Henry Martyn, Saint and Scholar / First Modern Missionary to the Mohammedans, 1781-1812

by George Smith

The men whom Henry Martyn’s pioneering and early death have led to live and to die that Christ may be revealed to the Mohammedans, are not so many as the thousands who have been spiritually stimulated by his Journal. Such work is still ‘the forlorn hope’ of the Church which he was the first to lead. But in Persia and Arabia he has had such followers as Anthony Groves, John Wilson, George Maxwell Gordon, Ion Keith-Falconer, and Bishop French. Where he pointed the way the great missionary societies of the United States of America and of England and the Free Church of Scotland have sent their noblest men and women.

The death of Henry Martyn, followed not many years after by that of her husband, who had been the first to mark his grave with a memorial stone, led Mrs. James Claudius Rich, eldest daughter of Sir James Mackintosh, to appeal in 1831 for ‘contributions in aid of the school at Baghdad, and those hoped to be established in Persia and other parts of the territory of Baghdad.’ In the same year, 1829, that Alexander Duff sailed for Calcutta, there had gone forth by the Scots Mission at Astrakhan to Baghdad, that Catholic founder of the sect since known as ‘The Brethren,’ Anthony N. Groves, dentist, of Exeter. Taking the commands of Christ literally, in the spirit of Henry Martyn, he sold all he had, and became the first of Martyn’s successors in Persia. The record of his two attempts forms a romantic chapter in the history of Christian missions.[104] All theories apart, he lived and he worked for the Mohammedans of Persia in the spirit of Henry Martyn. When the plague first, and persecution the second time, extinguished this Mission to Baghdad, Dr. John Wilson,[105] from his central and commanding position in Bombay, flashed into Arabia and Persia such rays of Gospel light as were possible at that time. He sent Bible colporteurs by Aden and up the Persian Gulf; he summoned the old Church of Scotland to despatch a mission to the Jews of Arabia, Busrah, and Bombay. A missionary was ready in the person of William Burns who afterwards went to China, the support of a missionary at Aden was guaranteed by a friend, and Wilson had found a volunteer ‘for the purpose of exploring Arabia,’ when the disruption of the Church of Scotland arrested the movement, only, however, vastly to increase the missionary development in India and Africa, as well as church extension in Scotland. What John Wilson tried in vain to do during his life was effected by his death. It was his career that summoned the Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer and his wife to open their Mission in Yemen, at Sheikh Othman and Aden. Like Martyn at Tokat, in the far north, and just at Martyn’s age, by his dust in the Aden cemetery Ion Keith-Falconer has taken possession of Arabia for Christ. ‘The Memoirs of David Brainerd and Henry Martyn gave me particular pleasure,’ wrote young John Wilson in 1824. ‘Mind to get hold of the Life of John Wilson, the great Scotch missionary of India,’ wrote the young Ion Keith-Falconer in 1878.[106] So the apostolic succession goes on.

Gordon of Kandahar, ‘the pilgrim missionary of the Punjab,’ was not the least remarkable of Henry Martyn’s deliberate followers, alike in a life of toil and in a death of heroism for the Master. Born in 1839, he was of Trinity College, Cambridge, and had as his fellow-curate Thomas Valpy French, when the future bishop came back from his first missionary campaign in India. Dedicating himself, his culture, and his considerable property to the Lord, he placed his unpaid services at the disposal of the Church Missionary Society, as Martyn once did. Refusing a bishopric after his first furlough, and seeking to prepare himself for the work of French’s Divinity School of St. John at Lahore, he returned to India by Persia, to learn the language and to help Dr. Bruce for a little in 1871. The famine was sore in that land, and he lived for its people as ‘relieving officer, doctor, purveyor, poorhouse guardian, outfitter and undertaker. There is a cry like the cry of Egypt in the night of the Exodus—not a house in which there was not one dead.’ So he wrote.[107] From Julfa he carried relief to Shiraz, where he found himself in the midst of the associations made sacred by Henry Martyn’s residence there. ‘I have taken up my quarters in a Persian’s house, and have a large garden all to myself. I am in the very same house which Henry Martyn was in. I heard to-day that my host is the grandson of his host Jaffir Ali Khan, and that the house has come down from father to son.’

Eight years after Gordon was in Kandahar, sole (honorary) chaplain to the twenty regiments who were fighting the Ameer of Afghanistan. There he found the assistant to the political officer attached to the force to be the same Persian gentleman who had been his host at Shiraz, and with whom when a child Martyn must have played. Gordon learned from him that the roads and sanitary improvements made as relief works, as well as the orphanage started on the interest of the famine relief fund sent from London, were still blessing the people. When, after the black day of Maiwand, the British troops were besieged in Kandahar, till relieved by the march and the triumph of Lord Roberts, Gordon as chaplain attended a sortie to dislodge the enemy. Hearing that wounded men were lying in a shrine outside the Kabul gate, he led out some bearers with a litter, and found that the dying men were in another shrine still more distant. In spite of all remonstrance he dashed through the murderous fire of the enemy, was struck down, and was himself carried back on the litter he had provided for others. He did not live to wear the Victoria Cross, but was on the same day, August 16, laid in a soldier’s grave.

It would seem difficult to name a follower more worthy of Henry Martyn than that, but Bishop French was such a disciple. More than any man, as saint and scholar, as missionary and chaplain, as the friend of the Mohammedan and the second apostle of Central Asia, he was baptized for the dead. Born on the first day of 1825, son of an Evangelical clergyman in Burton-on-Trent, a Rugby boy, and Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford, Thomas Valpy French was early inspired by Martyn’s life and writings. These and his mother’s holiness sent him forth to Agra in 1850, along with Edward Stuart of Edinburgh, now Bishop of Waiapu, New Zealand, to found the Church Missionary College there. In the next forty years, till he resigned the bishopric of Lahore that he might give the rest of his life to work out the aspirations of Martyn in Persia and Arabia, he consecrated himself and his all to Christ. It will be a wonderful story if it is well told. He then went home for rest, first of all, but took the way north through Persia and Turkey on Martyn’s track, so that in April 1888 he wrote from Armenia: ‘Were I ignorant both of Arabic and French, I should subside into the perfect rest, perhaps, which I require.’ So abundant were his labours to groups of Mohammedans and among the Syrian Christians, that he had nearly found a grave in the Tokat region.

After counselling the Archbishop of Canterbury as to the project of so reforming the Oriental Churches as to convert them themselves into the true apostles of the Mohammedan race, Bishop French returned to Asia and settled near Muscat, whence he wrote thus on March 10, 1891, his last letter to the Church Missionary Society:

Those three years of Arab study will not, I trust, be thrown away and proved futile. In memory of H. Martyn’s pleadings for Arabia, Arabs, and the Arabic, I seem almost trying at least to follow more directly in his footsteps and under his guidance, than even in Persia or India, however incalculable the distance at which the guided one follows the leader!...

I have scarcely expressed in the least degree the view I have of the extremely serious character of the work here to be entered upon; and the possible—nay probable—severity of the conflict to be expected and faithfully hazarded by the Church of Christ between two such strong and ancient forces, pledged to such hereditary and deep-grounded hostility. Yet The Lamb shall overcome them; for He is Lord of Lords, and King of Kings; and they also shall overcome that are with Him, called and chosen and faithful.

Two months after, on May 14, 1891, at the age of sixty-six, after exposure and toils like Martyn’s, he was laid to rest in the cemetery of Muscat by the sailors of H.M.S. Sphinx, to whom he had preached.

Henry Martyn at Tokat, John Wilson at Bombay, George Maxwell Gordon at Kandahar, Ion Keith-Falconer at Aden, and Thomas Valpy French at Muscat, have by their bodies taken possession of Mohammedan Asia for Christ till the resurrection. Of each we say to ourselves and to our generation: