Praise be given to the incomprehensible counsels of God, who, for the salvation of man, gave His Word, and causeth it to increase among all nations: who useth as His instruments the inhabitants of countries of different languages and tribes, not unfrequently the most distant from each other and altogether unacquainted with those for whom they labour! This is a true sign of the holy will of God respecting this work, who worketh all and in all. This is the case with the finished edition of the Persian New Testament, which was translated into that language in a far distant part of Asia, and prepared to be printed in another, but brought into Russia (where nothing of the kind was ever thought of) and printed off much sooner than was at first intended. Here men were found endowed with good-will and the requisite qualifications for the completion of this work, which at first seemed to be so difficult.
Meanwhile, Martyn himself having directed that a copy of the manuscript translation should be sent to Calcutta from Shiraz, when he left that city, four copies were made, lest any accident should befall it on the way to Bengal. It reached the Calcutta Corresponding Committee in 1814, and they invited Mirza Sayyid Ali to join them and pass it through the press. This second edition accordingly appeared at Calcutta in 1816. Professor Lee, of Cambridge, published a third edition of it in London in 1827, and a fourth in 1837. The most beautiful and valuable of all is the fifth, now before the writer, which Thomas Constable printed in Edinburgh in 1846 (corresponding to 1262 of the Hijrah) in three royal octavo volumes. This was also the most important because it accompanied a Persian translation of the Old Testament. Mirza Sayyid Ali had early informed the Calcutta Committee that he had his master’s original translation of the Psalter, and this also appeared at Calcutta in 1816. This formed the nucleus of the Persian Old Testament prepared by Dr. W. Glen, of the Scottish Missionary Society’s Mission, at Karass, Astrakhan, and printed along with Henry Martyn’s New Testament in the memorable and beautiful Edinburgh edition. That edition of the whole Bible was presented by Dr. Glen to the present Shah of Persia, Nassr-ed-Deen, on his accession to the throne in 1848. With Martyn’s New Testament His Majesty seemed to be well acquainted. Of the volume containing the Old Testament we read that ‘on handing the book to the servant in waiting he just kissed and then put it to his forehead, with the same indication of reverence which he would have shown had it been their own sacred book, the Koran.’ Archdeacon Robinson, of Poona, published another Persian translation of the Old Testament. The Church Missionary Society’s distinguished missionary at Julfa, Dr. Robert Bruce, has been for years engaged on a revision, or rather new translation of the Old Testament into Persian, the two versions of which are far inferior, in the opinion of one who is at the head of all living experts, to Henry Martyn’s translation of the New. Dr. Bruce’s work has now been completed.
I know no parallel to these achievements of Henry Martyn’s, writes Canon W.J. Edmonds, closing a survey of his powers and services as a translator of the Scriptures. There are in him the things that mark the born translator. He masters grammar, observes idioms, accumulates vocabulary, reads and listens, corrects and even reconstructs. Above all, he prays. He lives ‘in the Spirit,’ and rises from his knees full of the mind of the Spirit. Pedantry is not in him, nor vulgarity. He longs and struggles to catch the dialect in which men may speak worthily of the things of God. And so his work lives. In his own Hindustani New Testament, and in the recovered parts of the Old Testament in which he watched over the labours of Fitrut, his work is still a living influence; men find ‘reasons for reverting’ to it. His earlier Persian, and what is demonstrably distinct from it, his Persic translation, or rather Sabat’s, done under his superintendence, these indeed have gone. They did not survive his visit to Persia. Nor did the Arabic, which was the chief acknowledged motive of his journey. But what a gifted man is here, and what a splendid sum total of work, that can afford these deductions from the results of a five or six years’ struggle with illness, and still leave behind translations of the New Testament in Hindustani and in Persian; the Hindustani version living a double life, its own and that which William Bowley gave it in the humbler vocabulary of the Hindi villages! We live in hurrying times; our days are swifter than a shuttle. New names, new saints, new heroes ever rise and dazzle the eyes of common men. So it should be, for God lives, and through Him men live and manifest His unexhausted power. But Martyn is a perennial. He springs up fresh to every generation. It is time, though, to take care that he does not become simply the shadow of an angel passing by. His pinnacle is that lofty one which is only assigned to eminent goodness, but it rests upon, and is only the finial of, a broad-based tower of sound and solid intellectual endowment.
Henry Martyn’s Persian Testament called forth, in 1816, two Bulls from Pope Pius VIII., addressed to the Archbishops of Gnesne and Moghilev, within the Russian dominions, and letters from the Propaganda College at Rome to the Vicars Apostolic and Missionaries in Persia, Armenia, and other parts of the East. Wherever the Persian language was known the people were warned ‘against a version recently made into the Persian idiom.’ The Archbishops were told ‘that Bibles printed by heretics are numbered among the prohibited books by the rules of the Index (Nos. II. and III.), for it is evident, from experience, that from the Holy Scriptures which are published in the vulgar tongue, more injury than good has arisen through the temerity of men.’ Bible Societies in Russia and Great Britain are denounced as a ‘most crafty device, by which the very foundations of religion are undermined.’ So the Latin Church has ever put from it ‘The Great Missionary’ which the Reformation was the first to restore to Christendom and the world, and Henry Martyn gave to the Mohammedans in their own tongue.
FOOTNOTES:
[79] Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, &c., by Mrs. Bishop (Isabella C. Bird), two vols., John Murray, 1891.
[80] The fanatical shrine of Fatima. See Mrs. Bishop’s first volume and Mr. Curzon’s second.
[81] A Second Journey through Persia, &c., between the years 1810 and 1816, p. 223.
[82] ‘Were I,’ writes Mr. Baillie Fraser, ‘to select a spot the best calculated for the recovery of health, and for its preservation, I know not that I could hit upon any more suited to the purpose than Tabreez, at any season. A brighter sky and purer air can scarcely be found. To me it seems as if there was truly health in the breeze that blows around me.’
[83] See the Eleventh Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1815, Appendix, No. 51.