Sabat decided that he could no longer work as an expounder of Moslem law: he wanted to do work that would help to spread the Christian Faith. He went away north to Calcutta, and there he joined the great men who were working at the task of translating the Bible into different languages and printing them. This work pleased Sabat, for was it not through reading an Arabic New Testament that all his own life had been changed?
Because Sabat knew Persian as well as Arabic he was sent to help a very clever young chaplain from England named Henry Martyn, who was busily at work translating the New Testament into Persian and Arabic. So Sabat went up the Ganges to Cawnpore with Henry Martyn.
Sabat's fiery temper nearly drove Martyn wild. His was a flaming Arab spirit, hot-headed and impetuous; yet he would be ready to die for the man he cared for; proud and often ignorant, yet simple—as Martyn said, "an artless child of the desert."
Sabat's knowledge of Persian was not really so good as he himself thought it was, and some of the Indian translators at Calcutta criticised his translation. At this he got furiously angry, and, like St. Peter, the fiery, impetuous apostle, he denied Jesus Christ and spoke against Christianity.
With his heart burning with rage and his great voice thundering with anger, Sabat left his friends, went aboard ship and sailed down the Bay of Bengal by the Indo-Chinese coast till he came to Penang, where he began to live as a trader.
But by this time the fire of his anger had burnt itself out. He—again like Peter—remembered his denial of his Master, and when he saw in a Penang newspaper an article saying that the famous Sabat, who had become a Christian and then become a Mohammedan again, had come to live in their city, he wrote a letter which was published in the newspaper at Penang declaring that he was now—and for good and all—a Christian.
A British officer named Colonel MacInnes was stationed at Penang. Sabat went to him. "My mind is full of great sorrow," he said, "because I denied Jesus Christ. I have not had a moment's peace since Satan made me do that bad work. I did it for revenge. I only want to do one thing with my life: to spend it in undoing this evil that has come through my denial."
Sabat left the house of the Mohammedan with whom he was living in Penang. He found an old friend of his named Johannes, an Armenian Christian merchant, who had lived in Madras in the very days when Sabat first became a Christian. Every night Johannes the Armenian and Sabat the Arab got out their Bibles, and far into the night Sabat would explain their meaning to Johannes.
One day all Penang was agog with excitement because a brown Prince from Acheen, a Malay State in the island of Sumatra, had suddenly sailed into the harbour. He was in flight from his own land, where rebels had attacked him. The people of Acheen were wild and ferocious; many of them were cannibals.