Pioneers and Founders / or, Recent Workers in the Mission field

by Charlotte M. Yonge

CHAPTER II. DAVID BRAINERD, THE ENTHUSIAST.

The Indian pastor of Natick, who had been trained by Mr. Eliot, died in 1716, and two years later was born one of the men who did all in his power, through his brief life, to hold up the light of truth to the unfortunate natives of America, as they were driven further and further to the west before the advancing tide from Europe.

The fourth son among nine children, who lost both parents at a very early age, David Brainerd, though born above the reach of want, had many disadvantages to contend with. Both his parents had, however, been religious people, the children of ministers who had come out to America in the days of the Pilgrim Fathers, and settling at Haddam in Connecticut, trained up their families in the stern, earnest, and rigid rules and doctrines of Calvinism, which certainly, where they are accepted by an earnest and thoughtful mind, have a great tendency to stimulate the intellect, and force forward, as it were, the religious perceptions in early youth. David was, moreover, a delicate child, with the seeds of (probably) hereditary decline incipient, and at seven or eight years old he drew apart from play, thinking much of death, and trying to prepare by prayer and meditation. His parents’ death increased these feelings, and while living at East Haddam, under the charge of his brothers, and employed

in farm work, the boy was continually struggling with himself in silence, disliking all youthful mirth and amusement, fasting, watching and praying, and groaning over the state of his soul. At nineteen, the wish to become a minister came upon him, and he began to study hard at all spare moments; and in another year, at twenty, he went to reside with Mr. Fiske, the minister of Haddam, and in him found, for the first time, a friend to whom he could open his heart, who could understand the anxieties and longings within him, and who gave him advice to withdraw himself from the young companions whose gay spirits were uncongenial to him, and spend more time with the graver and more religious.

Whether this were good advice we do not know, but a period of terrible agony had to be struggled through. It seems plain, from comparison of different lives, that in the forms of religion which make everything depend upon the individual person’s own consciousness of the state of his heart and feelings, instead of supporting this by any outward tokens for faith to rest upon, the more humble and scrupulous spirits often undergo fearful misery before they can attain to such security of their own faith as they believe essential. Indeed, this state of wretchedness is almost deemed a necessary stage in the Christian life, like the Slough of Despond in the Pilgrim’s Progress; and with such a temperament as David Brainerd’s, the horrors of the struggle for hope were dreadful and lasted for months, before an almost physical perception of light, glory, and grace shone out upon him, although, even to the end of his life, hope and fear, spiritual joy and depression alternated, no doubt, greatly in consequence of his constant ill-health.

In 1739, in his twenty-first year, he became a student at Yale, and, between hard work and his mental self-reproach for the worldly ambition of distinction, his health broke down, hæmorrhage from the lungs set in, and he was sent home, it was supposed, only to die. He was then in a very happy frame of mind, and was almost sorry to find himself well enough to return to what he felt to be a scene of temptation. That same year, his head was entirely turned by the excitement of George Whitfield’s preaching; he was carried away by religious enthusiasm, and was in a state of indiscreet zeal, of which his better judgment afterwards repented, so that he

destroyed all the portion of his journal that related to that year. Indeed, his vehemence cost him dear, for, in the heat of a discussion, he had the misfortune to say, “Mr. Whittlesey, he has no more grace than this chair I am leaning upon.” Mr. Whittlesey was one of the college tutors, and a gossiping freshman who overheard the words thought proper to report this to a meddling woman, who immediately walked off to the Rector of the college with the awful intelligence that young Brainerd said that Mr. Whittlesey had no more grace than a chair!

The Rector had not the sense to silence the silly slander; he sent for the freshman, took his evidence, and that of the young men with whom Brainerd had been conversing, and then required him to make public confession and amends to Mr. Whittlesey before the whole assembled college,—a humiliation never previously required, except in cases of gross moral misconduct. The fact was, that the old-fashioned hereditary Presbyterianism, which had had time to slacken in the hundred years since the foundation of the colony, was dismayed at the new and vivid life imported by Whitfield from the Wesleyan revival in the English Church. It was what always happens. A mixture of genuine sober-minded dread of extravagance, or new doctrine, and a sluggish distaste to the more searching religion, combine to lead to a spirit of persecution. This was the true reason that the lad’s youthful rashness of speech was treated as so grave an offence. Brainerd’s spirit was up. Probably he saw no cause to alter his opinion as to Mr. Whittlesey’s amount of grace, and he stoutly refused to retract his words, whereupon he was found guilty of insubordination, and actually expelled from Yale. A council of ministers who assembled at Hartford petitioned for his restoration, but were refused, the authorities deeming themselves well rid of a dangerous fanatic.

Still, as a youth of blameless life and ardent piety, he was encouraged by his friends to continue his preparation for the ministry, and he persisted in reading hard, and going out between whiles to meditate in the depths of the glorious woods. It is curious that while his homely and rigid system precluded any conscious admiration of the beauties of nature, it is always evident from his journal that the lightenings of hope and joy which relieved his too frequent depression and melancholy,

were connected with the scenery and the glories of day and night. Sunrise and the aurora borealis seem to have filled him with spiritual bliss, and he never was so happy as when deep in the woods, out of the sight of men; but his morbid, sensitive, excitable nature never seems to have been understood by himself or by others.

Just as John Eliot’s missionary zeal was the outcome of the earnestness that carried the Puritans to New England, so the fresh infusion of religious life, brought by Whitfield, produced an ardent desire on the part of David Brainerd to devote himself to the remainder of the Indians; and in the year 1742, at twenty-five years old, he was examined by an assembly of ministers at Danbury, and licensed to preach the Gospel, when he began at once with a little settlement of Indians at Kent, with such a sinking of heart at his own unworthiness that he says he seemed to himself worse than any devil, and almost expected to have been stoned rather than listened to. Indeed, something of this diffidence and sadness seems always to have weighed him down when he began to preach, though the fervour of his subject and the responding faces of his audience always exhilarated him and bore him up through his sermon. To learn the Indian language had not occurred to him as part of his preparation, but probably these Kent Red men had been enough among the English to understand him, for they seem to have been much impressed.

A Scottish Society for propagating Christian Knowledge had arisen, and the delegates hearing of the zeal of David Brainerd, desired to engage him at a salary. The sense of his own unworthiness, and fear of keeping out a better man, brought his spirits down to the lowest ebb; nevertheless, he went to meet the representatives of the Society at New York, and there, though between the hubbub of the town and his own perpetual self-condemnation he was continually wretched, they were so well satisfied with him as to give him the appointment, on condition that he studied the language, intending to send him to the Red men between the Susquehanna and the Delaware; but there was a dispute between these and the Government, and it was decided to send him to a settlement called Kanaumeek, between Stockbridge and Albany.

Before going, David Brainerd, having no thought beyond devotion to the Indians, and thinking his allowance enough

for his wants, gave up the whole of his inheritance to support a scholar at the University, and set forth, undaunted by such weakness of health as in ordinary eyes would have fitted him for nothing but to be carefully nursed; for even then he was continually suffering from pain and dizziness, and weakness so great that he could often hardly stand.

In this state he arrived at Kanaumeek, with a young Indian to act as his interpreter, and there spent the first night sleeping on a heap of straw. It was a lonely, melancholy spot, where the Indians were herded together, watched with jealous eyes by adventurers who were always endeavouring to seize their lands, and sadly degenerated from the free, grave, high-spirited men to whom Eliot had preached. His first lodging was in the log house of a poor Scotchman who lived among the Indians—a single chamber, without so much as a floor, and where he shared the family meals upon porridge, boiled corn, and girdle-cakes. The family spoke Gaelic, only the master of the house knowing any English, and that not so good as the Indian interpreter’s; and, moreover, the spot was a mile and a half from the Indian wigwams, no small consideration to so weakly a man, thus poorly fed. However, the Indians were pleased with his addresses, and seemed touched by them; but the evil habits of the White men were the terrible stumbling-block. Parties of them would come into the town, and vex the missionary’s ears with their foul tongues, making a scandalous contrast to the grave, calm manners of the Indians. More than ever did he love solitude, and when with his own hands he had built himself a log hut, where he could be alone when he pleased, his relief was great.

He was not the highly educated scholar and practical theorist that his predecessor had been: he seems to have had no plans or systems, and merely to have tried to fulfil immediate needs; but he soon found that he could not hope to benefit his Red flock without a school, so he made a journey to New Jersey to entreat for means to set one up, and this was done, with his interpreter as master. His journey was made on horseback, and was no small undertaking, for even between Stockbridge and Kanaumeek he had once lost his way, and had to sleep a night in the woods.

He had by this time thoroughly repented of the uncharitableness and hastiness of his speech about Mr. Whittlesey, and

he took a journey to New Haven to send in a thoroughly humble and Christian-like apology, requesting to be permitted to take his degree. Twice he was refused, and the third time was told that the only condition on which the degree would be granted would be the making up his term of residence at Yale, which was, of course, not possible to a licensed minister in full employment, and in fact was an insulting proposal to a man of his standing and character.

His journey cost him dear, for as he was riding home he was attacked with violent pain in the face and shiverings, which forced him to halt at the first shelter he could find, happily with kind friends, who nursed him for a fortnight before he could return home. He believed that had his illness seized him in his log house at home, he must certainly have died for want of care and attendance, although he was much beloved by his poor Indians.

His life was indeed a frightfully hard one, and would have been so for a healthy man; for he had to work with his own hands to store provisions for his horse in the winter, and that when weak and suffering the more for want of proper food. He could get no bread but by riding ten or fifteen miles to procure it, and if he brought home too much it became mouldy and sour, while, if he brought home a small quantity, he could not go for more if he failed to catch his horse, which was turned out to graze in the woods; so that he was reduced to making little cakes of Indian meal, which he fried in the ashes. “And then,” he says, “I blessed God as if I had been a king.” “I have a house and many of the comforts of life to support me,” he says with great satisfaction; and the solitude of that house was so precious to him that, however weary he was, he would ride back twenty miles to it at night rather than spend an evening among ungodly men. By this terrible stinting of what we should deem the necessaries of life, he was actually able, in fifteen months, to devote a hundred pounds to charitable purposes, besides keeping the young man at the University.

So much, however, did he love his solitude, that he counted it as no relief, but an affliction, to have to ride to Stockbridge from time to time to learn the Indian language from Mr. Sergeant, the missionary there stationed. Something of this must have been morbid feeling, something from the want of energy consequent on the condition of his frame. For a man

in confirmed decline such an entry in a journal as this is no trifle:—“December 20.—Rode to Stockbridge. Was very much fatigued with my journey, wherein I underwent great hardship; was much exposed, and very wet by falling into a river.” Mr. Sergeant could hardly have been profane company, but Brainerd never enjoyed these visits, thinking that intercourse with the world made him less familiar with heaven.

Another inconvenience was the proximity of Kanaumeek to the frontier, and these were the days of that horrid war between England and France in America, when the native allies of each nation made savage descents on the outlying settlements, inflicting all the flagrant outrages of their wild warfare. A message came one evening to Kanaumeek from Colonel Stoddart, warning all in exposed situations to secure themselves as well as possible, since an attack might come at any moment; and this Brainerd quietly records as a salutary warning not to attach himself too much to the comforts of life he enjoyed.

The attack was never made, but he came to the conclusion that his small congregation of Indians would be much better with their fellows at Stockbridge under the care of Mr. Sergeant, and that this would leave him free to go to more wild and untaught tribes. It was carried out, and the Indians removed. There was much mutual love between them and their pastor, and the parting was very affectionate, though even after two years he was still unable to speak the language, and never seems to have troubled himself about this trifling obstacle. Several English congregations entreated him to become their minister, but he refused them all, and went to meet the Commissioners of the Scottish Society at New Jersey. They arranged with him for a mission to the Delaware Indians, in spite of his being laid up for some days at the time; and when he went back to Kanaumeek to dispose of his books and other “comforts,” the effects of being drenched with rain showed themselves in continued bleeding from the lungs. He knew that he was often in an almost dying state, and only wished to continue in his Master’s service to the end he longed for. He owns that his heart did sometimes sink at the thought of going alone into the wilderness; but he thought of Abraham, and took courage, riding alone through the depths of the forest, so desolate and lonely day after day, that it struck terror even into his soul. There were scanty settlements of Dutch and Irish, where he sometimes

spent a night, but the Sunday he passed among some Irish was so entirely unmarked by them, that he felt like a “creature banished from the sight of God.”

At last he reached his destination on the fork of the river Delaware, and being within moderate distance of Newark, there received ordination as a minister on the 11th of June, 1744. Severe illness followed the exertion of preaching and praying before the convened ministers; but as soon as he could walk, he set forth on his return, though he was so weak that he could hardly open his numbed hand, but his heart and hopes had begun to revive, and the little settlement of Whites with whom he lived were willing to listen to him.

The Indians were in the midst of preparing for an idolatrous feast and dance. Brainerd spent a day in the woods in an anguish of prayer, and then went to the place of meeting, where, stranger as he was, he prevailed on them to cease their revels and attend to him.

His biographer, President Jonathan Edwards, provokingly leaves out his method of teaching, “for the sake of brevity,” and from his own diary little is to be gathered but accounts of his state of feeling through endless journeyings and terrible prostrations of strength. He was always travelling about—now to the Susquehanna, now back to New England—apparently at times with the restlessness of disease, for this roving about must have prevented him from ever deepening the impression made by his preaching, which after all was only through an interpreter, for he never gave himself time to learn the language.

Yet after some months he did find a settlement of Indians, about eighty miles from the fork of Delaware, at a place called Crossweeksung, who were far more disposed to attend to him. They listened so eagerly, that day after day they would travel after him from village to village, hardly taking any heed to secure provisions for themselves. The description of their conduct is like that of those touched by Wesleyan preaching. They threw themselves on the ground, wept bitterly, and prayed aloud, with the general enthusiasm of excitement, though, he expressly says, without fainting or convulsions, and even the White men around, who came to scoff, were deeply impressed.

David Brainerd had at last his hour of bliss! He was delivered from his melancholy by the joy of such results, and in trembling

happiness baptized his converts in the river beside their wigwams before leaving them to proceed to a village on the Susquehanna, where he hoped for an interview with the chief Sachem of the Delawares.

The place, however, was in the wildest confusion and uproar, it being the period of a great festival, when every one was too tipsy to attend to him. At an island called Juneauta, he met a very remarkable personage, a Powaw, who bore the reputation of a reformer, anxious to restore the ancient religion of the Red man, which had become corrupted by intercourse with the White and his vices.

His aspect was the most dreadful thing Brainerd had ever seen. He wore a shaggy bearskin coat, hood, and stockings, and a hideous, painted mask, so that no part of his person was visible, not even the hand in which he held an instrument made of the shell of a tortoise, with dry corn within, and he came up rattling this, and dancing with all his might, and with such gesticulations that, though assured that he intended no injury, it was impossible not to shrink back as this savage creature came close.

Yet he was a thoughtful man, such as would have been a philosopher in ancient Greece or Rome. He took the missionary into his hut, and conversed long and earnestly with him. He had revolted in spirit from the degradation of his countrymen, and had gone to live apart in the woods, where he had worked out a system of natural religion for himself, which he believed the Great Spirit had taught him, and which had at last led him to return to his people and endeavour to restore them to that purity which of course he believed to have once existed. He believed there were good men somewhere, and he meant to wander till he found them; meantime, he was kindly to all who came near him, and constantly uplifted his testimony against their vices, especially when the love of strong drink was brought among them. When all was in vain, he would go weeping away into the woods, and hide himself there till the hateful fire-water was all consumed and the madness over. Brainerd was greatly touched by this red-skinned Epictetus, who, he said, had more honesty, sincerity, and conscientiousness than he had ever met with in an Indian, and more of the temper of true religion; and he expounded to him the Christian doctrine with great carefulness and double earnestness. The

self-taught philosopher broke in now and then with “Now that I like,”—“So the Great Spirit has taught me;” but when the missionary came to the regions where faith surpasses the power of the intellect and the moral sense, the Indian would not follow him, and rejected his teaching. It was curious that he particularly denied the idea of a devil, declaring that there was no such being, according to the ancient Indians. Now, the incantations of the Powaws were generally supposed to be addressed to evil spirits, and probably the perception of the falsehood of these pretended rites led to his disclaiming the Christian doctrine.

Whether time and further teaching would have overpowered his belief in his own inspiration does not appear, for Brainerd found the Indians too vicious and hardened to pay the least heed either to him or to their own reformer; and he went back to Crossweeksung, where his flock was still increasing, and in a most satisfactory condition, renouncing their heathen customs and their acquired vice of drunkenness, and practising some amount of industry. A school was set up, old and young learnt English, the children in three or four months could read the Bible in English, and Brainerd’s sermons and prayers were understood without an interpreter.

This improved condition of the Indians destroyed the shameful profits of the nearest settlement of Whites, whose practice it had hitherto been to entice them to drink, and then run up a heavy score against them for liquor. Finding that all endeavours to seduce them into drunkenness were now vain, these wretches first tried to raise the country against Brainerd, by reporting that he was a Roman Catholic in disguise; and when this failed, they laid claim to the lands of Crossweeksung, in discharge of debts that they declared to have been previously contracted. Fortunately, Brainerd had it in his power to advance 82l. from his private means, so as to save his people from this extortion; but he afterwards thought it best to remove them from these dangerous neighbours to a new settlement, fifteen miles off, called Cranberry. He remained himself in his little hut at Crossweeksung, after they had proceeded to raise wigwams and prepare the ground for maize; but, whenever he rode over to visit them, his approach was notified by the sound of a conch shell, and they all gathered round for his prayers and instruction.

His success with them seems to have greatly cured his depression of spirits, but his mind was balancing between the expedience of remaining among them as their permanent pastor, protector, and guide, and that of striving to extend the kingdom of faith. Sometimes he liked the prospect of a settled home and repose, study and meditation; but, at the thought of gaining souls to Christ, all these considerations melted before him, and he believed that he was marked out for the life of a pilgrim and hermit by his carelessness about hardships.

He had not, however, taken leave of his flock when he set forth on another expedition to the obdurate Indians of the Susquehanna, in the September of 1746. It was without result; he could obtain no attention, and the hardships of the journey, the night exposure, and the frequent drenchings completed the wreck of his health. He came back with night perspirations, bleeding from the lungs, and suffering greatly, feverish and coughing, and often in pain; yet, whenever he could mount his horse, riding the fifteen miles to attend to the Indians at Cranberry, or sitting in a chair before his hut, when they assembled round him.

On Sunday he persisted in preaching, till generally at the end of half an hour he fainted, and was carried to his bed; and at the administration of the Lord’s Supper he was carried to the place where he had forty Indian communicants, and likewise some Whites, who had learnt to reverence him, and who supported him back to his bed. He was quite happy now, for he felt he had done all he could to the utmost of his strength; but, soon becoming totally unable to speak at all, he felt that he must do what he called “consuming some time in diversions,” and try to spend the winter in a civilized place.

After riding his first short stage, however, his illness increased so much, that he was quite incapable of proceeding or returning, and remained in a friend’s house at Elizabethtown, suffering from cough, asthma, and fever the whole winter. In March 1747 he had rallied enough to ride to Cranberry, where he went from hut to hut, giving advice to and praying with each family, and parting with them with great tenderness. Tears were shed everywhere; for, though he still hoped to return, all felt that they should see his face no more! But, to his great comfort and joy, his poor people were not to be abandoned to

themselves and their tempters. His younger brother—John—relieved his mind by offering to assume the care of them, and under his pastorship he could thankfully leave them.

In April he set out again on his journey, at the rate of about ten miles a day, riding all the way, and on the 28th of May arrived at Northampton, where Jonathan Edwards, afterwards President of the College of New Jersey, was then minister. They were like-minded men, both disciples of Whitfield, and the self-devoted piety of the young missionary was already so well known to Mr. Edwards by report, that it was most gladly that he received him into his house and family. There the impression Brainerd made was of a singularly social, entertaining person, meek and unpretending, but manly and independent. Probably rest and brightness had come when the terrible struggle of his early years had ceased, and morbid despondency had given way to Christian hope, for he became at once a bright and pleasant member of any society where he formed a part, and to the Edwards family he was like a son or brother. When he was able, Mr. Edwards wished him to lead the family devotions, and was always greatly impressed by the manner and matter of his prayers, but one petition never failed, i.e. “that we might not outlive our usefulness.” Even in saying grace there was always something about him that struck the attention.

His purpose in coming to Northampton had been to consult Dr. Mather, whose verdict was that he was far gone in decline, and who gave him no advice but to ride as much as possible. So little difference did this sentence make to him that he never noted it in his diary, though he spoke of it cheerily in the Edwards family—a large household of young people—where he was so much beloved, that when he decided to go to Boston, Jerusha, the second daughter, entreated to be allowed to accompany him, to nurse him as his sister would have done.

The pure, severe simplicity of those early American manners was such, that no one seems to have been surprised at a girl of eighteen becoming the attendant of a man of twenty-nine. Jerusha had the full consent and approbation of her parents, and she was a great comfort and delight to him. He told her father that she was more spiritual, self denying, and earnest to do good, than any young person he had ever known; and on

doubt their communings were far above earth, hovering, as he was well known to be, upon the very borders of the grave.

They took four days to reach Boston, and there he was received with the greatest respect by all the ministers; but, a week after his arrival, so severe an attack of his illness came on that he became delirious, and was thought to be at the point of death. Again, however, he came back enough to life to sit up in bed and write ardent letters of counsel to the brother who had succeeded him among his Indians, and likewise to give his friends the assurance of his perfect peace and joy. He said that he had carefully examined himself, and though he had found much pride, selfishness, and corruption, he was still certain that he had felt it his greatest happiness to glorify and praise God; and this certainty, together with his faith in the Redeemer, had calmed all the anguish he had suffered for years.

Whenever he was able to converse he had numerous visitors, especially from the deputies of the Society in London which had assisted Eliot. A legacy for the support of two missionaries had newly been received, and his counsel on the mode of employing it was asked. He was able to strive to imbue others with the same zeal as himself, and to do much on behalf of his own mission, although he often lay so utterly exhausted that he said of himself that he could not understand how life could be retained. One of his brothers, a student at Yale, came to see him, and to tell him of the death of his favourite sister, of whose illness he had not even heard, but it was no shock to him, for he felt far more sure of meeting her again than if she had been left on earth.

The summer weather, to the surprise of all, brought back a slight revival of strength, and some of his friends began to hope he might yet recover, but he knew his own state too well, and told them he was as assuredly a dead man as if he had been shot through the heart; still he was resolved to profit by this partial restoration to return to Northampton, chiefly because the rumour had reached him that the Bostonians had intended to give him such a funeral as should testify their great esteem; and being disappointed in this, they intended to assemble and escort him publicly, while still alive, out of their city, but the bare idea naturally made him so unhappy that they were forced to give it up.

Five days were spent in the journey, and again the Edwardses reverentially opened their doors to a guest so near heaven. For some time he rode out two or three miles daily, and sat with the family, writing or conversing cheerfully when not engaged in prayer. His brother John came from Crossweeksung and cheered him with a good account of his Indians; and hearing of the great need of another school, he wrote to the friends who had shown themselves so warmly interested in him at Boston, and was gratified by their reply, with a subscription of 200l. for the purpose, and of 75l. for the mission to the Six Nations. His answers were written with his own hand; but he had become so much weaker that he felt this his last task. He had been one who, in his short life, had sown in tears to reap in joy.

He was sinking fast as the autumn cold came on, often talking tenderly to the little ones of the house, but suffering terribly at times, and sighing, “Why is His chariot so long coming?” then blaming himself for over-haste to be released.

He had a smile for Jerusha as she came into his room on Sunday morning. “Are you willing to part with me? I am willing to part with you, though if I thought I could not see you and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part. I am willing to leave all my friends. I am willing to leave my brother, though I love him better than any creature living. I have committed him and all my friends to God, and can leave them with God!”

Presently, looking at the Bible in her hands, he said, “Oh that dear Book! the mysteries in it and in God’s providence will soon be unfolded.”

He lingered in great agony at times till the 9th of October, 1747, when came a cessation of pain, and during this lull he breathed his last, then wanting six months of his thirtieth birthday. He had told Jerusha that they should soon meet above, and, in effect, she only lived until the next February. She told her father on her death-bed, that for years past she had not seen the time when she had any wish to live a moment longer, save for the sake of doing good and filling up the measure of her duty.

David Brainerd’s career ended at an age when John Eliot’s had not begun. It was a very wonderful struggle between the frail suffering body and the devoted, resolute spirit, both

weighed down by the natural morbid temper, further depressed by the peculiar tenets of the form of doctrine in which he had been bred. The prudent, well-weighed measures of the ripe scholar, studious theologian, and conscientious politician, formed by forty-two years’ experience of an old and a new country, could not be looked for in the sickly, self-educated, enthusiastic youth who had been debarred from the due amount of study, and started with little system but that of “proclaiming the Gospel”—even though ignorant of the language of those to whom he preached. And yet that heart-whole piety and patience was blessed with a full measure of present success, and David Brainerd’s story, though that of a short life, over-clouded by mental distress, hardship, and sickness, fills us with the joyful sense that there is One that giveth the victory.

CHAPTER III. CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH SCHWARTZ, THE COUNCILLOR OF TANJORE.

We must turn from America to the warmer regions of the East, from the patriarchal savage to complicated forms of society, and from the Red-skin to the Hindoo—a man of far nearer affinity to ourselves, being, like us, of the great Indo-European race, speaking a language like our own, an altered, corrupted, and intermingled dialect of the same original tongue, and his ancestors originally professing a religion in which the same primary ideas may be traced as those which were held by our ancient northern forefathers, and which are familiar to us in the graceful dress imposed on them by the Greeks. The sacred writings of the Hindoos form the earliest storehouse of the words of our common language, and the thoughts therein found, though recorded after the branches had parted from the common stock, are nearer the universal germ than those to be found anywhere else, and more nearly represent the primary notion of religion held by the race of Japheth, after that of Shem, to which God revealed Himself more distinctly, had parted from it. These oldest writings

are quaint, pure, and simple, but on them the fancies of a race enervated by climate engrafted much that was hideous, monstrous, and loathsome, leading to gross idolatry, and much vice perpetrated in the name of religion. Mythology always degenerates with the popular character, and then, so far as the character is formed by the religious faith, the mythology helps to debase it further, until the undying moral sense of conscience awakens again in some man, or band of men, and a new morality arises; sometimes grafted upon philosophic reasoning, sometimes upon a newly-invented or freshly introduced religion.

Thus, when Hindooism had become corrupt, the deeply meditative system of Buddha was introduced into many parts of India, and certainly brought a much higher theory and purer code than that founded on the garbled nature-worship of ancient India; but both religions co-existed, and, indeed, Buddhism was in one aspect an offshoot of the Hindoo faith.

Christianity—planted, as is believed, by St. Thomas, on the Malabar coast—never became wholly extinct, although tinged with Nestorianism, but it was never adopted by the natives at large, and the learning and philosophy of the Brahmins would have required the utmost powers of the most learned fathers of the Church to cope with them, before they could have been convinced.

The rigid distinctions of caste have made it more difficult for the Church which “preaches the Gospel to the poor,” to be accepted in India than anywhere else. Accounting himself sprung from the head of Brahma, the Brahmin deems himself, and is deemed by others, as lifted to an elevation which has no connection either with moral goodness, with wealth, or with power; and which is as much the due of the most poverty-stricken and wicked member of the caste as of the most magnificent priest. The Sudras, the governing and warlike class, are next in order, having sprung from the god’s breast, and beneath these come infinite grades of caste, their subdivisions each including every man of each trade or calling which he pursues hereditarily and cannot desert or change, save under the horrible penalty of losing caste, and becoming forsaken and despised of every creature, even the nearest kindred. The mere eating from a vessel used to contain food for a person of a different caste is enough to produce contamination;

the separation is complete, and the whole constitution of body and mind have become so inured to the distinction, that the cost of becoming a convert is infinitely severer in India than ever it could have been even in Greece or Rome, where, though the Christian might be persecuted even to the death, he was not thrust out of the pale of humanity like a Hindoo convert who transgresses caste.

The Christians of Malabar are a people living to themselves, and the great Bengalee nations never appear to have had the Gospel carried to them. The Mahometan conquest filled India with professors of the faith of the Koran; but these were a dominant race, proud and separate from the mass of people, whom they did not win to their faith, and thus the Hindoo idolatry had prevailed untouched for almost the whole duration of the world, when the wealth of India in the early days of naval enterprise first began to tempt small mercantile companies of Europeans to form factories on the coast merely for purposes of traffic, without at first any idea that these would lead to possession or conquest, and, in general, without any sense of the responsibility of coming as Christians into a heathen world.

The Portuguese did indeed strive earnestly to Christianize their territory at Goa; and they promoted by all means in their power the labours of Francisco Xavier and his Jesuit companions, so effectually that the fruits of their teaching have remained to the present day.

Neither were the Dutch, who then held Ceylon, entirely careless of the duty of instructing their subjects; and the Danes, who had obtained the town of Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast, in 1746, sent out a mission which was vigorously conducted, and met with good success. Hitherto, however, the English at Madras and Calcutta had been almost wholly indifferent, and it must be remembered that theirs was not a Government undertaking. The East India Company was still only a struggling corporation of merchants and traders, who only wanted to secure the warehouses and dwellings of those who conducted their traffic, and had as yet no thought of anything but the security of their trade; often, indeed, considering themselves pledged to no interference with the religion of the people around, and too often forgetting their own. However, the Danish mission received grants of

money and books from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; and the first Indian missionary of any note, a German by birth, was equally connected with both England and Denmark.

Sonnenburg in Brandenburg, still an electorate at the time, was the native home of Christian Friedrich Schwartz, of whose parents it is only known that they appear to have been in easy circumstances, and that his mother, who died before he could remember, told her husband and her pastor on her death-bed, that she had dedicated her infant to the service of God, imploring them to cherish and forward any inclination towards the ministerial office that might be visible in him. It was, of course, the Lutheran form in which the child of this pious woman was bred up, and in 1734 he was sent to the grammar school of Sonnenburg, where his piety was first excited by a religious master, then cooled by an indifferent one; and he was then taken by his father, walking on foot the whole way, to pursue his studies at Custrin. There he became beset by the temptations that surrounded young students, and after giving way to them for a time, was saved from further evil by the influence of the daughter of one of the Syndics. It does not appear to have been a matter of sentiment, but of honest friendship and good counsel, aiding the young man to follow his better instead of his worse impulses; and thus giving a labourer to the vineyard.

Before residing at Custrin, this lady had lived for a time at Halle, and what she told the young Schwartz of the professors at that university, inspired him with the desire of completing his course under them, especially August Hermann Francke, who had established an admirable orphan house, with an excellent grammar school.

In his twentieth year, Schwartz entered at Halle, but lodged at the orphan house, where he became teacher to the Latin classes, and was put in charge of the evening devotions of the household. At Halle, he met a retired Danish missionary, named Schultz, who had come thither to superintend the printing of a version of the Bible in Tamul, the language of Ceylon and of the Coromandel coast; and this it was that first turned his mind to the thought of offering himself as a worker in the great field of India.

He was the eldest of the family, and his friends all declared

that it was impossible that his father should consent to part with him; but when he went home, and earnestly stated his desire, the elder Schwartz, instead of at once refusing as all expected, desired to take three days to consider; and when they were passed, he came gravely down from his chamber, called his son Christian, gave him his blessing, and told him to depart in God’s name, charging him to forget his own country and his father’s house, and to win many souls to Christ.

And certainly that good old German’s blessing went forth with his son. Christian Schwartz next resigned his share in the family property to his brothers and sisters; and after completing his studies at Halle, went to Copenhagen, since it was by the Danish government that he was to be authorized. Two other young Germans, named Poltzenheigen and Hutteman, went with him. The Danes, though Lutherans in profession, have an Episcopal hierarchy, and the three students were ordained by the Danish Bishop Horreboa on the 6th of September, 1749; Christian Schwartz being then within a month of twenty-three.

Their first stage was to England, where they had to learn the language, and were entertained at the cost of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Mr. Ziegenhagen, German chaplain to George II., was very kind to his countrymen, helped them in all their difficulties, and gave them directions for which they were very grateful. He made them preach in the Chapel Royal on Christmas Day. No doubt the language was German, which must have been acceptable to the Hanoverian ears.

Their English studies were not greatly prolonged, for they arrived on the 8th of December, 1749, and sailed on the 29th of January, 1750, in an East India Company’s ship, where they were allowed a free passage, and were treated with respect and friendliness. The voyage lasted long enough to improve them in English, for they did not cast anchor at Tranquebar till the 8th of October.

At this considerable Danish factory, they were received into the mission-house of the Danes, and there remained while studying the language, in which Schwartz made so much progress that he preached his first Tamul sermon only four months after his arrival, and by the spring was able to catechize the children who attended the school. This station at Tranquebar

formed the home of seven or eight missionaries, who lived together, attended to the services and schools, prepared candidates for baptism, and made excursions by ones and twos into the villages that stood thickly on the coast, where they talked and argued with the natives, hoping to incite them to inquire further. The two greatest obstacles they met with here were the evil example of Europeans and the difficulty of maintenance for a convert. One poor dancing girl said, on hearing that no unholy person could enter into the kingdom of heaven, “Ah! sir, then no European will;” but, on the whole, they must have met with good success, for in 1752 there were three large classes of catechumens prepared and baptized at the station. In the district around there were several villages, where congregations of Christians existed, and, of all those south of the river Caveri, Schwartz was after two more years made the superintendent.

The simple habits of these German and Danish clergy eminently fitted them for such journeys; they set out in pairs on foot, after a farewell of united prayer from their brethren, carrying with them their Hebrew Bibles, and attended by a few Christian servants and coolies; they proceeded from village to village, sometimes sleeping in the house of a Hindoo merchant, sometimes at that of one the brother ministers they had come to see, and at every halt conversing and arguing with Hindoo or Mahometan, or sometimes with the remnants of the Christians converted by the Portuguese, who had been so long neglected that they had little knowledge of any faith.

The character of Christian Schwartz was one to influence all around him. He seems to have had all the quiet German patience and endurance of hardship, without much excitability, and with a steadiness of judgment and intense honesty and integrity, that disposed every one to lean on him and rely on him for their temporal as well as their spiritual matters—great charity and warmth of heart, and a shrewdness of perception that made him excellent in argument. He had also that true missionary gift, a great facility of languages, both in grammar and pronunciation, and his utter absence of all regard for his own comfort or selfish dignity, yet his due respect to times and places made him able to penetrate everywhere, from the hut to the palace.

The Carnatic war was at this time an impediment, by keeping

the minds of all the natives in a state of excitement and anxiety, from dread of Mahratta incursions; but Schwartz never intermitted his rounds, and was well supported by the Danish Governor, a good man, who often showed himself his friend. Some of the missionaries were actually made prisoners when the French took Cuddalore, but Count Lally Tollendal was very kind to them, and sent them with all their property and converts safely away to Tranquebar.

The Dutch missionaries in Ceylon had been in correspondence with those of Tranquebar, and had obtained from them copies of their Tamul Bible, and in 1760 Schwartz was sent on a visit to them. He was very well received by both clergy and laity; and though he was laid up by a severe illness at Colombo, yet he was exceedingly well contented with his journey and his conferences with his brethren.

Christian Schwartz had been more than sixteen years in India, and was forty years of age, before his really distinctive and independent work began, after his long training in the central station at Tranquebar.

The neighbouring district of Tanjore had at different times been visited, and the ministers of the Rajah had shown themselves willing to bestow some reflection on what they heard from the missionaries. Visits to this place and to Trichinopoly became frequent with him, and in 1766 the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge having decided on planting a mission station in the latter place, he was appointed to take the charge of it.

About this time he seems to have accommodated his name to English pronunciation, and to have always written it Swartz. It was now that he became acquainted with William Chambers, Esq., brother to the Chief Justice of Bengal,—not a Company’s servant, but a merchant, and an excellent man, who took great interest in missionary labours, and himself translated a great part of St. Matthew’s Gospel into Persian, the court language of India. From a letter of this gentleman, we obtain the only description we possess of Swartz’s appearance and manners. He says that, from the descriptions he had heard, he had expected to see a very austere and strict person, but “the first sight of him made a complete revolution on this point. His garb, indeed, which was pretty well worn, seemed foreign and old-fashioned, but in every other respect his appearance

was the reverse of all that could be called forbidding or morose. Figure to yourself a stout well-made man, somewhat above the middle size, erect in his carriage and address, with a complexion rather dark though healthy, black curled hair, and a manly engaging countenance, expressive of unaffected candour, ingenuousness, and benevolence, and you will have an idea of what Mr. Swartz appeared to be at first sight.” Mr. Chambers adds that Swartz’s whole allowance at Trichinopoly was ten pagodas a year, that is, about 48l. (as Mr. Chambers estimates it). The commanding officer of the English garrison was ordered to supply him with quarters, and gave him a room in an old native building, where “there was just room for his bed and himself, and in which few men could stand upright.” With this lodging he was content. His food was rice and vegetables dressed native fashion, and his clothes were made of black dimity. The little brass lamp which he had used for his studies at the University went with him to India, and served him all his life, often late at night, for he never preached even to the natives without much study.

He found the English without church or chaplain, and had very little knowledge of their language, having lived almost entirely among Germans, Danes, and natives; but he quickly picked it up among the soldiers, to whom his kindly simple manners commended him; and, as soon as he could speak it to any degree, he began to read the Church Service every Sunday to the garrison, with a printed sermon from an English divine, until he had obtained sufficient fluency to preach extempore. At first, the place of meeting was a large room in an old building, but he afterwards persuaded them to build themselves a church capable of holding from 1,500 to 2,000. His facility in learning languages must have been great, for the English of his letters is excellent, unless his biographer, Dean Pearson, has altered it. It is not at all like that of a German. His influence with the soldiers was considered as something wonderful, in those times of neglect and immorality, and the commandant and his wife—Colonel and Mrs. Wood—were his warmest friends; and when the Government at Madras heard of his voluntary services as chaplain, they granted him, unsolicited, a salary of 100l. a year, of which he devoted half to the service of his congregation. He was thus able to build a mission-house, and an English and a Tamul school, labour and materials being alike

cheap. But, in spite of all his care of the English soldiery, the natives were his chief thought; and he was continually among them, reading and arguing home with the most thorough knowledge and experience of their difficulties. He made expeditions from Trichinopoly to Tanjore, then under the government of a Rajah, under the protection of the British Government. The principal worship of the place was directed to an enormous black bull, said to be hewn out of a single block of granite, and so large that the temple had been built round it.

The Brahmins conversed with him a good deal, and often were all but converted. One plainly said that love of money and pleasure alone kept them from accepting Christianity. In 1769 he had a personal interview with the Rajah Tuljajee, a man of the dignity, grace, and courtesy usual in Hindoo princes, but very indolent, not even rising in the morning if he was told that it was not an auspicious day, though he was more cultivated than most men of his rank and period.

Swartz found him seated on a couch suspended from pillars, and was placed opposite to him, on a seat. The interpreter addressed him in Persian, and Swartz replied in the same; but, perceiving that the man omitted part of his speech, he asked leave to speak Tamul.

The Rajah asked questions, which led to an exposition of the Christian doctrine, and he listened with interest; and he likewise was struck when Swartz uttered a thanksgiving before partaking of the sweets that were carried round on trays. He showed himself so much disappointed when he learnt that the Padre had left Tanjore, that it was resolved that Swartz should return thither again; and for some days there were out-of-door preachings on the glacis of the fort, where, in spite of clouds of dust brought by the land wind, the people collected in crowds to hear him, and expressed ardent wishes that the Rajah would become a Christian, when they all could do the same. The Prince himself was much drawn towards the missionary; but it was the old story,—he was surrounded with ministers and courtiers who feared any change, above all any plain-speaking truth, and therefore did their best to keep the new light at a distance. However, Tuljajee called Swartz “his padre,” and gave him free entrance to his fort at Tanjore, where his arguments made a wide impression, and still more his example.

“Padre,” said a young Nabob, “we always regarded you Europeans as ungodly men, who knew not the use of prayers, till you came among us.”

He continued to go backwards and forwards between Trichinopoly and Tanjore, in both which places he began to gather catechumens round him. Unfortunately his Protestant principles brought him into collision with the Roman Catholics at the former place. A young Hindoo, of good birth, seems to have had one of those remarkable natures that cannot rest without truth. He had for seven years wandered to all the most famous pagodas and most sacred rivers, seeking rest for his soul, but in vain. Some Roman Catholics had given him a little brass crucifix, which he used to set up before him as he prayed; but he had learnt little more of them, and he was mournfully gazing at “the pagodas of Sirengam” (in his own words), and thinking, “What is all this? what can it avail?” when some of Swartz’s catechists began to speak. “Will this be better than what I have found?” he said to himself. He listened, was asked to remain a fortnight at the station, and soon had given his whole soul to the faith. He was baptized by the name of Nyána Prácasam, or Spiritual Light, and became a catechist. His father and mother were likewise led to Christianity by him, but the Roman Catholics, having begun his conversion, considered that they had a right to him, and on one occasion, when he was found reading to a sick relative, probably a member of their Church, he was severely beaten, and was rescued by the heathen neighbours when nearly killed.

Swartz seems to have regarded the Roman Catholics as in almost as much need of reconversion as the Hindoos and Mahometans; and as in those days their Church shared in that universal religious torpor that had crept over the world, it is most likely that he found them in a very debased condition.

With the Mahometans he had some success, though he found, like all other missionaries, that their faith, being rather a heresy than a paganism, had truth enough in it to be much harder to deal with than the Hindoo polytheism. Besides, they accepted the Persian proverb, “Every time a man argues, he loses a drop of blood from his liver.” He was impeded also by the want of a Persian translation of the

entire Bible, having no more than the Gospels to give the inquirers, and these badly translated; and with Mahometans the want of the real history of the Patriarchs was very serious. Some, however, were convinced and baptized, though by far the greater number of his converts were Hindoos.

In 1776, a coadjutor, either German or Danish-trained, named Christian Pohlé, joined him at Trichinopoly, and thus he became free to reside more constantly at Tanjore, where the Rajah always protected him, though continually fluctuating in feeling towards Christianity, according to the influences of his ministers and the Brahmins who surrounded him, and the too frequent offences given by the godless officers of the European garrison which was stationed in the fort.

Mr. Swartz was anxiously soliciting for means to build a church for the use of this garrison, when he was summoned to Madras, to the governor, Sir Thomas Rumbold, who promised him a grant for his church; but, at the same time, informed him that he was to be sent on a mission to visit the formidable Hyder Ali in Mysore, in order to judge how far his intentions towards the English were pacific. He was selected for the purpose on account of his perfect knowledge of Hindostanee, the simplicity of his manner of travelling, and his perfect immunity from any of the ordinary influences of interest or ambition; and he undertook it, as he tells the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, because he regarded it as conducing to peace, as opening fresh doors to the Gospel, and as a token of gratitude to the Honourable Company for kindness he had received; “but at the same time,” he says, “I resolved to keep my hands undefiled from any presents, by which determination the Lord enabled me to abide, so that I have not accepted a single farthing save my travelling expenses.”

On the 1st of July, 1779, he set out from Trichinopoly on this journey, taking one of his catechists, named Sattianadem, with him. He travelled in a palanquin, and took six days to reach Caroor, on the Mysore frontier, forty miles off, where he stayed a month with a young Ceylonese Dutchman in Hyder Ali’s service, while sending to ask the Nabob’s permission to proceed. All this time he and his catechist preached and gave instruction in the streets. It is curious to find him, on his journey, contrasting the excellent state of Hyder Ali’s roads

and bridges with the careless disorganization of the public works under the Company. An epidemic fever was raging in Seringapatam, and Swartz pitched his tent outside, where he could conveniently visit the many-pillared palace of the sovereign. He was much struck with the close personal supervision that Hyder Ali kept up over his officers, and with the terrible severity of the punishments. Two hundred men were kept armed with whips, and not a day passed without many being scourged, no rank being exempt, the Nabob’s two sons and sons-in-law being liable to be whipped like the meanest groom. Swartz was the unwilling spectator of the punishment of the collector of a district who was flogged with whips armed with nails.

A few hundreds of Europeans, English, German, and French, were in Hyder’s pay, encamped about the town, and a German captain lent his tent for public worship. No molestation was offered to any instructions that Swartz attempted to give, and he was very courteously entreated by the Prince himself. The conferences with him were generally held in a hall of marble columns, open to a garden adorned with fruit trees, rows of cypresses, and fountains. Hyder Ali sat on rich carpets, covering the floor, and the Padre was placed next to him. He spoke in general terms of his desire to keep the peace, though the British had violated their engagements, referring to an attempt that had newly been made to march troops through his territory without his permission. To Swartz he was gracious in speech, but the letter he entrusted to him was full of threatening for this and other acts which he considered aggressive; and the general impression brought back by the missionary was that a war was to be expected.

Hyder Ali had presented him with a bag of three hundred rupees for travelling expenses, which it would have been a great affront to return. He, however, made it over to the Government at Madras, and when they would not take it, asked leave to use it as the foundation for a collection for an English orphan school at Tanjore. This was granted, and proved a success. Finding that there was an intention of voting a present to him, he begged instead that a salary might be given to Mr. Pohlé at Trichinopoly; and, in consequence, both were enabled to maintain catechists and schoolmasters; for of making a home for themselves, these devoted men never thought.

Moreover, Swartz obtained bricks and lime for the building of his English church within the fort; and he bought and enlarged a house half a mile from it, for his Malabar Christians to worship in. His own observations of Hyder Ali’s warlike intentions led also to his purchasing 12,000 bags of rice as a provision against the scarcity that too surely attends upon Indian warfare.

In the summer of 1780, these apprehensions were realized. Hyder crossed the Ghauts, and passed down into the Carnatic with 100,000 men, directed by a staff of French officers, and plundered up to the very gates of Madras. Everything was in the greatest confusion; the English troops were dispersed in garrisons, and could not easily be brought together; and one small detachment under Colonel Baillie, who were made prisoners at Conjiveram, suffered a frightful captivity. Sir Eyre Coote did, indeed, keep the enemy in check, and defeat him in several battles, but had not at first sufficient numbers or stores effectually to drive him back; and the whole province of Tanjore was horribly wasted. The irrigation of the district had been broken up by the invaders; there was for three years neither seed-time nor harvest, and the miserable peasants crawled into the towns to perish there, often with their sons carried off to form a regiment of youths whom Hyder Ali was bringing up as a sort of Janissaries.

The unhappy creatures lay dying along the sides of the road, and among them moved from one to another that homely figure in the black dimity dress, and his catechists with him, feeding those who could still swallow, and speaking words of comfort to those who could hear. Some of the English sent a monthly subscription, which enabled Swartz to keep up the supply, so that a hundred and twenty a day were fed; but often in the morning he found the dead lying in heaps, and in one of his letters he mentions that his catechists are alive, as though he regarded it as a wonder and a mercy. Indeed he seems to have been a very Joseph to the Rajah, and even to the English garrison. There was absolutely no magazine for provisions, either for the Sepoys or the Rajah’s own troops, and twice he was implored, both by Tuljajee and the Company, to purchase supplies and get them brought in, since they were unable to do so, “for a want of good understanding with the natives who still possessed either rice or

oxen to transport it.” He was enabled to procure the supply, and then there was no place to store it in but his own new English church, so that he was obliged to hold three services on a Sunday in the other: from eight till ten in English, from ten till twelve in Tamul, and from four till five in Portuguese! About a hundred converts were gained during the famine; but he was forced to teach them very slowly, their mental faculties were so weakened by their state of exhaustion. The whole of the towns of Tanjore and Trichinopoly were, he says, filled with living skeletons, there was hardly an able or vigorous man to be found, and in this distress it was necessary to relax the ordinarily wise rule of never giving any assistance to a person under preparation for baptism, since to withhold succour would have been barbarous cruelty.

When the whole country was overrun by the troops of Mysore, the respect paid to the good Padre was such that he travelled from end to end of it without hindrance, even through the midst of the enemy’s camp, and on the only occasion when he was detained, the sentinel politely put it that “he was waiting for orders to let him proceed.” It was on one of these journeys that a little lad, named Christian David, the son of one of the converts, was attending him one evening, when, halting at a native village, the supper was brought, of rice and curry. The Padre made so long a grace out of the fulness of his heart, that at last the boy broke in with a murmur that the curry would be cold! He never forgot the reproof: “What! shall our gracious God watch over us through the heat and burden of the day, and shall we devour the food which He provides for us at night, with hands which we have never raised in prayer, and lips which have never praised Him?” The missionaries were always safe throughout the war, and, when Cuddalore capitulated to the French and Mysoreans, Mr. Gerické, who was then at the head of the station, concealed some English officers in his house, and likewise, by his representations to the French general, saved the town from being delivered up to be plundered by Hyder’s native troops.

In the end of 1782, Hyder Ali died; his son, Tippoo Sahib, assuming the title of Sultan, continued the war, with the same fierceness, but without the assistance of the French, who were withdrawn, in consequence of the peace that had been concluded at home.

This, together with the numerous victories that had been obtained by the English forces, led to hopes that Tippoo would consent to terms of peace, and two Commissioners were appointed, whom Swartz was requested to join as interpreter. He had no taste for political missions, but he thought it a duty to do all in his power for peace, and set off for the purpose, but the Mysoreans complained that the English promises had not been kept, and he was turned back again by the enemy’s troops. Colonel Fullarton, who was in command of the army about to invade Mysore, writes, “The knowledge and the integrity of this irreproachable missionary have retrieved the character of Europeans from imputations of general depravity!” He went back to Tanjore, and there, for the first time, experienced some failure in health. He was requested again to join the Commissioners, but would not again attempt it, partly from the state of his health, and partly because Tippoo was far more averse to Christianity than Hyder had been. All the 12,000 Tanjoreen captive boys—originally Hindoos—were bred up Mahometans, and he tolerated nothing else but Hindooism, persecuting the Roman Catholics in his dominions till no one dared make an open profession.

A treaty was, however, concluded in 1784, and there was for a time a little rest, greatly needed by Swartz, who had been suffering from much weakness and exhaustion; but a journey into Tinnevelly, with his friend Mr. Sullivan, seems to have restored him.

There were already some dawnings of Christianity in this district. As long before as 1771, one of the Trichinopoly converts, named Schavrimutta, who was living at Palamcotta, began to instruct his neighbours from the Bible, and a young Hindoo accountant, becoming interested, went to an English sergeant and his wife, who had likewise been under Swartz’s influence, and asked for further teaching. The sergeant taught him the Catechism and then baptized him, rather to the displeasure of Swartz, who always was strongly averse to hasty baptisms. Afterwards, a Brahmin’s widow begged for baptism. She, it appeared, was living with an English officer, and Swartz was obliged to refuse her while this state of things continued, but he found that the Englishman had promised to marry her, and had begun to teach her his language and his faith. He died without performing his promise, but Christianity had

become so dear to her, that she again entreated for baptism, and was then admitted into the Church by the name of Clarinda. She afterwards was the chief means of building a church at Palamcotta, to which Sattianadem became the catechist; and thus was first sown a seed which has never ceased growing, for this district of Tinnevelly has always been the stronghold of Christianity in India.

Meantime Swartz’s poor friend, the Rajah Tuljajee at Tanjore, was in a deplorable state. He had suffered great losses during Hyder Ali’s invasion of his country, and, moreover, was afflicted with an incurable disease, and had lately lost, by death, his only son, daughter, and grandson: He shut himself up in the depths of his palace, and became harsh and moody, heaping all the treasure together that he could collect, and employing a dean or minister, named Baba, whose exactions on the famished population were so intolerable that the people fled the country, and settled in the neighbouring districts, so that no less than 65,000 were said to have deserted the province.

Sir Archibald Campbell, Governor of Madras, remonstrated, but the Rajah was affronted, and would not dismiss his minister, and as the peasants refused to sow their land without some security that the crops should not be reaped by Baba’s emissaries before their very eyes, the Madras authorities decided on taking the management of Tanjoreen affairs into their hands and appointing a committee to watch over the government. Sir Archibald wished to place Mr. Swartz on this committee as the person best able to deal both with Rajah and people, and he accepted a seat, only stipulating that he was not to share in any violent or coercive measures.

When the “good Padre” assured the fugitives in the Rajah’s name and his own that oppression was at an end, 7,000 at once returned; and when he reminded them that the season for planting their corps was nearly past, they replied that in return for his kindness they intended to work night and day.

In 1787, the childless Rajah decided on—after the fashion of many Hindoo princes—adopting an heir, who might perform the last duties which were incumbent on a son. His choice fell upon the son of a near kinsman, a child ten years of age, whom he named Serfojee. A day or two after he sent for Mr. Swartz, and said, “This is not my son, but yours. Into your hand I deliver him.” “May the child become a child of

God,” was the answer of Swartz. The Rajah was too ill to continue the interview, but he sent for Swartz the next day, and said, “I appoint you guardian to this child; I put his hands into yours.”

Swartz, however, did not think it right to undertake the state guardianship of the lad, and the administration of the province. Indeed, he knew that to do so would be absolutely to put the child’s life in danger, from the cabals and jealousies which would be excited, and he induced Tuljajee to confide the charge to his brother, Rama Swamey, afterwards called Ameer Singh.

This was done, and the Rajah soon after died, in the year 1787, leaving the boy and Ameer Singh under the protection of the Company. He had always listened to Swartz willingly, and treated him affectionately, and the result of the influence of the missionary extended so far that no Suttee took place at his funeral, but he had never actually embraced Christianity, though protecting it to the utmost of his power.

The brother, Ameer Singh, was not contented merely to act as regent, but complained that injustice was done to him, and that Tuljajee was too much enfeebled in mind to judge of his own measures when he adopted the boy Serfojee. Sir Archibald Campbell, acting for the Company, came to Tanjore, and, after an examination into the circumstances, decided in favour of Ameer Singh, and confirmed him in the Rajahship, binding him over to be the faithful protector of poor little Serfojee, who, putting the adoption apart, was still his near relation.

Ameer was not a better manager of his province than his brother had been, and he was far from kind to Serfojee, whom Swartz had not been allowed to see for months, when the widows of the late Rajah made complaints that the boy was closely shut up and cruelly treated. On this Swartz applied to Government, and obtained an order to go with another gentleman to inquire into his condition. The Rajah was much offended; but as he reigned only by the protection of the English, he could not refuse, and the Padre was conducted to a large but dark room, where he found the poor child sitting by lamp-light. This had been his condition for almost two years, ever since his adopted father’s death, and on seeing the Padre, he asked piteously if it were the way in Europe to prevent children from seeing the sun and moon. Mr. Swartz comforted him,

and asked him if he had any one to teach him. The Rajah’s minister replied that he had a master, but was too idle to learn; but Serfojee looked up and said, “I have none to teach me, therefore I do not know a single letter.” The Rajah was only offended at remonstrance, and at last Government sent orders that could not be resisted, and a Sepoy guard to take charge of the lad. Then, as a great favour, the Rajah entreated that the guard would not enter his palace, but that for the night before Serfojee could be removed, the Padre would remain with him to satisfy them that he was safe. To this Swartz consented, and the guard disappeared, whereupon the Rajah told him “he might go home.”

“What! and be guilty of a breach of faith?” was his resolute answer. “Even my father should not be permitted to make me such a proposal!”

They were ashamed, and left him to remain that night with Serfojee, whom he probably thus saved from foul play, since the jealous and vindictive passions of Ameer Singh had been thoroughly excited. The captivity must have been very wretched, for he observed that the poor boy walked lame, and found that the cause was this:—“I have not been able to sleep,” said poor Serfojee, “from the number of insects in my room, but have had to sit clasping my knees about with my arms. My sinews are a little contracted, but I hope I shall soon recover.”

When taken out, the poor little fellow was delighted once more to see the sun, and to ride out again. A Brahmin master selected by Mr. Swartz was given to him, and he very rapidly learnt both to read his own language and English. Swartz also interfered on behalf of the late Rajah’s minister, Baba, who had indeed been extortionate and severe, but scarcely deserved such a punishment as being put into a hole six feet long and four feet broad and high.

For two years Serfojee was unmolested; but, in 1792, the husband of Ameer Singh’s only child died without children, and this misfortune was attributed by the Rajah to witchcraft on the part of the widows of Tuljajee. He imagined that they were contriving against his own life, and included Serfojee in his hatred. By way of revenge, he caused a pile of chilis and other noxious plants to be burnt under Serfojee’s windows, and thus nearly stifled him and his attendants. He prevented the

Prince’s teachers from having access to him, shut up his servants, and denied permission to merchants to bring their wares to him. Mr. Swartz was absent at the time, and Serfojee wrote a letter to him, begging that the English Government would again interfere. It was found that any remonstrance put the Rajah into such a state of fury that the lives of the youth and the ladies we’re really unsafe while they remained within his reach, and it was therefore decided that they should be transplanted to Madras. It was a wonderful step for Hindoo princesses to take, and was only accomplished by the influence of Mr. Swartz, backed by a guard of soldiers, under whose escort all safely arrived at Madras, where Serfojee’s education could at length be properly carried on.

