Pioneers and Founders

After returning from church he sank, nearly fainting, on a sofa in the hall; but, as soon as he revived, begged his friends to sing to him.  The hymn was—

“O God, our help in ages past,   Our hope in years to come,Our shelter from the stormy blast,   And our eternal home.”

After the early dinner and afternoon rest, on a sickly, hazy, burning evening, he preached for the last time to his beggars; came away fainting, and as he lay on his sofa told his friends that he did not believe that he had ever made the slightest impression on one of his audience there.

He knew not that Sheik Salah’s heart had been touched, and so deeply that he sought further instruction.  As to Sabat, his later career was piteous.  He fell back into Mahometanism, and, after some years of a wandering life, took service with the Mussulman chief of Acheen in Sumatra, where, having given some offence, he was barbarously hacked to pieces and thrown into the sea.  Such bitter disappointments occur in missionary life; and how should we wonder, since the like befel even St. Paul and St. John?

On the 1st of October, 1810, Mr. Martyn embarked on the Ganges, and on the last day of the month arrived at Mr. Brown’s house at Aldeen.  He was then much the stronger for the long rest to his voice and chest, but his friends thought him greatly changed and enfeebled, and he could not even hold a conversation without bringing on painful symptoms.  Nevertheless, he preached every Sunday but one at Calcutta until the 7th of January, 1811, when he took his last leave of his Anglo-Indian friends, and set forth on his journey to lands almost entirely strange even to his countrymen, in the hope of rendering the Scriptures available for the study of the numerous Hindoos and Mahometans who understood Persian better than any other literary language.  He went forth, in broken health, and not only without a companion, but without even an attendant, and for his further history we have only his own journals and letters to depend upon.  He went by sea to Bombay with a captain who had been a pupil of Swartz, and whose narratives delighted him much, and afterwards obtained a passage in an English ship which was to cruise in the Persian Gulf against Arab pirates.  Here he was allowed to have public prayers every evening, and on the 22nd of May was landed at Bushire, where he was lodged in the house of an English merchant with an Armenian wife.

The time for a journey to Persia was so far favourable that the Shah, Fath’ Ali, who had succeeded to the throne in 1794, owed England much gratitude for having interfered to check the progress of Russian conquest upon his northern frontier.  After Persia had long been closed from foreign intercourse by the jealous and cruel Shah, Aga Mohammed, Fath’ Ali, a comparatively enlightened prince in the prime of life, willingly entertained envoys and travellers from European courts, and Sir Gore Ouseley was resident at Shiraz as British Ambassador.  Yet it was not considered safe for a Frank to travel through Persia without an Oriental dress, and, accordingly, Martyn had to provide himself with the tall conical cap of black Tartar lambskin, baggy blue trousers, red boots, and a chintz coat, allowing his beard and moustache to grow, and eating rice by handfuls from the general dish.  Meantime he was hospitably entertained, the Armenian ladies came in a body to kiss his hand, and the priest placed him beside the altar in church, and incensed him four times over, for which he was not grateful on being told “it was for the honour of our order.”

An English officer joined company with him, and a muleteer undertook their transport to Shiraz.  It was a terrible journey up the parching mountain paths of Persia, where Alexander’s army had suffered so much, with the sun glaring down upon them, never, in that rainless belt around the Persian Gulf, tempered by a cloud.  They travelled only by night, and encamped by day, sometimes without a tree to spread their tents under.  The only mode of existing was to wrap the head in a wet cloth, and the body in all the heavy clothing to be had, to prevent the waste of moisture; but even thus Martyn says his state was “a fire within my head, my skin like a cinder, the pulse violent.”  The thermometer rose to 126° in the middle of the day, and came down to about 100° in the evening.  When exhausted with fever and sleeplessness, but unable to touch food, it was needful to mount, and, in a half-dead state of sleepiness, be carried by the sure-footed mountain pony up steep ascents, and along the verge of giddy precipices, with a general dreamy sense that it was magnificent scenery for any one who was in a bodily condition to admire it.

