From the Editor

To navigate this large collection you can use the Quick Table of Contents at the beginning; or you can access the full Table of Contents at any time by choosing MENU > GO TO > TABLE OF CONTENTS on your eReader.  You can also skip chapters by swiping up or down (newer versions) or pressing the forward “>” or backward “<” key on the 4-way controller in older versions.

If you have been blessed by this volume, you may also be interested in some of our other Christian Classics Treasury collections:

MISSIONS COLLECTIONS:

- Amy Carmichael 8-in-1

- The Hudson Taylor Collection (7-in-1)

- David Livingstone Collection (5-in-1)

- Samuel Zwemer 7-in-1(Missions in Arabia)

- Samuel Zwemer, 7-in-1, Vol 2

- Key to the Missionary Problem (Andrew Murray)

- Classic Missions Texts  (Murray, Allen, Carey, Zwemer)

CLASSIC COLLECTIONS:

- 7 Catholic Classics

- 7 Classics on PRAYER

- 7 Classics on HOLINESS

- 7 Classics on EVANGELISM and SOUL-WINNING

- 5 Classics on the HOLY SPIRIT

- 5 Classics on POWER

- EDERSHEIM COLLECTION  (Sketches of Jewish Social Life; The Temple; Jesus the Messiah)

- The Didache (Teaching of the 12 Apostles)

PREACHERS AND REVIVALISTS:

- Biography of John Wesley Collection: 4-in-1

- Biography of Andrew Murray

- Charles Spurgeon: 40 sermons on Prayer

- Charles Spurgeon: Lectures to My Students

- The George Muller Collection

- The Revival Writings of Jonathan Edwards (7-in-1)

- The Works of Catherine Booth (7-in-1)

- The Works of Charles Finney

- The Works of D. L. Moody

- The Works of R. A. Torrey

- The Works of William Booth

QUICK TABLE OF CONTENTS:

From the Editor

1.  RAYMOND LULL - FIRST MISSIONARY TO THE MUSLIMS (d. 1315)

2.  THE LIFE AND DIARY OF DAVID BRAINERD WITH NOTES AND REFLECTIONS (d. 1747)

3.  HENRY MARTYN: Saint and Scholar (d. 1812)

4.  THE LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY (d. 1834)

5.  HUDSON TAYLOR – A RETROSPECT (d. 1905)

6.  THE STORY OF JOHN G. PATON (d. 1907)

7.  THINGS AS THEY ARE: Mission Work in Southern India – Amy Carmichael (d. 1951)

1.  RAYMOND LULL - FIRST MISSIONARY TO THE MUSLIMS (d. 1315)

By Samuel Zwemer

1902

---

INTRODUCTION

IT would be difficult to find another so competent as Dr. Zwemer to write a life of the first great missionary to the Mohammedans. For twelve years he has been working with his associates of the Arabian Mission of the Reformed Church on the eastern coast of the Arabian peninsula and in the Turkish region northwest of the Persian Gulf. To an almost perfect command of Arabic, an accurate knowledge of the Koran, untiring zeal and indomitable courage, he has added an absorbing love for the Mohammedans, and a desire to make known to them in truth that Savior whom in their belief their prophet annuls and supersedes.

As I passed down the Persian Gulf in the spring of 1897, the captains of the steamers, without qualification, spoke out in praise of the "lion-hearted" missionary, as they called him, who would sit on the hatches with the Arab travelers and confound them out of their own scriptures. In the interval of itinerating journeys into the interior of El Rasa and Oman Dr. Zwemer has found time to produce a volume on Arabia (published in 1900), which is the standard authority on the peninsula, and one of the best books available on the questions of interest to all Christians springing from the rise and extension of Islam. Loving the Mohammedans and knowing their religion thoroughly, and working constantly for an enlargement of the missionary force attempting the evangelization of the Moslem world, Dr. Zwemer has qualifications for understanding the life of Raymund Lull, and for describing it sympathetically, which few possess in the same measure.

And there has been great need that an adequate life of Raymund Lull should be written for English readers of this modern day. He was the greatest missionary who has ever gone out to the Moslem world. He was one of the outstanding figures of the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century. He was a Christian of the modern spirit of Catholicity - neither Roman nor Protestant - a man of spiritual judgment, of divine love. He saw the futility of authority in matters of religion at the time that other men were busy with the most devilish expression of belief in authority ever conceived - the Inquisition. He loved Christ with a passionate love, and saw that the only true missionary method was the method of love. To leave his life in obscurity would involve an incalculable loss to the Church of our time. We need to revive the memory of it, to relearn its secrets, and to confirm the highest Christian tendencies of our day by the recollection of their noble illustration in the life of Lull. Of all the men of his century of whom we know, Raymund Lull was most possessed by the love and life of Christ, and most eager, accordingly, to share his possession with the world. The world sadly needed it; the Church scarcely less. It sets forth the greatness of Lull's character the more strikingly to see how sharply he rose above the world and Church of his day anticipating by many centuries moral standards, intellectual conceptions, and missionary ambitions, to which we have grown only slowly since the Reformation.

The movement of our thought, theological and philosophical, is now strongly toward biological conceptions. It is a gain that it should be so. We see that life is the supreme thing, and that we must state our notions in its terms. The missionary work will gain greatly by this new mode of thinking. Its purpose is to give life. Its method is to do by the contact of life. Raymund Lull proved this. He went out to give a divine life which he already possessed in his own soul. Somerville, in "St. Paul's Conception of Christ," points out that it was "in the consciousness of what the glorified Christ was to Paul in his personal life that we are to look for the genesis of his theology." It was in his inner experience of the glorified Christ that we are to look for the secret and source of Raymund Lull's doctrine and life: what he thought, what he was, what he suffered. And this must be true of all true missionaries. They do not go out to Asia and Africa to say, "This is the doctrine of the Christian Church," or "Your science is bad. Look through this microscope and see for yourselves and abandon such error," or "Compare your condition with that of America and see how much more socially beneficial Christianity is than Hinduism, or Confucianism, or fetichism, or Islam." Doubtless all this has its place the argument from the coherence of Christianity with the facts of the universe, the argument from fruit. But it is also secondary. The primary thing is personal testimony. "This I have felt. This Christ has done it for me. I preach whom I know. That which was from the beginning, that which I have heard, that which I have seen with my eyes, that which I beheld and my hands handled, concerning the Word of life (and the life was manifested, and I have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested unto me), that which I have seen and heard declare I unto you also, that ye also may have fellowship with me; yea and my fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ." The man who cannot say this may be able to change the opinions of those to whom he goes, to improve their social condition, to free them from many foolish errors and enslaving superstitions, but after all this, the one thing which, if done, would of itself have attended to these things and a thousand others, may be still unaccomplished - namely, the gift of life. The missionary who would do Paul's work or Lull's must be able to preach a living Christ, tested in experience, saved from all pantheistic error by the Incarnation and the roots thus sunk in history, and by the Resurrection and the personality thus preserved in God above, but a Christ here and known, lived and ready to be given by life to death, that death may become life.

It would be easy to draw other parallels than this between Paul and Lull: their conversions, their subsequent times of separation, their visions, their untiring toil, their passion for Christ, their sufferings and shipwrecks, their intellectual activity and power, their martyrdoms, the rule of Christ supreme thus in death, supreme also in life, its thought, its purpose, its taste, its use, its friends, its sacrifice. But the essence of all such comparison - the real essence of all true missionary character - is the possession by the life of Christ as life, and the ability thus to give, not a new doctrine only, not a new truth to men, but a new life The work of missions is just this: the going out from the Church over the world of a body of men and wornen knowing Christ, and, therefore, having life in themselves; their quiet residence among the dead peoples; and the resurrection from among these peoples of first one, then a few, then more and more, who feel the life and receive it and live. Lull sought in every way to fit himself for contact with men so that he might reach them in the deepest intimacies of their life, and be able thus to plant the seed of the divine life which he bore. Therefore he learned Arabic, became a master of the Moslem philosophy, studied geography and the heart of man. And, therefore, he became also a student of comparative religion, as we would call him today. There was a great difference between his view, however, and that of a large school of modern students of comparative religion. Lull had no idea that Christianity was not a complete and sufficient religion. He did not study other religions with the purpose of providing from them ideals which Christianity was supposed to lack. Nor did he propose to reduce out of all religions a common fund of general principles more or less to be found in all and regard these as the ultimate religion. He studied other religions to find out how better to reach the hearts of their adherents with the Gospel, itself perfect and complete, lacking nothing, needing nothing from any other doctrine. With him there was a difference between Christianity and other religions, not in degree only, but in kind. It possesses what they lack, which is desirable. It lacks what they possess which is unworthy. It alone satisfies. It alone is life. They are systems of society or politics, religions of books, methods, organizations. It and it alone is life, eternal life. Lull studied other religions, not to discover what they have to give to Christianity, for they have nothing, but to find how he might give to those who follow them the true life, which is life, and which no man shall ever find until he finds it in Christ.

Blessed as the influence of Lull should be upon the Christian life and experience of all who feel it in reading this sketch, it will fall short of its full purpose if they are not led to desire to make amends for the neglect of the centuries. It is six centuries since Lull fell at Bugia. Is that martyrdom never to have its fruitage? Shall we not now at last wake from the sleep of the generations and give the Savior His place above the Prophet, and the crescent its place beneath the cross?

ROBERT E. SPEER.

PREFACE

THE subject of this biography is acknowledged by all writers on the history of missions to be the one connecting link between the apostles of Northern Europe and the leaders who followed the Reformation. Eugene Stock, the editorial secretary of the Church Missionary Society, declares "there is no more heroic figure in the history of Christendom than that of Raymund Lull, the first and perhaps the greatest missionary to Mohammedans."

No complete biography of Lull exists in the English language; and since the twentieth century is to be preeminently a century of missions to Moslems, we should rescue the memory of the pioneer from oblivion.

His philosophical speculations and his many books have vanished away, for he knew only in part. But his self-sacrificing love never faileth and its memory cannot perish. His biography emphasizes his own motto:

"He who lives by the Life can not die."

It is this part of Lull's life that has a messsage for us today, and calls us to win back the Mohammedan world to Christ.

SAMUEL M. ZWEMER.

Bahrein Arabia. March 1902.

CHAPTER 1: EUROPE AND THE SARACENS IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

(A.D. 1200-1300)

"Although the history of an age is going on all at once, it can not be written all at once. Missionaries are proceeding on their errands of Ion, theologians are constructing their systems, persecutors are staying the believers, prelates are seeking the supremacy, kings are checking the advance of the churchmen - all this and an infinitude of detail is going on in the very same period of time." - Shedd's History of Doctrine

We can not understand a man unless we know his environment. Biography is a thread, but history is a web in which time is broad as well as long. To unravel the thread without breaking it we must loosen the web. To understand Raymund Lull we must put ourselves back seven hundred years and see Europe and the Saracens as they were before the dawn of the Renaissance and the daybreak of the Reformation. Although the shadow of the dark ages still felt heavily upon it, the thirteenth century was an eventful epoch, at least for Europe. The colossal power of the empire was waning, and separate states were springing up in Italy and Germany. The growth of civil liberty, although only in its infancy, was already bringing fruit in the enlargement of ideas and the founding of universities. In England, Norman and Saxon were at last one people; people Magna Carta was signed, and the first Parliament summoned. About the time when Lull was born, the Tatars invaded Russia and sacked Moscow; Saracens and Christians were disputing not only the possession of the Holy Land, but the rulership of the world. Although in the East the long struggle for the holy City had ended in the discomfiture of the Christians, the spirit of the Crusades lived on. The same century that saw the fall of Acre also witnessed the fall of Bagdad and the extinction of the califate. In Spain, Ferdinand of Castile was winning city after city from the Moors, who were entrenching their last stronghold, Granada. The year 1240 marks the rise of the Ottoman Turks; Lull was then five years old. Before he was twenty, Louis IX. had failed in his crusade and been taken prisoner by the Sultan of Egypt; emperors had deposed popes and popes emperors; and the Inquisition had begun in Spain to torture Jews and heretics. At Cologne the foundations of the great cathedral were being laid, and at Paris men were experimenting with the new giant, gunpowder.

All Europe was heated with the strong wine of political change and social expectations. In the same century sudden and subversive revolutions were taking place in Asia. The Mongolian hordes under Genghis Khan poured out, like long-pent waters, over all the countries of the East. The califate of Bagdad fell forever before the furious onslaught of Hulaku Khan The Seljuk empire soon advanced its Moslem rule into the mountain ranges of Anatolia, and Turks were disputing with Mongols the sovereignty of the "roof of the world."

The beneficial effects of the Crusades were already being felt in the breaking up of those two colossal fabrics of the Middle Ages, the Church and the Empire, which ruled both as ideas and as realities. The feudal system was disappearing. The invention and application of paper, the mariner's compass, and gunpowder heralded the eras of printing, exploration, and conquest in the century that followed. It was not dark as midnight, although not yet dawn. The cocks were crowing. In 1249 the University of Oxford was founded. In 1265 Dante was born at Florence. The pursuit of truth by philosophers was still a game of wordy dialectics, but Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura and Albertus Magnus left a legacy of thought as well. The two former died the same year that Raymund Lull wrote his "Ars Demonstrava." It was in the thirteenth century that physical science struggled into feeble life in the cells of Gerhert and Roger Bacon. But these men were accounted magicians by the vulgar and heretics by the clergy, and were rewarded with the dungeon. Marco Polo the Venetian the most famous of all travelers, belongs to the thirteenth century, and did for Asia what Columbus did for America. His work was a link in the providential chain which at last dragged the New World to light. But both Marco Polo and Roger Bacon lived ahead of their age. Gibbon says with truth that, "If the ninth and tenth centuries were the times of darkness, the thirteenth and fourteenth were the age of absurdity and fable." Thought was still in terror through dread of the doom declared on heretics and rebels.

The maps of the thirteenth century show no appreciation of Marco Polo's discoveries The world as Raymund Lull knew it was the world of medieval legend and classic lore. The earth's surface was represented as a circular disk surrounded by the ocean. The central point was the Holy Land or Jerusalem, according to the prophecy of Ezekiel. Paradise occupied the extreme east and Gog and Magog were on the north. The pillars of Hercules marked the boundary of farthest west and the nomenclature of even Southern Europe was loose and scanty. It is interesting to note that the first great improvement of these maps took place in Catalonia, the province of Spain where Lull's ancestors lived. The remarkable Catalan map of 1375 in the Paris Library is the first world-map that throws aside all pseudo-theological theories and incorporates India and China as part of the world. Nearly all the maps of the Middle Ages are inferior to those In our illustration. Clever artists concealed their ignorance and gave life to the disk of the world by pictures of turreted towns, walled cities, and roaring lions in imaginary forests. Swift has satirized their modern descendants as:

"Geographers who in Africa's maps

with savage pictures fir their gaps;

And o'er unhabitable downs

Place elephants for want of towns."

Regarding the general attitude of the masses toward intellectual progress, a writer[i] justly remarks: "There were by no means lacking demerits of native vigor ready to burst forth. But the courage that is born of knowledge, the calm strength begotten by a positive attitude of mind, face to face with the dominant overshadowing sphinx of theology, were lacking. We may fairly say that natural and untaught people had mare of the just intuition that was needed than earned folk trained in the schools. Man and the actual universe kept on reasserting their rights and claims in one way or another; but they were a ways being thrust back again into Cimmerian regions of abstractions, fictions, visions spectral hopes and fears in the midst of which the intellect somnambulistically moved upon an unknown way.

The morality of the Middle Ages presents startling contrasts. Over against each other, and not only in the same land but often in the same individual, we witness sublime faith and degrading superstition, angelic purity and signs of gross sensuality. It was an age of self denying charity to suffering Christians, and of barbarous cruelty to infidels, Jews, and heretics. The wealthy paid immense sums to redeem Christian slaves captured by the Saracens; and the Church took immense sums to persecute those who erred from the faith. When the Crusaders under Godfrey of Bouillon (who refused to wear a crown of gold where his Savior had worn a crown of thorns) came in sight of Jerusalem, they kissed the earth and advanced on their knees in penitential prayer; but after the capture of the city they massacred seventy thousand Moslems, burned the Jews in their synagogues, and waded in blood to the Holy Sepulcher to offer up thanks The general state of morals even among popes and the clergy was low. Gregory VII. and Innocent III. were great popes and mighty reformers of a corrupt priesthood, but they were exceptions in the long list. One of the popes was deposed on charges of incest, perjury, murder, and blasphemy. Many were power through simony. Concubinage and unnatural vices were rife in Rome among the clergy. Innocent IV., who became pope the very year Lull was born, was an outrageous tyrant. Nicholas III. and Martin IV., who were popes toward the close of the thirteenth century, rivaled each other in infamy. The pontificate of the former was so marked by rapacity and nepotism that be was consigned by Dante to his Inferno. The latter was the murderous instigator of the terrible "Sicilian Vespers."

Martensen says that "the ethics of this period often exhibit a mixture of the morals of Christianity with those of Aristotle." And this is natural if we remember that Thomas Aquinas represents the height of medieval morals as well as of dogmatics. Sins were divided into carnal and spiritual, venial and mortal. The way to perfection was through the monastic vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience.

The poetry of the period reflects the same startling contrast between piety and sensuality, composed as it was of the tenderest hymns of devotion and bacchanalian revels. The seven great hymns of the medieval Church have challenged and defied the skill of the best translators and imitators. The wonderful pathos of the "Stabat Mater Dolorosa" and the terrible power of " Dies Irae" appear even in their poorest translations. In spite of its objectionable doctrinal features, what Protestant can read Dr Cole's admirable translation of the" Stabat Mater" without being deeply affected?

Yet the same age had its Carmina Burana," written by Goliardi and others, - in which Venus and Bacchus go hand-in hand and the sensual element predominates.

"We do not need to be reminded that Beatrice's adorer had a wife and children, or that Laura's poet owned a son and daughter by a concubine." Nor were Dante and Petrarch exceptions among medieval poets in this respect. It was a dark world.

The thirteenth century was also an age of superstition, an age of ghosts and visions and miracles and fanaticism. The "Flagellants" wandered from city to city calling on the people to repent. Girded with ropes, in scant clothing or entirely naked, they scourged themselves in the open streets. The sect spread like contagion from Italy to Poland, propagating extravagant doctrines and often causing sedition and murder. Catherine of Sienna and Francis of Assisi in the fervor of their love saw visions. The latter bore the stigmata and died of the wounds of Christ, which are said to have impressed themselves on his hands and side through an imagination drunk with the contemplation and love of the crucified Redeemer. The author of the two most beautiful hymns of the medieval period went to fanatical extremes in self-sought torture to atone for his own sins and for the good of others. Peter Nolasco in 1228 saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, and devoted all his property from that day to the purchasing of freedom for Christian captives from their Moorish masters. He founded the order of the Mercedarians, whose members even gave themselves into slavery to save a fellow Christian from becoming an apostate to Islam. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the monastic orders increased in numbers and influence. They formed the standing army of the papacy and were generally promoters of learning, science, and art. The Franciscans were one of the strongest orders, although one of the latest.

In 1264 this order had eight thousand cloisters and two hundred thousand monks. Some of these monks were saints, some scientists, and some sensualists; alongside of unmeasured superstition and ignorance in the mass of the priesthood we meet with genius of intellect and wonderful displays of self-forgetting love in the few.

Yet the most sacred solemnities were parodied. On "Fool's Festival" was held in France on New Year's day, mock popes, bishops, and abbots were introduced and all their holy actions mimicked in a blasphemous manner.

Practical mysticism, which concerned itself not with philosophy but with personal salvation, was common in the thirteenth century, especially among the women of the Rhine provinces. St. Hildegard, Mechthild, and Gertrude the Great are striking examples. There were also attempts at a reformation of the Church and the abuses of the clergy The Albigenses and the Waldenses were in many ways forerunners of Protestantism. Numerous other sects less pure in doctrine and morals arose at this time and spread everywhere from Eastern Spain to Northern Germany. All of them were agreed in opposing ecclesiastical authority, and often that of the state.

Such was the political, intellectual, moral, and religious condition of Europe in the days of Raymund Lull.

The Mohammedan world was also in a state of ferment. The Crusades taught the Saracen at once the strength and the weakness of medieval Christianity. The battle-field of Tolosa, strewed with two hundred thousand slain Moslems, was the death knell of Islam in Spain. Saracen rule and culture at Granada were only the after-glow of a sunset, glorious but transient. What dominions the Saracens lost in the west they regained in Syria and the East. In 1250 the Mameluke sultans began to reign in Egypt, and under Beybars I. Moslem Egypt reached the zenith of its fame. Islam was a power in the thirteenth century not so much by its conquests with the sword as by its conquests with the pen. Moslem philosophy, as interpreted by Alkindi, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Algazel, but most of all the philosophy of Averroes, was taught in all the universities. Aristotle spoke Arabic before he was retranslated into the languages of Europe. "The Saracens," says Myers, "were during the Middle Ages almost the sole repositories of the scientific knowledge of the world. While the Western nations were too ignorant to know the value of the treasures of antiquity, the Saracens preserved them by translating into Arabic the scientific works of the Greeks." Part of this learning came to Europe through the Crusaders, but it came earlier and more largely through the Arabian schools of Spain. No other country in Europe was in such close touch with Islam for good and ill as the kingdoms of Castile, Navarre, and Aragon in the north of what we now call Spain. There the conflict was one of mind as well as of the sword. There for three centuries waged a crusade for truth as well as a conflict on the battlefield between Christian and Moslem. In this conflict Raymund Lull's ancestors played their part. During all the years of Lull's life the Moslem power held out at Granada against the united Spanish kingdoms. Not until 1492 was the Saracen expelled from Southern Europe.

Regarding missions in the thirteenth century, little can be said. There were a few choice souls whom the Spirit of God enlightened to see the spiritual needs of the Saracen and Mongol and to preach to them the Gospel. In 1256 William de Rubruquis was sent by Louis IX., diplomate, partly as a missionary to the Great Khan. In 1219, Francis of Assisi with mad courage went into the Sultan's presence at Darnietta and proclaimed the way of salvation, offering to undergo the ordeal of fire to prove the truth of the Gospel. The Dominican general Raimnd de Pennaforti, who died in 1273, also devoted himself to missions for the Saracens, but with no success.

The only missionary spirit of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that of the Crusaders. They took up the sword and perished by the sword. But Raymund Lull was raised up as it to prove in one startling case, to which the eyes of all Christendom were turned for many a day, what the Crusades might have become and might have done for the world, had they been fought for the cross with the weapons of Him whose last words from it were forgiveness and peace."[ii]

CHAPTER 2: RAYMUND LULL'S BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY LIFE

(A.D. 1255-1265)

I think that I better understand the proud, hardy, frugal Spaniard and his manly defiance of hardships since I have seen the country he inhabits.... The country, the habits, the very looks of the people, have something of the Arabian character." - Washington Irving's "The Alhamhra."

RAYMUND LULL was born of an illustrious family at Palma in the island of Majorca of the Balearic group in 1235.[iii] His father had been born at Barcelona and belonged to a distinguished Catalonian family. When the island of Majorca was taken from the Saracens by James I., king of Aragon, Lull's father served in the army of conquest. For his distinguished services he was rewarded with a gift of land in the conquered territory, and the estates grew in value under the new government.

Southern Europe between the Atlantic and the Adriatic is almost a duplicate in climate and scenery of Northern Africa. When the Moors crossed over into Spain and occupied the islands of the Western Mediterranean they felt at home. Not only in the names of rivers and mountains and on the architecture of Spain did they leave the impress of their conquest, but on the manners of the people, their literature, and their social life.

Catalonia, the eastern province of Spain, which was the home of Lull's ancestors and for a time of Lull himself, is about one hundred and thirty miles broad and one hundred and eighty-five miles long, with a coast of two hundred and forty miles. It has mountain ranges on the north, three considerable rivers, and woodland as well as meadow. The climate is healthy in spite of frequent mists and rains, sudden changes of temperature, and great midday heat. Mountains and climate and history have left their impress on its people. The Catalonians are distinct in origin from the other inhabitants of Spain, and differ from them to this day in dialect, dress, and character. About 470 A.D., this part of the peninsula was occupied by the Goths, whence it was called Gothalonia, and later Catalonia. It was taken possession of by the Berbers in 712, who in turn were dispossessed by the Spaniards and the troops of Charlemagne. In 1137 Catalonia was annexed to Aragon. The Catalonians are therefore a mixed race. They have always been distinguished for frugality, wit, and industry; they have much national pride and a strong revolutionary spirit.

The Catalan language and its large literature are quite distinct from that of the other Spanish provinces. The poetical works of Lull are among the oldest examples of Catalan extant.

The Balearic Islands have always belonged to the province of Catalonia as regards their people and their language. On a clear day the islands are plainly visible from the monastery of Monserrat, and by sea from Barcelona it is only one hundred and forty miles to Palma. Between these two harbors there has always been and is now a busy traffic. Majorca has an area of fourteen hundred and thirty square miles, a delightful climate, beautiful scenery, and a splendid harbor - Palma. Some of its valleys, such as Valdemosa and Soller, are celebrated for picturesque luxuriance. The northern mountain slopes are terraced; the olive, the vine, and the almond tree are plenteous everywhere in the plains.

According to the description of modern travelers it is an earthly paradise. During the summer there is scarcity of water, but, following a system handed down from the Arabs, the autumn rains are collected in large reservoirs. On the payment of a certain rate each landholder has his fields flooded.

Palma, Lull's birthplace and burial-place, is a pretty town with narrow streets and a sort of medieval look except where modern trade has crowded out "the old-world, Moorish character of the buildings."

The cathedral is still a conspicuous building, and was commenced in 1230 and dedicated to the Virgin by the same King James who gave Lull's father estates near Palma. Portions of the original building still remain, and the visitor can enter the royal chapel (built in 1232) with assurance that if Lull did not worship here he at least saw the outside of the building frequently.

Palma probably owes its name and harbor to Metellus Balearicus, who in 123 B.C. settled three thousand Roman and Spanish colonists on the island, and whose expedition is symbolized on the Roman coins by a palm branch. He also gave his name to the island group, and the Balearic slingers are famous in Cesar's "Commentaries."

Palma is to-day a busy little port, and direct commerce is carried on with Valencia, Barcelona, Marseilles, Cuba, Porto Rico, and even South American ports. The present population is about sixty thousand. Formerly, Palma was a great center for shipbuilding, and there is little doubt that in Lull's time this industry also gave importance to the town. As early as the fourteenth century a mole, to a length of three hundred and eighty-seven yards, was constructed to improve the harbor of Palma. This picturesque town was the birthplace of our hero, and today its inhabitants are still proud to lead you to the church of San Francisco where he lies buried. As late as 1886 a new edition of Lull's works was printed and published at Palma by Rosselo.

The significance or the derivation of Lull's family name is lost in obscurity. His personal name Raymund (in Spanish Ramon or Raymundo) is Teutonic and signifies "wise protection" or "pure in speech." It was borne by two distinguished counts of Toulouse: one of them, Raymund IV., was a Crusader (1045-1105), and the other (1156-1222) befriended the Albigenses against the Pope. It is possible that Lull received his first name from one of these martial heroes whose exploits were well known in Catalonia.

Of Lull's infancy and early youth nothing is known for certain. He was accustomed to medieval luxury from his birth, as his parents had a large estate and his father was distinguished for military services. Lull married at an early age, and, being fond of the pleasures of court life, left Palma and passed over with his bride to Spain, where he was made seneschal at the court of King James II. of Aragon. Thus his early manhood was spent in gaiety and even profligacy. All the enthusiasm and warmth of his character found exercise only in the pleasures of the court, and, by his own testimony, he lived a life of utter immorality in this corrupt age. Wine, women, and song were then, as often since, the chief pleasures of kings and princes. Notwithstanding his marriage and the blessing of children, Lull sought the reputation of a gallant and was mixed up in more than one intrigue. For this sort of life his office gave him every temptation and plenty of opportunity.

A seneschal (literally, an old servant)[iv] was the chief official in the household of a medieval prince or noble and had the superintendence of feasts and ceremonies. These must have been frequent and luxurious at the court of James II., for Aragon, previous to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, enjoyed the most liberal government of Europe. According to one authority, "the genius and maxims of the court were purely republican." The kings were elective, while the real exercise of power was In the hands of the Cortes, an assembly consisting of the nobility, the equestrian order, the representatives of cities, and the clergy. A succession of twenty sovereigns reigned from the year 1035 to 1516. At such a court and amid such an assemblage, probably in the capital town of Zaragoza (Saragossa), Lull spent several years of his life. He was early addicted to music and played the cithern with skill. But he was yet more celebrated as a court poet. According to his own confessions, however, the theme of his poetical effusions was not seldom the joys of lawless love. "I see, O Lord," he says in his Contemplations, "that trees bring forth every year flowers and fruit, each after their kind, whence mankind derive pleasure and profit. But thus it was not with me, sinful man that I am; for thirty years I brought forth no fruit in this world, I cumbered the ground, nay, was noxious and hurtful to my friends and neighbors. Therefore, since a mere tree, which has neither intellect nor reason, is more fruitful than I have been, I am exceedingly ashamed and count myself worthy of great blame."[v] In another part of the same book he returns thanks to God for the great difference he sees between the works of his after-life and those of his youth. "Then," he says, all his "actions were sinful and he enjoyed the pleasures of sinful companionship."

Raymund Lull was gifted with great mental accomplishments and enthusiasm. He had the soul of a poet, but at first his genius groveled in the mire of sensual pleasures, like that of other poets whose passions were not under the control of religion. We do Lull injustice, however, if we judge his court life by the standards of our Christian century. His whole environment was that of medieval darkness, and he was a gay knight at the banquets of James II. before he became a scholastic philosopher and a missionary. As knight he knew warfare and horsemanship so well that among his books there are several treatises on these sciences,[vi] first written in Catalan, and afterward put into Latin. Undoubtedly these were written, as was most of his poetry, before he was thirty years old. He was the most popular poet of his age in Spain, and his influence on Catalonian poetry is acknowledged in such terms that he might be called the founder of the Catalonian school of poets. The philological importance of Lull's Catalonian writings, especially his poems, was shown by Adolph Helfferich in his book on "Lull and the Origin of Catalan Literature." In this volume specimens of his poetry and proverbs are given. A writer in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" speaks of one of his poems, "Le Desconort" (Despair) as eminently fine and composite in its diction. This poem, if it was written before his conversion, as is probable, would already show that Lull himself was dissatisfied at heart with his life of worldly pleasure. Already; perhaps, there arose within him a mighty struggle between the spirit and the flesh. Sensual pleasures never satisfy, and his lower and higher natures strove one with the other.

It seems that at about his thirty-second year he returned to Palma, although there is little certainty of date among his biographers. At any rate it was at the place of his birth that Lull was born again. It was in the Franciscan church, and not at the court of Aragon, that he received his final call and made his decision to forsake all and become a preacher of righteousness. The prodigal son came to himself amid the swine, and his feet were already toward home when he saw his Father, and his Father ran out to meet him. The story of St. Augustine under the fig-tree at Milan was reenacted at Palma.

CHAPTER 3: THE VISION AND CALL TO SERVICE

(A.D. 1266-1267)

I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh,.... and your young men shall see visions-" - Joel ii, 28.

WHEN St. Paul told King Agrippa the story of his life, the key of it lay in the words, "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision." The angel had come to him and called him straight away from his career as arch-persecutor. All that he had done or meant to do was now of the past. He arose from the ground and took up his life again as one who could not be disobedient to his vision. It was a vision of Christ that made Paul a missionary. And his was not the last instance of the fulfilment of Joel's great prophecy. The twentieth century, even, dares not mock at the supernatural; and materialistic philosophy can not explain the phenomena of the spirit world. The Christians of the thirteenth century believed in visions and saw visions. Although an age of visions is apt to be a visionary age, this was not altogether true of the thirteenth century. The visions of Francis of Assisi, of Catherine the Saint, of Peter Nolasco, and of others in this age, had a tremendous effect on their lives and influence. We may doubt the vision, but we can not doubt its result in the lives of those who profess to have seen it. Call it religious hallucination or pious imagination if you will, but even then it has power. Ruskin says that "such imagination is given us that we may be able to vision forth the ministry of angels beside us and see the chariots of fire on the mountains that gird us round." In that age of Mariolatry and angel-worship and imitation of saints, it was not such a vision that arrested Lull, but a vision of Jesus Himself. The story, as told in a Life[vii] written with his consent during his lifetime, is as follows:

One evening the seneschal was sitting on a couch, with his cithern on his knees, composing a song in praise of a noble married lady who had fascinated him but who was insensible to his passion. Suddenly, in the midst of the erotic song, he saw on his right hand the Savior hanging on His cross, the blood trickling from His hands and feet and brow, look reproachfully at him. Raymund, conscience - struck, started up; he could sing no more; he laid aside his cithern and, deeply moved, retired into bed. Eight days after, he again attempted to finish the song and again took up the plea of an unrequited lover. But now again, as before, the image of Divine Love incarnate appeared - the agonized form of the Man of Sorrows. The dying eyes of the Savior were fixed on him mournfully, pleadingly:

See from His head. His hands, His feet

Sorrow and love flow mingling down:

Did ere such love and sorrow meet,

Or thorns compose so rich a crown?"

Lull cast his lute aside, and threw himself on his bed, a prey to remorse. He had seen the highest and deepest unrequited love. But the thought that

Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all,"

had not yet reached him. The effect of the vision was so transitory that he was not ready to yield until it again repeated itself.[viii] Then Lull could not resist the thought that this was a special message for himself to conquer his lower passions and to devote himself entirely to Christ's service. He felt engraved on his heart, as it were, the great spectacle of divine Self-sacrifice. Henceforth he had only one passion, to love and serve Christ. But there arose the doubt, How can I, defiled with impurity, rise and enter on a holier life? Night after night, we are told, he lay awake, a prey to despondency and doubt. He wept like Mary Magdalen, remembering how much and how deeply he had sinned. At length the thought occurred: Christ is meek and full of compassion; He invites all to come to Him; He will not cast me out. With that thought came consolation. Because he was forgiven so much he loved the more, and concluded that he would forsake the world and give up all for his Savior. How he was confirmed in this resolve we shall see shortly.

By way of parenthesis it is necessary to give another account of Lull's conversion which the author of "Acta Sanctorum" relates, and says he deems "improbable but not impossible." According to this story Lull was one day passing the window of the house of Signora Ambrosia, the married lady whose love he vainly sought to gain. He caught a glimpse of her ivory throat and bosom. On the spot he composed and sang a song to her beauty. The lady sent for him and showed him the bosom he so much admired, eaten with hideous cancers! She then besought him to lead a better life. On his return home Christ appeared to him and said, "Raymund, follow Me." Re gave up his court position, sold all his property, and withdrew to the retirement of a cell on Mount Roda. This was about the year 1266 When he had spent nine years in retirement he came to the conclusion that he was called of God to preach the Gospel to the Mohammedans.[ix]

Some biographers know nothing of this nine years' retirement in a cell at Mount Roda near Barcelona, although all of them agree that his conversion took place in July, 1266. The visions and spiritual conflicts and experiences at Mount Roda gained for Lull the title of "Doctor llluminatus," the scholar enlightened from heaven. And if we look at the life that was the result of these visions, we cannot deny that, in this dark age, heaven did indeed enlighten Lull to know the love of God and to do the will of God as no other in his day and generation.

Let us go back to the story of his conversion as told by Lull himself in that work, "On Divine Contemplation," which may be put side by side with Bunyan's "Grace Abounding" and Augustine's "Confessions" as the biography of a penitent soul, After the visions he came to the conclusion that he could devote his energies to no higher work than that of proclaiming the Message of the Cross to the Saracens. His thoughts would naturally take this direction. The islands of Majorca and Minorca had only recently been in the hands of the Saracens. His father had wielded the sword of the king of Aragon against these enemies of the Gospel; why should not the son now take up the sword of the Spirit against them? If the carnal weapons of the crusading knights had failed to conquer Jerusalem, was it not time to sound the bugle for a spiritual crusade for the conversion of the Saracen? Such were the thoughts that filled his mind. But then, he says, a difficulty arose. How could he, a layman, in an age when the Church and the clergy were supreme, enter on such a work? Thereupon it occurred to him that at least a beginning might be made by composing a volume which should demonstrate the truth of Christianity and convince the warriors of the Crescent of their errors. This took, however would not be understood by them unless it were in Arabic, and of this language he was ignorant; other difficulties presented themselves and almost drove him to despair. Full of such thoughts, he one day repaired to a neighboring church and poured forth his whole soul to God, beseeching Him if He did inspire these thoughts to enable him to carry them out.[x]

This was in the month of July. But, although old desires and the old life were passing away, all things had not yet become new. For three months his great design was laid aside and he struggled with old passions for the mastery. On the fourth of October, the festival of St. Francis of Assisi, Lull went to the Franciscan church at Palma and heard from the lips of the friar-preacher the tale of the "Spouse of Poverty". He learned how this son of Pietro Bernadone di Mericoni, once foremost in deeds of war and a carefree worldling, was taken prisoner at Perugia and brought by disease to the very gates of death; how he saw visions of the Christ and of the world to come; how, when he emerged from his dungeon, he exchanged his gay apparel for the garb of the mendicant, visiting the sick, tending the leprous, and preaching the Gospel; how in 1219, before the walls of Damietta, this missionary-monk crossed over to the infidels and witnessed for Christ before the Sultan, declaring, "I am not sent of man, but of God, to show thee the way of salvation."

The words of the preacher rekindled the fires of love half-smothered in the heart of Lull. He now made up his mind once and forever. He sold all his property, which was considerable, gave the money to the poor, and reserved only a scanty allowance for his wife and children. This was the vow of his consecration in his own words:

"To Thee, Lord God, do I now offer myself and my wife and my children and all that I possess; and since I approach Thee humbly with this gift and sacrifice, may it please Thee to condescend to accept all what I give and offer up now for Thee, that I and my wife and my children may be Thy humble slaves."[xi] It was a covenant of complete surrender, and the repeated reference to his wife and children shows that Raymund Lull's wandering passions had found rest at last. It was a family covenant, and by this token we know that Lull had for-ever said farewell to his former companions and his life of sin.

He assumed the coarse garb of a mendicant, made pilgrimages to various churches in the island, and prayed for grace and assistance in the work he had resolved to undertake. The mantle of apostolic succession fell from Francis of Assisi, forty years dead, upon the layman of Palma, now in his thirtieth year. From the mendicant orders of the Middle Ages, their precepts and their example, Lull in part drew his passionate, ascetic, and unselfish devotion. Most of his biographers assert that he became a Franciscan, but that is doubtful, especially since some of the earliest biographers were themselves of that order and would naturally seek glory in his memory.[xii]

Eymeric, a Catalonian Dominican in 1334 and the inquisitor of Aragon after 1356, expressly states that Lull was a lay merchant and a heretic. In 1371 the same Eymeric pointed out five hundred heresies in Lull's works, and in consequence Gregory XI. forbade some of the books. The Franciscans, Antonio Wadding and others, afterward warmly defended Lull and his writings, but the Jesuits have always been hostile to his memory. Therefore the Roman Catholic Church long hesitated whether to condemn Lull as a heretic or to recognize him as a martyr and a saint. He was never canonized by any pope, but in Spain and Majorca all good Catholics regard him as a saintly Franciscan. In a letter I have received from the present bishop of Majorca he speaks of Raymund Lull as "an extraordinary man with apostolic virtues, and worthy of all admiration."

Frederic Perry Noble, in speaking of Lull's conversion, says: "His new birth be it noted, sprang from a passion for Jesus. Lull's faith was not sacramental, but personal and vital, more Catholic than Roman." Even as the Catalonians first arose in protest and revolution against the tyranny of the state in the Middle Ages, so their countryman is distinguished for daring to act apart from the tyranny of the Church and to inaugurate the rights of laymen. The inner life of Lull finds its key in the story of his conversion. Incarnate Love overcame carnal love, and all of the passion and the poetry of Lull's genius bowed in submission to the cross. The vision of his youth explains the motto of his old age: "He who loves not lives not; he who lives by the Life can not die." The image of the suffering Savior remained for fifty years the mainspring of his being. Love for the personal Christ filled his heart, molded his mind, inspired his pen, and made his soul long for the crown of martyrdom. Long years afterward, when he sought for a reasonable proof of that greatest mystery of revelation and the greatest stumbling-block for Moslems-the doctrine of the Trinity - he once more recalled the vision. His proof for the Trinity was the love of God in Christ as revealed to us by the Holy Spirit.

CHAPTER 4: PREPARATION FOR THE CONFLICT

(A.D. 1267-1274)

"Sive ergo Mahometicus error haretico nomine deturpetur, cive gentili aut pagano infametur; agendim contra eum est scribendum est." - Petrus Venerabilis 1157.

"Aggredior vos, non ut nostra saepe faciunt, armis, sed verbis, non vi sed ratione, non odio sed amore." Ibid.

By his bold decision to attack Islam with the weapons of Christian philosophy, and in his lifelong conflict with this gigantic heresy, Lull proved himself the Athanasius of the thirteenth century. The Mohammedan missionary problem at the dawn of the twentieth century is not greater than it was then. True, Islam was not so extensive, but it was equally aggressive, and, if possible, more arrogant. The Mohammedan world was more of a unit, and from Bagdad to Morocco Moslems felt that the Crusades had been a defeat for Christendom. One half of Spain was under Moslem rule. In all Northern Africa Saracen power was in the ascendant. Many conversions to Islam took place in Georgia, and thousands of the Christian Copts in Egypt were saying farewell to the religion of their fathers and embracing the faith of the Mameluke conquerors. It was just at this time that Islam began to spread among the Mongols. In India, Moslem preachers were extending the faith in Ajmir and the Punjab. The Malay archipelago first heard of Mohammed about the time when Lull was born.[xiii] Beybars I., the first and greatest of the Mameluke Sultans, sat on the throne of Egypt.

A man of grand achievements, unceasing activity, and stern orthodoxy, he used every endeavor to extend and strengthen the religion of the state.[xiv] Islam had political power and prestige. She was mistress of philosophy and science. In the beginning of the thirteenth century the scientific works of Aristotle were translated from the Arabic into Latin. Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus were so learned that the clergy accused them of being in league with the Saracens!

Such was the Mohammedan world which Lull dared to defy, and planned to attack with the new weapons of love and learning instead of the Crusaders' weapons of fanaticism and the sword. The Christian world did not love Moslems in the thirteenth century, nor did they understand their religion. Marco Polo, a contemporary of Lull, wrote: "Marvel not that the Saracens hate the Christians; for the accursed law which Mohammed gave them commands them to do all the mischief in their power to all other descriptions of people, and especially to Christians; to strip such of their goods and do them all manner of evil. In such fashion the Saracens act throughout the world"[xv]

Dante voices the common opinion of this age when he puts Mohammed in the deepest hell of his Inferno and describes his fate in such dreadful language as offends polite ears.[xvi]  But even worse. things were said of the Arabian prophet in prose by other of Lull's contemporaries. Gross ignorance and great hatred were joined in nearly all who made any attempt to describe Mohammedanism.

Alanus de Insulis (1114-1200) was one of the first to write a book on Islam in Latin, and the title shows his ignorance: "Contra paganos seu Mahometanos." He classes Moslems with Jews and Waldenses! Western Europe, according to Keller, was ignorant even of the century in which Mohammed was born; and Hildebert, the archbishop of Tours, wrote a poem on Mohammed in which he is represented as an apostate from the Christian Church! Petrus Venerabilis, whose pregnant words stand at the head of this chapter, was the first to translate the Koran and to study Islam with sympathy and scholarship. He made a plea for translating portions of the Scripture into the language of the Saracens, and affirmed that the Koran itself had weapons with which to attack the citadel of Islam. But, alas! he added the plea of the scholar at his books: "I myself have no time to enter into the conflict." He first distinguished the true and the false in the teaching of Mohammed, and with keen judgment pointed out the pagan and Christian elements in Islam.[xvii] Petrus Venerabilis took up the pen of controversy and approached the Moslem, as he says, "Not with arms but with words, not by force but by reason, not in hatred but in love"; and in so far he was the first to breathe the true missionary spirit toward the Saracens. But he did not go out to them. It was reserved for the Spanish knight to take up the challenge and go out singlehanded against the Saracens, "not by force but by reason, not in hatred but in love". It was Raymund Lull who wrote: "I see many knights going to the Holy Land beyond the seas and thinking that they can acquire it by force of arms; but in the end all are destroyed before they attain that which they think to have, Whence it seems to me that the conquest of the Holy Land ought not to be attempted except in the way in which Thou and Thine apostles acquired it, namely, by love and prayers, and the pouring out of tears and of blood."

Lull was ready to pour out this sacrifice on the altar. The vision remained with him, and his love to God demanded exercise in showing forth that love to men.

He was not in doubt that God had chosen him to preach to the Saracens and win them to Christ. He only hesitated as to the best method to pursue. All the past history of his native land and the struggle yet going on in Spain emphasized for him the greatness of the task before him.

The knight of Christ felt that he could not venture into the arena unless he had good armor. The son of the soldier who had fought the Moors on many a bloody battle-field felt that the Saracens were worthy foemen. The educated seneschal knew that the Arabian schools of Cordova were the center of European learning, and that it was not so easy to convince a Saracen as a barbarian of Northern Europe.

At one time, we read Lull thought of repairing to Paris, and there by close and diligent scientific study to train himself for controversy with Moslems. At Paris in the thirteenth century was the most famous university of Christendom. And under St. Louis, Robert de Sorbon a common priest, founded in 1253 an unpretending theological college which afterward became the celebrated faculty of the Sorbonne with authority wellnigh as great as that of Rome.

But the advice of his kinsman, the Dominican Raymund de Pennaforte, dissuaded him, and be decided to remain at Majorca and pursue his studies and preparation privately. First he laid plans for a thorough mastery of the Arabic language. To secure a teacher was not an easy matter, as Majorca had years ago passed from Saracen into Christian hands; and as no earnest Moslem would teach the Koran language to one whose professed purpose was to assail Islam with the weapons of philosophy.

He therefore decided to purchase a Saracen slave, and with this teacher his biographers tell us that Lull was occupied in Arabic study for a period of more than nine years. Could anything prove more clearly that Lull was the greatest as well as the first missionary to Moslems? After this long, and we may believe successful, apprenticeship with the Saracen slave, a tragic incident interrupted his studies. Lull had learned the language of the Moslem, but the Moslem slave had not yet learned the love of Christ; nor had his pupil. In the midst of their studies, on one occasion the Saracen blasphemed Christ. How, we are not told; but those who work among Moslems know what cruel, vulgar words can come from Moslem lips against the Son of God. When Lull heard the blasphemy, he struck his slave violently on the face in his strong indignation. The Moslem, stung to the quick, drew a weapon, attempted Lull's life, and wounded him severely He was seized and imprisoned. Perhaps fearing the death-penalty for attempted murder, the Saracen slave committed suicide It was a sad beginning for Lull in his work of preparation. Patience had not yet had its perfect work. Lull felt more than ever before, He that loves not lives not." The vision of the thorn-crowned Head came back to him; he could not forget his covenant.

Although he retired for eight days to a mountain to engage in prayer and meditation, he did not falter, but persevered in his resolution. Even as in the case of Henry Martyn with his munshi, Sahat, who made life a burden to him, so Lull's experience with his Saracen slave was a school of faith and patience.

Besides his Arabic studies, Lull spent these nine years in spiritual meditation, in what he calls contemplating God.

"The awakened gaze

Turned wholly from the earth, on things of heaven

He dwelt both day and night. The thought of God

Filled him with infinite joy; his craving soul

Dwelt on Him as a feast; as did the soul

Of rapt Francesco in his holy cell

In blest Assisi ; and he knew the lain.

The deep despondence of the saint, the doubt,

The consciousness of dark offense, the joy

Of full assurance last. when heaven itself

Stands open to the ecstacy of faith-"

While thus employed the idea occurred to him of composing a work which should contain a strict and formal demonstration of all the Christian doctrines, of such cogency that the Moslems could not fail to acknowledge its logic and in consequence embrace the truth. Perhaps the idea was suggested to him by Raymund de Pennaforte, for he it was who, a few years previous, had persuaded Thomas Aquinas to compose his work in four volumes, On the Catholic Faith, or Summary against the Gentiles". [xviii]

In Lull's introduction to his "Necessaria Demonstratio Articulorum Fidei" he refers to the time when the idea of a controversial book for Moslems first took possession of him, and asks "the clergy and the wise men of the laity to examine his arguments against the Saracens in commending the Christian faith." He pleads earnestly that any weak points in his attempt to convince the Moslem be pointed out to him before the book is sent on its errand.

With such power did this one idea take possession of his mind that at last he regarded it in the light of a divine revelation, and, having traced the outline of such a work, he called it the "Ars Major sive Generalis." This universal system of logic and philosophy was to be the weapon of God against all error, and more especially against the errors of Islam.

Lull was now in his forty-first year. All his intellectual powers were matured. He retired to the spot near Palma where the idea had first burst upon him, and remained there for four months, writing the book and praying for divine blessing on its arguments. According to one biographer,[xix] it was at this time that Lull held interviews with a certain mysterious shepherd, "quem ipse nunquam viderat alias, neque de ipso audiverat quenquam loqui." Is it possible that this refers only to the Great Shepherd and to Lull's spiritual experiences, far away from his friends and family, in some lonely spot near Palma?

The "Ars Major" was finally completed in the year 1275. Lull had an interview with the king of Majorca, and under his patronage the first book of his new "Method" was published. Lull also began to lecture upon it in public. This remarkable treatise, while in one sense intended for the special work of convincing Moslems, was to include "a universal art of acquisition, demonstration, and confutation," and was meant to cover the whole field of knowledge and to supersede the inadequate methods of previous schoolmen". For the method of Lull’s philosophy we will wait until we reach the chapter specially devoted to an account of his teaching and his books. A few words, however, regarding the purpose of the Lullian method are in place.

In the age of scholasticism, when all sorts of puerile questions were seriously debated in the schools, and philosophy was anything but practical, it was Lull who proposed to use the great weapon of this age, dialectics, in the service of the Gospel and for the practical end of converting the Saracens. Let us admit that he was a scholastic, but he was also a missionary. His scholastic philosophy is ennobled by its fiery zeal for the propagation of the Gospel, and by the love for Christ which purifies all its dross in the flame of passion for souls.

We may smile at Lull's dialectic, and his "circles and tables for finding out the different ways in which categories apply to things"; hut no one can help admiring the spirit that inspired the method. In his assertion of the place of reason in religion, in his demand that a rational Christianity should be presented to heathendom, Lull goes far beyond the ideas and the aspirations of the century in which he lived.[xx]

In judging the character of Lull's method long period of preparation, one thing must not be forgotten. The strength of Islam in the age of scholasticism was its philosophy. Having thoroughly entered spirit of Arabian philosophical writings and seen its errors, there was nothing left for a man of Lull's intellect but to meet these Saracen philosophers on their ground. Avicenna, Algazel, and Averroes sat on the throne of Moslem learning and ruled Moslem thought. Lull's object was to undermine their influence and so reach the Moslem heart with the message of salvation. For such a conflict and in such an age his weapons were well chosen.

CHAPTER 5: AT MONTPELLIER, PARIS, AND ROME

(A.D. 1275-1298)

"I have one passion and it is He. He only. Zinzendorf

"In his assertion of the function or reason in religion and his demand that a rational Christianity be placed before Islam, this Don Quixote of his times belongs to our day." - Frederic Perry Noble.

IT is difficult to follow the story of Lull's life in exact chronological order because the sources at our disposal do not always agree in their dates; However, by grouping the events of his life, order comes out of confusion Lull's lifework was three fold: he devised a philosophical or educational system for persuading non-Christians of the truth of Christianity; he established missionary colleges; and he himself went and preached to the Moslems, sealing his witness with martyrdom. The story of his life is best told and best remembered if we follow this clue to its many years of loving service. Lull himself, when he was about sixty years old, reviews his life in these words: "I had a wife and children; I was tolerably rich; I led a secular life. All these things I cheerfully resigned for the sake of promoting the common good and diffusing abroad the holy faith. I learned Arabic. I have several times gone abroad to preach the Gospel to the Saracens. I have for the sake of the faith been cast into prison and scourged. I have labored forty-five years to gain over the shepherds of the church and the princes of Europe to the common good of Christendom. Now I am old and poor, but still I am intent on the same object. I will persevere in it till death, if the Lord permits it."

The sentence italicized is the subject of this chapter: the story of Lull's effort to found missionary schools and to persuade popes and princes that the true Crusade was to be with the pen and not with the sword. It was a grand idea, and it was startlingly novel in the age of Lull. It was an idea that, next to his favorite scheme of philosophy, possessed his whole soul. Both ideas were thoroughly missionary and they interacted the one on the other.

No sooner had Lull completed his "Ars Major," and lectured on it in public, than he set to work to persuade the king, James II., who had heard of his zeal, to found and endow a monastery in Majorca where Franciscan monks should be instructed in the Arabic language and trained to become able disputants among the Moslems. The king welcomed the idea, and in the year 1276 such a monastery was opened and thirteen monks began to study Lull's method and imbibe Lull's spirit. He aimed not at a mere school of theology or philosophy: his ideal training for the foreign field was ahead of many theological colleges of our century. It included in its curriculum the geography of missions and the language of the Saracens! "Knowledge of the regions of the world", he wrote, "is strongly necessary for the republic of believers and the conversion of unbelievers, and for withstanding infidels and Antichrist. The man unacquainted with geography is not only ignorant where he walks, but whither he leads. Whether he attempts the conversion of infidels or works for other interests of the Church, it is indispensable that he know the religions and the environments of all nations." This is high-water mark for the dark ages! The pioneer for Africa, six centuries before Livingstone, felt what the latter expressed more concisely but not more forcibly:

"The end of the geographical feat is the beginning of the missionary enterprise."

Authorities disagree whether this missionary training-school of Lull was opened under the patronage of the king, at Palma, or at Montpellier. From the fact that in 1297 Lull received letters at Montpellier from the general of the Franciscans recommending him to the superiors of all Franciscan houses, it seems that he must have formed connections with the brotherhood there at an early period.

Montpellier, now a town of considerable importance in the south of France near the Gulf of Lyons, dates its prosperity from the beginning of the twelfth century. In 1204 it became. a dependency of the house of Aragon through marriage, and remained so until 1350. Several Church councils were held there during the thirteenth century, and in 1292 Pope Nicholas IV., probably at the suggestion of Lull, founded a university at Montpellier. Its medical school was famous in the Middle Ages, and had in its faculty learned Jews who were educated in the Moorish schools of Spain.

At Montpellier Lull spent three or four years in study and in teaching. Here, most probably, he wrote his medical works, and some of his books appealing for help to open other missionary schools. In one place he thus pleads with words of fire for consecration to this cause: "I find scarcely any one, O Lord, who out of love to Thee is ready to suffer martyrdom as Thou hast suffered for us. It appears to me agreeable to reason, if an ordinance to that effect could be obtained, that the monks should learn various languages that they might be able to go out and surrender their lives in love to Thee.... O Lord of glory, if that blessed day should ever be in which I might see Thy holy monks so influenced by zeal to glorify Thee as to go to foreign lands in order to testify of Thy holy ministry, of Thy blessed incarnation, and of Thy bitter sufferings, that would be a glorious day, a day in which that glow of devotion would return with which the holy apostles met death for their Lord Jesus Christ."[xxi]

Lull longed with all his soul for a new Pentecost and for worldwide missions. Montpellier was too small to be his parish, although he was but a layman. His ambition was, in his own words, "to gain over the shepherds of the Church and the princes of Europe" to become missionary enthusiasts like himself. Where should he place his fulcrum to exert leverage to this end save the very center of Christendom? Popes had inaugurated and promoted the crusades of blood; they held the keys of spiritual and temporal power; their command in the Middle Ages was as a voice from heaven; their favor was the dew of blessing. Moreover, Lull's success with the king of Aragon led him to hope that the chief shepherd of Christendom might evince a similar interest in his plans.

He therefore undertook a journey to Rome in 1286, hoping to obtain from Honorius IV. the approbation of his treatise and aid in founding missionary schools in various parts of Europe. Honorius was distinguished during his brief pontificate for zeal and love of learning. He cleared the Papal States of bands of robbers, and attempted, in favor of learning, to found a school of Oriental languages at Paris. Had he lived it is possible that Lull would have succeeded in his quest. Honorius died April 3, 1287

Raymund Lull came to Rome, but found the papal chair vacant and all men busy with one thing, the election of a successor. He waited for calmer times, but impediments were always thrown in his way. His plans met with some ridicule and with little encouragement. The cardinals cared for their own ambitions more than for the conversion of the world. Nicholas IV. succeeded to the papal throne, and his character was such that we do not wonder that Lull gave up the idea of persuading him to become a missionary. He was a man without faith; and his monstrous disregard of treaties and oaths in the controversy with the king of Aragon, Alphonso, struck at the root of all honor.[xxii]  He believed in fighting the Saracens with the sword only, and sought actively but vainly to organize another Crusade. Not until ten years after did Lull again venture to appeal to a pope.

Disappointed at Rome, Lull repaired to Paris, and there lectured in the university on his "Ars Generalis," composing other works on various sciences, but most of all preparing his works of controversy and seeking to propagate his ideas of world conquest. In one of his books he prays fervently that "monks of holy lives and great wisdom should form institutions in order to learn various languages and to be able to preach to unbelievers." The times were not ripe.

At length, tired of seeking aid for his plans in which no one took interest, he determined to test the power of example. Although in his fifty-sixth year, he determined to set out alone and single-handed and preach Christ in North Africa. Of this first missionary voyage our next chapter contains an account.

On his return from Tunis, 1292, Lull found his way to Naples. Here a new Influence was brought to bear on his character. He made the acquaintance of the alchemist and pious nobleman, Arnaud de Villeneuve. Whether Lull actually acquired skill in transmuting metals and wrote some of the many works on alchemy that are attributed to him, will perhaps never be decided. I rather think this part of the story is medieval legend. But surely a man of Lull's affections imbibed a great deal of that spirit which brought down on Arnold of Villeneuve the censure of the Church for holding that "medicine and charity were more pleasing to God than religious services." Arnold taught that the monks had corrupted the doctrine of Christ, and that saying masses is useless; and that the papacy is a work of man. His writings were condemned by the Inquisition, as were also the works of Lull. Perhaps these brothers in heresy were really Protestants at heart, and their friendship was like that of the friends of God.

For the next few years the scene of Lull's labors changed continually He first went back to Paris, resumed his teaching there, and wrote his "Tabula Generalis" and "Ars Expositiva." In 1298 he succeeded in establishing at Paris, under the protection of King Louis Philippe le Bel, a college where his method was taught. But all France was in a ferment at this time because of the war against the Knights Templars and the struggle with Pope Boniface VIII. There was little leisure to study philosophy and no inclination to become propagandists among the Saracens.

Lull's thoughts again turned to Rome. But, alas! Rome in the thirteenth century was the last place of all Europe in which to find the spirit of self-sacrifice or the spirit of Christian missions. About the year 1274 the cessation of Church miracles was urged by an upholder of the crusade spirit as compelling the Church to resort to arms. Pope Clement IV. (1265-68) advised fighting Islam by force of arms. As a rule, the popes clung to the crusade idea as the ideal of missions.

Lull visited Rome the second time between 1294 and 1296. He had heard of the elevation of Celestine V. to the papal chair and with some reason hoped that this would favor his cause. Celestine was a man of austerity and the founder of an order of friars, and zelous for the faith. On the fifteenth of July, 1294, he was elected, but, compelled by the machinations of his successor, resigned his office on December 13 of the same year. He was cruelly imprisoned by the new Pope, Boniface VIII., and died two years later. Boniface was bold, avaricious, and domineering. His ambitions centered in himself. He carried his schemes for self-aggrandizement to the verge of frenzy, and afterward became insane. Lull found neither sympathy nor assistance in this quarter. From 1299 to 1306, when he made his second great journey to North Africa, Lull preached and taught in various places, as we shall see later.

In 1310 the veteran hero, now seventy-five years old, attempted once more to influence the heart of Christendom and to persuade the pope to make the Church true to its great mission. Full of his old ardor, since he himself was unable to attempt the great plans of spiritual conquest that consumed his very heart, he conceived the idea of founding an order of spiritual knights who should be ready to preach to the Saracens and so recover the tomb of Christ by a crusade of love.[xxiii] Pious noblemen and ladies of rank at Genoa offered to contribute for this object the sum of thirty thousand guilders. Much encouraged by this proof of interest, Lull set out for Avignon to lay his scheme before the pope, Clement V. He was the first pope who fixed his residence at Avignon, thus beginning the so-called "Babylonian Captivity" of the papacy. Contemporaneous writers accuse him of licentiousness, nepotism, simony, and avarice. It is no wonder that, with such a man holding the keys of authority, Lull again knocked at the door of "the vicar of Christ" all in vain.

Once more Lull returned to Paris, and, strong in mind although feeble in frame, attacked the Arabian philosophy of Averroes and wrote in defense of the faith and the doctrines of revelation.[xxiv] At Paris he heard that a general conference was to be summoned at Vienne, three hundred miles away in the south of France, on October 16, 1311. A general council might favor what popes had scarcely deigned to notice. So he retraced the long journey he had just taken. Nearly three hundred prelates were present at the council. The combat of heresies, the abrogation of the order of Templars, proposals for new crusades, and discussions as to the legitimacy of Boniface VIII. occupied the most attention. Nevertheless the council gave heed to at least one of Lull's proposals, and passed a decree that professorships of the Oriental languages should be endowed in the universities of Paris, Salamanca, and Oxford, and in all cities where the papal court resided.

Thus, at last, he had lived to see one portion of his lifelong pleadings brought to fruition. Who is able to follow out the result for missions of these first Oriental language chairs in European universities even as far as saintly Martyn and Ion Keith Falconer, Arabic professor at Cambridge? For this great idea of missionary preparation in the schools Lull fought single handed from early manhood to old age, until he stood on the threshold of success He anticipated Loyola, Zinzendorf, and Duff in linking schools to missions; and his fire of passion for this object equaled, if not surpassed their zeal.

CHAPTER 6: HIS FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY TO TUNIS

(A.D. 1291-1292)

"In that bright sunny land

Across the tideless sea. Where long ago

Proud Carthage reared its walls, beauteous and fair.

And large Phonician galleys laden deep

With richest stares, sailed bravely to and fro—

Where Gospel light in measure not unmixed

With superstitions vain, burned for a time,

And spread her peaceful conquests far and wide,

And gave her martyrs to the scorching fire—

There dwells to-day a darkness to be felt;

Each ray of that once rising, growing light

Faded and gone."

—Anon.

WHEN Raymond Lull met with disappointment on his first visit to Rome, he returned for a short time to Paris, as we have seen, and then determined to set out as a missionary indeed to propagate the faith among the Moslems of Africa. Lull was at this time fifty-six years old, and travel in those days was full of hardship by land and by sea. The very year in which Lull set out, news reached Europe of the fall of Acre and the end of Christian power in Palestine. All Northern Africa was in the hands of the Saracens, and they were at once elated at the capture of Acre and driven to the height of fanaticism by the persecution of the Moors in Spain. It was a bold step that Lull undertook. But he counted not his life dear in the project, and was ready, so he thought, to venture all on the issue. He expected to win by love and persuasion; at least, in his own words, he would "experiment whether he himself could not persuade some of them by conference with their wise men and by manifesting to them, according to the divinely given Method, the Incarnation of the Son of God and the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity in the Divine Unity of Essence."[xxv] Lull proposed a parliament of religions, and desired to meet the bald monotheism of Islam face to face with the revelation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Lull left Paris for Genoa, which was then the rival of Venice and contended with her for the supremacy of the Mediterranean. In the thirteenth century Genoa was at the height of its prosperity, and the superb palaces of that date still witness to the genius of her artists and the wealth of her merchant princes.

At Genoa the story of Lull's life was not unknown. Men had heard with wonder of the miraculous conversion of the gay and dissolute seneschal; and now it was whispered that he had devised a new and certain method for converting the "infidel" and was setting out all alone for the shores of Africa. The expectations of the people were raised to a high pitch. A vessel was found ready to sail for Africa and Lull's passage was engaged. The ship was lying the harbor; the missionary's books, even, had been conveyed on board. All was ready for the voyage and the venture.

But at this juncture a change came over him. Lull says that he was "overwhelmed with terror at the thought of what might befall him in the country whither he was going. The idea of enduring torture or lifelong imprisonment presented itself with such force that he could not control his emotions."[xxvi]  Such a strong reaction after his act of faith in leaving Paris must not surprise us. Similar experiences are not rare in the lives of missionaries. Henry Martyn wrote in his journal as the shores of Cornwall were disappearing: "Would I go back? Oh, no. But how can I be supported?

My faith fails. I find, by experience; I am as weak as water. O my dear friends in England, when we spoke with exaltation of the missions to the heathen, what an imperfect idea did we form of the sufferings by which it must be accomplished!" Lull had to face a darker and more uncertain future than did Martyn. His faith failed. His books were taken back on shore and the ship sailed without him.

However, no sooner did he receive tidings of the vessel's departure than he was seized with bitter remorse. His passionate love for Christ could not bear the thought that he had proved a traitor to the cause for which God had specially fitted and called him. He felt that he had given opportunity for those who scoff at Christ's religion to mock Him and his great mission. So keen was his sorrow that he was thrown into a violent fever. While yet suffering from weakness of body and prostration of mind, he heard that another ship was ready in the harbor and loaded to sail for the port of Tunis. Weak though he was, he begged his friends to put his books on board and asked them to permit him to attempt the voyage. He was taken to the ship, but his friends, convinced that he could not outlive the voyage, insisted on his being again landed. Lull returned to his bed, but did not find rest or recuperation. His old passion consumed him; he felt the contrition of Jonah and cried with Paul, "Woe is me if I preach not." Another ship offering fit opportunity, he determined at all risks to be put on board.

It is heroic reading to follow Lull in his autobiography as he tells how "from this moment he was a new man. The vessel had hardly lost sight of land before all fever left him; his conscience no more rebuked him for cowardice, peace of mind returned, and he seemed to have regained perfect health. Lull reached Tunis at the end of the year 1291 or early in 1292.[xxvii]

Why did the philosophic missionary choose Tunis as his first point of attack on the citadel of Islam? The answer is not far to seek.

Tunis, the present capital of the country of the same name, was founded by the Carthaginians, but first rose to importance under the Arab conquerors of North Africa, who gave it its present name; this comes from an Arabic root which signifies "to enjoy oneself."[xxviii]  Tunis was the usual port for those going from Kairwan (that Mecca of all North Africa) to Spain. In 1236, when the Hafsites displaced the Almohade dynasty, Abu Zakariyah made it his capital. When the fall of Bagdad left Islam without a titular head (1258) the Hafsites assumed the title of Prince of the Faithful and extended their rule from Tlemçen to Tripoli. The dignity of the Tunisian rulers was acknowledged even in Cairo and Mecca, and so strong were they in their government that, unaided, they held their own against repeated Frankish invasions. The Seventh Crusade ended disastrously before Tunis. Tunis was in fact the western center of the Moslem world in the thirteenth century. Where St. Louis failed as a king with his great army, Raymund Lull ventured on his spiritual crusade single-handed.

Tunis is on an isthmus between two salt lakes and is connected with the port of Goletta by an ancient canal. Two buildings still remain from the days of Lull: the mosque of Abu Zakariyah in the citadel, and the great Mosque of the Olive Tree in the center of the town. The ruins of Carthage, famous center of early Latin Christianity, lie a few miles north of Goletta. Even now Tunis has a population of more than 125,000; it was much larger at the period of which we write.

Lull must have arrived at Goletta and thence proceeded to Tunis. His first step was to invite the Moslem ulema or literati to a conference, just as did Ziegenbalg in South India and John Wilson at Bombay. He announced that he had studied the arguments on both sides of the question and was willing to submit the evidences for Christianity and for Islam to a fair comparison. He even promised that, if he was convinced, he would embrace Islam. The Moslem leaders willingly responded to the challenge, and coming in great numbers to the conference set forth with much show of learning the miracle of the Koran and the doctrine of God's unity. After long, tho fruitless discussion, Lull advanced the following propositions,[xxix] which are well calculated to strike the two weak points of Mohammedan monotheism: lack of love in the being of Allah, and lack of harmony in His attributes. "Every wise man must acknowledge that to be the true religion, which ascribed the greatest perfection to the Supreme Being, and not only conveyed the worthiest conception of all His attributes, His goodness, power, wisdom, and glory, but demonstrated the harmony and equality existing between them. Now their religion was defective in acknowledging only two active principles in the Deity, His will and His wisdom, while it left his goodness and greatness inoperative as though they were indolent qualities and not called forth into active exercise. But the Christian faith could not be charged with this defect. In its doctrine of the Trinity it conveys the highest conception of the Deity, as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in one simple essence and nature. In the Incarnation of the Son it evinces the harmony that exists between God's goodness and His greatness; and in the person of Christ displays the true union of the Creator and the creature; while in His Passion which He underwent out of His great love for man, it sets forth the divine harmony of infinite goodness and condescension, even the condescension of Him who for us men, and our salvation, and restitution to our primeval state of perfection, underwent those sufferings and lived and died for man."

This style of argument, whatever else may be thought of it, is orthodox and evangelical to the core. It surprises one continually to see how little medieval theology and how very few Romish ideas there are in Lull's writings. The offense of the cross is met everywhere in Lull's argument with Moslems. He never built a rickety bridge out of planks of compromise. His early Parliament of Religions was not built on the Chicago platform. The result proved it when persecution followed. There were some who accepted the truth and others who turned fanatics. One Imam pointed out to the Sultan the danger likely to beset the law of Mohammed if such a zealous teacher were allowed freely to expose the errors of Islam, and suggested that Lull be imprisoned and put to death. He was cast into a dungeon, and was only saved from a worse fate by the intercession of a less prejudiced leader. This man praised his intellectual ability and reminded the ruler that a Moslem who imitated the self devotion of the prisoner in preaching Islam would be highly honored. The spectacle of a learned and aged Christian philosopher freely disputing the truth of the Koran in the midst of Tunis was indeed a striking example of moral courage in the dark ages. "This," says Dr. Smith, "was no careless Crusader cheered by martial glory or worldly pleasure. His was not even such a task as that which had called forth all the courage of the men who first won over Goth and Frank, Saxon and Slav." Raymund Lull preached Christ to a people with whom apostasy is death and who had made Christendom feel their prowess for centuries."

Even his enemies were amazed at such boldness of devotion. The death-sentence was changed to banishment from the country. Well might Lull rejoice that escape was possible, since the death-penalty on Christians was often applied with barbarous cruelty.[xxx] Yet Lull was not ready to submit even to the sentence of banishment, and so leave his little group of converts to themselves without instruction or leadership.

The ship which had conveyed him to Tunis was on the point of returning to Genoa; he was placed on board and warned that if he ever made his way into the country again he would assuredly be stoned to death. Raymund Lull, however, felt that with the apostles, it was not for him to obey their "threatening that he should speak henceforth to no man in this Name." Perhaps also he felt that his cowardice at Genoa when setting out demanded atonement. At any rate he managed to escape from the ship by strategy and to return unawares to the harbor town of Goletta in defiance of the edict of banishment. For three long months the zealous missionary concealed himself like a wharf-rat and witnessed quietly for his Master. Such was the character of his versatile genius that we read how at this time, even, he composed a new scientific work!

But since his favorite missionary method of public discussion was entirely impossible, he finally embarked for Naples, where for several years he taught and lectured on his New Method. And later, as we have already seen, he revisited Rome.

It is evident from all of Lull's writings, as well as from the writings of his biographers, that his preaching to the Moslems was not so much polemical as apologetic. He always speaks of their philosophy and learning with respect. The very titles of his controversial writings prove the tact and love of his method. It was weak only in that it placed philosophy ahead of revelation, and therefore at times attempted to explain what must ever remain a mystery of faith.

As a theologian, we should remember, Lull was not a schoolman, nor did he ever receive instruction from the great teachers of his time. He was a self-taught man. The speculative and the practical were blended in his character and also in his system. "His speculative turn entered even into his enthusiasm for the cause of missions and his zeal as an apologist. His contests with the school of Averroes, and with the sect of that school which affirmed the irreconcilable opposition between faith and knowledge, would naturally lead him to make the relation subsisting between these two a matter of special investigation.”[xxxi]  Lull did not go to Naples because he had given up the battle. He went to burnish his weapons and to win recruits and to appeal to the popes to arm for a spiritual crusade against the strongest enemy of the kingdom of Christ. When, as we have seen in a previous chapter, these efforts proved nearly fruitless, He made other missionary journeys, and in 1307 was again on the shores of North Africa, fifteen years after his first banishment.

CHAPTER 7: OTHER MISSIONARY JOURNEYS

(A.D. 1301-1309)

"In an age of violence and faithlessness he was the apostle of heavenly love." - George Smith.

"Yea, so have I strived to preach the Gospel not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man's foundation." - Paul.

FROM 1301 to 1309 Lull made several missionary journeys which are the more remarkable if we consider that he was now sixty-six years old and if we think of the conditions of travel in the Middle Ages. The Mediterranean Was beset with pirates and the Catalan Grand Company were fighting the Byzantines, while Genoa and Venice waged a war of commercial rivalry. The Knights of St. John were fighting for Rhodes and the rival popes were quarreling.

Travel by sea was dangerous and by land was full of hardship. In the Middle Ages the use of carriages was prohibited as tending to render vassals less fit for military service. As late as the sixteenth century it was accounted a reproach for men to ride in them, and only ladies of rank used such conveyances. Men of all grades and professions rode on horses or mules, and sometimes the monks and women on she-asses. Highway robbers infested the forests, and the danger from wild animals had not yet ceased even in the south of Europe.

In spite of all obstacles, however, we read that Lull "resolved to travel from place to place and preach wherever he might have opportunity." His purpose seems to have been to reach Jews and Christian heretics as well as Saracens.  After laboring for some time with the Jews in Majorca he sailed for Cyprus, landing at Famagosta, the chief port and fortress during the Genoese occupancy of the island. Cyprus at that time had a large population of Jews as well as of Christians and Moslems. Lull's preaching probably did not meet with success, for he soon left the island, and, attended only by a single companion, crossed over to Syria and penetrated into Armenia, striving to reclaim the various Oriental sects to the orthodox faith.

Armenia, in the thirteenth century, was the name of a small principality to the north of Cilicia, under a native dynasty. With Cyprus it formed the last bulwark of Christianity against Islam in the East. For fear of being crushed by the Moslem powers the Armenians formed alliances with the Mongolian hordes that overran Asia and shared in the hostility and vengeance of the Mamelukes. Among this brave remnant and bulwark of the faith that even to our own day has resisted unto blood the aggressive spirit of Islam, Lull labored -for more than a year. It was in Armenia that he wrote his book entitled, "The things which a man ought to believe concerning God." Written in Latin, it was afterward translated for his Spanish countrymen into Catalan.[xxxii]

From Cyprus Lull returned once more to Italy and France, where from 1302 to 1305 he traveled about lecturing in the universities and writing more books. Before we speak of his second journey to North Africa, a few words should set forth the character of his love and labors for the despised Jew.

Scattered throughout every kingdom and island of Europe, the Jews had attained in many lands power and influence both because of their learning and their wealth. In Spain under the Saracen supremacy they enjoyed ample toleration, but, in proportion as the Moors were driven out and the Christians became powerful, the Jews suffered. As early as 1108 a riot broke out in Toledo against the Jews and the streets streamed with their blood. All through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries dark stories were told of the hostility of the Jews. It was said that they poisoned wells, stole the consecrated wafers to pierce them with a needle, and crucified infants at their Passover festivals and used their entrails for magic and secret rites In 1253 the Jews were expelled from France and in 1290 from England. Many Were put to death by the Inquisition, and there were very few Christians who dared to defend a Jew in court. A child could not be missed without some foul play being suspected on the part of a Jew. In vain a few pious monks protested against such accusations and tried to befriend the outcast race The whole spirit of the times was to class Jews and Moslems as infidels and as worthy of hatred and contempt. If possible, the hatred against the Jews was stronger in Spain than elsewhere. During the closing years of Lull's life there were already kindled in Spain the fires of bitter, cruel persecution which at last, under Torquemada, consumed the entire race of the Jews in that country.[xxxiii]

In the thirteenth century, in almost all lands, the Jews were compelled to wear an insulting badge, the so called "Jew's hat," a yellow, funnel-shaped covering on the head, and a ring of red cloth on the breast. They were also compelled to herd together in the cities in the ghetto or Jewish quarter which was often surrounded by a special wall.[xxxiv]

This despised, race however, was not outside the circle of Lull's love and interest. He wrote many books to prove to them the truth of the Christian religion.[xxxv] He showed them that their expected Messiah was none other than Jesus of Nazareth. His great mission to the Saracens in Africa did not blind him to the needs of missions at home, and we read how, in 1305 and even earlier, he labored to convince the Jews in Majorca of their errors. In an age when violence and faithlessness were the only treatment which Jews expected from Christians, Raymund Lull was the apostle of love to them also.

There is a story or legend to the effect that, about this time, Lull paid a short visit to England and wrote a work on alchemy at St. Catharine's Hospital in London.[xxxvi] But we have no good testimony for this event, and the legend probably arose from confounding Lull the missionary with another Lull who was celebrated for his knowledge of alchemy. In the "Acta Sanctorum" a special article is devoted to prove that Lull never taught or practised the arts of medieval alchemy.

We now come to his journey to North Africa, on which he set out in 1307, probably from some port in France or from Genoa. This time he did not go to Tunis, but to Bugia. Some say he visited Hippone and Algiers as well. A special interest attaches to the town of Bugia in the story of Lull's life as it was here he preached to Moslems in his old age and here was the scene of his death.

Bugia, or Bongiah, is a fortified seaport in Algeria between Cape Carbon and Wady Sahil. Its most important buildings at present are the French Roman Catholic church, the hospital, the barracks, and the old Abdul Kadir fort, now used as a prison. At present it has but a small population, yet conducts a considerable trade in wax, grain, oranges, oil, and wine.

Bugia is a town of great antiquity; it is the Salda of the Romans and was first built by the Carthaginians. Genseric the Vandal surrounded it with walls. In the tenth century it became the chief commercial city of all North Africa under the Beni Hammad sultans. The Italian merchants of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had numerous buildings of their own in the city, such as warehouses, baths, and churches. In the fifteenth century Bugia became a haunt for pirates; after that time it lost its prosperity and importance.

Our photograph shows the ruins of the old gateway from the harbor, which dates from the eleventh century, and through which Lull must have entered the town.

Although there were Christian merchants in Bugia, they were a small minority, and were able to secure commercial freedom and favor only by avoiding all religious controversy and keeping their light carefully under a bushel. One can read in the history of the Mameluke dynasty, which ruled Egypt at this period, how Christians were regarded and treated by the Saracens So far as possible the odious edict of Omar II. was reimposed and its intolerant rules enforced.

The Mameluke sultan Nasir, "a jealous, cruel, suspicious, and avaricious tyrant," extended his power over Tunis and Bugia from 1308-1320. He was fanatical as well as cruel, and one has only to read how Christian churches were destroyed, Christians burned or mutilated, and their property confiscated in the capital, to know what must have been the state of the provinces.[xxxvii]

Raymund Lull no sooner came to Bugia than he found his way to a public place, stood up boldly, and proclaimed in the Arabic language that Christianity was the only true faith, and expressed his willingness to prove this to the satisfaction of all. We know not what the exact nature of his argument was on this occasion, but it touched the character of Mohammed. A commotion ensued and many hands were lifted to do him violence

The mufti, or chief of the Moslem clergy, rescued him and expostulated with him on his madness in thus exposing himself to peril.

"Death," Lull replied, "has no terrors whatever for a sincere servant of Christ who is laboring to bring souls to a knowledge edge of truth." After this, the mufti, who must have been well versed in Arabian philosophy, challenged Lull for proofs of the superiority of Christ's religion over that of Mohammed.

Ond of Lull's arguments, given in his controversial books, consists of presenting to the Saracens the Ten Commandments as the perfect law of God, and then showing them from their own books that Mohammed violated every one of these divine precepts. Another favorite argument of Lull with the Moslems was to portray the seven cardinal virtues and the seven deadly sins, only to show subsequently how bare Islam was of the former and how full of the latter! Such arguments are to be used with care even in the twentieth century; we can imagine their effect on the Moslems in North Africa in Lull's day.

Persecution followed. He was flung into a dungeon and for half a year remained a close prisoner, befriended only by some merchants of Genoa and Spain, who took pity on the aged champion of their common faith.

Meanwhile riches, wives, high place, and power were offered the Christian philosopher if only he would abjure his faith and turn Moslem. This was Lull's reply, from the depth of his dungeon, to all their enticements: "Ye have for me wives and all sorts of worldly pleasure if I accept the law of Mohammed? Alas I ye offer a poor prize, as all your earthly goods cannot purchase eternal glory. I, however, promise you, if ye will forsake your false and devilish law, which was spread by sword and force alone, and if ye accept my belief, Eternal Life, for the Christian faith was propagated by preaching and by the blood of holy martyrs. Therefore I advise you to become Christians even now, and so obtain everlasting glory and escape the pains of hell."[xxxviii]  Such words, from the lips of a man seventy-three years old, in perfect command of the Arabic tongue, learned in the wisdom of the Arabian philosophy, and from whose eyes flashed earnest zeal for the truth, must have come with tremendous force.

While he tarried in prison, Lull proposed that both parties should write a defense of their faith. He was busy fulfilling his part of the agreement when a sudden command of the governor of Bugia directed that he be deported. Whether the reason of this command was the results that followed Lull's preaching, we know not. His biographers indicate that Lull was visited in prison by Moslems who again and again urged him to apostatize. "During his imprisonment they plied him for six months with all the sensual temptations of Islam."[xxxix]

This must have been a bitter experience for the missionary in recalling the sins of his youth and the vision of his early manhood.

"But amid the torture and the taunting -

I have had Thee!

Thy hand was holding thy hand fast and faster,

Thy voice was close to me:

And glorious eyes said, 'Follow Me, thy Master,

Smile, as I smile thy faithfulness to see"

Raymund Lull left Bugia practically a prisoner, since the Moslems did not wish to have repeated the incident that followed his embarking at Tunis. During the voyage, however, a storm arose and the vessel was almost wrecked off the Italian coast near Pisa. Here he was rescued and received with all respect by those who had heard of his fame as a philosopher and missionary. From Pisa, Lull went by way of Genoa to Paris; of his work there and at the Council of Vienne we have already given an account.

CHAPTER 8: RAYMUND LULL AS PHILOSOPHER AND AUTHOR

"He was at once a philosophical systematizer and an analytic chemist, a skillful mariner and a successful propagator of Christianity," - Humboldt's "Cosmos," ii., 629.

"Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." Ecclesiastes

IT will be difficult in one short chapter to crowd an account of Lull's philosophy, which for two centuries after his death perplexed the genius of Europe, and to enumerate even a small number of the vast library of books which have Lull for their author. One does not know which to admire most, the versatile character of the genius, or the prodigious industry of the author.

Raymund Lull was from his youth a master of Catalan and wrote in it long before his conversion. Of his works in that language there exists no complete catalog. One of Lull's biographers states that the books written by Lull number four thousand! In the first published edition of his works (1721), two hundred and eighty two titles are given; yet only forty-five of these, when printed, took up ten large folio volumes. To understand something of the scope and ambition of this genius intellect, one must read the partial list of his books given in the bibliography at the close of this volume. Lull was a philosopher, a poet, a novelist, a writer of proverbs, a keen logician, a deep theologian, and a fiery controversialist. There was not a science cultivated in his age to which he did not add. The critical historian Winsor states that in 1295 Lull wrote a handbook on navigation which was not superseded by a better until after Columbus.

Dr. George Smith credits Lull with the independent invention of the mariners compass; and not without reason, for we find repeated references to the magnetic needle in his devotional books.[xl] Rewrote a treatise on "the weight of the elements" and their shape; on the sense of smell; on astronomy, astrology, arithmetic, and geometry. One of his books is entitled, "On the squaring and triangulation of the circle." In medieval medicine, jurisprudence, and metaphysics he was equally at home. His seven volumes on medicine include one book on the use of the mind in curing the sick! And another on the effect of climate on diseases.

He was a dogmatic theologian, and wrote sixty-three volumes of theological discussion, some of which are so abstruse as to produce doubt whether their author earned the title of "Doctor Illuminatus," given him by his contemporaries. Other titles among his theological writings there are which awaken curiosity, such as: "On the Most Triune Trinity"; "On the Form of God"; "On the Language of the Angels," etc.

Among the sixty-two books of meditation and devotion which are preserved in the lists of Lull's writings, there are none on the saints, and only six treat of the Virgin Mary. This is one of the many proofs in Lull's books that he was more of a Catholic than a Romanist, and that he esteemed Christ more than all the saints of the papal calendar. One of his books of devotion is entitled, "On the One Hundred Names of God," and was evidently prepared for the use of Moslems who were seeking the light.[xli]

Raymund Lull wrote or collected three books of proverbs, one of which contains six thousand popular sayings and maxims. Here are a few out of many beautiful gems to be found in this collection:

"Deum dilige, ut ipsum timaes

Pax est participatio sine labore.

Deus exemplum dedit de sua unitate in natura.

Fortitudo est vigor cordis contra maliciam.

Divitiae sunt copiositates voluntatis.

Praedestinatio est scire Dei qui scit homines.

Deus adeo magnum habet recolere quod nihil obliviscitur."

Among Lull's works there are twenty on logic and metaphysics. One of the latter has the title, "On the Greatness and the Littleness of Man." Among his sermons and books on preaching there is only one commentary. That, in accord with Lull's mission and character, is a commentary on the prologue of John's Gospel.

Of making many controversial books there was no end in the days of Lull. His writings in this department, however, are not, as are those of his contemporaries, against heretics to condemn them, with their errors, to ecclesiastical perdition. Even the titles of his controversial writings show his irenic spirit and his desire to convert rather than to convince. All through his books there runs the spirit of earnest devotion; even his natural philosophy is full of the world to come and its glories. At the end of one of his books he bursts out with this prayer: "O Lord, my help I till this work is completed thy servant can not go to the land of the Saracens to glorify Thy glorious name, for I am so occupied with this book which I undertake for Thine honor that I can think of nothing else. For this reason I beseech Thee for that grace, that Thou wouldst stand by me that I may soon finish it and speedily depart to die the death of a martyr out of love to Thee, if it shall please Thee to count me worthy of it."

In 1296 he concluded a work on the logic of Christianity with this seraph-song to the key of world-wide missions: "Let Christians consumed with burning love for the cause of faith only consider that since nothing has power to withstand truth, they can by God's help and His might bring infidels back to the faith; so that the precious name of Jesus, which in most regions is still unknown to most men, may be proclaimed and adored." And again: "As my book is finished on the vigils of John the Baptist, who was the herald of the light, and pointed to Him who is the true light, may it please our Lord to kindle a new light of the world which may guide unbelievers to conversion, that with us they may meet Christ, to whom be honor and praise world without end." This is not the language of pious rhetoric, but the passionate outcry of a soul hungry for the coming of the Kingdom.

Lull was a popular author. He wrote not only in learned Latin, but in the vernacular of his native land. Noble calls him the Moody of the thirteenth century. He tried to reach the masses. His influence on popular religious ideas in Spain was so great, through his Catalan hymns and proverbs and catechisms that Helffierich compares him to Luther and calls him a reformer before the Reformation.[xlii]  He made the study of theology popular by putting its commonplaces into verse, so that the laity could learn by heart the summary of the Catholic faith and meet Moslems and Jews with ready-made arguments. Scholasticism was for the clergy; the "Lullian method" was intended for the laity as well. Raymund Lull had become discontented with the methods of scientific inquiry commonly in use, and so set himself to construct his "Ars Major," or Greater Art, which by a series of mechanical contrivances and a system of mnemonics was adapted to answer any question on any topic. This new philosophy is the key-note of most of Lull's treatises. All his philosophical works are but different explanations and phases of the "Ars Major." In his other books he seldom fails to call attention to this universal key of knowledge which the great art Supplies. What is the method of Lull's philosophy? The most complete account and the most luminous explanation of its abstruse perplexities is given by Pantl in his "History of Logic" (vol. iii., [145-147). This is a summary of it:

The reasonableness and demonstrability of Christianity is the real basis of his great method. Nothing, Lull held, interfered more with the spread of Christian truth than the attempt of its advocates to represent its doctrines as undemonstrable mysteries. The very difference between Christ and Antichrist lies in the fact that the former can prove his truth by miracles, etc., while the latter cannot. The glory of Christianity, Lull argues, is that it does not maintain the undemonstrable, but simply the supersensuous. It is not against reason, but above unsanctified reason. The demonstration, however, which Lull seeks is not that of ordinary logic. He says that we require a method which will reason not only from effect to cause, or from cause to effect, but per aquiprantiam, that is, by showing the contrary attributes can exist together in one subject. This method must be real, and not altogether formal or subjective. It must deal with the things themselves, and not merely with second intentions.

Lull's great art goes beyond logic and metaphysic: it provides a universal art of discovery, and contains the formulae to which every demonstration in every science can be reduced-being, in fact, a sort of cyclopedia of categories and syllogisms. Lull's "Ars Major" is a tabulation of the different points of view from which propositions may be framed about objects. It is a mnemonic, or, rather, a mechanical contrivance for ascertaining all possible categories that apply to any possible proposition. Just as by knowing the typical terminations or conjugations of Arabic grammar, for example, we can inflect and conjugate any word; so, Lull reasons, by a knowledge of the different types of existence and their possible relations and combinations we should possess knowledge of the whole of nature and of all truth as a system. "The great art, accordingly, begins by laying down an alphabet according to which the nine letters from B to K stand for the different kinds of substances and attributes. Thus in the series of substances B stands for God, C, angel, D, heaven, E, man, and so on; in the series of absolute attributes B represents goodness, D, duration, C, greatness; or, again, in the nine questions of scholastic philosophy B stands for utrum, C, for quid, D, for de quo, etc." By manipulating these letters in such a way as will show the relationship of different objects and predicates you exercise the "new art." This manipulation is effected by the help of certain so called "figures" or geometrical arrangements. Their construction differs in various books of Lull's philosophy, but their general character is the same. Circles and other figures are divided into sections by lines or colors, and then marked by Lull's symbolical letters so as to show all the possible combinations of which the letters are capable. For example, one arrangement represents the possible combinations of the attributes of God; another, the possible conditions of the soul, and so on. These figures are further fenced about by various definitions and rules, and their use is further specified by various "evacuations" and "multiplications" which show us how to exhaust all the possible combinations and sets of questions which the terms of our proposition admit. When so "multiplied," the "fourth figure " is, in Lull's language, that by which other sciences can be most readily and aptly acquired; and it may accordingly be taken as no unfair specimen of Lull's method. This "fourth figure" is simply an arrangement of three concentric circles each divided into nine sections, B, C, D, etc., and so constructed of pasteboard that when the upper and smaller circle remains fixed the two lower and outer revolve around it. Taking the letters in the sense of the series we are then able, by revolving the outer circles, to find out the possible relationships between different conceptions and elucidate the agreement or disagreement that exists between them Meanwhile the middle circle, in similar fashion gives us the intermediate terms by which they are to be connected or disconnected.

This Lullian method, of a wheel within a wheel, seems at first as perplexing as the visions of Ezekiel and as puerile as the automatic book-machine in "Gulliver's Travels." But it would be unfair to say that Lull supposed "thinking could be reduced to a mere rotation of pasteboard circles," or that his art enabled men "to talk without judgment of that which we do not know." Lull sought to give not a compendium of knowledge but a method of investigation. He sought a more scientific method for philosophy than the dialectic of his contemporaries. In his conception of a universal method and his application of the vernacular languages to philosophy he was the herald of Bacon himself. In his demand for a reasonable religion he was beyond his age. And, in applying this system, weak tho it was, to the conversion of infidels, he proved himself the first missionary philosopher. He perceived the possibilities (tho not the limitations) of comparative theology and the science of logic as weapons for the missionary. Nothing will so clearly illustrate the versatile and brilliant character of Lull's genius as to turn from his "Ars Major" to his religious novel," Blanquerna," the great allegory of the Middle Ages, and the predecessor of Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."[xliii] In fact, Raymund Lull was the first European who wrote a religious story in the vernacular.  The romances of the days of chivalry were doubtless well known to him before his conversion, and what was more it natural than that the missionary knight should write the romance of his new crusade of love against the Saracens? "Banquerna" is an allegory in four books. Its sub-title states that it is a mirror of morals in all classes of society, and treats of matrimony, religion, prelates, the papacy, and the hermit's life." It is the story of the pilgrimage of Enast, the hero, who marries Aloma, the daughter of a wealthy widow. Their only child, Blanquerna, desires to be a monk, but falls in love with a beautiful and pious maiden, Dona Cana by name.

Both, however, decide to remain ascetics. Blanquerna enters a monastery and his fair sweetheart turns nun. The allegory relates the experiences of these characters in their different surroundings-the pilgrim, the monk, and the abbess. To borrow words in another book from Lull himself, "we see the pilgrim traveling away in dis tant lands to seek Thee, tho Thou art so near that every man, if he would, might find Thee in his own house and chamber. The pilgrims are so deceived by false men, whom they meet in taverns and churches, that many of them when they return home show themselves to be far worse than they were when they set out." Dona Cana, the abbess, disputes with her sister nuns the authority of the priest to bind the conscience, and even draws in question some of the doctrines of the Church! The various characters bear allegorical names. When Blanquerna reaches Rome the Pope has a court-jester called "Raymund the Fool," who is none other than Lull himself, and who tells the cardinals some rare truths. The four cardinals bear the names, "We-give-thee-thanks," "Lord-God-heavenly-King, We-glorify-Thee," and "Thou-only-art-Holy" Blanquerna -finally becomes Pope and uses his authority in sending out a vast army of monk-missionaries to convert Jews and Mohammedans.

In various parts of the book songs of praise and devotion occur, while the missionary idea is never absent This remarkable allegory, as well as many other works of Lull, deserves to be rescued from oblivion. The arrival of Blanquerna before the door of the Enchanted Castle, over whose gateway the Ten Commandments are written, and, within, the solemn conclave of gray-beards who discourse on the vanity of the world, are two scenes that show a genius equal to that of John Bunyan. There are other resemblances between these two pilgrims rescued from the City of Destruction and describing their own experiences in allegory; but to present them here would make this chapter too lengthy. Who would know more of Lull the philosopher and the author is referred to the bibliography and to the writings themselves.

CHAPTER 9: HIS LAST MISSIONARY JOURNEY AND HIS MARTYRDOM

"As a hungry man makes despatch and takes large morsels on account of his great hunger, so Thy servant feels a great desire to die that he may glorify Thee. He hurries day and night to complete his work in order that he may give up his blood and his tears to be shed for Thee."—Lull's "Liber Contemplatonis in Deo."

"Is not devotion always blind? That a furrow be fecund it must have blood and tears such as Augustine called the blood of the soul."—Sabatier

THE scholastics of the Middle Ages taught that there were five methods of acquiring knowledge: observation, reading, listening, conversation, and meditation. But they left out the most important method, namely, that of suffering. Lull’s philosophy had taught him much, but it was in the school of suffering that he grew into a saint. Love, not learning, is the key to his character. The philosopher was absorbed in the missionary. The last scene of Lull's checkered life is not at Rome nor Paris nor Naples in the midst of his pupils, but in Africa, on the very shores from which he was twice banished.

At the council of Vienne (as we saw in Chapter V.) Lull had rejoiced to see some portion of the labors of his life brought to fruition. When the deliberations of the council were over and the battle for instruction in Oriental languages in the universities of Europe had been won, it might have been thought that he would have been willing to enjoy the rest he had so well deserved. Raymund Lull was now seventy-nine years old, and the last few years of his life must have told heavily even on so strong a frame and so brave a spirit as he possessed. His pupils and friends naturally desired that he should end his days in the peaceful pursuit of learning and the comfort of companionship.

Such, however, was not Lull's wish. His ambition was to die as a missionary and not as a teacher of philosophy. Even his favorite "Ars Major" had to give way to that ars maxima expressed in Lull's own motto, "He that lives by the life cannot die."

This language reminds one of Paul's Second Epistle to Timothy, where the Apostle tells us that he too was now "already being offered, and that the time of his departure was at hand." In Lull's "Contemplations" we read: "As the needle naturally turns to the north when it is touched by the magnet, so is it fitting, O Lord, that Thy servant should turn to love and praise and serve Thee; seeing that out of love to him Thou wast willing to endure such grievous pangs and sufferings." And again: "Men are wont to die, O Lord, from old age, the failure of natural warmth and excess of cold; but thus, if it be Thy will, Thy servant would not wish to die; he would prefer to die in the glow of love, even as Thou wast willing to die for him,"[xliv]

Other passages in Lull's writings of this period, such as the words at the head of this chapter, show that he longed for the crown of martyrdom. If we consider the age in which Lull lived and the race from which he sprang, this is not surprising. Even before the thirteenth century, thousands of Christians died as martyrs to the faith in Spain; many of them cruelly tortured by the Moors for blaspheming Mohammed.

Among the Franciscan order a mania for martyrdom prevailed. Every friar who was sent to a foreign shore craved to win the heavenly palm and wear the purple passion-flower. The spirit of the Crusades was in possession of the Church and its leaders, even after the sevenfold failure of its attempts to win by the sword. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to the Templars: "The soldier of Christ is safe when he slays, safer when he dies. When he slays it profits Christ; when he dies it profits himself"

Much earlier than the end of the Ages the doctrines of martyrdom had taken hold of the Church. Stories of the early martyrs were the popular literature to fan the flame of enthusiasm. A martyr's death was supposed, on the authority of many Scripture passages,[xlv] to cancel all sins of the past life, to supply the place of baptism, and to secure admittance at once to Paradise without a sojourn in Purgatory. One has only to read Dante, the graphic painter of society in the Middle Ages, to see this illustrated. Above all, it was taught that martyrs had the beatific vision of the Savior (even as did St. Stephen), and that their dying prayers were sure of hastening the coming of Christ's kingdom.

But the violent passions so prevalent and the universal hatred of Jews and infidels made men forget that "not the blood but the cause makes the martyr."

Raymund Lull was ahead of his age in his aims and in his methods, but he was not and could not be altogether uninfluenced by his environment. The spirit of chivalry was not yet dead in the knight who forty-eight years before had seen a vision of the Crucified and had been knighted by the pierced hands for a spiritual crusade. Like Heber he felt:

The Son of God goes forth to war,

A kingly crown to gain;

His blood-red banner streams afar

Who follows in His train?

Who best can drink his cup of Woe

Triumphant over pain

Who patient bears His cross below

He follows in His train.

A glorious band, the chosen few

On whom the Spirit came:

Twelve valiant saints, their hope they knew

And mocked the cross and flame.

They climbed the steep ascent of heaven

Through peril, toil, and pain;

O God, to us may grace be given To follow in their train.

The dangers and difficulties that made Lull shrink back from his journey at Genoa in 1291 Only urged him forward to North Africa once more In 1314 His love had not grown cold, but burned the brighter "with the failure of natural warmth and the weakness of old age." He longed not only for the martyr's crown, but also once more to see his little band of believers.

Animated by these sentiments, he crossed over to Bugia on August 14, and for nearly a whole year labored secretly among a little circle of converts, whom on his previous visits he had won over to the Christian faith.

Both to these converts, and to any others who had boldness to come and join them in religious conversation, Lull continued to expatiate on the one theme of which he never seemed to tire, the inherent superiority of Christianity to Islam. He saw that the real strength of Islam is not in the second clause of its all too brief creed, hut in its first clause. The Mohammedan conception of the unity and the attributes of God is a great half-truth. Their whole philosophy of religion finds its pivot in their wrong idea of absolute monism in the Deity. We do not find Lull wasting arguments to disprove Mohammed's mission, but presenting facts to show that Mohammed's conception of God was deficient and untrue.  If for nothing else he deserves the honor, yet this great principle of apologetics in the controversy with Islam, as first stated by Lull, marks him the great missionary to Moslems.

"If Moslems," he argued, "according to their law affirm that God loved man because He created him, endowed him with noble faculties, and pours His benefits upon him, then the Christians according to their law affirm the same. But inasmuch as the Christians believe more than this, and affirm that God so loved man that He was willing to become man, to endure poverty, ignominy, torture, and death for his sake, which the Jews and Saracens do not teach concerning Him; therefore is the religion of the Christians, which thus reveals a Love beyond all other love, superior to that of those which reveals it only in an inferior degree." Islam is a loveless religion. Raymund Lull believed and proved that Love could conquer it. The Koran denies the Incarnation, and so remains ignorant of the true character not only of the Godhead, but of God (Matt. xi. 27).

At the time when Lull visited Bugia and was imprisoned, the Moslems were already replying to his treatises and were winning converts from among Christians. He says: "The Saracens write books for the destruction of Christianity; I have myself seen such when I was in prison.... For one Saracen who becomes a Christian, ten Christians and more become Mohammedans. It becomes those who are in power to consider what the end will be of such a state of things God will not be mocked."[xlvi]

Lull did not think, apparently, that lack of speedy results was an argument for abandoning the work of preaching to Moslems the unsearchable riches of Christ.

High failure, towering far o'er low success,

Firm faith, unwarped by others' faithlessness,

Which, ken day brightest at eventide,

Scented never half so deathless, till he died."

For over ten months the aged missionary dwelt in hiding, talking and praying with his converts and trying to influence those who were not yet persuaded. His one weapon was the argument of God's love in Christ, and his "shield of faith" was that of medieval art which so aptly symbolizes the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. So lovingly and so unceasingly did Lull urge the importance of this doctrine that we have put the scutum fidei on the cover of this biography.[xlvii]

Of the length, breadth, depth, and height of the love of Christ, all Lull's devotional writings are full.

At length, weary of seclusion, and longing for martyrdom, he came forth into the open market and presented himself to the people as the same man whom they had once expelled from their town. It was Elijah showing himself to a mob of Ahabs! Lull stood before them and threatened them with divine wrath if they still persisted in their errors. He pleaded with love, but spoke plainly the whole truth. The consequences can be easily anticipated. Filled with fanatic fury at his boldness, and unable to reply to his arguments, the populace seized him, and dragged him out of the town; there by the command, or at least the connivance, of the king, he was stoned on the 30th of June, 1315.

Whether Raymund Lull died on that day or whether, still alive, he was rescued by a few of his friends, is disputed by his biographers. According to the latter idea his friends carried the wounded saint to the beach and he was conveyed in a vessel to Majorca, his birthplace, only to die ere he reached Palma. According to other accounts, which seem to me to carry more authority, Lull did not survive the stoning by the mob, but died, like Stephen, outside the city. Also in this case, devout men carried Lull to his burial and brought the body to Palma, Majorca, where it was laid to rest in the church of San Francisco.

An elaborate tomb was afterward built in this church as a memorial to Lull. Its date is uncertain, hut it is probably of the fourteenth century. Above the elaborately carved panels of marble are the shields or coat of arms of Raymund Lull; on either side are brackets of metal work to hold candles. The upper horizontal panel shows Lull in repose, in the garb of a Franciscan, with a rosary on his girdle, and his hands in the attitude of prayer.

May we not believe that this was his attitude when the angry mob caught up stones, and crash followed crash against the body of the aged missionary? Perhaps not only the manner of his death but his last prayer was like that of Stephen the first martyr.

It was the teaching of the medieval Church that there are three kinds of martyrdom: The first both in will and in deed, which is the highest; the second, in will but not in deed; the thin in deed but not in will St. Stephen and the whole army of those who were martyred by fire or sword for their testimony are examples of the first kind of martyrdom. St. John the Evangelist and others like him who died in exile or old age as witnesses to the truth but without violence, are examples of the second kind. The Holy Innocents, slain by Herod, are an example of the third kind. Lull verily was a martyr in will and in deed Not only at Bugia, when he fell asleep, but for all the years of his long life after his conversion, he was a witness to the Truth, ever ready "to fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ" in his flesh "for his body's sake which is the Church."

To be stoned to death while preaching the love of Christ to Moslems that was the fitting end for such a life. "Lull," says Noble, "was the greatest of medieval missionaries, perhaps the grandest of all missionaries from Paul to Carey and Livingstone. His career suggests those of Jonah the prophet, Paul the missionary, and Stephen the martyr. Though his death was virtually self-murder, its heinousness is lessened by his homesickness for heaven, his longing to be with Christ, and the sublimity of his character and career."

CHAPTER 10: "WHO BEING DEAD YET SPRAKETH"

He who loves not lives not; he who lives by the Life cannot die - Raymund Lull.

One step farther, but some slight response from his church or his age, and Raymund Lull would have anticipated William Carey by exactly seven centuries." George Smith.

NEANDER does not hesitate to compare Raymund Lull with Anselm, whom he resembled in possessing the threefold talents uncommon among men and so seldom found in one character: namely, a powerful intellect, a loving heart, and efficiency in practical things. If we acknowledge that Lull possessed these three divine gifts, we at once place him at the front as the true type of what a missionary to Moslems should be today.

He, whom Helfferich calls "the most remarkable figure of the Middle Ages" being dead yet speaketh. The task which he first undertook is still before the Church unaccomplished The modern missionary to Islam can see a reflection of his own trials of faith, difficulties, temptations, hopes, and aspirations in the story of Lull. Only with his spirit of self-sacrifice and enthusiasm can one gird for the conflict with this Goliath of the Philistines, who for thirteen centuries has defied the armies of the Living God.

Lull's writings contain glorious watch-words for the spiritual crusade against Islam in the twentieth century. How up-to-date is this prayer which we find at the close of one of his books. Lord of heaven, Father of all times, when Thou didst send Thy Son to take upon Him human nature, He and His apostles lived in outward peace with Jews, Pharisees, and other men; for never by outward violence did they capture or slay any of the unbelievers, Or of those who persecuted them. Of this outward peace they availed themselves to bring the erring to the knowledge of the truth and to a communion of spirit with themselves. And so after Thy example should Christians conduct themselves toward Moslems, but since that ardor of devotion which glowed in apostles and holy men of old no longer inspires us, love and devotion through almost all the world have grown cold, and therefore do Christians expend their efforts far more in the outward than in the spiritual conflict."

England's war in the Sudan cost more in men and money a hundred times than all missions to Moslems in the past century! Yet the former was only to put down a Moslem usurper by fire and sword; the latter represents the effort of Christendom to convert over two hundred millions of those who are in the darkness of Islam. There was a thousandfold more enthusiasm in the dark ages to wrest an empty sepulcher from the Saracens than there is in our day to bring them the knowledge of a living Savior. Six hundred years after Raymund Lull we are still "playing at missions" as far as Mohammedanism is concerned. For there are more mosques in Jerusalem than there are missionaries in all Arabia; and more millions of Moslems unreached in China than the number of missionary societies that work for Moslems in the whole world.

In North Africa, where Lull witnessed to the truth, missions to Moslems were not begun again until 1884. Now there is again daybreak in Morocco, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Egypt. Yet how feeble are the efforts in all Moslem lands compared with the glorious opportunities How vast is the work still before us, six hundred years after Lull.

According to recent and exhaustive statistics, the population of the Mohammedan world is placed at 259,680,672.[xlviii]  Of these 11,515,402 are in Europe, 171,278,008 are in Asia, 19,446 are in Australasia, 76,818,253 are in Africa, and 49,563 are in North and South America. Three per cent. of Europe's population is Moslem; Asia has 18 per cent., and Africa 37 per cent. Out of every 100 souls in the world 16 are followers of Mohammed. Islam's power extends in many lands, from Canton to Sierra Leone, and from Zanzibar to the Caspian Sea. Islam is growing today even faster in some lands than it did in the days of Lull. And yet in other lands, such as European Turkey, Caucasia, Syria, Palestine, and Turkestan, the number of Moslems is decreasing. In Lull's day the empire of Moslem faith and Moslem politics nearly coincided. Nowhere was there real liberty, and all the doors of access seemed barred. Now five-sixths of the Moslem world are accessible to foreigners and missionaries; but not one-sixtieth has ever been occupied by missions. There are no missions to the Moslems of all Afghanistan, Western Turkestan, Western, Central, and Southern Arabia, Southern Persia, and vast regions in North Central Africa.

Mission statistics of direct work for Moslems are an apology for apathy rather than an index of enterprise. The Church forgot its heritage of Lull's great example and was ages behind time. To Persia, one thousand years after Islam, the first missionary came; Arabia waited twelve centuries; in China Islam has eleven hundred years the start. This neglect appears the more inexcusable if we consider the great opportunities of today More than 125,000,000 Moslems are now under Christian rulers. The keys to every gateway in the Moslem world are today in the political grasp of Christian Powers, with the exception of Mecca and Constantinople. Think only, for example, of Gibraltar, Algiers, Cairo, Tunis, Khartum, Batoum, Aden, and Muskat, not to speak of India and the farther East. It is impossible to enforce the laws relating to renegades from Islam under the flag of the "infidel." One could almost visit Mecca as easily as Lull did Tunis were the same spirit of martyrdom alive among us that inspired the pioneer of Palma. The journey from London to Bagdad can now be accomplished with less hardship and in less time than it must have taken Lull to go from Paris to Bugia.

How much more promising too is the condition of Islam today! The philosophical disintegration of the system began very early, but has grown more rapidly in the past century than in all the twelve that preceded. The strength of Islam is to sit still, to forbid thought, to gag reformers, to abominate progress. But the Wahabis "drew a bow at a venture" and smote their king "between the joints of the harness." Their exposure of the unorthodoxy of Turkish Mohammedanism set all the world thinking. Abd-ul-Wahab meant to reform Islam by digging for the original foundations. The result was that they now must prop up the house! In India they are apologizing for Mohammed's morals and subjecting the Koran to higher criticism. In Egypt prominent Moslems advocate abolishing the veil. In Persia the Babi movement has undermined Islam everywhere. In Constantinople they are trying to put new wine into the old skins by carefully diluting the wine; the New Turkish party is making the rent of the old garment worse by its patchwork politics.

In addition to all this, the Bible now speaks the languages of Islam, and is everywhere preparing the way for the conquest of the cross. Even in the Moslem world, and in spite of all hindrances, "it is daybreak everywhere." The great lesson of Lull's life is that our weapons against Islam should never be carnal, Love, and love alone, will conquer. But it must be an all-sacrificing, an all-consuming love - a love that is faithful unto death.

"Taking him all in all," says Noble, "Lull's myriad gifts and graces make him the evening and the morning star of missions." He presaged the setting of medieval missions and heralded the dawn of the Reformation The story of his life and labors for Moslems in the dark ages is a challenge of faith to us who live in the light of the twentieth century to follow in the footsteps of Raymund Lull and win the whole Mohammedan world for Christ.

* * * * * * * * * *

If you have been blessed by this volume, you may also be interested in some of our other Christian Classics Treasury collections:

MISSIONS COLLECTIONS:

- Amy Carmichael 8-in-1

- The Hudson Taylor Collection (7-in-1)

- David Livingstone Collection (5-in-1)

- Samuel Zwemer 7-in-1(Missions in Arabia)

- Samuel Zwemer, 7-in-1, Vol 2

- Key to the Missionary Problem (Andrew Murray)

- Classic Missions Texts  (Murray, Allen, Carey, Zwemer)

CLASSIC COLLECTIONS:

- 7 Catholic Classics

- 7 Classics on PRAYER

- 7 Classics on HOLINESS

- 7 Classics on EVANGELISM and SOUL-WINNING

- 5 Classics on the HOLY SPIRIT

- 5 Classics on POWER

- EDERSHEIM COLLECTION  (Sketches of Jewish Social Life; The Temple; Jesus the Messiah)

- The Didache (Teaching of the 12 Apostles)

PREACHERS AND REVIVALISTS:

- Biography of John Wesley Collection: 4-in-1

- Biography of Andrew Murray

- Charles Spurgeon: 40 sermons on Prayer

- Charles Spurgeon: Lectures to My Students

- The George Muller Collection

- The Revival Writings of Jonathan Edwards (7-in-1)

- The Works of Catherine Booth (7-in-1)

- The Works of Charles Finney

- The Works of D. L. Moody

- The Works of R. A. Torrey

- The Works of William Booth

2.  THE LIFE AND DIARY OF DAVID BRAINERD WITH NOTES AND REFLECTIONS (d. 1747)

BY

The Rev. JONATHAN EDWARDS

Illustrations

Preface

THERE ARE TWO WAYS of representing and recommending true religion and virtue to the world; the one, by doctrine and precept; the other, by instance and example; both are abundantly used in the Holy Scriptures. Not only are the grounds, nature, design, and importance of religion clearly exhibited in the doctrine of scripture its exercise and practice plainly delineated, and abundantly enforced, in its commands and counsels but there we have many excellent examples of religion, in its power and practice, set before us, in the histories both of the Old and New Testament.

JESUS CHRIST, the great Prophet of God, when he came to be “the light of the world” to teach and enforce true religion, in a greater degree than ever had been before made use of both these methods. In his doctrine, he not only declared the mind and will of God the nature and properties of that virtue which becomes creatures of our make and in our circumstances more clearly and fully than ever it had been before; and more powerfully enforced it by what he declared of the obligations and inducements to holiness; but he also in his own practice gave a most perfect example of the virtue he taught. He exhibited to the world such an illustrious pattern of humility, divine love, discreet zeal, self-denial, obedience, patience, resignation, fortitude, meekness, forgiveness, compassion, benevolence, and universal holiness, as neither men nor angels ever saw before.

God also in his providence has been wont to make use of both these methods to hold forth light to mankind, and inducements to their duty, in all ages. He has from time to time raised up eminent teachers, to exhibit and bear testimony to the truth by their doctrine, and to oppose the errors, darkness, and wickedness of the world; and he has also raised up some eminent persons who have set bright examples of that religion which is taught and prescribed in the word of God; whose examples have, in the course of divine providence, been set forth to public view. These have a great tendency both to engage the attention of men to the doctrine and rules taught, and also to confirm and enforce them; especially when these bright examples have been exhibited in the same persons who have been eminent teachers. Hereby the world has had opportunity to see a confirmation of the truth, efficacy, and amiableness of the religion taught, in the practice of the same persons who have most clearly and forcibly taught it; and above all, when these bright examples have been set by eminent teachers, in a variety of unusual circumstances of remarkable trial; and when God has withal remarkably distinguished them with wonderful success of their instructions and labours.

Such an instance we have in the excellent person, whose life is published in the following pages. His example is attended with a great variety of circumstances tending to engage the attention of religious people, especially in these parts of the world. He was one of distinguished natural abilities; as all are sensible, who had acquaintance with him. As a minister of the gospel, he was called to unusual services in that work; and his ministry was attended with very remarkable and unusual events. His course of religion began before the late times of extraordinary religious commotion; yet he was not an idle spectator, but had a near concern in many things that passed at that time. He had a very extensive acquaintance with those who have been the subjects of the late religious operations, in places far distant, in people of different nations, education, manners, and customs. He had a peculiar opportunity of acquaintance with the false appearances and counterfeits of religion; was the instrument of a most remarkable awakening, a wonderful and abiding alteration and moral transformation of subjects who peculiarly render the change rare and astonishing.

In the following account, the reader will have an opportunity to see, not only what were the external circumstances and remarkable incidents of the life of this person, and how he spent his time from day to day, as to his external behaviour; but also what passed in his own heart. Here he will see the wonderful change he experienced in his mind and disposition, the manner in which that change was brought to pass, how it continued, what were its consequences in his inward frames, thoughts, affections, and secret exercises, through many vicissitudes and trials, for more than eight years.

He will also see, how all ended at last, in his sentiments, frame, and behaviour, during a long season of the gradual and sensible approach of death, under a lingering illness; and what were the effects of his religion in dying circumstances, or in the last stages of his illness. The account being written, the reader may have opportunity at his leisure to compare the various parts of the story, and deliberately to view and weigh the whole, and consider how far what is related is agreeable to the dictates of right reason and the holy word of God.

I am far from supposing, that Mr. Brainerd’s inward exercises and experiences, or his external conduct, were free from all imperfections. The example of Jesus Christ is the only example that ever existed in human nature as altogether perfect; which therefore is a rule to try all other examples by; and the dispositions, frames, and practices of others must be commended and followed no further, than they were followers of Christ.

There is one thing in Mr. Brainerd, easily discernible by the following account of his life, which may be called an imperfection in him, which though not properly an imperfection of a moral nature, yet may possibly be made an objection against the extraordinary appearances of religion and devotion in him, by such as seek for objections against every thing that can be produced in favour of true vital religion; and that is, that he was, by his constitution and natural temper, so prone to melancholy and dejection of spirit. There are some who think that all serious strict religion is a melancholy thing, and that what is called Christian experience, is little else besides melancholy vapours disturbing the brain, and exciting enthusiastic imaginations. But that Mr. Brainerd’s temper or constitution inclined him to despondency, is no just ground to suspect his extraordinary devotion to be only the fruit of a warm imagination. I doubt not but that all who have well observed mankind, will readily grant, that not all who by their natural constitution or temper are most disposed to dejection, are the most susceptive of lively and strong impressions on their imagination, or the most subject to those vehement affections, which are the fruits of such impressions. But they must well know, that many who are of a very happy and sanguine natural temper are vastly more so; and if their affections are turned into a religious channel, are much more exposed to enthusiasm, than many of the former. As to Mr. Brainerd in particular, notwithstanding his inclination to despondency, he was evidently one of those who usually are the furthest from a teeming imagination; being of a penetrating genius, of clear thought, of close reasoning, and a very exact judgment; as all know, who knew him. As he had a great insight into human nature, and was very discerning and judicious in general; so he excelled in his judgment and knowledge in divinity, but especially in things appertaining to inward experimental religion. He most accurately distinguished between real, solid piety, and enthusiasm; between those affections that are rational and scriptural having their foundation in light and judgment and those that are founded in whimsical conceits, strong impressions on the imagination, and vehement emotions of the animal spirits. He was exceedingly sensible of men’s exposedness to these things; how much they had prevailed, and what multitudes had been deceived by them; of their pernicious consequences, and the fearful mischief they had done in the Christian world. He greatly abhorred such a religion, and was abundant in bearing testimony against it, living and dying; and was quick to discern when any thing of that nature arose, though in its first buddings, and appearing under the most fair and plausible disguises. He had a talent for describing the various workings of this imaginary, enthusiastic religion evincing its falseness and vanity, and demonstrating the great difference between this and true spiritual devotion which I scarcely ever knew equalled in any person.

His judiciousness did not only appear in distinguishing among the experiences of others, but also among the various exercises of his own mind; particularly in discerning what within himself was to be laid to the score of melancholy; in which he exceeded all melancholy persons that ever I was acquainted with. This was doubtless owing to a peculiar strength in his judgment; for it is a rare thing indeed, that melancholy people are well sensible of their own disease, and fully convinced that such and such things are to be ascribed to it, as are its genuine operations and fruits. Mr. Brainerd did not obtain that degree of skill at once, but gradually; as the reader may discern by the following account of his life. In the former part of his religious course, he imputed much of that kind of gloominess of mind and those dark thoughts to spiritual desertion, which in the latter part of his life he was abundantly sensible were owing to the disease of melancholy; accordingly he often expressly speaks of them in his diary as arising from this cause. He often in conversation spoke of the difference between melancholy and godly sorrow, true humiliation and spiritual desertion, and the great danger of mistaking the one for the other, and the very hurtful nature of melancholy; discoursing with great judgment upon it, and doubtless much more judiciously for what he knew by his own experience.

But besides what may be argued from Mr. Brainerd’s strength of judgment, it is apparent in fact, that he was not a person of a warm imagination. His inward experiences, whether in his convictions or his conversion, and his religious views and impressions through the course of his life, were not excited by strong and lively images formed in his imagination; nothing at all appears of it in his diary from beginning to end. He told me on his death-bed, that although once, when he was very young in years and experience, he was deceived into a high opinion of such things looking on them as superior attainments in religion, beyond what he had ever arrived at was ambitious of them, and earnestly sought them; yet he never could obtain them. He moreover declared, that he never in his life had a strong impression on his imagination, of any outward form, external glory, or any thing of that nature; which kind of impressions abound among enthusiastic people.

As Mr. Brainerd’s religious impressions, views, and affections in their nature were vastly different from enthusiasm; so were their effects in him as contrary to it as possible. Nothing like enthusiasm puffs men up with a high conceit of their own wisdom, holiness, eminence, and sufficiency; and makes them so bold, forward, assuming, and arrogant. But the reader will see, that Mr. Brainerd’s religion constantly disposed him to a most mean thought of himself, an abasing sense of his own exceeding sinfulness, deficiency, unprofitableness, and ignorance; looking on himself as worse than others; disposing him to universal benevolence and meekness; in honour to prefer others, and to treat all with kindness and respect. And when melancholy prevailed, and though the effects of it were very prejudicial to him, yet it had not the effects of enthusiasm; but operated by dark and discouraging thoughts of himself, as ignorant, wicked, and wholly unfit for the work of the ministry, or even to be seen among mankind. Indeed, at the time forementioned, when he had not learned well to distinguish between enthusiasm and solid religion, he joined, and kept company with, some who were tinged with no small degree of the former. For a season he partook with them in a degree of their dispositions and behaviours; though, as was observed before, he could not obtain those things wherein their enthusiasm itself consisted, and so could not become like them in that respect, however he erroneously desired and sought it. But certainly it is not at all to be wondered at, that a youth, a young convert, one who had his heart so swallowed up in religion, and who so earnestly desired his flourishing state and who had so little opportunity for reading, observation, and experience should for a while be dazzled and deceived with the glaring appearances of mistaken devotion and zeal; especially considering the extraordinary circumstances of that day. He told me on his death-bed, that while he was in these circumstances he was out of his element, and did violence to himself, while complying, in his conduct, with persons of a fierce and imprudent zeal, from his great veneration of some whom he looked upon as better than himself. So that it would be very unreasonable, that his error at that time should nevertheless be esteemed a just ground of prejudice against the whole of his religion, and his character in general; especially considering, how greatly his mind was soon changed, and how exceedingly he afterwards lamented his error, and abhorred himself for his imprudent zeal and misconduct at that time, even to the breaking of his heart, and almost to the overbearing of his natural strength; and how much of a Christian spirit he showed, in condemning himself for that misconduct, as the reader will see.

What has been now mentioned of Mr. Brainerd, is so far from being a just ground of prejudice against what is related in the following account of his life, that, if duly considered, it will render the history the more serviceable. For by his thus joining for a season with enthusiasts, he had a more full and intimate acquaintance with what belonged to that sort of religion; and so was under better advantages to judge of the difference between that, and what he finally approved, and strove to his utmost to promote, in opposition to it. And hereby the reader has the more to convince him that Mr. Brainerd, in his testimony against it, and the spirit and behaviour of those who are influenced by it, speaks from impartial conviction, and not from prejudice; because therein he openly condemns his own former opinion and conduct, on account of which he had greatly suffered from his opposers, and for which some continued to reproach him as long as he lived.

Another imperfection in Mr. Brainerd, which may be observed in the following account of his life, was his being excessive in his labours; not taking due care to proportion his fatigues to his strength. Indeed the case was very often such, by the seeming calls of Providence, as made it extremely difficult for him to avoid doing more than his strength would well admit of; yea, his circumstances and the business of his mission among the Indians were such, that great fatigues and hardships were altogether inevitable. However, he was finally convinced, that he had erred in this matter, and that he ought to have taken more thorough care, and been more resolute to withstand temptations to such degrees of labour as injured his health; and accordingly warned his brother, who succeeds him in his mission, to be careful to avoid this error.

Besides the imperfections already mentioned, it is readily allowed, that there were some imperfections which ran through his whole life, and were mixed with all his religious affections and exercises; some mixture of what was natural with that which was spiritual; as it evermore is in the best saints in this world. Doubtless, natural temper had some influence in the religious exercises and experiences of Mr. Brainerd, as there most apparently was in the exercises of devout David, and the apostles Peter, John, and Paul. There was undoubtedly very often some influence of his natural disposition to dejection, in his religious mourning; some mixture of melancholy with truly godly sorrow and real Christian humility; some mixture of the natural fire of youth with his holy zeal for God; and some influence of natural principles mixed with grace in various other respects, as it ever was and ever will be with the saints while on this side heaven. Perhaps none were more sensible of Mr. Brainerd’s imperfections than he himself; or could distinguish more accurately than he, between what was natural and what was spiritual. It is easy for the judicious reader to observe, that his graces ripened, the religious exercises of his heart became more and more pure, and he more and more distinguished in his judgment, the longer he lived: he had much to teach and purify him, and he failed not to make his advantage.

But notwithstanding all these imperfections, I am persuaded every pious and judicious reader will acknowledge, that what is here set before him is indeed a remarkable instance of true and eminent Christian piety in heart and practice tending greatly to confirm the reality of vital religion, and the power of godliness that it is most worthy of imitation, and many ways calculated to promote the spiritual benefit of the careful observer.

It is fit the reader should be aware, that what Mr. Brainerd wrote in his diary, out of which the following account of his life is chiefly taken, was written only for his own private use, and not to get honour and applause in the world, nor with any design that the world should ever see it, either while he lived or after his death; excepting some few things that he wrote in a dying state, after he had been persuaded, with difficulty, not entirely to suppress all his private writings. He showed himself almost invincibly averse to the publishing of any part of his diary after his death; and when he was thought to be dying at Boston, he gave the most strict, peremptory orders to the contrary. But being by some of his friends there prevailed upon to withdraw so strict and absolute a prohibition, he was pleased finally to yield so far as that “his papers should be left in my hands, that I might dispose of them as I thought would be most for God’s glory and the interest of religion.”

But a few days before his death, he ordered some part of his diary to be destroyed, which renders the account of his life the less complete. And there are some parts of his diary here left out for brevity’s sake, that would, I am sensible, have been a great advantage to the history, if they had been inserted; particularly the account of his wonderful successes among the Indians; which for substance is the same in his private diary with that which has already been made public, in the journal he kept by order of the society in Scotland, for their information. That account, I am of opinion, would be more entertaining and more profitable, if it were published as it is written in his diary, in connexion with his secret religion and the inward exercises of his mind, and also with the preceding and following parts of the story of his life. But because that account has been published already, I have therefore omitted that part. However, this defect may in a great measure be made up to the reader, by the public journal. But it is time to end this preface, that the reader may be no longer detained from the history itself.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

N. B. Those parts of the following Life and Diary which are not in turned commas, are the words of the publisher, President Edwards. They contain the substance of Mr. Brainerd’s Diary for the time specified. By this mode, needless repetitions were prevented.

Part 1: From His Birth, To The Time When He Began To Study For The Ministry.

Mr. David Brainerd was born April 20, 1718, at Haddam, a town of Hartford, in Connecticut, New England. His father was the worshipful Hezekiah Brainerd, Esq. one of his Majesty’s council for that colony; who was the son of Daniel Brainerd, Esq. a justice of the peace, and a deacon of the church of Christ in Haddam. His mother was Mrs. Dorothy Hobart, daughter to the Reverend Mr. Jeremiah Hobart; who preached awhile at Topsfield, then removed to Hempstead on Long-Island, and afterwards by reason of numbers turning Quakers, and many others being so irreligious, that they would do nothing towards the support of the gospel settled in the work of the ministry at Haddam; where he died in the 85th year of his age. He went to the public worship in the forenoon, and died in his chair between meetings. This reverend gentleman was a son of the Reverend Peter Hobart; who was, first, minister of the gospel at Hingham, in the county of Norfolk in England; and, by reason of the persecution of the Puritans, removed with his family to New England, and was settled in the ministry at Hingham, in Massachusetts. He had five sons, viz. Joshua, Jeremiah, Gershom, Japheth, and Nehemiah. His son Joshua was minister at Southold on Long-Island. Jeremiah was Mr. David Brainerd’s grandfather, minister at Haddam, &c. as before observed; Gershom was minister of Groton in Connecticut; Japheth was a physician; he went in the quality of a doctor of a ship to England, (before the time of taking his second degree at college,) and designed to go from thence to the East Indies; but never was heard of more. Nehemiah was sometime fellow of Harvard college, and afterwards minister at Newton in Massachusetts. The mother of Mrs. Dorothy Hobart (who was afterwards Brainerd) was a daughter of the Reverend Samuel Whiting, minister of the gospel, first at Boston in Lincolnshire, and afterwards at Lynn in Massachusetts, New England. He had three sons who were ministers of the gospel.

David Brainerd was the third son of his parents. They had five sons, and four daughters. Their eldest son is Hezekiah Brainerd, Esq. a justice of the peace, and for several years past a representative of the town of Haddam, in the general assembly of Connecticut colony; the second was the Reverend Nehemiah Brainerd, a worthy minister at Eastbury in Connecticut, who died of a consumption, Nov. 10, 1742; the fourth is Mr. John Brainerd, who succeeds his brother David as missionary to the Indians, and pastor of the same church of Christian Indians in New Jersey; and the fifth was Israel, lately student at Yale college in New-Haven, who died since his brother David. Mrs. Dorothy Brainerd having lived about five years a widow, died when her son, of whose life I am about to give an account, was about fourteen years of age: so that in his youth he was left both fatherless and motherless. What account he has given of himself, and his own life, may be seen in what follows.

“I was from my youth somewhat sober, and inclined rather to melancholy than the contrary extreme; but do not remember any thing of conviction of sin, worthy of remark, till I was, I believe, about seven or eight years of age. Then I became concerned for my soul, and terrified at the thoughts of death, and was driven to the performance of duties: but it appeared a melancholy business, that destroyed my eagerness for play. And though, alas! this religious concern was but short-lived, I sometimes attended secret prayer; and thus lived at “ease in Zion, without God in the world,’’ and without much concern, as I remember, till I was above thirteen years of age. But some time in the winter 1732, I was roused out of carnal security, by I scarce know what means at first; but was much excited by the prevailing of a mortal sickness in Haddam. I was frequent, constant, and somewhat fervent in duties; and took delight in reading, especially Mr. Janeway’s Token for Children. I felt sometimes much melted in duties, and took great delight in the performance of them; and I sometimes hoped that I was converted, or at least in a good and hopeful way for heaven and happiness, not knowing what conversion was. The Spirit of God at this time proceeded far with me; I was remarkably dead to the world, and my thoughts were almost wholly employed about my soul’s concerns; and I may indeed say, “Almost I was persuaded to be a Christian” I was also exceedingly distressed and melancholy at the death of my mother, in March, 1732. But afterwards my religious concern began to decline, and by degrees I fell back into a considerable degree of security, though I still attended secret prayer.

“About the 15th of April, 1733, I removed from my father’s house to East Haddam, where I spent four years; but still “without God in the world,” though, for the most part, I went a round of secret duty. I was not much addicted to young company, or frolicking, as it is called, but this I know, that when I did go into such company, I never returned with so good a conscience as when I went; it always added new guilt, made me afraid to come to the throne of grace, and spoiled those good frames I was wont sometimes to please myself with. But, alas! all my good frames were but self-righteousness, not founded on a desire for the glory of God.

“About the latter end of April, 1737, being full nineteen years of age, I removed to Durham, to work on my farm, and so continued about one year; frequently longing, from a natural inclination, after a liberal education. When about twenty years of age, I applied myself to study; and was now engaged more than ever in the duties of religion. I became very strict, and watchful over my thoughts, words, and actions; and thought I must be sober indeed, because I designed to devote myself to the ministry; and imagined I did dedicate myself to the Lord.

“Some time in April, 1738, I went to Mr. Fiske’s, and lived with him during his life.   I remember he advised me wholly to abandon young company, and associate myself with grave elderly people: which counsel I followed. My manner of life was now exceeding regular, and full of religion, such as it was; for I read my Bible more than twice through in less than a year, spent much time every day in prayer and other secret duties, gave great attention to the word preached, and endeavoured to my utmost to retain it. So much concerned was I about religion, that I agreed with some young persons to meet privately on sabbath evenings for religious exercises, and thought myself sincere in these duties; and after our meeting was ended, I used to repeat the discourses of the day to myself; recollecting what I could, though sometimes very late at night. I used sometimes on Monday mornings to recollect the same sermons; had considerable movings of pleasurable affection in duties, and had many thoughts of joining the church. In short, I had a very good outside, and rested entirely on my duties, though not sensible of it.

“After Mr. Fiske’s death, I proceeded in my learning with my brother; was still very constant in religious duties, and often wondered at the levity of professors; it was a trouble to me, that they were so careless in religious matters. Thus I proceeded a considerable length on a self-righteous foundation; and should have been entirely lost and undone, had not the mere mercy of God prevented.

“Some time in the beginning of winter, 1738, it pleased God, on one sabbath-day morning, as I was walking out for some secret duties, to give me on a sudden such a sense of my danger, and the wrath of God, that I stood amazed, and my former good frames, that I had pleased myself with, all presently vanished. From the view I had of my sin and vileness, I was much distressed all that day, fearing the vengeance of God would soon overtake me. I was much dejected, kept much alone, and sometimes envied the birds and beasts their happiness, because they were not exposed to eternal misery, as I evidently saw I was. And thus I lived from day to day, being frequently in great distress: sometimes there appeared mountains before me -to obstruct my hopes of mercy; and the work of conversion appeared so great, that I thought I should never be the subject of it. I used, however, to pray and cry to God, and perform other duties with great earnestness; and thus hoped by some means to make the case better.

“And though, hundreds of times, I renounced all pretences of any worth in my duties, as I thought, even while performing them, and often confessed to God that I deserved nothing, for the very best of them, but eternal condemnation; yet still I had a secret hope of recommending myself to God by my religious duties. When I prayed affectionately, and my heart seemed in some measure to melt, I hoped God would be thereby moved to pity me, my prayers then looked with some appearance of goodness in them, and I seemed to mourn for sin. And then I could in some measure venture on the mercy of God in Christ, as I thought, though the preponderating thought, the foundation of my hope, was some imagination of goodness in my heart-meltings, flowing of affections in duty, extraordinary enlargements, &c. Though at times the gate appeared so very strait, that it looked next to impossible to enter, yet, at other times, I flattered myself that it was not so very difficult, and hoped I should by diligence and watchfulness soon gain the point. Sometimes after enlargement in duty and considerable affection, I hoped I had made a good step towards heaven; imagined that God was affected as I was, and that he would hear such sincere cries, as I called them. And so sometimes, when I withdrew for secret duties in great distress, I returned comfortable; and thus healed myself with my duties.

“Some time in February, 1739, I set apart a day for secret fasting and prayer, and spent the day in almost incessant cries to God for mercy, that he would open my eyes to see the evil of sin, and the way of life by Jesus Christ. And God was pleased that day to make considerable discoveries of my heart to me. But still I trusted in all the duties I performed; though there was no manner of goodness in them, there being in them no respect to the glory of God, nor any such principle in my heart. Yet, God was pleased to make my endeavours that day a means to show me my helplessness in some measure.

“Sometimes I was greatly encouraged, and imagined that God loved me, and was pleased with me; and thought I should soon be fully reconciled to God. But the whole was founded on mere presumption, arising from enlargement in duty, or flowing of affections, or some good resolutions, and the like. And when, at times, great distress began to arise, on a sight of my vileness, nakedness, and inability to deliver myself from a sovereign God, I used to put off the discovery, as what I could not bear. Once, I remember, a terrible pang of distress seized me, and the thoughts of renouncing myself, and standing naked before God, stripped of all goodness, were so dreadful to me, that I was ready to say to them as Felix to Paul, ‘Go thy way for this time.’ Thus, though I daily longed for greater conviction of sin, supposing that I must see more of my dreadful state in order to a remedy; yet when the discoveries of my vile, hellish heart, were made to me, the sight was so dreadful, and showed me so plainly my exposedness to damnation, that I could not endure it. I constantly strove after whatever qualifications I imagined others obtained before the reception of Christ, in order to recommend me to his favour. Sometimes I felt the power of a hard heart, and supposed it must be softened before Christ would accept of me; and when I felt any meltings of heart, I hoped now the work was almost done. Hence, when my distress still remained, I was wont to murmur at God’s dealings with me; and thought, when others felt their hearts softened, God showed them mercy; but my distress remained still.

“Sometimes I grew remiss and sluggish, without any great convictions of sin, for a considerable time together; but after such a season, convictions seized me more violently. One night I remember in particular, when I was walking solitarily abroad, I had opened to me such a view of my sin, that I feared the ground would cleave asunder under my feet, and become my grave; and would send my soul quick into hell, before I could get home. And though I was forced to go to bed, lest my distress should be discovered by others, which I much feared; yet I scarcely durst sleep at all, for I thought it would be a great wonder if I should be out of hell in the morning. And though my distress was sometimes thus great, yet I greatly dreaded the loss of convictions, and returning back to a state of carnal security, and to my former insensibility of impending wrath; which made me exceeding exact in my behaviour, lest I should stifle the motions of God’s Holy Spirit. When at any time I took a view of my convictions, and thought the degree of them to be considerable, I was wont to trust in them; but this confidence, and the hopes of soon making some notable advances towards deliverance, would ease my mind, and I soon became more senseless and remiss: but then again, when I discerned my convictions to grow languid, and I thought them about to leave me, this immediately alarmed and distressed me. Sometimes I expected to take a large step, and get very far towards conversion, by some particular opportunity or means I had in view.