The youth was so entirely the child of Swartz and of the Government, that it is disappointing to find that he did not become a Christian. No stipulation to the contrary seems to have been made by Tuljajee; but, probably, the missionary refrained from a sense of honour towards the late Rajah, and because to bring the boy up in the Church would have destroyed all chance of his obtaining the provinces, and probably have deprived him of the protection of the Company, who dreaded the suspicion of proselytizing. Still it is very disappointing, and requires all our trust in Swartz’s judgment and excellence to be satisfied that he was right in leaving this child, who had been confided to him, all his life a heathen. Serfojee learnt the theory of Christianity, was deeply attached to Mr. Swartz, and lived a life very superior to that of most Hindoo princes of his time. His faith in his hereditary paganism was probably only political, but he never made the desperate, and no doubt perilous, plunge of giving up all the world to save his own soul. Was it his fault, or was it any shortcoming in the teaching that was laid before him, and was that human honour a want of faith? It puzzles us! Here was Swartz, from early youth to hoary hairs unwavering in the work of the Gospel, gathering in multitudes to the Church, often at great peril to himself, yet holding back from bringing into the fold the child who had been committed to him, and, as far as we can see, without any stipulation to the contrary. Probably he thought it right to leave Serfojee’s decision uninfluenced until his education should be complete, and was disappointed that the force of old custom and the danger

of change were then too strong for him; and thus it was that Serfojee was only one of the many half-reclaimed Indian princes who have lived out their dreary, useless lives under English protection, without accepting the one pearl of great price which could alone have made them gainers.

It is just possible that there may have been too much of a certain sort of acquiescence in Swartz’s mind, missionary as he was. He did not attack the system of caste, with its multitudinous separations and distinctions. Of course he wished it to be abolished, but he accepted converts without requiring its renunciation, allowed high-caste persons to sit apart in the churches, and to communicate before Pariahs, and did not interfere with their habits of touching no food that the very finger of a person of a different caste had defiled. He no doubt thought these things would wither away of themselves, but his having permitted them, left a world of difficulty to his successors.

He lived, however, the life of a saint, nearly that of an ascetic. His almost unfurnished house was shared with some younger missionary. Kohloff, who was one of these, related in after years how plain their diet was. Some tea in a jug, with boiling water poured over it and dry bread broken into it, formed the breakfast, which lasted five minutes; dinner, at one, was of broth or curry; and at eight at night they had some meal or gruel. If wine were sent them, it was reserved for the communions or for the sick. Swartz only began, very late in life, to take a single glass in the middle of his Sunday services.

Every morning he assembled his native catechists at early prayer, and appointed them their day’s work. “You go there.” “You do this.” “You call on such and such families.” “You visit such a village.” About four o’clock they returned and made their report, when their master took them all with him to the churchyard or some public place, or to the front of the Mission-house, according to the season of the year, and there sat either expounding the Scriptures to those who would come and listen, or conversing with inquirers and objectors among the heathen. His manner was mild, sometimes humorous, but very authoritative, and he would brook neither idleness nor disobedience.

Over his Christian flock his authority was as complete as

ever that of Samuel could have been as a judge. If any of them did wrong, the alternative was—

“Will you go to the Rajah’s court, or be punished by me?”

“O Padre, you punish me!” was always the reply.

“Give him twenty strokes,” said the Padre, and it was done.

The universal confidence in the Padre, felt alike by Englishmen and Hindoos, was inestimable in procuring and carrying out regulations for the temporal prosperity of the peasantry at Tanjore, under the Board which had pretty well taken the authority out of the hands of the inefficient and violent Ameer Singh. Districts that, partly from misery, had become full of thieves, were brought into order, and the thieves themselves often became hopeful converts, and endured a good deal of persecution from their heathen neighbours. His good judgment in dealing with all classes, high and low, English or native, does indeed seem to have been wonderful, and almost always to have prevailed, probably through his perfect honesty, simplicity, and disinterestedness.

The converts in Tinnevelly became more and more numerous, and Sattianadem had been ordained to the ministry, Lutheran fashion, by the assembly of the presbytery at Tranquebar, there being as yet no Bishop in India; and thus many, the very best of his catechists, served for many years, at Palamcotta, the first Christian minister produced by modern India. On the whole, Swartz could look back on the half-century of his mission with great joy and thankfulness; he counted his spiritual children by hundreds; and the influence he had exerted upon the whole Government had saved multitudes of peasants from oppression and starvation, and had raised the whole tone of the administration. He was once or twice unkindly attacked by Englishmen who hated or mistrusted the propagation of Christianity. One gentleman even wrote a letter in a newspaper calling a missionary a disgrace to any nation, and raking up stories of the malpractices of heathens who had been preached to without being converted, which were laid to the charge of the actual Christians; but imputations like these did not meet with faith from any one whose good opinion was of any real consequence to Swartz.

His strong health and the suitability of his constitution to the climate brought him to a good old age in full activity. He had become the patriarch of the community of missionaries,

and had survived all those with whom he had at first laboured; but he was still able to circulate among the churches he had founded, teaching, praying, preaching and counselling, or laying any difficulty before the Government, whose attention he had so well earned. His last care was establishing the validity of the adoption of Serfojee, who had grown up a thoughtful, gentle, and upright man, satisfactory on all points except on the one which rendered him eligible to the throne of Tanjore, his continued heathenism. The question was referred to the Company at home, and before the answer could arrive, by the slow communication of those days, when the long voyage, and that by a sailing vessel, was the only mode of conveyance, the venerable guardian of the young Rajah had sunk into his last illness.

This was connected with a mortification in his left foot, which had been more or less painful for several years, but had probably been neglected. His Danish colleague, Mr. Gerické, was with him most of the time, and it was one of his subjects of thankfulness that he was permitted to depart out of the world in the society of faithful brethren. He suffered severely for about three months, but it was not till the last week that his departure was thought to be near. He liked to have the English children brought in to read to him chapters of the Bible and sing Dr. Watts’s hymns to him; and the beautiful old German hymns sung by Mr. Gerické and Mr. Kohloff were his great delight. Indeed, when at the very last, as he lay almost lifeless, with closed eyes, Mr. Gerické began to sing the hymn,

“Only to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ,”

he joined in with a clear melodious voice, and accompanied him to the end. Two hours later, about four o’clock in the afternoon of the 13th of February, 1798, Christian Friedrich Swartz breathed his last, in the seventy-second year of his age, and the forty-eighth of his mission service in India.

The cries and wailings of the poor resounded all night around the house, and Serfojee Rajah came from a distance to be present at his burial. It had been intended to sing a funeral hymn, but the cries and lamentations of the poor so overcame the clergy, that they could scarcely raise their voices. Serfojee wept bitterly, laid a gold cloth over the bier, and remained present while Mr. Gerické read the Funeral Service,—a most

unusual departure from Hindoo custom, and a great testimony of affection and respect.

A few months later arrived the decision of the East India Company, that the weak and rapacious Ameer Singh should be deposed, and Serfojee placed on the throne. He conducted himself excellently as a ruler, and greatly favoured Christians in his territory, always assisting the various schools, and giving liberal aid whenever the frequently-recurring famines of India brought them into distress.

Three years later, in 1801, Serfojee wrote to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, to beg them to order a “monument of marble” at his expense, to the memory of the late Rev. Father Swartz, to be affixed to the pillar nearest the pulpit. Accordingly, a bas-relief in white marble was executed by Flaxman, representing the death of Swartz, Gerické behind him, two native Christians and three children standing by, and Serfojee clasping his hand and receiving his blessing. It was not exactly fact, but it was the monumental taste of the day; and it so much delighted the Rajah, that he kept it in his palace, among the portraits of his ancestors, for two years before he could resolve on parting with it to the church. The Prince likewise composed the epitaph which was carved on the stone which covers the grave of Swartz, the first instance of English verse by a Hindoo:—

“Firm wast thou, humble and wise,
Honest, pure, free from disguise;
Father of orphans, the widow’s support,
Comfort in sorrow of every sort:
To the benighted dispenser of light,
Doing and pointing to that which is right.
Blessing to princes, to people, to me,
May I, my father, be worthy of thee,
Wisheth and prayeth thy Sarabojee.”

Swartz had always been striving to be poor, and never succeeding. Living and eating in the humblest manner, and giving away all that came to him, still recognitions of services from English and natives had flowed in on him; and, after all the hosts of poor he had fed, and of churches and schools he had founded, he was an instance of “there is that scattereth and yet increaseth;” for the property he bequeathed to the Mission was enough to assist materially in carrying it on after

his death. Moreover, Serfojee maintained the blind, lame, and decrepit members of his church, and founded an asylum for the orphan children; so that the good men, Gerické, Kohloff, Pohlé, and the rest, were not absolutely dependent on Europe for assistance; and this was well, since the Orphan-house at Halle and the Society at Copenhagen had in this long course of years ceased to send out funds.

But Swartz’s work under their hands continued to prosper. He had a sort of apotheosis among the heathen, such as he would have been the last to covet; for statues were raised to him, lights burnt before him, and crowns offered up. But about Palamcotta and throughout Tinnevelly there was one of those sudden movements towards Christianity that sometimes takes place. The natives were asking instruction from their friends, and going eagerly in search of the catechists and of Sattianadem, and even burning their idols and building chapels in preparation for the coming of more fully qualified teachers. Mr. Gerické made a tour among them in 1803, and found their hearts so moved towards the Gospel, that he baptized 1,300 in the course of his journey, and the work of Sattianadem and the catechists raised the number of converts to 4,000. This was, however, this good man’s last journey. On his return, he found that his only son, an officer in the Company’s service, was dying, and, under the weight of this and other troubles, his health gave way, and he died in the thirty-eighth year of his mission. Others of the original Danish and German missionaries likewise died, and scarcely any came out in their stead. Their places were, therefore, supplied by ordinations, by the assembly of ministers, of four native catechists, of whom was Nyanapracasem, a favourite pupil of Swartz. No Church can take root without a native ministry. But the absence of any central Church government was grievously felt, both as concerned the English and the Hindoos. There were more than twenty English regiments in India, and not a single chaplain among them all.

CHAPTER IV. HENRY MARTYN, THE SCHOLAR-MISSIONARY.

Again do we find the steady, plodding labourer of a lifetime contrasted with the warm enthusiast, whose lot seems rather to awaken others than to achieve victories in his own person. St. Stephen falls beneath the stones, but his glowing discourse is traced through many a deep argument of St. Paul. St. James drains the cup in early manhood, but his brother holds aloft his witness to extreme old age.

The ardent zeal of the Keltic character; the religious atmosphere that John Wesley had spread over Cornwall, even among those who did not enrol themselves among his followers; the ability and sensitiveness hereditary in the Martyn family, together with the strong influence of a university tutor,—all combined to make such a bright and brief trail of light of the career of Henry Martyn, the son of the head clerk in a merchant’s office at Truro, born on the 18th of February, 1781. This station sounds lowly enough, but when we find that it was attained by a self-educated man, who had begun life as a common miner, and taught himself in the intervals of rest, it is plain that the elder Martyn must have possessed no ordinary power. Out of a numerous family only four survived their infancy, and only one reached middle age, and in Henry at least great talent was united to an extreme susceptibility and delicacy of frame, which made him as a child unusually tender and gentle in manner when at his ease, but fretful and passionate when annoyed.

Of course he fared as ill with his fellow-scholars at Truro Grammar School as he did well with the masters; but an elder boy took him under his protection, and not only lessened his grievances at the time, but founded a lasting friendship.

In 1795, when only fourteen, Henry Martyn was sufficiently advanced to be sent up as a candidate for a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and passed a very creditable examination, though he failed in obtaining the election. Eight years later, we find him congratulating himself in his journal on thus having

escaped the “scenes of debauchery” to which his “profligate acquaintances” might have introduced him. Was Corpus very much changed, when, only eleven years after, John Keble entered it at the same age? Was it that Martyn’s Cornish schoolfellows were a bad set, or does this thanksgiving proceed from the sort of pious complacency which religious journalizing is apt to produce in the best of men?

The failure sent Henry back to work for two years longer at the Truro Grammar School, and when at sixteen he was entered at St. John’s, Cambridge (most peculiarly the college of future missionaries), he immediately made proof of his remarkable talent. Strange to say, although his father’s rise in life had begun in his mathematical ability, Henry’s training in this branch had been so deficient, and the study appeared so repugnant to him, that his first endeavour at Cambridge was to learn the proportions of Euclid by heart, without trying to follow their reasoning. This story is told of many persons, but perhaps of no one else who in four years’ time, while still a month under twenty, was declared Senior Wrangler.

This was in 1801, and the intervening time had been spent in hard study and regular habits, but neither his sister at home, nor a seriously-minded college friend, were satisfied with his religious feelings during the first part of the time, and he himself regarded it afterwards as a period of darkness. Indeed, his temper was under so little control that in a passion he threw a knife at a companion, but happily missed his aim, so that it only pierced the wall. The shock of horror no doubt was good for him. But the next step he recorded in his life was his surprise at hearing it maintained that the glory of God, not the praise of man, should be the chief motive of study. After thinking it over his mind assented, and he resolved to maintain this as a noble saying, but did not perceive that it would affect his conduct.

However, the dearest, almost the only hallowed form of the praise of man, was taken from him by the death of his father in 1799, immediately after the delight of hearing of his standing first in the Christmas examination. The expense of a return home was beyond his means, but he took to reading the Bible, as a proper form to be complied with in the days of mourning; and beginning with the Acts, as being the most entertaining part, he felt the full weight of the doctrine of the Apostles borne

in on him, and was roused to renew his long-neglected prayers. When next he went to chapel, with his soul thus awakened, he was struck by perceiving for the first time how joy for the coming of our Lord rings through the Magnificat.

The great religious influence of the day at Cambridge emanated from the pulpit and the rooms of the Reverend Charles Simeon, who did a truly remarkable work in stirring up young men to a sense of the responsibilities of the ministry. Henry Martyn regularly attended his sermons, and the newly lighted sparks were also fanned by anxious letters from the good sister at home; but until the strain, pressure, and excitement of preparing for the final examination were over, he had little time or attention for any other form of mental exertion.

When, however, he found himself in possession of the highest honours his University could award, he was amazed to discover how little they satisfied him, and that he felt as if he had grasped a shadow instead of a substance.

This instinctive longing, the sure token of a mind of the higher pitch, was finding rest as he became more and more imbued with the spirit of religion, and ventured upon manifesting it more openly. He had hitherto intended to apply himself to the law, but the example and conversation of Charles Simeon brought him to such a perception of the greatness of the office of the ministry that he resolved to dedicate himself thereto. During the term after this decision was made, while he was acting as a tutor at his college, he heard Mr. Simeon speak of William Carey and his self-devotion in India; he read the Life of that kindred spirit, David Brainerd, and the spark of missionary zeal was kindled in his ardent nature. The commission “Go ye and teach all nations” was borne in on his mind, and, with the promptness that was a part of his nature, he at once offered himself to the “Society for Missions to Africa and the East,” which had been established, in the year 1800, by members of the English Church who wished to act independently of the elder Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The name has since been altered to the “Church Missionary Society.”

However, Martyn was only just twenty-one, and not of an age to take Holy Orders, and he had therefore to wait, while studying divinity, and acting as a tutor at Cambridge. All through his life he kept copious journals of his sensations

and resolutions, full of the deepest piety, always replete with sternness towards himself and others, and tinged with that melancholy which usually pervades the more earnest of that school which requires conscious feeling as the test of spiritual life.

In October 1803, he went to Ely for ordination as a deacon, though still wanting five months of twenty-three. Those were lax days, there was little examination, and a very low standard of fitness was required. Henry Martyn was so much scandalized by the lightness of demeanour of one of his fellow candidates that he spoke to him in strong reproof—with what effect we do not know, but he records that he never ventured to speak in rebuke, “unless he at the same time experienced a peculiar contrition of spirit.”

He became Mr. Simeon’s curate, and at the same time took charge of the neighbouring parish of Lolworth. People then had small expectations of clerical care, if a parish could be entrusted to a young deacon, non-resident, acting as tutor and examiner, and with an assistant curacy besides! His whole mind was, however, intensely full of his duties, and so unworthy did he consider all other occupations that he prayed and struggled conscientiously against the pleasure he could not but feel, in getting up Thucydides and Xenophon for the examinations. Everything not actually devotional seemed to him at these times under a ban, and it is painful to see how a mind of great scope and power was cramped and contracted, and the spirits lowered by incessant self-contemplation and distrust of almost all enjoyment. When, at another time, he had to examine on “Locke on the Human Understanding,” the metaphysical study acting on his already introspective mind produced a sense of misery and anguish that he could hardly endure. It is pleasant, however, to find him in another mood, writing, “Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before; I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, for religion has refined my mind, and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful.”

This, no doubt, was true, but another influence had awakened his heart, earthly perhaps in itself, but so noble and so holy that it bears a heavenly light. He had become attached to a young lady in Cornwall, named Lydia Grenfell, like-minded

enough to return his affection. His intention of volunteering for the Church Missionary Society was overthrown by a disaster in Cornwall which deprived himself and his unmarried sister of all the provision that their father had made for them, thus throwing her upon him for maintenance, and making it necessary that he should obtain a salary that would support her. It was suggested by some of his friends that one of the chaplaincies founded by the old East India Company, before the jealousy of religious teaching had set in, would both give him opportunities for missionary work and enable him to provide for his sister at home. Application was accordingly made, and a man of his talent and character could not fail of being accepted; he was promised the next vacant post, and went down to spend the long vacation in Cornwall, and bid farewell to all whom he loved there, for the journey was long and expensive, and he had resolved not to trust himself among them again.

He writes in his journal, “Parted with Lydia for ever in this life with a sort of uncertain pain, which I knew would increase to violence.” And so it was, he suffered most acutely for many days, and, though calmness and comfort came after a time, never were hopes and affections more thoroughly sacrificed, or with more anguish, than by this most truly devoted disciple of his Master.

He worked on at Cambridge till he received his appointment in the January of 1805, and he then only waited to receive Priests’ Orders before going to London to prepare for his embarkation.

In those times of war, a voyage to India was a perilous and lengthy undertaking. A whole fleet was collected, containing merchant, convict, and transport vessels, all under the convoy of the ships of war belonging to the Company; and, as no straggler might be left behind, the progress of the whole was dependent on the rate of sailing of the slowest, and all were impeded by the disaster of one. The Union, in which a passage was given to the chaplain, contained, besides the crew, passengers, the 59th Regiment, some other soldiers, and young cadets, all thrown closely together for many months. She sailed from Portsmouth on the 17th of July; but in two days’ time one of the many casualties attendant on at least sixty vessels made the fleet put into Falmouth, where it remained for three weeks. This opportunity of intercourse with his

family might well seem an especial boon of Providence to the young missionary, who had denied himself a last visit to them, and he carried away much comfort from this meeting. His sister was engaged to be suitably married, so that he was relieved from care on her account, and some hope was entertained that Lydia would be able to come out to him in India. A correspondence likewise began, which has been in great part preserved. Two days after weighing anchor, the Union still lingered on the coast, and the well-known outline, with Mount’s Bay, the spire of St. Hilary’s church, and all the landmarks so dear and familiar to the young Cornishman’s eye and heart, were watched from morning to night with keen pain and grief, but with steadfast resolve and constant inward prayer.

Then he addressed himself to the duties of the voyage. Private study of Hebrew and of Hindostanee was of course a part; but he hoped to be useful to his companions as a friend and as a minister. He could only obtain permission to hold one service every Sunday, but he hoped to do much by private conversations and prayers, and he tried to gain over the cadets by offering to assist them in their studies, especially mathematics. Some of them had the sense to see that the teaching of a senior wrangler was no small advantage, and these read with him throughout the voyage; but in general they were but raw lads, and followed the example of their superiors, who for the most part were strongly set against Mr. Martyn. Those were the times when sailors were utterly uncared for, and when mauvais sujets at home were sent out to India to the corruptions of a luxurious climate and a heathen atmosphere. Men of this stamp would think it bad enough to have a parson on board at all, and when they found that he was a faithful priest, who held himself bound not to leave them unchecked in their evil courses, they thought themselves aggrieved. Nor was his manner likely to gain them. Grave and earnest, he had never in his life known sportiveness, and his distress and horror at the profanity and blasphemy that rang in his ears made him doubly sad and stern. From the first his Sunday service was by most treated as an infliction, and the officers, both of the ship and of the military, had so little sense of decency as to sit drinking, smoking, and talking within earshot. The persons who professed to attend showed no reverence of attitude; and when he endeavoured to make an impression on the soldiers

and their wives between-decks, he was met with the same rude and careless inattention.

With very little experience of mankind, he imagined that these hardened beings could be brought to repent by terror, and his discourses were full of denunciations of the wrath of God. He was told that, if he threatened them thus, they would not come to hear him, and his reply was an uncompromising sermon on the text, “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the people that forget God.” The bravery of the thing, and the spirit of truth and love that pervaded all he said on this solemn verse, was not lost upon all: some of the cadets were moved to tears, and an impression was made upon several persons. Indeed, there was much that should have induced serious thought, for, after having touched at Madeira and the Azores, it was made known that the 59th was to be disembarked at the Cape, to assist in the struggle then going on between the English and Dutch. Moreover, there was much sickness on board, and the captain himself, who had been always bitterly opposed to Mr. Martyn, anxiously called for him to attend upon his death-bed.

The 59th were landed in Table Bay just in time to take part in Sir David Baird’s victory. Martyn went on shore the next day to do his best for the wounded; but they were mostly in hospital, and, being Dutch, he could do little for them. He found congenial spirits among the Dutch clergy in Cape Town, and spent a happy month there, but the latter part of his voyage was not more satisfactory than the first. The educated portion of the passengers continued to set their faces against him, treating him with increased contempt, and even turning into ridicule the farewell sermon, in which he took an affectionate leave of all who had sailed with him.

It may be that his manner was ill-judged, but it is a fearful thing to find that it was possible for so many Christian people to have been in daily contact with as true a saint as ever lived, and yet make him their mock! Perhaps some of his words, and far more his example, may have borne fruit in after years, such as he never knew of.

The whole voyage had lasted nearly ten months before entering the Hooghly. While ascending the stream, the lassitude produced by the climate was so great that Martyn’s spirits sank under it: he thought he should “lead an idle,

worthless life to no purpose. Exertion seemed like death; indeed, absolutely impossible.” Yet at the least he could write, “Even if I should never see a native converted, God may design, by my patience and continuance, to encourage future missionaries.”

This feeling of exhaustion was the prelude to a severe attack of fever, which assailed him almost immediately after his arrival; but happily not till he was safely lodged at Aldeen, in the kindly house of the Rev. David Brown, where he was nursed till his recovery. His friends wanted to keep him among the English at Calcutta, but his heart was set on ministering to the heathen, and the sights and sounds of idolatry that constantly met him increased his eagerness. He once rushed out at the sight of the flames of a Suttee, hoping to rescue the victim, but she had perished before he reached the spot.

His arrival was when the alarm about the meeting at Vellore was at its height, and when the colony at Serampore had been forbidden to preach or distribute tracts in Calcutta. He by no means agreed with all the Baptist doctrines, but he held in great esteem and reverence such men as Carey and Marshman, was glad to profit by their experience and instructions, and heartily sympathised in all their difficulties. Mr. Carey might well write, “A young clergyman, Mr. Martyn, is lately arrived, who is possessed with a truly missionary spirit.” Together the Serampore missionaries, with Mr. Martyn, Mr. Corrie, and Mr. Brown, united in dedicating to the worship of God a heathen pagoda, which the last-mentioned had succeeded in purchasing from the natives. Altogether he was much cheered and refreshed. During the time that he waited at Aldeen he improved himself in Hindostanee, and began to study Sanscrit, and learnt the most approved method of dealing with the natives. Moreover, he found that his allowance as a chaplain was so liberal as amply to justify him in writing to urge Miss Grenfell to come out and join him; and, during the long period of sixteen or eighteen months before her refusal to do so reached him, he was full of the hope of receiving her.

His appointed station was Dinapore, where his primary duty was to minister to the English troops there posted, and to the families of the civilians; but he also hoped to establish native

schools, to preach in their own language to the Hindoos, and to scatter translations of portions of Scripture, such as the Parables, among them.

He had to read prayers to the soldiers from the drum-head by way of desk; there were no seats, and he was desired to omit the sermon: but afterwards a room was provided, and then the families of the officers and residents began to attend, though at first they were much scandalized by his preaching extempore. In fact there was a good deal in his whole tone that startled old orthodoxy; and in the opposition with which he met at times, there was some lawful and just distrust of the onesidedness of his tenets, together with the ordinary hatred and dislike of darkness to light. So scrupulous was he in the Jewish force given by his party to the Fourth Commandment, that, having one Sunday conceived the plan of translating the Prayer-book into Hindostanee, he worked at it till he had reached the end of the Te Deum; and there, doubting whether it were a proper employment for the day, desisted until the Monday, to give himself up to prayer, singing hymns, Scripture-reading, and meditation. The immediate value of this work was for the poor native wives of the English soldiers, whom he found professing Christianity, but utterly ignorant; and to them every Sunday, after the official English service, he repeated the Liturgy in the vulgar tongue. In this holy work he was the pioneer, since Swartz’s service was in Tamul. While working at his translations with his moonshee, or interpreter, a Mussulman, he had much opportunity for conversation and for study of the Mahometan arguments, so as to be very useful to himself; though he could not succeed in convincing the impracticable moonshee, who had all that self-satisfaction belonging to Mahometanism. “I told him that he ought to pray that God would teach him what the truth really is. He said he had no occasion to pray on this subject, as the word of God is express.” With the Hindoos at Dinapore, he found, to his surprise, that there was apparently little disinclination to “become Feringees,” as they called it, outwardly; but the difficulty lay in his insistance on Christian faith and obedience, instead of a mere external profession.

It was while he was at Dinapore that we first acquire anything like a distinct idea of Henry Martyn; for there a short halt of the 53rd Regiment brought him in contact with one

who had an eye to observe, a heart to honour, and a pen to describe him; namely, Mrs. Sherwood, the wife of the paymaster, a woman of deeply religious sentiments and considerable powers as an author. Mutual friends had already prepared Mr. Martyn to expect to find like-minded companions in the Sherwoods, invited to stay with him for the few days of their sojourn at Dinapore. “Mr. Martyn’s quarters,” says that lady, “were in the smaller square—a church-like abode, with little furniture, the rooms wide and high, with many vast doorways, having their green jalousied doors, and long verandahs encompassing two sides of the quarters.” So scanty, indeed, was the furniture, that, though he gave up his own bedroom, Mrs. Sherwood could not find a pillow, not only there, but in the whole house; and, with a severe pain in her face, could get nothing to lay her head on “but a bolster stuffed as hard as a pin-cushion.”

She thus describes the first sight of her host:—“He was dressed in white, and looked very pale, which, however, was nothing singular in India; his hair, a light brown, was raised from his forehead, which was a remarkably fine one. His features were not regular, but the expression was so luminous, so intellectual, so affectionate, so beaming with Divine charity, that no one could have looked at his features and thought of their shape or form; the outbeaming of his soul would absorb the attention of every observer. There was a very decided air, too, of the gentleman about Mr. Martyn, and a perfection of manners which, from his extreme attention to all minute civilities, might seem almost inconsistent with the general bent of his thoughts to the most serious subjects. He was as remarkable for ease as for cheerfulness. He did not appear like one who felt the necessity of contending with the world and denying himself its delights, but, rather, as one who was unconscious of the existence of any attractions in the world, or of any delights which were worthy of his notice. When he relaxed from his labours in the presence of his friends, it was to play and laugh like an innocent child, more especially if children were present to play and laugh with him.”

His labours were the incessant charge of the English, travelling often great distances to baptize, marry, or bury, together with constant teaching in the schools he had established both for the English and natives, attendance on the

sick in the hospitals, and likewise private arguments with Mahometans and Hindoos. Public preachings in the streets and bazaars, like those of Swartz, Carey, and Ward, he does not seem to have attempted at this time; but his translations were his great and serious employment, and one that gave him much delight. His thorough classical education and scholarship fitted him for this in an unusual degree, and besides the Hindostanee version of the Prayer-book, the Persian—so much wanted in the Bombay Presidency—was committed to him; and an assistant was sent to him, whose history, disappointing as it is, cannot be omitted from the account of Indian missions.

Sabat was an Arab of the tribe of Koreish, the same which gave birth to Mahomet himself. He was born on the banks of the Euphrates, and educated in such learning as still lingered about the city of the Khalifs; but he left home early, and served in the Turkish army against the French at Acre. Afterwards he became a soldier in the Persian army, where he was several times wounded, and in consequence retired, and, wandering into Cabul, there rose to be a royal secretary.

He formed a close friendship with his colleague, Abdallah, likewise a Koreishite Arab, and very able and poetical. When the Wahabees, the straitest sect of the Mussulmans, seized Mecca, their chief wrote a letter to the King of Cabul, which was committed to Abdallah to translate into Persian. By way of a graceful compliment, he put his translation into Persian verse, and the reward he received was equally strange; namely, the gift of as many pearls as could be stuffed into his mouth at once. He was, however, observed to be unusually grave and thoughtful, and to frequent the house of an Armenian—of course a Christian: but as this person had a beautiful daughter, she was supposed to be the attraction, and no suspicion was excited by his request to retire into his own country.

Soon after Sabat was made prisoner by the Tartars of Bokhara, and, by appealing to the king, as a descendant of the prophet, obtained his release and promotion to high honour. While visiting the city of Bokhara, he recognized his old friend, Abdallah, and, perceiving that his beard was shaved off, examined him on the cause so closely that he was driven to confess that the Armenian had converted him to the Christian faith, and that he did not wish to be known. Hereditary Christians are tolerated by the Moslem, but converts are

bitterly persecuted; and Sabat flew into a great rage, argued, threatened, and at last denounced his old friend to the Moollahs as a recreant from Islam.

Abdallah was arrested, and showed himself a true and faithful confessor and martyr. The Moollahs strove hard to make him recant. They demanded of him: “In the Gospel of Christ, is anything said of our Prophet?”—intending to extort that promise of the Comforter which Mahomet blasphemously applied to himself.

Abdallah’s answer was: “Yea—Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.”

This brave reply was requited by blows on the mouth till the blood flowed, and Sabat thought of the day he had seen that same mouth filled with pearls. Abdallah was sent back to prison, and four days were allowed him in which to recant; after which he was brought out and set before an assembled multitude. Pardon was offered him if he would deny his Lord, and, on his refusal, his left hand was cut off. The look of deep sorrow and pity he gave the former friend who had betrayed him sunk deep into Sabat’s heart. Again his life was offered, again he confessed himself a Christian, and finally his martyrdom was completed by cutting off his head.

This history Sabat told with feeling and earnestness, that convinced his hearers of its truth; and from this he did not vary, though his account of his own subsequent adventures varied so much that it was not possible at last to attach credence to anything he said of himself before he became expounder of Mohammedan Law in the Civil Court at Vizagapatam. At any rate Abdallah’s look dwelt with him; he detected discrepancies in the Koran, and became anxious to study the Christian Scriptures. He obtained from Bombay a copy, first of the New Testament, then of the Old, and, having become convinced, he came to Madras, and demanded baptism from Dr. Ker, the British chaplain. After some probation, which made Sabat so impatient that he threatened that he should accuse the minister before God if he delayed, he was baptized by the name of Nathanael, and sent to Serampore as a person likely to be useful in the translations always in hand there.

He was delighted with the habits there prevailing, dismissed his attendants, dined at the common table, and altogether conformed

himself to the spirit of the place. When it was decided to send him to Dinapore to assist Mr. Martyn in rendering the Bible into Persian, he took leave of Serampore with tears in his eyes. He was gladly welcomed by Mr. Martyn, and they worked together at the Gospel of St. Matthew, Sabat showing a scholar-like anxiety both for correctness and rhythm; but there was so much of the wild Arab about him that he was a continual anxiety. The Serampore missionaries thought him a grand, dignified figure. Mrs. Sherwood paints him much less pleasantly, and says he was exactly like the sign of the Saracen’s head, with intensely flashing eyes, high nose, white teeth, and jet black eyebrows, moustache, and beard. His voice was like rolling thunder, his dress of gorgeous material and thoroughly Oriental, silk skull-cap, jacket, jewelled girdle, loose trousers, and embroidered shoes, and he had a free and haughty manner, according with his signature, when writing to a gentleman who had offended him—“Nathanael Sabat, an Arab, who never was in bondage.”

In April 1809, Mr. Martyn was removed to the station at Cawnpore, where the Sherwoods were then residing. The time was one of the worst in the whole year for travelling across the sandy plains, with a wind blowing that made the air like “the mouth of an oven.” For two days and two nights, between Allahabad and Cawnpore, Mr. Martyn travelled in his palanquin without intermission, and, having expected to arrive sooner, he had brought no provision for the last day. “I lay in my palanquin, faint, with a headache, neither awake nor asleep, between dead and alive, the wind blowing flames.” When he arrived, Mr. Sherwood had only just time to lead him into the bungalow before he fainted away, and the hall being the least heated place, a couch was made ready for him there, where for some days he lay very ill; and the thermometer was never below 96°, though the punkah never ceased.

As soon as he mended a little, he enjoyed talking over his Hebrew and Greek studies and his ethnological researches with his clever and eager hostess, who must have greatly refreshed his spirit. He delighted in music: his voice and ear were both excellent, and he taught her many hymns and their tunes. He also took much pleasure in a little orphan girl whom she was bringing up. At this time she herself was almost a childless mother, all her Indian-born infants having been victims to the

climate; but a few months later Mr. Martyn christened her little daughter Lucy, a child of such gentle, gracious temper that he was wont to call her Serena. Mrs. Sherwood gives a pretty picture of this little creature, when about eighteen months old, creeping up to Mr. Martyn as he lay on a sofa with all his books about him, and perching herself on his Hebrew Lexicon, which he needed every moment, but would not touch so as to disturb her. The pale, white-clad pastor, and the child with silky hair, bare white feet and arms, and little muslin frock, looked equally innocent and pure.

Mr. Martyn’s house at Cawnpore was at the end of an avenue of palms and aloes: there were two bungalows connected by a long passage, in one of which he himself lived, the other was given up to Sabat and his wife. The garden was prettily laid out with shrubs and tall trees, with a raised platform in the centre; and on one side was a whole colony, consisting not only of the usual number of servants allowed to a military chaplain, but of a host of pundits, moonshees, schoolmasters, and poor nominal Christians, who hung about him because there was no one else to give them a handful of rice for their daily maintenance.

Here Mrs. Sherwood describes a motley entertainment, at which she was the only lady. Her husband, in his scarlet and gold uniform, and Mr. Martyn, in his clerical black silk coat, were the only other English. The other European present was Padre Giulio Cesare, an Italian Franciscan, whom Mr. Martyn was obliged to receive when he came to minister to the numerous Irish Roman Catholics in the regiment. He wore a purple satin cassock, a cord of twisted silk, a rosary of costly stones, and a little skull-cap, and his languages were French with the Sherwoods, and Italian and Latin with Mr. Martyn. Sabat was there in his Arab dress; there was a thin, copper-coloured, half-caste gentleman in white nankeen, speaking only Bengalee; and a Hindoo in full costume, speaking only his native tongue: so that no two of the party were in similar costume, seven languages were employed, and moreover the three Orientals viewed it as good breeding to shout at the very top of their voices.

Unluckily, too, Mr. Martyn in his politeness suddenly recollected that Mrs. Sherwood had expressed a liking for certain mutton patties, and ordered them to be brought, in a bachelor’s

entire oblivion whether any mutton was procurable otherwise than by killing a sheep: and the delay forced the guests to continue to sit on the platform in the dark, with the voices and languages making too great a Babel for the night-enjoyment sometimes so valued, when Mr. Martyn would show Mrs. Sherwood our own Pole Star just above the horizon, or watch the new moon “looking like a ball of ebony in a silver cup.” At last the patties were ready, and Mr. Martyn handed Mrs. Sherwood to a seat by him at the top of the table, while Sabat perched himself cross-legged upon a chair at the bottom.

The good chaplain’s simplicity seems to have been a great amusement to the Sherwoods. Late one evening he quietly observed, “The coolie does not come with my money: I was thinking this morning how rich I should be, and now I should not wonder in the least if he has run off and taken my treasure with him.” Thereupon it turned out that, not having drawn his pay for some time, he had sent a note to the collector at Cawnpore, asking that the amount should be forwarded by the bearer, a common coolie. It was all paid in silver, tied up in cotton bags, and no one expected that he would ever see it; however, the coolie arrived safely with it a little later. Another time, when each household had ordered a pineapple cheese, it was observed that the fissures in the two were marvellously similar; and at last it was discovered that the servants, though paid for two cheeses, made one do duty for both, appearing in turn at the two tables, which was the easier as Mr. Martyn supped on limes and other fruits, and only produced his cheese when the Sherwoods came to supper. He heeded little but his immediate thoughts, and, when he drove out in his gig, went on with his disquisitions on language and pronunciation, utterly unheeding what his horse was about.

The hope of having Lydia with him to brighten his life and aid his labours had by this time passed away. She had some entanglement which prevented her from coming out to India, and his disappointment was most acute. His letters urging her to come out to him are so strong, and full of such anguish, that it is hard to understand that the person who could withstand them could have been the admirable woman Miss Grenfell is described to have been in after-life—unless, indeed, Martyn did not appreciate the claims at home to which she yielded. “Why do things go so well with them and so hardly with me?”

was a thought that would come into his mind at the weddings where he officiated as priest. Meantime he had established native schools, choosing a master, usually a Mussulman, and giving him an anna a head for each boy whom he obtained as a scholar in reading and writing. Mr. Martyn supplied books, and these were translations of Scripture history, of the Parables, and the like, through which he hoped to lay a foundation for distinctive teaching. Here is Mrs. Sherwood’s description of the Cawnpore school, then in a long shed by the side of the cavalry lines:—

“The master sat at one end like a tailor on the dusty floor, and along under the shed sat the scholars, a pack of little urchins with no other clothes on than a skull-cap and a piece of cloth round their loins. These little ones squatted, like their master, in the sand: they had wooden imitations of slates in their hands, on which, having first written their lessons with chalk, they recited them à pleine gorge, as the French would say, being sure to raise their voices on the approach of any European or native of note. Now Cawnpore is one of the most dusty places in the world; the Sepoy lines are the most dusty part of Cawnpore; and as the little urchins are always well greased either with cocoa-nut oil, or, in failure thereof, with rancid mustard oil, whenever there was the slightest breath of air they always looked as if they had been powdered all over with brown powder. Who that has ever heard it, can forget the sounds of the various notes with which these little people intonated their ‘Aleph, Zubbin ah, Zair a, Paiche oh,’ as they moved backwards and forwards in their recitations? Who can forget the self-importance of the schoolmaster, who was generally a grey-bearded, dry, old man, who had no other means of proving his superiority to the scholars than by making more noise than even they could?”

