Walking afterwards with Mirza Sayyid Ali, he told me how much one of my remarks had affected him, namely, that he had no humility. He had been talking about simplicity and humility as characteristic of the Soofis. ‘Humility!’ I said to him, ‘if you were humble, you would not dispute in this manner; you would be like a child.’ He did not open his mouth afterwards, but to say, ‘True; I have no humility.’ In evident distress, he observed, ‘The truth is, we are in a state of compound ignorance—ignorant, yet ignorant of our ignorance.’
February 18.—While walking in the garden, in some disorder from vexation, two Mussulman Jews came up and asked me what would become of them in another world. The Mahometans were right in their way, they supposed, and we in ours, but what must they expect? After rectifying their mistake as to the Mahometans, I mentioned two or three reasons for believing that we are right: such as their dispersion, and the cessation of sacrifices immediately on the appearance of Jesus. ‘True, true,’ they said, with great feeling and seriousness; indeed, they seemed disposed to yield assent to anything I said. They confessed they had become Mahometans only on compulsion, and that Abdoolghuni wished to go to Baghdad, thinking he might throw off the mask there with safety, but they asked what I thought. I said that the Governor was a Mahometan. ‘Did I think Syria safer?’ ‘The safest place in the East,’ I said, ‘was India.’ Feelings of pity for God’s ancient people, and having the awful importance of eternal things impressed on my mind by the seriousness of their inquiries as to what would become of them, relieved me from the pressure of my comparatively insignificant distresses. I, a poor Gentile, blest, honoured, and loved; secured for ever by the everlasting covenant, whilst the children of the kingdom are still lying in outer darkness! Well does it become me to be thankful!
This is my birthday, on which I complete my thirty-first year. The Persian New Testament has been begun, and I may say finished in it, as only the last eight chapters of the Revelation remain. Such a painful year I never passed, owing to the privations I have been called to on the one hand, and the spectacle before me of human depravity on the other. But I hope that I have not come to this seat of Satan in vain. The Word of God has found its way into Persia, and it is not in Satan’s power to oppose its progress if the Lord hath sent it.
A week after, on February 24, 1812, Henry Martyn corrected the last page of the New Testament in Persian. As we read his words of thanksgiving to the Lord and his invocation of the Holy Spirit, in the already darkening light of his approaching end, before the beatific vision promised by the Master to the pure in heart, and the blessed companionship with Himself guaranteed to every true servant, we recall the Scottish Columba, whose last act was to transcribe the eleventh verse of the thirty-fourth Psalm, and the English Bede, who died when translating the ninth verse of the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.
I have many mercies for which to thank the Lord, and this is not the least. Now may that Spirit who gave the Word, and called me, I trust, to be an interpreter of it, graciously and powerfully apply it to the hearts of sinners, even to the gathering an elect people from amongst the long-estranged Persians!
FOOTNOTES:
[66] ‘That list, in which Martyn holds a conspicuous place, has grown long of late years, till we are half tempted to forget that the share our age has taken and is taking in the work of translating and distributing the Scriptures, links on to that of those who could remember men who had seen the Lord.’ Canon Edmonds’ Sermon, preached in the Cathedral Church of Truro, October 16, 1890 (Exeter).
[67] The Churchman for September 1889, p. 635.
[69] Evidently taken in detail from Adam’s Religious World Displayed.