“The many disappointments, great distresses, and perplexity I met with, put me into a most horrible frame of contesting with the Almighty; with an inward vehemence and virulence finding fault with his ways of dealing with mankind. I found great fault with the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity; and my wicked heart often wished for some other way of salvation, than by Jesus Christ. Being like the troubled sea, my thoughts confused, I used to contrive to escape the wrath of God by some other means. I had strange projects, full of atheism, contriving to disappoint God’s designs and decrees concerning me, or to escape his notice, and hide myself from him. But when, upon reflection, I saw these projects were vain, and would not serve me, and that I could contrive nothing for my own relief; this would throw my mind into the most horrid frame, to wish there was no God, or to wish there were some other God that could control him, &c. These thoughts and desires were the secret inclinations of my heart, frequently acting before I was aware; but, alas! they were mine, although I was affrighted when I came to reflect on them. When I considered,  it distressed me to think, that my heart was so full of enmity against God; and it made me tremble, lest his vengeance should suddenly fall upon me. I used before to imagine, that my heart was not so bad as the Scriptures and some other books represented it. Sometimes I used to take much pains to work it up into a good frame, an humble submissive disposition; and hoped there was then some goodness in me. But, on a sudden, the thoughts of the strictness of the law, or the sovereignty of God, would so irritate the corruption of my heart, that I had so watched over, and hoped I had brought to a good frame, that it would break over all bounds, and burst forth on all sides, like floods of water when they break down their dam.

“Being sensible of the necessity of a deep humiliation in order to a saving close with Christ, I used to set myself to work in my own heart those convictions that were requisite in such an humiliation; as, a conviction that God would be just, if he cast me off for ever; that if ever God should bestow mercy on me, it would be mere grace, though I should be in distress many years first, and be never so much engaged in duty; that God was not in the least obliged to pity me the more for all past duties, cries, and tears, &c. I strove to my utmost to bring myself to a firm belief of these things and a hearty assent to them; and hoped that now I was brought off from myself, truly humbled, and that I bowed to the divine sovereignty. I was wont to tell God in my prayers, that now I had those very dispositions of soul that he required, and on which he showed mercy to others, and thereupon to beg and plead for mercy to me. But when I found no relief, and was still oppressed with guilt, and fears of wrath, my soul was in a tumult, and my heart rose against God, as dealing hardly with me. Yet then my conscience flew in my face, putting me in mind of my late confession to God of his justice in my condemnation, &c. And this giving me a sight of the badness of my heart, threw me again into distress, and I wished I had watched my heart more narrowly, to keep it from breaking out against God’s dealings with me; and I even wished I had not pleaded for mercy on account of my humiliation, because thereby I had lost all my seeming goodness. Thus, scores of times, I vainly imagined myself humbled and prepared for saving mercy. And while I was in this distressed, bewildered, and tumultuous state of mind, the corruption of my heart was especially irritated with the following things.

“1. The strictness of the divine law. For I found it was impossible for me, after my utmost pains, to answer its demands. I often made new resolutions, and as often broke them. I imputed the whole to carelessness and the want of being more watchful, and used to call myself a fool for my negligence. But when, upon a stronger resolution, and greater endeavours, and close application to fasting and prayer, I found all attempts fail; then I quarrelled with the law of God, as unreasonably rigid. I thought, if it extended only to my outward actions and behaviours I could bear with it; but I found it condemned me for my evil thoughts, and sins of my heart, which I could not possibly prevent. I was extremely loth to own my utter helplessness in this matter: but after repeated disappointments, thought that, rather than perish, I could do a little more still; especially if such and such circumstances might but attend my endeavours and strivings. I hoped, that I should strive more earnestly than ever, if the matter came to extremity though I never could find the time to do my utmost, in the manner I intended and this hope of future more favourable circumstances, and of doing something great hereafter, kept me from utter despair in myself, and from seeing myself fallen into the hands of a sovereign God, and dependent on nothing but free and boundless grace.

“2. Another thing was, that faith alone, was the condition of salvation; that God would not come down to lower terms, and that he would not promise life and salvation upon my sincere and hearty prayers and endeavours. That word, Mark xvi. 16. “He that believeth not, shall be damned,” cut off all hope there: and I found, faith was the sovereign gift of God; that I could not get it as of myself, and could not oblige God to bestow it upon me, by any of my performances, (Eph. ii. 1, 8.) This, I was ready to say, is a hard saying, who can bear it? I could not bear, that all I had done should stand for mere nothing, who had been very conscientious in duty, had been exceeding religious a great while, and had, as I thought, done much more than many others who had obtained mercy. I confessed indeed the vileness of my duties; but then, what made them at that time seem vile, was my wandering thoughts in them; not because I was all over defiled like a devil, and the principle corrupt from whence they flowed, so that I could not possibly do any thing that was good. And therefore I called what I did, by the name of honest faithful endeavours; and could not bear it, that God had made no promises of salvation to them.

“3. Another thing was, that I could not find out what faith was; or what it was to believe, and come to Christ. I read the calls of Christ to the weary and heavy laden; but could find no way that he directed them to come in. I thought I would gladly come, if I knew how, though the path of duty were never so difficult. I read Mr. Stoddard’s Guide to Christ, (which I trust was, in the hand of God, the happy means of my conversion,) and my heart rose against the author; for though he told me my very heart all along under convictions, and seemed to be very beneficial to me in his directions; yet here he failed, he did not tell me any thing I could do that would bring me to Christ, but left me as it were with a great gulf between, without any direction to get through. For I was not yet effectually and experimentally taught, that there could be no way prescribed, whereby a natural man could, of his own strength, obtain that which is supernatural, and which the highest angel cannot give.

“4. Another thing to which I found a great inward opposition, was the sovereignty of God. I could not bear that it should be wholly at God’s pleasure to save or damn me, just as he would. That passage, Rom. ix. 11-23. was a constant vexation to me, especially ver. 21. Reading or meditating on this, always destroyed my seeming good frames: for when I thought I was almost humbled, and almost resigned, this passage would make my enmity against the sovereignty of God appear. When I came to reflect on my inward enmity and blasphemy, which arose on this occasion, I was the more afraid of God, and driven further from any hopes of reconciliation with him. It gave me such a dreadful view of myself, that I dreaded more than ever to see myself in God’s hands, at his sovereign disposal, and it made me more opposite than ever to submit to his sovereignty; for I thought God designed my damnation.

“All this time the Spirit of God was powerfully at work with me; and I was inwardly pressed to relinquish all self-confidence, all hopes of ever helping myself by any means whatsoever: and the conviction of my lost estate was sometimes so clear and manifest before my eyes, that it was as if it had been declared to me in so many words, ‘It is done, it is done, for ever impossible to deliver yourself.’ For about three or four days my soul was thus greatly distressed. At some turns, for a few moments, I seemed to myself lost and undone; but then would shrink back immediately from the sight, because I dared not venture myself into the hands of God, as wholly helpless, and at the disposal of his sovereign pleasure. I dared not see that important truth concerning myself, that I was dead in trespasses and sins. But when I had as it were thrust away these views of myself at any time, I felt distressed to have the same discoveries of myself again; for I greatly feared being given over of God to final stupidity. When I thought of putting it off to a more convenient season, the conviction was so close and powerful, with regard to the present time, that it was the best, and probably the only time, that I dared not put it off.

“It was the sight of truth concerning myself, truth respecting my state, as a creature fallen and alienated from God, and that consequently could make no demands on God for mercy, but must subscribe to the absolute sovereignty of the Divine Being; the sight of the truth, I say, my soul shrank away from, and trembled to think of beholding. Thus, he that doth evil, as all unregenerate men continually do, hates the light of truth, neither cares to come to it, because it will reprove his deeds, and show him his just deserts, John iii. 20. And though, some time before, I had taken much pains, as I thought, to submit to the sovereignty of God, yet I mistook the thing; and did not once imagine, that seeing and being made experimentally sensible of this truth, which my soul now so much dreaded and trembled at, was the frame of soul that I had been so earnest in pursuit of heretofore. For I had ever hoped, that when I had attained to that humiliation, which I supposed necessary to go before faith, then it would not be fair for God to cast me off; but now I saw it was so far from any goodness in me, to own myself spiritually dead, and destitute of all goodness, that, on the contrary, my mouth would be for ever stopped by it; and it looked as dreadful to me, to see myself, and the relation I stood in to God I a sinner and criminal, and he a great Judge and Sovereign as it would be to a poor trembling creature, to venture off some high precipice. And hence I put it off for a minute or two, and tried for better circumstances to do it in; either I must read a passage or two, or pray first, or something of the like nature; or else put off my submission to God’s sovereignty, with an objection, that I did not know how to submit. But the truth was, I could see no safety in owning myself in the hands of a sovereign God, and that I could lay no claim to any thing better than damnation.

“But after a considerable time spent in such like exercises and distresses, one morning, while I was walking in a solitary place, as usual, I at once saw that all my contrivances and projects to effect or procure deliverance and salvation for myself, were utterly in vain; I was brought quite to a stand, as finding myself totally lost. I had thought many times before, that the difficulties in my way were very great; but now I saw, in another and very different light, that it was for ever impossible for me to do any thing towards helping or delivering myself. I then thought of blaming myself, that I had not done more, and been more engaged, while I had opportunity for it seemed now as if the season of doing was for ever over and gone but I instantly saw, that let me have done what I would, it would no more have tended to my helping myself, than what I had done; that I had made all the pleas I ever could have made to all eternity; and that all my pleas were vain. The tumult that had been before in my mind, was now quieted; and I was something eased of that distress, which I felt, while struggling against a sight of myself, and of the divine sovereignty. I had the greatest certainty that my state was for ever miserable, for all that I could do; and wondered that I had never been sensible of it before.

“While I remained in this state, my notions respecting my duties were quite different from what I had ever entertained in times past. Before this, the more I did in duty, the more hard I thought it would be for God to cast me off; though at the same time I confessed, and thought I saw, that there was no goodness or merit in my duties; but now the more I did in prayer or any other duty, the more I saw I was indebted to God for allowing me to ask for mercy; for I saw it was self-interest had led me to pray, and that I had never once prayed from any respect to the glory of God. Now I saw there was no necessary connexion between my prayers and the bestowment of divine mercy; that they laid not the least obligation upon God to bestow his grace upon me; and that there was no more virtue or goodness in them, than there would be in my paddling with my hand in the water, (which was the comparison I had then in my mind,) and this because they were not performed from any love or regard to God. I saw that I had been heaping up my devotions before God, fasting, praying, &c. pretending, and indeed really thinking sometimes, that I was aiming at the glory of God; whereas I never once truly intended it, but only my own happiness. I saw, that as I had never done any thing for God, I had no claim on any thing from him, but perdition, on account of my hypocrisy and mockery. Oh how different did my duties now appear from what they used to do! I used to charge them with sin and imperfection; but this was only on account of the wanderings and vain thoughts attending them, and not because I had no regard to God in them; for this I thought I had. But when I saw evidently that I had regard to nothing but self-interest, then they appeared a vile mockery of God, self-worship, and a continual course of lies; so that I now saw that something worse had attended my duties, than barely a few wanderings, &c.; for the whole was nothing but self-worship, and a horrid abuse of God.

“I continued, as I remember, in this state of mind, from Friday morning till the sabbath evening following, (July 12, 1739,) when I was walking again in the same solitary place, where I was brought to see myself lost and helpless, as before mentioned. Here, in a mournful melancholy state, I was attempting to pray; but found no heart to engage in that or any other duty; my former concern, exercise, and religious affections were now gone. I thought the Spirit of God had quite left me; but still was not distressed: yet disconsolate, as if there was nothing in heaven or earth could make me happy. Having been thus endeavouring to pray though, as I thought, very stupid and senseless for near half an hour, then, as I was walking in a dark thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the view and apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, for I saw no such thing; nor do I intend any imagination of a body of light, somewhere in the third heavens, or any thing of that nature; but it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never had before, nor any thing which had the least resemblance of it. I stood still, wondered, and admired! I knew that I never had seen before any thing comparable to it for excellency and beauty; it was widely different from all the conceptions that ever I had of God, or things divine. I had no particular apprehension of any one person in the Trinity, either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost; but it appeared to be divine glory. My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable, to see such a God, such a glorious Divine Being; and I was inwardly pleased and satisfied that he should be God over all for ever and ever. My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency, loveliness, greatness, and other perfections of God, that I was even swallowed up in him; at least to that degree, that I had no thought (as I remember) at first about my own salvation, and scarce reflected there was such a creature as myself.

“Thus God, I trust, brought me to a hearty disposition to exalt him, and set him on the throne, and principally and ultimately to aim at his honour and glory, as King of the universe. I continued in this state of inward joy, peace, and astonishment, till near dark, without any sensible abatement; and then began to think and examine what I had seen; and felt sweetly composed in my mind all the evening following. I felt myself in a new world, and every thing about me appeared with a different aspect from what it was wont to do. At this time, the way of salvation opened to me with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that I wondered I should ever think of any other way of salvation; was amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances, and complied with this lovely, blessed, and excellent way before. If I could have been saved by my own duties, or any other way that I had formerly contrived, my whole soul would now have refused it. I wondered that all the world did not see and comply with this way of salvation, entirely by the righteousness of Christ.

“The sweet relish of what I then felt, continued with me for several days, almost constantly, in a greater or less degree; I could not but sweetly rejoice in God, lying down and rising up. The next Lord’s day I felt something of the same kind, though not so powerful as before. But not long after I was again involved in thick darkness, and under great distress; yet not of the same kind with my distress under convictions. I was guilty, afraid, and ashamed to come before God; was exceedingly pressed with a sense of guilt: but it was not long before I felt, I trust, true repentance and joy in God. About the latter end of August, I again fell under great darkness; it seemed as if the presence of God was clean gone for ever; though I was not so much distressed about my spiritual state, as I was at my being shut out from God’s presence, as I then sensibly was. But it pleased the Lord to return graciously to me, not long after.

“In the beginning of September I went to college,   and entered there; but with some degree of reluctancy, fearing lest I should not be able to lead a life of strict religion, in the midst of so many temptations. After this, in the vacancy, before I went to tarry at college, it pleased God to visit my soul with clearer manifestations of himself and his grace. I was spending some time in prayer, and self-examination, when the Lord by his grace so shined into my heart, that I enjoyed full assurance of his favour, for that time; and my soul was unspeakably refreshed with divine and heavenly enjoyments. At this time especially, as well as some others, sundry passages of God’s word opened to my soul with divine clearness, power, and sweetness, so as to appear exceeding precious, and with clear and certain evidence of its being the word of God. I enjoyed considerable sweetness in religion all the winter following.

“In Jan. 1740, the measles spread much in college; and I having taken the distemper, went home to Haddam. But some days before I was taken sick, I seemed to be greatly deserted, and my soul mourned the absence of the Comforter exceedingly. It seemed to me all comfort was for ever gone; I prayed and cried to God for help, yet found no present comfort or relief. But through divine goodness, a night or two before I was taken ill, while I was walking alone in a very retired place, and engaged in meditation and prayer, I enjoyed a sweet refreshing visit, as I trust, from above; so that my soul was raised far above the fears of death. Indeed I rather longed for death, than feared it. O how much more refreshing this one season was, than all the pleasures and delights that earth can afford! After a day or two I was taken with the measles, and was very ill indeed, so that I almost despaired of life; but had no distressing fears of death at all. However, through divine goodness I soon recovered; yet, by reason of hard and close studies, and being much exposed on account of my freshmanship, I had but little time for spiritual duties: my soul often mourned for want of more time and opportunity to be alone with God. In the spring and summer following, I had better advantages for retirement, and enjoyed more comfort in religion. Though indeed my ambition in my studies greatly wronged the activity and vigour of my spiritual life; yet this was usually the case with me, that “in the multitude of my thoughts within me, God’s comforts principally delighted my soul;” these were my greatest consolations day by day.

“One day I remember, in particular, (I think it was in June, 1740,) I walked to a considerable distance from the college, in the fields alone at noon, and in prayer found such unspeakable sweetness and delight in God, that I thought, if I must continue still in this evil world, I wanted always to be there, to behold God’s glory. My soul dearly loved all mankind, and longed exceedingly that they should enjoy what I enjoyed. It seemed to be a little resemblance of heaven. On Lord’s day, July 6, being sacrament-day, I found some divine life and spiritual refreshment in that holy ordinance. When I came from the Lord’s table, I wondered how my fellow-students could live as I was sensible most did. Next Lord’s day, July 13, I had some special sweetness in religion. Again, Lord’s day, July 20, my soul was in a sweet and precious frame.

“Some time in August following, I became so weakly and disordered, by too close application to my studies, that I was advised by my tutor to go home, and disengage my mind from study, as much as I could; for I was grown so weak, that I began to spit blood. I took his advice, and endeavoured to lay aside my studies. But being brought very low, I looked death in the face more stedfastly; and the Lord was pleased to give me renewedly a sweet sense and relish of divine things; and particularly, October 13, I found divine help and consolation in the precious duties of secret prayer and self-examination, and my soul took delight in the blessed God: so likewise on the 17th of October.

“Saturday, Oct. 18. In my morning devotions, my soul was exceedingly melted, and bitterly mourned over my exceeding sinfulness and vileness. I never before had felt so pungent and deep a sense of the odious nature of sin, as at this time. My soul was then unusually carried forth in love to God, and had a lively sense of God’s love to me. And this love and hope, at that time, cast out fear. Both morning and evening I spent some time in self-examination, to find the truth of grace, as also my fitness to approach to God at his table the next day; and through infinite grace, found the Holy Spirit influencing my soul with love to God, as a witness within myself.

“Lord’s day, Oct. 19. In the morning I felt my soul hungering and thirsting after righteousness. In the forenoon, while I was looking on the sacramental elements, and thinking that Jesus Christ would soon be “set forth crucified before me,” my soul was filled with light and love, so that I was almost in an ecstasy; my body was so weak, I could scarcely stand. I felt at the same time an exceeding tenderness and most fervent love towards all mankind; so that my soul and all the powers of it seemed, as it were, to melt into softness and sweetness. But during the communion, there was some abatement of this life and fervour. This love and joy cast out fear; and my soul longed for perfect grace and glory. This frame continued till the evening, when my soul was sweetly spiritual in secret duties.

“Monday, Oct. 20. I again found the assistance of the Holy Spirit in secret duties, both morning and evening, and life and comfort in religion through the whole day. Tuesday, Oct. 21. I had likewise experience of the goodness of God in “shedding abroad his love in my heart,” and giving me delight and consolation in religious duties; and all the remaining part of the week, my soul seemed to be taken up with divine things. I now so longed after God, and to be freed from sin, that when I felt myself recovering, and thought I must return to college again, which had proved so hurtful to my spiritual interest the year past, I could not but be grieved, and I thought I had much rather have died; for it distressed me to think of getting away from God. But before I went, I enjoyed several other sweet and precious seasons of communion with God, (particularly Oct. 30, and Nov. 4,) wherein my soul enjoyed unspeakable comfort.

“I returned to college about Nov. 6, and, through the goodness of God, felt the power of religion almost daily, for the space of six weeks. Nov. 28. In my evening devotion, I enjoyed precious discoveries of God, and was unspeakably refreshed with that passage, Heb. xii. 22-24. My soul longed to wing away for the paradise of God; I longed to be conformed to God in all things. A day or two after, I enjoyed much of the light of God’s countenance, most of the day; and my soul rested in God.

“Tuesday, Dec. 9. I was in a comfortable frame of soul most of the day; but especially in evening devotions, when God was pleased wonderfully to assist and strengthen me; so that I thought nothing should ever move me from the love of God in Christ Jesus my Lord. O! one hour with God infinitely exceeds all the pleasures and delights of this lower world.

“Some time towards the latter end of January, 1741, I grew more cold and dull in religion, by means of my old temptation, viz. ambition in my studies. But through divine goodness, a great and general awakening spread itself over the college, about the latter end of February, in which I was much quickened, and more abundantly engaged in religion.”

This awakening was at the beginning of that extraordinary religious commotion through the land, which is fresh in every one’s memory. It was for a time very great and general at New-Haven; and the college had no small share in it. That society was greatly reformed, the students in general became serious, many of them remarkably so, and much engaged in the concerns of their eternal salvation. And however undesirable the issue of the awakenings of that day have appeared in many others, there have been manifestly happy and abiding effects of the impressions then made on the minds of many of the members of that college. And by all that I can learn concerning Mr. Brainerd, there can be no reason to doubt but that he had much of God’s gracious presence, and of the lively actings of true grace, at that time: but yet he was afterwards abundantly sensible, that his religions experiences and affections at that time were not free from a corrupt mixture, nor his conduct to be acquitted from many things that were imprudent and blamable; which he greatly lamented himself, and was desirous that others should not make an ill use of such an example. And therefore, although  at the time he kept a constant diary, containing a very particular account of what passed from day to day, for the next thirteen months, from the latter end of Jan. 1741, forementioned, in two small books, which he called the two first volumes of his diary, next following the account before given of his convictions, conversion, and consequent comforts; yet, when he lay on his death-bed, he gave order (unknown to me till after his death) that these two volumes should be destroyed, and in the beginning of the third book of his diary, he wrote thus, (by the hand of another, he not being able to write himself,) “The two preceding volumes, immediately following the account of the author’s conversion, are lost. If any are desirous to know how the author lived, in general, during that space of time, let them read the first thirty pages of this volume; where they will find something of a specimen of his ordinary manner of living, through that whole space of time, which was about thirteen months; excepting that here he was more refined from some imprudencies and indecent heats, than there; but the spirit of devotion running through the whole was the same.”

It could not be otherwise than that one whose heart had been so prepared and drawn to God, as Mr. Brainerd’s had been, should be mightily enlarged, animated, and engaged at the sight of such an alteration made in the college, the town, and country; and so great an appearance of men reforming their lives, and turning from their profaneness and immorality to seriousness and concern for their salvation, and of religion reviving and flourishing almost every where. But as an intemperate, imprudent zeal, and a degree of enthusiasm, soon crept in, and mingled itself with that revival of religion; and so great and general an awakening being quite a new thing in the land, at least as to all the living inhabitants of it; neither people nor ministers had learned thoroughly to distinguish between solid religion and its delusive counterfeits. Even many ministers of the gospel, of long standing and the best reputation, were for a time overpowered with the glaring appearances of the latter; and therefore, surely it was not to be wondered at, that young Brainerd, but a sophomore at college, should be so; who was not only young in years, but very young in religion and experience. He had enjoyed but little advantage for the study of divinity, and still less for observing the circumstances and events of such an extraordinary state of things. To think it strange, a man must divest himself of all reason. In these disadvantageous circumstances, Brainerd had the unhappiness to have a tincture of that intemperate, indiscreet zeal, which was at that time too prevalent; and was led, from his high opinion of others whom he looked upon as better than himself, into such errors as were really contrary to the habitual temper of his mind. One instance of his misconduct at that time, gave great offence to the rulers of the college, even to that degree that they expelled him the society; which it is necessary should here be particularly related, with its circumstances.

During the awakening at college, there were several religious students who associated together for mutual conversation and assistance in spiritual things. These were wont freely to open themselves one to another, as special and intimate friends: Brainerd was one of this company. And it once happened, that he and two or three more of these intimate friends were in the hall together, after Mr. Whittelsey, one of the tutors, had been to prayer there with the scholars; no other person now remaining in the hall but Brainerd and his companions. Mr. Whittelsey having been unusually pathetical in his prayer, one of Brainerd’s friends on this occasion asked him what he thought of Mr. Whittelsey; he made answer, “He has no more grace than this chair.” One of the freshmen happening at that time to be near the hall (though not in the room) over-heard those words. This person, though he heard no name mentioned, and knew not who was thus censured, informed a certain woman in the town, withal telling her his own suspicion, viz. that he believed Brainerd said this of some one or other of the rulers of the college. Whereupon she went and informed the rector, who sent for this freshman and examined him. He told the rector the words he heard Brainerd utter, and informed him who were in the room with him at that time. Upon which the rector sent for them: they were very backward to inform against their friend what they looked upon as private conversation, and especially as none but they had heard or knew of whom he had uttered those words: yet the rector compelled them to declare what he said, and of whom he said it. Brainerd looked on himself very ill used in the management of this affair; and thought, that it was injuriously extorted from his friends, and then injuriously required of him as if he had been guilty of some open, notorious crime to make a public confession, and to humble himself before the whole college in the hall, for what he had said only in private conversation. He not complying with this demand, and having gone once to the separate meeting at New-Haven, when forbidden by the rector; and also having been accused by one person of saying concerning the rector, “that he wondered he did not expect to drop down dead for fining the scholars who followed Mr. Tennent to Milford, though there was no proof of it; (and Mr. Brainerd ever professed that he did not remember his saying any thing to that purpose;) for these things he was expelled the college.

Now, how far the circumstances and exigencies of that day might justify such great severity in the governors of the college, I will not undertake to determine; it being my aim, not to bring reproach on the authority of the college, but only to do justice to the memory of a person, who was I think eminently one of those whose memory is blessed. The reader will see, in the sequel of the story of Mr. Brainerd’s life,   what his own thoughts afterwards were of his behaviour in these things, and in how Christian a manner he conducted himself, with respect to this affair: though he ever, as long as he lived, supposed himself ill used in the management of it, and in what he suffered. His expulsion was in the winter, 1742, while in his third year at college.

* * * * * * *

Part 2: Study Of Divinity Until Licensed To Preach

FROM ABOUT THE TIME THAT HE FIRST BEGAN TO DEVOTE HIMSELF MORE ESPECIALLY TO THE STUDY OF DIVINITY, TILL HE WAS EXAMINED AND LICENSED TO PREACH, BY THE ASSOCIATION OF MINISTERS BELONGING TO THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF THE COUNTY OF FAIRFIELD, IN CONNECTICUT.

Mr. Brainerd, the Spring after his expulsion, went to live with the Reverend Mr. Mills, of Ripton, to pursue his studies with him, in order to his being fitted for the work of the ministry; where he spent the greater part of the time, till the Association licensed him to preach; but frequently rode to visit the neighbouring ministers, particularly Mr. Cooke of Stratford, Mr. Graham of Southbury, and Mr. Bellamy of Bethlehem. While with Mr. Mills, he began the third book of his diary, in which the account he wrote of himself, is as follows.

“Thursday, April 1, 1742. I seem to be declining, with respect to my life and warmth in divine things; had not so free access to God in prayer as usual of late. O that God would humble me deeply in the dust before him! I deserve hell every day, for not loving my Lord more, who has, I trust, loved me, and given himself for me; and every time I am enabled to exercise any grace renewedly, I am renewedly indebted to the God of all grace for special assistance. Where then is boasting? Surely it is excluded, when we think how we are dependent on God for the being and every act of grace. Oh, if ever I get to heaven, it will be because God will, and nothing else; for I never did any thing of myself, but get away from God! My soul will be astonished at the unsearchable riches of divine grace, when I arrive at the mansions, which the blessed Saviour is gone before to prepare.

“Friday, April 2. In the afternoon I felt, in secret prayer, much resigned, calm, and serene. What are all the storms of this lower world, if Jesus by his Spirit does but come walking on the seas! Some time past, I had much pleasure in the prospect of the heathen being brought home to Christ, and desired that the Lord would employ me in that work: but now, my soul more frequently desires to die, to be with Christ. O that my soul were wrapt up in divine love, and my longing desires after God increased! In the evening, was refreshed in prayer, with the hopes of the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world.

“Saturday, April 3. Was very much amiss this morning, and had a bad night. I thought, if God would take me to himself now, my soul would exceedingly rejoice. O that I may be always humble and resigned to God, and that he would cause my soul to be more fixed on himself, that I may be more fitted both for doing and suffering!

“Lord’s day, April 4. My heart was wandering and lifeless. In the evening God gave me faith in prayer, made my soul melt in some measure, and gave me to taste a divine sweetness. O my blessed God! Let me climb up near to him, and love, and long, and plead, and wrestle, and stretch after him, and for deliverance from the body of sin and death. Alas! my soul mourned to think I should ever lose sight of its beloved again. ‘O come, Lord Jesus, Amen.’”

On the evening of the next day, he complains, that he seemed to be void of all relish of divine things, felt much of the prevalence of corruption, and saw in himself a disposition to all manner of sin; which brought a very great gloom on his mind, and cast him down into the depths of melancholy; so that he speaks of himself as amazed, having no comfort, but filled with horror, seeing no comfort in heaven or earth.

“Tuesday, April 6. I walked out this morning to the same place where I was last night, and felt as I did then; but was somewhat relieved by reading some passages in my diary, and seemed to feel as if I might pray to the great God again with freedom; but was suddenly struck with a damp, from the sense I had of my own vileness. Then I cried to God to cleanse me from my exceeding filthiness, to give me repentance and pardon. I then began to find it sweet to pray; and could think of undergoing the greatest sufferings, in the cause of Christ, with pleasure; and found myself willing, if God should so order it, to suffer banishment from my native land, among the heathen, that I might do something for their salvation, in distresses and deaths of any kind. Then God gave me to wrestle earnestly for others, for the kingdom of Christ in the world, and for dear Christian friends. I felt weaned from the world, and from my own reputation amongst men, willing to be despised, and to be a gazing-stock for the world to behold. It is impossible for me to express how I then felt: I had not much joy, but some sense of the majesty of God, which made me as it were tremble. I saw myself mean and vile, which made me more willing that God should do what he would with me; it was all infinitely reasonable.

“Wednesday, April 7. I had not so much fervency, but felt something as I did yesterday morning, in prayer. At noon I spent some time in secret, with some fervency, but scarce any sweetness; and felt very dull in the evening.

“Thursday, April 8. Had raised hopes to-day respecting the heathen. O that God would bring in great numbers of them to Jesus Christ! I cannot but hope I shall see that glorious day. Every thing in this world seems exceeding vile and little to me: I look so on myself. I had some little dawn of comfort to-day in prayer; but especially to-night, I think I had some faith and power of intercession with God. I was enabled to plead with God for the growth of grace in myself; and many of the dear children of God then lay with weight upon my soul. Blessed be the Lord! It is good to wrestle for divine blessings.

“Friday, April 9. Most of my time in morning devotion was spent without sensible sweetness; yet I had one delightful prospect of arriving at the heavenly world. I am more amazed than ever at such thoughts; for I see myself infinitely vile and unworthy. I feel very heartless and dull; and though I long for the presence of God, and seem constantly to reach towards God in desires; yet I cannot feel that divine and heavenly sweetness that I used to enjoy. No poor creature stands in need of divine grace more than I, and none abuse it more than I have done, and still do.

“Saturday, April 10. Spent much time in secret prayer this morning, and not without some comfort in divine things; and, I hope, had some faith in exercise: but am so low, and feel so little of the sensible presence of God, that I hardly know what to call faith, and am made to possess the sins of my youth, and the dreadful sin of my nature. I am all sin; I cannot think, nor act, but every motion is sin. I feel some faint hopes, that God will, of his infinite mercy, return again with showers of converting grace to poor gospel-abusing sinners; and my hopes of being employed in the cause of God, which of late have been almost extinct, seem now a little revived. O that all my late distresses and awful apprehensions might prove but Christ’s school, to make me fit for greater service, by teaching me the great lesson of humility!

“Lord’s day, April 11. In the morning I felt but little life, excepting that my heart was somewhat drawn out in thankfulness to God for his amazing grace and condescension to me, in past influences and assistances of his Spirit. Afterwards, I had some sweetness in the thoughts of arriving at the heavenly world. O for the happy day! After public worship God gave me special assistance in prayer; I wrestled with my dear Lord, with much sweetness; and intercession was made a delightful employment to me. In the evening, as I was viewing the light in the north, I was delighted in contemplation on the glorious morning of the resurrection.

“Monday, April 12. This morning the Lord was pleased to lift up the light of his countenance upon me in secret prayer, and made the season very precious to my soul. And though I have been so depressed of late, respecting my hopes of future serviceableness in the cause of God; yet now I had much encouragement respecting that matter. I was especially assisted to intercede and plead for poor souls, and for the enlargement of Christ’s kingdom in the world, and for special grace for myself, to fit me for special services. I felt exceedingly calm, and quite resigned to God, respecting my future employment, when and where he pleased. My faith lifted me above the world, and removed all those mountains, that I could not look over of late. I wanted not the favour of man to lean upon; for I knew Christ’s favour was infinitely better, and that it was no matter when, nor where, nor how Christ should send me, nor what trials he should still exercise me with, if I might be prepared for his work and will. I now found revived, in my mind, the wonderful discovery of infinite wisdom in all the dispensations of God towards me, which I had a little before I met with my great trial at college; every thing appeared full of divine wisdom.

“Tuesday, April 13. I saw myself to be very mean and vile; and wondered at those that showed me respect. Afterwards I was somewhat comforted in secret retirement, and assisted to wrestle with God, with some power, spirituality, and sweetness. Blessed be the Lord, he is never unmindful of me, but always sends me needed supplies; and, from time to time, when I am like one dead, he raises me to life. O that I may never distrust infinite goodness!

“Wednesday, April 14. My soul longed for communion with Christ, and for the mortification of indwelling corruption, especially spiritual pride. O there is a sweet day coming, wherein the weary will be at rest! My soul has enjoyed much sweetness this day in the hopes of its speedy arrival.

“Thursday, April 15. My desires apparently centred in God, and I found a sensible attraction of soul after him sundry times to-day. I know I long for God, and a conformity to his will, in inward purity and holiness, ten thousand times more than for any thing here below.

“Friday and Saturday, April 16, 17. I seldom prayed without some sensible joy in the Lord. Sometimes I longed much to he dissolved, and to be with Christ. O that God would enable me to grow in grace every day! Alas!  my barrenness is such, that God might well say, Cut it dawn. I am afraid of a dead heart on the sabbath now begun:   O that God would quicken me by his grace!

“Lord’s day, April 18. I retired early this morning into the woods for prayer; had the assistance of God’s Spirit, and faith in exercise; and was enabled to plead with fervency for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world, and to intercede for dear absent friends. At noon, God enabled me to wrestle with him, and to feel, as I trust, the power of divine love in prayer. At night I saw myself infinitely indebted to God, and had a view of my shortcomings: it seemed to me, that I had done as it were nothing for God, and that I never had lived to him but a few hours of my life.

“Monday, April 19. I set apart this day for fasting, and prayer to God for his grace; especially to prepare me for the work of the ministry, to give me divine aid and direction in my preparations for that great work, and in his own time to send me into his harvest. Accordingly, in the morning, I endeavoured to plead for the divine presence for the day, and not without some life. In the forenoon, I felt the power of intercession for precious, immortal souls; for the advancement of the kingdom of my dear Lord and Saviour in the word; and withal, a most sweet resignation, and even consolation and joy in the thoughts of suffering hardships, distresses, and even death itself, in the promotion of it; and had special enlargement in pleading for the enlightening and conversion of the poor heathen. In the afternoon, God was with me of a truth. O it was blessed company indeed! God enabled me so to agonize in prayer, that I was quite wet with perspiration, though in the shade, and the cool wind. My soul was drawn out very much for the world; for multitudes of souls. I think I had more enlargement for sinners, than for the children of God; though I felt as if I could spend my life in cries for both. I enjoyed great sweetness in communion with my dear Saviour. I think I never in my life felt such an entire weanedness from this world, and so much resigned to God in every thing. O that I may always live to and upon my blessed God! Amen, Amen.

“Tuesday, April 20. This day I am twenty-four years of age. O how much mercy have I received the year past! How often has God caused his goodness to pass before me! And how poorly have I answered the vows I made this time twelvemonth, to be wholly the Lord’s, to be for ever devoted to his service! The Lord help me to live more to his glory for the time to come. This has been a sweet, a happy day to me: blessed be God. I think my soul was never so drawn out in intercession for others, as it has been this night. Had a most fervent wrestle with the Lord tonight for my enemies; and I hardly ever so longed to live to God, and to be altogether devoted to him; I wanted to wear out my life in his service, and for his glory.

“Wednesday, April 21. Felt much calmness and resignation, and God again enabled me to wrestle for numbers of souls, and had much fervency in the sweet duty of intercession. I enjoyed of late more sweetness in intercession for others, than in any other part of prayer. My blessed Lord really let me come near to him, and plead with him.”

The frame of mind, and exercises of soul, that he expresses the three days next following, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, are much of the same kind with those expressed the two days past.

“Lord’s day, April 25. This morning I spent about two hours in secret duties, and was enabled more than ordinarily to agonize for immortal souls; though it was early in the morning, and the sun scarcely shined at all, yet my body was quite wet with sweat. I felt much pressed now, as frequently of late, to plead for the meekness and calmness of the Lamb of God in my soul; and through divine goodness felt much of it this morning. O it is a sweet disposition, heartily to forgive all injuries done us; to wish our greatest enemies as well as we do our own souls! Blessed Jesus, may I daily be more and more conformed to thee. At night I was exceedingly melted with divine love, and had some feeling sense of the blessedness of the upper world. Those words hung upon me, with much divine sweetness, Psal lxxxiv. 7. ‘They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion appeareth before God.’ O the near access that God sometimes gives us in our addresses to him! This may well be termed appearing before God: it is so indeed, in the true spiritual sense, and in the sweetest sense. I think I have not had such power of intercession these many months, both for God’s children, and for dead sinners, as have had this evening. I wished and longed for the coming of my dear Lord: I longed to join the angelic hosts in praises, wholly free from imperfection. O the blessed moment hastens! All I want is to be more holy, more like my dear Lord. O for sanctification! My very soul pants for the complete restoration of the blessed image of my Saviour; that I may be fit for the blessed enjoyments and employments of the heavenly world.

’Farewell, vain world; my soul can bid adieu; My Saviour’s taught me to abandon you. Your charms may gratify a sensual mind; Not please a soul wholly for God design’d. Forbear to entice, cease then my soul to call; ‘Tis fix’d through grace; my God shall be my all. While he thus lets me heavenly glories view,Your beauties fade, my heart’s no room for you.’

“The Lord refreshed my soul with many sweet passages of his word. O the new Jerusalem! my soul longed for it. O the song of Moses and the Lamb! And that blessed song, that no man can learn, but they who are redeemed from the earth! and the glorious white robes, that were given to the souls under the altar!

’Lord, I’m a stranger here alone;Earth no true comforts can afford; Yet, absent from my dearest one, My soul delights to cry, My Lord. Jesus, my Lord, my only love, Possess my soul, nor thence depart; Grant me kind visits, heavenly Dove; My God shall then have all my heart.’

“Monday, April 26. Continued in a sweet frame of mind; but in the afternoon felt something of spiritual pride stirring. God was pleased to make it an humbling season at first; though afterwards he gave me sweetness. O my soul exceedingly longs for that blessed state of perfect deliverance from all sin! At night, God enabled me to give my soul up to him, to cast myself upon him, to be ordered and disposed of according to his sovereign pleasure; and I enjoyed great peace and consolation in so doing. My soul took sweet delight in God; my thoughts freely and sweetly centred in him. O that I could spend every moment of my life to his glory!

“Tuesday, April 27. I retired pretty early for secret devotions; and in prayer God was pleased to pour such ineffable comforts into my soul, that I could do nothing for some time but say over and over,’ O my sweet Saviour! ‘O my sweet Saviour! whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.’ If I had had a thousand lives, my soul would gladly have laid them all down at once to have been with Christ. My soul never enjoyed so much of heaven before; it was the most refined and the most spiritual season of communion with God I ever yet felt. I never felt so great a degree of resignation in my life. In the afternoon I withdrew to meet with my God, but found myself much declined, and God made it an humbling season to my soul. I mourned over the body of death that is in me. It grieved me exceedingly, that I could not pray to and praise God with my heart full of divine heavenly love. O that my soul might never offer any dead, cold services to my God! In the evening had not so much divine love, as in the morning; but had a sweet season of fervent intercession.

“Wednesday, April 28. I withdrew to my usual place of retirement in great peace and tranquillity, spent about two hours in secret duties, and felt much as I did yesterday morning, only weaker and more overcome. I seemed to depend wholly on my dear Lord; wholly weaned from all other dependences. I knew not what to say to my God, but only lean on his bosom, as it were, and breathe  out my desires after a perfect conformity to him in all things. Thirsting desires, and insatiable longings, possessed my soul after perfect holiness. God was so precious to my soul, that the world with all its enjoyments was infinitely vile. I had no more value for the favour of men, than for pebbles. The Lord was my All; and that he overruled all, greatly delighted me. I think, my faith and dependence on God scarce ever rose so high. I saw him such a fountain of goodness, that it seemed impossible I should distrust him again, or be any way anxious about any thing that should happen to me. I now enjoyed great sweetness in praying for absent friends, and for the enlargement of Christ’s kingdom in the world. Much of the power of these divine enjoyments remained with me through the day. In the evening my heart seemed to melt, and, I trust, was really humbled for indwelling corruption, and I mourned like a dove. I felt, that all my unhappiness arose from my being a sinner. With resignation I could bid welcome to all other trials; but sin hung heavy upon me; for God discovered to me the corruption of my heart. I went to bed with a heavy heart, because I was a sinner; though I did not in the least doubt of God’s love. O that God would purge away my dross, and take away my tin, and make me seven times refined!

“Thursday, April 29. I was kept off at a distance from God; but had some enlargement in intercession for precious souls.

“Friday, April 30. I was somewhat dejected in spirit: nothing grieves me so much, as that I cannot live constantly to God’s glory. I could bear any desertion or spiritual conflicts, if I could but have my heart all the while burning within me with love to God and desires of his glory. But this is impossible; for when I feel these, I cannot be dejected in my soul, but only rejoice in my Saviour, who has delivered me from the reigning power, and will shortly deliver me from the indwelling of sin.

“Saturday, May 1. I was enabled to cry to God with fervency for ministerial qualifications, that he would appear for the advancement of his own kingdom, and that he would bring in the heathen, &c. Had much assistance in my studies. This has been a profitable week to me; I have enjoyed many communications of the blessed Spirit in my soul.

“Lord’s day, May 2. God was pleased this morning to give me such a sight of myself, as made me appear very vile in my own eyes. I felt corruption stirring in my heart, which I could by no means suppress; felt more and more deserted; was exceeding weak, and almost sick with my inward trials.

“Monday, May 3. Had a sense of vile ingratitude. In the morning I withdrew to my usual place of retirement, and mourned for my abuse of my dear Lord: spent the day in fasting and prayer. God gave me much power of wrestling for his cause and kingdom; and it was a happy day to my soul. God was with me all the day, and I was more above the world than ever in my life.”

Through the remaining part of this week he complains almost every day of desertion, inward trials and conflicts, attended with dejection of spirit; but yet speaks of times of relief and sweetness, and daily refreshing visits of the divine Spirit, affording special assistance and comfort, and enabling, at some times, to much fervency and enlargement in religious duties.

“Lord’s day, May, 9. I think I never felt so much of the cursed pride of my heart, as well as the stubbornness of my will, before. Oh dreadful! what a vile wretch I am! I could submit to be nothing, and to lie down in the dust. O that God would humble me in the dust! I felt myself such a sinner, all day, that I had scarce any comfort. O when shall I be delivered from the body of this death! I greatly feared, lest through stupidity and carelessness I should lose the benefit of these trials. O that they might be sanctified to my soul! Nothing seemed to touch me but only this, that I was a sinner. Had a fervency and refreshment in social prayer in the evening.

“Monday, May 10. I rode to New-Haven; saw some Christian friends there; and had comfort in joining in prayer with them, and hearing of the goodness of God to them, since I last saw them.

“Tuesday, May 11. I rode from New-Haven to Weathersfeld; was very dull most of the day; had little spirituality in this journey, though I often longed to be alone with God; was much perplexed with vile thoughts; was sometimes afraid of every thing: but God was my helper. Catched a little time for retirement in the evening, to my comfort and rejoicing. Alas! I cannot live in the midst of a tumult. I long to enjoy God alone.

“Wednesday, May 12. I had a distressing view of the pride, enmity, and vileness of my heart. Afterwards had sweet refreshment in conversing, and worshipping God, with Christian friends.

“Thursday, May 13. Saw so much of the wickedness of my heart, that I longed to get away from myself. I never before thought there was so much spiritual pride in my soul. I felt almost pressed to death with my own vileness. Oh what a body of death is there in me! Lord, deliver my soul. I could not find any convenient place for retirement, and was greatly exercised. Rode to Hartford in the afternoon: had some refreshment and comfort in religious exercises with Christian friends; but longed for more retirement. O the closest walk with God is the sweetest heaven that can be enjoyed on earth!

“Friday, May 14. I waited on a council of ministers convened at Hartford, and spread before them the treatment I had met with from the rector and tutors of Yale college; who thought it adviseable to intercede for me with the rector and trustees, and to entreat them to restore me to my former privileges in college.   After this, spent some time in religious exercises with Christian friends.

“Saturday, May 15. I rode from Hartford to Hebron; was somewhat dejected on the road; appeared exceeding vile in my own eyes, saw much pride and stubbornness in my heart. Indeed I never saw such a week as this before; for I have been almost ready to die with the view of the wickedness of my heart. I could not have thought I had such a body of death in me. Oh that God would deliver my soul!”

The three next days (which he spent at Hebron, Lebanon, and Norwich) he complains still of dulness and desertion, and expresses a sense of his vileness, and longing to hide himself in some cave or den of the earth: but yet speaks of some intervals of comfort and soul-refreshment each day.

“Wednesday, May 19. (At Millington) I was so amazingly deserted this morning, that I seemed to feel a sort of horror in my soul. Alas! when God withdraws, what is there that can afford any comfort to the soul!”

Through the eight days next following he expresses more calmness and comfort, and considerable life, fervency, and sweetness in religion.

“Friday, May 28. (At New-Haven) I think I scarce ever felt so calm in my life; I rejoiced in resignation, and giving myself up to God, to be wholly and entirely devoted to him for ever.”

On the three following days there was, by the account he gives, a continuance of the same excellent frame of mind, last expressed: but it seems not to be altogether to so great a degree.

“Tuesday, June 1. Had much of the presence of God in family prayer, and had some comfort in secret. I was greatly refreshed from the word of God this morning, which appeared exceeding sweet to me: some things that appeared mysterious, were opened to me. O that the kingdom of the dear Saviour might come with power, and the healing waters of the sanctuary spread far and wide for the healing of the nations! Came to Ripton; but was very weak. However, being visited by a number of young people in the evening, I prayed with them.”

The remaining part of this week he speaks of being much diverted and hindered in the business of religion, by great weakness of body, and necessary affairs he had to attend; and complains of having but little power in religion; but signifies, that God hereby showed him he was like a helpless infant cast out in the open field.

“Lord’s day, June 6. I feel much deserted: but all  this teaches me my nothingness and vileness more than ever.

“Monday, June 7. Felt still powerless in secret prayer. Afterwards I prayed and conversed with some little life. God feeds me with crumbs: blessed be his name for any thing. I felt a great desire, that all God’s people might know how mean and little and vile I am; that they might see I am nothing, that so they might pray for me aright, and not have the least dependence upon me.

“Tuesday, June 8. I enjoyed one sweet and precious season this day: I never felt it so sweet to be nothing, and less than nothing, and to be accounted nothing.”

The three next days he complains of desertion, and want of fervency in religion; but yet his diary shows that every day his heart was engaged in religion, as his great, and, as it were, only business.

“Saturday, June 12. Spent much time in prayer this morning, and enjoyed much sweetness: felt insatiable longings after God much of the day. I wondered how poor souls do to live that have no God. The world, with all its enjoyments, quite vanished. I see myself very helpless: but I have a blessed God to go to. I longed exceedingly to be dissolved, and to be with Christ, to behold his glory. Oh, my weak, weary soul longs to arrive at my Father’s house!

“Lord’s day, June 13. Felt something calm and resigned in the public worship: at the sacrament saw myself very vile and worthless. O that I may always lie low in the dust. My soul seemed steadily to go forth after God, in longing desires to live upon him.

“Monday, June 14. Felt something of the sweetness of communion with God, and the constraining force of his love: how admirably it captivates the soul, and makes all the desires and affections to centre in God! I set apart this day for secret fasting and prayer, to entreat God to direct and bless me with regard to the great work I have in view, of preaching the gospel; and that the Lord would return to me, and show me the light of his countenance. Had little life and power in the forenoon: near the middle of the afternoon, God enabled me to wrestle ardently in intercession for absent friends: but just at night, the Lord visited me marvellously in prayer: I think my soul never was in such an agony before. I felt no restraint; for the treasures of divine grace were opened to me. I wrestled for absent friends, for the ingathering of souls, for multitudes of poor souls, and for many that I thought were the children of God, personally, in many distant places. I was in such an agony, from sun half an hour high, till near dark, that I was all over wet with sweat; but yet it seemed to me that I had wasted away the day, and had done nothing. Oh, my dear Jesus did sweat blood for poor souls! I longed for more compassion towards them. Felt still in a sweet frame, under a sense of divine love and grace; and went to bed in such a frame, with my heart set on God.

“Tuesday, June 15. Had the most ardent longings after God that ever I felt in my life: at noon, in my secret retirement, I could do nothing but tell my dear Lord, in a sweet calm, that he knew I longed for nothing but himself, nothing but holiness; that he had given me these desires, and he only could give me the thing desired. I never seemed to be so unhinged from myself, and to be so wholly devoted to God. My heart was swallowed up in God most of the day. In the evening I had such a view of the soul being as it were enlarged, to contain more holiness, that it seemed ready to separate from my body. I then wrestled in an agony for divine blessings; had my heart drawn out in prayer for some Christian friends, beyond what I ever had before. I feel differently now from whatever I did under any enjoyments before; more engaged to live to God for ever. and less pleased with my own frames. I am not satisfied with my frames, nor feel at all more easy after such strugglings than before; for it seems far too little, if I could always be so. Oh how short do I fall of my duty in my sweetest moments!”

In his diary for the two next days he expresses something of the same frame, but in a far less degree.

“Friday, June 18. Considering my great unfitness for the work of the ministry, my present deadness, and total inability to do any thing for the glory of God that way, feeling myself very helpless, and at a great loss what the Lord would have me to do; I set apart this day for prayer to God, and spent most of the day in that duty, but amazingly deserted most of the day. Yet I found God graciously near, once in particular; while I was pleading for more compassion for immortal souls, my heart seemed to be opened at once, and I was enabled to cry with great ardency, for a few minutes. Oh, I was distressed to think, that I should offer such dead, cold services to the living God! My soul seemed to breathe after holiness, a life of constant devotedness to God. But I am almost lost sometimes in the pursuit of this blessedness, and ready to sink, because I continually fall short and miss of my desire. O that the Lord would help me to hold out, yet a little while, till the happy hour of deliverance comes!

“Saturday, June 19. Felt much disordered; my spirits were very low: but yet enjoyed some freedom and sweetness in the duties of religion. Blessed be God.

“Lord’s day, June 20. Spent much time alone. My soul longed to be holy, and reached after God; but seemed not to obtain my desire. I hungered and thirsted; but was not refreshed and satisfied. My soul hung on God, as my only portion. O that I could grow in grace more abundantly every day!”

The next day he speaks of his having assistance in his studies, and power, fervency, and comfort in prayer.

“Tuesday, June 22. In the morning spent about two hours in prayer and meditation, with considerable delight. Towards night, felt my soul go out in longing desires after God, in secret retirement. In the evening, was sweetly composed and resigned to God’s will; was enabled to leave myself and all my concerns with him, and to have my whole dependence upon him. My secret retirement was very refreshing to my soul; it appeared such a happiness to have God for my portion, that I had rather be any other creature in this lower creation, than not come to the enjoyment of God. I had rather be a beast, than a man without God, if I were to live here to eternity. Lord, endear thyself more to me!”

In his diary for the next seven days he expresses a variety of exercises of mind. He speaks of great longings after God and holiness, and earnest desires for the conversion of others; of fervency in prayer, power to wrestle with God, composure, comfort, and sweetness, from time to time; but expresses a sense of the vile abomination of his heart, and bitterly complains of his barrenness, and the pressing body of death; and says, he “saw clearly that whatever he enjoyed, better than hell, was of free grace.” He complains of being exceeding low, much below the character of a child of God; and is sometimes very disconsolate and dejected.

“Wednesday, June 30. Spent this day alone in the woods, in fasting and prayer; underwent the most dreadful conflicts in my soul that ever I felt, in some respects. I saw myself so vile, that I was ready to say, “I shall now perish by the hand of Saul.” I thought, and almost concluded, I had no power to stand for the cause of God, but was almost “afraid of the shaking of a leaf.” Spent almost the whole day in prayer, incessantly. I could not bear to think of Christians showing me any respect. I almost despaired of doing any service in the world: I could not feel any hope or comfort respecting the heathen, which used to afford me some refreshment in the darkest hours of this nature. I spent the day in the bitterness of my soul. Near night, I felt a little better; and afterwards enjoyed some sweetness in secret prayer.

“Thursday, July 1. Had some sweetness in prayer this morning. Felt exceeding sweetly in secret prayer to-night, and desired nothing so ardently as that God should do with me just as he pleased.

“Friday, July 2. Felt composed in secret prayer in the morning. My desires ascended to God this day, as I was travelling: and was comfortable in the evening. Blessed be God for all my consolations.

“Saturday, July 3. My heart seemed again to sink.

The disgrace I was laid under at college, seemed to damp me; as it opens the mouths of opposers. I had no refuge but in God. Blessed be his name, that I may go to him at all times, and, find him a present help.

“Lord’s day, July 4. Had considerable assistance. In the evening I withdrew, and enjoyed a happy season in secret prayer. God was pleased to give me the exercise of faith, and thereby brought the invisible and eternal world near to my soul; which appeared sweetly to me. I hoped, that my weary pilgrimage in the world would be short; and that it would not be long before I was brought to my heavenly home and Father’s house. I was resigned to God’s will, to tarry his time, to do his work, and suffer his pleasure. I felt thankfulness to God for all my pressing desertions of late; for I am persuaded they have been made a means of making me more humble, and much more resigned. I felt pleased, to be little, to be nothing, and to lie in the dust. I enjoyed life and consolation in pleading for the dear children of God, and the kingdom of Christ in the world; and my soul earnestly breathed after holiness, and the enjoyment of God. O come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.“

By his diary for the remaining days of this week, it appears that he enjoyed considerable composure and tranquillity, and had sweetness and fervency of spirit in prayer, from day to day.

“Lord’s day, July 11. Was deserted, and exceedingly dejected, in the morning. In the afternoon, had some life and assistance, and felt resigned. I saw myself exceeding vile.”

On the two next days he expresses inward comfort, resignation, and strength in God.

“Wednesday, July 14. Felt a kind of humble resigned sweetness: spent a considerable time in secret, giving myself up wholly to the Lord. Heard Mr. Bellamy preach towards night: felt very sweetly part of the time: longed for nearer access to God.“

The four next days he expresses considerable comfort and fervency of spirit, in Christian conversation and religious exercises.

“Monday, July 19. My desires seem especially to be carried out after weanedness from the world, perfect deadness to it, and to be even crucified to all its allurements. My soul longs to feel itself more of a pilgrim and stranger here below; that nothing may divert me from pressing through the lonely desert, till I arrive at my Father’s house.

“Tuesday, July 20. It was sweet to give away myself to God, to be disposed of at his pleasure; and had some feeling sense of the sweetness of being a pilgrim on earth.“

The next day he expresses himself as determined to be wholly devoted to God; and it appears by his diary, that he spent the whole day in a most diligent exercise of religion, and exceeding comfortably.

“Thursday, July 22. Journeying from Southbury to Ripton, I called at a house by the way; where being very kindly entertained and refreshed, I was filled with amazement and shame, that God should stir up the hearts of any to show so much kindness to such a dead dog as I; was made sensible, in some measure, how exceedingly vile it is, not to be wholly devoted to God. I wondered that God would suffer any of his creatures to feed and sustain me from time to time.”

In his diary for the six next days are expressed various exercises and experiences; such as, sweet composure and fervency of spirit in meditation and prayer, weanedness from the world, being sensibly a pilgrim and stranger on the earth, engagedness of mind to spend every inch of time for God, &c.

“Thursday, July 29. I was examined by the Association met at Danbury, as to my learning, and also my experiences in religion, and received a licence from them to preach the gospel of Christ. Afterwards felt much devoted to God; joined in prayer with one of the ministers, my peculiar friend, in a convenient place; went to bed resolving to live devoted to God all my days.

* * * * * * *

Part 3: From Being Licensed To Preach Till Appointment As Missionary

FROM THE TIME OF HIS BEING LICENSED TO PREACH BY THE ASSOCIATION, TILL HE WAS EXAMINED IN NEW YORK, BY THE CORRESPONDENTS, OR COMMISSIONERS OF THE SOCIETY IN SCOTLAND FOR PROPAGATING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, AND APPROVED AND APPOINTED AS THEIR MISSIONARY TO THE INDIANS.

“Friday, July 30, 1742. Rode from Danbury to Southbury; preached there from 1 Pet. iv. 8. ‘And above all things have fervent charity,’ &c. Had much of the comfortable presence of God in the exercise. I seemed to have power with God in prayer, and power to get hold of the hearts of the people in preaching.

“Saturday, July 31. Exceeding calm and composed, and was greatly refreshed and encouraged.”

It appears by his diary, that he continued in this sweetness and tranquillity almost through the whole of the next week.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 8. In the morning I felt comfortably in secret prayer; my soul was refreshed with the hopes of the heathen coming home to Christ; was much resigned to God, and thought it was no matter what became of me. Preached both parts of the day at Bethlehem, from Job xiv. 14. “If a man die, shall he live again,” &c. It was sweet to me to meditate on death. In the evening felt very comfortably, and cried to God fervently in secret prayer.”

It appears by his diary, that he continued through the three next days engaged with all his might in the business of religion, and in almost a constant enjoyment of the comforts of it.

“Thursday, Aug. 12. This morning and last night I was exercised with sore inward trials: I had no power to pray; but seemed shut out from God. I had in a great measure lost my hopes of God sending me among the heathen afar off, and of seeing them flock home to Christ. I saw so much of my hellish vileness, that I appeared worse to myself than any devil: I wondered that God would let me live, and wondered that people did not stone me, much more that they would ever hear me preach! It seemed as though I never could nor should preach any more; yet about nine or ten o’clock, the people came over, and I was forced to preach. And blessed be God, he gave me his presence and Spirit in prayer and preaching: so that I was much assisted, and spake with power from Job xiv. 14. Some Indians cried out in great distress,   and all appeared greatly concerned. After we had prayed and exhorted them to seek the Lord with constancy, and hired an Englishwoman to keep a kind of school among them, we came away about one o clock, and came to Judea, about fifteen or sixteen miles. There God was pleased to visit my soul with much comfort. Blessed be the Lord for all things I meet with.”

It appears that the two next days he had much comfort, and had his heart much engaged in religion.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 15. Felt much comfort and devotedness to God this day. At night it was refreshing to get alone with God, and pour out my soul. O who can conceive of the sweetness of communion with the blessed God, but those who have experience of it! Glory to God for ever, that I may taste heaven below.

“Monday, Aug. 16. Had some comfort in secret prayer, in the morning Felt sweetly sundry times in prayer this day: but was much perplexed in the evening with vain conversation.

“Tuesday, Aug. 17. Exceedingly depressed in spirit, it cuts and wounds my heart, to think how much self-exaltation, spiritual pride, and warmth of temper, I have formerly had intermingled with my endeavours to promote God’s work: and sometimes I long to lie down at the feet of opposers, and confess what a poor imperfect creature I have been, and still am. Oh, the Lord forgive me, and make me for the future “wise as a serpent, and harmless as a dove!” Afterwards enjoyed considerable comfort and delight of soul.

”Wednesday, Aug. 18. Spent most of this day in prayer and reading. I see so much of my own extreme vileness, that I feel ashamed and guilty before God and man; I look to myself like the vilest fellow in the land: I wonder that God stirs up his people to be so kind to me.

“Thursday, Aug. 19. This day, being about to go from Mr. Bellamy’s at Bethlehem, where I had resided some time, I prayed with him, and two or three other Christian friends. We gave ourselves to God with all our hearts, to be his for ever: eternity looked very near to me, while I was praying. If I never should see these Christians again in this world, it seemed but a few moments before I should meet them in another world.

“Friday, Aug. 20. I appeared so vile to myself, that I hardly dared to think of being seen especially on account of spiritual pride. However, to-night I enjoyed a sweet hour alone with God (at Ripton): I was lifted above the frowns and flatteries of this lower world, had a sweet relish of heavenly joys, and my soul did as it were get into the eternal world, and really taste of heaven. I had a sweet season of intercession for dear friends in Christ; and God helped me to cry fervently for Zion. Blessed be God for this season.

“Saturday, Aug. 21. Was much perplexed in the morning. Towards noon enjoyed more of God in secret, was enabled to see that it was best to throw myself into the hands of God, to be disposed of according to his pleasure, and rejoiced in such thoughts. In the afternoon rode to New-Haven; was much confused all the way. Just at night underwent such a dreadful conflict as I have scarce ever felt. I saw myself exceedingly vile and unworthy; so that I was guilty, and ashamed that any body should bestow any favour on me, or show me any respect.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 22. In the morning, continued still in perplexity. In the evening, enjoyed that comfort that seemed to me sufficient to overbalance all my late distresses. I saw that God is the only soul-satisfying portion, and I really found satisfaction in him. My soul was much enlarged in sweet intercession for my fellowmen every where, and for many Christian friends in particular, in distant places.

“Monday, Aug. 23. Had a sweet season in secret prayer: the Lord drew near to my soul, and filled me with peace and divine consolation. O my soul tasted the sweetness of the upper world; and was drawn out in prayer for the world, that it might come home to Christ! Had much comfort in the thoughts and hopes of the ingathering of the heathen; was greatly assisted in intercession for Christian friends.”

He continued still in the same frame of mind the next day, but in a lesser degree.

“Wednesday, Aug. 25. In family prayer, God helped me to climb up near him, so that I scarce ever got nearer.”

The four next days, he appears to have been the subject of desertion, and of comfort, and fervency in religion, interchangeably, together with a sense of vileness and unprofitableness.

“Monday, Aug. 30. Felt something comfortably in the morning; conversed sweetly with some friends; was in a serious composed frame; and prayed at a certain house with some degree of sweetness. Afterwards, at another house, prayed privately with a dear Christian friend or two; and I think I scarce ever launched so far into the eternal world as then; I got so far out on the broad ocean that my soul with joy triumphed over all the evils on the shores of mortality. I think time, and all its happy amusements and cruel disappointments, never appeared so inconsiderable to me before. I was in a sweet frame; I saw myself nothing, and my soul reached after God with intense desire. O! I saw what I owed to God, in such a manner, as I scarce ever did: I knew I had never lived a moment to him as I should do; indeed it appeared to me I had never done any thing in Christianity: my soul longed with a vehement desire to live to God. In the evening, sung and prayed with a number of Christians: felt the powers of the world to come in my soul, in prayer. Afterwards prayed again privately, with a dear Christian or two, and found the presence of God; was something humbled in my secret retirement: felt my ingratitude, because I was not wholly swallowed up in God.”

He was in a sweet frame great part of the next day.

“Wednesday, Sept. 1. Went to Judea, to the ordination of Mr. Judd. Dear Mr. Bellamy preached from Matt. xxiv. 46. ‘Blessed is that servant,’ &c. I felt very solemn most of the time; had my thoughts much on that time when our Lord will came; that time refreshed my soul much; only I was afraid I should not be found faithful, because I had so vile a heart. My thoughts were much in eternity, where I love to dwell. Blessed be God for this solemn season. Rode home to-night with Mr. Bellamy, conversed with some friends till it was very late, and then retired to rest in a comfortable frame.

“Thursday, Sept. 2. About two in the afternoon I preached from John vi. 67. ‘Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away?’ and God assisted me in some comfortable degree; but more especially in my first prayer: my soul seemed then to launch quite into the eternal world, and to be as it were separated from this lower world. Afterwards preached again from Isa. v. 4. ‘What could have been done more,’ &c. God gave me some assistance; but I saw myself a poor worm.’

On Friday, Sept. 3. He complains of having but little life in the things of God, the former part of the day, but afterwards speaks of sweetness and enlargement.

“Saturday, Sept. 4. Much out of health, exceedingly depressed in my soul, and at an awful distance from God. Towards night spent some time in profitable thoughts on Rom. viii. 2. ‘For the law of the spirit of life,’ &c. Near night had a very sweet season in prayer; God enabled me to wrestle ardently for the advancement of the Redeemer’s kingdom; pleaded earnestly for my own dear brother John, that God would make him more of a pilgrim and stranger on the earth, and fit him for singular serviceableness in the world; and my heart sweetly exulted in the Lord, in the thoughts of any distresses that might alight on him or me, in the advancement of Christ’s kingdom. It was a sweet and comfortable hour unto my soul, while I was indulged with freedom to plead, not only for myself, but also for many other souls.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 5. Preached all day: was somewhat strengthened and assisted in the afternoon; more especially in the evening: had a sense of my unspeakable short-comings in all my duties. I found, alas! that I had never lived to God in my life.

“Monday, Sept. 6. Was informed, that they only waited for an opportunity to apprehend me for preaching at New-Haven lately, that so they might imprison me. This made me more solemn and serious, and to quit all hopes of the world’s friendship: it brought me to a further sense of my vileness, and just desert of this, and much more, from the hand of God, though not from the hand of man. Retired into a convenient place in the woods, and spread the matter before God.

“Tuesday, Sept. 7. Had some relish of divine things in the morning. Afterwards felt more barren and melancholy. Rode to New-Haven, to a friend’s house at a distance from the town; that I might remain undiscovered, and yet have opportunity to do business privately with friends which come to commencement.

“Wednesday, Sept. 8. Felt very sweetly when I first rose in the morning. In family prayer had some enlargement, but not much spirituality, till eternity came up before me, and looked near: I found some sweetness in the thoughts of bidding a dying farewell to this tiresome world. Though some time ago I reckoned upon seeing my dear friends at commencement; yet being now denied the opportunity, for fear of imprisonment, I felt totally resigned, and as contented to spend this day alone in the woods, as I could have done, if I had been allowed to go to town. Felt exceedingly weaned from the world to-day. In the afternoon I discoursed on divine things with a dear Christian friend, whereby we were both refreshed. Then I prayed, with a sweet sense of the blessedness of communion with God: I think I scarce ever enjoyed more of God in any one prayer. O it was a blessed season indeed to my soul; I know not that ever I saw so much of my own nothingness in my life; never wondered so, that God allowed me to preach his word. This has been a sweet and comfortable day to my soul. Blessed be God. Prayed again with my dear friend, with something of  the divine presence. I long to be wholly conformed to God, and transformed into his image.

“Thursday, Sept. 9. Spent much of the day alone: enjoyed the presence of God in some comfortable degree: was visited by some dear friends, and prayed with them: wrote sundry letters to friends; felt religion in my soul while writing: enjoyed sweet meditations on some scriptures. In the evening, went very privately into town, from the place of my residence at the farms, and conversed with some dear friends; felt sweetly in singing hymns with them: and made my escape to the farms again, without being discovered by any enemies, as I knew of. Thus the Lord preserves me continually.

“Friday, Sept. 10. Longed with intense desire after God; my whole soul seemed impatient to be conformed to him, and to become ‘holy, as he is holy.’ In the afternoon, prayed with a dear friend privately, and had the presence of God with us; our souls united together to reach after a blessed immortality, to be unclothed of the body of sin and death, and to enter the blessed world, where no unclean thing enters. O, with what intense desire did our souls long for that blessed day, that we might be freed from sin, and for ever live to and in our God! In the evening, took leave of that house; but first kneeled down and prayed; the Lord was of a truth in the midst of us; it was a sweet parting season; felt in myself much sweetness and affection in the things of God. Blessed be God for every such divine gale of his Spirit, to speed me on in my way to the new Jerusalem! Felt some sweetness afterwards, and spent the evening in conversation with friends, and prayed with some life, and retired to rest very late.”

The five next days he appears to have been in an exceeding comfortable frame of mind, for the most part, and to have been the subject of the like heavenly exercises as are often expressed in preceding passages of his diary; such as, having his heart much engaged for God, wrestling with him in prayer with power and ardency; enjoying at times sweet calmness and composure of mind, giving himself up to God to be his for ever, with great complacence of mind; being wholly resigned to the will of God, that he might do with him what he pleased; longing to improve time, having the eternal world as it were brought nigh; longing after God and holiness, earnestly desiring a complete conformity to him, and wondering how poor souls do to exist without God.

“Thursday, Sept. 16. At night enjoyed much of God in secret prayer: felt an uncommon resignation, to be and do what God pleased. Some days past I felt great perplexity on account of my past conduct: my bitterness, and want of Christian kindness and love, has been very distressing to my soul: the Lord forgive me my unchristian warmth, and want of a spirit of meekness!”

The next day he speaks of much resignation, calmness, and peace of mind, and near views of the eternal world.

“Saturday, Sept. 18. Felt some compassion for souls, and mourned I had no more. I feel much more kindness, meekness, gentleness, and love towards all mankind, than ever. I long to be at the feet of my enemies and persecutors: enjoyed some sweetness, in feeling my soul conformed to Christ Jesus, and given away to him for ever.”

The next day he speaks of much dejection and discouragement, from an apprehension of his own unfitness ever to do any good in preaching; but blesses God for all dispensations of providence and grace; finding that by all God weaned him more from the world, and made him more resigned.

The next ten days he appears to have been for the most part under great degrees of melancholy, exceedingly dejected and discouraged: speaks of his being ready to give up all for gone respecting the cause of Christ, and exceedingly longing to die: yet had some sweet seasons and intervals of comfort, and special assistance and enlargement in the duties of religion, and in performing public services, and considerable success in them.

“Thursday, Sept. 30. Still very low in spirits; I did not know how to engage in any work or business, especially to correct some disorders among Christians; felt as though I had no power to be faithful in that regard. However, towards noon I preached from Deut. viii. 2. Deut. viii. 2 ‘And thou shalt remember,’ &c. and was enabled with freedom to reprove some things in Christians’ conduct, that I thought very unsuitable and irregular; insisted near two hours on this subject.”

Through this and the two following weeks he passed through a variety of exercises: he was frequently dejected, and felt inward distresses; and sometimes sunk into the depths of melancholy: at which turns he was not exercised about the state of his soul, with regard to the favour of God, and his interest in Christ, but about his own sinful infirmities, and unfitness for God’s service. His mind appears sometimes extremely depressed and sunk with a sense of inexpressible vileness. But in the mean time he speaks of many seasons of comfort and spiritual refreshment, wherein his heart was encouraged and strengthened in God, and sweetly resigned to his will; of some seasons of very high degrees of spiritual consolation, and of his great longings after holiness and conformity to God; of his great fear of offending God, and of his heart being sweetly melted in religious duties; of his longing for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom, of his having at times much assistance in preaching, and of remarkable effects on the auditory.

“Lord’s day, Oct. 17. Had a considerable sense of my helplessness and inability; saw that I must be dependent on God for all I want; and especially when I went to the place of public worship. I found I could not speak a word for God without his special help and assistance. I went into the assembly trembling, as I frequently do, under a sense of my insufficiency to do any thing in the cause of God, as I ought to do. But it pleased God to afford me much assistance, and there seemed to be a considerable effect on the hearers. In the evening I felt a disposition to praise God, for his goodness to me, that he had enabled me in some measure to be faithful; and my soul rejoiced to think, that I had thus performed the work of one day more, and was one day nearer my eternal, and I trust my heavenly, home. O that I might be “faithful to the death, fulfilling as an hireling my day,” till the shades of the evening of life shall free my soul from the toils of the day! This evening, in secret prayer, I felt exceeding solemn, and such longing desires after deliverance from sin, and after conformity to God, as melted my heart. Oh, I longed to be “delivered from this body of death!” I felt inward pleasing pain, that I could not be conformed to God entirely, fully, and for ever. I scarce ever preach without being first visited with inward conflicts and sore trials. Blessed be the Lord for these trials and distresses as they are blessed for my humbling.

“Monday, Oct. 18. In the morning I felt some sweetness, but still pressed through trials of soul. My life is a constant mixture of consolations and conflicts, and will be so till I arrive at the world of spirits.

“Tuesday, Oct. 19. This morning and last night I felt a sweet longing in my soul after holiness. My soul seemed so to reach and stretch towards the mark of perfect sanctity, that it was ready to break with longings.

“Wednesday, Oct. 20. Exceeding infirm in body, exercised with much pain, and very lifeless in divine things. Felt a little sweetness in the evening.

“Thursday, Oct. 21. Had a very deep sense of the vanity of the world most of the day; had little more regard to it than if I had been to go into eternity the next hour. Through divine goodness, I felt very serious and solemn. O, I love to live on the brink of eternity, in my views and meditations! This gives me a sweet, awful, and reverential sense and apprehension of God and divine things, when I see myself as it were standing before the judgment-seat of Christ.

“Friday, Oct. 22. Uncommonly weaned from the world to-day: my soul delighted to be a stranger and pilgrim on the earth; I felt a disposition in me never to have any thing to do with this world. The character given of some of the ancient people of God, in Heb. xi. 13. was very pleasing to me, ‘They confessed that they were pilgrims and strangers on the earth,’ by their daily practice; and O that I could always do so! Spent some considerable time in a pleasant grove, in prayer and meditation. O it is sweet to be thus weaned from friends, and from myself, and dead to the present world, that so I may  live wholly to and upon the blessed God! Saw myself little, low, and vile in myself. In the afternoon preached at Bethlehem, from Deut. viii. 2. God helped me to speak to the hearts of dear Christians. Blessed be the Lord for this season: I trust they and I shall rejoice on this account to all eternity. Dear Mr. Bellamy came in, while I was making the first prayer; (being returned home from a journey;) and after meeting we walked away together, and spent the evening in sweetly conversing on divine things, and praying together, with sweet and tender love to each other, and returned to rest with our hearts in a serious spiritual frame.

“Saturday, Oct. 23. Somewhat perplexed and confused. Rode this day from Bethlehem to Simsbury.

“Lord’s day, Oct. 24. Felt so vile and unworthy, that I scarce knew how to converse with human creatures.

“Monday, Oct. 25. [At Turky-Hills] In the evening I enjoyed the divine presence in secret prayer. It was a sweet and comfortable season to me; my soul longed for God, for the living God: enjoyed a sweet solemnity of spirit, and longing desire after the recovery of the divine image in my soul. ‘Then shall I be satisfied, when I shall awake in God’s likeness,’ and never before.

“Tuesday, Oct. 26. [At West-Suffield] Underwent the most dreadful distresses, under a sense of my own unworthiness. It seemed to me, I deserved rather to be driven out of the place, than to have any body treat me with any kindness, or come to hear me preach. And verily my spirits were so depressed at this time, (as at many others,) that it was impossible I should treat immortal souls with faithfulness. I could not deal closely and faithfully with them, I felt so infinitely vile in myself. Oh, what dust and ashes I am, to think of preaching the gospel to others! Indeed I never can be faithful for one moment, but shall certainly ‘daub with untempered mortar,’ if God do not grant me special help. In the evening I went to the meeting-house, and it looked to me near as easy for one to rise out of the grave and preach, as for me. However, God afforded me some life and power, both in prayer and sermon; and was pleased to lift me up, and show me that he could enable me to preach. O the wonderful goodness of God to so vile a sinner! Returned to my quarters; and enjoyed some sweetness in prayer alone, and mourned that I could not live more to God.

“Wednesday, Oct. 27. I spent the forenoon in prayer and meditation; was not a little concerned about preaching in the afternoon: felt exceedingly without strength, and very helpless indeed; and went into the meeting-house, ashamed to see any come to hear such an unspeakably worthless wretch. However, God enabled me to speak with clearness, power, and pungency. But there was some noise and tumult in the assembly, that I did not well like; and endeavoured to bear public testimony against it with moderation and mildness, through the current of my discourse. In the evening, was enabled to be in some measure thankful and devoted to God.”

The frames and exercises of his mind during the four next days were mostly very similar to those of the two days past; excepting intervals of considerable degrees of divine peace and consolation.

The things expressed within the space of the three following days are such as these; some seasons of dejection, mourning for being so destitute of the exercises of grace, longing to be delivered from sin, pressing after more of God, seasons of sweet consolation, precious and intimate converse with God in secret prayer, sweetness of Christian conversation, &c. Within this time he rode from Sufileld to Eastbury, Hebron, and Lebanon.

“Thursday, Nov. 4. [At Lebanon] Saw much of my nothingness most of this day: but felt concerned that I had no more sense of my insufficiency and unworthiness. O it is sweet lying in the dust! But it is distressing to feel in my soul that hell of corruption, which still remains in me. In the afternoon, had a sense of the sweetness of a strict, close, and constant devotedness to God, and my soul was comforted with his consolations. My soul felt a pleasing, yet painful concern, lest I should spend some moments without God. O may I always live to God! In the evening, I was visited by some friends, and spent the time in prayer and such conversation as tended to our edification. It was a comfortable season to my soul: I felt an intense desire to spend every moment for God. God is unspeakably gracious to me continually. In times past, he has given me inexpressible sweetness in the performance of duty. Frequently my soul has enjoyed much of God; but has been ready to say, ‘Lord, it is good to be here;’ and so to indulge sloth, while I have lived on the sweetness of my feelings. But of late, God has been pleased to keep my soul hungry, almost continually; so that I have been filled with a kind of pleasing pain. When I really enjoy God, I feel my desires of him the more insatiable, and my thirstings after holiness the more unquenchable; and the Lord will not allow me to feel as though I were fully supplied and satisfied, but keeps me still reaching forward. I feel barren and empty, as though I could not live without more of God; I feel ashamed and guilty before him. Oh! I see that ‘the law is spiritual, but I am carnal.’ I do not, I cannot live to God. Oh for holiness! Oh for more of God in my soul! Oh this pleasing pain! It makes my soul press after God; the language of it is, ‘Then shall I be satisfied, when I awake in God’s likeness,’ (Ps. xvii. 15. ult.) but never, never before: and consequently I am engaged to ‘press towards the mark’ day by day. O that I may feel this continual hunger, and not be retarded, but rather animated by every cluster from Canaan, to reach forward in the narrow way, for the full enjoyment and possession of the heavenly inheritance! O that I may never loiter in my heavenly journey!”

These insatiable desires after God and holiness continued the two next days, with a great sense of his own exceeding unworthiness, and the nothingness of the things of this world.

“Lord’s day, Nov. 7. [At Millington] It seemed as if such an unholy wretch as I never could arrive at that blessedness, to be ‘holy, as God is holy.’ At noon I longed for sanctification, and conformity to God. Oh, that is the all, the all! The Lord help me to press after God for ever.

“Monday, Nov. 8. Towards night enjoyed much sweetness in secret prayer, so that my soul longed for an arrival in the heavenly country, the blessed paradise of God. Through divine goodness, I have scarce seen the day, for two months, but death has looked so pleasant to me at one time or other of the day, that I could have rejoiced the present should be my last, notwithstanding my pressing inward trials and conflicts. I trust the Lord will finally make me a conqueror, and more than a conqueror; and that I shall be able to use that triumphant language, ‘O death, where is thy sting!’ And, ‘O grave, where is thy victory!’”

Within the next ten days the following things are expressed: longing and wrestling to be holy, and to live to God; a desire that every single thought might be for God; feeling guilty, that his thoughts were no more swallowed up in God; sweet solemnity and calmness of mind; submission and resignation to God; great weanedness from the world; abasement in the dust; grief at some vain conversation that was observed; sweetness from time to time in secret prayer, and in conversing and praying with Christian friends. And every day he appears to have been greatly engaged in the great business of religion and living to God, without interruption.

“Friday, Nov. 19. [At New-Haven] Received a letter from the Reverend Mr. Pemberton of New York, desiring me speedily to go down thither, and consult about the Indian affairs in those parts; and to meet certain gentlemen there who were intrusted with those affairs. My mind was instantly seized with concern; so I retired with two or three Christian friends, and prayed; and indeed it was a sweet time with me. I was enabled to leave myself and all my concerns with God; and taking leave of friends, I rode to Ripton, and was comforted in an opportunity to see and converse with dear Mr. Mills.”

In the four next following days he was sometimes oppressed with the weight of that great affair, about which Mr. Pemberton had written to him; but was enabled from time to time to “cast his burden on the Lord,” and to commit himself and all his concerns to him. He continued  still in a sense of the excellency of holiness, longings after it, and earnest desires of the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world; and had from time to time sweet comfort in meditation and prayer.

“Wednesday, Nov. 24. Came to New York: felt still much concerned about the importance of my business; put up many earnest requests to God for his help and direction; was confused with the noise and tumult of the city; enjoyed but little time alone with God: but my soul longed after him.

“Thursday, Nov. 25. Spent much time in prayer and supplication: was examined by some gentlemen, of my Christian experiences, and my acquaintance with divinity, and some other studies, in order to my improvement in that important affair of gospellizing the heathen;   and was made sensible of my great ignorance and unfitness for public service. I had the most abasing thoughts of myself’, I think, that ever I had; I thought myself the worst wretch that ever lived: it hurt me, and pained my very heart, that any body should show me any respect. Alas! methought, how sadly they are deceived in me! how miserably would they be disappointed, if they knew my inside! Oh my heart! And in this depressed condition I was forced to go and preach to a considerable assembly, before some grave and learned ministers; but felt such a pressure from a sense of my vileness, ignorance, and unfitness to appear in public, that I was almost overcome with it; my soul was grieved for the congregation; that they should sit there to hear such a dead dog as I preach. I thought myself infinitely indebted to the people, and longed that God would reward them with the rewards of his grace. I spent much of the evening alone.”

* * * * * * *

Part 4: First Missionary Work

FROM THE TIME OF HIS EXAMINATION BY THE CORRESPONDENTS OF THE SOCIETY FOR PROPAGATING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, AND BEING APPOINTED THEIR MISSIONARY, TO HIS FIRST ENTRANCE ON THE BUSINESS OF HIS MISSION AMONG THE INDIANS AT KAUNAUMEEK.

“Friday, Nov. 26. Had still a sense of my great vileness, and endeavoured as much as I could to keep alone. Oh, what a nothing, what dust and ashes am I! Enjoyed some peace and comfort in spreading my complaints before the God of all grace.

”Saturday, Nov. 27. Committed my soul to God with some degree of comfort; left New York about nine in the morning; came away with a distressing sense still of my unspeakable unworthiness. Surely I may well love all my brethren; for none of them all is so vile as I; whatever they do outwardly, yet it seems to me none is conscious of so much guilt before God. Oh my leanness, my barrenness, my carnality, and past bitterness, and want of a gospel-temper! These things oppress my soul. Rode from New York, thirty miles, to White Plains, and most of the way continued lifting up my heart to God for mercy and purifying grace: and spent the evening much dejected in spirit.”

The three next days he continued in this frame, in a great sense of his own vileness, with an evident mixture of melancholy, in no small degree; but had some intervals of comfort, and God’s sensible presence with him.

“Wednesday, Dec. 1. My soul breathed after God, in sweet spiritual and longing desires of conformity to him; my soul was brought to rest itself and all on his rich grace, and felt strength and encouragement to do or suffer any thing that Divine Providence should allot me. Rode about twenty miles from Stratfield to Newton.”

Within the space of the next nine days he went a journey from Newton to Haddam, his native town; and after staying there some days, returned again into the western part of Connecticut, and came to Southbury. In his account of the frames and exercises of his mind, during this space of time, are such things as these: frequent turns of dejection; a sense of his vileness, emptiness, and an unfathomable abyss of desperate wickedness in his heart, attended with a conviction that he had never seen but little of it; bitterly mourning over his barrenness, being greatly grieved that he could not live to God, to whom he owed his all ten thousand times, crying out, “My leanness, my leanness!” a sense of the meetness and suitableness of his lying in the dust beneath the feet of infinite majesty; fervency and ardour in prayer; longing to live to God; being afflicted with some impertinent trifling conversation that he heard; but enjoying sweetness in Christian conversation.

“Saturday, Dec. 11. Conversed with a dear friend, to whom I had thought of giving a liberal education, and being at the whole charge of it, that he might be fitted for the gospel-ministry.   I acquainted him with my thoughts in that matter, and so left him to consider of it, till I should see him again. Then I rode to Bethlehem, came to Mr. Bellamy’s lodgings, and spent the evening with him in sweet conversation and prayer. We recommended the concern of sending my friend to college to the God of all grace. Blessed be the Lord for this evening’s opportunity together.

“Lord’s day, Dec. 12. I felt, in the morning as if I had little or no power either to pray or preach; and felt a distressing need of divine help. I went to meeting trembling; but it pleased God to assist me in prayer and sermon. I think my soul scarce ever penetrated so far into the immaterial world, in any one prayer that ever I made, nor were my devotions ever so free from gross conceptions and imaginations framed from beholding material objects. I preached with some sweetness, from Matt. vi. 33. ‘But seek ye first the kingdom of God,’ &c.; and in the afternoon from Rom. xv. 30. ‘And now I beseech you, brethren,’ &c. There was much affection in the assembly. This has been a sweet sabbath to me; and blessed be God, I have reason to think, that my religion is become more spiritual, by means of my late inward conflicts. Amen. May I always be willing that God should use his own methods with me!

“Monday, Dec. 13. Joined in prayer with Mr. Bellamy; and found sweetness and composure in parting with him, as he went a journey. Enjoyed some sweetness through the day; and just at night rode down to Woodbury.

“Tuesday, Dec. 14. Some perplexity hung on my mind; I was distressed last night and this morning, for the interest of Zion, especially on account of the false appearances of religion, that do but rather breed confusion, especially in some places. I cried to God for help, to enable me to bear testimony against those things, which instead of promoting, do but hinder the progress of vital piety. In the afternoon rode down to Southbury; and conversed again with my friend about the important affair of his pursuing the work of the ministry; and he appeared much inclined to devote himself to that work, if God should succeed his attempts to qualify himself for so great a work. In the evening I preached from 1 Thess. iv. 8. ‘He therefore that despiseth,’ &c. and endeavoured, though with tenderness, to undermine false religion. The Lord gave me some assistance; but, however, I seemed so vile, I was ashamed to be seen when I came out of the meeting-house.

“Wednesday, Dec. 15. Enjoyed something of God to-day, both in secret and social prayer; but was sensible of much barrenness, and defect in duty, as well as my inability to help myself for the time to come, or to perform  the work and business I have to do. Afterwards, felt much of the sweetness of religion, and the tenderness of the gospel-temper. I found a dear love to all mankind, and was much afraid lest some motion of anger or resentment should, some time or other, creep into my heart. Had some comforting soul-refreshing discourse with dear friends, just as we took our leave of each other; and supposed it might be likely we should not meet again till we came to the eternal world.   I doubt not, through grace, but that some of us shall have a happy meeting there, and bless God for this season, as well as many others. Amen.

“Thursday, Dec. 16. Rode down to Derby; and had some sweet thoughts on the road: especially on the essence of our salvation by Christ, from those words, Thou shalt call his name Jesus, &c.

“Friday, Dec. 17. Spent much time in sweet conversation on spiritual things with dear Mr. Humphreys. Rode to Ripton; spent some time in prayer with dear Christian friends.

“Saturday, Dec. 18. Spent much time in prayer in the woods; and seemed raised above the things of the world: my soul was strong in the Lord of hosts; but was sensible of great barrenness.

“Lord’s day, Dec. 19. At the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, I seemed strong in the Lord; and the world, with all its frowns and flatteries, in a great measure disappeared, so that my soul had nothing to do with them: and I felt a disposition to be wholly and for ever the Lord’s. In the evening, enjoyed something of the divine presence; had a humbling sense of my vileness, barrenness, and sinfulness. Oh, it wounded me, to think of the misimprovement of time! God be merciful to me a sinner.

“Monday, Dec. 20. Spent this day in prayer, reading, and writing; and enjoyed some assistance, especially in correcting some thoughts on a certain subject; but had a mournful sense of my barrenness.

“Tuesday, Dec. 21. Had a sense of my insufficiency for any public work and business, as well as to live to God. I rode over to Derby, and preached there. It pleased God to give me very sweet assistance and enlargement, and to enable me to speak with a soft, tender power and energy. We had afterwards a comfortable evening in singing and prayer. God enabled me to pray with as much spirituality and sweetness as I have done for some time: my mind seemed to be unclothed of sense and imagination, and was in a measure let into the immaterial world of spirits. This day was, I trust, through infinite goodness, made very profitable to a number of us, to advance our souls in holiness and conformity to God: the glory be to him for ever. Amen. How blessed it is to grow more and more like God.

“Wednesday, Dec. 22. Enjoyed some assistance in preaching at Ripton; but my soul mourned within me for my barrenness.

“Thursday, Dec. 23. Enjoyed, I trust, something of God this morning in secret. Oh how divinely sweet is it to come into the secret of his presence, and abide in his pavilion! Took an affectionate leave of friends, not expecting to see them again for a very considerable time, if ever in this world. Rode with Mr. Humphreys to his house at Derby; spent the time in sweet conversation; my soul was refreshed and sweetly melted with divine things. Oh that I was always consecrated to God! Near night, I rode to New-Haven, and there enjoyed some sweetness in prayer and conversation, with some dear Christian friends. My mind was sweetly serious and composed; but alas! I too much lost the sense of divine things.”

He continued much in the same frame of mind, and in like exercises, the two following days.

“Lord’s day, Dec. 26. Felt much sweetness and tenderness in prayer, especially my whole soul seemed to love my worst enemies, and was enabled to pray for those that are strangers and enemies to God with a great degree of softness and pathetic fervour. In the evening, rode from New-Haven to Branford, after I had kneeled down and prayed with a number of dear Christian friends in a very retired place in the woods, and so parted.

“Monday, Dec. 27. Enjoyed a precious season indeed; had a sweet melting sense of divine things, of the pure spirituality of the religion of Christ Jesus. In the evening, I preached from Matt. vi. 33. ‘But seek ye first,’ &c. with much freedom, and sweet power and pungency: the presence of God attended our meeting. O the sweetness, the tenderness I felt in my soul! if ever I felt the temper of Christ, I had some sense of it now. Blessed be my God, I have seldom enjoyed a more comfortable and profitable day than this. O that I could spend all my time for God!

“Tuesday, Dec. 28. Rode from Branford to Haddam. In the morning, my clearness and sweetness in divine things continued; but afterwards my spiritual life sensibly declined.”

The next twelve days he was for the most part extremely dejected, discouraged, and distressed; and was evidently very much under the power of melancholy. There are from day to day most bitter complaints of exceeding vileness, ignorance, and corruption; an amazing load of guilt, unworthiness even to creep on God’s earth, everlasting uselessness, fitness for nothing, &c. and sometimes expressions even of horror at the thoughts of ever preaching again. But yet in this time of great dejection, he speaks of several intervals of divine help and comfort.

The three next days, which were spent at Hebron and the Crank, (a parish in Lebanon,) he had relief, and enjoyed considerable comfort.

“Friday, Jan. 14, 1743. My spiritual conflicts to-day were unspeakably dreadful, heavier than the mountains and overflowing floods. I seemed enclosed, as it were, in hell itself: I was deprived of all sense of God, even of the being of a God; and that was my misery. I had no awful apprehensions of God as angry. This was distress the nearest akin to the damneds’ torments, that I ever endured: their torment, I am sure, will consist much in a privation of God, and consequently of all good. This taught me the absolute dependence of a creature upon God the Creator, for every crumb of happiness it enjoys. Oh! I feel that if there is no God, though I might live for ever here, and enjoy not only this, but all other worlds, I should be ten thousand times more miserable than a toad. My soul was in such anguish I could not eat; but felt as I suppose a poor wretch would that is just going to the place of execution. I was almost swallowed up with anguish, when I saw people gathering together, to hear me preach. However, I went in that distress to the house of God, and found not much relief in the first prayer: it seemed as if God would let loose the people upon me to destroy me; nor were the thoughts of death distressing to me, like my own vileness. But afterwards, in my discourse from Deut. viii. 2. God was pleased to give me some freedom and enlargement, some power and spirituality; and I spent the evening somewhat comfortably.”

The two next days his comfort continues, and he seems to enjoy an almost continual sweetness of soul in the duties and exercises of religion and Christian conversation. On Monday was a return of the gloom he had been under the Friday before. He rode to Coventry this day, and the latter part of the day had more freedom. On Tuesday he rode to Canterbury, and continued more comfortable.

“Wednesday, Jan. 19. [At Canterbury] In the afternoon preached the lecture at the meeting-house; felt some tenderness, and something of the gospel-temper: exhorted the people to love one another, and not to set up their own frames as a standard to try all their brethren by. But was much pressed, most of the day, with a sense of my own badness, inward impurity, and unspeakable corruption. Spent the evening in loving, Christian conversation.

“Thursday, Jan. 20. Rode to my brother’s house between Norwich and Lebanon; and preached in the evening to a number of people: enjoyed neither freedom nor spirituality, but saw myself exceeding unworthy.

“Friday, Jan. 21. Had great inward conflicts; enjoyed but little comfort. Went to see Mr. Williams of Lebanon,  and spent several hours with him; and was greatly delighted with his serious, deliberate, and impartial way of discourse about religion.”

The next day he was much dejected.

“Lord’s day, Jan. 23. I scarce ever felt myself so unfit to exist, as now: saw I was not worthy of a place among the Indians, where I am going, if God permit: thought I should be ashamed to look them in the face, and much more to have any respect shown me there. Indeed I felt myself banished from the earth, as if all places were too good for such a wretch. I thought I should be ashamed to go among the very savages of Africa; I appeared to myself a creature fit for nothing, neither heaven nor earth. None know, but those who feel it, what the soul endures that is sensibly shut out from the presence of God: alas! it is more bitter than death.”

On Monday he rode to Stoningtown, Mr. Fish’s parish. On Tuesday he expresses considerable degrees of spiritual comfort and refreshment.

“Wednesday, Jan. 26. Preached to a pretty large assembly at Mr. Fish’s meeting-house; insisted on humility, and stedfastness in keeping God’s commands; and that through humility we should prefer one another in love, and not make our own frames the rule by which we judge others. I felt sweetly calm, and full of brotherly love; and never more free from party spirit. I hope some good will follow; that Christians will be freed from false joy, and party zeal, and censuring one another.”

On Thursday, after considerable time spent in prayer and Christian conversation, he rode to New London.

“Friday, Jan. 28. Here I found some fallen into extravagances; too much carried away with a false zeal and bitterness. Oh, the want of a gospel-temper is greatly to be lamented. Spent the evening in conversing about some points of conduct in both ministers and private Christians; but did not agree with them. God had not taught them with briers and thorns to be of a kind disposition towards mankind.”

On Saturday he rode to East Haddam, and spent the three following days there. In that space of time he speaks of his feeling weanedness from the world, a sense of the nearness of eternity, special assistance in praying for the enlargement of Christ’s kingdom, times of spiritual comfort, &c.

“Wednesday, Feb. 2. Preached my farewell sermon, last night, at the house of an aged man, who had been unable to attend on the public worship for some time. This morning spent the time in prayer, almost wherever I went; and having taken leave of friends, I set out on my journey towards the Indians; though I was to spend some time at East Hampton on Long island, by leave of the commissioners who employed me in the Indian affair;   and being accompanied by a messenger from East-Hampton, we travelled to Lyme. On the road I felt an uncommon pressure of mind: I seemed to struggle hard for some pleasure in some here below, and seemed loth to give up all for gone; saw I was evidently throwing myself into all hardships and distresses in my present undertaking. I thought it would be less difficult to lie down in the grave; but yet I chose to go, rather than stay. Came to Lyme that night.”

He waited the two next days for a passage over the Sound, and spent much of the time in inward conflicts and dejection, but had some comfort.

On Saturday he crossed the Sound, and landed at Oyster-Ponds on Long Island, and travelled from thence to East Hampton. And the seven following days he spent there, for the most part, under extreme dejection and gloominess of mind, with great complaints of darkness, ignorance, &c. Yet his heart appears to have been constantly engaged in the great business of religion, much concerned for the interest of religion in East Hampton, and praying and labouring much for it.

“Saturday, Feb. 12. Enjoyed a little more comfort; was enabled to meditate with some composure of mind; and especially in the evening, found my soul more refreshed in prayer, than at any time of late; my soul seemed to ‘take hold of God’s strength,’ and was comforted with his consolations. O how sweet are some glimpses of divine glory! how strengthening and quickening!

“Lord’s day, Feb. 13. At noon under a great degree of discouragement; knew not how it was possible for me to preach in the afternoon. I was ready to give up all for gone; but God was pleased to assist me in some measure. In the evening, my heart was sweetly drawn out after God, and devoted to him.”

The next day he had comfort and dejection intermingled.

“Tuesday, Feb. 15. Early in the day I felt some comfort; afterwards I walked into a neighbouring grove, and felt more as a stranger on earth, I think, than ever before; dead to any of the enjoyments of the world, as if I had been dead in a natural sense. In the evening, had divine sweetness in secret duty: God was then my portion, and my soul rose above those deep waters, into which I have sunk so low of late. My soul then cried for Zion, and had sweetness in so doing.”

This sweet frame continued the next morning; but afterwards his inward distress returned.

“Thursday, Feb. 17. In the morning found myself comfortable, and rested on God in some measure. Preached this day at a little village belonging to East Hampton; and God was pleased to give me his gracious presence and assistance, so that I spake with freedom, boldness, and some power. In the evening, spent some time with a dear Christian friend; and felt serious, as on the brink of eternity. My soul enjoyed sweetness in lively apprehensions of standing before the glorious God: prayed with my dear friend with sweetness, and discoursed with the utmost solemnity. And truly it was a little emblem of heaven itself. I find my soul is more refined and weaned from a dependence on my frames and spiritual feelings.

“Friday, Feb. 18. Felt something sweetly most of the day, and found access to the throne of grace. Blessed be the Lord for any intervals of heavenly delight and composure, while I am engaged in the field of battle. O that I might be serious, solemn, and always vigilant, while in an evil world! Had some opportunity alone to-day, and found some freedom in study. O, I long to live to God!

“Saturday, Feb. 19. Was exceeding infirm to-day, greatly troubled with pain in my head and dizziness, scarce able to sit up. However, enjoyed something of God in prayer, and performed some necessary studies. I exceedingly long to die; and yet, through divine goodness, have felt very willing to live, for two or three days past.

“Lord’s day, Feb. 20. I was perplexed on account of my carelessness; thought I could not be suitably concerned about the important work of the day, and so was restless with my easiness. Was exceeding infirm again to-day; but the Lord strengthened me, both in the outward and inward man, so that I preached with some life and spirituality, especially in the afternoon, wherein I was enabled to speak closely against selfish religion, that loves Christ for his benefits, but not for himself.”

During the next fortnight, it appears that, for the most part, he enjoyed much spiritual peace and comfort. In his diary for this space of time are expressed such things as these; mourning over indwelling sin and unprofitableness; deadness to the world; longing after God, and to live to his glory; heart-melting desires after his eternal home; fixed reliance on God for his help; experience of much divine assistance both in the private and public exercises of religion; inward strength and courage in the service of God; very frequent refreshment, consolation, and divine sweetness in meditation, prayer, preaching, and Christian conversation. And it appears by his account, that this space of time was filled up with great diligence and earnestness in serving God, in study, prayer, meditation, preaching, and privately instructing and counselling.

“Monday, March 7. This morning when I arose, I found my heart go forth after God in longing desires of conformity to him, and in secret prayer found myself sweetly quickened and drawn out in praises to God for all he had done to and for me, and for all my inward trials  and distresses of late. My heart ascribed glory, glory, glory to the blessed God! and bid welcome to all inward distress again, if God saw meet to exercise me with it. Time appeared but an inch long, and eternity at hand; and I thought I could with patience and cheerfulness bear any thing for the cause of God; for I saw that a moment would bring me to a world of peace and blessedness. My soul, by the strength of the Lord, rose far above this lower world, and all the vain amusements and frightful disappointments of it. Afterwards, had some sweet meditation on Gen. v. 24. ‘And Enoch walked with God,’ &c. This was a comfortable day to my soul.”

The next day he seems to have continued in a considerable degree of sweetness and fervency in religion.

“Wednesday, March 9. Endeavoured to commit myself and all my concerns to God. Rode sixteen miles to Mantauk,   and had some inward sweetness on the road; but something of flatness and deadness after I came there and had seen the Indians. I withdrew, and endeavoured to pray, but found myself awfully deserted and left, and had an afflicting sense of my vileness and meanness. However, I went and preached from Isa. liii. 10. ‘Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him,’ &c. Had some assistance; and, I trust, something of the divine presence was among us. In the evening, I again prayed and exhorted among them, after having had a season alone, wherein I was so pressed with the blackness of my nature, that I thought it was not fit for me to speak so much as to Indians.”

The next day he returned to East Hampton; was exceeding infirm in body through the remaining part of this week; but speaks of assistance and enlargement in study and religious exercises, and of inward sweetness and breathing after God.

“Lords day, March 13. At noon I thought it impossible for me to preach, by reason of bodily weakness and inward deadness. In the first prayer I was so weak that I could hardly stand; but in the sermon God strengthened me, so that I spake near an hour and a half with sweet freedom, clearness, and some tender power, from Gen. v. 24. ‘And Enoch walked with God.’ I was sweetly assisted to insist on a close walk with God, and to leave this as my parting advice to God’s people here, that they should walk with God. May the God of all grace succeed my poor labours in this place!

“Monday, March 14. In the morning was very busy in preparation for my journey, and was almost continually engaged in ejaculatory prayer. About ten, took leave of the dear people of East Hampton; my heart grieved and mourned, and rejoiced at the same time; rode near fifty miles to a part of Brook-Haven, and lodged there, and had refreshing conversation with a Christian friend.”

In two days more he reached New York; but complains of much desertion and deadness on the road. He stayed one day in New York, and on Friday went to Mr. Dickinson’s at Elizabeth-Town. His complaints are the same as on the two preceding days.

“Saturday, March 19. Was bitterly distressed under a sense of my ignorance, darkness, and unworthiness; got alone, and poured out my complaint to God in the bitterness of my soul. In the afternoon, rode to Newark, and had some sweetness in conversation with Mr. Burr, and in praying together. O blessed be God for ever and ever, for any enlivening and quickening seasons.

“Lord’s day, March 20. Preached in the forenoon: God gave me some assistance and sweetness, and enabled me to speak with real tenderness, love, and impartiality. In the evening, preached again; and, of a truth, God was pleased to assist a poor worm. Blessed be God, I was enabled to speak with life, power, and desire of the edification of God’s people; and with some power to sinners. In the evening, I felt spiritual and watchful, lest my heart should by any means be drawn away from God.

Oh, when I shall come to that blessed world, where every power of my soul will be incessantly and eternally wound up in heavenly employments and enjoyments, to the highest degree!”

On Monday he went to Woodbridge, where he speaks of his being with a number of ministers;   and, the day following, of his travelling part of the way towards New York. On Wednesday he came to New York. On Thursday he rode near fifty miles, from New York to North-Castle. On Friday went to Danbury. Saturday, to New Milford. On the sabbath he rode five or six miles to the place near Kent in Connecticut, called Scaticoke, where dwell a number of Indians,   and preached to them. On Monday, being detained by the rain, he tarried at Kent. On Tuesday he rode from Kent to Salisbury. Wednesday he went to Sheffield. Thursday, March 31, he went to Mr. Sergeant’s at Stockbridge. He was dejected and very disconsolate, through the main of this journey from New Jersey to Stockbridge; and especially on the last day his mind was overwhelmed with exceeding gloominess and melancholy.

* * * * * * *

Part 5: From His Beginning To Instruct The Indians, To His Ordination.

PART V. FROM HIS BEGINNING TO INSTRUCT THE INDIANS AT KAUNAUMEEK, TO HIS ORDINATION.

“Friday, April 1, 1743. I rode to Kaunaumeek, near twenty miles from Stockbridge, where the Indians live with whom I am concerned, and there lodged on a little heap of straw. I was greatly exercised with inward trials and distresses all day; and in the evening, my heart was sunk, and I seemed to have no God to go to. O that God would help me!”

The next five days he was for the most part in a dejected, depressed state of mind, and sometimes extremely so. He speaks of God’s “waves and billows rolling over his soul;” and of his being ready sometimes to say, “Surely his mercy is clean gone for ever, and he will be favourable no more;” and says, the anguish he endured was nameless and inconceivable; but at the same time speaks thus concerning his distresses, “What God designs by all my distresses I know not; but this I know, I deserve them all and thousands more.” He gives an account of the Indians kindly receiving him, and being seriously attentive to his instructions.

“Thursday, April 7. Appeared to myself exceeding ignorant, weak, helpless, unworthy, and altogether unequal to my work. It seemed to me I should never do any service or have any success among the Indians. My soul was weary of my life; I longed for deaths beyond measure. When I thought of any godly soul departed, my soul was ready to envy him his privilege, thinking, ‘Oh, when will my turn come! must it be years first!’ But I know, these ardent desires, at this and other times, rose partly for want of resignation to God under all miseries; and so were but impatience. Towards night, I had the exercise of faith in prayer, and some assistance in writing. O that God would keep me near him!

“Friday, April 8. Was exceedingly pressed under a sense of my pride, selfishness, bitterness, and party spirit, in times past, while attempted to promote the cause of God. Its vile nature and dreadful consequences appeared in such odious colours to me, that my very heart was pained. I saw how poor souls stumbled over it into everlasting destruction, that I was constrained to make that prayer in the bitterness of my soul, ‘O lord, deliver me from blood-guiltiness.’ I saw my desert of hell on this account. My soul was full of inward anguish and shame  before God, that I had spent so much time in conversation tending only to promote a party spirit. Oh, I saw I had not suitably prized mortification, self-denial, resignation under all adversities, meekness, love, candour, and holiness of heart and life: and this day was almost wholly spent in such bitter and soul-afflicting reflections on my past frames and conduct. Of late I have thought much of having the kingdom of Christ advanced in the world; but now I had enough to do within myself. The Lord be merciful to me a sinner, and wash my soul!

“Saturday, April 9. Remained much in the same state as yesterday; excepting that the sense of my vileness was not so quick and acute.

“Lord’s day, April 10. Rose early in the morning, and walked out, and spent a considerable time in the woods, in prayer and meditation. Preached to the Indians, both forenoon and afternoon. They behaved soberly in general: two or three in particular appeared under some religious concern; with whom I discoursed privately; and one told me, ‘her heart had cried, ever since she heard me preach first.’”

The next day, he complains of much desertion.

“Tuesday, April 12. Was greatly oppressed with grief and shame, reflecting on my past conduct, my bitterness and party zeal. I was ashamed to think that such a wretch as I had ever preached. Longed to be excused from that work. And when my soul was not in anguish and keen distress, I felt senseless ‘as a beast before God,’ and felt a kind of guilty amusement with the least trifles; which still maintained a kind of stifled horror of conscience, so that I could not rest any more than a condemned malefactor.

“Wednesday, April 13. My heart was overwhelmed within me: I verily thought I was the meanest, vilest, most helpless, guilty, ignorant, benighted creature living. And yet I knew what God had done for my soul, at the same time: though sometimes I was assaulted with damping doubts and fears, whether it was possible for such a wretch as I to be in a state of grace.

“Thursday, April 14. Remained much in the same state as yesterday.

“Friday, April 15. In the forenoon, very disconsolate. In the afternoon, preached to my people, and was a little encouraged in some hopes that God might bestow mercy on their souls. Felt somewhat resigned to God under all dispensations of his providence.

“Saturday, April 16. Still in the depths of distress. In the afternoon, preached to my people; but was more discouraged with them than before; feared that nothing would ever be done for them to any happy effect. I retired and poured out my soul to God for mercy; but without any sensible relief. Soon after came an Irishman and a Dutchman, with a design, as they said, to hear me preach the next day; but none can tell how I felt, to hear their profane talk. Oh, I longed that some dear Christian knew my distress. I got into a kind of hovel, and there groaned out my complaint to God; and withal felt more sensible gratitude and thankfulness to God, that he had made me to differ from these men, as I knew through grace he had.

“Lord’s day, April 17. In the morning was again distressed as soon as I waked, hearing much talk about the world and the things of it. I perceived the men were in some measure afraid of me; and I discoursed something about sanctifying the sabbath, if possible to solemnize their minds: but when they were at a little distance, they again talked freely about secular affairs. Oh, I thought what a hell it would be, to live with such men to eternity! The Lord gave me some assistance in preaching, all day, and some resignation, and a small degree of comfort in prayer at night.”

He continued in this disconsolate frame the next day.

“Tuesday, April 19. In the morning I enjoyed some sweet repose and rest in God; felt some strength and confidence in him; and my soul was in some measure refreshed and comforted. Spent most of the day in writing, and had some exercise of grace, sensible and comfortable. My soul seemed lifted above the deep waters, wherein it has been so long almost drowned; felt some spiritual longings and breathings of soul after God; and found myself engaged for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in my own soul.

“Wednesday, April 20. Set apart this day for fasting and prayer, to bow my soul before God for the bestowment of divine grace; especially that all my spiritual afflictions and inward distresses might be sanctified to my soul. And endeavoured also to remember the goodness of God to me the year past, this day being my birth-day. Having obtained help of God, I have hitherto lived, and am now arrived at the age of twenty-five years. My soul was pained to think of my barrenness and deadness; that I have lived so little to the glory of the eternal God. I spent the day in the woods alone, and there poured out my complaint to God; O that God would enable me to live to his glory for the future!

“Thursday, April 21. Spent the forenoon in reading and prayer, and found myself engaged; but still much depressed in spirit under a sense of my vileness and unfitness for any public service. In the afternoon, I visited my people, and prayed and conversed with some about their souls’ concerns; and afterwards found some ardour of soul in secret prayer. O that I might grow up into the likeness of God!

“Friday, April 22. Spent the day in study, reading, and prayer; and felt a little relieved of my burden, that has been so heavy of late. But still was in some measure oppressed; and had a sense of barrenness. Oh, my leanness testifies against me! my very soul abhors itself for its unlikeness to God, its inactivity and sluggishness. When I have done all, alas, what an unprofitable servant am I! My soul groans, to see the hours of the day roll away, because I do not fill them in spirituality and heavenly mindedness. And yet I long they should speed their pace, to hasten me to my eternal home, where I may fill up all my moments, through eternity, for God and his glory.”

On Saturday and Lords day, his melancholy again prevailed; he complained of his ignorance, stupidity, and senselessness; while yet he seems to have spent the time with the utmost diligence, in study, in prayer, in instructing and counselling the Indians. On Monday he sunk into the deepest melancholy; so that he supposed he never spent a day in such distress in his life; not in fears of hell, (which, he says, he had no pressing fear of,) but a distressing sense of his own vileness, &c. On Tuesday, he expresses some relief. Wednesday he kept as a day of fasting and prayer, but in great distress. The three days next following his melancholy continued, but in a less degree, and with intervals of comfort.

“Lord’s day, May 1. Was at Stockbridge to-day. In the forenoon had some relief and assistance; though not so much as usual. In the afternoon felt poorly in body and soul; while I was preaching, seemed to be rehearsing idle tales, without the least life, fervour, sense, or comfort; and especially afterwards, at the sacrament, my soul was filled with confusion, and the utmost anguish that ever I endured, under the feeling of my inexpressible vileness and meanness. It was a most bitter and distressing season to me, by reason of the view I had of my own heart, and the secret abominations that lurk there: I thought the eyes of all in the house were upon me, and I dared not look any one in the face; for it verily seemed as if they saw the vileness of my heart, and all the sins I had ever been guilty of. And if I had been banished from the presence of all mankind, never to be seen any more, or so much as thought of, still I should have been distressed with shame; and I should have been ashamed to see the most barbarous people on earth, because I was viler, and seemingly more brutishly ignorant, than they. ‘I am made to possess the sins of my youth.’”

The remaining days of this week were spent, for the most part, in inward distress and gloominess. The next sabbath, he had encouragement, assistance, and comfort; but on Monday sunk again.

“Tuesday, May 10. Was in the same state, as to my mind, that I have been in for some time; extremely  pressed with a sense of guilt, pollution, and blindness: ‘The iniquity of my heels have compassed me about; the sins of my youth have been set in order before me; they have gone over my head, as a heavy burden, too heavy for me to bear.’ Almost all the actions of my life past seem to be covered over with sin and guilt; and those of them that I performed in the most conscientious manner, now fill me with shame and confusion, that I cannot hold up my face. Oh! the pride, selfishness, hypocrisy, ignorance, bitterness, party-zeal, and the want of love, candour, meekness, and gentleness, that have attended my attempts to promote religion and virtue; and this when I have reason to hope I had real assistance from above, and some sweet fellowship with heaven! But, alas, what corrupt mixtures attended my best duties!”

The next seven days his gloom and distress continued for the most part, but he had some turns of relief and spiritual comfort. He gives an account of his spending part of this time in hard labour, to build himself a little cottage to live in amongst the Indians, in which he might be by himself; having, it seems, hitherto lived with a poor Scotchman, as he observes in the letter just now referred to; and afterwards, before his own house was habitable, lived in a wigwam among the Indians.

“Wednesday, May 18. My circumstances are such, that I have no comfort, of any kind, but what I have in God. I live in the most lonesome wilderness; have but one single person to converse with, that can speak English.   Most of the talk I hear, is either Highland Scotch or Indian. I have no fellow-Christian to whom I might unbosom myself, or lay open my spiritual sorrows; with whom I might take sweet counsel in conversation about heavenly things, and join in social prayer. I live poorly with regard to the comforts of life: most of my diet consists of boiled corn, hasty-pudding, &c. I lodge on a bundle of straw, my labour is hard and extremely difficult, and I have little appearance of success to comfort me. The Indians have no land to live on but what the Dutch people lay claim to; and these threaten to drive them off. They have no regard to the souls of the poor Indians; and, by what I can learn, they hate me, because I come to preach to them. But that which makes all my difficulties grievous to be borne, is, that God hides his face from me.

“Thursday, May 19. Spent most of this day in close studies; but was sometimes so distressed that I could think of nothing but my spiritual blindness, ignorance, pride, and misery. Oh, I have reason to make that prayer, ‘Lord, forgive my sins of youth, and former trespasses.’

“Friday, May 20. Was much perplexed some part of the day; but towards night, had some comfortable meditations on Isa. xl. 1. ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye,’ &c. and enjoyed some sweetness in prayer. Afterwards my soul rose so far above the deep waters, that I dared to rejoice in God. I saw there was sufficient matter of consolation in the blessed God.”

The next nine days his burdens were for the most part alleviated, but with variety; at some times having considerable consolation; and at others, more depressed. The next day, Monday, May 30, he set out on a journey to New Jersey, to consult the commissioners who employed him about the affairs of his mission.   He performed his journey thither in four days; and arrived at Mr. Burr’s in Newark on Thursday. In great part of his journey, he was in the depths of melancholy, under distresses like those already mentioned. On Friday he rode to Elizabeth-town: and on Saturday to New York; and from thence on his way homewards as far as White Plains. There he spent the sabbath, and had considerable degrees of divine consolation and assistance in public services. On Monday he rode about sixty miles to New-Haven. There he attempted a reconciliation with the authority of the college; and spent this week in visiting his friends in those parts, and in his journey homewards, till Saturday, in a pretty comfortable frame of mind. On Saturday, in his way from Stockbridge to Kaunaumeek, he was lost in the woods, and lay all night in the open air; but happily found his way in the morning, and came to his Indians on Lord’s day, June 12, and had greater assistance in preaching among them than ever before, since his first coming among them.

From this time forward he was the subject of various frames and exercises of mind: in the general, much after the same manner as hitherto, from his first coming to Kaunaumeek till he got into his own house, (a little hut, which he made chiefly with his own hands, by long and hard labour,) which was near seven weeks from this time. Great part of this space of time, he was dejected, and depressed with melancholy, sometimes extremely; his melancholy operating in like manner as related in times past. How it was with him in those dark seasons, he himself further describes in his diary for July 2, in the following manner. “My soul is, and has for a long time been, in a piteous condition, wading through a series of sorrows, of various kinds. I have been so crushed down sometimes with a sense of my meanness and infinite unworthiness, that I have been ashamed that any, even the meanest of my fellow-creatures, should so much as spend a thought about me; and have wished sometimes, while travelling among the thick brakes, to drop, as one of them, into everlasting oblivion. In this case, sometimes, I have almost resolved never again to see any of my acquaintance; and really thought I could not do it and hold up my face; and have longed for the remotest region, for a retreat from all my friends, that I might not be seen or heard of any more. Sometimes the consideration of my ignorance has been a means of my great distress and anxiety. And especially my soul has been in anguish with fear, shame, and guilt, that ever I had preached, or had any thought that way. Sometimes my soul has been in distress on feeling some particular corruptions rise and swell like a mighty torrent, with present violence; having, at the same time, ten thousand former sins and follies presented to view, in all their blackness and aggravations. And these, while destitute of most of the conveniencies of life, and I may say, of all the pleasures of it; without a friend to communicate any of my sorrows to, and sometimes without any place of retirement, where I may unburden my soul before God, which has greatly contributed to my distress. Of late, more especially, my great difficulty has been a sort of carelessness, a kind of regardless temper of mind, whence I have been disposed to indolence and trifling: and this temper of mind has constantly been attended with guilt and shame; so that sometimes I have been in a kind of horror, to find myself so unlike the blessed God. I have thought I grew worse under all my trials; and nothing has cut and wounded my soul more than this. Oh, if I am one of God’s chosen, as I trust through infinite grace I am, I find of a truth, that the righteous are scarcely saved.“

It is apparent, that one main occasion of that distressing gloominess of mind which he was so much exercised with at Kaunaumeek, was reflection on his past errors and misguided zeal at college, in the beginning of the late religious commotions. And therefore he repeated his endeavours this year for reconciliation with the governors of the college, whom he had at that time offended. Although he had been at New haven, in.June, this year, and attempted a reconciliation, as mentioned already; yet, in the beginning of July, he made another journey thither, and renewed his attempt, but still in vain.

Although he was much dejected great part of that space of time which I am now speaking of; yet he had many intermissions of his melancholy, and some seasons of comfort, sweet tranquillity, and resignation of mind, and frequent special assistance in public services, as appear in his diary. The manner of his relief from his sorrow, once in particular, is worthy to be mentioned in his own words, (diary for July 25.) “Had little or no resolution for a life of holiness; was ready almost to renounce my hopes of living to God. And oh how dark it looked, to think of being unholy for ever! This I could not endure. The cry  of my soul was, Psal. lxv. 3. ‘Iniquities prevail against me.’ But was in some measure relieved by a comfortable meditation on God’s eternity, that he never had a beginning, &c. Whence I was led to admire his greatness and power, &c. in such a manner, that I stood still, and praised the Lord for his own glories and perfections; though I was (and if I should for ever be) an unholy creature, my soul was comforted to apprehend an eternal, infinite, powerful, holy God.

“Saturday, July 30. Just at night, moved into my own house, and lodged there that night; found it much better spending the time alone, than in the wigwam where I was before.

“Lord’s day, July 31. Felt more comfortably than some days past. Blessed be the Lord, who has now given me a place of retirement. O that I might find God in it, and that he would dwell with me for ever!

“Monday, Aug. 1. Was still busy in further labours on my house. Felt a little of the sweetness of religion, and thought it was worth the while to follow after God through a thousand snares, deserts, and death itself. O that I might always follow after holiness, that I may be fully conformed to God! Had some degree of sweetness, in secret prayer, though I had much sorrow.

“Tuesday, Aug. 2. Was still labouring to make myself more comfortable, with regard to my house and lodging. Laboured under spiritual anxiety; it seemed to me, I deserved to be kicked out of the world; yet found some comfort in committing my cause to God. It is good for me to be afflicted, that I may die wholly to this world, and all that is in it.

“Wednesday, Aug. 3. Spent most of the day in writing. Enjoyed some sense of religion. Through divine goodness I am now uninterruptedly alone; and find my retirement comfortable. I have enjoyed more sense of divine things within a few days last past, than for some time before. I longed after holiness, humility, and meekness: O that God would enable me to ‘pass the time of my sojourning here in his fear,’ and always live to him!

“Thursday, Aug. 4. Was enabled to pray much, through the whole day; and through divine goodness found some intenseness of soul in the duty, as I used to do, and some ability to persevere in my supplications. I had some apprehensions of divine things, that were engaging, and which afforded me some courage and resolution. It is good, I find, to persevere in attempts to pray, if I cannot pray with perseverance, i. e. continue long in my addresses to the Divine Being. I have generally found, that the more I do in secret prayer, the more I heave delighted to do, and have enjoyed more of a spirit of prayer: and frequently have found the contrary, when with journeying or otherwise I have been much deprived of retirement. A seasonable, steady performance of secret duties in their proper hours, and a careful improvement of all time, filling up every hour with some profitable labour, either of heart, head, or hands, are excellent means of spiritual peace and boldness before God. Christ, indeed, is our peace, and by him we have boldness of access to God; but a good conscience void of offence, is an excellent preparation for an approach into the divine presence. There is difference between self-confidence or a self-righteous pleasing of ourselves as with our own duties, attainments, and spiritual enjoyments which godly souls sometimes are guilty of, and that holy confidence arising from the testimony of a good conscience, which good Hezekiah had, when he says, “Remember, O Lord, I beseech thee, how I have walked before thee in truth, and with a perfect heart.’   ’Then (says the holy psalmist) shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect to all thy commandments.’ Filling up our time with and for God, is the way to rise up and lie down in peace.”

The next eight days he continued for the most part in a very comfortable frame, having his mind fixed and sweetly engaged in religion; and more than once blesses God, that he had given him a little cottage, where he might live alone, and enjoy a happy retirement, free from noise and disturbance, and could at any hour of the day lay aside all studies, and spend time in lifting up his soul to God for spiritual blessings.

“Saturday, Aug. 13. Was enabled in secret prayer to raise my soul to God, with desire and delight. It was indeed a blessed season to my soul: I found the comfort of being a Christian; and counted the sufferings of the present lift not worthy to be compared with the glory of divine enjoyments even in this world. All my past sorrows seemed kindly to disappear, and I ‘remembered no more the sorrow, for joy.’ O, how kindly, and with a filial tenderness, the soul confides in the Rock of ages, at such a season, that he will ‘never leave it, nor forsake it,’ that he will cause ‘all things to work together for its good!’ &c. I longed that others should know how good a God the Lord is. My soul was full of tenderness and love, even to the most inveterate of my enemies. I longed they should share in the same mercy; and loved that God should do just as he pleased with me and every thing else. I felt exceeding serious, calm, and peaceful, and encouraged to press after holiness as long as I live, whatever difficulties and trials may be in my way. May the Lord always help me so to do! Amen, and Amen.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 14. I had much more freedom in public than in private. God enabled me to speak with some feeling sense of divine things; but perceived no considerable effect.

“Monday, Aug. 15. Spent most of the day in labour, to procure something to keep my horse on in the winter. Enjoyed not much sweetness in the morning: was very weak in body through the day, and thought this flail body would soon drop into the dust: had some very realizing apprehensions of a speedy entrance into another world. And in this weak state of body, I was not a little distressed for want of suitable food. I had no bread, nor could I get any. I am forced to go or send ten or fifteen miles for all the bread I eat; and sometimes it is mouldy and sour before I eat it, if I get any considerable quantity. Aced then again I have none for sortie days together, for want of an opportunity to send for it, and cannot find my horse in the woods to go myself; and this was my case now: but through divine goodness I had some Indian meal, of which I made little cakes, and fried them. Yet felt contented with my circumstances, and sweetly resigned to God. In prayer I enjoyed great freedom; and blessed God as much for my present circumstances, as if I had been a king; and thought I found a disposition to be contented in any circumstances. Blessed be God.“

The rest of this week he was exceeding weak in body, and much exercised with pain; yet obliged from day to day to labour hard, to procure fodder for his horse. Except some part of the time, he was so very ill, that he was neither able to work nor study; but speaks of longings after holiness and perfect conformity to God. He complains of enjoying but little of God; yet he says, that little was better to him than all the world besides. In his diary for Saturday, he says, he was somewhat melancholy and sorrowful in mind; and adds, “I never feel comfortably, but when I find my soul going forth after God: if I cannot be holy, I must necessarily be miserable for ever.”

“Lord’s day, Aug. 21. Was much straitened in the forenoon-exercise; my thoughts seemed to be all scattered to the ends of the earth. At noon, I fell down before the Lord, groaned under my vileness, barrenness, aced deadness; and felt as if I was guilty of soul-murder, in speaking to immortal souls in such a mariner as I had then done. In the afternoon, God was pleased to give me some assistance, and I was enabled to set before my hearers the nature and necessity of true repentance, &c. Afterwards, had some small degree of thankfulness. Was very ill and full of pain in the evening; and my soul mourned that I had spent so much time to so little profit.

“Monday, Aug. 22. Spent most of the day in study; and found my bodily strength in a measure restored. Had some intense and passionate breathings of soul after holiness, and very clear manifestations of my utter inability to procure, or work it in myself; it is wholly owing to the power of God. O, with what tenderness the love and desire of holiness fills the soul! I wanted to wing out of myself to God, or rather to get a conformity to him: but, alas! I cannot add to my stature in grace one cubit. However, my soul can never leave striving for it; or at least groaning that it cannot strive for it, and obtain more purity of heart. At night I spent some time in instructing  my poor people. Oh that God would pity their souls!

“Tuesday, Aug. 23. Studied in the forenoon, and enjoyed some freedom. In the afternoon, laboured abroad: endeavoured to pray; but found not much sweetness or intenseness of mind. Towards night, was very weary, and tired of this world of sorrow: the thoughts of death and immortality appeared very desirable, and even refreshed my soul. Those lines turned in my mind with pleasure,

’Come, death, shake hands, I’ll kiss thy bands:‘Tis happiness for me to die.What! dost thou think that I will shrink?I’ll go to immortality.’

In evening prayer God was pleased to draw near my soul, though very sinful and unworthy: was enabled to wrestle with God, and to persevere in my requests for grace. I poured out my soul for all the world, friends, and enemies. My soul was concerned, not so much for souls as such, but rather for Christ’s kingdom, that it might appear in the world, that God might be known to be God in the whole earth. And, oh, my soul abhorred the very thought of a party in religion! Let the truth of God appear, wherever it is; and God have the glory for ever. Amen. This was indeed a comfortable season. I thought I had some small taste of, and real relish for, the enjoyments and employments of the upper world. O that my soul was more attempered to it!

“Wednesday, Aug. 24. Spent some time in the morning in study and prayer. Afterwards was engaged in some necessary business abroad. Towards night, found a little time for some particular studies. I thought if God should say, ‘Cease making any provision for this life, for you shall in a few days go out of time into eternity,’ my soul would leap for joy. O that I may both ‘desire to be dissolved, to be with Christ,’ and likewise ‘wait patiently all the days of my appointed time till my change come!’ But, alas! I am very unfit for the business and blessedness of heaven. O for more holiness!

“Thursday, Aug. 25. Part of the day, was engaged in studies; and part in labour abroad. I find it is impossible to enjoy peace and tranquillity of mind without a careful improvement of time. This is really an imitation of God and Christ Jesus:‘My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,   ’ says our Lord. But still, if we would be like God we must see that we fill up our time for him. I daily long to dwell in perfect light and love. In the mean time, my soul mourns that I make so little progress in grace, and preparation for the world of blessedness: I see and know that I am a very barren tree in God’s vineyard, and that he might justly say, ‘Cut it down,’ &c. O that God would make me more lively and vigorous in grace, for his own glory! Amen.”

The two next days he was much engaged in some necessary labours, in which he extremely spent himself. He seems these days to have had a great sense of the vanity of the world, continued longings after holiness, and more fervency of spirit in the service of God.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 28. Was much perplexed with some irreligious Dutchmen. All their discourse turned upon the things of the world; which was no small exercise to my mind. Oh, what a hell it would be to spend an eternity with such men! Well might David say, ‘I beheld the transgressors, and was grieved.   ’ But adored be God, heaven is a place into which no unclean thing enters.’ Oh, I long for the holiness of that world! Lord, prepare me for it.’”

The next day he set out on a journey to New York. Was somewhat dejected the two first days of his journey; but yet seems to have enjoyed some degrees of the sensible presence of God.

“Wednesday, Aug. 31. Rode down to Bethlehem: was in a sweet, serious, and, I hope, Christian frame, when I came there. Eternal things engrossed all my thoughts; and I longed to be in the world of spirits. O how happy is it to have all our thoughts swallowed up in that world; to feel one’s self a serious considerate stranger in this world, diligently seeking a road through it, the best, the sure road to the heavenly Jerusalem!

“Thursday, Sept. 1. Rode to Danbury. Was more dull and dejected in spirit than yesterday. Indeed, I always feel comfortably when God realizes death, and the things of this world, to my mind: whenever my mind is taken off from the things of this world, and set on God, my soul is then at rest.“

He went forward on his journey, and came to New York on the next Monday. And after tarrying there two or three days, he set out from the city towards New-Haven, intending to be there at the commencement; and on Friday came to Horse-Neck. In the mean time, he complains much of dulness, and want of fervour in religion: but yet, from time to time, speaks of his enjoying spiritual warmth and sweetness in conversation with Christian friends, assistance in public services, &c.

“Saturday, Sept. 10. Rode six miles to Stanwich, and preached to a considerable assembly of people. Had some assistance and freedom, especially towards the close. Endeavoured much afterwards, in private conversation, to establish holiness, humility, meekness, &c. as the essence of true religion; and to moderate some noisy sort of persons, that appeared to me to be acted by unseen spiritual pride. Alas, what extremes men incline to run into! Returned to Horse-Neck, and felt some seriousness and sweet solemnity in the evening.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 11. In the afternoon I preached from Tit. iii. 8. ‘This is a faithful saying, and these things,’ &c. I think God never helped me more in painting true religion, and in detecting clearly, and tenderly discountenancing, false appearances of religion, wild-fire party zeal, spiritual pride, &c. as well as a confident dogmatical spirit, and its spring, viz. ignorance of the heart. In the evening took much pains in private conversation to suppress some confusions, that I perceived were amongst that people.

“Monday, Sept. 12. Rode to Mr. Mills’s at Ripton. Had some perplexing hours; but was some part of the day very comfortable. It is ‘through great trials,’ I see, ‘that we must enter the gates of paradise.’ If my soul could but be holy, that God might not be dishonoured, methinks I could bear sorrows.

“Tuesday, Sept. 13. Rode to New-Haven. Was sometimes dejected; not in the sweetest frame. Lodged at ****. Had some profitable Christian conversation, &c. I find, though my inward trials were great, and a life of solitude gives them greater advantage to settle, and penetrate to the very inmost recesses of the soul; yet it is better to be alone, than encumbered with noise and tumult. I find it very difficult maintaining any sense of divine things while removing from place to place, diverted with new objects, and filled with care and business. A settled steady business is best adapted to a life of strict religion.

Wednesday, Sept. 14. This day I ought to have taken my degree;   but God sees fit to deny it me. And though I was greatly afraid of being overwhelmed with perplexity and confusion, when I should see my class-mates take theirs; yet, at the very time, God enabled me with calmness and resignation to say, ‘The will of the Lord be done.’ Indeed, through divine goodness, I have scarcely felt my mind so calm, sedate, and comfortable for some time. I have long feared this season, and expected my humility, meekness, patience, and resignation would be much tried:   but found much more pleasure and divine comfort than I expected. Felt spiritually, serious, tender, and affectionate in private prayer with a dear Christian friend to-day.

“Thursday, Sept. 15. Had some satisfaction in hearing the ministers discourse, &c. It is always a comfort to me, to hear religious and spiritual discourse. O that ministers and people were more spiritual and devoted to God! Towards night, with the advice of Christian friends, I offered the following reflections in writing, to the rector and trustees of the college which are for substance the same that I  had freely offered to the rector before, and entreated him to accept that if possible I might cut off all occasion of offence, from those who seek occasion. What I offered, is as follows:

“Whereas I have said before several persons, concerning Mr. Whittelsey, one of the tutors of Yale college, that I did not believe he had any more grace than the chair I then leaned upon: I humbly confess, that herein I have sinned against God, and acted contrary to the rules of his word, and have injured Mr. Whittelsey. I had no right to make thus free with his character; and had no just reason to say as I did concerning him. My fault herein was the more aggravated, in that I said this concerning one that was so much my superior, and one that I was obliged to treat with special respect and honour, by reason of the relation I stood in to him in the college. Such a manner of behaviour, I confess, did not become a Christian; it was taking too much upon me, and did not savour of that humble respect that I ought to have expressed towards Mr. Whittelsey. I have long since been convinced of the falseness of those apprehensions, by which I then justified such a conduct. I have often reflected on this act with grief; I hope, on account of the sin of it: and am willing to lie low, and be abased before God and man for it. And humbly ask the forgiveness of the governors of the college, and of the whole society; but of Mr. Whittelsey in particular. And whereas I have been accused by one person of saying concerning the reverend rector of Yale college, that I wondered he did not expect to drop down dead for fining the scholars that followed Mr. Tennent to Milford; I seriously profess, that I do not remember my saying any thing to this purpose. But if I did, which I am not certain I did not, I utterly condemn it, and detest all such kind of behaviour; and especially in an undergraduate towards the rector. And I now appear, to judge and condemn myself for going once to the separate meeting in New-Haven, a little before I was expelled, though the rector had refused to give me leave. For this I humbly ask the rector’s forgiveness. And whether the governors of the college shall ever see cause to remove the academical censure I lie under, or no, or to admit me to the privileges I desire; yet I am willing to appear, if they think fit, openly to own, and to humble myself for, those things I have herein confessed.”

“God has made me willing to do any thing that I can do, consistent with truth, for the sake of peace, and that I might not be a stumbling-block to others. For this reason I can cheerfully forego, and give up, what I verily believe, after the most mature and impartial search, is my right, in some instances. God has given me that disposition, that, if this were the case, that a man has done me a hundred injuries, and I (though ever so much provoked to it) have done him one, I feel disposed, and heartily willing, humbly to confess my fault to him, and on my knees to ask forgiveness of him; though at the same time he should justify himself in all the injuries he has done me, and should only make use of my humble confession to blacken my character the more, and represent me as the only person guilty, &c. yea, though he should as it were insult me, and say, ‘he knew all this before, and that I was making work for repentance,’ &c. Though what I said concerning Mr. Whittelsey was only spoken in private, to a friend or two; and being partly overheard, was related to the rector, and by him extorted from my friends; yet, seeing it was divulged acid made public, I was willing to confess my fault therein publicly. But I trust God will plead my cause.”

The next day he went to Derby; then to Southbury, where he spent the sabbath: and speaks of some spiritual comfort; but complains much of unfixedness, and wanderings of mind in religion.

“Monday, Sept. 19. In the afternoon rode to Bethlehem, and there preached. Had some measure of assistance, both in prayer and preaching. I felt serious, kind, and tender towards all mankind, and longed that holiness might flourish more on earth.

“Tuesday, Sept. 20. Had thoughts of going forward on my journey to my Indians; but towards night was taken with a hard pain in my teeth, and shivering cold; and could not possibly recover a comfortable degree of warmth the whole night following. I continued very full of pain all night; and in the morning had a very hard fever, and pains almost over my whole body. I had a sense of the divine goodness in appointing this to be the place of my sickness, viz. among my friends, who were very kind to me. I should probably have perished, if I had first got home to my own house in the wilderness, where I have none to converse with but the poor, rude, ignorant Indians. Here I saw was mercy in the midst of affliction. I continued thus, mostly confined to my bed, till Friday night; very full of pain most of the time; but through divine goodness not afraid of death. Then the extreme folly of those appeared to me, who put off their turning to God till a sick-bed. Surely this is not a time proper to prepare for eternity. On Friday evening my pains went off somewhat suddenly, I was exceeding weak, and almost fainted; but was very comfortable the night following. These words, Psal. cxviii. 17. ‘I shall not die, but live,’ &c. I frequently revolved in my mind; and thought we were to prize the continuation of life only on this account, that we may ‘show forth God’s goodness and works of grace.’”

From this time he gradually recovered; and on the next Tuesday was so well as to be able to go forward on his journey homewards; but it was not till the Tuesday following that he reached Kaunaumeek. And seems, great part of this time, to have had a very deep and lively sense of the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, and of the reality, nearness, and vast importance of eternal things.

“Tuesday, Oct. 4. This day rode home to my own house and people. The poor Indians appeared very glad of my return. Found my house and all things in safety. I presently fell on my knees, and blessed God for my safe return, after a long and tedious journey, and a season of sickness in several places where I had been, and after I had been ill myself. God has renewed his kindness to me, in preserving me one journey more. I have taken many considerable journeys since this time last year, and yet God has never suffered one of my bones to be broken, or any distressing calamity to befall me, excepting the ill turn I had in my last journey. I have been often exposed to cold and hunger in the wilderness, where the comforts of life were not to be had; have frequently been lost in the woods; and sometimes obliged to ride much of the night; and once lay out in the woods all night; yet, blessed be God, he has preserved me!”

In his diary for the next eleven days, are great complaints of distance from God, spiritual pride, corruption, and exceeding vileness. He once says, his heart was so pressed with a sense of his pollution, that he could scarcely have the face and impudence (as it then appeared to him) to desire that God should not damn him for ever. And at another time, he says, he had so little sense of God, or apprehension and relish of his glory and excellency, that it made him more disposed to kindness and tenderness towards those who are blind and ignorant of God and things divine and heavenly.

“Lords day, Oct. 16. In the evening, God was pleased to give me a feeling sense of my own unworthiness; but through divine goodness such as tended to draw me to, rather than drive me from, God: it filled me with solemnity.  I retired alone, (having at this time a friend with me,) and poured out my soul to God with much freedom; and yet in anguish, to find myself so unspeakably sinful and unworthy before a holy God. Was now much resigned under God’s dispensations towards me, though my trials had been very great. But thought whether I could be resigned, if God should let the French Indians come upon me, and deprive me of life, or carry me away captive, (though I knew of no special reason then to propose this trial to myself, more than any other,) and my soul seemed so far to rest and acquiesce in God, that the sting and terror of these things seemed in a great measure gone. Presently after I came to the Indians, whom I was teaching to sing psalm-tunes that evening, I received the following letter from Stockbridge, by a messenger sent on the sabbath on purpose, which made it appear of greater importance.