In the winter of 1809, Mr. Martyn made his first endeavour at native preaching. The Yogis and Fakers, devotees and vagrants, haunted the station, and every Sunday evening he opened the gates of his garden, admitted all who were collected by the assurance of the distribution of a pice a head; and standing on his platform, read to them some simple verse of Scripture, and then endeavoured to make them believe there is a pure Almighty Universal Father. A frightful crowd: they were often five hundred in number. “No dreams,” says Mrs.

Sherwood, “in the delirium of a raging fever, could surpass the realities” of their appearance; “clothed with abominable rags, or nearly without clothes, or plastered with mud and cow-dung, or with long matted locks streaming down to their heels; every countenance foul and frightful with evil passions; the lips black with tobacco, or crimson with henna. One man, who came in a cart drawn by a bullock, was so bloated as to look like an enormous frog; another had kept an arm above his head with his hand clenched till the nail had come out at the back of his hand; and one very tall man had all his bones marked on his dark skin with white chalk, like the figure of grim Death himself.” The assemblage, in contrast with the pure, innocent, pale face and white dress of the preacher who addressed them, must have been like some of Gustave Doré’s illustrations.

These addresses were jealously watched by the British authorities, and were often interrupted by the howls and threatenings of his loathsome congregation; while, moreover, pulmonary complaint, the enemy of his family, began to manifest itself, so that the physicians insisted on his trying the effect of cessation from work, a sea-voyage, and a visit to England. On this plan he had at first fixed. He enters in his journal a happy dream of a walk with Lydia, and, waking, the recollection of the 16,000 miles between them; but in the meantime he heard from the critics at Calcutta, that his translation of the Gospels into Persian, done with the assistance of Sabat, was too full of Arabic idioms, and in language not simple enough for its purpose; and he therefore made up his mind to spend his leave of absence in making his way through Persia and part of Arabia, so as to improve himself in the languages, and submit his translation to more trustworthy scholars. Mr. Brown, on hearing of his plan, consented in these remarkable terms: “Can I then bring myself to cut the string and let you go? I confess I could not if your bodily frame were strong, and promised to last for half a century. But as you burn with the intenseness and rapid blaze of phosphorus, why should we not make the most of you? Your flame may last as long, and perhaps longer, in Arabia than in India. Where should the phœnix build her odoriferous nest but in the land prophetically called the ‘blessed’? And where shall we ever expect but from that country the true Comforter to come to the nations of the East?”

In September, therefore, Henry Martyn made ready to set forth, and to take leave of his congregation of beggars. He had baptized one poor old Hindoo woman, and she seemed to him to be the only fruit of his toils; but though the exhortation, at the end of all his labours of the Sunday, cost him severe pain and exhaustion, he had constantly persisted, often beginning in a low feeble tone, but gradually rising in fervour to the full power of his musical voice; then himself going among the disgusting throng to distribute their petty bribe for attendance, and often falling afterwards, faint and speechless, on a sofa.

He knew not that one seed, cast on these turbid waters, had found good soil, and was springing up. Sheik Salah was the son of a pundit at Delhi, and was well-learned in Persian and Arabic. When a youth he had become moonshee to two English gentlemen then living at Lucknow, and while in their service converted a Hindoo fellow-servant from his idolatry to Islam. Elated with his success, he gave himself such airs that his English masters reproved him; and he left them in displeasure, vowing never to serve a Feringhee again. However, being in the pay of a Mahratta chief, he was sent in company with a Mahometan envoy who had undertaken to murder a rival of his master, and having lulled his victim into security by an oath on the Koran that no treachery was intended, decoyed him into his tent, and there stabbed him.

Sheik Salah was a deeply conscientious man, and not only did he leave the Mahratta service, lest some such horrible act should be required of him, but he conceived a certain distrust of his own faith, which, though it condemns such deeds, had not hindered them. While in search of employment, he came to Cawnpore, and there, one fine evening, he sat with some other young Mussulmans, in a summer-house on the garden wall that bounded Mr. Martyn’s garden, enjoying their hookahs and sherbet, and amusing themselves with what they called the “foolishness” of the Feringhee Padre, who was discoursing to the throng of hateful looking beggars below. By and by, anxious to hear more, they came down, entered the garden, and stood in a row before the front of the bungalow; their arms folded, their turbans placed jauntily on one side, and their countenances expressive of the utmost contempt.

But the words that Sheik Salah caught were sinking deep. They were of the intense purity and holiness of God and of

His laws, and of the need of His power to attain to the keeping of them, as well as of His Sacrifice to atone for man’s sinfulness. Sheik Salah could not rest without hearing more, and becoming determined to obtain employment at Cawnpore, he undertook to copy Persian manuscripts for Sabat, and was lodged by him in one of the numerous huts in Mr. Martyn’s compound. He was a well-educated, graceful man, exceedingly handsome, looking like a hero of the Old Testament; and probably Sabat was afraid of a rival, for he never mentioned to Mr. Martyn the stranger who, Sunday after Sunday, listened to his preaching, and no doubt would have as thankfully profited by his individual teaching as he would have joyfully given it.

Sabat was at this time a great trial to Mr. Martyn, who in the flush of enthusiasm had let him be put too forward at first, and found the wild man of the desert far too strong for him. Sometimes, when they differed about a word in the translation, Sabat would contend so violently for a whole morning that poor Mr. Martyn, when unable to bear it any longer, would order his palanquin and be carried over to the Sherwoods to escape from the intolerable brawling shout. What Sabat could be was plain from the story of his wife Amina; his seventh, as he told his friends. When he was trying to convert her, she asked his views upon the future lot of those who remained Mahometans, and, when he consigned them to the state of condemnation, she quietly replied that she greatly preferred hell without Sabat’s company to heaven with him. The poor man was no doubt in great measure sincere, but his probation had been insufficient, and his wild Ishmaelitish nature, so far from being overcome, gained in pride and violence through the enthusiasm that was felt for him as a convert. Once, in a fit of indignation, he wrote a Persian letter, full of abuse of Mr. Martyn, to a friend in the service of the English resident at Lucknow. By him it was carried to his master, who, wishing to show Mr. Martyn the real character of his favourite convert, sent him the letter. Instead of looking into it, Mr. Martyn summoned Sabat, and bade him read it aloud to him. For once the Arab was overpowered; he cowered before his calm master and entreated his pardon, and when Mr. Martyn put the letter into his hands, assuring him that he had not read it, he was really touched, and showed sorrow for his violence.

On the last Sunday of September 1810, Mr. Martyn took

leave of Cawnpore. It was also the Sunday of the installation as chaplain of his dearest friend, the Reverend Daniel Corrie, and of the opening of a church which his exertions had prevailed to raise, whereas all former services had been in his own long verandah. The first sound of the bell most deeply affected those who had scarcely heard one since they had left their native country. That church has given place to the beautiful building which commemorates the horrors of 1857; but the name of Henry Martyn ought never to be forgotten at Cawnpore, if only as the priest to whom it was granted first to give thanks that, in his own words, “a temple of God was erected and a door opened for the service of the Almighty in a place where, from the foundation of the world, the tabernacle of the true God had never stood.”

After returning from church he sank, nearly fainting, on a sofa in the hall; but, as soon as he revived, begged his friends to sing to him. The hymn was—

“O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope in years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.”

After the early dinner and afternoon rest, on a sickly, hazy, burning evening, he preached for the last time to his beggars; came away fainting, and as he lay on his sofa told his friends that he did not believe that he had ever made the slightest impression on one of his audience there.

He knew not that Sheik Salah’s heart had been touched, and so deeply that he sought further instruction. As to Sabat, his later career was piteous. He fell back into Mahometanism, and, after some years of a wandering life, took service with the Mussulman chief of Acheen in Sumatra, where, having given some offence, he was barbarously hacked to pieces and thrown into the sea. Such bitter disappointments occur in missionary life; and how should we wonder, since the like befel even St. Paul and St. John?

On the 1st of October, 1810, Mr. Martyn embarked on the Ganges, and on the last day of the month arrived at Mr. Brown’s house at Aldeen. He was then much the stronger for the long rest to his voice and chest, but his friends thought him greatly changed and enfeebled, and he could not even hold a conversation

without bringing on painful symptoms. Nevertheless, he preached every Sunday but one at Calcutta until the 7th of January, 1811, when he took his last leave of his Anglo-Indian friends, and set forth on his journey to lands almost entirely strange even to his countrymen, in the hope of rendering the Scriptures available for the study of the numerous Hindoos and Mahometans who understood Persian better than any other literary language. He went forth, in broken health, and not only without a companion, but without even an attendant, and for his further history we have only his own journals and letters to depend upon. He went by sea to Bombay with a captain who had been a pupil of Swartz, and whose narratives delighted him much, and afterwards obtained a passage in an English ship which was to cruise in the Persian Gulf against Arab pirates. Here he was allowed to have public prayers every evening, and on the 22nd of May was landed at Bushire, where he was lodged in the house of an English merchant with an Armenian wife.

The time for a journey to Persia was so far favourable that the Shah, Fath’ Ali, who had succeeded to the throne in 1794, owed England much gratitude for having interfered to check the progress of Russian conquest upon his northern frontier. After Persia had long been closed from foreign intercourse by the jealous and cruel Shah, Aga Mohammed, Fath’ Ali, a comparatively enlightened prince in the prime of life, willingly entertained envoys and travellers from European courts, and Sir Gore Ouseley was resident at Shiraz as British Ambassador. Yet it was not considered safe for a Frank to travel through Persia without an Oriental dress, and, accordingly, Martyn had to provide himself with the tall conical cap of black Tartar lambskin, baggy blue trousers, red boots, and a chintz coat, allowing his beard and moustache to grow, and eating rice by handfuls from the general dish. Meantime he was hospitably entertained, the Armenian ladies came in a body to kiss his hand, and the priest placed him beside the altar in church, and incensed him four times over, for which he was not grateful on being told “it was for the honour of our order.”

An English officer joined company with him, and a muleteer undertook their transport to Shiraz. It was a terrible journey up the parching mountain paths of Persia, where Alexander’s army had suffered so much, with the sun glaring down upon

them, never, in that rainless belt around the Persian Gulf, tempered by a cloud. They travelled only by night, and encamped by day, sometimes without a tree to spread their tents under. The only mode of existing was to wrap the head in a wet cloth, and the body in all the heavy clothing to be had, to prevent the waste of moisture; but even thus Martyn says his state was “a fire within my head, my skin like a cinder, the pulse violent.” The thermometer rose to 126° in the middle of the day, and came down to about 100° in the evening. When exhausted with fever and sleeplessness, but unable to touch food, it was needful to mount, and, in a half-dead state of sleepiness, be carried by the sure-footed mountain pony up steep ascents, and along the verge of giddy precipices, with a general dreamy sense that it was magnificent scenery for any one who was in a bodily condition to admire it.

Swift clear streams and emerald valleys began to refresh the travellers as they rose into the higher land above the arid region; and, after one twenty-four hours’ halt in a sort of summer-house, where Henry Martyn was too ill to move till he had had a few hours of sleep, they safely arrived at the mountain-city of Shiraz, where he was kindly received by Jaffier Ali Khan, a Persian gentleman to whom he had brought letters of introduction.

Persia, as is well known, has a peculiar intellectual character of its own. Descended from the Indo-European stock, and preserved from total enervation by their mountain air, the inhabitants have, even under Islam, retained much of the vivacity, fire, and poetry inherent in the Aryan nature. Their taste for beauty, especially in form and colour, has always been exquisite; their delight in gardens, in music, and poetry has had a certain refinement, and with many terrible faults—in especial falsehood and cruelty, the absence of the Turkish stolidity, the Arab wildness, and the Hindoo pride and indolence—has always made them an attractive people. Their Mahommedanism, too, is of a different form from that of the Arab and Turk. Theirs is the schismatical sect of Ali, which is less rigid, and affords more scope for the intellect and fancy, and it has thrown off a curious body called the Soofees, a sort of philosophers in relation to Islam. The name may be either really taken from the Greek Sophos, wise, or else comes from the Persian Soof, purity. The Soofees profess to be continually

in search of truth, and seem, for the most part, to rest upon a general belief in an all-pervading Creator, with a spirit diffused through all His works. Like their (apparent) namesakes of old, they revel in argument, and delight to tell or to hear some new thing.

Thus, Jaffier Ali Khan, who belonged to this sect, made the English padre welcome; and his brother, Seid Ali, whose title of Mirza shows him to have been a Scribe, undertook to assist in the translation, while Moollahs and students delighted to come and hold discussions with him; and very vain and unprofitable logomachies he found them, whether with Soofee, Mahometan, or Jew. But the life, on the whole, was interesting, since he was fulfilling his most important object of providing a trustworthy and classical version of the Scriptures, such as might adequately express their meaning, and convey a sense of their beauty of language and force of expression to the scholarly and fastidious Oriental.

He made friends in the suite of the Ambassador, Sir Gore Ouseley, whose house he ministered on Sunday, and he was presented by him to the heir to the throne, Prince Abbas Mirza. He had, by way of Court dress, to wear a pair of red cloth stockings and high-heeled shoes, and was marched up through the great court of the palace, where a hundred fountains began to play the moment the Ambassador entered. The Prince sat on the ground in his hall of audience, and all his visitors sat in a line with their hats on, but he conversed with no one but the Ambassador, looking so gentle and amiable that Mr. Martyn could hardly believe that the tyrannical acts reported of him could be true.

In the summer heat, Jaffier Ali pitched a tent for him in a garden outside the walls of Shiraz, where he worked with much enjoyment, “living among clusters of grapes, by the side of a clear stream,” and sitting under the shade of an orange-tree. From thence he made an expedition to see the ruins of Persepolis, greatly to the perplexity of his escort, who, after repeatedly telling him that the place was uninhabited, concluded that he had come thither to drink brandy in secret!

On the New Year’s Day of 1812 Martyn wrote in his journal: “The present year will probably be a perilous one, but my life is of little consequence, whether I live to finish the Persian New Testament, or do not. I look back with pity and shame on

my former self, and on the importance I then attached to my life and labours. The more I see of my own works, the more I am ashamed of them. Coarseness and clumsiness mar all the works of men. I am sick when I look at man, and his wisdom, and his doings, and am relieved only by reflecting that we have a city whose builder and maker is God. The least of His works is refreshing to look at. A dried leaf or a straw makes me feel myself in good company. Complacency and admiration take the place of disgust.”

On the 24th of February he finished his Persian New Testament, and in six weeks more his translation of the Psalms. His residence in Persia had lasted just a year, and, though direct missionary work had not been possible to him there, he had certainly inspired his coadjutor, Mirza Seid Ali, with a much higher morality and with something very like faith. On one of the last days before his leaving Shiraz, Seid Ali said seriously, “Though a man had no other religious society, I suppose he might, with the aid of the Bible, live alone with God.” It was to this solitude that Martyn left him, not attempting apparently to induce him to give up anything for the sake of embracing Christianity. Death would probably have been the consequence of joining the Armenian Church in Persia, but why did Martyn’s teaching stop at inward faith instead of insisting on outward confession, the test fixed by the Saviour Himself?

On the 24th of May, Mr. Martyn and another English clergyman set out to lay his translation before the Shah, who was in his camp at Tebriz. There they were admitted to the presence of the Vizier, before whom two Moollahs, the most ignorant and discourteous whom he had met in Persia, were set to argue with the English priest. The Vizier mingled in the discussion, which ended thus: “You had better say God is God, and Mahomet is His prophet.” “God is God,” repeated Henry Martyn, “and Jesus is the Son of God.”

“He is neither born nor begets,” cried the Moollahs; and one said, “What will you say when your tongue is burnt out for blasphemy?”

He had offended against the Mohammedan doctrine most strictly held; and, knowing this well, he had kept back the confession of the core of the true faith till to withhold it longer would have been a denial of his Lord. After all, he was not

allowed to see the Shah without the Ambassador to present him, and descended again to Sultania—a painful journey, from which he brought a severe ague and fever, through which he was nursed by Sir Gore and Lady Ouseley.

As soon as he had recovered, he decided on making his way to Constantinople, and thence to England, where he hoped to recruit his health and, it might be, induce Lydia to accompany him back to India. His last letter to her was written from Tebriz on the 28th of August, dreading illness on the journey, but still full of hope. In that letter, too, he alludes to Sabat as the greatest tormentor he had known, but warns her against mentioning to others that this “star of the East,” as Claudius Buchanan had called him, had been a disappointment. His diary is carried on as far as Tocat. The last entry is on the 6th of October. It closes thus: “Oh! when shall time give place to eternity? When shall appear that new heaven and earth wherein dwelleth righteousness? There, there shall in nowise enter in anything that defileth; none of that wickedness which has made men worse than wild beasts, none of those corruptions which add still more to the miseries of mortality, shall be seen or heard of any more.”

No more is known of Henry Martyn save that he died at Tocat on the 16th of that same October of 1812, without a European near. It is not even known whether his death were caused by fever, or by the plague, which was raging at the place. He died a pilgrim’s solitary death, and lies in an unknown grave in a heathen land.

What fruit has his mission zeal left? It has left one of the soul-stirring examples that have raised up other labourers. It has left the Persian Bible for the blessing of all to whom that language is familiar. It left, for the time, a strong interest in Christianity in Shiraz. It left in India many English quickened to a sense of religion; and it assuredly left Sheik Salah a true convert. Baptized afterwards by the name of Abdul Messeh, or Servant of the Messiah, he became the teacher of no less than thirty-nine Hindoos whom he brought to Holy Baptism. Such were the reapings in Paradise that Henry Martyn has won from his thirty-one years’ life and his seeming failure.

CHAPTER V. WILLIAM CAREY AND JOSHUA MARSHMAN, THE SERAMPORE MISSIONARIES.

The English subjects and allies in India had hitherto owed their scanty lessons in Christianity to Germans or Danes, and the first of our own countrymen who attempted the work among them was, to the shame of our Government be it spoken, a volunteer from among the humblest classes, of no more education than falls to the lot of the child of a village schoolmaster and parish clerk.

In 1761, when Schwartz was just beginning to make his way in Tanjore, William Carey was born in the village of Paulerspury, in Northamptonshire. He showed himself a diligent scholar in his father’s little school, and had even picked up some Latin before, at fourteen years old, he was apprenticed to a shoemaker at the neighbouring village of Hackleton. Still he had an earnest taste for study; and, falling in with a commentary on the New Testament full of Greek words, he copied them all out, and carried them for explanation to a man living in his native village, who had thrown away a classical education by his dissipated habits.

