| PAGE | |
| Portrait—Henry Martyn | [Frontispiece] |
| St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1797 | [13] |
| Second Court, St. John’s College, in 1803 | [32] |
| Trinity Church, Cambridge, in 1803 | [37] |
| St. Michael’s Mount, at Full Tide | [45] |
| Pagoda, Aldeen House | [159] |
| A Brick from Henry Martyn’s Pagoda | [161] |
| Shiraz | [357] |
| Tokat in 1812 | [518] |
| Tomb of Henry Martyn | [531] |
Then came another of priestly garb and mien,
A young man still wanting the years of Christ,
But long since with the saints....
A poet with the contemplative gaze
And listening ear, but quick of force and eye,
Who fought the wrong without, the wrong within,
And, being a pure saint, like those of old,
Abased himself and all the precious gifts
God gave him, flinging all before the feet
Of Him whose name he bore—a fragile form
Upon whose hectic cheek there burned a flush
That was not health; who lived as Xavier lived,
And died like him upon the burning sands,
Untended, yet whose creed was far from his
As pole from pole; whom grateful England still
Loves.
The awakened gaze
Turned wholly from the earth, on things of heaven
He dwelt both day and night. The thought of God
Filled him with infinite joy; his craving soul
Dwelt on Him as a feast; as did the soul
Of rapt Francesco in his holy cell
In blest Assisi; and he knew the pain,
The deep despondence of the saint, the doubt,
The consciousness of dark offence, the joy
Of full assurance last, when heaven itself
Stands open to the ecstasy of faith.
The relentless lie
Of Islam ... he chose to bear, who knew
How swift the night should fall on him, and burned
To save one soul alive while yet ’twas day.
This filled his thoughts, this only, and for this
On the pure altar of his soul he heaped
A costlier sacrifice, this youth in years,
For whom Love called, and loving hands, and hope
Of childish lives around him, offering these,
Like all the rest, to God.
Yet when his hour
Was come to leave his England, was it strange
His weakling life pined for the parting kiss
Of love and kindred, whom his prescient soul
Knew he should see no more?
... The woman of his love
Feared to leave all and give her life to his,
And both to God; his sisters passed away
To heaven, nor saw him more. There seemed on earth
Nothing for which to live, except the Faith,
Only the Faith, the Faith! until his soul
Wore thin her prison bars, and he was fain
To rest awhile, or work no more the work
For which alone he lived.
A Vision of Saints. By Lewis Morris.
CHAPTER I
CORNWALL AND CAMBRIDGE, 1781-1803
Writing half a century ago, as one who gratefully accepted the guidance of the Church of England, from the evangelical and philanthropic side of which he sprang, Sir James Stephen declared the name of Henry Martyn to be ‘in fact the one heroic name which adorns her annals from the days of Elizabeth to our own’. The past fifty years have seen her annals, in common with those of other Churches, adorned by many heroic names. These are as many and as illustrious on the side which has enshrined Henry Martyn in the new Cathedral of Truro, as amongst the Evangelicals, to whom in life he belonged. But the influence which streams forth from his short life and his obscure death is the perpetual heritage of all English-speaking Christendom, and of the native churches of India, Arabia, Persia, and Anatolia in all time to come. His Journal, even in the mutilated form published first by his friend Sargent, is one of the great spiritual autobiographies of Catholic literature. It is placed beside the Confessions of Augustine and the Grace Abounding of Bunyan. The Letters are read along with those of Samuel Rutherford and William Cowper by the most saintly workers, persuasive preachers, and learned scholars, who, even in these days of searching criticism, attribute to the young chaplain-missionary their early inspiration and renewed consecration, even as he traced his to Brainerd, Carey, and Charles Simeon.
Born in Truro on February 18, 1781, Henry Martyn came from a land the oldest and most isolated in Great Britain; a Celtic people but recently transformed from the rudest to the most courteous and upright; a family created and partly enriched by the great mining industry; and a church which had been the first, in these far-western islands, to receive the teaching of the Apostles of Jesus Christ.
The tin found in the lodes and streams of the Devonian Slates of West Cornwall was the only large source of supply to the world down to Henry Martyn’s time. The granite porphyries which form the Land’s End had come to be worked only a century before that for the ‘bunches’ of copper which fill the lines of fault and fissure. It was chiefly from the deeper lodes of Gwennap, near Truro, that his family had drawn a competence. The statement of Richard Carew, in his Survey of Cornwall, was true of the dim centuries before Herodotus wrote, that the ‘tynne of the little angle (Cornwall) overfloweth England, watereth Christendom, and is derived to a great part of the world besides’.[1] Tyrian and Jew, Greek and Roman, as navigators, travellers, and capitalists, had in the darkness of prehistoric days dealings with the land described in an Elizabethan treatise on Geography as a foreign country on that side of England next to Spain. London itself is modern compared with the Cornish trade, which in its latest stage assumed the Latin name Stannum, and the almost perfect economic laws administered by the Lord Warden of the Stannaries since King John leased the mines to the Jews, and Edward I., as Earl of Cornwall, established the now vexed ‘royalties’ by charter. Even in the century since Henry Martyn’s early days, fourteen of the Cornish mines have yielded a gross return of more than thirteen millions sterling, of which above one-fifth was clear profit.
Whether the Romans used the Britons in the mines as slaves or not, the just and democratic system of working them—which was probably due to the Norman kings, and extorted the admiration of M. Jars, a French traveller of the generation to which Henry Martyn’s father belonged—did not humanise the population. So rude were their manners that their heath-covered rocks bore the name of ‘West Barbary.’ Writing two centuries before Martyn, Norden described the city of his birth as remarkable for its neatness, which it still is, but he added, there is not a town ‘more discommendable for the pride of the people.’ The Cornish miner’s life is still as short as it is hard and daring, in spite of his splendid physique and the remarkable health of the women and children. But the perils of a rock-bound coast, the pursuits of wrecking and smuggling, added to the dangers of the mines, and all isolated from the growing civilisation of England, had combined, century after century, to make Cornwall a byword till John Wesley and George Whitfield visited it. Then the miner became so changed, not less really because rapidly, that the feature of the whole people which first and most continuously strikes a stranger is their grave and yet hearty politeness. Thomas Carlyle has, in his Life of Sterling, pictured the moral heroism which Methodism, with its ‘faith of assurance,’ developes in the ignorant Cornish miner, a faith which, as illustrated by William Carey and taught by the Church of England, did much to make Henry Martyn what he became. John Wesley’s own description in the year of Henry Martyn’s birth is this: ‘It pleased God the seed there sown has produced an abundant harvest. Indeed, I hardly know any part of the three kingdoms where there has been a more general change.’ The Cornishman still beguiles the weary hours of his descent of the ladder to his toil by crooning the hymns of Charles Wesley. The local preacher whose eloquent earnestness and knowledge of his Bible have delighted the stranger on Sunday, is found next day two hundred fathoms below the sea, doing his eight hours’ work all wet and grimy and red from the iron-sand, picking out the tin of Bottallack or the copper of Gwennap. Long before Henry Martyn knew Simeon he had become unconsciously in some sense the fruit of the teaching of the Wesleys.