’Sir, Just now we received advices from Col. Stoddard, that there is the utmost danger of a rupture with France. He has received the same from his excellency our governor, ordering him to give notice to all the exposed places, that they may secure themselves the best they can against any sudden invasion. We thought best to send directly to Kaunaumeek, that you may take the prudentest measures for your safety that dwell there. I am, Sir, &c.’

“I thought, upon reading the contents, it came in a good season; for my heart seemed fixed on God, and therefore I was not much surprised. This news only made me more serious, and taught me that I must not please myself with any of the comforts of life which I had been preparing. Blessed be God, who gave me any intenseness and fervency this evening!

“Monday, Oct. 17. Had some rising hopes, that ‘God would arise and have mercy on Zion speedily.’ My heart is indeed refreshed, when I have any prevailing hopes of Zion’s prosperity. O that I may see the glorious day, when Zion shall become the joy of the whole earth! Truly there is nothing that I greatly value in this lower world.”

On Tuesday he rode to Stockbridge; complains of being much diverted, and having but little life. On Wednesday he expresses some solemn sense of divine things, and longing to be always doing for God with a godly frame of spirit.

“Thursday, Oct. 20. Had but little sense of divine things this day. Alas, that so much of my precious time is spent with so little of God! Those are tedious days, wherein I have no spirituality.

“Friday, Oct. 21. Returned home to Kaunaumeek: was glad to get alone in my little cottage, and to cry to that God who seeth in secret, and is present in a wilderness.

“Saturday, Oct. 22. Had but little sensible communion with God. This world is a dark, cloudy mansion. Oh, when will the Sun of righteousness shine on my soul without intermission!

“Lord’s day, Oct. 23. In the morning I had a little dawn of comfort arising from hopes of seeing glorious days in the church of God: was enabled to pray for such a glorious day with some courage and strength of hope. In the forenoon treated on the glories of heaven, &c. In the afternoon, on the miseries of hell, and the danger of going there. Had some freedom and warmth, both parts of the day. And my people were very attentive. In the evening two or three came to me under concern for their souls; to whom I was enabled to discourse closely, and with some earnestness and desire. O that God would be merciful to their poor souls!”

He seems, through the whole of this week, to have been greatly engaged to fill up every inch of time in the service of God, and to have been most diligently employed in study, prayer, and instructing the Indians; and from time to time expresses longings of soul after God, and the advancement of his kingdom, and spiritual comfort and refreshment.

“Lord’s day, Oct. 30. In the morning I enjoyed some fixedness of soul in prayer, which was indeed sweet and desirable; was enabled to leave myself with God, and to acquiesce in him. At noon my soul was refreshed with reading Rev. iii. more especially the Rev. iii. 11, 12. 11th and 12th verses. Oh, my soul longed for that blessed day, when I should ‘dwell in the temple of God,’ and ‘go no more out’ of his immediate presence!

“Monday, Oct. 31. Rode to Kinderhook, about fifteen miles from my place. While riding I felt some divine sweetness in the thoughts of being   a pillar in the temple of God’ in the upper world, and being no more deprived of his blessed presence, and the sense of his favour, which is better than life. My soul was so lifted up to God, that I could pour out my desires to him, for more grace and further degrees of sanctification, with abundant freedom. Oh, I longed to be more abundantly prepared for that blessedness, with which I was then in some measure refreshed! Returned home in the evening; but took an extremely bad cold by riding in the night.

“Tuesday, Nov. 1. Was very much disordered in body, and sometimes full of pain in my face and teeth; was not able to study much, and had not much spiritual comfort. Alas! when God is withdrawn, all is gone. Had some sweet thoughts, which I could not but write down, on the design, nature, and end of Christianity.

“Wednesday, Nov. 2. Was still more indisposed in body, and in much pain most of the day. I had not much comfort; was scarcely able to study at all; and still entirely alone in the wilderness. But blessed be the Lord, I am not exposed in the open air; I have a house, and many of the comforts of life to support me. I have learned in a measure, that all good things relating both to time and eternity come from God. In the evening I had some degree of quickening in prayer: I think God gave me some sense of his presence.

“Thursday, Nov. 3. Spent this day in secret fasting and prayer, from morning till night. Early in the morning I had some small degree of assistance in prayer. Afterwards read the story of Elijah the prophet, 1 Kings. xvii. xviii. chapters, and also 2 Kings. ii. and iv. chapters. My soul was much moved, observing the faith, zeal, and power of that holy man; how he wrestled with God in prayer, &c. My soul then cried with Elisha,   ‘Where is the Lord God of Elijah!’ Oh, I longed for more faith! My soul breathed after God, and pleaded with him, that a ‘double portion of that spirit,’ which was given to Elijah, might ‘rest on me.’ And that which was divinely refreshing and strengthening to my soul was, I saw that God is the same that he was in the days of Elijah. Was enabled to wrestle with God by prayer, in a more affectionate, fervent, humble, intense, and importunate manner, than I have for many months past. Nothing seemed too hard for God to perform; nothing too great for me to hope for from him. I had for many months entirely lost all hopes of being made instrumental of doing any special service for God in the world; it has appeared entirely impossible, that one so black and vile should be thus employed for God. But at this time God was pleased to revive this hope. Afterwards read the 3rd chapter of Exodus and on to the 20th, and saw more of the glory and majesty of God discovered in those chapters, than ever I had seen before; frequently in the mean time falling on my knees, and crying to God for the faith of Moses, and for a manifestation of the divine glory. Especially the 3rd and 4th, and part of the 14th and 15th chapters, were unspeakably sweet to my soul: my soul blessed God, that he had shown himself so gracious to his servants of old. The 15th chapter seemed to be the very language which my soul uttered to God in the season of my first spiritual comfort, when I had just got through the Red sea, by a way that I had no expectation of. O how my soul then rejoiced in God! And now those things came fresh and lively to my mind; now my soul blessed God afresh, that he had opened that unthought-of way to deliver me from the fear of the Egyptians, when I almost despaired of life. Afterwards read the story of Abraham’s pilgrimage in the land of Canaan: my soul was melted, in observing his faith, bow he leaned on God; how he communed with God, and what a stranger he was here in the world. After that, read the story of Joseph’s sufferings, and God’s goodness to him: blessed God for these examples of faith and patience. My soul was ardent in prayer, was enabled to wrestle ardently for myself, for Christian friends, and for the church of God. And felt more desire to see the power  of God in the conversion of souls, than I have done for a long season. Blessed be God for this season of fasting and prayer! May his goodness always abide with me, and draw my soul to him!

“Thursday, Nov. 4. Rode to Kinderhook: went quite to Hudson’s river, about twenty miles from my house; performed some business, and returned home in the evening to my own house. I had rather ride hard and fatigue myself, to get home, than to spend the evening and night amongst those who have no regard for God.”

The two next days he was very ill, and full of pain, probably through his riding in the night after a fatiguing day’s journey on Thursday; but yet seems to have been diligent in business.

“Monday, Nov. 7. This morning the Lord afforded me some special assistance in prayer; my mind was solemn, fixed, affectionate, and ardent in desires after holiness; felt full of tenderness and love; and my affections seemed to be dissolved into kindness. In the evening I enjoyed the same comfortable assistance in prayer as in the morning: my soul longed after God, and cried to him with a filial freedom, reverence, and boldness. O that I might be entirely consecrated and devoted to God.”

The two next days he complains of bodily illness and pain; but much more of spiritual barrenness and unprofitableness.

“Thursday, Nov. 10. Spent this day in fasting and prayer alone. In the morning was very dull and lifeless, melancholy and discouraged. But after some time, while reading 2 Kings xix. my soul was moved and affected; especially reading verse 14, and onward. I saw there was no other way for the afflicted children of God to take, but to go to God with all their sorrows. Hezekiah, in his great distress, went and spread his complaint before the Lord. I was then enabled to see the mighty power of God, and my extreme need of that power; was enabled to cry to him affectionately and ardently for his power and grace to be exercised towards me. Afterwards read the story of David’s trials, and observed the course he took under them, how he strengthened his hands in God; whereby my soul was carried out after God, enabled to cry to him, and rely upon him, and felt strong in the Lord. Was afterwards refreshed, observing the blessed temper that was wrought in David by his trials: all bitterness and desire of revenge seemed wholly taken away; so that he mourned for the death of his enemies; 2 Sam. i. 17. and iv. 9, ad fin. Was enabled to bless God, that he had given me something of this divine temper, that my soul freely, forgives and heartily loves my enemies.“

It appears by his diary for the remaining part of this week, and for the two following weeks, that great part of the time he was very ill, and full of pain; and yet obliged, through his circumstances, in this ill state of body, to be at great fatigues, in labour, and travelling day and night, and to expose himself in stormy and severe seasons. He from time to time, within this space, speaks of outgoings of soul after God; his heart strengthened in God; seasons of divine sweetness and comfort; his heart affected with gratitude for mercies, &c. And yet there are many complaints of lifelessness, weakness of grace, distance from God, and great unprofitableness. But still there appear a constant care from day to day, not to lose time, but to improve it all for God.

“Lord’s day, Nov. 27. In the evening I was greatly affected in reading an account of the very joyful death of a pious gentleman; which seemed to invigorate my soul in God’s ways. I felt courageously engaged to pursue a life of holiness and self-denial as long as I live; and poured out my soul to God for his help and assistance in order thereto. Eternity then seemed near, and my soul rejoiced, and longed to meet it. I trust that will be a blessed day that finishes my toil here.

“Monday, Nov. 28. In the evening I was obliged to spend time in company and conversation that was unprofitable. Nothing lies heavier upon me, than the misimprovement of time.

“Tuesday, Nov. 29. Began to study the Indian tongue with Mr. Sergeant at Stockbridge.   Was perplexed for want of more retirement. I love to live alone in my own little cottage, where I can spend much time in prayer, &c.

“Wednesday, Nov. 30. Pursued my study of Indian: but was very weak and disordered in body, and was troubled in mind at the barrenness of the day, that I had done so little for God. I had some enlargement in prayer at night. Oh, a barn, or stable, hedge, or any other place, is truly desirable, if God is there! Sometimes, of late, my hopes of Zion’s prosperity are more raised than they were in the summer. My soul seems to confide in God, that he will yet ‘show forth his salvation’ to his people, and make Zion ‘the joy of the whole earth. O how excellent is the loving-kindness of the Lord!’ My soul sometimes inwardly exults at the lively thoughts of what God has already done for his church, and what Luke ii. 30.“mine eyes have seen of the salvation of God.” It is sweet, to hear nothing but spiritual discourse from God’s children; and sinners ‘inquiring the way to Zion,’ saying, ‘What shall we do?’ &c. O that I may see more of this blessed work!

“Thursday, Dec. 1. Both morning and evening I enjoyed some intenseness of soul in prayer, and longed for the enlargement of Christ’s kingdom in the world. My soul seems, of late, to wait on God for his blessing on Zion. O that religion might powerfully revive!

“Friday, Dec. 2. Enjoyed not so much health of body, or fervour of mind, as yesterday. If the chariot-wheels move with ease and speed at any time, for a short space, yet by and by they drive heavily again. ‘O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly away’ from sin and corruption, and be at rest in God!

“Saturday, Dec. 3. Rode home to my house and people. Suffered much with the extreme cold. I trust I shall ere long arrive safe at my journey’s end, where my toils shall cease.

Lord’s day, Dec. 4. Had but little sense of divine and heavenly things. My soul mourns over my barrenness. Oh how sad is spiritual deadness!

“Monday, Dec. 5. Rode to Stockbridge. Was almost outdone with the extreme cold. Had some refreshing meditations by the way; but was barren, wandering, and lifeless, much of the day. Thus my days roll away, with but little done for God; and this is my burden.

“Tuesday, Dec. 6. Was perplexed to see the vanity and levity of professed Christians. Spent the evening with a Christian friend, who was able in some measure to sympathize with me in my spiritual conflicts. Was a little refreshed to find one with whom I could converse of inward trials, &c.

“Wednesday, Dec. 7. Spent the evening in perplexity, with a kind of guilty indolence. When I have no heart or resolution for God, and the duties incumbent on me, I feel guilty of negligence and misimprovement of time. Certainly I ought to be engaged in my work and business, to the utmost extent of my strength and ability.

“Thursday, Dec. 8. My mind was much distracted with different affections. I seemed to be at an amazing distance from God; and looking round in the world, to see if there was not some happiness to be derived from it. God, and certain objects in the world, seemed each to invite my heart and affections; and my soul seemed to be distracted between them. I have not been so much beset with the world for a long time; and that with relation to some particular objects which I thought myself most dead to. But even while I was desiring to please myself with any thing below, guilt, sorrow, and perplexity attended the first motions of desire. Indeed I cannot see the appearance of pleasure and happiness in the world, as I used to do: and blessed be God for any habitual deadness to the world. I found no peace, or deliverance from this distraction and perplexity of mind, till I found access to the throne of grace: and as soon as I had any sense of God, and things divine, the allurements of the world vanished, and my heart was determined for God. But my soul mourned over my folly, that I should desire any pleasure, but only in God. God forgive my spiritual idolatry!”

The next thirteen days he appears to have been continually in deep concern about the improvement of precious time; and there are many expressions of grief, that he improved time no better; such as, “Oh, what misery do I feel, when “my thoughts rove after vanity! I should be happy if always engaged for God! O wretched man that I am!” &c. Speaks of his being pained with a sense of his barrenness, perplexed with his wanderings, longing for deliverance from the being of sin, mourning that time passed away, and so little was done for God, &c. On Tuesday, December 20, he speaks of his being visited at Kaunaumeek by some under spiritual concern.

“Thursday, Dec. 22. Spent this day alone in fasting and prayer, and reading in God’s word the exercises and deliverances of his children. Had, I trust, some exercise of faith, and realizing apprehension of divine power, grace, and holiness; and also of the unchangeableness of God, that he is the same as when he delivered his saints of old out of great tribulation. My soul was sundry times in prayer enlarged for God’s church and people. O that Zion might become the ‘joy of the whole earth!’ It is better to wait upon God with patience, than to put confidence in any thing in this lower world. ‘My soul, wait thou on the Lord;’ for ‘from him comes thy salvation.’

“Friday, Dec. 23. Felt a little more courage and resolution in religion, than at some other times.

“Saturday, Dec. 24. Had some assistance and longing desires after sanctification in prayer this day; especially in the evening: was sensible of my own weakness and spiritual impotency; saw plainly I should fall into sin, if God of his abundant mercy did not “uphold my soul, and withhold me from evil.’ O that God would ‘uphold me by his free Spirit, and save me from the hour of temptation.’

“Lord’s day, Dec. 25. Prayed much, in the morning, with a feeling sense of my own spiritual weakness and insufficiency for any duty. God gave me some assistance in preaching to the Indians; and especially in the afternoon, when I was enabled to speak with uncommon plainness, freedom, and earnestness. Blessed be God for any assistance granted to one so unworthy. Afterwards felt some thankfulness; but still sensible of barrenness. Spent some time in the evening with one or two persons under spiritual concern, and exhorting others to their duty, &c.

“Monday, Dec. 26. Rode down to Stockbridge. Was very much fatigued with my journey, wherein I underwent great hardships: was much exposed and very wet by falling into a river. Spent the day and evening without much sense of divine and heavenly things; but felt guilty, grieved, and perplexed with wandering careless thoughts.

“Tuesday, Dec. 27. Had a small degree of warmth in secret prayer, in the evening; but, alas! had but little spiritual life, and consequently but little comfort. Oh, the pressure of a body of death!

“Wednesday, Dec. 28. Rode about six miles to the ordination of Mr. Hopkins. At the solemnity I was somewhat affected with a sense of the greatness and importance of the work of a minister of Christ. Afterwards was grieved to see the vanity of the multitude. In the evening spent a little time with some Christian friends, with some degree of satisfaction; but most of the time I had rather have been alone.

“Thursday, Dec. 29. Spent the day mainly in conversing with friends; yet enjoyed little satisfaction, because I could find but few disposed to converse of divine and heavenly things. Alas, what are the things of this world, to afford satisfaction to the soul! Near night returned to Stockbridge; in secret, I blessed God for retirement, and that I am not always exposed to the company and conversation of the world. O that I could live ‘in the secret of God’s presence!’

“Friday, Dec. 30. Was in a solemn devout frame in the evening. Wondered that earth, with all its charms, should ever allure me in the least degree. O that I could always realize the being and holiness of God!

“Saturday, Dec. 31. Rode from Stockbridge home to my house: the air was clear and calm, but as cold as ever I felt it, or near. I was in great danger of perishing by the extremity of the season. Was enabled to meditate much on the road.

“Lord’s day, Jan. 1, 1744. In the morning had some small degree of assistance in prayer. Saw myself so vile and unworthy, that I could not look my people in the face, when I came to preach. Oh, my meanness, folly, ignorance, and inward pollution! In the evening had a little assistance in prayer, so that the duty was delightful, rather than burdensome. Reflected on the goodness of God to me in the past year, &c. Of a truth God has been kind and gracious to me, though he has caused me to pass through many sorrows; he has provided for me bountifully, so that I have been enabled, in about fifteen months past, to bestow to charitable uses about a hundred pounds New England money, that I can now remember.   Blessed be the Lord, that has so far used me as his steward, to distribute a portion of his goods. May I always remember, that all I have comes from God. Blessed be the Lord, that has carried me through all the toils, fatigues, and hardships of the year past, as well as the spiritual sorrows and conflicts that have attended it. O that I could begin this year with God, and spend the whole of it to his glory, either in life or death!

“Monday, Jan. 2. Had some affecting sense of my own impotency and spiritual weakness. It is nothing but the power of God that keeps me from all manner of wickedness. I see I am nothing, and can do nothing without help from above. Oh, for divine grace! In the evening, had some ardour of soul in prayer, and longing desires to have God for my guide and safeguard at all times.

“Tuesday, Jan. 3. Was employed much of the day in writing; and spent some time in other necessary employment. But my time passes away so swiftly, that I am astonished when I reflect on it, and see how little I do. My state of solitude does not make the hours hang heavy upon my hands. O what reason of thankfulness have I on account of this retirement! I find that I do not, and it seems I cannot, lead a Christian life when I am abroad, and cannot spend time in devotion, Christian conversation, and serious meditation, as I should do. Those weeks that I am obliged now to be from home, in order to learn the Indian tongue, are mostly spent in perplexity and barrenness, without much sweet relish of divine things; and I feel myself a stranger at the throne of grace, for want of more frequent and continued retirement. When I return home, and give myself to meditation, prayer, and fasting, a new scene opens to my mind, and my soul longs for mortification, self-denial, humility, and divorcement from all the things of the world. This evening my heart was somewhat warm and fervent in prayer and meditation, so that I was loth to indulge sleep. Continued in those duties till about midnight.

“Wednesday, Jan. 4. Was in a resigned and mortified temper of mind, much of the day. Time appeared a moment, life a vapour, and all its enjoyments as empty bubbles, and fleeting blasts of wind.

“Thursday, Jan. 5. Had an humbling and pressing sense of my unworthiness. My sense of the badness of my own heart filled my soul with bitterness and anguish; which was ready to sink, as under the weight of a heavy burden. Thus I spent the evening, till late. Was somewhat intense and ardent in prayer.

“Friday, Jan. 6. Feeling and considering my extreme weakness, and want of grace, the pollution of my soul, and danger of temptations on every side, I set apart this day for fasting and prayer, neither eating nor drinking from evening to evening, beseeching God to have mercy on me. My soul intensely longed, that the dreadful spots and stains of sin might be washed away from it. Saw something of the power and all-sufficiency of God. My soul seemed to rest on his power and grace; longed for resignation to his will, and mortification to all things here below. My mind was greatly fixed on divine things: my resolutions for a life of mortification, continual watchfulness, self-denial,  seriousness, and devotion, were strong and fixed; my desires ardent and intense; my conscience tender, and afraid of every appearance of evil. My soul grieved with reflection on past levity, and want of resolution for God. I solemnly renewed my dedication of myself to God, and longed for grace to enable me always to keep covenant with him. Time appeared very short, eternity near; and great name, either in or after life, together with all earthly pleasures and profits, but an empty bubble, a deluding dream.

“Saturday, Jan. 7. Spent this day in seriousness, with stedfast resolutions for God and a life of mortification. Studied closely, till I felt my bodily strength fail. Felt some degree of resignation to God, with an acquiescence in his dispensations. Was grieved that I could do so little for God before my bodily strength failed. In the evening, though tired, was enabled to continue instant in prayer for some time. Spent the time in reading, meditation, and prayer, till the evening was far spent: was grieved to think that I could not watch unto prayer the whole night. But blessed be God, heaven is a place of continual and incessant devotion, though the earth is dull.”

The six days following he continued in the same happy frame of mind; enjoyed the same composure, calmness, resignation, ardent desire, and sweet fervency of spirit, in a high degree, every day, not one excepted. Thursday, this week, he kept as a day of secret fasting and prayer.

“Saturday, Jan. 14. This morning enjoyed a most solemn season in prayer: my soul seemed enlarged, and assisted to pour out itself to God for grace, and for every blessing I wanted, for myself, my dear Christian friends, and for the church of God; and was so enabled to see him who is invisible, that my soul rested upon him for the performance of every thing I asked agreeable to his will. It was then my happiness, to ‘continue instant in prayer,’ and was enabled to continue in it for nearly an hour. My soul was then ‘strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.’ Longed exceedingly for angelic holiness and purity, and to have all my thoughts, at all times, employed in divine and heavenly things. O how blessed is a heavenly temper! O how unspeakably blessed it is, to feel a measure of that rectitude, in which we were at first created! Felt the same divine assistance in prayer sundry times in the day. My soul confided in God for myself, and for his Zion; trusted in divine power and grace, that he would do glorious things in his church on earth, for his own glory.”

The next day he speaks of some glimpses he had of the divine glories, and of his being enabled to maintain his resolutions in some measure; but complains, that he could not draw near to God. He seems to be filled with trembling fears lest he should return to a life of vanity, to please himself with some of the enjoyments of this lower world; and speaks of his being much troubled, and feeling guilty, that he should address immortal souls with no more ardency and desire of their salvation. On Monday he rode down to Stockbridge, when he was distressed with the extreme cold; but notwithstanding, his mind was in a devout and solemn frame in his journey. The four next days he was very ill, probably from the cold in his journey; yet he spent the time in a solemn manner. On Friday evening he visited Mr. Hopkins; and on Saturday rode eighteen miles to Solsbury, where he kept the sabbath, and enjoyed considerable degrees of God’s gracious presence, assistance in duty, and divine comfort and refreshment, longing to give himself wholly to God, to be his for ever.

“Monday, Jan. 23. I think I never felt more resigned to God, nor so much dead to the world, in every respect, as now; was dead to all desire of reputation and greatness, either in life, or after death; all I longed for, was to be holy, humble, crucified to the world, &c.

“Tuesday, Jan. 24. Near noon, rode over to Canaan. In the evening I was unexpectedly visited by a considerable number of people, with whom I was enabled to converse profitably of divine things: took pains to describe the difference between a regular and irregular SELF-LOVE; the one consisting with a supreme love to God, but the other not; the former uniting God’s glory and the soul’s happiness, that they become one common interest, but the latter disjoining and separating God’s glory and man’s happiness, seeking the latter with a neglect of the former. Illustrated this by that genuine love that is founded between the sexes; which is diverse from that which is wrought up towards a person only by rational argument, or hope of self-interest. Love is a pleasing passion, it affords pleasure to the mind where it is; but yet, genuine love is not, nor can be placed, upon any object with that design of pleasure itsef.“

On Wednesday he rode to Sheffield; the next day, to Stockbridge; and on Saturday, home to Kaunaumeek, though the season was cold and stormy: which journey was followed with illness and pain. It appears by this diary, that he spent the time, while riding, in profitable meditations, and in lifting up his heart to God; and he speaks of assistance, comfort, and refreshment; but still complains of barrenness, &c. His diary for the five next days is full of the most heavy, bitter complaints; and he expresses himself as full of shame and self-loathing for his lifeless temper of mind and sluggishness of spirit, and as being in perplexity and extremity, and appearing to himself unspeakably vile and guilty before God, on account of some inward workings of corruption he found in his heart, &c.

“Thursday, Feb. 2. Spent this day in fasting and prayer, seeking the presence and assistance of God, that he would enable me to overcome all my corruptions and spiritual enemies.

“Friday, Feb. 3. Enjoyed more freedom and comfort than of late; was engaged in meditation upon the different whispers of the various powers and affections of a pious mind, exercised with a great variety of dispensations: and could but write, as well as meditate, on so entertaining a subject.   I hope the Lord gave me some true sense of divine things this day: but alas, how great and pressing are the remains of indwelling corruption! I am now more sensible than ever, that God alone is ‘the author and finisher of our faith,’ i. e. that the whole, and every part of sanctification, and every good word, work, or thought, found in me, is the effect of his power and grace; that ‘without him I can do nothing,’ in the strictest sense, and that ‘he works in us to will and to do of his own good pleasure,’ and from no other motive. Oh, how amazing it is that people can talk so much about men’s power and goodness; when, if God did not hold us back every moment, we should be devils incarnate! This my bitter experience, for several days last past, has abundantly taught me concerning myself.

“Saturday, Feb. 4. Enjoyed some degree of freedom and spiritual refreshment; was enabled to pray with some fervency, and longing desires of Zion’s prosperity, and my faith and hope seemed to take hold of God, for the performance of what I was enabled to plead for. Sanctification in myself, and the ingathering of God’s elect, was all my desire; and the hope of its accomplishment, all my joy.

“Lord’s day, Feb. 5. Was enabled in some measure to rest and confide in God, and to prize his presence and some glimpses of the light of his countenance, above my necessary food. Thought myself, after the season of weakness, temptation, and desertion I endured the last week, to be somewhat like Samson, when his locks began to grow again. Was enabled to preach to my people with more life and warmth than I have for some weeks past.

“Monday, Feb. 6. This morning my soul again was strengthened in God, and found some sweet repose in him in prayer; longing especially for the complete mortification of sensuality and pride, and for resignation to God’s dispensations, at all times, as through grace I felt it at this time. I did not desire deliverance from any difficulty that attends my circumstances, unless God was willing. O how comfortable is this temper! Spent most of the day in reading God’s word, in writing, and prayer. Enjoyed repeated and frequent comfort and intenseness of soul in prayer through the day. In the evening spent some hours in private conversation with my people; and afterwards felt some warmth in secret prayer.

“Tuesday, Feb. 7. Was much engaged in some sweet meditations on the powers and affections of the godly soul in their pursuit of their beloved object: wrote something of the native language of spiritual sensation, in its soft and tender whispers; declaring, that it now feels and tastes that the Lord is gracious; that he is the supreme good, the only soul-satisfying happiness: that he is a complete, sufficient, and almighty portion: saying,

’Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire besides this blessed portion. O, I feel it is heaven to please him, and to be just what he would have me to be! O that my soul were holy, as he is holy! O that it were pure, even as Christ is pare; and perfect, as my Father in heaven is perfect! These, I feel, are the sweetest commands in God’s book, comprising all others. And shall I break them! must I break them! am I under a necessity of it as long as I live in the world! O my soul, woe, woe is me that I am a sinner, because I now necessarily grieve and offend this blessed God, who is infinite in goodness and grace! Oh, methinks, if he would punish me for my sins, it would not wound my heart so deep to offend him: but though I sin continually, yet he continually repeats his kindness to me! Oh, methinks I could bear any sufferings; but how can I bear to grieve and dishonour this blessed God! How shall I yield ten thousand times more honour to him? What shall I do to glorify and worship this best of beings? O that I could consecrate myself, soul and body, to his service for ever! O that I could give up myself to him, so as never more to attempt to be my own, or to have any will or affections that are not perfectly conformed to him! But, alas, alas! I find I cannot be thus entirely devoted to God; I cannot live, and not sin. O ye angels, do ye glorify him incessantly; and if possible, prostrate yourselves lower before the blessed King of heaven? I long to bear a part with you; and, if it were possible, to help you. Oh, when we have done all that we can, to all eternity, we shall not be able to offer the ten thousandth part of the homage that the glorious God deserves!’

“Felt something spiritual, devout, resigned, and mortified to the world, much of the day; and especially towards and in the evening. Blessed be God, that he enables me to love him for himself.

“Wednesday, Feb. 8. Was in a comfortable frame of soul most of the day; though sensible of, and restless under, spiritual barrenness. I find that both mind and body are quickly tired with intenseness and fervour in the things of God. O that I could be as incessant as angels in devotion and spiritual fervour!

“Thursday, Feb. 9. Observed this day as a day of fasting and prayer, entreating of God to bestow upon me his blessing and grace; especially to enable me to live a life of mortification to the world, as well as of resignation and patience. Enjoyed some realizing sense of divine power and goodness in prayer, several times; and was enabled to roll the burden of myself, and friends, and Zion, upon the goodness and grace of God: but, in the general, was more dry and barren than I have usually been of late upon such occasions.

“Friday, Feb. 10. Was exceedingly oppressed, most of the day, with shame, grief, and fear, under a sense of my past folly, as well as present barrenness and coldness. When God sets before me my past misconduct, especially any instances of misguided zeal, it sinks my soul into shame and confusion, makes me afraid of a shaking leaf. My fear is such as the prophet Jeremy complains of, Jer xx. 10. I have no confidence to hold up my face, even before my fellow-worms; but only when my soul confides in God, and I find the sweet temper of Christ, the spirit of humility, solemnity, and mortification, and resignation, alive in my soul. But, in the evening, was unexpectedly refreshed in pouring out my complaint to God; my shame and fear was turned into a sweet composure and acquiescence in God.

“Saturday, Feb. 11. Felt much as yesterday: enjoyed but little sensible communion with God.

“Lord’s day, Feb. 12. My soul seemed to confide in God, and to repose itself on him; and had outgoings of soul after God in prayer. Enjoyed some divine assistance, in the forenoon, in preaching; but in the afternoon, was more perplexed with shame, &c. Afterwards, found some relief in prayer; loved, as a feeble, afflicted, despised creature, to cast myself on a God of infinite grace and goodness, hoping for no happiness but from him.

“Monday, Feb. 13. Was calm and sedate in morning-devotions; and my soul seemed to rely on God. Rode to Stockbridge, and enjoyed some comfortable meditations by the way; had a more refreshing taste and relish of heavenly blessedness than I have enjoyed for many months past. I have many times, of late, felt as ardent desires of holiness as ever; but not so much sense of the sweetness and unspeakable pleasure of the enjoyments and employments of heaven. My soul longed to leave earth, and bear a part with angels in their celestial employments. My soul said, ‘Lord, it is good to be here;’ and it appeared to be better to die than to lose the relish of these heavenly delights.”

A sense of divine things seemed to continue with him, in a lesser degree, through the next day. On Wednesday he was, by some discourse that he heard, cast into a melancholy gloom, that operated much in the same manner as his melancholy had formerly done, when he came first to Kaunaumeek; the effects of which seemed to continue in some degree the six following days.

“Wednesday, Feb. 22. In the morning had as clear a sense of the exceeding pollution of my nature, as ever I remember to have had in my life. I then appeared to myself inexpressibly loathsome and defiled; sins of childhood, of early youth, and such follies as I had not thought of for years together, as I remember, came now fresh to my view as if committed but yesterday, and appeared in the most odious colours; they appeared more in numbers than the hairs of my head; yea, they ‘went over my head as a heavy burden.’ In the evening, the hand of faith seemed to be strengthened in God; my soul seemed to rest and acquiesce in him; was supported under my burdens, reading the 125th Psalm; and found that it was sweet and comfortable to lean on God.

“Thursday, Feb. 23. Was frequent in prayer, and enjoyed some assistance. There is a God in heaven who overrules all things for the best; and this is the comfort of my soul: ‘I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of God in the land of the living,’ notwithstanding present sorrows. In the evening, enjoyed some freedom in prayer, for myself, friends, and the church of God.

“Friday Feb. 24. Was exceeding restless and perplexed under a sense of the misimprovement of time; mourned to see time pass away; felt in the greatest hurry; seemed to have every thing to do: yet could do nothing, but only grieve and groan under my ignorance, unprofitableness, meanness, the foolishness of my actions and thoughts, the pride and bitterness of some past frames, all which at this time appeared to me in lively colours, and filled me with shame. I could not compose my mind to any profitable studies, by reason of this pressure. And the reason, I judge, why I am not allowed to study a great part of my time, is, because I am endeavouring to lay in such a stock of knowledge, as shall be a self-sufficiency. I know it to be my indispensable duty to study, and qualify myself in the best manner I can for public service: but this is my misery, I naturally study and prepare, that I may ‘consume it upon my lusts’ of pride and self-confidence.”

He continued in much the same frame of uneasiness at the misimprovement of time, and pressure of spirit under a sense of vileness, unprofitableness, &c. for the sir following days; excepting some intervals of calmness and composure, in resignation to and confidence in God.

“Friday, March 2. Was most of the day employed in writing on a divine subject. Was frequent in prayer, and enjoyed some small degree of assistance. But in the evening, God was pleased to grant me a divine sweetness in prayer; especially in the duty of intercession. I think I never felt so much kindness and love to those who, I have reason to think, are my enemies though at that time I found such a disposition to think the best of all, that I scarce knew how to think that any such thing as enmity and hatred lodged in any soul; it seemed as if all the world must needs be friends and never prayed with more  freedom and delight, for myself, or dearest friend, than I did now for my enemies.

“Saturday, March 3. In the morning spent (I believe) an hour in prayer, with great intenseness and freedom, and with the most soft and tender affection towards mankind. I longed that those who, I have reason to think, owe me ill will, might be eternally happy. It seemed refreshing to think of meeting them in heaven, how much soever they had injured me on earth: had no disposition to insist upon any confession from them, in order to reconciliation, and the exercise of love and kindness to them. O it is an emblem of heaven itself, to love all the world with a love of kindness, forgiveness, and benevolence; to feel our souls sedate, mild, and meek; to be void of all evil surmisings and suspicions, and scarce able to think evil of any man upon any occasion; to find our hearts simple, open, and free, to those that look upon us with a different eye! Prayer was so sweet an exercise to me, that I knew not how to cease lest I should lose the spirit of prayer. Felt no disposition to eat or drink, for the sake of the pleasure of it, but only to support my nature, and fit me for divine service. Could not be content without a very particular mention of a great number of dear friends at the throne of grace; as also the particular circumstances of many, so far as they were known.

“Lord’s day, March 4. In the morning, enjoyed the same intenseness in prayer as yesterday morning, though not in so great a degree: felt the same spirit of love, universal benevolence, forgiveness, humility, resignation, mortification to the world, and composure of mind, as then. My soul rested in God; and I found I wanted no other refuge or friend. While my soul thus trusts in God, all things seem to be at peace with me, even the stones of the earth: but when I cannot apprehend and confide in God, all things appear with a different aspect.”

Through the four next days he complains of barrenness, want of holy confidence in God, stupidity, wanderings of mind, &c. and speaks of oppression of mind under a sense of exceeding meanness, past follies, as well as present workings of corruption. On Friday he seems to have been restored to a considerable degree of the same excellent frame that he enjoyed the Saturday before.

“Saturday, March 10. ‘In the morning, felt exceeding dead to the world, and all its enjoyments: I thought I was ready and willing to give up life and all its comforts, as soon as called to it; and yet then had as much comfort of life as almost ever I had. Life itself now appeared but an empty bubble; the riches, honours, and common enjoyments of life appeared extremely tasteless. I longed to be perpetually and entirely crucified to all things here below, by the cross of Christ. My soul was sweetly resigned to God’s disposal of me, in every regard; and I saw there had nothing happened but what was best for me. I confided in God, that he would never leave me, though I should ‘walk through the valley of the shadow of death.’ It was then my meat and drink to be holy, to live to the Lord, and die to the Lard. And I thought, that I then enjoyed such a heaven, as far exceeded the most sublime conceptions of an unregenerate soul; and even unspeakably beyond what I myself could conceive of at another time. I did not wonder that Peter said, “Lord, it is good to be here,” when thus refreshed with divine glories. My soul was full of love and tenderness in the duty of intercession; especially felt a most sweet affection to some precious godly ministers of my acquaintance. Prayed earnestly for dear Christians, and for those I have reason to fear are my enemies; and could not have spoken a word of bitterness, or entertained a bitter thought, against the vilest man living. Had a sense of my own great unworthiness. My soul seemed to breathe forth love and praise to God afresh, when I thought he would let his children love and receive me as one of their brethren and fellow-citizens. When I thought of their treating me in that manner, I longed to lie at their feet; and could think of no way to express the sincerity and simplicity of my love and esteem of them, as being much better than myself. Towards night was very sorrowful; seemed to myself the worst creature living; and could not pray, nor meditate, nor think of holding up my face before the world. Was a little relieved in prayer, in the evening; but longed to get on my knees, and ask forgiveness of every body that ever had seen any thing amiss in my past conduct, especially in my religious zeal. Was afterwards much perplexed, so that I could not sleep quietly.

“Lord’s day, March 11. My soul was in some measure strengthened in God, in morning devotion; so that I was released from trembling fear and distress. Preached to my people from the parable of the sower, Matt. xiii. and enjoyed some assistance, both parts of the day: had some freedom, affection, and fervency in addressing my poor people; longed that God should take hold of their hearts, and make them spiritually alive. And indeed I had so much to say to them, that I knew not how to leave off speaking.

“Monday, March 12. In the morning was in a devout, tender, and loving frame of mind; and was enabled to cry to God, I hope, with a child-like spirit, with importunity, and resignation, and composure of mind. My spirit was full of quietness, and love to mankind; and longed that peace should reign on the earth: was grieved at the very thoughts of a fiery, angry, and intemperate zeal in religion; mourned over past follies in that regard; and my soul confided in God for strength and grace sufficient for my future work and trials. Spent the day mainly in hard labour, making preparation for my intended journey.

“Tuesday, March 13. Felt my soul going forth after God sometimes; but not with such ardency as I longed for. In the evening, was enabled to continue instant in prayer, for some considerable time together; and especially had respect to the journey I designed to enter upon, with the leave of Divine Providence, on the morrow. Enjoyed some freedom and fervency, entreating that the divine presence might attend me in every place where my business might lead me; and had a particular reference to the trials and temptations that I apprehended I might be more eminently exposed to in particular places. Was strengthened and comforted; although I was before very weary. Truly the joy of the Lord is strength and life.

“Wednesday, March 14. Enjoyed some intenseness of soul in prayer, repeating my petitions for God’s presence in every place where I expected to be in my journey. Besought the Lord that I might not be too much pleased and amused with dear friends and acquaintance, in one place and another. Near ten set out on my journey; and near night came to Stockbridge.

“Thursday, March 15. Rode down to Sheffield. Here I met a messenger from East Hampton on Long-Island; who by the unanimous vote of that large town, was sent to invite me thither, in order to settle with that people, where I had been before frequently invited. Seemed more at a loss what was my duty than before; when I heard of the great difficulties of that place, I was much concerned and grieved, and felt some desires to comply with their request; but knew not what to do: endeavoured to commit the case to God.”

The two next days he went no further than Salisbury, being much hindered by the rain. When he came there, he was much indisposed. He speaks of comfortable and profitable conversation with Christian friends, on these days.

“Lord’s day, March 18. [At Salisbury.] Was exceeding weak and faint, so that I could scarce walk: but God was pleased to afford me much freedom, clearness, and fervency in preaching: I have not had the like assistance in preaching to sinners for many months past. Here another messenger met me, and informed me of the vote of another congregation, to give me an invitation to come among them upon probation for settlement.   Was somewhat exercised in mind with a weight and burden of care. O that God would ‘send forth faithful labourers into his harvest!”

After this he went forward on his journey towards New  York and New Jersey: in which he proceeded slowly; performing his journey under great degrees of bodily indisposition. However, he preached several times by the way, being urged by friends; in which he had considerable assistance. He speaks of comfort in conversation with Christian friends, from time to time, and of various things in the exercises and frames of his heart, that show much of a divine influence on his mind in this journey: but yet complains of the things that he feared, viz. a decline of his spiritual life, or vivacity in religion, by means of his constant removal from place to place, and want of retirement; and complains bitterly of his unworthiness, deadness, &c. He came to New York on Wednesday, March 28, and to Elizabeth-town on the Saturday following, where it seems he waited till the commissioners came together.

“Thursday, April 5. Was again much exercised with weakness, and with pain in my head. Attended on the commissioners in their meeting.   Resolved to go on still with the Indian affair, if Divine Providence permitted; although I had before felt some inclination to go to East Hampton, where I was solicited to go.”

After this, he continued two or three days in the Jerseys, very ill; and then returned to New York; and from thence into New England; and went to his native town of Haddam, where he arrived on Saturday, April 14 And he continues still his bitter complaints of want of retirement. While he was in New York, he says thus, “Oh, it is not the pleasures of the world can comfort me! If God deny his presence, what are the pleasures of the city to me? One hour of sweet retirement where God is, is better than the whole world.” And he continues to complain of his ignorance, meanness, and unworthiness. However, he speaks of some seasons of special assistance, and divine sweetness. He spent some days among his friends at East Hampton and Millington.

“Tuesday, April 17. Rode to Millington again; and felt perplexed when I set out; was feeble in body, and weak in faith. I was going to preach a lecture; and feared I should never have assistance enough to get through. But contriving to ride alone, at a distance from the company that was going, I spent the time in lifting up my heart to God: had not gone far before my soul was abundantly strengthened with those words, ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ I went on, confiding in God; and fearing nothing so much as self-confidence. In this frame I went to the house of God, and enjoyed some assistance. Afterwards felt the spirit of love and meekness in conversation with some friends. Then rode home to my brother’s; and in the evening, singing hymns with friends, my soul seemed to melt; and in prayer afterwards, enjoyed the exercise of faith, and was enabled to be fervent in spirit: found more of God’s presence, than I have done any time in my late wearisome journey. Eternity appeared very near; my nature was very weak, and seemed ready to be dissolved; the sun declining, and the shadows of the evening drawing on apace. O I longed to fill up the remaining moments all for God! Though my body was so feeble, and wearied with preaching, and much private conversation, yet I wanted to sit up all night to do something for God. To God, the giver of these refreshments, be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

“Wednesday, April 18. Was very weak, and enjoyed but little spiritual comfort. Was exercised with one who cavilled against original sin. May the Lord open his eyes to see the fountain of sin in himself!”

After this, he visited several ministers in Connecticut; and then travelled towards Kaunaumeek, and came to Mr. Sergeant’s at Stockbridge, Thursday, April 26. He performed this journey in a very weak state of body. The things he speaks of, appertaining to the frames and exercises of his mind, are at some times deadness and want of spiritual comfort; at other times, resting in God, spiritual sweetness in conversation, engagedness in meditation on the road, assistance in preaching, rejoicing to think that so much more of his work was done, and he so much nearer to the eternal world. And he once and again speaks of a sense of great ignorance, spiritual pollution, &c.

“Friday and Saturday, April 27, and 28. Spent some time in visiting friends, and discoursing with my people, (who were now moved down from their own place to Mr. Sergeant’s,) and found them very glad to see me returned. Was exercised in my mind with a sense of my own unworthiness.

“Lord’s day, April 29. Preached for Mr. Sergeant, both parts of the day, from Rev. xiv. 4. ‘These are they which were not defiled,’ &c. Enjoyed some freedom in preaching, though not much spirituality. In the evening, my heart was in some measure lifted up in thankfulness to God for any assistance.

“Monday, April 30. Rode to Kaunaumeek, but was extremely ill; did not enjoy the comfort I hoped for in my own house.

“Tuesday, May 1. Having received new orders to go to a number of Indians on Delaware river in Pennsylvania, and my people here being mostly removed to Mr. Sergeant’s, I this day took all my clothes, books, &c. and disposed of them, and set out for Delaware river: but made it my way to return to Mr. Sergeant’s; which I did this day, just at night. Rode several hours in the rain through the howling wilderness, although I was so disordered in body, that little or nothing but blood came from me.”

He continued at Stockbridge the next day, and on Thursday rode a little way, to Sheffield, under a great degree of illness; but with encouragement and cheerfulness of mind under his fatigues. On Friday he rode to Salisbury, and continued there till after the sabbath. He speaks of his soul’s being, some part of this time, refreshed in conversation with some Christian friends, about their heavenly home and their journey thither. At other times, he speaks of himself as exceedingly perplexed with barrenness and deadness, and has this exclamation, “Oh, that time should pass with so little done for God!” On Monday he rode to Sharon; and speaks of himself as distressed at the consideration of the misimprovement of time.

“Tuesday, May 8. Set out from Sharon in Connecticut, and travelled about forty-five miles to a place called the Fish-kill;‡ and lodged there. Spent much of my time, while riding, in prayer, that God would go with me to Delaware. My heart sometimes was ready to sink with the thoughts of my work, and going alone in the wilderness, I knew not where: but still it was comfortable to think, that others of God’s children had ‘wandered about in caves and dens of the earth,’ and Abraham, when he was called to go forth, ‘went out, not knowing whither he went.’ O that I might follow after God!”

The next day he went forward on his journey; crossed Hudson’s river, and went to Goshen in the Highlands; and so travelled across the woods, from Hudson’s river to Delaware, about a hundred miles, through a desolate and hideous country, above New Jersey; where were very few settlements; in which journey he suffered much fatigue and hardship. He visited some Indians in the way,   and  discoursed with them concerning Christianity. Was considerably melancholy and disconsolate, being alone in a strange wilderness. On Saturday he came to a settlement of Irish and Dutch people, about twelve miles above the Forks of Delaware.

“Lord’s day, May 13. Rose early; felt very poorly after my long journey, and after being wet and fatigued. Was very melancholy; have scarce even seen such a gloomy morning in my life; there appeared to be no sabbath; the children were all at play; I a stranger in the wilderness, and knew not where to go; and all circumstances seemed to conspire to render my affairs dark and discouraging. Was disappointed respecting an interpreter, and heard that the Indians were much scattered, &c. Oh, I mourned after the presence of God, and seemed like a creature banished from his sight! yet he was pleased to support my sinking soul, amidst all my sorrows; so that I never entertained any thought of quitting my business among the poor Indians; but was comforted to think that death would ere long set me free from these distresses. Rode about three or four miles to the Irish people, where I found some that appeared sober and concerned about religion. My heart then began to be a little encouraged: went and preached first to the Irish, and then to the Indians; and in the evening, was a little comforted; my soul seemed to rest on God, and take courage. O that the Lord would be my support and comforter in an evil world!

“Monday, May 14. Was very busy in some necessary studies. Felt myself very loose from all the world; all appeared ‘vanity and vexation of spirit.’ Seemed lonesome and disconsolate, as if I were banished from all mankind, and bereaved of all that is called pleasurable in the world; but appeared to myself so vile and unworthy, it seemed fitter for me to be here than any where.

“Tuesday, May 15. Still much engaged in my studies; and enjoyed more health than I have for some time past: but was something dejected in spirit with a sense of my meanness; seemed as if I could never do any thing at all to any good purpose by reason of ignorance and folly. O that a sense of these things might work more habitual humility in my soul!”

He continued much in the same frame the next day.

“Thursday, May 17. Was this day greatly distressed with a sense of my vileness; appeared to myself too bad to walk on God’s earth, or to be treated with kindness by any of his creatures. God was pleased to let me see my inward pollution and corruption, to such a degree, that I almost despaired of being made holy: ‘Oh! wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ In the afternoon met with the Indians, according to appointment, and preached to them. And while riding to them, my soul seemed to confide in God; and afterwards had some relief and enlargement of soul in prayer, and some assistance in the duty of intercession; vital piety and holiness appeared sweet to me, and I longed for the perfection of it.

“Friday, May 18. Felt again something of the sweet spirit of religion; and my soul seemed to confide in God, that he would never leave me. But oftentimes saw myself so mean a creature, that I knew not how to think of preaching. O that I could always live to and upon God!

“Saturday, May 19. Was, some part of the time, greatly oppressed with the weight and burden of my work; it seemed impossible for me ever to go through with the business I had undertaken. Towards night was very calm and comfortable; and I think my soul trusted in God for help.

“Lord’s day, May 20. Preached twice to the poor Indians, and enjoyed some freedom in speaking, while I attempted to remove their prejudices against Christianity. My soul longed for assistance from above, all the while; for I saw I had no strength sufficient for that work. Afterwards preached to the Irish people; was much assisted in the first prayer, and something in sermon. Several persons seemed much concerned for their souls, with whom I discoursed afterwards with much freedom and some power. Blessed be God for any assistance afforded to an unworthy worm. O that I could live to him!”

Through the remainder of this week he was sometimes ready to sink with a sense of his unworthiness and unfitness for the work of the ministry; and sometimes encouraged and lifted above his fears and sorrows, and was enabled confidently to rely on God; and especially on Saturday, towards night, he enjoyed calmness and composure, and assistance in prayer to God. He rejoiced, “That God remains unchangeably powerful and faithful, a sure and sufficient portion, and the dwelling-place of his children in all generations.”

“Lord’s day, May 27. Visited my Indians in the morning, and attended upon a funeral among them; was affected to see their heathenish practices. O that they might be ‘turned from darkness to light!’ Afterwards got a considerable number of them together, and preached to them; and observed them very attentive. After this, preached to the white people from Heb. ii. 3.’How shall we escape, if we neglect,’ &c. Was enabled to speak with some freedom and power: several people seemed much concerned for their souls; especially one who had been educated a Roman catholic. Blessed be the Lord for any help.

“Monday, May 28. Set out from the Indians above the Forks of Delaware, on a journey towards Newark in New Jersey, according to my orders. Rode through the wilderness; was much fatigued with the heat; lodged at a place called Black-river; was exceedingly tired and worn out.”

On Tuesday he came to Newark. The next day, went to Elizabeth-town; on Thursday he went to New York; and on Friday returned to Elizabeth-town. These days were spent in some perplexity of mind. He continued at Elizabeth-town till Friday in the week following. Was enlivened, refreshed, and strengthened on the sabbath at the Lord’s table. The ensuing days of the week were spent chiefly in studies preparatory to his ordination; and on some of them he seemed to have much of God’s gracious presence, and of the sweet influences of his Spirit; but was in a very weak state of body. On Saturday he rode to Newark.

“Lord’s day, June 10. [At Newark] In the morning, was much concerned how I should perform the work of the day; and trembled at the thoughts of being left to myself. Enjoyed very considerable assistance in all parts of the public service. Had an opportunity again to attend on the ordinance of the Lord’s supper, and through divine goodness was refreshed in it: my soul was full of love and tenderness towards the children of God, and towards all men; felt a certain sweetness of disposition towards every creature. At night I enjoyed more spirituality and sweet desire of holiness, than I have felt for some time: was afraid of every thought and every motion, lest thereby my heart should be drawn away from God. O that I might never leave the blessed God! ‘Lord, in thy presence is fulness of joy.’ O the blessedness of living to God!

“Monday, June 11. This day the Presbytery met together at Newark, in order to my ordination. Was very weak and disordered in body; yet endeavoured to repose my confidence in God. Spent most of the day alone; especially the forenoon. At three in the afternoon preached my probation-sermon, from Acts xxvi. 17, 18. ‘Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles,’ &c. being a text given me for that end. Felt not well, either in body or mind; however God carried me through comfortably. Afterwards passed an examination before the Presbytery. Was much tired, and my mind burdened with the greatness of that charge I was in the most solemn manner about to take upon me; my mind was so pressed with the weight of the work incumbent upon me, that I could not sleep this night, though very weary and in great need of rest.

Tuesday, June 12. Was this morning further examined, respecting my experimental acquaintance with Christianity*  At ten o’clock my ordination was attended; the sermon preached by the Reverend Mr. Pemberton. At this time I was affected with a sense of the important trust committed to me; yet was composed, and solemn, without distraction: and I hope that then, as many times before, I gave myself up to God, to be for him, and not for another. O that I might always be engaged in the service of God, and duly remember the solemn charge I have received, in the presence of God, angels, and men. Amen. May I be assisted of God for this purpose. Towards night rode to Elizabeth-town.”

* * * * * * *

Part 6: From His Ordination Till He First Began To Preach At Crossweeksung

FROM HIS ORDINATION, TILL HE FIRST BEGAN TO PREACH TO THE INDIANS AT CROSSWEEKSUNG, AMONG WHOM HE HAD HIS MOST REMARKABLE SUCCESS.

“Wednesday, June 13. [1744.] Spent some considerable time in writing an account of the Indian affairs to go to Scotland; some, in conversation with friends; but enjoyed not much sweetness and satisfaction.

“Thursday, June 14. Received some particular kindness from friends; and wondered that God should open the hearts of any to treat me with kindness: saw myself to be unworthy of any favour from God, or any of my fellow-men. Was much exercised with pain in my head; however, I determined to set out on my journey towards Delaware in the afternoon; but when the afternoon came, my pain increased exceedingly, so that I was obliged to betake myself to bed. The night following I was greatly distressed with pain and sickness; was sometimes almost bereaved of the exercise of reason by the extremity of pain. Continued much distressed till Saturday, when I was somewhat relieved by an emetic: but was unable to walk abroad till the Monday following, in the afternoon; and still remained very feeble. I often admired the goodness of God, that he did not suffer me to proceed on my journey from this place where I was so tenderly used, and to be sick by the way among strangers. God is very gracious to me, both in health and sickness, and intermingles much mercy with all my afflictions and toils. Enjoyed some sweetness in things divine, in the midst of my pain and weakness. O that I could praise the Lord!”

On Tuesday, June 19, he set out on his journey home, and in three days reached his place, near the Forks of Delaware. Performed the journey under much weakness of body; but had comfort in his soul, from day to day: and both his weakness of body, and consolation of mind, continued through the week.

“Lord’s day, June 24. Extremely feeble; scarce able to walk: however, visited my Indians, and took much pains to instruct them; laboured with some that were much disaffected to Christianity. My mind was much burdened with the weight and difficulty of my work. My whole dependence and hope of success seemed to be on God; who alone I saw could make them willing to receive instruction. My heart was much engaged in prayer, sending up silent requests to God, even while I was speaking to them. O that I could always go in the strength of the Lord!

“Monday, June 25. Was something better in health than of late; was able to spend a considerable part of the day in prayer and close studies. Had more freedom and fervency in prayer than usual of late; especially longed for the presence of God in my work, and that the poor heathen might be converted. And in evening prayer my faith and hope in God were much raised. To an eye of reason every thing that respects the conversion of the heathen is as dark as midnight; and yet I cannot but hope in God for the accomplishment of something glorious among them. My soul longed much for the advancement of the Redeemer’s kingdom on earth. Was very fearful lest I should admit some vain thought, and so lose the sense I then had of divine things. O for an abiding heavenly temper!

“Tuesday, June 26. In the morning my desires seemed to rise, and ascend up freely to God. Was busy most of the day in translating prayers into the language of the Delaware Indians; met with great difficulty, by reason that my interpreter was altogether unacquainted with the business. But though I was much discouraged with the extreme difficulty of that work, yet God supported me; and especially in the evening gave me sweet refreshment. In prayer my soul was enlarged, and my faith drawn into sensible exercise; was enabled to cry to God for my poor Indians; and though the work of their conversion appeared impossible with man, yet with God I saw all things were possible. My faith was much strengthened, by observing the wonderful assistance God afforded his servants Nehemiah and Ezra, in reforming his people, and re-establishing his ancient church. I was much assisted in prayer for dear Christian friends, and for others that I apprehended to be Christless; but was more especially concerned for the poor heathen, and those of my own charge: was enabled to be instant in prayer for them; and hoped that God would bow the heavens and come down for their salvation. It seemed to me there could be no impediment sufficient to obstruct that glorious work, seeing the living God, as I strongly hoped, was engaged for it. I continued in a solemn frame, lifting up my heart to God for assistance and grace, that I might be more mortified to this present world, that my whole soul might be taken up continually in concern for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom: longed that God would purge me more, that I might be as a chosen vessel to bear his name among the heathens. Continued in this frame till I dropped asleep.

“Wednesday, June 27. Felt something of the same solemn concern, and spirit of prayer, that I enjoyed last night, soon after I rose in the morning. In the afternoon rode several miles to see if I could procure any lands for the poor Indians, that they might live together, and be under better advantages for instruction. While I was riding had a deep sense of the greatness and difficulty of my work; and my soul seemed to rely wholly upon God for success, in the diligent and faithful use of means. Saw, with greatest certainty, that the arm of the Lord must be revealed, for the help of these poor heathen, if ever they were delivered from the bondage of the powers of darkness. Spent most of the time, while riding, in lifting up my heart for grace and assistance.

“Thursday, June 28. Spent the morning in reading several parts of the Holy Scripture, and in fervent prayer for my Indians, that God would set up his kingdom among them, and bring them into his church. About nine I withdrew to my usual place of retirement in the woods; and there again enjoyed some assistance in prayer. My great concern was for the conversion of the heathen to God; and the Lord helped me to plead with him for it. Towards noon rode up to the Indians, in order to preach to them; and while going, my heart went up to God in prayer for them; could freely tell God, he knew that the cause was not mine, which I was engaged in; but it was his own cause, and it would be for his own glory to convert the poor Indians: and blessed be God, I felt no desire of their conversion, that I might receive honour from the world, as being the instrument of it. Had some freedom in speaking to the Indians.”

The next day he speaks of some serious concern for the kingdom of the blessed Redeemer; but complains much of barrenness, wanderings, inactivity, &c.

“Saturday, June 30. My soul was very solemn in reading God’s word; especially the ninth chapter of Daniel. I saw how God had called out his servants to prayer, and made them wrestle with him, when he designed to bestow any great mercy on his church. And, alas! I was ashamed of myself, to think of my dulness and inactivity, when there seemed to be so much to do for the upbuilding of Zion. Oh, how does Zion lie waste! I longed that the church of God might be enlarged: was enabled to pray, I think, in faith; my soul seemed sensibly to confide in God, and was enabled to wrestle with him. Afterwards walked abroad to a place of sweet retirement, and enjoyed some assistance in prayer again; had a sense of my great need of divine help, and felt my  soul sensibly depend on God. Blessed be God, this has been a comfortable week to me.

“Lord’s day, July 1. In the morning was perplexed with wandering, vain thoughts; was much grieved, judged and condemned myself before God. And oh, how miserable did I feel, because I could not live to God! At ten, rode away with a heavy heart, to preach to my Indians. Upon the road I attempted to lift up my heart to God; but was infested with an unsettled, wandering frame of mind; and was exceeding restless and perplexed, and filled with shame and confusion before God. I seemed to myself to be ‘more brutish than any man;’ and thought none deserved to be ‘cast out of God’s presence’ so much as I. If I attempted to lift up my heart to God, as I frequently did by the way, on a sudden, before I was aware, my thoughts were wandering ‘to the ends of the earth;’ and my soul was filled with surprise and anxiety, to find it thus. Thus also after I came to the Indians my mind was confused; and I felt nothing sensibly of that sweet reliance on God, that my soul has been comforted with in days past. Spent the forenoon in this posture of mind, and preached to the Indians without any heart. In the afternoon I felt still barren, when I began to preach; and for about half an hour, I seemed to myself to know nothing, and to have nothing to say to the Indians; but soon after I found in myself a spirit of love, and warmth, and power, to address the poor Indians; and God helped me to plead with them, to ‘turn from all the vanities of the heathen, to the living God:’ and I am persuaded the Lord touched their consciences; for I never saw such attention raised in them before. And when I came away from them, I spent the whole time while I was riding to my lodgings, three miles distant, in prayer and praise to God. And after I had rode more than two miles, it came into my mind to dedicate myself to God again; which I did with great solemnity, and unspeakable satisfaction; especially gave up myself to him renewed in the work of the ministry. And this I did by divine grace, I hope, without any exception or reserve: not in the least shrinking back from any difficulties that might attend this great and blessed work. I seemed to be most free, cheerful, and full in this dedication of myself. My whole soul cried, ‘Lord, to thee I dedicate myself! O accept of me, and let me be thine for ever. Lord, I desire nothing else, I desire nothing more. O come, come, Lord, accept a poor worm. Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee.’ After this, was enabled to praise God with my whole soul, that he had enabled me to devote and consecrate all my powers to him in this solemn manner. My heart rejoiced in my particular work as a missionary; rejoiced in my necessity of self-denial in many respects; and still continued to give up myself to God, and implore mercy of him; praying incessantly, every moment, with sweet fervency. My nature being very weak of late, and much spent, was now considerably overcome: my fingers grew very feeble, and somewhat Numb. so that I could scarcely stretch them out straight; and when I lighted from my horse, could hardly walk, my joints seemed all to be loosed. But I felt abundant strength in the inner man. Preached to the white people: God helped me much, especially in prayer. Sundry of my poor Indians were so moved as to come to meeting also; and one appeared much concerned.

“Monday, July 2. Had some relish of the divine comforts of yesterday; but could not get that warmth and exercise of faith that I desired. Had sometimes a distressing sense of my past follies, and present ignorance and barrenness: and especially in the afternoon, was sunk down under a load of sin and guilt, in that I had lived so little to God, after his abundant goodness to me yesterday. In the evening, though very weak, was enabled to pray with fervency, and to continue instant in prayer, near an hour. My soul mourned over the power of its corruption, and longed exceedingly to be washed and purged as with hyssop. Was enabled to pray for my dear absent friends, Christ’s ministers, and his church; and enjoyed much freedom and fervency, but not so much comfort, by reason of guilt and shame before God Judged and condemned myself for the follies of the day.

“Tuesday, July 3. Was still very weak. This morning was enabled to pray under a feeling sense of my need of help from God, and, I trust, had some faith in exercise; and, blessed be God, was enabled to plead with him a considerable time. Truly God is good to me. But my soul mourned, and was grieved at my sinfulness and barrenness, and longed to be more engaged for God. Near nine withdrew again for prayer; and through divine goodness, had the blessed Spirit of prayer; my soul loved the duty, and longed for God in it. O it is sweet to be the Lord’s, to be sensibly devoted to him! What a blessed portion is God! How glorious, how lovely in himself! O my soul longed to improve time wholly for God! Spent most of the day in translating prayers into Indian. In the evening was enabled again to wrestle with God in prayer with fervency. Was enabled to maintain a self-diffident and watchful frame of spirit, in the evening, and was jealous and afraid lest I should admit carelessness and self-confidence.”

The next day he seems to have had special assistance and fervency most of the day, but in a less degree than the preceding day. Tuesday was spent in great bodily weakness; yet seems to have been spent in continual and exceeding painfulness in religion; but in great bitterness of spirit by reason of his vileness and corruption; he says, “I thought there was not one creature living so vile as I. Oh, my inward pollution! Oh, my guilt and shame before God! I know not what to do. Oh, I longed ardently to be cleansed and washed from the stains of inward pollution! Oh, to be made like God, or rather to be made fit for God to own!”

“Friday, July 6. Awoke this morning in the fear of God: soon called to mind my sadness in the evening past; and spent my first waking minutes in prayer for sanctification, that my soul may be washed from its exceeding pollution and defilement. After I arose, I spent some time in reading God’s word and in prayer. I cried to God under a sense of my great indigency. I am, of late, most of all concerned for ministerial qualifications, and the conversion of the heathen: last year I longed to be prepared for a world of glory, and speedily to depart out of this world; but of late all my concern almost is for the conversion of the heathen; and for that end I long to live. But blessed be God, I have less desire to live for any of the pleasures of the world, than ever I had. I long and love to be a pilgrim; and want grace to imitate the life, labours, and sufferings of St. Paul among the heathen. And when I long for holiness now, it is not so much for myself as formerly; but rather that thereby I may become an ‘able minister of the New Testament,’ especially to the heathen. Spent about two hours this morning in reading and prayer by turns; and was in a watchful, tender frame, afraid of every thing that might cool my affections, and draw away my heart from God. Was a little strengthened in my studies; but near night was very weak and weary.

“Saturday, July 7. Was very much disordered this morning, and my vigour all spent and exhausted: but was affected and refreshed in reading the sweet story of Elijah’s translation, and enjoyed some affection and fervency in prayer: longed much for ministerial gifts and graces, that I might do something in the cause of God. Afterwards was refreshed and invigorated, while reading Mr. Joseph Alleine’s first Case of Conscience, &c. and enabled then to pray with some ardour of soul, and was afraid of carelessness and self-confidence, and longed for holiness.

“Lord’s day, July 8. Was ill last night, not able to rest quietly. Had some small degree of assistance in preaching to the Indians; and afterwards was enabled to preach to the white people with some power, especially in the close of my discourse, from Jer. iii. 23. ‘Truly in vain is salvation hoped for from the hills,’ &c. The Lord also assisted me in some measure in the first prayer: blessed be his name. Near night, though very weary, was enabled to read God’s word with some sweet relish of it, and to pray with affection, fervency, and I trust with faith: my soul was more sensibly dependent on God than usual. Was watchful, tender, and jealous of my own heart, lest I should admit carelessness and vain thoughts, and grieve the blessed Spirit, so that he should withdraw his sweet, kind, and tender influences. Longed to ‘depart, and be   with Christ,’ more than at any time of late. My soul was exceedingly united to the saints of ancient times, as well as those now living; especially my soul melted for the society of Elijah and Elisha. Was enabled to cry to God with a child-like spirit, and to continue instant in prayer for some time. Was much enlarged in the sweet duty of intercession: was enabled to remember great numbers of dear friends, and precious souls, as well as Christ’s ministers. Continued in this frame, afraid of every idle thought, till I dropped asleep.

“Monday, July 9. Was under much illness of body most of the day; and not able to sit up the whole day. Towards night felt a little better. Then spent some time in reading God’s word and prayer; enjoyed some degree of fervency and affection; was enabled to plead with God for his cause and kingdom: and, through divine goodness, it was apparent to me, that it was his cause I pleaded for, and not my own; and was enabled to make this an argument with God to answer my requests.

“Tuesday, July 10. Was very ill, and full of pain, and very dull and spiritless. In the evening had an affecting sense of my ignorance, &c. and of my need of God at all times, to do every thing for me; and my soul was humbled before God.

“Wednesday, July 11. Was still exercised with illness and pain. Had some degree of affection and warmth in prayer and reading God’s word: longed for Abraham’s faith and fellowship with God; and felt some resolution to spend all my time for God, and to exert myself with more fervency in his service; but found my body weak and feeble. In the afternoon, though very ill, was enabled to spend some considerable time in prayer; spent indeed most of the day in that exercise; and my soul was diffident, watchful, and tender, lest I should offend my blessed Friend, in thought or behaviour. I am persuaded my soul confided in, and leaned upon, the blessed God. Oh, what need did I see myself to stand in of God at all times, to assist me and lead me! Found a great want of strength and vigour, both in the outward and inner man.”

The exercises and experiences that he speaks of in the next nine days, are very similar to those of the preceding days of this and the foregoing week; a sense of his own weakness, ignorance, unprofitableness, and vileness; loathing and abhorring himself; self-diffidence; sense of the greatness of his work, and his great need of divine help, and the extreme danger of self-confidence; longing for holiness and humility, and to be fitted for his work, and to live to God; and longing for the conversion of the Indians; and these things to a very great degree.

“Saturday, July 21. This morning I was greatly oppressed with guilt and shame, from a sense of inward vileness and pollution. About nine, withdrew to the woods for prayer; but had not much comfort; I appeared to myself the vilest, meanest creature upon earth, and could scarcely live with myself; so mean and vile I appeared, that I thought I should never be able to hold up my face in heaven, if God of his infinite grace should bring me thither. Towards night my burden respecting my work among the Indians began to increase much; and was aggravated by hearing sundry things that looked very discouraging; in particular, that they intended to meet together the next day for an idolatrous feast and dance. Then I began to be in anguish: I thought I must in conscience go, and endeavour to break them up; and knew not how to attempt such a thing. However, I withdrew for prayer, hoping for strength from above. And in prayer I was exceedingly enlarged, and my soul was as much drawn out as ever I remember it to have been in my life, or near. I was in such anguish, and pleaded with so much earnestness and importunity, that when I rose from my knees I felt extremely weak and overcome, I could scarcely walk straight, my joints were loosed, the sweat ran down my face and body, and nature seemed as if it would dissolve. So far as I could judge, I was wholly free from selfish ends in my fervent supplications for the poor Indians. I knew they were met together to worship devils, and not God; and this made me cry earnestly, that God would now appear, and help me in my attempts to break up this idolatrous meeting. My soul pleaded long; and I thought God would hear, and would go with me to vindicate his own cause: I seemed to confide in God for his presence and assistance. And thus I spent the evening praying incessantly for divine assistance, and that I might not be self-dependent, but still have my whole dependence upon God. What I passed through was remarkable, and indeed inexpressible. All things here below vanished; and there appeared to be nothing of any considerable importance to me, but holiness of heart and life, and the conversion of the heathen to God. All my cares, fears, and desires, which might be said to be of a worldly nature, disappeared; and were, in my esteem, of little more importance than a puff of wind. I exceedingly longed, that God would get to himself a name among the heathen; and I appealed to him with the greatest freedom, that he knew I ‘preferred him above my chief joy.’ Indeed, I had no notion of joy from this world; I cared not where or how I lived, or what hardships I went through, so that I could but gain souls to Christ. I continued in this frame all the evening and night. While I was asleep, I dreamed of these things; and when I waked, (as I frequently did,) the first thing I thought of was this great work of pleading for God against Satan.

“Lord’s day, July 22. When I waked, my soul was burdened with what seemed to be before me. I cried to God before I could get out of my bed: and as soon as I was dressed, I withdrew into the woods, to pour out my burdened soul to God, especially for assistance in my great work; for I could scarcely think of any thing else. I enjoyed the same freedom and fervency as the last evening; and did with unspeakable freedom give up myself afresh to God, for life or death, for all hardships he should call me to among the heathen: and felt as if nothing could discourage me from this blessed work. I had a strong hope, that God would ‘bow the heavens and come down,’ and do some marvellous work among the heathen. And when I was riding to the Indians, three miles, my heart was continually going up to God for his presence and assistance; and hoping, and almost expecting, that God would make this the day of his power and grace amongst the poor Indians. When I came to them, I found them engaged in their frolic; but through divine goodness I got them to break up and attend to my preaching: yet still there appeared nothing of the special power of God among them. Preached again to them in the afternoon; and observed the Indians were more sober than before: but still saw nothing special among them; from whence Satan took occasion to tempt and buffet me with these cursed suggestions, There is no God, or if there be, he is not able to convert the Indians before they have more knowledge, &c. I was very weak and weary, and my soul borne down with perplexity; but was mortified to all the world, and was determined still to wait upon God for the conversion of the heathen, though the devil tempted me to the contrary.

“Monday, July 23. Retained still a deep and pressing sense of what lay with so much weight upon me yesterday; but was more calm and quiet; enjoyed freedom and composure, after the temptations of the last evening: had sweet resignation to the divine will; and desired nothing so much as the conversion of the heathen to God, and that his kingdom might come in my own heart, and the hearts of others. Rode to a settlement of Irish people, about fifteen miles south-westward; spent my time in prayer and meditation by the way. Near night preached from Matt. v. 3. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ &c. God was pleased to afford me some degree of freedom and fervency. Blessed be God for any measure of assistance.

“Tuesday, July 24. Rode about seventeen miles westward over a hideous mountain, to a number of Indians. Got together near thirty of them: preached to them in the evening, and lodged among them.   Was weak, and felt in some degree disconsolate; yet could have no freedom in the thought of any other circumstances or business in life. All my desire was the conversion of the heathen, and all my hope was in God. God does not suffer me to  please or comfort myself with hopes of seeing friends, returning to my dear acquaintance, and enjoying worldly comforts.”

The next day he preached to these Indians again, and then returned to the Irish settlement, and there preached to a numerous congregation. There was a considerable appearance of awakening in the congregation. Thursday he returned home, exceedingly fatigued and spent; still in the same frame of mortification to the world, and solicitous for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom; and on this day he says thus: “I have felt this week more of the spirit of a pilgrim on earth than perhaps ever before; and yet so desirous to see Zion’s prosperity, that I was not so willing to leave this scene of sorrows as I used to be.” The two remaining days of the week he was very ill, and complains of wanderings, dulness, and want of spiritual fervency and sweetness. On the sabbath he was confined by illness, not able to go out to preach. After this, his illness increased upon him, and he continued very ill all the week;   and says, that “he thought he never before endured such a season of distressing weakness; and that his nature was so spent, that he could neither stand, sit, nor lie with any quiet; and that he was exercised with extreme faintness and sickness at his stomach; and that his mind was as much disordered as his body, seeming to be stupid, and without any kind of affections towards all objects; and yet perplexed, to think that he lived for nothing, that precious time rolled away, and he could do nothing but trifle: and speaks of it as a season wherein Satan buffeted him with some peculiar temptations.” Concerning the next five days he writes thus, “On Lord’s day, August 5, was still very poor. But, though very weak, I visited and preached to the poor Indians twice, and was strengthened vastly beyond my expectations. And indeed, the Lord gave me some freedom and fervency in addressing them; though I had not strength enough to stand, but was obliged to sit down the whole time. Towards night was extremely weak, faint, sick, and full of pain. And thus I have continued much in the same state that I was in last week, through the most of this, (it being now Friday,) unable to engage in any business; frequently unable to pray in the family. I am obliged to let all my thoughts and concerns run at random; for I have neither strength to read, meditate, or pray: and this naturally perplexes my mind. I seem to myself like a man that has all his estate embarked in one small boat, unhappily going adrift, down a swift torrent. The poor owner stands on the shore, and looks, and laments his loss. But, alas! though my all seems to be adrift, and I stand and see it, I dare not lament; for this sinks my spirits more, and aggravates my bodily disorders! I am forced therefore to divert myself with trifles; although at the same time I am afraid, and often feel as if I was guilty of the misimprovement of time. And oftentimes my conscience is so exercised with this miserable way of spending time, that I have no peace; though I have no strength of mind or body to improve it to better purpose. O that God would pity my distressed state!”

The next three weeks after this his illness was not so extreme; he was in some degree capable of business, both public and private; although he had some turns wherein his indisposition prevailed to a great degree. He also in this space had, for the most part, much more inward assistance, and strength of mind. He often expresses great longings for the enlargement of Christ’s kingdom, especially by the conversion of the heathen to God; and speaks of this hope as all his delight and joy. He continues still to express his usual longings after holiness, living to God, and a sense of his own unworthiness. He several times speaks of his appearing to himself the vilest creature on earth; and once says, that he verily thought there were none of God’s children who fell so far short of that holiness and perfection in their obedience which God requires, as he. He speaks of his feeling more dead than ever to the enjoyments of the world. He sometimes mentions the special assistance he had, this space of time, in preaching to the Indians, and of appearances of religious concern among them. He speaks also of assistance in prayer for absent friends, and especially ministers and candidates for the ministry; and of much comfort he enjoyed in the company of some ministers who came to visit him.

“Saturday, Sept. 1. Was so far strengthened, after a season of great weakness, that I was able to spend two or three hours in writing on a divine subject. Enjoyed some comfort and sweetness in things divine and sacred: and as my bodily strength was in some measure restored, so my soul seemed to be somewhat vigorous, and engaged in the things of God.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 2. Was enabled to speak to my poor Indians with much concern and fervency; and I am persuaded God enabled me to exercise faith in him, while I was speaking to them. I perceived that some of them were afraid to hearken to and embrace Christianity, lest they should be enchanted and poisoned by some of the powows: but I was enabled to plead with them not to fear these; and confiding in God for safety and deliverance, I bid a challenge to all these powers of darkness, to do their worst upon me first. I told my people I was a Christian, and asked them why the powows did not bewitch and poison me. I scarcely ever felt more sensible of my own unworthiness, than in this action: I saw, that the honour of God was concerned in the affair; and I desired to be preserved not from selfish views, but for a testimony of the divine power and goodness, and of the truth of Christianity, and that God might be glorified. Afterwards I found my soul rejoice in God for his assisting grace.”

After this he went a journey into New England, and was absent from the place of his abode, at the Forks of Delaware, about three weeks. He was in a feeble state the greater part of the time. But in the latter part of the journey he found he gained much in health and strength. And as to the state of his mind, and his religious and spiritual exercises, it was much with him as usual in his journeys; excepting that the frame of his mind seemed more generally to be comfortable. But yet there are complaints of some uncomfortable seasons, want of fervency, and want of retirements, and time alone with God. In his journey, he did not forget the Indians; but once and again speaks of his longing for their conversion.

“Wednesday, Sept. 26. Rode home to the Forks of Delaware. What reason have I to bless God, who has preserved me in riding more than four hundred and twenty miles, and has ‘kept all my bones, that not one of them has been broken!’ My health likewise is greatly recovered. O that I could dedicate my all to God! This is all the return I can make to him.

“Thursday, Sept. 27. Was somewhat melancholy; had not much freedom and comfort in prayer: my soul is disconsolate when God is withdrawn.

“Friday, Sept. 28. Spent the day in prayer, reading, and writing, Felt some small degree of warmth in prayer, and some desires of the enlargement of Christ’s kingdom by the conversion of the heathen, and that God would make me a ‘chosen vessel, to bear his name before them;’ longed for grace to enable me to be faithful.”

The next day he speaks of the same longings for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom, and the conversion of the Indians; but complains greatly of the ill effects of the diversions of his late journey, as unfixing his mind from that degree of engagedness, fervency, watchfulness, &c. which he enjoyed before. And the like complaints are continued the day after.

“Monday, Oct. 1. Was engaged this day in making preparation for my intended journey to Susquehannah: withdrew several times to the woods for secret duties, and endeavoured to plead for the divine presence to go with me to the poor pagans, to whom I was going to preach the gospel. Towards night rode about four miles, and met brother Byram;   who was come, at my desire, to be my companion in travel to the Indians. I rejoiced to see him; and, I trust, God made his conversation profitable to me. I saw him, as I thought, more dead to the world, its anxious cares and alluring objects, than I was; and this made me look within myself, and gave me a greater sense of my guilt, ingratitude, and misery.

“Tuesday, Oct. 2. Set out on my journey, in company  with dear brother Byram, and my interpreter, and two chief Indians from the Forks of Delaware. Travelled about twenty-five miles, and lodged in one of the last houses on our road; after which there was nothing but a hideous and howling wilderness.

“Wednesday, Oct. 3. We went on our way into the wilderness, and found the most difficult and dangerous travelling, by far, that ever any of us had seen; we had scarce any thing else but lofty mountains, deep valleys, and hideous rocks, to make our way through. However, I felt some sweetness in divine things, part of the day, and had my mind intensely engaged in meditation on a divine subject. Near night my beast that I rode upon hung one of her legs in the rocks, and fell down under me; but through divine goodness I was not hurt. However, she broke her leg; and being in such a hideous place, and near thirty miles from any house, I saw nothing that could be done to preserve her life, and so was obliged to kill her, and to prosecute my journey on foot. This accident made me admire the divine goodness to me, that my bones were not broken, and the multitude of them filled with strong pain. Just at dark we kindled a fire, cut up a few bushes and made a shelter over our heads, to save us from the frost, which was very hard that night; and committing ourselves to God by prayer, we lay down on the ground, and slept quietly.”

The next day they went forward on their journey, and at night took up their lodging in the woods in like manner.

“Friday, Oct. 5. We arrived at Susquehannah river, at a place called Opeholhaupung:   found there twelve Indian houses: after I had saluted the king in a friendly manner, I told him my business, and that my desire was to teach them Christianity. After some consultation, the Indians gathered, and I preached to them. And when I had done, I asked if they would hear me again. They replied, that they would consider of it; and soon after sent me word, that they would immediately attend, if I would preach: which I did, with freedom, both times. When I asked them again, whether they would hear me further, they replied, they would the next day. I was exceeding sensible of the impossibility of doing any thing for the poor heathen without special assistance from above: and my soul seemed to rest on God, and leave it to him to do as he pleased in that which I saw was his own cause: and indeed, through divine goodness, I had felt something of this frame most of the time while I was travelling thither, and in some measure before I set out.

“Saturday, Oct. 6. Rose early and besought the Lord for help in my great work. Near noon preached again to the Indians; and in the afternoon visited them from house to house, and invited them to come and hear me again the next day, and put off their hunting design, which they were just entering upon, till Monday. ‘This night,’ I trust, ‘the Lord stood by me,’ to encourage and strengthen my soul: I spent more than an hour in secret retirement; was enabled to ‘pour out my heart ‘before God,’ for the increase of grace in my soul, for ministerial endowments, for success among the poor Indians, for God’s ministers and people, for distant dear friends, &c. Blessed be God!”

The next day he complains of great want of fixedness and intenseness in religion, so that he could not keep any spiritual thought one minute without distraction; which occasioned anguish of spirit. He felt amazingly guilty, and extremely miserable; and cries out, “Oh, my soul, what death it is, to have the affections unable to centre in God, by reason of darkness, and consequently roving after that satisfaction elsewhere, that is only to be found here!” However, he preached twice to the Indians with some freedom and power; but was afterwards damped by the objections they made against Christianity. In the evening, in a sense of his great defects in preaching, he “entreated God not to impute to him blood-guiltiness;” but yet was at the same time enabled to rejoice in God.

“Monday, Oct. 8. Visited the Indians with a design to take my leave of them, supposing they would this morning go out to hunting early; but beyond my expectation and hope, they desired to hear me preach again. I gladly complied with their request, and afterwards endeavoured to answer their objections against Christianity. Then they went away; and we spent the rest of the afternoon in reading and prayer, intending to go homeward very early the next day. My soul was in some measure refreshed in secret prayer and meditation. Blessed be the Lord for all his goodness.

“Tuesday, Oct. 9. We rose about four in the morning, and commending ourselves to God by prayer, and asking his special protection, we set out on our journey homewards about five, and travelled with great steadiness till past six at night; and then made us a fire, and a shelter of barks, and so rested. I had some clear and comfortable thoughts on a divine subject, by the way, towards night. In the night the wolves howled around us; but God preserved us.”

The next day they rose early, and set forward, and travelled that day till they came to an Irish settlement, with which Mr. Brainerd was acquainted, and lodged there. He speaks of some sweetness in divine things, and thankfulness to God for his goodness to him in this journey, though attended with shame for his barrenness. On Thursday he continued in the same place; and both he and Mr. Byram preached there to the people.

“Friday, Oct. 12. Rode home to my lodgings; where I poured out my soul to God in secret prayer, and endeavoured to bless him for his abundant goodness to me in my late journey. I scarce ever enjoyed more health, at least, of later years; and God marvellously, and almost miraculously, supported me under the fatigues of the way, and travelling on foot. Blessed be the Lord, who continually preserves me in all my ways.”

On Saturday he went again to the Irish settlement, to spend the sabbath there, his Indians being gone.

“Lord’s day, Oct. 14. Was much confused and perplexed in my thoughts; could not pray; and was almost discouraged, thinking I should never be able to preach any more. Afterwards, God was pleased to give me some relief from these confusions; but still I was afraid, and even trembled before God. I went to the place of public worship, lifting up my heart to God for assistance and grace in my great work: and God was gracious to me, helping me to plead with him for holiness, and to use the strongest arguments with him; drawn from the incarnation and sufferings of Christ for this very end, that men might he made holy. Afterwards I was much assisted in preaching. I know not that ever God helped me to preach in a more close and distinguishing manner for the trial of men’s state. Through the infinite goodness of God, I felt what I spoke; he enabled me to treat on divine truth with uncommon clearness: and yet I was so sensible of my defects in preaching, that I could not be proud of my performance, as at some times; and blessed be the Lord for this mercy. In the evening I longed to be entirely alone, to bless God for help in a time of extremity; and longed for great degrees of holiness, that I might show my gratitude to God.”

The next morning he spent some time before sun-rise in prayer, in the same sweet and grateful frame of mind that he had been in the evening before: and afterwards went to his Indians, and spent some time in teaching and exhorting them.

“Tuesday, Oct. 16. Felt a spirit of solemnity and watchfulness; was afraid I should not live to and upon God: longed for more intenseness and spirituality. Spent the day in writing; frequently lifting up my heart to God for more heavenly-mindedness. In the evening enjoyed sweet assistance in prayer, and thirsted and pleaded to be as holy as the blessed angels: longed for ministerial gifts and graces, and success in my work: was sweetly assisted in the duty of intercession, and enabled to remember and plead for numbers of dear friends, and Christ’s ministers.”

He seemed to have much of the same frame of mind the two next days.

“Friday, Oct. 19. Felt an abasing sense of my own impurity and unholiness; and felt my soul melt and mourn, that I had abused and grieved a very gracious God, who was still kind to me, notwithstanding all my unworthiness.

My soul enjoyed a sweet season of bitter repentance and sorrow, that I had wronged that blessed God, who, I was persuaded, was reconciled to me in his dear Son. My soul was now tender, devout, and solemn. And I was afraid of nothing but sin; and afraid of that in every action and thought.”

The four next days were manifestly spent in a most constant tenderness, watchfulness, diligence, and self-diffidence. But he complains of wanderings of mind, languor of affections, &c.

“Wednesday, Oct. 24. Near noon, rode to my people; spent some time, and prayed with them: felt the frame of a pilgrim on earth; longed much to leave this gloomy mansion; but yet found the exercise of patience and resignation. And as I returned home from the Indians, spent the whole time in lifting up my heart to God. In the evening enjoyed a blessed season alone in prayer; was enabled to cry to God with a child-like spirit, for the space of near an hour; enjoyed a sweet freedom in supplicating for myself, for dear friends, ministers, and some who are preparing for that work, and for the church of God; amid longed to be as lively myself in God’s service as the angels.

“Thursday, Oct. 25. Was busy in writing. Was very sensible of my absolute dependence on God in all respects; saw that I could do nothing, even in those affairs that I have sufficient natural faculties for, unless God should smile upon my attempt. ‘Not that we are sufficient of ourselves, to think any thing as of ourselves,’ I saw was a sacred truth.

“Friday, Oct. 26. In the morning my soul was melted with a sense of divine goodness and mercy to such a vile unworthy worm. I delighted to lean upon God, and place my whole trust in him. My soul was exceedingly grieved for sin, and prized and longed after holiness; it wounded my heart deeply, yet sweetly, to think how I had abused a kind God. I longed to be perfectly holy, that I might not grieve a gracious God; who will continue to love, notwithstanding his love is abused! I longed for holiness more for this end, than I did for my own happiness’ sake: and yet this was my greatest happiness, never more to dishonour, but always to glorify, the blessed God. Afterwards rode up to the Indians, in the afternoon, &c.”

The four next days he was exercised with much disorder and pain of body, with a degree of melancholy and gloominess of mind, bitterly complaining of deadness and unprofitableness, yet mourning and longing after God.

“Wednesday, Oct. 31. Was sensible of my barrenness and decays in the things of God: my soul failed when I remembered the fervency I had enjoyed at the throne of grace. Oh, I thought, if I could but be spiritual, warm, heavenly-minded, and affectionately breathing after God, this would be better than life to me! My soul longed exceedingly for death, to be loosed from this dulness and barrenness, and made for ever active in the service of God. I seemed to live for nothing, and to do no good: and oh, the burden of such a life! Oh, death, death, my kind friend, hasten, and deliver me from dull mortality, and make me spiritual and vigorous to eternity!

“Thursday, Nov. 1. Had but little sweetness in divine things; but afterwards, in the evening, felt some life, and longings after God. I longed to be always solemn, devout, and heavenly-minded; and was afraid to leave off praying, lest I should again lose a sense of the sweet things of God.

“Friday, Nov. 2. Was filled with sorrow and confusion in the morning, and could enjoy no sweet sense of divine things, nor get any relief in prayer. Saw I deserved that every one of God’s creatures should be let loose, to be the executioners of his wrath against me; and yet therein saw I deserved what I did not fear as my portion. About noon rode up to the Indians; and while going could feel no desires for them, and even dreaded to say any thing to them; but God was pleased to give me some freedom and enlargement, and made the season comfortable to me. In the evening had enlargement in prayer. But, alas! what comforts and enlargements I have felt for these many weeks past, have been only transient and short; and the greater part of my time has been filled up with deadness, or struggles with deadness, and bitter conflicts with corruption. I have found myself exercised sorely with some particular things that I thought myself most of all freed from. And thus I have ever found it, when I have thought the battle was over, and the conquest gained, and so let down my watch, the enemy has risen up and done me the greatest injury.

“Saturday, Nov. 3. I read the life and trials of a godly man, and was much warmed by it: I wondered at my past deadness; and was more convinced of it than ever. Was enabled to confess and bewail my sin before God, with self-abhorrence.

“Lord’s day, Nov. 4. Had, I think, some exercise of faith in prayer in the morning: longed to be spiritual. Had considerable help in preaching to my poor Indians: was encouraged with them, and hoped that God designed mercy for them.”

The next day* he set out on a journey to New York, to the meeting of the Presbytery there; and was from home more than a fortnight. He seemed to enter on his journey with great reluctance; fearing that the diversions of it would prove a means of cooling his religious affections, as he had found in other journeys. But yet in this journey he had some special seasons wherein he enjoyed extraordinary evidences and fruits of God’s gracious presence. He was greatly fatigued, and exposed to cold and storms: and when he returned from New York to New Jersey, on Friday, was taken very ill, and was detained by his illness some time.

“Wednesday, Nov. 21. Rode from Newark to Rockciticus in the cold, and was almost overcome with it. Enjoyed some sweetness in conversation with dear Mr. Jones, while I dined with him: my soul loves the people of God, and especially the ministers of Jesus Christ, who feel the same trials that I do.

“Thursday, Nov. 22. Came on my way from Rockciticus to Delaware river. Was very much disordered with a cold and pain in my head. About six at night I lost my way in the wilderness, and wandered over rocks and mountains, down hideous steeps, through swamps, and most dreadful and dangerous places; and the night being dark, so that few stars could be seen, I was greatly exposed. I was much pinched with cold, and distressed with an extreme pain in my head, attended with sickness at my stomach; so that every step I took was distressing to me. I had little hope for several hours together, but that I must lie out in the woods all night, in this distressed case. But about nine o’clock I found a house, through the abundant goodness of God, and was kindly entertained. Thus I have frequently been exposed, and sometimes lain out the whole night; but God has hitherto preserved me; and blessed be his name. Such fatigues and hardships as these serve to wean me more from the earth; and, I trust, will make heaven the sweeter. Formerly, when I was thus exposed to cold, rain, &c. I was ready to please myself with the thoughts of enjoying a comfortable house, a warm fire, and other outward comforts; but now these have less place in my heart, (through the grace of God,) and my eye is more to God for comfort. In this world I expect tribulation; and it does not now, as formerly, appear strange to me. I do not in such seasons of difficulty flatter myself that it will be better hereafter; but rather think, how much worse it might be; how much greater trials others of God’s children have endured; and how much greater are yet perhaps reserved for me. Blessed be God, that he makes the thoughts of my journey’s end and of my dissolution a great comfort to me, under my sharpest trials; and scarce ever lets these thoughts be attended with terror or melancholy; but they are attended frequently with great joy.

“Friday, Nov. 23. Visited a sick man; discoursed and prayed with him. Then visited another house, where was one dead and laid out; looked on the corpse, and longed that my time might come to depart, that I might be with Christ. Then went home to my lodgings, about one o’clock. Felt poorly; but was able to read most of the afternoon.”

Within the space of the next twelve days he passed under many changes in the frames and exercises of his mind. He had many seasons of the special influences of God’s Spirit, animating, invigorating, and comforting him in the ways of God and the duties of religion: but had some turns of great dejection and melancholy. He spent much time, within this space, in hard labour, with others, to make for himself a little cottage or hut, to live in by himself through the winter. Yet he frequently preached to the Indians, and speaks of special assistance he had from time to time, in addressing himself to them; and of his sometimes having considerable encouragement, from the attention they gave. But on Tuesday, December 4, he was sunk into great discouragement, to see most of them going in company to an idolatrous feast and dance, after he had taken abundant pains to dissuade them from these things.

“Thursday, Dec. 6. Having now a happy opportunity of being retired in a house of my own, which I have lately procured and moved into, and considering that it is now a long time since I have been able, either on account of bodily weakness, or for want of retirement, or some other difficulty, to spend any time in secret fasting and prayer; considering also the greatness of my work, and the extreme difficulties that attend it; and that my poor Indians are now worshipping devils, notwithstanding all the pains I have taken with them, which almost overwhelms my spirit; moreover, considering my extreme barrenness, spiritual deadness and dejection, of late; as also the power of some particular corruptions; I set apart this day for secret prayer and fasting, to implore the blessing of God on myself, on my poor people, on my friends, and on the church of God. At first I felt a great backwardness to the duties of the day, on account of the seeming impossibility of performing them; but the Lord helped me to break through this difficulty. God was pleased, by the use of means, to give me some clear conviction of my sinfulness, and a discovery of the plague of my own heart, more affecting than what I have of late had. And especially I saw my sinfulness in this, that when God had withdrawn himself, then, instead of living and dying in pursuit of him, I have been disposed to one of these two things; either, first, to yield an unbecoming respect to some earthly objects, as if happiness were to be derived from them; or, secondly, to be secretly froward and impatient, and unsuitably desirous of death, so that I have sometimes thought I could not bear to think my life must be lengthened out. And that which often drove me to this impatient desire of death, was a despair of doing any good in life; and I chose death, rather than a life spent for nothing. But now God made me sensible of my sin in these things, and enabled me to cry to him for forgiveness. Yet this was not all I wanted; for my soul appeared exceedingly polluted, my heart seemed like a nest of vipers, or a cage of unclean and hateful birds: and therefore I wanted to be purified ‘by the blood of sprinkling, that cleanseth from all sin.’ And this, I hope, I was enabled to pray for in faith. I enjoyed much more intenseness, fervency, and spirituality, than I expected; God was better to me than my fears. And towards night I felt my soul rejoice, that God is unchangeably happy and glorious; that he will be glorified, whatever becomes of his creatures. I was enabled to persevere in prayer till some time in the evening; at which time I saw so much need of divine help, in every respect, that I knew not how to leave off, and had forgot that I needed food. This evening I was much assisted in meditating on Isa. lii. 3. ‘For thus saith the Lord, Ye have sold yourselves for nought,’ &c. Blessed be the Lord for any help in the past day.

“Friday, Dec. 7. Spent some time in prayer, in the morning; enjoyed some freedom and affection in the duty, and had longing desires of being made ‘faithful to the death.’ Spent a little time in writing on a divine subject: then visited the Indians, and preached to them; but under inexpressible dejection. I had no heart to speak to them, and could not do it but as I forced myself: I knew they must hate to hear me, as having but just got home from their idolatrous feast and devil-worship. In the evening had some freedom in prayer and meditation.

“Saturday, Dec. 8. Have been uncommonly free this day from dejection, and from that distressing apprehension, that I could do nothing: was enabled to pray and study with some comfort; and especially was assisted in writing on a divine subject. In the evening my soul rejoiced in God; and I blessed his name for shining on my soul. O the sweet and blessed change I then felt, when God ‘brought me out of darkness into his marvellous light!’

“Lord’s day, Dec. 9. Preached, both parts of the day, at a place called Greenwich, in New Jersey, about ten miles from my own house. In the first discourse I had scarce any warmth or affectionate longing for souls. In the intermediate season I got alone among the bushes, and cried to God for pardon of my deadness; and was in anguish and bitterness, that I could not address souls with more compassion and tender affection. I judged and condemned myself for want of this divine temper; though I saw I could not get it as of myself, any more than I could make a world. In the latter exercise, blessed be the Lord, I had some fervency, both in prayer and preaching; and especially in the application of my discourse, I was enabled to address precious souls with affection, concern, tenderness, and importunity. The Spirit of God, I think, was there; as the effects were apparent, tears running down many cheeks.

“Monday, Dec. 10. Near noon I preached again: God gave me some assistance, and enabled me to be in some degree faithful; so that I had peace in my own soul, and a very comfortable composure, ‘although Israel should not be gathered.’ Came away from Greenwich, and rode home; arrived just in the evening. By the way my soul blessed God for his goodness; and I rejoiced, that so much of my work was done, and I so much nearer my blessed reward. Blessed be God for grace to be faithful.

“Tuesday, Dec. 11. Felt very poorly in body, being much tired and worn out the last night. Was assisted in some measure in writing on a divine subject: but was so feeble and sore in my breast, that I had not much resolution in my work. Oh, how I long for that world ‘where the weary are at rest!’ and yet through the goodness of God I do not now feel impatient.

Wednesday, Dec. 12. Was again very weak; but somewhat assisted in secret prayer, and enabled with pleasure and sweetness to cry, ‘Come, Lord Jesus! come, Lord Jesus! come quickly.’ My soul ‘longed for God, for the living God.’ O how delightful it is, to pray under such sweet influences! Oh how much better is this, than one’s necessary food! I had at this time no disposition to eat, (though late in the morning,) for earthly food appeared wholly tasteless. O how much ‘better is thy love than wine,’ than the sweetest wine! I visited and preached to the Indians in the afternoon; but under much dejection. Found my interpreter under some concern for his soul; which was some comfort to me; and yet filled me with new care. I longed greatly for his conversion; lifted up my heart to God for it, while I was talking to him; came home, and poured out my soul to God for him: enjoyed some freedom in prayer, and was enabled, I think, to leave all with God.

“Thursday, Dec. 13. Endeavoured to spend the day in fasting and prayer, to implore the divine blessing, more especially on my poor people; and in particular, I sought for converting grace for my interpreter, and three or four more under some concern for their souls. I was much disordered in the morning when I arose; but having determined to spend the day in this manner, I attempted it. Some freedom I had in pleading for these poor concerned souls, several times; and when interceding for them, I enjoyed greater freedom from wandering and distracting thoughts, than in any part of my supplications. But, in the general, I was greatly exercised with wanderings; so that in the evening it seemed as if I had need to pray for nothing so much as for the pardon of sins committed in the day past, and the vileness I then found in myself. The sins I had most sense of, were pride, and wandering thoughts, whereby I mocked God. The former of these cursed iniquities excited me to think of writing, preaching, or converting heathens, or performing some other great work, that my name might live when I should be dead. My soul was in anguish, and ready to drop into despair, to find so much of that cursed temper. With this, and the  other evil I laboured under, viz. wandering thoughts, I was almost overwhelmed, and even ready to give over striving after a spirit of devotion; and oftentimes sunk into a considerable degree of despondency, and thought I was ‘more brutish than any man.’ Yet after all my sorrows, I trust, through grace, this day and the exercises of it have been for my good, and taught me more of my corruption, and weakness without Christ, than I knew before.

“Friday, Dec. 14. Near noon went to the Indians; but knew not what to say to them, and was ashamed to look them in the face: I felt I had no power to address their consciences, and therefore had no boldness to say any thing. Was, much of the day, in a great degree of despair about ever ‘doing or seeing any good in the land of the living.’”

He continued under the same dejection the next day.

“Lord’s day, Dec. 16. Was so overwhelmed with dejection, that I knew not how to live. I longed for death exceedingly: my soul was sunk into deep waters, and the floods were ready to drown me. I was so much oppressed, that my soul was in a kind of horror: could not keep my thoughts fixed in prayer, for the space of one minute, without fluttering and distraction; and was exceedingly ashamed that I did not live to God. I had no distressing doubt about my own state; but would have cheerfully ventured (as far as I could possibly know) into eternity. While I was going to preach to the Indians, my soul was in anguish; I was so overborne with discouragement, that I despaired of doing any good, and was driven to my wit’s end; I knew nothing what to say, nor what course to take. But at last I insisted on the evidence we have of the truth of Christianity from the miracles of Christ; many of which I set before them: and God helped me to make a close application to those who refused to believe the truth of what I taught them. Indeed I was enabled to speak to the consciences of all, in some measure, and was somewhat encouraged to find, that God enabled me to be faithful once more. Then came and preached to another company of them; but was very weary and faint. In the evening I was refreshed, and enabled to pray, and praise God with composure and affection: had some enlargement and courage with respect to my work: was willing to live, and longed to do more for God than my weak state of body would admit of. I can do all things through Christ that strengthens me;’ and by his grace, I am willing to spend and be spent in his service, when I am not thus sunk in dejection, and a kind of despair.

“Monday, Dec. 17. Was comfortable in mind most of the day; and was enabled to pray with some freedom, cheerfulness, composure, and devotion; had also some assistance in writing on a divine subject.

“Tuesday, Dec. 18. Went to the Indians, and discoursed to them near an hour, without any power to come close to their hearts. But at last I felt some fervency, and God helped me to speak with warmth. My interpreter also was amazingly assisted; and I doubt not but ‘the Spirit of God was upon him;’ (though I had no reason to think he had any true and saving grace, but was only under conviction of his lost state;) and presently upon this most of the grown persons were much affected, and the tears ran down their cheeks; and one old man (I suppose, a hundred years old) was so affected, that he wept, and seemed convinced of the importance of what I taught them. I staid with them a considerable time, exhorting and directing them; and came away, lifting up my heart to God in prayer and praise, and encouraged and exhorted my interpreter to ‘strive to enter in at the strait gate.’ Came home, and spent most of the evening in prayer and thanksgiving; and found myself much enlarged and quickened. Was greatly concerned that the Lord’s work, which seemed to be begun, might be carried on with power, to the conversion of poor souls, and the glory of divine grace.

Wednesday, Dec. 19. Spent a great part of the day in prayer to God for the outpouring of his Spirit on my poor people; as also to bless his name for awakening my interpreter and some others, and giving us some tokens of his presence yesterday. And, blessed be God, I had much freedom, five or six times in the day, in prayer and praise, and felt a weighty concern upon my spirit for the salvation of those precious souls, and the enlargement of the Redeemer’s kingdom among them. My soul hoped in God for some success in my ministry: and blessed be his name for so much hope.

“Thursday, Dec. 20. Was enabled to visit the throne of grace frequently this day; and through divine goodness enjoyed much freedom and fervency sundry times: was much assisted in crying for mercy for my poor people, and felt cheerfulness and hope in my requests for them. I spent much of the day in writing; but was enabled to intermix prayer with my studies.

“Friday, Dec. 21. Was enabled again to pray with freedom, cheerfulness, and hope. God was pleased to make the duty comfortable and pleasant to me; so that I delighted to persevere, and repeatedly to engage in it. Towards noon visited my people, and spent the whole time in the way to them in prayer, longing to see the power of God among them, as there appeared something of it the last Tuesday; and I found it sweet to rest and hope in God. Preached to them twice, and at two distinct places: had considerable freedom each time, and so had my interpreter. Several of them followed me from one place to the other: and I thought there was some divine influence discernible amongst them. In the evening, was assisted in prayer again. Blessed be the Lord.“

Very much the same things are expressed concerning his inward frame, exercises, and assistances on Saturday, as on the preceding days. He observes, that this was a comfortable week to him. But then concludes, “Oh that I had no reason to complain of much barrenness! Oh that there were no vain thoughts and evil affections lodging within me! The Lord knows how I long for that world, where they rest not day nor night, saying, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,” &c. On the following Sabbath, he speaks of assistance and freedom in his public work, but as having less of the sensible presence of God, than frequently in the week past; but yet says, his soul was kept from sinking in discouragement. On Monday again he seemed to enjoy very much the same liberty and fervency, through the day, that he enjoyed through the greater part of the preceding week.’

“Tuesday, Dec. 25. Enjoyed very little quiet sleep last night, by reason of bodily weakness, and the closeness of my studies yesterday; yet my heart was somewhat lively in prayer and praise; I was delighted with the divine glory and happiness, and rejoiced that God was God, and that he was unchangeably possessed of glory and blessedness. Though God held my eyes waking, yet he helped me to improve my time profitably amidst my pains and weakness, in continued meditations on Luke xiii. 7.’ Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit,’ &c. My meditations were sweet; and I wanted to set before sinners their sin and danger.”

He continued in a very low state, as to his bodily health, for some days; which seems to have been a great hinderance to him in his religious exercises and pursuits. But yet he expresses some degree of divine assistance, from day to day, through the remaining part of this week. He preached several times this week to his Indians; and there appeared still some concern amongst them for their souls. On Saturday he rode to the Irish settlement, about fifteen miles from his lodgings, in order to spend the sabbath there.

“Lord’s day, Dec. 30. Discoursed, both parts of the day, from Mark viii. 34. ‘Whosoever will come after me,’ &c. God gave me very great freedom and clearness, and (in the afternoon especially) considerable warmth and fervency. In the evening also had very great clearness while conversing with friends on divine things: I do not remember ever to have had more clear apprehensions of religion in my life: but found a struggle, in the evening, with spiritual pride.”

On Monday he preached again in the same place with freedom and fervency; and rode home to his lodging, and arrived in the evening, under a considerable degree of bodily illness, which continued the two next days. And he  complains much of spiritual emptiness and barrenness on those days.

“Thursday, Jan. 3, 1745. Being sensible of the great want of divine influences, and the outpouring of God’s Spirit, I spent this day in fasting and prayer, to seek so great a mercy for myself, my poor people in particular, and the church of God in general. In the morning was very lifeless in prayer, and could get scarce any sense of God. Near noon enjoyed some sweet freedom to pray that the will of God might in every respect become mine; and I am persuaded it was so at that time in some good degree. In the afternoon, I was exceeding weak, and could not enjoy much fervency in prayer; but felt a great degree of dejection; which, I believe, was very much owing to my bodily weakness and disorder.

“Friday, Jan. 4. Rode up to the Indians near noon; spent some time under great disorder: my soul was sunk down into deep waters, and I was almost overwhelmed with melancholy.

“Saturday, Jan. 5. Was able to do something at writing; but was much disordered with pain in my head. At night was distressed with a sense of my spiritual pollution, and ten thousand youthful, yea, and childish follies, that nobody but myself had any thought about; all which appeared to me now fresh, and in a lively view, as if committed yesterday, and made my soul ashamed before God, and caused me to hate myself.

“Lord’s day, Jan. 6. Was still distressed with vapoury disorders. Preached to my poor Indians: but had little heart or life. Towards night my soul was pressed under a sense of my unfaithfulness. O the joy and peace that arises from a sense of ‘having obtained mercy of God to be faithful!’ And oh the misery and anguish that spring from an apprehension of the contrary!”

His dejection continued the two next days; but not to so great a degree on Tuesday, when he enjoyed some freedom and fervency in preaching to the Indians.

Wednesday, Jan. 9. In the morning God was pleased to remove that gloom which has of late oppressed my mind, and gave me freedom and sweetness in prayer. I was encouraged, strengthened, and enabled to plead for grace for myself, and mercy for my poor Indians; and was sweetly assisted in my intercessions with God for others. Blessed be his holy name for ever and ever. Amen, and Amen. Those things that of late appeared most difficult and almost impossible, now appeared not only possible, but easy. My soul so much delighted to continue instant in prayer, at this blessed season, that I had no desire for my necessary food: even dreaded leaving off praying at all, lest I should lose this spirituality, and this blessed thankfulness to God which I then felt. I felt now quite willing to live, and undergo all trials that might remain for me in a world of sorrow: but still longed for heaven, that I might glorify God in a perfect manner. O ‘come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.’ Spent the day in reading a little; and in some diversions, which I was necessitated to take by reason of much weakness and disorder. In the evening enjoyed some freedom and intenseness in prayer.”

The three remaining days of the week he was very low and feeble in body; but nevertheless continued constantly in the same comfortable sweet frame of mind, as is expressed on Wednesday. On the sabbath this sweetness in spiritual alacrity began to abate; but still he enjoyed some degree of comfort, and had assistance in preaching to the Indians.

“Monday, Jan. 14. Spent this day under a great degree of bodily weakness and disorder; and had very little freedom, either in my studies or devotions; and in the evening, I was much dejected and melancholy. It pains and distresses me, that I live so much of my time for nothing. I long to do much in a little time, and if it might be the Lord’s will, to finish my work speedily in this tiresome world. I am sure I do not desire to live for any thing in this world; and through grace I am not afraid to look the king of terrors in the face. I know I shall be afraid, if God leaves me; and therefore I think it always my duty to lay in for that solemn hour. But for a very considerable time past, my soul has rejoiced to think of death in its nearest approaches; and even when I have been very weak, and seemed nearest eternity. ‘Not unto me, not unto me, but to God be the glory.’ I feel that which convinces me, that if God do not enable me to maintain a holy dependence upon him, death will easily be a terror to me; but at present, I must say, ‘I long to depart, and to be with Christ,’ which is the best of all. When I am in a sweet resigned frame of soul, I am willing to tarry awhile in a world of sorrow, I am willing to be from home as long as God sees fit it should be so; but when I want the influence of this temper, I am then apt to be impatient to be gone. Oh when will the day appear, that I shall be perfect in holiness, and in the enjoyment of God!”

The next day was spent under a great degree of dejection and melancholy; which (as he himself was persuaded) was owing partly to bodily weakness, and vapoury disorders.

“Wednesday and Thursday, Jan. 16 and 17. I spent most of the time in writing on a sweet divine subject, and enjoyed some freedom and assistance. Was likewise enabled to pray more frequently and fervently than usual: and my soul, I think, rejoiced in God; especially on the evening of the last of these days: praise then seemed comely, and I delighted to bless the Lord. O what reason have I to be thankful, that God ever helps me to labour and study for him! he does but receive his own, when I am enabled in any measure to praise him, labour for him, and live to him. Oh, how comfortable and sweet it is, to feel the assistance of divine grace in the performance of the duties God has enjoined us! Bless the Lord, O my soul.“

The same enlargement of heart, and joyful frame of soul, continued through the next day. But on the day following it began to decline; which decay seems to have continued the whole of the next week: yet he enjoyed some seasons of special and sweet assistance.

“Lord’s day, Jan. 27. Had the greatest degree of inward anguish that almost ever I endured. I was perfectly overwhelmed, and so confused, that after I began to discourse to the Indians, before I could finish a sentence, sometimes I forgot entirely what I was aiming at; or if, with much difficulty, I had recollected what I had before designed, still it appeared strange, and like something I had long forgotten, and had now but an imperfect remembrance of. I know it was a degree of distraction, occasioned by vapoury disorders, melancholy, spiritual desertion, and some other things that particularly pressed upon me this morning, with an uncommon weight, the principal of which respected my Indians. This distressing gloom never went off the whole day; but was so far removed, that I was enabled to speak with some freedom and concern to the Indians, at two of their settlements; and I think there was some appearance of the presence of God with us, some seriousness, and seeming concern among the Indians, at least a few of them. In the evening this gloom continued still, till family prayer,   about nine o’clock, and almost through this, until I came near the close, when I was praying (as I usually do) for the illumination and conversion of my poor people; and then the cloud was scattered, so that I enjoyed sweetness and freedom, and conceived hopes that God designed mercy for some of them. The same I enjoyed afterwards in secret prayer; in which precious duty I had for a considerable time sweetness and freedom, and (I hope) faith, in praying for myself, my poor Indians, and dear friends and acquaintance in New England, and elsewhere, and for the dear interest of Zion in general. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.“

He spent the rest of this week, or at least the most of it, under dejection and melancholy; which on Friday rose to an extreme height; he being then, as he himself observes, much exercised with vapoury disorders. This exceeding gloominess continued on Saturday, till the evening, when he was again relieved in family prayer; and after it was refreshed in secret, and felt willing to live, and endure hardships in the cause of God; and found his hopes of the advancement of Christ’s kingdom, as also his hopes to see the power of God among the poor Indians, considerably raised.

“Lord’s day, Feb. 3. In the morning I was somewhat relieved of that gloom and confusion that my mind has of late been greatly exercised with: was enabled to pray with some composure and comfort. But, however, went to my Indians trembling; for my soul ‘remembered the wormwood and the gall’ (I might almost say the hell) of Friday last; and I was greatly afraid I should be obliged again to drink of that cup of trembling, which was inconceivably more bitter than death, and made me long for the grave more, unspeakably more, than for hid treasures, yea, inconceivably more than the men of this world long for such treasures. But God was pleased to hear my cries, and to afford me great assistance; so that I felt peace in my own soul; and was satisfied, that if not one of the Indians should be profited by my preaching, but should all be damned, yet I should be accepted and rewarded as faithful; for I am persuaded God enabled me to be so. Had some good degree of help afterwards, at another place; and much longed for the conversion of the poor Indians. Was somewhat refreshed, and comfortable, towards night, and in the evening. O that my soul might praise the Lord for his goodness! Enjoyed some freedom in the evening, in meditation on Luke xiii. 24. ‘Strive to enter in at the strait gate,’ &c.”

In the three next days he was the subject of much dejection; but the three remaining days of the week seem to have been spent with much composure and comfort. On the next sabbath he preached at Greenwich in New Jersey. In the evening he rode eight miles to visit a sick man at the point of death, and found him speechless and senseless.

“Monday, Feb. 11. About break of day the sick man died. I was affected at the sight: spent the morning with the mourners: and after prayer, and some discourse with them, I returned to Greenwich, and preached again from Psal. lxxxix. 15. ‘Blessed is the people that know,’ &c. and the Lord gave me assistance; I felt a sweet love to souls, and to the kingdom of Christ; and longed that poor sinners might know the joyful sound. Several persons were much affected. And after meeting I was enabled to discourse with freedom and concern, to some persons that applied to me under spiritual trouble. Left the place, sweetly composed, and rode home to my house about eight miles distant. Discoursed to friends, and inculcated divine truths upon some. In the evening was in the most solemn frame that almost I ever remember to have experienced: I know not that ever death appeared more real to me, or that ever I saw myself in the condition of a dead corpse, laid out, and dressed for a lodging in the silent grave, so evidently as at this time. And yet I felt exceeding comfortably; my mind was composed and calm, and death appeared without a sting. I think I never felt such an universal mortification to all created objects as now. Oh, how great and solemn a thing it appeared to die! Oh, how it lays the greatest honour in the dust! And oh, how vain and trifling did the riches, honours, and pleasures of the world appear! I could not, I dare not, so much as think of any of them; for death, death, solemn (though not frightful) death appeared at the door. Oh, I could see myself dead, and laid out, and enclosed in my coffin, and put down into the cold grave, with the greatest solemnity, but without terror! I spent most of the evening in conversing with a dear Christian friend; and, blessed be God, it was a comfortable evening to us both. What are friends? What are comforts? What are sorrows? What are distresses? ’ The time is short: it remains, that they which weep be as though they wept not; and they which rejoice, as though they rejoiced not: for the fashion of this world passeth away. O come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen.’ Blessed be God for the comforts of the past day.

“Tuesday, Feb. 12. Was exceeding weak; but in a sweet, resigned, composed frame, most of the day: felt my heart freely go forth after God in prayer.

“Wednesday, Feb. 13. Was much exercised with vapoury disorders; but still enabled to maintain solemnity, and, I think, spirituality.

“Thursday, Feb. 14. Spent the day in writing on a divine subject: enjoyed health, and freedom in my work; had a solemn sense of death; as I have indeed had every day this week, in some measure: what I felt on Monday last has been abiding, in some considerable degree, ever since.

“Friday, Feb. 15. Was engaged in writing again almost the whole day. In the evening was much assisted in meditating on that precious text, John vii. 37. ‘Jesus stood and cried,’ &c. I had then a sweet sense of the free grace of the gospel; my soul was encouraged, warmed, and quickened. My desires were drawn out after God in prayer; and my soul was watchful, afraid of losing so sweet a guest as I then entertained. I continued long in prayer and meditation, intermixing one with the other; and was unwilling to be diverted by any thing at all from so sweet an exercise. I longed to proclaim the grace I then meditated upon, to the world of sinners. O how quick and powerful is the word of the blessed God!”

The next day he complains of great conflicts with corruption, and much discomposure of mind.

“Lord’s day, Feb. 17. Preached to the white people (my interpreter being absent) in the wilderness upon the sunny side of a hill: had a considerable assembly, consisting of people who lived (at least many of them) not less than thirty miles asunder; some of them came near twenty miles. I discoursed to them, all day, from John vii. 37. ‘Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst,’ &c. In the afternoon it pleased God to grant me great freedom and fervency in my discourse; and I was enabled to imitate the example of Christ in the text, who stood and cried. I think I was scarce ever enabled to offer the free grace of God to perishing sinners with more freedom and plainness in my life. And afterwards I was enabled earnestly to invite the children of God to come renewedly, and drink of this fountain of water of life, from whence they have heretofore derived unspeakable satisfaction. It was a very comfortable time to me. There were many tears in the assembly; and I doubt not but that the Spirit of God was there, convincing poor sinners of their need of Christ. In the evening I felt composed, and comfortable, though much tired. I had some sweet sense of the excellency and glory of God; and my soul rejoiced, that he was ‘God over all, blessed for ever;’ but was too much crowded with company and conversation, and longed to be more alone with God. Oh that I could for ever bless God for the mercy of this day, who ‘answered me in the joy of my heart.’”

The remainder of this week seems to have been spent under a decay of this life and joy, and in distressing conflicts with corruption; but not without some seasons of refreshment and comfort.

“Lord’s day, Feb. 24. In the morning was much perplexed: my interpreter being absent, I knew not how to perform my work among the Indians. However, I rode to them, got a Dutchman to interpret for me, though he was but poorly qualified for the business. Afterwards I came and preached to a few white people from John vi. 67. ‘Then said Jesus unto the twelve,’ &c. Here the Lord seemed to unburden me in some measure, especially towards the close of my discourse: I felt freedom to open the love of Christ to his own dear disciples. When the rest of the world forsakes him, and are forsaken by him, that he calls them no more, he then turns to his own, and says, Will ye also go away? I had a sense of the free grace of Christ to his own people, in such seasons of general apostacy, and when they themselves in some measure backslide with the world. O the free grace of Christ, that he seasonably reminds his people of their danger of backsliding, and invites them to persevere in their adherence to himself! I saw that backsliding souls, who seemed to be about to go away with the world, might return, and welcome, to him immediately; without any thing to recommend them; notwithstanding all their former backslidings. And thus my discourse was suited to my own soul’s case: for, of late, I have found a great want of this sense and apprehension of divine grace; and have often been greatly distressed in my own soul, because I did not suitably apprehend this ‘fountain to purge away sin;’ and to have been too much labouring for spiritual life, peace of conscience, and progressive holiness, in my own strength: but now God showed me, in some measure,  the arm of all strength, and the fountain of all grace. In the evening I felt solemn, devout, and sweet, resting on free grace for assistance, acceptance, and peace of conscience.”

Within the space of the next nine days he had frequent refreshing, invigorating influences of God’s Spirit; attended with complaints of dulness, and with longings after spiritual life and holy fervency.

“Wednesday, March 6. Spent most of the day in preparing for a journey to New England. Spent some time in prayer, with a special reference to my intended journey. Was afraid I should forsake the fountain of living waters, and attempt to derive satisfaction from broken cisterns, my dear friends and acquaintance, with whom I might meet in my journey. I looked to God to keep me from this vanity, as well as others. Towards night, and in the evening, was visited by some friends, some of whom, I trust, were real Christians; who discovered an affectionate regard to me, and seemed grieved that I was about to leave them; especially seeing I did not expect to make any considerable stay among them, if I should live to return from New England.   O how kind has God been to me! how has he raised up friends in every place, where his providence has called me! Friends are a great comfort; and it is God that gives them; it is he makes them friendly to me. ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.”

The next day he set out on his journey; and it was about five weeks before he returned. The special design of this journey, he himself declares afterwards, in his diary for March 21, where, speaking of his conversing with a certain minister in New England, he says, “Contrived with him how to raise some money among Christian friends, in order to support a colleague with me in the wilderness, (I having now spent two years in a very solitary manner,) that we might be together; as Christ sent out his disciples two and two: and as this was the principal concern I had in view, in taking this journey, so I took pains in it, and hope God will succeed it, if for his glory.” He first went into various parts of New Jersey, and visited several ministers there: then went to New York; and from thence into New England, going to various parts of Connecticut. He then returned into New Jersey; and met a number of ministers at Woodbridge, “who,” he says, “met there to consult about the affairs of Christ’s kingdom, in some important articles.” He seems, for the most part, to have been free from melancholy in this journey; and many times to have had extraordinary assistance in public ministrations, and his preaching sometimes attended with very hopeful appearances of a good effect on the auditory. He also had many seasons of special comfort and spiritual refreshment, in conversation with ministers and other Christian friends, and also in meditation and prayer when alone.

“Saturday, April 13. Rode home to my own house at the Forks of Delaware: was enabled to remember the goodness of the Lord, who has now preserved me while riding full six hundred miles in this journey; has kept me that none of my bones have been broken. Blessed be the Lord, who has preserved me in this tedious journey, and returned me in safety to my own house. Verily it is God that has upheld me, and guarded my goings.

“Lord’s day, April 14. Was disordered in body with the fatigues of my late journey; but was enabled however to preach to a considerable assembly of white people, gathered from all parts round about, with some freedom, from Ezek. xxxiii. 11. ‘As I live, saith the Lord God,’ &c. Had much more assistance than I expected.”

This week he went a journey to Philadelphia, in order to engage the governor there to use his interest with the chief man of the Six Nations, (with whom he maintained a strict friendship,) that he would give him leave to live at Susquehannah, and instruct the Indians that are within their territories.   In his way to and from thence, he lodged with Mr. Beaty, a young presbyterian minister. He speaks of seasons of sweet spiritual refreshment that he enjoyed at his lodgings.

“Saturday, April 20. Rode with Mr. Beaty to Abington, to attend Mr. Treat’s administration of the sacrament, according to the method of the church of Scotland. When we arrived, we found Mr. Treat preaching; afterwards I preached a sermon from Matt. v. 3. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ &c. God was pleased to give me great freedom and tenderness, both in prayer and sermon: the assembly was sweetly melted, and scores were all in tears. It was, as then I hoped, and was afterwards abundantly satisfied by conversing with them, a ‘word spoken in season to many weary souls.’ I was extremely tired, and my spirits much exhausted, so that I could scarcely speak loud; yet I could not help rejoicing in God.

“Lord’s day, April 21. In the morning was calm and composed, and had some outgoings of soul after God in secret duties, and longing desires of his presence in the sanctuary and at his table; that his presence might be in the assembly; and that his children might be entertained with a feast of fat things. In the forenoon Mr. Treat preached. I felt some affection and tenderness during the administration of the ordinance. Mr. Beaty preached to the multitude abroad, who could not half have crowded into the meeting-house. In the season of the communion, I had comfortable and sweet apprehensions of the blissful communion of God’s people, when they shall meet at their Father’s table in his kingdom, in a state of perfection. In the afternoon I preached abroad, to the whole assembly, from Rev. xiv. 4. ‘These are they that follow the Lamb,’ &c. God was pleased again to give me very great freedom and clearness, but not so much warmth as before. However, there was a most amazing attention in the whole assembly; and, as I was informed afterwards, this was a sweet season to many.

“Monday, April 22. I enjoyed some sweetness in retirement, in the morning. At eleven o’clock Mr. Beaty preached, with freedom and life. Then I preached from John vii. 37. ‘In the last day,’ &c. and concluded the solemnity. Had some freedom; but not equal to what I had enjoyed before: yet in the prayer the Lord enabled me to cry, I hope, with a child-like temper, with tenderness and brokenness of heart. Came home with Mr. Beaty to his lodgings; and spent the time, while riding, and afterwards, very agreeably on divine things.

“Tuesday, April 23. Left Mr. Beaty’s, and returned home to the Forks of Delaware: enjoyed some sweet meditations on the road, and was enabled to lift up my heart to God in prayer and praise.”

The two next days he speaks of much bodily disorder, but of some degrees of spiritual assistance and freedom.

“Friday, April 26. Conversed with a Christian friend with some warmth; and felt a spirit of mortification to the world, in a very great degree. Afterwards was enabled to pray fervently, and to rely on God sweetly, for ‘all things pertaining to life and godliness.’ Just in the evening was visited by a dear christian friend, with whom I spent an hour or two in conversation, on the very soul of religion. There are many with whom I can talk about religion; but alas! I find few with whom I can talk religion itself: but, blessed be the Lord, there are some that love to feed on the kernel, rather than the shell.”

The next day he went to the Irish settlement, often before mentioned, about fifteen miles distant; where he spent the sabbath, and preached with some considerable assistance. On Monday he returned, in a very weak state, to his own lodgings.

“Tuesday, April 30. Was scarce able to walk about, and was obliged to betake myself to bed much of the day; and spent away the time in a very solitary manner; being neither able to read, meditate, nor pray, and had none to converse with in that wilderness. Oh, how heavily does time pass away, when I can do nothing to any good purpose; but seem obliged to pass away precious time! But of late, I have seen it my duty to divert myself by all lawful means, that I may be fit, at least some small part of my time, to labour for God. And here is the difference between my present diversions, and those I once pursued,  when in a natural state. Then I made a god of diversions, delighted in them with a neglect of God, and drew my highest satisfaction from them: now I use them as means to help me in living to God; fixedly delighting in him, and not in them, drawing my highest satisfaction from him. Then they were my all; now they are only means leading to my all. And those things that are the greatest diversion when pursued with this view, do not tend to hinder but promote my spirituality; and I see now, more than ever, that they are absolutely necessary.

“Wednesday, May 1. Was not able to sit up more than half the day; and yet had such recruits of strength sometimes, that I was able to write a little on a divine subject. Was grieved that I could no more live to God. In the evening had some sweetness and intenseness in secret prayer.

“Thursday, May 2. In the evening, being a little better in health, I walked into the woods, and enjoyed a sweet season of meditation and prayer. My thoughts ran upon Ps. xvii. 15. ‘I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy likeness.’ And it was indeed a precious text to me. I longed to preach to the whole world; and it seemed to me, they must needs all be melted in hearing such precious divine truths, as I had then a view and relish of. My thoughts were exceeding clear, and my soul was refreshed. Blessed be the Lord, that in my late and present weakness, now for many days together, my mind is not gloomy, as at some other times.

“Friday, May 3. Felt a little vigour of body and mind in the morning; had some freedom, strength, and sweetness in prayer. Rode to, and spent some time with, my Indians. In the evening again retiring into the woods, I enjoyed some sweet meditations on Isa. liii. 1. ‘Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him,’ &c.”

The three next days were spent in much weakness of body: but yet he enjoyed some assistance in public and private duties; and seems to have remained free from melancholy.

“Tuesday, May 7. Spent the day mainly in making preparation for a journey into the wilderness. Was still weak, and concerned how I should perform so difficult a journey. Spent some time in prayer for the divine blessing, direction, and protection in my intended journey; but wanted bodily strength to spend the day in fasting and prayer.”

The next day he set out on his journey to Susquehannah, with his interpreter. He endured great hardships and fatigues in his way thither through a hideous wilderness; where after having lodged one night in the open woods, he was overtaken with a north-easterly storm, in which he was almost ready to perish. Having no manner of shelter, and not being able to make a fire in so great a rain, he could have no comfort if he stopt; therefore he determined to go forward in hopes of meeting with some shelter, without which he thought it impossible to live the night through; but their horses happening to have eat poison (for want of other food) at a place where they lodged the night before were so sick that they could neither ride nor lead them, but were obliged to drive them and travel on foot; until, through the mercy of God, just at dusk they came to a bark-but, where they lodged that night. After he came to Susquehannah, he travelled about a hundred miles on the river, and visited many towns and settlements of the Indians; saw some of seven or eight distinct tribes; and preached to different nations by different interpreters. He was sometimes much discouraged, and sunk in his spirits, through the opposition that appeared in the Indians to Christianity. At other times he was encouraged by the disposition that some of these people manifested to hear, and willingness to be instructed. He here met with some that had formerly been his hearers at Kaunaumeek, and had removed hither; who saw and heard him again with great joy. He spent a fortnight among the Indians on this river, and passed through considerable labours and hardships, frequently lodging on the ground, and sometimes in the open air; and at length he fell extremely ill, as he was riding in the wilderness, being seized with an ague, followed with a burning fever, and extreme pains in his head and bowels, attended with a great evacuation of blood; so that he thought he must have perished in the wilderness. But at last coming to an Indian trader’s hut, he got leave to stay there; and though without physic or food proper for him, it pleased God, after about a week’s distress, to relieve him so far that he was able to ride. He returned homewards from Juncauta, an island far down the river; where was a considerable number of Indians, who appeared more free from prejudices against Christianity, than most of the other Indians. He arrived at the Forks of Delaware on Thursday, May 30, after having rode in this journey about three hundred and forty miles.   He came home in a very weak state, and under dejection of mind; which was a great hinderance to him in religious exercises. However, on the sabbath, after having preached to the Indians, he preached to the white people with some success, from Isa. liii. 10. ‘Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him,’ &c. some being awakened by his preaching. The next day he was much exercised for want of spiritual life and fervency.

“Tuesday, June 4. Towards evening was in distress for God’s presence, and a sense of divine things: withdrew myself to the woods, and spent near an hour in prayer and meditation; and I think the Lord had compassion on me, and gave me some sense of divine things; which was indeed refreshing and quickening to me. My soul enjoyed intenseness and freedom in prayer, so that it grieved me to leave the place.

“Wednesday, June 5. Felt thirsting desires after God in the morning. In the evening enjoyed a precious season of retirement: was favoured with some clear and sweet meditations upon a sacred text; divine things opened with clearness and certainty, and had a divine stamp upon them. My soul was also enlarged and refreshed in prayer; and I delighted to continue in the duty; and was sweetly assisted in praying for fellow-Christians, and my dear brethren in the ministry. Blessed be the dear Lord for such enjoyments. O how sweet and precious it is, to have a clear apprehension and tender sense of the mystery of godliness, of true holiness, and likeness to the best of beings! O what a blessedness it is, to be as much like God, as it is possible for a creature to be like his great Creator! Lord, give me more of thy likeness; ‘I shall be satisfied, when I awake with it.’

Thursday, June 6. Was engaged a considerable part of the day in meditation and study on divine subjects. Enjoyed some special freedom, clearness, and sweetness in meditation. O how refreshing it is, to be enabled to improve time well!”

The next day he went a journey of near fifty miles to Neshaminy, to assist at a sacramental occasion, to he attended at Mr. Beaty’s meeting-house; being invited thither by him and his people.

“Saturday, June 8. Was exceeding weak and fatigued with riding in the heat yesterday: but being desired, I preached in the afternoon, to a crowded audience, from Isa. xl. 1. ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.’ God was pleased to give me great freedom, in opening the sorrows of God’s people, and in setting before them comforting considerations. And, blessed be the Lord, it was a sweet melting season in the assembly.

“Lord’s day, June 9. Felt some longing desires of the presence of God to be with his people on the solemn occasion of the day. In the forenoon Mr. Beaty preached; and there appeared some warmth in the assembly. Afterwards I assisted in the administration of the Lord’s supper: and towards the close of it, I discoursed to the multitude extempore, with some reference to that sacred passage, Isa. liii. 10. ‘Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him.’ Here God gave me great assistance in addressing sinners: and the word was attended with amazing power; many scores, if not hundreds, in that great assembly, consisting of three or four thousand, were much affected; so that there was a ‘very great mourning, like the mourning of Hadadrimmon.’ In the evening I could hardly look any body in the face, because of the imperfections I saw in my performances in the day past.

“Monday, June 10. Preached with a good degree of  clearness and some sweet warmth, from Psal. xvii. 15. ‘I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.’ And blessed be God, there was a great solemnity and attention in the assembly, and sweet refreshment among God’s people; as was evident then, and afterwards.

“Tuesday, June 11. Spent the day mainly in conversation with dear Christian friends; and enjoyed some sweet sense of divine things. O how desirable it is, to keep company with God’s dear children! These are the ‘excellent ones of the earth in whom,’ I can truly say, ‘is all my delight.’ O what delight will it afford, to meet them all in a state of perfection! Lord, prepare me for that state.”

The next day he left Mr. Beaty’s, and went to Maiden-head in New Jersey; and spent the next seven days in a comfortable state of mind, visiting several ministers in those parts.

“Tuesday, June 18. Set out from New Brunswick with a design to visit some Indians at a place called Crossweeksung in New Jersey, towards the sea.   In the afternoon, came to a place called Cranberry, and meeting with a serious minister, Mr. Macknight, I lodged there with him. Had some enlargement and freedom in prayer with a number of people.”

* * * * * * *

Part 7: From His Beginning To Preach At Crossweeksung Till He Returned Ill With The Consumption

FROM HIS BEGINNING TO PREACH TO THE INDIANS AT CROSSWEEKSUNG, TILL HE RETURNED FROM HIS LAST JOURNEY TO SUSQUEHANNAH ILL WITH THE CONSUMPTION WHEREOF HE DIED.

We are now come to that part of Mr. Brainerd’s life, wherein he had his greatest success, in his labours for the good of souls, and in his particular business as a missionary to the Indians. An account of which, if here published, would doubtless be very entertaining to the reader, after he has seen, by the preceding parts of this account of his life, how great and long-continued his desires for the spiritual good of this sort of people were; how he prayed, laboured, and wrestled, and how much he denied himself, and suffered, to this end. After all Mr. Brainerd’s agonizing in prayer, and travailing in birth, for the conversion of Indians, and all the interchanges of his raised hopes and expectations, and then disappointments and discouragements; and after waiting in a way of persevering prayer, labour, and suffering, as it were through a long night; at length the day dawns: “Weeping continues for a night, but joy comes in the morning. He went forth weeping, bearing precious seed, and now he comes with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.” The desired event is brought to pass at last; but at a time, in a place, and upon subjects, that scarce ever entered into his heart. An account of this would undoubtedly now much gratify the Christian reader: and it should have been here inserted, as it stands in his diary, had it not been, that a particular account of this glorious and wonderful success was drawn up by Mr. Brainerd himself, pursuant to the order of the Honourable Society in Scotland, and published by him in his lifetime. I hope those of my readers, who are not already possessed of his public Journal, will procure one of those books, that they may not be without that which in some respects is the most remarkable, and to a Christian mind would be the most pleasant part, of the whole story. That the reader who is furnished with one of those books, may know the place where the defects of this history are to be supplied from thence, I shall either expressly observe it as I go along, or else make a dash or stroke thus ; which when the reader finds in this 7th part of this history, he is to understand by it, that in that place something in Mr. Brainerd’s diary, worth observing, is left out, because the same for substance was published before in his printed Journal.†

“Wednesday, June 19, 1745. Rode to the Indians at Crossweeksung: found few at home; discoursed to them, however, and observed them very serious and attentive. At night I was extremely worn out, and scarce able to walk or sit up. Oh, how tiresome is earth! how dull the body!

“Thursday, June 20. Towards night preached to the Indians again; and had more hearers than before. In the evening enjoyed some peace and serenity of mind, some composure and comfort in prayer alone; and was enabled to lift up my head with some degree of joy, under an apprehension that my redemption draws nigh. Oh, blessed be God, that there remains a rest to his poor weary people!

“Friday, June 21. Rode to Freehold, to see Mr. William Tennent; and spent the day comfortably with him. My sinking spirits were a little raised and encouraged; and I felt my soul breathing after God, in the midst of Christian conversation. And in the evening, was refreshed in secret prayer; saw myself a poor worthless creature, without wisdom to direct, or strength to help myself. Oh, blessed be God, that lays me under a happy, a blessed necessity of living upon himself!

“Saturday, June 22. About noon rode to the Indians again; and near night preached to them. Found my body much strengthened, and was enabled to speak with abundant plainness and warmth. And the power of God evidently attended the word; so that sundry persons were brought under great concern for their souls, and made to shed many tears, and to wish for Christ to save them. My soul was much refreshed, and quickened in my work: and I could not but spend much time with them, in order to open both their misery and remedy. This was indeed a sweet afternoon to me. While riding, before I came to the Indians, my spirits were refreshed, and my soul enabled to cry to God almost incessantly, for many miles together. In the evening also I found the consolations of God were not small: I was then willing to live, and in some respects desirous of it, that I might do something for the dear kingdom of Christ; and yet death appeared pleasant: so that I was in some measure in a strait between two, having a desire to depart. I am often weary of this world, and want to leave it on that account; but it is desirable to be drawn, rather than driven, out of it.”

In the four next days is nothing remarkable in his diary, but what is in his public Journal.

Thursday, June 27. My soul rejoiced to find, that God enabled me to be faithful, and that he was pleased to awaken these poor Indians by my means. O how heart-reviving and soul-refreshing is it to me to see the fruit of my labours!

Friday, June 28. In the evening my soul was revived, and my heart lifted up to God in prayer, for my poor Indians, myself, and friends, and the dear church of God. And O how refreshing, how sweet was this! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not his goodness and tender mercy.

“Saturday, June 29. Preached twice to the Indians; and could not but wonder at their seriousness, and the strictness of their attention. Blessed be God that has inclined their hearts to hear. And O how refreshing it is to me, to see them attend with such uncommon diligence and affection, with tears in their eyes, and concern in their hearts! In the evening could not but lift up my heart to God in prayer, while riding to my lodgings; and blessed be his name, had assistance and freedom. O how much better than life is the presence of God!”

His diary gives an account of nothing remarkable on the two next days, besides what is in his public Journal; excepting his heart being lifted up with thankfulness, rejoicing in God, &c.

“Tuesday, July 2. Rode from the Indians to Brunswick, near forty miles, and lodged there. Felt my heart drawn  out after God in prayer, almost all the forenoon; especially while riding. And in the evening, could not help crying to God for those poor Indians; and after I went to bed, my heart continued to go out to God for them, till I dropped asleep. O blessed be God that I may pray!”

He was so fatigued by constant preaching to these Indians, yielding to their earnest and importunate desires, that he found it necessary to give himself some relaxation. He spent therefore about a week in New Jersey, after he left these Indians, visiting several ministers, and performing some necessary business, before he went to the Forks of Delaware. And though he was very weak in body, yet he seems to have been strong in spirit. On Friday, July 12, he arrived at his own house in the Forks of Delaware; continuing still free from melancholy; from day to day, enjoying freedom, assistance, and refreshment in the inner man. But on Wednesday, the next week, he seems to have had some melancholy thoughts about his doing so little for God, being so much hindered by weakness of body.

