Is it for nothing he is dead?
Send forth your children in his stead!
O Eastern lover from the West!
Thou hast out-soared these prisoning bars;
Thy memory, on thy Master’s breast,
Uplifts us like the beckoning stars.
We follow now as thou hast led,
Baptize us, Saviour, for the dead.[108]
Each, like not a few American missionaries, men and women, like Dr. Bruce and his colleagues of the Church Missionary Society, like Mr. W.W. Gardner and Dr. J.C. Young of the Scottish Keith-Falconer Mission, is a representative of the two great principles, as expressed by Dr. Bruce: (1) That the lands under the rule of Islam belong to Christ, and that it is the bounden duty of the Church to claim them for our Lord. (2) That duty can be performed only by men who are willing to die in carrying it out.
Henry Martyn’s words, almost his last, on his thirty-first birthday were these: ‘The Word of God has found its way into this land of Satan (Persia), and the devil will never be able to resist it if the Lord hath sent it.’ We have seen what sort of men the Lord raised up to follow him. This is what the Societies have done. In 1829 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions began, and in 1871 the Presbyterian Board shared, the mission to Persia and Asiatic Turkey. The former has missionaries at Aintab, Marash, Antioch, Aleppo, and Oorfa, to the south of the Taurus range, being its mission to Central Turkey; at Constantinople, Adrianople, Smyrna, Broosa, Nicomedia, Trebizond, Marsovan, Sivas, including Tokat, and Cæsarea, being its mission to Western Turkey; at Erzroom, Harpoot, and Arabkir, uniting with the Assyrian stations of Mardin and Diarbekir, its mission to Eastern Turkey. Taking up the evangelisation at Oroomiah, the American Presbyterians unite with that Tabreez, Mosul, and Salmas as their Western, and Teheran and Hamadan as their Eastern Persia Mission. In 1876 a letter of Henry Venn’s and the urgency of its principal missionary, Dr. Bruce, led the Church Missionary Society to charge itself with the evangelisation, by a revised version of the Persian Bible and medical missions, of the whole southern half of the ancient kingdom of Persia, the whole of Nimrod’s Babylonia, and the eastern coast of Arabia, from Julfa (Ispahan) and Baghdad as centres. Very recently the independent Arabian Mission of America has made Busrah its headquarters for Turkish Arabia. The Latin Church since 1838 has worked for the Papacy alone. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s mission since 1886 has sought to influence the Nestorian or Syrian Church, which in the seventh century sent forth missionaries to India from Seleucia, Nisibis, and Edessa, and now desires protection from Romish usurpation. All these represent a vast and geographically linked organisation claiming, at long intervals, the whole of Turkey, Persia, and Arabia for Christ since Henry Martyn pointed the way. Dr. Robert Bruce, writing to us from Julfa, thus sums up the results and the prospect:
I believe there is a great work going on at present in Persia, and Henry Martyn and his translations prepared the way for it, to say nothing of his life sacrifice and prayers for this dark land. The Babi movement is a very remarkable one, and is spreading far and wide, and doing much to break the power of the priesthood. Many of the Babis are finding their system unsatisfactory, and beginning to see that it is only a half-way house (in which there is no rest or salvation) to Christianity. Ispahan has been kept this year in a constant state of turmoil by the ineffectual efforts of two moollas to persecute both Babis and Jews.[109] They have caused very great suffering to some of both these faiths, but they have been really defeated, and all these persecutions have tended towards religious liberty. Our mission-house is the refuge of all such persecuted ones, and the light is beginning to dawn upon them.
While the whole Church, and every meditative soul seeking deliverance from self in Jesus Christ, claims Henry Martyn, he is specially the hero of the Church of England. An Evangelical, he is canonised, so far as ecclesiastical art can legitimately do that, in the baptistry of the new cathedral of his native city. A Catholic, his memory is enshrined in the heart of his own University of Cambridge. There, in the New Chapel of St. John’s College, in the nineteenth bay of its interior roof, his figure is painted first of the illustriories of the eighteenth Christian century, before those of Wilberforce, Wordsworth, and Thomas Whytehead, missionary to New Zealand. In the market place, beside Charles Simeon’s church, there was dedicated on October 18, 1887, ‘The Henry Martyn Memorial Hall.’ There, under the shadow of his name, gather daily the students who join in the University Prayer Meeting, and from time to time the members of the Church Missionary and Gospel Propagation Societies. ‘This was the hero-life of my boyhood,’ said Dr. Vaughan, the Master of the Temple and Dean of Llandaff, when he preached the opening sermon before the University. In Trinity Church, where Martyn had been curate, the new Master of Trinity preached so that men said: ‘What a power of saintliness must have been in Henry Martyn to have affected with such appreciative love one whose own life and character are so honoured as Dr. Butler’s!’ In the Memorial Hall itself, its founder, Mr. Barton, now Vicar of Trinity Church; Dr., now Bishop, Westcott, for the faculty of Divinity; Dr. Bailey, for St. John’s College and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; Mr. Barlow, Vicar of Islington, for the Church Missionary Society; and the Christian scholar, Professor Cowell, for all Orientalists and Anglo-Indians, spake worthily.
We would continue his work. The hopes, the faith, the truths which once animated him are still ours. Still, as on the day when he preached his first sermon from this pulpit, is it true that if each soul, if each society, if each heathen nation knew the gift of God, and Who the promised Saviour is, they would for very thirst’s sake ask of Him, and He would indeed give them His living water. And still it is the task of each true witness of Christ, and most of all of each ordained minister of His Word and Sacraments, first to arouse that thirst where it has not yet been felt, and then to allay it at once and perpetuate it from the one pure and undefiled spring. And still each true minister will feel, as Martyn felt, as St. Paul himself felt, ‘Who is sufficient for these things?’ The riper he is in his ministry, the more delicate his touch of human souls, alike in their strivings and in their inertness; the closer his walk with God and his wonder at the vastness and the silent secrecy of God’s ways, the more he will say in his heart what Martyn said but a few days after his feet had ceased to tread our Cambridge streets. ‘Alas! do I think that a schoolboy or a raw academic should be likely to lead the hearts of men! What a knowledge of men and acquaintance with Scriptures, what communion with God and study of my own heart, ought to prepare me for the awful work of a messenger from God on the business of the soul!’
To these lessons of Martyn’s life Dr. Butler added that which the eighty years since have suggested—the confidence of the soldier who has heard his Captain’s voice, and knows that it was never deceived or deceiving: Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.
In that confidence let the Church Catholic preach Christ to the hundred and eighty millions of the Mohammedan peoples, more than half of whom are already the subjects of Christian rulers. Thus shall every true Christian best honour Henry Martyn.
FOOTNOTES:
[101] In 1816 Charles Simeon thus wrote from King’s College to Thomason, of the Journal: ‘Truly it has humbled us all in the dust. Since the Apostolic age I think that nothing has ever exceeded the wisdom and piety of our departed brother; and I conceive that no book, except the Bible, will be found to excel this.... David Brainerd is great, but the degree of his melancholy and the extreme impropriety of his exertions, so much beyond his strength, put him on a different footing from our beloved Martyn.’