Swift clear streams and emerald valleys began to refresh the travellers as they rose into the higher land above the arid region; and, after one twenty-four hours’ halt in a sort of summer-house, where Henry Martyn was too ill to move till he had had a few hours of sleep, they safely arrived at the mountain-city of Shiraz, where he was kindly received by Jaffier Ali Khan, a Persian gentleman to whom he had brought letters of introduction.

Persia, as is well known, has a peculiar intellectual character of its own.  Descended from the Indo-European stock, and preserved from total enervation by their mountain air, the inhabitants have, even under Islam, retained much of the vivacity, fire, and poetry inherent in the Aryan nature.  Their taste for beauty, especially in form and colour, has always been exquisite; their delight in gardens, in music, and poetry has had a certain refinement, and with many terrible faults—in especial falsehood and cruelty, the absence of the Turkish stolidity, the Arab wildness, and the Hindoo pride and indolence—has always made them an attractive people.  Their Mahommedanism, too, is of a different form from that of the Arab and Turk.  Theirs is the schismatical sect of Ali, which is less rigid, and affords more scope for the intellect and fancy, and it has thrown off a curious body called the Soofees, a sort of philosophers in relation to Islam.  The name may be either really taken from the Greek Sophos, wise, or else comes from the Persian Soof, purity.  The Soofees profess to be continually in search of truth, and seem, for the most part, to rest upon a general belief in an all-pervading Creator, with a spirit diffused through all His works.  Like their (apparent) namesakes of old, they revel in argument, and delight to tell or to hear some new thing.

Thus, Jaffier Ali Khan, who belonged to this sect, made the English padre welcome; and his brother, Seid Ali, whose title of Mirza shows him to have been a Scribe, undertook to assist in the translation, while Moollahs and students delighted to come and hold discussions with him; and very vain and unprofitable logomachies he found them, whether with Soofee, Mahometan, or Jew.  But the life, on the whole, was interesting, since he was fulfilling his most important object of providing a trustworthy and classical version of the Scriptures, such as might adequately express their meaning, and convey a sense of their beauty of language and force of expression to the scholarly and fastidious Oriental.

He made friends in the suite of the Ambassador, Sir Gore Ouseley, whose house he ministered on Sunday, and he was presented by him to the heir to the throne, Prince Abbas Mirza.  He had, by way of Court dress, to wear a pair of red cloth stockings and high-heeled shoes, and was marched up through the great court of the palace, where a hundred fountains began to play the moment the Ambassador entered.  The Prince sat on the ground in his hall of audience, and all his visitors sat in a line with their hats on, but he conversed with no one but the Ambassador, looking so gentle and amiable that Mr. Martyn could hardly believe that the tyrannical acts reported of him could be true.

In the summer heat, Jaffier Ali pitched a tent for him in a garden outside the walls of Shiraz, where he worked with much enjoyment, “living among clusters of grapes, by the side of a clear stream,” and sitting under the shade of an orange-tree.  From thence he made an expedition to see the ruins of Persepolis, greatly to the perplexity of his escort, who, after repeatedly telling him that the place was uninhabited, concluded that he had come thither to drink brandy in secret!

On the New Year’s Day of 1812 Martyn wrote in his journal: “The present year will probably be a perilous one, but my life is of little consequence, whether I live to finish the Persian New Testament, or do not.  I look back with pity and shame on my former self, and on the importance I then attached to my life and labours.  The more I see of my own works, the more I am ashamed of them.  Coarseness and clumsiness mar all the works of men.  I am sick when I look at man, and his wisdom, and his doings, and am relieved only by reflecting that we have a city whose builder and maker is God.  The least of His works is refreshing to look at.  A dried leaf or a straw makes me feel myself in good company.  Complacency and admiration take the place of disgust.”

On the 24th of February he finished his Persian New Testament, and in six weeks more his translation of the Psalms.  His residence in Persia had lasted just a year, and, though direct missionary work had not been possible to him there, he had certainly inspired his coadjutor, Mirza Seid Ali, with a much higher morality and with something very like faith.  On one of the last days before his leaving Shiraz, Seid Ali said seriously, “Though a man had no other religious society, I suppose he might, with the aid of the Bible, live alone with God.”  It was to this solitude that Martyn left him, not attempting apparently to induce him to give up anything for the sake of embracing Christianity.  Death would probably have been the consequence of joining the Armenian Church in Persia, but why did Martyn’s teaching stop at inward faith instead of insisting on outward confession, the test fixed by the Saviour Himself?

