He was at the same time an exponent of the emotional character of the revived religion. His character was emotional by constitution: it had continued so by habit; and now it was carried to the highest pitch of sensibility by the faith and doctrine of the special party to which he had joined himself. He was upheld in his missionary purpose by the strong and practical mind of Mr. Grant; and this, no doubt, saved him from much conflict; but there were difficulties behind, which no human aid could solve. The work seemed to him so great, and he himself was so small, that he was perpetually disparaging himself, fearing to sink in a holy enterprise and become a castaway, and insisting to himself on the necessity of sacrificing every predilection which could impair his devotedness to the task of his life. After conflicts of mind which it is painful to read of, he sailed for India in 1805, under the countenance of the Missionary Society. It may be said at once, that it was not poverty—in the sense of deficiency of income—that Henry Martyn encountered as one of the trials of missionary life. His objects involved a good deal of expense; and Mr. Grant procured for him an allowance of 1200l. a year. No one who knows anything of the character of the man, could suppose for an instant that the prospect of a good income tempted him, more or less. With some people his reputation would have stood higher if he had not had it; but money was no consolation for such troubles and sorrows as Henry Martyn went forth to encounter.
In frail and feeble health, with a heart half broken by an attachment which he believed it his duty to surrender; at times lifted up by high hope, or calmed by a divine peace; but again perturbed by the remorse of a sensitive conscience, and the humiliations which dog a repressed and perverted nature, he went to Asia, because the people there were infinitely more miserable than he was. He regarded the whole heathen and Mohammedan world as lost. Every soul that he should meet would need to be rescued from perdition. Such was then, as it usually is still, the view of the promoters of missions. Such a view is not only a sanction of their devotedness, but it accounts for the practice, universal among Protestants in Henry Martyn’s time, of endeavouring to root out, at the earliest possible moment, every idea and feeling involved in heathen religion and morality, and to plant down into the minds of converts ideas, beliefs, and feelings, such as are entertained by their new teachers. The Catholics had done differently. They had compromised with the old worship by slipping their saints and apostles into the shrines and garments of the old idols—had, in fact, sanctioned the old idolatry to a certain extent, in the hope of modifying it immediately, and at length transmuting it into the real religion of their Church. This, and the shocking failures which had taken place after wholesale conversions (which sometimes meant baptism by a broom sprinkling the greatest possible number in the shortest time), wrought up to the highest pitch the eagerness of the renovated English Church to save souls by a real renewal of the heart and mind; and this renewal could, as was then supposed, be effected only by an extirpation of old thoughts and feelings, and the introduction of new.
Great and varied dangers must attend such a work as this warfare against the faith and prepossessions of a whole community. Every missionary prepared himself to endure contumely, solitude of the mind and heart, want, mortification, persecution, torture, and death, amidst every outward disgrace of the religion he venerated. Missionaries professed to expect such things; and they did expect them in the way in which we anticipate future evils while surrounded with present comforts. The devotedness was as entire as it could be by anticipation: but there is great support in the admiring homage of the Church, the sympathy of friends, the united hope, and confidence, and prayers of a multitude.
When faith is firm and conscience clear,
And words of peace the spirit cheer,
And vision’d glories half appear,
’Tis joy, ’tis triumph then to die:
and, we may add, to go forth to death.
In this spirit Henry Martyn went forth. The new phase of the missionary office was marked by the special preparation he underwent. It was not his object at first to set himself on high places, and cry out to the heathen to forsake their abominations. He proposed to circulate the Scriptures in the Eastern tongues, and to gain access to the minds of superior men in the societies he should enter. He spent five years in Hindostan, under the name of a chaplain of the East India Company; and then he entered the Mussulman field, by travelling in Persia. He had laboured long and hard at the translation of the Bible into Persian and Hindostanee; and had proceeded some way with an Arabic version. Thus provided, he took up his abode at Shiraz for a twelvemonth, suffering in almost every incident of his life, and rarely cheered by confidence within or success without.
His abode in Persia was a dreary purgatory. The climate kept him constantly feverish or feeble. He found it difficult to the last degree to get any hold of minds like those of the learned men who conversed with him—slippery, specious, ingenious, and sceptical, or bigoted, under manners which were polite and hollow, or really kind, in the absence of all intellectual sympathy. At times he hoped he had made some impression on an individual here and there; and again, he did not know what to think, and fell back on the hopes afforded by the diffusion of the Scriptures. His fever consumed him; his strength waned; his spirits fluctuated; the old human affection seemed to gain ground as his prospect of life receded. He was tormented by scruples about leaving his work; but it became evident that his only chance for life was in returning home. Once convinced of this, his eagerness for home and its intercourses may be imagined; and what was the torture to a heart like his of the doubt whether he should ever again see a familiar face, or hear his own language in an English home! Ten days before his death, he made his last entry in his diary, telling how he sat in the orchard, and found comfort in devotion, while wondering how long the defilements of the unregenerate should keep