Martigny

“ Martyn was much dejected, in contemplating the vast multitude of idolaters amongst whom he was now placed.
“Every thing presented the appearance of wretchedness. I thought of my future labours among them with some despondency; yet I am willing, I trust, through grace, to pass my days among them, if by any means these poor people may be brought to God. The sight of men, women, and children, all idolaters, makes me shudder, as if in the dominions of the prince of darkness. I fancy the frown of God is visible;—there is something peculiarly awful in the stillness that prevails. ”

“ When we think of the bigotry and intolerance of these people and of Mr. Martyn's unflinching courage single-handed and alone, declaring the truth and preaching Christ, exposed to the greatest personal danger, contempt and insult, but unabashed, he stands before the world during his Shiraz residence as one of the bravest and grandest heroes that has ever lived. Such a spectacle is thrilling and sublime. God was with him to protect him and to inspire his magnificent confessions. A figure-head in history! A sight for angels and for men! ”

“ Not one of these brightly dressed people was, however, the strongest power there. A man in black clothes was the real centre of the group. Very slight in build, not tall, clean-shaven, with a high forehead and sensitive lips, young Henry Martyn seemed a stripling beside the flaming Arab. Yet Sabat, with all his sound and fury, was no match for the swift-witted, clear-brained young Englishman. Henry Martyn was a chaplain in the army of the East India Company, which then ruled in India. ”

“ New names, new saints, new heroes ever rise and dazzle the eyes of common men. So it should be, for God lives, and through Him men live and manifest His unexhausted power. But Martyn is a perennial. He springs up fresh to every generation. ”

“ The concourse of people in that great city was a solemn admonition to me to be diligent in study and prayer. Thousands of intelligent people [Pg 100] together; no Sabbath; no word of God; no one to give them advice: how inscrutable the ways of God!”
Martyn had made considerable progress in translating the scriptures into the language of India; he now, at the suggestion of Mr. Brown, a missionary near Calcutta, applied himself diligently to finishing the work, and to oversee, also, a translation into Persian. This became a delightful employment, as his own expressions show. ”

“ It is wanting in no element of moral heroism. Our souls confess its grandeur. The contemplation lifts us into a higher atmosphere than that of mammon, and self, and earth. We rejoice to see a crown so rare, so fair, so precious, laid at the feet of Jesus, the King. He is worthy. And we long to see the youth of our land and the church inspired by Henry Martyn's example, as he was inspired by David Brainerd's. And so we would have the apostolic succession continued till the millennium, of such as shall not count their lives dear for the testimony of the gospel. ”

“ During these hours of rest, John Martyn devoted himself to improving his education, which had been very slight; and by his industrious application, he soon became so well acquainted with arithmetic, that he was at length engaged, as clerk, by a merchant in the town of Truro, in the county of Cornwall. The conduct of this man is an example to all persons whose occupations afford them any leisure. There is scarcely any one who is so constantly occupied, as not to have some time in the week, for the improvement of his mind. ”

“ Martyn, who, when he was asked by the prince, what were the laws of Christianity, (meaning how often it required its believers to pray, wash, &c.,) said, that it had two commandments—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy strength; and thy neighbour, as thyself.” In these debates he had to endure great contempt from his opponents, which is one of the severest trials a man of honourable feeling, and a minister of the gospel, can be called to suffer. ”

“ Henry Martyn has now been in heaven twenty-six years, having died in his thirty-second year. Dearest Corrie was born like myself in 1778, and died in 1837, aged fifty-nine, and after having been thirty-one years in India. He has been at home now a year and five months. When, where, how, I may be called hence I know not. The Lord make me a follower of them who through faith and patience have inherited the promises. In H. Martyn’s Journals the spirit of prayer, the time he devoted to the duty, and his fervour in it, are the first things which strike me. ”

“ Marty straightened and stiffened himself.
“Help me to him. Something’s wrong with my legs. I’ll see for myself. If it must be, I’ll do it for myself.”
The frontiersman understood the sentiment and respected it. He had had to do a like hard duty for his own horseflesh before that, and he had always felt it a sort of murder. He did not look at Marty’s face as he carefully guided his wavering steps into the thicket and the presence of the suffering Comanche, where one look sufficed his master. ”

“ 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 commands of Christ, as has already been remarked, are as binding on you, as any of the commandments of the moral law; and if you are not now an active, sincere disciple, living by faith upon Him, and living to his glory, the guilt of your natural sinfulness is awfully aggravated.
The zeal and devotion of Mr. Martyn were not beyond his duty. There is no such thing as a man being more holy, or doing more good than God requires of him. Had he done tenfold more, he could not have, on that account, procured the pardon of a single sin. ”

“ These discouragements are mentioned, not to exalt the praises of Martyn; for had he been a perfect man, they would have appeared too insignificant to affect him at all, but to show that God gives strength to those who serve Him, and depend upon Him, proportionate to their trials and necessities; that his grace can enable a man to do actions of benevolence, which no other influence could; and that the sacrifices which Martyn made, are a proof of the reality of religion, as well as of the sincerity of his own profession. ”

“ And he doubtless found Him still nearer in his dying hour, when flesh and strength failed him; for the Saviour adapts his consolations to the circumstances [Pg 193] of his people, and in proportion to their necessities, he imparts more of the gifts of his Holy Spirit, and they are enabled to say, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me.”
When Mr. Martyn left England for India, it was his expectation and desire to be employed principally in preaching to the natives. ”

“ The manner of his death is not known, whether it resulted from the sickness described, or from the plague, then raging. Whether Hassan was cruel and driving to the last, whether all his heartless Turkish attendants deserted him or not in his hour of final agony, we cannot tell. No relative or friend was there, no tender voice of sympathy, no woman's soothing hand, no alleviations from medicine. Even the commonest decencies and necessities of civilized life were lacking. Earth gave nothing to Henry Martyn in his mortal need, but we are sure heavenly consolations were unstinted. ”

“ A person's got to like something that's alive and human, or—" Marthy was clumsy with words, and she was always coming to the barrier between her powers of expression and the thoughts that were prisoned and dumb. "Here's your bread 'n' honey."
"What makes you sound that way, Marthy? You sound like you had tears inside, and they couldn't get out your eyes. Are you sad? Did you ever have a little girl, Marthy?"
"What makes you ask that?" Marthy sat heavily down upon a box beside the rough kitchen table and looked at Billy Louise queerly, as if she were half afraid of her. ”

“ But to turn to the life itself. Henry Martyn, like Martin Luther, sprang from a family of mine captains, and was born at Truro, on Feb. 18th, 1781—the third child of a family of four. His father, who lived [224] at first near Gwennap Church-Town, had been an Accountant at Wheal Virgin; and being, like many others of his calling, an ingenious and self-reliant man, taught himself arithmetic and some mathematics; his abilities attracted the attention of Mr. Daniell, one of the Truro merchants, and ultimately John Martyn became his chief clerk. ”

“ But Martyn thought that even such a reception as this was better than so unworthy a sinner as he merited! Referring to this episode in Martyn's career Dean Alford writes:
[239]
'The pale-faced Frank among them sits: what brought him from afar?
Nor bears he bales of merchandise, nor teaches arts of war.
One pearl alone he brings with him—the Book of life and death.
One warfare only teaches he—to fight the fight of faith.'
Matters, however, improved after a while; the Armenian ladies came to kiss his hand, and the priest incensed him four times over at the altar. ”

“ The life of faith in Jesus is what I want. My soul might almost burst with astonishment at its own wickedness! but at the same time, trusting to mercy, rise and go, and try to make men happy. The Lord go with me! Let my right hand forget her cunning, if I remember not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”
On the 8th of July 1805, Mr. Martyn proceeded to Portsmouth, from which place he was to sail in a ship of the East India Company, to Calcutta, there to act as chaplain of the Company. ”

“ There, there shall in no wise enter in any thing that defileth: none of that wickedness which has made men worse than wild beasts,—none of those corruptions which add still more to the miseries of mortality, shall be seen or heard of any more.”
These were the last words that Martyn wrote! Nothing more is known of his fate than that he reached the town of Tocat, in Turkey, nearly six hundred miles from Tebriz, and about three hundred from Constantinople, and that he died there on the 16th of October, being in the thirty-second year of his life. ”

“ Marshman, in frequent letters, as his ‘dear brother,’ anticipating the catholic tenderness of Bishop Heber. [22] Martyn attended those family lectures of Ward on the Hindus which resulted in his great book on the subject. In the Pagoda, ‘Carey, Marshman, and Ward joined in the same chorus of praise with Brown, Martyn, and Corrie.’ Martyn himself gives us these exquisite unconscious pictures of Christian life in Serampore, in which all true missionaries face to face with the common enemy have followed the giants of those days. ”

“ Martyn had been so diligent in order to gain this supposed reward, that his fellow-students called him ‘the man who had not lost an hour;’ he found too late that he had for ever lost many hours of opportunity of acquiring the knowledge of divine truth, and of his own duty, and many hours of happiness, such as all the honours, and even all the pleasures [Pg 16] of learning, can never confer, or compensate a man for its loss. ”

“ Martyn never would have attained style, but he could, I think, have learned to make his characters express themselves in a way nearer to true dramatic speech than the lifeless dialogue of his that only just manages to give you their thought, with none of their mood of the moment or of their personality.
In every one of Mr. Martyn's plays the plot is interesting, save in "The Place Hunters"; in every other play it is significant; and in all it is come largely of his individual experience of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Martyn has always been her favorite because he is a boy. Throughout his babyhood she invariably spoke of him as “little-Martyn-God-bless-his-dear-chubby-little-face,” and she unconsciously resents it, now that little Martyn has grown up and has ceased to be chubby—which he did long before she ceased to call him so. As for the formula of benediction, I think Claire feels that God, in all probability, experiences exactly the same difficulty as herself in viewing Sallie and Martyn as real people at all. ”

“ Not she, but the girl with the red lips and the pale face and the hair that came out of a bottle had stripped Marty of his armor, and the truth of it was that Marty, yes, even Marty, was not really a knight but a very ordinary man.
Out of the orchard and the garden she went, once she had arrived at this stage, and tramped the countryside with her ears tuned to catch the alluring strains of the mechanical music of the Round-about. She had not only been making a fool of herself but had been made to look a fool, she thought. Her pain and suffering and disillusion had been wasted. ”

“ More than any man, as saint and scholar, as missionary and chaplain, as the friend of the Mohammedan and the second apostle of Central Asia, he was baptized for the dead. Born on the first day of 1825, son of an Evangelical clergyman in Burton-on-Trent, a Rugby boy, and Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford, Thomas Valpy French was early inspired by Martyn’s life and writings. These and his mother’s holiness sent him forth to Agra in 1850, along with Edward Stuart of Edinburgh, now Bishop of Waiapu, New Zealand, to found the Church Missionary College there. ”