The young shoemaker, thus struggling on to instruct himself, fell under the notice of Thomas Scott, the author of the Commentary on the Bible, and it was from him that Carey first received any strong religious impressions. Scott was a Baptist; and young Carey, who had grown up in the days of the deadness of the Church, was naturally led to his teacher’s sect, and began to preach at eighteen years of age. He always looked back with humiliation to the inexperienced performances of his untried zeal at that time of life; but he was doing his best to study, working hard at grammar, and every morning reading his portion of the Scripture for the day in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as English. Well might Mr. Scott say, as he looked at the little cobbler’s shop, “That was Mr. Carey’s college;” for all this time he was working at his trade, and, on

his master’s death, took the business, and married the daughter of the house before he was twenty.

It was an unlucky marriage, for she was a dull, ignorant woman, with no feeling for her husband’s high aims or superior powers, and the business was not a flourishing one; but he never manifested anything but warm affection and tenderness towards this very uncompanionable person, and perhaps, like most men of low station and unusual intellect, had no idea that more could be expected of a wife.

Perhaps, in spite of his kindness, Mrs. Carey had to endure the disasters common to the wives of struggling great men: for William Carey’s shoes were not equal to his sermons, and his congregation were too poor even to raise means to clothe him decently. His time was spent in long tramps to sell shoes he had made and to obtain the mending of others, and, meantime, he was constantly suffering from fever and ague.

In 1786, when in his twenty-fifth year, he obtained a little Baptist chapel and the goodwill of a school at Moulton; but as a minister he only received 16l. per annum, and at the same time proved, as many have done before him, that aptness to learn does not imply aptness to teach. He could not keep order, and his boys first played tricks with him and then deserted, till he came nearly to starvation, and had to return to his last and his leather.

Yet it was the geography lessons of this poor little school that first found the way to the true chord of Carey’s soul. Those broad tracts of heathenism that struck his eye in the map, and the summary of nations and numbers professing false religions, were to a mind like his no mere items of information to be driven into dull brains, but were terrible realities representing souls perishing for lack of knowledge. Cook’s Voyages fell into his hands and fed the growing impulse. He hung up in his shop a large map, composed of several sheets pasted together, and gazed at it when at his work, writing against each country whatever information he had been able to collect as to the number of the inhabitants, their religion, government, or habits, also as to the climate and natural history.

After he had for some time thus dwelt on the great longing of his heart, he ventured on speaking it forth at a meeting of ministers at Northampton, when there was a request that some topic might be named for discussion. Carey then modestly

rose and proposed “the duty of Christians to attempt the spread of the Gospel among the heathen.” The words were like a shock. The senior, who acted as president, sprang up in displeasure, and shouted out, “Young man, sit down! When God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine.” And another, namely Mr. Fuller, who afterwards became the sheet anchor of the Missions, describes himself as having thought of the words of the noble at Jezreel, “If the Lord should make windows in heaven, might such a thing be?”

Silenced by his brethren, Carey persevered, and proceeded to write what he had not been allowed to speak. A Birmingham tradesman of the name of Pott, an opulent man, was induced by his earnestness to begin a subscription for the publication of Carey’s pamphlet, which showed wonderful acquaintance with the state of the countries it mentioned, and manifested talent of a remarkable order. In truth, Carey had been endowed with that peculiar missionary gift, facility for languages. A friend gave him a large folio in Dutch, and was amazed by his returning shortly after with a translation into English of one of the sermons which the book contained.

He was becoming more known, and an invitation from a congregation at Leicester, in 1789, placed him in somewhat more comfortable circumstances, and brought him into contact with persons better able to enter into his views; but it was three years more before he could either publish his pamphlet or take the very first steps towards the establishment of a Society for Promoting the Conversion of the Heathen.

The first endeavour to collect a subscription resulted in 13l. 2s. 6d. This was at Kettering, and at the same time Carey offered to embark for any country the Society might appoint. The committee, however, waited to collect more means, but they found it almost impossible to awaken people’s minds. At Birmingham, indeed, 70l. was collected, but in London the dissenting pastors would have nothing to do with the cause; and the only minister of any denomination who showed any sympathy was the Rev. John Newton, that giant of his day, who had in his youth been captain of a slaver, and well knew what were the dark places of the earth. The objections made at that time were perfectly astounding. In the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, several Presbyterian

ministers pronounced it to be “highly preposterous” to attempt to spread the Gospel among barbarous nations, extolled the “simple virtues” of the untutored savage, and even declared that the funds of Missionary Societies might be turned against Government.

In India itself, the endeavours of the Danish settlement at Tranquebar had little affected Bengal, but a few of the more religious men at Calcutta had begun to be shocked at the utter oblivion of all Christian faith and morality by their own countrymen, and the absolute favour shown to the grossest idolatry of the heathen. Charles Grant, a member of the Board of Trade at Calcutta, was the foremost of these, and on his return to England brought the subject under the notice of that great champion of Christ, William Wilberforce. The charter of the East India Company was renewed from time to time; and when it was brought before Parliament, Wilberforce proposed the insertion of clauses enforcing the maintenance of chaplains, churches, and schools, so that a branch of the Church might take root in Hindostan.

This scheme, however, excited violent and selfish alarm in the directors, chiefly men who had made their fortunes in India, and after living there for years under no restraint were come home to enjoy their riches. They believed that the natives would take umbrage at the least interference with their religion, and that their own wealth and power, so highly prized, would be lost if idolatry were not merely tolerated, but flattered and supported. The souls of men and the honour of God were nothing to them; they were furious with indignation, and procured from the House of Commons the omission of the clauses. There was another hope in the Lords; but though Archbishop Moore and the Bishop of London spoke in favour of the articles, the Bishop of St. David’s said one nation had no right to impose its faith on another. None of the other Bishops stirred, and the charter passed without one line towards keeping Englishmen Christians, or making Hindoos such! The lethargy of the Church of the eighteenth century was so heavy that not only had such a son as Carey been allowed to turn from her pale in search of earnest religion, but while she was forced to employ foreigners, bred up in the Lutheran communion, as the chaplains and missionaries of her Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, he was going forth unaccredited

as a volunteer in the cause which her paralysed efforts could not support!

For it was to India that the minds of the little Baptist Society were turned by the return of one John Thomas, who seems to have been the Gaultier Sans Avoir of this crusade. He was Baptist by education, and having gone out as a surgeon to Calcutta, had been so shocked at the state of things as to begin to preach on his own account, but he was a hot tempered, imprudent man, and quarrelled with everybody, so as to make the cause still more unpopular with the East Indians. Yet this strange, wild character had a wonderful power of awakening enthusiasm. He had come home in the same ship with one Wilson, whose history was a marvel in itself. He had been made prisoner by the French during the Carnatic war, and finding that the captives were to be delivered up to Hyder Ali, he resolved to escape, leapt forty feet from his prison window, and swam the river Coleroon, in happy ignorance that it was infested with alligators; but then going up an eminence to judge of his bearings, he was seen, secured, and stripped naked, and, with his hands tied behind him, was driven before Hyder Ali. His account of having crossed the Coleroon was treated as a lie. “No mortal man,” said the natives, “had ever swum the river; did he but dip a finger in, he would be seized by the alligators,” but when evidence proved the fact, the Nabob held up his hands and cried, “This is the man of God.” Nevertheless Wilson was chained to a soldier, and, like the well-known David Baird, John Lindsay, and many others, was driven naked, barefoot, and wounded, 500 miles to Seringapatam; where, loaded with irons of thirty-two pounds weight, and chained in couples, they were thrust into a “black hole,” and fed so scantily that Wilson declared that at sight of food his jaws snapped together of themselves. Many a time in the morning corpses were unchained, and the survivors coupled up together again. Wilson was one of the thirty-one who lived to be released after twenty-two months, in a frightful state of exhaustion and disease. Afterwards, when commanding a ship at Bencoolen, every European under his command died, and he alone escaped, yet all this time he was an absolute infidel; and, when having made a fortune, he was returning home, he appeared so utterly hardened against all the arguments that the zealous Thomas could bring in favour

of Christianity, as to make him in despair remark to the chief officer that he should have more hope of converting the Lascar sailors than of Captain Wilson.

However, the words were penetrating the hitherto ignorant or obdurate heart, and preparing it to attend to further instruction. After some years of comfort at home, on hearing of plans for a mission to the South Sea Islands, Wilson resolved to offer himself as a free and spontaneous fellow-worker, ready to sacrifice his whole self in the great cause!

Meantime Thomas’s fervid account of the needs of India had made the infant Society propose to send him out with one colleague; and William Carey, now thirty-three years of age, offered himself as a fellow-worker.

The notion was terrible to Mrs. Carey, who flatly refused to go; but her husband decided on leaving her at home, and only taking his eldest boy, then about ten or eleven years old. An application was made to the Board of Directors for a licence to the two missionaries to preach, and for a passage in one of the Company’s vessels; but when Mr. Grant learnt that Thomas was one of them, he refused to assist in promoting their request, though he undertook to do what he could for Carey alone. However, the Board were certain to refuse them a passage; not because they were unordained or dissenters, but simply because they wished to be Christian teachers. A captain with whom Thomas had sailed as surgeon, offered to smuggle them over without permission; but while his ship was preparing, they had to wait in the Isle of Wight, and Thomas was continually in danger of being arrested by his creditors, and was constantly obliged to hide himself, till Carey became ashamed of such an associate. At last, just as they were on board, with 250l. paid for their passage, and the goods in which the money for their support had been invested, the captain received a letter warning him that an information was about to be laid against him at the India House for taking out people without permission. Not only missionaries, but Europeans of any kind, not in the public service, were forbidden to set foot on the Company’s territories without special licence, and the danger was so great that the captain set them ashore at once; and poor Carey beheld with tears the Indian fleet sailing from Portsmouth without him.

However, by vigorous exertion, Thomas found that a Danish ship would be lying in the Downs, on her way to the East

Indies, and that a passage in her would cost 100l. for a full-grown person and 50l. for a child. Posting down to Northamptonshire, Carey made a desperate effort to persuade his wife to come with him, and succeeded at last, on condition that her sister, Miss Old, should come too. There were now five children, and the passage-money for the whole party amounted to 600l., of which their utmost efforts, including the sale of all the little property the Careys possessed, could only raise half.

Thomas, who really had a generous spirit, then arranged that the whole party should be squeezed into two cabins, and that Mr. and Mrs. Carey alone should be treated as first-class passengers. They were taken on these terms; but the captain, an Englishman, naturalized in Denmark, gave Mr. Thomas and Miss Old each a cabin, made them dine at his own table, and treated them all most kindly.

Thus they safely arrived at Calcutta; but this was only the beginning of troubles. The goods, the sale of which was intended to maintain the mission, were entrusted to Thomas, and realized next to nothing; and Carey was indebted to the goodwill of a rich Hindoo for a miserable house in an unhealthy suburb of Calcutta, where he lodged his unfortunate family. They had a great deal of illness, and he was able to do little but study the language and endeavour to translate the Bible into Bengalee. Several moves made their state rather worse than better, until, in 1795, a gentleman in the Civil Service, Mr. George Udney, offered Carey the superintendence of an indigo factory of his own at Mudnabutty, where he hoped both to obtain a maintenance, and to have great opportunities of teaching the natives in his employment.

Disaster as usual followed him: the spot was unhealthy, the family had fevers, one of the children died, and the mother lost her reason from grief, so that she had to be kept under restraint for the rest of her life. Nor was Carey a better indigo-planter than a shoe-maker; the profits of the factory dwindled, and the buildings fell into ruin; the seasons were bad, and in three years Mr. Udney found himself obliged to give up the speculation; but in the meantime, though Carey had not been able to produce much effect on the natives, he had completed the preparation of the implement to which he most trusted for his work, a translation of the New Testament; and, moreover, had been presented by good Mr. Udney with a wooden printing-press

with Bengalee type. The wonderful-looking thing was set up in one of the side rooms at the factory, and was supposed by the natives to be the idol of the Europeans!

In the meantime he opened a school, and preached to the natives in all the villages round, but without making much, if any, impression; indeed he was so disheartened, that he did not even teach his own children. The chief benefit of his residence in India was at present the example he set, and the letters he sent home, which bore in on the minds of others the necessities of their brethren in the East, and brought aid in subscriptions and, what was still more needed, men.

In 1799, four members of the Baptist communion offered themselves to go out as missionaries to India, and two of these were men who left most important traces behind them: William Ward, who had been a printer and editor of a newspaper at Derby, and had seen Mr. Carey before his going out to India, and Joshua Marshman. This latter was the person who, above all others, gave the struggling mission the strength, consistency, and prudence which it wanted. The descendant of an old Puritan officer on the one side, and of Huguenot refugees on the other, he was brought up in strict Baptist principles by his father, who was one of the cloth weavers then inhabiting Wiltshire in great numbers. As a child, he was passionately fond of reading, and his huge appetite for books and great memory made him a wonder in his village. A London bookseller, who was visiting the place, heard of this clever lad, and took him into his shop as an errand boy; but Joshua found that his concern was more with the outside of books than the inside, and came home, at the end of five months, to his father’s loom.

He was a steady lad, with no passions save for reading and quiet heartfelt religion; but though he had never been guilty of any serious fault, the Baptist body to which his family belonged considered he had too much “head-knowledge” of Christianity to have much “heart-knowledge” of its truths; and for that reason only, and their distrust and contempt of human learning, refused to admit him to baptism.

However, this was no obstacle either to his marrying the daughter of a minister of his own persuasion, or taking the mastership of a school at Bristol, where he found less narrow-minded co-religionists, and was baptized by them in 1734, when twenty-six years of age. He was a successful schoolmaster,

and was likewise able to join the classes at Bristol Academy, where he studied thoroughly Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac. His circumstances were prosperous and rapidly improving when, after five years of great comfort at Bristol, his mind became so imbued with the sense of the need that some one should assist Carey, that he offered himself, together with Ward and two other young men, one of whom he had recently brought back to Christianity from Tom Paine’s infidel doctrines. Again his “human learning” stood in his way. The honest, ignorant men who were working so earnestly, fancied it connected with Pharisaism, and had little idea that the Brahmin philosophy was as hard to deal with as the Greek. They accepted him, but with hesitation, and a passage for the whole party, including wives and children, was taken in an American vessel.

Mr. Charles Grant advised them not to attempt to land at Calcutta, where they would probably be at once arrested and sent home again, but to land at the Danish colony of Serampore, and there wait for an opportunity of joining Carey at Mudnabutty.

Serampore is on the Hooghly, sixteen miles above Calcutta, and here they found themselves on the 13th of October, 1799, in a town pleasantly situated, beautiful to look at, and full of a mixed population of Danes, Dutch, English, and natives of all hues. They were preparing to set forth for Mudnabutty when, on the fifth day after their arrival, they were informed that the British Government demanded that they should be immediately re-embarked and sent home again, whilst a local English paper, having never heard of Baptists, concluded that the word was a mistake for Papists, and announced the arrival of four Popish priests, emissaries of Buonaparte. The Danish governor, Colonel Bie, was resolved to stand his ground and not deliver them up; but they were prevented from setting foot upon the Company’s territory, and the unwholesome, damp, little house that they were obliged to take while waiting at Serampore proved fatal to one of their number, the young man whom Marshman had rescued from infidelity, who died of chill and fever before his inexperienced associates were aware of his danger.

Another difficulty in the way of joining Carey and assisting in the printing of his translations, was that papers which were

thought dangerous to the British power had lately been issued, and the Marquis Wellesley, who was then in the midst of his great war with Tippoo Sahib, was resolved not to allow any printing to be carried on except in Calcutta, where it could be under the eye of his officials. However, he had no objection to the establishment of mission, school, or press on the Danish ground, and Colonel Bie was only desirous to keep them there; so it was decided to send Ward alone, with a Danish passport, to visit Carey at Mudnabutty, and confer with him upon his removal to Serampore, and the establishment of a mission settlement there.

All doubt was removed, while this consultation was in progress, by finding that the jealous Anglo-Indians were prepared to arrest any missionary whom they caught upon their ground; and Carey’s five years’ covenant as an indigo planter being now run out, his supposed idol was taken down and packed up, and his four boys and poor insane wife removed to Serampore, where all their present capital was laid out in the purchase of a piece of ground and the construction of the habitations of the little colony. The expenses were to be defrayed from a common stock, each missionary in turn superintending the domestic arrangements for a month, all the household dining together at one table, and only a small allowance being made to each head of a family for pocket money.

Six families were here united, and only 200l. was left to support them for the six months until remittances could be obtained from England; but all were used to cottage fare, and were not so dependent on servants as most Europeans in India. A piece of land attached to the house became, under Mr. Carey’s care, a beautiful botanic garden. The press was set up under the care of Ward, and on the 18th of March, 1800, the first sheets of the Gospels in Bengalee were struck off. Mr. and Mrs. Marshman opened two boarding schools for European children for the maintenance of the mission, and their great ability in tuition rendered these so profitable as to become its main support. This was soon followed by another school for the natives, to which they eagerly thronged.

Meanwhile the missionaries went out, singly or in pairs, into the streets or the neighbourhood of the heathen temples, and attracted a crowd by singing hymns in Bengalee, and then

preached to them, offering to receive any inquiries at the mission-house. Carey’s time was almost entirely taken up in hearing and answering these questions; but, as usual, the ties of family, society, and custom almost always proved too strong to be broken through even by the conviction of the truth of Christianity. Ram-bosoo, Mr. Carey’s first Hindoo friend, was like Serfojee, ready to do anything on behalf of Christianity except to embrace it openly himself.

Mr. Thomas had meantime engaged himself as superintendent of a sugar factory at Beerbhoom, whence he came to visit his brethren at Serampore, bringing with him one of his workmen named Fukier, whom he believed that he had converted. The man gave so good an account of his faith that the missionaries deemed him fit for baptism, and rejoiced in him as the first-fruits of seven years’ labour; but he went home to take leave of his friends, and either they prevailed on him to give up his intention, or privately murdered him, for he never was heard of again.

However, a carpenter of Serampore named Krishnu, who had been brought into the mission-house with a dislocated arm for Mr. Thomas to set, was so struck by what he heard there that he, with his wife and daughter and his brother Goluk, were all willing to give up their caste and be baptized.

There was much, however, to render the joy of this day far from being unmixed. Poor John Thomas, after his seventeen years of effort, fitful, indeed, but sincere, was so overjoyed at this confession of faith that he became frantic, and in three days was raving violently. Meanwhile, the native mob, infuriated by hearing that Krishnu and Goluk had renounced their caste, rose to the number of two thousand, and dragged them to the magistrate, but found nothing to accuse them of. The magistrate released them, but they were brought back immediately after, on the plea that the person to whom Krishnu’s daughter had been betrothed had a claim upon her. This, however, the authorities disallowed, and they even gave the missionaries a guard to secure them from any interruption during the rite of Baptism, which, by the customs of their sect, was necessarily in public, and by immersion; but there was serious consultation whether it were fit to use the Ganges, so superstitiously adored by the natives, for the purpose. Some argued that the Hindoos might think that the sacredness of Gunga was thus recognized,

others that they would consider that the Christians had defiled it, and it was finally resolved to use it like any other stream. In the meantime, Goluk and the two women had been so much terrified that they would not come forward; and on the day of the baptism, Sunday, the 26th of December, 1800, the only two candidates were Krishnu and Felix Carey, the missionary’s own eldest son. William Carey walked from the chapel to the ghat, or steps leading to the river, with his son on one side and the Hindoo on the other; but the court they had to pass resounded with the frightful imprecations of poor Mr. Thomas in one room, echoed by screams from Mrs. Carey in the other.

