During fifty-five years again and again John Wesley visited Cornwall, preaching in the open air all over the mining county and in the fishing hamlets, till two generations were permanently changed. His favourite centre was Gwennap, which had long been the home of the Martyn family, a few miles from Truro. There he found his open-air pulpit and church in the great hollow, ever since known as ‘Wesley’s Pit,’ where, to this day, thousands crowd every Whit-Monday to commemorative services. Wesley’s published journal, which closes with October 1790, when Henry Martyn was nearly ten years of age, has more frequent and always more appreciative references to Gwennap than to any other town. On July 6, 1745, we find him writing:
At Gwennap also we found the people in the utmost consternation. Word was brought that a great company of tinners, made drunk on purpose, were coming to do terrible things—so that abundance of people went away. I preached to the rest on ‘Love your enemies.’
By 1774 we read ‘the glorious congregation was assembled at five in the amphitheatre at Gwennap.’ Next year we find this:
‘At five in the evening in the amphitheatre at Gwennap. I think this is the most magnificent spectacle which is to be seen on this side heaven. And no music is to be heard upon earth comparable to the sound of many thousand voices when they are all harmoniously joined together singing “praises to God and the Lamb.” Four-and-twenty thousand were present, frequently, at that spot. And yet all, I was informed, could hear distinctly in the fair, calm evening.’ Again: ‘I think this is my ne plus ultra. I shall scarce see a larger congregation till we meet in the air.’
We are thus introduced to the very spot where Henry Martyn was born: ‘About noon I preached in the piazza adjoining to the Coinage Hall in Truro. I was enabled to speak exceeding plain on “Ye are saved through faith.”’ In the evening of the same day Wesley preached in the fishing village of Megavissey, ‘where I saw a very rare thing—men swiftly increasing in substance, and yet not decreasing in holiness.’
From such a land and such influences sprang the first missionary hero of the Church of England in modern times. The Martyn family had for more than a century been known locally as one of skilled miners, described by their ablest representative in recent times[2] as ‘mine agents or mine captains who filled positions of trust.’ Martin Luther had a similar origin. There is no evidence that any of them went underground, although that, if true, would justify the romance for which Martyn’s first biographer is responsible. His great-grandfather was Thomas Martyn, his grandfather was John Martyn of Gwennap Churchtown, and his grand-uncle was the surveyor, Thomas Martyn (1695-1751), who published the map of Cornwall described as a marvel of minute and accurate topography, due to a survey on foot for fifteen years. Mr. Jeffery quotes from some manuscript notes written by his father:
John, an elder brother of Thomas Martyn, was the father of John Martyn, who was born at Gwennap Churchtown, and, when young, was put as an accountant at Wheal Virgin Mine. He was soon made cashier to Ralph Allen Daniell, Esq., of Trelissick. Mr. Martyn held one-twenty-fourth of Wheal Unity Mine, where upwards of 300,000l. was divided. He then resided in a house opposite the Coinage Hall (now the Cornish Bank), Truro, a little below the present Market House. Here Henry Martyn was born February 18, 1781, and was sent thence to Dr. Cardew’s School in 1788.
The new Town Hall stands on the site of the house.
The boy bore a family name which is common in Southwest England, and which was doubtless derived, in the first instance, from the great missionary monk of Celtic France, the founder of the Gallic Church, St. Martin, Bishop of Tours. Born in what is now Lower Hungary, the son of a pagan soldier of Rome, St. Martin, during his long life which nearly covered the fourth century, made an impression, especially on Western or Celtic Christendom, even greater than that of the Devonshire Winfrith or Boniface on Germany long after him. It was in the generation after his death, when St. Martin’s glory was at its height, that the Saxon invasion of Britain led to the migration of British Christians from West and South England to Armorica, which was thence called Brittany. The intercourse between Cornwall and Britannia Minor became as close as is now the case between the Celtic districts of the United Kingdom and North America. Missionaries continually passed and repassed between them. St. Corentin, consecrated Bishop of Quimper in Brittany or French Cornwall, by the hands of St. Martin himself, was sent to Cornwall long before Pope Gregory despatched St. Augustin to Canterbury, and became a popular Cornish saint after whom St. Cury’s parish is still named. On the other side, the Early British Church of Cornwall, where we still find Roman Christian inscriptions, kept up a close fellowship with the Church in Ireland. The earliest martyrs and hermits of the Church of Cornu-Gallia were companions of St. Patrick.
Certainly there is no missionary saint in all the history of the Church of Christ whom, in his character, Henry Martyn so closely resembled as his namesake, the apostle of the Gallic peoples. In the pages of the bishop’s biographer, Sulpicius Severus, we see the same self-consecration which has made the Journal of Henry Martyn a stimulus to the noblest spirits of modern Christendom; the same fiery zeal, often so excessive as to defeat the Divine mission; the same soldier-like obedience and humility; the same prayerfulness without ceasing, and faith in the power of prayer; the same fearlessness in preaching truth however disagreeable to the luxurious and vicious of the time; and, above all on the practical side, the same winning loveableness and self-sacrifice for others which have made the story of St. Martin dividing his cloak with the beggar second only, in Mediæval art, to the Gospel records of the Lord’s own acts of tender grace and Divine self-emptying. As we trace, step by step, the unceasing service of Henry Martyn to men for love of his Master, we shall find a succession of modern parallels to the act of St. Martin, who, when a lad of eighteen with his regiment at Amiens, himself moneyless, answered the appeal of a beggar, shivering at the city gates in a cruel winter, by drawing his dagger, dividing his military cloak, and giving half of it to the naked man. If the legend continues to run, that the boy saw in a dream Christ Himself in the half-cloak saying to the attendant angels, ‘Martin, still a catechumen, has clothed Me with this garment,’ and forthwith sought baptism—that is only a form of the same spirit which, from the days of Paul to our own, finds inspiration in the thought that we are compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses.