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:

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.

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 ??e??a?, ? ?a?e?d??, ?a? ???sta, ‘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:

Those three years of Arab study will not, I trust, be thrown away and proved futile. In memory of H. Martyn’s pleadings for Arabia, Arabs, and the Arabic, I seem almost trying at least to follow more directly in his footsteps and under his guidance, than even in Persia or India, however incalculable the distance at which the guided one follows the leader!...

I have scarcely expressed in the least degree the view I have of the extremely serious character of the work here to be entered upon; and the possible—nay probable—severity of the conflict to be expected and faithfully hazarded by the Church of Christ between two such strong and ancient forces, pledged to such hereditary and deep-grounded hostility. Yet The Lamb shall overcome them; for He is Lord of Lords, and King of Kings; and they also shall overcome that are with Him, called and chosen and faithful.