Long after this the good seed of the Kingdom, as sown by Henry Martyn, continued to bear fruit, which in its turn propagated itself. In 1816 there came to Corrie in Calcutta, for further instruction, from Bareilly, a young Mohammedan ascetic and teacher who, at seventeen, had abandoned Hinduism, seeking peace of mind. He fell in with Martyn’s Hindustani New Testament, and was baptized under the new name of Fuez Massee’h. Under somewhat similar circumstances Noor Massee’h was baptized at Agra. The missionary labours of Martyn at Cawnpore, followed up by Corrie there and at Agra soon after, farther resulted in the baptism there of seventy-one Hindus and Mohammedans, of whom fifty were adults. All of these, save seven, remained steadfast, and many became missionaries in their turn. The career of Abdool Massee’h closed in 1827, after he had been ordained in the Calcutta cathedral by Bishop Heber, who loved him. His last breath was spent in singing the Persian hymn, translated thus:
Beloved Saviour, let not me
In Thy kind heart forgotten be!
Of all that deck the field or bower,
Thou art the sweetest, fairest flower!
Youth’s morn has fled, old age comes on.
But sin distracts my soul alone;
Beloved Saviour, let not me
In Thy kind heart forgotten be.
As from Dinapore Martyn sought out the moulvies of Patna, so from Cawnpore he found his way to Lucknow There, after he had baptized a child of the Governor-General’s Resident, he met the Nawab Saadut Ali, and his eyes for the first time beheld one who had full power of life and death over his subjects. He visited the moulvies, at the tomb of Asaf-ood-Dowla, who were employed to read the Koran constantly. ‘With them I tried my strength, of course, and disputed for an hour; it ended in their referring me for an answer to another.’
Toil such as Martyn’s, physical and mental, in successive hot seasons, in such hospitals and barracks as then killed off the British troops and their families, and without a decent church building, would have sacrificed the healthiest in a few years. Corrie had to flee from it, or he would never have lived to be the first and model Bishop of Madras. But such labours, such incessant straining of the voice through throat and lungs, acting on his highly neurotic constitution, and the phthisical frame which he inherited from his mother, became possible to Henry Martyn only because he willed, he agonised, to live till he should give at least the New Testament to the peoples of Arabia and Persia, and to the Mohammedans of India, in their own tongues. We see him in his Journal, before God, spiritually spurring the sides of his intent day by day, and running like the noble Arab horse till it drops—its object gained. He had many warnings, and if he had had a wife to see that he obeyed the voice of Providence he might have outlived his hereditary tendency in such a tropical climate as that of India—a fact since proved by experience. He had narrowly escaped death at Dinapore a few months before, and he knew it. But it is well that, far more frequently than the world knows, such cases occur in the missionary fields of the world. The Brainerds and the Martyns, the Pattesons and the Hanningtons, the Keith-Falconers and the Mackays—to mention some of the dead only—have their reward in calling hundreds to fill their places, not less than the Careys and the Livingstones, the Duffs and the Wilsons, the Frenches and the Caldwells. To all who know the tropics, and especially the seasons of India, the dates that follow are eloquent.
1809, May 29.—The East has been long forsaken of God, and depravity in consequence more thoroughly wrought into them. I have been very ill all this week, the disorder appearing in the form of an intermittent. In the night cold sweats, and for about five hours in the day head-ache and vertigo. Last night I took some medicine, and think that I am better, though the time when the fever has generally come on is not yet arrived. But I hardly know how to be thankful enough for this interval of ease.
September 25.—Set out at three in the morning for Currah, and reached it on the 26th in the morning, and married a Miss K. to Mr. R.; the company was very unpleasant, so after passing the night there, I set out and travelled all day and night, and through Divine mercy arrived at home again on the 28th, but excessively fatigued, indeed almost exhausted. At night with the men, my whole desire was to lie low in the dust. ‘Thou hast left thy first love,’ on which I spoke, was an awful call to me, and I trust in God I shall ever feel it so.
November 19.—Received a letter from Mr. Simeon, mentioning Sarah’s illness; consumption has seized her, as it did my mother and sister, and will carry her off as it did them, and now I am the only one left. Oh, my dear Corrie, though I know you are well prepared, how does nature bleed at the thought of a beloved sister’s drooping and dying! Yet still to see those whom I love go before me, without so much as a doubt of their going to glory, will, I hope, soothe my sorrow. How soon shall I follow? I know it must be soon. The paleness and fatigue I exhibit after every season of preaching show plainly that death is settled in my lungs.
1810, April 9.—From the labours of yesterday, added to constant conversation and disagreement with visitors to-day, I was quite exhausted, and my chest in pain.
April 10.—My lungs still so disordered that I could not meet my men at night.