January 24.—Heard yesterday of the marriage of Mr. John—what a mercy to me do I feel it!—a load gone off my mind, for every evil I heard of his committing I feared I might have been the cause of, by my conduct ten years since—I rejoice in this event for his sake and my own.
February 6.—Heard at last of the safety of my friend in India, and wrote to him—many fears on my mind as to its propriety, and great deadness of soul in doing it—yet ere I concluded I felt comforted from the thought of the nearness of eternity, and the certainty that then, without any fear of doing wrong, I should again enjoy communion with him.
February 24.—Many sad presages of evil concerning my absent friend, yet I am enabled to leave all to God—only now I pray, if consistent with His will, his life may be spared, and as a means of it, that God may incline him to return again to this land. I never did before dare to ask this, believing the cause of God would be more advanced by his remaining in India; but now I pray, without fear of doing wrong or opposing the will of God, for his return.
March 5.—I am sensible of a very remarkable change in the desires of my soul before God, respecting my absent friend. I with freedom and peace now pray continually that he may be restored to his friends and country; before, I never dared to ask anything but that the Lord would order this as His wisdom saw fit, and thought it not a subject for prayer. His injured health causes me to believe that India is not the place for his labours—and, oh, that his mind may be rightly influenced and the Lord’s will done, whether it be his remaining there or returning.
April 23.—Wrote to India.
November 30.—Heard yesterday, and again to-day, from India.[35] The illness of my friend fills me with apprehensions on his account, and I seemed called on to prepare for hearing of his removal. I wish to place before my eyes the blessedness of the change to him, and, though agitated and sad, I can bear to think of our never more beholding each other in this world. This indeed has long been my expectation, and that he should have left the toils of mortality for the joys of heaven should, on his account, fill me with praise—yet my heart cannot rise with thankfulness. I seem stupefied, insensible to any feeling but that of anxiety to hear again and know the truth, and that my heart could joy in God at all times; but alas! all is cold there! Oh, return, blessed Spirit of life and peace.
1811, March 28.—Heard from my dearest friend in India.[36] Rose early. Found my spirit engaged in prayer, but was far ... otherwise in reading. Such dulness and inattention as ought deeply to abase me, vanity and a desire to appear of importance in the school, beset me.
Corrie had been ordered from his narrow parish of Chunar to the wider field of Agra, and on his way up was directed to remain at Cawnpore to help his friend, whose physical exhaustion was too apparent even to the most careless officer. Among those influenced by both was one of the surgeons, Dr. Govan,[37] who was spared, at St. Andrews, till after the Mutiny of 1857, when in an unpublished lecture to its Literary and Philosophical Society, he thus alluded to these workers in Cawnpore:
The Hukeem and the missionary hear native opinion spoken out with much greater freedom than the political agent, the judge, or commandant. ‘Were there many more of the Sahibean Ungez (the English gentlemen) in character like the Padre Sahibs (Corrie and Martyn), Christianity would make more progress here,’ was the unvaried testimony of the natives in their favour.... I cannot help mentioning the results of various conversations I had with two natives of Eastern rank and family employed by the Venerable Mr. Corrie, afterwards Bishop of Madras, and the Rev. Henry Martyn, in Scripture translation, and whose assistance I had used in the study of the languages, as they quite coincide with much which I had the opportunity of hearing among men of still higher position in the native educated community, when attached to the staff of the Governor-General: ‘By the decrees of God,’ said the Mohammedan noble, ‘and the ubiquity of their fleets, armaments, and commerce, it appears plainly that the European nations have become the arbiters of the destinies of the nations of Asia. Yet this seems to us strange in the followers of Him who taught that His true disciples must be ready to give their cloaks also to him who took from them their coats.’ To which I had no better reply than this, that the progress of events in the world’s history seems to us to give evidence that undoubtedly a Divine message had been sent, both to governments and their subjects, to which, at their peril, both must give attention. But that, as a question of public national policy, it seemed generally admitted and understood that the civil rulers of no nation, Christian, Mohammedan, or Heathen, were laid under an obligation, by their individual beliefs, to allow a country, unable to govern itself by reason of its interminable divisions and subjects of deadly internal strife, to be occupied and made use of by their European or other enemies, as a means for their own injury or destruction, for any criminal or sinful acts, done in the building up of a nation or government. I may add that I never heard a native of India attempt directly to impugn the perfect justice of the British possession of India on this ground. ‘The Padre Sahib has put the subject in its true light’ (said the same Mohammedan authority) ‘when he said that Christianity had higher objects in view, in its influence on human character, than to enforce absolute rules about meats and drinks; for should he even induce me (which is unlikely) to become more of a Christian than I am, believing, as I do, in the authority of the Old Testament prophets, and in Jesus Christ as a prophet sent by God, he will never persuade me to look upon many articles of diet used by Christians with anything but the most intense disgust and abhorrence, and he will assuredly find it the same with most of these idolatrous Hindus.’
We return to Martyn’s Journal and Correspondence: