the promises at a distance. He pursued his journey towards Constantinople in a way which showed how much he needed the care and guardianship of affection which he had long ago surrendered. Nearly all the way from Tabriz to Tokat he rode at a gallop under a burning sun. Few things in biography are more painful than the record of that journey, with its anguish of body and consequent misery of mind. He could get no further; and Constantinople was still 250 miles off. He died at Tokat on the 6th of October, 1812, in his thirty-second year.
He has been mourned in England from that day to this. He is the Church of England’s great missionary,—at least equal to any sent forth by the piety and zeal of the Dissenters. His personal character, his cultivation of mind and manners, his meek devotedness, and the heroic direction of his will and temper of his soul make him worthy of the place he holds as the representative of modern English protestant missions.
The Missionary of the Roman Church (provided he issues from her organisation) holds a different place, and fulfils a different function. Henry Martyn would have said that however persecuted and obstructed, he has an easy task in comparison with the Protestant. The difference is in the placing of the responsibility. Henry Martyn had, with his Protestant freedom, the obligation to choose his own line of duty, and bear all the doubts, misgivings, and after-questionings which belonged to it. He was exactly the man to suffer under the necessity for such a decision. He had strong passions united with a constitutional melancholy and an imperative conscience; and he was therefore incessantly anxious about every act of his mission,—questioning whether it was done to gratify himself or to further his work. From all such misgivings the Lazarist Fathers, Huc and Gabet, were free, when they were sent to “the Land of Grass,” beyond the frontier of China, as Missionaries to the capital of Thibet, in or about 1844.
Catholic devotees do not wait on the operations of the Spirit for guidance as to their course. Their Church takes all that care off them; and they are spared the pains and penalties of all search into, and interpretation of the Divine Will. They consider this an advantage; and Protestants think otherwise. There is no question as to the comparative ease, in the first instance, of the two methods. The controversy between them is on quite a different point, which does not concern us here. What does concern us is that on which all are agreed,—that it is far easier to go anywhere, and meet any fate, at the bidding of an authority believed infallible, than to determine for oneself whether it is right or wrong to choose such a course, whether it is presumption or holy courage which incites to the choice, and, therefore, whether good or evil results may be expected.
It is not to be supposed that M. Huc would have been liable to Henry Martyn’s sufferings if he had been ever so Protestant, and even a member of the most anxious coterie connected with the Clapham Church. He is not a man who could, under any circumstances, be liable to severe spiritual sufferings. But neither could he have been so gay and light-hearted, in such a country and among such people, if he had carried a weight of responsibility about being there at all. He lived under a direction which he never thought of questioning. By that authority he was ordered into Thibet, and told where to go, and for what purpose. Thus he had only to bear the genuine force of the evils he encountered, without a single question as to how he came into the midst of them. If we wonder at the hilarious tone of his missionary travels under such circumstances, we shall hardly see where the mistake lies when thoughtless people are surprised at the mirth and levity of negro slaves.
These Jesuit missionaries would have made Henry Martyn stand aghast, if their work had been contemporary with his. With as true a courage and devotedness as himself, they had no turn for sentiment, or at least for expressing it. When he would have been plunged in the torment of self-questioning on the verge of a new effort, they were joking and quizzing the natives. Where he would have described the peril of lost souls, they give us caricatures of the people about them. Where he roused up a heroic patience to sustain him under mortifications of the flesh such as attend missionary travels, these Jesuits make wry mouths, and declare them detestable, but make fun of them all the while. In the gravest dangers, when Henry Martyn would have been happiest, in the certainty that he was in the path of duty, for the glory of God, these Jesuits declare that they shook as in an ague, that their teeth chattered with fear, that they wished themselves a hundred miles off, and so forth. Yet they always said and did what was so wise that they were certainly self-possessed; and so brave that they were certainly possessed with the true spirit of their office. They prayed to the Virgin in the moment of crisis, just as Martyn resorted to his Protestant prayer. Like him, they knew the heart-sinking of spiritual solitude. They witnessed a spiritual degradation lower than he saw in Persia, and as low as anything he saw in Hindostan; and he and they held in common an assured belief that all whom they could not convert were doomed to perdition; and the sense of this appears through the fun and frolic of M. Huc’s narrative, as distinctly as through Henry Martyn’s melancholy diary. The Jesuits pined and sank under hardship in a barbarous land and a fatal climate, with as much suffering as human nature can endure. M. Gabet died under it; and M. Huc struggled through with great difficulty. Their efforts, their sufferings, and their splendid merits were much alike; but nothing could be more opposite than their tone of mind and manners, and their style of narrative.
The Catholic mission at Pekin had sunk very low,—below the ken of the Government. The native Christians had, for the most part, crossed the frontier, and settled in “the Land of Grass,” to escape notice and persecution. A new diocese of Mongolia was formed, in consequence; and the mission of M. Huc and his comrade was to explore this diocese, and give an account of its extent and circumstances. As at least one-third of the population were priests, and this amount of celibacy caused so much social embarrassment