At the ghât the Danish governor himself, together with several of his countrymen, some Englishmen, a large body of Portuguese, and a throng of natives, Hindoo and Mahometan, were waiting, and before all these the baptism was performed by Mr. Carey. All were silent as if overawed, and Colonel Bie even shed tears.

The next day there was not a scholar in the native school, but the love of learning soon filled it again. Even down till quite recently, when the bands of attachment to the old heathenism have become much loosened, every open conversion continued to empty the schools, though never for long at a time.

The women soon recovered from their alarm and were baptized, and the mission also gained over an influential Portuguese gentleman named Fernandez, whom their tenets led them to view as in as much need of conversion as the heathen. He proved an active assistant, and for full thirty years laboured in their cause.

In the meantime Lord Wellesley had been engaged in founding the college at Fort William, Calcutta, for the training of young Europeans for the civil service in the knowledge of the numerous native tongues, laws, and customs with which they had to deal—and which are as various as they are important—not only practically, but philosophically. The only person at that time in Bengal qualified to teach the Bengalese language was the Northamptonshire cobbler, who had acquired it for the love of God and the spread of Gospel light!

His dissent was a disqualification for any of the higher offices of the college, but the teachership was offered to him, with a salary of 500 rupees a month—absolute affluence compared with his original condition. Yet he would not accept the post

unless he were allowed still to be regarded as a missionary. No objection was made, and thus by his talent and usefulness had Carey forced from the Government which had forbidden him to set foot on their territories his recognition in the character he had always claimed. Even his private secular earnings he never regarded as his own: this income, and that arising from Marshman’s school, these good men viewed as rendering their mission from henceforth independent, and setting free the Society at home to support fresh ones. Already the accounts they sent home were stirring up many more subscribers, and the commendations bestowed on them in the periodical accounts pained their humility. Ward wrote that it was like a public show: “Very fine missionaries to be seen here! Walk in, brethren and sisters, walk in!”

It was happy for the missionaries that their ground had thus been won, for the war with Denmark occasioned Serampore to be occupied by British troops early in 1801, and this would, earlier in their career, infallibly have led to their expulsion: but, as it was, they were allowed to proceed exactly as they had done before.

Their most serious difficulties were at an end before poor Thomas, though he had recovered from his brain fever, died of an attack of fever and ague, after having done almost an equal amount of good and harm to his cause by his excitable nature and entire want of balance. Converts continued from time to time to be gathered in: Goluk took courage after waiting about two years, and a Brahmin named Krishnu-prisad trampled on his brahminical cord or poita, and was baptized. He was allowed to wear it as a mark of distinction, but he gave it up voluntarily after three years. Moreover he broke through Indian prejudice by marrying the daughter of Krishnu, the first convert, though of a caste far inferior to his own. This was the occasion of a happy little wedding feast, given under a tree in front of the house of the bride’s father, when a hymn composed by Krishnu was sung, and native dishes served up in Eastern style, after which the entertainment concluded with prayer. Only the next week, in contrast to the devotion that blessed these family ties, three Hindoo widows were burnt on a pile not far from the mission-house!

In still greater contrast was the first funeral among the converts of the mission-house—that of a man named Gokool.

The native custom is that the dead are always carried to burial by persons of their own caste, and it is intense defilement for one of another caste to touch the body. Christians were always carried by the lowest class of the Portuguese, who had fallen into so degraded a state that they were usually known by their own word for poor, “pobre,” and were despised by the whole population. They were generally drunk and disorderly, and their rudeness, irreverence, and quarrels were a scandal to the solemn occasion. Mr. Marshman, who was in charge of the mission at the time in Mr. Carey’s absence, had some difficulty in persuading the Hindoo converts that it was no shame, but a charitable work, to bear a brother’s body to its last resting-place, even though they were seen doing the work of the despised pobres. Accordingly he resolved to set the example, and the corpse of the convert, within a coffin covered with white muslin, was carried to the burial-ground by Marshman, Felix Carey, a baptized Brahmin, and a baptized Hindoo, all the procession singing a Bengalee Christian hymn.

The most remarkable events that befell the Serampore Mission from this time were either domestic, or related to their connection with the College at Fort William, and the sanction they received from Government. Lord Wellesley went home in 1805, Colonel Bie died the same year, and these were most serious losses to the cause of the Serampore mission. Lord Wellesley had followed his own judgment, and carried things with a high hand, often against the will of the East India Company, and there was a strong desire to reverse his policy. His successor, Lord Cornwallis, died two months after landing, and Sir George Barlow, who carried on the government in the interregnum, though a good man, had not force enough to withstand the dislike of the Anglo-Indians to the mission. Mr. Ward made an attempt at Calcutta to preach in Hindoo in a chapel, the ground of which had been purchased by the missionaries, but as he walked through the streets the people shouted, “That’s the Hindoo padre; why dost thou destroy the caste of the people?” And when, two Sundays later, a preacher of Brahmin birth appeared, there were loud cries of indignation. “O vagabond,” cried one man, “why didst thou not come to my house? I would have given thee a handful of rice rather than that thou shouldst have become a Feringhee!” In spite of these cries, however, the chapel was thronged, until,

after the third Sunday, when an order came forth from the magistrates, forbidding the missionaries either to preach, allow their converts to preach, distribute tracts, or even argue with the natives—or in anyway “interfere with their prejudices”—in Calcutta; and two new missionaries, named Chater and Robinson, who had come out without a licence, were prohibited from proceeding to Serampore.

Considering that these orders emanated only from a Provisional Government during an interregnum, and that there was every hope that they might be reversed by the next Governor-General, the missionaries resolved to submit to them for the time, and to abstain from working in Calcutta. Early in the year 1806, however, the animosity of the English East Indians was increased by a mutiny that broke out among the Sepoys at Vellore, in the Madras Presidency, in consequence of some regulations as to their dress, which they resented as being supposed to assimilate them to Europeans. The English colonel and all his garrison were massacred, and, though the mutineers were surrounded and destroyed, great alarm prevailed. The discontent of the Sepoys was attributed to their displeasure at the spread of Christianity, and it was even averred that the lives of the English in India could only be preserved by the recall of all the missionaries!

At Calcutta, Sir George Barlow sent to forbid Mr. Carey and his colleagues from making any further attempts at conversion, and for a short time they were entirely restricted to the Danish territory, while Chater and Robinson were ordered to embark for England, and were only kept by their appeal to the flag of Denmark.

Upon this Mr. Chater proceeded to Rangoon, an independent province, but on the whole the current of opposition was diminishing. Lord Wellesley and Mr. Pitt had prevailed upon Government not to permit the College at Fort William to be broken up, though it was reduced and remodelled. Mr. Carey was a gainer by the change, for he was promoted to a professorship, with an increase of salary, which he said was “very good for the mission.” He soon after received the diploma of a Doctor of Divinity from an American University.

The head-quarters of the establishment continued to be at Serampore, where the missionaries and their families still lived in common, supported upon the proceeds of Mr. Carey’s professorship,

Mr. Marshman’s school, and likewise the subscriptions received from England. Here were their chapel, their schools, and their printing-press, from whence emanated such books and tracts in Bengalee as could be useful for their purpose, and likewise their great work, the translation of the Scriptures, which Marshman and Carey were continually revising and improving as their knowledge of the language became more critical. Thence Mr. Carey went to give instruction at Fort William, and thence the preachers, as the opposition relaxed, went forth on expeditions into the country to teach, argue, and persuade, without any very wide-spread success, but still every year gaining a few converts—sometimes as many as twenty—who, when they had given sufficient evidence of faith, were always publicly baptized by immersion, according to the custom of the sect, which indeed acknowledged no other form as valid, and re-baptized such members of other communions as joined them. Every missionary to the East Indies, whether belonging to their own society or not, was certain to visit and hold council with them, as the veterans of the Christian army in India, and the men most experienced in the character and language of the natives; they were the prime leaders and authorities in all that concerned the various vernacular translations of the Scriptures, and their example was as a trumpet-call to others to follow them in their labours; while all the time the simplicity, humility, self-denial, and activity of the men themselves remained unspoiled.

Wonderful, too, had been the effect produced by the stirring of the sluggish waters of indifference. The Society that had been with such difficulty established at home, was numbering multitudes of subscribers both in England and America; it had awakened a like spirit in other sects, and whereas no dissenting minister in London had at first taken up Carey’s cause, it had become a scandal for a minister not to subscribe to or promote missions to the heathen. Missionary reports were everywhere distributed, young men aspired to the work, and American Universities did honour to the ability and scholarship of the pioneers of Serampore.

Mrs. Carey died on the 7th of December, 1807, having spent twelve years in a state of constant melancholy and often raving insanity. Poor woman! she was from the first a victim to her husband’s aspirations, which she never understood. There is

something piteous in the cobbler’s daughter marrying the apprentice to keep on the business, and finding him a genius and a hero on her hands, starving, being laughed at, and at last carried off to a strange land and fatal climate, all without the least comprehension or sympathy for the cause, and her mind failing before the material prosperity came, which she might have regarded as compensation.

In 1807, when some progress had been made, the grant for the translation of the Scriptures was withdrawn; but the superintendents resolved to persevere on their own account, and at the same time to collect all the information in their power respecting the Christians in India, so as to be able to rouse the cold hearts at home to the perception that a real work was in progress. For this purpose, Dr. Claudius Buchanan, the Provost of the College at Fort William, made an expedition of inquiry among the various Christians, and his little book, “Christian Researches,” brought much before the public at home, of which they had hitherto been ignorant.

Before his time the enormities of the worship of Jaghernauth, and the horrors of the car, beneath which human victims threw themselves, had hardly been realized; and his very effective style of writing brought into full prominence the atrocities of the Suttee, or burning of widows on the funeral pile, a custom with which it was supposed to be impossible to interfere, but which has been proved to be entirely a corrupt practice, unsanctioned by any ancient law, only encouraged by the Brahmins out of avarice. Happily the present generation only knows of these atrocities as almost proverbial expressions, but when the century came in they were in full force.

It was Buchanan, too, who first revealed to the English the existence of those Nestorian Christians of St. Thomas, on the coast of Malabar, who had probably had no ecclesiastical intercourse with this country since the embassy of King Alfred, nine hundred years before. He also brought into public notice the effect of Swartz’s labours, by describing a visit that he made to Tanjore, where he had a most kind reception from Serfojee, and greatly admired the numerous charitable foundations of that beneficent Rajah. He also heard the services held in three languages in Swartz’s church, and was greatly struck, when the Tamul sermon began, by hearing a universal scratching and grating all round him. This was caused, he

found, by the iron pens upon the palmyra leaves upon which most of the native congregation were taking notes, writing nearly as fast as the minister spoke. He also heard Sattianadem—now a white-haired old man—preach on the “Marvellous Light,” and he felt that a great man had verily left his impress on these districts.

Carey’s second marriage was curiously different from his first. It was to a lady named Charlotte Rumohr, of noble extraction, belonging to a family of high rank, in the duchy of Schleswig. She was small and slightly deformed, but of good abilities; she had been highly educated, and being generally a prisoner on a couch, she had read deeply in many languages. She had come out to India in search of a warm climate, and residing at Serampore, had fallen under the influence of the missionaries, and had some years previously been admitted to their congregation by immersion. For the first time, Dr. Carey now enjoyed a really happy home, with a lady equal to conversing with him after the labours of the day.

But this mission, though subsisting for some years longer, hardly affords many more events. It was not without troubles. At times came friendly support; at others, opposition from the authorities—the committee at home were sometimes ignorantly meddlesome, sometimes sordid in their fits of economy; insufficiently tested fellow-labourers came out and failed; promising converts fell away; the climate was one steady unrelaxing foe, which took victims out of every family: but all these things were as the dust of the highway, trials common to man, and only incident to the very position that had been so wondrously achieved, since the day when the poor Baptist cobbler was so peremptorily silenced for but venturing to hint at the duty of converting the heathen.

Lord Hastings’ government was far more friendly than any previous one, and the few notable events that befell the community are quickly numbered. In 1821, they were visited by Swartz’s pupil, Serfojee, who was staying with the Governor-General, Lord Hastings, on his way to Benares, whither, strange and sad to say, he was on pilgrimage, though all the time showing full intellectual understanding of, and warm external affection for, the Christian faith. He talked English easily, and showed much interest in all that was going on, but a heathen he still remained.

This visit only preceded by a few weeks the death of Mrs. Carey, after thirteen years’ marriage, the happiest of Dr. Carey’s life; but in another year he married a widow of forty-five, who was ready to nurse his now declining years. That year 1822 was a year of much sorrow; the cholera, said to have first appeared in 1817, became very virulent. The Hindoos viewed it as a visitation from the goddess of destruction, and held services to propitiate it, and when that had passed away, a more than usually fatal form of fever set in. Krishnu-pal, the first convert, who had for twenty years been a consistent Christian, was one of the first to be taken away. Dr. Carey himself, though exceedingly ill, recovered his former state of health, and continued his arduous labours, he being by this time the ablest philologist in India; but the little band had come to the time of life when “the clouds return after the rain,” and in 1823 Mr. Ward died of cholera. For twenty-three years had the threefold cord between Carey, Marshman, and Ward, been unbroken. They had lived together like brothers, alike in aim and purposes, each supplying what the other lacked; and the distress of the parting was terrible, especially to Dr. Marshman, who at the time of his friend’s illness was suffering from an attack of deafness, temporary indeed, but for some days total, so that he could only watch the final struggle without hearing a single word.

He wrote as if he longed to be with those whose toils and sorrows were at an end, but he still had much more to do. In 1826, he visited England, partly for the sake of pleading with the Society at home, first begun on so small a scale by Carey, but which now numbered many members and disposed of large sums. The committee, however, were often hard to deal with. There were among them many men of good intentions, but without breadth of views, and used to small economies. They listened to false reports, censured without sufficient information, pinched their missions, and dictated the management, so that to deal with them was but a vexation of spirit. Indeed, such annoyances are inseparable from the very fact of the supplies and the government being in the hands of a body at a distance from the scene of action, and destitute of personal experience of the needs.

After much argument, the matter ended in the Serampore mission being separated from the General Society, as indeed it

had become nearly self-supporting through the numerous schools which the talents of the members of it had been able to establish. It was an unfortunate time, however, when the two men whose abilities had earned their present position were so far past the prime of life; and, in 1830, the failure of a great banking company both deprived them of a large part of their investments, and, by ruining numerous families, lessened the attendance at Dr. Marshman’s school. Moreover, the American subscribers sent a most vexatious and absurd remonstrance against any part of their contributions for training young men to the ministry, being employed in teaching science. “As if,” said Dr. Marshman, “youths in America could be educated for ministers without learning science.”

Another disaster was that, on Lord William Bentinck’s arrival in India in 1830, the finances of the Government were found to be in so unsatisfactory a state, that salaries were everywhere reduced, and that which Dr. Carey had derived from the college at Fort William was thus cut down from 1,000 rupees per month to 500. At this time, the missions and preachers dependent on Serampore required 1,500l. a year for their support, and only 900l. was to be had, and this when both Marshman and Carey were seventy years of age, and still were toiling as hard as ever.

There were other troubles, too, as to who was the owner of the buildings, whether the Baptist Society, or the missionaries as trustees, and as having paid a large portion of the price. A great inundation of the Hooghly had nearly settled the question by washing the whole away. As it was, it did much damage, and destroyed the beautiful botanical garden that had for twenty years been Dr. Carey’s delight. Finally the whole of the right of Marshman and Carey to the buildings was sold to the Society, for a much less amount than they had paid from their own pockets; but they were to occupy them rent free for the rest of their lives.

The trouble and anxiety consequent on this question, which had been of many years’ standing, had greatly impaired Dr. Marshman’s strength both of body and mind. Morbid attacks of depression came on, during which he wandered about, unable to apply himself so much as even to write a letter, though in the intervals he was both cheerful and full of activity. Dr. Carey’s health was likewise failing, and, with no formed illness,

he gradually sank, and died on the 9th of June, 1834, in his seventy-third year.

To him belongs the honour of the awakening of the missionary spirit in England. Yet, as an individual preacher and teacher, he does not seem to have had much power. His talent was for language and philology; his perfections were faith and perseverance. In these he was a giant; in everything else, whether as a cobbler, schoolmaster, indigo-planter, nay, even as father of a family, he was a failure: but his steady, faithful purpose enabled him so to use that one talent as to make him the pioneer and the support as well as the example of numbers better qualified for the actual work than himself.

His loss left Dr. Marshman alone, and suffering from melancholy more and more, as well as much harassed by difficulties as to the resources, and by captious complaints from home. In 1836, a great shock was given to his nerves by the danger of his daughter. She was the wife of Lieutenant Henry Havelock, a young officer, who, deeply impressed by Dr. Marshman’s piety, had joined his congregation, and who was destined to become in after years one of the most heroic and able of the defenders of the British cause in India. During his absence, she and her three children had been left at Landour, when their bungalow caught fire in the middle of the night, and blazed up with a rapidity due to its light, dry materials. She rushed out with her baby in her arms, but in crossing the verandah tripped and fell, losing her hold of the child. She was dragged away by a faithful native servant, who likewise snatched out her two eldest boys, but the poor baby was lost in the flames, and she herself was so much injured and overwhelmed by the alarm and grief, that, when her husband arrived, her state was almost hopeless, and he wrote a letter preparing her father to hear of her death. From some untoward accident, no more tidings reached Serampore for three days, and to spirits that had already lost their balance the suspense was fatal. The aged father wandered about the house in a purposeless manner, sometimes standing gazing along the road through the Venetian blinds, sometimes talking incoherently; and when at last the intelligence arrived that Mrs. Havelock was out of danger, though his joy and thankfulness were ecstatic, the effects of these three days were irremediable; he was hardly ever seen to smile again, could take no part in the renewed discussions

with the Baptist Society, although his mind and memory were still clear. He died on the 5th of December, 1837, just as the Serampore mission had been re-united to the General Baptist mission.

“There had been but few men at Serampore, but they were all giants,” was said of them by one of the dignitaries of the Church and assuredly it was a wonderful triumph, that a shoe-maker, a schoolmaster, and a printer should in thirty-eight years not only have aroused the missionary spirit in England, but have, by their resolution and talent, established thirty-three stations for the preaching of Christianity in India; while at the time of the death of the last survivor, forty-nine ministers were in union with them, half of whom were natives of Hindostan, and around each of the elder stations was a fair proportion of converts. Still more amazingly, these self-educated men had, by their accurate knowledge and deep study, become most eminent authorities in matters of language and philology; and by their usefulness had actually compelled a prejudiced Government to depend on them for assistance, and thus to support the work for which alone they cared. Never were the words more completely fulfilled than in them, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

The reverses that chequered their wonderful success were not the more interesting difficulties of wild country, or persecuting heathen, but troubles with an obstructive Government, and with the Society at home, which endeavoured to rule them without understanding them. These vexations are inseparable from the conditions of Societies trying to govern from home instead of letting the management be carried on by a head upon the spot.