Another visit to his solitary retreat in Cornwall refreshed him during the summer, and whilst there he preached to a crowded congregation at Kenwyn Church from 2 Cor. v. 20, 21: 'Now we are ambassadors,' etc. (a very favourite text of his), and availed himself of the opportunity, before returning to Cambridge on 18th of September, 1804, to take leave of his county and friends, in view of the probability of his soon getting the desired appointment under the East India Company. On his way back to the University, as his journals testify, with characteristic zeal and devotedness, though, apparently, not always with tact and skill, he lost no opportunity, in season or out of season, of turning the conversation of his fellow-travellers to religious topics.
At this period of his life his usual routine seems to have been to rise every morning at about half-past five (and, if he failed to do so, his self-reproaches are most bitter); to work hard, either with his pupils, his flock, or his books; to pray at least four times a day, and to write at least one sermon a week. The Scriptures he doubtless read daily; and the spirit in which he read them may be seen from the following extract from his Journals, written when on board ship, on his way to India: 'Read Isaiah the rest of the evening—sometimes happy and at other times tired, and desiring to take up some other religious book; but I saw it an important duty to check this slighting of the Word of God.' And here it may be interesting to note the other works which seem to have been amongst Martyn's favourites. Of course, he kept up his mathematics and science; but the references to these in his Journals are slight and few. He often read the Greek plays, but his chief reading was, as might be expected, divinity; and especially St. Augustine, Grotius, Paley, Baxter, Hooker, Pearson, Fletcher's 'Portrait,' Flavel's 'Saint Indeed,' Searle's 'Christian Remembrancer,' Thomas à Kempis, Law's 'Serious Call,' Lowth, Bishop Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards's 'Original Sin,' and his work on the Affections, Whitfield's Journal, Leighton, Milner's 'Church History,' etc., etc.; and these were interspersed with the study of Hindostanee and other Oriental languages.
Martyn's religious position and views have been thus described in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1844, by a writer who traces their origin to the well-known Clapham School of 'Evangelical' religion:
'From that circle he adopted, in all its unadorned simplicity, the system called Evangelical—that system of which (if Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the writers of the English Homilies may be credited) Christ Himself was the author, and Paul the first and greatest interpreter.
'Through shallow heads and voluble tongues, such a creed (or indeed any creed) filtrates so easily, that, of the multitudes who maintain it, comparatively few are aware of the conflict of their faith with the natural and unaided reason of mankind. Indeed, he who makes such an avowal will hardly escape the charge of affectation or of impiety. Yet if any truth be clearly revealed, it is, that the Apostolic doctrine was foolishness to the sages of this world. If any unrevealed truth be indisputable, it is, that such sages are at this day making, as they have ever made, ill-disguised efforts to escape the inferences with which their own admissions teem. Divine philosophy divorced from human science—celestial things stripped of the mitigating veils woven by man's wit and fancy to relieve them—form an abyss as impassable at Oxford now, as at Athens eighteen centuries ago. To Henry Martyn the gulf was visible, the self-renunciation painful, the victory complete. His understanding embraced, and his heart reposed in, the two comprehensive and ever-germinating tenets of the school in which he studied. Regarding his own heart as corrupt, and his own reason as delusive, he exercised an unlimited affiance in the holiness and the wisdom of Him, in whose person the divine nature had been allied to the human, that, in the persons of his followers, the human might be allied to the divine.
'Such was his religious theory—a theory which doctors may combat, or admit, or qualify, but in which the readers of Henry Martyn's Biography, Letters, and Journals, cannot but acknowledge that he found the resting-place of all the impetuous appetencies of his mind, the spring of all his strange powers of activity and endurance. Prostrating his soul before the real, though the hidden Presence he adored, his doubts were silenced, his anxieties soothed, and every meaner passion hushed into repose.'
On the 2nd of April, 1805, having previously been ordained priest at St. James's Chapel Royal, London, and having taken his degree as Bachelor of Divinity, he preached his last sermon at Cambridge, and came to London to prosecute his studies in Hindostanee, and to preach occasionally at St. John's Chapel, Bedford Row. It was about this time that he made the acquaintance of Wilberforce, dining with him and going afterwards to the House of Commons, where he was much struck with the eloquence, great seriousness, and energy of Pitt 'about that which is of no consequence at all.'
He at length, on the 24th April, 1805, obtained the long-wished-for chaplaincy, with a salary of £1,200 a year, and was fervently longing to enter upon his labours, exclaiming on one occasion, from the very depths of his soul: 'Gladly shall this base blood be shed, every drop of it, if India can be benefited in one of her children!'
This would seem to be the proper occasion to advert to a passage in Martyn's Life which must possess for any genial reader a most touching interest. The enthusiastic clergyman had become deeply smitten with the attractions of Miss Lydia Grenfell, of the parish of St. Hilary, three or four miles from Marazion. His affection for this lady appears to have been both profound and sincere; but he feared that its indulgence might prove a bar to the higher aims which he had set before him. His mental conflicts on this subject, as on all others, were most severe; and under such circumstances, and with his gloomy and excitable religious views, he may have appeared, what the lady herself (some few years his senior) undoubtedly was, a somewhat languid and vacillating lover. That the lady never married him—although her final refusal did not reach him till 1807, when he was in India—was perhaps fortunate for both parties; but, undoubtedly, Martyn continued to love her and to correspond with her to the last. The peculiar circumstances of this attachment gave rise to Holme Lee's (Harriet Parr's) story of 'Her Title of Honour;' that title consisting of the honour done to Eleanor Trevelyan by being beloved by so good and great a man as Francis Gwynne (Martyn). Miss Grenfell never married. Her sister Emma became the wife of the Rev. T. M. Hitchins,[108] of Devonport, Martyn's cousin; and some interesting letters to her from Martyn, mostly bearing upon the subject of his love for Lydia, will be found in a supplement to the 'Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall' edited by Mr. Henry Martyn Jeffery, F.R.S. (vol. vii. pt. 3, December, 1882, No. 26).