On the 24th of May, Mr. Martyn and another English clergyman set out to lay his translation before the Shah, who was in his camp at Tebriz.  There they were admitted to the presence of the Vizier, before whom two Moollahs, the most ignorant and discourteous whom he had met in Persia, were set to argue with the English priest.  The Vizier mingled in the discussion, which ended thus: “You had better say God is God, and Mahomet is His prophet.”  “God is God,” repeated Henry Martyn, “and Jesus is the Son of God.”

“He is neither born nor begets,” cried the Moollahs; and one said, “What will you say when your tongue is burnt out for blasphemy?”

He had offended against the Mohammedan doctrine most strictly held; and, knowing this well, he had kept back the confession of the core of the true faith till to withhold it longer would have been a denial of his Lord.  After all, he was not allowed to see the Shah without the Ambassador to present him, and descended again to Sultania—a painful journey, from which he brought a severe ague and fever, through which he was nursed by Sir Gore and Lady Ouseley.

As soon as he had recovered, he decided on making his way to Constantinople, and thence to England, where he hoped to recruit his health and, it might be, induce Lydia to accompany him back to India.  His last letter to her was written from Tebriz on the 28th of August, dreading illness on the journey, but still full of hope.  In that letter, too, he alludes to Sabat as the greatest tormentor he had known, but warns her against mentioning to others that this “star of the East,” as Claudius Buchanan had called him, had been a disappointment.  His diary is carried on as far as Tocat.  The last entry is on the 6th of October.  It closes thus: “Oh! when shall time give place to eternity?  When shall appear that new heaven and earth wherein dwelleth righteousness?  There, there shall in nowise enter in anything 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.”

No more is known of Henry Martyn save that he died at Tocat on the 16th of that same October of 1812, without a European near.  It is not even known whether his death were caused by fever, or by the plague, which was raging at the place.  He died a pilgrim’s solitary death, and lies in an unknown grave in a heathen land.

What fruit has his mission zeal left?  It has left one of the soul-stirring examples that have raised up other labourers.  It has left the Persian Bible for the blessing of all to whom that language is familiar.  It left, for the time, a strong interest in Christianity in Shiraz.  It left in India many English quickened to a sense of religion; and it assuredly left Sheik Salah a true convert.  Baptized afterwards by the name of Abdul Messeh, or Servant of the Messiah, he became the teacher of no less than thirty-nine Hindoos whom he brought to Holy Baptism.  Such were the reapings in Paradise that Henry Martyn has won from his thirty-one years’ life and his seeming failure.

CHAPTER V.  WILLIAM CAREY AND JOSHUA MARSHMAN, THE SERAMPORE MISSIONARIES

The English subjects and allies in India had hitherto owed their scanty lessons in Christianity to Germans or Danes, and the first of our own countrymen who attempted the work among them was, to the shame of our Government be it spoken, a volunteer from among the humblest classes, of no more education than falls to the lot of the child of a village schoolmaster and parish clerk.

In 1761, when Schwartz was just beginning to make his way in Tanjore, William Carey was born in the village of Paulerspury, in Northamptonshire.  He showed himself a diligent scholar in his father’s little school, and had even picked up some Latin before, at fourteen years old, he was apprenticed to a shoemaker at the neighbouring village of Hackleton.  Still he had an earnest taste for study; and, falling in with a commentary on the New Testament full of Greek words, he copied them all out, and carried them for explanation to a man living in his native village, who had thrown away a classical education by his dissipated habits.

The young shoemaker, thus struggling on to instruct himself, fell under the notice of Thomas Scott, the author of the Commentary on the Bible, and it was from him that Carey first received any strong religious impressions.  Scott was a Baptist; and young Carey, who had grown up in the days of the deadness of the Church, was naturally led to his teacher’s sect, and began to preach at eighteen years of age.  He always looked back with humiliation to the inexperienced performances of his untried zeal at that time of life; but he was doing his best to study, working hard at grammar, and every morning reading his portion of the Scripture for the day in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as English.  Well might Mr. Scott say, as he looked at the little cobbler’s shop, “That was Mr. Carey’s college;” for all this time he was working at his trade, and, on his master’s death, took the business, and married the daughter of the house before he was twenty.

It was an unlucky marriage, for she was a dull, ignorant woman, with no feeling for her husband’s high aims or superior powers, and the business was not a flourishing one; but he never manifested anything but warm affection and tenderness towards this very uncompanionable person, and perhaps, like most men of low station and unusual intellect, had no idea that more could be expected of a wife.

Perhaps, in spite of his kindness, Mrs. Carey had to endure the disasters common to the wives of struggling great men: for William Carey’s shoes were not equal to his sermons, and his congregation were too poor even to raise means to clothe him decently.  His time was spent in long tramps to sell shoes he had made and to obtain the mending of others, and, meantime, he was constantly suffering from fever and ague.

In 1786, when in his twenty-fifth year, he obtained a little Baptist chapel and the goodwill of a school at Moulton; but as a minister he only received 16l. per annum, and at the same time proved, as many have done before him, that aptness to learn does not imply aptness to teach.  He could not keep order, and his boys first played tricks with him and then deserted, till he came nearly to starvation, and had to return to his last and his leather.

Yet it was the geography lessons of this poor little school that first found the way to the true chord of Carey’s soul.  Those broad tracts of heathenism that struck his eye in the map, and the summary of nations and numbers professing false religions, were to a mind like his no mere items of information to be driven into dull brains, but were terrible realities representing souls perishing for lack of knowledge.  Cook’s Voyages fell into his hands and fed the growing impulse.  He hung up in his shop a large map, composed of several sheets pasted together, and gazed at it when at his work, writing against each country whatever information he had been able to collect as to the number of the inhabitants, their religion, government, or habits, also as to the climate and natural history.

After he had for some time thus dwelt on the great longing of his heart, he ventured on speaking it forth at a meeting of ministers at Northampton, when there was a request that some topic might be named for discussion.  Carey then modestly rose and proposed “the duty of Christians to attempt the spread of the Gospel among the heathen.”  The words were like a shock.  The senior, who acted as president, sprang up in displeasure, and shouted out, “Young man, sit down!  When God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine.”  And another, namely Mr. Fuller, who afterwards became the sheet anchor of the Missions, describes himself as having thought of the words of the noble at Jezreel, “If the Lord should make windows in heaven, might such a thing be?”

Silenced by his brethren, Carey persevered, and proceeded to write what he had not been allowed to speak.  A Birmingham tradesman of the name of Pott, an opulent man, was induced by his earnestness to begin a subscription for the publication of Carey’s pamphlet, which showed wonderful acquaintance with the state of the countries it mentioned, and manifested talent of a remarkable order.  In truth, Carey had been endowed with that peculiar missionary gift, facility for languages.  A friend gave him a large folio in Dutch, and was amazed by his returning shortly after with a translation into English of one of the sermons which the book contained.

He was becoming more known, and an invitation from a congregation at Leicester, in 1789, placed him in somewhat more comfortable circumstances, and brought him into contact with persons better able to enter into his views; but it was three years more before he could either publish his pamphlet or take the very first steps towards the establishment of a Society for Promoting the Conversion of the Heathen.

The first endeavour to collect a subscription resulted in 13l. 2s. 6d.  This was at Kettering, and at the same time Carey offered to embark for any country the Society might appoint.  The committee, however, waited to collect more means, but they found it almost impossible to awaken people’s minds.  At Birmingham, indeed, 70l. was collected, but in London the dissenting pastors would have nothing to do with the cause; and the only minister of any denomination who showed any sympathy was the Rev. John Newton, that giant of his day, who had in his youth been captain of a slaver, and well knew what were the dark places of the earth.  The objections made at that time were perfectly astounding.  In the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, several Presbyterian ministers pronounced it to be “highly preposterous” to attempt to spread the Gospel among barbarous nations, extolled the “simple virtues” of the untutored savage, and even declared that the funds of Missionary Societies might be turned against Government.

In India itself, the endeavours of the Danish settlement at Tranquebar had little affected Bengal, but a few of the more religious men at Calcutta had begun to be shocked at the utter oblivion of all Christian faith and morality by their own countrymen, and the absolute favour shown to the grossest idolatry of the heathen.  Charles Grant, a member of the Board of Trade at Calcutta, was the foremost of these, and on his return to England brought the subject under the notice of that great champion of Christ, William Wilberforce.  The charter of the East India Company was renewed from time to time; and when it was brought before Parliament, Wilberforce proposed the insertion of clauses enforcing the maintenance of chaplains, churches, and schools, so that a branch of the Church might take root in Hindostan.

This scheme, however, excited violent and selfish alarm in the directors, chiefly men who had made their fortunes in India, and after living there for years under no restraint were come home to enjoy their riches.  They believed that the natives would take umbrage at the least interference with their religion, and that their own wealth and power, so highly prized, would be lost if idolatry were not merely tolerated, but flattered and supported.  The souls of men and the honour of God were nothing to them; they were furious with indignation, and procured from the House of Commons the omission of the clauses.  There was another hope in the Lords; but though Archbishop Moore and the Bishop of London spoke in favour of the articles, the Bishop of St. David’s said one nation had no right to impose its faith on another.  None of the other Bishops stirred, and the charter passed without one line towards keeping Englishmen Christians, or making Hindoos such!  The lethargy of the Church of the eighteenth century was so heavy that not only had such a son as Carey been allowed to turn from her pale in search of earnest religion, but while she was forced to employ foreigners, bred up in the Lutheran communion, as the chaplains and missionaries of her Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, he was going forth unaccredited as a volunteer in the cause which her paralysed efforts could not support!

For it was to India that the minds of the little Baptist Society were turned by the return of one John Thomas, who seems to have been the Gaultier Sans Avoir of this crusade.  He was Baptist by education, and having gone out as a surgeon to Calcutta, had been so shocked at the state of things as to begin to preach on his own account, but he was a hot tempered, imprudent man, and quarrelled with everybody, so as to make the cause still more unpopular with the East Indians.  Yet this strange, wild character had a wonderful power of awakening enthusiasm.  He had come home in the same ship with one Wilson, whose history was a marvel in itself.  He had been made prisoner by the French during the Carnatic war, and finding that the captives were to be delivered up to Hyder Ali, he resolved to escape, leapt forty feet from his prison window, and swam the river Coleroon, in happy ignorance that it was infested with alligators; but then going up an eminence to judge of his bearings, he was seen, secured, and stripped naked, and, with his hands tied behind him, was driven before Hyder Ali.  His account of having crossed the Coleroon was treated as a lie.  “No mortal man,” said the natives, “had ever swum the river; did he but dip a finger in, he would be seized by the alligators,” but when evidence proved the fact, the Nabob held up his hands and cried, “This is the man of God.”  Nevertheless Wilson was chained to a soldier, and, like the well-known David Baird, John Lindsay, and many others, was driven naked, barefoot, and wounded, 500 miles to Seringapatam; where, loaded with irons of thirty-two pounds weight, and chained in couples, they were thrust into a “black hole,” and fed so scantily that Wilson declared that at sight of food his jaws snapped together of themselves.  Many a time in the morning corpses were unchained, and the survivors coupled up together again.  Wilson was one of the thirty-one who lived to be released after twenty-two months, in a frightful state of exhaustion and disease.  Afterwards, when commanding a ship at Bencoolen, every European under his command died, and he alone escaped, yet all this time he was an absolute infidel; and, when having made a fortune, he was returning home, he appeared so utterly hardened against all the arguments that the zealous Thomas could bring in favour of Christianity, as to make him in despair remark to the chief officer that he should have more hope of converting the Lascar sailors than of Captain Wilson.