CHAPTER XV
BAPTIZED FOR THE DEAD
Henry Martyn is, first of all, a spiritual force. Personally he was that to all who came in contact with him from the hour in which he gave himself to Jesus Christ. To Cambridge student and peasant alike; to Charles Simeon, his master, as to Kirke White and Sargent, Corrie and Thomason, his admiring friends; to women like Lydia Grenfell, his senior in years and experience, as to children like his cousin’s at Plymouth, and David Brown’s at Aldeen; to the rude soldiery of the Cape campaign and the East India Company’s raw recruits as to the cultured statesmen and scholars who were broadening the foundations of our Indian empire; to the caste-bound Hindu, but far more to the fanatical Arab and the Mohammedan mystic of Persia—to all he carried the witness of his saintly life and his Divine message with a simple power that always compelled attention, and often drew forth obedience and imitation. His meteor-like spirit burned and flamed as it passed across the first twelve years of the nineteenth century, from the Cam to the Fal, by Brazil and South Africa, by Calcutta and Serampore, by Patna and Cawnpore, by Bombay and Muscat, by Bushire and Shiraz and Tabreez, to the loneliness of the Armenian highlands, and the exile grave of the Turkish Tokat.
From the year in which Sargent published fragments of his Journal, and half revealed to the whole Church of Christ the personality known in its deep calling unto deep only to the few, Henry Martyn has been the companion of good men[101] and women of all the Churches, and the stimulus of the greatest workers and scholars of the century. The latest writer, the Hon. George N. Curzon, M.P., in his exhaustive work on Persia (1892), describes him as ‘this remarkable man, who impressed everyone, by his simplicity and godliness of character,’ though he ascribes the ‘effect in the short space of a year’ as much to the charm of his personality as to the character of his mission.
Perhaps the most representative of the many whom Martyn is known to have influenced was Daniel Wilson, of Islington and Calcutta. When visiting his vast diocese in 1838 and crossing the Bay of Bengal, Bishop Wilson[102] thus carefully compared the Journal with corresponding passages in his own life:
It is consoling to a poor sinner like myself, who has been placed in the full bustle of public business, to see how the soul even of a saint like H. Martyn faints and is discouraged, laments over defects of love, and finds an evil nature still struggling against the law of his mind. I remember there are similar confessions in J. Milner. It is this which explains the seventh of Romans. Henry Martyn has now been in heaven twenty-six years, having died in his thirty-second year. Dearest Corrie was born like myself in 1778, and died in 1837, aged fifty-nine, and after having been thirty-one years in India. He has been at home now a year and five months. When, where, how, I may be called hence I know not. The Lord make me a follower of them who through faith and patience have inherited the promises. In H. Martyn’s Journals the spirit of prayer, the time he devoted to the duty, and his fervour in it, are the first things which strike me. In the next place, his delight in Holy Scripture, his meditations in it, the large portions he committed to memory, the nourishment he thence derived to his soul, are full of instruction. Then his humility is quite undoubted, unfeigned, profound, sincere. There seems, however, to have been a touch of natural melancholy and depression, which was increased by one of his greatest mistakes, the leaving England with his affections tied to Lydia Grenfell, whom he ought either not to have loved or else to have married and taken her with him. Such an ecstatic, warm creature as Henry Martyn could do nothing by halves. Separation was martyrdom to such a tender heart. But, oh, to imitate his excellences, his elevation of piety, his diligence, his spirituality, his superiority to the world, his love for souls, his anxiety to improve all occasions to do them good, his delight in the mystery of Christ, his heavenly temper! These, these are the secrets of the wonderful impression he made in India, joined as they were with first-rate talents, fine scholarship, habit of acquiring languages, quickness and promptitude of perception, and loftiness of imaginative powers.
Henry Martyn’s Journal holds a place of its own in the literature of mysticism. It stamps him as the mystic writer and worker of the first quarter of the century of modern missions (1792-1814), as his master, Robert Leighton, was of the more barren period that ended in 1688. The too little known Rules and Instructions for Devout Exercises, found among Leighton’s papers, written with his own hand and for his own use, was Martyn’s ‘usual’ companion, with results which made that work[103] as supplemented by the Journal, what the De Imitatione Christi and the Theologia Germanica were to the more passive dark ages of Christendom. At the close of the eighteenth century the young and impulsive Cornish student found himself in an age not less, to him, godless and anti-evangelical than that which had wrung from the heart of at least one good man the hopeless longing of the Theologia Germanica. He had seen his Divine Master crucified afresh in the person of Charles Simeon, whom he possibly, as Sargent certainly, had at first attended only to scoff and brawl. He had been denied a church in which to preach the goodness of God, in his own county, other than that of a kinsman. In the troopship and the Bengal barrack even his official authority could hardly win a hearing from officer or soldier. The young prophet waxed sore in heart, as the fire burned within him, at the unbelief and iniquity of his day, till his naturally sunny spirit scorched the souls he sought to warm with the Divine persuasiveness. He stood really at the opening of the Evangelical revival of Christendom, and like William Carey, who loved the youth, he was working out his own side of that movement, but, equally like Carey, he knew it not. He was to do as much by his death as by his life, but all he knew in his humility was that he must make haste while he lived to give the millions of Mohammedans the Word, and to reveal to them the Person of Jesus Christ. The multitude of his thoughts within him he committed to a Journal, written for himself alone, and rescued from burning only by the interference of his friend Corrie.
The mysticism of Martyn has been pronounced morbid. All the more that his searching introspection and severe judgment on himself are a contrast to the genial and merry conversation of the man who loved music and children’s play, the converse of friends and the conflict of controversy for the Lord, does every reader who knows his own heart value the vivisection. Martyn writes of sin and human nature as they are, and therefore he is clear and comforting in the answer he gives as to the remedy for the one and the permanent elevation of the other. Even more than Leighton he is the Evangelical saint, for where Leighton’s times paralysed him for service, Martyn’s called him to energise and die in the conflict with the greatest apostacy of the world. Both had a passion to win souls to the entrancing, transforming love they had found, but unless on the side against the Stewarts, how could that passion bear fruit in action? Both, like the author of the De Imitatione, wrote steeped in the spirit of sadness; but the joy of the dawn of the modern era of benevolence, as it was even then called, working unconsciously on the sunny Cornubian spirit, kept Martyn free alike from the selfish absorption which marked the monk of the Middle Ages, and the peace-loving compromise which neutralised Leighton. The one adored in his cell, the other wrestled in his study at Newbattle or Dunblane, and we love their writings. But Henry Martyn worked for his generation and all future ages as well as wrote, so that they who delight in his mystic communings are constrained to follow him in his self-sacrificing service. Beginning at March 1807, let us add some passages from the Journal to those which have been already extracted for autobiographical purposes.
I am thus taught to see what would become of me if God should let go His strong hand. Is there any depth into which Satan would not plunge me? Already I know enough of the nature of Satan’s cause to vow before God eternal enmity to it. Yes! in the name of Christ I say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’
Employed a great deal about one Hebrew text to little purpose. Much tried with temptation to vanity, but the Lord giveth me the victory through His mercy from day to day, or else I know not how I should keep out of hell.