasoning. Indeed, there is no reasoning with such temptations, and no safety but in flight.
I would that all should adore, but especially that I myself should lie prostrate. As for self, contemptible self, I feel myself saying, Let it be forgotten for ever; henceforth let Christ live, let Christ reign, let Him be glorified for ever.
Henry Martyn, by service, escaped the weakness and the danger of the mystic who seeks absorption into God, in the mental sense, as the remedy for sin, instead of a free and purified individuality in Christ. He felt that the will sins; he saw the cure to lie not in the destruction of the will, but in its rectification and personal co-working with God. Absorption is spiritual suicide, not service. Martyn realised and taught that a free individuality is the best offering we can make to God after Christ has given it to us to offer to Him. With Martyn moral service helped spiritual contemplation to rise heavenward, and to raise men with it. The saint was also the sacred scholar and translator; the mystic was the prophet preacher, the Persian controversialist, the unresting missionary. His Christian life was guided by the motto, ‘To believe, to suffer, and to hope.’ His praying realised his own ideal of ‘a visit to the invisible world.’ His working was ever quickened like St. Paul’s by the summons, alike of the Old dispensation and the New, which he cut with a diamond on the window of his college rooms Ἕγειραι, ὁ καθεύδων, καὶ ἀνάστα, ‘Awake thou that sleepest and arise.’ When the fierce flame of his love and his service had burned out his frail body, his picture, painted at Calcutta the year before he died, spoke thus to Charles Simeon, and ever since it has whispered to every new generation of Cambridge men, ‘Be serious, be in earnest; don’t trifle—don’t trifle.’
The men whom Henry Martyn’s pioneering and early death have led to live and to die that Christ may be revealed to the Mohammedans, are not so many as the thousands who have been spiritually stimulated by his Journal. Such work is still ‘the forlorn hope’ of the Church which he was the first to lead. But in Persia and Arabia he has had such followers as Anthony Groves, John Wilson, George Maxwell Gordon, Ion Keith-Falconer, and Bishop French. Where he pointed the way the great missionary societies of the United States of America and of England and the Free Church of Scotland have sent their noblest men and women.
The death of Henry Martyn, followed not many years after by that of her husband, who had been the first to mark his grave with a memorial stone, led Mrs. James Claudius Rich, eldest daughter of Sir James Mackintosh, to appeal in 1831 for ‘contributions in aid of the school at Baghdad, and those hoped to be established in Persia and other parts of the territory of Baghdad.’ In the same year, 1829, that Alexander Duff sailed for Calcutta, there had gone forth by the Scots Mission at Astrakhan to Baghdad, that Catholic founder of the sect since known as ‘The Brethren,’ Anthony N. Groves, dentist, of Exeter. Taking the commands of Christ literally, in the spirit of Henry Martyn, he sold all he had, and became the first of Martyn’s successors in Persia. The record of his two attempts forms a romantic chapter in the history of Christian missions.[104] All theories apart, he lived and he worked for the Mohammedans of Persia in the spirit of Henry Martyn. When the plague first, and persecution the second time, extinguished this Mission to Baghdad, Dr. John Wilson,[105] from his central and commanding position in Bombay, flashed into Arabia and Persia such rays of Gospel light as were possible at that time. He sent Bible colporteurs by Aden and up the Persian Gulf; he summoned the old Church of Scotland to despatch a mission to the Jews of Arabia, Busrah, and Bombay. A missionary was ready in the person of William Burns who afterwards went to China, the support of a missionary at Aden was guaranteed by a friend, and Wilson had found a volunteer ‘for the purpose of exploring Arabia,’ when the disruption of the Church of Scotland arrested the movement, only, however, vastly to increase the missionary development in India and Africa, as well as church extension in Scotland. What John Wilson tried in vain to do during his life was effected by his death. It was his career that summoned the Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer and his wife to open their Mission in Yemen, at Sheikh Othman and Aden. Like Martyn at Tokat, in the far north, and just at Martyn’s age, by his dust in the Aden cemetery Ion Keith-Falconer has taken possession of Arabia for Christ. ‘The Memoirs of David Brainerd and Henry Martyn gave me particular pleasure,’ wrote young John Wilson in 1824. ‘Mind to get hold of the Life of John Wilson, the great Scotch missionary of India,’ wrote the young Ion Keith-Falconer in 1878.[106] So the apostolic succession goes on.
Gordon of Kandahar, ‘the pilgrim missionary of the Punjab,’ was not the least remarkable of Henry Martyn’s deliberate followers, alike in a life of toil and in a death of heroism for the Master. Born in 1839, he was of Trinity College, Cambridge, and had as his fellow-curate Thomas Valpy French, when the future bishop came back from his first missionary campaign in India. Dedicating himself, his culture, and his considerable property to the Lord, he placed his unpaid services at the disposal of the Church Missionary Society, as Martyn once did. Refusing a bishopric after his first furlough, and seeking to prepare himself for the work of French’s Divinity School of St. John at Lahore, he returned to India by Persia, to learn the language and to help Dr. Bruce for a little in 1871. The famine was sore in that land, and he lived for its people as ‘relieving officer, doctor, purveyor, poorhouse guardian, outfitter and undertaker. There is a cry like the cry of Egypt in the night of the Exodus—not a house in which there was not one dead.’ So he wrote.[107] From Julfa he carried relief to Shiraz, where he found himself in the midst of the associations made sacred by Henry Martyn’s residence there. ‘I have taken up my quarters in a Persian’s house, and have a large garden all to myself. I am in the very same house which Henry Martyn was in. I heard to-day that my host is the grandson of his host Jaffir Ali Khan, and that the house has come down from father to son.’
Eight years after Gordon was in Kandahar, sole (honorary) chaplain to the twenty regiments who were fighting the Ameer of Afghanistan. There he found the assistant to the political officer attached to the force to be the same Persian gentleman who had been his host at Shiraz, and with whom when a child Martyn must have played. Gordon learned from him that the roads and sanitary improvements made as relief works, as well as the orphanage started on the interest of the famine relief fund sent from London, were still blessing the people. When, after the black day of Maiwand, the British troops were besieged in Kandahar, till relieved by the march and the triumph of Lord Roberts, Gordon as chaplain attended a sortie to dislodge the enemy. Hearing that wounded men were lying in a shrine outside the Kabul gate, he led out some bearers with a litter, and found that the dying men were in another shrine still more distant. In spite of all remonstrance he dashed through the murderous fire of the enemy, was struck down, and was himself carried back on the litter he had provided for others. He did not live to wear the Victoria Cross, but was on the same day, August 16, laid in a soldier’s grave.
It would seem difficult to name a follower more worthy of Henry Martyn than that, but Bishop French was such a disciple. More than any man, as saint and scholar, as missionary and chaplain, as the friend of the Mohammedan and the second apostle of Central Asia, he was baptized for the dead. Born on the first day of 1825, son of an Evangelical clergyman in Burton-on-Trent, a Rugby boy, and Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford, Thomas Valpy French was early inspired by Martyn’s life and writings. These and his mother’s holiness sent him forth to Agra in 1850, along with Edward Stuart of Edinburgh, now Bishop of Waiapu, New Zealand, to found the Church Missionary College there. In the next forty years, till he resigned the bishopric of Lahore that he might give the rest of his life to work out the aspirations of Martyn in Persia and Arabia, he consecrated himself and his all to Christ. It will be a wonderful story if it is well told. He then went home for rest, first of all, but took the way north through Persia and Turkey on Martyn’s track, so that in April 1888 he wrote from Armenia: ‘Were I ignorant both of Arabic and French, I should subside into the perfect rest, perhaps, which I require.’ So abundant were his labours to groups of Mohammedans and among the Syrian Christians, that he had nearly found a grave in the Tokat region.
After counselling the Archbishop of Canterbury as to the project of so reforming the Oriental Churches as to convert them themselves into the true apostles of the Mohammedan race, Bishop French returned to Asia and settled near Muscat, whence he wrote thus on March 10, 1891, his last letter to the Church Missionary Society: