IN PERSIA—TRANSLATING THE SCRIPTURES

Great as saint and notable as scholar, in the twelve years of his young life from Senior Wrangler to martyr at thirty-one years of age, the highest title of Henry Martyn to everlasting remembrance is that he gave the Persians in their own tongue the Testament of the one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and the Hebrew Psalms. By that work, the fruit of which every successive century will reveal till the consummation of the ages, he unconsciously wrote his name beside those of the greatest missionaries in the history of the Church of Christ, the sacred scholars who were the first to give the master races of Asia and Africa, of Europe and America, the Word of God in their vernaculars. Let us write the golden list, which for modern Africa and Oceania also we might inscribe in letters of silver,[66] were not most of the translators still living and perfecting their at first tentative efforts, which time must try:

It was David Brown who was wont to call the Bible ‘The Great Missionary which would speak in all tongues the wonderful works of God.’

From first to last and above all Henry Martyn was a philologist. His school and college honours sprang from the root of all linguistic studies, Greek and Latin, in which he was twice appointed public examiner in his college and the University of Cambridge. For the uncritical time in which he lived, and the generations which followed his to the present, he was an enthusiastic and accomplished Hebraist. No young scholar in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was so well equipped for translating the Bible by a knowledge of its two original languages. True, he was the Senior Wrangler of the year 1801, but to him the honour was a ‘shadow,’ because the mathematical sciences could do nothing for him as a translator and preacher of the words of righteousness, compared with the linguistic. Only once, when the rapture of his holy work had carried him away to the borderland of a dark metaphysical theology, did he record the passing regret that he had abandoned the rationalistic ground of mathematical certainty. His devotion to the study of the languages which interpret and apply to the races of India, Arabia, and Persia, the books of the Christian Revelation, was so absorbing as to shorten his career. Like Carey, he never knew an idle moment, even when on shipboard, and he jealously guarded his time from correspondence, other than that with Lydia Grenfell, Brown and Corrie, that he might live to finish the Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic New Testaments at least. The spiritual motive it was, the desire to win every man to Christ, that urged his unresting course, and in the sacred toil he had the reflex joy of being himself won nearer and nearer by the Spirit.

On the other hand, he was ever on the watch against the deadening influence of routine or one-sided study. ‘So constantly engaged with outward works of translation of languages that I fear my inward man has declined in spirituality.’

Canon Edmonds expresses the experience of the present writer in the remark,[67] that to read Martyn’s Journal with the single object of noticing this point is to discover another Martyn, not a saint only, but a grammarian. ‘He read grammars as other men read novels, and to him they were more entertaining than novels.’ So early as September 28, 1804, in Cambridge we find him at prayer after dinner, before visiting Wall’s Lane, and then on his return finishing the Bengali Grammar which he had begun the day before. ‘I am anxious to get Carey’s Bengali New Testament,’ which could not long have reached London. Five days after, Thomas À Kempis, followed by hymns and the writing of a sermon, seemed but the preliminary to his Hindustani as well as Bengali studies. ‘Engaged all the rest of the morning by Gilchrist’s Hindustani Dictionary. After dinner began Halhed’s Bengali Grammar, for I found that the other grammar I had been reading was only for the corrupted Hindustani.’ The first traces of his Persian and Arabic studies have an interest all their own:

When fairly at work in Dinapore he wrote almost daily such passages in his Journal as these:

On reaching Calcutta in 1806 Martyn found this to be the position of the Bible translation work. Carey’s early labours had led to the formation of the other English and Scottish Missionary Societies at the close of the last century. By 1803 his experience and that of his colleagues had enabled them, with the encouragement of Brown and Buchanan, to formulate a magnificent plan for translating the Bible into all the languages of the far East. The Marquis Wellesley, though Governor-General, approved, and his College at Fort William, with its staff of learned men, including Carey himself and many Asiatics, had become a school of interpreters. In 1804, after all this, the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded, under the ex-Governor-General, Lord Teignmouth, as its first president. That Society, leaving India to the Serampore Brotherhood, at once directed its attention to the three hundred millions of Chinese, who also could be reached only through the East India Company. But, until six years after, when Dr. Marshman made the first reliable translation of the Bible into the language, in its Mandarin dialect, there was no Chinese translation save an anonymous MS. of a large portion of the New Testament in the British Museum, probably of Roman Catholic origin. At that time the infant Society did not see its way to spend two thousand guineas in producing an edition of a thousand copies of a work about which the few experts differed. So, while giving grants to the Serampore translators, it invited the opinions, as to the formation of a corresponding committee in Calcutta, of George Udny, who had by that time become Member of Council, and the Rev. Messrs. Brown, Buchanan, Carey, Ward, and Marshman. The Serampore plan and its rapid execution had been communicated to all the principal civil and military officials, who, after Lord Wellesley’s tolerant and reverent action, subscribed liberally to carry it out, and the Society continued its grants. But when in 1807, under Lord Minto, the anti-Christian reaction set in, caused by a groundless panic as to the Vellore Mutiny, and the Fort William College was reduced, Dr. Buchanan proposed to found ‘The Christian Institution,’ the Society preferred its original plan of a corresponding committee, which was formed in August 1809.

Martyn had not waited one hour for this. Almost from the day of landing at the capital he was engaged in Hindustani translation, and in studious preparation for his projected Persian and Arabic Bibles. In the brotherly intercourse at Aldeen with the Serampore missionaries it was arranged to leave these three languages entirely to him, under the direction of Mr. Brown. Part of the Society’s annual grant to India and Ceylon of a thousand pounds a year was assigned to pay his assistants, Mirza Fitrut, the Persian, and Nathanael Sabat, the Arabian, and to print the results. The Corresponding Committee caused an annual sermon to be preached in Calcutta, to rouse public intelligence and help. On the first day of 1810 Mr. Brown preached it in the old church, in the interest chiefly of the thousands of native Christians who had been baptized in Tanjor and Tinnevelli, both Reformed and Romanist, and needed copies of the Tamul Bible. Such was the result of this appeal, headed by the Commander-in-chief, General Hewett, with the sum of 2,000 Sicca-rupees (250l.), that the committee resolved on establishing a ‘Bibliotheca Biblica,’ combining a Bible Repository and a Translation Library. The Scottish poet and friend of Sir Walter Scott, Dr. Leyden, was foremost in the enterprise, and took charge of work in the languages of Siam and the Spice Islands, as well as in the Pushtu of Afghanistan.

On the first day of 1811 it fell to the Rev. Henry Martyn to preach the second annual sermon.[68] His appeal was for not only the growing native Church of India, but more particularly for the whole number of nominal Christians, of all sects, in India and Ceylon, whom he estimated at 900,000.[69] In 1881 the Government census returned these, in the Greater India of our day but without Ceylon, as upwards of 2,000,000, and in 1891 as 2,280,549. Martyn’s figures included 342,000 of the Singhalese, whom the Dutch had compelled by secular considerations outwardly to conform. The sermon, on Galatians vi. 10, was published at the time, and it appears as the last in the volume of Twenty Sermons by the late Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D.,[70] first printed at Calcutta with this passage in the preface: ‘The desire to know how such a man preached is natural and unavoidable.... His manner in the pulpit was distinguished by a holy solemnity, always suited to the high message which he was delivering, and accompanied by an unction which made its way to the hearts of his audience. With this was combined a fidelity at once forcible by its justice and intrepidity, and penetrating by its affection. There was, in short, a power of holy love and disinterested earnestness in his addresses which commended itself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.’

Addressing the well-paid servants of the East India Company in Calcutta, and its prosperous merchants and shopkeepers, the preacher said: ‘Do we not blush at the offers of assistance from home ... where all that is raised may be employed with such effect in benefiting the other three quarters of the globe? Asia must be our care; or, if not Asia, India at least must look to none but us. Honour calls as well as duty.’ He then continued:

The brief decade of Henry Martyn’s working life fell at a time when the science of Comparative Philology was as yet unborn, but the materials were almost ready for generalisation. Sir William Jones, and still more his successor as a scholar—Henry Thomas Colebrooke—had used their opportunities in India well. The Bengal Asiatic Society, in its Asiatic Researches, was laboriously piling up facts and speculations. These awaited only the flash of hardworking genius to evolve the order and the laws which have made Comparative Grammar the most fruitful of the historical and psychological sciences. It might have been Martyn’s, had he lived to reach England, to manifest that genius. His Asiatic career was contemporary with the most fruitful part of Colebrooke’s. He toiled and he speculated, as he mastered the grammar and much of the vocabulary of the great classical and vernacular languages which made him a seven-tongued man. But his divine motive led him to grope for the philological solvent through the imperfect Semitic. The Germans, Schlegel and Bopp, found it rather, and later, in the richer Aryan or Indo-European family, in Sanskrit and old Persian.

His longing to give the Arabs the Scriptures in their purity intensified his devotion to the study of Hebrew; had he lived to give himself to the Persian, he might have anticipated the German critics who used, at second-hand, the materials that he and Colebrooke, and other servants of the East India Company, were annually accumulating. Nor did his Hebraism lead him, at the beginning of the century, to that fertile criticism of the text and the literary origin of the books of the Old Testament which, at the end of the century, is beginning to make the inspired historians and the prophets, the psalmists and the moralists of the old Jews live anew for the modern Church. But how true has proved his prediction to Corrie in the year 1809:

Again in 1810:

Again in 1811, when at Bombay:

Henry Martyn’s first practical work was in Hindustani. His position in Dinapore and Patna, the capital of Bihar with its Hindi dialects, his duties to the native wives and families of the soldiers whom he taught and exhorted, his preaching to the Hindus and discussions with the Mohammedans, all led him to prepare three works—(1) portions of the Book of Common Prayer, which Corrie finished and published seventeen years after his death; (2) a Commentary on the Parables, in 1807; (3) the Four Gospels in 1809, and in 1810 the whole New Testament. Let us look at him in his spiritual and scholarly workshop.

Completed in 1810, Martyn’s Hindustani New Testament for Mohammedans was passing through the Serampore press when the great fire of March 11, 1812, destroyed all the sheets save the first thirteen chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, and melted the fount of Persian type. The Corresponding Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society, for which it had been prepared, put it to press the second time at Serampore, from finer type, and it appeared in 1814 in an edition of 2,000 copies, on English paper. The demand for portions for immediate use was such that 3,000 copies of the Gospels and Acts, on Patna paper, had been previously struck off. The longing translator—who had once written, ‘Oh, may I have the bliss of soon seeing the New Testament in Hindustani and Persian!’—had then been two years dead, but verily his works followed him. Such was the reputation of the version that it was read in the native schools at Agra and elsewhere; while an edition of 2,000 copies in the Deva-Nagri character, for Hindus, appeared in 1817, and was used up till a Hindi version was prepared from it by Mr. Bowley, the zealous agent of the Church Missionary Society at Chunar, by divesting it of the Persian and Arabic terms. Bishop Corrie’s revision of this work and portions of the Old Testament were circulated in many editions and extending numbers, in the Kaithi character also, among the millions of Hindus who speak the most widespread of Indian languages with many dialects. The Bible Society in London welcomed Martyn’s work, of which Professor Lee prepared a large edition. Learning that the lamented scholar had done some work on the Old Testament in Hindustani, and had taught Mirza Fitrut Hebrew, to enable that able moonshi to carry on the translation from the original, the Society first published Genesis in Hindustani, under Professor Lee’s care, in 1817, and then issued a revision of the rough draft of the entire version of the Old Testament, by Bishop Corrie and Mr. Thomason. In 1843 Mr. SchÜrmann, of the London Missionary Society, and Mr. Justice Hawkins, an elder of the Free Church of Scotland and an accomplished Bengal civilian, issued a uniform revision of the Old and New Testaments in the Arabic and Roman characters, in the course of which Mr. SchÜrmann ‘saw reason to revert in a great measure to the translation of Henry Martyn, especially in the latter half of the version.’[71] Of the different translations of the Bible into Hindustani, the Oordoo or ‘camp’ language understood by the sixty millions of Mussulmans in India, this criticism is just: ‘the idiomatic and faithful version of Henry Martyn still maintains its ground, although, from the lofty elegance of its style, it is better understood by educated than by illiterate Mohammedans.’[72]

In the first generation, from 1814 to 1847, after the appearance of Henry Martyn’s work, sixteen editions[73] of the Hindustani New Testament were published and sent into circulation among the then fifty millions of Mussulmans in India. Before Martyn’s work was printed, he and Corrie used to dictate to inquirers translations of Bible passages suited to their needs. When Corrie was at Chunar, he tells us, because ‘there was not at that time any translation of the Scriptures to put into his hands, a native Roman Catholic took down the translated texts on loose pieces of paper.’ Years after, Mr. Wilkinson, of Gorakpore, was called to visit the man on his death-bed, and found him so well acquainted with Scripture that he asked an explanation. ‘The poor man produced the loose slips of paper on which he had written my translations,’ says Corrie. ‘On these, it appeared, his soul had fed through life, and through them he died such a death that Mr. Wilkinson entertained no doubt of his having passed into glory.’ In the forty years since the sixteen editions made the Word of God known to thousands of India Mussulmans, the Oordoo Bible has caused the Word to grow mightily, and in many cases to prevail.

The entire Bible in Hindustani was again revised, by Dr. R.C. Mather, after many years’ experience in Benares and Mirzapore, and was published, in both the Arabic and Roman characters, in 1869, after continuous labour for more than six years. He stumbled, in the library of the British and Foreign Bible Society, on sixteen manuscript volumes of a Hindustani translation of nearly the whole Old Testament, beginning with Martyn’s Genesis. The folios were interleaved, and on the blank pages were thousands of notes in English. At the end of the Pentateuch the copyist records that ‘the above has been completed, by order of Paymaster Sherwood, for the Rev. Daniel Corrie, by me, MÁkhdum Buksh.’ The copy seems to have been the accomplished Thomason’s, and to have been deposited in the library by his widow after his death at Port Louis, Mauritius. This practically complete translation of the Old Testament had been lost for forty years. The eulogy passed by Thomason on Martyn’s Hindustani New Testament, that it ‘will last as a model of elegant writing as well as of faithful translation,’ is pronounced by Dr. Mather,[74] after all that time, as, ‘in the main, just; the work has lasted and continued to be acceptable, and will perhaps always continue to be useful. All subsequent translators have, as a matter of course, proceeded upon it as a work of excellent skill and learning, and rigid fidelity.’

The modern Arabic translation of the New Testament, by Martyn and Sabat, was not printed (in Calcutta) till 1816, and the translation of the Old Testament was continued under the supervision of Mr. Thomason, who became virtually Martyn’s literary executor, and whose labours as Oriental translator and editor hurried him, like his friend, to a premature death. Both had the same biographer—the good Sargent, Rector of Lavington. As Thomason toiled at the Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani editions, he wrote: ‘I am filled with astonishment at the opening scenes of usefulness. Send us labourers—send us faithful laborious labourers!’[75] Martyn’s Arabic New Testament, produced with the assistance of an undoubtedly learned Arab, as conceited and of temper as intolerable as Sabat, did its work among the ‘learned and fastidious’ Mohammedans for whom chiefly it was prepared. Professor Lee issued a second edition in London, and Mr. Thomason a third in Calcutta. In common with the old translations, made for the land in which St. Paul began the first missionary work, and reproduced in various Polyglot Bibles, it has been superseded by the wonderfully perfect and altogether beautiful Arabic Bible (Beirut) of Dr. Eli Smith and Dr. Van Dyck, on which these American scholars, assisted by learned natives of Syria and Cairo, were occupied for nearly thirty years. In the Beirut Arabic Scriptures, Henry Martyn’s troubled life with Sabat found early and luxuriant fruit. How wisely and humbly the missionary chaplain of the East India Company estimated his own, and especially his Arabic, translations, and how at the same time he longed to live that he might do in 1812-20 what Eli Smith and Van Dyck did in 1837-65, may be seen from these early letters and journals:

The King sent His eager servant to Persia, and did not give him the desire of his heart to enter Arabia. Truly he hastened so unrestingly that the Spirit of God led him to complete the Persian New Testament, and then carried him away from the many tongues of mortal men, which as they sprang from disunion, so they are to ‘cease’ in the one speech of the multitudes of every nation and kindred and tribe and tongue who sing the new song.

The following letter to Charles Simeon, the original of which was presented by his biographer, Canon Carus, to Canon Moor, who permits it to be published here for the first time, fitly introduces Henry Martyn’s translation used in Persia. Simeon received it on January 21, 1812, and thus wrote of it to Thomason:

He had just before written this pathetic letter, of exquisite friendliness:

To the Rev. D. Corrie

Shiraz: December 12, 1811.

Dearest Brother,—Your letters of January 28 and April 22 have just reached me. After being a whole year without any tidings of you, you may conceive how much they have tended to revive my spirits. Indeed, I know not how to be sufficiently thankful to our God and Father for giving me a brother who is indeed a brother to my soul, and thus follows me with affectionate prayers wherever I go, and more than supplies my place to the precious flock over whom the Holy Ghost hath made us overseers. There is only one thing in your letters that makes me uneasy, and that is, the oppression you complain of in the hot weather. As you will have to pass another hot season at Cawnpore, and I do not know how many more, I must again urge you to spare yourself. I am endeavouring to learn the true use of time in a new way, by placing myself in idea twenty or thirty years in advance, and then considering how I ought to have managed twenty or thirty years ago. In racing violently for a year or two, and then breaking down? In this way I have reasoned myself into contentment about staying so long at Shiraz. I thought at first, what will the Government in India think of my being away so long, or what will my friends think? Shall I not appear to all a wandering shepherd, leaving the flock and running about for my own pleasure! But placing myself twenty years on in time, I say, Why could not I stay at Shiraz long enough to get a New Testament done there, even if I had been detained there on that account three or six years? What work of equal importance can ever come from me? So that now I am resolved to wait here till the New Testament is finished, though I incur the displeasure of Government, or even be dismissed the service. I have been many times on the eve of my departure, as my translator promised to accompany me to Baghdad, but that city being in great confusion he is afraid to trust himself there; so I resolved to go westward through the north of Persia, but found it impossible, on account of the snow which blocks up the roads in winter, to proceed till spring. Here I am therefore, for three months more; our Testament will be finished, please God, in six weeks. I go on as usual, riding round the walls in the morning, and singing hymns at night over my milk and water, for tea I have none, though I much want it. I am with you in spirit almost every evening, and feel a bliss I cannot describe in being one with the dear saints of God all over the earth, through one Lord and one Spirit.

They continued throwing stones at me every day, till happening one day to tell Jaffir Ali Khan, my host, how one as big as my fist had hit me in the back, he wrote to the Governor, who sent an order to all the gates, that if any one insulted me he should be bastinadoed, and the next day came himself in state to pay me a visit. These measures have had the desired effect; they now call me the Feringhi Nabob, and very civilly offer me the kalean; but indeed the Persian commonalty are very brutes; the Soofis declare themselves unable to account for the fierceness of their countrymen, except it be from the influence of Islam. After speaking in my praise one of them added ‘and there are the Hindus too (who have brought the guns), when I saw their gentleness I was quite charmed with them; but as for our Iranees, they delight in nothing but tormenting their fellow creatures.’ These Soofis are quite the Methodists of the East. They delight in everything Christian, except in being exclusive. They consider that all will finally return to God, from whom they emanated, or rather of whom they are only different forms. The doctrine of the Trinity they admired, but not the atonement, because the Mohammedans, they say, consider Imam Husain as also crucified for the sins of men; and to everything Mohammedan they have a particular aversion. Yet withal they conform externally. From these, however, you will perceive the first Persian Church will be formed, judging after the manner of men. The employment of my leisure hours is translating the Psalms into Persian. What will poor Fitrut do when he gets to the poetical books? Job, I hope, you have let him pass over. The Books of Solomon are also in a very sorry condition in the English. The Prophets are all much easier, and consequently better done. I hear there is a man at Yezd that has fallen into the same way of thinking as myself about the letters, and professes to have found out all the arts and sciences from them. I should be glad to compare notes with him. It is now time for me to bid you good night. We have had ice on the pools some time, but no snow yet. They build their houses without chimneys, so if we want a fire we must take the smoke along with it. I prefer wrapping myself in my sheepskin.

Your accounts of the progress of the kingdom of God among you are truly refreshing. Tell dear H. and the men of both regiments that I salute them much in the Lord, and make mention of them in my prayers. May I continue to hear thus of their state, and if I am spared to see them again, may we make it evident that we have grown in grace. Affectionate remembrances to your sister and Sherwoods; I hope they continue to prosecute their labours of love. Remember me to the people of Cawnpore who inquire, etc. Why have not I mentioned Col. P.? It is not because he is not in my heart, for there is hardly a man in the world whom I love and honour more. My most Christian salutations to him.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, dearest brother. Yours affectionately,

H. Martyn.