CHAPTER XII
SHIRAZ TO TABREEZ—THE PERSIAN NEW TESTAMENT
The next three months were spent, still in Shiraz, in the preparation of copies of the precious Persian MS. of the New Testament, and in very close spiritual intercourse with the company of inquirers whom neither fanaticism, conceit, nor, in some cases, a previously immoral life, had prevented from reverencing the teaching of the man of God. Jaffir Ali Khan’s garden became to such a holy place, as the Persian spring passed into the heat of summer. There the privileged translator, Mirza Sayyid Ali; Aga Baba, the Mede; Aga Boozong, vizier of Prince Abbas Mirza, and ‘most magisterial of the Soofis;’ Mirza Ibrahim, the controversialist leader; Sheikh Abulhassan, and many a moolla to whom he testified that Christ was the Creator and Saviour, gathered round him as he read, ‘at their request,’ the Old Testament histories. ‘Their attention to the Word, and their love and attention to me, seemed to increase as the time of my departure approached. Aga Baba, who had been reading St. Matthew, related very circumstantially to the company the particulars of the death of Christ. The bed of roses on which we sat, and the notes of the nightingales warbling around us, were not so sweet to me as this discourse from the Persian.’
Telling Mirza Sayyid Ali one day that I wished to return to the city in the evening, to be alone and at leisure for prayer, he said with seriousness, ‘Though a man had no other religious society I suppose he might, with the aid of the Bible, live alone with God?’ This solitude will, in one respect, be his own state soon;—may he find it the medium of God’s gracious communications to his soul! He asked in what way God ought to be addressed: I told him as a Father, with respectful love; and added some other exhortations on the subject of prayer.
May 11.—Aga Baba came to bid me farewell, which he did in the best and most solemn way, by asking, as a final question, ‘whether, independently of external evidences, I had any internal proofs of the doctrine of Christ?’ I answered, ‘Yes, undoubtedly: the change from what I once was is a sufficient evidence to me.’ At last he took his leave, in great sorrow, and what is better, apparently in great solicitude about his soul.
The rest of the day I continued with Mirza Sayyid Ali, giving him instructions what to do with the New Testament in case of my decease, and exhorting him, as far as his confession allowed me, to stand fast. He had made many a good resolution respecting his besetting sins. I hope, as well as pray, that some lasting effects may be seen at Shiraz from the Word of God left among them.
For the Shah and for the heir-apparent, Prince Abbas Mirza, two copies of the Persian New Testament were specially written out in the perfect caligraphy which the Persians love, and carefully corrected with the translator’s own hand. That he might himself present them, especially the former, he left Shiraz on May 11, 1812, after a year’s residence in the country. The whole length of the great Persian plateau had to be traversed, by Ispahan to Teheran, thence to the royal camp at Sultania, and finally to Tabreez, where was Sir Gore Ouseley, the British ambassador, through whom alone the English man of God could be introduced to the royal presence. He was accompanied by Mr. Canning, an English clergyman.
The journey occupied eight weeks, and proved to be one of extreme hardship, which rapidly developed Henry Martyn’s disease. At one time his life was in danger, in spite of the letters which he carried from General Malcolm’s friend, and now his own, Jaffir Ali Khan, to the Persian prime minister at Teheran. Mrs. Bishop’s experience of travel by the same road[79] at a more favourable season, over the ‘great mud land’ to which centuries of misrule have changed the populous paradise of Darius, enables us to imagine what the brief record of the Journal only half reveals seventy years ago. The old village which the founder of the Kajar dynasty enlarged into Teheran, straggles within eleven miles of walls in the most depressed part of an uninteresting waste. Save for the exterior of the Shah’s palace, and those of some of his ministers, the suburb with the European legations, and now the large and handsome buildings of the American Presbyterian Mission, it is unworthy of being a capital city. Eager to present the sacred volume while life was left to him, Henry Martyn hurried away to find Mirza Shufi, the premier, and the Shah, who were in camp a night’s journey off at Karach.
May 13.—Remained all day at the caravanserai, correcting the Prince’s copy.