March 31.—I am at present employed in the toilsome work of going through the Syriac Gospels, and writing out the names, in order to ascertain their orthography if possible, and correcting with Mirza the Epistles. This last work is incredibly difficult in Hindustani, and will be nearly as much so in Persian, but very easy and elegant in Arabic.
June 1 to 4.—Employed incessantly in reading the Persian of St. Matthew to Sabat. Met with the Italian padre, Julius, with whom I conversed in French.
June 6.—Going on with the Persian Gospel, visiting the hospital, and with the men at night. My spirit refreshed and revived by every night’s ministration to them. Sent the Persian of Matthew to Mr. Brown for the press, and went on with the remainder of the Hindustani of St. Matthew. I have not felt such trials of my temper for many months as to-day. The General declared he was an enemy to my design in translating the Scriptures. My poor harassed soul looked at last to God, and cast its burden of sin at the foot of the cross. Towards evening I found rest and peace. A son-in-law of the Qasi ool Qoorrat, of Patna, a very learned man, called on me. I put to him several questions about Mohammedanism, which confused him; and as he seemed a grave, honest man, they may produce lasting doubts.
1809, September 24.—Began with Mirza Fitrut the correction of the Hindustani Gospels: Quod felix faustumque sit. Began with my men a course of lectures from the beginning of the Bible.
September 25 to 28.—Revising Arabic version of Romans; going on in correction of Hindustani; preparing report of progress in translating for Bible Society. Reading occasionally Menishi’s Turkish Grammar.
Completed in 1810, Martyn’s Hindustani New Testament for Mohammedans was passing through the Serampore press when the great fire of March 11, 1812, destroyed all the sheets save the first thirteen chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, and melted the fount of Persian type. The Corresponding Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society, for which it had been prepared, put it to press the second time at Serampore, from finer type, and it appeared in 1814 in an edition of 2,000 copies, on English paper. The demand for portions for immediate use was such that 3,000 copies of the Gospels and Acts, on Patna paper, had been previously struck off. The longing translator—who had once written, ‘Oh, may I have the bliss of soon seeing the New Testament in Hindustani and Persian!’—had then been two years dead, but verily his works followed him. Such was the reputation of the version that it was read in the native schools at Agra and elsewhere; while an edition of 2,000 copies in the Deva-Nagri character, for Hindus, appeared in 1817, and was used up till a Hindi version was prepared from it by Mr. Bowley, the zealous agent of the Church Missionary Society at Chunar, by divesting it of the Persian and Arabic terms. Bishop Corrie’s revision of this work and portions of the Old Testament were circulated in many editions and extending numbers, in the Kaithi character also, among the millions of Hindus who speak the most widespread of Indian languages with many dialects. The Bible Society in London welcomed Martyn’s work, of which Professor Lee prepared a large edition. Learning that the lamented scholar had done some work on the Old Testament in Hindustani, and had taught Mirza Fitrut Hebrew, to enable that able moonshi to carry on the translation from the original, the Society first published Genesis in Hindustani, under Professor Lee’s care, in 1817, and then issued a revision of the rough draft of the entire version of the Old Testament, by Bishop Corrie and Mr. Thomason. In 1843 Mr. Schürmann, of the London Missionary Society, and Mr. Justice Hawkins, an elder of the Free Church of Scotland and an accomplished Bengal civilian, issued a uniform revision of the Old and New Testaments in the Arabic and Roman characters, in the course of which Mr. Schürmann ‘saw reason to revert in a great measure to the translation of Henry Martyn, especially in the latter half of the version.’[71] Of the different translations of the Bible into Hindustani, the Oordoo or ‘camp’ language understood by the sixty millions of Mussulmans in India, this criticism is just: ‘the idiomatic and faithful version of Henry Martyn still maintains its ground, although, from the lofty elegance of its style, it is better understood by educated than by illiterate Mohammedans.’[72]
In the first generation, from 1814 to 1847, after the appearance of Henry Martyn’s work, sixteen editions[73] of the Hindustani New Testament were published and sent into circulation among the then fifty millions of Mussulmans in India. Before Martyn’s work was printed, he and Corrie used to dictate to inquirers translations of Bible passages suited to their needs. When Corrie was at Chunar, he tells us, because ‘there was not at that time any translation of the Scriptures to put into his hands, a native Roman Catholic took down the translated texts on loose pieces of paper.’ Years after, Mr. Wilkinson, of Gorakpore, was called to visit the man on his death-bed, and found him so well acquainted with Scripture that he asked an explanation. ‘The poor man produced the loose slips of paper on which he had written my translations,’ says Corrie. ‘On these, it appeared, his soul had fed through life, and through them he died such a death that Mr. Wilkinson entertained no doubt of his having passed into glory.’ In the forty years since the sixteen editions made the Word of God known to thousands of India Mussulmans, the Oordoo Bible has caused the Word to grow mightily, and in many cases to prevail.
The entire Bible in Hindustani was again revised, by Dr. R.C. Mather, after many years’ experience in Benares and Mirzapore, and was published, in both the Arabic and Roman characters, in 1869, after continuous labour for more than six years. He stumbled, in the library of the British and Foreign Bible Society, on sixteen manuscript volumes of a Hindustani translation of nearly the whole Old Testament, beginning with Martyn’s Genesis. The folios were interleaved, and on the blank pages were thousands of notes in English. At the end of the Pentateuch the copyist records that ‘the above has been completed, by order of Paymaster Sherwood, for the Rev. Daniel Corrie, by me, Mákhdum Buksh.’ The copy seems to have been the accomplished Thomason’s, and to have been deposited in the library by his widow after his death at Port Louis, Mauritius. This practically complete translation of the Old Testament had been lost for forty years. The eulogy passed by Thomason on Martyn’s Hindustani New Testament, that it ‘will last as a model of elegant writing as well as of faithful translation,’ is pronounced by Dr. Mather,[74] after all that time, as, ‘in the main, just; the work has lasted and continued to be acceptable, and will perhaps always continue to be useful. All subsequent translators have, as a matter of course, proceeded upon it as a work of excellent skill and learning, and rigid fidelity.’
The modern Arabic translation of the New Testament, by Martyn and Sabat, was not printed (in Calcutta) till 1816, and the translation of the Old Testament was continued under the supervision of Mr. Thomason, who became virtually Martyn’s literary executor, and whose labours as Oriental translator and editor hurried him, like his friend, to a premature death. Both had the same biographer—the good Sargent, Rector of Lavington. As Thomason toiled at the Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani editions, he wrote: ‘I am filled with astonishment at the opening scenes of usefulness. Send us labourers—send us faithful laborious labourers!’[75] Martyn’s Arabic New Testament, produced with the assistance of an undoubtedly learned Arab, as conceited and of temper as intolerable as Sabat, did its work among the ‘learned and fastidious’ Mohammedans for whom chiefly it was prepared. Professor Lee issued a second edition in London, and Mr. Thomason a third in Calcutta. In common with the old translations, made for the land in which St. Paul began the first missionary work, and reproduced in various Polyglot Bibles, it has been superseded by the wonderfully perfect and altogether beautiful Arabic Bible (Beirut) of Dr. Eli Smith and Dr. Van Dyck, on which these American scholars, assisted by learned natives of Syria and Cairo, were occupied for nearly thirty years. In the Beirut Arabic Scriptures, Henry Martyn’s troubled life with Sabat found early and luxuriant fruit. How wisely and humbly the missionary chaplain of the East India Company estimated his own, and especially his Arabic, translations, and how at the same time he longed to live that he might do in 1812-20 what Eli Smith and Van Dyck did in 1837-65, may be seen from these early letters and journals:
To the Rev. David Brown, Calcutta