“Thursday, July 18. Longed to spend the little inch of time I have in the world more for God. Felt a spirit of seriousness, tenderness, sweetness, and devotion; and wished to spend the whole night in prayer and communion with God.

“Friday, July 19. In the evening walked abroad for prayer and meditation, and enjoyed composure and freedom in these sweet exercises; especially in meditation on Rev. iii. 12. ‘Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God,’ &c. This was then a delightful theme to me, and it refreshed my soul to dwell upon it. Oh, when shall I go no more out from the service and enjoyment of the dear Lord! Lord, hasten the blessed day.“

Within the space of the next six days he speaks of much inward refreshment and enlargement, from time to time.

“Friday, July 26. In the evening God was pleased to help me in prayer, beyond what I have experienced for some time; especially my soul was drawn out for the enlargement of Christ’s kingdom, and for the conversion of my poor people: and my soul relied on God for the accomplishment of that great work. Oh, how sweet were the thoughts of death to me at this time! Oh, how I longed to be with Christ, to be employed in the glorious work of angels, and with an angel’s freedom, vigour, and delight! And yet how willing was I to stay awhile on earth, that I might do something, if the Lord pleased, for his interest in the world! My soul, my very soul, longed for the ingathering of the poor heathen; and I cried to God for them most willingly and heartily; I could not but cry. This was a sweet season; for I had some lively taste of heaven, and a temper of mind suited in some measure to the employments and entertainments of it. My soul was grieved to leave the place; but my body was weak and worn out, and it was near nine o’clock. Oh, I longed that the remaining part of my life might be filled up with more fervency and activity in the things of God! Oh the inward peace, composure, and God-like serenity of such a frame! heaven must needs differ from this only in degree, and not in kind. Lord, ever give me this bread of life.“

Much of this frame seemed to continue the next day.

“Lord’s day, July 28. In the evening my soul was melted, and my heart broken, with a sense of past barrenness and deadness: and oh, how I then longed to live to God, and bring forth much fruit to his glory!

“Monday, July 29. Was much exercised with a sense of vileness, with guilt and shame before God.”

For other things remarkable, while he was this time at the Forks of Delaware, the reader must be referred to his public Journal. As particularly for his labours and success there among the Indians.

On Wednesday, July 31, he set out on his return to Crossweeksung, and arrived there the next day. In his way thither, he had longing desires that he might come to the Indians there, in the ‘fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ;’ attended with a sense of his own great weakness, dependence, and worthlessness.

“Friday, Aug. 2. In the evening I retired, and my soul was drawn out in prayer to God; especially for my poor people, to whom I had sent word that they might gather together, that I might preach to them the next day. I was much enlarged in praying for their saving conversion; and scarce ever found my desires of any thing of this nature so sensibly and clearly (to my own satisfaction) disinterested, and free from selfish views. It seemed to me I had no care, or hardly any desire, to be the instrument of so glorious a work, as I wished and prayed for among the Indians: if the blessed work might be accomplished to the honour of God, and the enlargement of the dear Redeemer’s kingdom, this was all my desire and care; and for this mercy I hoped, but with trembling; for I felt what Job expresses, chap. ix. 16. ‘If I had called, and he had answered,’ &c. My rising hopes, respecting the conversion of the Indians, have been so often dashed, that my spirit is as it were broken, and courage wasted, and I hardly dare hope.”

Concerning his labours and marvellous success amongst the Indians, for the following ten days, let the reader see his public Journal. The things worthy of note in his diary, not there published, are his earnest and importunate prayers for the Indians, and the travail of his soul for them from day to day; and his great refreshment and joy in beholding the wonderful mercy of God, and the glorious manifestations of his power and grace in his work among them; and his ardent thanksgivings to God; his heart rejoicing in Christ, as King of his church, and King of his soul: in particular, at the sacrament of the Lord’s supper at Mr. Macknight’s meeting-house; together with a sense of his own exceeding unworthiness, which sometimes was attended with dejection and melancholy.

“Monday, Aug. 19. Near noon, I rode to Freehold, and preached to a considerable assembly, from Matt. v. 3. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ &c. It pleased God to leave me to be very dry and barren; so that I do not remember to have been so straitened for a whole twelve-month past. God is just, and he has made my soul acquiesce in his will in this regard. It is contrary to flesh and blood, to be cut off from all freedom, in a large auditory, where their expectations were much raised: but so it was with me; and God helped me to say Amen to it; ‘Good is the will of the Lord.’ In the evening I felt quiet and composed, and had freedom and comfort in secret prayer.

Tuesday, Aug. 20. Was composed and comfortable, still in a resigned frame. Travelled from Mr. Tennent’s in Freehold to Elizabeth-town. Was refreshed to see friends, and relate to them what God had done, and was still doing, among my poor people.

Wednesday, Aug. 21. Spent the forenoon in conversation with Mr. Dickinson, contriving something for the settlement of the Indians together in a body, that they might be under better advantages for instruction. In the afternoon spent time agreeably with other friends; wrote to my brother at college: but was grieved that time slid away, while I did so little for God.

“Friday, Aug. 23. In the morning was very weak; but favoured with some freedom and sweetness in prayer: was composed and comfortable in mind. After noon rode to Crossweeksung to my poor people.

“Saturday, Aug. 24. Had composure and peace, while riding from the Indians to my lodgings: was enabled to pour out my soul to God for dear friends in New England. Felt a sweet tender frame of spirit: my soul was composed and refreshed in God. Had likewise freedom and earnestness in praying for my dear people: blessed be God. ‘O the peace of God that passeth all understanding!’ It is impossible to describe time sweet peace of conscience, and tenderness of soul, I then enjoyed. O the blessed foretastes of heaven!

“Lord’s day, Aug. 25. I rode to my lodgings in the evening, blessing the Lord for his gracious visitation of the Indians, and the soul-refreshing things I had seen time day past amongst them, and praying that God would still carry on his divine work among them.

“Monday, Aug. 26. I went from the Indians to my lodgings, rejoicing for the goodness of God to my poor people; and enjoyed freedom of soul in prayer, and other duties, in the evening. Bless the Lord, O my soul.“

The next day he set out on a journey towards the Forks of Delaware, designing to go from thence to Susquehannah, before he returned to Crossweeksung. It was five days  from his departure from Crossweeksung, before he reached the Forks, going round by the way of Philadelphia, and waiting on the governor of Pennsylvania, to get a recommendation from him to the chiefs of the Indians; which he obtained. He speaks of much comfort and spiritual refreshment in this journey; and also a sense of his exceeding unworthiness, thinking himself the meanest creature that ever lived.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 1. [At the Forks of Delaware] God gave me the spirit of prayer, and it was a blessed season in that respect. My soul cried to God for mercy, in an affectionate manner. In the evening also my soul rejoiced in God.”

His private diary has nothing remarkable, for the two next days, but what is in his public Journal.

“Wednesday, Sept. 4. Rode fifteen miles to an Irish settlement, and preached there from Luke xiv. 22. ‘And yet there is room.’ God was pleased to afford me some tenderness and enlargement in the first prayer, and much freedom, as well as warmth, in sermon. There were many tears in the assembly: the people of God seemed to melt, and others to be in some measure awakened. Blessed be the Lord, that lets me see his work going on in one place and another.”

The account for Thursday is the same for substance as in his public Journal.

“Friday, Sept. 6. Enjoyed some freedom and intenseness of mind in prayer alone; and longed to have my soul more warmed with divine and heavenly things. Was somewhat melancholy towards night, and longed to die and quit a scene of sin and darkness; but was a little supported in prayer.”

This melancholy continued the next day.

Lord’s day, Sept. 8. In the evening God was pleased to enlarge me in prayer, and give me freedom at the throne of grace. I cried to God for the enlargement of his kingdom in the world, and in particular among my dear people; was also enabled to pray for many dear ministers of my acquaintance, both in these parts and in New England; and also for other dear friends in New England. And my soul was so engaged and enlarged in the sweet exercise, that I spent near an hour in it, and knew not how to leave the mercy-seat. Oh, how I delighted to pray and cry to God! I saw God was both able and willing to do all that I desired, for myself and friends, and his church in general. I was likewise much enlarged and assisted in family prayer, And afterwards, when I was just going to bed, God helped me to renew my petitions with ardency and freedom. Oh, it was to me a blessed evening of prayer! Bless the Lord, O my soul.”

The next day he set out from the Forks of Delaware to go to Susquehannah. And on the fifth day of his journey he arrived at Shaumoking, a large Indian town on Susquehannah river. He performed the journey under a considerable degree of melancholy.

“Saturday, Sept. 14. [At Shaumoking] In the evening my soul was enlarged and sweetly engaged in prayer; especially that God would set up his kingdom in this place, where the devil now reigns in the most eminent manner. And I was enabled to ask this for God, for his glory, and because I longed for the enlargement of his kingdom, to the honour of his dear name. I could appeal to God with the greatest freedom, that he knew it was his dear cause, and not my own, that engaged my heart: and my soul cried, ‘Lord, set up thy kingdom, for thine own glory. Glorify thyself; and I shall rejoice. Get honour to thy blessed name; and this is all I desire. Do with me just what thou wilt. Blessed be thy name for ever, that thou art God, and that thou wilt glorify thyself. O that the whole world might glorify thee! O let these poor people be brought to know thee, and love thee, for the glory of thy dear ever-blessed name!” I could not but hope, that God would bring in these miserable, wicked Indians; though there appeared little human probability of it; for they were then dancing and revelling, as if possessed by the devil. But yet I hoped, though against hope, that God would be glorified, and that his name would be glorified by these poor Indians. I continued long in prayer and praise to God; and had great freedom, enlargement, and sweetness, remembering dear friends in New England, as well as the people of my charge. Was entirely free from that dejection of spirit with which I am frequently exercised. Blessed be God!”

His diary from this time to Sept. 22, (the last day of his continuance among the Indians at Susquehannah,) is not legible, by reason of the badness of the ink. It was probably written with the juice of some berries found in the woods, having no other ink in that wilderness. So that for this space of time the reader must be wholly referred to his public Journal.

On Monday Sept. 23, he left the Indians, in order to return to the Forks of Delaware, in a very weak state of body, and under dejection of mind, which continued the two first days of his journey.

“Wednesday, Sept. 25. Rode still homeward. In the forenoon enjoyed freedom and intenseness of mind in meditation on Job xlii. 5, 6. ‘I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee: wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.’ The Lord gave me clearness to penetrate into the sweet truths contained in that text. It was a comfortable and sweet season to me.

“Thursday, Sept. 26. Was still much disordered in body, and able to ride but slowly. Continued my journey, however. Near night, arrived at the Irish settlement, about fifteen miles from mine own house. This day, while riding, I was much exercised with a sense of my barrenness; and verily thought there was no creature that had any true grace, but what was more spiritual and fruitful. I could not think that any of God’s children made so poor a hand of living to God.

“Friday, Sept. 27. Spent a considerable time in the morning in prayer and praise to God. My mind was somewhat intense in the duty, and my heart in some degree warmed with a sense of divine things. My soul was melted to think that ‘God had accounted me faithful, putting me into the ministry,’ notwithstanding all my barrenness and deadness. My soul was also in some measure enlarged in prayer for the dear people of my charge, as well as for other dear friends. In the afternoon visited some Christian friends, and spent the time, I think, profitably: my heart was warmed, and more engaged in the things of God. In the evening I enjoyed enlargement, warmth, and comfort in prayer: my soul relied on God for assistance and grace to enable me to do something in his cause; my heart was drawn out in thankfulness to God for what he had done for his own glory among my poor people of late. I felt encouraged to proceed in his work, being persuaded of his power, and hoping his arm might be further revealed, for the enlargement of his dear kingdom: and my soul ‘rejoiced in hope of the glory of God,’ in hope of the advancement of his declarative glory in the world, as well as of enjoying him in a world of glory. Oh, blessed be God, the living God, for ever!”

He continued in this comfortable, sweet frame of mind the two next days. On the day following he went to his own house, in the Forks of Delaware, and continued still in the same frame. The next day, which was Tuesday, he visited his Indians. Wednesday he spent mostly in writing the meditations he had in his late journey in Susquehannah. On Thursday he left the Forks of’ Delaware, and travelled towards Crossweeksung, where he arrived on Saturday, (October 5,) and continued from day to day in a comfortable state of mind. There is nothing material in his diary for this day and the next, but what is in his printed Journal.

Monday, Oct. 7. Being called by the church and people of East Hampton on Long Island, as a member of a council, to assist and advise in affairs of difficulty in that church, I set out on my journey this morning, before it was well light, and travelled to Elizabeth-town, and there lodged. Enjoyed some comfort on the road, in conversation with Mr. Wm. Tennent, who was sent for on the same business.”

He prosecuted his journey with the other ministers who were sent for; and did not return till Oct. 24. While he was at East Hampton, the importance of the business that the council were come upon, lay with such weight on his mind, and he was so concerned for the interest of religion in that place, that he slept but little for several nights successively. In his way to and fro from East Hampton, he  had several seasons of sweet refreshment, wherein his soul was enlarged and comforted with divine consolations, in secret retirement; and he had special assistance in public ministerial performances in the house of God: and yet, at the same time, a sense of extreme vileness and unprofitableness. From time to time he speaks of soul-refreshment and comfort in conversation with the ministers that travelled with him; and seems to have little or nothing of melancholy, till he came to the west end of Long Island, in his return. After that he was oppressed with dejection and gloominess of mind, for several days together. For an account of the four first days after his return from his journey, I refer the reader to his public Journal.

“Monday, Oct. 28. Had an evening of sweet refreshing; my thoughts were raised to a blessed eternity; my soul was melted with desires of perfect holiness, and perfectly glorifying God.

“Tuesday, Oct. 29. About noon rode and viewed the Indian lands at Cranberry: was much dejected, and greatly perplexed in mind; knew not how to see any body again, my soul was so sunk within me. Oh that these trials might make me more humble and holy. Oh that God would keep me from giving way to sinful dejection, which may hinder my usefulness.

“Wednesday, Oct. 30. My soul was refreshed with a view of the continuance of God’s blessed work among the Indians.

“Thursday, Oct. 31. Spent most of the day in writing: enjoyed not much spiritual comfort; but was not so much sunk with melancholy as at some other times.”

“Friday, Nov. 1. See the public Journal.

“Saturday, Nov. 2. Spent the day with the Indians, and wrote some things of importance; and longed to do more for God than I did or could do in this present and imperfect state.”

Nov. 3, and 4. See the public Journal. Tuesday, Nov. 5. He left the Indians, and spent the remaining part of this week in travelling to various parts of New Jersey, in order to get a collection for the use of the Indians, and to obtain a schoolmaster to instruct them. And in the mean time he speaks of very sweet refreshment and entertainment with Christian friends, and of his being sweetly employed, while riding, in meditation on divine subjects; his heart being enlarged, his mind clear, his spirit refreshed with divine truths, and his “heart burning within him, while he went by the way and the Lord opened to him the Scriptures.”

“Lord’s day, Nov. 10. [At Elizabeth-town.] Was comfortable in the morning, both in body and mind: preached in the forenoon from 2 Cor. v. 20. ‘Now then we are ambassadors for Christ,’ &c. God was pleased to give me freedom and fervency in my discourse; and the presence of God seemed to be in the assembly; numbers were affected, and there were many tears among them. In the afternoon preached from Luke xiv. 22. ‘And yet there is room.’ Was favoured with divine assistance in the first prayer, and poured out my soul to God with a filial temper of mind; the living God also assisted me in the sermon.”

The next day he went to New-town on Long Island, to a meeting of the Presbytery. He speaks of some sweet meditations he had while there, on “Christ delivering up the kingdom to the Father;” and of his soul being much refreshed and warmed with the consideration of that blissful day.

“Friday, Nov. 15. Could not cross the ferry by reason of the violence of the wind; nor could I enjoy any place of retirement at the ferry-house; so that I was in perplexity. Yet God gave me some satisfaction and sweetness in meditation, and in lifting up my heart to him in the midst of company. And although some were drinking and talking profanely, which was indeed a grief to me, yet my mind was calm and composed. And I could not but bless God, that I was not like to spend an eternity in such company. In the evening I sat down and wrote with composure and freedom; and can say (through pure grace) it was a comfortable evening to my soul, an evening I was enabled to spend in the service of God.

“Saturday, Nov. 16. Crossed the ferry about ten o’clock; arrived at Elizabeth-town near night. Was in a calm, composed frame of mind, and felt an entire resignation with respect to a loss I had lately sustained, in having my horse stolen from me the last Wednesday night, at New-town. Had some longings of soul for the dear people of Elizabeth-town, that God would pour out his Spirit upon them, and revive his work amongst them.”

He spent the four next days at Elizabeth-town, for the most part in a free and comfortable state of mind, intensely engaged in the service of God, and enjoying, at some times, the special assistances of his Spirit. On Thursday, this week, he rode to Freehold, and spent the day under considerable dejection.

“Friday, Nov. 22. Rode to Mr. Tennent’s, and from thence to Crossweeksung. Had but little freedom in meditation, while riding; which was a grief and burden to my soul. Oh that I could fill up all my time, whether in the house or by the way, for God! I was enabled, I think, this day to give up my soul to God, and put over all my concerns into his hands; and found some real consolation in the thought of being entirely at the divine disposal, and having no will or interest of my own. I have received my all from God; oh that I could return my all to God! Surely God is worthy of my highest affection, and most devout adoration; he is infinitely worthy, that I should make him my last end, and live for ever to him. Oh that I might never more, in any one instance, live to myself!

“Saturday, Nov. 23. Visited my people; spent the day with them: wrote some things of importance. But was pretty much dejected most of the day.”

There is nothing very material in his diary for the four next days, but what is also in his public Journal.

“Thursday, Nov. 28. I enjoyed some divine comfort and fervency in the public exercise, and afterwards. And while riding to my lodgings, was favoured with some sweet meditations on Luke ix. 31. ‘Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease, which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.’ My thoughts ran with freedom, and I saw and felt what a glorious subject the death of CHRIST is for glorified souls to dwell upon in their conversation. Oh, the death of CHRIST! how infinitely precious!”

For the three next days, see the public Journal.

“Monday, Dec. 2. Was much affected with grief, that I had not lived more to God; and felt strong resolutions to double my diligence in my Master’s service.”

After this he went to a meeting of the Presbytery at a place in New Jersey called Connecticut-Farms; which occasioned his absence from his people the remainder of this week. He speaks of some seasons of sweetness, solemnity, and spiritual affection in his absence. Lord’s day, Dec. 8. See his public Journal.

“Monday, Dec. 9. Spent most of the day in procuring provisions, in order to my setting up house-keeping among the Indians. Enjoyed little satisfaction through the day, being very much out of my element.

“Tuesday, Dec. 10. Was engaged in the same business as yesterday. Towards night, got into my own house.

“Wednesday, Dec. 11. Spent the forenoon in necessary labour about my house. In the afternoon, rode out upon business, and spent the evening with some satisfaction among friends in conversation on a serious and profitable subject.”

Thursday, Dec. 12. See his public Journal.

“Friday, Dec. 13. Spent the day mainly in labour about my house. In the evening, spent some time in writing; but was very weary, and much outdone with the labour of the day.

“Saturday, Dec. 14. Rose early, and wrote by candlelight some considerable time: spent most of the day in writing; but was somewhat dejected. In the evening was exercised with a pain in my head.”

For the two next days see his public Journal. The remainder of this week he spent chiefly in writing: some part of the time under a degree of melancholy; but some part of it with a sweet ardency in religion.

“Saturday, Dec. 21. After my labours with the Indians, I spent some time in writing some things divine and solemn; and was much wearied with the labours of the day; found that my spirits were extremely spent, and that I could do no more. I am conscious to myself that my labours are as great and constant as my nature will bear, and that ordinarily I go to the extent of my strength; so that I do all I can: but the misery is, I do not labour with that heavenly temper, that single eye to the glory of God, that I long for.”

Lord’s day, Dec. 22. See the public Journal.

“Monday and Tuesday, Dec. 23 and 24. Spent these days in writing, with the utmost diligence. Felt in the main a sweet mortification to the world, and a desire to live and labour only for God; but wanted more warmth and spirituality, a more sensible and affectionate regard to the glory of God.”

Wednesday, Dec. 25. See the public Journal.

“Thursday and Friday, Dec. 26 and 27. Laboured in my studies, to the utmost of my strength; and though I felt a steady disposition of mind to live to God, and that I had nothing in this world to live for; yet I did not find that sensible affection in the service of God, that I wanted to have; my heart seemed barren, though my head and hands were full of labour.”

For the four next days see his public Journal.

“Wednesday, Jan. 1, 1746. I am this day beginning a new year; and God has carried me through numerous trials and labours in the past. He has amazingly supported my feeble frame; for ‘having obtained help of God, I continue to this day.’ O that I might live nearer to God this year than I did the last! The business to which I have been called, and which I have been enabled to go through, I know, has been as great as nature could bear up under, and what would have sunk and overcome me quite, without special support. But alas, alas! though I have done the labours, and endured the trials, with what spirit have I done the one, and borne the other? how cold has been the frame of my heart oftentimes! and how little have I sensibly eyed the glory of God, in all my doings and sufferings! I have found that I could have no peace without filling up all my time with labours; and thus ‘necessity has been laid upon me;’ yea, in that respect, I have loved to labour: but the misery is, I could not sensibly labour for God, as I would have done. May I for the future be enabled more sensibly to make the glory of God my all!”

For the space from this time till the next Monday, see the public Journal.

“Monday, Jan. 6. Being very weak in body, I rode for my health. While riding, my thoughts were sweetly engaged, for a time, upon ‘the stone cut out of the mountain without hands, which brake in pieces’ all before it, and ‘waxed great, and became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth;’ and I longed that Jesus should ‘take to himself his great power, and reign to the ends of the earth.’ And oh, how sweet were the moments, wherein I felt my soul warm with hopes of the enlargement of the Redeemer’s kingdom! I wanted nothing else but that Christ should reign, to the glory of his blessed name.”

The next day he complains of want of fervency.

“Wednesday, Jan. 8. In the evening my heart was drawn out after God in secret: my soul was refreshed and quickened; and, I trust, faith was in exercise. I had great hopes of the ingathering of precious souls to Christ; not only among my own people, but others also. I was sweetly resigned and composed under my bodily weakness; and was willing to live or die, and desirous to labour for God to the utmost of my strength.

“Thursday, Jan. 9. Was still very weak, and much exercised with vapoury disorders. In the evening enjoyed some enlargement and spirituality in prayer. Oh that I could always spend my time profitably, both in health and weakness!

“Friday, Jan. 10. My soul was in a sweet, calm, composed frame, and my heart filled with love to all the world; and Christian simplicity and tenderness seemed then to prevail and reign within me. Near night visited a serious baptist minister, and had some agreeable conversation with him; and found that I could taste God in friends.”

For the four next days see the public Journal.

“Wednesday, Jan. 15. My spirits were very low and flat, and I could not but think I was a burden to God’s earth; and could scarcely look any body in the face, through shame and sense of barrenness. God pity a poor unprofitable creature!”

The two next days he had some comfort and refreshment. For the two following days see the public Journal. The next day he set out on a journey to Elizabeth-town, to confer with the Correspondents, at their meeting there; and enjoyed much spiritual refreshment from day to day, through this week. The things expressed in this space of time, are such as these; serenity, composure, sweetness, and tenderness of soul; thanksgiving to God for his success among the Indians; delight in prayer and praise; sweet and profitable meditations on various divine subjects; longing for more love, for more vigour to live to God, for a life more entirely devoted to him, that he might spend all his time profitably for God and in his cause; conversing on spiritual subjects with affection; and lamentation for unprofitableness.

“Lord’s day, Jan. 26. [At Connecticut-Farms.] Was calm and composed. Was made sensible of my utter inability to preach without divine help; and was in some good measure willing to leave it with God, to give or withhold assistance, as he saw would be most for his own glory. Was favoured with a considerable degree of assistance in my public work. After public worship, I was in a sweet and solemn frame of mind, thankful to God that he had made me in some measure faithful in addressing precious souls, but grieved that I had been no more fervent in my work; and was tenderly affected towards all the world, longing that every sinner might be saved; and could not have entertained any bitterness towards the worst enemy living. In the evening rode to Elizabeth-town: while riding was almost constantly engaged in lifting up my heart to God, lest I should lose that sweet heavenly solemnity and composure of soul I then enjoyed. Afterwards was pleased to think that God reigneth; and thought I could never be uneasy with any of his dispensations; but must be entirely satisfied, whatever trials he should cause me or his church to encounter. Never felt more sedateness, divine serenity, and composure of mind; could freely have left the dearest earthly friend, for the society of ‘angels, and spirits of just men made perfect:’ my affections soared aloft to the blessed Author of every dear enjoyment. I viewed the emptiness and unsatisfactory nature of the most desirable earthly objects, any further than God is seen in them: and longed for a life of spirituality and inward purity; without which, I saw, there could be no true pleasure.”

He retained a great degree of this excellent frame of mind the four next days. As to his public services for and among the Indians, and his success at this time, see the public Journal.

“Saturday, Feb. 1. Towards night enjoyed some of the clearest thoughts on a divine subject, (viz. that treated of 1 Cor. xv. 13 16. ‘But if there be no resurrection of the dead,’ &c.) that ever I remember to have had upon any subject whatsoever; and spent two or three hours in writing them. I was refreshed with this intenseness: my mind was so engaged in these meditations, I could scarcely turn it to any thing else; and indeed I could not be willing to part with so sweet an entertainment.

“Lord’s day, Feb. 2. After public worship, my bodily strength being much spent, my spirits sunk amazingly; and especially on hearing that I was so generally taken to be a Roman catholic, sent by the papists to draw the Indians into an insurrection against the English, that some were in fear of me, and others were for having me taken up by authority and punished. Alas, what will not the devil do to bring a slur and disgrace on the work of God! Oh, how holy and circumspect had I need to be! Through divine goodness, I have been enabled to  ’mind my own business,’ in these parts, as well as elsewhere; and to let all men, and all denominations of men, alone, as to their party notions; and only preached the plain and necessary truths of Christianity, neither inviting to, nor excluding from, my meeting any, of any sort or persuasion whatsoever. Towards night the Lord gave me freedom at the throne of grace, in my first prayer before my catechetical lecture: and in opening the 46th Psalm to my people, my soul confided in God, although the wicked world should slander and persecute me, or even condemn and execute me as a traitor to my king and country. Truly God is a ‘present help in time of trouble.’ In the evening my soul was in some measure comforted, having some hope that one poor soul was brought home to God this day; though the case did by no means appear clear. Oh that I could fill up every moment of time, during my abode here below, in the service of my God and King.

“Monday, Feb. 3. My spirits were still much sunk with what I heard the day before, of my being suspected to be engaged in the Pretender’s interest: it grieved me, that after there had been so much evidence of a glorious work of grace among these poor Indians, as that the most carnal men could not but take notice of the great change made among them, so many poor souls should still suspect the whole to be only a popish plot, and so cast an awful reproach on this blessed work of the divine Spirit; and at the time wholly exclude themselves from receiving any benefit by this divine influence. This put me upon searching whether I had ever dropped any thing inadvertently, that might give occasion to any to suspect that I was stirring up the Indians against the English: and could think of nothing, unless it was my attempting sometimes to vindicate the rights of the Indians, and complaining of the horrid practice of making the Indians drunk, and then cheating them out of their lands and other properties: and once, I remembered, I had done this with too much warmth of spirit, which much distressed me; thinking that it might possibly prejudice them against this work of grace, to their everlasting destruction. God, I believe, did me good by this trial; which served to humble me, and show me the necessity of watchfulness, and of being ‘wise as a serpent,’ as well as ‘harmless as a dove.’ This exercise led me often to the throne of grace; and there I found some support; though I could not get the burden wholly removed. Was assisted in prayer, especially in the evening.”

He remained still under a degree of exercise of mind about this affair; which continued to have the same effect upon him, to cause him to reflect upon, and humble himself, and frequent the throne of grace: but soon found himself much more relieved and supported. He was, this week, in an extremely weak state, and obliged (as he expresses it) “to consume considerable time in diversions for his health.” For Saturday, Feb. 7. and the sabbath following, see his public Journal.

The Monday after he set out on a journey to the Forks of Delaware, to visit the Indians there. He performed the journey under great weakness, and sometimes was exercised with much pain; but says nothing of dejection and melancholy. He arrived at his own house at the Forks on Friday. The things appertaining to his inward frames and exercises, expressed within this week, are, sweet composure of mind; thankfulness to God for his mercies to him and others; resignation to the divine will; comfort in prayer and religious conversation; his heart drawn out after God, and affected with a sense of his own barrenness, as well as the fulness and freeness of divine grace.

“Lord’s day, Feb. 16 In the evening was in a sweet composed flame of mind. It was exceeding refreshing and comfortable to think that God had been with me, affording me some good measure of assistance. I then found freedom and sweetness in prayer and thanksgiving to God; and found my soul sweetly engaged and enlarged in prayer for dear friends and acquaintance. Blessed be the name of the Lord, that ever I am enabled to do any thing for his dear interest and kingdom. Blessed be God who enables me to he faithful. Enjoyed more resolution and courage for God, and more refreshment of spirit, than I have been favoured with for many weeks past.

“Monday, Feb. 17. I was refreshed and encouraged: found a spirit of prayer, in the evening, and earnest longings for the illumination and conversion of these poor Indians.”

Tuesday, Feb. 18. See the public Journal.

“Wednesday, Feb. 19. My heart was comforted and refreshed, and my soul filled with longings for the conversion of the Indians here.

“Thursday, Feb. 20. God was pleased to support and refresh my spirits, by affording me assistance this day, and so hopeful a prospect of success. I returned home rejoicing and blessing the name of the Lord; found freedom and sweetness afterwards in secret prayer, and had my soul drawn out for dear friends. Oh, how blessed a thing is it, to labour for God faithfully, and with encouragement of success! Blessed be the Lord for ever and ever, for the assistance and comfort granted this day.

“Friday, Feb. 21. My soul was refreshed and comforted, and I could not but bless God, who had enabled me in some good measure to be faithful in the day past. Oh, how sweet it is to be spent and worn out for God!

“Saturday, Feb. 22. My spirits were much supported, though my bodily strength was much wasted. Oh that God would be gracious to the souls of these poor Indians!

“God has been very gracious to me this week: he has enabled me to preach every day; and has given me some assistance, and encouraging prospect of success in almost every sermon. Blessed be his name. Divers of the white people have been awakened this week, and sundry of the Indians much cured of prejudices and jealousies they had conceived against Christianity, and some seem to be really awakened.”

Lord’s day, Feb. 23. See the public Journal. The next day, he left the Forks of Delaware, to return to Crossweeksung; and spent the whole week till Saturday, before he arrived there; but preached by the way every day, excepting one; and was several times greatly assisted; and had much inward comfort, and earnest longings to fill up all his time in the service of God. He utters such expressions as these, after preaching: “Oh that I may be enabled to plead the cause of God faithfully, to my dying moment! Oh how sweet it would be to spend myself wholly for God, and in his cause, and to be freed from selfish motives in my labours.”

For Saturday and Lord’s day, March 1 and 2, see the public Journal. The four next days were spent in great bodily weakness; but he speaks of some seasons of considerable inward comfort.

“Thursday, March 6. I walked alone in the evening, and enjoyed sweetness and comfort in prayer, beyond what I have of late enjoyed: my soul rejoiced in my pilgrimage state, and I was delighted with the thoughts of labouring and enduring hardness for God: felt some longing desires to preach the gospel to dear immortal souls; and confided in God, that he would be with me in my work, and that he ‘never would leave nor forsake me,’ to the end of my race. Oh, may I obtain mercy of God to be faithful to my dying moment!

“Friday, March 7. In the afternoon went on in my work with freedom and cheerfulness, God assisting me; and enjoyed comfort in the evening.”

For the two next days see the public Journal.

“Monday, March 10. My soul was refreshed with freedom and enlargement; and I hope, the lively exercise of faith, in secret prayer, this night; my will was sweetly resigned to the divine will, and my hopes respecting the enlargement of the dear kingdom of Christ somewhat raised, and could commit Zion’s cause to God as his own.”

On Tuesday he speaks of some sweetness and spirituality in Christian conversation. On Wednesday complains that he enjoyed not much comfort and satisfaction, through the day, because he did but little for God. On Thursday, spent considerable time in company, on a special occasion; but in perplexity, because without savoury religious conversation. For Friday, Saturday, and Lord’s day, see the public Journal.

In the former part of the week following he was very ill; and also under great dejection; being, as he apprehended, rendered unserviceable by illness, and fearing that  he should never be serviceable any more; and therefore exceedingly longed for death. But afterwards was more encouraged, and life appeared more desirable, because, as he says, he “had a little dawn of hope, that he might be useful in the world.” In the latter part of the week he was in some measure relieved of his illness, in the use of means prescribed by a physician. For Saturday and Lord’s day, March 22 and 23, see his public Journal.

“Monday, March 24. After the Indians were gone to their work, to clear their lands, I got alone, and poured out my soul to God, that he would smile upon these feeble beginnings, and that he would settle an Indian town, that might be a mountain of holiness; and found my soul much refreshed in these petitions, and much enlarged for Zion’s interest, and for numbers of dear friends in particular. My sinking spirits were revived and raised, and I felt animated in the service God has called me to. This was the dearest hour I have enjoyed for many days, if not weeks. I found an encouraging hope, that something would be done for God, and that God would use and help me in his work. And oh, how sweet were the thoughts of labouring for God, when I felt any spirit and courage, and had any hope that ever I should be succeeded!”

The next day his schoolmaster was taken sick with a pleurisy; and he spent great part of the remainder of this week in attending him: which in his weak state was almost an overbearing burden; he being obliged constantly to wait upon him, from day to day, and to lie on the floor at night. His spirits sunk in a considerable degree, with his bodily strength, under this burden. For Saturday and Lord’s day, March 29 and 30, see the public Journal.

“Monday, March 31. Towards night enjoyed some sweet meditations on those words: ‘It is good for me to draw near to God.’ My soul, I think, had some sweet sense of what is intended in those words.”

The next day he was extremely busy in tending the schoolmaster, and in some other necessary affairs, that greatly diverted him from what he looked upon as his proper business: but yet speaks of comfort and refreshment at some times of the day.

“Wednesday, April 2. Was somewhat exercised with a spiritless frame of mind; but was a little relieved and refreshed in the evening with meditation alone in the woods. But, alas! my days pass away as the chaff! it is but little I do, or can do, that turns to any account; and it is my constant misery and burden, that I am so fruitless in the vineyard of the Lord. Oh that I were spirit, that I might be active for God. This, (I think,) more than any thing else, makes me long, that ‘this corruptible might put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.’ God deliver me from clogs, fetters, and a body of death, that impede my service for him.”

The next day he complains bitterly of some exercises by corruption he found in his own heart.

“Friday, April 4. Spent most of the day in writing on Rev. xxii. 17. ‘And whosoever will,’ &c. Enjoyed some freedom and encouragement in my work; and found some comfort in prayer.

“Saturday, April 5. After public worship a number of my dear Christian Indians came to my house; with whom I felt a sweet union of soul. My heart was knit to them; and I cannot say I have felt such a sweet and fervent lure to the brethren for some time past; and I saw in them appearances of the same love. This gave me something of a view of the heavenly state; and particularly that part of the happiness of heaven, which consists in the communion of saints: and this was affecting to me.”

For the two next days see the public Journal. On Tuesday he went to a meeting of the Presbytery appointed at Elizabeth-town. In his way thither he enjoyed some sweet meditations; but after he came there he was (as he expresses it) very vapoury and melancholy, and under an awful gloom, that oppressed his mind. And this continued till Saturday evening, when he began to have some relief and encouragement. He spent the sabbath at Staten-Island; where he preached to an assembly of Dutch and English, and enjoyed considerable refreshment and comfort, both in public and private. In the evening he returned to Elizabeth-town.

“Monday, April 14. My spirits this day were raised and refreshed, and my mind composed, so that I was in a comfortable frame of soul most of the day. In the evening my head was clear, my mind serene; I enjoyed sweetness in secret prayer, and meditation on Ps. lxxiii. 28. ‘But it is good for me to draw near to God,’ &c. Oh, how free, how comfortable, cheerful, and yet solemn, do I feel when I am in a good measure freed from those damps and melancholy glooms, that I often labour under! And blessed be the Lord, I find myself relieved in this respect.

“Tuesday, April 15. My soul longed for more spirituality; and it was my burden, that I could do no more for God. Oh, my barrenness is my daily affliction and heavy load! Oh, how precious is time: and how it pains me, to see it slide away, while I do so very little to any good purpose! Oh that God would make me more fruitful and spiritual.“

The next day he speaks of his being almost overwhelmed with vapoury disorders; but yet not so as wholly to destroy the composure of his mind.

“Thursday, April 17. Enjoyed some comfort in prayer, some freedom in meditation, and composure in my studies. Spent some time in writing in the forenoon. In the afternoon spent some time in conversation with several dear ministers. In the evening preached from Ps. lxxiii. 28. ‘But it is good for me to draw near to God.’ God helped me to feel the truth of my text, both in the first prayer and in sermon. I was enabled to pour out my soul to God, with great freedom, fervency, and affection; and blessed be the Lord, it was a comfortable season to me. I was enabled to speak with tenderness, and yet with faithfulness; and divine truths seemed to fall with weight and influence upon the hearers. My heart was melted for the dear assembly, and I loved every body in it; and scarce ever felt more love to immortal souls in my life: my soul cried, ‘Oh that the dear creatures might be saved! O that God would have mercy on them!’”

He seems to have been in a very comfortable frame of mind the two next days.

“Lord’s day, April 20.   Enjoyed some freedom, and, I hope, exercise of faith in prayer, in the morning; especially when I came to pray for Zion. I was free from that gloomy discouragement that so often oppresses my mind; and my soul rejoiced in the hopes of Zion’s prosperity, and the enlargement of the dear kingdom of the great Redeemer. Oh that his kingdom might come.

“Monday, April 21. Was composed and comfortable in mind most of the day; and was mercifully freed from those gloomy damps that I am frequently exercised with. Had freedom and comfort in prayer several times; and especially had some rising hopes of Zion’s enlargement and prosperity. Oh, how refreshing were these hopes to my soul! Oh that the kingdom of the dear Lord might come. Oh that the poor Indians might quickly be gathered in, in great numbers!

“Tuesday, April 22. My mind was remarkably free this day from melancholy damps and glooms, and animated in my work. I found such fresh vigour and resolution in the service of God, that the mountains seemed to become a plain before me. Oh, blessed be God for an interval of refreshment, and fervent resolution in my Lord’s work! In the evening my soul was refreshed in secret prayer, and my heart drawn out for divine blessings; especially for the church of God, and his interest among my own people, and for dear friends in remote places. Oh that Zion might prosper, and precious souls he brought home to God!”

In this comfortable, fervent frame of mind he remained the two next days. For the four days next following, viz. Friday, Saturday, Lord’s day, and Monday, see his public Journal. On Tuesday he went to Elizabeth-town, to attend the meeting of the Presbytery there: and seemed to spend the time while absent from his people on this occasion, in a free and comfortable state of mind.

“Saturday, May 3. Rode from Elizabeth-town home  to my people, at or near Cranberry; whither they are now removed, and where, I hope, God will settle them as a Christian congregation. Was refreshed in lifting up my heart to God, while riding; and enjoyed a thankful frame of spirit for divine favours received the week past. Was somewhat uneasy and dejected in the evening; having no house of my own to go into in this place: but God was my support.”

For Lord’s day and Monday see the public Journal.

“Tuesday, May 6. Enjoyed some spirit and courage in my work; was in a good measure free from melancholy: blessed be God for freedom from this death.

“Wednesday, May 7. Spent most of the day in writing, as usual. Enjoyed some freedom in my work. Was favoured with some comfortable meditations this day. In the evening was in a sweet composed frame of mind; was pleased and delighted to leave all with God, respecting myself, for time and eternity, and respecting the people of my charge, and dear friends. Had no doubt but that God would take care of me, and of his own interest among my people; and was enabled to use freedom in prayer, as a child with a tender father. Oh, how sweet is such a frame!

“Thursday, May 8. In the evening was somewhat refreshed with divine things, and enjoyed a tender, melting frame in secret prayer, wherein my soul was drawn out for the interest of Zion, and comforted with the lively hope of the appearing of the kingdom of the great Redeemer. These were sweet moments: I felt almost loth to go to bed, and grieved that sleep was necessary. However, I lay down with a tender, reverential fear of God, sensible that ‘his favour is life,’ and his smiles better than all that earth can boast of, infinitely better than life itself.”

Friday, May 9. See the public Journal.

“Saturday, May 10. Rode to Allen’s-town, to assist in the administration of the Lord’s supper. In the afternoon preached from Tit. ii. 14. ‘Who gave himself for us,’ &c. God was pleased to carry me through with some competency of freedom; and yet to deny me that enlargement and power I longed for. In the evening my soul mourned, and could not but mourn, that I had treated so excellent a subject in so defective a manner; that I had borne so broken a testimony for so worthy and glorious a Redeemer. And if my discourse had met with the utmost applause from all the world, (as I accidentally heard it applauded by some persons of judgment,) it would not have given me any satisfaction. Oh, it grieved me to think, that I had had no more holy warmth and fervency, that I had been no more melted in discoursing of Christ’s death, and the end and design of it! Afterwards enjoyed some freedom and fervency in secret and family prayer, and longed much for the presence of God to attend his word and ordinances the next day.

“Lord’s day, May 11. Assisted in the administration of the Lord’s supper; but enjoyed little enlargement: was grieved and sunk with some things I thought undesirable, &c. In the afternoon went to the house of God weak and sick in soul, as well as feeble in body: and longed that the people might be entertained and edified with divine truths, and that an honest fervent testimony might be borne for God; but knew not how it was possible for me to do any thing of that kind, to any good purpose. Yet God, who is rich in mercy, was pleased to give me assistance, both in prayer and preaching. God helped me to wrestle for his presence in prayer, and to tell him that he had promised, ‘Where two or three are met together in his name, there he would be in the midst of them;’ and that we were, at least some of us, so met; and pleaded, that for his truth’s sake he would be with us. And blessed be God, it was sweet to my soul thus to plead, and rely on God’s promises. Discoursed upon Luke ix. 30, 31. ‘And behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias; who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease, which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.’ Enjoyed special freedom, from the beginning to the end of my discourse, without interruption. Things pertinent to the subject were abundantly presented to my view; and such a fulness of matter, that I scarce knew how to dismiss the various heads and particulars I had occasion to touch upon. And, blessed be the Lord, I was favoured with some fervency and power, as well as freedom; so that the word of God seemed to awaken the attention of a stupid audience, to a considerable degree. I was inwardly refreshed with the consolations of God; and could with my whole heart say, ‘Though there be no fruit in the vine, &c. yet will I rejoice in the Lord.’ After public service, was refreshed with the sweet conversation of some Christian friends.”

The four next days seem to have been mostly spent with spiritual comfort and profit.

“Friday, May 16. Near night enjoyed some agreeable and sweet conversation with a dear minister, which, I trust, was blessed to my soul. My heart was warmed, and my soul engaged to live to God; so that I longed to exert myself with more vigour than ever I had done in his cause: and those words were quickening to me, ‘Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bring forth much fruit.’ Oh, my soul longed, and wished, and prayed, to be enabled to live to God with utmost constancy and ardour! In the evening God was pleased to shine upon me in secret prayer, and draw out my soul after himself; and I had freedom in supplication for myself, but much more in intercession for others: so that I was sweetly constrained to say, ‘Lord, use me as thou wilt; do as thou wilt with me: but oh, promote thine own cause! Zion is thine; oh visit thine heritage! Let thy kingdom come! Oh let thy blessed interest be advanced in the world!’ When I attempted to look to God, respecting my worldly circumstances, and his providential dealings with me, in regard of my settling down in my congregation, which seems to be necessary, and yet very difficult, and contrary to my fixed intention for years past, as well as my disposition which has been, and still is, at times especially, to go forth, and spend my life in preaching the gospel from place to place, and gathering souls afar off to Jesus the great Redeemer I could only say, ‘The will of the Lord be done; it is no matter for me.’ The same frame of mind I felt with respect to another important affair I have lately had some serious thoughts of: I could say, with utmost calmness and composure, ‘Lord, if it be most for thy glory, let me proceed in it; but if thou seest that it will in any wise hinder my usefulness in thy cause; oh prevent my proceeding: for all I want, respecting this world, is such circumstances as may best capacitate me to do service for God in the world.’ But blessed be God, I enjoyed liberty in prayer for my dear flock, and was enabled to pour out my soul into the bosom of a tender Father: my heart within me was melted, when I came to plead for my dear people, and for the kingdom of Christ in general. Oh, how sweet was this evening to my soul! I knew not how to go to bed; and when got to bed, longed for some way to improve time for God, to some excellent purpose. Bless the Lord, O my soul.

“Saturday, May 17. Walked out in the morning, and felt much of the same frame I enjoyed the evening before: had my heart enlarged in praying for the advancement of the kingdom of Christ, and found the utmost freedom in leaving all my concerns with God.

“I find discouragement to be an exceeding hinderance to my spiritual fervency and affection: but when God enables me sensibly to find that I have done something for him, this refreshes and animates me, so that I could break through all hardships, undergo any labours, and nothing seems too much either to do or to suffer. But oh, what a death it is, to strive, and strive; to be always in a hurry, and yet do nothing, or at least nothing for GOD! Alas, alas, that time flies away, and I do so little for God!

“Lord’s day, May 18. I felt my own utter insufficiency for my work: God made me to see that I was a child; yea, that I was a fool. I discoursed, both parts of the day, from Rev. iii. 20. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” God gave me freedom and power in the latter part of my forenoon’s discourse: although, in the former part of it, I felt peevish and provoked with the unmannerly behaviour of the white people, who crowded in between my people and me; which proved a great temptation to me. But blessed be God, I got these shackles off before the middle of my discourse, and was favoured with a sweet frame of spirit in the latter part of the exercise; was full of love, warmth, and tenderness, in addressing my  dear people. In the intermission-season, could not but discourse to my people on the kindness and patience of Christ in standing and knocking at the door, &c. In the evening I was grieved that I had done so little for God. Oh that I could be a flame of fire in the service of my God!”

Monday, May 19. See the public Journal. On Tuesday he complains of want of freedom and comfort; but had some return of these on Wednesday.

“Thursday, May 22. In the evening was in a frame somewhat remarkable: had apprehended for several days before, that it was the design of Providence I should settle among my people here; and had in my own mind begun to make provision for it, and to contrive means to hasten it; and found my heart something engaged in it, hoping I might then enjoy more agreeable circumstances of life, in several respects: and yet was never fully determined, never quite pleased with the thoughts of being settled and confined to one place. Nevertheless I seemed to have some freedom in that respect, because the congregation I thought of settling with, was one that God had enabled me to gather from amongst pagans. For I never, since I began to preach, could feel any freedom to ‘enter into other men’s labours,’ and settle down in the ministry where the ‘gospel was preached before.’ I never could make that appear to be my province: when I felt any disposition to consult my ease and worldly comfort, God has never given me any liberty in that respect, either since or for some years before I began to preach. But God having succeeded my labours, and made me instrumental in gathering a church for him among these Indians, I was ready to think, it might be his design to give me a quiet settlement and a stated home of my own. And this, considering the late frequent sinking and failure of my spirits, and the need I stood in of some agreeable society, and my great desire of enjoying conveniencies and opportunities for profitable studies, was not altogether disagreeable to me. Although I still wanted to go about far and wide, in order to spread the blessed gospel among benighted souls, far remote; yet I never had been so willing to settle in any one place, for more than five years past, as I was in the foregoing part of this week. But now these thoughts seemed to be wholly dashed to pieces; not by necessity, but of choice: for it appeared to me, that God’s dealings towards me had fitted me for a life of solitariness and hardship; and that I had nothing to lose, nothing to do with earth, and consequently nothing to lose by a total renunciation of it. It appeared to me just right, that I should be destitute of house and home, and many comforts of life, which I rejoiced to see others of God’s people enjoy. And at the same time, I saw so much of the excellency of Christ’s kingdom, and the infinite desirableness of its advancement in the world, that it swallowed up all my other thoughts; and made me willing, yea, even rejoice, to be made a pilgrim or hermit in the wilderness, to my dying moment, if I might thereby promote the blessed interest of the great Redeemer. And if ever my soul presented itself to God for his service, without any reserve of any kind, it did so now. The language of my thoughts and disposition now was, ’Here I am, Lord, send me; send me to the ends of the earth; send me to the rough, the savage pagans of the wilderness; send me from all that is called comfort in earth, or earthly comfort; send me even to death itself, if it be but in thy service, and to promote thy kingdom.’ And at the same time I had as quick and lively a sense of the value of worldly comforts, as ever I had; but only saw them infinitely overmatched by the worth of Christ’s kingdom, and the propagation of his blessed gospel. The quiet settlement, the certain place of abode, the tender friendship, which I thought I might be likely to enjoy in consequence of such circumstances, appeared as valuable to me, considered absolutely and in themselves, as ever before; but considered comparatively, they appeared nothing. Compared with the value and preciousness of an enlargement of Christ’s kingdom, they vanished like the stars before the rising sun. And sure I am, that although the comfortable accommodations of life appeared valuable and dear to me, yet I did surrender and resign myself, soul and body, to the service of God, and promotion of Christ’s kingdom: though it should be in the loss of them all. And I could not do any other, because I could not will or choose any other. I was constrained, and yet chose, to say, ‘Farewell, friends and earthly comforts, the dearest of them all, the very dearest, if the Lord calls for it; adieu, adieu; I will spend my life, to my latest moments, in caves and dens of the earth, if the kingdom of Christ may thereby be advanced.’ I found extraordinary freedom at this time in pouring out my soul to God, for his cause; and especially that his kingdom might be extended among the Indians, far remote; and I had a great and strong hope, that God would do it. I continued wrestling with God in prayer for my dear little flock here; and more especially for the Indians elsewhere; as well as for dear friends in one place and another; till it was bed-time, and I feared I should hinder the family, &c. But oh, with what reluctancy did I find myself obliged to consume time in sleep! I longed to be as a flame of fire, continually glowing in the divine service, preaching and building up Christ’s kingdom, to my latest, my dying moment.

“Friday, May 23. In the morning was in the same frame of mind as in the evening before. The glory of Christ’s kingdom so much outshone the pleasure of earthly accommodations and enjoyments, that they appeared comparatively nothing, though in themselves good and desirable. My soul was melted in secret meditation and prayer, and I found myself divorced from any part in this world: so that in those affairs that seemed of the greatest importance to me, in respect of the present life, and those wherein the tender powers of the mind are most sensibly touched, I could only say, ‘The will of the Lord be done.’ But just the same things that I felt the evening before, I felt now; and found the same freedom in prayer for the people of my charge, for the propagation of the gospel among the Indians, and for the enlargement and spiritual welfare of Zion in general, and my dear friends in particular, now, as I did then; and longed to burn out in one continued flame for God. Retained much of the same frame through the day. In the evening was visited by my brother John Brainerd; the first visit I have ever received from any near relative since I have been a missionary. Felt the same frame of spirit in the evening as in the morning; and found that ‘it was good for me to draw near to God,’ and leave all my concerns and burdens with him. Was enlarged and refreshed in pouring out my soul for the propagation of the gospel of the Redeemer among the distant tribes of Indians. Blessed be God. If ever I filled up a day with studies and devotion, I was enabled so to fill up this day.

“Saturday, May 24. Enjoyed this day something of the same frame of mind as I felt the day before.”

Lord’s day, May 25. See the public Journal. This week, at least the former part of it, he was in a very weak state: but yet seems to have been free from melancholy, which often had attended the failing of his bodily strength. He from time to time speaks of comfort and inward refreshment, this week. Lord’s day, June 1. See the public Journal.

“Monday, June 2. In the evening enjoyed some freedom in secret prayer and meditation.

“Tuesday, June 3. My soul rejoiced, early in the morning, to think, that all things were at God’s disposal. Oh, it pleased me to leave them there! Felt afterwards much as I did on Thursday evening, May 22, last; and continued in this frame for several hours. Walked out into the wilderness, and enjoyed freedom, fervency, and comfort in prayer; and again enjoyed the same in the evening.

“Wednesday, June 4. Spent the day in writing, and enjoyed some comfort, satisfaction, and freedom in my work. In the evening I was favoured with a sweet refreshing frame of soul in secret prayer and meditation. Prayer was now wholly turned into praise, and I could do little else but try to adore and bless the living God. The wonders of his grace displayed in gathering to himself a church among the poor Indians here, were the subject matter of my meditation, and the occasion of exciting my soul to praise and bless his name. My soul was scarce ever more disposed to inquire, ‘What I should render to God for all his benefits, than at this time. Oh, I was  brought into a strait, a sweet and happy strait, to know what to do! I longed to make some returns to God; but found I had nothing to return: I could only rejoice, that God had done the work himself; and that none in heaven or earth might pretend to share the honour of it with him. I could only be glad, that God’s declarative glory was advanced by the conversion of these souls, and that it was to the enlargement of his kingdom in the world: but saw I was so poor, that I had nothing to offer to him. My soul and body, through grace, I could cheerfully surrender to him: but it appeared to me, this was rather a cumber than a gift; and nothing could I do to glorify his dear and blessed name. Yet I was glad at heart that he was unchangeably possessed of glory and blessedness. Oh that he might be adored and praised by all his intelligent creatures, to the utmost of their power and capacities! M soul would have rejoiced to see others praise him, though I could do nothing towards it myself.”

The next day he speaks of his being subject to some degree. of melancholy; but of being somewhat relieved in the evening. Friday, June 6. See the public Journal.

“Saturday, June 7. Rode to Freehold to assist Mr. Tennent in the administration of the Lord’s supper. In the afternoon preached from Psal. lxxiii. 28. ‘But it is good for me to draw near to God,’ &c. God gave me some freedom and warmth in my discourse; and I trust his presence was in the assembly. Was comfortably composed, and enjoyed a thankful frame of spirit; and my soul was grieved that I could not render something to God for his benefits bestowed. O that I could be swallowed up in his praise!

“Lord’s day, June 8. Spent much time, in the morning, in secret duties; but between hope and fear, respecting the enjoyment of God in the business of the day then before us. Was agreeably entertained in the forenoon, by a discourse from Mr. Tennent, and felt somewhat melted and refreshed. In the season of communion, enjoyed some comfort; and especially in serving one of the tables. Blessed be the Lord, it was a time of refreshing to me, and I trust to many others. A number of my dear people sat down by themselves at the last table; at which time God seemed to be in the midst of them. And the thoughts of what God had done among them were refreshing and melting to me. In the afternoon God enabled me to preach with uncommon freedom, from 2 Cor. v. 20. ‘Now then we are ambassadors for Christ,’ &c. Through the great goodness of God, I was favoured with a constant flow of pertinent matter, and proper expressions, from the beginning to the end of my discourse. In the evening I could not but rejoice in God, and bless him for the manifestations of grace in the day past. Oh, it was a sweet and solemn day and evening! a season of comfort to the godly, and of awakening to some souls. Oh that I could praise the Lord!

“Monday, June 9. Enjoyed some sweetness in secret duties. Preached the concluding sermon from Gen. v. 24. ‘And Enoch walked with God,’ &c. God gave me enlargement and fervency in my discourse; so that I was enabled to speak with plainness and power; and God’s presence seemed to be in the assembly. Praised be the Lord, it was a sweet meeting, a desirable assembly. I found my strength renewed, and lengthened out, even to a wonder; so that I felt much stronger at the conclusion than in the beginning of this sacramental solemnity. I have great reason to bless God for this solemnity, wherein I have found assistance in addressing others, and sweetness in my own soul.”

On Tuesday he found himself spent and his spirits exhausted by his late labours; and on Wednesday complains of vapoury disorders, and dejection of spirit, and of enjoying but little comfort or spirituality.

“Thursday, June 12. In the evening enjoyed freedom of mind, and some sweetness in secret prayer: it was a desirable season to me; my soul was enlarged in prayer for my own dear people, and for the enlargement of Christ’s kingdom, and especially for the propagation of the gospel among the Indians, hack in the wilderness. Was refreshed in prayer for dear friends in New England, and elsewhere: I found it sweet to pray at this time; and could with all my heart say, ‘It is good for me to draw near to God.’

“Friday, June 13. I came away from the meeting of the Indians this day, rejoicing and blessing God for his grace manifested at this season.

“Saturday, June 14. Rode to Kingston, to assist the Rev. Mr. Wales in the administration of the Lord’s supper. In the afternoon preached; but, almost fainted in pulpit: yet God strengthened me when I was just gone, and enabled me to speak his word with freedom, fervency, and application to the conscience. And, praised be the Lord, ‘out of weakness I was made strong.’ I enjoyed some sweetness in and after public worship; but was extremely tired. Oh, how many are the mercies of the Lord! ‘To them that have no might, he increaseth strength.’

“Lord’s day, June 15. Was in a dejected, spiritless flume, that I could not hold up my head, nor look any body in the face. Administered the Lord’s supper at Mr. Wales’s desire; and found myself in a good measure unburdened and relieved of my pressing load, when I came to ask a blessing on the elements: here God gave me enlargement, and a tender affectionate sense of spiritual things; so that it was a season of comfort, in some measure, to me, and, I trust, more so to others. In the afternoon preached to a vast multitude, from Rev. xxii. 17. ‘And whosoever will,’ &c. God helped me to offer a testimony for himself, and to leave sinners inexcusable in neglecting his grace. I was enabled to speak with such freedom, fluency, and clearness, as commanded the attention of the great. Was extremely tired, in the evening, but enjoyed composure and sweetness.

“Monday, June 16. Preached again; and God helped me amazingly, so that this was a sweet, refreshing season to my soul and others. Oh, for ever blessed be God for help afforded at this time, when my body was so weak, and while there was so large an assembly to hear. Spent the afternoon in a comfortable, agreeable manner.”

The next day was spent comfortably. On Wednesday he went to a meeting of ministers at Hopewell. Thursday, June 19. See his public Journal.   On Friday and Saturday he was very much amiss; but yet preached to his people on Saturday. His illness continued on the sabbath; but he preached, notwithstanding, to his people both parts of the day; and after the public worship was ended, he endeavoured to apply divine truths to the consciences of some, and addressed them personally for that end; several were in tears, and some appeared much affected. But he was extremely wearied with the services of the day, and was so ill at night that he could have no bodily rest; but remarks, that “God was his support, and that he was not left destitute of comfort in him.” On Monday he continued very ill, but speaks of his mind being calm and composed, resigned to the divine dispensations, and content with his feeble state. By the account he gives of himself, the remaining part of this week, he continued very feeble, for the most part dejected in mind. He enjoyed no great freedom nor sweetness in spiritual things; excepting that for some very short spaces of time he had refreshment and encouragement, which engaged his heart on divine things; and sometimes his heart was melted with spiritual affection.

“Lord’s day, June 29. Preached, both parts of the day, from John xiv. 19. ‘Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more,’ &c. God was pleased to assist me, to afford me both freedom and power, especially towards the close of my discourses, both forenoon and afternoon. God’s power appeared in the assembly, in both exercises. Numbers of God’s people were refreshed and melted with divine things; one or two comforted, who had been long under distress: convictions, in divers instances, powerfully revived; and one man in years much awakened, who had not long frequented our meeting, and appeared before as stupid as a stock. God amazingly renewed and lengthened out my strength. I was so spent at noon, that I could scarce walk, and all my joints trembled; so that I could not sit, nor so much as hold my hand still: and yet God  strengthened me to preach with power in the afternoon; although I had given out word to my people that I did not expect to be able to do it. Spent some time afterwards in conversing, particularly, with several persons, about their spiritual state; and had some satisfaction concerning one or two. Prayed afterwards with a sick child, and gave a word of exhortation. Was assisted in all my work. Blessed be God. Returned home with more health than I went out with; although my linen was wringing wet upon me, from a little after ten in the morning till past five in the afternoon. My spirits also were considerably refreshed; and my soul rejoiced in hope, that I had through grace done something for God. In the evening walked out, and enjoyed a sweet season in secret prayer and praise. But oh, I found the truth of the psalmist’s words, ‘My goodness extendeth not to thee!’ I could not make any returns to God; I longed to live only to him, and to be in tune for his praise and service for ever. Oh, for spirituality and holy fervency, that I might spend and be spent for God to my latest moment!

“Monday, June 30. Spent the day in writing; but under much weakness and disorder. Felt the labours of the preceding day; although my spirits were so refreshed the evening before, that I was not then sensible of my being spent.

“Tuesday, July 1. In the afternoon visited and preached to my people, from Heb. ix. 27. ‘And as it is appointed unto men once to die,’ &c. on occasion of some persons lying at the point of death, in my congregation. God gave me some assistance; and his word made some impressions on the audience, in general. This was an agreeable and comfortable evening to my soul: my spirits were somewhat refreshed, with a small degree of freedom and help enjoyed in my work.”

On Wednesday he went to Newark, to a meeting of the Presbytery: complains of lowness of spirits; and greatly laments his spending his time so unfruitfully. The remaining part of the week he spent there and at Elizabeth-town; and speaks of comfort and divine assistance from day to day; but yet greatly complains for want of more spirituality.

“Lord’s day, July 6. [At Elizabeth-town] Enjoyed some composure and serenity of mind in the morning: heard Mr. Dickinson preach in the forenoon, and was refreshed with his discourse; was in a melting frame some part of the time of sermon: partook of the Lord’s supper, and enjoyed some sense of divine things in that ordinance. In the afternoon I preached from Ezek. xxxiii. 11. ‘As I live, saith the Lord God,’ &c. God favoured me with freedom and fervency; and helped me to plead his cause beyond my own power.

“Monday, July 7. My spirits were considerably refreshed and raised in the morning. There is no comfort, I find, in any enjoyment, without enjoying God, and being engaged in his service. In the evening had the most agreeable conversation that ever I remember in all my life, upon God’s being all in all, and all enjoyments being just that to us which God makes them, and no more. It is good to begin and end with God. Oh, how does a sweet solemnity lay a foundation for true pleasure and happiness!

“Tuesday, July 8. Rode home, and enjoyed some agreeable meditations by the way.

“Wednesday, July 9. Spent the day in writing; enjoyed some comfort and refreshment of spirit in my evening retirement.

“Thursday, July 10. Spent most of the day in writing. Towards night rode to Mr. Tennent’s; enjoyed some agreeable conversation: went home, in the evening, in a solemn, sweet frame of mind; was refreshed in secret duties, longed to live wholly and only for God, and saw plainly there was nothing in the world worthy of my affection; so that my heart was dead to all below; yet not through dejection, as at some times, but from views of a better inheritance.

“Friday, July 11. Was in a calm, composed frame in the morning, especially in the season of my secret retirement. I think I was well pleased with the will of God, whatever it was, or should be, in all respects I had then any thought of. Intending to administer the Lord’s supper the next Lord’s day, I looked to God for his presence and assistance upon that occasion; but felt a disposition to say, ‘The will of the Lord be done,’ whether it be to give me assistance, or not. Spent some little time in writing: visited the Indians, and spent some time in serious conversation with them; thinking it not best to preach, many of them being absent.

“Saturday, July 12. This day was spent in fasting and prayer by my congregation, as preparatory to the sacrament. I discoursed, both parts of the day, from Rom. iv. 25. ‘Who was delivered for our offences,’ &c. God gave me some assistance in my discourses, and something of divine power attended the word; so that this was an agreeable season. Afterwards led them to a solemn renewal of their covenant, and fresh dedication of themselves to God. This was a season both of solemnity and sweetness, and God seemed to be ‘in the midst of us.’ Returned to my lodgings, in the evening, in a comfortable frame of mind.

“Lord’s day, July 13. In the forenoon discoursed on the bread of life, from John vi. 35. God gave me some assistance, in part of my discourse especially; and there appeared some tender affection in the assembly under divine truths; my soul also was somewhat refreshed. Administered the sacrament of the Lord’s supper to thirty-one persons of the Indians. God seemed to be present in this ordinance; the communicants were sweetly melted and refreshed, most of them. Oh, how they melted, even when the elements were first uncovered! There was scarcely a dry eye among them when I took off the linen, and showed them the symbols of Christ’s broken body. Having rested a little, after the administration of the sacrament, I visited the communicants, and found them generally in a sweet, loving frame; not unlike what appeared among them on the former sacramental occasion, on April 27. In the afternoon, discoursed upon coming to Christ, and the satisfaction of those who do so, from the same verse I insisted on in the forenoon. This was likewise an agreeable season, a season of much tenderness, affection, and enlargement in divine service; and God, I am persuaded, crowned our assembly with his divine presence. I returned home much spent, yet rejoicing in the goodness of God.

“Monday, July 14. Went to my people, and discoursed to them from Psal. cxix. 106. ‘I have sworn, and I will perform it,’ &c. Observed, 1. That all God’s judgments or commandments are righteous. 2. That God’s people have sworn to keep them; and this they do especially at the Lord’s table. There appeared to be a powerful divine influence on the assembly, and considerable melting under the word. Afterwards I led them to a renewal of their covenant before God, (that they would watch over themselves and one another, lest they should fall into sin and dishonour the name of Christ,) just as I did on Monday, April 28. This transaction was attended with great solemnity; and God seemed to own it by exciting in them a fear and jealousy of themselves, lest they should sin against God; so that the presence of God seemed to be amongst us in this conclusion of the sacramental solemnity.”

The next day he set out on a journey towards Philadelphia; from whence he did not return till Saturday. He went this journey, and spent the week, under a great degree of illness of body, and dejection of mind.

“Lord’s day, July 20. Preached twice to my people, from John xvii. 24. ‘Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me.’ Was helped to discourse with great clearness and plainness in the forenoon. In the afternoon, enjoyed some tenderness, and spake with some influence. Divers were in tears; and some, to appearance, in distress.

“Monday, July 21. Preached to the Indians, chiefly for the sake of some strangers. Then proposed my design of taking a journey speedily to Susquehannah: exhorted my people to pray for me, that God would be with me in that journey, &e. Then chose divers persons of the congregation to travel with me. Afterwards spent some time in discoursing to the strangers, and was somewhat encouraged with them. Took care of my people’s secular  business, and was not a little exercised with it. Had some degree of composure and comfort in secret retirement.

“Tuesday, July 22. Was in a dejected frame most of the day: wanted to wear out life, and have it at an end; but had some desires of living to God, and wearing out life for him. Oh that I could indeed do so!”

The next day, he went to Elizabeth-town, to a meeting of the Presbytery; and spent this, and Thursday, and the former part of Friday, under a very great degree of melancholy, and exceeding gloominess of mind; not through any fear of future punishment, but as being distressed with a senselessness of all good, so that the whole world appeared empty and gloomy to him. But in the latter part of Friday he was greatly relieved and comforted.

“Saturday, July 26. Was comfortable in the morning; my countenance and heart were not sad, as in days past; enjoyed some sweetness in lifting up my heart to God. Rode home to my people, and was in a comfortable, pleasant frame by the way; my spirits were much relieved of their burden, and I felt free to go through all difficulties and labours in my Master’s service.

“Lord’s day, July 27. Discoursed to my people, in the forenoon, from sp Luke xii. 37. on the duty and benefit of watching: God helped me in the latter part of my discourse, and the power of God appeared in the assembly. In the afternoon discoursed from Luke xiii. 25. ‘When once the master of the house is risen up,’ &c. Here also I enjoyed some assistance, and the Spirit of God seemed to attend what was spoken, so that there was a great solemnity, and some tears among Indians and others.

“Monday, July 28. Was very weak, and scarce able to perform any business at all; but enjoyed sweetness and comfort in prayer, both morning and evening; and was composed and comfortable through the day: my mind was intense, and my heart fervent, at least in some degree, in secret duties; and I longed to spend and be spent for God.

“Tuesday, July 29. My mind was cheerful, and free from those melancholy damps that I am often exercised with: had freedom in looking up to God at sundry times in the day. In the evening I enjoyed a comfortable season in secret prayer; was helped to plead with God for my own dear people, that he would carry on his own blessed work among them; was assisted also in praying for the divine presence to attend me in my intended journey to Susquehannah; add was helped to remember dear brethren and friends in New England. I scarce knew how to leave the throne of grace, and it grieved me that I was obliged to go to bed; I longed to do something for God, but knew not how. Blessed be God for this freedom from dejection.

“Wednesday, July 30. Was uncommonly comfortable, both in body and mind; in the forenoon especially: my mind was solemn, I was assisted in my work, and God seemed to be near to me; so that the day was as comfortable as most I have enjoyed for some time. In the evening was favoured with assistance in secret prayer, and felt much as I did the evening before. Blessed be God for that freedom I then enjoyed at the throne of grace, for myself, my people, and my dear friends. It is good for me to draw near to God.“

He seems to have continued very much in the same free, comfortable state of mind the next day.

“Friday, Aug. 1. In the evening enjoyed a sweet season in secret prayer; clouds of darkness and perplexing care were sweetly scattered, and nothing anxious remained. Oh, how serene was my mind at this season! how free from that distracting concern I have often felt! ‘Thy will be done,’ was a petition sweet to my soul; and if God had bidden me choose for myself in any affair, I should have chosen rather to have referred the choice to him; for I saw he was infinitely wise, and could not do any thing amiss, as I was in danger of doing. Was assisted in prayer for my dear flock, that God would promote his own work among them, and that God would go with me in my intended journey to Susquehannah: was helped to remember dear friends in New England, and my dear brethren in the ministry. I found enough in the sweet duty of prayer to have engaged me to continue in it the whole night, would my bodily state have admitted of it. Oh, how sweet it is to be enabled heartily to say Lord, not my will, but thine be done!

“Saturday, Aug. 2. Near night preached from Matt xi. 29. ‘Take my yoke upon you,’ &c. Was considerably helped; and the presence of God seemed to be somewhat remarkably in the assembly; divine truths made powerful impressions, both upon saints and sinners. Blessed be God for such a revival among us. In the evening was very weary, but found my spirits supported and refreshed.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 3. Discoursed to my people, in the forenoon, from Col. iii. 4. and observed, that Christ is the believer’s life. God helped me, and gave me his presence in this discourse; and it was a season of considerable power in the assembly. In the afternoon preached from Luke xix. 41, 42. ‘And when he was come near, he beheld the city,’ &c. I enjoyed some assistance; though not so much as in the forenoon. In the evening I enjoyed freedom and sweetness in secret prayer; God enlarged my heart, freed me from melancholy damps, and gave me satisfaction in drawing near to himself. Oh that my soul could magnify the Lord, for these seasons of composure and resignation to his will!

“Monday, Aug. 4. Spent the day in writing; enjoyed much freedom and assistance in my work: was in a composed and comfortable frame most of the day; and in the evening enjoyed some sweetness in prayer. Blessed be God, my spirits were yet up, and I was free from sinking damps; as I have been in general ever since I came from Elizabeth-town last. Oh what a mercy is this!

“Tuesday, Aug. 5. Towards night preached at the funeral of one of my Christians, from Isa. lvii. 2. ‘He shall enter into peace,’ &c. I was oppressed with the nervous headache, and considerably dejected: however, had a little freedom some part of the time I was discoursing. Was extremely weary in the evening; but notwithstanding, enjoyed some liberty and cheerfulness of mind in prayer; and found the dejection that I feared, much removed, and my spirits considerably refreshed.”

He continued in a very comfortable, cheerful frame of mind the next day, with his heart enlarged in the service of God.

“Thursday, Aug. 7. Rode to my house, where I spent the last winter, in order to bring some things I needed for my Susquehannah journey: was refreshed to see that place, which God so marvellously visited with the showers of his grace. Oh how amazing did the power of God often appear there! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.“

The next day he speaks of liberty, enlargement, and sweetness of mind in prayer and religious conversation.

“Saturday, Aug. 9. In the afternoon visited my people; set their affairs in order, as much as possible, and contrived for them the management of their worldly business; discoursed to them in a solemn manner, and concluded with prayer. Was composed and comfortable in the evening, and somewhat fervent in secret prayer; had some sense and view of the eternal world, and round a serenity of mind. Oh that I could magnify the Lord for any freedom he affords me in prayer!

“Lord’s day, Aug. 10. Discoursed to my people, both parts of the day, from Acts iii. 19. ‘Repent ye, therefore,’ &c. In discoursing of repentance in the forenoon, God helped me, so that my discourse was searching; some were in tears, both of the Indians and white people, and the word of God was attended with some power. In the intermission I was engaged in discoursing to some in order to their baptism; as well as with one who had then lately met with some comfort, after spiritual trouble and distress. In the afternoon was somewhat assisted again, though weak and weary. Afterwards baptized six persons; three adults, and three children. Was in a comfortable frame in the evening, and enjoyed some satisfaction in secret prayer. I scarce ever in my life felt myself so full of tenderness as this day.

“Monday, Aug. 11. Being about to set out on a journey to Susquehannah the next day, with leave of Providence, I spent some time this day in prayer with my people, that God would bless and succeed my intended journey; that he would send forth his blessed Spirit with  his word, and set up his kingdom among the poor Indians in the wilderness. While I was opening and applying part of the 110th and 2d Psalms, the power of God seemed to descend on the assembly in some measure; and while I was making the first prayer, numbers were melted, and I found some affectionate enlargement of soul myself. Preached from Acts iv. 31. ‘And when they had prayed, the place was shaken,’ &c. God helped me, and my interpreter also: there was a shaking and melting among us; and divers, I doubt not, were in some measure ‘filled with the Holy Ghost.’ Afterwards Mr. Macknight prayed: I then opened the two last stanzas of the 72d Psalm; at which time God was present with us; especially while I insisted upon the promise of all nations blessing the great Redeemer. My soul was refreshed to think, that this day, this blessed glorious season, should surely come; and I trust, numbers of my dear people were also refreshed. Afterwards prayed; had some freedom, but was almost spent: then walked out, and left my people to carry on religious exercises among themselves: they prayed repeatedly, and sung, while I rested and refreshed myself. Afterwards went to the meeting; prayed with and dismissed the assembly. Blessed be God, this has been a day of grace. There were many tears and affectionate sobs among us this day. In the evening my soul was refreshed in prayer: enjoyed liberty at the throne of grace, in praying for my people and friends, and the church of God in general. Bless the Lord, O my soul.”

The next day he set out on his journey towards Susquehannah, and six of his Christian Indians with him, whom be had chosen out of his congregation, as those that he judged most fit to assist him in the business he was going upon. He took his way through Philadelphia; intending to go to Susquehannah river, far down, where it is settled by the white people, below the country inhabited by the Indians; and so to travel up the river to the Indian habitations. For although this was much farther about, yet hereby he avoided the huge mountains, and hideous wilderness, that must be crossed in the nearer way; which in time past he found to be extremely difficult and fatiguing. He rode this week as far as Charlestown, a place of that name about thirty miles westward of Philadelphia; where he arrived on Friday: and in his way hither was, for the most part, in a composed, comfortable state of mind.

“Saturday, Aug. 16. [At Charlestown] It being a day kept by the people of the place where I now was, as preparatory to the celebration of the Lord’s supper, I tarried; heard Mr. Treat preach; and then preached myself. God gave me some good degree of freedom, and helped me to discourse with warmth, and application to the conscience. Afterwards I was refreshed in spirit, though much tired; and spent the evening agreeably, having some freedom in prayer, as well as Christian conversation.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 17. Enjoyed liberty, composure, and satisfaction, in the secret duties of the morning: had my heart somewhat enlarged in prayer for dear friends, as well as for myself. In the forenoon attended Mr. Treat’s preaching, partook of the Lord’s supper, five of my people also communicating in this holy ordinance: I enjoyed some enlargement and outgoing of soul in this season. In the afternoon preached from Ezek. xxxiii. 11. ‘Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord God,’ &c. Enjoyed not so much sensible assistance as the day before: however, was helped to some fervency in addressing immortal souls. Was somewhat confounded in the evening, because I thought I had done little or nothing for God; yet enjoyed some refreshment of spirit in Christian conversation and prayer. Spent the evening, till near midnight, in religious exercises; and found my bodily strength, which was much spent when I came from the public worship, something renewed before I went to bed.

“Monday, Aug. 18. Rode on my way towards Paxton, upon Susquehannah river. Felt my spirits sink, towards night, so that I had little comfort.

“Tuesday, Aug. 19. Rode forward still; and at night lodged by the side of Susquehannah. Was weak and disordered both this and the preceding day, and found my spirits considerably damped, meeting with none that I thought godly people.

“Wednesday, Aug. 20. Having lain in a cold sweat all night, I coughed much bloody matter this morning, and was under great disorder of body, and not a little melancholy; but what gave me some encouragement, was, I had a secret hope that I might speedily get a dismission from earth, and all its toils and sorrows. Rode this day to one Chambers’, upon Susquehannah, and there lodged. Was much afflicted, in the evening, with an ungodly crew, drinking, swearing, &c. Oh, what a hell would it be, to be numbered with the ungodly! Enjoyed some agreeable conversation with a traveller, who seemed to have some relish of true religion.

“Thursday, Aug. 21. Rode up the river about fifteen miles, and there lodged, in a family that appeared quite destitute of God. Laboured to discourse with the man about the life of religion, but found him very artful in evading such conversation. Oh, what a death it is to some to hear of the things of God! Was out of my element; but was not so dejected as at some times.

“Friday, Aug. 22. Continued my course up the river; my people now being with me, who before were parted from me; travelled above all the English settlements; at night lodged in the open woods; and slept with more comfort than while among an ungodly company of white people. Enjoyed some liberty in secret prayer this evening; and was helped to remember dear friends, as well as my dear flock, and the church of God in general.

“Saturday, Aug. 23. Arrived at the Indian town, called Shaumoking, near night. Was not so dejected as formerly; but yet somewhat exercised. Felt somewhat composed in the evening; enjoyed some freedom in leaving my all with God. Through the great goodness of God, I enjoyed some liberty of mind; and was not distressed with a despondency, as frequently heretofore.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 24. Towards noon, visited some of the Delawares, and discoursed with them about Christianity. In the afternoon discoursed to the king, and others, upon divine things; who seemed to dispose to hear. Spent most of the day in these exercises. In the evening enjoyed some comfort and satisfaction; and especially had some sweetness in secret prayer. This duty was made so agreeable to me, that I loved to walk abroad and repeatedly engage in it. Oh, how comfortable is a little glimpse of God!

“Monday, Aug. 25. Spent most of the day in writing. Sent out my people that were with me, to talk with the Indians, and contract a friendship and familiarity with them, that I might have a better opportunity of treating with them about Christianity. Some good seemed to be done by their visit this day, divers appeared willing to hearken to Christianity. My spirits were a little refreshed this evening; and I found some liberty and satisfaction in prayer.

“Tuesday, Aug. 26. About noon discoursed to a considerable number of Indians: God helped me, I am persuaded: I was enabled to speak with much plainness, and some warmth and power. The discourse had impression upon some, and made them appear very serious. I thought things now appeared as encouraging, as they did at Crossweeks. At the time of my first visit to those Indians, I was a little encouraged: I pressed things with all my might; and called out my people, who were then present, to give in their testimony for God; which they did. Towards night was refreshed; felt a heart to pray for the setting up of God’s kingdom here; as well as for my dear congregation below, and my dear friends elsewhere.

“Wednesday, Aug. 27. There having been a thick smoke in the house where I lodged all night before, whereby I was almost choked, I was this morning distressed with pains in my head and neck, and could have no rest. In the morning the smoke was still the same; and a cold easterly storm gathering, I could neither live within doors nor without any long time together. I was pierced with the rawness of the air abroad, and in the house distressed with the smoke. I was this day very vapoury, and lived in great distress, and had not health enough to do any thing to any purpose.

“Thursday, Aug. 28. In the forenoon I was under great concern of mind about my work. Was visited by some who desired to hear me preach; discoursed to them, in the afternoon, with some fervency, and laboured to  persuade them to turn to God. Was full of concern for the kingdom of Christ, and found some enlargement of soul in prayer, both in secret and in my family. Scarce ever saw more clearly, than this day, that it is God’s work to convert souls, and especially poor heathens. I knew I could not touch them; I saw I could only speak to dry bones, but could give them no sense of what I said. My eyes were up to God for help: I could say, the work was his; and if done, the glory would be his.

“Friday, Aug. 29. Felt the same concern of mind as the day before. Enjoyed some freedom in prayer, and a satisfaction to leave all with God. Travelled to the Delawares, found few at home: felt poorly, but was able to spend some time alone in reading God’s word and in prayer, and enjoyed some sweetness in these exercises. In the evening was assisted repeatedly in prayer, and found some comfort in coming to the throne of grace.

“Saturday, Aug. 30. Spent the forenoon in visiting a trader, that came down the river sick; who appeared as ignorant as any Indian. In the afternoon spent some time in writing, reading, and prayer.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 31. Spent much time in the morning in secret duties: found a weight upon my spirits, and could not but cry to God with concern and engagement of soul. Spent some time also in reading and expounding God’s word to my dear family, that was with me, as well as in singing and prayer with them. Afterwards, spake the word of God to some few of the Susquehannah Indians. In the afternoon felt very weak and feeble. Near night was something refreshed in mind, with some views of things relating to my great work. Oh, how heavy is my work, when faith cannot take hold of an almighty arm, for the performance of it! Many times have I been ready to sink in this case. Blessed be God, that I may repair to a full fountain.

“Monday, Sept. 1. Set out on a journey towards a place called The great island, about fifty miles distant from Shaumoking, in the north-western branch of Susquehannah. Travelled some part of the way, and at night lodged in the woods. Was exceeding feeble this day, and sweat much the night following.

“Tuesday, Sept. 2. Rode forward; but no faster than my people went on foot. Was very weak, on this as well as the preceding days. I was so feeble and faint, that I feared it would kill me to lie out in the open air; and some of our company being parted from us, so that we had now no axe with us, I had no way but to climb into a young pine-tree, and with my knife to lop the branches, and so made a shelter from the dew. But the evening being cloudy, and very likely for rain, I was still under fears of being extremely exposed: sweat much in the night, so that my linen was almost wringing wet all night. I scarce ever was more weak and weary than this evening, when I was able to sit up at all. This was a melancholy situation I was in; but I endeavoured to quiet myself with considerations of the possibility of my being in much worse circumstances, amongst enemies, &c.

“Wednesday, Sept. 3. Rode to the Delaware-town; found divers drinking and drunken. Discoursed with some of the Indians about Christianity; observed my interpreter much engaged and assisted in his work; some few persons seemed to hear with great earnestness and engagement of soul. About noon rode to a small town of Shauwaunoes, about eight miles distant; spent an hour or two there, and returned to the Delaware-town, and lodged there. Was scarce ever more confounded with a sense of my own unfruitfulness and unfitness for my work, than now. Oh, what a dead, heartless, barren, unprofitable wretch did I now see myself to be! My spirits were so low, and my bodily strength so wasted, that I could do nothing at all. At length, being much overdone, lay down on a buffalo-skin; but sweat much the whole night.

Thursday, Sept. 4. Discoursed with the Indians, in the morning, about Christianity; my interpreter, afterwards, carrying on the discourse to a considerable length. Some few appeared well-disposed, and somewhat affected. Left this place, and returned towards Shaumoking; and at night lodged in the place where I lodged the Monday night before: was in very uncomfortable circumstances in the evening, my people being belated, and not coming to me till past ten at night; so that I had no fire to dress any victuals, or to keep me warm, or keep off wild beasts; and I was scarce ever more weak and worn out in all my life. However, I lay down and slept before my people came up, expecting nothing else but to spend the whole night alone, and without fire.

“Friday, Sept. 5. Was exceeding weak, so that I could scarcely ride; it seemed sometimes as if I must fall off from my horse, and lie in the open woods: however, got to Shaumoking towards night: felt something of a spirit of thankfulness, that God had so far returned me: was refreshed to see one of my Christians, whom I left here in my late excursion.

“Saturday, Sept. 6. Spent the day in a very weak state; coughing and spitting blood, and having little appetite to any food I had with me: was able to do very little, except discourse a while of divine things to my own people, and to some few I met with. Had, by this time, very little life or heart to speak for God, through feebleness of body, and flatness of spirits. Was scarcely ever more ashamed and confounded in myself, than now. I was sensible, that there were numbers of God’s people, who knew I was then out upon a design (or at least the pretence) of doing something for God, and in his cause, among the poor Indians; and they were ready to suppose, that I was fervent in spirit: but oh, the heartless frame of mind that I felt filled me with confusion! Oh (methought) if God’s people knew me, as God knows, they would not think so highly of my zeal and resolution for God, as perhaps now they do! I could not but desire they should see how heartless and irresolute I was, that they might be undeceived, and ‘not think of me above what they ought to think.’ And yet I thought, if they saw the utmost of my flatness and unfaithfulness, the smallness of my courage and resolution for God, they would be ready to shut me out of their doors, as unworthy of the company or friendship of Christians.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 7. Was much in the same weak state of body, and afflicted frame of mind, as in the preceding day: my soul was grieved, and mourned that I could do nothing for God. Read and expounded some part of God’s word to my own dear family, and spent some time in prayer with them; discoursed also a little to the pagans: but spent the sabbath with a little comfort.

“Monday, Sept. 8. Spent the forenoon among the Indians; in the afternoon left Shaumoking, and returned down the river a few miles. Had proposed to have tarried a considerable time longer among the Indians upon Susquehannah; but was hindered from pursuing my purpose by the sickness that prevailed there, the weakly circumstances of my own people that were with me, and especially my own extraordinary weakness, having been exercised with great nocturnal sweats, and a coughing up of blood, in almost the whole of the journey. I was a great part of the time so feeble and faint, that it seemed as though I never should be able to reach home; and at the same time very destitute of the comforts, and even necessaries, of life; at least, what was necessary for one in so weak a state. In this journey I sometimes was enabled to speak the word of God with some power, and divine truths made some impressions on divers that heard me; so that several, both men and women, old and young, seemed to cleave to us, and be well disposed towards Christianity; but others mocked and shouted, which damped those who before seemed friendly, at least some of them. Yet God, at times, was evidently present, assisting me, my interpreter, and other dear friends who were with me. God gave, sometimes, a good degree of freedom in prayer for the ingathering of souls there; and I could riot but entertain a strong hope, that the journey should not be wholly fruitless. Whether the issue of it would be the setting up of Christ’s kingdom there, or only the drawing of some few persons down to my congregation in New Jersey; or whether they were now only being prepared for some further attempts, that might be made among them, I did not determine: but I was persuaded the journey would not be lost. Blessed be God, that I had any encouragement and hope.

“Tuesday, Sept. 9. Rode down the river near thirty miles. Was extremely weak, much fatigued, and wet with  a thunder-storm. Discoursed with some warmth and closeness to some poor ignorant souls, on the life and power of religion; what were, and what were not, the evidences of it. They seemed much astonished when they saw my Indians ask a blessing and give thanks at dinner; concluding that a very high evidence of grace in them: but were astonished when I insisted that neither that, nor yet secret prayer, was any sure evidence of grace. Oh the ignorance of the world! How are some empty outward forms, that may all be entirely selfish, mistaken for true religion, infallible evidences of it! The Lord pity a deluded world!

“Wednesday, Sept. 10. Rode near twenty miles homeward. Was much solicited to preach, but was utterly unable, through bodily weakness. Was extremely overdone with the heat and showers this day, and coughed up a considerable quantity of blood.

“Thursday, Sept. 11. Rode homeward; but was very weak, and sometimes scarce able to ride. Had a very importunate invitation to preach at a meeting-house I came by, the people being then gathering; but could not, by reason of weakness. Was resigned and composed under my weakness; but was much exercised with concern for my companions in travel, whom I had left with much regret, some lame, and some sick.

“Friday, Sept. 12. Rode about fifty miles; and came just at night to a Christian friend’s house, about twenty-five miles westward from Philadelphia. Was courteously received, and kindly entertained, and found myself much refreshed in the midst of my weakness and fatigues.

“Saturday, Sept. 13. Was still agreeably entertained with Christian friendship, and all things necessary for my weak circumstances. In the afternoon heard Mr. Treat preach; and was refreshed in conversation with him in the evening.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 14. At the desire of Mr. Treat and the people, I preached both parts of the day (but short) from Luke xiv. 23. ‘And the Lord said unto the servant, go out,’ &c. God gave me some freedom and warmth in my discourse; and, I trust, helped me in some measure to labour in singleness of heart. Was much tired in the evening, but was comforted with the most tender treatment I ever met with in my life. My mind through the whole of this day was exceeding calm; and I could ask for nothing in prayer, with any encouragement of soul, but that ‘the will of God might be done.’

“Monday, Sept. 15. Spent the whole day in concert with Mr. Treat, in endeavours to compose a difference, subsisting between certain persons in the congregation where we now were; and there seemed to be a blessing on our endeavours. In the evening baptized a child: was in a calm, composed frame, and enjoyed, I trust, a spiritual sense of divine things, while administering the ordinance. Afterwards spent the time in religious conversation, till late in the night. This was indeed a pleasant, agreeable evening.

“Tuesday, Sept. 16. Continued still at my friend’s house, about twenty-five miles westward of Philadelphia. Was very weak, unable to perform any business, and scarcely able to sit up.

Wednesday, Sept. 17. Rode into Philadelphia. Still very weak, and my cough and spitting of blood continued. Enjoyed some agreeable conversation with friends, but wanted more spirituality.

“Thursday, Sept. 18. Went from Philadelphia to Mr. Treat’s: was agreeably entertained on the road: and was in a sweet, composed frame, in the evening.

Friday, Sept. 19. Rode from Mr. Treat’s to Mr. Stockston’s at Prince-town: was extremely weak, but kindly received and entertained. Spent the evening with some degree of satisfaction.

“Saturday, Sept. 20. Arrived among my own people, just at night: found them praying together; went in, and gave them some account of God’s dealings with me and my companions in the journey; which seemed affecting to them. I then prayed with them, and thought the divine presence was amongst us; divers were melted into tears, and seemed to have a sense of divine things. Being very weak, I was obliged soon to repair to my lodgings, and felt much worn out in the evening. Thus God has carried me through the fatigues and perils of another journey to Susquehannah, and returned me again in safety, though under a great degree of bodily indisposition. Oh that my soul were truly thankful for renewed instances of mercy! Many hardships and distresses I endured in this journey; but the Lord supported me under them all.”

* * * * * * *

Part 8: After His Return From His Last Journey To Susquehannah, Until His Death.

PART VIII. AFTER HIS RETURN FROM HIS LAST JOURNEY TO SUSQUEHANNAH, UNTIL HIS DEATH.

HITHERTO Mr. Brainerd had kept a constant diary, giving an account of what passed from day to day, with very little interruption: but henceforward his diary is very much interrupted by his illness; under which he was often brought so low, as either not to be capable of writing, or not well able to bear the burden of a care so constant, as was requisite, to recollect every evening what had passed in the day, and digest it, and set down an orderly account of it in writing. However, his diary was not wholly neglected; but he took care, from time to time, to take some notice in it of the most material things concerning himself and the state of his mind, even till within a few days of his death; as the reader will see afterwards.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 21, 1746. I was so weak I could not preach, nor pretend to ride over to my people in the forenoon. In the afternoon rode out; sat in my chair, and discoursed to my people from Rom. xiv. 7, 8. ‘For none of us liyeth to himself,’ &c. I was strengthened and helped in my discourse; and there appeared something agreeable in the assembly. I returned to my lodgings extremely tired; but thankful that I had been enabled to speak a word to my poor people I had been so long absent from. Was able to sleep very little this night, through weariness and pain. Oh, how blessed should I be, if the little I do were all done with right views! Oh that, ‘whether I live, I might live to the Lord,’ &c.

“Saturday, Sept. 27. Spent this day, as well as the whole week past, under a great degree of bodily weakness, exercised with a violent cough, and a considerable fever. I had no appetite to any kind of food; and frequently brought up what I ate, as soon as it was down; and oftentimes had little rest in my bed by reason of pains in my breast and back. I was able, however, to ride over to my people about two miles every day, and take some care of those who were then at work upon a small house for me to reside in amongst the Indians.   I was sometimes scarce able to walk, and never able to sit up the whole day, through the week. Was calm and composed, and but little exercised with melancholy damps, as in former seasons of weakness. Whether I should ever recover or no, seemed very doubtful; but this was many times a comfort to me, that life and death did not depend upon my choice. I was pleased to think, that he who is infinitely wise, had the determination of this matter; and that I had no trouble to consider and weigh things upon all sides, in order to make the choice, whether I should live or die. Thus my time was consumed; I had little strength to pray, none to write or read, and scarce any to meditate: but through divine goodness, I could with great composure look death in the face, and frequently with sensible  joy. Oh how blessed it is, to be habitually prepared for death! The Lord grant that I may be actually ready also!

“Lord’s day, Sept. 28. Rode to my people; and, though under much weakness, attempted to preach from 2 Cor. xiii. 5. ‘Examine yourselves,’ &c. Discoursed about half an hour; at which season divine power seemed to attend the word: but being extremely weak, I was obliged to desist: and after a turn of faintness, with much difficulty rode to my lodgings; where betaking myself to my bed, I lay in a burning fever, and almost delirious, for several hours; till towards morning my fever went off with a violent sweat. I have often been feverish, and unable to rest quietly after preaching; but this was the most severe, distressing turn that ever preaching brought upon me. Yet I felt perfectly at rest in my own mind, because I had made my utmost attempts to speak for God, and knew I could do no more.

“Tuesday, Sept. 30. Yesterday, and to-day, was in the same weak state, or rather weaker than in days past; was scarce able to sit up half the day. Was in a composed frame of mind, remarkably free from dejection and melancholy damps; as God has been pleased, in a great measure, to deliver me from these unhappy glooms, in the general course of my present weakness hitherto, and also from a peevish, froward spirit. And oh how great a mercy is this! Oh that I might always be perfectly quiet in seasons of greatest weakness, although nature should sink and fail!

Oh that I may always be able with utmost sincerity to say, ‘Lord, not my will, but thine be done!’ This, through grace, I can say at present, with regard to life or death, ‘The Lord do with me as seems good in his sight;’ that whether I live or die, I may glorify him, who is ‘worthy to receive blessing, and honour, and dominion for ever. Amen.’

“Saturday, Oct. 4. Spent the former part of this week under a great degree of infirmity and disorder, as I had done several weeks before: was able, however, to ride a little every day, although unable to sit up half the day, till Thursday. Took some care daily of some persons at work upon my house. On Friday afternoon found myself wonderfully revived and strengthened; and having some time before given notice to my people, and those of them at the Forks of Delaware in particular, that I designed, with leave of Providence, to administer the sacrament of the Lord’s supper upon the first sabbath in October, the sabbath now approaching, on Friday afternoon I preached, preparatory to the sacrament, from 2 Cor. xiii. 5. finishing what I had proposed to offer upon the subject the sabbath before. The sermon was blessed of God to the stirring up religious affection, and a spirit of devotion, in the people of God; and to the greatly affecting one who had backslidden from God, which caused him to judge and condemn himself. I was surprisingly strengthened in my work while I was speaking: but was obliged immediately after to repair to bed, being now removed into my own house among the Indians; which gave me such speedy relief and refreshment, as I could not well have lived without. Spent some time on Friday night in conversing with my people about divine things, as I lay upon my bed; and found my soul refreshed, though my body was weak. This being Saturday, I discoursed particularly with divers of the communicants; and this afternoon preached from Zech. xii. 10. ‘And I will pour on the house of David,’ &c. There seemed to be a tender melting, and hearty mourning for sin, in numbers in the congregation. My soul was in a comfortable frame, and I enjoyed freedom and assistance in public service; was myself, as well as most of the congregation, much affected with the humble confession and apparent broken-heartedness of the forementioned backslider; and could not but rejoice, that God had given him such a sense of his sin and unworthiness. Was extremely tired in the evening; but lay on my bed, and discoursed to my people.

“Lord’s day, Oct. 5. Was still very weak; and in the morning considerably afraid I should not be able to go through the work of the day; having much to do, both in private and public. Discoursed before the administration of the sacrament, from John i. 29.’Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.’ Where I considered, I. In what respects Christ is called the Lamb of God: and observed that he is so called, (1.) From the purity and innocence of his nature. (2.) From his meekness and patience under sufferings. (3.) From his being that atonement, which was pointed out in the sacrifice of lambs, and in particular by the paschal lamb. II. Considered how and in what sense he ‘takes away the sin of the world:’ and observed, that the means and manner, in and by which he takes away the sins of men, was his ‘giving himself for them,’ doing and suffering in their room and stead, &c. And he is said to take away the sin of the world, not because all the world shall actually be redeemed from sin by him; but because, (1.) He has done and suffered sufficient to answer for the sins of the world, and so to redeem all mankind. (2.) He actually does take away the sins of the elect world. And, III. Considered how we are to behold him, in order to have our sins taken away. (1.) Not with our bodily eyes. Nor, (2.) By imagining him on the cross, &c. But by a spiritual view of his glory and goodness, engaging the soul to rely on him, &c. The divine presence attended this discourse; and the assembly was considerably melted with divine truths. After sermon baptized two persons. Then administered the Lord’s supper to near forty communicants of the Indians, besides divers dear Christians of the white people. It seemed to be a season of divine power and grace; and numbers seemed to rejoice in God. Oh, the sweet union and harmony then appearing among the religious people! My soul was refreshed, and my religious friends, of the white people, with me. After the sacrament, could scarcely get home, though it was not more than twenty roods; but was supported and led by my friends, and laid on my bed; where I lay in pain till some time in the evening; and then was able to sit up and discourse with friends. Oh, how was this day spent in prayers and praises among my dear people! One might hear them, all the morning, before public worship, and in the evening, till near midnight, praying and singing praises to God, in one or other of their houses. My soul was refreshed, though my body was weak.”

This week, in two days, though in a very low state, he went to Elizabeth-town, to attend the meeting of the Synod there: but was disappointed by its removal to New York. He continued in a very composed, comfortable frame of mind.

“Saturday, Oct. 11 Towards night was seized with an ague, which was followed with a hard fever, and considerable pain: was treated with great kindness, and was ashamed to see so much concern about so unworthy a creature, as I knew myself to be. Was in a comfortable frame of mind, wholly submissive, with regard to life or death. It was indeed a peculiar satisfaction to me, to think, that it was not my concern or business to determine whether I should live or die. I likewise felt peculiarly satisfied, while under this uncommon degree of disorder; being now fully convinced of my being really weak, and unable to perform my work. Whereas at other times my mind was perplexed with fears, that I was a misimprover of time, by conceiting I was sick, when I was not in reality so. Oh, how precious is time! And how guilty it makes me feel, when I think I have trifled away and misimproved it, or neglected to fill up each part of it with duty, to the utmost of my ability and capacity!

“Lord’s day, Oct. 12. Was scarce able to sit up in the forenoon: in the afternoon attended public worship, and was in a composed, comfortable frame.

“Lord’s day, Oct. 19. Was scarcely able to do any thing at all in the week past, except that on Thursday I rode out about four miles; at which time I took cold. As I was able to do little or nothing, so I enjoyed not much spirituality, or lively religious affection; though at some times I longed much to be more fruitful and full of heavenly affection; and was grieved to see the hours slide away, while I could do nothing for God. Was able this week to attend public worship. Was composed and comfortable, willing either to die or live; but found it hard to be reconciled to the thoughts of living useless. Oh that I might never live to be a burden to God’s creation; but that I might be allowed to repair home, when my sojourning work is done!”

This week he went back to his Indians at Cranberry, to  take some care of their spiritual and temporal concerns; and was much spent with riding; though he rode but a little way in a day.

“Thursday, Oct. 23. Went to my own house, and set things in order. Was very weak, and somewhat melancholy: laboured to do something, but had no strength; and was forced to lie down on my bed, very solitary.

“Friday, Oct. 24. Spent the day in overseeing and directing my people about mending their fence, and securing their wheat. Found that all their concerns of a secular nature depended upon me. Was somewhat refreshed in the evening, having been able to do something valuable in the day-time. Oh, how it pains me to see time pass away, when I can do nothing to any purpose!

“Saturday, Oct. 25. Visited some of my people; spent some time in writing, and felt much better in body than usual. When it was near night, I felt so well, that I had thoughts of expounding: but in the evening was much disordered again, and spent the night in coughing, and spitting blood.

“Lord’s day, Oct. 26. In the morning was exceeding weak: spent the day, till near night, in pain to see my poor people wandering as sheep not having a shepherd, waiting and hoping to see me able to preach to them before night. It could not but distress me to see them in this case, and to find myself unable to attempt any thing for their spiritual benefit. But towards night, finding myself a little better, I called them together to my house, and sat down, and read and expounded Matt. v. 1-16. This discourse, though delivered in much weakness, was attended with power to many of the hearers; especially what was spoken upon the last of these verses; where I insisted on the infinite wrong done to religion, by having our light become darkness, instead of shining before men. Many in the congregation were now deeply affected with a sense of their deficiency, in regard of a spiritual conversation, that might recommend religion to others, and a spirit of concern and watchfulness seemed to be excited in them. There was one, in particular, who had fallen into the sin of drunkenness some time before, now deeply convinced of his sin, and the great dishonour done to religion by his misconduct, and he discovered a great degree of grief and concern on that account. My soul was refreshed to see this. And though I had no strength to speak so much as I would have done, but was obliged to lie down on the bed; yet I rejoiced to see such an humble melting in the congregation; and that divine truths, though faintly delivered, were attended with so much efficacy upon the auditory.

“Monday, Oct. 27. Spent the day in overseeing and directing the Indians about mending the fence round their wheat: was able to walk with them, and contrive their business, all the forenoon. In the afternoon was visited by two dear friends, and spent some time in conversation with them. Towards night I was able to walk out, and take care of the Indians again. In the evening enjoyed a very peaceful frame.

“Tuesday, Oct. 28. Rode to Prince-town, in a very weak state: had such a violent fever, by the way, that I was forced to alight at a friend’s house, and lie down for some time. Near night was visited by Mr. Treat, Mr. Beaty and his wife, and another friend: my spirits were refreshed to see them; but I was surprised, and even ashamed, that they had taken so much pains as to ride thirty or forty miles to see me. Was able to sit up most of the evening; and spent the time in a very comfortable manner with my friends.

“Wednesday, Oct. 29. Rode about ten miles with my friends that came yesterday to see me; and then parted with them all but one, who stayed on purpose to keep me company, and cheer my spirits. Was extremely weak, and very feverish, especially towards night; but enjoyed comfort and satisfaction.

“Thursday, Oct. 30. Rode three or four miles, to visit Mr. Wales: spent some time, in an agreeable manner, in conversation; and though extremely weak, enjoyed a comfortable, composed frame of mind.

Friday, Oct. 31. Spent the day among friends, in a comfortable frame of mind, though exceeding weak, and under a considerable fever.

“Saturday, Nov. 1 Took leave of friends after having spent the forenoon with them, and returned home to my own house. Was much disordered in the evening, and oppressed with my cough; which has now been constant for a long time, with a hard pain in my breast, and fever.

“Lord’s day, Nov. 2. Was unable to preach, and scarcely able to sit up, the whole day. Was grieved, and almost sunk, to see my poor people destitute of the means of grace; especially considering they could not read, and so were under great disadvantages for spending the sabbath comfortably. Oh, me thought, I could be contented to be sick, if my poor flock had a faithful pastor to feed them with spiritual knowledge! A view of their want of this was more afflictive to me than all my bodily illness.

“Monday, Nov. 3. Being now in so weak and low a state, that I was utterly incapable of performing my work, and having little hope of recovery, unless by much riding, I thought it my duty to take a long journey into New England, and to divert myself among my friends, whom I had not now seen for a long time. And accordingly took leave of my congregation this day. Before I left my people, I visited them all in their respective houses, and discoursed to each one, as I thought most proper and suitable for their circumstances, and found great freedom and assistance in so doing. I scarcely left one house but some were in tears; and many were not only affected with my being about to leave them, but with the solemn addresses I made them upon divine things; for I was helped to be fervent in spirit while I discoursed to them. When I had thus gone through my congregation, (which took me most of the day,) and had taken leave of them, and of the school, I left home, and rode about two miles, to the house where I lived in the summer past, and there lodged. Was refreshed, this evening, in that I had left my congregation so well-disposed and affected, and that I had been so much assisted in making my farewell-addresses to them.

“Tuesday, Nov. 4. Rode to Woodbridge, and lodged with Mr. Pierson; continuing in a weak state.

“ Wednesday, Nov. 5. Rode to Elizabeth-town; intending as soon as possible to prosecute my journey into New England. But was, in an hour or two after my arrival, taken much worse.

“ After this, for near a week, I was confined to my chamber, and most of the time to my bed: and then so far revived as to be able to walk about the house; but was still confined within doors.

“In the beginning of this extraordinary turn of disorder, after my coming to Elizabeth-town, I was enabled through mercy to maintain a calm, composed, and patient spirit, as I had been before from the beginning of my weakness. After I had been in Elizabeth-town about a fortnight, and had so far recovered that I was able to walk about the house, upon a day of thanksgiving kept in this place, I was enabled to recall and recount over the mercies of God, in such a manner as greatly affected me, and filled me with thankfulness and praise. Especially my soul praised God for his work of grace among the Indians, and the enlargement of his dear kingdom. My soul blessed God for what he is in himself, and adored him, that he ever would display himself to creatures. I rejoiced that he was God, and longed that all should know it, and feel it, and rejoice in it. ‘Lord, glorify thyself,’ was the desire and cry of my soul. Oh that all people might love and praise the blessed God; that he might have all possible honour and glory from the intelligent world!

“ After this comfortable thanksgiving-season, I frequently enjoyed freedom, enlargement, and engagedness of soul in prayer, and was enabled to intercede with God for my dear congregation, very often for every family, and every person, in particular. It was often a great comfort to me, that I could pray heartily to God for those, to whom I could not speak, and whom I was not allowed to see. But at other times, my spirits were so flat and low, and my bodily vigour so much wasted, that I had scarce any affections at all.

“ In December I had revived so far as to be able to  walk abroad, and visit friends, and seemed to be on the gaining hand with regard to my health, in the main, until Lord’s day, December 21. At which time I went to the public worship; and it being sacrament day, I laboured much at the Lord’s table, to bring forth a certain corruption, and have it slain, as being an enemy to God and my own soul; and could not but hope, that I had gained some strength against this, as well as other corruptions; and felt some brokenness of heart for my sin.

“After this, having perhaps taken some cold, I began to decline as to bodily health; and continued to do so, till the latter end of January, 1747. Having a violent cough, a considerable fever, an asthmatic disorder, and no appetite for any manner of food, nor any power of digestion, I was reduced to so low a state, that my friends, I believe, generally despaired of my life; and some of them, for some time together, thought I could scarce live a day. At this time, I could think of nothing, with any application of mind, and seemed to be in a great measure void of all affection, and was exercised with great temptations; but yet was not ordinarily afraid of death.

“On Lord’s day, Feb. 1. Though in a very weak and low state, I enjoyed a considerable deal of comfort and sweetness in divine things; and was enabled to plead and use arguments with God in prayer, I think, with a childlike spirit. That passage of Scripture occurred to my mind, and gave me great assistance, ‘If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?’ This text I was helped to plead and insist upon; and saw the divine faithfulness engaged for dealing with me better than any earthly parent can do with his child. This season so refreshed my soul, that my body seemed also to be a gainer by it. And from this time I began gradually to amend. And as I recovered some strength, vigour, and spirit, I found at times some freedom and life in the exercises of devotion, and some longings after spirituality and a life of usefulness to the interests of the great Redeemer. At other times I was awfully barren and lifeless, and out of frame for the things of God; so that I was ready often to cry out, ‘Oh that it were with me as in months past!’ Oh that God had taken me away in the midst of my usefulness, with a sudden stroke, that I might not have been under a necessity of trifling away time in diversions! Oh that I had never lived to spend so much precious time, in so poor a manner, and to so little purpose! Thus I often reflected, was grieved, ashamed, and even confounded, sunk and discouraged.

“On Tuesday, Feb. 24. I was able to ride as far as Newark, (having been confined within Elizabeth-town almost four months,) and the next day returned to Elizabeth-town. My spirits were somewhat refreshed with the ride, though my body was weary.

“On Saturday, Feb. 28. Was visited by an Indian of my own congregation; who brought me letters, and good news of the sober and good behaviour of my people in general. This refreshed my soul; I could not but soon retire, and bless God for his goodness; and found, I trust, a truly thankful frame of spirit, that God seemed to be building up that congregation for himself.

“On Wednesday, March 4. I met with a reproof from a friend, which, although I thought I did not deserve it from him, yet was, I trust, blessed of God to make me more tenderly afraid of sin, more jealous over myself, and more concerned to keep both heart and life pure and unblamable. It likewise caused me to reflect on my past deadness, and want of spirituality, and to abhor myself, and look on myself as most unworthy. This frame of mind continued the next day; and for several days after, I grieved to think, that in my necessary diversions I had not maintained more seriousness, solemnity, heavenly affection and conversation. Thus my spirits were often depressed and sunk; and yet I trust that reproof was made to be beneficial to me.

“Wednesday, March 11, being kept in Elizabeth-town as a day of fasting and prayer, I was able to attend public worship; which was the first time I was able so to do after December 21. Oh, how much weakness and distress did God carry me through in this space of time! But having obtained help from him, I yet live: Oh that I could live more to his glory!

“Lord’s day, March 15. Was able again to attend the public worship, and felt some earnest desires of being restored to the ministerial work: felt, I think, some spirit and life to speak for God.

“Wednesday, March 18. Rode out with a design to visit my people; and the next day arrived among them: but was under great dejection in my journey.

“ On Friday morning I rose early, walked about among my people, and inquired into their state and concerns and found an additional weight and burden on my spirits, upon hearing some things disagreeable. I endeavoured to go to God with my distresses, and made some kind of lamentable complaint; and in a broken manner spread my difficulties before God; but, notwithstanding, my mind continued very gloomy. About ten o’clock I called my people together, and after having explained and sung a psalm, I prayed with them. There was a considerable deal of affection among them; I doubt not, in some instances, that which was more than merely natural.”

This was the last interview that he ever had with his people. About eleven o’clock the same day he left them; and the next day came to Elizabeth-town; his melancholy remaining still: and he continued for a considerable time under a great degree of dejection through vapoury disorders.

“Saturday, March 28. Was taken this morning with violent griping pains. These pains were extreme and constant for several hours; so that it seemed impossible for me, without a miracle, to live twenty-four hours in such distress. I lay confined to my bed the whole day, and in distressing pain all the former part of it: but it pleased God to bless means for the abatement of my distress. Was exceedingly weakened by this pain, and continued so for several days following; being exercised with a fever, cough, and nocturnal sweats. In this distressed case, so long as my head was free of vapoury confusions, death appeared agreeable to me; I looked on it as the end of toils, and an entrance into a place ‘where the weary are at rest;’ and I think I had some relish of the entertainments of the heavenly state; so that by these I was allured and drawn as well as driven by the fatigues of life. Oh, how happy it is, to be drawn by desires of a state of perfect holiness!

“Saturday, April 4. Was sunk and dejected, very restless and uneasy, by reason of the misimprovement of time; and yet knew not what to do. I longed to spend time in fasting and prayer, that I might be delivered from indolence and coldness in the things of God; but, alas, I had not bodily strength for these exercises! Oh, how blessed a thing is it to enjoy peace of conscience! but how dreadful is a want of inward peace and composure of soul! It is impossible, I find, to enjoy this happiness without redeeming time, and maintaining a spiritual frame of mind.

“Lord’s day, April 5. It grieved me to find myself so inconceivably barren. My soul thirsted for grace; but alas, how far was I from obtaining what appeared to me so exceeding excellent! I was ready to despair of ever being a holy creature, and yet my soul was desirous of following hard after God; but never did I see myself so far from having apprehended, or being already perfect, as at this time. The Lord’s supper being this day administered, I attended the ordinance: and though I saw in myself a dreadful emptiness and want of grace, and saw myself as it were at an infinite distance from that purity which becomes the gospel; yet at the communion, especially the distribution of the bread, I enjoyed some warmth of affection, and felt a tender love to the brethren; and I think, to the glorious Redeemer, the first-born among them. I endeavoured then to bring forth mine and his enemies, and slay them before him; and found great freedom in begging deliverance from this spiritual death, as well as in asking divine favours for my friends and congregation, and the church of Christ in general.

“Tuesday, April 7. In the afternoon rode to Newark, in order to marry the Reverend Mr. Dickinson;   and  in the evening performed that work. Afterwards rode home to Elizabeth-town, in a pleasant frame, full of composure and sweetness.

“Thursday, April 9. Attended the ordination of Mr. Tucker,   and afterwards the examination of Mr. Smith: was in a comfortable frame of mind this day, and felt my heart, I think, sometimes in a spiritual frame.

“Friday, April 10. Spent the forenoon in Presbyterial business: in the afternoon, rode to Elizabeth-town; found my brother John there:   spent some time in conversation with him; but was extremely weak and outdone, my spirits considerably sunk, and my mind dejected.

“Monday, April 13. Assisted in examining my brother. In the evening, was in a solemn devout frame; but was much overdone and oppressed with a violent head-ache.

“Tuesday, April 14. Was able to do little or nothing: spent some time with Mr. Byram and other friends. This day my brother went to my people.

“Wednesday, April 15. Found some freedom at the throne of grace several times this day. In the afternoon was very weak, and spent the time to very little purpose; and yet in the evening had, I thought, some religious warmth and spiritual desires in prayer: my soul seemed to go forth after God, and take complacence in his divine perfections. But, alas! afterwards awfully let down my watch, and grew careless and secure.

“Thursday, April 16. Was in bitter anguish of soul in the morning, such as I have scarce ever felt, with a sense of sin and guilt. I continued in distress the whole day, attempting to pray wherever I went; and indeed could not help so doing: but looked upon myself so vile, I dared not look any body in the face; and was even grieved that any body should show me any respect, or at least that they should be so deceived as to think I deserved it.

“Friday, April 17. In the evening could not but think that God helped me to ‘draw near to the throne of grace,’ though most unworthy, and gave me a sense of his favour; which gave me inexpressible support and encouragement. Though I scarcely dared to hope the mercy was real, it appeared so great; yet could not but rejoice that ever God should discover his reconciled face to such a vile sinner. Shame and confusion, at times, covered me; and then hope, and joy, and admiration of divine goodness gained the ascendant. Sometimes I could not but admire the divine goodness, that the Lord had not let me fall into all the grossest, vilest acts of sins and open scandal that could be thought of; and felt myself so necessitated to praise God, that this was ready for a little while to swallow up my shame and pressure of spirit on account of my sins.”

After this, his dejection and pressure of spirit returned; and he remained under it the two next days.

“Monday, April 20. Was in a very disordered state, and kept my bed most of the day. I enjoyed a little more comfort than in several of the preceding days. This day I arrived at the age of twenty-nine years.

“Tuesday, April 21. I set out on my journey for New England, in order (if it might be the will of God) to recover my health by riding: travelled to New York, and there lodged.”

This proved his final departure from New Jersey. he travelled slowly, and arrived among his friends at East Haddam, about the beginning of May. There is very little account in his diary of the time that passed from his setting out on his journey to May 10. He speaks of his sometimes finding his heart rejoicing in the glorious perfections of God, and longing to live to him; but complains of the unfixedness of his thoughts, and their being easily diverted from divine subjects, and cries out of his leanness, as testifying against him, in the loudest manner. And concerning those diversions he was obliged to use for his health, he says, that he sometimes found he could use diversions with ”singleness of heart,” aiming at the glory of God; but that he also found there was a necessity of great care and watchfulness, lest he should lose that spiritual temper of mind in his diversions, and lest they should degenerate into what was merely selfish, without any supreme aim at the glory of God in them.

“Lord’s day, May 10. (At Had-Lime) I could not but feel some measure of gratitude to God at this time, (wherein I was much exercised,) that he had always disposed me, in my ministry, to insist on the great doctrine of regeneration, the new creature, faith in Christ, progressive sanctification, supreme love to God, living entirely to the glory of God, being not our own, and the like. God thus helped me to see, in the surest manner, from time to time, that these, and the like doctrine necessarily connected with them, are the only foundation of safety and salvation for perishing sinners; and that those divine dispositions, which are consonant hereto, are that holiness, ‘without which no man shall see the Lord.’ The exercise of these God-like tempers wherein the soul acts in a kind of concert with God, and would be and do every thing that is pleasing to him I saw, would stand by the soul in a dying hour; for God must, I think, deny himself, if he cast away his own image, even the soul that is one in desires with himself.

“Lord’s day, May 17. [At Millington] Spent the forenoon at home, being unable to attend the public worship. At this time, God gave me some affecting sense of my own vileness and the exceeding sinfulness of my heart; that there seemed to be nothing but sin and corruption within me. ‘Innumerable evils compassed me about:’ my want of spirituality and holy living, my neglect of God, and living to myself. All the abominations of my heart and life seemed to be open to my view; and I had nothing to say, but, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’ Towards noon I saw, that the grace of God in Christ is infinitely free towards sinners, and such sinners as I was. I also saw, that God is the supreme good, that in his presence is life; and I began to long to die, that I might be with him, in a state of freedom from all sin. Oh, how a small glimpse of his excellency refreshed my soul! Oh, how worthy is the blessed God to be loved, adored, and delighted in for himself, for his own divine excellencies!

“Though I felt much dulness, and want of a spirit in prayer this week; yet I had some glimpses of the excellency of divine things; and especially one morning, in secret meditation and prayer, the excellency and beauty of holiness, as a likeness to the glorious God, was so discovered to me, that I began to long earnestly to be in that world where holiness dwells in perfection. I seemed to long for this perfect holiness, not so much for the sake of my own happiness, (although I saw clearly that this was the greatest, yea, the only happiness of the soul,) as that I might please God, live entirely to him, and glorify him to the utmost stretch of my rational powers and capacities.

“Lord’s day, May 24. [Long Meadow in Springfield] Could not but think, as I have often remarked to others, that much more of true religion consists in deep humility, brokenness of heart, and an abasing sense of barrenness and want of grace and holiness, than most who are called Christians imagine; especially those who have been esteemed the converts of the late day. Many seem to know of no other religion but elevated joys and affections, arising only from some flights of imagination, or some suggestion made to their mind, of Christ being theirs, God living them, and the like.”

On Thursday, May 28. He came from Long Meadow to Northampton: appearing vastly better than, by his account, he had been in the winter; indeed so welt, that he was able to ride twenty-five miles in a day, and to walk half a mile; and appeared cheerful, and free from melancholy; but yet undoubtedly, at that time, in a confirmed, incurable consumption.

I had much opportunity, before this, of particular information  concerning him, from many who were well acquainted with him; and had myself once an opportunity of considerable conversation and some acquaintance with him, at New-Haven, near four years before, at the time of the commencement, when he offered that confession to the rector of the college, which has been already mentioned in this history; I being one he was pleased then several times to consult on that affair: but now I had opportunity for a more full acquaintance with him. I found him remarkably sociable, pleasant, and entertaining in his conversation; yet solid, savoury, spiritual, and very profitable. He appeared meek, modest, and humble; far from any stiffness, moroseness, superstitious demureness, or affected singularity in speech or behaviour, and seeming to dislike all such things. We enjoyed not only the benefit of his conversation, but had the comfort and advantage of hearing him pray in the family, from time to time. His manner of praying was very agreeable; most becoming a worm of the dust, and a disciple of Christ, addressing an infinitely great and holy God, and Father of mercies; not with florid expressions, or a studied eloquence; not with any intemperate vehemence, or indecent boldness. It was at the greatest distance from any appearance of ostentation, and from every thing that might look as though he meant to recommend himself to those that were about him, or set himself off to their acceptance. It was free also from vain repetitions, without impertinent excursions, or needless multiplying of words. He expressed himself with the strictest propriety, with weight, and pungency; and yet what his lips uttered seemed to flow from the fulness of his heart, as deeply impressed with a great and solemn sense of our necessities, unworthiness, and dependence, and of God’s infinite greatness, excellency, and sufficiency, rather than merely from a warm and fruitful brain, pouring out good expressions. And I know not that ever I heard him so much as ask a blessing or return thanks at table, but there was something remarkable to be observed both in the matter and manner of the performance. In his prayers, he insisted much on the prosperity of Zion, the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world, and the flourishing and propagation of religion among the Indians. And he generally made it one petition in his prayer, “that we might not outlive our usefulness.”

“Lord’s day, May 31. [At Northampton] I had little inward sweetness in religion most of the week past; not realizing and beholding spiritually the glory of God, and the blessed Redeemer; from whence always arise my comforts and joys in religion, if I have any at all: and if I cannot so behold the excellencies and perfections of God, as to cause me to rejoice in him for what he is in himself, I have no solid foundation for joy. To rejoice, only because I apprehend I have an interest in Christ, and shall be finally saved, is a poor mean business indeed.”

This week he consulted Dr. Mather, at my house, concerning his illness, who plainly told him, that there were great evidences of his being in a confirmed consumption, and that he could give him no encouragement that he should ever recover. But it seemed not to occasion the least discomposure in him, not to make any manner of alteration as to the cheerfulness and serenity of his mind, or the freedom or pleasantness of his conversation.

“Lord’s day, June 7. My attention was greatly engaged, and my soul so drawn forth, this day, by what I heard of the ‘exceeding preciousness of the saving grace of God’s Spirit,’ that it almost overcame my body, in my weak state. I saw, that true grace is exceeding precious indeed; that it is very rare; and that there is but a very small degree of it, even where the reality of it is to be found; at least, I saw this to be my case.

In the preceding week I enjoyed some comfortable seasons of meditation. One morning the cause of God appeared exceeding precious to me: the Redeemer’s kingdom is all that is valuable in the earth, and I could not but long for the promotion of it in the world. I saw also, that this cause is God’s, that he has an infinitely greater regard and concern for it than I could possibly have; that if I have any true love to this blessed interest, it is only a drop derived from that ocean: hence, I was ready to ‘lift up my head with joy;’ and conclude, ‘Well, if God’s cause be so dear and precious to him, he will promote it.’

And thus I did as it were rest on God, that surely he would promote that which was so agreeable to his own will; though the time when must still be left to his sovereign pleasure.”

He was advised by physicians still to continue riding, as what would tend, above any other means, to prolong his life. He was at a loss, for some time, which way to bend his course next; but finally determined to ride from hence to Boston; we having concluded that one of this family should go with him, and be helpful to him in his weak and low state.

“Tuesday, June 9. I set out on a journey from Northampton to Boston. Travelled slowly, and got some acquaintance with divers ministers on the road.

“Having now continued to ride for some considerable time together, I felt myself much better than I had formerly done; and found, that in proportion to the prospect I had of being restored to a state of usefulness, so I desired the continuance of life: but death appeared inconceivably more desirable to me than a useless life; yet blessed be God, I found my heart, at times, fully resigned and reconciled to this greatest of afflictions, if God saw fit thus to deal with me.

“Friday, June 12. I arrived in Boston this day, somewhat fatigued with my journey. Observed that there is no rest, but in God: fatigues of body, and anxieties of mind, attend us, both in town and country; no place is exempted.

“Lord’s day, June 14. I enjoyed some enlargement and sweetness in family prayer, as well as in secret exercises; God appeared excellent, his ways full of pleasure and peace, and all I wanted was a spirit of holy fervency, to live to him.

“Wednesday, June 17. This, and the two preceding days, I spent mainly in visiting the ministers of the town, and was treated with great respect by them.

“On Thursday, June 18. I was taken exceeding ill, and brought to the gates of death, by the breaking of small ulcers in my lungs, as my physician supposed. In this extreme weak state I continued for several weeks, and was frequently reduced so low, as to be utterly speechless, and not able so much as to whisper a word; and even after I had so far revived, as to walk about the house, and to step out of doors, I was exercised every day with a faint turn, which continued usually four or five hours: at which times, though I was not so utterly speechless, but that I could say Yes or No, yet I could not converse at all, nor speak one sentence, without making stops for breath; and divers times in this season, my friends gathered round my bed, to see me breathe my last, which they looked for every moment, as I myself also did.

“How I was, the first day or two of my illness, with regard to the exercise of reason, I scarcely know; I believe I was somewhat shattered with the violence of the fever, at times: but the third day of my illness, and constantly afterwards, for four or five weeks together, I enjoyed as much serenity of mind, and clearness of thought, as perhaps I ever did in my life; and I think my mind never penetrated with so much ease and freedom into divine things, as at this time; and I never felt so capable of demonstrating the truth of many important doctrine of the gospel as now. And as I saw clearly the truth of those great doctrine, which are justly styled the doctrine of grace; so I saw with no less clearness, that the essence of religion consisted in the soul’s conformity to God, and acting above all selfish views, for his glory, longing to be for him, to live to him, and please and honour him in all things: and this from a clear view of his infinite excellency and worthiness in himself, to be loved, adored, worshipped, and served by all intelligent creatures. Thus I saw, that when a soul loves God with a supreme love, he therein acts like the blessed God himself, who most justly loves himself in that manner. So when God’s interest and his are become one, and he longs that God should be glorified, and rejoices to think that he is unchangeably possessed of the highest glory and blessedness, herein also he acts in conformity to God. In like manner, when the soul is fully resigned to, and rests satisfied and contented with, the divine will, here it is also conformed to God.

“I saw further, that as this divine temper, whereby the  soul exalts God, and treads self in the dust, is wrought in the soul by God’s discovering his own glorious perfections in the face of Jesus Christ to it, by the special influences of the Holy Spirit, so he cannot but have regard to it, as his own work; and as it is his image in the soul, he cannot but take delight in it. Then I saw again, that if God should slight and reject his own moral image, he must needs deny himself; which he cannot do. And thus I saw the stability and infallibility of this religion; and that those who are truly possessed of it, have the most complete and satisfying evidence of their being interested in all the benefits of Christ’s redemption, having their hearts conformed to him; and that these, these only, are qualified for the employments and entertainments of God’s kingdom of glory; as none but these have any relish for the business of heaven, which is to ascribe glory to God, and not to themselves; and that God (though I would speak it with great reverence of his name and perfection) cannot, without denying himself, finally cast such away.

“The next thing I had then to do, was to inquire, whether this was my religion: and here God was pleased to help me to the most easy remembrance and critical review of what had passed in course, of a religious nature, through several of the latter years of my life. And although I could discover much corruption attending my best duties, many selfish views and carnal ends, much spiritual pride and self-exaltation, and innumerable other evils which compassed me about; yet God was pleased, as I was reviewing, quickly to put this question out of doubt, by showing me that I had, from time to time, acted above the utmost influence of mere self-love; that I had longed to please and glorify him, as my highest happiness, &c. And this review was through grace attended with a present feeling of the same divine temper of mind; I felt now pleased to think of the glory of God, and longed for heaven, as a state wherein I might glorify God perfectly, rather than a place of happiness for myself: and this feeling of the love of God in my heart, which I trust the Spirit of God excited in me afresh, was sufficient to give me full satisfaction, and make me long, as I had many times before done, to be with Christ. I did not now want any of the sudden suggestions, which many are so pleased with, ‘That Christ and his benefits are mine; that God loves me,’ &c. in order to give me satisfaction about my state: no, my soul now abhorred those delusions of Satan, which are thought to be the immediate witness of the Spirit, while there is nothing but an empty suggestion of a certain fact, without any gracious discovery of the divine glory, or of the Spirit’s work in their own hearts. I saw the awful delusion of this kind of confidence, as well as of the whole of that religion, from which they usually spring, or at least of which they are the attendants. The false religion of the late day, (though a day of wondrous grace,) the imaginations, and impressions made only on the animal affections together with the sudden suggestions made to the mind by Satan, transformed into an angel of light, of certain facts not revealed in Scripture and many such like things, I fear, have made up the greater part of the religious appearance in many places.

“These things I saw with great clearness, when I was thought to be dying. And God gave me great concern for his church and interest in the world, at this time: not so much because the late remarkable influence upon the minds of people was abated, as because that false religion those heats of imagination, and wild and selfish commotions of the animal affections which attended the work of grace, had prevailed so far. This was that which my mind dwelt upon, almost day and night: and this, to me, was the darkest appearance, respecting religion, in the land; for it was this, chiefly, that had prejudiced the world against inward religion. And I saw the great misery of all was, that so few saw any manner of difference between those exercises that were spiritual and holy, and those which have self-love only for their beginning, centre, and end.

“As God was pleased to afford me clearness of thought, and composure of mind, almost continually, for several weeks together under my great weakness; so he enabled me, in some measure, to improve my time, as I hope, to valuable purposes. I was enabled to write a number of important letters to friends in remote places:   and sometimes I wrote when I was speechless, i. e. unable to maintain conversation with any body; though perhaps I was able to speak a word or two so as to be heard. At this season also, while I was confined at Boston, I read with care and attention some papers of old Mr. Shepard’s, lately come to light, and designed for the press: and as I was desired, and greatly urged, made some corrections, where the sense was left dark, for want of a word or two. Besides this, I had many visitants; with whom, when I was able to speak, I always conversed of the things of religion; and was peculiarly disposed and assisted in distinguishing between the true and false religion of the times. There was scarce any subject, that has been matter of debate in the late day, but what I was in at one time or other brought to a sort of necessity to discourse upon, and show my opinion; and that frequently before numbers of people; and especially, I discoursed repeatedly on the nature and necessity of that humiliation, self-emptiness, or full conviction of a person’s being utterly undone in himself, which is necessary in order to a saving faith, and the extreme difficulty of being brought to this, and the great danger there is of persons taking up with some self-righteous appearances of it. The danger of this I especially dwelt upon, being persuaded that multitudes perish in this hidden way; and because so little is said from most pulpits to discover any danger here: so that persons being never effectually brought to die in themselves, are never truly united to Christ, and so perish. I also discoursed much on what I take to be the essence of true religion, endeavouring plainly to describe that God-like temper and disposition of soul, and that holy conversation and behaviour, that may justly claim the honour of having God for its original and patron. And I have reason to hope God blessed my way of discoursing and distinguishing to some, both ministers and people; so that my time was not wholly lost.”

He was much visited, while in Boston, by many persons of considerable note and character, and by some of the first rank; who showed him uncommon respect, and appeared highly pleased and entertained with his conversation. And besides his being honoured with the company and respect of ministers of the town, he was visited by several ministers from various parts of the country. He took all opportunities to discourse of the peculiar nature and distinguishing characters of true, spiritual, and vital religion; and to hear his testimony against the various false appearances of it, consisting in, or arising from, impressions on the imagination, sudden and supposed immediate suggestions of truths not contained in the Scripture, and that faith which consists primarily in a person believing that Christ died for him in particular, &c. What he said was, for the most part, heard with uncommon attention and regard: and his discourses and reasonings appeared manifestly to have great weight and influence, with many that he conversed with, both ministers and others.

Also the Honourable Commissioners in Boston, of the incorporated Society in London for propagating the Gospel in New England and parts adjacent, having newly had committed to them a legacy of the late reverend and famous Dr. Daniel Williams of London, for the support of two missionaries to the heathen, were pleased, while he was in Boston, to consult him about a mission to those Indians called the Six Nations, particularly about the qualifications requisite in a missionary to those Indians; and were so satisfied with his sentiments on this head, and had that confidence in his faithfulness, and his judgment and discretion in things of this nature, that they desired him to undertake to find and recommend a couple of persons fit to be employed in this business; and very much left the matter with him.

Likewise certain pious and generously disposed gentlemen in Boston, being moved by the wonderful narrative of  his labours and success among the Indians in New Jersey, and more especially by their conversation with him on the same subject, took opportunity to inquire more particularly into the state and necessities of his congregation, and the school among them, with a charitable intention of contributing something to promote the excellent design of advancing the interests of Christianity among the Indians; and understanding that there was a want of Bibles for the school, three dozen of Bibles were immediately procured, and 14l. in bills (of the old tenor) given over and above, besides more large benefactions made afterwards, which I shall have occasion to mention in their proper place.

Mr. Brainerd’s restoration from his extremely low state in Boston, so as to go abroad again and to travel, was very unexpected to him and his friends. My daughter who was with him, writes thus concerning him, in a letter dated June 23. “On Thursday, he was very ill with a violent fever, and extreme pain in his head and breast, and at turns, delirious. So he remained till Saturday evening, when he seemed to be in the agonies of death; the family was up with him till one or two o’clock, expecting every hour would be his last. On sabbath-day he was a little revived, his head was better, but very full of pain, and exceeding sore at his breast, much put to it for breath, &c. Yesterday he was better upon all accounts. Last night he slept but little. This morning he was much worse. Dr. Pynchon says, he has no hopes of his life; nor does he think it likely he will ever come out of the chamber; though he says, he may be able to come to Northampton ”

In another letter, dated June 29, she says as follows. “Mr. Brainerd has not so much pain, nor fever, since I last wrote, as before; yet he is extremely weak and low, and very faint, expecting every day will be his last. He says, it is impossible for him to live, for he has hardly vigour enough to draw his breath. I went this morning into town, and when I came home, Mr. Bromfield said, he never expected I should see him alive; for he lay two hours, as they thought, dying; one could scarcely tell whether he was alive or not; he was not able to speak for some time: but now is much as he was before. The doctor thinks he will drop away in such a turn. Mr. Brainerd says he never felt any thing so much like dissolution, as what he felt to-day; and says he never had any conception of its being possible for any creature to be alive, and yet so weak as he is from day to day. Dr. Pynchon says, he should not be surprised if he should so recover as to live half a year; nor would it surprise him if he should die in half a day. Since I began to write he is not so well, having had a faint turn again; yet patient and resigned, having no distressing fears, but the contrary.”

His physician, the honourable Joseph Pynchon, Esq. when he visited him in his extreme illness in Boston, attributed his sinking so suddenly into a state so extremely low, and nigh unto death, to the breaking of ulcers, that had been long gathering in his lungs, (as Mr. Brainerd himself intimates in a forementioned passage in his diary,) and there discharging and diffusing their purulent matter. This, while nature was labouring and struggling to throw it off, which could be done no otherwise than by a gradual straining of it through the small vessels of those vital parts, occasioned a high fever and violent coughing, threw the whole frame of nature into the utmost disorder, and brought it near to a dissolution. But it was supposed, if the strength of nature held till the lungs had this way gradually cleared themselves of this putrid matter, he might revive, and continue better, till new ulcers gathered and broke; but that this would surely sink him again, and there was no hope of his recovery. He expressed himself to one of my neighbours, who at that time saw him in Boston, that he was as certainly a dead man as if he was shot through the heart.

But so it was ordered in divine providence, that the strength of nature held out through this great conflict, so as just to escape the grave at that turn; and then he revived, to the astonishment of all that knew his case. After he began to revive, he was visited by his youngest brother, Mr. Israel Brainerd, a student at Yale college; who having heard of his extreme illness, went from thence to Boston, in order to see him, if he might find him alive, which he but little expected.

This visit was attended with a mixture of joy and sorrow to Mr. Brainerd. He greatly rejoiced to see his brother, especially because he had desired an opportunity of some religious conversation with him before he died. But this meeting was attended with sorrow, as his brother brought to him the sorrowful tidings of his sister Spencer’s death at Haddam; a sister, between whom and him had long subsisted a peculiarly dear affection, and much intimacy in spiritual matters, and whose house he used to make his home when he went to Haddam, his native place. He had heard nothing of her sickness till this report of her death. But he had these comforts together with the tidings, viz. a confidence of her being gone to heaven, and an expectation of his soon meeting her there. His brother continued with him till he left the town, and came with him from thence to Northampton. Concerning the last sabbath Mr. Brainerd spent in Boston, he writes in his diary as follows.

“Lord’s day, July 19. I was just able to attend public worship, being earned to the house of God in a chaise. Heard Dr. Sewall preach in the forenoon: partook of the Lord’s supper at this time. In this sacrament I saw astonishing divine wisdom displayed; such wisdom as I saw required the tongues of angels and glorified saints to celebrate. It seemed to me I never should do any thing at adoring the infinite wisdom of God, discovered in the contrivance of man’s redemption, until I arrived at a world of perfection; yet I could not help striving to ‘call upon my soul, and all within me, to bless the name of God.’ In the afternoon heard Mr. Prince preach. I saw more of God in the wisdom discovered in the plan of man’s redemption, than I saw of any other of his perfections, through the whole day.”

He left Boston the next day. But before he came away, he had occasion to bear a very full, plain, and open testimony against that opinion, that the essence of saving faith lies in believing that Christ died for me in particular; and that this is the first act of faith in a true believer’s closing with Christ. He did it in a long conference he had with a gentleman, who has very publicly and strenuously appeared to defend that tenet. He had this discourse with him in the presence of a number of considerable persons, who came to visit Mr. Brainerd before he left the town, and to take their leave of him. In which debate he made this plain declaration, (at the same time confirming what he said by many arguments,) That the essence of saving faith was wholly left out of the definition which that gentleman has published; and that the faith which he had defined, had nothing of God in it, nothing above nature, nor indeed above the power of the devils; and that all such as had this faith, and had no better, though they might have this to never so high a degree, would surely perish. And he declared also, that he never had greater assurance of the falseness of the principles of those that maintained such a faith, and of their dangerous and destructive tendency, or a more affecting sense of the great delusion and misery of those that depended on getting to heaven by such a faith, (while they had no better,) than he lately had when he was supposed to be at the point to die, and expected every minute to pass into eternity. Mr. Brainerd’s discourse at this time, and the forcible reasonings by which he confirmed what he asserted, appeared to be greatly to the satisfaction of those present; as several of them took occasion expressly to manifest to him, before they took leave of him.

When this conversation was ended, having bid an affectionate farewell to his friends, he set out in the cool of the afternoon, on his journey to Northampton, attended by his brother, and my daughter that went with him to Boston; and would have been accompanied out of the town by a number of gentlemen, besides that honourable person who gave him his company for some miles on that occasion, as a testimony of their esteem and respect, had not his aversion to any thing of pomp and show prevented it.

“Saturday, July 25, I arrived here at Northampton; having set out from Boston on Monday, about four o’clock, P. M. In this journey I rode about sixteen miles a day,  one day with another. Was sometimes extremely tired and faint on the road, so that it seemed impossible for me to proceed any further: at other times I was considerably better, and felt some freedom both of body and mind.

“Lord’s day, July 26. This day I saw clearly that I should never be happy; yea, that God himself could not make me happy, unless I could be in a capacity to ‘please and glorify him for ever.’ Take away this, and admit me into all the fine heavens that can be conceived of by men or angels, and I should still be miserable for ever.”

Though he had so far revived, as to be able to travel thus far, yet he manifested no expectation of recovery: he supposed, as his physician did, that his being brought so near to death at Boston, was owing to the breaking of ulcers in his lungs. He told me that he had several such ill turns before, only not to so high a degree, but as he supposed, owing to the same cause, viz. the breaking of ulcers; and that he was brought lower and lower every time; and it appeared to him, that in his last sickness he was brought as low as it was possible, and yet live; and that he had not the least expectation of surviving the next return of this breaking of ulcers; but still appeared perfectly calm in the prospect of death.

On Wednesday morning, the week after he came to Northampton, he took leave of his brother Israel, never expecting to see him again in this world; he now setting out from hence on his journey to New-Haven.

When Mr. Brainerd came hither, he had so much strength as to be able, from day to day, to ride out two or three miles, and to return; and sometimes to pray in the family; but from this time he gradually decayed, becoming weaker and weaker.

While he was here, his conversation from first to last was much on the same subjects as when in Boston. He spoke much of the nature of true religion in heart and practice, as distinguished from its various counterfeits; expressing his great concern, that the latter so much prevailed in many places. He often manifested his great abhorrence of all such doctrine and principles in religion, as had any tendency to antinomianism; of all such notions, as seemed to diminish the necessity of holiness of life, or to abate men’s regard to the commands of God, and a strict, diligent, and universal practice of virtue and piety, under a pretence of depreciating bur works, and magnifying Gods free grace. He spoke often, with much detestation, of such experiences and pretended discoveries and joys, as have nothing of the nature of sanctification in them, as do not tend to strictness, tenderness, and diligence in religion, to meekness and benevolence towards mankind, and an humble behaviour. He also declared, that he looked on such pretended humility as worthy of no regard, which was not manifested by modesty, of conduct and conversation. He spake often, with abhorrence, of the spirit and practice that appears among the greater part of separatists at this day in the land, particularly those in the eastern parts of Connecticut; in their condemning and separating from the standing ministry and churches, their crying down learning and a learned ministry, their notion of an immediate call to the work of the ministry, and the forwardness of laymen to set up themselves as public teachers. He had been much conversant in the eastern part of Connecticut, (it being near his native place,) when the same principles, notion, and spirit began to operate, which have since prevailed to a greater height; and had acquaintance with some of those persons who are become heads and leaders of the separatists. He had also been conversant with persons of the same way elsewhere; and I heard him say, once and again, he knew by his acquaintance with this sort of people, that what was chiefly and most generally in repute among them as the power of godliness, was an entirely different thing from that true vital piety recommended in the Scriptures, and had nothing in it of that nature. He manifested a great dislike of a disposition in persons to much noise and show in religion, and affecting to be abundant in proclaiming and publishing their own experiences. Though at the same time he did not condemn, but approved of Christians speaking of their own experiences on some occasions, and to some persons, with due modesty and discretion. He himself sometimes, while at my house, spake of his own experiences; but it was always with apparent reserve, and in the exercise of care and judgment with respect to occasions, persons, and circumstances. He mentioned some remarkable things of his own religious experience to two young gentlemen, candidates for the ministry, who watched with him (each at a different time) when he was very low, and not far from his end; but he desired both of them not to speak of what he had told them till after his death.

The subject of that debate I mentioned before, which he had with a certain gentleman, the day he left Boston, seemed to lie with much weight on his mind after he came hither; and he began to write a letter to that gentleman, expressing his sentiments concerning the dangerous tendency of some of the tenets he had expressed in conversation, and in the writings he had published; with the considerations by which the exceeding hurtful nature of those notions is evident; but he had not strength to finish his letter.

After he came hither, as long as he lived, he spoke much of that future prosperity of Zion which is so often foretold and promised in the Scripture. It was a theme he delighted to dwell upon; and his mind seemed to be carried forth with earnest concern about it, and intense desires, that religion might speedily and abundantly revive and flourish. Though he had not the least expectation of recovery, yea, the nearer death advanced, and the more the symptoms of its approach increased, still the more did his mind seem to be taken up with this subject. He told me, when near his end, that “he never in all his life had his mind so led forth in desires and earnest prayers for the flourishing of Christ’s kingdom on earth, as since he was brought so exceeding low at Boston.” He seemed much to wonder, that there appeared no more of a disposition in ministers and people to pray for the flourishing of religion through the world; that so little a part of their prayers was generally taken up about it, in their families, and elsewhere; and particularly, he several times expressed his wonder, that there appeared no more forwardness to comply with the proposal lately made, in a Memorial from a number of ministers in Scotland, and sent over into America, for united extraordinary prayer, among Christ’s ministers and people, for the coming of Christ’s kingdom: and he sent it as his dying advice to his own congregation, that they should practise agreeably to that proposal.

Though he was constantly exceeding weak, yet there appeared in him a continual care well to improve time and fill it up with something that might be profitable, and in some respect for the glory of God or the good of men; either profitable conversation, or writing letters to absent friends, or noting something in his diary, or looking over his former writings, correcting them, and preparing them to be left in the hands of others at his death, or giving some directions concerning the future management of his people, or employment in secret devotions. He seemed never to be easy, however ill, if he was not doing something for God, or in his service. After he came hither, he wrote a preface to a diary of the famous Mr. Shepard’s, (in those papers before mentioned, lately found,) having been much urged to it by those gentlemen in Boston who had the care of the publication: which diary, with his preface, has since been published.

In his diary for Lord’s day, Aug. 9, he speaks of longing desires after death, through a sense of the excellency of a state of perfection. In his diary for Lord’s day, Aug. 16, he speaks of his having so much refreshment of soul in the house of God, that it seemed also to refresh his body. And this is not only noted in his diary, but was very observable to others: it was very apparent, not only that his mind was exhilarated with inward consolation, but also that his animal spirits and bodily strength seemed to be  remarkably restored, as though he had forgot his illness. But this was the last time that ever he attended public worship on the sabbath.

On Tuesday morning that week (I being absent on a journey) he prayed with my family; but not without much difficulty, for want of bodily strength; and this was the last family prayer that ever he made. He had been wont, till now, frequently to ride out two or three miles; but this week, on Thursday, was the last time he ever did so.

“Lord’s day, Aug. 23. This morning I was considerably refreshed with the thought, yea, the hope and expectation of the enlargement of Christ’s kingdom; and I could not but hope the time was at hand, when Babylon the great would fall, and rise no more. This led me to some spiritual meditations, that were very refreshing to me. I was unable to attend public worship, either part of the day; but God was pleased to afford me fixedness and satisfaction in divine thoughts. Nothing so refreshes my soul, as when I can go to God, yea, to God my exceeding joy. When he is so, sensibly, to my soul, oh how unspeakably delightful is this!

“In the week past I had divers turns of inward refreshing; though my body was inexpressibly weak, followed continually with agues and fevers. Sometimes my soul centred in God, as my only portion; and I felt that I should be for ever unhappy if he did not reign. I saw the sweetness and happiness of being his subject, at his disposal. This made all my difficulties quickly vanish.

“From this Lord’s day, viz. Aug. 23, I was troubled very much with vapoury disorders, and could neither write nor read, and could scarcely live; although, through mercy, was not so much oppressed with heavy melancholy and gloominess, as at many other times.

Till this week he had been wont to lodge in a room above stairs; but he now grew so weak, that he was no longer able to go up stairs and down. Friday, Aug. 28, was the last time he ever went above-stairs; henceforward he betook himself to a lower room.

On Wednesday, Sept. 2, being the day of our public lecture, he seemed to be refreshed with seeing the neighbouring ministers that came hither to the lecture, and expressed a great desire once more to go to the house of God on that day: and accordingly rode to the meeting, and attended divine service, while the Reverend Mr. Woodbridge, of Hatfield, preached. He signified that he supposed it to be the last time that ever he should attend the public worship; as it proved. And indeed it was the last time that ever he went out at our gate alive.

On the Saturday evening next following he was unexpectedly visited by his brother, Mr. John Brainerd, who came to see him from New Jersey. He was much refreshed by this unexpected visit, this brother being peculiarly dear to him; and he seemed to rejoice in a devout and solemn manner, to see him, and to hear the comfortable tidings he brought concerning the state of his dear congregation of Christian Indians. A circumstance of this visit, of which he was exceeding glad, was, that his brother brought him some of his private writings from New Jersey, and, particularly his diary that he had kept for many years past.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 6. I began to read some of my private writings, which my brother brought me; and was considerably refreshed with what I met with in them.

“Monday, Sept. 7. I proceeded further in reading my old private writings, and found they had the same effect upon me as before. I could not but rejoice and bless God for what passed long ago, which without writing had been entirely lost.

“This evening, when I was in great distress of body, my soul longed that God should be glorified: I saw there was no heaven but this. I could not but speak to the bystanders then of the only happiness, viz. pleasing God. O that I could for ever live to God! The day, I trust, is at hand, the perfect day. Oh, the day of deliverance from all sin.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 13. I was much refreshed and engaged in meditation and writing, and found a heart to act for God. My spirits were refreshed, and my soul delighted to do something for God.”

On the evening following that Lord’s day, his feet began to appear sensibly swelled; which thenceforward swelled more and more. A symptom of his dissolution coming on. The next day his brother John left him, being obliged to return to New Jersey on some business of great importance and necessity; intending to return again with all possible speed, hoping to see his brother yet once more in the land of the living.

Mr. Brainerd having now, with much deliberation, considered of the important affair before mentioned, which was referred to him by the Honourable Commissioners in Boston, of the Corporation in London fur the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and parts adjacent, viz. the fixing upon and recommending of two persons proper to be employed as missionaries to the Six Nations, he about this time wrote a letter, recommending two young gentlemen of his acquaintance to those commissioners, viz. Mr. Elihu Spencer of East Haddam, and Mr. Job Strong of Northampton. The commissioners, on the receipt of this letter, cheerfully and unanimously agreed to accept of and employ the persons he had recommended. They accordingly have since waited on the commissioners to receive their instructions; and pursuant to these, have applied themselves to a preparation for the business of their mission. One of them, Mr. Spencer, has been solemnly ordained to that work, by several of the ministers of Boston, in the presence of an ecclesiastical council convened for that purpose; and is now gone forth to the nation of Oncidaes, about a hundred and seventy miles beyond Albany.

He also this week, viz. on Wednesday, Sept. 16, wrote a letter to a particular gentleman in Boston (one of those charitable persons before mentioned, who appeared so forward to contribute of their substance for promoting Christianity among the Indians) relating to the growth of the Indian school. And the need of another schoolmaster, or some person to assist the schoolmaster in instructing the Indian children. These gentlemen, on the receipt of this letter, had a meeting, and agreed with great cheerfulness to give 200l. (in bills of the old tenor) for the support of another schoolmaster; and desired the Reverend Mr. Pemberton of New York, (who was then at Boston, and was also, at their desire, present at their meeting,) as soon as possible to procure a suitable person for that service; and also agreed to allow 75l. to defray some special charges that were requisite to encourage the mission to the Six Nations, (besides the salary allowed by the commissioners,) which was also done on some intimations given by Mr. Brainerd.

Mr. Brainerd spent himself much in writing those letters, being exceeding weak: but it seemed to be much to his satisfaction, that he had been enabled to do it; hoping that it was something done for God, and which might be for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom and glory. In writing the last of these letters, he was obliged to use the hand of another, not being able to write himself.

On the Thursday of this week (Sept. 17.) was the last time that ever he went out of his lodging room. That day he was again visited by his brother Israel, who continued with him thenceforward till his death. On that evening, he was taken with something of a diarrhœa; which he looked upon as another sign of his approaching death: whereupon he expressed himself thus; “Oh, the glorious time is now coming! I have longed to serve God perfectly: now God will gratify those desires!” And from time to time, at the several steps and new symptoms of the sensible approach of his dissolution, he was so far from being sunk or damped, that he seemed to be animated, and made more cheerful; as being glad at the appearance of death’s approach. He often used the epithet, glorious, when speaking of the day of his death, calling it that glorious day. And as he saw his dissolution gradually approaching, he talked much about it; and with perfect calmness he spoke of a future state. He also settled all his affairs, giving directions very particularly and minutely, concerning what he would have done in one respect and another after his decease. And the nearer death approached, the more desirous he seemed to be of it. He several times spoke of the different kinds of willingness to  die; and represented it as an ignoble, mean kind, to be willing to leave the body, only to get rid of pain; or to go to heaven, only to get honour and advancement there.

“Saturday, Sept. 19. Near night, while I attempted to walk a little, my thoughts turned thus; ‘How infinitely sweet it is, to love God, and be all for him!’ Upon which it was suggested to me, ‘You are not an angel, not lively and active.’ To which my whole soul immediately replied, ‘I as sincerely desire to love and glorify God, as any angel in heaven.’ Upon which it was suggested again, ‘But you are filthy, not fit for heaven.’ Hereupon instantly appeared the blessed robes of Christ’s righteousness, which I could not but exult and triumph in; and I viewed the infinite excellency of God, and my soul even broke with longings that God should be glorified. I thought of dignity in heaven; but instantly the thought returned, ‘I do not go to heaven to get honour, but to give all possible glory and praise.’ Oh, how I longed that God should be glorified on earth also! Oh, I was made for eternity, if God might be glorified! Bodily pains I cared not for; though I was then in extremity, I never felt easier. I felt willing to glorify God in that state of bodily distress, as long as he pleased I should continue in it. The grave appeared really sweet, and I longed to lodge my weary bones in it: but oh, that God might be glorified! this was the burden of all my cry. Oh, I knew I should be active as an angel in heaven; and that I should be stripped of my filthy garments! so that there was no objection. But, oh, to love and praise God more, to please him for ever! this my soul panted after, and even now pants for while I write. Oh that God might be glorified in the whole earth! ‘Lord, let thy kingdom come.’ I longed for a Spirit of preaching to descend and rest on ministers, that they might address the consciences of men with closeness and power. I saw God ‘had the residue of the Spirit;’ and my soul longed it should be ‘poured from on high.’ I could not but plead with God for my dear congregation, that he would preserve it, and not suffer his great name to lose its glory in that work; my soul still longing that God might be glorified.“

The extraordinary frame he was in that evening could not be hid; “his mouth spake out of the abundance of his heart,” expressing in a very affecting manner much the same things as are written in his diary; and among very many other extraordinary expressions, which he then uttered, were such as these; ”My heaven is to please God, and glorify him, and to give all to him, and to be wholly devoted to his glory: that is the heaven I long for; that is my religion, and that is my happiness, and always was ever since I suppose I had any true religion: and all those that are of that religion shall meet me in heaven. I do not go to heaven to be advanced, but to give honour to God. It is no matter where I shall be stationed in heaven, whether I have a high or low seat there; but to love, and please, and glorify God is all. Had I a thousand souls, if they were worth any thing, I would give them all to God; but I have nothing to give, when all is done. It is impossible for any rational creature to be happy without acting all for God: God himself could not make him happy any other way. I long to be in heaven, praising and glorifying God with the holy angels: all my desire is to glorify God, My heart goes out to the burying place; it seems to me a desirable place: but oh to glorify, God! that is it; that is above all. It is a great comfort to me to think that I have done a little for God in the world: oh! it is but a very small matter; yet I have done a little; and I lament it that I have not done more for him. There is nothing in the world worth living for, but doing good and finishing God’s work, doing the work that Christ did. I see nothing else in the world that can yield any satisfaction, besides living to God, pleasing him, and doing his whole will. My greatest joy and comfort has been to do something for promoting the interest of religion, and the souls of particular persons: and now in my illness, while I am full of pain and distress from day to day, all the comfort I have is in being able to do some little char (or small piece of work), for God; either by something that I say, or by writing, or some other way.”

He intermingled with these and other like expressions, many pathetical counsels to those who were about him: particularly to my children and servants. He applied himself to some of my younger children at this time; calling them to him, and speaking to them one by one; setting before them in a very plain manner the nature and essence of true piety, and its great importance and necessity; earnestly warning them not to rest in any thing short of a true and thorough change of heart, and a life devoted to God. He counselled them not to be slack in the great business of religion, nor in the least to delay it; enforcing his counsels with this, that his words were the words of a dying man: said he, “I shall die here, and here I shall be buried, and here you will see my grave, and do you remember what I have said to you. I am going into eternity; and it is sweet to me to think of eternity: the endlessness of it makes it sweet: but oh, what shall I say to the eternity of the wicked! I cannot mention it, nor think of it; the thought is too dreadful. When you see my grave, then remember what I said to you while I was alive; then think with yourself, how the man who lies in that grave counselled and warned me to prepare for death.”

His body seemed to be marvellously strengthened, through the inward vigour and refreshment of his mind; so that, although before he was so weak that he could hardly utter a sentence, yet now he continued his most affecting and profitable discourse to us for more than an hour, with scarce any intermission; and said of it, when he had done, “it was the last sermon that ever he should preach.” This extraordinary frame of mind continued the next day; of which he says in his diary as follows.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 20. Was still in a sweet and comfortable frame: and was again melted with desires that God might be glorified, and with longings to love and live to him. Longed for the influences of the divine Spirit to descend on ministers, in a special manner. And oh, I longed to be with God, to behold his glory, and to bow in his presence!”

It appears by what is noted in his diary, both of this day and the evening preceding, that his mind at this time was much impressed with a sense of the importance of the work of the ministry, and the need of the grace of God, and his special spiritual assistance in this work. It also appeared in what he expressed in conversation; particularly in his discourse to his brother Israel, who was then a member of Yale college at New Haven, prosecuting his studies for the work of the ministry.   He now, and from time to time, in this his dying state, recommended to his brother a life of self-denial, of weanedness from the world, and devotedness to God, and an earnest endeavour to obtain much of the grace of God’s Spirit, and God’s gracious influences on his heart; representing the great need which ministers stand in of them, and the unspeakable benefit of them from his own experience. Among many other expressions, he said thus; “When ministers feel these special gracious influences on their hearts, it wonderfully assists them to come at the consciences of men, and as it were to handle them; whereas, without them, whatever reason and oratory we make use of, we do but make use of stumps, instead of hands.“

Monday, Sept. 21. I began to correct a little volume of my private writings. God, I believe, remarkably helped me in it; my strength was surprisingly lengthened out, my thoughts were quick and lively, and my soul refreshed, hoping it might be a work for God. Oh, how good, how sweet it is, to labour for God!

Tuesday, Sept. 22. Was again employed in reading and correcting, and had the same success as the day before. I was exceeding weak; but it seemed to refresh my soul thus to spend time.

“Wednesday, Sept. 23. I finished my corrections of the little piece before mentioned, and felt uncommonly peaceful: it seemed as if I had now done all my work in this world, and stood ready for my call to a better. As  long as I see any thing to be done for God, life is worth having: but oh, how vain and unworthy it is, to live for any lower end! This day I indited a letter, I think, of great importance, to the Reverend Mr. Byram in New Jersey. Oh that God would bless and succeed that letter, which was written for the benefit of his church!   Oh that God would purify the sons of Levi, that his glory may be advanced! This night I endured a dreadful turn, wherein my life was expected scarce an hour or minute together. But blessed be God, I have enjoyed considerable sweetness in divine things this week, both by night and day.

“Thursday, Sept. 24. My strength began to fail exceedingly; which looked further as if I had done all my work: however, I had strength to fold and superscribe my letter. About two I went to bed, being weak and much disordered, and lay in a burning fever till night, without any proper rest. In the evening I got up, having lain down in some of my clothes; but was in the greatest distress that ever I endured, having an uncommon kind of hiccough; which either strangled me, or threw me into a straining to vomit; and at the same time was distressed with griping pains. Oh, the distress of this evening! I had little expectation of my living the night through, nor indeed had any about me: and I longed for the finishing moment! l was obliged to repair to bed by six o’clock; and through mercy enjoyed some rest; but was grievously distressed at turns with the hiccough. My soul breathed after God, ‘When shall I come to God, even to God, my exceeding joy?’ Oh for his blessed likeness!

“Friday, Sept. 25. This day I was unspeakably weak, and little better than speechless all the day: however, I was able to write a little, and felt comfortably in some part of the day. Oh, it refreshed my soul, to think of former things, of desires to glorify God, of the pleasures of living to him! Oh, my dear God, I am speedily coming to thee, I hope. Hasten the day, O Lord, if it be thy blessed will. Oh come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen.†

“Saturday, Sept. 26. I felt the sweetness of divine things this forenoon; and had the consolation of a consciousness that I was doing something for God.

“Lord’s day, Sept. 27. This was a very comfortable day to my soul; I think I awoke with God. I was enabled to lift up my soul to God early this morning; and while I had little bodily strength, I found freedom to lift up my heart to God for myself and others. Afterwards was pleased with the thoughts of speedily entering into the unseen world.”

Early this morning, as one of the family came into the room, he expressed himself thus: “I have had more pleasure this morning, than all the drunkards in the world enjoy.” So much did he esteem the joy of faith above the pleasures of sin. He felt that morning an unusual appetite to food, with which his mind seemed to be exhilarated, looking on it as a sign of the very near approach of death. At this time he also said, “I was born on a sabbath-day; and I have reason to think I was new-born on a sabbath-day; and I hope I shall die on this sabbath-day. I shall look upon it as a favour, if it may be the will of God that it should be so: I long for the time. Oh, ‘why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the wheels of his chariots?’ I am very willing to part with all: I am willing to part with my dear brother John, and never to see him again, to go to be for ever with the Lord.   Oh, when I go there, how will God’s dear church on earth be upon my mind!”

Afterwards, the same morning, being asked, how he did? he answered, “I am almost in eternity. I long to be there. My work is done: I have done with all my friends: all the world is nothing to me. I long to be in heaven, praising and glorifying God with the holy angels. All my desire is to glorify God.“

During the whole of these last two weeks of his life, he seemed to continue in this frame of heart; loose from all the world, as having finished his work, and done with all things here below. He had now nothing to do but to die, and to abide in an earnest desire and expectation of the happy moment, when his soul should take its flight to a state of perfect holiness, in which he should be found perfectly glorifying and enjoying God. He said, “That the consideration of the day of death, and the day of judgment, had a long time been peculiarly sweet to him.” From time to time he spake of his being willing to leave the body and the world immediately, that day, that night, that moment, if it was the will of God. He also was much engaged in expressing his longings that the church of Christ on earth might flourish, and Christ’s kingdom here might be advanced, notwithstanding he was about to leave the earth, and should not with his eyes behold the desirable event, nor be instrumental in promoting it. He said to me, one morning, as I came into the room, “My thoughts have been employed on the old dear theme, the prosperity of God’s church on earth. As I waked out of sleep, I was led to cry for the pouring out of God’s Spirit, and the advancement of Christ’s kingdom, which the dear Redeemer did and suffered so much for. It is that especially makes me long for it.” He expressed much hope that a glorious advancement of Christ’s kingdom was near at hand.

He once told me, that “he had formerly longed for the outpouring of the Spirit of God, and the glorious times of the church, and hoped they were coming; and should have been willing to have lived to promote religion at that time, if that had been the will of God; but, says he, I am willing it should be as it is; I would not have the choice to make for myself, for ten thousand worlds.” He expressed on his deathbed a full persuasion that he should in heaven see the prosperity of the church on earth, and should rejoice with Christ therein; and the consideration of it seemed to be highly pleasing and satisfying to his mind.

He also still dwelt much on the great importance of the work of gospel ministers; and expressed his longings, that they might be filled with the Spirit of God. He manifested much desire to see some of the neighbouring ministers, with whom he had some acquaintance, and whose sincere friendship he was confident, that he might converse freely with them on that subject, before he died. And it so happened, that he had opportunity with some of them according to his desire.

Another thing that lay much on his heart, from time to time, in these near approaches of death, was the spiritual prosperity of his own congregation of Christian Indians in New Jersey: and when he spake of them, it was with peculiar tenderness; so that his speech would be presently interrupted and drowned with tears.

He also expressed much satisfaction in the disposals of Providence, with regard to the circumstances of his death; particularly that God had before his death given him an opportunity in Boston, with so many considerable persons, ministers and others, to give in his testimony for God against false religion, and many mistakes that lead to it, and promote it. He was much pleased that he had an opportunity there to lay before pious and charitable gentlemen the state of the Indians, and their necessities, to so good effect; and that God had since enabled him to write to them further concerning these affairs; and to write other letters of importance, that he hoped might be of good influence with regard to the state of religion among the Indians, and elsewhere, after his death. He expressed great thankfulness to God for his mercy in these things. He also mentioned it as what he accounted a merciful circumstance of his death, that he should die here.   And speaking of these things, he said, “God had granted him  all his desire;” and signified, that now he could with the greater alacrity leave the world.

“Monday, Sept. 28. I was able to read, and make some few corrections in my private writings; but found I could not write as I had done; I found myself sensibly declined in all respects. It has been only from a little while before noon, till about one or two o’clock, that I have been able to do any thing for some time past: yet this refreshed my heart, that I could do any thing, either public or private, that I hoped was for God.”

This evening he was supposed to be dying: he thought so himself, and was thought so by those who were about him. He seemed glad at the appearance of the near approach of death. He was almost speechless, but his lips appeared to move: and one that sat very near him, heard him utter such expressions as these, “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Oh, why is his chariot so long in coming.” After he revived, he blamed himself for having been too eager to be gone. And in expressing what he found in the frame of his mind at that time, he said, he then found an inexpressibly sweet love to those that he looked upon as belonging to Christ, beyond almost all that ever he felt before; so that it “seemed (to use his own words) like a little piece of heaven to have one of them near him.” And being asked, whether he heard the prayer that was (at his desire) made with him; he said, “Yes, he heard every word, and had an uncommon sense of the things that were uttered in that prayer, and that every word reached his heart.”

On the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 29, as he lay on his bed, he seemed to be in an extraordinary frame; his mind greatly engaged in sweet meditations concerning the prosperity of Zion. There being present here at that time two young gentlemen of his acquaintance, that were candidates for the ministry, he desired us all to unite in singing a psalm on that subject, even Zion’s prosperity. And on his desire we sung a part of the 102d Psalm. This seemed much to refresh and revive him, and gave him new strength; so that, though before he could scarcely speak at all, now he proceeded with some freedom of speech, to give his dying counsels to those two young gentlemen before mentioned, relating to their preparation for, and prosecution of, that great work of the ministry they were designed for; and in particular, earnestly recommended to them frequent secret fasting and prayer: and enforced his counsel with regard to this, from his own experience of the great comfort and benefit of it; which (said he) I should not mention, were it not that I am a dying person. And after he had finished his counsel, he made a prayer in the audience of us all; wherein, besides praying for this family, for his brethren, and those candidates for the ministry, and for his own congregation, he earnestly prayed for the reviving and flourishing of religion in the world. Till now, he had every day sat up part of the day; but after this he never rose from his bed.

Wednesday, Sept. 30. I was obliged to keep my bed the whole day, through weakness. However, redeemed a little time, and, with the help of my brother, read and corrected about a dozen pages in my MS. giving an account of my conversion.

Thursday, Oct. 1. I endeavoured again to do something by way of writing, but soon found my powers of body and mind utterly fail. Felt not so sweetly as when I was able to do something that I hoped would do some good. In the evening was discomposed and wholly delirious; but it was not long before God was pleased to give me some sleep, and fully composed my mind.   Oh, blessed he God for his great goodness to me, since I was so low at Mr. Bromfield’s, on Thursday, June 18, last. He has, except those few minutes, given me the clear exercise of my reason, and enabled me to labour much for him, in things both of a public and private nature; and perhaps to do more good than I should have done if I had been well; besides the comfortable influences of his blessed Spirit, with which he has been pleased to refresh my soul. May his name have all the glory for ever and ever. Amen.

“Friday, Oct. 2. My soul was this day, at turns, sweetly set on God: I longed to be with him, that I might behold his glory. I felt sweetly disposed to commit all to him, even my dearest friends, my dearest flock, my absent brother, and all my concerns for time and eternity. Oh that his kingdom might come in the world; that they might all love and glorify him, for what he is in himself; and that the blessed Redeemer might ‘see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied!’ ‘Oh come, Lord Jesus, come quickly! Amen.’”

The next evening we very much expected his brother John from New Jersey; it being about a week after the time that he proposed for his return, when he went away. And though our expectations were still disappointed; yet Mr. Brainerd seemed to continue unmoved, in the same calm and peaceful frame that he had before manifested; as having resigned all to God, and having done with his friends, and with all things here below.

On the morning of the next day, being Lord’s day, Oct. 4, as my daughter Jerusha (who chiefly attended him) came into the room, he looked on her very pleasantly, and said,” Dear Jerusha, are you willing to part with me?—I am quite willing to part with you: I am willing to part with all my friends: I am willing to part with my dear brother John, although I love him the best of any creature living: I have committed him and all my friends to God, and can leave them with God. Though, if I thought I should not see you and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part with you. But we shall spend a happy eternity together!”   In the evening, as one came into the room with a Bible in her hand, he expressed himself thus; “Oh that dear book! that lovely book! I shall soon see it opened! the mysteries that are in it, and the mysteries of God’s providence, will be all unfolded!”

His distemper now very apparently preyed on his vitals in an extraordinary manner: not by a sudden breaking of ulcers in his lungs, as at Boston, but by a constant discharge of purulent matter, in great quantities: so that what he brought up by expectoration, seemed to be as it were mouthfuls of almost clear pus; which was attended with very inward pain and distress.

On Thursday, Oct. 6, he lay for a considerable time as if he were dying. At which time he was heard to utter, in broken whispers, such expressions as these; “He will come, he will not tarry. I shall soon he in glory. I shall soon glorify God with the angels.” But after some time he revived.

The next day, Wednesday, Oct. 7, his brother John arrived from New Jersey; where he had been detained much longer than he intended, by a mortal sickness prevailing among the Christian Indians, and by some other circumstances that made his stay with them necessary. Mr. Brainerd was affected and refreshed with seeing him, and appeared fully satisfied with the reasons of his delay; seeing the interest of religion and of the souls of his people required it.

The next day, Thursday, Oct. 8, he was in great distress and agonies of body; and for the greater part of the day, was much disordered as to the exercise of his reason. In the evening he was more composed, and had the use of his reason well; but the pain of his body continued and increased. He told me, it was impossible for any to conceive  of the distress he felt in his breast. He manifested much concern lest he should dishonour God by impatience, under his extreme agony; which was such, that he said, the thought of enduring it one minute longer was almost insupportable. He desired that others would be much in lifting up their hearts continually to God for him, that God would support him, and give him patience. He signified, that he expected to die that night; but seemed to fear a longer delay: and the disposition of his mind with regard to death appeared still the same that it had been all along. And notwithstanding his bodily agonies, yet the interest of Zion lay still with great weight on his mind; as appeared by some considerable discourse he had that evening with the Reverend Mr. Billing, one of the neighbouring ministers, (who was then present,) concerning the great importance of the work of the ministry, &c. And afterwards, when it was very late in the night, he had much very proper and profitable discourse with his brother John, concerning his congregation in New Jersey, and the interest of religion among the Indians. In the latter part of the night, his bodily distress seemed to rise to a greater height than ever; and he said to those then about him, that “it was another thing to die than people imagined;” explaining himself to mean that they were not aware what bodily pain and anguish is undergone before death. Towards day, his eyes fixed; and he continued lying immovable, till about six o’clock in the morning, and then expired, on Friday, Oct. 9, 1747; when his soul, as we may well conclude, was received by his dear Lord and Master, as an eminently faithful servant, into that state of perfection of holiness, and fruition of God, which he had so often and so ardently longed for; and was welcomed by the glorious assembly in the upper world, as one peculiarly fitted to join them in their blessed employ and enjoyment.

Much respect was shown to his memory at his funeral which was on the Monday following, after a sermon preached the same day, on that solemn occasion. His funeral was attended by eight of the neighbouring ministers, and seventeen other gentlemen of liberal education, and a great concourse of people.

* * * * * * * * * *

If you have been blessed by this volume, you may also be interested in some of our other Christian Classics Treasury collections:

MISSIONS COLLECTIONS:

- Amy Carmichael 8-in-1

- The Hudson Taylor Collection (7-in-1)

- David Livingstone Collection (5-in-1)

- Samuel Zwemer 7-in-1(Missions in Arabia)

- Samuel Zwemer, 7-in-1, Vol 2

- Key to the Missionary Problem (Andrew Murray)

- Classic Missions Texts  (Murray, Allen, Carey, Zwemer)

CLASSIC COLLECTIONS:

- 7 Catholic Classics

- 7 Classics on PRAYER

- 7 Classics on HOLINESS

- 7 Classics on EVANGELISM and SOUL-WINNING

- 5 Classics on the HOLY SPIRIT

- 5 Classics on POWER

- EDERSHEIM COLLECTION  (Sketches of Jewish Social Life; The Temple; Jesus the Messiah)

- The Didache (Teaching of the 12 Apostles)

PREACHERS AND REVIVALISTS:

- Biography of John Wesley Collection: 4-in-1

- Biography of Andrew Murray

- Charles Spurgeon: 40 sermons on Prayer

- Charles Spurgeon: Lectures to My Students

- The George Muller Collection

- The Revival Writings of Jonathan Edwards (7-in-1)

- The Works of Catherine Booth (7-in-1)

- The Works of Charles Finney

- The Works of D. L. Moody

- The Works of R. A. Torrey

- The Works of William Booth

3.  HENRY MARTYN: Saint and Scholar (d. 1812)

Henry Martyn.

From the portrait in the University Library. Cambridge.

HENRY MARTYN

SAINT AND SCHOLAR

FIRST MODERN MISSIONARY TO THE MOHAMMEDANS

1781-1812

BY

GEORGE SMITH, C.I.E., LL.D.

AUTHOR OF ‘LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY’ ‘LIFE OF ALEXANDER DUFF’ ETC.

Now let me burn out for God

WITH PORTRAIT AND ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON

THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY

56 Paternoster Row, 65 St Paul’s Churchyard

and 164 Piccadilly

1892

PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

LONDON

PREFACE

In the year 1819, John Sargent, Rector of Lavington, published A Memoir of the Rev. Henry Martyn. The book at once became a spiritual classic. The saint, the scholar, and the missionary, alike found in it a new inspiration. It ran through ten editions during the writer’s life, and he died when projecting an additional volume of the Journals and Letters. His son-in-law, S. Wilberforce, afterwards Bishop of Oxford and of Winchester, accordingly, in 1837 published, in two volumes, Journals and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D., with an introduction on Sargent’s life. Sargent had suppressed what Bishop Wilberforce describes as ‘a great variety of interesting materials’. Especially in the lifetime of Lydia Grenfell it was thought necessary to omit the facts which give to Henry Martyn’s personality its human interest and intensify our appreciation of his heroism. On the lady’s death, in 1829, Martyn’s letters to her became available, and Bishop Wilberforce incorporated these in what he described as ‘further and often more continuous selections from the journals and letters of Mr. Martyn.’ But, unhappily, his work does not fully supplement that of Sargent. The Journal is still mutilated; the Letters are still imperfect.

Some years ago, on completing the Life of William Carey, who had written that wherever his friend Henry Martyn might go as chaplain the Church need not send a missionary, I began to prepare a new work on the first modern apostle to the Mohammedans. I was encouraged by his grand-nephew, a distinguished mathematician, the late Henry Martyn Jeffery, F.R.S., who had in 1883 printed Two Sets of Unpublished Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D., of Truro. For a time I stopped the work on learning that he had come into possession of Lydia Grenfell’s papers, and was preparing the book which appeared in 1890, Extracts from the Religious Diary of Miss L. Grenfell, of Marazion, Cornwall. Except her letters to Henry Martyn, which are not in existence now, all the desirable materials seemed to be ready. Meanwhile, the missionary bishop who most resembled Martyn in character and service, Thomas Valpy French, of Lahore and Muscat, had written to Canon Edmonds of S. Wilberforce’s book as ‘a work for whose reprint I have often pleaded in vain, and for which all that there is of mission life in our Church would plead, had it not been so long out of print and out of sight.’

My aim is to set the two autobiographies, unconsciously written in the Journals and Letters of Henry Martyn and in the Diary of Lydia Grenfell, in the light of recent knowledge of South Africa and India, Persia and Turkey, and of Bible work and missionary history in the lands of which, by his life and by his death, Henry Martyn took possession for the Master. Bengal chaplain of the East India Company, he was, above all, a missionary to the two divisions of Islam, in India and Persia, and in Arabia and Turkey. May this book, written after years of experience in Bengal, lead many to enter on the inheritance he has left to the Catholic Church!

Then came another of priestly garb and mien,

A young man still wanting the years of Christ,

But long since with the saints....

A poet with the contemplative gaze

And listening ear, but quick of force and eye,

Who fought the wrong without, the wrong within,

And, being a pure saint, like those of old,

Abased himself and all the precious gifts

God gave him, flinging all before the feet

Of Him whose name he bore—a fragile form

Upon whose hectic cheek there burned a flush

That was not health; who lived as Xavier lived,

And died like him upon the burning sands,

Untended, yet whose creed was far from his

As pole from pole; whom grateful England still

Loves.

The awakened gaze

Turned wholly from the earth, on things of heaven

He dwelt both day and night. The thought of God

Filled him with infinite joy; his craving soul

Dwelt on Him as a feast; as did the soul

Of rapt Francesco in his holy cell

In blest Assisi; and he knew the pain,

The deep despondence of the saint, the doubt,

The consciousness of dark offence, the joy

Of full assurance last, when heaven itself

Stands open to the ecstasy of faith.

The relentless lie

Of Islam ... he chose to bear, who knew

How swift the night should fall on him, and burned

To save one soul alive while yet ’twas day.

This filled his thoughts, this only, and for this

On the pure altar of his soul he heaped

A costlier sacrifice, this youth in years,

For whom Love called, and loving hands, and hope

Of childish lives around him, offering these,

Like all the rest, to God.

Yet when his hour

Was come to leave his England, was it strange

His weakling life pined for the parting kiss

Of love and kindred, whom his prescient soul

Knew he should see no more?

... The woman of his love

Feared to leave all and give her life to his,

And both to God; his sisters passed away

To heaven, nor saw him more. There seemed on earth

Nothing for which to live, except the Faith,

Only the Faith, the Faith! until his soul

Wore thin her prison bars, and he was fain

To rest awhile, or work no more the work

For which alone he lived.

A Vision of Saints. By Lewis Morris.

CHAPTER I: CORNWALL AND CAMBRIDGE, 1781-1803

Writing half a century ago, as one who gratefully accepted the guidance of the Church of England, from the evangelical and philanthropic side of which he sprang, Sir James Stephen declared the name of Henry Martyn to be ‘in fact the one heroic name which adorns her annals from the days of Elizabeth to our own’. The past fifty years have seen her annals, in common with those of other Churches, adorned by many heroic names. These are as many and as illustrious on the side which has enshrined Henry Martyn in the new Cathedral of Truro, as amongst the Evangelicals, to whom in life he belonged. But the influence which streams forth from his short life and his obscure death is the perpetual heritage of all English-speaking Christendom, and of the native churches of India, Arabia, Persia, and Anatolia in all time to come. His Journal, even in the mutilated form published first by his friend Sargent, is one of the great spiritual autobiographies of Catholic literature. It is placed beside the Confessions of Augustine and the Grace Abounding of Bunyan. The Letters are read along with those of Samuel Rutherford and William Cowper by the most saintly workers, persuasive preachers, and learned scholars, who, even in these days of searching criticism, attribute to the young chaplain-missionary their early inspiration and renewed consecration, even as he traced his to Brainerd, Carey, and Charles Simeon.

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 granite porphyries which form the Land’s End had come to be worked only a century before that for the ‘bunches’ of copper which fill the lines of fault and fissure. It was chiefly from the deeper lodes of Gwennap, near Truro, that his family had drawn a competence. The statement of Richard Carew, in his Survey of Cornwall, was true of the dim centuries before Herodotus wrote, that the ‘tynne of the little angle (Cornwall) overfloweth England, watereth Christendom, and is derived to a great part of the world besides’.[1] Tyrian and Jew, Greek and Roman, as navigators, travellers, and capitalists, had in the darkness of prehistoric days dealings with the land described in an Elizabethan treatise on Geography as a foreign country on that side of England next to Spain. London itself is modern compared with the Cornish trade, which in its latest stage assumed the Latin name Stannum, and the almost perfect economic laws administered by the Lord Warden of the Stannaries since King John leased the mines to the Jews, and Edward I., as Earl of Cornwall, established the now vexed ‘royalties’ by charter. Even in the century since Henry Martyn’s early days, fourteen of the Cornish mines have yielded a gross return of more than thirteen millions sterling, of which above one-fifth was clear profit.

Whether the Romans used the Britons in the mines as slaves or not, the just and democratic system of working them—which was probably due to the Norman kings, and extorted the admiration of M. Jars, a French traveller of the generation to which Henry Martyn’s father belonged—did not humanise the population. So rude were their manners that their heath-covered rocks bore the name of ‘West Barbary.’ Writing two centuries before Martyn, Norden described the city of his birth as remarkable for its neatness, which it still is, but he added, there is not a town ‘more discommendable for the pride of the people.’ The Cornish miner’s life is still as short as it is hard and daring, in spite of his splendid physique and the remarkable health of the women and children. But the perils of a rock-bound coast, the pursuits of wrecking and smuggling, added to the dangers of the mines, and all isolated from the growing civilisation of England, had combined, century after century, to make Cornwall a byword till John Wesley and George Whitfield visited it. Then the miner became so changed, not less really because rapidly, that the feature of the whole people which first and most continuously strikes a stranger is their grave and yet hearty politeness. Thomas Carlyle has, in his Life of Sterling, pictured the moral heroism which Methodism, with its ‘faith of assurance,’ developes in the ignorant Cornish miner, a faith which, as illustrated by William Carey and taught by the Church of England, did much to make Henry Martyn what he became. John Wesley’s own description in the year of Henry Martyn’s birth is this: ‘It pleased God the seed there sown has produced an abundant harvest. Indeed, I hardly know any part of the three kingdoms where there has been a more general change.’ The Cornishman still beguiles the weary hours of his descent of the ladder to his toil by crooning the hymns of Charles Wesley. The local preacher whose eloquent earnestness and knowledge of his Bible have delighted the stranger on Sunday, is found next day two hundred fathoms below the sea, doing his eight hours’ work all wet and grimy and red from the iron-sand, picking out the tin of Bottallack or the copper of Gwennap. Long before Henry Martyn knew Simeon he had become unconsciously in some sense the fruit of the teaching of the Wesleys.

During fifty-five years again and again John Wesley visited Cornwall, preaching in the open air all over the mining county and in the fishing hamlets, till two generations were permanently changed. His favourite centre was Gwennap, which had long been the home of the Martyn family, a few miles from Truro. There he found his open-air pulpit and church in the great hollow, ever since known as ‘Wesley’s Pit,’ where, to this day, thousands crowd every Whit-Monday to commemorative services. Wesley’s published journal, which closes with October 1790, when Henry Martyn was nearly ten years of age, has more frequent and always more appreciative references to Gwennap than to any other town. On July 6, 1745, we find him writing:

At Gwennap also we found the people in the utmost consternation. Word was brought that a great company of tinners, made drunk on purpose, were coming to do terrible things—so that abundance of people went away. I preached to the rest on ‘Love your enemies.’

By 1774 we read ‘the glorious congregation was assembled at five in the amphitheatre at Gwennap.’ Next year we find this:

‘At five in the evening in the amphitheatre at Gwennap. I think this is the most magnificent spectacle which is to be seen on this side heaven. And no music is to be heard upon earth comparable to the sound of many thousand voices when they are all harmoniously joined together singing “praises to God and the Lamb.” Four-and-twenty thousand were present, frequently, at that spot. And yet all, I was informed, could hear distinctly in the fair, calm evening.’ Again: ‘I think this is my ne plus ultra. I shall scarce see a larger congregation till we meet in the air.’

We are thus introduced to the very spot where Henry Martyn was born: ‘About noon I preached in the piazza adjoining to the Coinage Hall in Truro. I was enabled to speak exceeding plain on “Ye are saved through faith.”’ In the evening of the same day Wesley preached in the fishing village of Megavissey, ‘where I saw a very rare thing—men swiftly increasing in substance, and yet not decreasing in holiness.’

From such a land and such influences sprang the first missionary hero of the Church of England in modern times. The Martyn family had for more than a century been known locally as one of skilled miners, described by their ablest representative in recent times[2] as ‘mine agents or mine captains who filled positions of trust.’ Martin Luther had a similar origin. There is no evidence that any of them went underground, although that, if true, would justify the romance for which Martyn’s first biographer is responsible. His great-grandfather was Thomas Martyn, his grandfather was John Martyn of Gwennap Churchtown, and his grand-uncle was the surveyor, Thomas Martyn (1695-1751), who published the map of Cornwall described as a marvel of minute and accurate topography, due to a survey on foot for fifteen years. Mr. Jeffery quotes from some manuscript notes written by his father:

John, an elder brother of Thomas Martyn, was the father of John Martyn, who was born at Gwennap Churchtown, and, when young, was put as an accountant at Wheal Virgin Mine. He was soon made cashier to Ralph Allen Daniell, Esq., of Trelissick. Mr. Martyn held one-twenty-fourth of Wheal Unity Mine, where upwards of 300,000l. was divided. He then resided in a house opposite the Coinage Hall (now the Cornish Bank), Truro, a little below the present Market House. Here Henry Martyn was born February 18, 1781, and was sent thence to Dr. Cardew’s School in 1788.

The new Town Hall stands on the site of the house.

The boy bore a family name which is common in Southwest England, and which was doubtless derived, in the first instance, from the great missionary monk of Celtic France, the founder of the Gallic Church, St. Martin, Bishop of Tours. Born in what is now Lower Hungary, the son of a pagan soldier of Rome, St. Martin, during his long life which nearly covered the fourth century, made an impression, especially on Western or Celtic Christendom, even greater than that of the Devonshire Winfrith or Boniface on Germany long after him. It was in the generation after his death, when St. Martin’s glory was at its height, that the Saxon invasion of Britain led to the migration of British Christians from West and South England to Armorica, which was thence called Brittany. The intercourse between Cornwall and Britannia Minor became as close as is now the case between the Celtic districts of the United Kingdom and North America. Missionaries continually passed and repassed between them. St. Corentin, consecrated Bishop of Quimper in Brittany or French Cornwall, by the hands of St. Martin himself, was sent to Cornwall long before Pope Gregory despatched St. Augustin to Canterbury, and became a popular Cornish saint after whom St. Cury’s parish is still named. On the other side, the Early British Church of Cornwall, where we still find Roman Christian inscriptions, kept up a close fellowship with the Church in Ireland. The earliest martyrs and hermits of the Church of Cornu-Gallia were companions of St. Patrick.

Certainly there is no missionary saint in all the history of the Church of Christ whom, in his character, Henry Martyn so closely resembled as his namesake, the apostle of the Gallic peoples. In the pages of the bishop’s biographer, Sulpicius Severus, we see the same self-consecration which has made the Journal of Henry Martyn a stimulus to the noblest spirits of modern Christendom; the same fiery zeal, often so excessive as to defeat the Divine mission; the same soldier-like obedience and humility; the same prayerfulness without ceasing, and faith in the power of prayer; the same fearlessness in preaching truth however disagreeable to the luxurious and vicious of the time; and, above all on the practical side, the same winning loveableness and self-sacrifice for others which have made the story of St. 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. If the legend continues to run, that the boy saw in a dream Christ Himself in the half-cloak saying to the attendant angels, ‘Martin, still a catechumen, has clothed Me with this garment,’ and forthwith sought baptism—that is only a form of the same spirit which, from the days of Paul to our own, finds inspiration in the thought that we are compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses.

Henry Martyn was baptised in the old church of St. Mary, now part of the unfinished cathedral. He was the third of four children. The eldest, a half-brother, John, was born fifteen years before him. The second and fourth were his own sisters, Laura and Sally; the former married Mr. Curgenven, nephew of the Vicar of Lamorran of that name; the latter married a Mr. Pearson. Short-lived as Henry himself proved to be, all three died before him. To both the sisters—and especially to the younger, who proved to be to him at once sister, mother, and spiritual guide to Christ—there are frequent allusions in his Journals and Letters. His mother, named Fleming, and from Ilfracombe, died in the year after his birth, having transmitted her delicate constitution to her children. It was through his father, as well as younger sister, that the higher influences were rained on Henry Martyn. In the wayward and often wilful years before the boy yielded to the power of Christ’s resurrection, the father’s gentleness kept him in the right way, from which any violent opposition would have driven one of proud spirit. A skilled accountant and practical self-trained mathematician, the father encouraged in the boy the study of science, and early introduced him to the great work of Newton. Valuing the higher education as few in England did at that time, John Martyn ever kept before the lad the prospect of a University course. Looking back on these days, and especially on his last visit home before his father’s unexpected death, Henry Martyn wrote when he was eighteen years of age:

The consummate selfishness and exquisite irritability of my mind were displayed in rage, malice, and envy, in pride and vain-glory and contempt of all; in the harshest language to my sister, and even to my father, if he happened to differ from my mind and will. Oh, what an example of patience and mildness was he! I love to think of his excellent qualities, and it is frequently the anguish of my heart that I ever could be so base and wicked as to pain him by the slightest neglect.

Truro was fortunate in its grammar school—‘the Eton of Cornwall’—and in the headmaster of that time, the Rev. Cornelius Cardew, D.D., whose portrait now adorns the city’s council chamber. The visitor who seeks out the old school in Boscawen Street now finds it converted into the ware-room of an ironmonger. All around may still be seen the oak panels on which successive generations of schoolboys cut their names. A pane of glass on which Henry Martyn scratched his name, with a Greek quotation and a Hebrew word, probably on his last visit to the spot before he left England forever, is reverently preserved in the muniment room of the corporation buildings. There also are the musty folios of the dull history and duller divinity which formed the school library of that uncritical century, but there is no means of tracing the reading of the boys. Into this once lightsome room, adorned only by a wood-carving of the galleon which formed the city arms, was the child Henry Martyn introduced at the age of seven. Dr. Clement Carlyon, who was one of his fellow-pupils, writes of him as ‘a good-humoured plain little fellow, with red eyelids devoid of eyelashes’. But we know from Mrs. Sherwood, when she first met him in India—where his hair, a light brown, was raised from his forehead, which was a remarkably fine one—that although his features were not regular, ‘the expression was so luminous, so intellectual, so affectionate, so beaming with Divine charity, as to absorb the attention of every observer’. His sensitive nature and violent passionateness when roused, at once marked him out as the victim of the older boys. In a happy moment Dr. Cardew put ‘little Henry Martyn’ under the care of one of them, who became his protector, tutor, and friend, not only at school but at college, and had an influence on his spiritual as well as intellectual life next only to that of his father, sister, and Charles Simeon. That ‘upper boy’—named Kempthorne, son of Admiral Kempthorne, of Helston—delighted to recall to his first biographer, Sargent, ‘the position in which he used to sit, the thankful expression of his affectionate countenance, when he happened to be helped out of some difficulty, and a thousand other little incidents of his boyish days.’ This boy-friend ‘had often the happiness of rescuing him from the grasp of oppressors, and has never seen more feeling of gratitude evinced than was shown by him on those occasions.’

Even at seven Henry’s natural cleverness was so apparent that high expectations of his future were formed. Dr. Cardew wrote of his proficiency in the classics as exceeding that of most of his school-fellows, but he was too lively and too careless to apply himself as some did who distanced him. ‘He was of a lively, cheerful temper, and, as I have been told by those who sat near him, appeared to be the idlest among them, being frequently known to go up to his lesson with little or no preparation, as if he had learnt it by intuition.’ The delicacy of his constitution naturally kept him from joining in the rougher games of his fellows. Such was the impression made by his progress at school that, when he was fifteen years of age, not only Dr. Cardew and his father, but many of his father’s friends, urged him to compete for a vacant scholarship of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. With only a letter to the sub-rector of Exeter College, the usual Cornish College, the boy found himself in the great University city. The examiners were divided in opinion as to the result, but a majority gave it in favour of one with whom Henry Martyn was almost equal. Had he become a member of that University at fifteen, with character unformed and knowledge immature or superficial, it is not likely that Oxford would have gained what, at a riper stage, Cambridge fell heir to. His own comment, written afterwards like Augustine’s in the Confessions, was this: ‘The profligate acquaintances I had in Oxford would have introduced me to scenes of debauchery, in which I must, in all probability, from my extreme youth, have sunk for ever.’ He returned to school for two years, to extend his knowledge of the classics. He spent his leisure in shooting, and in reading travels and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters. His early private Journal reflects severely on that time as spent in ‘attributing to a want of taste for mathematics what ought to have been ascribed to idleness; and having his mind in a roving, dissatisfied, restless condition, seeking his chief pleasure in reading and human praise.’

ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, IN 1797

In this spirit he began residence in St. John’s College, Cambridge, in the month of October 1797, as a pensioner or unassisted student. To that University he was attracted by Kempthorne, who had been his protector at school, and had just distinguished himself at St. John’s, coming out Senior Wrangler. Alike from the idleness to which he was tempted by other fellow-students who were new to him, and from the variety of study with no other motive than to win glory of men, his friend gradually weaned his fickle and impulsive genius. But for two years he halted between two opinions. He was ever restless because ever dissatisfied with himself, and his want of inward peace only increased the natural irritability of his temper. He indulged in bursts of passion on slight provocation, and sometimes on none at all, save that of an uneasy conscience. Like Clive about the same age, Henry Martyn on one occasion hurled a knife at his friend, Cotterill, who just escaped, leaving it quivering in the panel of the dining-hall. The father and younger sister at home prayerfully watched over him, and by letter sought to guide him. On his periodical visits to Truro he was able at least to report success in his examinations, and at the close of 1799 he came out first, to his father’s delight. The providence of God had made all things ready for the completion of His eighteen years’ work in the convictions and character of Henry Martyn, on his return to college. To him, at the opening of the new century, all things became new.

Cambridge, first of all, had received—unconsciously to its leading men for a time—that new spirit which has ever since identified its University with the aggressive missionary philanthropy of the nineteenth century. For nearly the whole period of Martyn’s life, up to that time, Charles Simeon, the Eton boy, Fellow of King’s College, and Christian gentleman, who had sought the position only that he might preach Christ after the manner of St. Paul, had, from the pulpit of Trinity Church, been silently transforming academic life. He had become the trusted agent of Charles Grant and George Udny, the Bengal civilians who were ready to establish an eight-fold mission in Bengal as soon as he could send out the men. Failing to find these, he had brought about the foundation of the Church Missionary Society on April 12, 1799. Some years before that, Charles Grant exchanged his seat in the Bengal council for one of the ‘chairs’ of the Court of Directors. He became their chairman, and it was to Simeon that he turned for East India chaplains. Cambridge, even more than London itself, had become the centre of the spiritual life of the Church of England.

First among the fellow-students of Henry Martyn, though soon to leave for India when he entered it, was his future friend, Claudius Buchanan, B.A. of 1796 and Fellow of Queen’s College, of which Isaac Milner was president. Magdalene College—which had sent David Brown to Calcutta in 1786, to prepare the way for the other four, who are for ever memorable as ‘the Five Chaplains’—had among its students of the same standing as Martyn, Charles Grant’s two distinguished sons, of whom one became Lord Glenelg and a cabinet minister, and the younger, Robert, was afterwards Governor of Bombay, the still valued hymnologist, and the warm friend of Dr. John Wilson. Thomason—seven years older than Martyn, and induced afterwards, by his example, to become a Bengal chaplain—was Simeon’s curate and substitute in the closing years of the last century, when to Mr. Thornton of Clapham, who had warned him against preaching five sermons a week, as casting the net too often to allow time to mend it, he drew this picture of college life: ‘There are reasons for fearing the mathematical religion which so prevails here. Here, also, is everything that can contribute to the ease and comfort of life. Whatever pampers the appetite and administers fuel to sloth and indolence is to be found in abundance. Nothing is left to want or desire. Here is the danger; this is the horrible precipice.’ Corrie and Dealtry, also of the Five Chaplains, and afterwards first and second Bishops of Madras, were of Martyn’s Cambridge time, the latter graduating before, and the former just after him.

Hardly had Henry Martyn returned to college in January 1800 when he received from his half-brother news of the death of their father, whom he had just before left ‘in great health and spirits.’ The first result was ‘consternation,’ and then, as he told his sister,

I was extremely low-spirited, and, like most people, began to consider seriously, without any particular determination, that invisible world to which he had gone and to which I must one day go. As I had no taste at this time for my usual studies, I took up my Bible. Nevertheless I often took up other books to engage my attention, and should have continued to do so had not Kempthorne advised me to make this time an occasion of serious reflection. I began with the Acts, as being the most amusing, and when I was entertained with the narrative I found myself insensibly led to inquire more attentively into the doctrines of the Apostles.... On the first night after, I began to pray from a precomposed form, in which I thanked God in general for having sent Christ into the world. But though I prayed for pardon I had little sense of my own sinfulness; nevertheless, I began to consider myself a religious man.

The college chapel service at once had a new meaning for the student whom death had shaken and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles had awakened. ‘The first time after this that I went to chapel I saw, with some degree of surprise at my former inattention, that in the Magnificat there was a great degree of joy expressed at the coming of Christ, which I thought but reasonable.’ His friend then lent him Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, but, because the first part of that book ‘appeared to make religion consist too much in humiliation, and my proud and wicked heart would not bear to be brought down into the dust,’ he could not bear to read it. ‘Soon, however,’ as he afterwards told his sister, who had prayed for this very thing all her life, as Monica had agonised for Augustine, ‘I began to attend more diligently to the words of our Saviour in the New Testament, and to devour them with delight. When the offers of mercy and forgiveness were made so freely, I supplicated to be made partaker of the covenant of grace with eagerness and hope, and thanks be to the ever-blessed Trinity for not leaving me without comfort.’ The doctrines of the Apostles, based on the narrative of the Acts, and confirming the teaching of the family in early youth, were seen to be in accord with the words of the Master, and thus Henry Martyn started on the Christian life an evangelical of the Evangelicals. In the preaching and the personal friendship of the minister of Trinity Church he found sympathetic guidance, and so ‘gradually acquired more knowledge in divine things.’ All the hitherto irregular impulses of his fervent Celtic nature received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and became centred in the living, reigning, personal Christ. All the restless longings of his soul and his senses found their satisfaction for ever in the service of Him who had said ‘He that loveth his life shall lose it. If any man serve Me, let him follow Me, and where I am there shall also My servant be.’ All the pride of his genius, his intellectual ambition, and his love of praise became purged by the determination thenceforth to know nothing save the Crucified One.

His first temptation and test of honest fitness for such service was found in the examination for degrees, and especially for the greatest honour of all, that of Senior Wrangler. If we place his conversion to Christ at the close of his nineteenth year, we find that the whole of his twentieth was spent in the necessary preparation for the competition, and in the accompanying spiritual struggles. It is not surprising that, when looking back on that year from higher experiences, he should be severe in his self-examination. But the path of duty clearly lay in hard and constant study, and not alone in religious meditation. It was not surprising that the experienced convert should afterwards pronounce the former worldly, and lament that ‘the intenseness with which I pursued my studies’ prevented his growth in contrition, and in a knowledge of the excellency of Christ. But so severe a judge as his friend and fellow-student John Sargent, who knew all the facts, and became not less saintly than himself, declares that there was no reason, save his own humility, for his suspecting a want of vitality at least in his spiritual life in this critical year. His new-found life in Christ, and delight in the Bible, reacted on his whole nature, elevating it to that degree of spontaneous energy free from all self-consciousness which is the surest condition, divine and human, of success. He himself used to tell how, when he entered the Senate House, the text of a sermon he had recently heard quieted his spirit: ‘Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not, saith the Lord.’

Henry Martyn was not fully twenty years of age when, in January 1801, he came out Senior Wrangler and first Smith’s (mathematical) Prizeman. His year was one of the most brilliant in the recent history of the University. Woodall of Pembroke was second. Robert Grant was third, and Charles Grant (Lord Glenelg) fourth Wrangler. They distanced him in classics, once his strongest point. But the boy who entered college believing that geometry was to be learned by committing Euclid[3] to memory had given the whole strength of his powers during three years to the college examinations, so as to please his father and win the applause of his fellows. Until recently it was possible for a student to enter the University ignorant of mathematics, and to come out Senior Wrangler, as the late Professor Kelland used to tell his Edinburgh class. Such was the reverence for Newton that the Leibnizian methods were not recognised in the University studies till the reform of the Cambridge course was introduced by Dean Peacock and his contemporaries. In those earlier days, Dr. Carlyon,[4] who had been one of his school-fellows, tells us high Wranglers won their places by correct book-work rapidly produced in oral examination from four set treatises by Wood and Vince, on optics, mechanics, hydrostatics, and astronomy; problem papers were answered by the best men. Martyn’s grand-nephew, himself a distinguished mathematician, remarks that he sprang from a family of calculators, and so had the patience and taste necessary for mathematical attainments. There is no evidence that he pursued science even at Cambridge except as a tutor; he does not appear to have been a mathematical examiner even in his own college.

The truth is seen in his own comment on a success which at once won for him admiration and deference in circles that could not appreciate the lofty Christian aims of his life: ‘I obtained my highest wishes, but was surprised to find that I had grasped a shadow.’ He was called to other service, and for that he brought his University triumph with him to the feet of Christ. He was too cultured, however, to despise learning or academic reputation, for they might be made weapons for the Master’s use, and we shall find him wielding both alike in home and foreign missions. His genius and learning found expression in the study, the translation, and the unceasing application to the consciences of men, of the Word of God. His early love of the classics of Greece and Rome prevailed over his later mathematical studies to make him an ardent philologist, with the promise, had he lived, of becoming an Orientalist of the type of Sir William Jones. If he was known in his college as ‘the man who had not lost an hour’ when University honours alone were his object, how much would not his unresting perseverance have accomplished, when directed by the highest of all motives, had he been spared to the age of William Carey or John Wilson?

The time had come for the brilliant student to decide on his profession. The same ambition which had stimulated him to his college successes, had led him to resolve on studying the law, as the most lucrative. ‘I could not consent to be poor for Christ’s sake,’ was his own language at a later period. But Christ himself had changed all that, as effectually as when the young lawyer Saul was stricken down after the martyr testimony of Stephen. The year 1801 was to him one of comparative solitude, both in Cornwall and at the University, where he cultivated the fruitful grace of meditation, learning to know and to master himself, as he came to know more and more intimately, and to submit himself to, Christ Jesus. He was admitted to the inner circle of Simeon’s friends, and to unreserved intercourse with men of his own age who had come to Christ before him. Especially was he drawn to John Sargent, one year his senior, who was about to leave the university for the Temple, that he might by the study of law prepare himself to administer worthily the family estate to which he was to succeed. His son-in-law, the late Bishop S. Wilberforce, has left us a charming picture[5] of this saintly man, of whom Martyn wrote, even at college, ‘Sargent seems to be outstripping us all.’ While Simeon ever, by his counsels and his example, impressed on the choice youth whom he gathered around him the attractiveness of the Christian ministry,[6] Sargent bewailed that only a painful sense of duty to others kept him from it, and in a few years he succeeded in entering its consecrated ranks. Among such friends, and with his own heart growing in the experience of the power of the Holy Spirit, Henry Martyn was constrained, notwithstanding his new humbleness of mind, to hear and obey the divine call. He who had received such mercy must tell it abroad; he who had known such love must bring others to share the sweetness. Hence he writes to his sister:

When we consider the misery and darkness of the unregenerate world, oh! with how much reason shall we burst out into thanksgiving to God, who has called us in His mercy through Christ Jesus! What are we, that we should thus be made objects of distinguishing grace! Who, then, that reflects upon the rock from which he was hewn, but must rejoice to give himself entirely and without reserve to God, to be sanctified by His Spirit. The soul that has truly experienced the love of God, will not stay meanly inquiring how much he shall do, and thus limit his service, but will be earnestly seeking more and more to know the will of our Heavenly Father, and that he may be enabled to do it. Oh, may we both be thus minded! may we experience Christ to be our all in all, not only as our Redeemer, but also as the fountain of grace. Those passages of the Word of God which you have quoted on this head, are indeed awakening; may they teach us to breathe after holiness, to be more and more dead to the world, and alive unto God, through Jesus Christ. We are as lights in the world; how needful then that our tempers and lives should manifest our high and heavenly calling! Let us, as we do, provoke one another to good works, not doubting that God will bless our feeble endeavours to His glory.

The next year, 1802, saw Martyn Fellow of his College and the winner of the first University prize for a Latin essay, open to those who had just taken the Bachelor of Arts degree. It ended in his determination to offer himself to the Church Missionary Society. He had no sooner resolved to be a minister of Christ than he began such home mission work as lay to his hands among his fellow members of the University, and in the city where, at a recent period, one who closely resembled him in some points, Ion Keith-Falconer, laboured. When ministering to a dying man he found that the daughters had removed to another house, where they were cheerful, and one of the students was reading a play to them. ‘A play! when their father was lying in the agonies of death! What a species of consolation! I rebuked him so sharply, and, I am afraid, so intemperately, that a quarrel will perhaps ensue.’ This is the first of those cases in which the impulsively faithful Christian, testifying for his Master, often roused hatred to himself. But the student afterwards thanked him for his words, became a new man, and went out to India, where he laboured for a time by his side. After a summer tour—during which he walked to Liverpool, and then through Wales, ascending Snowdon—Henry Martyn found himself in the old home in Truro, then occupied by his brother. From the noise of a large family he moved to Woodbury: ‘With my brother-in-law[7] I passed some of the sweetest moments in my life. The deep solitude of the place favoured meditation; and the romantic scenery around supplied great external sources of pleasure.’

Along the beautiful coast of Cornwall and Devon there is no spot more beautiful than Woodbury. It is henceforth sacred as Moulton in Carey’s life, and St. Andrews in Alexander Duff’s, for there Henry Martyn wrestled out his deliberate dedication to the service of Christ in India and Persia. The Fal river is there just beginning to open out into the lovely estuary which, down almost to Falmouth town and Carrick Road, between Pendennis and St. Mawes, is clothed on either side with umbrageous woods. On the left shore, after leaving the point from which is the best view of Truro and its cathedral, now known as the Queen’s View, there is Malpas, and further on are the sylvan glories of Tregothnan. On the right shore, sloping down to the ever-moving tide, are the oaks, ilexes, and firs which inclose Woodbury, recently rebuilt. There the Cambridge scholar of twenty-one roamed and read his Bible (especially Isaiah); ‘and from this I derived great spirituality of mind compared with what I had known before.’ He returned to Cambridge and its tutorial duties, ready to become Simeon’s curate, and ultimately to go abroad when the definite call should come. In the first conversation which he had with him, Simeon, who had been reading the last number of the Periodical Accounts from Serampore, drew attention to the results of William Carey’s work, in the first nine years of his pioneering, as showing what a single missionary could accomplish. From this time, in his letters and journals, we find all his thoughts and reading, when alone, revolving around the call to the East.

1803, January 12 to 19.—Reading Lowth on Isaiah—Acts—and abridged Bishop Hopkins’ first sermon on Regeneration. On the 19th called on Simeon, from whom I found that I was to go to the East Indies, not as a missionary, but in some superior capacity; to be stationed at Calcutta, or possibly at Ceylon. This prospect of this world’s happiness gave me rather pain than pleasure, which convinced me that I had before been running away from the world, rather than overcoming it. During the whole course of the day, I was more worldly than for some time past, unsettled and dissatisfied. In conversation, therefore, I found great levity, pride, and bitterness. What a sink of corruption is this heart, and yet I can go on from day to day in self-seeking and self-pleasing! Lord, shew me myself, nothing but ‘wounds and bruises, and putrefying sores,’ and teach me to live by faith on Christ my all.

St. John’s, January 17, 1803.

My dear Sargent,—G. and H. seem to disapprove of my project much; and on this account I have been rather discouraged of late, though not in any degree convinced. It would be more satisfactory to go out with the full approbation of my friends, but it is in vain to attempt to please man. In doubtful cases, we are to use the opinions of others no further than as means of directing our own judgment. My sister has also objected to it, on the score of my deficiency in that deep and solid experience necessary in a missionary.

February 4.—Read Lowth in the afternoon, till I was quite tired. Endeavoured to think of Job xiv. 14, and to have solemn thoughts of death, but could not find them before my pupil came, to whom I explained justification by faith, as he had ridiculed Methodism. But talk upon what I will, or with whom I will, conversation leaves me ruffled and discomposed. From what does this arise? From a want of the sense of God’s presence when I am with others.

February 6.—Read the Scriptures, between breakfast and church, in a very wandering and unsettled manner, and in my walk was very weak in desires after God. As I found myself about the middle of the day full of pride and formality, I found some relief in prayer. Sat with H. and D. after dinner, till three, but though silent, was destitute of humility. Read some of S. Pearce’s[8] life, and was much interested by his account of the workings of his mind on the subject of his mission. Saw reason to be thankful that I had no such tender ties to confine me at home, as he seemed to have; and to be amazed at myself, in not making it a more frequent object of reflection, and yet to praise God for calling me to minister in the glorious work of the conversion of the Gentiles.

March 27.—The lectures in chemistry and anatomy I was much engaged with, without receiving much instruction. A violent cold and cough led me to prepare myself for an inquiry into my views of death. I was enabled to rest composed on the Rock of Ages. Oh, what mercy shewn to the chief of sinners.

April 22.—Was ashamed to confess to —— that I was to be Mr. Simeon’s curate, a despicable fear of man from which I vainly thought myself free. He, however, asked me if I was not to be, and so I was obliged to tell him. Jer. i. 17.

May 8.—Expressed myself contemptuously of ——, who preached at St. Mary’s. Such manifestations of arrogance which embody, as it were, my inward pride, wound my spirit inexpressibly, not to contrition, but to a sullen sense of guilt. Read Second Epistle to Timothy. I prayed with some earnestness.

June 13 to 24.—Passed in tolerable comfort upon the whole; though I could on no day say my walk had been close with God. Read Sir G. Staunton’s Embassy to China, and was convinced of the propriety of being sent thither. But I have still the spirit of worldly men when I read worldly books. I felt more curiosity about the manners of this people than love and pity towards their souls.

St. John’s, June 30, 1803.

Dear Sargent,—May you, as long as you shall give me your acquaintance, direct me to the casting down of all high imaginations. Possibly it may be a cross to you to tell me or any one of his faults. But should I be at last a castaway, or at least dishonour Christ through some sin, which for want of faithful admonition remained unmortified, how bitter would be your reflections! I conjure you, therefore, my dear friend, as you value the good of the souls to whom I am to preach, and my own eternal interests, that you tell me what you think to be, in my life, spirit, or temper, not according to the will of God my Saviour. D. has heard about a religious young man of seventeen, who wants to come to College, but has only 20l. a year. He is very clever, and from the perusal of some poems which he has published, I am much interested about him. His name is H.K. White.

July 17.—Rose at half-past five, and walked a little before chapel in happy frame of mind; but the sunshine was presently overcast by my carelessly neglecting to speak for the good of two men, when I had an opportunity. The pain was, moreover, increased by the prospect of the incessant watchfulness for opportunities I should use; nevertheless, resolved that I would do so through grace. The dreadful act of disobeying God, and the baseness of being unwilling to incur the contempt of men, for the sake of the Lord Jesus, who had done so much for me, and the cruelty of not longing to save souls, were the considerations that pressed on my mind.

July 18 to 30.—Gained no ground in all this time; stayed a few days at Shelford, but was much distracted and unsettled for want of solitude. Felt the passion of envy rankle in my bosom on a certain occasion. Seldom enjoyed peace, but was much under the power of corruption. Read Butler’s Analogy; Jon. Edwards On the Affections; in great hopes that this book will be of essential use to me.

September 10.—Was most deeply affected with reading the account of the apostasy of Lewis and Broomhall, in the transactions of the Missionary Society. When I first came to the account of the awful death of the former, I cannot describe the sense I had of the reality of religion,—that there is a God who testifies His hatred of sin; ‘my flesh trembled for fear of His judgments.’ Afterwards, coming to the account of Broomhall’s sudden turn to Deism, I could not help even bursting into tears of anxiety and terror at my own extreme danger; because I have often thought, that if I ever should make shipwreck, it would be on the rocks of sensuality or infidelity. The hollowness of Broomhall’s arguments was so apparent, that I could only attribute his fall to the neglect of inquiring after the rational foundation of his faith.

September 12.—Read some of the minor prophets, and Greek Testament, and the number of the Missionary Transactions. H. drank tea with me in the evening. I read some of the missionary accounts. The account of their sufferings and diligence could not but tend to lower my notions of myself. I was almost ashamed at my having such comforts about me, and at my own unprofitableness.

September 13.—Received a letter from my sister, in which she expressed her opinion of my unfitness for the work of a missionary. My want of Christian experience filled me with many disquieting doubts, and this thought troubled me among many others, as it has often done: ‘I am not only not so holy as I ought, but I do not strive to have my soul wrought up to the highest pitch of devotion every moment.’

September 17.—Read Dr. Vanderkemp’s mission to Kafraria. What a man! In heaven I shall think myself well off, if I obtain but the lowest seat among such, though now I am fond of giving myself a high one.

St. John’s, September 29, 1803.

How long it seems since I heard from you, my dear Sargent. My studies during the last three months have been Hebrew, Greek Testament, Jon. Edwards On Original Sin, and On the Affections, and Bishop Hopkins,—your favourite and mine. Never did I read such energetic language, such powerful appeals to the conscience. Somehow or other he is able to excite most constant interest, say what he will. I have been lately reading the first volume of the Reports of the Missionary Society, who sent out so many to Otaheite and the southern parts of Africa. You would find the account of Dr. Vanderkemp’s mission into Kafraria infinitely entertaining. It appeared so much so to me, that I could read nothing else while it lasted. Respecting my own concerns in this way, no material change has taken place, either externally or internally, except that my sister thinks me unqualified, through want of religious experience, and that I find greater pleasure at the prospect of it. I am conscious, however, of viewing things too much on the bright side, and think more readily of the happiness of seeing the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose, than of pain, and fatigue, and crosses, and disappointments. However it shall be determined for me, it is my duty to crush the risings of self-will, so as to be cheerfully prepared to go or stay.

October 1.—In the afternoon read in Law’s Serious Call, the chapter on ‘Resignation,’ and prayed for it, according to his direction. I rather think a regular distribution of the day for prayer, to obtain the three great graces of humility, love, and resignation, would be far the best way to grow in them. The music at chapel led my thoughts to heaven, and I went cheerfully to Mrs. S.H. drank tea with me afterwards. As there was in the Christian Observer something of my own, the first which ever appeared in print, I felt myself going off to vanity and levity.

SECOND COURT, ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, 1803

October 9.—Rose at six, which is earlier than of late, and passed the whole morning in great tranquillity. I prayed to be sent out to China, and rejoiced in the prospect of the glorious day when Christ shall be glorified on earth. At chapel the music of the chant and anthem seemed to be in my ears as the sounds of heaven, particularly the anthem, 1 Chron. xxix. 10. But these joys, alas! partake much of the flesh in their transitory nature. At chapel I wished to return to my rooms to read the song of Moses the servant of God, &c. in the Revelation, but when I came to it I found little pleasure. The sound of the music had ceased, and with it my joy, and nothing remained but evil temper, darkness, and unbelief. All this time I had forgotten what it is to be a poor humble soul. I had floated off the Rock of Ages into the deep, where I was beginning to sink, had not the Saviour stretched out His hand, and said to me, ‘It is I!’ Let me never be cheated out of my dependence on Him, nor ever forget my need of Him.

October 12.—Reading Paley’s Evidences. Had my pride deeply wounded to-day, and perceived that I was far from humility. Great bitterness and dislike arose in my mind against the man who had been the unconscious cause of it. Oh, may I learn daily my hidden evils, and loathe myself for my secret abominations! Prayed for the man, and found my affections return.

October 19.—I wished to have made my approaching ordination to the ministry a more leading object of my prayers. For two or three days I have been reading some of St. Augustine’s Meditations, and was delighted with the hope of enjoying such communion with God as this holy man. Blessed be God! nothing prevents, no earthly business, no earthly love can rightfully intrude to claim my thoughts, for I have professedly resigned them all. My mind still continues in a joyous and happy state, though at intervals, through want of humility, my confidence seems vain.

October 20.—This morning was almost all lost, by friends coming in. At noon I read the fortieth chapter of Isaiah. Amidst the bustle of common life, how frequently has my heart been refreshed by the descriptions of the future glory of the Church, and the happiness of man hereafter!

November 13.—I longed to draw very near to God, to pray Him that He would give me the Spirit of wisdom and revelation. I thought of David Brainerd, and ardently desired his devotedness to God and holy breathings of soul.

When a Fellow of St. John’s, Henry Martyn occupied the three rooms in the highest storey of E block, entered from the right-hand corner of the Second Court before passing through the gateway into the Third Court. The Court is that pronounced by Ruskin the finest in the University, because of the beautiful plum-red hue of the old brick, going back to 1595, and the perfect architecture. From the same stair the fine College Library is entered. The low roof was formed of reed, instead of lath, and plaster, down to a very recent date. On one occasion, while the outer roof was being repaired, the foot of a workman suddenly pushed through the frail inner ceiling above the study table, an incident which has enabled their present occupant[9] to identify the rooms. Here Martyn studied, and taught, and prayed, while hour after hour and quarter after quarter, from the spire of St. Clement’s on the one side, and the tower of Trinity College on the other, the flight of time was chimed forth. When, a generation after, Alexander Duff visited Charles Simeon and his successor, Carus, and expressed surprise that so few Cambridge men had, by 1836, given themselves to foreign missions, Carus pointed to the exquisite beauty of the Cam, as it winds between Trinity and St. John’s, as one explanation of the fact. Both forgot Henry Martyn, whose Cornish temperament was most susceptible to the seductive influence, and whose academic triumphs might have made the ideal life of a Fellow of St. John’s an overpowering temptation. As we stand in these hallowed rooms, or wander through the four courts, and in the perfect gardens, or recall the low chapel—which has given place to Sir Gilbert Scott’s, with a frescoed figure of Henry Martyn on its roof—we can realise the power of the motive that sent him forth to Dinapore and Cawnpore, Shiraz and Tokat.

Samuel Pearce—the ‘seraphic’ preacher of Birmingham, whom a weak body, like Martyn’s, alone prevented from joining his beloved Carey at Serampore; Vanderkemp, the Dutch physician, who had given up all for the good of the Kafirs, and whom he was soon to see in the midst of his converts; David Brainerd, also like himself in the shortness and saintliness of his career; the transactions of the London Missionary Society; the latest works on the East; and the experimental divinity of Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, and Law, with the writings of Bishops Butler and Hopkins, and Dr. Paley—these were the men and the books he used to train his spirit for the work of the ministry abroad, when he had fed it with the words of Jesus Christ, Isaiah, and Paul. He thus describes his examination for Deacon’s orders, and his ordination by the Bishop of Ely on the title of his Fellowship, after which he became Mr. Simeon’s curate, and took charge of the neighbouring small parish of Lolworth.

1803, October 22.—Went in a gig to Ely with B. Having had no time for morning prayer, my conversation was poor. At chapel, I felt great shame at having come so confidently to offer myself for the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, with so much ignorance and unholiness, and I thought it would be but just if I were sent off with ignominy. Dr. M., the examining chaplain, set me to construe the eleventh chapter of Matthew: Grotius: To turn the first article into Latin: To prove the being of a God, His infinite power and goodness: To give the evidence of Christianity to Jews and heathens: To shew the importance of the miracle of the resurrection of Christ. He asked an account, also, of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes, the places of the worship amongst the Jews, &c. After leaving the palace I was in very low spirits. I had now nothing to think of but the weight and difficulty of the work which lay before me, which never appeared so great at a distance. At dinner the conversation was frivolous. After tea I was left alone with one of the deacons, to whom I talked seriously, and desired him to read the Ordination Service, at which he was much affected. Retired to my room early, and besought God to give me a right and affecting sense of things. I seemed to pray a long time in vain, so dark and distracted was my mind. At length I began to feel the shameful and cruel neglect and unconcern for the honour of God, and the souls of my brethren, in having trifled with men whom I feared were about to ‘lie to the Holy Ghost.’ So I went to them again, resolving to lay hold on any opportunity, but found none to do anything effectually. Went to bed with a painful sense of my hardness of heart and unsuitable preparation for the ministry.

October 23.—Rose early, and prayed, not without distraction. I then walked, but could not acquire a right and happy sense of God’s mercy in calling me to the ministry; but was melancholy at the labours that awaited me. On returning, I met one of the deacons, to whom I spoke on the solemn occasion, but he seemed incapable of entertaining a serious thought. At half-past ten we went to the cathedral. During the ordination and sacramental services I sought in vain for a humble heavenly mind. The outward show which tended to inspire solemnity, affected me more than the faith of Christ’s presence, giving me the commission to preach the gospel. May I have grace to fulfil those promises I made before God and the people! After dinner, walked with great rapidity to Cambridge. I went straight to Trinity Church, where my old vanities assailed my soul. How monstrous and horrible did they appear in me, now that I was a minister of holy things! I could scarcely believe that so sacred an office should be held by one who had such a heart within. B. sat with me in the evening, but I was not humbled; for I had not been near to God to obtain the grace of contrition. On going to prayer at night, I was seized with a most violent sickness. In the pain and disorder of my body, I could but commend myself faintly to God’s mercy in Jesus Christ.

TRINITY CHURCH IN 1803.

October 24 to 29.—Busily employed in writing a sermon, and from the slow advances I made in it, was in general very melancholy. I read on the Thursday night for the first time in Trinity Church.

October 30.—Rose with a heavy heart, and my head empty, from having read so little of the Scriptures this last week. After church, sat with —— two hours conversing about the missionary plan. He considered my ideas on the subject to be enthusiastic, and told me that I had neither strength of body nor mind for the work. This latter defect I did not at all like; it was galling to the pride of my heart, and I went to bed hurt; yet thankful to God for sending me one who would tell me the truth.

December 3.—Employed all day in writing sermon. The incessant employment of my thoughts about the necessary business of my life, parishes, pupils, sermons, sick, &c., leave far too little time for my private meditations; so that I know little of God and my soul. Resolved I would gain some hours from my usual sleep, if there were no other way; but failed this morning in consequence of sitting up so late.

December 4.—Called at two or three of the parishioners’ houses, and found them universally in the most profound state of ignorance and stupidity. On my road home could not perceive that men who have any little knowledge should have anything to do but instruct their wretched fellow-creatures. The pursuits of science, and all the vain and glittering employments of men, seemed a cruel withholding from their perishing brethren of that time and exertion which might save their souls.

December 22.—Married ——. How satisfactory is it to administer the ordinance of matrimony, where the couple are pious! I felt thankful that I was delivered from all desires of the comforts of the married life. With the most desirable partner, and every prospect of happiness, I would prefer a single life, in which there are so much greater opportunities for heavenly-mindedness.

When appointed classical examiner of his college at this time, he jealously examined himself:

Did I delight in reading of the retreat of the ten thousand Greeks; and shall not my soul glory in the knowledge of God, who created the Greeks, and the vast countries over which they passed! I examined in Butler’s Analogy and in Xenophon: how much pride and ostentatious display of learning was visible in my conduct—how that detestable spirit follows me, whatever I do!

He opened the year 1804, after preaching in Trinity Church, and visiting two men whom he exhorted to think on their ways, with a review of his new-found life.

Nevertheless, I judge that I have grown in grace in the course of the last year; for the bent of my desires is towards God more than when I thought I was going out as a missionary, though vastly less than I expected it would have been by this time.

This year he received into his fellowship the young poet, Henry Kirke White, whom Wilberforce had, at Simeon’s request, sent to St. John’s. Southey declares that Chatterton is the only youthful poet whom Kirke White does not leave far behind him. ‘The Star of Bethlehem’ is certainly a hymn that will live. The sickly youth followed close in Martyn’s steps, becoming the first man of his year, but the effort carried him off almost before his friend reached India.

Had Martyn been of canonical age for ordination at the close of 1803, there can be little doubt that he would at once have been sent out by the Church Missionary Society, which could find only German Lutherans as its agents abroad, until 1813, when another Fellow of St. John’s, and a Wrangler, the Rev. William Jowett, offered his services, and was stationed at Malta. But when ordained he lost the little that he had inherited from his father, and saw his younger sister also without resources. There was a tradition in the family of his half-brother John, that Henry and his sisters litigated with him, and farther lessened the patrimony. However that may have been, while in India Henry set apart the proceeds of his Fellowship at St. John’s for the maintenance of his brother’s family, and bequeathed all he had to his children. Mr. H. Thornton, of Clapham, was executor, and duly carried out his instructions, starting the nephews in life. Another incident at this time foreshadows the self-denial of his Indian career. By opening the door of his room suddenly he had disfigured the face of his Cambridge landlady, whose husband was a clergyman. He left to her the interest of 1,000l. as an amend, and she enjoyed this annuity through a very long life.

The Senior Wrangler was not allowed to preach in the church where he had been baptised, nor in any church of his native county, save in his brother-in-law’s. On August 8, 1804, he thus wrote to his friend ‘R. Boys, Esq., Bene’t Coll., Cambridge,’ after preaching at Plymouth for his cousin:

The following Sunday it was not permitted me to occupy the pulpit of my native town, but in a neighbouring church I was allowed to testify the Gospel of the grace of God. But that one sermon was enough. The clergy seem to have united to exclude me from their churches, so that I must now be contented with my brother-in-law’s two little churches about five miles from Truro. The objection is that ‘Mr. Martyn is a Calvinist preacher in the dissenting way, &c.’ My old schoolmaster, who has always hitherto been proud of his pupil, has offered his services for any time to a curate near this place, rather than, as he said, he should apply to me for assistance.

It is interesting to remember, remarks Mr. Moule, who has published this letter for the first time, that ‘always now, as the anniversary of Martyn’s death recurs, a sermon is preached in the cathedral of Truro, in which the great work of Missions is set forth, and his illustrious share in it commemorated.’

As confidential adviser of Charles Grant in the Court of Directors, in the appointment of chaplains, Simeon always sought to attract the best of his curates to that career, and it would appear from the Journal that so early as the beginning of 1803 he had hinted at this to Martyn. Now the way was plain. Martyn could no longer support himself as one of those volunteer missionaries whose services the two great missionary societies of the Church of England have always been happy to enjoy, nor could he relieve his sister out of the subsistence allowance of a missionary. Mr. Grant’s offer of a Bengal chaplaincy seemed to come to him as the solution. But a new element had entered into his life, second only to his spiritual loyalty. He had learned to love Lydia Grenfell.

CHAPTER II: LYDIA GRENFELL

Twenty-six miles south-west of Truro, and now the last railway station before Penzance is reached for the Land’s End, is Marazion, the oldest, the warmest, and long the dullest, of English towns. This was the home of Lydia Grenfell; this was the scene of Henry Martyn’s wooing. Running out from the town is a natural causeway, uncovered at low tide, and leading to the most romantic spot on a romantic coast—the granite rock known to the Greek geographers as Ictis, and to English legend and history as St. Michael’s Mount. Here it was that Jack slew the giant, Cormoran; here that the Phœnician, and possibly Israelite, traffickers found the harbour, and in the town the market, where they bought their copper and their tin; here that St. Michael appeared, as on the larger rock off Normandy, to the earliest Christian hermits, followed by the Benedictines; and here that King John made a fortress which both sides in the Great Rebellion held and took alternately. Since that time, possessed by the St. Aubyn family, and open to all the world, St. Michael’s Mount has been a unique retreat in which castle and chapel, cemetery and garden, unite peacefully, to link the restlessness of the nineteenth century with the hermit saintliness and angel-ophanies of the fifth. It was the last spot of English, of Cornish, ground seen by Henry Martyn, and he knew that the windows of his beloved looked upon its grassy castellated height.

In the one ascending street of Marazion on the shore, there still stands the plain substantial Grenfell House, now boarded up and falling to ruin for want of the freehold tenure. Opposite it is the parish church, now on the site of the old chapel of ease of the neighbouring St. Hilary, which Lydia Grenfell deserted for the then warmer evangelical service of the little Wesleyan chapel. That is hidden in a lane, and is still the same as when she worshipped there, or only a little enlarged. The Grenvilles, Grenviles, or Grenfells, were long a leading family connected with Cornwall as copper-buyers and smelters. One, Pascoe Grenfell, was a Governor of the Bank of England. Mr. Pascoe Grenfell, of Marazion (1729-1810), Commissary to the States of Holland, was father (1) of Emma, who became wife of Martyn’s cousin, Rev. T. Martyn Hitchins; (2) of Lydia Grenfell; and (3) of Pascoe Grenfell, D.C.L., M.P. for Marlow and Penryn. This Pascoe’s four daughters—Lydia Grenfell’s nieces—each became the wife of a remarkable man. The eldest, in 1825, married Mr. Carr Glyn, M.P. for Kendal, and the first Lord Wolverton; the second, Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne; the third, Mr. James Anthony Froude; and the fourth, Charles Kingsley.

ST. MICHAEL’S MOUNT AT FULL TIDE.

Lydia Grenfell, born in 1775, died in her sister’s house, the old Vicarage of Breage, in 1829. She was thus six years older than Henry Martyn. As the sister of his cousin by marriage he must have known of her early. He evidently did not know, till it was too late, that she had been engaged to a Mr. Samuel John, solicitor, of Penzance, who was unworthy of her and married someone else. This engagement and its issue seem to have weighed on her very sensitive conscience; it became to her very much what Henry Martyn’s hopeless love for her proved to be to himself. In the years from October 19, 1801, to 1826, she kept a diary not less devout, but far more morbid than his own. The two journals form, where they meet, a pathetic, even tragic, tale of affection, human and divine. Her bulky memoranda[10] contain few incidents of interest, rather severe introspections, incessant communings and heart-searchings, abstracts of sermons, records of visits to the sick and poor, but also a valuable residuum by which her relations with Martyn can be established beyond controversy. They show that she was as saintly as himself. She weighed every thought, every action, as in the immediate presence of God.

When Henry Martyn, at nineteen, entered on the higher life, he must have known Lydia Grenfell as the sister of Mrs. T.M. Hitchins, the cousin with whom his correspondence shows him to have been on most intimate, and even affectionate, terms. At that time the difference of age would seem slight; her it would affect little, if at all, while common experience suggests that it would be even attractive to him. With the ardour of a young disciple—which in his case grew, year by year, till he passed away—he sought spiritual counsel and communion. On his visits to Cornwall he found both in his younger sister, but it is evident that, from the first, the riper spiritual life of Lydia Grenfell attracted him to her. His triumph, at twenty, as Senior Wrangler put him quite in a position to dream of winning her. His unexpected poverty was relieved by his Fellowship of St. John’s. In those days, however, that would have ceased with marriage. When it became more than probable that he would receive an appointment to Bengal, through Mr. Charles Grant—either as minister of the Mission Church founded by Kiernander, or as a chaplain of the East India Company—he was face to face with the question of marrying.

In these days the course followed by missionary societies as the result of experience is certainly the best. A missionary and a chaplain in India should, in ordinary circumstances, be married, but it is not desirable that the marriage take place for a year or longer, until the young minister has proved the climate, and has learned the native language, when the lady can be sent out to be united to him. At the beginning of the modern missionary enterprise, a century ago, it was difficult to find spiritual men willing to go to India on any terms, and they did well in every case to go out married. All the conditions of time, distance, society, and Christian influence were then different. If the missionary’s or chaplain’s wife is worthy of his calling, she doubles his usefulness, notwithstanding the cares and the expense of children in many cases, alike by keeping her husband in a state of efficiency on every side, by her own works of charity and self-sacrifice—especially among the women, who can be reached in no other way—and by helping to present to the idolatrous or Mussulman community the powerful example of a Christian home. Henry Martyn’s principles and instincts were right in this matter. As a chaplain, at any rate, he was in a position to marry at once. As India or Bengal then was, Lydia, had she gone out with him, or soon after him, would have proved to be a much needed force in Anglo-Indian society, an influence on the native communities whom he sought to bring to Christ. Above all, as a man born with a weak body, with habits of incessant and intense application to study and to duty, Henry Martyn required one with the influence of a wife to keep him in life and to prolong his Indian service. It was the greatest calamity of his whole career that Lydia did not accompany him. But, since he learned to love her with all the rich devotion of his passionate nature, we cannot consider it ‘a bitter misfortune,’ as some do, that he ever knew her. His love for Lydia, in the fluctuations of its hope, in the ebb and flow of its tenderness, and in the transmutation of its despair into faith and resignation to the will of God, worked out a higher elevation for himself, and gives to his Journals and Letters a pure human interest which places them above the Confessions of St. Augustine.

The first allusion to the possibility of marriage we find in his Journal of January 23, 1803, and again in June 12 of the same year:

I was grieved to find that all the exertions of prayer were necessary against worldly-mindedness, so soon had the prospect of the means of competent support in India filled my heart with concern about earthly happiness, marriage, &c.; but I strove earnestly against them, and prayed for grace that, if it should please God to try my faith by calling me to a post of opulence, I might not dare to use for myself what is truly His; as also, that I might be enabled to keep myself single, for serving Him more effectually. Nevertheless, this change in my circumstances so troubled me, that I could have been infinitely better pleased to have gone out as a missionary, poor as the Lord and His Apostles.

His friend Sargent’s ‘approaching marriage with a lady of uncommon excellence rather excited in me a desire after a similar state; but I strove against it,’ he wrote on July 10. Next day, on the top of the coach from London to Bath, in the cold of a high wind, he was ‘most dreadfully assailed by evil thoughts, but at the very height prayer prevailed, and I was delivered, and during the rest of the journey enjoyed great peace and a strong desire to live for Christ alone, forsaking the pleasures of the world, marriage, &c.’ At Plymouth he spent two days ‘with my dear cousin T.H.,’ Lydia’s sister. After Truro, Kenwyn, and Lamorran, near Truro, of which his sister Sarah’s husband was vicar, he rode to St. Hilary.

1804, July 29. (Sunday.)—Read and prayed in the morning before service with seriousness, striving against those thoughts which oppressed me all the rest of the day. At St. Hilary Church in the morning my thoughts wandered from the service, and I suffered the keenest disappointment. Miss L.G. did not come. Yet, in great pain, I blessed God for having kept her away, as she might have been a snare to me. These things would be almost incredible to another, and almost to myself, were I not taught by daily experience that, whatever the world may say, or I may think of myself, I am a poor, wretched, sinful, contemptible worm.

Called after tea on Miss L.G., and walked with her and ——, conversing on spiritual subjects. All the rest of the evening, and at night, I could not keep her out of my mind. I felt too plainly that I loved her passionately. The direct opposition of this to my devotedness to God in the missionary way, excited no small tumult in my mind. In conversation, having no divine sweetness in peace, my cheerfulness was affected, and, consequently, very hurtful to my conscience. At night I continued an hour and a half in prayer, striving against this attachment. I endeavoured to analyse it, that I might see how base, and mean, and worthless such a love to a speck of earth was, compared with divine love. Then I read the most solemn parts of Scripture, to realise to myself death and eternity; and these attempts were sometimes blest. One while I was about to triumph, but in a moment my heart had wandered to the beloved idol. I went to bed in great pain, yet still rather superior to the evening; but in dreams her image returned, and I awoke in the night with my mind full of her. No one can say how deeply this unhappy affection has fixed itself; since it has nothing selfish in it, that I can perceive, but is founded on the highest admiration of her piety and manners.

July 30.—Rose in great peace. God, by secret influence, seemed to have caused the tempest of self-will to subside. Rode away from St. Hilary to Gwennap in peace of mind, and meditated most of the way on Romans viii. I again devoted myself to the Lord, and with more of my will than last night. I was much disposed to think of subjects entirely placed beyond the world, and had strong desires, though with heavy opposition from my corrupt nature, after that entire deadness to the world which David Brainerd manifested. At night I found myself to have backslidden a long way from the life of godliness, to have declined very much since my coming into Cornwall, but especially since I went to St. Hilary. Sat up late, and read the last chapter and other parts of Revelation, and was deeply affected. Prayed with more success than lately.

July 31.—Read and prayed this morning with increasing victory over my self-will. Romans vii. was particularly suitable; it was agreeable to me to speak to God of my own corruption and helplessness. Walked in the afternoon to Redruth, after having prayed over the Epistle to the Ephesians with much seriousness. On the road I was enabled to triumph at last, and found my heart as pleased with the prospect of a single life in missionary labours as ever. ‘What is the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who believe!’

After preaching to crowds in his brother-in-law’s church at Kenwyn and Lamorran, on the two subsequent Sundays, he walked to St. Hilary:

1804, August 26.—Rose early, and walked out, invited by the beauty of the morning. Many different pleasing thoughts crowded on my mind, as I viewed the sea and rocks, Mount and bay, and thought of the person who lived near it; but, for want of checking my natural spirits, and fixing on one subject of thought, I was not much benefited by my meditations. Walked in the evening with Mrs. G. and Lydia up the hill, with the most beautiful prospect of the sea, &c.; but I was unhappy, from feeling the attachment to Lydia, for I was unwilling to leave her.

August 27.—Walked to Marazion, with my heart more delivered from its idolatry, and enabled to look steadily and peacefully to God. Reading in the afternoon to Lydia alone, from Dr. Watts, there happened to be, among other things, a prayer on entire preference of God to the creature. Now, thought I, here am I in the presence of God, and my idol. So I used the prayer for myself, and addressed it to God, who answered it, I think, for my love was kindled to God and divine things, and I felt cheerfully resigned to the will of God, to forego the earthly joy which I had just been desiring with my whole heart. I continued conversing with her, generally with my heart in heaven, but every now and then resting on her. Parted with Lydia, perhaps for ever in this life, with a sort of uncertain pain, which I knew would increase to greater violence afterwards, on reflection. Walked to St. Hilary, determining, in great tumult and inward pain, to be the servant of God. All the rest of the evening, in company or alone, I could think of nothing but her excellences. My efforts were, however, through mercy, not in vain, to feel the vanity of this attachment to the creature. Read in Thomas à Kempis many chapters directly to the purpose; the shortness of time, the awfulness of death and its consequences, rather settled my mind to prayer. I devoted myself unreservedly to the service of the Lord, to Him, as to one who knew the great conflict within, and my firm resolve, through His grace, of being His, though it should be with much tribulation.

August 28.—Rose with a heavy heart, and took leave of St. Hilary, where all the happier hours of my early life were passed. —— and —— accompanied me in the chaise a few miles; but the moment they left me I walked on, dwelling at large on the excellence of Lydia. I had a few faint struggles to forget her, and delight in God, but they were ineffectual. Among the many motives to the subjection of self-will, I found the thought of the entire unworthiness of a soul escaped from hell to choose its own will before God’s, most bring my soul to a right frame. So that, while I saw the necessity of resigning, for the service of God, all those joys, for the loss of which I could not perceive how anything in heaven or earth could be a compensation, I said, Amen!

August 29.—I walked to Truro, with my mind almost all the way taken up with Lydia. But once reasoning in this way—If God made me, and wills my happiness, as I do not doubt, then He is providing for my good by separating me from her; this reasoning convinced my mind. I felt very solemnly and sweetly the excellence of serving God faithfully, of following Christ and His Apostles, and meditated with great joy on the approach of the end of this world. Yet still I enjoyed, every now and then, the thought of walking hereafter with her, in the realms of glory, conversing on the things of God. My mind the rest of the evening was much depressed. I had no desire to live in this world; scarcely could I say where I would be, or what I would do, now that my self-will was so strongly counteracted. Thus God waits patiently my return from my backsliding, which I would do immediately. If He were to offer me the utmost of my wishes, I would say, ‘Not so, Lord! Not my will, but Thine be done.’

August 30.—Passed the morning rather idly, in reading lives of pious women. I felt an indescribable mixture of opposing emotions. At one time, about to ascend with delight to God, who had permitted me to aspire after the same glory, but oftener called down to earth by my earthly good. Major Sandys calling, continued till dinner conversing about India. I consented to stay a day with him at Helston, but the thought of being so near Marazion renewed my pain, especially taken in connection with my going thither on the subject of my departure. After dinner, walked in the garden for two hours, reasoning with my perverse heart, and, through God’s mercy, not without success. You preach up deadness to the world, and yet not an example of it! Now is the time, my soul, if you cannot feel that it is best to bear the cross, to trust God for it. This will be true faith. If I were put in possession of my idol, I should immediately say and feel that God alone was, notwithstanding, the only good, and to Him I should seek immediately. Again I weighed the probable temporal consequence of having my own will gratified; the dreadful pain of separation by death, after being united, together with the distress I might bring upon her whom I loved. All these things were of small influence till I read the Epistle to the Hebrews, by which my mind, made to consider divine things attentively, was much more freed from earthly things. ‘Let us come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need,’ was very precious and comforting to me. I have found grace to help in this time of need; I still want a humble spirit to wait upon the Lord. I almost called God to witness that I duly resigned my pleasure to His, as if I wished it to be remembered. In the evening had a serious and solemn time in prayer, chiefly for the influences of the Spirit, and rose with my thoughts fixed on eternity; I longed for death, and called on the glorious day to hasten; but it was in order to be free from the troubles of this world.

August 31.—Passed the morning partly in reading and writing, but chiefly in business. Rode to Rosemundy, with my mind at first very unhappy, at the necessity of mortifying my self-will, in the same particulars as for some days. In conversing on the subject of India with Major Sandys, I could not help communicating the pain I felt at parting with the person to whom I was attached; but by thus dwelling on the subject my heart was far more distressed than ever. Found my mind more easy and submissive to God at night in prayer.

St. Hilary Church, in which Henry Martyn preached, is one of the oldest in England, containing, in the tower of Edward III.’s reign, two stones with inscriptions of the time of the Emperor Flavius Constantinus, who was killed by Honorius in 411. What Lydia Grenfell thought of Martyn’s sermon on that day, August 26, thenceforth memorable to both, we find in her Diary of that date:

1804, August 26.—Heard H.M. on ‘Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God. For He hath made Him to be sin (i.e. sin-offering) for us, Who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.’ Exordium on the honourable employment of a minister of the Gospel. In the text two things were implied. First, we were at enmity with God. Second, we were unable to restore ourselves to His favour. There were two things expressed in the text—the means of reconciliation, and God’s invitation to be reconciled; a threefold address to saints, backsliders, and sinners; and a farewell address. A precious sermon. Lord, bless the preacher, and those that heard him!

At that time, in 1804, the lady was still preoccupied, in conscience or heart, or both, by her imaginary ties to Mr. S. John. But six months before that she had heard of his approaching marriage, though, in fact, that did not take place till 1810. All that time, if she did not feel, to one to whom her heart had been more closely united than to any ‘earthly object,’ as she had written in her Diary, what Mr. H.M. Jeffery describes as the attachment of a widow with the responsibility of a wife, her scrupulous introspective habit was an obstacle to a healthy attachment. The preacher, younger than herself, was in 1804 evidently to her only an interesting and gracious second cousin, or perhaps a little more.

On his way back to London Henry Martyn again visited Plymouth, where he learned from his cousin ‘that my attachment to her sister was not altogether unreturned, and the discovery gave me both pleasure and pain.’ He left them, his thoughts ‘almost wholly occupied with Lydia.’ London, Cambridge, his reading and his walking, his work and even his sleep, bring him no rest from the absorbing passion. His Journal is full of it, almost every day. Fortescue’s poems recall the happy mornings at St. Hilary, but his pensive meditation subsided into a more profitable one on the vanity of the world: ‘they marry and are given in marriage,’ and at the end of a few years what are they more than myself?—looking forward to the same dissolution, and expecting their real happiness in another life. ‘The fashion of this world passeth away,’ Amen. ‘Let me do the will of God while I am in it.’

The first day of the year 1805 led him to review the past five years, and to renew his self-dedication to God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to be His servant for ever. The time for his departure to India was at hand, and his last act, on leaving London for Cambridge, to complete his arrangements for sailing, was deliberately to engage himself to Lydia Grenfell in the following letter to her sister.[11] It is thus referred to in his Journal:

I was in some doubt whether I should send the letter to Emma, as it was taking a very important step, and I could scarcely foresee all the consequences. However, I did send it, and may now be said to have engaged myself to Lydia.

18 Brunswick Square (London), January 11, 1805.

My dear Mrs. Hitchins,—How unaccountable must my long silence appear to you after the conversation that passed between us in the carriage! You may well wonder that I could forbear, for three whole months, to inquire about the ‘beloved Persis.’ Indeed, I am surprised at my own patience, but, in truth, I found it impossible to discover what it is which I wish or ought to say on the subject, and therefore determined to defer writing till I could inform you with certainty of my future destination. But I have it not yet in my power to do this, for no actual appointment has been made for me yet. I came to town the beginning of this week to inquire into the present state of the business, and learned from Mr. Grant that the situation he intended to procure, and to which he had no doubt of getting me nominated, was not in the Army, but at Fort William, near Calcutta. Thus it pleases God to suspend the declaration of His mind, and I can believe that He acts wisely. These apparent delays serve to check my youthful impetuosity, and teach me to look up to God, and wait for Him. If the chaplaincy at Fort William should be given me, it would seem to be His design not to call me to the peculiar work of a missionary, but to fix my station among the English. At present my own inclination remains almost unbiassed, as to the particular employment or place God shall assign me, whether to pass my days among the natives, or the more polished inhabitants of Calcutta, or even to remain at home.

But you will easily conceive that the increasing probability of my being settled in a town rather tends to revive the thoughts of marriage, for I feel very little doubt in my own mind, that in such a situation it would be expedient for me on the whole to marry, if other circumstances permitted it. It is also as clear that I ought not to make an engagement with any one in England, till I have ascertained by actual observation in India, what state of life and mode of proceeding would be most conducive to the ends of my mission. But why do I mention these difficulties? If they were removed, others would remain still more insurmountable. The affections of the beloved object in question must still be engaged in my favour, or even then she would not agree to leave the kingdom, nor would any of you agree to it, nor would such a change of climate, it may be thought, suit the delicacy of her constitution.

Must I, then, yield to the force of these arguments, and resolve to think of her no more? It shall certainly be my endeavour, by the help of my God, to do it, if need be; but I confess I am very unwilling to go away and hear of her only accidentally through the medium of others. It is this painful reflection that has prompted a wish, which I do not mention without some hesitation, and that is my wish of corresponding with her. It is possible you may instantly perceive some impropriety in it which escapes my notice, and indeed there are some objections which I foresee might be made, but instead of anticipating them, I will leave you to form your own opinion. In religion we have a subject to write upon of equal interest to us both, and though I cannot expect she would derive any advantage from my letters, it is certain I should receive no small benefit from hers. But I leave it with yourself; if you disapprove of the measure, let the request be forgotten. It will be best for her never to know I had made it, or if she does, she will, I hope, pardon a liberty to which I have been drawn only by the love of her excellence.

N.B.—I remember Leighton; take care not to forget it nor the desired MS.

On June 1 he wrote in his Journal:

My departure from my friends, and my deprivation of the sweetest delight in society, for ever in this life, have rather dejected me to-day. Ah! Nature, thou hast still tears to shed for thyself!... I seem to be hankering after something or other in this world, though I am sure I could not say there is anything which I believed could give me happiness. No! it is in God above. Yet to-night I have been thinking much of Lydia. Memory has been at work to unnerve my soul, but reason, and honour, and love to Christ and to souls, shall prevail. Amen. God help me!

Two days after, at the Eclectic Society, after a discussion on the symptoms of ‘the state of the nation,’ the subject of marriage, somehow or other, came to be mentioned.

Mr. Cecil spoke very freely and strongly on the subject. He said I should be acting like a madman if I went out unmarried. A wife would supply by her comfort and counsel the entire want of society, and also be a preservative both to character and passions amidst such scenes. I felt as cold as an anchorite on the subject as to my own feelings, but I was much perplexed all the rest of the evening about it. I clearly perceived that my own inclination upon the whole was not to marriage. The fear of being involved in worldly cares and numberless troubles, which I do not now foresee, makes me tremble and dislike the thoughts of such connection. When I think of Brainerd, how he lived among the Indians, travelling freely from place to place, can I conceive he would have been so useful had he been married? I remember also that Owens, who had been so many years in the West Indies as a missionary, gave his advice against marriage. Schwartz was never married, nor St. Paul. On the other hand, when I suppose another in my circumstances, fixed at a settlement without company, without society, in a scene and climate of such temptation, I say without hesitation, he ought to be married. I have recollected this evening very much my feelings when I walked through Wales; how I longed there to have some friend to speak to; and the three weeks seemed an age without one. And I have often thought how valuable would be the counsel and comfort of a Christian brother in India. These advantages would be obtained by marrying. I feel anxious also that as many Christians as possible should go to India, and anyone willing to go would be a valuable addition. But yet voluntary celibacy seems so much more noble and glorious, and so much more beneficial in the way of example, that I am loth to relinquish the idea of it. In short, I am utterly at a loss to know what is best for the interests of the Gospel. But, happily, my own peace is not much concerned in it. If this opinion of so many pious clergymen had come across me when I was in Cornwall, and so strongly attached to my beloved Lydia, it would have been a conflict indeed in my heart to oppose so many arguments. But now I feel, through grace, an astonishing difference. I hope I am not seeking an excuse for marriage, nor persuading myself I am indifferent about it, in order that what is really my inclination may appear to be the will of God. But I feel my affections kindling to their wonted fondness while I dwell on the circumstances of a union with Lydia. May the Lord teach His weak creature to live peacefully and soberly in His love, drawing all my joys from Him, the fountain of living waters.

June 4.—The subject of marriage made me thoughtful and serious. Mr. Atkinson, whose opinion I revere, was against my marrying. Found near access to my God in prayer. Oh, what a comfort it is to have God to go to. I breathed freely to Him my sorrows and cares, and set about my work with diligence. The Lord assisted me very much, and I wrote more freely than ever I did. Slept very little in the night.

June 5.—Corrie breakfasted with me, and went to prayer; I rejoiced to find he was not unwilling to go to India. He will probably be my fellow-labourer. Most of this morning was employed in writing all my sentiments on the subject of marriage to Mr. Simeon. May the Lord suggest something to him which may be of use to guide me, and keep my eye single. In my walk out, and afterwards, the subject was constantly on my mind. But, alas! I did not guard against that distraction from heavenly things which I was aware it would occasion. On reflection at home, I found I had been talking in a very inconsistent manner, but was again restored to peace by an application to Christ’s blood through the Spirit. My mind has all this day been very strongly inclined to marriage, and has been consequently uncomfortable, for in proportion to its want of simplicity it is unhappy. But Mr. Cecil said to-day, he thought Lydia’s decision would fully declare the will of God. With this I am again comforted, for now hath the Lord taken the matter into His own hands. Whatever He decides upon, I shall rejoice; and though I confess I think she will not consent to go, I shall then have the question finally settled.

Discussion in the evening was about my marriage again; they were all strenuous advocates for it. Wrote at night with great freedom, but my body is very weak from the fatigue I have already undergone. My mind seems very active this week; manifestly, indeed, strengthened by God to be enabled to write on religious subjects with such unusual ease, while it is also full of this important business of the marriage. My inclination continues, I think, far more unbiassed than when I wrote to Mr. Simeon.

June 7.—Oh, the subtlety of the devil, and the deceitfulness of this corrupted heart! How has an idol been imperceptibly raised up in it. Something fell from Dr. F. this evening against my marriage which struck me so forcibly, though there was nothing particular in it, that I began to see I should finally give up all thoughts about it. But how great the conflict! I could not have believed it had such hold on my affections. Before this I had been writing in tolerable tranquillity, and walked out in the enjoyment of a resigned mind, even rejoicing for the most part in God, and dined at Mr. Cecil’s, where the arguments I heard were all in favour of the flesh, and so I was pleased; but Dr. F.’s words gave a new turn to my thoughts, and the tumult showed me the true state of my heart. How miserable did life appear without the hope of Lydia! Oh, how has the discussion of the subject opened all my wounds afresh! I have not felt such heartrending pain since I parted with her in Cornwall. But the Lord brought me to consider the folly and wickedness of all this. Shall I hesitate to keep my days in constant solitude, who am but a brand plucked from the burning? I could not help saying, ‘Go, Hindus, go on in your misery; let Satan still rule over you; for he that was appointed to labour among you is consulting his ease.’ No, thought I; hell and earth shall never keep me back from my work. I am cast down, but not destroyed; I began to consider, why am I so uneasy? ‘Cast thy care upon Him, for He careth for you.’ ‘In everything, by prayer,’ &c. These promises were graciously fulfilled before long to me.

June 8.—My mind continued in much the same state this morning, waiting with no small anxiety for a letter from Mr. Simeon, hoping, of course, that the will of God would coincide with my will, yet thinking the determination of the question would be indifferent to me. When the letter arrived I was immediately convinced, beyond all doubt, of the expediency of celibacy. But my wish did not follow my judgment quite so readily. Mr. Pratt coming in, argued strongly on the other side, but there was nothing of any weight. The subject so occupied my thoughts that I could attend to nothing else. I saw myself called to be less than ever a man of this world, and walked out with a heavy heart. Met Dr. F., who alone of all men could best sympathise, and his few words were encouraging. Yet I cannot cordially acquiesce in all the Lord’s dealings, though my reason and judgment approve them, and my inclination would desire to do it. Dined at Mr. Cecil’s, where it providentially happened that Mr. Foster came in. To them I read Mr. Simeon’s letter, and they were both convinced by it. So I went away home, with nothing to do but to get my heart easy again under this sacrifice. I devoted myself once more to the entire and everlasting service of God, and found myself more weaned from this world, and desiring the next, though not from a right principle. Continued all the evening writing sermon, and reading Pilgrim’s Progress, with successions of vivid emotions of pain and pleasure. My heart was sometimes ready to break with agony at being torn from its dearest idol, and at other times I was visited by a few moments of sublime and enraptured joy. Such is the conflict; why have my friends mentioned this subject? It has torn open old wounds, and I am again bleeding. With all my honours and knowledge, the smiles and approbation of men, the health and prosperity that have fallen to my lot, together with that freedom from doubts and fears with which I was formerly visited, how much have I gone through in the last two or three years to bring my mind to be willing to do the will of God when it should be revealed! My heart is pained within me, and my bodily frame suffers from it.

June 9. (Sunday.)—My heart is still pained. It is still as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke; the Lord help me to maintain the conflict. Preached this morning at Long Acre Chapel on Matt. xxviii., the three last verses. There was the utmost attention. In the interval between morning and afternoon, passed most of the time in reading and prayer. Read Matthew iii., and considered the character of John the Baptist. Holy emulation seemed to spring up in my mind. Then read John xvii. and last chapter, and Rev. i., all of which were blessed to my soul. I went into the church persuaded in my feelings—which is different from being persuaded in the understanding—that it was nobler and wiser to be as John the Baptist, Peter, John, and all the Apostles, than to have my own will gratified. Preached on Eph. ii. 18. Walked a little with Mr. Grant this evening. He told me I should have great trials and temptations in India; but I know where to apply for grace to help.

Cecil’s final opinion, that Lydia Grenfell’s decision would fully declare the will of God, was not borne out by the result, as we shall see. Meanwhile, let us trace the steps which led to the final appointment to India, and the farewell.

On his first visit to London at the beginning of the year 1804, by the Telegraph coach, the Cambridge recluse was distracted by the bustle of the great city, as he walked about the streets and called at the booksellers’. Dr. Wollaston, the British Museum, and the Gresham Lecture on Music, of which he was passionately fond, occupied his first two days. At the old India House, since swept away from Leadenhall Street, he met Mr. Charles Grant, who, as he took him to Clapham, the evangelical centre which Sir James Stephen has made so famous,[12] gave him much information on the state of India, such as this:

It would be absolutely necessary to keep three servants, for three can do no more than the work of one English; that no European constitution can endure being exposed to mid-day heat; that Mr. Schwartz, who was settled at Tanjore, did do it for a time, walking among the natives. Mr. Grant had never seen Mr. Schwartz, but corresponded with him. He was the son of a Saxon gentleman (the Saxon gentlemen never enter the ministry of the Church), and had early devoted himself to the work of a missionary amongst the Indians. Besides the knowledge of the Malabar tongue, in which he was profoundly skilled and eloquent, he was a good classic, and learnt the English, Portuguese, and Dutch. He was a man of dignified and polished manners, and cheerful.

This was the first opportunity that ‘the Clapham sect’ had to satisfy themselves that the Senior Wrangler was worthy of the commendation of Charles Simeon. Accordingly they dined with William Wilberforce at Broomfield.

We conversed about my business. They wished me to fill the church in Calcutta very much; but advised me to wait some time, and to cherish the same views. To Mr. Wilberforce I went into a detail of my views, and the reasons that had operated on my mind. The conversation of Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Grant during the whole of the day, before the rest of the company, which consisted of Mr. Johnston, of New South Wales, a French Abbé, Mrs. Unwin, Mr. H., and other ladies, was edifying; agreeable to what I should think right for two godly senators, planning some means of bringing before Parliament propositions for bettering the moral state of the colony of Botany Bay. At evening worship Mr. W. expounded Sacred Scripture with serious plainness, and prayed in the midst of his large household.

In The Life of William Wilberforce, by his sons, we find this passage introduced by the remark, ‘It is delightful to contrast with his own language the observation of one who, with as holy and as humble a soul, was just entering on his brief but glorious course:’ Martyn ‘drank tea at Mr. Newton’s; the old man was very civil to me, and striking in his remarks in general.’ Next day:

Read Isaiah. At one, we went to hear the charge delivered to the missionaries at the New London Tavern, in Cheapside. There was nothing remarkable in it, but the conclusion was affecting. I shook hands with the two missionaries, Melchior Rayner and Peter Hartwig, and almost wished to go with them, but certainly to go to India. Returned, and read Isaiah.

From the ever recurring distractions of his soul, caused now by ‘a despicable indulgence in lying in bed,’ and again by the interruptions of visitors, he sought refuge frequently in fasting and ascetic self-denial, and occasionally in writing verse:

Composed some poetry during my walk, which often has a tendency to divert my thoughts from the base distractions of this life, and to purify and elevate it to higher subjects.... On my way to Mr. Simeon’s, heard part of the service in King’s Chapel. The sanctity of the place, and the music, brought heaven and eternal things, and the presence of God, very near to me.

He seems to have competed for the Seatonian Prize. He was an ardent lover of Nature.

Walked out before breakfast, and the beauties of the opening spring constrained me to adoration and praise. But no earthly object or operation can produce true spirituality of heart. My present failing is in this, that I do not feel the power of motives.

Of another walk he writes:

I was led to think a good while on my deficiency in human learning, and on my having neglected those branches which would have been pleasing and honourable in the acquisition. Yet I said, though with somewhat of melancholy, ‘What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.’ Though I become less esteemed by man, I cannot but think (though it is not easy to do so) that it must be more acceptable to God to labour for souls, though the mind remains uninformed; and, consequently, that it must be more truly great and noble, than to be great and notable among men for learning. In the garden afterwards I rejoiced exceedingly at the prospect of a death fast approaching, when my powers of understanding would be enlarged inconceivably. They all talked to me in praise of my sermon on Sunday night; but praise is exceedingly unpleasant to me, because I am slow to render back to God that glory which belongs to Him alone. Sometimes it may be useful in encouraging me, when I want encouragement; but that at present is not the case; and in truth, praise generally produces pride, and pride presently sets me far from God.

Oh, what a snare are public ministrations to me! Not that I wish for the praise of men, but there is some fear and anxiety about not getting through. How happy could I be in meeting the people of my God more frequently were it not for this fear of being unprofitable! But since God has given me natural gifts, let this teach me that all I want is a spiritual frame to improve and employ them in the things of God!

Mr. K. White, of Nottingham, breakfasted with me. In my walk was greatly cast down, except for a short time on my return, when, as I was singing, or rather chanting, some petitions in a low, plaintive voice, I insensibly found myself sweetly engaged in prayer.

Such outpourings of his heart must be read in the light of a time when even the Churches had not awoke to their duty, and the most theologically orthodox were too often the most indifferent, or opposed, to the Lord’s command.

1804, January 13.—Walked out in the evening in great tranquillity, and on my return met with Mr. C., with whom I was obliged to walk an hour longer. He thought it a most improper step for me to leave the University to preach to the ignorant heathen, which any person could do, and that I ought rather to improve the opportunity of acquiring human learning. All our conversation on the subject of learning, religion, &c., ended in nothing; he was convinced he was right, and all the texts of Scripture I produced were applicable, according to him, only to the times of the Apostles. How is my soul constrained to adore the sovereign mercy of God, who began His work in my proud heart, and carried it on through snares which have ruined thousands—namely, human learning and honours: and now my soul, dost thou not esteem all things but dung and dross, compared with the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord? Yea, did not gratitude constrain me, did not duty and fear of destruction, yet surely the excellency of the service of Christ would constrain me to lay down ten-thousand lives in the prosecution of it. My heart was a little discomposed this evening at the account of the late magnificent prizes proposed by Mr. Buchanan and others in the University, for which Mr. C. has been calling me to write; but I was soon at rest again. But how easily do I forget that God is no respecter of persons; that in the midst of the notice I attract as an enthusiast He judges of me according to my inward state. Oh, my soul, take no pleasure in outward religion, nor in exciting wonder, but in the true circumcision of the heart.

January 16.— —— told me of many contemptuous insulting things that had been said of me, reflecting, some on my understanding, some on my condition, sincerity, inconsistent conduct. It was a great trial of my patience, and I was frequently tempted, in the course of the evening, to let my natural spirit rage forth in indignation and revenge; but I remembered Him of whom it was said, ‘Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously.’ As I was conscious I did not deserve the censures which were passed upon me, I committed myself to God; and in Him may I abide until the indignation be overpast!

In July 1804 he again visited London on his way to Cornwall, and to see Mr. Charles Grant.

Dined with Mr. Wilberforce at Palace Yard. It was very agreeable, as there was no one else. Speaking of the slave trade, I mentioned the words, ‘Shall I not visit for these things?’ and found my heart so affected that I could with difficulty refrain from tears. Went with Mr. W. to the House of Commons, where I was surprised and charmed with Mr. Pitt’s eloquence. Ah, thought I, if these powers of oratory were now employed in recommending the Gospel!

On his way back to Cambridge, through London, he

Went to St. Paul’s, to see Sir W. Jones’s monument; the sight of the interior of the dome filled my soul with inexpressible ideas of the grandeur of God, and the glory of heaven, much the same as I had at the sight of a painted vaulted roof in the British Museum. I could scarcely believe that I might be in the immediate enjoyments of such glory in another hour. In the evening the sound of sacred music, with the sight of a rural landscape, imparted some indescribable emotions after the glory of God, by diligence in His work. To preach the Gospel for the salvation of my poor fellow-creatures, that they might obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory, seemed a very sweet and precious employment. Lydia then, again, seemed a small hindrance.

His duties as examiner, tutor, and in charge of Lolworth, and home mission work in Wall’s Lane, the hospital and almshouse, left him little leisure, and that he gave to the Bengali grammars of Halhed and Carey, to Carey’s Bengali New Testament, to Arabic grammars, and to the missionary accounts in the Christian Observer, for which, also, he wrote. Referring, evidently, to Carey’s convert, he wrote:

The account of a Brahmin preaching the Gospel delighted me most exceedingly. I could not help blessing God for thus glorifying Himself.... I was much pained and humbled at reflecting that it has never yet, to my knowledge, pleased God to awaken one soul by my means, either in public or private,—shame be to myself.

Simeon gave me a letter from Mr. Brown of Calcutta, which gave me great delight on many accounts. Speaking of me, he says, ‘Let him marry, and come out at once.’ I thought of Lydia with great tenderness, but without pain at my determination to go out single. I found great affection in prayer for my dear brethren at Calcutta, for the establishing of Christ’s Kingdom among the poor Gentiles, and for my being sent among them, if it were His will.

Thinking my mind was in need of recreation, I took up Lord Teignmouth’s Life of Sir William Jones, and read till tea.

Low spirits at church, through being about to preach old sermons, which I feel so ashamed of offering to God, that I believe I shall rather leave everything undone, than not write one new one at least every week.

Mr. Thomason preached on Heb. xii. to my edification.

Dr. Milner and Lord C. called. I was introduced as having been Senior Wrangler; but how contemptible did these paltry honours appear to me! Ah, thought I, you know not how little I am flattered by these intended compliments.

In the hall was much affected by the sight of Lord B., whose look of meekness and humility riveted my attention, and almost melted me to tears. If there is one disposition in the world I wish for more than another, it is this; but the bias of my corrupted nature hurries me violently against it.

Mr. Grant’s summons to him ‘to sail for St. Helena in eight or ten days,’ reached him a month before his twenty-fourth birthday, before which he could not legally receive full ordination, in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s.

Felt more persuaded of my call than ever; indeed, there was scarcely a shadow of a doubt left. Rejoice, O my soul, thou shalt be the servant of thy God in this life, and then in the next for all the boundless ages of eternity.

Not till August 31 was it possible for the fleet which convoyed the East Indiamen, in that year of war with France and Napoleon’s Continental allies, to see the last of Ireland. The seven months were spent by Henry Martyn in elaborate preparations for what proved to be nearly a year’s voyage, and in repeated farewells the anguish of which is reflected in his Journal and correspondence. Having previously taken his M.A. degree, he received that of Bachelor of Divinity by mandate, which required the assent of all the heads of colleges, and then a grace to pass the senate, and the presenting of a petition to the King. Dr. Gilchrist, the Orientalist who had just returned from his long career in Calcutta, where he had been a colleague of Carey in the College of Fort William, gave him lessons in Hindustani pronunciation.

On my mentioning my desire of translating some of the Scriptures with him, he advised me by all means to desist till I knew much more of the language, by having resided some years in the country. He said it was the rock on which missions had split, that they had attempted to write and preach before they knew the language. The Lord’s Prayer, he said, was now a common subject of ridicule with the people, on account of the manner in which it had been translated. All these are useful hints to me.

The mode of appointing to Indian chaplaincies has varied so much since the time of Charles Grant and Simeon, that it is interesting to see what was done in Henry Martyn’s case.

1805, April 1.—Went to Lord Hawkesbury’s office, but, being too early, I went into St. James’s Park, and sat down on a bench to read my Bible. After a little time a person came and sat down on the same bench; on entering into conversation with him I found he had known better days. He was about seventy years of age, and of a very passionate and disappointed spirit. He spoke sensibly on several subjects, and was acquainted with the Gospel; but was offended at my reminding him of several things concerning it. On my offering him some money, which I saw he needed, he confessed his poverty; he was thankful for my little donation, and I repeated my advice of seeking divine consolation.

April 2.—Breakfasted with ——. Our conversation was on the most delightful subject to me, the spread of the Gospel in future ages. I went away animated and happy. Went with Mr. Grant towards the India House. He said that he was that day about to take the necessary steps for bringing forward the business of the chaplains, and that by to-morrow night I should know whether I could go or not. In prayer at night my soul panted after God, and longed to be entirely conformed to His image.

April 3.—After dinner, passed some time in prayer, and rejoiced to think that God would finally glorify Himself, whatever hindrance may arise for a time. Going to Mr. Grant’s, I found that the chaplaincies had been agreed to, after two hours’ debate, and some obloquy thrown upon Mr. Grant by the chairman, for his connection with Mr. Wilberforce and those people. Mr. G. said that though my nomination had not taken place, the case was now beyond danger, and that I should appear before the court in a couple of days in my canonicals. I felt very indignant at this, not so much, I think, from personal pride, as on account of the degradation of my office. Mr. G. pleasantly said, I must attend to my appearance, as I should be much remarked, on account of the person who had nominated me. I feel this will be a trial to me, which I would never submit to for gain; but I rejoice that it will be for my dear and blessed Lord.

April 4.—Went down to Cambridge.

April 6.—Passed most of the morning in the Fellows’ garden. It was the last time I visited this favourite retreat, where I have often enjoyed the presence of God.

April 7. (Sunday.)—Preached at Lolworth on Prov. xxii. 17; very few seemed affected at my leaving them, and those chiefly women. An old farmer of a neighbouring parish, as he was taking leave of me, turned aside to shed tears; this affected me more than anything. Rode away with my heart heavy, partly at my own corruption, partly at the thoughts of leaving this place in such general hardness of heart. Yet so it hath pleased God, I hope, to reserve them for a more faithful minister. Prayed over the whole of my sermon for the evening, and when I came to preach it, God assisted me beyond my hopes. Most of the younger people seemed to be in tears. The text was 2 Sam. vii. 28, 29. Took leave of Dr. Milner; he was much affected, and said himself his heart was full. Mr. Simeon commended me to God in prayer, in which he pleaded, amongst other things, for a richer blessing on my soul. He perceives that I want it, and so do I. Professor Parish walked home with me to the college gate, and there I parted from him, with no small sorrow.

April 8.—My young friends in the University, who have scarcely left me a moment to myself, were with me this morning as soon as I was moving, leaving me no time for prayer. My mind was very solemn, and I wished much to be left alone. A great many accompanied me to the coach, which took me up at the end of the town. It was a thick, misty morning, so the University, with its towers and spires, was out of sight in an instant.

April 24.—Keenly disappointed at finding no letter from Lydia; thus it pleased God, in the riches of His grace, to quash at once all my beginnings of entanglement. Oh, may it be to make me more entirely His own. ‘The Lord shall be the portion of mine inheritance, and of my cup.’ Oh, may I live indeed a more spiritual life of faith! Prayed that I might obtain a more deep acquaintance with the mysteries of the Gospel, and the offices of Christ; my soul was solemnised. Went to Russell Square, and found from Mr. Grant that I was that day appointed a chaplain to the East India Company, but that my particular destination would depend on the government in India. Rather may I say that it depends on the will of my God, who in His own time thus brings things to pass. Oh, now let my heart be spiritualised; that the glorious and arduous work before me may fill all my soul, and stir me up to prayer.

April 25.—Breakfasted with the venerable Mr. Newton, who made several striking remarks in reference to my work. He said he had heard of a clever gardener, who would sow the seeds when the meat was put down to roast, and engage to produce a salad by the time it was ready; but the Lord did not sow oaks in this way. On my saying that perhaps I should never live to see much fruit, he answered, I should have a bird’s eye view of it, which would be better. When I spoke of the opposition that I should be likely to meet with, he said, he supposed Satan would not love me for what I was about to do. The old man prayed afterwards, with sweet simplicity. Drank tea at C. Our hearts seemed full of the joy which comes from the communion of saints.

April 26.—Met D. at Mr. Grant’s, and was much affected at some marks of love expressed by the people at Cambridge, at the time of my leaving them. He said that as I was going down the aisle they all rose up to take their last view.

May 4.—Waiting this morning on the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace. He had learnt from somebody my circumstances, the degree I had taken, and my object in going to India. He spoke much on the importance of the work, the small ecclesiastical establishment for so great a body of people, and the state of those English there, who, he said, ‘called themselves Christians.’ He was throughout very civil, and wished me all the success I desired. I then proceeded to the India House, and received directions to attend on Wednesday to be sworn in. Afterwards walked to Mr. Wilberforce’s at Broomfield.

May 8.—Reading Mr. Grant’s book.[13] The state of the natives, and the prospects of doing good there, the character of Schwartz, &c., set forth in it, much impressed my mind, and I found great satisfaction in pleading for the fulfilment of God’s promises to the heathen. It seemed painful to think of myself at all, except in reference to the Church of Christ. Being somewhat in danger of distraction this evening, from many concurrent circumstances, I found a very short prayer answered by my being kept steady. Heard from Mr. Parry this evening, that in consequence of an embargo laid on all the ships by government, who had taken the best seamen from the Company’s ships, on account of the sailing of the French and Spanish fleets, I should not be able to go before the middle of June, if so soon.

May 15.—Read prayers at Mr. Newton’s, and preached on Eph. ii. 19-21. The clerk threw out very disrespectful and even uncivil things respecting my going to India; though I thought the asperity and contemptuousness he manifested unsuitable to his profession, I felt happy in the comfortable assurance of being upright in my intentions. The sermon was much praised by some people coming in, but happily this gives me little satisfaction. Went home and read a sermon of Flavel’s, on knowing nothing but Christ.

May 17.—Walked out, and continued in earnest striving with my corruption. I made a covenant with my eyes, which I kept strictly; though I was astonished to find the difficulty I had in doing even this.

May 22.—Endeavoured to guard my thoughts this morning in a more particular manner, as expecting to pass it, with Sargent, in prayer for assistance in the ministry. Called at Mr. Wilberforce’s, when I met Mr. Babington. The extreme kindness and cordiality of these two was very pleasing to me, though rather elating. By a letter from B. to-day, learnt that two young men of Chesterton had come forward, who professed to have been awakened by a sermon of mine on Psalm ix. 17. I was not so affected with gratitude and joy as I expected to be; could not easily ascribe the glory to God; yet I will bless Him through all my ignorance that He has thus owned the ministry of one so weak. Oh, may I have faith to go onward, expecting to see miracles wrought by the foolishness of preaching. H., to whom I had made application for the loan which Major Sandys found it inconvenient to advance, dined with me, and surprised me by the difficulty he started. After dinner went to the India House to take leave. Mr. ——, the other chaplain, sat with me before we were called in, and I found that I knew a little of him, having been at his house. As he knew my character, I spoke very freely to him on the subject of religion. Was called in to take the oaths. All the directors were present, I think. Mr. Grant, in the chair, addressed a charge to us, extempore. One thing struck my attention, which was, that he warned us of the enervating effects of the climate.

I felt more acutely than ever I did in my life the shame attending poverty. Nothing but the remembrance that I was not to blame supported me. Whatever comes to me in the way of Providence is, and must be, for my good.

May 30.—Went to the India House. Kept the covenant with my eyes pretty well. Oh, what bitter experience have I had to teach me carefulness against temptation! I have found this method, which I have sometimes had recourse to, useful to-day—namely, that of praying in ejaculations for any particular person whose appearance might prove an occasion of sinful thoughts. After asking of God that she might be as pure and beautiful in her mind and heart as in body, and be a temple of the Holy Ghost, consecrated to the service of God, for whose glory she was made, I dare not harbour a thought of an opposite tendency.

June 6.—How many temptations are there in the streets of London!

June 14.—Sent off all my luggage, as preparatory to its going on board. Dined at Mr. Cecil’s; he endeavoured to correct my reading, but in vain. ‘Brother M.,’ says he, ‘you are a humble man, and would gain regard in private life; but to gain public attention you must force yourself into a more marked and expressive manner.’ Generally, to-night, have I been above the world; Lydia, and other comforts, I would resign.

June 16.—I thought it probable, from illness, that death might be at hand, and this was before me all the day; sometimes I was exceedingly refreshed and comforted at the thought, at other times I felt unwilling and afraid to die. Shed tears at night, at the thought of my departure, and the roaring sea, that would soon be rolling between me and all that is dear to me upon earth.

Mrs. T.M. Hitchins, his cousin’s wife, having asked him for some of his sermons, he replied:

London: June 24, 1805.

The arguments you offer to induce me seem not to possess that force which I look for in your reasoning. Sermons cannot be good memorials, because once read they are done with—especially a young man’s sermons, unless they possess a peculiar simplicity and spirituality; which I need not say are qualities not belonging to mine. I hope, however, that I am improving and I trust that—now I am removed from the contagion of academic air—I am in the way of acquiring a greater knowledge of men and of my own heart—I shall exchange my jejune scholastic style for a simple spiritual exhibition of profitable truth. Mr. Cecil has been taking a great deal of pains with me. My insipid, inanimate manner in the pulpit, he says, is intolerable. Sir, said he, it is cupola-painting, not miniature, that must be the character of a man that harangues a multitude. Lieut. Wynter called on me last Saturday, and last night drank tea with me. I cannot but admire his great seriousness. I feel greatly attached to him. He is just the sort of person, of a sober thoughtful cast, that I love to associate with. He mentioned Lydia, I do not know why, but he could not tell me half enough about her, while she was at Plymouth, to satisfy my curiosity. Whitsun-week was a time of the utmost distress to me on her account. On the Monday at the Eclectic, Mr. Cecil, speaking of celibacy, said, I was acting like a madman in going out without a wife. So thought all the other ten or eleven ministers present, and Mr. Foster among the rest, who is unmarried. This opinion, coming deliberately from so many experienced ministers, threw me into great perplexity, which increased, as my affections began to be set more afloat, for then I was less able than before to discern the path of duty. At last I wrote to Simeon, stating to him the strongest arguments I heard in favour of marriage in my case. His answer decided my mind. He put it in this way. Is it necessary? To this I could answer, No. Then is it expedient? He here produced so many weighty reasons against its expediency, that I was soon satisfied in my mind. My turbulent will was, however, not so easily pacified. I was again obliged to undergo the severest pain in making that sacrifice which had cost me so dear before. Better had it been if those wounds had never been torn open. But now again, through the mercy of God, I am once more at peace. What cannot His power effect? The present wish of my heart is that there may be never a necessity of marriage, so that I may henceforth have no one thing upon earth for which I would wish to stay another hour, except it be to serve the Lord my Saviour in the work of the ministry. Once more, therefore, I say to Lydia, and with her to all earthly schemes of happiness, Farewell. Let her live happy and useful in her present situation, since that is the will of God. How long these thoughts may continue, I cannot say. At times of indolence, or distress, or prevalent corruption, the former wishes, I suppose, will occur and renew my pain: but pray, my dear sister, that the Lord may keep in the imaginations of the thoughts of my heart all that may be for the glory of His great name. The only objection which presented itself to my advisers to marriage was the difficulty of finding a proper person to be the wife of a missionary. I told them that perhaps I should not have occasion to search a long time for one. Simeon knows all about Lydia. I think it very likely that he will endeavour to see her when she comes to town next winter.

(Addendum at the commencement, before the Address.)

I never returned my acknowledgment for the little hymn book, which is a memento of both. It is just the sort of thing. Instead of sending the books I intended, I shall inclose in the tea-caddy a little Pilgrim’s Progress for you, and another for Lydia.

July 2 was spent with Corrie in prayer, and converse ‘about the great work among the heathen.’ Martyn gave a final sitting for his miniature for his sister, to ‘the painter lady, who still repeated her infidel cavils; having nothing more to say in the way of argument, I thought it right to declare the threatenings of God to those who reject the Gospel.’ On the 8th he sat for his picture, for his friend Bates, to Russel. After his farewell to Sargent, and riding back,

Though I was in good health a moment before, yet as I was undressing I fainted and fell into a convulsive fit; I lost my senses for some time, and on recovering a little found myself in intense pain. Death appeared near at hand, and seemed somewhat different and more terrible than I could have conceived before, not in its conclusion, but in itself. I felt assured of my safety in Christ. Slept very little that night, from extreme debility. Tenth, I went to Portsmouth, where we arrived to breakfast, and find friends from Cambridge. Went with my things on board the Union at the Motherbank. Mr. Simeon read and prayed in the afternoon, thinking I was to go on board for the last time. Mr. Simeon first prayed, and then myself. On our way to the ship we sung hymns. The time was exceedingly solemn, and our hearts seemed filled with solemn joy.

As tidings from Lord Nelson were waited for, the fleet—consisting of fifteen sail under convoy of the Belliqueuse, Captain Byng—went no farther than Plymouth, and then anchored off Falmouth.

The coast of Devonshire and Cornwall was passing before me. The memory of beloved friends, then, was very strong and affecting.... I was rather flurried at the singularity of this providence of God, in thus leading me once more to the bosom of all my friends.... I have thought with exceeding tenderness of Lydia to-day; how I long to see her; but if it be the Lord’s will, He will open a way. I shall not take any steps to produce a meeting.

So he wrote on July 20. On the same day, the Rev. T.M. Hitchins wrote to him, thus: ‘Lydia, from whom we heard about ten days ago, is quite well. She is much interested in your welfare.’ Mrs. Hitchins wrote: ‘Lydia, whom I heard lately from, is well, and never omits mentioning you in her letters—and, I may venture to say, what you will value still more, in her prayers also.’ Martyn wrote to Mr. Hitchins on the 23rd: ‘A great work lies before me, and I must submit to many privations if I would see it accomplished. I should say, however, that poverty is not one of the evils I shall have to encounter; the salary of a chaplain, even at the lowest, is 600 rupees a month. Give my kind love to mama—as also to Miss L. Grenfell.’ A postscript to the letter stated that the writer had taken his place in the coach for Marazion: ‘Trust to pass some part of the morning at Miss Grenfell’s.’ He thus records in his Journal the interviews which resulted in what amounted to a brief engagement:

I arrived at Marazion in time for breakfast, and met my beloved Lydia. In the course of the morning I walked with her, though not uninterruptedly; with much confusion I declared my affection for her, with the intention of learning whether, if ever I saw it right in India to be married, she would come out; but she would not declare her sentiments, she said that the shortness of arrangement was an obstacle, even if all others were removed. In great tumult I walked up to St. Hilary, whence, after dining, I returned to Mr. Grenfell’s, but, on account of the number of persons there, I had not an opportunity of being alone with Lydia. Went back to Falmouth with G. I was more disposed to talk of Lydia all the way, but roused myself to a sense of my duty, and addressed him on the subject of religion. The next day I was exceedingly melancholy at what had taken place between Lydia and myself, and at the thought of being separated from her. I could not bring myself to believe that God had settled the whole matter, because I was not willing to believe it.

To Miss Lydia Grenfell, Marazion

Union, Falmouth Harbour: July 27, 1805.

... As I was coming on board this morning, and reading Mr. Serle’s hymn you wrote out for me, a sudden gust of wind blew it into the sea. I made the boatmen immediately heave to, and recovered it, happily without any injury except what it had received from the sea. I should have told you that the Morning Hymn, which I always kept carefully in my pocket-book, was one day stolen with it, and other valuable letters, from my rooms in college. It would be extremely gratifying to me to possess another copy of it, as it always reminded me most forcibly of the happy day on which we visited the aged saint. The fleet, it is said, will not sail for three weeks, but if you are willing to employ any of your time in providing me with this or any other manuscript hymns, the sooner you write them, the more certain I shall be of receiving them. Pardon me for thus intruding on your time; you will in no wise lose your reward. The encouragement conveyed in little compositions of this sort is more refreshing than a cup of cold water. The Lord of the harvest, who is sending forth me, who am most truly less than the least of all saints, will reward you for being willing to help forward even the meanest of His servants. The love which you bear to the cause of Christ, as well as motives of private friendship, will, I trust, induce you to commend me to God, and to the word of His grace, at those sacred moments when you approach the throne of our covenant God. To His gracious care I commend you. May you long live happy and holy, daily growing more meet for the inheritance of the saints in light. I remain, with affectionate regard, yours most truly,

H. Martyn.

July 28.—(Sunday.)—Preached in the morning, on board, on John iii. 3. In the afternoon, at Falmouth Church, on 1 Cor. i. 20 to 26.

July 29.—My gloom returned. Walked to Lamorran; alternately repining at my dispensation, and giving it up to the Lord. Sometimes—after thinking of Lydia for a long time together, so as to feel almost outrageous at being deprived of her—my soul would feel its guilt, and flee again to God. I was much relieved at intervals by learning the hymn, ‘The God of Abraham praise.’

The lady’s Diary has these passages, which show that her sister, Mrs. Hitchins, had rightly represented the state of her heart as not altogether refusing to return Martyn’s affection:

1805, July 25.—I was surprised this morning by a visit from H.M., and have passed the day chiefly with him. The distance he is going, and the errand he is going on, rendered his society particularly interesting. I felt as if bidding a final adieu to him in this world, and all he said was as the words of one on the borders of eternity. May I improve the opportunity I have enjoyed of Christian converse, and may the Lord moderate the sorrow I feel at parting with so valuable and excellent friend—some pains have attended it, known only to God and myself. Thou God, that knowest them, canst alone give comfort.... Oh, may we each pursue our different paths, and meet at last around our Father’s throne; may we often meet now in spirit, praying and obtaining blessings for each other. Now, my soul, return to God, the author of them.

July 26.—Oh, how this day has passed away! Nothing done to any good purpose. Lord, help me! I feel Thy loved presence withdrawn; I feel departing from Thee. Oh, let Thy mercy pardon, let Thy love succour, me. Deliver me from this temptation, set my soul at liberty, and I will praise Thee. I know the cause of all this darkness, this depression; dare I desire what Thou dost plainly, by the voice of Thy providence, condemn? O Lord, help me to conquer my natural feelings, help me to be watchful as Thy child. Oh, leave me not; or I fall a prey to this corroding care. Let me cast every care on Thee.

Gurlyn, July 30.—Blessed Lord, I thank Thee for affording me the retirement I so much delight in; here I enjoy freedom from all the noise and interruption of a town. Oh, may the Lord sanctify this pleasure. Oh, may it prove the means of benefiting my soul. Oh, may I watch against the intrusions of vain thoughts; else, instead of an advantage, I shall find solitude ruinous to my soul.

August 4.—This evening my soul has been pained with many fears concerning an absent friend, yet the Lord sweetly supports me, and is truly a refuge to me. It is a stormy and tempestuous night; the stillness and retirement of this place add to the solemnity of the hour. I hear the voice of God in every blast—it seems to say, ‘Sin has brought storm and tempest on a guilty world.’ O my Father and my God, Thou art righteous in all Thy judgments, merciful in all Thy ways. I would humbly trust in Thee, and confide all who are dear to me into Thy hands. The anxieties of nature, the apprehensions of affection, do Thou regulate, and make me acquiesce in whatever is Thy will.

August 5.—My mind is relieved to-day by hearing the fleet, in which I thought my friend had sailed, has not left the port. Oh, how frequently do unnecessary pains destroy our peace. Lord, look on me to-night, pardon my sins and make me more watchful and fight against my inward corruption. Oh, it is a state of conflict indeed!

He thus wrote to Mrs. Hitchins:

Falmouth: July 30, 1805.

‘My dearest Cousin,—I am exceedingly rejoiced at being permitted to send you one more letter, as the former, if it had been the last, would have left, I fear, a painful impression on your mind. It pleased God to restore peace to my mind soon after I came on board—as I thought—finally. I was left more alone with God, and found blessed seasons of intercourse with Him. But when your letter came, I found it so sympathising, so affectionate, that my heart was filled with joy and thankfulness to God for such a dear friend, and I could not refrain from bowing my knees immediately to pray that God might bless all your words to the good of my soul, and bless you for having written them. My views of the respective importance of things continue, I hope, to rectify. The shortness of time, the precious value of immortal souls, and the plain command of Christ, all conspire to teach me that Lydia must be resigned—and for ever—for though you suggest the possibility of my hereafter returning and being united to her, I rather wish to beware of looking forward to anything in this life as the end or reward of my labours. It would be a temptation to me to return before being necessitated. The rest which remaineth for the people of God is in another world, where they neither marry nor are given in marriage. But while I thus reason, still a sigh will ever and anon escape me at the thought of a final separation from her. In the morning when I rise, before prayer puts grace into exercise, there is generally a very heavy gloom on my spirits—and a distaste for everything in earth or heaven. You do not seem to suppose that any objection would remain in her mind, if I should return and other obstacles were removed—which opinion of yours is, no doubt, very pleasing to me—but if there were anything more than friendship, do you think it at all likely she could have spoken and written to me as she has? However, do not suppose from this that I wish to hear from you anything more on this subject—in the hope of being gratified with an assurance to the contrary. I cannot tell what induced me to take my leave of the people in the west when I was last there, as it was so probable we should be detained; were it not for having bid them adieu, I believe I should pay them another visit—only that I could not do it without being with Lydia again, which might not perhaps answer any good purpose, and more probably would renew the pain.

If, in India, I should be persuaded of the expediency of marriage, you perceive that I can do nothing less than make her the offer, or rather propose the sacrifice. It would be almost cruel and presumptuous in me to make such an application to her, especially as she would be induced by a sense of duty rather than personal attachment. But what else can be done? Should she not, then, be warned of my intention—before I go? If you advance no objection, I shall write a letter to her, notwithstanding her prohibition. When this is done no further step remains to be taken, that I know of. The shortness of our acquaintance, which she made a ground of objection, cannot now be remedied.

The matter, as it stands, must be left with God—and I do leave it with Him very cheerfully. I pray that hereafter I may not be tempted to follow my will, and mistake it for God’s—to fancy I am called to marriage, when I ought to remain single—and you will likewise pray, my dear cousin, that my mind may be always under a right direction.

His Journal thus continues:

July 31.—Went on board this morning in extreme anguish. I could not help saying, ‘Lord, it is not a sinful attachment in itself, and therefore I may commune more freely with Thee about it.’ I sought for hymns suitable to my case, but none did sufficiently; most complained of spiritual distress, but mine was not from any doubt of God’s favour, for I felt no doubt of that.

August 1.—Rose in great anguish of mind, but prayer relieved me a little. The wind continuing foul, I went ashore after breakfast; but before this, sat down to write to Lydia, hoping to relieve the burden of my mind. I wrote in great turbulence, but in a little time my tumult unaccountably subsided, and I enjoyed a peace to which I have been for some time a stranger. I felt exceedingly willing to leave her, and to go on my way rejoicing. I could not account for this, except by ascribing it to the gracious influence of God. The first few Psalms were exceedingly comfortable to me. Received a letter this evening from Emma, and received it as from God; I was animated before, but this added tenfold encouragement. She warned me, from experience, of the carefulness it would bring upon me; but spoke with such sympathy and tenderness, that my heart was quite refreshed. I bowed my knees to bless and adore God for it, and devoted myself anew to His beloved service. Went on board at night; the sea ran high, but I felt a sweet tranquillity in Him who stilleth the raging of the sea. I was delighted to find that the Lascars understood me perfectly when I spoke to them a sentence or two in Hindustani.

August 5.—Went ashore. Walked to Pendennis garrison; enjoyed some happy reflections as I sat on one of the ramparts, looking at the ships and sea.

August 7.—Preached at Falmouth Church, on Psalm iii. 1, with much comfort; after church, set off to walk to St. Hilary. Reached Helston in three hours in extraordinary spirits. The joy of my soul was very great. Every object around me called forth praise and gratitude to God. Perhaps it might have been joy at the prospect of seeing Lydia, but I asked myself at the time, whether out of love to God I was willing to turn back and see her no more. I persuaded myself that I could. But perhaps had I been put to the trial, it would have been otherwise. I arrived safe at St. Hilary, and passed the evening agreeably with R. 8th. Enjoyed much of the presence of God in morning prayer. The morning passed profitably in writing on Heb. ii. 3. My soul seemed to breathe seriously after God. Walked down with R. to Gurlyn to call on Lydia. She was not at home when we called, so I walked out to meet her. When I met her coming up the hill, I was almost induced to believe her more interested about me than I had conceived. Went away in the expectation of visiting her frequently. Called on my way (from Falmouth) at Gurlyn. My mind not in peace; at night in prayer, my soul was much overwhelmed with fear, which caused me to approach God in fervent petition, that He would make me perfectly upright, and my walk consistent with the high character I am called to assume.

August 10.—Rose very early, with uneasiness increased by seeing the wind northerly; walked away at seven to Gurlyn, feeling little or no pleasure at the thought of seeing Lydia; apprehension about the sailing of the fleet made me dreadfully uneasy; was with Lydia a short time before breakfast; afterwards I read the 10th Psalm, with Horne’s Commentary, to her and her mother; she was then just putting into my hand the 10th of Genesis to read when a servant came in, and said a horse was come for me from St. Hilary, where a carriage was waiting to convey me to Falmouth. All my painful presentiments were thus realised, and it came upon me like a thunderbolt. Lydia was evidently painfully affected by it; she came out, that we might be alone at taking leave, and I then told her, that if it should appear to be God’s will that I should be married, she must not be offended at receiving a letter from me. In the great hurry she discovered more of her mind than she intended; she made no objection whatever to coming out. Thinking, perhaps, I wished to make an engagement with her, she said we had better go quite free; with this I left her, not knowing yet for what purpose I have been permitted, by an unexpected providence, to enjoy these interviews. I galloped back to St. Hilary, and instantly got into a chaise with Mr. R., who had been awaked by the signal gun at five in the morning, and had come for me. At Hildon I got a horse, with which I rode to Falmouth, meeting on the road another express sent after me by R. I arrived about twelve, and instantly went on board; almost all the other ships were under weigh, but the Union had got entangled in the chains. The commodore expressed his anger as he passed, at this delay, but I blessed the Lord, who had thus saved His poor creature from shame and trouble. How delusive are schemes of pleasure; at nine in the morning I was sitting at ease, with the person dearest to me on earth, intending to go out with her afterwards to see the different views, to visit some persons with her, and to preach on the morrow; four hours only elapsed, and I was under sail from England! The anxiety to get on board, and the joy I felt at not being left behind, absorbed other sorrowful considerations for a time; wrote several letters as soon as I was on board. When I was left a little at leisure, my spirits began to sink; yet how backward was I to draw near to my God. I found relief occasionally, yet still was slow to fly to this refuge of my weary soul. Was meditating on a subject for to-morrow. As more of the land gradually appeared behind the Lizard, I watched with my spy-glass for the Mount (St. Michael’s), but in consequence of lying to for the purser, and thus dropping astern of the fleet, night came on before we weathered the point. Oh, let not my soul be deceived and distracted by these foolish vanities, but now that I am actually embarked in Christ’s cause, let a peculiar unction rest upon my soul, to wean me from the world, and to inspire me with ardent zeal for the good of souls.

To Miss Lydia Grenfell

Union, Falmouth: August 10, 1805.

My dear Miss Lydia,—It will perhaps be some satisfaction to yourself and your mother, to know that I was in time. Our ship was entangled in the chain, and was by that means the only one not under weigh when I arrived. It seems that most of the people on board had given me up, and did not mean to wait for me. I cannot but feel sensibly this instance of Divine mercy in thus preserving me from the great trouble that would have attended the loss of my passage. Mount’s Bay will soon be in sight, and recall you all once more to my affectionate remembrance.... I bid you a long Farewell. God ever bless you, and help you sometimes to intercede for me.

H. Martyn.

The lady alludes thus, in her Diary, to these events, in language which confesses her love, as she did not again confess it till after his death:[14]

August 8.—I was surprised again to-day by a visit from my friend, Mr. Martyn, who, contrary to every expectation, is detained, perhaps weeks longer. I feel myself called on to act decisively—oh how difficult and painful a part—Lord, assist me. I desire to be directed by Thy wisdom, and to follow implicitly what appears Thy will. May we each consider Thy honour as entrusted to us, and resolve, whatever it may cost us, to seek Thy glory and do Thy will. O Lord, I feel myself so weak that I would fain fly from the trial. My hope is in Thee—do Thou strengthen me, help me to seek, to know, and resolutely to do, Thy will, and that we may be each divinely influenced, and may principle be victorious over feeling. Thou, blessed Spirit, aid, support, and guide us. Now may we be in the armour of God, now may we flee from temptation. O blessed Jesus, leave me not, forsake me not.

August 9.—What a day of conflict has this been! I was much blessed, as if to prepare me for it, in the morning, and expected to see my friend, and hoped to have acted with Christian resolution. At Tregembo I learnt he had been called on by express last night. The effect this intelligence had on me shows how much my affections are engaged. O Lord, I lament it, I wonder at myself, I tremble at what may be before me—but do not, O Lord, forsake me. The idea of his going, when at parting I behaved with greater coolness and reserve than I ever did before, was a distress I could hardly bear, and I prayed the Lord to afford me an opportunity of doing away the impression from his mind. I saw no possibility of this—imagining the fleet must have sailed—when, to my astonishment, I learnt from our servant that he had called again this evening, and left a message that he would be here to-morrow. Oh, I feel less able than ever to conceal my real sentiments, and the necessity of doing it does not so much weigh with me. O my soul, pause, reflect—thy future happiness, and his too, the glory of God, the peace of my dear mother—all are concerned in what may pass to-morrow; I can only look and pray to be directed aright.

August 10.—Much have I to testify of supporting grace this day, and of what I must consider Divine interference in my favour, and that of my dear friend, who is now gone to return no more. My affections are engaged past recalling, and the anguish I endured yesterday, from an apprehension that I had treated him with coolness, exceeds my power to express; but God saw it, and kindly ordered it that he should come and do away the idea from my mind. It contributed likewise to my peace, and I hope to his, that it is clearly now understood between us that he is free to marry where he is going, and I have felt quite resigned to the will of God in this, and shall often pray the Lord to find him a suitable partner.

Went to meeting in a comfortable frame, but the intelligence brought me there—that the fleet had probably sailed without my friend—so distressed and distracted my mind, that I would gladly have exchanged my feelings of yesterday for those I was now exercised with; yet in prayer I found relief, and in appealing to God. How unsought by me was his coming here. I still felt anxiety beyond all expression to hear if he arrived in time or not. Oh, not for all the world could offer me would I he should lose his passage!—yet stay, my soul, recollect thyself, are not all events at the Lord’s disposal? Are not the steps of a good man ordered by the Lord? Cast then this burden on Him who carest for thee, my soul. Oh, let not Thy name, great God, be blasphemed through us—surely we desire to glorify it above all things, and would sacrifice everything to do so; enter then my mind this night, and let me in every dark providence trust in the Lord.

August 11.—A day of singular mercies. O my soul, how should the increasing goodness of God engage thee to serve Him with more zeal and ardour. I had a comfortable season in prayer before breakfast, enjoying sweet liberty of spirit before God my Saviour, God, the sinner’s friend and helper. Went to church, but could get no comfort from the sermon; the service I found in some parts quickening. On my return I found a letter from my excellent friend, dated on board the Union. Oh, what a relief to my mind! By a singular providence this ship was prevented sailing by getting entangled in the chain; every other belonging to the fleet was under weigh when he reached Falmouth, and his friends there had given over the hope of his arriving in time. Doth not God care for His people, and order everything, even the most trifling, that concerns them? The fleet must not sail till the man of God joined it;—praised be the name of the Lord for this instance of His watchful care. And now, my soul, turn to God, thy rest. Oh, may the remembrance of my dear friend, whilst it is cherished as it ought, be no hindrance to my progress in grace and holiness. May God alone fill my thoughts, and may my regard for my friend be sanctified, and be a means of stimulating me to press forward, and animate me in devoting myself entirely to God. Lord, I would unfeignedly adore Thee for all the instances of Thy loving kindness to me this week. I have had many remarkable answers to prayer, many proofs that the Lord watches over me, unworthy as I am. O Divine Saviour, how shall I praise Thee? Walked this evening to a little meeting at Thirton Wood. I was greatly refreshed and comforted. Oh, what a support in time of trouble is the Lord God of Israel! I am about retiring to rest—oh, may my thoughts upon my bed be solemn and spiritual. The remembrance of my dear friend is at times attended with feelings most painful, and yet, when I consider why he is gone, and Whom he is serving, every burden is removed, and I rejoice on his account, and rejoice that the Lord has such a faithful servant employed in the work. Oh, may I find grace triumphant over every feeling of my heart. Come, Lord Jesus, and dwell with me.

August 12.—Passed a sweet, peaceful day, enjoying much of His presence whose favour giveth life, and joy, and peace. Visited several of the poor near me, and found ability to speak freely and feelingly to them of the state of their souls. My dear absent friend is constantly remembered by me, but I find not his remembrance a hindrance to my soul in following after God—no, rather does it stimulate me in my course. Thus hath the Lord answered my prayers, as it respects myself, that our regard might be a sanctified one. Oh, bless the Lord, my soul, for ever! praise Him in cheerful lays from day to day, and hope eternally to do so.

August 13.—Awoke early and had a happy season. Visited a poor old man in great poverty, whose mind seemed disposed to receive instruction, and in some measure enlightened to know his sinful state and need of Christ; I found it a good time whilst with him. This evening my spirits are depressed; my absent friend is present to my remembrance, possessing more than common sensibility and affection. What must his sufferings be? but God is sufficient for him. He that careth for the falling sparrow will not forget him—this is my never-failing source of consolation.

August 15.—My soul has been cold in duties to-day. Oh, for the spirit of devotion! Great are the things God has wrought for me; oh, let these great things suitably impress my soul. I have had many painful reflections to-day respecting my absent friend, fearing whether I may not be the occasion of much sorrow to him and possibly of hindering him in the work. I could not do such violence to my feelings as to treat him with reserve and distance, yet, in his circumstances, I think I ought to. O Lord, if in this I have offended, forgive me, and oh, do away from his mind every improper remembrance of me. Help me to cast my cares on Thee to-night, and help me with peace.

Marazion, September 2.—My mind has been exercised with many painful anxieties about my dear friend, but I have poured out my soul to God, and am relieved; I have left my sorrows with Him. Isaiah (41st chapter) has comforted me. Oh, what pleasure did that permission give me when my heart was overburdened to-day. ‘Produce your cause’—what a privilege to come to God as a friend. I disclose those feelings to Him I have no power to any earthly friend. Those I could say most to seem to avoid the subject that occupies my mind; I have been wounded by their silence, yet I do not imagine them indifferent or unconcerned. It is well for me they have seemed to be so, for it has made me more frequent at a throne of grace, and brought me more acquainted with God as a friend who will hear all my complaints. Oh, how sweet to approach Him, through Christ, as my God. ‘Fear not,’ He says, ‘for I am with you: be not dismayed, I am thy God, I will strengthen thee, yea (O blessed assurance!) I will help thee, yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of My righteousness;’ and so I find it—glory be to God! Lord, hear the frequent prayers I offer for Thy dear servant, sanctify our mutual regard; may it continue through eternity, flowing from our love to Thee.

September 3.—Still no letters from Stoke, and no intelligence whether the fleet has sailed—this is no small exercise of my patience, but at times I feel a sweet complacency in saying, ‘Thou art my portion, O Lord.’ I have often felt happy in saying this, but it is in a season such as this, when creature comforts fail, that we may know whether we are sincere in saying so. Ah! how do we imperceptibly cleave to earth, and how soon withdraw our affections from God. I am sensible mine would never fix on Him but by His own power effecting it. I rest on Thy power, O God most high, retired from human observation.

When the commodore opened his sealed despatches off the Lizard, it was found that the fleet was to linger still longer at Cork, whence Henry Martyn wrote again to Lydia’s sister, Mrs. Hitchins. On Sunday, when becalmed in Mount’s Bay, and he would have given anything to have been ashore preaching at Marazion or St. Hilary, he had taken for his text Hebrews xi. 16: ‘But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.’

Cork Harbour: August 19, 1805.

The beloved objects were still in sight, and Lydia I knew was about that time at St. Hilary, but every wave bore me farther and farther from them. I introduced what I had to say by observing that we had now bid adieu to England, and its shores were dying away from the view. The female part of my audience were much affected, but I do not know that any were induced to seek the better country. The Mount continued in sight till five o’clock, when it disappeared behind the western boundary of the bay. Amidst the extreme gloom of my mind this day I found great comfort in interceding earnestly for my beloved friends all over England. If you have heard from Marazion since Sunday, I should be curious to know whether the fleet was observed passing....

We are now in the midst of a vast number of transports filled with troops. It is now certain from our coming here that we are to join in some expedition, probably the Cape of Good Hope, or the Brazils; anywhere for me so long as the Lord goes with me. If it should please God to send me another letter from you, which I scarcely dare hope, do not forget to tell me as much as you can about Lydia. I cannot write to her, or I should find the greatest relief and pleasure even in transmitting upon paper the assurances of my tenderest love.

Cove of Cork: August 28, 1805.

My dearest Cousin,—I have but a few minutes to say that we are again going to sea—under convoy of five men of war. Very anxiously have I been expecting to receive an answer to the letter I sent you on my arrival at this port, bearing date August 16; from the manner in which I had it conveyed to the post-office, I begin to fear it has never reached you. I have this instant received the letter you wrote me the day on which we sailed from Falmouth. Everything from you gives me the greatest pleasure, but this letter has rather tended to excite sentiments of pain as well as pleasure. I fear my proceedings have met with your disapprobation, and have therefore been wrong—since it is more probable you should judge impartially than myself.

I am now fully of opinion that, were I convinced of the expediency of marriage, I ought not in conscience to propose it, while the obstacle of S.J. remains. Whatever others have said, I think that Lydia acts no more than consistently by persevering in her present determination. I confess, therefore, that till this obstacle is removed my path is perfectly clear, and, blessed be God! I feel very, very happy in all that my God shall order concerning me. Let me suffer privation, and sorrow and death, if I may by these tribulations enter into the kingdom of God. Since we have been lying here I have been enjoying a peace almost uninterrupted. The Spirit of adoption has been drawing me near to God, and giving me the full assurance of His love. My prayer is continually that I may be more deeply and habitually convinced of His unchanging, everlasting love, and that my whole soul may be altogether in Christ. The Lord teaches me to desire Christ for my all in all—to long to be encircled in His everlasting arms, to be swallowed up in the fulness of His love. Surely the soul is happy that thus bathes in a medium of love. I wish no created good, but to be one with Him and to be living for my Saviour and Lord. Oh, may it be my constant care to live free from the spirit of bondage, and at all times have access to the Father. This I now feel, my beloved cousin, should be our state—perfect reconciliation with God, perfect appropriation of Him in all His endearing attributes, according to all that He has promised. This shall bear us safely through the storm. Oh, how happy are we in being introduced to such high privileges! You and my dear brother, and Lydia, I rejoice to think, are often praying for me and interested about me. I have, of course, much more time and leisure to intercede for you than you for me—and you may be assured I do not fail to employ my superior opportunities in your behalf. Especially is it my prayer that the mind of my dear cousin, formed as it is by nature and by grace for higher occupations, may not be rendered uneasy by the employments and cares of this.

Hearing nothing accurately of the India fleet after its departure from Mount’s Bay, Lydia Grenfell thus betrayed to herself and laid before God her loving anxiety:

1805, September 24.—Have I not reason ever, and in all things, to trust and bless God? O my soul, why dost thou yield to despondency? why art thou disquieted? O my soul, put thy trust in God, assured that thou shalt yet praise Him, who is the help of thy countenance and thy God in Christ Jesus. My mind is under considerable anxiety, arising from the uncertainty of my dear friend’s situation, and an apprehension of his being ill. Oh, how soon is my soul filled with confusion! yet I find repose for it in the love of Jesus—oh, let me then raise my eyes to Him, and may His love be shed abroad in my heart; make me in all things resigned to Thy will, to trust and hope and rejoice in Thee.

November 1.—My dear absent friend has too much occupied my thoughts and affections, and broken my peace—but Jesus reigns in providence and grace, and He does all things well. Yes, in my best moments I can rejoice in believing this, but too often I yield to unbelieving fears and discouragements. The thought that we shall meet no more sinks at times my spirits, yet I would say and feel submissive—Thy will be done. Choose for my motto, on entering my thirty-first year, this Scripture: ‘Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.’

November 4.—I think of my friend, but blessed be God for not suffering my regard to lead me from Himself.

November 16.—I have been employed to-day in a painful manner, writing[15] (perhaps for the last time) to too dear a friend. I have to bless God for keeping me composed whilst doing so, and for peace of mind since, arising from a conviction that I have done right; and oh, that I may now be enabled to turn my thought from all below to that better world where my soul hopes eternally to dwell. Blessed Lord Jesus, be my strength and shield. Oh, let not the enemy harass me, nor draw my affections from Thee.

November 17.—Felt great depression of spirits to-day, from the improbability of ever seeing H.M. return. I feel it necessary to fly to God, praying for submission to His will, and to rest assured of the wisdom and love of this painful event. O my soul, rise from these cares, look beyond the boundary of time. Oh, cheering prospect, in that blest world where my Redeemer lives I shall regain every friend I love—with Christian love again. Be resigned then, my soul, Jesus is thine, and He does all things well.

CHAPTER III: THE NINE MONTHS’ VOYAGE—SOUTH AMERICA—SOUTH AFRICA, 1805-1806

The East India fleet had been detained off Ireland ‘for fear of immediate invasion, in which case the ships might be of use.’ The young chaplain was kept busy enough in his own and the other vessels. In one of these, the Ann, there was a mutiny. Another, the Pitt, was a Botany Bay ship, carrying out 120 female convicts. Thanks to Charles Simeon, he was able to supply all with Bibles and religious books. But even on board his own transport, the Union, the captain would allow only one service on the Sabbath, and denied permission to preach to the convicts. The chaplain’s ministrations between decks were continued daily, amid the indifference and even opposition of all save a few.

At last, on August 31, 1805, the Indiamen of the season and fifty transports sailed out of the Cove of Cork under convoy of the Diadem, 64 guns, the Belliqueuse, 64 guns, the Leda and Narcissus frigates, on a voyage which, after two months since lifting the anchor at Portsmouth, lasted eight and a half months to Calcutta. The Union had H.M. 59th Regiment on board. Of its officers and men, and of the East India Company’s cadets and the officers commanding them, he succeeded in inducing only five to join him in daily worship. His own presence and this little gathering caused the vessel to be known in the fleet as ‘the praying ship.’ The captain died during the voyage to the Cape. One of the ships was wrecked, the Union narrowly escaping the same fate. Martyn’s Journal reveals an amount of hostility to himself and of open scoffing at his message which would be impossible now. He fed his spirit with the Word of God, which he loved to expound to others. Leighton, especially the too little known Rules for Holy Living, was ever in his hands. Augustine and Ambrose delighted him, also Hooker, Baxter, Jonathan Edwards, and Flavel, which he read to any who would listen, while he spoke much to the Mohammedan Lascars. He worked hard at Hindustani, Bengali, and Portuguese. Not more faithfully reflected in his Journal than the tedium of the voyage and the often blasphemous opposition of his fellows are, all unconsciously, his own splendid courage, his untiring faithfulness even when down with dysentery and cough, his watchful prayerfulness, his longing for the spread of Christ’s kingdom. As the solitary young saint paced the deck his thoughts, too, were with the past—with Lydia, in a way which, even he felt, did not leave him indisposed for communion with God. From Funchal, Madeira, he wrote to Lydia’s sister: ‘God knows how dearly I love you, and Lydia and Sally (his younger sister), and all His saints in England, yet I bid you all an everlasting farewell almost without a sigh.’ His motto throughout the voyage was the sentence in which Milner characterises the first Christians:

‘To Believe, to Suffer, and to Love.’

Meanwhile Lydia Grenfell was thus committing to her Diary these melancholy longings:

November 22.—Yesterday brought me most pleasing intelligence from my dear friend, for which I have and do thank Thee, O Lord my God. He assures us of his being well, and exceedingly happy—oh, may he continue so. I have discovered that insensibly I have indulged the hope of his return, which this letter has seemed to lessen. I see it is my duty to familiarise my mind to the idea of our separation being for ever, with what feelings the thought is admitted, the Lord—whose will I desire therein to be done—only knows, and I find it a blessed relief to look to Him for comfort. I can bear testimony to this, that the Lord does afford me the needful support. I have been favoured much within this day or two, and seem, if I may trust to present feelings, to be inspired to ask the Lord’s sovereign will and pleasure concerning me and him. I look forward to our meeting only in another state of existence, and oh, how pure, how exalted will be our affection then! here it is mixed with much evil, many pains, and great anxieties. Hasten, O Lord, Thy coming, and fit me for it and for the society of Thy saints in light. I desire more holiness, more of Christ in my soul, more of His likeness. Oh, to be filled with all Thy fulness, to be swallowed up in Thee!

November 23.—Too much has my mind been occupied to-day with a subject which must for ever interest me. O Lord, have mercy on me! help can only come from Thee. Let Thy blessed Word afford me relief; let the aids of Thy Spirit be vouchsafed. Restore to me the joys of Thy salvation.

November 24.—Passed a night of little sleep, my mind restless, confused, and unhappy. In vain did I endeavour to fix my thoughts on spiritual things, and to drive away those distressing fears of what may befall my dear friend. Blessed for ever be the Lord that on approaching His mercy-seat, through the blood of Jesus, I found peace, rest, and an ability to rely on God for all things. I have through the day enjoyed a sense of the Divine presence, and a blessed nearness to the Lord. To-night I am favoured with a sweet calmness; I seem to have no desire to exert myself. O Lord, animate, refresh my fainting soul. I see how dangerous it is to admit any worldly object into the heart, and how prone mine is to idolatry, for whatever has the preference, that to God is an idol. Alas! my thoughts, my first and last thoughts, are now such as prove that God cannot be said to have the supreme place in my affections; yet, blessed be His name, I can resign myself and all my concerns to His disposal, and this is my heart’s desire. Thy will be done.

December 11.—I seem reconciled to all before me, and consider the Lord must have some great and wise purposes to answer by suffering my affections to be engaged in the degree they are. If it is only to exercise my submission to His will, and to make me more acquainted with His power to support and comfort me, it will be a great end answered, and oh, may I welcome all He appoints for this purpose. The mysteries of Providence are unfathomable. The event must disclose them, and in this I desire to make up my mind from henceforth no more to encourage the least expectation of meeting my dear friend in this world. O Lord, when the desire is so strong, how impossible is it for me to do this; but Thou art able to strengthen me for it. Oh, vouchsafe the needful help.

December 16.—I have had many distressing feelings to-day, and struggled with my heart, which is at times rent, I may say, by the reflection that I have bidden adieu for ever in this life to so dear a friend; but the blessed employment the Lord has assisted me in, and the thought that he is serving my blessed Lord Jesus, is most consolatory. Oh, may I never more seek to draw him back from the work. Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I would not do this.

December 26.—Went early to St. Hilary, where I had an opportunity of reading the excellent prayers of our Church. I have been blest with sweet peace to-day—a solemn expectation of entering eternity. I feel a sadness of spirit at times (attended with a calm resignation of mind, not unpleasing) at the remembrance of my friend, whom I expect no more to see till we meet in heaven. Oh, blessed hope that there we shall meet! Lord, keep us each in the narrow way that leads to Thee.

December 31.—The last in 1805—oh, may it prove the most holy to my soul. I am shut out from the communion of Thy saints in a measure; oh, let me enjoy more communion with my God. Thou knowest my secret sorrows, yea, Thou dost calm them by causing me to have regard to a future life of bliss with Thee, when I shall see and adore the wisdom of Thy dealings with me. Oh, my idolatrous heart!

These passages occur in Henry Martyn’s Journal:

December 4.—Dearest Lydia! never wilt thou cease to be dear to me; still, the glory of God, and the salvation of immortal souls, is an object for which I can part with thee. Let us live then for God, separate from one another, since such is His holy will. Hereafter we shall meet in a happier region, and if we shall have lived and died, denying ourselves for God, triumphant and glorious will our meeting be....

December 5.—My mind has been running on Lydia, and the happy scenes in England, very much; particularly on that day when I walked with her on the sea-shore, and with a wistful eye looked over the blue waves that were to bear me from her. While walking the deck I longed to be left alone, that my thoughts might run at random. Tender feelings on distant scenes do not leave me indisposed for communion with God; that which is present to the outward senses is the greatest plague to me. Went among the soldiers in the afternoon, distributing oranges to those who are scorbutic. My heart was for some hours expanding with joy and love; but I have reason to think that the state of the body has great influence on the frames and feelings of the mind. Let the rock of my consolations be not a variable feeling, but Jesus Christ and His righteousness.

The fleet next touched at San Salvador, or Bahia, from which Henry Martyn wrote to Mrs. Hitchins, his cousin, asking her to send him by Corrie, who was coming out as chaplain, ‘your profile and Cousin Tom’s and Lydia’s. If she should consent to it, I should much wish for her miniature.’ The request, when it reached her, must have led to such passages in her Diary as these:

1806, February 8.—I have passed some days of pain and weakness, but now am blessed again with health. During the whole of this sickness I was afflicted with much deadness of soul, and have had very few thoughts of God. I felt, as strength returned, the necessity of more earnest supplications for grace and spiritual life. I have ascertained this sad truth, that my soul has declined in spiritual fervour and liveliness since I have admitted an earthly object so much into my heart. Ah! I know I have not power to recall my affections, but God can, and I believe He will, enable me to regulate them better. This thought has been of great injury to me, as I felt no murmuring at the will of God, nor disposed to act therein contrary to His will. I thought I might indulge secretly my affection, but it has been of vast disadvantage to me. I am now convinced, and I do humbly (relying on strength from on high) resolve no more to yield to it. Oh, may my conversation be in heaven, and the glories of Immanuel be all my theme.

February 15.—I have been much exercised yesterday and to-day—walking in darkness, without light—and I feel the truth of this Scripture: ‘Your sins have separated between you and your God.’ I have betrayed a most unbecoming impatience and warmth of temper. My dear absent friend, too, has been much in my mind. How many times have I endured the pain of bidding him farewell! I would not dare repine. I doubt not for a moment the necessity of its being as it is, but the feelings of my mind at particular seasons overwhelm me. My refuge is to consider it is the will of God. Thy will, my God, be done.

Henry Martyn did not lose a day in discharging his mission to the residents and slaves of that part of the coast of Brazil, in the great commercial city and seat of the metropolitan. His was the first voice to proclaim the pure Gospel in South America since, three hundred years before, Coligny’s and Calvin’s missionaries had been there silenced by Villegagnon, and put to death. Martyn was frequently ashore, almost fascinated by the tropical glories of the coast and the interior, and keenly interested in the Portuguese dons, the Franciscan friars, and the negro slaves. After his first walk through the town to the suburbs, he was looking for a wood in which he might rest, when he found himself at a magnificent porch leading to a noble avenue and house. There he was received with exuberant hospitality by the Corrè family, especially by the young Señor Antonio, who had received a University training in Portugal, and soon learned to enjoy the society of the Cambridge clergyman. In his visits of days to this family, his exploration of the immediate interior and the plantations of tapioca and pepper, introduced from Batavia, and his discussions with its members and the priests on Roman Catholicism, all conducted in French and Latin, a fortnight passed rapidly. He was ever about his Master’s business, able in speaking His message to men and in prayer and meditation. ‘In a cool and shady part of the garden, near some water, I sat and sang,

O’er the gloomy hills of darkness.

I could read and pray aloud, as there was no fear of anyone understanding me. Reading the eighty-fourth Psalm,

O how amiable are Thy tabernacles,

this morning in the shade, the day when I read it last under the trees with Lydia was brought forcibly to my remembrance, and produced some degree of melancholy.’ Refreshed by the hospitality of San Salvador, he resumed the voyage with new zeal for his Lord and for his study of such authorities as Orme’s Indostan and Scott’s Dekkan, and thus taking himself to task: ‘I wish I had a deeper conviction of the sinfulness of sloth.’

Thus had he taken possession of Brazil, of South America, for Christ. As he walked through the streets, where for a long time he ‘saw no one but negro slaves male and female’; as he passed churches in which ‘they were performing Mass,’ and priests of all colours innumerable, and ascended the battery which commanded a view of the whole bay of All Saints, he exclaimed, ‘What happy missionary shall be sent to bear the name of Christ to these western regions? When shall this beautiful country be delivered from idolatry and spurious Christianity? Crosses there are in abundance, but when shall the doctrine of the Cross be held up?’ In the nearly ninety years that have gone since that time, Brazil has ceased to belong to the house of Braganza, slavery has been abolished, the agents of the Evangelical churches and societies of the United States of America and the Bible societies have been sent in answer to his prayer; while down in the far south Captain Allen Gardiner, R.N., by his death for the savage people, has brought about results that extorted the admiration of Dr. Darwin. As Martyn went back to the ship for the last time, after a final discussion on Mariolatry with the Franciscans, rowed by Lascars who kept the feast of the Hijra with hymns to Mohammed, and in converse with a fellow-voyager who declared mankind needed to be told nothing but to be sober and honest, he cried to God with a deep sigh ‘to interfere in behalf of His Gospel; for in the course of one hour I had seen three shocking examples of the reign and power of the devil in the form of Popish and Mohammedan delusion and that of the natural man. I felt, however, in no way discouraged, but only saw the necessity of dependence on God.’

Why did Henry Martyn’s preaching and daily pastoral influence excite so much opposition? Undoubtedly, as we shall see, both in Calcutta and Dinapore, his Cornish-Celtic temperament, possibly the irritability due to the disease under which he was even then suffering, disabled him from disarming opposition, as his friend Corrie, for instance, afterwards always did. But we must remember to whom he preached and what he preached, and the time at which he preached, in the history not only of the Church of England, but of Evangelical religion. He had himself been brought out of spiritual darkness under the influence of Kempthorne and Charles Simeon, by the teaching of Paul in his letters to the Roman and the Galatian converts. To him sin was exceeding sinful. The Pauline doctrine of sin and its one remedy was the basis not only of his theology, but of his personal experience and daily life. After a brief ministry to the villagers of Lolworth and occasional sermons to his fellow students in Cambridge, this Senior Wrangler and Classic, yet young convert, was put in spiritual charge of a British regiment and Indiaman’s crew, and was the only chaplain in a force of eight thousand soldiers, some with families, and many female convicts. At a time when the dead churches were only beginning to wake up, after the missions of the Wesleys and Whitfield, of William Carey and Simeon, this youthful prophet was called to reason of temperance, righteousness, and judgment to come, with men who were practically as pagan or as sceptical as Felix.

His second address at sea, on September 15, was from Paul’s sermon in the synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia (Acts xiii. 38-39): Through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins, &c.[16] It was a full and free declaration of God’s love in Jesus Christ to sinful man, which he thus describes in his Journal: ‘In the latter part I was led to speak without preparation on the all-sufficiency of Christ to save sinners who came to Him with all their sins without delay. I was carried away with a Divine aid to speak with freedom and energy. My soul was refreshed, and I retired seeing reason to be thankful!’ But the next week’s experience resulted in this: ‘I was more tried by the fear of man than I have ever been since God called me to the ministry. The threats and opposition of those men made me unwilling to set before them the truths which they hated; yet I had no species of hesitation about doing it. They had let me know that if I would preach a sermon like one of Blair’s they should be glad to hear it; but they would not attend if so much of hell was preached.’ Strengthened by our Lord’s promise of the Comforter (John xiv. 16), he next Sunday took for his text Psalm ix. 17: The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God. He thus concluded:

Pause awhile, and reflect! Some of you, perhaps, by this time, instead of making a wise resolve, have begun to wonder that so heavy a judgment should be denounced merely against forgetfulness. But look at the affairs of common life, and be taught by them. Do not neglect, and want of attention, and not looking about us to see what we have to do—do not any of these bring upon us consequences as ruinous to our worldly business as any ACTIVE misbehaviour? It is an event of every day, that a man, by mere laziness and inattention to his business, does as certainly bring himself and family to poverty, and end his days in a gaol, as if he were, in wanton mischief, to set fire to his own house. So it is also with the affairs of the soul: neglect of that—forgetfulness of God, who only can save it—will work his ruin, as surely as a long and daring course of profligate wickedness.

When any one has been recollecting the proper proofs of a future state of rewards and punishments, nothing, methinks, can give him so sensible an apprehension of punishment or such a representation of it to the mind, as observing that, after the many disregarded checks, admonitions, and warnings which people meet with in the ways of vice, folly, and extravagance warnings from their very nature, from the examples of others, from the lesser inconveniences which they bring upon themselves, from the instructions of wise and good men—after these have been long despised, scorned, ridiculed—after the chief bad consequences (temporal consequences) of their follies have been delayed for a great while, at length they break in irresistibly like an armed force: repentance is too late to relieve, and can serve only to aggravate their distress: the case is become desperate; and poverty and sickness, remorse and anguish, infamy and death, the effects of their own doings, overwhelm them beyond possibility of remedy or escape. This is an account of what is, in fact, the general constitution of Nature.

But is the forgetfulness of God so light a matter? Think what ingratitude, rebellion, and atheism there is at the bottom of it! Sirs, you have ‘a carnal mind, which is enmity against God.’ (Rom. viii. 7.) Do not suppose that you have but to make a slight effort, and you will cease to forget Him: it is your nature to forget Him: it is your nature to hate Him: so that nothing less than an entire change of heart and nature will ever deliver you from this state of enmity. Our nature ‘is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. They that are in the flesh cannot please God.’ (Rom. viii. 7, 8.) From this state let the fearful menace in the text persuade you to arise! Need we remind you again of the dreadfulness of hell—of the certainty that it shall overtake the impenitent sinner? Enough has been said; and can any of you be still so hardened, and such enemies to your souls, as still to cleave to sin? Will you still venture to continue any more in the hazard of falling into the hands of God? Alas! ‘Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?’ (Isa. xxxiii. 14.) ‘Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be strong, in the days that I shall deal with thee? I the Lord have spoken it, and will do it!’ (Ezek. xxii. 14.) Observe, that men have dealt with sinners—ministers have dealt with them—apostles, prophets, and angels have dealt with them: at last, God will take them in hand, and deal with them! Though not so daring as to defy God, yet, brethren, in all probability you put on repentance. Will you securely walk a little longer along the brink of the burning furnace of the Almighty’s fury? ‘As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, there is but a step between thee and death!’ (1 Sam. xx. 3.) When you lie down you know not but you may be in it before the morning; and when you rise you know not but God may say, ‘Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee!’ When once the word is given to cut you down, the business is over. You are cut off from your lying refuges and beloved sins—from the world—from your friends—from the light—from happiness—from hope, for ever! Be wise, then, my friends, and reasonable: give neither sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eyelids, till you have resolved, on your knees before God, to forget Him no more. Go home and pray. Do not dare to fly, as it were, in the face of your Maker, by seeking your pleasure on His holy day; but if you are alarmed at this subject, as well you may be, go and pray to God that you may forget Him no more. It is high time to awake out of sleep. It is high time to have done with hesitation: time does not wait for you; nor will God wait till you are pleased to turn. He hath bent His bow, and made it ready: halt no more between two opinions: hasten—tarry not in all the plain, but flee from the wrath to come. Pray for grace, without which you can do nothing. Pray for the knowledge of Christ, and of your own danger and helplessness, without which you cannot know what it is to find refuge in Him. It is not our design to terrify, without pointing out the means of safety. Let us then observe, that if it should have pleased God to awaken any of you to a sense of your danger, you should beware of betaking yourselves to a refuge of lies.

But, through the mercy of God, many among us have found repentance unto life—have fled for refuge to the hope set before them—have seen their danger, and fled to Christ. Think with yourselves what it is now to have escaped destruction; what it will be to hear at the last day our acquittal, when it shall be said to others, ‘Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.’ Let the sense of the mercy of God gild all the path of life. On the other hand, since it is they who forget God that are to bear the weight of His wrath, let us beware, brethren, how we forget Him, through concern about this world, or through unbelief, or through sloth. Let us be punctual in all our engagements with Him. With earnest attention and holy awe ought we to hear His voice, cherish the sense of His presence, and perform the duties of His worship. No covenant relation or Gospel grace can render Him less holy, less jealous, or less majestic. ‘Wherefore let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably, with reverence and godly fear; for our God is a consuming fire.’

The officers had seated themselves behind the preacher, that they might retire in case of dislike, and one of them employed himself in feeding the geese; so it had happened in the case of the missionary Paul, and Martyn wrote: ‘God, I trust, blessed the sermon to the good of many. Some of the cadets and soldiers were in tears.’ The complement[17] of this truth he soon after displayed to them in his sermon on the message through Ezekiel xxxiii. 11. As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked.

Men have been found in all ages who have vented their murmurs against God for the severity of His final punishment, as well as for the painful continuance of His judgments upon them in this life, saying, ‘If our state be so full of guilt and misery as is represented, and God is determined to avenge Himself upon us, be it so; then we must take the consequences.’ If God were to reply to this impious complaint only by silence; if He were to suffer the gloom of their hearts to thicken into tenfold darkness, and give them up to their own malignity, till they died victims to their own impiety and despair, the Lord would still be righteous, they would then only eat of the fruit of their doings. But, behold, the Lord gives a very unexpected message, with which He bids us to follow men, to interrupt their sad soliloquies, to stop their murmurs. ‘Say unto them,’ saith He, ‘As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn ye, turn ye, from your evil ways; for why will ye die?’

Behold the inseparable connexion—we must turn, or die. Here there is a question put by God to sinners. Let sinners then answer the question which God puts to them,—‘Why will ye die?’ Is death a motive not strong enough to induce you to forego a momentary pleasure? Is it a light thing to fall into the hands of the living God? Is a life of godliness so very intolerable as not to be repaid by heavenly glory? Turn ye at His reproof—‘Why will ye die?’ Is it because there is no hope? God has this very hour testified with an oath that it is His desire to save you. Yea, He at this moment expostulates with you and beseeches you to seek Him. ‘Why will ye die?’ You know not why. If, then, you are constrained—now accustomed as you are to self-vindication—to acknowledge your unreasonableness, how much more will you be speechless in the last day when madness will admit of no palliation, and folly will appear without disguise!

Are any returned to God? Do any believe they are really returned?—then here they have consolation. It is a long time before we lose our slavish dread of God, for our natural prejudices and mistakes become inveterate by habit, and Satan opposes the removal of them. But come now, and let us reason together. Will ye also dishonour your God by accounting Him more willing to destroy than to save you? Will ye think hardly of God? Oh, that I had been able to describe as it deserves, His willingness to save! Oh, that I could have borrowed the pen of a seraph, and dipped it in a fount of light! Could plainer words be needed to describe the wonders of His love? Hearken, my beloved brethren! Hath He no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and will He take pleasure in yours? Hath He promised His love, His tenderness to those who turn from their wicked ways, and yet, when they are turned, straightway forgot His promise? Harbour no more fearful, unbelieving thoughts. But the reply is often that the fear is not of God, but of myself, lest I have not turned away from my evil ways. But this point may surely be ascertained, brethren; and if it may, any further refinements on this subject are derogatory to God’s honour. Let these words convince you that, if you are willing to be saved in His way, He is willing to save you. It may be you will still be kept in darkness, but darkness is not always the frown of God; it is only Himself—thy shade on thy right hand. Then tremble not at the hand that wipes away thy tears; judge Him not by feeble sense, but follow Him, though He lead thee by a way that thou knewest not.

There are some of you who have reason to hope that you have turned from the error of your ways. Ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. It is but a taste, a foretaste, an antepast of the feast of heaven. It was His pleasure that you should turn from your ways; it is also His good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Then what shall we recommend to you, but gratitude, admiration, and praise? ‘Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise thy God, O Zion.’ Let each of us abundantly utter the memory of His great goodness, and sing aloud of His righteousness. Let each say, ‘Awake, lute and harp; I myself will awake right early.’ Let us join the chorus of angels, and all the redeemed, in praising the riches of His love in His kindness towards us through Christ Jesus.

As the fleet sailed from San Salvador, the captains were summoned to the commodore, to learn that Cape Town and the Dutch settlement formed the object of the expedition, and that stout resistance was expected. This gave new zeal to the chaplain, were that possible, in his dealings with the officers and men of his Majesty’s 59th, and with the cadets, to whom he taught mathematics in his unrewarded friendliness. Many were down with dysentery, then and long a peculiarly fatal disease till the use of ipecacuanha. His constant service made him also for some time a sufferer.

1805, December 29. (Sunday.)—My beloved spake and said unto me, Rise up, &c. (Cant. ii. 10, 11). Ah! why cannot I rise and go forth and meet my Lord? Every hindrance is removed: the wrath of God, the guilt of sin, and severity of affliction; there is nothing now in the world that has any strong hold of my affections. Separated from my friends and country for ever in this life, I have nothing to distract me from hearing the voice of my beloved, and coming away from this world and walking with Him in love, amidst the flowers that perfume the air of Paradise, and the harmony of the happy spirits who are singing His praise. But alas! my heart is cold and slothful. Preached on 2 Peter iii. 11, taking notice at the end of these remarkable circumstances, that made the text particularly applicable to us. It was the last Sabbath of a year, which had been memorable to us from our having left our country, and passed through many dangers. Secondly, within a few days they were to meet an enemy on the field of battle. Thirdly, the death of the captain. I was enabled to be self-collected, and in some degree tender. There was a great impression; many were in tears. Visited and conversed with Mr. M. twice to-day, and marked some passages for him to read. His heart seems tender. There was a considerable number on the orlop in the afternoon. Expounded Matt. xix. and prayed. In the evening Major Davidson and M’Kenzie came to my cabin, and stayed nearly three hours. I read Romans vi. and vii., and explained those difficult chapters as well as I could, so that the Major, I hope, received a greater insight into them; afterwards I prayed with them. But my own soul after these ministrations seemed to have received harm rather than good. It was an awful reflection that Judas was a preacher, perhaps a successful one. Oh, let my soul tremble, lest, after preaching to others, I myself should be a castaway.

1806. January 4.—Continued to approach the land; about sunset the fleet came to an anchor between Robben Island and the land on that side, farthest from Cape Town, and a signal was immediately given for the 59th Regiment to prepare to land. Our men were soon ready, and received thirty-six rounds of ball cartridge; before the three boats were lowered down and fitted, it was two in the morning. I stayed up to see them off; it was a melancholy scene; the privates were keeping up their spirits by affecting to joke about the approach of danger, and the ladies sitting in the cold night upon the grating of the after-hatchway overwhelmed with grief; the cadets, with M’Kenzie, who is one of their officers, all went on board the Duchess of Gordon, the general rendezvous of the company’s troops. I could get to speak to none of my people, but Corporals B. and B. I said to Sergeant G., ‘It is now high time to be decided in religion,’ he replied with a sigh; to Captain S. and the cadets I endeavoured to speak in a general way. I this day signed my name as a witness to Captain O.’s and Major Davidson’s wills; Captain O. left his with me; I passed my time at intervals in writing for to-morrow. The interest I felt in the outward scene distracted me very much from the things which are not seen, and all I could do in prayer was to strive against this spirit. But with what horror should I reflect on the motions of sins within me, which tempted me to wish for bloodshed, as something gratifying by its sublimity. My spirit would be overwhelmed by such a consciousness of depravity, but that I can pray still deliberately against sin; and often the Lord manifested His power by making the same sinful soul to feel a longing desire that the blessed gospel of peace might soothe the spirits of men, and make them all live together in harmony and love. Yet the principle within me may well fill me with shame and sorrow.

Since, on April 9, 1652, Johan Anthonie van Riebeck by proclamation took formal possession of the Cape for the Netherlands East India Company, ‘providing that the natives should be kindly treated,’[18] the Dutch had governed South Africa for nearly a century and a half. The natives had been outraged by the Boers, the Moravian missionaries had departed, the colony had been starved, and yet denied the rudiments of autonomy. The French Revolution changed all that, and very much else. The Stadtholder of the United Provinces having allied himself with Great Britain, Dumouriez entered Holland, and Pichegru marched the armies of France over its frozen waters in the terrible winter of 1794-5. To protect the trade with India from the French, Admiral Elphinstone thereupon took possession of the Cape, which was administered successively by General J.H. Craig, the Earl of Macartney, Sir George Young, and Sir Francis Dundas, for seven prosperous years, until the Treaty of Amiens restored it to the Batavian Republic in February 1803. It was then a territory of 120,000 square miles, reaching from the Cape to a curved line which extended from the mouth of the Buffalo River in Little Namaqualand to the present village of Colesberg. The Great Fish River was the eastern boundary. Now the Christian colonies and settlements of South Africa, enjoying British sovereignty and largely under self-governing institutions, stretch north from the sea, and east and west from ocean to ocean, to the great river Zambesi—the base from which Christian civilisation, by missions and chartered companies, is slowly penetrating the explored wilds of Central Africa up the lake region to the Soudan and Ethiopia.

This less than a century’s progress has been made possible by the expedition of 1806, in which Henry Martyn, almost alone, represented Christianity. After the three years’ respite given by the virtual armistice of Amiens, Napoleon Bonaparte again plunged Europe and the world into war. William Pitt’s last government sent out this naval armament under Sir Home Popham. The 5,000 troops were commanded by Sir David Baird, who had fought and suffered in India when the senior of the future Duke of Wellington. Henry Martyn has told us how the squadron of the sixty-three sail had anchored between Robben Island and the coast. The Dutch Governor, General Jan Willen Janssens, was more worthy of his trust than his predecessor ten years before. He had been compelled to send on a large portion of his force for the defence of Java, soon to fall to Lord Minto, the Governor-General, and had only 2,000 troops left. He had received only a fortnight’s notice of the approach of the British fleet, which was reported by an American vessel. He drilled the colonists, he called French marines to his aid, he organised Malay artillery, he embodied even Hottentot sepoys, and made a reserve and refuge of Hottentot’s Holland, from which he hoped to starve Cape Town, should Baird capture it. Both armies were equal in numbers at least.

All was in vain. On January 8 was fought the battle of Blaauwberg (on the side of Table Bay opposite Cape Town), from the plateau of which the Dutch, having stood the musketry and field pieces, fled at the charge of the bayonet with a loss of 700 men. The British, having dropped 212, marched on Cape Town, halted at Papendorp, and there, on January 10, 1806, were signed the articles of capitulation which have ever since given the Roman-Dutch law to the colony. Sir David Baird and Sir Home Popham soon after received the surrender of Janssens, whose troops were granted all the honours of war in consideration of their gallant conduct. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Lord Castlereagh sacrificed Java to the Dutch, but kept South Africa for Great Britain. The surrender of the former, in the midst of the splendid successes of Sir Stamford Raffles, is ascribed to that minister’s ignorance of geography. He knew equally little of the Cape, which he kept, beyond its importance to India, but God has overruled all that for the good of Equatorial, as well as South, Africa, as, thanks to David Livingstone, vacillating statesmen have begun to see.

Henry Martyn’s Journal thus describes the battle and the battlefield.

1806, January.—Ten o’clock. When I got up, the army had left the shore, except the Company’s troops, who remained to guard the landing-place; but soon after seven a most tremendous fire of artillery began behind a mountain abreast of the ship; it seemed as if the mountain itself were torn by intestine convulsions. The smoke rose from a lesser eminence on the right of the hill, and on the top of it troops were seen rushing down the farther declivity; then came such a long drawn fire of musketry, that I could not have conceived anything like it. We all shuddered at considering what a multitude of souls must be passing into eternity. The poor ladies were in a dreadful condition, every peal seemed to go through their hearts; I have just been endeavouring to do what I can to keep up their spirits. The sound is now retiring, and the enemy are seen retreating along the low ground on the right towards the town. Soon after writing this I went ashore and saw M’K., &c., and Cecil, with whom I had an agreeable conversation on Divine things. The cadets of our ship had erected a little shed made of bushes and straw, and here, at their desire, I partook of their cheer. Three Highlanders came to the lines just as I arrived, all wounded in the hand. In consequence of their report of the number of the wounded, a party of East India troops, with slings and barrows, attended by a body of cadets with arms, under Major Lumsden, were ordered to march to the field of battle.

I attached myself to these, and marched six miles through the soft burning sand with them. The first we came to was a Highlander, who had been shot through the thigh, and had walked some way from the field and lay spent under some bushes. He was taken care of and we went on, and passed the whole of the larger hill without seeing anything. The ground then opened into a most extensive plain, which extended from the sea to the blue mountains at a great distance on the east. On the right was the little hill, to which we were attracted by seeing some English soldiers; we found that they were some wounded men of the 24th. They had all been taken care of by the surgeons of the Staff. Three were mortally wounded. One, who was shot through the lungs, was spitting blood, and yet very sensible. The surgeon desired me to spread a great-coat over him as they left him; as I did this, I talked to him a little of the blessed Gospel, and begged him to cry for mercy through Jesus Christ. The poor man feebly turned his head in some surprise, but took no further notice. I was sorry to be obliged to leave him and go on after the troops, from whom I was not allowed to be absent, out of a regard to my safety. On the top of the little hill lay Captain F., of the grenadiers of the same regiment, dead, shot by a ball entering his neck and passing into his head. I shuddered with horror at the sight; his face and bosom were covered with thick blood, and his limbs rigid and contracted as if he had died in great agony. Near him were several others dead, picked off by the riflemen of the enemy. We then descended into the plain where the two armies had been drawn up.

A marine of the Belliqueuse gave me a full account of the position of the armies and particulars of the battle. We soon met with some of the 59th, one a corporal, who often joins us in singing, and who gave the pleasing intelligence that the regiment had escaped unhurt, except Captain McPherson. In the rear of the enemy’s army there were some farm-houses, which we had converted into a receptacle for the sick, and in which there were already two hundred, chiefly English, with a few of the enemy. Here I entered, and found that six officers were wounded; but as the surgeon said they should not be disturbed, I did not go in, especially as they were not dangerously wounded. In one room I found a Dutch captain wounded, with whom I had a good deal of conversation in French. After a few questions about the army and the Cape, I could not help inquiring about Dr. Vanderkemp; he said he had seen him, but believed he was not at the Cape, nor knew how I might hear of him. The spectacle at these houses was horrid. The wounded soldiers lay ranged within and without covered with blood and gore. While the India troops remained here, I walked out into the field of battle with the surgeon. On the right wing, where they had been attacked by the Highland regiment, the dead and wounded seemed to have been strewed in great numbers, from the knapsacks, &c. Some of them were still remaining; with a Frenchman whom I found amongst them I had some conversation. All whom we approached cried out instantly for water. One poor Hottentot I asked about Dr. Vanderkemp, I saw by his manner that he knew him; he lay with extraordinary patience under his wound on the burning sand; I did what I could to make his position comfortable, and laid near him some bread, which I found on the ground. Another Hottentot lay struggling with his mouth in the dust, and the blood flowing out of it, cursing the Dutch in English, in the most horrid language; I told him he should rather forgive them, and asked him about God, and after telling him of the Gospel, begged he would pray to Jesus Christ; but he did not attend. While the surgeon went back to get his instrument in hopes of saving the man’s life, a Highland soldier came up, and asked me in a rough tone, ‘Who are you?’ I told him, ‘An Englishman;’ he said, ‘No, no, you are French,’ and was going to present his musket. As I saw he was rather intoxicated, and might in mere wantonness fire, I went up to him and told him that if he liked he might take me prisoner to the English army, but that I was certainly an English clergyman. The man was pacified at last. The surgeon on his return found the thigh bone of the poor Hottentot broken, and therefore left him to die. After this I found an opportunity of retiring, and lay down among the bushes, and lifted up my soul to God. I cast my eyes over the plain which a few hours before had been the scene of bloodshed and death, and mourned over the dreadful effects of sin. How reviving to my thoughts were the blue mountains on the east, where I conceived the missionaries labouring to spread the Gospel of peace and love.

At sunrise on the 10th, a gun from the commodore’s ship was instantly answered by all the men-of-war, as the British flag was seen flying on the Dutch fort. The future historian of the Christianisation of Africa will not fail to put in the forefront, at the same time, the scene of Henry Martyn, on his knees, taking possession of the land, and of all lands, for Christ.

I could find it more agreeable to my own feelings to go and weep with the relatives of the men whom the English have killed, than to rejoice at the laurels they have won. I had a happy season in prayer. No outward scene seemed to have power to distract my thoughts. I prayed that the capture of the Cape might be ordered to the advancement of Christ’s kingdom; and that England, while she sent the thunder of her arms to the distant regions of the globe, might not remain proud and ungodly at home; but might show herself great indeed, by sending forth the ministers of her Church to diffuse the gospel of peace.

Thus on Africa, as on South America, North India, Persia and Turkey, is written the name of Henry Martyn.

The previous government of the Cape by the British, under Sir Francis Dundas, had been marked by the arrival, in 1799, of the London Missionary Society’s agents, Dr. Vanderkemp and Kicherer. With the great chief Ngqika, afterwards at Graaff Reinet and then near Algoa Bay, the quondam Dutch officer, Edinburgh medical student, and aged landed proprietor, giving his all to Christ, had gathered in many converts. Martyn, who had learned to admire Vanderkemp from his books, was even more delighted with the venerable man. Driven by the Boers into Cape Town, the old missionary, and Mr. Reid, his colleague, were found in the midst of their daily services with the Hottentots and Kafirs. In such society, worshipping through the Dutch language, the India chaplain spent the greater part of the five weeks’ detention of the Union. ‘Dear Dr. Vanderkemp gave me a Syriac Testament as a remembrance of him.’ When Martyn and Reid parted, the latter for Algoa Bay, ‘we spoke again of the excellency of the missionary work. The last time I had stood on the shore with a friend speaking on the same subject, was with Lydia, at Marazion.’ In Isaiah, and Leighton, especially his Rules for a Holy Life, the missionary chaplain found comfort and stimulus.

February 5, 1806.—I am born for God only. Christ is nearer to me than father, or mother, or sister,—a nearer relation, a more affectionate friend; and I rejoice to follow Him, and to love Him. Blessed Jesus! Thou art all I want—a forerunner to me in all I ever shall go through, as a Christian, a minister, or a missionary.

February 13.—After breakfast had a solemn season in prayer, with the same impressions as yesterday, from Leighton, and tried to give up myself wholly to God, not only to be resigned solely to His will, but to seek my only pleasure from it, to depart altogether from the world, and be exactly the same in happiness, whether painful or pleasing dispensations were appointed me: I endeavoured to realise again the truth, that suffering was my appointed portion, and that it became me to expect it as my daily lot. Yet after all, I was ready to cry out, what an unfortunate creature I am, the child of sorrow and care; from my infancy I have met with nothing but contradiction, but I always solaced myself that one day it would be better, and I should find myself comfortably settled in the enjoyment of domestic pleasures, whereas, after all the wearying labours of school and college, I am at last cut off from all my friends, and comforts, and dearest hopes, without being permitted even to hope for them any more. As I walked the deck, I found that the conversation of others, and my own gloomy surmises of my future trials, affected me far less with vexation, than they formerly did, merely from this, that I took it as my portion from God, all whose dispensations I am bound to consider and receive as the fruits of infinite wisdom and love towards me. I felt, therefore, very quiet, and was manifestly strengthened from above with might in my inner man; therefore, without any joy, without any pleasant considerations to balance my present sickness and gloom, I was contented from the reflection, that it was God who did it. I pray that this may be my state—neither to be anxious to escape from this stormy sea that was round the Cape, nor to change the tedious scene of the ship for Madras, nor to leave this world merely to get rid of the troubles of it, but to glorify God where I am, and where He puts me, and to take each day as an important trust for Him, in which I have much to do both in suffering and acting. Employed in collecting from the New Testament all the passages that refer to our walking in Christ.

February 18.—Completed my twenty-fifth year. Let me recollect it to my own shame, and be warned by it, to spend my future years to a better purpose; unless this be the case, it is of very little consequence to notice when such a person came into the world. Passed much of the morning in prayer, but could not succeed at all in getting an humble and contrite spirit; my pride and self-esteem seemed unconquerable. Wrote sermon with my mind impressed with the necessity of diligence: had the usual service, and talked much to a sick man. Read Hindustani.

February 27.—Rose once more after a sleepless night, and had in consequence a peevish temper to contend with. Had a comfortable and fervent season of prayer, in the morning, while interceding for the heathen from some of the chapters in Isaiah. How striking did those words Isaiah xlii. 8 appear to me, ‘I am the Lord, that is My name; and My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images.’ Lord, is not Thy praise given to graven images in India? Here, then, is Thine own express word that it shall not continue to be so. And how easy is it for the mighty God that created the heavens and stretched them out, that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein; to effect His purposes in a moment. What is caste? What are inveterate prejudices, and civil power, and priestly bigotry, when once the Lord shall set to His hand? Who knows whether even the present generation may not see Satan’s throne shaken to its base in India? Learning Hindustani words in the morning; in the afternoon below, and much hurt at the cold reception the men gave me.

March 7.—Endeavoured this morning to consider Christ as the High Priest of my profession. Never do I set myself to understand the nature of my walk in Christ without getting good to my soul. Employed as usual through the day. Heard from M’Kenzie that they are not yet tired with inveighing against my doctrines. They took occasion also to say, from my salary, that ‘Martyn, as well as the rest, can share the plunder of the natives in India; whether it is just or not he does not care.’ This brought back the doubts I formerly had about the lawfulness of receiving anything from the Company. My mind is not yet comfortable about it. I see it, however, my duty to wait in faith and patience, till the Lord shall satisfy my doubts one way or other. I would wish for no species of connection with the East India Company, and notwithstanding the large sums I have borrowed on the credit of my salary, which I shall never be able to repay from any other means, I would wish to become a missionary, dependent on a society; but I know not how to decide. The Lord in mercy keep my soul in peace. Other thoughts have occurred to me since. A man who has unjustly got possession of an estate hires me as a minister to preach to his servants, and pays me a salary: the money wherewith he pays me comes unjustly to him, but justly to me. The Company are the acknowledged proprietors of the country, the ruling power. If I were to refuse to go there, I might, on the same account, refuse to go to France, and preach to the French people or bodyguard of the emperor, because the present monarch who pays me is not the lawful one. If there were a company of Mohammedan merchants or Mohammedan princes in possession of the country, should I hesitate to accept an offer of officiating as chaplain among them, and receiving a salary?

March 14.—Suavissima vita est indies sentire se fieri meliorem. So I can say from former experience more than from present. But oh, it is the ardent desire of my soul to regard all earthly things with indifference, as one who dwells above with God. May I grow in grace; may the grace of God, which bringeth salvation, teach me to become daily more spiritual, more humble, more steadfast in Christ, more meek, more wise, and in all things to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. How shall I attain to greater heavenly-mindedness? Rose refreshed after a good night’s sleep, and wrote on a subject; had much conversation with Mr. B. upon deck; he seemed much surprised when I corrected his notions on religion, but received what I said with great candour. He said there was a minister at Madras, a Dane, with whom Sir D. Baird was well acquainted, who used to speak in the same manner of religion, whose name was Schwartz. My attention was instantly roused at the venerable name, and I eagerly inquired of him all the particulars with which he was acquainted. He had often heard him preach, and Mr. Jænicke had often breakfasted with him; Schwartz, he said, had a very commanding manner, and used to preach extempore in English at Madras; he died very poor. In the afternoon had a service below; much of the evening M’Kenzie passed with me, and prayed.

March 26.—Passed much time before breakfast in sitting on the poop, through utter disinclination to all exertion. Such is the enervating effect of the climate; but after staying some hours learning Hindustani words, 2 Timothy ii. roused me to a bodily exertion. I felt strong in spirit, resolving, if I died under it, to make the body submit to robust exercise; so I walked the deck with great rapidity for an hour and a half. My animal spirits were altered instantly; I felt a happy and joyful desire to brave the enervating effects of India in the service of the blessed Lord Jesus. B. still delirious and dying fast: the first thing he said to me when I visited him this afternoon, was, ‘Mr. Martyn, what will you choose for a kingdom?’ I made no answer to this, but thought of it a good deal afterwards. What would I choose? Why, I do not know that anything would be a heaven to me, but the service of Christ, and the enjoyment of His presence.

In this spirit, coasting Ceylon, and getting his first sight of India at the Danish mission station of Tranquebar, on April 22, 1806, Henry Martyn landed at Madras. To Mr. Hitchins he afterwards wrote:

There was nothing remarkable in this first part of India which I visited; it was by no means so romantic as America. Vast numbers of black people were walking about with no dress but a little about their middle, but no European was to be seen except here and there one in a palanquin. Once I preached at Fort St. George, though the chaplains hardly knew what to make of such sort of preaching; they were, however, not offended. Finding that the people would bear to be addressed plainly, and not really think the worse of a minister for dealing closely with their consciences, they determined, they said, to preach the Gospel as I did; but I fear that one, if not both, has yet to learn what the Gospel is. I breakfasted one day with Sir E. Pellew, the Port Admiral at Madras, and met S. Cole, his captain. I was perfectly delighted to find one with whom I could speak about St. Hilary and Marazion; we spoke of every person, place, and thing we could think of in your neighbourhood.

CHAPTER IV: INDIA AND THE EAST IN THE YEAR 1806

Henry Martyn reached India, and entered on his official duties as chaplain and the work of his heart as missionary to North India, at a time when the Anglo-Indian community had begun to follow society in England, in a reformation of life and manners, and in a corresponding desire to do good to the natives. The evangelical reaction set in motion by the Pietists, Moravians, and Marrow-men, John Wesley and Whitfield, Andrew Fuller and Simeon, John Erskine and the Haldanes, had first affected South India and Madras, where Protestant Christian Missions were just a century old. The Danish-Halle men, led by Ziegenbalg and Schwartz, had found support in the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge from the year 1709. So early as 1716 an East India Company’s chaplain, the Rev. William Stevenson, wrote a remarkable letter to that society,[19] ‘concerning the most effectual way of propagating the Gospel in this (South India) part of the world.’ He urged a union of the several agencies in England, Denmark, and Germany into one common Society for Promoting the Protestant Missions, the formation of colleges in Europe to train missionaries, the raising of an annual income of 3,000l., and the maintenance therewith of a staff of at least eight well-qualified missionaries. By a century and a half he anticipated the proposal of that union which gives strength and charity; the erection of colleges, at Tranquebar and Madras, to train native ministers, catechists, and schoolmasters, and the opening of free schools in every considerable place superintended by the European missionaries on the circle system. Another Madras chaplain, the Rev. George Lewis, was no less friendly and helpful to Ziegenbalg; he was Mr. Stevenson’s predecessor, and wrote in 1712.

In North India—where the casteless races of the hills, corresponding to the Shanars around Cape Comorin, were not discovered till far on in the present century—almost everything was different. By the time that the Evangelical Church directed its attention to Calcutta, the East India Company had become a political, and consequently an intolerant, power. It feared Christian proselytism, and it encouraged Hindu and Mohammedan beliefs and institutions. Whereas, in Madras, it gladly used Schwartz, subsidised the mission with 500 pagodas or 225l. a year, and had always conveyed the missionaries’ freight in its ships free of charge, in Bengal it kept out missionaries, or so treated them with all the rigour of the law against ‘interlopers,’ that William Carey had to begin his career as an indigo planter, and seek protection in Danish Serampore, where he became openly and only a preacher and teacher of Christ. North India, too, with Calcutta and Benares as its two Hindu centres, and Lucknow and Delhi as its two Mohammedan centres, Shiah and Soonni, was, and is, the very citadel of all the non-Christian world. The same Gospel which had proved the power of God to the simple demonolators of the Dravidian south, must be shown to be the wisdom of God to the Koolin of Bengal, the Brahman of Kasi, the fanatical Muslim from Dacca, and ultimately to Peshawur and Cabul, Persia and Arabia. The Himalayan and Gangetic land—from which Buddhism overran Eastern and Southern Asia—must again send forth a missionary message to call Cathay to Christ.

The Christianising of North India began in 1758, the year after the battle of Plassey, when, as Governor, the conqueror, Clive, welcomed his old acquaintance, of the Cuddalore Mission, the Swede Kiernander, to Calcutta, and gave him a rent-free house for eight years. Even Burke was friendly with Clive, writing of him: ‘Lord Clive once thought himself obliged to me for having done what I thought an act of justice towards him;’[20] and it is pleasant thus to be able in any way to link that name with the purely spiritual force which used the Plassey and the Mutiny wars, as it will direct all events, for making India Christ’s. The first church, built in 1715 by the merchants and captains, had been destroyed by a hurricane; the second had been demolished by Suraj-ood-Dowlah, in the siege of Calcutta, two years before, and one of the two chaplains had perished in the Black Hole, while the other was driven away. For the next thirty years the few who went to the chaplains’ church worshipped in a small bungalow in the old fort, where Kiernander opened his first school. By 1771-4 he had formed such a congregation of poor Christians—Portuguese, Roman Catholics, and Bengali converts—that he built and extended the famous Mission Church and School-house, at a cost of 12,000l., received from both his marriages. When, by becoming surety for another, the old man lost his all, and blindness added to his sorrows, he left an English congregation of 147 members, and a Native congregation of 119, half Portuguese or Eurasians, and half Bengali.

Kiernander’s Mission Church was the centre of the religious life of Calcutta and Bengal. Six years after its foundation there came to Calcutta, from Madras, Mr. William Chambers—who had been converted by Schwartz—and John Christian Obeck, who had been one of the catechists of the Apostle of South India. Chambers had not been a year in the capital when he found out Charles Grant, at that time overwhelmed by a domestic sorrow, and brought him to Christ. Grant soon after went to Maldah as Commercial Resident, where he had as his subordinates, George Udny, Ellerton, W. Brown, W. Grant, J. Henry, and Creighton. These men, with their families, Sir Robert Chambers, of the Supreme Court, Mrs. Anne Chambers who was with her sons, Mrs. Chapman, and others less known, formed the nucleus of a Christian community which first supported Thomas as a medical missionary, then welcomed Carey, and, with the assistance of two Governor-Generals, Sir John Shore and Lord Wellesley, changed the tone of Anglo-Indian society. Sir William Jones, too, in his brief career of six years, set an example of all the virtues. Henry Martyn had two predecessors as Evangelical chaplains and missionary philanthropists, the Yorkshire David Brown, and the Scottish Claudius Buchanan.

David Brown, an early friend of Simeon and Fellow of Magdalen College, was recovering from a long illness in 1785, when a letter reached him from London, proposing that he should seek ordination, and in ten days he accompanied Captain Kirkpatrick to Calcutta to superintend the Military Orphan School. The officers of the Bengal Army had unanimously resolved to tax themselves for the removal and prevention of the scandal caused by the number of boys and girls left destitute—no fewer than 500 at that time. This noble school, the blessings of which were soon extended to the white and coloured offspring of non-commissioned officers and soldiers also, was organised at Howrah by Brown, who then was made chaplain to a brigade, and afterwards one of the Fort William or Presidency chaplains. He found the Mission practically non-existent, owing to Kiernander’s losses and old age. To save the buildings from sale by the sheriff, Charles Grant bought them for 10,000 rupees and vested them in himself, Mr. A. Chambers, and Mr. Brown, by a deed providing that they remain appropriated to the sole purposes of religion. Until the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge could send out a minister, David Brown greatly extended the work of Kiernander. At one time it was likely that Henry Martyn would be sent out by Mr. Grant. Under the Church Missionary Society the Mission Church of Calcutta has ever since been identified with all that is best in pure religion and missionary enterprise in the city of Calcutta.

When sending out the Rev. A.T. Clarke, B.A. of Trinity College, Cambridge, who soon after became a chaplain, the Christian Knowledge Society, referring to Schwartz and Germany, fertile in missionaries, declared, ‘It has been the surprise of many, and the lamentation of more, that fortitude thus exemplified should not have inspired some of our own clergy with an emulation to follow and to imitate these champions of the Cross, thus seeking and thus contending to save them who are lost.’ That was in 1789, when the Society and Dr. Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, along with Simeon, Wilberforce, and the other Clapham men, had before it, officially, the request of Charles Grant, Chambers and Brown to send out eight English missionaries on 350l. a year each, to study at Benares and attack Hinduism in its very centre. Not till 1817 was the first Church of England missionary, as such, the Rev. William Greenwood, to settle in Ceylon and then in Bengal. Even he became rather an additional chaplain to the invalid soldiers at Chunar.

After a career not unlike that of John Newton, who first directed his attention to India, Claudius Buchanan, whom his father had intended to educate for the ministry of the Church of Scotland, wandered to London, was sent to Queen’s College, Cambridge, by Mr. Thornton of Clapham; there came under Simeon’s influence, and was appointed to Bengal as a chaplain by Mr. Grant. That was in 1796. For the next ten years in Barrackpore and Calcutta as the trusted chaplain of Lord Wellesley, by his researches in South India, by his promotion of Bible translation, and by the interest in the Christianising of India which his generous prizes excited in the Universities and Churches of England and Scotland, Dr. Claudius Buchanan was the foremost ecclesiastic in the East. He at once gave an impulse to the silent revolution which David Brown began and the Serampore missionaries carried on. His Christian statesmanship commended him to all the authorities, and soon the new Cathedral of St. John, which Warren Hastings had erected to supersede the old Bungalow Church, became filled with an attentive and devout congregation, as well as the mission church. These two men and William Carey formed the pillars of the College of Fort William, by which Lord Wellesley not only educated the young civilians and military officers in the Oriental languages, and in their duties to the natives, but developed a high ideal of public life and personal morality. Such was the growth of Christian feeling alike in the army and the civil service, and such the sense of duty to the rapidly increasing Eurasian community, as well as to the natives, that by 1803 Claudius Buchanan submitted to the Governor-General, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bishop Porteus, his Thoughts on the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India. It took ten years, covering the whole period of Henry Martyn’s activities and life, from this time for the proposal to be legislatively carried out in the East India Company’s Charter of 1813.

Practically—except in Maldah residency during the influence of Grant, Udny, and Carey at the end of last century—the reformation was confined to Calcutta, as we shall see. It was a young lieutenant of the Company’s army who was the first to draw the attention of the Governor-General, Sir John Shore, in 1794, to the total neglect of religion in Bengal. Lieutenant White wrote that he had been eleven years in the country without having had it in his power to hear the public prayers of the Church above five times. He urged the regular worship of God, the public performance of Divine service, and preaching at all the stations. He proposed ‘additional chaplains to the Company’s complement for considerable places which now have none to officiate. Unless places were erected at the different stations for assembling to Divine service, it must be impossible for chaplains even to be able to do their duty, and to assemble the people together.’ The letter delighted the Governor-General, who said of it to David Brown, ‘I shall certainly recommend places to be made at the stations, and shall desire the General who is going up the country to take this matter in charge, and to fix on spots where chapels shall be erected.’ Nothing was done in consequence of this, however. It was left to Martyn, and the other chaplains who were in earnest, to find or create covered places for worship at the great military stations. Claudius Buchanan himself could not hold regular services at Barrackpore, close to Calcutta, for want of a church, and that was supplied long after by adapting and consecrating the station theatre!

The figures in Buchanan’s published Memoir on the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment, enable us to estimate exactly the spiritual destitution of the Protestant subjects of the British Government in Asia. Twelve years after Lieutenant White, Sir John Shore, David Brown, and Claudius Buchanan first raised the question, and when Henry Martyn began his ministrations to all classes, there were 676,557 Protestant subjects in India, Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, and Canton, Roman Catholics and Syrian Christians not included. In the three Presidencies of India alone there were 156,057, of whom 7,257 were civil and military officers and inhabitants, 6,000 were the Company’s European troops, 19,800 were the King’s troops, 110,000 were Eurasians, and 13,000 were ‘native Protestant Christians at Tanjore.’ In Bengal alone—that is, North India—there were fifty stations, thirty-one civil and nineteen military, many of which had been ‘without the offices of religion for twenty years past, though at each there reside generally a judge, a collector, a commercial resident, with families, together with their assistants and families, and a surgeon;’ also indigo planters, tradesmen, and other European inhabitants and the alarmingly large number of Eurasians. In Bengal alone there were 13,299 European Protestants, of whom 2,467 were civil servants and military officers; of the whole 13,299, ‘a tenth part do not return to England,’ and desire Christian education and confirmation for their children. Yet ‘at present there are but three churches in India, the chief of which was aided in construction by Hindu contribution.’ The India Journals and Letters of Martyn must be read in the light of all this.

It was thus that the successive generations of soldiers and civilians who won for Christian England its Indian Empire in the century from Clive to Wellesley, Hastings, and Dalhousie, were de-Christianised. Not till the close of the Mutiny war in 1858 did John Lawrence, first as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab and then as Viceroy, and Sir Robert Montgomery as Lieutenant-Governor, lead the Queen’s Government to do its duty, by erecting, or helping Christians to erect, a chapel in every station up to Peshawur and Burma—that, to use Buchanan’s language in 1806, ‘the English soldiers and our countrymen of all descriptions, after long absence from a Christian country, may recognise a church.’ Including Ceylon, Buchanan’s scheme proposed an annual expenditure of 144,000l. for four dioceses, with 50 English chaplains and 100 native curates, 200 schoolmasters and 4 colleges to train both Europeans and natives for the ministry; of this, Parliament to give 100,000l. The ecclesiastical establishment of India—without Ceylon, but including Church of Scotland chaplains, and grants to Wesleyans and Roman Catholics—now costs India itself 160,000l. a year, while the annual value of the lands devoted to the non-Christian cults is many millions sterling. With all this, and the aid of the Additional Clergy and Anglo-Indian Evangelisation Societies, and of the missionaries to the natives, Great Britain does not meet the spiritual wants of the now enormous number and scattered communities of Christian soldiers and residents in its Indian Empire.

Henry Martyn went out to India at a time when the government of India had been temporarily entrusted to one of the only three or four incompetent and unworthy men who have held the high office of Governor-General. Sir George Barlow was a Bengal civilian of the old type, whom Lord Wellesley had found so zealous and useful in matters of routine that he had recommended him as provisional Governor-General. But the moment that that proconsul had seated the East India Company on the throne of the Great Mogul, as has been said, and Lord Cornwallis, who had been hurried out a second time to undo his magnificent and just policy, had died at Ghazipore, Sir George Barlow showed the most disastrous zeal in opposition to all his former convictions. By withholding from Sindia the lamentable despatch of September 19, 1805, which Lord Cornwallis had signed when the unconsciousness of death had already weakened his efficiency, Lord Lake gave the civil authorities a final opportunity to consider their ways. But Barlow’s stupidity—now clothed with the almost dictator’s power of the highest office under the British Crown, as it was in those days—deliberately declared it to be his desire, not only to fix the limit of our empire at the Jumna, a river fordable by an enemy at all times, but to promote general anarchy beyond that frontier as the best security for British peace within it. The peace of Southern Asia and the good of its peoples were postponed for years, till, with difficulty, the Marquis of Hastings restored the empire to the position in which Lord Wellesley had left it. Sir George Barlow is responsible for the twelve years’ anarchy of British India, from 1805 to 1817. His administration, which became such a failure that he was removed to Madras, and was from even that province recalled, must rank as a blot on the otherwise unbroken splendour and benevolence to the subject races of the government of South Asia in the century and a half from Clive to Lord Lansdowne.

The man who, from dull stolidity more than from Macchiavellian craft, thus again plunged half India into a series of wars by chief upon chief and creed upon creed, was no less guilty of intolerance to Christianity within the Company’s territories. On the one hand, in opposition to the views of Lord Wellesley, and even of the Court of Directors led by Charles Grant, he made the Company’s government the direct manager of the Poori temple of Jaganath and its dancing girls; on the other, he would have banished the Serampore and all Christian missionaries from the country, but for the courageous opposition of the little Governor of that Danish settlement. All too late he was relieved by Lord Minto, whom the Brahmanised officials of 1807 to 1810 used for a final and futile effort to crush Christianity out of India, to the indignation of Henry Martyn, whose language in his Journal is not more unmeasured than the intolerance deserves. But in his purely foreign policy Lord Minto proved that he had not held the office of President of the Board of Control in vain. He once more asserted the only reason for the existence of a foreign power in India, ‘the suppression of intestine disorder,’ clearing Bundelkhund of robber chiefs and military strongholds. Surrounded and assisted by the brilliant civilians and military officers whom Wellesley and Carey had trained—men like Mountstuart Elphinstone, Metcalfe and Malcolm—Lord Minto proved equal to the strain which the designs of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Treaty of Tilsit put upon our infant empire in the East. He sent Metcalfe to Lahore, and confined the dangerous power of Ranjeet Singh to the north of the Sutlej. He despatched Elphinstone to Cabul, introducing the wise policy which has converted Afghanistan into a friendly subsidised State; and through Malcolm he opened Persia to English influence, paving the way for the embassy of Wellesley’s friend, Sir Gore Ouseley, and—unconsciously—for the kindly reception of Henry Martyn.

It was on April 22, 1806, at sunrise, that the young chaplain landed from the surf-boat on the sands of Madras. His experience at San Salvador had prepared him for the scene, and even for the crowds of dark natives, though not for ‘the elegance of their manners.’ ‘I felt a solemn sort of melancholy at the sight of such multitudes of idolators. While the turbaned Asiatics waited upon us at dinner, about a dozen of them, I could not help feeling as if we had got into their places.’ He visited the native suburb in which his Hindustani-speaking servants dwelt, and was depressed by its ‘appearance of wretchedness.’ His soul was filled with the zeal of the Old Testament prophets against idolatry, the first sight of which—of men, women, and children, mad upon their idols—produces an impression which he does not exaggerate: ‘I fancy the frown of God to be visible.’ He lost not a day in commending his Master to the people. ‘Had a good deal of conversation with a Rajpoot about religion, and told him of the Gospel.’ The young natives pressed upon the new-comer as usual. ‘Rose early, but could not enjoy morning meditations in my walk, as the young men would attach themselves to me.’

He was much in the society of the Rev. Dr. Kerr[21] and the other Madras chaplains; one of these was about to proceed to Seringapatam, where Martyn urged him to ‘devote himself to the work of preaching to the natives.’ This was ever foremost in his thoughts. He spent days in obtaining from Dr. Kerr ‘a vast deal of information about all the chaplains and missionaries in the country, which he promised to put in writing for me.’ Schwartz was not then dead ten years, and Dr. Kerr, who had known him and Guericke well, gave his eager listener many details of the great missionary.

Felt excessively delighted with accounts of a very late date from Bengal, describing the labours of the missionaries, and was rather agitated at the confusion of interesting thoughts that crowded upon me; but I reasoned, Why thus? God may never honour you with a missionary commission; you must expect to leave the field, and bid adieu to the world and all its concerns.

On his first Sunday in India, April 27, 1806, Henry Martyn assisted in the service in the church at Fort St. George, and preached from Luke x. 41, 42, ‘One thing is needful.’

There was much attention, and Lord William sent to Dr. Kerr afterwards to request a copy of the sermon; but I believe it was generally thought too severe. After dinner, went to Black Town to Mr. Loveless’s chapel. I sat in the air at the door enjoying the blessed sound of the Gospel on an Indian shore, and joining with much comfort in the song of divine praise. With young Torriano I had some conversation respecting his entering the ministry, as he spoke the Malabar tongue fluently. Walked home at night enjoying the presence of God.

April 28.—This morning, at breakfast, Sir E. Pellew came in and said: ‘Upon my word, Mr. Martyn, you gave us a good trimming yesterday.’ As this was before a large company, and I was taken by surprise, I knew not what to say. Passed most of the day in transcribing the sermon. There was nothing very awakening in it. About five in the evening I walked to Dr. Kerr’s, and found my way across the fields, which much resembled those near Cambridge; I stopped some time to take a view of the men drawing ‘toddy’ from the tree, and their manner of ploughing.

April 30.—Breakfasted at Sir E. Pellew’s with Captain S. Cole of the Culloden. I had a good deal of conversation about our friends at St. Hilary and Marazion. Continued at home the rest of the day transcribing sermon, and reading Zechariah. In the evening drove with Dr. Kerr to Mr. Faulkner’s, the Persian translator, five or six miles in the country. We had some useful conversation about the languages. On my return walked by moonlight in the grounds reflecting on the mission. My soul was at first sore tried by desponding thoughts: but God wonderfully assisted me to trust Him for the wisdom of His dispensations. Truly, therefore, will I say again, ‘Who art thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.’ How easy for God to do it! and it shall be done in good time: and even if I never should see a native converted, God may design by my patience and continuance in the work to encourage future missionaries. But what surprises me is the change of views I have here from what I had in England.—There, my heart expanded with hope and joy at the prospect of the speedy conversion of the heathen! but here, the sight of the apparent impossibility requires a strong faith to support the spirits.

The ‘Lord William’ of the Journal is the Governor of Madras, Lord William Bentinck, whom, at the beginning of his Indian career, it is interesting to find thus pleasantly brought into contact with Henry Martyn—just as he became the fast friend of Alexander Duff, at the close of his long and beneficent services to his country and to humanity. In two months thereafter the Vellore Mutiny was to break out, through no fault of his, and he was to be recalled by an act of injustice for which George Canning and the Court of Directors atoned twenty years after by appointing him Governor-General.

After a fortnight off Madras, the Union once more set sail under the convoy of the Victor sloop-of-war. Every moment the young scholar had sought to add to his knowledge of Hindustani and Persian. He changed his first native servant for one who could speak Hindustani. He drove with Dr. Kerr to Mr. Faulkner’s, the Persian translator to Government. ‘We had some useful conversation about the languages.’ On the voyage to Calcutta, he was ‘employed in learning Bengali. Passed the afternoon on the poop reading Sale’s Al Coran.’ Only missionary thoughts and aspirations ruled his mind, now despairing of his own fitness; now refreshed as he turned from the Church Missionary Society’s reports to the evangelical prophecies of Malachi; again praying for the young missionaries of the London Society as he passed Vizagapatam, and for ‘poor India’ as he came in sight of the Jaganath pagoda, ‘much resembling in appearance Roche Rock in Cornwall ... the scene presented another specimen of that tremendous gloom with which the devil has overspread the land.’ After taking a pilot on board in Balasore Roads, where Carey had first landed, the ship was driven out to sea by a north-wester, and Henry Martyn suffered from his first sunstroke. In three days she anchored in the Hoogli, above Culpee, and on May 13 bumped on that dreaded shoal, the James and Mary. ‘The captain considered the vessel as lost. Retired as soon as possible for prayer, and found my soul in peace at the prospect of death.’ She floated off, exchanging most of the treasure into a tender which lay becalmed off the Garden Reach suburb, then ‘very beautiful.’

Henry Martyn landed at Calcutta in the height of the hot season, on May 16, 1806. Claudius Buchanan had passed him at the mouth of the Hoogli, setting out on the tour of the coasts of India, which resulted in the Christian Researches. David Brown was in his country retreat at Aldeen, near Serampore.

The man whom, next to his own colleagues, he first sought out was the quondam shoemaker of Hackleton, and poor Baptist preacher of Moulton, the Bengali missionary to whose success Charles Simeon had pointed him when fresh from the triumph of Senior Wrangler; the apostle then forty-five years of age, who was busy with the duties of Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi, in the College of Fort William, that he might have the Bible translated into all the languages of Asia, and preached in all the villages of North India.

1806, May 16.—Went ashore at daylight this morning, and with some difficulty found Carey: Messrs. Brown and Buchanan being both absent from Calcutta. With him I breakfasted, joined with him in worship, which was in Bengali for the advantage of a few servants, who sat, however, perfectly unmoved. I could not help contrasting them with the slaves and Hottentots at Cape Town, whose hearts seemed to burn within them. After breakfast Carey began to translate, with a Pandit, from a Sanskrit manuscript. Presently after, Dr. Taylor came in. I had engaged a boat to go to Serampore, when a letter from Mr. Brown found me out, and directed me to his house in the town, where I spent the rest of the day in solitude, and more comfortably and profitably than any time past. I enjoyed several solemn seasons in prayer, and more lively impressions from God’s Word. I felt elevated above those distressing fears and distractions which pride and worldliness engender in the mind. Employed at times in writing to Mr. Simeon, Mr. Brown’s moonshi; a Brahmin of the name of B. Roy came in and disputed with me two hours about the Gospel. I was really surprised at him; he spoke English very well and possessed more acuteness, good sense, moderation, and acquaintance with the Scriptures than I could conceive to be found in an Indian. He spoke with uncommon energy and eloquence, intending to show that Christianity and Hinduism did not materially differ. He asked me to explain my system, and adduce the proofs of it from the Bible, which he said he believed was the Word of God. When I asked him about his idolatry, he asked in turn what I had to say to our worshipping Christ. This led to inquiries about the Trinity, which, after hearing what I had to say, he observed was actually the Hindu notion. I explained several things about the Jews and the Old Testament, about which he wanted information, with all which he was amazingly pleased. I feel much encouraged by this to go to instruct them. I see that they are a religious people, as St. Paul called the Athenians, and my heart almost springs at the thought that the time is ripening for the fulness of the Gentiles to come in.

May 17.—A day more unprofitable than the foregoing; the depravity of my heart, as it is in its natural frame, appeared to me to-day almost unconquerable. I could not, however long in prayer, keep the presence of God, or the power of the world to come, in my mind at all. It sunk down to its most lukewarm state, and continued in general so, in spite of my endeavours. Oh, how I need a deep heartrending work of the Spirit upon myself, before I shall save myself, or them that hear me! What I hear about my future destination has proved a trial to me to-day. My dear brethren, Brown and Buchanan, wish to keep me here, as I expected, and the Governor accedes to their wishes. I have a great many reasons for not liking this; I almost think that to be prevented going among the heathen as a missionary would break my heart. Whether it be self-will or aught else, I cannot yet rightly ascertain. At all events I must learn submission to everything. In the multitude of my thoughts Thy comforts delight my soul. I have been running the hurried round of thought without God. I have forgotten that He ordereth everything. I have been bearing the burden of my cares myself, instead of casting them all upon Him. Mr. Brown came in to-day from Serampore, and gave me directions how to proceed; continued at home writing to E. In the afternoon went on board, but without being able to get my things away. Much of the rest of the day passed in conversation with Mr. Brown. I feel pressed in spirit to do something for God. Everybody is diligent, but I am idle; all employed in their proper work, but I tossed in uncertainty; I want nothing but grace; I want to be perfectly holy, and to save myself and those that hear me. I have hitherto lived to little purpose, more like a clod than a servant of God; now let me burn out for God.

CHAPTER V: CALCUTTA AND SERAMPORE, 1806

‘Now let me burn out for God!’ Such were the words with which Henry Martyn began his ministry to natives and Europeans in North India, as in the secrecy of prayer he reviewed his first two days in Calcutta. Chaplain though he was, officially, at the most intolerant time of the East India Company’s administration, he was above all things a missionary. Charles Simeon had chosen him, and Charles Grant had sent him out, for this as well as his purely professional duty, and it never occurred to him that he could be anything else. He burned to bring all men to the same peace with God and service to Him which he himself had for seven years enjoyed. We find him recording his great delight, now at an extract sent to him from the East India Company’s Charter, doubtless the old one from William III., ‘authorising and even requiring me to teach the natives,’ and again on receiving a letter from Corrie, ‘exulting with thankfulness and joy that Dr. Kerr was preaching the Gospel. Eight such chaplains in India! this is precious news indeed.’ Even up to the present time no Christian in India has ever recognised so fully, or carried out in a brief time so unrestingly, his duty to natives and Europeans alike as sinners to be saved by Jesus Christ alone.

Henry Martyn’s first Sunday in Calcutta was spent in worship in St. Johns, the ‘new church,’ when Mr. Jefferies read one part and Mr. Limerick another of the service, and Mr. Brown preached. Midday was spent with ‘a pious family where we had some agreeable and religious conversation, but their wish to keep me from the work of the mission and retain me at Calcutta was carried farther than mere civility, and showed an extraordinary unconcern for the souls of the poor heathens.’ In the evening, though unwell with a cold and sore throat, he ventured to read the service in the mission or old church of Kiernander. He was there ‘agreeably surprised at the number, attention, and apparent liveliness of the audience. Most of the young ministers that I know would rejoice to come from England if they knew how attractive every circumstance is respecting the church.’ Next day he was presented at the levée of Sir George Barlow, acting Governor-General, ‘who, after one or two trifling questions, passed on.’ He then spent some time in the College of Fort William, where he was shown Tipoo’s library, and one of the Mohammedan professors—a colleague of Carey—chanted the Koran. Thence he was rowed with the tide, in an hour and a half, sixteen miles up the Hoogli to Aldeen, the house of Rev. David Brown in the suburb of Serampore, which became his home in Lower Bengal. On the next two Sundays he preached in the old church of Calcutta, and in the new church ‘officiated at the Sacrament with Mr. Limerick.’ It was on June 8 that he preached in the new church, for the first time, his famous sermon from 1 Cor. i. 23, 24, on ‘Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.’

This is his own account of the immediate result:

1806, June 8.—The sermon excited no small ferment; however, after some looks of surprise and whispering, the congregation became attentive and serious. I knew what I was to be on my guard against, and therefore, that I might not have my mind full of idle thoughts about the opinions of men, I prayed both before and after, that the Word might be for the conversion of souls, and that I might feel indifferent, except on this score.

We cannot describe the sermon, as it was published after his death, and again in 1862, more correctly than by comparing it to one of Mr. Spurgeon’s, save that, in style, it is a little more academic and a little less Saxon or homely. But never before had the high officials and prosperous residents of Calcutta, who attended the church which had become ‘fashionable’ since the Marquess Wellesley set the example of regular attendance, heard the evangel preached. The chaplains had been and were of the Arian and Pelagian type common in the Church till a later period. They at once commenced an assault on their young colleague and on the doctrines by which Luther and Calvin had reformed the Churches of Christendom. This was the conclusion of the hated sermon:

There is, in every congregation, a large proportion of Jews and Greeks. There are persons who resemble the Jews in self-righteousness; who, after hearing the doctrines of grace insisted on for years, yet see no occasion at all for changing the ground of their hopes. They seek righteousness ‘not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law: for they stumble at that stumbling-stone’ (Rom. ix. 32); or, perhaps, after going a little way in the profession of the Gospel, they take offence at the rigour of the practice which we require, as if the Gospel did not enjoin it. ‘This is a hard saying,’ they complain; ‘who can hear it?’ (John vi. 60), and thus resemble those who first made the complaint, who ‘went back and walked no more with Him.’

Others come to carp and to criticise. While heretics who deny the Lord that bought them, open infidels, professed atheists, grossly wicked men, are considered as entitled to candour, liberality, and respect, they are pleased to make serious professors of the Gospel exclusively objects of contempt, and set down their discourses on the mysteries of faith as idle and senseless jargon. Alas! how miserably dark and perverse must they be who think thus of that Gospel which unites all the power and wisdom of God in it. After God has arranged all the parts of His plan, so as to make it the best which in His wisdom could be devised for the restoration of man, how pitiable their stupidity and ignorance to whom it is foolishness! And, let us add, how miserable will be their end! because they not only are condemned already, and the wrath of God abideth on them, but they incur tenfold danger: they not only remain without a remedy to their maladies, but have the guilt of rejecting it when offered to them. This is their danger, that there is always a stumbling-block in the way: the further they go, the nearer are they to their fall. They are always exposed to sudden, unexpected destruction. They cannot foresee one moment whether they shall stand or fall the next; and when they do fall they fall at once without warning. Their feet shall slide in due time. Just shame is it to the sons of men, that He whose delight it was to do them good, and who so loved them as to shed His blood for them, should have so many in the world to despise and reject His offers; but thus is the ancient Scripture fulfilled—‘The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God’ (1 Cor. ii. 14).

Tremble at your state, all ye that from self-righteousness, or pride, or unwillingness to follow Him in the regeneration, disregard Christ! Nothing keeps you one moment from perdition but the mere sovereign pleasure of God. Yet suppose not that we take pleasure in contradicting your natural sentiments on religion, or in giving pain by forcing offensive truths upon your attention—no! as the ministers of joy and peace we rise up at the command of God, to preach Christ crucified to you all. He died for His bitterest enemies: therefore, though ye have been Jews or Greeks, self-righteous, ignorant, or profane—though ye have presumed to call His truths in question, treated the Bible with contempt, or even chosen to prefer an idol to the Saviour—yet return, at length, before you die, and God is willing to forgive you.

How happy is the condition of those who obey the call of the Gospel. Their hope being placed on that way of salvation which is the power and wisdom of God, on what a broad, firm basis doth it rest! Heaven and earth may pass away, though much of the power and wisdom of God was employed in erecting that fabric; but the power and wisdom themselves of God must be cut off from His immutable essence, and pass away, before one tittle of your hope can fail. Then rejoice, ye children of Wisdom, by whom she is justified. Happy are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear; and the things which God hath hidden from the wise and prudent, He hath revealed unto you. Ye were righteous in your own esteem; but ye ‘count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord.’ Then be not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, ‘which is the power of God unto salvation unto every one that believeth’; but continue to display its efficacy by the holiness of your lives, and live rejoicing in hope of the glory of God.

The opposition of the officers and many of the troops on board the transport had made the preacher familiar with attack and misrepresentation, but not less faithful in expounding the Gospel of the grace of God as he himself had received it to his joy, and for his service to the death. But the ministrations of David Brown for some years might have been expected to have made the civilians and merchants of Calcutta more tolerant, if not more intelligent. They were, however, incited or led by the two other chaplains thus:

1806, June 16.—Heard that Dr. Ward had made an intemperate attack upon me yesterday at the new church, and upon all the doctrines of the Gospel. I felt like the rest, disposed to be entertained at it; but I knew it to be wrong, and therefore found it far sweeter to retire and pray, with my mind fixed upon the more awful things of another world.

June 22.—Attended at the new church, and heard Mr. Jefferies on the evidences of Christianity. I had laboured much in prayer in the morning that God would be pleased to keep my heart during the service from thinking about men, and I could say as I was going, ‘I will go up to Thy house in the multitude of Thy mercies, and in Thy fear will I worship toward Thy holy temple.’ In public worship I was rather more heavenly-minded than on former occasions, yet still vain and wandering. At night preached on John x. 11: ‘I am the good shepherd;’ there was great attention. Yet felt a little dejected afterwards, as if I always preached without doing good.

July 6.—Laboured to have my mind impressed with holy things, particularly because I expected to have a personal attack from the pulpit. Mr. Limerick preached from 2 Pet. i. 13, and spoke with sufficient plainness against me and my doctrines. Called them inconsistent, extravagant, and absurd. He drew a vast variety of false inferences from the doctrines, and thence argued against the doctrines themselves. To say that repentance is the gift of God was to induce men to sit still and wait for God. To teach that Nature was wholly corrupt was to lead men to despair; that men thinking the righteousness of Christ sufficient to justify, will account it unnecessary to have any of their own: this last assertion moved me considerably, and I started at hearing such downright heresy. He spoke of me as one of those who understand neither what they say nor whereof they affirm, and as speaking only to gratify self-sufficiency, pride, and uncharitableness. I rejoiced at having the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper afterwards, as the solemnities of that blessed ordinance sweetly tended to soothe the asperities and dissipate the contempt which was rising; and I think I administered the cup to —— and —— with sincere good-will. At night I preached on John iv. 10, at the mission church, and, blessed be God! with an enlarged heart. I saw —— in tears, and that encouraged me to hope that perhaps some were savingly affected, but I feel no desire except that my God should be glorified. If any are awakened at hearing me, let me not hear of it if I should glory.

August 24.—At the new church, Mr. Jefferies preached. I preached in the evening on Matt. xi. 28, without much heart, yet the people as attentive as possible.

August 25.—Called on Mr. Limerick and Mr. Birch; with the latter I had a good deal of conversation on the practicability of establishing schools, and uniting in a society. An officer who was there took upon him to call in question the lawfulness of interfering with the religion of the natives, and said that at Delhi the Christians were some of the worst people there. I was glad at the prospect of meeting with these Christians. The Lord enabled me to speak boldly to the man, and to silence him. From thence I went to the Governor-General’s levée, and received great attention from him, as, indeed, from most others here. Perhaps it is a snare of Satan to stop my mouth, and make me unwilling to preach faithfully to them. The Lord have mercy, and quicken me to diligence.

August 26.—At night Marshman came, and our conversation was very refreshing and profitable. Truly the love of God is the happiness of the soul! My soul felt much sweetness at this thought, and breathed after God. At midnight Marshman came to the pagoda, and awakened me with the information that Sir G. Barlow had sent word to Carey not to disperse any more tracts nor send out more native brethren, or in any way interfere with the prejudices of the natives. We did not know what to make of this; the subject so excited me that I was again deprived of necessary sleep.

August 28.—Enjoyed much comfort in my soul this morning, and ardour for my work, but afterwards consciousness of indolence and unprofitableness made me uneasy. In the evening Mr. Marshman, Ward, Moore, and Rowe came up and talked with us on the Governor’s prohibition of preaching the Gospel, &c. Mr. Brown’s advice was full of wisdom, and weighed with them all. I was exceedingly excited, and spoke with vehemence against the measures of government, which afterwards filled me justly with shame.

The earnestness of the young chaplain was such that ‘the people of Calcutta,’ or all the Evangelicals, joined even by the Baptist missionaries at Serampore, gave him no rest that he might consent to become minister of the mission or old church, with a chaplain’s salary and house. Dr. Marshman urged that thus he might create a missionary spirit and organise missionary undertakings of more value to the natives than the preaching of any one man. But he remained deaf to the temptation, while he passed on the call to Cousin T. Hitchins and Emma, at Plymouth. His call was not to preach even in the metropolis of British India, the centre of Southern Asia; but, through their own languages, to set in motion a force which must win North India, Arabia, and Persia to Christ, while by his death he should stir up the great Church of England to do its duty.

PAGODA, ALDEEN HOUSE

Serampore was the scene of his praying, his communing, and his studying, while every Sunday was given to his duties in Calcutta, as he waited five months for his first appointment to a military station. David Brown had not long before acquired Aldeen House, with its tropical garden and English-like lawn sloping down to the river, nearly opposite the Governor-General’s summer-house and park of Barrackpore. Connected with the garden was the old and architecturally picturesque temple of the idol Radha-bullub, which had been removed farther inland because the safety of the shrine was imperilled by the river. But the temple still stands, in spite of the rapid Hoogli at its base, and the more destructive peepul tree which has spread over its massive dome. In 1854, when the present writer first visited the now historic spot, even the platform above the river was secure, but that has since disappeared, with much of the fine brick moulding and tracery work. Here was the young saint’s home; ever since it has been known as Henry Martyn’s Pagoda, and has been an object of interest to hundreds of visitors from Europe and America.

Henry Martyn became one of David Brown’s family, with whom he kept up the most loving correspondence almost to his death. But he spent even more time with the already experienced missionaries who formed the famous brotherhood a little farther up the right bank of the Hoogli. Carey thus wrote of him, knowing nothing of the fact that it was his own earlier reports which, in Simeon’s hands, had first led Martyn to desire the missionary career: ‘A young clergyman, Mr. Martyn, is lately arrived, who is possessed of a truly missionary spirit. He lives at present with Mr. Brown, and as the image or shadow of bigotry is not known among us here, we take sweet counsel together and go to the house of God as friends.’ Later on, the founder of the Modern Missionary enterprise, who desired to send a missionary to every great centre in North India, declared of the Anglican chaplain that, wherever he went no other missionary would be needed. The late Mr. John Clark Marshman, C.S.I., who as a lad saw them daily, wrote: ‘A strong feeling of sympathy drew him into a close intimacy with Dr. Marshman, and they might be often seen walking arm in arm, for hours together, on the banks of the river between Aldeen House and the Mission House.’ To the last he addressed Dr. 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.

1806, May 19.—In the cool of the evening we walked to the mission-house, a few hundred yards off, and I at last saw the place about which I have so long read with pleasure. I was introduced to all the missionaries. We sat down about one hundred and fifty to tea, at several long tables in an immense room. After this there was evening service in another room adjoining, by Mr. Ward. Mr. Marshman then delivered his lecture on grammar. As his observations were chiefly confined to the Greek, and seemed intended for the young missionaries, I was rather disappointed, having expected to hear something about the Oriental languages. With Mr. M. alone I had much conversation, and received the first encouragement to be a missionary that I have met with since I came to this country. I blessed God in my heart for this seasonable supply of refreshment. Finding my sore throat and cough much increased, I thought there might be some danger, and felt rather low at the prospect of death. I could scarcely tell why. The constant uneasiness I am in from the bites of the mosquitoes made me rather fretful also. My habitation assigned me by Mr. Brown is a pagoda in his grounds, on the edge of the river. Thither I retired at night, and really felt something like superstitious dread at being in a place once inhabited, as it were, by devils, but yet felt disposed to be triumphantly joyful that the temple where they were worshipped was become Christ’s oratory. I prayed out aloud to my God, and the echoes returned from the vaulted roof. Oh, may I so pray that the dome of heaven may resound! I like my dwelling much, it is so retired and free from noise; it has so many recesses and cells that I can hardly find my way in and out.

May 20.—Employed in preparing a sermon for to-morrow, and while walking about for this purpose, my body and mind active, my melancholy was a little relieved by the hope that I should not be entirely useless as a missionary. In the evening I walked with Mr. Brown, to see the evening worship at a pagoda whither they say the god who inhabited my pagoda retired some years ago. As we walked through the dark wood which everywhere covers the country, the cymbals and drums struck up, and never did sounds go through my heart with such horror in my life. The pagoda was in a court, surrounded by a wall, and the way up to it was by a flight of steps on each side. The people to the number of about fifty were standing on the outside, and playing the instruments. In the centre of the building was the idol, a little ugly black image, about two feet high, with a few lights burning round him. At intervals they prostrated themselves with their foreheads to the earth. I shivered at being in the neighbourhood of hell; my heart was ready to burst at the dreadful state to which the Devil had brought my poor fellow-creatures. I would have given the world to have known the language, to have preached to them. At this moment Mr. Marshman arrived, and my soul exulted that the truth would now be made known. He addressed the Brahmins with a few questions about the god; they seemed to be all agreed with Mr. Marshman, and quite ashamed at being interrogated, when they knew they could give no answer. They were at least mute, and would not reply; and when he continued speaking they struck up again with their detestable music, and so silenced him. We walked away in sorrow, but the scene we had witnessed gave rise to a very profitable conversation, which lasted some hours. Marshman in conversation with me alone sketched out what he thought would be the most useful plan for me to pursue in India; which would be to stay in Calcutta a year to learn the language, and when I went up the country to take one or two native brethren with me, to send them forth, and preach occasionally only to confirm their word, to establish schools, and visit them. He said I should do far more good in the way of influence than merely by actual preaching. After all, whatever God may appoint, prayer is the great thing. Oh, that I may be a man of prayer; my spirit still struggles for deliverance from all my corruptions.

May 22.—In our walk at sunset, met Mr. Marshman, with whom I continued talking about the languages. Telling Mr. Brown about my Cambridge honours, I found my pride stirred, and bitterly repented having said anything about it. Surely the increase of humility need not be neglected when silence may do it.

May 23.—Was in general in a spiritual, happy frame the whole day, which I cannot but ascribe to my being more diligent and frequent in prayer over the Scriptures, so that it is the neglect of this duty that keeps my soul so low. Began the Bengali grammar, and got on considerably. Continued my letters to Mr. Simeon and Emma. At night we attended a conference of the missionaries on this subject: ‘Whether God could save sinners without the death of Christ.’ Messrs. Carey, Marshman, and Ward spoke, Mr. Brown and myself. I offered what might be said on the opposite side of the question to that which the rest took, to show that He might have saved them without Christ. About fourteen of the Bengali brethren were present and spoke on the subject. Ram Roteen prayed.

Monday, May 26.—Went up to Serampore with Mr. Brown, with whom I had much enlivening conversation. Why cannot I be like Fletcher and Brainerd, and those men of modern times? Is anything too hard for the Lord? Cannot my stupid stony heart be made to flame with love and zeal? What is it that bewitches me, that I live such a dying life? My soul groans under its bondage. In the evening Marshman called; I walked back with him, and was not a little offended at his speaking against the use of a liturgy. I returned full of grief at the offences which arise amongst men, and determined to be more alone with the blessed God.

May 29.—Had some conversation with Marshman alone on the prospects of the Gospel in this country, and the state of religion in our hearts, for which I felt more anxious. Notwithstanding, I endeavoured to guard against prating only to display my experience; I found myself somewhat ruffled by the conversation, and derived no benefit from it, but felt desirous only to get away from the world, and to cease from men; my pride was a little hurt by Marshman’s questioning me as the merest novice. He probably sees farther into me than I see into myself.

June 12.—Still exceedingly feeble; endeavoured to think on a subject, and was much irritated at being unable to write a word. Mrs. Brown, and afterwards Mr. Brown, paid me a visit. I came into the house to dinner, but while there I felt as if fainting or dying, and indeed really thought I was departing this life. I was brought back again to the pagoda, and then on my bed I began to pray as on the verge of eternity. The Lord was pleased to break my hard heart, and deliver me from that satanic spirit of light and arrogant unconcern about which I groaned out my complaint to God. From this time I lay in tears, interceding for the unfortunate natives of this country; thinking with myself, that the most despised Soodra of India was of as much value, in the sight of God, as the King of Great Britain: through the rest of the day my soul remained in a spirit of contrition.

June 14.—A pundit came to me this morning, but after having my patience tried with him, I was obliged to send him away, as he knew nothing about Hindustani. I was exceedingly puzzled to know how I should ever be able to acquire any assistance in learning these languages. Alas! what trials are awaiting me. Sickness and the climate have increased the irritability of my temper, and occasions of trying it occur constantly. In the afternoon, while pleading for a contrite tender spirit, but in vain, I was obliged to cease praying for that tenderness of spirit, and to go on to other petitions, and by this means was brought to a more submissive state. Officiated at evening worship.

June 15.—Found my mouth salivated this morning from calomel. Attended the morning service at the mission-house; Mr. Marsdon preached. After service Marshman and Carey talked with me in the usual cheering way about missionary things, but my mind was dark. In the afternoon was rather more comfortable in prayer, and at evening worship was assisted to go through the duties of it with cheerfulness. Read some of Whitfield’s Sermons.

June 19.—Rose in gloom, but that was soon dissipated by consideration and prayer. Began after breakfast for the first time with a moonshi, a Cashmerian Brahmin, with whom I was much pleased. In the boat, back to Serampore, learning roots. Officiated at evening worship. Walked at night with Marshman and Mr. Brown to the bazaar held at this time of the year, for the use of the people assembling at Juggernaut. The booth or carriage was fifty feet high, in appearance a wooden temple, with rows of wheels through the centre of it. By the side of this a native brother who attended Marshman gave away papers, and this gave occasion to disputes, which continued a considerable time between Marshman and the Brahmins. Felt somewhat hurt at night at ——’s insinuating that my low spirits, as he called it, was owing to want of diligence. God help me to be free from this charge, and yet not desirous to make a show before men. May I walk in sweet and inward communion with Him, labouring with never-ceasing diligence and care, and assured that I shall not live or labour in vain.

June 24.—At daylight left Calcutta, and had my temper greatly exercised by the neglects and improper behaviour of the servants and boatmen. Arrived at Serampore at eight, and retired to my pagoda, intending to spend the day in fasting and prayer; but after a prayer in which the Lord helped me to review with sorrow the wickedness of my past life, I was so overcome with fatigue that I fell asleep, and thus lost the whole morning; so I gave up my original intention. Passed the afternoon in translating the second chapter of St. Matthew into Hindustani. Had a long conversation at night with Marshman, whose desire now is that I should stay at Serampore, give myself to the study of Hindustani for the sake of the Scriptures, and be ready to supply the place of Carey and Marshman in the work, should they be taken off; and for another reason—that I might awaken the attention of the people of God in Calcutta more to missionary subjects. I was struck with the importance of having proper persons here to supply the place of these two men; but could not see that it was the path God designed for me. I felt, however, a most impatient desire that some of my friends should come out and give themselves to the work; for which they are so much more fit in point of learning than any of the Dissenters are, and could not bear that a work of such stupendous magnitude should be endangered by their neglect and love of the world. Marshman recommended that the serious people in Calcutta should unite in a society for the support of missions, and each subscribe fifty rupees a month for their maintenance. Ten members with this subscription could support sixty or seventy native brethren. He wished me also to see the duty of their all remaining in the country, learning the language, and instructing their servants. My mind was so filled and excited by the first part of our conversation, that I could not sleep for many hours after going to bed. He told me that the people were surfeited with the Gospel, and that they needed to be exhorted to duty.

June 26.—Employed in translating St. Matthew into Hindustani, and reading Mirza’s translation; afterwards had moonshi a little. In the afternoon walked with Mr. Brown to see Juggernaut’s car drawn back to its pagoda. Many thousands of people were present, rending the air with acclamations. The car with the tower was decorated with a vast number of flags, and the Brahmins were passing to and fro through the different compartments of it, catching the offerings of fruit, cowries, &c., that were thrown up to the god, for which they threw down in return small wreaths of flowers, which the people wore round their necks and in their hair. When the car stopped at the pagoda, the god and two attending deities were let down by ropes, muffled up in red cloths, a band of singers with drums and cymbals going round the car while this was performed. Before the stumps of images, for they were not better, some of the people prostrated themselves, striking the ground twice with their foreheads; this excited more horror in me than I can well express, and I was about to stammer out in Hindustani, ‘Why do ye these things?’ and to preach the Gospel. The words were on my lips—though if I had spoken thousands would have crowded round me, and I should not have been understood. However, I felt my spirit more inflamed with zeal than I ever conceived it would be; and I thought that if I had words I would preach to the multitudes all the day, if I lost my life for it. It was curious how the women clasped their hands, and lifted them up as if in the ecstasy of devotion, while Juggernaut was tumbled about in the most clumsy manner before their eyes. I thought with some sorrow that Satan may exert the same influence in exciting apparently religious affections in professors of the Gospel, in order to deceive souls to their eternal ruin. Dr. Taylor and Mr. Moore joined us, and distributed tracts. Mr. Ward, we heard, was at a distance preaching. On our return we met Marshman going upon the same errand. In evening worship my heart was rather drawn out for the heathen, and my soul in general through the day enjoyed a cheering sense of God’s love. Marshman joined us again, and our conversation was about supporting some native missions.

June 30.—Went up to Serampore in the boat, learning roots. Spent the afternoon chiefly in prayer, of which my soul stood greatly in need through the snares into which my heart had been falling. Called at the mission-house, and saw Mr. Marsdon previous to the commencement of his missionary career. Now the plans of God are, I trust, taking another step forward.

July 2.—Mr. Brown proposed a prayer meeting between ourselves and the missionaries previous to the departure of Dr. Taylor for Surat. It was a season of grace to my soul, for some sense of the vast importance of the occasion dwelt upon my mind in prayer, and I desired earnestly to live zealously, labouring for souls in every possible way, with more honesty and openness. In the evening went to Marshman, and proposed it. There were at his house many agreeable sights; one pundit was translating Scripture into Sanskrit, another into Guzerati, and a table was covered with materials for a Chinese dictionary. Employed with moonshi in Hindu Story-teller, and in learning to write the Persian characters.

July 3.—Rose with some happiness in my soul, and delight in the thought of an increase of labour in the Church of God. Employed morning as usual, and in thinking of subject for sermon. Was detained in the house at a time when I wanted prayer. In the evening walked with the family through Serampore, the native’s part. At night we had a delightful spiritual conversation. Thus my time passes most agreeably in this dear family. Lord, let me be willing to leave it and the world with joy.

July 8.—Reading with moonshi all the morning. Spent the afternoon in reading and prayer, as preparatory to a meeting of the missionaries at night. At eight, ten of us met in my pagoda. It was, throughout, a soul-refreshing ordinance to me. I felt as I wished, as if having done with the world, and standing on the very verge of heaven, rejoicing at the glorious work which God will accomplish on the earth. The Lord will, I hope, hear our prayers for our dear brother, on whose account we met, previous to his departure for Surat. An idea thrown out by Carey pleased me very much, not on account of its practicability, but its grandeur, i.e. that there should be an annual meeting, at the Cape of Good Hope, of all the missionaries in the world.

July 9.—Dull and languid from the exertions and late hours of yesterday. Reading the Sermon on the Mount, in the Hindustani Testament, with moonshi. In the evening went to the mission-house, drank tea, and attended their worship. These affectionate souls never fail to mention me particularly in their prayers, but I am grieved that they so mistake my occasional warmth for zeal. It is one of the things in which I am most low and backward, as the Lord, who seeth in secret, knows too well. Oh, then, may any who think it worth while to take up my name into their lips, pray for the beginning rather than the continuance of zeal! Marshman, in my walk with him, kindly assured me of his great regard and union of heart with me. I would that I had more gratitude to God, for so putting it into the hearts of His people to show regard to one so undeserving of it. At night had much nearness to God in prayer. I found it sweet to my spirit to reflect on my being a pilgrim on earth, with Christ for my near and dear friend, and found myself unwilling to leave off my prayer.

July 10.—Employed during the morning with moonshi. At morning and evening worship enjoyed freedom of access to God in prayer. Mr. Brown’s return in the evening, with another Christian friend, added greatly to my pleasure. Marshman joined us at night, but these enjoyments, from being too eagerly entered into, often leave my soul carnally delighted only, instead of bringing me nearer to God. Wrote sermon at night.

July 12.—Most of this morning employed about sermon. In the afternoon went down to Calcutta with Mr. Brown and all his family; we passed the time very agreeably in singing hymns. Found Europe letters on our arrival, but were disappointed in not finding Corrie or Parson in the list of passengers. My letters were from Lydia, T.H. and Emma, Mr. Simeon, and Sargent. All their first letters had been taken in the Bell Packet. I longed to see Lydia’s, but the Lord saw it good, no doubt, not to suffer it to arrive. The one I did receive from her was very animating, and showed the extraordinary zeal and activity of her mind. Mr. Simeon’s letter contained her praises, and even he seemed to regret that I had gone without her. My thoughts were so occupied with these letters that I could get little or no sleep.

July 13. (Sunday.)—Talked to Mr. Brown about Lydia, and read her letter to him. He strongly recommended the measure of endeavouring to bring her here, and was clear that my future situation in the country would be such as to make it necessary to be married. A letter from Colonel Sandys, which he opened afterwards, spoke in the highest terms of her. The subject of marriage was revived in my mind, but I feel rather a reluctance to it. I enjoy in general such sweet peace of mind, from considering myself a stranger upon earth, unconnected with any persons, unknown, forgotten, that were I never thrown into any more trying circumstances than I am in at present, no change could add to my happiness. At the new church this morning, had the happiness of hearing Mr. Jefferies preach. I trust God will graciously keep him, and instruct him, and make him another witness of Jesus in this place. My heart was greatly refreshed, and rejoiced at it all the day. At night preached at the missionary church, on Eph. ii. 1-3, to a small congregation. Sat up late with Mr. Brown, considering the same subject as we had been conversing on before, and it dwelt so much on my mind that I got hardly any sleep the whole night.

July 14.—The same subject engrosses my whole thoughts. Mr. Brown’s arguments appear so strong that my mind is almost made up to send for Lydia. I could scarcely have any reasonable doubts remaining, that her presence would most abundantly promote the ends of the mission.

July 15.—Most of the day with moonshi; at intervals, thinking on subject for sermon. My affections seemed to be growing more strong towards Lydia than I could wish, as I fear my judgment will no longer remain unbiassed. The subject is constantly on my mind, and imagination heightens the advantages to be obtained from her presence. And yet, on the other hand, there is such a sweet happiness in living unconnected with any creature, and hastening through this life with not one single attraction to detain my desires here, that I am often very unwilling to exchange a life of celibacy for one of which I know nothing, except that it is in general a life of care.

July 16.—Morning with moonshi; afterwards preparing myself for church. Preached at night, at missionary church, on Isa. lxiii. 1. Both in prayers and sermon I felt my heart much more affected than I expected, and there seemed to be some impression on a few of the people. I feel to be thankful to God, and grateful to the people, that they continue to hear me with such attention. My thoughts this day have been rather averse to marriage. Anxiety about the education and conversion of children rather terrifies me.

July 20. (Sunday.)—Preached at the new church on 2 Cor. v. 17. Mr. Marshman dined with us, and at four I went to the bazaar, to hear him preach to the natives. I arrived at the shed before him, and found the native brethren singing, after which one of them got up, and addressed the people with such firmness and mild energy, notwithstanding their occasional contradictions and ridicule, that I was quite delighted and refreshed. To see a native Indian an earnest advocate for Jesus, how precious! Marshman afterwards came, and prayed, sung, and preached. If I were to be very severe with him, I should say that there is a want of seriousness, tenderness, and dignity in his address, and I felt pained that he should so frequently speak with contempt of the Brahmins, many of whom were listening with great respect and attention. The group presented all that variety of countenance which the Word is represented as producing in a heathen audience—some inattentive, others scornful, and others seemingly melting under it. Another native brother, I believe, then addressed them. An Indian sermon about Jesus Christ was like music on my ear, and I felt inflamed to begin my work: these poor people possess more intelligence and feeling than I thought. At the end of the service there was a sort of uproar when the papers were given away, and the attention of the populace and of some Europeans was excited. Read prayers at night at the missionary church; Mr. Brown preached on the unspeakable gift.

July 21.—Returned to Serampore rather in a low state of mind, arising from deprivation of a society of which I had been too fond.

July 22.—Read Hindustani without moonshi. Not being able to get to the pagoda from the incessant rain, I passed the latter part of the day in the house, reading the life of Francis Xavier. I was exceedingly roused at the astonishing example of that great saint, and began to consider whether it was not my duty to live, as he did, in voluntary poverty and celibacy. I was not easy till I had determined to follow the same course, when I should perceive that the kingdom of God would be more advanced by it. At night I saw the awful necessity of being no longer slothful, nor wasting my thoughts about such trifles as whether I should be married or not, and felt a great degree of fear, lest the blood of the five thousand Mohammedans, who, Mr. Brown said, were to be found in Calcutta capable of understanding a Hindustani sermon, should be required at my hand.

July 25.—The thought of the Mohammedans and heathens lies very heavy upon my mind. The former, who are in Calcutta, I seem to think are consigned to me by God, because nobody preaches in Hindustani. Employed the morning in sermon and Hindustani. In the afternoon went down to Calcutta. In the boat read Wrangham’s Essay and some of Mr. Lloyd’s letters, when young. What knowledge have some believers of the deep things of God! I felt myself peculiarly deficient in that experimental knowledge of Christ with which Mr. Lloyd was particularly favoured. Walked from the landing-place, a mile and a half, through the native part of Calcutta, amidst crowds of Orientals of all nations. How would the spirit of St. Paul have been moved! The thought of summoning the attention of such multitudes appeared very formidable, and during the course of the evening was the occasion of many solemn thoughts and prayer, that God would deliver me from all softness of mind, fear, and self-indulgence, and make me ready to suffer shame and death for the name of the Lord Jesus.

July 26.—My soul in general impressed with the awfulness of my missionary work, and often shrinking from its difficulties.

July 28.—In the boat to Serampore we read Mitchell’s Essay on Evangelizing India, and were much pleased and profited. Whatever plans and speculations may be agitated, I felt it my duty to think only of putting my hand to the work without delay. Felt very unhappy at having other work put upon me, which will keep me from making progress in the language. Nothing but waiting upon God constantly for direction, and an assurance that His never-ceasing love will direct my way, would keep me from constant vexation. I scarcely do anything in the language, from having my time so constantly taken up with writing sermons.

July 29.—Much of this morning taken up in writing to Lydia. As far as my own views extend, I feel no doubt at all about the propriety of the measure—of at least proposing it. May the Lord, in continuance of His loving-kindness to her and me, direct her mind, that if she comes I may consider it as a special gift from God, and not merely permitted by Him. Marshman sat with us in the evening, and as usual was teeming with plans for the propagation of the Gospel. Stayed up till midnight in finishing the letter to Lydia.

To Lydia Grenfell

Serampore: July 30, 1806.

My dearest Lydia,—On a subject so intimately connected with my happiness and future ministry, as that on which I am now about to address you, I wish to assure you that I am not acting with precipitancy, or without much consideration and prayer, while I at last sit down to request you to come out to me to India.

May the Lord graciously direct His blind and erring creature, and not suffer the natural bias of his mind to lead him astray. You are acquainted with much of the conflict I have undergone on your account. It has been greater than you or Emma have imagined, and yet not so painful as I deserve to have found it for having suffered my affections to fasten so inordinately on an earthly object.

Soon, however, after my final departure from Europe, God in great mercy gave me deliverance, and favoured me throughout the voyage with peace of mind, indifference about all worldly connections, and devotedness to no object upon earth but the work of Christ. I gave you up entirely—not the smallest expectation remained in my mind of ever seeing you again till we should meet in heaven: and the thought of this separation was the less painful from the consolatory persuasion that our own Father had so ordered it for our mutual good. I continued from that time to remember you in my prayers only as a Christian sister, though one very dear to me. On my arrival in this country I saw no reason at first for supposing that marriage was advisable for a missionary—or rather the subject did not offer itself to my mind. The Baptist missionaries indeed recommended it, and Mr. Brown; but not knowing any proper person in this country, they were not very pressing upon the subject, and I accordingly gave no attention to it. After a very short experience and inquiry afterwards, my own opinions began to change, and when a few weeks ago we received your welcome letter, and others from Mr. Simeon and Colonel Sandys, both of whom spoke of you in reference to me, I considered it even as a call from God to satisfy myself fully concerning His will. From the account which Mr. Simeon received of you from Mr. Thomason, he seemed in his letter to me to regret that he had so strongly dissuaded me from thinking about you at the time of my leaving England. Colonel Sandys spoke in such terms of you, and of the advantages to result from your presence in this country, that Mr. Brown became very earnest for me to endeavour to prevail upon you. Your letter to me perfectly delighted him, and induced him to say that you would be the greatest aid to the mission I could possibly meet with. I knew my own heart too well not to be distrustful of it, especially as my affections were again awakened, and accordingly all my labour and prayer have been to check their influence, that I might see clearly the path of duty.

Though I dare not say that I am under no bias, yet from every view of the subject I have been able to take, after balancing the advantages and disadvantages that may ensue to the cause in which I am engaged, always in prayer for God’s direction, my reason is fully convinced of the expediency, I had almost said the necessity, of having you with me. It is possible that my reason may still be obscured by passion; let it suffice, however, to say that now with a safe conscience and the enjoyment of the Divine presence, I calmly and deliberately make the proposal to you—and blessed be God if it be not His will to permit it; still this step is not advancing beyond the limits of duty, because there is a variety of ways by which God can prevent it, without suffering any dishonour to His cause. If He shall forbid it, I think that, by His grace, I shall even then be contented and rejoice in the pleasure of corresponding with you. Your letter, dated December 1805, was the first I received (your former having been taken in the Bell Packet), and I found it so animating that I could not but reflect on the blessedness of having so dear a counsellor always near me. I can truly say, and God is my witness, that my principal desire in this affair is that you may promote the kingdom of God in my own heart, and be the means of extending it to the heathen. My own earthly comfort and happiness are not worth a moment’s notice. I would not, my dearest Lydia, influence you by any artifices or false representations. I can only say that if you have a desire of being instrumental in establishing the blessed Redeemer’s kingdom among these poor people, and will condescend to do it by supporting the spirits and animating the zeal of a weak messenger of the Lord, who is apt to grow very dispirited and languid, ‘Come, and the Lord be with you!’ It can be nothing but a sacrifice on your part, to leave your valuable friends to come to one who is utterly unworthy of you or any other of God’s precious gifts: but you will have your reward, and I ask it not of you or of God for the sake of my own happiness, but only on account of the Gospel. If it be not calculated to promote it, may God in His mercy withhold it. For the satisfaction of your friends, I should say that you will meet with no hardships. The voyage is very agreeable, and with the people and country of India I think you will be much pleased. The climate is very fine—the so much dreaded heat is really nothing to those who will employ their minds in useful pursuits. Idleness will make people complain of everything. The natives are the most harmless and timid creatures I ever met with. The whole country is the land of plenty and peace. Were I a missionary among the Esquimaux or Boschemen, I should never dream of introducing a female into such a scene of danger or hardship, especially one whose happiness is dearer to me than my own: but here there is universal tranquillity, though the multitudes are so great that a missionary needs not go three miles from his house without having a congregation of many thousands. You would not be left in solitude if I were to make any distant excursion, because no chaplain is stationed where there is not a large English Society. My salary is abundantly sufficient for the support of a married man, the house and number of people kept by each Company’s servant being such as to need no increase for a family establishment. As I must make the supposition of your coming, though it may be perhaps a premature liberty, I should give you some directions. This letter will reach you about the latter end of the year; it would be very desirable if you could be ready for the February fleet, because the voyage will be performed in far less time than at any other season. George will find out the best ship—one in which there is a lady of high rank in the service would be preferable. You are to be considered as coming as a visitor to Mr. Brown, who will write to you or to Colonel Sandys, who is best qualified to give you directions about the voyage. Should I be up the country on your arrival in Bengal, Mr. Brown will be at hand to receive you, and you will find yourself immediately at home. As it will highly expedite some of the plans which we have in agitation that you should know the language as soon as possible, take Gilchrist’s Indian Stranger’s Guide, and occasionally on the voyage learn some of the words.

If I had room I might enlarge on much that would be interesting to you. In my conversations with Marshman, the Baptist missionary, our hearts sometimes expand with delight and joy at the prospect of seeing all these nations of the East receive the doctrine of the Cross. He is a happy labourer; and I only wait, I trust, to know the language to open my mouth boldly and make known the mystery of the Gospel. My romantic notions are for the first time almost realised; for in addition to the beauties of sylvan scenery may be seen the more delightful object of multitudes of simple people sitting in the shade listening to the words of eternal life. Much as yet is not done; but I have seen many discover by their looks while Marshman was preaching that their hearts were tenderly affected. My post is not yet determined; we expect, however, it will be Patna, a civil station, where I shall not be under military command. As you are so kindly anxious about my health, I am happy to say, that through mercy my health is far better than it ever was in England.

The people of Calcutta are very desirous of keeping me at the mission-church, and offer to any Evangelical clergyman a chaplain’s salary and a house besides. I am of course deaf to such a proposal; but it is strange that no one in England is tempted by such an inviting situation. I am actually going to mention it to Cousin T.H. and Emma—not, as you may suppose, with much hope of success; but I think that possibly the chapel at Dock may be too much for him, and he will have here a sphere of still greater importance. As this will be sent by the overland despatch, there is some danger of its not reaching you. You will therefore receive a duplicate, and perhaps a triplicate by the ships that will arrive in England a month or two after. I cannot write now to any of my friends. I will therefore trouble you, if you have opportunity, to say that I have received no letters since I left England, but one from each of these—Cousin Tom and Emma, Simeon, Sargent, Bates: of my own family I have heard nothing. Assure any of them whom you may see of the continuance of my affectionate regard, especially dear Emma. I did not know that it was permitted me to write to you, or I fear she would not have found me so faithful a correspondent on the voyage. As I have heretofore addressed you through her, it is probable that I may be now disposed to address her through you—or, what will be best of all, that we both of us address her in one letter from India. However, you shall decide, my dearest Lydia. I must approve your determination, because with that spirit of simple-looking to the Lord which we both endeavour to maintain, we must not doubt that you will be divinely directed. Till I receive an answer to this, my prayers you may be assured will be constantly put up for you that in this affair you may be under an especial guidance, and that in all your ways God may be abundantly glorified by you through Jesus Christ. You say in your letter that frequently every day you remember my worthless name before the throne of grace. This instance of extraordinary and undeserved kindness draws my heart toward you with a tenderness which I cannot describe. Dearest Lydia, in the sweet and fond expectation of your being given to me by God, and of the happiness which I humbly hope you yourself might enjoy here, I find a pleasure in breathing out my assurance of ardent love. I have now long loved you most affectionately, and my attachment is more strong, more pure, more heavenly, because I see in you the image of Jesus Christ. I unwillingly conclude, by bidding my beloved Lydia adieu.

H. Martyn.

Serampore: September 1, 1806.

My dearest Lydia,—With this you will receive the duplicate of the letter I sent you a month ago, by the overland despatch. May it find you prepared to come! All the thoughts and views which I have had of the subject since first addressing you, add tenfold confirmation to my first opinion; and I trust that the blessed God will graciously make it appear that I have been acting under a right direction, by giving the precious gift to me and to the Church in India. I sometimes regret that I had not obtained a promise from you of following me at the time of our last parting at Gurlyn, as I am occasionally apt to be excessively impatient at the long delay. Many, many months must elapse before I can see you or even hear how you shall determine. The instant your mind is made up you will send a letter by the overland despatch. George will let you know how it is to be prepared, as the Company have given some printed directions. It is a consolation to me during this long suspense, that had I engaged with you before my departure I should not have had such a satisfactory conviction of it being the will of God. The Commander-in-chief is in doubt to which of the three following stations he shall appoint me—Benares, Patna, or Moorshedabad; it will be the last, most probably. This is only two days’ journey from Calcutta. I shall take my departure in about six weeks. In the hour that remains, I must endeavour to write to my dear sister Emma, and to Sally. By the fleet which will sail hence in about two months, they will receive longer letters. You will then, I hope, have left England. I am very happy here in preparing for my delightful work, but I should be happier still if I were sufficiently fluent in the language to be actually employed; and happiest of all if my beloved Lydia were at my right hand, counselling and animating me. I am not very willing to end my letter to you; it is difficult not to prolong the enjoyment of speaking, as it were, to one who occupies so much of my sleeping and waking hours; but here, alas! I am aware of danger; and my dear Lydia will, I hope, pray that her unworthy friend may love no creature inordinately.

It will be base in me to depart in heart from a God of such love as I find Him to be. Oh, that I could make some returns for the riches of His love! Swiftly fly the hours of life away, and then we shall be admitted to behold His glory. The ages of darkness are rolling fast away, and shall soon usher in the Gospel period when the whole world shall be filled with His glory. Oh, my beloved sister and friend, dear to me on every account, but dearest of all for having one heart and one soul with me in the cause of Jesus and the love of God, let us pray and rejoice, and rejoice and pray, that God may be glorified, and the dying Saviour see of the travail of His soul. May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing, that we may both of us abound in hope through the power of the Holy Ghost. Now, my dearest Lydia, I cannot say what I feel—I cannot pour out my soul—I could not if you were here; but I pray that you may love me, if it be the will of God; and I pray that God may make you more and more His child, and give me more and more love for all that is God-like and holy. I remain, with fervent affection,

Yours, in eternal bonds,

H. Martyn.

To Charles Simeon[23]

Calcutta: September 1, 1806.

My dearest Brother,—I feel no hesitation about inviting Miss L.G. on her own account, except it be that she should come so far for one who is so utterly unworthy of her. I would rather die than bring one whom I honour so much into a situation of difficulty; but indeed there is no hardship to be encountered. In my absence she might, if she pleased, visit the English ladies who are always to be found at the different stations. The plan about to be adopted by the Baptists is to establish missionary stations in the country; while one missionary makes the circuit of the surrounding country, another shall always be in the way to receive enquiries and to explain. I should think that a zealous woman, acquainted with the language, and especially if assisted by native brethren, might be of use in this way without moving from her house.... Three such men as Carey, Marshman, and Ward, so suited to one another and to their work, are not to be found, I should think, in the whole world.

September 13.—Heard of the arrival of Corrie and Parson at Madras, and of my appointment to Dinapore.

September 15.—Called with Mr. Brown on Mr. Udny, then went up with him to Serampore, and passed much of the afternoon in reading with him a series of newspapers from England. How affecting to think how the fashion of this world passeth away! What should I do without Christ as an everlasting portion! How vain is life, how mournful is death, and what is eternity without Christ! In the evening Marshman and Ward came to us. By endeavouring to recollect myself as before God, I found more comfort, and was enabled to show more propriety in conversation.

September 16.—Passed the day with moonshi in Hindustani and writing sermon. In the evening wrote to Lydia.

September 17.—The blaze of a funeral pile this morning near the pagoda drew my attention. I ran out, but the unfortunate woman had committed herself to the flames before I arrived. The remains of the two bodies were visible. At night, while I was at the missionaries’, Mr. Chamberlain arrived from up the country. Just as we rejoiced at the thought of seeing him and his wife, we found she had died in the boat! I do not know when I was so shocked; my soul revolted at everything in this world, which God has so marked with misery—the effect of sin. I felt reluctance to engage in every worldly connection. Marriage seemed terrible, by exposing one to the agonising sight of a wife dying in such circumstances.

September 24.—Went down to Calcutta with Mr. Brown and Corrie, and found letters. My affections of love and joy were so excited by them that it was almost too much for my poor frame. My dearest Lydia’s assurances of her love were grateful enough to my heart, but they left somewhat of a sorrowful effect, occasioned I believe chiefly from a fear of her suffering in any degree, and partly from the long time and distance that separate us, and uncertainty if ever we shall be permitted to meet one another in this world. In the evening the Lord gave me near and close and sweet communion with Him on this subject, and enabled me to commit the affair with comfort into His hands. Why did I ever doubt His love? Does He not love us far better than we love one another?

September 25.—Went to Serampore with Mr. Brown and Parson; in the afternoon read with moonshi; enjoyed much of the solemn presence of God the whole day, had many happy seasons in prayer, and felt strengthened for the work of a missionary, which is speedily to begin; blessed be God! My friends are alarmed about the solitariness of my future life, and my tendency to melancholy; but, O my dearest Lord! Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. I go on Thine errand, and I know that Thou art and wilt be with me. How easily canst Thou support and refresh my heart!

To Lydia Grenfell

Serampore: September 1806.

How earnestly do I long for the arrival of my dearest Lydia! Though it may prove at last no more than a waking dream that I ever expected to receive you in India, the hope is too pleasing not to be cherished till I am forbidden any longer to hope. Till I am assured of the contrary, I shall find a pleasure in addressing you as my own. If you are not to be mine you will pardon me; but my expectations are greatly encouraged by the words you used when we parted at Gurlyn, that I had better go out free, implying, as I thought, that you would not be unwilling to follow me if I should see it to be the will of God to make the request. I was rejoiced also to see in your letter that you unite your name with mine when you pray that God would keep us both in the path of duty: from this I infer that you are by no means determined to remain separate from me. You will not suppose, my dear Lydia, that I mention these little things to influence your conduct, or to implicate you in an engagement. No, I acknowledge that you are perfectly free, and I have no doubt that you will act as the love and wisdom of our God shall direct. Your heart is far less interested in this business than mine, in all probability; and this on one account I do not regret, as you will be able to see more clearly the directions of God’s providence. About a fortnight ago I sent you a letter accompanying the duplicate of the one sent overland in August. If these shall have arrived safe you will perhaps have left England before this reaches it. But if not, let me entreat you to delay not a moment. Yet how will my dear sister Emma be able to part with you, and George—but above all your mother? I feel very much for you and for them, but I have no doubt at all about your health and happiness in this country.

The Commander-in-chief has at last appointed me to the station of Dinapore, near Patna, and I shall accordingly take my departure for that place as soon as I can make the necessary preparations. It is not exactly the situation I wished for, though in a temporal point of view it is desirable enough. The air is good, the living cheap, the salary 1,000l. a year, and there is a large body of English troops there. But I should have preferred being near Benares, the heart of Hinduism. We rejoice to hear that two other brethren are arrived at Madras on their way to Bengal, sent, I trust, by the Lord to co-operate in overturning the kingdom of Satan in these regions. They are Corrie and Parson, both Bengal chaplains. Their stations will be Benares and Moorshedabad—one on one side of me and the other on the other. There are also now ten Baptist missionaries at Serampore. Surely good is intended for this country.

Captain Wickes, the good old Captain Wickes, who has brought out so many missionaries to India, is now here. He reminds me of Uncle S. I have been just interrupted by the blaze of a funeral pile, within a hundred yards of my pagoda. I ran out, but the wretched woman had consigned herself to the flames before I reached the spot, and I saw only the remains of her and her husband. O Lord, how long shall it be? Oh, I shall have no rest in my spirit till my tongue is loosed to testify against the Devil, and deliver the message of God to these His unhappy bond-slaves. I stammered out something to the wicked Brahmins about the judgments of God upon them for the murder they had just committed, but they said it was an act of her own free-will. Some of the missionaries would have been there, but they are forbidden by the Governor-General to preach to the natives in the British territory. Unless this prohibition is revoked by an order from home it will amount to a total suppression of the mission.

I know of nothing else that will give you a further idea of the state of things here. The two ministers continue to oppose my doctrines with unabated virulence; but they think not that they fight against God. My own heart is at present cold and slothful. Oh, that my soul did burn with love and zeal! Surely were you here I should act with more cheerfulness and activity with so bright a pattern before me. If Corrie brings me a letter from you, and the fleet is not sailed, which, however, is not likely, I shall write to you again. Colonel Sandys will receive a letter from me and Mr. Brown by this fleet. Continue to remember me in your prayers, as a weak brother. I shall always think of you as one to be loved and honoured.

H. Martyn.

September 26.—Employed as usual in Hindustani; visited Marshman at night. He and Mr. Carey sat with us in the evening. My heart still continuing some degree of watchfulness, but enjoying less sweetness.

October 1.—Reading with moonshi and preparing sermon; found great cause to pray for brotherly love. Preached at night at the mission-church on Eph. ii. 4. Had a very refreshing conversation with Corrie afterwards; we wished it to be for the benefit of two cadets, who supped with us, and I hope it will not be in vain. May the Lord be pleased to make me act with a single eye to His glory. How easy it is to preach about Christ Jesus the Lord, and yet to preach oneself.

None of six letters from Lydia Grenfell have been preserved, but we find in her Diary more self-revealing of her heart than could be made to Henry Martyn, and also more severity in judging of herself as in the presence of God.

1806, May 23.—Wrote dear H. I have felt to-day a return of spirits, but have spent them too much in worldly things. I found it a blessed season in prayer, yet I fear whether my satisfaction did not rather arise from being enabled to pray than from any extraordinary communications from above. O Lord, search and try my heart, let not its deceitfulness impose on me.

July 19.—Thought much this week of my dear absent friend.

August 2.—My family’s unhappiness preys on my mind—sister burning with anger and resentment against sister, brother against brother, a father against his children. Oh, what a picture! Let me not add to the weight of family sin.

August 4.—Passed a happy day. Read Baxter, and found in doing so my soul raised above. Oh, let me have, blessed Lord, anticipations of this blessedness and foretaste of glory. In Thy presence above I shall be reunited to Thy dear saint, now labouring in Thy vineyard in a distant land. One year is nearly passed since we parted, but scarcely a waking hour, I believe, has he been absent from my mind. In general my remembrance of him is productive of pleasure—that I should possess so large a share of his affection, and be remembered in his prayers, and have an eternity to spend with him, yielding me in turn delightful pleasing meditations; but just now nature grieves that we are no more to meet below; yet, O my blessed Father, I cry, ‘Thy will be done, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.’

August 10.—Went to church. My soul was very dull and inanimate throughout the service—the sermon had nothing in it to enliven or instruct. Barren as this place is for other means of grace, I have the Word and leisure to search; I cannot then complain, but of myself there is cause enough. Oh, how is my soul so earthly? why cannot I rise and dwell above? Tied and bound with the chain of sin, fettered and confined, I can only cast a look above. One year is gone since my dear friend left England. The number of our years of separation is so much lessened, and our salvation draws near.

October 19.—My birthday. One-and-thirty years have I existed on this earth, for twenty-five of which all the amount was sin, vanity, and rebellion against God; the last six, though spent differently, yet for every day in them I am persuaded I have sinned in heart, so as justly to merit condemnation of that God in whose mercy I trust.

November 5.—To-day I was reading of David’s harp driving away the evil spirit from Saul, and resolved again (the Lord helping me) to try the sweet harp of Jesse’s son in my first and last waking thoughts, for sad and disordered are my thoughts upon my friend. The expectation of letters from my dear friend in India by this fleet is almost over, and my mind is rendered anxious about him.

November 25.—My very soul has been cheered by accounts from my dear friend in India, for whom my mind has been greatly anxious. ‘Cast thy cares on Me’ is a command badly attended to by me.

The formal and first request from Henry Martyn to join him in India reached Lydia Grenfell on March 2, 1807. We learn from his reply in October 1807, from Dinapore, that she had sent a refusal in her mother’s name. But, on April 25, the Rev. Charles Simeon called on her with the result which he thus records:

With her mother’s leave Miss G. accompanied us to Col. Sandys’, when I had much conversation with her about Mr. Martyn’s affair. She stated to me all the obstacles to his proposals: first, her health; second, the indelicacy of her going out to India alone on such an errand; third, her former engagement with another person, which had indeed been broken off, and he had actually gone up to London two years ago to be married to another woman, but, as he was unmarried, it seemed an obstacle in her mind; fourth, the certainty that her mother would never consent to it. On these points I observed that I thought the last was the only one that was insurmountable; for that, first, India often agreed best with persons of a delicate constitution—e.g. Mr. Martyn himself and Mr. Brown. Second, it is common for ladies to go thither without any previous connection; how much more, therefore, might one go with a connection already formed! Were this the only difficulty, I engaged, with the help of Mr. Grant and Mr. Parry, that she should go under such protection as should obviate all difficulties upon this head. Third, the step taken by the other person had set her at perfect liberty. Fourth, the consent of her mother was indispensable, and as that appeared impossible, the matter might be committed to God in this way. If her mother, of her own accord, should express regret that the connection had been prevented, from an idea of her being irreconcilably averse to it, and that she would not stand in the way of her daughter’s wishes, this would be considered as a direction from God in answer to her prayers, and I should instantly be apprised of it by her, in order to communicate to Mr. M. In this she perfectly agreed. I told her, however, that I would mention nothing of this to Mr. M., because it would only tend to keep him in painful suspense. Thus the matter is entirely set aside, unless God, by a special interposition of His providence (i.e. by taking away her mother, or overruling her mind, contrary to all reasonable expectation, to approve of it), mark His own will concerning it.

We find this account of the crisis in her Diary:

1807, March 2.—Passed some peaceful happy days at Tregembo. My return was marked by two events, long to be remembered—seeing John and hearing from H.M. Great has been my distress, but peace is returned, and could I cease from anticipating future evils I should enjoy more. The Lord has been gracious in affording me help, but He made me first feel my weakness, and suffered Satan to harass me. I am called upon now to act a decisive part.

Marazion, March 8.—With David let me say, In the multitude of thoughts within me Thy comforts have refreshed my soul. O Thou! my refuge, my rest, my hiding-place, in every time of sorrow to Thee I fly, and trust in the covert of Thy wings. Thou hast been a shelter for me and a strong tower. I have liberty to pour out my griefs into the bosom of my God, and doing so I am lightened of their burden. The Lord’s dealings are singular with me, yet not severe, yea, they are merciful. Twice have I been called on to act[24] ... in a way few are tried in, but the Lord’s goodness towards me is so manifest in the first, that I have come to wait in silence and hope the event of this. I am satisfied I have done now what is right, and peace has returned to me; yet there is need of great watchfulness to resist the enemy of souls, who would weaken and depress my soul, bringing to remembrance the affection of my dear friend, and representing my conduct as ungrateful towards him. To-day I have had many distressing feelings on his account, yet in the general I have been looking to things invisible and eternal, and therefore enjoyed peace. I must live more in the contemplation of Christ and heavenly things. Oh, come, fill and satisfy my soul, be my leader and guide, dispose of me as Thou wilt. The pain of writing to him is over, and I feel satisfied I wrote what duty required of me.[25] Now then, return, O my soul, to thy rest.

March 22.—A week of conflict and of mercies is over. May the remembrance of Thy goodness never be forgotten. I bless Thee, O my God, that Thou hast brought me hitherto, and with more reason than David, inquire what am I that Thou shouldest do so?

April 23.—To-day my mind has been painfully affected by the receipt of letters from ——. I found in the presence of my mother I dared not indulge the inclination I feel to mourn; and believing my Heavenly Parent’s will to be that I should be careful for nothing, I ought to be equally exerting myself in secret to resist the temptation. How true it is we suffer more in the person of another dear to us than in our own! Lord, I know Thou canst perfectly satisfy him by the consolation of Thy Spirit and communications of Thy grace; Thou canst display the glories of Thy beloved Son to his view, and put gladness into his heart. Oh, support, cheer, and bless him; let Thy left hand be under his head, and Thy right hand embrace him, that he may feel less than my fears suggest. Oh, do Thou powerfully impress our minds with a persuasion of Thy overruling hand in this trial. Let us see it to be Thy will, and be now and ever disposed to bow to it. Uphold me, Jesus, or I fan a prey to distracting thoughts and imagination.

April 24.—The arrival of dear Mr. Simeon has been a cordial to my fainting heart. Lord, do Thou comfort me by him; none but Thyself can give me lasting comfort—instruments are nothing without Thee. Oh, may I now be watchful, for often, through my depraved nature, when unlooked-for deliverance comes, I get careless and light in my frame; then the Lord hides His face, and trouble comes, which no outward circumstances can relieve. I need especial direction from on high. Oh, may my dependence be on the Lord, and I shall not go astray.

April 28.—Went on Saturday with Mr. Simeon and Mr. E. to Helston. Lord, I bless Thy holy name, I adore Thy wonderful unmerited goodness towards such a base, vile creature, that Thou shouldest at this particular season send me counsel and support through the medium of Thy dear servant. I am brought home again in safety, and enjoyed, during my absence, an opportunity of seeing how a Christian lives.

April 29.—The state of my mind lately has led me to fill too much of my Diary with expressions of regard for an earthly object, and now I am convinced of the evil of indulging this affection. Oh, may the Lord enable me to mortify it; may this mirror of my heart show me more of love to God and less to anything earthly. This morning was a sad one, and to the present I have to mourn over the barrenness of my soul, its indisposedness to any spiritual exertion. Almost constantly do I remember my dear absent friend; may I do so with less pain.

May 1.—I begin this month in circumstances peculiarly trying, such as I can support only by aid vouchsafed from above, and sought in constant prayer. The Lord is a stronghold in this time of trouble.

May 2.—To-day and yesterday I have found more composure of mind than of late; once indeed the enemy (whose devices I am too ignorant of to meet them as I ought) succeeded in distracting my mind, and excited many sinful passions from the probability that Miss Corrie, who is going to her brother, may be the partner appointed for my dear friend. This continued for a short time only, and I found relief at a throne of grace. It is a subject I must not dwell on—when the trial comes, grace will be given; but at present I have none to meet it; yet have I prayed the Lord to provide him a suitable helpmate. Deceitful is my heart; how little do I know it! O Thou bleeding Saviour, let me hide myself in Thee from deserved wrath, and oh, speak peace once more to my soul.

May 3.—A day of much sinful inquietude. Oh, that I could withdraw my affections! Oh, that I could once more feel I have no desire but after heavenly things! What a chaos has my mind been to-day, even in the house of God and at the throne of grace. I have been, in imagination, conversing with a fellow-creature. Where is thy heart? is a question not now to be answered satisfactorily. Tied and bound with this chain, if for a little time I rise to God, soon I turn from the glories of His face, grieving His Spirit by preferring the ideal presence of my friend—sometimes drawing the scene of his distress, at others the pleasure of his return. Oh, let me not continue thus to walk in the vanity of my mind. Oh, may I find sufficient happiness in the presence of my God here, and live looking to the things not seen, looking to that heavenly country where I shall enjoy in perfection the blessed society and (of?) all I loved below.

May 4.—Passed a day of less conflict, though I have very imperfectly kept my resolution not to indulge vain improbable expectations of the future; yet I have been favoured with a greater freedom from them than yesterday.

May 5.—I have been suddenly to-day seized with a violent depression of spirits and a sadness of heart, hard to be concealed. I have not, as before, fallen into a long train of vain imaginations, drawing scenes improbable and vain, but my soul has lost its spiritual appetite. I am looking forward to distant and uncertain events with anticipations of sorrow and trial impending. O my Lord and my God, come to my relief!

May 9.—Oh, what great troubles and adversities hast Thou showed me, and yet Thou didst turn again and refresh me! The whole of this day has been a dark and exceedingly gloomy season, my mind tossed to and fro like the tempestuous sea. I think the chief cause of my distress arises from a dread of dishonouring the name of the Lord, by appearing to have acted deceitfully in the eyes of my family, and some pride is at the bottom of this (I like not to be thought ill of), and also pain for the disappointment my dear friend will soon know. His situation grieves me infinitely more than my own. I think, for myself, I want nothing more than I find in Thy presence.

May 20.—My chief concern now is lest I should have given too much reason for my dear friend’s hoping I might yet be prevailed on to attend to his request, and I feel the restraint stronger than ever, that, having before promised, I am not free to marry. I paint the scene of his return, and, whichever way I take, nothing but misery and guilt seems to await me. Yet oh, I will continue to pray, ‘Heal me, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved.’ Thou art my strength and hope, O Lord; though shame is my portion among men. Thou who knowest my heart, Thou wilt not in this condemn me, for oh, Thou knowest these consequences of my regard for Thy dear saint were not intended by me, and that first, when I regarded him otherwise than as a Christian brother, I believed myself free to do so, imagining him I first loved united to another. When I consider this circumstance my mind is relieved of a heavy burden, and yet I must lament the evils that have flown from this mistake. My thoughts have been called since Sunday into the eternal world by the sudden death of a very kind friend, H.C. I have found this event, though the cause of pain, very useful to me at this time.

May 22.—The way Satan takes is made plain to me, and I must resist him in the first pleasing ideas arising from the remembrance of true affection in my dear and ever-esteemed friend. When I yield to these, I am presently lost to all sober thoughts, and plunged soon in the deepest sorrow for the distress it has brought on him; then my conduct towards him and every part of my family is painted in the most horrid colours, till I am nearly distracted. Thus has Satan over and over oppressed me, and relief been afforded my fainting soul through the help of a superior power even than Satan. I must watch and pray, for thus the Lord will bruise Satan under my feet.

August 6.—This season recalls a dear friend to my remembrance. Oh, may he occupy no more of my thoughts and affections than is consistent with the will of God, and pleasing in His sight. May these resignations be manifested by us both.

August 9.—Just two years since I parted from a dear friend and brother, whose memory will ever be cherished by me. Blessed be God! I feel now as if he was the inhabitant of another world, rather than of another part of this earth.

On October 10, 1806, on the close of his preparations for departure to Dinapore, ‘at night the missionaries, etc., met us at the pagoda for the purpose of commending me to the grace of God.’ ‘My soul never yet had such Divine enjoyment. I felt a desire to break from the body, and join the high praises of the saints above.’ Next day, in Calcutta, at evening worship at Mr. Myers’, ‘I found my heaven begun on earth. No work so sweet as that of praying and living wholly to the service of God.’ On Sunday, the 12th, ‘at night I took my leave of the saints in Calcutta in a sermon on Acts xx. 32. But how very far from being in spirit like the great apostle.’ On Monday he went up by land to Barrackpore with Mr. Brown, ‘happy in general.’ On Tuesday ‘Corrie came to me at the pagoda and prayed with me.’

1806, October 15.—Took my leave of the family at Aldeen in morning worship; but I have always found my heart most unable to be tender and solemn when occasions most require it. At eleven I set off in a budgerow with Mr. Brown, Corrie, and Parson. Marshman saw us as we passed the mission-house, and could not help coming aboard. He dined with us, and after going on a little way left us with a prayer. About sunset we landed at the house of the former French governor, and walked five miles through villages to Chandernagore, where we waited at an hotel till the boats came up. With the French host I found a liberty I could not have hoped for in his language, and was so enabled to preach the Gospel to him. There are two Italian monks in this place, who say Mass every day. I wished much to visit the fathers, if there had been time. A person of Calcutta, here for his health, troubled us with his profaneness, but we did not let him go unwarned, nor kept back the counsel of God. At night in the budgerow I prayed with my dear brethren.

October 16.—Rose somewhat dejected, and walked on to Chinsurah, the Dutch settlement, about three miles. There we breakfasted, and dined with Mr. Forsyth, the missionary. We all enjoyed great happiness in the presence and blessing of our God. Mr. Forsyth came on with us from Chinsurah, till we stopped at sunset opposite Bandel, a Portuguese settlement, and then we had Divine service. I prayed and found my heart greatly enlarged. After his departure our conversation was suitable and spiritual. How sweet is prayer to my soul at this time! I seem as if I never could be tired, not only of spiritual joys, but of spiritual employments, since they are now the same.

October 17.—My dear brethren, on account of the bad weather, were obliged to leave me to-day. So we spent the whole morning in a Divine ordinance in which each read a portion of Scripture and all sang and prayed. Mr. Brown’s passage, chosen from Joshua i., was very suitable, ‘Have I not commanded thee?’ Let this be an answer to my fears, O my Lord, and an assurance that I am in Thy work. It was a very affecting season to me. In prayer I was very far from a state of seriousness and affection. Indeed, I have often remarked that I have never yet prayed comfortably with friends when it has been preceded by a chapter of the Revelation. Perhaps because I depend too much on the feelings which the imagery of that book excites, instead of putting myself into the hands of the Spirit, the only author of the prayer of faith. They went away in their boat, and I was left alone for the first time, with none but natives.

CHAPTER VI: DINAPORE AND PATNA, 1807-1809

Until, in 1852 and the ten years following, Lord Dalhousie’s railway up the Ganges valley was completed to Allahabad, the usual mode of proceeding up-country from Calcutta was by the house-boat known as the budgerow, which is still common on the many rivers of Bengal where English planters and officials are found. At the rate of twenty-five miles a day the traveller is towed up against stream by the boatmen. When time is no object, and opportunities are sought for reading, shooting, and intercourse with the natives, the voyage is delightful in the cool season. Henry Martyn rejoiced in six weeks of this solitary life—alone yet not alone, and ever about his Father’s business. His studies were divided between Hindustani and Sanskrit; he was much occupied in prayer and in the reading of the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures. Morning and evening he spent himself among the people on the banks, and at the ghauts and bazaars of the mighty river, preaching Christ and spreading abroad the New Testament. The dense population and the spiritual darkness, as the panorama of native life moved hourly before his eyes, on river and on land, stirred up the busiest of Christians to be still busier, in spite of his fast-wasting body; ‘What a wretched life shall I lead if I do not exert myself from morning till night, in a place where, through whole territories, I seem to be the only light!’ His gun supplied him with small game, ‘enough to make a change with the curry.’

At Cutwa, one of Carey’s mission stations, he had fellowship with Chamberlain, receiving that ‘refreshment of spirit which comes from the blessing of God on Christian communion.’ ‘Tell Marshman,’ he wrote, ‘with my affectionate remembrance, that I have seriously begun the Sanskrit Grammar.’ To Ward he sends a list of errata which he found in a tract in the Persian character. He had his Serampore moonshi with him. At Berhampore, soon to be occupied by Mr. Parson as chaplain, and by the London Missionary Society, he spent some time, for it was the great military station of the old Nawab Nazim’s capital, Moorshidabad, which Clive described as wealthier than London, and quite as populous. Henry Martyn at once walked into the hospital, where the surgeon immediately recognised him as an old schoolfellow and townsman. But even with such help he could not induce the men to rise and assemble for Divine service. ‘I left three books with them and went away amidst the sneers and titters of the common soldiers. Certainly it is one of the greatest crosses I am called to bear, to take pains to make people hear me. It is such a struggle between a sense of propriety and modesty on the one hand, and a sense of duty on the other, that I find nothing equal to it.’ At Rajmahal, like Carey six years before, he met some of the hill tribes—‘wrote down from their mouth some of the names of things.’

At Maldah he was in the heart of the little Christian community which, under Charles Grant twenty years before, had proved the salt of Anglo-Indian society, and had made the first attempt with Carey’s assistance to open vernacular Christian schools. With Mr. Ellerton, whose wife had witnessed the duel between Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, and who as a widow indeed lived to the Mutiny of 1857 as the friend of Bishop Daniel Wilson, he went to Gomalty, and visited one of the schools. ‘The cheerful faces of the little boys, sitting cross-legged on their mats round the floor, much delighted me. While they displayed their power of reading, their fathers, mothers, etc., crowded in numbers round the door and windows.’ Here we see the now vast educational system of Bengal in the birth. Not less striking is the contrast, due to the progress of that system on its missionary side, when we find Martyn, in 1806, recording his surprise at the extraordinary fear and unwillingness of the people to take tracts and books. One postmaster, when he found what the booklet was about, returned it with the remark that a person who had his legs in two boats went on his way uncomfortably. Passing Colgong and Monghyr, he ‘reached Patna. Walked about the scene of my future ministry with a spirit almost overwhelmed at the sight of the immense multitudes.’ On November 26 he arrived at Dinapore—‘the multitudes at the water-side prodigious.’

Nowhere, in British India as it was in 1807, could Henry Martyn have found a better training field, at once as chaplain to the troops and missionary to the Mohammedans, than the Patna centre of the great province of Bihar. For fourteen miles, Patna, the Mohammedan city, Bankipore, the British civil station, and Dinapore, the British military station, line the right bank of the Ganges, which is there two miles broad. Patna itself—‘the city,’ as the word means—was the Buddhist capital to which the Greek ambassador Megasthenes came from Seleukos Nikator, 300 B.C., and the Chinese pilgrim, Hwen T’sang, 637 years A.D. But under the Mogul emperors and down to the present day, Patna has been the focus of the most fanatical sect of Islam. There Meer Kasim murdered sixty Englishmen in 1763; and so little did a century’s civilisation affect the place, which Christian missionaries, except Martyn, neglected till recently, that in 1857 it was a centre of the Mutiny, and in 1872 it was the nucleus of Wahabi rebellion. The second city in Bengal next to Calcutta, and the fifth city in all India in inhabitants, Patna with Bankipore and Dinapore commanded an accessible native population of half a million. Such was Henry Martyn’s first ‘parish’ in the East. For the mass of these he opened schools and translated the Word of God; with their learned men he ‘disputed’ continually, in the spirit of Paul seeking to commend to them the very Christ.

Besides the Company’s civil servants in Bankipore whom he never ceased to influence, he was specially charged with the spiritual care of two European regiments, consisting at one time of 1,700 men and 80 officers in various positions. Then and up till 1860, when what was known as ‘the White Mutiny’ led the Queen’s Government to disband the troops, the East India Company had a European force of its own, specially recruited and paid more highly than the royal regiments. The men were generally better educated than the ordinary private of those days, were, indeed, often runaway sons of good families and disreputable adventurers from many countries. As a fighting force they were splendid veterans; in all other respects their history and character as well as his own experience of them on board ship, justified Martyn’s language in a letter to Mr. Brown. ‘My disdainful and abandoned countrymen among the military; they are impudent children and stiff-hearted, and will receive, I fear, my ministrations, as all the others have done, with scorn. Yet Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Henceforward let me live with Christ alone.’ How loving and faithful, if not always tender, his ministry was among them and their native women, and how it gained their respect till it formed a little Church in the army, we shall see.

Having settled down in barrack apartments at 50 rupees a month till he should get a house against the hot season, and having called on the general commanding and others, after the Anglo-Indian fashion, he reported to his longing friends in Aldeen: ‘I stand alone;[26] not one voice is heard saying, “I wish you good luck in the name of the Lord.” I offered to come over to Bankipore to officiate to them on the Sabbath. They are going to take this into consideration. I have found out two schools in Dinapore. I shall set on foot one or two schools without delay, and by the time the scholars are able to read we can get books ready for them.’ In this spirit and by a renewed act of self-dedication he entered on the year 1807:

Seven years have passed away since I was first called of God. Before the conclusion of another seven years, how probable is it that these hands will have mouldered into dust! But be it so: my soul through grace hath received the assurance of eternal life, and I see the days of my pilgrimage shortening without a wish to add to their number. But oh, may I be stirred up to a faithful discharge of my high and awful work; and laying aside, as much as may be, all carnal cares and studies, may I give myself to this ‘one thing.’ The last has been a year to be remembered by me, because the Lord has brought me safely to India, and permitted me to begin, in one sense, my missionary work. My trials in it have been very few; everything has turned out better than I expected; loving-kindness and tender mercies have attended me at every step: therefore here will I sing His praise. I have been an unprofitable servant, but the Lord hath not cut me off: I have been wayward and perverse, yet He has brought me further on the way to Zion; here, then, with sevenfold gratitude and affection, would I stop and devote myself to the blissful service of my adorable Lord. May He continue His patience, His grace, His direction, His spiritual influences, and I shall at last surely come off conqueror. May He speedily open my mouth, to make known the mysteries of the Gospel, and in great mercy grant that the heathen may receive it and live!

The hostility of the officers and civilians to his message sometimes became scorn, when they saw his efforts to teach and preach to the natives. These were days when the Patna massacre was still remembered. So few baptized Christians knew the power of the Faith which they practically dishonoured, that they had no desire to make it known to others; many even actually resented the preaching of Christ to the people, as both politically dangerous and socially an insult to the ruling race. This feeling has long since disappeared in India at least, though its expression is not unknown in some of the colonies where the land is held by the dark savages. Henry Martyn keenly felt such opposition, and none the less that the natives of the Patna district—especially the Mohammedans—were in their turn hostile to a government which had supplanted them so recently. A few weeks after his arrival we find him writing this in his Journal:

1806, December 1.—Early this morning I set off in my palanquin for Patna. Something brought the remembrance of my dear Lydia so powerfully to my mind that I could not cease thinking of her for a moment. I know not when my reflections seemed to turn so fondly towards her; at the same time I scarcely dare to wish her to come to this country. The whole country is manifestly disaffected. I was struck at the anger and contempt with which multitudes of the natives eyed me in my palanquin.

December 2.—On my way back called on Mr. D., the Judge, and Mr. F., at Bankipore. Mr. F.’s conversation with me about the natives was again a great trial to my spirit; but in the multitude of my troubled thoughts I still saw that there is a strong consolation in the hope set before us. Let men do their worst, let me be torn to pieces, and my dear L. torn from me; or let me labour for fifty years amidst scorn, and never seeing one soul converted; still it shall not be worse for my soul in eternity, nor worse for it in time. Though the heathen rage and the English people imagine a vain thing, the Lord Jesus, who controls all events, is my friend, my master, my God, my all. On the Rock of Ages when I feel my foot rest my head is lifted up above all mine enemies round about, and I sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the Lord. If I am not much mistaken, sore trials are awaiting me from without. Yet the time will come when they will be over. Oh, what sweet refuge to the weary soul does the grave appear! There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. Here every man I meet is an enemy; being an enemy to God, he is an enemy to me also on that account; but he is an enemy too to me because I am an Englishman. Oh, what a place must heaven be, where there are none but friends! England appears almost a heaven upon earth, because there one is not viewed as an unjust intruder; but, oh, the heaven of my God! the general assembly of the first-born, the spirits of the just made perfect, and Jesus! Oh, let me for a little moment labour and suffer reproach!

1807, January 2.—They seem to hate to see me associating at all with the natives, and one gave me a hint a few days ago about taking my exercise on foot. But if our Lord had always travelled about in His palanquin, the poor woman who was healed by touching the hem of His garment might have perished. Happily I am freed from the shackles of custom; and the fear of man, though not extirpated, does not prevail.

January 8.—Pundit was telling me to-day that there was a prophecy in their books that the English should remain one hundred years in India, and that forty years were now elapsed of that period; that there should be a great change, and they should be driven out by a king’s son, who should then be born. Telling this to moonshi, he said that about the same time the Mussulmans expected some great events, such as the coming of Dujjel, and the spread of Islam over the earth.

January 29.—The expectation from prophecy is very prevalent hereabouts that the time is coming when all the Hindus will embrace the religion of the English; and the pundit says that in many places they had already begun. About Agra, and Delhi, and Narwa, in the Mahratta dominions, there are many native Christian families.

Henry Martyn’s occupation of the Aldeen Pagoda had resulted, after his departure, in the formation, by Brown, Corrie, Parson, and Marmaduke Thompson, the Madras chaplain, of what would now be called a clerical club, with these three objects—to aid the British and Foreign Bible Society, then recently established; to help forward the translation of the Scriptures into the languages of the East; and especially to meet the whole expense of the Sanskrit and Greek Testaments, and to send on to Mr. Brown, for circulation, a quarterly report of the prospects, plans, and actual situation of each member so far as the Church is concerned. Of this Evangelical Anglican Brotherhood Martyn seems to have been the most active member during his brief career. His translations were made for it, in the first instance. ‘The Synod’, or ‘the Associated Clergy,’ as he called it at different times, when as yet there was no Bishop of Calcutta, consciously linked him to the fellowship of the Saints, to the Church and the University from which he had come forth. We find him noting seven years after ‘the day I left Cambridge: my thoughts frequently recurred with many tender recollections to that beloved seat of my brethren, and again I wandered in spirit amongst the trees on the banks of the Cam.’

The letters from these four chaplains cheered him at Dinapore when he was ‘very much depressed in spirits,’ and he hastens to write to each, giving this picture of his life:

From a solitary walk on the banks of the river I had just returned to my dreary rooms, and with the reflection that just at this time of the day I could be thankful for a companion, was taking up the flute to remind myself of your social meetings in worship, when your two packages of letters, which had arrived in my absence, were brought to me. For the contents of them, all I can say is, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name! The arrival of another dear brother, and the joy you so largely partake of in fellowship with God and with one another, act as a cordial to my soul. They show me what I want to learn, that the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, and that they that keep the faith of Jesus are those only whom God visits with His strong consolations. I want to keep in view that our God is the God of the whole earth, and that the heathen are given to His exalted Son, the uttermost parts of the earth for a possession.

Continually his love of music breaks forth alike for the worship of God and the association of friendship and affection. His correspondence with Brown was regular, but as that of a son with a father. His letters to Corrie, his old Cambridge junior, are frank and free. His joy was great when Corrie was stationed at the rock-fortress of Chunar, not very far from Dinapore, so that they occasionally met and officiated for each other. But up to this time his chief, his almost fearful human, delight was to think of Lydia by night and by day.

1806, December 10.—A dream last night was so like reality, and the impression after it was so deep upon my spirits, that I must record the date of it. It was about Lydia. I dreamt that she had arrived, but that after some conversation I said to her, ‘I know this is a dream; it is too soon after my letter for you to have come.’ Alas! it is only a dream; and with this I awoke, and sighed to think that it was indeed only a dream. Perhaps all my hope about her is but a dream! Yet be it so; whatever God shall appoint must be good for us both, and with that I will endeavour to be tranquil and happy, pursuing my way through the wilderness with equal steadiness, whether with or without a companion.

December 14. (Sunday.)—Service performed by an after order, at ten o’clock. The general was present, about twenty officers, and some of their ladies. I preached on the parable of the tares of the field. Much of the rest of the day I was in great distraction, owing to the incessant recurrence of thoughts about Lydia. My impatience and fear respecting her sometimes rose to such a height that I felt almost as at Falmouth, when I was leaving Europe, as I thought to see her no more. But in the evening it pleased the Lord to show me something of the awful nearness of the world of spirits, and the unmeasurable importance of my having my thoughts and cares devoted to my missionary work. Thus I obtained peace. I prayed in sincerity and fervour, that if there were any obstacle in the sight of God, the Lord might never suffer us to meet.

December 21. (Sunday.)—In the evening, after a solemn season of prayer, I received letters from Europe, one from Cousin T., Emma, Lydia, and others. The torrent of vivid affection which passed through my heart at receiving such assurances of regard continued almost without intermission for four hours. Yet, in reflection afterwards, the few words my dearest Lydia wrote turned my joy into tender sympathy with her. Who knows what her heart has suffered! After all, our God is our best portion; and it is true that if we are never permitted to meet, we shall enjoy blissful intercourse for ever in glory.

December 22.—Thinking far too much of dear Lydia all day.

December 23.—Set apart the chief part of this day for prayer, with fasting; but I do not know that my soul got much good. Oh, what need have I to be stirred up by the Spirit of God, to exert myself in prayer! Had no freedom or power in prayer, though some appearance of tenderness. Lydia is a snare to me; I think of her so incessantly, and with such foolish and extravagant fondness, that my heart is drawn away from God. Thought at night, Can that be true love which is other than God would have it? No; that which is lawful is most genuine when regulated by the holy law of God.

December 25.—Preached on 1 Tim. i. 15 to a large congregation. Those who remained at the Sacrament were chiefly ladies, and none of them young men. My heart still entangled with this idolatrous affection, and consequently unhappy. Sometimes I gained deliverance from it for a short time, and was happy in the love of God. How awful the thought, that while perishing millions demand my every thought and care, my mind should be distracted about such an extreme trifle as that of my own comfort! Oh, let me at last have done with it, and the merciful God save me from departing from Him, and committing that horrible crime of forsaking the fountain of living waters, and hewing out to myself broken cisterns.

As the delightful cold season of the Bihar uplands passed all too quickly, and the dry hot winds of Upper India began to scorch its plains, the solitary man began to think it ‘impossible I could ever subsist long in such a climate.’ From April 1807 his hereditary disease made rapid advances, while he reproached himself for lassitude and comparative idleness, and put additional constraint on himself to work and to pray unceasingly. From this time his Journal has frequent records of sickness, of loss of appetite, and of ‘pain’ in his ministrations, ending in loss of voice altogether for a time. Corrie and Brown and his other correspondents remonstrated, but they were at a distance. He needed a watchful and authoritative nurse such as only a wife could be, and he found only lack of sympathy or active opposition. He lived, as we can now see, as no white man in the tropics in any rank of life should live, from sheer simplicity, unselfishness, and consuming zeal. When the hot winds drove him out of the barracks, the first rainy season flooded his house. At all times and amid the insanitary horrors of an Indian cemetery he had to bury the dead of a large cantonment in a sickly season. His daily visits to the hospital were prolonged, for there he came soul to soul with the sinner, the penitent, and the rejoicing. And all the time he is writing to Corrie and each of his friends, ‘I feel anxious for your health.’ To marry officers and baptize children he had to make long journeys by palanquin, and expose his wasting body alike to heat and rain. But amid it all his courage never fails, for it is rooted in God; his heart is joyful, for he has the peace that passeth all understanding.

1807, May 18.—Through great mercy my health and strength are supported as by a daily miracle. But oh, the heat! By every device of darkness and tatties I cannot keep the thermometer below 92°, and at night in bed I seem in danger of suffocation. Let me know somewhat more particularly what the heat is, and how you contrive to bear it. The worst bad effect I experience is the utter loss of appetite. I dread the eating time.

July 7.—Heat still so great as to oblige me to abandon my quarters.

July 8.—Went to Bankipore to baptize a child. One of the ladies played some hymn-tunes on my account. If I were provided with proper books much good might be done by these visits, for I meet with general acceptance and deference. In the evening buried a man who had died in the hospital after a short illness. My conscience felt again a conviction of guilt at considering how many precious hours I waste on trifles, and how cold and lukewarm my spirit is when addressing souls.

August 23. (Sunday.)—Preached on Job xix. 25-27: ‘I know that my redeemer liveth.’ There seemed little or no attention; only one officer there besides Major Young. At Hindustani prayers, the women few, but attentive; again blest with much freedom; at the hospital was seized with such pain from over-exertion of my voice, that I was obliged to leave off and go away.

To Brown he writes: ‘The rains try my constitution. I am apt to be troubled with shortness of breath, as at the time I left you. Another rainy reason I must climb some hill and live there; but the Lord is our rock. While there is work which we must do, we shall live.’ Again in the early Sunday morning of August he dreamed—

That as I was attacked so violently in July, but recovered, at the same time next year I should be attacked again, and carried off by death. This, however, would only be awaking in a better world. If I may but awake up satisfied with Thy likeness, why shall I be afraid? I think I have but one wish to live, which is, that I may do the Lord’s work, particularly in the Persian and Hindustani translations; for this I could almost feel emboldened to supplicate, like Hezekiah, for prolongation of life, even after receiving this, which may be a warning.

After six months’ experience of his Dinapore-cum-Patna parish, Martyn sent in ‘to the Associated Clergy’ the first quarterly report of his own spiritual life, and of his work for others.

April 6.—I begin my first communication to my dear and honoured brethren, with thankfully accepting their proposal of becoming a member of their society, and I bless the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for this new instance of His mercy to His unworthy creature. May His grace and favour be vouchsafed to us, and His Holy Spirit direct all our proceedings, and sanctify our communications to the purposes for which we are united.

On a review of the state of my mind since my arrival at Dinapore, I observe that the graces of joy and love have been at a low ebb. Faith has been chiefly called into exercise, and without a simple dependence on the Divine promises I should still every day sink into fatal despondency. Self-love and unbelief have been suggesting many foolish fears respecting the difficulties of my future work among the heathen. The thought of interrupting a crowd of busy people like those at Patna, whose every day is a market-day, with a message about eternity, without command of language sufficient to explain and defend myself, and so of becoming the scorn of the rabble without doing them good, was offensive to my pride. The manifest disaffection of the people, and the contempt with which they eyed me, confirmed my dread. Added to this the unjust proceedings of many of the principal magistrates hereabout led me to expect future commotions in the country, and that consequently poverty and murder would terminate my career.

‘Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof’—‘As thy days are so shall thy strength be,’ were passages continually brought to my remembrance, and with these at last my mind grew quiet. Our countrymen, when speaking of the natives, said, as they usually do, that they cannot be converted, and if they could they would be worse than they are. Though I have observed before now that the English are not in the way of knowing much about the natives, yet the number of difficulties they mentioned proved another source of discouragement to me. It is surprising how positively they are apt to speak on this subject, from their never acknowledging God in anything: ‘Thy judgments are far above out of his sight.’ If we labour to the end of our days without seeing one convert, it shall not be worse for us in time, and our reward is the same in eternity. The cause in which we are engaged is the cause of mercy and truth, and therefore, in spite of seeming impossibilities, it must eventually prevail.

I have been also occasionally troubled with infidel thoughts, which originated perhaps from the cavillings of the Mohammedans about the person of Christ; but these have been never suffered to be more than momentary. At such times the awful holiness of the Word of God, and the deep seriousness pervading it, were more refreshing to my heart than the most encouraging promises in it. How despicable must the Koran appear with its mock majesty and paltry precepts to those who can read the Word of God! It must presently sink into contempt when the Scriptures are known.

Sometimes when those fiery darts penetrated more deeply, I found safety only in cleaving to God, as a child clasps to his mother’s neck. These things teach me the melancholy truth that the grace of a covenant God can alone keep me from apostasy and ruin.

The European society here consists of the military at the cantonment and the civil servants at Bankipore. The latter neither come into church nor have accepted the offer of my coming to officiate to them. There is, however, no contempt shown, but rather respect. Of the military servants very few officers attend, and of late scarcely any of the married families, but the number of privates, and the families of the merchants, always make up a respectable congregation. They have as yet heard very little of the doctrines of the Gospel. I have in general endeavoured to follow the directions contained in Mr. Milner’s letter on this subject, as given in Mr. Brown’s paper, No. 4.

At the hospital I have read Doddridge’s Rise and Progress, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. As the people objected to extempore preaching at church, I have in compliance with their desires continued to use a book. But on this subject I should be glad of some advice from my brethren.

I think it needless to communicate the plans or heads of any of my sermons, as they have been chiefly on the Parables. It is of more importance to observe that the Word has not gone forth in vain, blessed be God! as it has hitherto seemed to do in most places where I have been called to minister; and this I feel to be an animating testimony of His presence and blessing. I think the commanding officer of the native regiment here and his lady are seeking their salvation in earnest; they now refuse all invitations on the Lord’s day, and pass most of that day at least in reading the Word, and at all times discover an inclination to religious conversation. Among the privates, one I have little doubt is truly converted to God, and is a great refreshment to me. He parted at once with his native woman, and allows her a separate maintenance. His conversion has excited much notice and conversation about religion among the rest, and three join him in coming twice a week to my quarters for exposition, singing and prayer.

I visit the English very little, and yet have had sufficient experience of the difficulty of knowing how a minister should converse with his people. I have myself fallen into the worst extreme, and, from fear of making them connect religion with gloom, have been led into such shameful levity and conformity to them as ought to fill me with grief and deep self-abasement.

How repeatedly has guilt been brought upon my conscience in this way! Oh, how will the lost souls with whom I have trifled the hours away look at me in the day of judgment! I hope I am more and more convinced of the wickedness and folly of assuming any other character than that of a minister. I ought to consider that my proper business with the flock over which the Holy Ghost hath made me overseer is the business of another world, and if they will not consider it in the same light, I do not think that I am bound to visit them.

About the middle of last month, the Church service being ready in Hindustani, I submitted to the commanding officer of the European regiment a proposal to perform Divine service regularly for the native women of his regiment, to which he cordially assented. The whole number of women, about 200, attended with great readiness, and have continued to do so. Instead of a sermon, the Psalms, and the appointed lessons, I read in two portions the Gospel of St. Matthew regularly forward, and occasionally make some small attempts at expounding. The conversion of any of such despised people is never likely perhaps to be of any extensive use in regard to the natives at large; but they are a people committed to me by God, and as dear to Him as others; and next in order after the English, they come within the expanding circle of action.

After much trouble and delay, three schools have been established for the native children on Mr. Creighton’s plan—one at Dinapore, one at Bankipore, and one at Patna, at the last of which the Persian character is taught as well as the Nagri. The number of children already is about sixty. The other schoolmasters, not liking the introduction of these free schools, spread the report that my intention was to make them Christians, and send them to Europe; in consequence of which the zemindars retracted their promises of land, and the parents refused to send their children; but my schoolmasters very sensibly went to the people, and told them, ‘We are men well known among you, and when we are made Christians then do you begin to fear.’ So their apprehensions have subsided; but when the book of Parables, which is just finished, is put into their hands, I expect a revival of their fears. My hope is that I shall be able to ingratiate myself a little with the people before that time; but chiefly that a gracious God will not suffer Satan to keep his ground any longer, now that the appointed means are used to dislodge him. But, though these plans should fail, I hope to be strengthened to fight against him all my days. For, from what I feel within and see without, I know enough of him to vow, with my brethren, eternal enmity against him and his cause.

Respecting the state of the natives hereabouts, I believe that the Hindus are lax, for the rich men being few or none, there are few Brahmins and few tumashas (fêtes), and without these idolatry droops. The Mohammedans are numerous and ignorant, but from the best of them I cannot learn that more than three arguments can be offered for their religion, which are—the miracles wrought by Mohammed, those still wrought by his followers, and his challenge in the second chapter of the Koran, about producing a chapter like it, all of which are immediately answered.

If my brethren have any others brought forward to them they will, I hope, mention them; and if they have observed any remark or statement apparently affect a native’s mind, they will notice it.

Above all things, seriousness in argument with them seems most desirable, for without it they laugh away the clearest proofs. Zeal for making proselytes they are used to, and generally attribute to a false motive; but a tender concern manifested for their souls is certainly new to them, and seemingly produces corresponding seriousness in their minds.

From an officer who had been in the Mahratta service, I learned some time ago that there were large bodies of Christians at Narwa, in the Mahratta dominions, Sardhana, Delhi, Agra, Bettia, Boglipore. To obtain more information respecting them, I sent a circular letter to the missionaries residing at the three latter places, and have received two letters in reply. The padre at Boglipore is a young man just arrived, and his letter contains no information. From the letter of the padre at Agra I subjoin some extracts, premising that my questions were: 1. By whom were you sent? 2. How long has a mission been established in the place of your residence? 3. Do you itinerate, and to what distance? 4. Have you any portion of the MSS. translated, or do you distribute tracts? 5. Do you allow any remains of caste to the baptized? 6. Have you schools? are the masters heathen or Christians? 7. Is there any native preacher or catechist? 8. Number of converts.

In concluding my report, I take the liberty of proposing two questions on which I should be thankful for communications in your next quarterly report.

1. On the manner in which a minister should observe the Sabbath; whether he should make it a point of duty to leave no part of his discourses to prepare on that day? Whether our particular situation in this country, requiring redoubled exertion in those of us at least who are called to the heathen, will justify the introduction of a secular work into the Sabbath, such as translating the Scriptures, etc.?

2. In the commencement of our labours among the heathen, to which model should our preaching be conformed,—to that of John the Baptist and our Saviour, or that of the Apostles? The first mode seems more natural, and if necessary for the Jews, comparatively so enlightened, how much more for the heathen, who have scarcely any notions of morality! On the other hand, the preaching of the cross has in all ages won the most ignorant savages; and the Apostles preached it at once to heathens as ignorant perhaps as these.

Like Marshman and the Serampore missionaries, Henry Martyn kept up a Latin correspondence with the missionaries sent from Rome by the Propaganda to the stations founded by Xavier, and those afterwards established by that saint’s nephew in the days of the tolerant Akbar. At the beginning of this century, Anglican, Baptist, and Romanist missionaries all over the East co-operated with each other in translation work and social intercourse. More than once Martyn protected the priest at Patna from the persecution of the military authorities. He planned a visit to their station at Bettia, to the far north, at the foot of the Himalayas. In hospital his ministrations were always offered to the Irish soldiers in the absence of their own priest, and always without any controversial reference. In his Journal he is often indignant at the Popish perversion of the doctrines of grace, and in preaching he occasionally set forth the truth, but in pastoral and social intercourse he never failed to show the charity of the Christian scholar and the gentleman.

Major Young, with his wife, was the first of the officers to welcome Martyn’s preaching. Soon the men in hospital learned to appreciate his daily visits, and to attend to his earnest reading and talk. A few began to meet with him at his own house regularly, for prayer and the exposition of Holy Scripture. In January, he writes of one Sunday: ‘Great attention. I think the Word is not going forth in vain. In the afternoon read at the hospital. The steward I found had been long stationed at Tanjore and knew Schwartz; that Schwartz baptized the natives not by immersion, but by sprinkling, and with godfathers, and read the services both in English and Tamil. Felt much delighted at hearing anything about him. The man told me that the men at the hospital were very attentive and thankful that I came amongst them. Passed the evening with great joy and peace in singing hymns.’ In the heat of May he writes: ‘Found fifty sick at the hospital, who heard The Pilgrim’s Progress with great delight. Some men came to-night, but my prayer with them was exceedingly poor and lifeless.’

In these days, thanks to Lord Lawrence and Sir Henry Norman, there is a prayer-hall in every cantonment, ever open for the soldier who seeks quiet communion with God. Then—‘Six soldiers came to me to-night. To escape as much as possible the taunts of their wicked companions, they go out of their barracks in opposite directions to come to me. At night a young Scotsman of the European regiment came to me for a hymn-book. He expressed with tears his past wickedness and determination to lead a religious life.’ On the other side we have such passages as these: ‘What sort of men are these committed to my care? I had given them one more warning about their whoredom and drunkenness, and it’s the truth grappling with their consciences that makes them furious.’ Of the Company’s European regiment he writes to Corrie: ‘A more wicked set of men were, I suppose, never seen. The general, the colonel of the 67th, and their own colonel all acknowledge it. At the hospital when I visit their part, some go to a corner and invoke blasphemies upon me because, as they now believe, the man I speak to dies to a certainty.’ A young lieutenant of fine abilities he recommended strenuously to go into the ministry.

Although, fifteen years before, Sir John Shore had given orders as to the building of churches at military stations, and Lord Wellesley had set an example of interest in the moral and spiritual welfare of the Company’s servants, nothing had been done outside of the three Presidency cities. All that Henry Martyn found provided for him, as chaplain, on his first Sunday at Dinapore, was a long drum, on which he placed the Prayer-book. He was requested not to preach, because the men could not stand so long. He found the men playing at fives on Sunday. All that he soon changed, by an appeal to the general to put a stop to the games on Sunday, and by holding service at first in a barrack, and then in his own house. Before leaving Calcutta he had observed, in a conversation with the Governor-General, on the disgrace of there being no places of worship at the principal subordinate stations; upon which directions were given to prepare plans of building. He wrote to the equally troubled Corrie at Chunar. A year later nothing had been done, and he draws this picture to Corrie: ‘From the scandalous disorder in which the Company have left the ecclesiastical part of their affairs, so that we have no place fit, our assemblies are little like worshipping assemblies. No kneeling because no room; no singing, no responses.’ At last Sir George Barlow sent an order for an estimate for building a church, but Martyn had left for Cawnpore, only to see a worse state of things there. But the faithfulness of the ‘black’ chaplains was telling. He writes, on March 14, 1808:

The 67th are now all here. The number of their sick makes the hospital congregation very considerable, so that if I had no natives, translations, etc., to think of, there is call enough for my labours and prayers among all these Europeans. The general at my request has determined to make the whole body of troops attend in three divisions; and yesterday morning the Company’s European, and two companies of the King’s, came to church in great pomp, with a fine band of music playing. The King’s officers, according to their custom, have declared their intention not to call upon the Company’s; therefore I mean to call upon them. I believe I told you that 900 of the 67th are Roman Catholics. It seemed an uncommonly splendid Mohurrum here also. Mr. H., an assistant judge lately appointed to Patna, joined the procession in a Hindustani dress, and went about beating his breast, etc. This is a place remarkable for such folly. The old judge, you know, has built a mosque here, and the other judge issued an order that no marriage nor any feasting should be held during the season of Mohammedan grief. A remarkably sensible young man called on me yesterday with the Colonel; they both seem well disposed to religion. I receive many gratifying testimonies to the change apparently taking place among the English in religious matters in India; testimonies, I mean, from the mouths of the people, for I confess I do not observe much myself.

Having translated the Church Service into Hindustani, Henry Martyn was ready publicly to minister to the native women belonging to the soldiers of the Company’s European regiment. From such unions, rarely lawful, sprang the now great and important Eurasian community, many of whom have done good service to the Church and the Empire. ‘The Colonel approved, but told me that it was my business to find them an order, and not his.’

1807, March 23.—So I issued my command to the Sergeant-Major to give public notice in the barracks that there would be Divine service in the native language on the morrow. The morrow came, and the Lord sent 200 women, to whom I read the whole of the morning service. Instead of the lessons I began Matthew, and ventured to expound a little, and but a little. Yesterday we had a service again, but I think there were not more than 100. To these I opened my mouth rather more boldly, and though there was the appearance of lamentable apathy in the countenances of most of them, there were two or three who understood and trembled at the sermon of John the Baptist. This proceeding of mine is, I believe, generally approved among the English, but the women come, I fear, rather because it is the wish of their masters. The day after attending service they went in flocks to the Mohurrum, and even of those who are baptized, many, I am told, are so addicted to their old heathenism, that they obtain money from their husbands to give to the Brahmins. Our time of Divine service in English is seven in the morning, and in Hindustani two in the afternoon. May the Lord smile on this first attempt at ministration in the native language!

1807, March 23.—A few days ago I went to Bankipore to fulfil my promise of visiting the families there; and amongst the rest called on a poor creature whose black wife has made him apostatise to Mohammedanism and build a mosque. Major Young went with me, and the old man’s son-in-law was there. He would not address a single word to me, nor a salutation at parting, because I found an occasion to remind him that the Son of God had suffered in the stead of sinners. The same day I went on to Patna to see how matters stood with respect to the school. Its situation is highly favourable, near an old gate now in the midst of the city, and where three ways meet; neither master nor children were there. The people immediately gathered round me in great numbers, and the crowd thickened so fast, that it was with difficulty I could regain my palanquin. I told them that what they understood by making people Christians was not my intention; I wished the children to be taught to fear God and become good men, and that if, after this declaration, they were still afraid, I could do no more; the fault was not mine, but theirs. My schools have been heard of among the English sooner than I wished or expected. The General observed to me one morning that that school of mine made a very good appearance from the road; ‘but,’ said he, ‘you will make no proselytes.’ If that be all the opposition he makes, I shall not much mind.

A week later he wrote:

March 30.—Sick in body, but rather serious and humble in spirit, and so happy; corrected the Parables for a fair copy. Reading the Koran and Hindustani Ramayuna, and translating Revelation; a German sergeant came with his native woman to have her baptized; I talked with her a good while, in order to instruct her, and found her extraordinarily quick in comprehension.

April 1.—The native woman came again, and I passed a great deal of time in instructing her in the nature of the Gospel; but, alas! till the Lord touch her heart, what can a man do? At night the soldiers came, and we had again a very happy time; how graciously the Lord fulfils His promise of being where two or three are gathered together! The pious soldier grows in faith and love, and spoke of another who wants to join us. They said that the native women accounted it a great honour to be permitted to come to a church and hear the Word of God, and wondered why I should take such trouble for them.

‘How shall it ever be possible to convince a Hindu or Brahmin of anything?’ wrote Henry Martyn to Corrie after two years’ experience in Bengal.

1808, January 4.—Truly, if ever I see a Hindu a real believer in Jesus, I shall see something more nearly approaching the resurrection of a dead body than anything I have yet seen. However, I well remember Mr. Ward’s words, ‘The common people are angels compared with the Brahmins.’ Perhaps the strong man armed, that keeps the goods in peace, shall be dispossessed from these, when the mighty Word of God comes to be ministered by us.

‘We shall live to see better days.’ For these he prepared his translations of the Word of God. He wished to itinerate among the people, but his military duties kept him to the station. When Mr. Brown made another attempt to get him fixed in the Mission-Church he replied, ‘The evangelisation of India is a more important object than preaching to the European inhabitants of Calcutta.’ To Corrie he wrote: ‘Those sequestered valleys seen from Chunar present an inviting field for missionary labours. A Sikh, making a pilgrimage to Benares, came to me; he was very ignorant, and I do not know whether he understood what I endeavoured to show him about the folly of pilgrimages, the nature of true holiness, and the plan of the Gospel.’

1808, February 12.—Sabat describes so well the character of a missionary that I am ashamed of my great house, and mean to sell it the first opportunity, and take the smallest quarters I can find. Would that the day were come when I might throw off the coat and substitute the jamer; I long for it more and more; and am often very uneasy at being in the neighbourhood of so great a Nineveh without being able to do anything immediately for the salvation of so many perishing souls. What do you think of my standing under a shed somewhere in Patna as the missionaries did in the Lal Bazar? Will the Government interfere? What are your sensations on the late news? I fear the judgments of God on our proud nation, and that, as we have done nothing for the Gospel in India, this vineyard will be let out to others who shall bring the fruits of it in their season. I think the French would not treat Juggernaut with quite so much ceremony as we do.

Above all men in India, at that time and during the next half-century, however, Henry Martyn was a missionary to the Mohammedans. For them he learned and he translated Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic. With their moulvies he conducted controversies; and for years he associated with himself that extraordinary Arab, Sabat, who made life a burden to him.

Sabat and Abdallah, two Arabs of notable pedigree, becoming friends, resolved to travel together. After a visit to Mecca they went to Cabul, where Abdallah entered the service of Zeman Shah, the famous Ameer. There an Armenian lent him the Arabic Bible, he became a Christian, and he fled for his life to Bokhara. Sabat had preceded him there, and at once recognised him on the street. ‘I had no pity,’ said Sabat afterwards. ‘I delivered him up to Morad Shah, the king.’ He was offered his life if he would abjure Christ. He refused. Then one of his hands was cut off, and again he was pressed to recant. ‘He made no answer, but looked up steadfastly towards heaven, like Stephen, the first martyr, his eyes streaming with tears. He looked at me, but it was with the countenance of forgiveness. His other hand was then cut off. But he never changed, and when he bowed his head to receive the blow of death all Bokhara seemed to say, “What new thing is this?”’

Remorse drove Sabat to long wanderings, in which he came to Madras, where the Government gave him the office of mufti, or expounder of the law of Islam in the civil courts. At Vizagapatam he fell in with a copy of the Arabic New Testament as revised by Solomon Negri, and sent out to India by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in the middle of last century. He compared it with the Koran, the truth fell on him ‘like a flood of light,’ and he sought baptism in Madras at the hands of the Rev. Dr. Kerr. He was named Nathaniel. He was then twenty-seven years of age.

When the news reached his family in Arabia his brother set out to destroy him, and, disguised as an Asiatic, wounded him with a dagger as he sat in his house at Vizagapatam. He sent him home with letters and gifts to his mother, and then gave himself up to propagate the truth he had once, in his friend Abdallah’s person, persecuted to the death. He became one of the translating staff of the Serampore brotherhood, and did good service on the Arabic and Persian Scriptures. Mr. John Marshman, who knew him well, used to describe him as a man of lofty station, of haughty carriage, and with a flowing black beard. Delighted with the simple life and devotion of the missionaries, he dismissed his two Arab servants, and won the affection of all. When Serampore arranged to leave to Henry Martyn the Persian translation of the New Testament, Sabat left them with tears in his eyes for Dinapore. In almost nothing does the saintliness of Martyn appear so complete as in the references in his Journal to the pride, the vanity, the malice, the rage of this ‘artless child of the desert,’ when it became apparent that his knowledge of Persian and Arabic had been over-estimated. The passages are pathetic, and are equalled only by those which, in the closing days of his life, describe the dying missionary’s treatment by his Tartar escort. But to the last, Sabat, according to Colonel MacInnes of Penang,[27]  ‘never spoke of Mr. Martyn without the most profound respect, and shed tears of grief whenever he recalled how severely he had tried the patience of this faithful servant of God. He mentioned several anecdotes to show with what extraordinary sweetness Martyn had borne his numerous provocations. “He was less a man,” he said, “than an angel from heaven.”’

The rest of Sabat’s story may at once be told. Moved by rage at the exposure, by the Calcutta moonshis, of the incorrectness of his Arabic, and at the suspicions that his translations were copies from some old version, Sabat apostatised by publishing a virulent attack on Christianity. ‘As when Judas acted the traitor, Ananias the liar, and Simon Magus the refined hypocrite, so it was when Sabat daringly departed from the nominal profession of the truth. The righteous sorrowed, the unrighteous triumphed; yet wisdom was justified of her children,’ wrote Mr. Sargent. He left Calcutta as a trader for Penang, where he wrote to the local newspaper declaring that he professed Christianity anew, and he entered the service of the fugitive Sultan of Acheen, on the north of Sumatra. Thence, when he was imprisoned by the insurgents, he wrote letters with his own blood to the Penang authorities, declaring that he was in some sense a martyr for Christ. All the private efforts of Colonel MacInnes to obtain his freedom were in vain; he was tied up in a sack and thrown into the sea. In the light of these events we must now read Henry Martyn’s Journal:

1807, August 24.—To live without sin is what I cannot expect in this world, but to desire to live without it may be the experience of every hour. Thinking to-night of the qualifications of Sabat, I felt the conviction, both in reflection and prayer, of the power of God to make him another St. Paul.

November 10.—The very first day we began to spar. He would come into none of my plans, nor did I approve of his; but I gave way, and by yielding prevailed, for he now does everything I tell him.... Sabat lives and eats with me, and goes to his bungalow at night, so that I hope he has no care on his mind. On Sunday morning he went to church with me. While I was in the vestry a bearer took away his chair from him, saying it was another gentleman’s. The Arab took fire and left the church, and when I sent the clerk after him he would not return. He anticipated my expostulations after church, and began to lament that he had two dispositions, one old, the other new.

1808, January 11.—Sabat sometimes awakes some of the evil parts of my nature. Finding I have no book of Logic, he wishes to translate one of his compositions, to instruct me in that science. He is much given to contradict, and set people right, and that he does with an air so dogmatical, that I have not seen the like of it since I left Cambridge. He looks on the missionaries at Serampore as so many degrees below him in intellect, that he says he could write so deeply on a text, that not one of them would be able to follow him. So I have challenged him in their name, and to-day he has brought me the first half of his essay or sermon on a text: with some ingenuity, it has the most idle display of school-boy pedantic logic you ever saw. I shall translate it from the Persian, in order to assist him to rectify his errors. He is certainly learned in the learning of the Arabs, and how he has acquired so much in a life so active is strange, but I wish it could be made to sit a little easier on him. I look forward to St. Paul’s Epistles, in hopes some good will come to him from them. It is a very happy circumstance that he did not go to preach at his first conversion; he would have entangled himself in metaphysical subjects out of his depth, and probably made shipwreck of his own faith. I have, I think, led him to see that it is dangerous and foolish to attempt to prove the doctrine of the Trinity by reason, as he said at first he was perfectly able to do.

January 30.—Sabat to-day finishes St. Matthew, and will write to you on the occasion. Your letter to him was very kind and suitable, but I think you must not mention his logic to him, except with contempt; for he takes what you say on that head as homage due to his acquirements, and praise to him is brandy to a man in a high fever. He loves as a Christian brother; but as a logician he holds us all in supreme contempt. He assumes all the province of reasoning as his own by right, and decides every question magisterially. He allows Europeans to know a little about Arithmetic and Navigation, but nothing more. Dear man! I smile to observe his pedantry. Never have I seen such an instance of dogmatical pride since I heard Dr. Parr preach his Greek Sermon at St. Mary’s, about the τὸ ὄν.

March 7.—Mirza is gone to the Mohurrum to-day: he discovers no signs of approach to the truth. Sabat creates himself enemies in every quarter by his jealous and passionate spirit, particularly among the servants. At his request I have sent away my tailor and bearers, and he is endeavouring to get my other servants turned away; because without any proof he suspects them of having persuaded the bearers not to come into his service. He can now get no bearers nor tailor to serve him. One day this week he came to me, and said that he meant to write to Mr. Brown to remove him from this place, for everything went wrong—the people were all wicked, etc. The immediate cause of this vexation was that some boxes, which he had been making at the expense of 150 rupees, all cracked at the coming on of the hot weather. I concealed my displeasure at his childish fickleness of temper, and discovered no anxiety to retain him, but quietly told him of some of the consequences of removing, so it is gone out of his mind. But Mirza happened to hear all Sabat’s querulous harangue, and, in order to vex and disgust him effectually, rode almost into his house, and came in with his shoes. This irritated the Arab; but Mirza’s purpose was not answered. Mirza began next day to tell a parcel of lies about Sabat, and to bring proofs of his own learning. The manifest tendency of all this was to make a division between Sabat and me, and to obtain his salary and work for himself. Oh, the hypocrisy and wickedness of an Indian! I never saw a more remarkable contrast in two men than in Mirza and Sabat. One is all exterior—the other has no outside at all; one a most consummate man of the world—the other an artless child of the desert.

March 28.—Sabat has been tolerably quiet this week; but think of the keeper of a lunatic, and you see me. A war of words broke out the beginning of last week, but it ended in an honourable peace. After he got home at night he sent a letter, complaining of a high crime and misdemeanour in some servant; I sent him a soothing letter, and the wild beast fell asleep. In all these altercations we take occasion to consider the extent of Christian forbearance, as necessary to be exercised in all the smaller occasions of life, as well as when persecution comes for religion. This he has not been hitherto aware of. One night in prayer I forgot to mention Mr. Brown; so, after I had done, he continued on his knees and went on and prayed in Persian for him. I was much pleased at this.

Did you read Lord Minto’s speech, and his commendation of those learned and pious men, the missionaries? I have looked upon him ever since as a nursing-father to the Church.

April 11.—It is surprising that a man can be so blinded by vanity as to suppose, as Sabat does, that he is superior to Mirza in Hindustani; yet this he does, and maintains it stoutly. I am tired of combating this opinion, as nothing comes of our arguments but strifes. Another of his odd opinions is, that he is so under the immediate influence and direction of the Spirit, that there will not be one single error in his whole Persian translation. You perceive a little enthusiasm in the character of our brother. As often as he finds himself in any difficulty, he expects a dream to set him right.

April 26.—These Orientals with whom I translate require me to point out the connection between every two sentences, which is often more than I can do. It is curious how accurately they observe all the rules of writing, and yet generally write badly. I can only account for it by supposing that they have been writing too long. From time immemorial they have been authors, without progressive knowledge; and so to produce variety they supply their lack of knowledge by overstraining their imagination; hence their extravagant metaphors and affected way of expressing the commonest things. Sabat, though a real Christian, has not lost a jot of his Arabian pride. He looks upon the Europeans as mushrooms, and seems to regard my pretensions to any learning as we do those of a savage or an ape.

May 31.—Some days Sabat overworked himself and was laid up. He does his utmost. He is increasingly dear to me, as I see more of the meekness and gentleness of Christ in him. Our conflicts I hope are over, and we shall draw very quietly together side by side.

In all this, and much more that followed, or is unrecorded, Henry Martyn was being prepared unconsciously for his formal and unanswered controversies with the learned Mussulmans of Persia. His letters to Corrie tell of his farther experience with his moonshis and the moulvies of Patna, and describe the true spirit of such ‘disputings’ for the truth.

1807, April 28.—Of what importance is our walk in reference to our ministry, and particularly among the natives. For myself, I never enter into a dispute with them without having reason to reflect that I mar the work for which I contend by the spirit in which I do it. During my absence at Monghyr moonshi went to a learned native for assistance against an answer I had given him to their main argument for the Koran, and he not being able to render it, they mean to have down their leading man from Benares to convince me of the truth of their religion. I wish a spirit of inquiry may be excited, but I lay not much stress upon clear arguments; the work of God is seldom wrought in this way. To preach the Gospel, with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, is a better way to win souls.

May 4.—I am preparing for the assault of this great Mohammedan Imaum. I have read the Koran and notes twice for this purpose, and even filled whole sheets with objections, remarks, questions, etc.; but, alas! what little hopes have I of doing him or any of them good in this way! Moonshi is in general mute.

October 28.—At night, in a conversation with Mirza accidentally begun, I spoke to him for more than three hours on Christianity and Mohammedanism. He said there was no passage in the Gospel that said no prophet shall come after Christ. I showed him the last verse in Matthew, the passages in Isaiah and Daniel, on the eternity of Christ’s kingdom, and proved it from the nature of the way of salvation in the Gospel. I then told him my objections against Mohammedanism, its laws, its defects, its unnecessariness, the unsuitableness of its rewards, and its utter want of support by proof. When he began to mention Mahomet’s miracles, I showed him the passages in the 6th and 13th chapters of the Koran, where he disavows the power. Nothing surprised him so much as these passages; he is, poor man, totally indifferent about all religion; he told me that I had produced great doubt in his mind, and that he had no answer to give.

November 21.—My mind violently occupied with thoughts respecting the approaching spread of the Gospel, and my own going to Persia. Sabat’s conversation stirs up a great desire in me to go; as by his account all the Mahometan countries are ripe for throwing off the delusion. The gracious Lord will teach me, and make my way plain before my face. Oh, may He keep my soul in peace, and make it indifferent to me whether I die or live, so Christ be magnified by me. I have need to receive this spirit from Him, for I feel at present unwilling to die, as if my own life and labours were necessary for this work, or as if I should be deprived of the bliss of seeing the conversion of the nations. Vain thought! God, who keeps me here awhile, arranges every part of His plans in unerring wisdom, and if I should be cut off in the midst of my plans, I shall still, I trust, through mercy, behold His works in heaven, and be everlastingly happy in the never-ceasing admiration of His works and nature. Every day the disputes with Mirza and Moorad Ali become more interesting. Their doubts of Mahometanism seem to have amounted almost to disbelief. Moorad Ali confessed that they all received their religion, not on conviction, but because it was the way of their fathers; and he said with great earnestness, that if some great Sheikh-ool-Islam, whom he mentioned, could not give an answer, and a satisfactory, rational evidence, of the truth of Islamism, he would renounce it and be baptized. Mirza seemed still more anxious and interested, and speaks of it to me and Sabat continually. In translating 1 Timothy i. 15, I said to them, ‘You have in that verse heard the Gospel; your blood will not be required at my hands; you will certainly remember these words at the last day.’ This led to a long discussion, at the close of which, when I said that, notwithstanding their endeavours to identify the two religions, there is still so much difference ‘that if our word is true you are lost,’ they looked at each other almost with consternation, and said ‘It is true.’ Still the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ afford a plea to the one, and a difficulty to the other.

At another time, when I had, from some passage, hinted to Mirza his danger, he said with great earnestness, ‘Sir, why won’t you try to save me?’ ‘Save you?’ said I, ‘I would lay down my life to save your soul: what can I do?’ He wished me to go to Phoolwari, the Mussulman college, and there examine the subject with the most learned of their doctors. I told him I had no objection to go to Phoolwari, but why could not he as well inquire for himself whether there were any evidence for Mohammedanism?

1808, June 14.—Called on Bahir Ali Khan, Dare, and the Italian padre; with Bahir Ali I stayed two hours, conversing in Persian. He began our theological discussion with a question to me, ‘How do you reconcile God’s absolute power and man’s free will?’ I pleaded ignorance and inability, but he replied to his own question very fully, and his conclusion seemed to be that God had created evil things for the trial of His creatures. His whole manner, look, authority, and copiousness constantly reminded me of the Dean of Carlisle.[28] I asked him for the proofs of the religion of Mahomet. The first he urged was the eloquence of the Koran. After a long time he conceded that it was, of itself, an insufficient argument. I then brought forward a passage of the Koran containing a sentiment manifestly false; on which he floundered a good deal; but concluded with saying that I must wait till I knew more of logic and Persian before he could explain it to me satisfactorily. On the whole, I was exceedingly pleased with his candour, politeness, and good sense. He said he had nothing to lose by becoming a Christian, and that, if he were once persuaded of the truth, he would change without hesitation. He showed me an Arabic translation of Euclid.

June 15.—Read an account of Turkey. The bad effects of the book were so great that I found instant need of prayer, and I do not know when I have had such divine and animating feelings. Oh, it is Thy Spirit that makes me pant for the skies. It is He that shall make me trample the world and my lusts beneath my feet, and urge my onward course towards the crown of life.

December 5.—Went to Patna to Sabat, and saw several Persians and Arabians. I found that the intended dispute had come to nothing, for that Ali had told Sabat he had been advised by his father not to dispute with him. They behaved with the utmost incivility to him, not giving him a place to sit down, and desiring him at last to go. Sabat rose, and shook his garment against them, and said, ‘If you know Mohammedanism to be right, and will not try to convince me, you will have to answer for it at the day of judgment. I have explained to you the Gospel; I am therefore pure from your blood.’ He came home and wrote some poetry on the Trinity, and the Apostles, which he recited to me. We called on Mizra Mehdi, a jeweller, who showed us some diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. With an old Arabian there I tried to converse in Arabic. He understood my Arabic, but I could not understand his. They were all full of my praise, but then the pity was that I was a Christian. I challenged them to show what there was wrong in being a Nazarene, but they declined. Afterwards we called on the nabob Moozuffur Ali Khan. The house Sabat lived in was properly an Oriental one; and, as he said, like those in Syria. It reminded me often of the Apostles, and the recollection was often solemnising.

December 6 to 8.—Betrayed more than once into evil temper, which left dreadful remorse of conscience; I cried unto God in secret, but the sense of my sinfulness was overwhelming. It had a humbling effect, however. In prayer with my men I was led more unfeignedly to humble myself even to the dust, and after that I enjoyed, through the sovereign mercy of God, much peace, and a sense of His presence. Languid in my studies; indisposition causing sleepiness. Reading chiefly Persian and a little Greek: Hanway, Waring, and Franklin’s Travels into Persia. Haji Khan, a sensible old man from Patna, called two days following, and sat a long time conversing upon religion.

To Mrs. Dare, Gaya

Dinapore: May 19, 1808.

Dear Mrs. Dare,[29]—Your letter arrived just in time to save you from some severe animadversions that were preparing for you. I intended to have sent by your young friend some remarks, direct and oblique, on the variableness of the sex, the facility with which promises are made and broken, the pleasures of indolence, and other topics of the like nature,—but your kind epistle disarms me. Soon after you left us, the heat increased to a degree I had never before felt, and made me often think of you with concern. I used to say to Colonel Bradshaw, ‘I wonder how Mrs. Dare likes Gya, and its burning hills—I dare say she would be glad to be back again.’ Well, I should be glad if we had you here again. I want female society, and among the ladies of Dinapore there is none with whom I have a chance of obtaining a patient hearing when speaking to them on the subject of their most important interest. This, you know, is the state of all but Mrs. Stuart, and it is a state of danger and death. Follow them no more, my dear friend: but now, in the solitude of Gya, learn those lessons of heavenly wisdom, that, when you are brought again into a larger society, you may not yield to the impulse of doing as others do, but, by a life of true seriousness, put them to shame.

I go on much as usual, occupied all day, and laying a weary head on the pillow at night. My health, which you inquire after so kindly, is on the whole good; but I am daily reminded that it is a fragile frame I carry about.

August 23.—I rejoice to find by your letter that you are contented with your lot. Before the time of Horace, and since too, contentment has been observed to be a very rare thing on earth, and I know not how it is to be obtained but by learning in the school of the Gospel. ‘I have learned,’ said even St. Paul, ‘in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.’ To be a little slanderous for once, I suspect Colonel Bradshaw, our common friend, who will send you a letter by the same sepoy, must have a lecture or two more read to him in this science, as he is far from being perfect in it. He has, you know, all that heart can wish of this world’s goods, and yet he is restless; sometimes the society is dull; at other times the blame is laid on the quarters, and he must go out of cantonments. To-day he is going to Gya, to-morrow on the river. Now, I tell him that he need not change his place, but his heart. Let him seek his happiness in God, and he will carry about a paradise in his own bosom. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for him, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.

September 23.—My dear Mrs. Dare, attend to the call of God; He never speaks more to the heart than by affliction. Such a season as this, so favourable to the commencement of true piety, may never again occur. Hereafter time may have riveted worldly habits on you, and age rendered the heart insensible. Begin now to be melancholy? No—to be seriously happy, to be purely happy, everlastingly happy.

Ever, through the solitude, the suffering, and the toiling of the first twelve months at Dinapore, the thought of Lydia Grenfell, the hope of her union to him, and her help in his agonising for India, runs like a chord of sad music. He thus writes to his cousin, her sister:

Indeed, all my Europe letters this season have brought me such painful news that I almost dread receiving another. Such is the vanity of our expectations. I had been looking out with more than ordinary anxiety for these letters, thinking they would give me some account of Lydia’s coming—whereas yours and hers have only wounded me, and my sister’s,[30] giving me the distressing tidings of her ill-health, makes my heart bleed. Oh, it is now that I feel the agony of having half the globe intervening between us. Could I but be with her: yet God who heareth prayer will surely supply my place. From Sally I expect neither promptness nor the ability to console her sister. This is the first time Sally has taken up her pen to write to me, and thought an apology necessary for her neglect. Perhaps she has been wrapt up in her dear husband, or her dearer self. I feel very angry with her. But my dear faithful Lydia has more than compensated for all the neglect of my own relations. I believe she has sent me more than all the rest in England put together. If I had not loved her before, her affectionate and constant remembrance of me would win my heart.

You mention the name of your last little one (may she be a follower of her namesake!). It reminds me of what Mr. Brown has lately written to me. He says that Mrs. B. had determined her expected one should be called after me: but, as it proved to be a girl, it was called Lydia Martyn Brown, a combination that suggests many reflections to my mind.

And now I ought to begin to write about myself and India: but I fear you are not so interested about me as you used to be: yet the Church of God, I know, is dear to you always! Let me speak of the ministers. The Gospel was preached before the Governor-General by seven different evangelical chaplains in the course of six months. Of these five have associated, agreeing to communicate with each other quarterly reports of their proceedings. They are Mr. Brown at Calcutta, Thompson at Cuddalore, Parson at Berhampore, Corrie at Chunar, and myself here. Corrie and myself, as being most similarly employed, correspond every week. He gives all his attention to the languages, and has his heart wholly towards the heathen. He has set on foot four schools in his neighbourhood, and I four here along the banks of the Ganges, containing 120 boys: he has nearly the same number. The masters are heathens—but they have consented with some reluctance to admit the Christian books. The little book on the Parables in the dialect of Bihar, which I had prepared for them, is now in the press at Serampore; for the present, they read with their own books the Sermon on the Mount. We hope by the help of God to enlarge the plan of the schools very considerably, as soon as we have felt the ground, and can advance boldly.

Respecting my own immediate plans, I am rather in the dark. They wish to engage me as a translator of the Scriptures into Hindustani and Persian, by the help of some learned natives; and if this plan is settled at Calcutta, I shall engage in it without hesitation, as conceiving it to be the most useful way in which I can be employed at present in the Church of God. If not, I hope to begin to itinerate as soon as the rains are over; not that I can hope to be easily understood yet, but by mixing familiarly with the natives I should soon learn. Little permanent good, however, can be done till some of the Scriptures can be put into their hands. On this account I wish to help forward this work as quick as possible, because a chapter will speak plainly in a thousand places at once, while I can speak, and not very plainly, but in one. One advantage attending the delay of public preaching will be that the schools will have a fair run, for the commencement of preaching will be the downfall of the schools. I have my tent ready, and would set out with pleasure to-morrow if the time for this work were come. As there is public service here every Lord’s Day, three days’ journey is the longest I can take. This may hereafter prove an inconvenience: but the advantages of being a Company’s servant are incalculable. A missionary not in the service is liable to be stopped by every subaltern; but there is no man that can touch me. Amongst the Europeans at this station I am not without encouragement. Eight or ten, chiefly corporals or sergeants, come to my quarters Sunday and Wednesday nights for social worship: but it does not appear that more than one are truly converted. The commanding officer of the native battalion and his lady, whom I mentioned in my last, are, I think, increasingly serious—but the fear of man is their snare. Mrs. Young says that, with Lydia to support her, she could face the frown of the world. I had been looking forward with pleasure to the time when she would have such support, and rejoiced that Lydia would have so sensible and hopeful a companion.

Dinapore: December, 1807.

My dear Cousin,—Your letter, after so long a silence, was a great relief to me, as it assured me of your undiminished affection; but I regretted you had been so sparing in your consolations on the subject of my late disappointment. Remember, it was to you I used to unbosom all my anxieties, and I still look to you for that sympathising tenderness which no other person perhaps feels for me, or at least can venture to express. How every particular of our conversation in the journey from Redruth to Plymouth Dock returns to my mind! I have reason indeed to remember it—from that time I date my sorrows—we talked too much about Lydia. Her last letter was to bid me a final farewell, so I must not write to her without her permission; she wished she might hear by you that I was happy. I am therefore obliged to say that God has, according to her prayer, kept me in peace, and indeed strengthened me unto all patience and long-suffering with joyfulness. At first, like Jonah, I was more grieved at the loss of my gourd than at the sight of the many perishing Ninevehs all round me; but now my earthly woes and earthly attachments seem to be absorbing in the vast concern of communicating the Gospel to these nations. After this last lesson from God on the vanity of creature love, I feel desirous to be nothing, to have nothing, to ask for nothing, but what He gives. So remarkably and so repeatedly has He baffled my schemes of earthly comfort that I am forced at last to believe His determination to be, that I should live in every sense a stranger and pilgrim on the earth. Lydia allows me not the most distant prospect of ever seeing her; and if indeed the supposed indelicacy of her coming out to me is an obstacle that cannot be got over, it is likely indeed to be a lasting separation: for when shall I ever see it lawful to leave my work here for three years, when every hour is unspeakably precious? I am beginning therefore to form my plans as a person in a state of celibacy, and mean to trouble you no more on what I have been lately writing about so much. However, let me be allowed to make one request; it is that Lydia would at least consider me as she did before, and write as at that time. Perhaps there may be some objection to this request, and therefore I dare not urge it. I say only that by experience I know it will prove an inestimable blessing and comfort to me. If you really wish to have a detailed account of my proceedings, exert your influence in effecting this measure; for you may be sure that I shall be disposed to write to her letters long enough, longer than to any other, for this reason among others, that of the three in the world who have most love for me, i.e. Sally, Lydia, and yourself, I believe that, notwithstanding all that has happened, the middle one loves most truly. If this conjecture of mine is well-founded, she will be most interested in what befalls me, and I shall write in less fear of tiring. My bodily health, which you require me always to mention, is prodigious, my strength and spirits are in general greater than ever they were, and this under God I ascribe to the susceptibility of my frame, giving me instant warning of anything that may disorder it. Half-an-hour’s exposure to the sun produces an immediate overflow of bile: therefore I take care never to let the sun’s rays fall upon my body. Vexation or anxiety has the same effect. For this, faith and prayer for the peace of God are the best remedy.

Since my last letter, written a few months ago in reply to Cousin T., I do not recollect that anything has happened. Dr. Buchanan’s last publication on the Christian Institution will give you the most full and interesting accounts of the affairs of our Lord’s kingdom in India. The press seems to us all to be the great instrument at present. Preaching by the European Mission here has in no instance that I know of been successful. Everything in our manner, pronunciation, and doctrine is so new and strange, that to instruct them properly vivâ voce seems to be giving more time to a small body of them than can be conveniently spared from the great mass. Yet, on the other hand, I feel reason to be guarded against the love of carnal ease, which would make me prefer the literary work of translating to that of an itinerant: upon the whole, however, I acquiesce in the work that Dr. B. has assigned me, from conviction. Through the blessing of God I have finished the New Testament in the Perso-Arabic-Hindustani, but it must undergo strict revisal before it can be sent to the press. My assistants in this work were Mirza Mahommed Ali and Moorad Ali, two Mahometans, and I sometimes hope there are convictions in their minds which they will not be able to shake off. They have not much doubt of the falsehood of Mahometanism, and the truth of the Gospel, but they cannot take up the cross.

The arrival of Jawad Sabat, our Arabian brother, at Dinapore, had a great effect upon them.... He is now employed in translating the New Testament into Persian and Arabic, and great will be the benefit to his own soul, that he is called to study the Word of God: the Bible Society at home will, I hope, bear the expense of printing it. This work, whenever it is done properly, will be the downfall of Mahometanism. What do I not owe to the Lord for giving me to take part in a translation? Never did I see such wonders of wisdom and love in the blessed book, as since I have been obliged to study every expression; and it is often a delightful reflection, that even death cannot deprive us of the privilege of studying its mysteries.... I forgot to mention Lydia’s profile, which I received. I have now to request her miniature picture, and you must draw on Mr. Simeon, my banker, for the expense.... I need not assure you and Cousin T. of my unceasing regard, nor Lydia of my unalterable attachment. God bless you all, my beloved friends. Pray for me, as I do also for you. Our separation will soon be over.

July 3.—Received two Europe letters—one from Lydia, and the other from Colonel Sandys. The tender emotions of love, and gratitude, and veneration for her, were again powerfully awakened in my mind, so that I could with difficulty think of anything else; yet I found myself drawn nearer to God by the pious remarks of her letter. Nature would have desired more testimonies of her love to me, but grace approved her ardent love to her Lord.

To Charles Simeon[31]

Danapore (sic): January, 1808.

My dearest Friend and Brother,—I must begin my letter with assurances of eternal regard; eternal will it be if I find grace to be faithful.... My expectation of seeing Lydia here is now at an end. I cannot doubt any longer what is the Divine will, and I bow to it. Since I have been led to consider myself as perfectly disengaged from the affairs of this life, my soul has been filled with more ardent desires to spend and be spent in the service of God; and though in truth the world has now little to charm me, I think these desires do not arise from a misanthropic disgust to it.... I never loved, nor ever shall love, human creature as I love her.

Soon after David Brown of Calcutta wrote to Charles Simeon, whom a rumour of Henry Martyn’s engagement to Miss Corrie, his friend’s sister, had reached: ‘How could you imagine that Miss C. would do as well as Miss L.G. for Mr. Martyn? Dear Martyn is married already to three wives, whom, I believe, he would not forsake for all the princesses in the earth—I mean his three translations of the Holy Scriptures.’

To Mrs. Brown at Aldeen, who was his confidante in India, Martyn wrote on July 21:

It appears that the letter by the overland despatch did not reach Lydia. Again, the Sarah Christiana packet, which carried the duplicate, ought to have arrived long before the sailing of these last ships from England, but I see no account of her. It is probable, therefore, that I shall have to wait a considerable time longer in uncertainty; all which is good, because so hath the Lord appointed it.

July 25.—Hard at Arabic grammar all day, after finishing sermon. Sat in the evening a long time at my door, after the great fatigue of the day, to let my mind relax itself, and found a melancholy pleasure in looking back upon the time spent at St. Hilary and Marazion. How the days and years are gone by, as a tale that is told!

At last the blow had fallen.

October 24.—An unhappy day: received at last a letter from Lydia, in which she refuses to come because her mother will not consent to it. Grief and disappointment threw my soul into confusion at first, but gradually as my disorder subsided my eyes were opened, and reason resumed its office. I could not but agree with her that it would not be for the glory of God, nor could we expect His blessing, if she acted in disobedience to her mother. As she has said, ‘They that walk in crooked paths shall not find peace;’ and if she were to come with an uneasy conscience, what happiness could we either of us expect?

To Lydia Grenfell

Dinapore: October 24, 1807.

My dear Lydia,—Though my heart is bursting with grief and disappointment, I write not to blame you. The rectitude of all your conduct secures you from censure. Permit me calmly to reply to your letter of March 5, which I have this day received.

You condemn yourself for having given me, though unintentionally, encouragement to believe that my attachment was returned. Perhaps you have. I have read your former letters with feelings less sanguine since the receipt of the last, and I am still not surprised at the interpretation I put upon them. But why accuse yourself for having written in this strain? It has not increased my expectations nor consequently embittered my disappointment. When I addressed you in my first letter on the subject, I was not induced to it by any appearances of regard you had expressed, neither at any subsequent period have my hopes of your consent been founded on a belief of your attachment to me. I knew that your conduct would be regulated, not by personal feelings, but by a sense of duty. And therefore you have nothing to blame yourself for on this head.

In your last letter you do not assign among your reasons for refusal a want of regard to me. In that case I could not in decency give you any further trouble. On the contrary, you say that ‘present circumstances seem to you to forbid my indulging expectations.’ As this leaves an opening, I presume to address you again; and till the answer arrives must undergo another eighteen months of torturing suspense.

Alas! my rebellious heart—what a tempest agitates me! I knew not that I had made so little progress in a spirit of resignation to the Divine will. I am in my chastisement like a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke, like a wild bull in a net, full of the fury of the Lord, the rebuke of my God. The death of my late most beloved sister almost broke my heart; but I hoped it had softened me and made me willing to suffer. But now my heart is as though destitute of the grace of God, full of misanthropic disgust with the world, and sometimes feeling resentment against yourself and Emma, and Mr. Simeon, and, in short, all whom I love and honour most; sometimes, in pride and anger, resolving to write neither to you nor to any one else again. These are the motions of sin. My love and my better reason draw me to you again.... But now with respect to your mother, I confess that the chief and indeed only difficulty lies here. Considering that she is your mother, as I hoped she would be mine, and that her happiness so much depends on you; considering also that I am God’s minister, which amidst all the tumults of my soul I dare not forget, I falter in beginning to give advice which may prove contrary to the law of God. God forbid, therefore, that I should say, disobey your parents, where the Divine law does not command you to disobey them; neither do I positively take upon myself to say that this is a case in which the law of God requires you to act in contradiction to them. I would rather suggest to your mother some considerations which justify me in attempting to deprive her of the company of a beloved child.

October 26.—A Sabbath having intervened since the above was written, I find myself more tranquillised by the sacred exercises of the day. One passage of Scripture which you quote has been much on my mind, and I find it very appropriate and decisive,—that we are not to ‘make to ourselves crooked paths, which whoso walketh in shall not know peace.’ Let me say I must be therefore contented to wait till you feel that the way is clear. But I intended to justify myself to Mrs. Grenfell. Let her not suppose that I would make her or any other of my fellow-creatures miserable, that I might be happy. If there were no reason for your coming here, and the contest were only between Mrs. Grenfell and me, that is, between her happiness and mine, I would urge nothing further, but resign you to her. But I have considered that there are many things that might reconcile her to a separation from you (if indeed a separation is necessary, for if she would come along with you, I should rejoice the more). First, she does not depend on you alone for the comfort of her declining years. She is surrounded by friends. She has a greater number of sons and daughters honourably established in the world than falls to the lot of most parents—all of whom would be happy in having her amongst them. Again, if a person worthy of your hand, and settled in England, were to offer himself, Mrs. Grenfell would not have insuperable objections, though it did deprive her of her daughter. Nay, I sometimes think, perhaps arrogantly, that had I myself remained in England, and in possession of a competency, she would not have withheld her consent. Why, then, should my banishment from my native country, in the service of mankind, be a reason with any for inflicting an additional wound, far more painful than a separation from my dearest relatives?

I have no claim upon Mrs. Grenfell in any way, but let her only conceive a son of her own in my circumstances. If she feels it a sacrifice, let her remember that it is a sacrifice made to duty; that your presence here would be of essential service to the Church of God it is superfluous to attempt to prove. If you really believe of yourself as you speak, it is because you were never out of England.

Your mother cannot be so misinformed respecting India and the voyage to it as to be apprehensive on account of the climate or passage, in these days when multitudes of ladies every year, with constitutions as delicate as yours, go to and fro in perfect safety, and a vastly greater majority enjoy their health here than in England. With respect to my means I need add nothing to what was said in my first letter. But, alas! what is my affluence good for now? It never gave me pleasure but when I thought you were to share it with me. Two days ago I was hastening on the alterations in my house and garden, supposing you were at hand; but now every object excites disgust. My wish, upon the whole, is that if you perceive it would be your duty to come to India, were it not for your mother—and of that you cannot doubt—supposing, I mean, that your inclinations are indifferent, then you should make her acquainted with your thoughts, and let us leave it to God how He will determine her mind.

In the meantime, since I am forbidden to hope for the immediate pleasure of seeing you, my next request is for a mutual engagement. My own heart is engaged, I believe, indissolubly.

My reason for making a request which you will account bold is that there can then be no possible objection to our correspondence, especially as I promise not to persuade you to leave your mother.

In the midst of my present sorrow I am constrained to remember yours. Your compassionate heart is pained from having been the cause of suffering to me. But care not for me, dearest Lydia. Next to the bliss of having you with me, my happiness is to know that you are happy. I shall have to groan long, perhaps, with a heavy heart; but if I am not hindered materially by it in the work of God, it will be for the benefit of my soul. You, sister beloved in the Lord, know much of the benefit of affliction. Oh, may I have grace to follow you, though at a humble distance, in the path of patient suffering, in which you have walked so long! Day and night I cease not to pray for you, though I fear my prayers are of little value.

But, as an encouragement to you to pray, I cannot help transcribing a few words from my journal, written at the time you wrote your letter to me (March 7): ‘As on the two last days’ (you wrote your letter on the 5th), ‘felt no desire for a comfortable settlement in the world, scarcely pleasure at the thought of Lydia’s coming, except so far as her being sent might be for the good of my soul and assistance in my work. How manifestly is there an omnipresent, all-seeing God, and how sure we may be that prayers for spiritual blessings are heard by our God and Father! Oh, let that endearing name quell every murmur! When I am sent for to different parts of the country to officiate at marriages, I sometimes think, amidst the festivity of the company, Why does all go so easily with them, and so hardly with me? They come together without difficulty, and I am baulked and disconcerted almost every step I take, and condemned to wear away the time in uncertainty. Then I call to mind that to live without chastening is allowed to the spurious offspring, while to suffer is the privilege of the children of God.’

Dearest Lydia, must I conclude? I could prolong my communion with you through many sheets; how many things have I to say to you, which I hoped to have communicated in person. But the more I write and the more I think of you, the more my affection warms, and I should feel it difficult to keep my pen from expressions that might not be acceptable to you.

Farewell! dearest, most beloved Lydia, remember your faithful and ever affectionate,

H. Martyn.

October 25. (Sunday.)—Preached on Isaiah lii. 13 to a large congregation, my mind continually in heaviness, and my health disturbed in consequence. The women still fewer than ever at Hindustani prayer, and, at night, some of the men who were not on duty did not come; all these things are deeply afflicting, and yet my heart is so full of its own griefs, that I mourn not as I ought for the Church of God. I have not a moment’s relief from my burdens but after being some time in prayer; afterwards my uneasiness and misery return again.

October 26.—Mirza from Benares arrived to-day; I employed all the day in writing letters to Mr. Brown, Corrie, and Lydia. The last was a sweet and tranquillising employment to me. I felt more submission to the Divine will, and began to be more solicitous about Lydia’s peace and happiness than my own. How much has she been called to suffer! These are they that come out of great tribulation.

To Rev. David Brown

Dinapore: October 26, 1807.

My dear Sir,—I have received your two letters of the 14th and 17th; the last contained a letter from Lydia. It is as I feared. She refuses to come because her mother will not give her consent. Sir, you must not wonder at my pale looks when I receive so many hard blows on my heart. Yet a Father’s love appoints the trial, and I pray that it may have its intended effect. Yet, if you wish to prolong my existence in this world, make a representation to some persons at home who may influence her friends. Your word will be believed sooner than mine. The extraordinary effect of mental disorder on my bodily frame is unfortunate; trouble brings on disease and disorders the sleep. In this way I am labouring a little now, but not much; in a few days it will pass away again. He that hath delivered and doth deliver, is He in whom we trust that He will yet deliver.

The queen’s ware on its way to me can be sold at an outcry or sent to Corrie. I do not want queen’s ware or anything else now. My new house and garden, without the person I expected to share it with me, excite disgust.

November 25.—Letters came from Mr. Simeon and Lydia, both of which depressed my spirits exceedingly; though I have been writing for some days past, that I might have it in my power to consider myself free, so as to be able to go to Persia or elsewhere;—yet, now that the wished-for permission is come, I am filled with grief; I cannot bear to part with Lydia, and she seems more necessary to me than my life; yet her letter was to bid me a last farewell. Oh, how have I been crossed from childhood, and yet how little benefit have I received from these chastisements of my God! The Lord now sanctify this, that since the last desire of my heart also is withheld, I may with resignation turn away for ever from the world, and henceforth live forgetful of all but God. With Thee, O my God, there is no disappointment; I shall never have to regret that I loved Thee too well. Thou hast said, ‘Delight thyself in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.’

November 26.—Received a letter from Emma, which again had a tendency to depress my spirits; all the day I could not attain to sweet resignation to God. I seemed to be cut off for ever from happiness in not having Lydia with me.

The receipt of his letter of October 24, 1807, was thus acknowledged, before God, by Lydia Grenfell in her Diary:

1808, May 9.—A letter from my dear friend in India (requesting me to come out) reached me. These words form my comfort: ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ I see my duty pointed out, and am persuaded, dark as the prospect is, God will appear God in this matter; whether we meet again or not, His great power and goodness will be displayed—it has been in quieting my heart, for oh, the trial is not small of seeing the state of his mind. But I am to be still, and now, O Lord, let Thy love fill my soul, let it be supreme in his breast and mine; there is no void where Thou dwellest, whatever else is wanting.

May 11.—My mind distressed, perplexed, and troubled for my dear friend; much self-reflection for having suffered him to see my regard for him (and what it is), yet the comforts of God’s Word return—‘Why take ye thought?’ said our Lord. Yet to-morrow burdens the present day. Oh, pity and support me to bear the thought of injuring his peace—inquire if the cause is of God.

May 15.—Lord, Thou seest my wanderings—oh, how many, how great! Put my tears into Thy bottle. Yes, my Lord, I can forsake Thee and be content; I turn and turn, restless and miserable, till I am turned to Thee. What a week have I passed! never may such another pass over my head!—my thoughts wholly occupied about my absent friend—distressed for his distress, and full of self-reproaches for all that’s past—writing bitter things against myself—my heart alienated dreadfully from God—and the duties I am in the habit of performing all neglected. Oh, should the Lord not awake for me and draw me back, whither should I go? His Word has been my comfort at times, but Satan or conscience (I doubt which) tells me I am in a delusion to take the comfort of God’s Word, for I ought to suffer. But am I justified in putting comfort from me? since I no way excuse myself, but am, I trust, humbled for my imprudence in letting my friend know the state of mind towards him, and this is all I have injured him in. I accuse myself, too, for want of candour with my family, and oh, let me not forget the greatest offence of all—not consulting the will and glory of God in indulging and encouraging a regard He seems to frown on. I have to-day found deliverance, and felt some measure of calm reliance. I know there is a particular providence over him and me, but this belief does not lessen my fears of acting wrong—I am as responsible as if all were left to me. What shall I do but say, Because Thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of Thy wings will I trust? I fly to Thy power and take shelter in Thy love to sinners. Oh, for a continually bleeding heart, mourning for sin!

June 12.—I have peace in my soul to-day. My remembrance of God’s dear saint in India is frequent, but I am still in this affair, and expect to know more of the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness of our God in it and by it than I have heretofore. My prayer for him constantly is that he maybe supported, guided, and made in all things obedient and submissive to the will of his God.

Henry Martyn seems to have written again to Marazion, at this time, a letter which has not been preserved, for Lydia Grenfell thus refers to it:

August 29.—Heard of my absent dear friend by this day’s post, and was strangely affected, though the intelligence was satisfactory in every respect. I sought deliverance in prayer, and the Lord spoke peace to my agitated mind, and gave me what I desired—liberty of soul to return to Himself, and the contemplation of heavenly things, though a sadness remained on my spirit. Heard three sermons, for I thought it best to be less alone than usual, lest my thoughts should wander. Found great hardness of heart in the services of the day, but I doubt whether my affections were spiritual or not, though they arose from a longing to be in heaven, and a joyful sense of the certainty that God would bring me there.

September 11.—After some days of darkness and distress, sweet peace and light return, and my soul rests on God as my all-sufficient help. Oh, the idolatrous state of my heart! what painful discoveries are made to me! I see the stream of my affections has been turned from God and on.... An exertion must be made, like cutting off a right hand, in order to give Thee, O Lord, my heart. I must hear neither of nor from the person God has called in His providence to serve Him in a distant country. Oh, to be resolute, knowing by woeful experience the necessity of guarding my thoughts against the remembrance of one, though dear. As I value the presence of my God, I must avoid everything that leads my thoughts to this subject—O Lord, keep me dependent on Thee for grace to do so; Thou hast plainly informed me of Thy will by withholding Thy presence at this time, and Thy Word directed me to lay aside this weight.

October 30.—Thought of my dear friend to-night with tenderness, but entire resignation to Thy will, O our God, in never seeing or hearing from him again; to meet him above is my desire.

December 30.—I reckon among my mercies the Lord’s having enabled me to choose a single life, and that my friend in India has been so well reconciled to my determination. That trial was a sore one, and I believe the effects of it will be felt as long as I live. My weak frame could not support the perturbed state of my mind, and the various painful apprehensions that assailed me on his arrival nearly wore me down. But the Lord removed them all by showing me He approved of my choice, and in granting me the tidings of his enjoying peace and happiness in our separation. Every burden now respecting him is removed, and my soul has only to praise the wise and gracious hand which brought me through that thorny path. It was one I made to myself, by ever entering into a correspondence with him, and by expressing too freely my regard.

On March 28, 1809, Martyn wrote to Mr. Brown:

Your letter is just come. The Europe letter is from Lydia. I trembled at the handwriting.... It was only more last words, sent by the advice of Colonel Sandys, lest the non-arrival of the former might keep me in suspense.... I trust that I have done with the entanglements of this world; seldom a day passes but I thank God for the freedom from earthly care which I enjoy.

And so end Henry Martyn’s love-letters, marked by a delicacy as well as tenderness of feeling in such contrast to the action of Lydia Grenfell throughout, as to explain the mingled resentment and resignation in which they close. The request for a mutual engagement which would justify correspondence at least seems to have been unheeded for some months, till the news of his serious illness in July 1808 led her again to write to him, as taking the place of his sister who had been removed by death. He was ordered to Cawnpore, and set off in the hot season by Chunar and Ghazipore, writing these last words on April 11, 1809, from Dinapore:

My men seem to be in a more flourishing state than they have yet been. About thirty attend every night. I had a delightful party this week, of six young men, who will, I hope, prove to be true soldiers of Christ. Seldom, even at Cambridge, have I been so much pleased.

CHAPTER VII: CAWNPORE, 1809-1810

Mrs. Sherwood, known in the first decade of this century as a writer of such Anglo-Indian tales as Little Henry and his Bearer, and as a philanthropist who did much for the white and the dark orphans of British soldiers in India, was one of the many who came under the influence of Henry Martyn. This Lichfield girl, whose father had been the playmate of Samuel Johnson, and who had known Garrick and Dr. Darwin, Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth, had married her cousin, the paymaster of the King’s 53rd Regiment of Foot. The regiment was sent to Bengal. On its way up the Hoogli from Calcutta in boats, Mr. Sherwood and his wife were walking after sunset, when they stumbled on ‘a small society’ of their own men, who met regularly to read their Bibles and to pray, often in old stores, ravines, woods, and other retired places. ‘The very existence of any person in the barracks who had the smallest notion of the importance of religion was quite unsuspected by me,’ writes Mrs. Sherwood in her Autobiography.[32]  ‘I am not severe when I assert that at that time there really was not one in the higher ranks in the regiment who had courage enough to come forward and say, “I think it right, in this distant land, to do, as it regards religion, what I have been accustomed to do at home.”’ At Berhampore, the chaplain, Mr. Parson, began that good work in the 53rd which Martyn and Corrie afterwards carried on. When it continued the voyage up the Ganges, after a season, by Dinapore to Cawnpore, Mr. Parson gave the Sherwoods a letter of introduction to Martyn, then about to leave Dinapore. To this fact we owe the fullest and the brightest glimpses that we get of Henry Martyn, from the outside, all through his career. We are enabled to supplement the abasing self-revelation of his nature before God, as recorded in his Journal, by the picture of his daily life, drawn by a woman of keen sympathy and some shrewdness.

The moment the boat anchored at Dinapore Mr. Sherwood set out on foot to present his letter. He found the chaplain in the smaller square, at some distance, in a ‘sort of church-like abode with little furniture, the rooms wide and high, with many vast doorways, having their green jalousied doors, and long verandahs encompassing two sides of the quarters.’

Mr. Martyn received Mr. Sherwood not as a stranger, but as a brother,—the child of the same father. As the sun was already low, he must needs walk back with him to see me. I perfectly remember the figure of that simple-hearted and holy young man, when he entered our budgerow. He was dressed in white, and looked very pale, which, however, was nothing singular in India; his hair, a light brown, was raised from his forehead, which was a remarkably fine one. His features were not regular, but the expression was so luminous, so intellectual, so affectionate, so beaming with Divine charity, that no one could have looked at his features, and thought of their shape or form,—the out-beaming of his soul would absorb the attention of every observer. There was a very decided air, too, of the gentleman about Mr. Martyn, and a perfection of manners which, from his extreme attention to all minute civilities, might seem almost inconsistent with the general bent of his thoughts to the most serious subjects. He was as remarkable for ease as for cheerfulness, and in these particulars his Journal does not give a graphic account of this blessed child of God. I was much pleased at the first sight of Mr. Martyn. I had heard much of him from Mr. Parson; but I had no anticipation of his hereafter becoming so distinguished as he subsequently did. And if I anticipated it little, he, I am sure, anticipated it less; for he was one of the humblest of men.

Mr. Martyn invited us to visit him at his quarters at Dinapore, and we agreed to accept his invitation the next day. Mr. Martyn’s house was destitute of every comfort, though he had multitudes of people about him. I had been troubled with a pain in my face, and there was not such a thing as a pillow in the house. I could not find anything to lay my head on at night but a bolster stuffed as hard as a pin-cushion. We had not, as is usual in India, brought our own bedding from the boats. Our kind friend had given us his own room; but I could get no rest during the two nights of my remaining there, from the pain in my face, which was irritated by the bolster; but during each day, however, there was much for the mind to feed upon with delight. After breakfast Mr. Martyn had family prayers, which he commenced by singing a hymn. He had a rich, deep voice, and a fine taste for vocal music. After singing, he read a chapter, explained parts of it, and prayed extempore. Afterwards he withdrew to his studies and translations. The evening was finished with another hymn, Scripture reading, and prayers. The conversion of the natives and the building up of the kingdom of Christ were the great objects for which alone that child of God seemed to exist.

He believed that he saw the glimmering of this day in the exertions then making in Europe for the diffusion of the Scriptures and the sending forth of missionaries. Influenced by the belief that man’s ministry was the instrumentality which, by the Holy Spirit, would be made effectual to the work, we found him labouring beyond his strength, and doing all in his power to excite other persons to use the same exertions.

Henry Martyn was one of the very few persons whom I have ever met who appeared never to be drawn away from one leading and prevailing object of interest, and that object was the promotion of religion. He did not appear like one who felt the necessity of contending with the world, and denying himself its delights, but rather as one who was unconscious of the existence of any attractions in the world, or of any delights which were worthy of his notice. When he relaxed from his labours in the presence of his friends, it was to play and laugh like an innocent, happy child, more especially if children were present to play and laugh with him. In my Indian Journal I find this remark: ‘Mr. Martyn is one of the most pleasing, mild, and heavenly-minded men, walking in this turbulent world with peace in his mind, and charity in his heart.’

As the regiment was passing Chunar, after a night in ‘the polluted air’ of Benares, the Sherwoods were met by a boat with fresh bread and vegetables from Corrie. On their arrival at Cawnpore, Mrs. Sherwood at once opened two classes for the ‘great boys’ and ‘elder girls.’ Many of the former died in a few years, and not a few of the latter married officers above their own birth. Such were the conditions of military life in India at that time, notwithstanding the Calcutta Orphan Schools which David Brown had first gone out to India to organise; for Henry Lawrence and his noble wife, Honoria, with their Military Orphan Asylums in the hills, belonged to a later generation.

When first ordered to Cawnpore, in the hottest months of 1809, Henry Martyn resolved to apply to the Military Board for permission to delay his departure till the rainy season. But, though even then wasted by consumption and ceaseless toil, and tempted to spend the dreary months with the beloved Corrie at Chunar, as he might well have done under the customary rules, he could not linger when duty called. Had he not resolved to ‘burn out’ his life? So, deluding himself by the intention to ‘stay a little longer to recruit’ at Chunar, should he suffer from the heat, he set off in the middle of April in a palanquin by Arrah, afterwards the scene of a heroic defence in the great Mutiny; Buxar, where a battle had been fought not long before, and Ghazipore, seat of the opium manufacture, like Patna. Sabat was sent on in a budgerow, with his wife Ameena and the baggage. This is Martyn’s account, to Brown, of the voyage above Chunar:

Cawnpore: May 3, 1809.

I transported myself with such rapidity to this place that I had nearly transported myself out of the world. From Dinapore to Chunar all was well, but from Allahabad to that place I was obliged to travel two days and nights without intermission, the hot winds blowing like fire from a furnace. Two days after my arrival the fever which had been kindling in my blood broke out, and last night I fainted repeatedly. But a gracious God has again interposed to save my life; to-day I feel well again. Where Sabat is I do not know. I have heard nothing of him since leaving Dinapore. Corrie is well, but it is grievous to see him chained to a rock with a few half-dead invalids, when so many stations—amongst others, the one I have left—are destitute....

I do not like this place at all. There is no church, not so much as the fly of a tent; what to do I know not except to address Lord Minto in a private letter. Mr. (Charles) Grant, who is anxious that we should labour principally for the present among the Europeans, ought, I think, to help us with a house. I mean to write to Mr. Simeon about this.

I feel a little uncomfortable at being so much farther removed from Calcutta. At Dinapore I had friends on both sides of me, and correspondence with you was quick: here I seem cut off from the world. Alas! how dependent is my heart upon the creature still. I am ordered to seal up.—Yours affectionately ever,

H. Martyn.

This is Mrs. Sherwood’s description of his arrival:

On May 30 the Rev. Henry Martyn arrived at our bungalow. The former chaplain had proceeded to the presidency, and we were so highly favoured as to have Mr. Martyn appointed in his place. I am not aware whether we expected him, but certainly not at the time when he did appear. It was in the morning, and we were situated as above described, the desert winds blowing like fire without, when we suddenly heard the quick steps of many bearers. Mr. Sherwood ran out to the leeward of the house, and exclaimed, ‘Mr. Martyn!’ The next moment I saw him leading in that excellent man, and saw our visitor, a moment afterwards, fall down in a fainting fit. He had travelled in a palanquin from Dinapore, and the first part of the way he moved only by night. But between Cawnpore and Allahabad, being a hundred and thirty miles, there is no resting-place, and he was compelled for two days and two nights to journey on in his palanquin, exposed to the raging heat of a fiery wind. He arrived, therefore, quite exhausted, and actually under the influence of fever. There was not another family in Cawnpore except ours to which he could have gone with pleasure; not because any family would have denied shelter to a countryman in such a condition, but, alas! they were only Christians in name. In his fainting state Mr. Martyn could not have retired to the sleeping-room which we caused to be prepared immediately for him, because we had no means of cooling any sleeping-room so thoroughly as we could the hall. We, therefore, had a couch set for him in the hall. There he was laid, and very ill he was for a day or two. The hot winds left us, and we had a close, suffocating calm. Mr. Martyn could not lift his head from the couch. In our bungalow, when shut up as close as it could be, we could not get the thermometer under 96°, though the punkah was constantly going. When Mr. Martyn got a little better he became very cheerful, and seemed quite happy with us all about him. He commonly lay on his couch in the hall during the morning, with many books near to his hand, and amongst these always a Hebrew Bible and a Greek Testament. Soon, very soon, he began to talk to me of what was passing in his mind, calling to me at my table to tell me his thoughts. He was studying the Hebrew characters, having an idea, which I believe is not a new one, that these characters contain the elements of all things, though I have reason to suppose he could not make them out at all to his satisfaction; but whenever anything occurred to him he must needs make it known to me.

He was much engaged also with another subject, into which I was more capable of entering. It was his opinion that, if the Hindus could be persuaded that all nations are made of one blood, to dwell upon the face of the earth, and if they could be shown how each nation is connected by its descent from the sons and grandsons of Noah with other nations existing upon the globe, it would be a means of breaking down, or at least of loosening, that wall of separation which they have set up between themselves and all other people. With this view Mr. Martyn was endeavouring to trace up the various leading families of the earth to their great progenitors; and so much pleased was I with what he said on this subject, that I immediately committed all I could remember to paper, and founded thereupon a system of historical instruction which I ever afterwards used with my children. Mr. Martyn, like myself at this time, was often perplexed and dismayed at the workings of his own heart, yet, perhaps, not discerning a hundredth part of the depth of the depravity of his own nature, the character of which is summed up in Holy Writ in these two words—‘utterly unclean.’ He felt this the more strongly because he partook also of that new nature ‘which sinneth not.’ It was in the workings and actings of that nature that his character shone so pre-eminently as it did amid a dark and unbelieving society, such as was ours then at Cawnpore.

In a very few days he had discerned the sweet qualities of the orphan Annie, and had so encouraged her to come about him that she drew her chair, and her table, and her green box to the vicinity of his couch. She showed him her verses, and consulted him about the adoption of more passages into the number of her favourites. Annie had a particular delight in all the pastoral views given in Scripture of our Saviour and of His Church; and when Mr. Martyn showed her this beautiful passage, ‘Feed Thy people with Thy rod, the flock of Thine heritage, which dwell solitarily in the wood, in the midst of Carmel’ (Micah vii. 14), she was as pleased with this passage as if she had made some wonderful acquisition. What could have been more beautiful than to see the Senior Wrangler and the almost infant Annie thus conversing together, whilst the elder seemed to be in no ways conscious of any condescension in bringing down his mind to the level of the child’s? Such are the beautiful influences of the Divine Spirit, which, whilst they depress the high places of human pride, exalt the lowly valleys.

When Mr. Martyn lost the worst symptoms of his illness he used to sing a great deal. He had an uncommonly fine voice and fine ear; he could sing many fine chants, and a vast variety of hymns and psalms. He would insist upon it that I should sing with him, and he taught me many tunes, all of which were afterwards brought into requisition; and when fatigued himself, he made me sit by his couch and practise these hymns. He would listen to my singing, which was altogether very unscientific, for hours together, and he was constantly requiring me to go on, even when I was tired. The tunes he taught me, no doubt, reminded him of England, and of scenes and friends no longer seen. The more simple the style of singing, the more it probably answered his purpose.

As soon as Mr. Martyn could in any way exert himself, he made acquaintance with some of the pious men of the regiment (the same poor men whom I have mentioned before, who used to meet in ravines, in huts, in woods, and in every wild and secret place they could find, to read, and pray, and sing); and he invited them to come to him in our house, Mr. Sherwood making no objection. The time first fixed was an evening after parade, and in consequence they all appeared at the appointed hour, each carrying their mora (a low seat), and their books tied up in pocket-handkerchiefs. In this very unmilitary fashion they were all met in a body by some officers. It was with some difficulty that Mr. Sherwood could divert the storm of displeasure which had well-nigh burst upon them on the occasion. Had they been all found intoxicated and fighting, they would have created less anger from those who loved not religion. How truly is it said that ‘the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.’ Notwithstanding this unfortunate contretemps, these poor good men were received by Mr. Martyn in his own apartment; and a most joyful meeting he had with them. We did not join the party, but we heard them singing and praying, and the sound was very sweet. Mr. Martyn then promised them that when he had got a house he would set aside a room for them, where they might come every evening, adding he would meet them himself twice in the week. When these assemblies were sanctioned by our ever kind Colonel Mawby, and all difficulties, in short, overcome, many who had been the most zealous under persecution fell quite away, and never returned. How can we account for these things? Many, however, remained steadfast under evil report as well as good report, and died, as they had lived, in simple and pure faith.

I must not omit another anecdote of Mr. Martyn, which amused us much at the time, after we had recovered the alarm attending it. The salary of a chaplain is large, and Mr. Martyn had not drawn his for so long a time, that the sum amounted perhaps to some hundreds. He was to receive it from the collector at Cawnpore. Accordingly he one morning sent a note for the amount, confiding the note to the care of a common coolie, a porter of low caste, generally a very poor man. This man went off, unknown to Mr. Sherwood and myself, early in the morning. The day passed, the evening came, and no coolie arrived. At length Mr. Martyn said in a quiet voice to us, ‘The coolie does not come with my money. I was thinking this morning how rich I should be; and, now, I should not wonder in the least if he has not run off, and taken my treasure with him.’ ‘What!’ we exclaimed, ‘surely you have not sent a common coolie for your pay?’ ‘I have,’ he replied. Of course we could not expect that it would ever arrive safe; for it would be paid in silver, and delivered to the man in cotton bags. Soon afterwards, however, it did arrive—a circumstance at which we all greatly marvelled.

Cawnpore, of which Henry Martyn was chaplain for the next two years, till disease drove him from it, was the worst station to which he could have been sent. The district, consisting of clay uplands on the Doab between the Ganges and the Jumna rivers, which unite below at Allahabad, was at that time a comparatively desolate tract, swept by the hot winds, and always the first to suffer from drought. The great famine of 1837 afterwards so destroyed its unhappy peasantry and labourers, that the British Government made its county town one of the two terminals of the great Ganges canal, which the Marquis of Dalhousie opened, and irrigated the district by four branches with their distributing channels. Even then, and to this day, Cawnpore has not ceased to be a repulsive station. Its leather factories and cotton mills do not render it less so, nor the memory of the five massacres of British officers, their wives and children, by the infamous Nana Dhoondoo Panth, which still seems to cover it as with a pall, notwithstanding the gardens and the marble screen inclosing the figure of the Angel of the Resurrection with the palm of victory above the Massacre Well. The people of the town at least have always been disagreeable, from Hindu discontent and Mohammedan sulkiness. The British cantonment used to be at Bilgram, on the opposite bank, in the territory of Oudh. Well might Martyn write of such a station as Cawnpore: ‘I do not like this place at all,’ although he then enjoyed the social ministrations of the Sherwoods, and was constant in his own service to the Master among British and natives alike, and at his desk in translation work.

The first use which the chaplain made of his pay was this, according to Mrs. Sherwood: ‘Being persuaded by some black man, he bought one of the most undesirable houses, to all appearance, which he could have chosen.’ But he had chosen wisely for his daily duties of translation and preaching to the natives.

Mr. Martyn’s house was a bungalow situated between the Sepoy Parade and the Artillery Barracks, but behind that range of principal bungalows which face the Parade. The approach to the dwelling was called the Compound, along an avenue of palm trees and aloes. A more stiff, funereal avenue can hardly be imagined, unless it might be that one of noted sphynxes which I have read of as the approach to a ruined Egyptian temple. At the end of this avenue were two bungalows, connected by a long passage. These bungalows were low, and the rooms small. The garden was prettily laid out with flowering shrubs and tall trees; in the centre was a wide space, which at some seasons was green, and a chabootra, or raised platform of chunam (lime), of great extent, was placed in the middle of this space. A vast number and variety of huts and sheds formed one boundary of the compound; these were concealed by the shrubs. But who would venture to give any account of the heterogeneous population which occupied these buildings? For, besides the usual complement of servants found in and about the houses of persons of a certain rank in India, we must add to Mr. Martyn’s household a multitude of pundits, moonshis, schoolmasters, and poor nominal Christians, who hung about him because there was no other to give them a handful of rice for their daily maintenance; and most strange was the murmur which proceeded at times from this ill-assorted and discordant multitude. Mr. Martyn occupied the largest of the two bungalows. He had given up the least to the wife of Sabat, that wild man of the desert whose extraordinary history has made so much noise in the Christian world.

It was a burning evening in June, when after sunset I accompanied Mr. Sherwood to Mr. Martyn’s bungalow, and saw for the first time its avenue of palms and aloes. We were conducted to the chabootra, where the company was already assembled; there was no lady but myself. This chabootra was many feet square, and chairs were set for the guests. A more heterogeneous assembly surely had not often met, and seldom, I believe, were more languages in requisition in so small a party. Besides Mr. Martyn and ourselves, there was no one present who could speak English. But let me introduce each individual separately. Every feature in the large disk of Sabat’s face was what we should call exaggerated. His eyebrows were arched, black, and strongly pencilled; his eyes dark and round, and from time to time flashing with unsubdued emotion, and ready to kindle into flame on the most trifling occasion. His nose was high, his mouth wide, his teeth large, and looked white in contrast with his bronzed complexion and fierce black mustachios. He was a large and powerful man, and generally wore a skull-cap of rich shawling, or embroidered silk, with circular flaps of the same hanging over each ear. His large, tawny throat and neck had no other covering than that afforded by his beard, which was black. His attire was a kind of jacket of silk, with long sleeves, fastened by a girelle, or girdle, about his loins, to which was appended a jewelled dirk. He wore loose trousers, and embroidered shoes turned up at the toes. In the cold season he threw over this a wrapper lined with fur, and when it was warmer the fur was changed for silk. When to this costume is added ear-rings, and sometimes a golden chain, the Arab stands before you in his complete state of Oriental dandyism. This son of the desert never sat in a chair without contriving to tuck up his legs under him on the seat, in attitude very like a tailor on his board. The only languages which he was able to speak were Persian, Arabic, and a very little bad Hindustani; but what was wanting in the words of this man was more than made up by the loudness with which he uttered them, for he had a voice like rolling thunder. When it is understood that loud utterance is considered as an ingredient of respect in the East, we cannot suppose that one who had been much in native courts should think it necessary to modulate his voice in the presence of the English Sahib-log.[33]

The second of Mr. Martyn’s guests, whom I must introduce as being not a whit behind Sabat in his own opinion of himself, was the Padre Julius Cæsar, an Italian monk of the order of the Jesuits, a worthy disciple of Ignatius Loyola. Mr. Martyn had become acquainted with him at Patna, where the Italian priest was not less zealous and active in making proselytes than the Company’s chaplain, and probably much more wise and subtle in his movements than the latter. The Jesuit was a handsome young man, and dressed in the complete costume of the monk, with his little skull-cap, his flowing robes, and his cord. The materials, however, of his dress were very rich; his robe was of the finest purple satin, and his cord of twisted silk, and his rosary of costly stones, whilst his air and manner were extremely elegant. He spoke French fluently, and there Mr. Sherwood was at home with him, but his native language was Italian. His conversation with Mr. Martyn was carried on partly in Latin and partly in Italian. A third guest was a learned native of India, in his full and handsome Hindustani costume; and a fourth a little, thin, copper-coloured, half-caste Bengali gentleman, in white nankeen, who spoke only Bengali. Mr. Sherwood made a fifth, in his scarlet and gold uniform; myself, the only lady, was the sixth; and add our host, Mr. Martyn, in his clerical black silk coat, and there is our party. Most assuredly I never listened to such a confusion of tongues before or since. Such a noisy, perplexing Babel can scarcely be imagined. Everyone who had acquired his views of politeness in Eastern society was shouting at the top of his voice, as if he had lost his fellow in a wood; and no less than eight languages were in constant request, viz. English, French, Italian, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, Bengali, and Latin.

In order to lengthen out the pleasures of the evening, we were scarcely seated before good Mr. Martyn recollected that he had heard me say that I liked a certain sort of little mutton pattie, which the natives made particularly well; so, without thinking how long it might take to make these same patties, he called to a servant to give orders that mutton patties should be added to the supper. I heard the order, but never dreamed that perhaps the mutton might not be in the house. The consequence of this order was that we sat on the chabootra till it was quite dark, and till I was utterly weary with the confusion. No one who has not been in or near the tropics can have an idea of the glorious appearance of the heavens in these regions, and the brilliancy of the star-lit nights, at Cawnpore. Mr. Martyn used often to show me the pole-star, just above the line of the horizon; and I have seen the moon, when almost new, looking like a ball of ebony in a silver cup. Who can, therefore, be surprised that the science of astronomy should first have been pursued by the shepherds who watched their flocks by night in the plains of the South? When the mutton patties were ready, I was handed by Mr. Martyn into the hall of the bungalow. Mr. Martyn took the top of the table, and Sabat perched himself on a chair at the bottom. I think it was on this day, when at table, Sabat was telling some of his own adventures to Mr. Martyn, in Persian, which the latter interpreted to Mr. Sherwood and myself, that the wild Arab asserted that there were in Tartary and Arabia many persons converted to Christianity, and that many had given up their lives for the faith. He professed to be himself acquainted with two of these, besides Abdallah. ‘One,’ he said, ‘was a relation of his own.’ But he gave but small proof of this man’s sincerity. This convert, if such he was, drew the attention of the priests by a total neglect of all forms; and this was the more remarkable on account of the multiplied forms of Islam; for at the wonted hour of prayer a true Mussulman must kneel down and pray in the middle of a street, or between the courses of a feast, nay, even at the moment when perhaps his hands might be reeking with a brother’s blood. This relative of Sabat’s, however, was, as he remarked, observed to neglect all forms, and he was called before the heads of his tribe, and required to say wherefore he was guilty of this offence. His answer was, ‘It is nothing.’ He proceeded to express himself as if he doubted the very existence of a God. The seniors of the tribe told him that it would be better for him to be a Christian than an atheist; adding, therefore, ‘If you do not believe in our prophet you must be a Christian;’ for they wisely accounted that no man but a fool could be without some religion. The man’s reply was, that he thought the Christian’s a better religion than that of Mahomet; the consequence of which declaration was that they stoned him until he died. The other example which Sabat gave us was of a boy in Baghdad, who was converted by an Armenian, and endeavoured to escape, but was pursued, seized, and offered pardon if he would recant; but he was preserved in steadfastness to the truth, and preferred death to returning to Mahometanism. His life was required of him.

From the time Mr. Martyn left our house he was in the constant habit of supping with us two or three times a week, and he used to come on horseback, with the sais running by his side. He sat his horse as if he were not quite aware that he was on horseback, and he generally wore his coat as if it were falling from his shoulders. When he dismounted, his favourite place was in the verandah, with a book, till we came in from our airing. And when we returned many a sweet and long discourse we had, whilst waiting for our dinner or supper. Mr. Martyn often looked up to the starry heavens, and spoke of those glorious worlds of which we know so little now, but of which we hope to know so much hereafter. Often we turned from the contemplation of these to the consideration of the smallness, and apparent diminutiveness in creation, of our own little globe, and of the exceeding love of the Father, who so cared for its inhabitants that He sent His Son to redeem them.

On the occasion of the baptism of my second Lucy, never can I forget the solemn manner with which Mr. Martyn went through the service, or the beautiful and earnest blessing he implored for my baby, when he took her into his arms after the service was concluded. I still fancy I see that child of God as he looked down tenderly on the gentle babe, and then looked upwards, asking of his God that grace and mercy for the infant which he truly accounted as the only gift which parents ought to desire. This babe, in infancy, had so peculiar a gentleness of aspect, that Mr. Martyn always called her Serena.

Little was spoken of at Mr. Martyn’s table but of various plans for advancing the triumphs of Christianity. Among the plans adopted, Mr. Martyn had, first at Dinapore and then at Cawnpore, established one or two schools for children of the natives of the lower caste. His plan was to hire a native schoolmaster, generally a Mussulman, to appoint him a place, and to pay him an anna (1½d.) a head for each boy whom he could induce to attend school. These boys the master was to teach to write and read. It was Mr. Martyn’s great aim, and, indeed, the sole end of his exertions, to get Christian books into the school. As no mention was ever made of proselytism, there was never any difficulty found in introducing even portions of the Scripture itself, more especially portions of the Old Testament, to the attention of the children. The books of Moses are always very acceptable to a Mussulman, and Genesis is particularly interesting to the Hindus. Mr. Martyn’s first school at Cawnpore was located in a long shed, which was on the side of the cavalry lines. It was the first school of the kind I ever saw. The master sat at one end, like a tailor, on the dusty floor; and along under the shed sat the scholars, a pack of little urchins, with no other clothes on than a skull-cap and a piece of cloth round the loins. These little ones squatted, like their master, in the sand. They had wooden imitations of slates in their hands, on which, having first written their lessons with chalk, they recited them, à pleine gorge, as the French would say, being sure to raise their voices on the approach of any European or native of note. Now, Cawnpore is about one of the most dusty places in the world. The Sepoy lines are the most dusty part of Cawnpore; and as the little urchins are always well greased, either with cocoanut oil or, in failure thereof, with rancid mustard oil, whenever there was the slightest breath of air they always looked as if they had been powdered all over with brown powder. But what did this signify? They would have been equally dusty in their own huts. In these schools they were in the way of getting a few ideas; at all events, they often got so far as to be able to copy a verse on their wooden slates. Afterwards they committed to memory what they had written. Who that has ever heard it can forget the sounds of the various notes with which these little people intonated their ‘Aleph Zubbur ah—Zair a—Paiche oh,’ as they waved backwards and forwards in their recitations? Or who can forget the vacant self-importance of the schoolmaster, who was generally a long-bearded, dry old man, who had no other means of proving his superiority over the scholars but making more noise than even they could do? Such a scene, indeed, could not be forgotten; but would it not require great faith to expect anything green to spring from a soil so dry? But this faith was not wanting to the Christians then in India.

Besides the 53rd Regiment, the Cavalry Corps called in those days the 8th Light Dragoons, and six companies of Artillery, were stationed at Cawnpore. At the first parade service, on May 15, 1809, ‘two officers dropped down and some of the men. They wondered how I could go through the fatigue,’ wrote their new chaplain, not many days after his nearly fatal palanquin journey from Chunar. His voice even reached the men at the other end of the square which they had formed. Above a hundred men were in hospital, a daily congregation. Every night about a dozen of the soldiers met with him in the house. Not only the men but the officers were privately rebuked by him for swearing. Of the General he writes: ‘He has never been very cordial, and now he is likely to be less so; though it was done in the gentlest way, he did not seem to like it. Were it not to become all things to all men in order to save some, I should never trouble them with my company. But how then should I be like Christ? I have been almost the whole morning engaged in a good-humoured dispute with Mrs. P., who, in an instant after my introduction to her, opened all her guns of wit and eloquence against me for attempting to convert the Brahmans.’ A little later he writes of a dinner at the brigade-major’s with the chief persons of the station: ‘I could gain no attention while saying grace; and the moment the ladies withdrew the conversation took such a turn that I was obliged to make a hasty retreat. Oh! the mercy to have escaped their evil ways.’

The year was one of alarms of war, from which the history of our Indian Empire can rarely be free, surrounded as it is by a ring-fence of frontier tribes and often aggressive States. But in those days the great internal conflicts for the consolidation of our power, and the peace and prosperity of peoples exposed to anarchy for centuries, were still being waged. Marathas, Sikhs, and Goorkhas had all to be pacified in 1809. Now the infantry were being sent to the conquest of Bundlekhund and difficult siege of the fortress of Kalinjar, as old as the Mahabharat Epic in which it is mentioned. Now the artillery were under orders to march to Lodiana to check Ranjeet Singh. Now the cavalry were sent off to the, at first, fatal chase of the Goorkhas by Gillespie. Thus it was that their ever-careful chaplain sought to prepare them for the issue:

October 20.—Spoke to my men on preparation for the Lord’s Supper, and endeavoured to prepare myself for the ordinance, by considering my former life of sin, and all my unfaithfulness since my call to the Gospel. My heart was, as usual, insensible for a long time, but at last a gracious God made me feel some compunction, and then my feelings were such as I would wish they always were. I resolved at the time that it should be my special labour every day to obtain, and hold fast, this humbling view of my own depravity.

October 22. (Sunday.)—Preached at sunrise to the 53rd, on Acts xxviii. 29. At ten, about sixteen of the regiment, with Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood and Sabat, met in my bungalow, where, after a short discourse on ‘Behold the Lamb of God,’ we commemorated the death of the Lord. It was the happiest season I have yet had at the Lord’s Table, though my peace and pleasure were not unalloyed; the rest of the day I felt weak in body, but calm in mind, and rather spiritual; at night I spoke to the men on Rev. xxii. 2; the number was double; afterwards had some conversation on eternal things, but had reason to groan at the hollow-heartedness and coldness with which I do my best works.

November 18.—At night I took leave of my beloved Church previous to their departure for Bundlekhund with their regiment. I spoke to them from Gen. xxviii: ‘I will be with thee in all places whithersoever thou goest,’ etc. The poor men were much affected; they gave me their wills and watches.

November 19. (Sunday.)—Preached at sunrise to the dragoons, on John i. 17: ‘The law was given by Moses.’ At eleven at head-quarters, on Rom. iii. 19.

Nowhere are eucharistic seasons of communion so precious as in exile, and especially in the isolation of a tropical station. Not unfrequently in India, Christian people, far separated from any ordained minister, and about to part from each other, are compelled, by loving obedience to the Lord, to meet thus together. But what joy it must have been to have been ministered to at such times by one of Henry Martyn’s consecrated saintliness! Mrs. Sherwood lingers over her description of that Cawnpore service of October 22, 1809—the long inner verandah of the house, where daily prayer was wont to be made, shut in by lofty doors of green lattice-work; the table, with the white cloth and all things requisite, at one end; hassocks on which to kneel, and a high form in front of the table; all ‘decent and in good order, according to the forms of the Church of England.’ Still there was no church building. His first parade service in the hot winds brought on fever, so that he proposed to ask for the billiard-room, ‘which is better than the ball-room,’ but in vain. His next service was in the riding-school, but ‘the effluvium was such as would please only the knights of the turf. What must the Mohammedans think of us? Well may they call us “dogs,” when even in Divine worship we choose to kennel ourselves in such places.’ The General delayed to forward to Government the proposal for a church.

Henry Martyn’s missionary work among the natives became greatly extended at Cawnpore, as his scrupulous conscience and delicate scholarship allowed him to use in public the colloquial Hindustani, and in conversation the more classical Persian. To Corrie he wrote, five months after his arrival there:

What will friends at home think of Martyn and Corrie? They went out full of zeal, but, behold! what are they doing? Where are their converts? They talked of the banyan-tree before they went out; but now they seem to prefer a snug bungalow to field-preaching. I fear I should look a little silly if I were to go home just at this time; but more because I should not be able to make them understand the state of things than because my conscience condemns me. Brother, what can you do? If you itinerate like a European, you will only frighten the people; if as a native, you will be dead in one year. Yet the latter mode pleases me, and nothing would give me greater pleasure than so to live, with the prospect of being able to hold out a few years.

Again, to an old Cambridge friend:

November, 1809.—Respecting my heart, about which you ask, I must acknowledge that H. Martyn’s heart at Dinapore is the same as H. Martyn’s heart at Cambridge. The tenor of my prayer is nearly the same, except on one subject, the conversion of the heathen. At a distance from the scene of action, and trusting too much to the highly-coloured description of missionaries, my heart used to expand with rapture at the hope of seeing thousands of the natives melting under the Word as soon as it should be preached to them. Here I am called to exercise faith—that so it shall one day be. My former feelings on this subject were more agreeable, and at the same time more according with the truth; for if we believe the prophets, the scenes that time shall unfold, ‘though surpassing fable, are yet true.’ While I write, hope and joy spring up in my mind. Yes, it shall be; yonder stream of Ganges shall one day roll through tracts adorned with Christian churches, and cultivated by Christian husbandmen, and the holy hymn be heard beneath the shade of the tamarind. All things are working together to bring on the day, and my part in the blessed plan, though not at first exactly consonant to my wishes, is, I believe, appointed me by God. To translate the Word of God is a work of more lasting benefit than my preaching would be. But, besides that, I am sorry to say that my strength for public preaching is almost gone. My ministrations among the Europeans at this station have injured my lungs, and I am now obliged to lie by except on the Sabbath days, and once or twice in the week.... However, I am sufficiently aware of my important relations to the natives, and am determined not to strain myself any more for the Europeans. This rainy season has tried my constitution severely. The first attack was with spasms, under which I fainted. The second was a fever, from which a change of air, under God, recovered me. There is something in the air at the close of the rains so unfavourable, that public speaking at that time is a violent strain upon the whole body. Corrie passed down a few weeks ago to receive his sister. We enjoyed much refreshing communion in prayer and conversation on our dear friends at and near Cambridge, and found peculiar pleasure in the minutest circumstances we could recollect about you all.

At Cawnpore, in front of his house, he began his wonderful preaching to the native beggars and ascetics of all kinds, Hindoo jogees and Mohammedan fakeers, the blind and the deaf, the maimed and the halt, the diseased and the dying, the impostor and the truly needy. These classes had soon found out the sympathetic padre-sahib, and to secure peace he seems to have organised a weekly dole of an anna each or of rice.

He wrote to Corrie:

I feel unhappy, not because I do nothing, but because I am not willing to do my duty. The flesh must be mortified, and I am reluctant to take up the cross. Sabat said to me yesterday, ‘Your beggars are come: why do not you preach to them? It is your duty.’ I made excuses; but why do not I preach to them? My carnal spirit says that I have been preaching a long time without success to my servants, who are used to my tongue; what can I expect from them—the very dregs of the people? But the true cause is shame: I am afraid of exposing myself to the contempt of Sabat, my servants, and the mob, by attempting to speak in a language which I do not speak well. To-day in prayer, one consideration has been made of some power in overcoming this shameful backwardness:—these people, if I neglect to speak to them, will give me a look at the last day which may fill me with horror. Alas! brother, where is my zeal?

December 17. (Sunday.)—Preached to H.M. Light Dragoons on Rev. iii. 20: ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock,’ etc. There was great attention. In the afternoon the beggars came, to the number of above four hundred, and, by the help of God, I determined to preach to them, though I felt as if I were leading to execution. I stood upon the chabootra in front of which they were collected.

To Corrie he thus described his talks with his ‘congregation of the poor’:

I went without fear, trusting to myself, and not to the Lord, and accordingly I was put to shame—that is, I did not read half as well as the preceding days. I shuffled and stammered, and indeed I am persuaded that there were many sentences the poor things did not understand at all. I spoke of the dry land, rivers, etc.; here I mentioned Gunga,‘a good river,’ but there were others as good. God loves Hindus, but does He not love others also? He gave them a good river, but to others as good. All are alike before God. This was received with applause. On the work of the fourth day, ‘Thus sun and moon are lamps. Shall I worship a candle in my hand? As a candle in the house, so is the sun in the sky.’ Applause from the Mohammedans. There were also hisses, but whether these betokened displeasure against me or the worship of the sun I do not know. I then charged them to worship Gunga and sun and moon no more, but the honour they used to give to them, henceforward to give to God their Maker. Who knows but even this was a blow struck, at least a branch lopped from the tree of heathenism? The number was about 550. You need not be deterred, dear brother, if this simple way of teaching do any good.

Again:

I spoke on the corruption of human nature, ‘The Lord saw that every imagination,’ etc. In the application I said, ‘Hence all outward works are useless while the heart remains in this state. You may wash in Gunga, but the heart is not washed.’ Some old men shook their heads, in much the same way as we do when seriously affected with any truth. The number was about seven hundred. The servants told me it was nonsense to give them all rice, as they were not all poor; hundreds of them are working people; among them was a whole row of Brahmins. I spoke to them about the Flood; this was interesting, as they were very attentive, and at the end said, ‘Shabash wa wa’ (Well said).

Mrs. Sherwood pictures the scene after an almost pathetic fashion:

We went often on the Sunday evenings to hear the addresses of Mr. Martyn to the assembly of mendicants, and we generally stood behind him. On these occasions we had to make our way through a dense crowd, with a temperature often rising above 92°, whilst the sun poured its burning rays upon us through a lurid haze of dust. Frightful were the objects which usually met our eyes in this crowd: so many monstrous and diseased limbs, and hideous faces, were displayed before us, and pushed forward for our inspection, that I have often made my way to the chabootra with my eyes shut, whilst Mr. Sherwood led me. On reaching the platform I was surrounded by our own people, and yet even there I scarcely dared to look about me. I still imagine that I hear the calm, distinct, and musical tones of Henry Martyn, as he stood raised above the people, endeavouring, by showing the purity of the Divine law, to convince the unbelievers that by their works they were all condemned; and that this was the case of every man of the offspring of Adam, and they therefore needed a Saviour who was both willing and able to redeem them. From time to time low murmurs and curses would arise in the distance, and then roll forward, till they became so loud as to drown the voice of this pious one, generally concluding with hissings and fierce cries. But when the storm passed away, again might he be heard going on where he had left off, in the same calm, steadfast tone, as if he were incapable of irritation from the interruption. Mr. Martyn himself assisted in giving each person his pice (copper) after the address was concluded; and when he withdrew to his bungalow I have seen him drop, almost fainting, on a sofa, for he had, as he often said, even at that time, a slow inflammation burning in his chest, and one which he knew must eventually terminate his existence. In consequence of this he was usually in much pain after any exertion of speaking.

No dreams nor visions excited in the delirium of a raging fever can surpass these realities. These devotees vary in age and appearance: they are young and old, male and female, bloated and wizened, tall and short, athletic and feeble; some clothed with abominable rags; some nearly without clothes; some plastered with mud and cow-dung; others with matted, uncombed locks streaming down to their heels; others with heads bald or scabby, every countenance being hard and fixed, as it were, by the continual indulgence of bad passions, the features having become exaggerated, and the lips blackened with tobacco, or blood-red with the juice of the henna. But these and such as these form only the general mass of the people; there are among them still more distinguished monsters. One little man generally comes in a small cart drawn by a bullock; his body and limbs are so shrivelled as to give, with his black skin and large head, the appearance of a gigantic frog. Another has his arm fixed above his head, the nail of the thumb piercing through the palm of the hand; another, and a very large man, has his ribs and the bones of his face externally traced with white chalk, which, striking the eye in relief above the dark skin, makes him appear, as he approaches, like a moving skeleton. When Mr. Martyn collected these people he was most carefully watched by the British authorities.

Shall anyone say that the missionary chaplain’s eighteen months’ work among this mixed multitude of the poor and the dishonest was as vain as he himself, in his humility, feared that it was? ‘Greater works’ than His own were what the Lord of Glory, who did like service to man in the Syria of that day, promised to His believing followers.

On the wall which enclosed his compound was a kiosk, from which some young Mussulman idlers used to look down on the preacher, as they smoked their hookahs and sipped their sherbet. One Sunday, determined to hear as well as see, that they might the more evidently scoff, they made their way through the crowd, and with the deepest scorn took their place in the very front. They listened in a critical temper, made remarks on what they heard, and returned to the kiosk. But there was one who no longer joined in their jeering. Sheikh Saleh, born at Delhi, Persian and Arabic moonshi of Lucknow, then keeper of the King of Oudh’s jewels, was a Mussulman so zealous that he had persuaded his Hindu servant to be circumcised. But he was afterwards horrified by the treachery and the atrocities of his co-religionists in the Rajpoot State of Joudhpore, whither he had gone. He was on his way back to his father at Lucknow when, on a heart thus prepared, there fell the teaching of the English man of God as to the purity of the Divine law and salvation from sin by Jesus Christ.

Eager to learn more of Christianity from its authoritative records, he sought employment on the translating staff of the preacher, through a friend who knew Sabat. He was engaged to copy Persian manuscripts by that not too scrupulous tyrant, without the knowledge of Martyn or any of the English. On receiving the completed Persian New Testament, to have it bound, he read it all, and his conversion by the Spirit of God, its Author, was complete. He determined to attach himself to Martyn, who as yet knew him not personally. He followed him to Calcutta, and applied to him for baptism. After due trial during the next year he was admitted to the Church under the new name of ‘Bondman of Christ,’ Abdool Massee’h. This was almost the last act of the Rev. David Brown, who since 1775 had spent his life in diffusing Christian knowledge in Bengal. Abdool’s conversion caused great excitement in Lucknow. Nor was this all. The new convert was sent to Meerut, when Mr. Parson was chaplain in that great military station, and there he won over the chief physician of the Rajah of Bhurtpore, naming him Taleb Massee’h. After preaching and disputing in Meerut, Abdool visited the Begum Sumroo’s principality of Sardhana, where he left Taleb to care for the native Christians. They and the Sherwoods together were the means of calling and preparing several native converts for baptism, all the fruit, direct and indirect, of Henry Martyn’s combined translating and preaching of the New Testament at Cawnpore.

Mrs. Sherwood writes:

We were told that Mr. Corrie might perhaps be unable to come as far as Delhi, and the candidates for baptism became so anxious that they set off to meet him on the Delhi road. We soon heard of their meeting from Mr. Corrie himself, and that he was pleased with them. Shortly afterwards our beloved friend appeared, with tents, camels, and elephants, and we had the pleasure of having his largest tent pitched in our compound, for we had not room for all his suite within the house. Then for the next week our house and grounds brought to my mind what I had often fancied of a scene in some high festival in Jerusalem; but ours was an assembly under a fairer, brighter dispensation. ‘Here we are,’ said Mr. Corrie, ‘poor weary pilgrims;’ and he applied the names of ‘Christian’ and ‘Mercy’ to his wife and an orphan girl who was with them. Dear Mr. Corrie! perhaps there never was a man so universally beloved as he was. Wherever he was known, from the lisping babe who climbed upon his knee to the hoary-headed native, he was regarded as a bright example of Christian charity and humility. On Sunday, January 31, the baptism of all the converts but one took place. Numbers of Europeans from different quarters of the station attended. The little chapel was crowded to overflowing, and most affecting indeed was the sight. Few persons could restrain their tears when Mr. Corrie extended his hand to raise the silver curls which clustered upon the brow of Monghul Das, one of the most sincere of the converts. The ceremony was very affecting, and the convert, who stood by and saw the others baptized, became so uneasy that, when Mr. Corrie set off to return, he followed him. For family reasons this man’s baptism had been deferred, as he hoped by so doing to bring others of his family into the Church of God.

How delightfully passed that Sunday!—how sweet was our private intercourse with Mr. Corrie! He brought our children many Hindustani hymns, set to ancient Oriental melodies, which they were to sing at the Hindu services, and we all together sang a hymn, which I find in my Journal designated by this title:

‘We Have Seen His Star in The East’

In Britain’s land of light my mind

To Jesus and His love was blind,

Till, wandering midst the heathen far,

Lo in the East I saw His star.

Oh, should my steps, which distant roam,

Attain once more my native shore,

Better than India’s wealth by far,

I’ll speak the worth of Bethlehem’s star.

There is little merit in the composition of this hymn; but it had a peculiar interest for us at that time, and the sentiment which it professes must ever retain its interest.

Long after this the good seed of the Kingdom, as sown by Henry Martyn, continued to bear fruit, which in its turn propagated itself. In 1816 there came to Corrie in Calcutta, for further instruction, from Bareilly, a young Mohammedan ascetic and teacher who, at seventeen, had abandoned Hinduism, seeking peace of mind. He fell in with Martyn’s Hindustani New Testament, and was baptized under the new name of Fuez Massee’h. Under somewhat similar circumstances Noor Massee’h was baptized at Agra. The missionary labours of Martyn at Cawnpore, followed up by Corrie there and at Agra soon after, farther resulted in the baptism there of seventy-one Hindus and Mohammedans, of whom fifty were adults. All of these, save seven, remained steadfast, and many became missionaries in their turn. The career of Abdool Massee’h closed in 1827, after he had been ordained in the Calcutta cathedral by Bishop Heber, who loved him. His last breath was spent in singing the Persian hymn, translated thus:

Beloved Saviour, let not me

In Thy kind heart forgotten be!

Of all that deck the field or bower,

Thou art the sweetest, fairest flower!

Youth’s morn has fled, old age comes on.

But sin distracts my soul alone;

Beloved Saviour, let not me

In Thy kind heart forgotten be.

As from Dinapore Martyn sought out the moulvies of Patna, so from Cawnpore he found his way to Lucknow There, after he had baptized a child of the Governor-General’s Resident, he met the Nawab Saadut Ali, and his eyes for the first time beheld one who had full power of life and death over his subjects. He visited the moulvies, at the tomb of Asaf-ood-Dowla, who were employed to read the Koran constantly. ‘With them I tried my strength, of course, and disputed for an hour; it ended in their referring me for an answer to another.’

Toil such as Martyn’s, physical and mental, in successive hot seasons, in such hospitals and barracks as then killed off the British troops and their families, and without a decent church building, would have sacrificed the healthiest in a few years. Corrie had to flee from it, or he would never have lived to be the first and model Bishop of Madras. But such labours, such incessant straining of the voice through throat and lungs, acting on his highly neurotic constitution, and the phthisical frame which he inherited from his mother, became possible to Henry Martyn only because he willed, he agonised, to live till he should give at least the New Testament to the peoples of Arabia and Persia, and to the Mohammedans of India, in their own tongues. We see him in his Journal, before God, spiritually spurring the sides of his intent day by day, and running like the noble Arab horse till it drops—its object gained. He had many warnings, and if he had had a wife to see that he obeyed the voice of Providence he might have outlived his hereditary tendency in such a tropical climate as that of India—a fact since proved by experience. He had narrowly escaped death at Dinapore a few months before, and he knew it. But it is well that, far more frequently than the world knows, such cases occur in the missionary fields of the world. The Brainerds and the Martyns, the Pattesons and the Hanningtons, the Keith-Falconers and the Mackays—to mention some of the dead only—have their reward in calling hundreds to fill their places, not less than the Careys and the Livingstones, the Duffs and the Wilsons, the Frenches and the Caldwells. To all who know the tropics, and especially the seasons of India, the dates that follow are eloquent.

1809, May 29.—The East has been long forsaken of God, and depravity in consequence more thoroughly wrought into them. I have been very ill all this week, the disorder appearing in the form of an intermittent. In the night cold sweats, and for about five hours in the day head-ache and vertigo. Last night I took some medicine, and think that I am better, though the time when the fever has generally come on is not yet arrived. But I hardly know how to be thankful enough for this interval of ease.

September 25.—Set out at three in the morning for Currah, and reached it on the 26th in the morning, and married a Miss K. to Mr. R.; the company was very unpleasant, so after passing the night there, I set out and travelled all day and night, and through Divine mercy arrived at home again on the 28th, but excessively fatigued, indeed almost exhausted. At night with the men, my whole desire was to lie low in the dust. ‘Thou hast left thy first love,’ on which I spoke, was an awful call to me, and I trust in God I shall ever feel it so.

November 19.—Received a letter from Mr. Simeon, mentioning Sarah’s illness; consumption has seized her, as it did my mother and sister, and will carry her off as it did them, and now I am the only one left. Oh, my dear Corrie, though I know you are well prepared, how does nature bleed at the thought of a beloved sister’s drooping and dying! Yet still to see those whom I love go before me, without so much as a doubt of their going to glory, will, I hope, soothe my sorrow. How soon shall I follow? I know it must be soon. The paleness and fatigue I exhibit after every season of preaching show plainly that death is settled in my lungs.

1810, April 9.—From the labours of yesterday, added to constant conversation and disagreement with visitors to-day, I was quite exhausted, and my chest in pain.

April 10.—My lungs still so disordered that I could not meet my men at night.

April 15. (Sunday.)—Preached to the Dragoons on the parable of the pounds. At the General’s on Luke xxii 22. With the native congregation I strained myself greatly in order to be heard, and to this I attribute the injury I did myself to-day. Attempted the usual service with my men at night, but after speaking to them from a passage in Scripture, was obliged to leave them before prayer.

April 16.—Imprudently joined in conversation with some dear Christian friends to-night, and talked a great deal; the pain in the chest in consequence returned.

May 12.—This evening thrown with great violence from my horse: while he was in full gallop, the saddle came off, but I received no other injury but contusion. Thus a gracious Providence preserves me in life. But for His kindness I had been now dragging out a wretched existence in pain, and my blessed work interrupted for years perhaps.

Henry Martyn was too absorbed in the higher life at all times to be trusted in riding or driving. Mrs. Sherwood writes:

I often went out with him in his gig, when he used to call either for me or Miss Corrie, and whoever went with him went at the peril of their lives. He never looked where he was driving, but went dashing through thick and thin, being always occupied in reading Hindustani by word of mouth, or discussing some text of Scripture. I certainly never expected to have survived a lesson he gave me in his gig, in the midst of the plain at Cawnpore, on the pronunciation of one of the Persian letters.

All through his Cawnpore life, also, the wail of disappointed love breaks from time to time. On Christmas day, 1809, he received, through David Brown as usual, a letter ‘from Lydia, containing a second refusal; so now I have done.’ On March 23, 1810, Mr. Steven’s letter reached him, reporting the death of his last sister. ‘She was my dear counsellor and guide for a long time in the Christian way. I have not a relation left to whom I feel bound by ties of Christian fellowship, and I am resolved to form no new connection of a worldly nature, so that I may henceforward hope to live entirely, as a man of another world.’ Meanwhile he has received Lydia Grenfell’s sisterly offer, to which he thus replies in the first of eleven letters, to one who had sunk the lover in the Christian friend, as was possible to two hearts so far separated and never to meet again in this world. But she was still his ‘dearest.’

To Lydia Grenfell

Cawnpore: March 30, 1810.

Since you kindly bid me, my beloved friend, consider you in the place of that dear sister whom it has pleased God in His wisdom to take from me, I gratefully accept the offer of a correspondence, which it has ever been the anxious wish of my heart to establish. Your kindness is the more acceptable, because it is shown in the day of affliction. Though I had heard of my dearest sister’s illness some months before I received the account of her death, and though the nature of her disorder was such as left me not a ray of hope, so that I was mercifully prepared for the event, still the certainty of it fills me with anguish. It is not that she has left me, for I never expected to see her more on earth. I have no doubt of meeting her in heaven, but I cannot bear to think of the pangs of dissolution she underwent, which have been unfortunately detailed to me with too much particularity. Would that I had never heard them, or could efface them from my remembrance. But oh, may I learn what the Lord is teaching me by these repeated strokes! May I learn meekness and resignation. May the world always appear as vain as it does now, and my own continuance in it as short and uncertain. How frightful is the desolation which Death makes, and how appalling his visits when he enters one’s family. I would rather never have been born than be born and die, were it not for Jesus, the Prince of life, the Resurrection and the Life. How inexpressibly precious is this Saviour when eternity seems near! I hope often to communicate with you on these subjects, and in return for your kind and consolatory letters to send you, from time to time, accounts of myself and my proceedings. Through you I can hear of all my friends in the West. When I first heard of the loss I was likely to suffer, and began to reflect on my own friendless situation, you were much in my thoughts, whether you would be silent on this occasion or no? whether you would persist in your resolution? Friends indeed I have, and brethren, blessed be God! but two brothers[34] cannot supply the place of one sister. When month after month passed away, and no letter came from you, I almost abandoned the hope of ever hearing from you again. It only remained to wait the result of my last application through Emma. You have kindly anticipated my request, and, I need scarcely add, are more endeared to me than ever.

Of your illness, my dearest Lydia, I had heard nothing, and it was well for me that I did not.—Yours most affectionately,

H. Martyn.

To David Brown he wrote, ‘My long-lost Lydia consents to write to me again;’ and in three weeks he thus addresses to Lydia herself again a letter of exquisite tenderness:

To Lydia Grenfell

Cawnpore: April 19, 1810.

I begin my correspondence with my beloved Lydia, not without a fear of its being soon to end. Shall I venture to tell you that our family complaint has again made its appearance in me, with more unpleasant symptoms than it has ever yet done? However, God, who two years ago redeemed my life from destruction, may again, for His Church’s sake, interpose for my deliverance. Though, alas! what am I that my place should not instantly be supplied with far more efficient instruments? The symptoms I mentioned are chiefly a pain in the chest, occasioned, I suppose, by over-exertion the two last Sundays, and incapacitating me at present from all public duty, and even from conversation. You were mistaken in supposing that my former illness originated from study. Study never makes me ill—scarcely ever fatigues me—but my lungs! death is seated there; it is speaking that kills me. May it give others life! ‘Death worketh in us, but life in you.’ Nature intended me, as I should judge from the structure of my frame, for chamber-council, not for a pleader at the Bar. But the call of Jesus Christ bids me cry aloud and spare not. As His minister, I am a debtor both to the Greek and the barbarian. How can I be silent when I have both ever before me, and my debt not paid? You would suggest that energies more restrained will eventually be more efficient. I am aware of this, and mean to act upon this principle in future, if the resolution is not formed too late. But you know how apt we are to outstep the bounds of prudence when there is no kind of monitor at hand to warn us of the consequences.

Had I been favoured with the one I wanted, I might not now have had occasion to mourn. You smile at my allusion, at least I hope so, for I am hardly in earnest. I have long since ceased to repine at the decree that keeps us as far asunder as the east is from the west, and yet am far from regretting that I ever knew you. The remembrance of you calls forth the exercise of delightful affections, and has kept me from many a snare. How wise and good is our God in all His dealings with His children! Had I yielded to the suggestions of flesh and blood, and remained in England, as I should have done, without the effectual working of His power, I should without doubt have sunk with my sisters into an early grave. Whereas here, to say the least, I may live a few years, so as to accomplish a very important work. His keeping you from me appears also, at this season of bodily infirmity, to be occasion of thankfulness. Death, I think, would be a less welcome visitor to me, if he came to take me from a wife, and that wife were you. Now, if I die, I die unnoticed, involving none in calamity. Oh, that I could trust Him for all that is to come, and love Him with that perfect love which casteth out fear; for, to say the truth, my confidence is sometimes shaken. To appear before the Judge of quick and dead is a much more awful thought in sickness than in health. Yet I dare not doubt the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ, nor can I, with the utmost ingenuity of unbelief, resist the reasonings of St. Paul, all whose reasons seem to be drawn up on purpose to work into the mind the persuasion that God will glorify Himself by the salvation of sinners through Jesus Christ. I wish I could more enter into the meaning of this ‘chosen vessel.’ He seems to move in a world by himself, and sometimes to utter the unspeakable words such as my natural understanding discerneth not; and when I turn to commentators I find that I have passed out of the spiritual to the material world, and have got amongst men like myself. But soon, as he says, we shall no longer see as in a glass, by reflected rays, but see as we are seen, and know as we are known.

April 25.—After another interval I resume my pen. Through the mercy of God I am again quite well, but my mind is a good deal distressed at Sabat’s conduct. I forbear writing what I think, in the hope that my fears may prove groundless; but indeed the children of the East are adepts in deceit. Their duplicity appears to me so disgusting at this moment, that I can only find relief from my growing misanthropy by remembering Him who is the faithful and true Witness; in whom all the promises of God are ‘yea and amen’; and by turning to the faithful in Europe—children that will not lie. Where shall we find sincerity in a native of the East? Yesterday I dined in a private way with ——. After one year’s inspection of me they begin to lose their dread and venture to invite me. Our conversation was occasionally religious, but topics of this nature are so new to fashionable people, and those upon which they have thought so much less than on any other, that often from the shame of having nothing to say they pass to other subjects where they can be more at home. I was asked after dinner if I liked music. On my professing to be an admirer of harmony, cantos were performed and songs sung. After a time I inquired if they had no sacred music. It was now recollected that they had some of Handel’s, but it could not be found. A promise, however, was made that next time I came it should be produced. Instead of it the 145th Psalm-tune was played, but none of the ladies could recollect enough of the tune to sing it. I observed that all our talents and powers should be consecrated to the service of Him who gave them. To this no reply was made, but the reproof was felt. I asked the lady of the house if she read poetry, and then proceeded to mention Cowper, whose poems, it seems, were in the library; but the lady had never heard of the book. This was produced, and I read some passages. Poor people! here a little and there a little is a rule to be observed in speaking to them.

April 26.—From speaking to my men last night, and again to-day conversing long with some natives, my chest is again in pain, so much so that I can hardly speak. Well, now I am taught, and will take more care in future. My sheet being full, I must bid you adieu. The Lord ever bless and keep you. Believe me to be with the truest affection,—Yours ever,

H. Martyn.

To Rev. T.M. Hitchins, Plymouth Dock

Cawnpore: October 10, 1809.

My dearest Brother,—I am again disappointed in receiving no letter from you. The last intelligence from the West of England is Lydia’s letter of July 8, 1808. Colonel Sandys has long since ceased to write to me, and I have no other correspondent. It is very affecting to me to be thus considered as dead by almost all my natural relations and early connections; and at this time, when I am led to think of you and the family to which you are united, and have been reading all your letters over, I feel that I could dip my pen deep in melancholy; for, strange as it may seem to you, I love so true, that though it is now the fifth year since I parted from the object of my affection, she is as dear to me as ever; yet, on the other hand, I find my present freedom such a privilege that I would not lose it for hardly any consideration. It is the impossibility of compassing every wish, that I suppose is the cause of any uneasiness that I feel. I know not how to express my thoughts respecting Lydia better than in Martial’s words—Nec tecum possum vivere nec sine te. However, these are not my general sentiments; it pleases God to cause me to eat my meat with gladness, praising God. Almost always I am without carefulness, as indeed it would be to my shame if I were not.

My kindest remembrances attend my dearest sisters, Emma and Lydia, as they well know. You two are such bad correspondents that on this ground I prefer another petition for the renewal of Lydia’s correspondence,—she need not suspect anything now, nor her friends. I have no idea that I should trouble her upon the old subject, even if I were settled in England—for oh, this vain world! quid habet commodi? quid non potius laboris?

But I never expect to see England more, nor do I expect that though all obstacles should be removed, she would ever become mine unless I came for her, and I now do not wonder at it, though I did before. If any one of my sisters had had such a proposal made to them, I would never have consented to their going, so you may see the affair is ended between us. My wish is that she would be scribe for you all, and I promise on my part to send you through her an ample detail of all my proceedings; also she need not imagine that I may form another attachment—in which case she might suppose a correspondence with an unmarried lady might be productive of difficulties,—for after one disappointment I am not likely to try my chance again, and if I do I will give her the earliest intelligence of it, with the same frankness with which I have always dealt (with her).

Meanwhile, on the silent shores of South Cornwall, Lydia Grenfell was thus remembering him before God:

1809, March 30.—My dear friend in India much upon my heart lately, chiefly in desires that the work of God may prosper in his hands, and that he may become more and more devoted to the Lord. I seem, as to the future, to have attained what a year or two since I prayed much for—to regard him absent as in another state of existence, and my affection is holy, pure, and spiritual for this dear saint of God; when it is otherwise, it is owing to my looking back. Recollections sometimes intrude, and I welcome them, alas, and act over again the past—but Lord, Thy holy, blessed will be done—cheerfully, thankfully I say this.

Tregembo, July 11.—I have suffered from levity of spirit, and lost thereby the enjoyment of God. How good then is it in the Lord to employ means in His providence to recall His wanderer to Himself and happiness! Such mercy belongeth unto God—and this His care over me I will record as a testimony against myself, if I forsake Him again and lose that sweet seriousness of mind, so essential to my peace and safety. Though I have never (perhaps for many hours in a day) ceased to remember my dear friend in India, it has not of late been in a way but as I might love and think of him in heaven. Why is it then that the intelligence of his probable nearness to that blessed abode should distress me? yet it did, and does so still. It is this intelligence which has, I hope, taught that my late excessive cheerfulness was dangerous to my soul, in weakening my hold of better and calmer joys. I was directed, I think, to the thirty-sixth Psalm for what I wanted on this occasion, as I was once before to the sixty-first, and I have found it most wonderfully cheering to my heart. The Lord, as ‘the preserver of man and beast,’ caused me to exercise dependence on Him respecting the result of my friend’s illness. Then the description of the Divine perfections drew back my wandering heart, I hope to God. The declaration of those who trust in God being abundantly satisfied with the fatness of His house, taught me where real enjoyment alone will be found; but the concluding part opened in a peculiarly sweet way to my mind: ‘Thou shalt make them drink of the river of Thy pleasures.’

October 23.—I am under some painful forebodings respecting my dear absent friend, and know not how to act. I am strongly impelled to write to him, now that he is in affliction and perhaps sickness himself—yet I dread departing from the plain path of duty. ‘O Lord, direct me,’ is my cry. I hope my desire is to do Thy will, and only Thy will. I have given him up to Thee—oh, let me do so sincerely, and trust in Thy fatherly care.

1810, January 1.—Felt the necessity of beginning this year with prayer for preserving grace. Prayed with some sense of my own weakness and dependence on God—with a conviction of much sin and hope in His mercy through Jesus Christ. Oh, to be Thine, Lord, in heart and life this year! Had a remembrance of those most dear to me in prayer, and found it very sweet to commend them to God, especially my friend in India—perhaps not now in India, but in heaven. Oh, to join him at last in Thy blissful presence!

January 24.—Heard yesterday of the marriage of Mr. John—what a mercy to me do I feel it!—a load gone off my mind, for every evil I heard of his committing I feared I might have been the cause of, by my conduct ten years since—I rejoice in this event for his sake and my own.

February 6.—Heard at last of the safety of my friend in India, and wrote to him—many fears on my mind as to its propriety, and great deadness of soul in doing it—yet ere I concluded I felt comforted from the thought of the nearness of eternity, and the certainty that then, without any fear of doing wrong, I should again enjoy communion with him.

February 24.—Many sad presages of evil concerning my absent friend, yet I am enabled to leave all to God—only now I pray, if consistent with His will, his life may be spared, and as a means of it, that God may incline him to return again to this land. I never did before dare to ask this, believing the cause of God would be more advanced by his remaining in India; but now I pray, without fear of doing wrong or opposing the will of God, for his return.

March 5.—I am sensible of a very remarkable change in the desires of my soul before God, respecting my absent friend. I with freedom and peace now pray continually that he may be restored to his friends and country; before, I never dared to ask anything but that the Lord would order this as His wisdom saw fit, and thought it not a subject for prayer. His injured health causes me to believe that India is not the place for his labours—and, oh, that his mind may be rightly influenced and the Lord’s will done, whether it be his remaining there or returning.

April 23.—Wrote to India.

November 30.—Heard yesterday, and again to-day, from India.[35] The illness of my friend fills me with apprehensions on his account, and I seemed called on to prepare for hearing of his removal. I wish to place before my eyes the blessedness of the change to him, and, though agitated and sad, I can bear to think of our never more beholding each other in this world. This indeed has long been my expectation, and that he should have left the toils of mortality for the joys of heaven should, on his account, fill me with praise—yet my heart cannot rise with thankfulness. I seem stupefied, insensible to any feeling but that of anxiety to hear again and know the truth, and that my heart could joy in God at all times; but alas! all is cold there! Oh, return, blessed Spirit of life and peace.

1811, March 28.—Heard from my dearest friend in India.[36] Rose early. Found my spirit engaged in prayer, but was far ... otherwise in reading. Such dulness and inattention as ought deeply to abase me, vanity and a desire to appear of importance in the school, beset me.

Corrie had been ordered from his narrow parish of Chunar to the wider field of Agra, and on his way up was directed to remain at Cawnpore to help his friend, whose physical exhaustion was too apparent even to the most careless officer. Among those influenced by both was one of the surgeons, Dr. Govan,[37] who was spared, at St. Andrews, till after the Mutiny of 1857, when in an unpublished lecture to its Literary and Philosophical Society, he thus alluded to these workers in Cawnpore:

The Hukeem and the missionary hear native opinion spoken out with much greater freedom than the political agent, the judge, or commandant. ‘Were there many more of the Sahibean Ungez (the English gentlemen) in character like the Padre Sahibs (Corrie and Martyn), Christianity would make more progress here,’ was the unvaried testimony of the natives in their favour.... I cannot help mentioning the results of various conversations I had with two natives of Eastern rank and family employed by the Venerable Mr. Corrie, afterwards Bishop of Madras, and the Rev. Henry Martyn, in Scripture translation, and whose assistance I had used in the study of the languages, as they quite coincide with much which I had the opportunity of hearing among men of still higher position in the native educated community, when attached to the staff of the Governor-General: ‘By the decrees of God,’ said the Mohammedan noble, ‘and the ubiquity of their fleets, armaments, and commerce, it appears plainly that the European nations have become the arbiters of the destinies of the nations of Asia. Yet this seems to us strange in the followers of Him who taught that His true disciples must be ready to give their cloaks also to him who took from them their coats.’ To which I had no better reply than this, that the progress of events in the world’s history seems to us to give evidence that undoubtedly a Divine message had been sent, both to governments and their subjects, to which, at their peril, both must give attention. But that, as a question of public national policy, it seemed generally admitted and understood that the civil rulers of no nation, Christian, Mohammedan, or Heathen, were laid under an obligation, by their individual beliefs, to allow a country, unable to govern itself by reason of its interminable divisions and subjects of deadly internal strife, to be occupied and made use of by their European or other enemies, as a means for their own injury or destruction, for any criminal or sinful acts, done in the building up of a nation or government. I may add that I never heard a native of India attempt directly to impugn the perfect justice of the British possession of India on this ground. ‘The Padre Sahib has put the subject in its true light’ (said the same Mohammedan authority) ‘when he said that Christianity had higher objects in view, in its influence on human character, than to enforce absolute rules about meats and drinks; for should he even induce me (which is unlikely) to become more of a Christian than I am, believing, as I do, in the authority of the Old Testament prophets, and in Jesus Christ as a prophet sent by God, he will never persuade me to look upon many articles of diet used by Christians with anything but the most intense disgust and abhorrence, and he will assuredly find it the same with most of these idolatrous Hindus.’

We return to Martyn’s Journal and Correspondence:

July 8. (Sunday.)—Corrie preached to the 53rd a funeral sermon on the death of one of their captains. In the afternoon I spoke to the natives on the first commandment, with greater fluency than I have yet found. My thoughts to-day very much towards Lydia; I began even to be reconciled to the idea of going to England for her. ‘Many are the thoughts of a man’s heart, but the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand.’

To Lydia Grenfell

Cawnpore: August 14, 1810.

With what delight do I sit down to begin a letter to my beloved Lydia! Yours of February 5, which I received a few days ago, was written, I conceive, in considerable embarrassment. You thought it possible it might find me married, or about to be so. Let me begin, therefore, with assuring you, with more truth than Gehazi did his master, ‘Thy servant went no whither:’ my heart has not strayed from Marazion, or Gurlyn, or wherever you are. Five long years have passed, and I am still faithful. Happy would it be if I could say that I had been equally true to my profession of love for Him who is fairer than ten thousand, and altogether lovely. Yet to the praise of His grace let me recollect that twice five years have passed away since I began to know Him, and I am still not gone from Him. On the contrary, time and experience have endeared the Lord to me more and more, so that I feel less inclination, and see less reason for leaving Him. What is there, alas! in the world, were it even everlasting?

I rejoice at the accounts you give me of your continued good health and labours of love. Though you are not so usefully employed as you might be in India, yet as that must not be, I contemplate with delight your exertions at the other end of the world. May you be instrumental in bringing many sons and daughters to glory. What is become of St. Hilary and its fairy scenes? When I think of Malachy, and the old man, and your sister, and Josepha, etc., how some are dead, and the rest dispersed, and their place occupied by strangers, it seems all like a dream.

August 15.—It is only little intervals of time that I can find for writing; my visitors, about whom I shall write presently, taking up much of my leisure from necessary duty. Here follow some extracts from my Journal....

Here my Journal must close. I do not know whether you understand from it how we go on. I must endeavour to give you a clearer idea of it.

We all live here in bungalows, or thatched houses, on a piece of ground enclosed. Next to mine is the church, not yet opened for public worship, but which we make use of at night with the men of the 53rd. Corrie lives with me, and Miss Corrie with the Sherwoods. We usually rise at daybreak, and breakfast at six. Immediately after breakfast we pray together, after which I translate into Arabic with Sabat, who lives in a small bungalow on my ground. We dine at twelve, and sit recreating ourselves with talking a little about dear friends in England. In the afternoon, I translate with Mirza Fitrut into Hindustani, and Corrie employs himself in teaching some native Christian boys whom he is educating with great care, in hopes of their being fit for the office of catechist. I have also a school on my premises, for natives; but it is not well attended. There are not above sixteen Hindu boys in it at present: half of them read the Book of Genesis. At sunset we ride or drive, and then meet at the church, where we often raise the song of praise, with as much joy, through the grace and presence of our Lord, as you do in England. At ten we are all asleep. Thus we go on. To the hardships of missionaries we are strangers, yet not averse, I trust, to encounter them when we are called. My work at present is evidently to translate; hereafter I may itinerate. Dear Corrie, I fear, never will, he always suffers from moving about in the daytime. But I should have said something about my health, as I find my death was reported at Cambridge. I thank God I am perfectly well, though not very strong in my lungs; they do not seem affected yet, but I cannot speak long without uneasiness. From the nature of my complaint, if it deserves the name, it is evident that England is the last place I should go to. I should go home only to find a grave. How shall I therefore ever see you more on this side of eternity? Well! be it so, since such is the will of God: we shall meet, through grace, in the realms of bliss.

I am truly sorry to see my paper fail. Write as often as possible, every three months at least. Tell me where you go, and whom you see and what you read.

August 17.—I am sorry to conclude with saying that my yesterday’s boasted health proved a mistake; I was seized with violent sickness in the night, but to-day am better. Continue to pray for me, and believe me to be, your ever affectionate,

H. Martyn.

September 22.—Was walking with Lydia; both much affected, and speaking on the things dearest to us both. I awoke, and behold it was a dream. My mind remained very solemn and pensive; shed some tears; the clock struck three, and the moon was riding near her highest noon; all was silence and solemnity, and I thought with some pain of the sixteen thousand miles between us. But good is the will of the Lord, if I see her no more.

To Lydia Grenfell

From the Ganges: October 6, 1810.

My dearest Lydia,—Though I have had no letter from you very lately, nor have anything particular to say, yet having been days on the water without a person to speak to, tired also with reading and thinking, I mean to indulge myself with a little of what is always agreeable to me, and sometimes good for me; for as my affection for you has something sacred in it, being founded on, or at least cemented by, an union of spirit in the Lord Jesus; so my separation also from you produced a deadness to the world, at least for a time, which leaves a solemn impression as often as I think of it. Add to this, that as I must not indulge the hope of ever seeing you again in this world, I cannot think of you without thinking also of that world where we shall meet. You mention in one of your letters my coming to England, as that which may eventually prove a duty. You ought to have added, that in case I do come, you will consider it a duty not to let me come away again without you. But I am not likely to put you to the trial. Useless as I am here, I often think I should be still more so at home. Though my voice fails me, I can translate and converse. At home I should be nothing without being able to lift my voice on high. I have just left my station, Cawnpore, in order to be silent six months. I have no cough, or any kind of consumption, except that reading prayers, or preaching, or a slight cold, brings on pain in the chest. I am advised therefore to recruit my strength by rest. So I am come forth, with my face towards Calcutta, with an ulterior view to the sea. Nothing happened at Cawnpore, after I wrote to you in September but I must look to my Journal.

I think of having my portrait taken in Calcutta, as I promised Mr. Simeon five years ago. Sabat’s picture would also be a curiosity. Yesterday I carried Col. Wood to dine with me, at the Nabob Bahir Ali’s. Sabat was there. The Colonel, who had been reading by the way the account of his conversion, in the Asiatic and East Society Report, which I had given him, eyed him with no great complacency, and observed in French, that Sabat might not understand him, ‘Il a l’air d’un sauvage.’ Sabat’s countenance is indeed terrible; noble when he is pleased, but with the look of an assassin when he is out of humour. I have had more opportunities of knowing Sabat than any man has had, and I cannot regard him with that interest which the ‘Star in the East’ is calculated to excite in most people. Buchanan says, I wrote (to whom I do not know) in terms of admiration and affection about him. Affection I do feel for him, but admiration, if I did once feel it, I am not conscious of it at present. I tremble for everything our dear friends publish about our doings in India, lest shame come to us and them.

Calcutta, November 5.—A sheet full, like the preceding, I had written, but the moment it is necessary to send off my letter I cannot find it. That it does not go on to you is of little consequence, but into whose hands may it have fallen? It is this that grieves me. It was the continuance of my Journal to Calcutta, where I arrived the last day in October. Constant conversation with dear friends here has brought on the pain in the chest again, so that I do not attempt to preach. In two or three weeks I shall embark for the Gulf of Persia, where, if I live, I shall solace myself in my hours of solitude with writing to you.

Farewell, beloved friend; pray for me, as you do, I am sure, and doubt not of an unceasing interest in the heart and prayers of your ever affectionate,

H. Martyn.

Ordered away on six months’ sick leave, Henry Martyn had the joy of once at least ministering to his soldier flock in the ‘new church,’ which he had induced the authorities to form out of an ordinary bungalow. Daily and fondly had he watched the preparations, reporting to Brown: ‘My church is almost ready for the organ and the bell.’ On Sunday, September 16, he had written:

‘Rain prevented me from having any service in public; the natives not being able to sit upon the grass, I could not preach to them.’

On Sunday, September 30, he thus took farewell of his different congregations:

Corrie preached to the Dragoons, at nine the new church was opened. There was a considerable congregation, and I preached on, ‘In all places where I record my name, I will come unto thee and bless thee.’ I felt something of thankfulness and joy, and our dear friends the same. The Sherwoods and Miss Corrie stayed with us the rest of the day. In the afternoon I preached the Gospel to the natives for the first time, giving them a short account of the life, death, miracles, manner of teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus, then the doctrines of His religion, and concluded with exhorting them to believe in Him, and taking them to record that I had declared to them the glad tidings that had come to us, and that if they rejected it I was clear from their blood, and thus I bid them farewell.

Mrs. Sherwood thus describes the scene:

On the Sunday before Mr. Martyn left the church was opened, and the bell sounded for the first time over this land of darkness. The church was crowded, and there was the band of our regiment to lead the singing and the chanting. Sergeant Clarke—our Sergeant Clarke—had been appointed as clerk; and there he sat under the desk in due form, in his red coat, and went through his duty with all due correctness. The Rev. Daniel Corrie read prayers, and Mr. Martyn preached. That was a day never to be forgotten. Those only who have been for some years in a place where there never has been public worship can have any idea of the fearful effect of its absence, especially among the mass of the people, who, of course, are unregenerate. Every prescribed form of public worship certainly has a tendency to become nothing more than a form, yet even a form may awaken reflection, and any state is better than that of perfect deadness. From his first arrival at the station Mr. Martyn had been labouring to effect the purpose which he then saw completed; namely, the opening of a place of worship. He was permitted to see it, to address the congregation once, and then he was summoned to depart. How often, how very often, are human beings called away, perhaps from this world, at the moment they have been enabled to bring to bear some favourite object. Blessed are those whose object has been such a one as that of Henry Martyn. Alas! he was known to be, even then, in a most dangerous state of health, either burnt within by slow inflammation, which gave a flush to his cheek, or pale as death from weakness and lassitude.

On this occasion the bright glow prevailed—a brilliant light shone from his eyes—he was filled with hope and joy; he saw the dawn of better things, he thought, at Cawnpore, and most eloquent, earnest, and affectionate was his address to the congregation. Our usual party accompanied him back to his bungalow, where, being arrived, he sank, as was often his way, nearly fainting, on a sofa in the hall. Soon, however, he revived a little, and called us all about him to sing. It was then that we sang to him that sweet hymn which thus begins:

O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come,

Our shelter from the stormy blast,

And our eternal home.

We all dined early together, and then returned with our little ones to enjoy some rest and quiet; but when the sun began to descend to the horizon we again went over to Mr. Martyn’s bungalow, to hear his last address to the fakeers. It was one of those sickly, hazy, burning evenings, which I have before described, and the scene was precisely such a one as I have recounted above. Mr. Martyn nearly fainted again after this effort, and when he got to his house, with his friends about him, he told us that he was afraid he had not been the means of doing the smallest good to any one of the strange people whom he had thus so often addressed. He did not even then know of the impression he had been enabled to make, on one of these occasions, on Sheikh Saleh. On the Monday our beloved friend went to his boats, which lay at the Ghaut, nearest the bungalow; but in the cool of the evening, however, whilst Miss Corrie and myself were taking the air in our tonjons, he came after us on horseback. There was a gentle sadness in his aspect as he accompanied me home; and Miss Corrie came also. Once again we all supped together, and united in one last hymn. We were all low, very, very low; we could never expect to behold again that face which we then saw—to hear again that voice, or to be again elevated and instructed by that conversation. It was impossible to hope that he would survive the fatigue of such a journey as he meditated. Often and often, when thinking of him, have these verses, so frequently sung by him, come to my mind:

E’er since by faith I saw the stream

Thy flowing wounds supply,

Redeeming love has been my theme,

And shall be till I die.

Then, in a nobler, sweeter song,

I’ll sing Thy power to save,

When this poor lisping, stammering tongue

Is silent in the grave.

Henry Martyn’s continued to be the military church of Cawnpore till 1857, when it was destroyed in the Mutiny. Its place has been taken by a Memorial Church which visibly proclaims forgiveness and peace on the never-to-be forgotten site of Wheeler’s entrenchment—consecrated ground indeed!

On October 1 he left Cawnpore, ‘after a parting prayer with my dearest brother Corrie,’[38] to whom he wrote from Allahabad:

Thus far we are come in safety; but my spirits tell me that I have parted with friends. Your pale face as it appeared on Monday morning is still before my eyes, and will not let me be easy till you tell me you are strong and prudent. The first night there blew a wind so bleak and cold, through and through my boat and bed, that I rose, as I expected, with a pain in the breast, which has not quite left me, but will, I hope, to-night, when I shall take measures for expelling it. There is a gate not paid for yet belonging to the churchyard, may you always go through it in faith and return through it with praise. You are now in prayer with our men. The Lord be with you, and be always with you, dearest brother.

Ministering to all who needed his services, in preaching, baptizing, and marrying, on his way down the great Ganges, at Benares, at Ghazipore, where he met with ‘the remains’ of his old 67th regiment, at Bhagulpore, and at Bandel, where he called on the Roman Catholics, on November 12 he at last came to Aldeen.

Children jumping, shouting, and convoying me in troops to the house. They are a lovely family indeed, and I do not know when I have felt so delighted as at family worship last night. To-day Mr. Brown and myself have been consulting at the Pagoda.

After four years’ absence he seemed a dying man to his Serampore and Calcutta friends, Brown, Thomason, Udny, and Colonel Young of Dinapore memory. But he was ever cheerful, and he preached every Sunday for five weeks, though in his Journal we find this on November 21:

Caught a cold, and kept awake much of the night by a cough. From this day perhaps I may date my decay. Nature shrinks from dissolution, and conscience trembles at the thought of a judgment to come. But I try to rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

November 25. (Sunday.)—Preached at the old church, on ‘While Paul reasoned of righteousness,’ etc. The Governor-General, Lord Minto, was present, desiring, as was supposed, to abolish the distinction which had been made between the two churches. One passage in my sermon appeared to some personal, and on reconsideration I thought it so myself, and was excessively distressed at having given causeless offence, and perhaps preventing much good. Lord! pardon a blind creature. How much mischief may I do through mere thoughtlessness!

December 2.—Preached at eight, on ‘Grace reigns,’ and was favoured with strength of body and joy of heart in proclaiming the glorious truth.

December 25.—Preached, with much comfort to myself, on ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,’ etc. Mr. Brown on ‘Let your light so shine before men,’ etc. The whole sum collected about seven thousand rupees. At night Mr. Thomason on ‘Through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us.’ This day how many of those who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity are rejoicing in His birth. My dear Lydia remembers me.

December 31.—Had a long dispute with Marshman, which brought on pain in the chest.

He opened the year 1811 by preaching for the new Calcutta Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society his published sermon on Christian India and the Bible, to be read in the light of his own translation work hereafter. He thus on the same day committed himself to the future in the spirit of St. Paul:

1811.—The weakness which has come upon me in the course of the last year, if it should not give an entire new turn to my life, is likely to be productive of events in the course of the present year which I little expected, or at least did not expect so soon. I now pass from India to Arabia, not knowing what things shall befall me there; but assured that an ever-faithful God and Saviour will be with me in all places whithersoever I go. May He guide and protect me, and after prospering me in the thing whereunto I go, bring me back again to my delightful work in India. It would be a painful thought indeed, to suppose myself about to return no more. Having succeeded, apparently, through His blessing, in the Hindustani New Testament, I feel much encouraged, and could wish to be spared in order to finish the Bible.

CHAPTER VIII: FROM CALCUTTA TO CEYLON, BOMBAY, AND ARABIA

Two motives made Henry Martyn eager to leave India for a time, and to cease the strain on his fast-ebbing strength, caused by incessant preaching and speaking: he desired to prolong his life, but to prolong it only till he should give the Mohammedans of Arabia and Persia the Word of God in their own tongues. After his first, almost fatal, attack at Dinapore, Corrie, who had gone to help him in his duties, wrote to ‘the Patriarch,’ as they called Mr. Brown, at Aldeen: ‘He wishes to be spared on account of the translations, but with great earnestness said, “I wish to have my whole soul swallowed up in the will of God.”’ Two years after, Corrie wrote to England from Cawnpore: ‘He is going to try sea air. May God render it effectual to his restoration. His life is beyond all price to us. You know what a profound scholar he is, and all his acquirements are dedicated to the service of Christ. If ever man, since St. Paul, could use these words, he may, One thing I do. But the length of his life will depend on his desisting from public duties.’ To Martyn himself, when at last he had left Cawnpore, Corrie wrote: ‘If you will not take rest, dear brother, come away back;’ informing him, at the same time, that he had returned to a Colonel, whom he had married, 1,600 rupees, he and Martyn having resolved to decline all fees for marrying and burying in India, where such were a stumbling-block in the way of morality and religion, constituted as Anglo-Indian society was at that time.

When he was leaving Cawnpore, Henry Martyn was about to destroy what he called ‘a number of memorandums.’ These afterwards proved to be his Journals from January 1803 to 1811, some of which were written in Latin, and some in Greek, for greater secrecy. Corrie remonstrated with him, and persuaded him to seal them up and leave them in his hands. Lord Minto, the Governor-General, and General Hewett, the Commander-in-chief, after receiving a statement of Martyn’s object, gave their sanction to his spending his sick-leave in Persia and Syria. At first the only ship he could find bound for Bombay, en route to the Persian Gulf, was one of the native buggalows which carried the coasting trade in the days before the British India Steam Navigation Company had begun to develop the commerce of the Indian Ocean all along East Africa, Southern Asia, the Spice Islands, and Australasia. But he wrote to Corrie:

The captain of the ship after many excuses has at last refused to take me, on the ground that I might try to convert the Arab sailors, and so cause a mutiny in the ship. So I am quite out of heart, and more than half disposed to go to the right about, and come back to Cawnpore.

His uncompromising earnestness as a witness for Christ was well known. Fortunately, a month after, the Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone ‘was proceeding to take the residency of Poona,’ and Martyn secured a passage in the same ship, the Hummoody, an Arab coaster belonging to a Muscat merchant, and manned by his Abyssinian slave as Nakhoda.

His last message to Calcutta, on the evening of the first Sunday of the year 1811, was on The one thing needful. Next morning he quietly went on board Mr. Elphinstone’s pinnace ‘without taking leave of my two dear friends in Calcutta.’ As they dropped down the Hoogli, anchoring for two nights in its treacherous waters, his henceforth brief entries in his Journal are these: ‘8th. Conversation with Mr. Elphinstone, and disputes with his Persian moulvi, left me weak and in pain. 9th. Reached the ship at Saugur, and began to try my strength with the Arab sailors.’ He found that the country-born captain, Kinsay, had been brought up by Schwartz, and he obtained from him much information regarding the habits and the rule of the Lutheran apostle of Southern India. This is new:

It was said that Schwartz had a warning given him of his death. One clear moonlight night he saw a light, and heard a voice which said to him, ‘Follow me.’ He got up and went to the door; here the vision vanished. The next day he sent for Dr. Anderson and said, ‘An old tree must fall.’ On the doctor’s perceiving there was nothing the matter with him, Schwartz asked him whether he observed any disorder in his intellect; to which the doctor replied, ‘No.’ He and General Floyd (now in Ireland), another friend of Schwartz, came and stayed with him. The next fifteen days he was continually engaged in devotion, and attended no more to the school: on the last day he died in his chair.

Henry Martyn was well fitted by culture and training to appreciate the society of such statesmen and thinkers as Mountstuart Elphinstone, Sir John Malcolm, Sir James Mackintosh, and Jonathan Duncan, who in their turn delighted in his society during the next five weeks. Of the first he wrote to Corrie: ‘His agreeable manners and classical acquirements made me think myself fortunate indeed in having such a companion, and I found his company the most agreeable circumstance in my voyage.’ They walked together in the cinnamon groves of Ceylon, when the ship touched at Colombo; together they talked of the work of Xavier as they skirted Cape Comorin, and observed Portuguese churches every two or three miles, with a row of huts on each side. ‘Perhaps,’ he wrote in his Journal, ‘many of these poor people, with all the incumbrances of Popery, are moving towards the kingdom of heaven.’ Together the two visited old Goa, the ecclesiastical capital, its convents and churches. The year after their visit the Goa Inquisition, one of the cruellest of its branches since its foundation, was suppressed. Henry Martyn’s letters to Lydia Grenfell best describe his experiences and impressions:

To Lydia Grenfell

At Sea, Coast of Malabar: February 4, 1811.

The last letter I wrote to you, my dearest Lydia, was dated November 1810. I continued in Calcutta to the end of the year, preaching once a week, and reading the Word in some happy little companies, with whom I enjoyed that sweet communion which all in this vale of tears have reason to be thankful for, but especially those whose lot is cast in a heathen land. On New-year’s day, at Mr. Brown’s urgent request, I preached a sermon for the Bible Society, recommending an immediate attention to the state of the native Christians. At the time I left Calcutta they talked of forming an auxiliary society. Leaving Calcutta was so much like leaving England, that I went on board my boat without giving them notice, and so escaped the pain of bidding them farewell. In two days I met my ship at the mouth of the river, and we put to sea immediately. Our ship is commanded by a pupil of Schwartz, and manned by Arabians, Abyssinians, and others. One of my fellow-passengers is Mr. Elphinstone, who was lately ambassador at the court of the King of Cabul, and is now going to be resident at Poona, the capital of the Mahratta empire. So the group is rather interesting, and I am happy to say not averse to religious instruction; I mean the Europeans. As for the Asiatics, they are in language, customs, and religion, as far removed from us as if they were inhabitants of another planet. I speak a little Arabic sometimes to the sailors, but their contempt of the Gospel, and attachment to their own superstition, make their conversion appear impossible. How stupendous that power which can make these people the followers of the Lamb, when they so nearly resemble Satan in pride and wickedness! The first part of the voyage I was without employment, and almost without thought, suffering as usual so much from sea sickness, that I had not spirits to do anything but sit upon the poop, surveying the wide waste of waters blue. This continued all down the Bay of Bengal. At length in the neighbourhood of Ceylon we found smooth water, and came to an anchor off Colombo, the principal station in the island. The captain having proposed to his passengers that they should go ashore and refresh themselves with a walk in the cinnamon gardens, Mr. Elphinstone and myself availed ourselves of the offer, and went off to inhale the cinnamon breeze. The walk was delightful. The huts of the natives, who are (in that neighbourhood at least) most of them Protestants, are built in thick groves of cocoanut-tree, with openings here and there, discovering the sea. Everything bore the appearance of contentment. I contemplated them with delight, and was almost glad that I could not speak with them, lest further acquaintance should have dissipated the pleasing ideas their appearance gave birth to. In the gardens I cut off a piece of the bark for you. It will not be so fragrant as that which is properly prepared; but it will not have lost its fine smell, I hope, when it reaches you.

At Captain Rodney’s, the Chief Secretary to Government, we met a good part of the European society of Colombo. The party was like most mixed parties in England, where much is said that need not be remembered. The next day we stretched across the Gulf of Manaar, and soon came in sight of Cape Comorin, the great promontory of India. At a distance the green waves seemed to wash the foot of the mountain, but on a nearer approach little churches were seen, apparently on the beach, with a row of little huts on each side. Was it these maritime situations that recalled to my mind Perran church and town in the way to Gurlyn; or that my thoughts wander too often on the beach to the east of Lamorran? You do not tell me whether you ever walk there, and imagine the billows that break at your feet to have made their way from India. But why should I wish to know? Had I observed silence on that day and thenceforward, I should have spared you much trouble, and myself much pain. Yet I am far from regretting that I spoke, since I am persuaded that all things will work together for good. I sometimes try to put such a number of things together as shall produce the greatest happiness possible, and I find that even in imagination I cannot satisfy myself. I set myself to see what is that ‘good for the sons of men, which they should do under heaven all the days of their life,’ and I find that paradise is not here. Many things are delightful, some things are almost all one could wish; but yet in all beauty there is deformity, in the most perfect something wanting, and there is no hope of its ever being otherwise. ‘That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.’ So that the expectation of happiness on earth seems chimerical to the last degree. In my schemes of happiness I place myself of course with you, blessed with great success in the ministry, and seeing all India turning to the Lord. Yet it is evident that with these joys there would be mingled many sorrows. The care of all the churches was a burden to the mighty mind of St. Paul. As for what we should be together, I judge of it from our friends. Are they quite beyond the vexations of common life? I think not—still I do not say that it is a question whether they gained or lost by marrying. Their affections will live when ours (I should rather say mine) are dead. Perhaps it may not be the effect of celibacy; but I certainly begin to feel a wonderful indifference to all but myself. From so seldom seeing a creature that cares for me, and never one that depends at all upon me, I begin to look round upon men with reciprocal apathy. It sometimes calls itself deadness to the world, but I much fear that it is deadness of heart. I am exempt from worldly cares myself, and therefore do not feel for others. Having got out of the stream into still water, I go round and round in my own little circle. This supposed deterioration you will ascribe to my humility; therefore I add that Mr. Brown could not help remarking the difference between what I am and what I was, and observed on seeing my picture, which was taken at Calcutta for Mr. Simeon, and is thought a striking likeness, that it was not Martyn that arrived in India, but Martyn the recluse.

February 10.—To-day my affections seem to have revived a little. I have been often deceived in times past, and erroneously called animal spirits joy in the Holy Ghost. Yet I trust that I can say with truth, ‘To them who believe, He is precious!’ Yes, Thou art precious to my soul, my transport and my trust. No thought now is so sweet as that which those words suggest—‘In Christ.’ Our destinies thus inseparably united with those of the Son of God, what is too great to be expected? All things are yours, for ye are Christ’s! We may ask what we will, and it shall be given to us. Now, why do I ever lose sight of Him, or fancy myself without Him, or try to do anything without Him? Break off a branch from a tree, and how long will it be before it withers? To-day, my beloved sister, I rejoice in you before the Lord, I rejoice in you as a member of the mystic body, I pray that your prayers for one who is unworthy of your remembrance may be heard, and bring down tenfold blessings on yourself. How good is the Lord in giving me grace to rejoice with His chosen all over the earth; even with those who are at this moment going up with the voice of joy and praise, to tread His courts and sing His praise. There is not an object about me but is depressing. Yet my heart expands with delight at the presence of a gracious God, and the assurance that my separation from His people is only temporary.

On the 7th we landed at Goa, the capital of the Portuguese possessions in the East. I reckoned much on my visit to Goa, expecting, from its being the residence of the archbishop and many ecclesiastics, that I should obtain such information about the Christians in India as would render it superfluous to make inquiries elsewhere, but I was much disappointed. Perhaps it was owing to our being accompanied by several officers, English and Portuguese, that the archbishop and his principal agents would not be seen; but so it was, that I scarcely met with a man who could make himself intelligible. We are shown what strangers are usually shown, the churches and monasteries, but I wanted to contemplate man, the only thing on earth almost that possesses any interest for me. I beheld the stupendous magnificence of their noble churches without emotion, except to regret that the Gospel was not preached in them. In one of the monasteries we saw the tomb of Francis Xavier, the Apostle of India, most richly ornamented, as well as the room in which it stands, with paintings and figures in bronze, done in Italy. The friar who showed us the tomb, happening to speak of the grace of God in the heart, without which, said he, as he held the sacramental wafer, the body of Christ profits nothing. I began a conversation with him, which, however, came to nothing.

We visited among many other places the convent of nuns. After a long altercation with the lady porter we were admitted to the antechamber, in which was the grate, a window with iron bars, behind which the poor prisoners make their appearance. While my companions were purchasing their trinkets I was employed in examining their countenances, which I did with great attention. In what possible way, thought I, can you support existence, if you do not find your happiness in God? They all looked ill and discontented, those at least whose countenances expressed anything. One sat by reading, as if nothing were going on. I asked to see the book, and it was handed through the grate. Finding that it was a Latin prayer-book, I wrote in Latin something about the love of the world, which seclusion from it would not remove. The Inquisition is still existing at Goa. We were not admitted as far as Dr. Buchanan was, to the Hall of Examination, and that because he printed something against the inquisitors which came to their knowledge. The priest in waiting acknowledged that they had some prisoners within the walls, and defended the practice of imprisoning and chastising offenders, on the ground of its being conformed to the custom of the Primitive Church. We were told that when the officers of the Inquisition touch an individual, and beckon him away, he dares not resist; if he does not come out again, no one must ask about him; if he does, he must not tell what was done to him.

February 18.—(Bombay.) Thus far I am brought in safety. On this day I complete my thirtieth year. ‘Here I raise my Ebenezer; Hither by Thy help I’m come.’ 27th. It is sweet to reflect that we shall at last reach our home. I am here amongst men who are indeed aliens to the commonwealth of Israel and without God in the world. I hear many of those amongst whom I live bring idle objections against religion, such as I have answered a hundred times. How insensible are men of the world to all that God is doing! How unconscious of His purposes concerning His Church! How incapable, seemingly, of comprehending the existence of it! I feel the meaning of St. Paul’s words—‘Hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known unto us the mystery of His will, that He would gather in one all things in Christ.’ Well! let us bless the Lord. ‘All thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children.’ In a few days I expect to sail for the Gulf of Persia in one of the Company’s sloops of war.

Farewell, my beloved Lydia, and believe me to be ever yours most affectionately,

H. Martyn.

All through the voyage, in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, the scholar was busy with his books, the Hebrew Old Testament, ‘reading Turkish grammar, Niebuhr’s Arabia, making extracts from Maracci’s Refutation of the Koran, in general reading the Word of God with pleasure.’

February 10. (Sunday.)—Somewhat of a happy Sabbath; I enjoyed communion with the saints, though far removed from them; service morning and night in the cabin.

January 14 to 17.—When sitting on the poop Mr. Elphinstone kindly entertained me with information about India, the politics of which he has had such opportunities of making himself acquainted with. The Afghans, to whom he went as ambassador, to negotiate a treaty of alliance in case of invasion by the French, possess a tract of country considerably larger than Great Britain, using the Persian and Pushtu languages. Their chief tribe is the Doorani, from which the king is elected. Shah Zeman was dethroned by his half-brother Mahmood, governor of Herat, who put out his eyes. Shah Zeman’s younger brother Shoujjah took up arms, and after several defeats established himself for a time. He was on the throne when Mr. Elphinstone visited him, but since that Mahmood has begun to dispute the sovereignty with him. Mr. Elphinstone has been with Holkar and Sindia a good deal. Holkar he described as a little spitfire, his general, Meer Khan, possessed abilities; Sindia none; the Rajah of Berar the most politic of the native powers, though the Nizam the most powerful; the influence of residents at Nagpoor and Hyderabad very small.

February 17.—Mostly employed in writing the Arabic tract, also in reading the Koran; a book of geography in Arabic, and Jami Abbari in Persian.

I would that all should adore, but especially that I myself should lie prostrate. As for self, contemptible self, I feel myself saying, let it be forgotten for ever; henceforth let Christ live, let Christ reign, let Him be glorified for ever.

February 18.—Came to anchor at Bombay. This day I finish the 30th year of my unprofitable life, an age in which Brainerd had finished his course. He gained about a hundred savages to the Gospel; I can scarcely number the twentieth part. If I cannot act, and rejoice, and love with the ardour some did, oh, let me at least be holy, and sober, and wise. I am now at the age at which the Saviour of men began His ministry, and at which John the Baptist called a nation to repentance. Let me now think for myself and act with energy. Hitherto I have made my youth and insignificance an excuse for sloth and imbecility: now let me have a character, and act boldly for God.

February 19.—Went on shore. Waited on the Governor, and was kindly accommodated with a room at the Government House.

The Governor was the good Jonathan Duncan, in the last year of his long administration and of his benevolent life. In the first decade of the nineteenth century Bombay was a comparatively little place, but the leaders of its English society were all remarkable men. In the short time, even then, Bombay had become the political and social centre of all the Asiatics and Africans, from Higher Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Arabia, to Abyssinia, Zanzibar, and the Comoro Isles; especially had it then begun to be what every generation since has made it more and more, the best centre from which to direct a Christian mission to the Mohammedans. With Poona, it is the capital of the most subtle and unimpressionable class, the Marathi Brahmans, and it is the point from which most widely to influence the Parsees. But as a base of operations against Islam it has never yet been fully used or appreciated. The late Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer preferred Aden, or the neighbouring village of Sheikh Othman, the British door into Arabia, of which he took possession for the Master by there laying down his life in the ripeness of his years, his scholarship, and his prosperity. But even in Arabia such work may be directed from Bombay. The city, like its harbour for commerce, stands without a rival as a missionary and civilising focus. Henry Martyn spent his weeks there in mastering the needs of its varied races and religionists, Jewish and Arabic, Persian and Brahman, talking with representative men of all the cults, and striving to influence them. He kept steadily in view his duty to the Mohammedans, writing his Arabic tract, and consulting as to his Persian translation of the Scriptures. It was not given to him to remain there. Dr. Taylor, whom he had joined with Brown and the Serampore Brotherhood at Aldeen in commending to God, was hard at work on the Malayalim New Testament, and he often visited the press to see the sacred work in progress. It was to be the life task of the Scottish Dr. John Wilson, twenty years after, to use Bombay as the missionary key of the peoples who border the Indian Ocean.

The friend of Mountstuart Elphinstone and guest of the Governor, Henry Martyn was welcomed by the literary society of the city, which at that time was unrivalled in the East. It is fortunate that we thus obtain an impartial estimate of his personal character and scholarship from such men as Elphinstone, Mackintosh, and Malcolm. In their journals and letters, written with all the frankness of private friendship, we see the consistent and ever-watchful saint, but at the same time the lively talker, the brilliant scholar, and, above all, the genial companion and even merry comrade. Since he had left Cambridge Henry Martyn had not enjoyed society like this, able to appreciate his many-sided gifts, and to call forth his natural joyfulness. In Bombay we see him at his best all round as man, scholar, saint, and missionary.

In Sir T.E. Colebrooke’s Life of that most eminent Indian statesman who twice refused the crown of the Governor-General,[39] we find Mountstuart Elphinstone writing thus to his friend Strachey: ‘We have in Mr. Martyn an excellent scholar, and one of the mildest, cheerfullest, and pleasantest men I ever saw. He is extremely religious, and disputes about the faith with the Nakhoda, but talks on all subjects, sacred and profane, and makes others laugh as heartily as he could do if he were an infidel. We have people who speak twenty-five languages (not apiece) in the ship.’ Again, in his Journal of July 10, 1811, Elphinstone has this entry: ‘Mr. Martyn has proved a far better companion than I reckoned on, though my expectations were high. His zeal is unabated, but it is not troublesome, and he does not press disputes and investigate creeds. He is familiar with Greek and Latin, understands French and Italian, speaks Persian and Arabic, has translated the Scriptures into Hindustani, and is translating the Old Testament from Hebrew. He was an eminent mathematician even at Cambridge, and, what is of more consequence, he is a man of good sense and taste, and simple in his manners and character, and cheerful in his conversation.’ He who, in the close intimacy of shipboard life in the tropics, could win that eulogy from a critic so lofty and so experienced, must have been at once more human and more perfect than his secret Journal, taken alone, has led its readers to believe possible.

Sir John Malcolm, fresh from his second mission to Persia, was writing his great History of Persia in the quiet of Parell and Malabar Hill, with the help of the invaluable criticism of Sir James Mackintosh, whom he described to his brother Gilbert as ‘a very extraordinary man.’ Malcolm introduced Mackintosh and Elphinstone to each other, and Elphinstone lost not a day in taking Martyn to call on the Recorder. Although the distinguished Scots Highlander, who had become the admiring friend of Robert Hall when they were fellow students at Aberdeen University, was in full sympathy with missionary enthusiasm, and condemned the intolerance of the East India Company,[40] Martyn and he did not at first ‘cotton’ to each other. The former wrote thus of him:

1811, February 22.—Talked a good deal with the Governor about my intended journey.

February 23.—Went with him to his residence in the country, and at night met a large party, amongst whom were Sir J. Mackintosh and General Malcolm: with Sir James I had some conversation on different subjects; he was by no means equal to my expectations.

Mackintosh’s account of their first interview was this:

February 24. (Sunday.)—Elphinstone introduced me to a young clergyman called Martyn, come round from Bengal on his way to Bussora, partly for health and partly to improve his Arabic, as he is translating the Scriptures into that language. He seems to be a mild and benevolent enthusiast—a sort of character with which I am always half in love. We had the novelty of grace before and after dinner, all the company standing.

Again, a week after:

March 1.—Mr. Martyn, the saint from Calcutta, called here. He is a man of acuteness and learning; his meekness is excessive, and gives a disagreeable impression of effort to conceal the passions of human nature.

Both had the Celtic fire, but Sir James Mackintosh had not lived with Sabat. Another month passed, and the two were learning to appreciate each other.

Padre Martyn, the saint, dined here in the evening; it was a very considerably more pleasant evening than usual; he is a mild and ingenious man. We had two or three hours’ good discussion on grammar and metaphysics.

Henry Martyn’s growing appreciation of Mackintosh is seen in this later passage in his Journal:

1811, March 1.—Called on Sir J. Mackintosh, and found his conversation, as it is generally said to be, very instructive and entertaining. He thought that the world would be soon Europeanised, in order that the Gospel might spread over the world. He observed that caste was broken down in Egypt, and the Oriental world made Greek by the successors of Alexander, in order to make way for the religion of Christ. He thought that little was to be apprehended, and little hoped for, from the exertions of missionaries. Called at General Malcolm’s, and though I did not find him at home, was very well rewarded for my trouble in getting to his house, by the company of Mr. ——, lately from R. Dined at Farish’s with a party of some very amiable and well-behaved young men. What a remarkable difference between the old inhabitants of India and the new-comers. This is owing to the number of religious families in England.

March 4.—Dined at General Malcolm’s, who gave me a Chaldee missal. Captain Stewart, who had accompanied him as his secretary into Persia, gave me much information about the learned men of Ispahan.

March 8.—Spent the first part of the day at General Malcolm’s, who gave me letters of introduction and some queries respecting the wandering tribes of Persia.

The reference to young Mr. Farish, is to one who afterwards became interim Governor of Bombay, and the friend of John Wilson, and who, because he taught a class in the Sunday School that used to meet in the Town Hall, was for the time an object of suspicion and attack by the Parsees and Hindus, on the baptism of Dhanjibhai Naoroji, the first Parsee to put on Christ.[41]

On Malcolm, according to Sir John Kaye, his biographer,[42] the young Christian hero appears to have made a more favourable impression than on Mackintosh. Perhaps the habitual cheerfulness of his manner communicated itself to the ‘saint from Calcutta,’ of whom he wrote to Sir Gore Ouseley, the British ambassador, that he was likely to add to the hilarity of his party.

He requested me to give him a line to the Governor of Bushire, which I did, as well as one to Mahomed Nebbee Khan. But I warned him not to move from Bushire without your previous sanction. His intention is, I believe, to go by Shiraz, Ispahan, and Kermanshah to Baghdad, and to endeavour on that route to discover some ancient copies of the Gospel, which he and many other saints are persuaded lie hid in the mountains of Persia. Mr. Martyn also expects to improve himself as an Oriental scholar; he is already an excellent one. His knowledge of Arabic is superior to that of any Englishman in India. He is altogether a very learned and cheerful man, but a great enthusiast in his holy calling. He has, however, assured me, and begged I would mention it to you, that he has no thought of preaching to the Persians, or of entering into any theological controversies, but means to confine himself to two objects—a research after old Gospels, and the endeavour to qualify himself for giving a correct version of the Scriptures into Arabic and Persian, on the plan proposed by the Bible Society.

I have not hesitated to tell him that I thought you would require that he should act with great caution, and not allow his zeal to run away with him. He declares he will not, and he is a man of that character that I must believe. I am satisfied that if you ever see him, you will be pleased with him. He will give you grace before and after dinner, and admonish such of your party as take the Lord’s name in vain; but his good sense and great learning will delight you, whilst his constant cheerfulness will add to the hilarity of your party.

In such social intercourse in the evening, in constant interviews and discussions with Jews and Mohammedans, Parsees and Hindus, during the day, and in frequent preaching for the chaplains, the weeks passed all too rapidly. A ropemaker who had just arrived from London called on him. ‘He understood from my preaching that he might open his heart to me. We conversed and prayed together.’ Against this and the communion with young Farish and his fellows, we must set the action of those whom he thus describes in a letter to Corrie:

1811, February 26.—Peacefully preaching the Word of life to a people daily edified is the nearest approach to heaven below. But to move from place to place, hurried away without having time to do good, is vexatious to the spirit as well as harassing to the body. Hearing last Saturday that some sons of Belial, members of the Bapre Hunt,[43] intended to have a great race the following day, I informed Mr. Duncan, at whose house I was staying, and recommended the interference of the secular arm. He accordingly sent to forbid it. The messengers of the Bapre Hunt were exceedingly exasperated; some came to church expecting to hear a sermon against hunting, but I merely preached to them on ‘the one thing needful.’ Finding nothing to lay hold of, they had the race on Monday, and ran Hypocrite against Martha and Mary.

His last message to India, from the ‘faithful saying’ of 1 Timothy i. 15, was misunderstood and resented, as his first sermon in Calcutta had been in similar circumstances.

March 24. (Sunday).—Speaking on the evidence of its truth, I mentioned its constant efficacy in collecting the multitude, and commanding their attention, which moral discourses never did. This was considered as a reflection on the ministers of Bombay, which distressed me not a little.

Henry Martyn was granted a passage to Arabia and Persia in the Benares, Captain Sealey, one of the ships of the old Indian Navy, ordered to cruise along with the Prince of Wales in the Persian Gulf. At that time the danger was considerable. For a century the Joasmi Arabs, of ‘the pirate coast’ of Oman, had been the terror of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, driving off even the early Portuguese, and confining the Persians, then invulnerable by land, to their own shores. The Wahabee puritans of Islam having mastered them, they added to their own bloodthirsty love of plunder and the slave-trade the fanaticism of Mohammed-ibn-Abdul-Wahab, the ‘bestower of blessings,’ as the name signifies. The East India Company tolerated them, retaining two or three ships of war in the Gulf for the protection of the factories at Gombroon, Bushire, and Busrah. But, in an evil moment, in the year 1797, the Joasmi pirates dared to seize a British vessel. From that hour their fate was sealed, though the process of clearing the southern coast of Asia of pirates and slavers ended only with the accession of Queen Victoria, in the year when Aden was added to the empire. In 1809-10 the Bombay Government expedition, under Commodore John Wainwright, captured their stronghold of Ras-ul-Khymah, delivered our feudatory of Muscat from their terrorism, and gave the Gulf peace for ten years. The two ships of war which conveyed the chaplain missionary with his message of peace to Eastern Arabia and Persia were sent to complete the work of the Wainwright expedition,[44] which had been summoned by Lord Minto to the conquest of Java. Henry Martyn acted as chaplain to the forty-five sailors and twelve artillerymen who formed the European part of the crew of the Benares. After two days at Muscat he tells the story of his voyage:

To Lydia Grenfell

Muscat: April 22, 1811.

My dearest Lydia,—I am now in Arabia Felix: to judge from the aspect of the country it has little pretensions to the name, unless burning barren rocks convey an idea of felicity; but perhaps as there is a promise in reserve for the sons of Joktan, their land may one day be blest indeed.

We sailed from Bombay on Lady-day; and on the morning of Easter saw the land of Mekran in Persia. After another week’s sail across the mouth of the Gulf, we arrived here, and expect to proceed up the Gulf to Bushire, as soon as we have taken in our water. You will be happy to learn that the murderous pirates against whom we were sent, having received notice of our approach, are all got out of the way, so that I am no longer liable to be shot in a battle, or to decapitation after it, if it be lawful to judge from appearances. These pestilent Ishmaelites indeed, whose hand is against every man’s, will escape, and the community suffer, but that selfish friendship of which you once confessed yourself guilty, will think only of the preservation of a friend. This last marine excursion has been the pleasantest I ever made, as I have been able to pursue my studies with less interruption than when ashore. My little congregation of forty or fifty Europeans does not try my strength on Sundays; and my two companions are men who read their Bible every day. In addition to all these comforts, I have to bless God for having kept me more than usually free from the sorrowful mind. We must not always say with Watts, ‘The sorrows of the mind be banished from the place;’ but if freedom from trouble be offered us, we may choose it rather. I do not know anything more delightful than to meet with a Christian brother, where only strangers and foreigners were expected. This pleasure I enjoyed just before leaving Bombay; a ropemaker who had just come from England, understood from my sermon that I was one he might speak to, so he came and opened his heart, and we rejoiced together. In this ship I find another of the household of faith. In another ship which accompanies us there are two Armenians who do nothing but read the Testament. One of them will I hope accompany me to Shiraz in Persia, which is his native country.

We are likely to be detained here some days, but the ship that will carry our letters to India sails immediately, so that I can send but one letter to England, and one to Calcutta. When will our correspondence be established? I have been trying to effect it these six years, and it is only yet in train. Why there was no letter from you in those dated June and July 1810, I cannot conjecture, except that you had not received any of mine, and would write no more. But I am not yet without hopes that a letter in the beloved hand will yet overtake me somewhere. My kindest and most affectionate remembrances to all the Western circle. Is it because he is your brother that I love George so much? or because he is the last come into the number? The angels love and wait upon the righteous who need no repentance; but there is joy whenever another heir of salvation is born into the family. Read Eph. i. I cannot wish you all these spiritual blessings, since they already are all yours; but I pray that we may have the spirit of wisdom and knowledge to know that they are ours. It is a chapter I keep in mind every day in prayer. We cannot believe too much or hope too much. Happy our eyes that they see, and our ears that they hear.

As it may be a year or more before I shall be back, you may direct one letter after receiving this, if it be not of a very old date, to Bombay, all after to Bengal, as usual. Believe me to be ever, my dearest Lydia, your most affectionate,

H. Martyn.

April 22.—Landed at Muscat with Lockett and walked through the bazaar; we wished to ascend one of the hills in the neighbourhood, but on the native guards expressing disapprobation, we desisted.

We turn to her Diary for the corresponding passage.

1812, February 1.—Heard yesterday from,[45] and wrote to-day to, India. My conviction of being declining in spiritual life is deeper and deeper. I would stop and pause at what is before me. It is no particular outward sin, but an inward loss I mourn.

Every word of Henry Martyn’s Journal regarding Arabia is precious, alike in the light of his attempt to give its people the Word of God in their own tongue, and of the long delayed and too brief efforts of his successors, Ion Keith-Falconer in Yemen in 1887, and Bishop French in Muscat in 1891. To David Brown, all unknowing of his death, he wrote on April 23:

I left India on Lady-day, looked at Persia on Easter Sunday, and seven days after found myself in Arabia Felix. In a small cove, surrounded by bare rocks, heated through, out of the reach of air as well as wind, lies the good ship Benares, in the great cabin of which, stretched on a couch, lie I. But though weak I am well—relaxed but not disordered. Praise to His grace who fulfils to me a promise which I have scarcely a right to claim—‘I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest.’

Last night I went ashore for the first time with Captain Lockett; we walked through the bazaar and up the hill, but saw nothing but what was Indian or worse. The Imam or Sultan is about thirty miles off, fighting, it is said, for his kingdom, with the Wahabees.

You will be happy to learn that the pirates whom we were to scourge are got out of our way, so that I may now hope to get safe through the Gulf without being made to witness the bloody scenes of war.

April 24.—Went with one English party and two Armenians and an Arab who served as guard and guide, to see a remarkable pass about a mile from the town, and a garden planted by a Hindu in a little valley beyond. There was nothing to see, only the little bit of green in this wilderness seemed to the Arab a great curiosity. I conversed a good deal with him, but particularly with his African slave, who was very intelligent about religion. The latter knew as much about his religion as most mountaineers, and withal was so interested, that he would not cease from his argument till I left the shore.

To Corrie he wrote on the same day:

The Imam of Muscat murdered his uncle, and sits on the throne in the place of his elder brother, who is here a cipher. Last night the Captain went ashore to a council of state, to consider the relations subsisting between the Government of Bombay and these mighty chieftains. I attended as interpreter. The Company’s agent is an old Hindu who could not get off his bed. An old man in whom pride and stupidity seemed to contend for empire sat opposite to him. This was the Wazeer. Between them sat I, opposite to me the Captain. The Wazeer uttered something in Arabic, not one word of which could I understand. The old Hindu explained in Persian, for he has almost forgot his Hindi, and I to the Captain in English. We are all impatient to get away from this place.

To the last he was busy with his Arabic translation of Scripture. The ships of war crossed and recrossed the Gulf from shore to shore, surveying its coasts and islands in the heat of May, tempered by a north-wester which tossed them about. On May 6 he wrote in his Journal:

Much cast down through a sinful propensity, which I little thought was in me at all, till occasion manifested its existence.

On the 19th:

Preached to the ship’s company on John iii. 3. My thoughts so much on Lydia, whose old letter I had been reading the day before, that I had a sense of guilt for having neglected the proper duties of the day.

May 20.—We have now a fair wind, carrying us gently to Bushire.

May 22.—Finished the syllabus of Ecclesiastical History which I have been making all the voyage, and extracts from Mosheim concerning the Eastern Church.

On May 21, 1811, Henry Martyn at last reached Persian soil.

Landed at Bushire this morning in good health; how unceasing are the mercies of the Lord; blessed be His goodness; may He still preserve me from danger, and, above all, make my journey a source of future good to this kingdom of Persia, into which I am now come. We were hospitably received by the acting Resident. In the evening I walked out by the sea-side to recollect myself, to review the past, and look forward to the future.

Suffering the will of God is as necessary a part of spiritual discipline as doing, and much more trying.

But he landed still with the desire ‘to go to Arabia circuitously by way of Persia,’ a course which he declared to be rendered necessary by the advanced state of the season. The people of Arabia were first in his heart.

CHAPTER IX: IN PERSIA—BUSHIRE AND SHIRAZ, 1811

The Persia to whose seven millions of people Henry Martyn was the first in modern times to carry the good-news of God, was just the size of the India of his day. The Mohammedan majority of its scattered inhabitants, in cities, in villages, and wandering over its plains and deserts, had never been, and are not yet, as Shi’ahs, rigid members of Islam, fanatically aggressive against all others, like the orthodox Soonnis. After the apparent extinction of the cult of Zoroaster and the flight of the surviving remnant of Parsees to India, the successive ruling dynasties were liberal and tolerant in their treatment of Christians compared with other Moslem powers; more liberal than Christian Russia is to the Jews and the non-‘orthodox’ sects. When those cultured and enterprising brothers, Sir Anthony and Sir Thomas Sherley,[46] went from Oxford to the court of Persia, then in all its magnificence under Shah Abbas the Great, two centuries before Henry Martyn, that Shah sent one back as Persian envoy to the Christian powers of Europe, to establish an alliance for the destruction of the Turks. Shah Abbas made over Gombroon to them, calling it by his own name, Bunder Abbas, which it still retains, and his Majesty’s grant used such language as this: ‘Our absolute commandment, will, and pleasure is that our countries and dominions shall be from this day open to all Christian people and to their religion.... Because of the amitie now ioyned with the princes that professe Christ, I do give this pattent for all Christian merchants,’ etc. Only the intolerance of the Portuguese, who, under Albuquerque, took the island of Ormuz, and so dominated the Persian Gulf till driven out by the English, led this great Asiatic monarch to except the power which Prince Henry the Navigator alone redeems from historical contempt to the present day.

The Suffavian dynasty gave place to the Afghan, and that to the short-lived but wide-spreading empire of Nadir Kooli Khan, from Delhi to the Oxus River and the Caspian Sea. Out of half a century’s bloody revolutions, such as formed the normal course of the annals of Asia till Great Britain pushed its ‘Peace’ up from the Southern Ocean, Aga Mohammed Khan, of the Kajar clan, founded the present dynasty in 1795. His still greater nephew succeeded on his death three years after. Futteh Ali Shah became for the next thirty-eight years the close friend of the British Crown and the East India Company. Shah-in-Shah, or king of the four kings of Afghanistan, Georgia, Koordistan, and Arabistan, the ruler of Persia had now incorporated Arabistan in his own dominion, and had lost Afghanistan. But he still claimed the allegiance of the two subject-sovereigns of Georgia and Koordistan. His uncle had avenged on the people, and especially the beautiful women of Georgia, the transfer of the country by its Wali to the Russian Catherine II. Placed in the commanding centre of Western Asia, Futteh Ali almost immediately found himself the object of eager competition by the representatives of the Christian powers at Teheran. His revenue was estimated by so competent an authority as Sir John Malcolm at nearly six millions sterling. The crown jewels, chief of them the Sea of Light, or Derya-i-Noor, a diamond weighing 178 carats, were then the most valuable collection in the world; for though the Koh-i-Noor had remained with the Afghans, whence through the Sikhs it came to a greater Shah-in-Shah, the Queen-Empress of Great Britain, he still possessed not a little of Nadir’s plunder of Delhi.

Sir Robert Ker Porter describes him about the time when Martyn reached his capital, as ‘one blaze of jewels,’ at the New Year festival of Norooz. On his head was a lofty tiara of three elevations, ‘entirely composed of thickly-set diamonds, pearls, rubies, and emeralds, so exquisitely disposed as to form a mixture of the most beautiful colours in the brilliant light reflected from its surface. Several black feathers, like the heron plume, were intermixed with the resplendent aigrettes of this truly imperial diadem, whose bending points were furnished with pear-formed pearls of an immense size. The vesture was of gold tissue nearly covered with a similar disposition of jewelry; and crossing the shoulders were two strings of pearls, probably the largest in the world. But for splendour nothing could exceed the broad bracelets round his arms and the belt which encircled his waist; they actually blazed like fire when the rays of the sun met them. The throne was of pure white marble raised a few steps from the ground, and carpeted with shawls and cloth of gold. While the Great King was approaching his throne, the whole assembly continued bowing their heads to the ground till he had taken his place. In the midst of solemn stillness, while all eyes were fixed on the bright object before them, which sat indeed as radiant and immovable as the image of Mithras itself, a sort of volley of words bursting at one impulse from the mouths of the mollahs and astrologers, made me start, and interrupted my gaze. This strange oratory was a kind of heraldic enumeration of the Great King’s titles, dominions, and glorious acts. There was a pause, and then his Majesty spoke. The effect was even more startling than the sudden bursting forth of the mollahs; for this was like a voice from the tombs—so deep, so hollow, and, at the same time, so penetratingly loud.’[47]

That was the man to whose feet the French Emperor Napoleon and the Tsar Alexander, King George III. and the greatest Governor-General of the East India Company, the Marquess Wellesley, sent special embassies; the man from whom they sought secret treaties, lavishing on his courtiers more than royal gifts. To arrest the march of the Afghan invader, who a few years before had reached Lahore on his way to set up again at Delhi the house of Timour, and in order to foil the secret embassy sent by Napoleon, who had resolved to give England its death-blow through India, a young Scotsman, Captain Malcolm, was deputed to Teheran in 1801, following up a native envoy who had been most successful just before. This soldier diplomatist, who was afterwards to help Henry Martyn to a very different success, ‘bribed like a king,’ and returned with two treaties, political and commercial, but still more with the knowledge which fitted him to write his classic history, and make his second ambassage. For England failed to carry out the first so far as to help the Shah against Russia, and from that hour Persia has seen province after province overwhelmed by the wave from the north.

Taking alarm a second time, just before and after the Peace of Tilsit, both the Crown and the Company appointed plenipotentiaries to Teheran. It was Lord Minto’s wise policy to protect our Indian empire ‘by binding the Western Frontier States in a chain of friendly alliance.’ Hence the Governor-General’s four missions, to Sindh, to Lahore, to Cabul, and again to Persia under Sir John Malcolm. Sir Harford Jones appeared as ambassador from the Crown after Malcolm had left Teheran, and took advantage of a change in the political situation to secure the preliminary treaty of 1809, which renewed the pledge of its predecessor to assist the Shah with troops or a subsidy if any European forces should invade his territories. In a modified form this became the definitive treaty of March 14, 1812 (further altered in that of 1814), to arrange which Sir Gore Ouseley was sent out, superseding both Malcolm and Jones.[48] Sir Gore Ouseley became Henry Martyn’s friend. Commended by Sir John Malcolm to his personal friends among the Persians, and officially encouraged by the British plenipotentiary, the Bengal chaplain seeking health had all the facilities secured to him that were possible to pursue the God-given mission of the apostle of Christ to the peoples of Persia and Arabia.

The strong and wise rule of Futteh Ali Shah kept Persia itself at peace, but he could not get the better of Russian intrigue and attack, even with the friendly offices of the British Government. Up till Martyn’s arrival these vast regions had been wrested from the Shah-in-Shah: Georgia, Mingrelia, Daghistan, Sherwan, Karabagh, and Talish. During his presence in the country the negotiations with Russia were going on, which ended in 1813 in the Treaty of Gulistan, surrendering to the Tsar all he had taken, and apparently stopping his advance by a line of demarcation. But as its exact direction had to be settled by commissioners Russia has ever since continued steadily to strip Persia of its northern lands, and only the presence of the British Navy has kept it as yet out of the Persian Gulf.[49]

Such were the historical and political conditions amid which the missionary chaplain of India became a resident in the cities, and a traveller through the villages of Persia and Turkey at the age of thirty. He went there as the friend of Malcolm Sahib, whose gracious dignity and lavish gifts had made him a hero among the officials and many of the people of Persia. He went with letters of introduction from the Governor-General of India and the Governor of Bombay to the new British ambassador, who had lived at Lucknow, and must have known well of his work in the neighbouring station of Cawnpore. He went with the reputation of a man of God in the Oriental sense, and of a scholar who knew the sacred books of Mohammedans and Christians alike, and who sought the good of the people. The Armenian colonies at Calcutta and Bombay had commended him to the many members of their Church in Persia.

Bushire, or Abu Shahr, at which he began his mission to Persia, is the port of that province of Fars from which the whole empire takes its name. Its mixed Persian and Arab population, now numbering some fifteen thousand, its insanitary position on a spit of sand almost surrounded by the sea, and the filthy narrow streets hardly redeemed by the Char Burj or citadel, and the British Residency, do not attract the visitor, and he soon learns that the humid heat of its climate in summer is more insupportable than that even of the Red Sea. From Reshire, close by, in the Anglo-Persian War of 1856-7, General Havelock shelled the town when he pitched the camp of the force to the south of its gate. Henry Martyn was there in the worst season of May and June, when the thermometer rises to 100° in the shade, and sometimes 106°. He became the guest of an English merchant and his Armenian wife, and was received by the Armenians as a priest of great sanctity. His Journal describes his receptions and daily occupations.

1811, May 23.—Rode out with a party in the evening, or rather in the afternoon, for the heat of the sun made me ill.

May 24.—The Governor called on us; also the Armenian priest. Received an answer from the ambassador, Sir Gore Ouseley, to a letter I sent him from Muscat.

May 25.—In the evening called with the two Captains, the Resident, and the Captain of his guard, on the Governor. In consequence of a letter I brought for him from General Malcolm, he was very particular in his attentions, seated me on his own seat, and then sat by my side apart from the rest. I observed that a Christian was not allowed to enter a mosque; he said, ‘No,—do you wish to hear the prayers?’ I said, ‘No, but the preaching, if there is any;’ he said there were no preachers except at Yezd.

May 26. (Sunday.)—The Europeans assembled for Divine service, which was performed at the Resident’s. I preached on 1 Cor. xv.: ‘For He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet,’ etc. In the evening I went, at the padre’s request, to the Armenian church. There was the same disagreeable succession of unmeaning ceremonies and noisy chants as at Bombay. I was introduced within the rails, and at the time of incense I was censed, as the padre afterwards desired me to observe, four times, whereas the laity have the honour done them but once. I asked the old man what was meant by burning incense. He said it was in imitation of the Wise Men of the East, who offered incense to Christ. I told him, Why then do you not offer myrrh and gold? To this he made no reply. Walking afterwards with him by the sea-side, I tried to get into a conversation suitable to our profession as ministers, speaking particularly of the importance of the charge entrusted to us. Nothing could be more vapid and mean than his remarks.

May 27.—Very ill, from head-ache and overpowering sleepiness, arising, as I suppose, from a stroke of the sun. As often as I attempted to read, I fell asleep, and awoke in weakness and pain. How easily may existence be embittered; still I will say, ‘Not my will, but Thine be done.’ In the evening a Jewish goldsmith called with a fine boy, who read the Hebrew fluently. Grief has marked the countenance of the Eastern Jews in a way that makes them indescribably interesting. I could have wept while looking at them. O Lord, how long? Will Thine anger burn for ever?—is not justice yet satisfied? This afflicted people are as much oppressed in Persia as ever. Their women are not allowed to veil, as all others are required to do; hence, if there be one more than ordinarily beautiful, she is soon known, and a khan or the king sends for her, makes her a Mahometan, and puts her into the harem. As soon as he is tired, she is given to another, and then to another, till she becomes the property of the most menial servant; such is the degradation to which the daughters of Israel are subjected.

May 28.—Through the infinite and unmerited goodness of God I am again restored, and able to do something in the way of reading. The Resident gave us some account this evening of the moral state of Persia. It is enough to make one shudder. If God rained down fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, how is it that this nation is not blotted out from under heaven? I do not remember to have heard such things of the Hindus, except the Sikhs; they seem to rival the Mahometans.

For personal comfort and freedom from insult or attack, Henry Martyn, when in Bushire, ordered the usual wardrobe of a Persian gentleman. He had suffered his beard and moustachios to vegetate undisturbed since leaving India, as he wrote to Corrie. In conical Astrakhan cap, baggy blue trousers, red boots, and light chintz tunic and chogha or flowing coat, mounted on a riding pony, and followed by his Armenian servant on a mule, with another mule for his baggage, he set out on May 30, 1811, for Shiraz. His companion was a British officer. The party formed a large caravan with some thirty horses and mules, carrying goods to the ambassador. They marched by night, in the comparative coolness of 100°, to which the thermometer fell from the noonday heat of 126°, when they lay panting in their tents protected from the scorching dry wind by heavy clothing. The journey of some 170 miles occupied the first nine days of June. After ninety miles over a hot sandy plain the traveller rises, by four rocky kotuls or inclines, so steep as to be called ladders, over the spurs of the Zagros range into a cooler region at Kaziroon, on the central plateau of Iran, and then passes through the most delightful valleys, wooded or clad with verdure, to the capital, Shiraz, surrounded by gardens and by cemeteries.

May 30.—Our Persian dresses being ready, we set off this evening for Shiraz. Our kafila consisted of about thirty horses and mules; some carrying things to the ambassador, the rest for our servants and luggage; the animal for my use was a yaboo or riding pony, a mule for my trunks, and one for my servant Zechariah, an Armenian of Ispahan. It was a fine moonlight night, about ten o’clock, when we marched out of the gate of Bushire, and began to make our way over the plain. Mr. B., who accompanied me a little way, soon returned. Captain T. went on, intending to accompany us to Shiraz. This was the first time we had any of us put off the European, and the novelty of our situation supplied us with many subjects for conversation for about two hours. When we began to flag and grow sleepy, and the kafila was pretty quiet, one of the muleteers on foot began to sing: he sang with a voice so plaintive that it was impossible not to have one’s attention arrested. At the end of the first tune he paused, and nothing was heard but the tinkling of the bells attached to the necks of the mules; every voice was hushed. The first line was enough for me, and I dare say it set many others thinking of their absent friends. ‘Without thee my heart can attach itself to none.’ It is what I have often felt on setting out on a journey. The friends left behind so absorb the thoughts, that the things by the wayside are seen without interest, and the conversation of strangers is insipid. But perhaps the first line, as well as the rest, is only a promise of fidelity, though I did not take it in that sense when I first heard it. The following is perhaps the true translation:

Think not that e’er my heart can dwell

Contented far from thee;

How can the fresh-caught nightingale

Enjoy tranquillity?

Forsake not then thy friend for aught

That slanderous tongues can say;

The heart that fixes where it ought,

No power can rend away.

Thus we went on, and as often as the kafila by their dulness and sleepiness seemed to require it, or perhaps to keep himself awake, he entertained the company and himself with a song. We met two or three other kafilas taking advantage of the night to get on. My loquacious servant Zachary took care to ask every one whence they came, and by that means sometimes got an answer which raised a laugh against him.

June 1.—At sunrise we came to our ground at Ahmeda, six parasangs, and pitched our little tent under a tree: it was the only shelter we could get. At first the heat was not greater than we had felt it in India, but it soon became so intense as to be quite alarming. When the thermometer was above 112°, fever heat, I began to lose my strength fast; at last it became quite intolerable. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and all the warm covering I could get, to defend myself from the external air; by which means the moisture was kept a little longer upon the body, and not so speedily evaporated as when the skin was exposed; one of my companions followed my example, and found the benefit of it. But the thermometer still rising, and the moisture of the body being quite exhausted, I grew restless, and thought I should have lost my senses. The thermometer at last stood at 126°: in this state I composed myself, and concluded that though I might hold out a day or two, death was inevitable. Captain T., who sat it out, continued to tell the hour, and height of the thermometer; and with what pleasure did we hear of its sinking to 120°, 118°, etc. At last the fierce sun retired, and I crept out, more dead than alive. It was then a difficulty how I could proceed on my journey: for besides the immediate effects of the heat, I had no opportunity of making up for the last night’s want of sleep, and had eaten nothing. However, while they were loading the mules, I got an hour’s sleep, and set out, the muleteers leading my horse, and Zechariah, my servant, an Armenian, of Ispahan, doing all in his power to encourage me. The cool air of the night restored me wonderfully, so that I arrived at our next munzil with no other derangement than that occasioned by want of sleep. Expecting another such day as the former, we began to make preparation the instant we arrived on the ground. I got a tattie made of the branches of the date-tree, and a Persian peasant to water it; by this means the thermometer did not rise higher than 114°. But what completely secured me from the heat was a large wet towel, which I wrapped round my head and body, muffling up the lower part in clothes. How could I but be grateful to a gracious Providence, for giving me so simple a defence against what I am persuaded would have destroyed my life that day! We took care not to go without nourishment, as we had done: the neighbouring village supplied us with curds and milk. At sunset, rising up to go out, a scorpion fell upon my clothes; not seeing where it fell, I did not know what it was; but Captain T., pointing it out, gave the alarm, and I struck it off, and he killed it. The night before we found a black scorpion in our tent; this made us rather uneasy; so that though the kafila did not start till midnight, we got no sleep, fearing we might be visited by another scorpion.

June 2.—We arrived at the foot of the mountains, at a place where we seemed to have discovered one of Nature’s ulcers. A strong suffocating smell of naphtha announced something more than ordinarily foul in the neighbourhood. We saw a river:—what flowed in it, it seemed difficult to say, whether it were water or green oil; it scarcely moved, and the stones which it laved it left of a greyish colour, as if its foul touch had given them the leprosy. Our place of encampment this day was a grove of date-trees, where the atmosphere, at sunrise, was ten times hotter than the ambient air. I threw myself down on the burning ground, and slept; when the tent came up I awoke, as usual, in a burning fever. All this day I had recourse to the wet towel, which kept me alive, but would allow of no sleep. It was a sorrowful Sabbath; but Captain T. read a few hymns, in which I found great consolation. At nine in the evening we decamped. The ground and air were so insufferably hot, that I could not travel without a wet towel round my face and neck. This night, for the first time, we began to ascend the mountains. The road often passed so close to the edge of the tremendous precipices, that one false step of the horse would have plunged his rider into inevitable destruction. In such circumstances I found it useless to attempt guiding the animal, and therefore gave him the rein. These poor animals are so used to journeys of this sort, that they generally step sure. There was nothing to mark the road but the rocks being a little more worn in one place than in another. Sometimes my horse, which led the way, as being the muleteer’s, stopped, as if to consider about the way: for myself, I could not guess, at such times, where the road lay, but he always found it. The sublime scenery would have impressed me much, in other circumstances; but my sleepiness and fatigue rendered me insensible to everything around me. At last we emerged superas ad auras, not on the top of a mountain to go down again, but to a plain, or upper world. At the pass, where a cleft in the mountain admitted us into the plain, was a station of Rahdars. While they were examining the muleteer’s passports, etc., time was given for the rest of the kafila to come up, and I got a little sleep for a few minutes.

June 4.—We rode briskly over the plain, breathing a purer air, and soon came in sight of a fair edifice, built by the king of the country for the refreshment of pilgrims. In this caravanserai we took our abode for the day. It was more calculated for Eastern than European travellers, having no means of keeping out the air and light. We found the thermometer at 110°. At the passes we met a man travelling down to Bushire with a load of ice, which he willingly disposed of to us. The next night we ascended another range of mountains, and passed over a plain, where the cold was so piercing that with all the clothes we could muster we were shivering. At the end of this plain we entered a dark valley, contained by two ranges of hills converging one to another. The muleteer gave notice that he saw robbers. It proved to be a false alarm; but the place was fitted to be a retreat for robbers; there being on each side caves and fastnesses from which they might have killed every man of us. After ascending another mountain, we descended by a very long and circuitous route into an extensive valley, where we were exposed to the sun till eight o’clock. Whether from the sun or from continued want of sleep, I could not, on my arrival at Kaziroon, compose myself to sleep; there seemed to be a fire within my head, my skin like a cinder, and the pulse violent. Through the day it was again too hot to sleep; though the place we occupied was a sort of summer-house in a garden of cypress-trees, exceedingly well fitted up with mats and coloured glass. Had the kafila gone on that night, I could not have accompanied it; but it halted there a day, by which means I got a sort of night’s rest, though I awoke twenty times to dip my burning hand in water. Though Kaziroon is the second greatest town in Fars, we could get nothing but bread, milk, and eggs, and those with difficulty. The Governor, who is under great obligations to the English, heard of our arrival, but sent no message.

June 5.—At ten we left Kaziroon and ascended a mountain: we then descended from it on the other side into a beautiful valley, where the opening dawn discovered to us ripe fields of wheat and barley, with the green oak here and there in the midst of it. We were reminded of an autumnal morning in England. Thermometer 62°.

June 6.—Half-way up the Peergan Mountain we found a caravanserai. There being no village in the neighbourhood, we had brought supplies from Kaziroon. My servant Zachary got a fall from his mule this morning, which much bruised him; he looked very sorrowful, and had lost much of his garrulity.

June 7.—Left the caravanserai at one this morning, and continued to ascend. The hours we were permitted to rest, the mosquitoes had effectually prevented me from using, so that I never felt more miserable and disordered; the cold was very severe; for fear of falling off, from sleep and numbness, I walked a good part of the way. We pitched our tent in the vale of Dustarjan, near a crystal stream, on the banks of which we observed the clover and golden cup: the whole valley was one green field, in which large herds of cattle were browsing. The temperature was about that of spring in England. Here a few hours’ sleep recovered me in some degree from the stupidity in which I had been for some days. I awoke with a light heart, and said: ‘He knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are but dust. He redeemeth our life from destruction, and crowneth us with loving kindness and tender mercies. He maketh us to lie down in the green pastures, and leadeth us beside the still waters.’ And when we leave this vale of tears, there is ‘no more sorrow, nor sighing, nor any more pain.’ ‘The sun shall not light upon thee, nor any heat; but the Lamb shall lead thee to living fountains of waters.’

June 8.—Went on to a caravanserai, three parasangs, where we passed the day. At night set out upon our last march for Shiraz. Sleepiness, my old companion and enemy, again overtook me. I was in perpetual danger of falling off my horse, till at last I pushed on to a considerable distance beyond the kafila, planted my back against a wall, and slept I know not how long, till the good muleteer came up and gently waked me.

June 9. (Sunday.)—By daylight we found ourselves in the plain of Shiraz. We went to the halting-place outside the walls of the city, but found it occupied; however, after some further delay, we were admitted with our servants into another; as for the kafila, we saw no more of it. The ambassador, Sir Gore Ouseley, was encamped near us; Sir William and Major D’Arcy, and Dr. Sharp, called on us, but I did not see the two first, being asleep at the time. In the evening we dined with his excellency, who gave us a general invitation to his table. Returned to our garden, where we slept.

June 10.—Went this morning to Jaffir Ali Khan’s, to whom we had letters from General Malcolm, and with whom we are to take up our abode. After the long and tedious ceremony of coffee and kaleans (pipes), breakfast made its appearance on two large trays: curry, pilaws, various sweets cooled with snow and perfumed with rose-water, were served in great profusion in china plates and basins, a few wooden spoons beautifully carved; but being in a Persian dress, and on the ground, I thought it high time to throw off the European, and so ate with my hands. After breakfast Jaffir took me to a summer-house in his garden, where his brother-in-law met us, for the purpose of a conversazione. From something I had thrown out at breakfast about Sabat, and accident, he was curious to know what were our opinions on these subjects. He then began to explain his own sentiments on Soofi-ism, of which it appeared he was a passionate admirer.

June 11.—Breakfasted at Anius with some of the Embassy, and went with them afterwards to a glass-house and pottery. Afterwards called on Mr. Morier, secretary to the Embassy, Major D’Arcy, and Sir W. Ouseley. Our host, Jaffir Ali Khan, gave us a good deal of information this evening, about this country and government. He used to sit for hours with the king at Teheran telling him about India and the English.

June 12.—Employed about Journal, writing letters, reading Gulistan, but excessively indolent. In the morning I enjoyed much comfort in prayer. What a privilege to have a God to go to, in such a place, and in such company. To read and pray at leisure seemed like coming home after being long abroad. Psalm lxxxix. was a rich repast to me. Why is it not always thus with me?

At Shiraz Henry Martyn was in the very heart of old Persia, to which the eldest son of Shem had given his name, Elam. One of the greatest of the Shahs, Kareem Khan, made Shiraz his capital, instead of the not distant Persepolis, which also Martyn visited. The founder of the present dynasty levelled its walls and desolated its gardens, but the city of the six gates still dominates the fine valley which no tyrant could destroy, and has still a pleasing appearance, though its Dewan Khana has been stripped of the royal pillars to adorn the palace of the new capital of Teheran. Even Timour respected Shiraz; when red with the blood of Ispahan, he sent for Hafiz, and asked how the poet dared to dispose of the Tartar’s richest cities, Bokhara and Samarcand, for the mole on his lady’s cheek. ‘Can the gifts of Hafiz ever impoverish Timour?’ was the answer; and Shiraz was spared. Kareem Khan long after built mausoleums over the dust of the Anacreon of Persia, and over that of Sadi, its Socrates in verse, as Sir Robert Ker Porter well describes the author of the Gulistan, which was Martyn’s daily companion at this time.

SHIRAZ

We have an account of Shiraz[50] and the people of Persia, written six years before Martyn’s visit, by Edward Scott Waring, Esq., of the Bengal Civil Establishment, who, led by ill-health and curiosity, followed the same route by Bushire and Kaziroon to the city. He is sceptical as to those splendours which formed the theme of Hafiz, and describes the city as ‘worth seeing, but not worth going to see.’ The tomb of the poet[51] the Hafizieh garden he found to be of white marble, on which two of his odes were very beautifully cut; a few durweshes daily visited the spot and chanted his verses. Mr. George N. Curzon, M.P.,[52] the latest visitor, contrasts the grave of Hafiz with that of his contemporary Dante, at Ravenna. Sadi’s grave was then quite neglected; no one had carved on it the beautiful epitaph (paraphrased by Dryden) which he wrote for himself on the Bostan: ‘O passenger! who walkest over my grave, think of the virtuous persons who have gone before me. What has Sadi to apprehend from being turned into dust? he was but earth when alive. He will not continue dust long, for the winds will scatter him over the whole universe.’ Yet as long as the garden of knowledge has blossomed not a nightingale has warbled so sweetly in it. It would be strange if such a nightingale should die, and not a rose grow upon its grave. Sir Robert Ker Porter, twelve years later, found both spots alike neglected. One poet had written of the garden where Hafiz was buried, ‘Paradise does not boast such lovely banks as those of Rocknabeel, nor such groves as the high-scented fragrance of the bowers of Mosella.’ Another now sadly writes, ‘Though the bowers of love grew on its banks, and the sweet song of Hafiz kept time with the nightingale and the rose, the summer is past and all things are changed.’

Six years after Henry Martyn’s residence in Shiraz, Sir Robert Ker Porter entered the city, which to him, as to every Christian or even English-speaking man, became thenceforth more identified with this century’s apostle to the Persians than with even Hafiz and Sadi. ‘Faint with sickness and fatigue,’ he writes,[53]  ‘I felt a momentary reviving pleasure in the sight of a hospitable city, and the cheerful beauty of the view. As I drew near, the image of my exemplary countryman, Henry Martyn, rose in my thoughts, seeming to sanctify the shelter to which I was hastening. He had approached Shiraz much about the same season of the year, A.D. 1811, and like myself was gasping for life under the double pressure of an inward fire and outward burning sun. He dwelt there nearly a year, and on leaving its walls the apostle of Christianity found no cause for shaking off the dust of his feet against the Mohammedan city. The inhabitants had received, cherished and listened to him; and he departed thence amidst the blessings and tears of many a Persian friend. Through his means the Gospel had then found its way into Persia, and, as it appears to have been sown in kindly hearts, the gradual effect hereafter may be like the harvest to the seedling. But, whatever be the issue, the liberality with which his doctrines were permitted to have been discussed, and the hospitality with which their promulgation was received by the learned, the nobles, and persons of all ranks, cannot but reflect lasting honour on the Government, and command our respect for the people at large. Besides, to a person who thinks at all on these subjects, the circumstances of the first correct Persian translation of the Holy Scriptures being made at Shiraz, and thence put into the royal hands and disseminated through the empire, cannot but give an almost prophetic emphasis to the transaction, as arising from the very native country, Persia Proper, of the founder of the empire who first bade the temple of Jerusalem be rebuilt, who returned her sons from captivity, and who was called by name to the Divine commission.’

As the guest of Jaffir Ali Khan, now in his house in Shiraz, and now in his orange summer garden, Henry Martyn gave himself up to the two absorbing duties of making a new translation of the New Testament into Persian, assisted by his host’s brother-in-law, Mirza Seyd Ali Khan, and of receiving and, in the Pauline sense, disputing with the learned Mohammedans of the city and neighbourhood. But all through his inner life, sanctified by his spiritual experience and intensifying that, there continued to run the love of Lydia Grenfell.

To Lydia Grenfell

Shiraz: June 23, 1811.

How continually I think of you, and indeed converse with you, it is impossible to say. But on the Lord’s day in particular, I find you much in my thoughts, because it is on that day that I look abroad, and take a view of the universal church, of which I observe that the saints in England form the most conspicuous part. On that day, too, I indulge myself with a view of the past, and look over again those happy days, when, in company with those I loved, I went up to the house of God with a voice of praise. How then should I fail to remember her who, of all that are dear to me, is the dearest? It is true that I cannot look back upon many days, nor even many hours passed with you—would they had been more—but we have insensibly become more acquainted with each other, so that, on my part at least, it may be said that separation has brought us nearer to one another. It was a momentary interview, but the love is lasting, everlasting. Whether we ever meet again or not, I am sure that you will continue to feel an interest in all that befalls me.

After the death of my dear sister, you bid me consider that I had one sister left while you remained; and you cannot imagine how consolatory to my mind this assurance is. To know that there is one who is willing to think of me, and has leisure to do so, is soothing to a degree that none can know but those who have, like me, lost all their relations.

I sent you a letter from Muscat, in Arabia, which I hope you received; for if not, report will again erase my name from the catalogue of the living, as I sent no other to Europe. Let me here say with praise to our ever-gracious Heavenly Father, that I am in perfect health; of my spirits I cannot say much; I fancy they would be better were ‘the beloved Persis’ by my side. This name, which I once gave you, occurs to me at this moment, I suppose, because I am in Persia, entrenched in one of its valleys, separated from Indian friends by chains of mountains and a roaring sea, among a people depraved beyond all belief, in the power of a tyrant guilty of every species of atrocity. Imagine a pale person seated on a Persian carpet, in a room without table or chair, with a pair of formidable moustachios, and habited as a Persian, and you see me.

June 26.—Here I expect to remain six months. The reason is this: I found on my arrival here, that our attempts at Persian translation in India were good for nothing; at the same time they proposed, with my assistance, to make a new translation. It was an offer I could not refuse, as they speak the purest dialect of the Persian. My host is a man of rank, his name Jaffir Ali Khan, who tries to make the period of my captivity as agreeable as possible. His wife—for he has but one—never appears; parties of young ladies come to see her, but though they stay days in the house, he dare not go into the room where they are. Without intending a compliment to your sex, I must say that the society here, from the exclusion of females, is as dull as it can well be. Perhaps, however, to a stranger like myself, the most social circles would be insipid. I am visited by all the great and the learned; the former come out of respect to my country, the latter to my profession. The conversation with the latter is always upon religion, and it would be strange indeed, if with the armour of truth on the right hand and on the left, I were not able to combat with success the upholders of such a system of absurdity and sin. As the Persians are a far more unprejudiced and inquisitive people than the Indians, and do not stand quite so much in awe of an Englishman as the timid natives of Hindustan, I hope they will learn something from me; the hope of this reconciles me to the necessity imposed on me of staying here; about the translation I dare not be sanguine. The prevailing opinion concerning me is, that I have repaired to Shiraz in order to become a Mussulman. Others, more sagacious, say that I shall bring from India some more, under pretence of making them Mussulmans, but in reality to seize the place. They do not seem to have thought of my wish to have them converted to my religion; they have been so long accustomed to remain without proselytes to their own. I shall probably have very little to write about for some months to come, and therefore I reserve the extracts of my Journal since I last wrote to you for some other opportunity; besides that, the ambassador, with whose despatches this will go, is just leaving Shiraz.

July 2.—The Mohammedans now come in such numbers to visit me, that I am obliged, for the sake of my translation-work, to decline seeing them. To-day one of the apostate sons of Israel was brought by a party of them, to prove the Divine mission of Mohammed from the Hebrew Scriptures, but with all his sophistry he proved nothing. I can almost say with St. Paul, I feel continual pity in my heart for them, and love them for their fathers’ sake, and find a pleasure in praying for them. While speaking of the return of the Jews to Jerusalem, I observed that the ‘Gospel of the kingdom must first be preached in all the world, and then shall the end come.’ He replied with a sneer, ‘And this event, I suppose you mean to say, is beginning to take place by your bringing the Gospel to Persia.’

July 5.—I am so incessantly occupied with visitors and my work, that I have hardly a moment for myself. I have more and more reason to rejoice at my being sent here; there is such an extraordinary stir about religion throughout the city, that some good must come of it. I sometimes sigh for a little Christian communion, yet even from these Mohammedans I hear remarks that do me good. To-day, for instance, my assistant observed, ‘How He loved those twelve persons!’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and not those twelve only, but all those who shall believe in Him, as He said, “I pray not for them alone, but for all them who shall believe on me through their word.”’ Even the enemy is constrained to wonder at the love of Christ. Shall not the object of it say, What manner of love is this? I have learned that I may get letters from England much sooner than by way of India. Be so good as to direct to me, to the care of Sir Gore Ouseley, Bart., Ambassador at Teheran, care of J. Morier, Esq., Constantinople, care of G. Moon, Esq., Malta. I have seen Europe newspapers of only four months’ date, so that I am delightfully near you. May we live near one another in the unity of the Spirit, having one Lord, one hope, one God and Father. In your prayers for me pray that utterance may be given me that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mysteries of the Gospel. I often envy my Persian hearers the freedom and eloquence with which they speak to me. Were I but possessed of their powers, I sometimes think that I should win them all; but the work is God’s, and the faith of His people does not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Remember me as usual with the most unfeigned affection to all my dear friends. This is now the seventh letter I send you without having received an answer. Farewell!

Yours ever most affectionately,

H. Martyn.

Shiraz: September 8, 1811.

A courier on his way to the capital affords me the unexpected pleasure of addressing my most beloved friend. It is now six months since I left India, and in all that time I have not heard from thence. The dear friends there, happy in each other’s society, do not enough call to mind my forlorn condition. Here I am still, beset by cavilling infidels, and making very little progress in my translation, and half disposed to give it up and come away. My kind host, to relieve the tedium of being always within a walled town, pitched a tent for me in a garden a little distance, and there I lived amidst clusters of grapes, by the side of a clear stream; but nothing compensates for the loss of the excellent of the earth. It is my business, however, as you will say, and ought to be my effort, to make saints, where I cannot find them. I do use the means in a certain way, but frigid reasoning with men of perverse minds seldom brings men to Christ. However, as they require it, I reason, and accordingly challenged them to prove the Divine mission of their prophet. In consequence of this, a learned Arabic treatise was written by one who was considered as the most able man, and put into my hands; copies of it were also given to the college and the learned. The writer of it said that if I could give a satisfactory answer to it he would become a Christian, and at all events would make my reply as public as I pleased. I did answer it, and after some faint efforts on his part to defend himself, he acknowledged the force of my arguments, but was afraid to let them be generally known. He then began to inquire about the Gospel, but was not satisfied with my statement. He required me to prove from the very beginning the Divine mission of Moses, as well as of Christ; the truth of the Scriptures, etc. With very little hope that any good will come of it, I am now employed in drawing out the evidences of the truth; but oh! that I could converse and reason, and plead with power from on high. How powerless are the best-directed arguments till the Holy Ghost renders them effectual.

A few days ago I was just on the eve of my departure for Ispahan, as I thought, and my translator had consented to accompany me as far as Baghdad, but just as we were setting out, news came that the Persians and Turks were fighting thereabouts, and that the road was in consequence impassable. I do not know what the Lord’s purpose may be in keeping me here, but I trust it will be for the furtherance of the Gospel of Christ, and in that belief I abide contentedly.

My last letter to you was dated July. I desired you to direct to me at Teheran. As it is uncertain whether I shall pass anywhere near there, you had better direct to the care of S. Morier, Esq., Constantinople, and I can easily get your letters from thence.

I am happy to say that I am quite well, indeed, never better; no returns of pain in the chest since I left India. May I soon receive the welcome news that you also are well, and prospering even as your soul prospers. I read your letters incessantly, and try to find out something new, as I generally do, but I begin to look with pain at the distant date of the last. I cannot tell what to think, but I cast all my care upon Him who hath already done wonders for me, and am sure that, come what will, it shall be good, it shall be best. How sweet the privilege that we may lie as little children before Him! I find that my wisdom is folly and my care useless, so that I try to live on from day to day, happy in His love and care. May that God who hath loved us, and given us everlasting consolation and good hope through grace, bless, love, and keep my ever-dearest friend; and dwelling in the secret place of the Most High, and abiding under the shadow of the Almighty, may she enjoy that sweet tranquillity which the world cannot disturb. Dearest Lydia! pray for me, and believe me to be ever most faithfully and affectionately yours,

H. Martyn.

Shiraz: October 21, 1811.

It is, I think, about a month since I wrote to you, and so little has occurred since that I find scarcely anything in my Journal, and nothing worth transcribing. This state of inactivity is becoming very irksome to me. I cannot get these Persians to work, and while they are idle I am sitting here to no purpose. Sabat’s laziness used to provoke me excessively, but Persians I find are as torpid as Arabs when their salary does not depend on their exertions, and both very inferior to the feeble Indian, whom they affect to despise. My translator comes about sunrise, corrects a little, and is off, and I see no more of him for the day. Meanwhile I sit fretting, or should do so, as I did at first, were it not for a blessed employment which so beguiles the tediousness of the day that I hardly perceive it passing. It is the study of the Psalms in the Hebrew. I have long had it in contemplation, in the assurance, from the number of flat and obscure passages that occur in the translations, that the original has not been hitherto perfectly understood. I am delighted to find that many of the most unmeaning verses in the version turn out, on close examination, to contain a direct reference to the Lord our Saviour. The testimony of Jesus is indeed the spirit of prophecy. He is never lost sight of. Let them touch what subject they will, they must always let fall something about Him. Such should we be, looking always to Him. I have often attempted the 84th Psalm, endeared to me on many accounts as you know, but have not yet succeeded. The glorious 16th Psalm I hope I have mastered. I write with the ardour of a student communicating his discoveries and describing his difficulties to a fellow student.

I think of you incessantly, too much, I fear, sometimes; yet the recollection of you is generally attended with an exercise of resignation to His will. In prayer I often feel what you described five years ago as having felt—a particular pleasure in viewing you as with me before the Lord, and entreating our common Father to bless both His children. When I sit and muse my spirit flies away to you, and attends you at Gurlyn, Penzance, Plymouth Dock, and sometimes with your brother in London. If you acknowledge a kindred feeling still, we are not separated; our spirits have met and blended. I still continue without intelligence from India; since last January I have heard nothing of any one person whom I love. My consolation is that the Lord has you all under His care, and is carrying on His work in the world by your means, and that when I emerge I shall find that some progress is made in India especially, the country I now regard as my own. Persia is in many respects a ripe field for the harvest. Vast numbers secretly hate and despise the superstition imposed on them, and as many of them as have heard the Gospel approve it, but they dare not hazard their lives for the name of the Lord Jesus. I am sometimes asked whether the external appearance of Mohammedanism might not be retained with Christianity, and whether I could not baptize them without their believing in the Divinity of Christ. I tell them, No.

Though I have complained above of the inactivity of my translation, I have reason to bless the Lord that He thus supplies Gibeonites for the help of His true Israel. They are employed in a work of the importance of which they are unconscious, and are making provision for future Persian saints, whose time is, I suppose, now near. Roll back, ye crowded years, your thick array! Let the long, long period of darkness and sin at last give way to the brighter hours of light and liberty, which wait on the wings of the Sun of Righteousness. Perhaps we witness the dawn of the day of glory, and if not, the desire that we feel, that Jesus may be glorified, and the nations acknowledge His sway, is the earnest of the Spirit, that when He shall appear we shall also appear with Him in glory. Kind love to all the saints who are waiting His coming.

Yours, with true affection, my ever dearest Lydia,

H. Martyn.

It is now determined that we leave Shiraz in a week, and as the road through Persia is impassable through the commotions which are always disturbing some part or other of this unhappy country, I must go back to Bushire.

My scribe finished the New Testament; in correcting we are no further than the 13th of Acts.

October 24 to 26.—Resumed my Hebrew studies; on the two first days translated the eight first Psalms into Persian, the last all day long thinking about the word Higgaion in the 9th Psalm.

October 27 to 29.—Finished Psalm xii. Reading the 5th of St. Matthew to Zachariah my servant. Felt awfully convinced of guilt; how fearlessly do I give way to causeless anger, speaking contemptuously of men, as if I had never read this chapter. The Lord deliver me from all my wickedness, and write His holy law upon my heart, that I may walk circumspectly before Him all the remaining days of my life.

November 1.—Everything was prepared for our journey to Baghdad by the Persian Gulf, and a large party of Shiraz ladies, chiefly of Mirza Seid Ali’s family, had determined to accompany us, partly from a wish to visit the tombs, and partly to have the company of their relations a little longer. But a letter arriving with the intelligence that Bagdhad was all in confusion, our kafila separated, and I resolved to go on through Persia to Armenia, and so to Syria. But the season was too far advanced for me to think of traversing the regions of Caucasus just then, so I made up my mind to winter at Shiraz.

CHAPTER X: IN PERSIA—CONTROVERSIES WITH MOHAMMEDANS, SOOFIS, AND JEWS

Henry Martyn’s first week in Persia was enough to lead him to use such language as this: ‘If God rained down fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, how is it that this nation is not blotted out from under heaven? I do not remember to have heard such things of the Hindus, except the Sikhs; they seem to rival the Mohammedans.’ The experienced Bengal civilian, Mr. E. Scott Waring, had thus summed up his impressions: ‘The generality of Persians are sunk in the lowest state of profligacy and infamy, and they seldom hesitate alluding to crimes which are abhorred and detested in every civilised country in the universe. Their virtues consist in being most excellent companions, and in saying this we say everything which can be advanced in their favour. The same argument cannot be advanced for them which has been urged in favour of the Greeks, for they have laws which stigmatise the crimes they commit.’ Every generation seems to have departed farther and farther from the character of the hero-king, Cyrus. At the present time, after two visits to Europe by their Shah, the governing class, the priestly order of Moojtahids, and the people seem to be more hopelessly corrupt than ever.[54]

So early as the twelfth century the astronomer-poet of Persia, Omar Khayyam, of Naishapur, in his few hundred tetrastichs of exquisite verse which have ever since won the admiration of the world, struck the note of dreary scepticism and epicurean sensuality, as the Roman Lucretius had done. His age was one of spiritual darkness, when men felt their misery, and all the more that they saw no means of relieving it. The purer creed of Zoroaster had been stamped down but not rooted out by the illiterate Arab hordes of Mohammed. A cultured Aryan race could not accept submissively the ignorant fanaticism of the Semitic sons of the desert. The Arabs destroyed or drove out ultimately to India the fire-worshippers who had courage to prefer their faith to the Koran; the mass of the people and their leaders worked out the superficial Mohammedanism identified with the name and the sufferings of Ali. The new national religion became more and more a falsehood, alike misrepresenting the moral facts and the character and claims of God, and not really believed in by the general conscience. The few who from time to time arose endowed with spiritual fervour or poetic fire, found no vent through the popular religion, and no satisfaction for the aching void of the heart. The loftier natures ran by an inevitable law of the human mind either into such self-indulgent despairing scepticism as Omar Khayyam’s, or into the sensual mysticism of Sadi, Jami, and Hafiz, of the whole tribe of ascetic enthusiasts and impostors, the Soofis, fakeers, and durweshes, who fill the world of Islam, from the mosques on the Bosporus to the secret chambers of Persia and Oudh. To all such we may use one of the few rare tetrastichs which Omar Khayyam was compelled by his higher nature to write:[55]

O heart! wert thou pure from the body’s dust,

Thou shouldest soar naked spirit above the sky;

Highest heaven is thy native seat—for shame, for shame,

That thou shouldest stoop to dwell in a city of clay!

We must remember all this when we come to the disputations of Henry Martyn with the doctors of Shiraz and Persia. They, and some fifteen millions out of the hundred and eighty millions of Islam in the world, are Shi’ahs, or ‘followers’ of Ali, whom, as Mohammed’s first cousin and son-in-law, they accept as his first legitimate imam, kaliph, or successor; while they treat the de facto kaliphs of the Soonni Muslims—Abu Bakr, Omar, and Othman—as usurpers. The Persians are in reality more tolerant of the Christians, the Jews, and even the Majusi (Magi), or fire-worshippers, all of whom are people of the Book who have received an inspired revelation, than of their Soonni co-religionists. The people—though not of course their ruler, who is of Turkish origin—are more tolerant of new sects, such as that of Babism, and even their spiritual guides or the more respectable among these are in expectation of a new leader, the twelfth, the Imam-al-Mahdi, who has once before been manifested, and has long been waiting secretly for the final consummation.

We must also realise the extent to which Soofi-ism had saturated the upper classes and the Moojtahid order, who sought out Henry Martyn, and even recognised in him the Divine drunkenness, so that they always treated him and spoke of him as a merdi khodai, a man of God. The first Soofi—a name taken either from the word for the woollen dress of the Asiatic or from that for purity—was Ali, according to the Shi’ahs; but this form of philosophical mysticism, often attended by carnal excesses through which its devotees express themselves, is rather Hindu in its origin. The deepest thought of the Asiatic, without the revelation of Jesus Christ, is for Brahman and Buddhist, Sikh and Soofi, Hindu and Mohammedan, this absorption into the Divine Essence, so as to lose all personality and individual consciousness. That Essence may be the sum total of all things—the materialistic side; or the spirit underlying matter, the idealistic side, but the loss of individuality is the ultimate aim. But such absorption can be finally reached only by works—asceticism, pilgrimage, almsgiving, meditation—and by cycles of trans-migrations to sublimate the soul for unconsciousness of all that is objective, and of self itself. Hafiz is as full of wine and women in his poems as Anacreon or the worst of the Latin erotic poets; but the Soofis, who revel in his verses, maintain that they ‘profess eager desire with no carnal affection, and circulate the cup, but no material goblet, since all things are spiritual in their sect; all is mystery within mystery.’

What Henry Martyn learned to find, in even his brief experience of the Aryan Shi’ahs, to whom he offered the love of Christ and through the Son a personal union with the Father, is best expressed in this description by the most recent skilled writer on the people, before referred to:

Persia is the one purely Mohammedan country which, in the process of a national revolt against the rigid hide-bound orthodoxy of Islam, has only succeeded in wrapping more closely round its national and political life the encircling folds of that ‘manteau commode, sous lequel s’abrite, en se cachant à peine, tout le passé.’ Under the extravagances and fanaticism of the Shi’ah heresy, the old Zoroastrian faith lives on, transformed into an outward conformity to the forms of the Moslem creed, and the product is that grotesque confusion of faith and fanaticism, mysticism and immorality, rationalism and superstition, which is the despair and astonishment of all who have looked beneath the surface of ordinary everyday life in Persia. Soofi-ism, with its profound mysticism and godless doctrine, has found a congenial home in Persia, often, indeed, blossoming into beautiful literary form such as is found in the Rubaiyāt of Omar Khayyam, or in the delightful pages of the Gulistan of Sheikh Sadi, or in the poems of Hafiz.

Soofi-ism is the illegitimate offspring of scepticism and fanaticism. It is tersely described by one Persian writer as ‘a sensual plunging into the abyss of darkness’; by another as ‘a deadly abomination’; and by a third as ‘the part of one who goes raving mad with unlawful lusts.’ Nevertheless, as Professor Kuenen has well observed, the true Soofi is a Moslem no more.

All Martyn’s experience among the Wahabees of Patna and the Shi’ahs of Lucknow had fitted him for the discussions which were almost forced upon him in Persia, for he went there to translate the New Testament afresh. But he had, in his reading, sought to prepare himself for the Mohammedan controversy. When coasting round India, he made this entry in his Journal: ‘1811, January 28.—Making extracts from Maracci’s Refutation of Koran. Felt much false shame at being obliged to confess my ignorance of many things which I ought to have known.’ Soofi-ism met him the day after he reached Shiraz, on the first visit of Seyd Ali, brother-in-law of his host, Jaffir Ali Khan. Thus:

June 10.—He spoke so indistinctly, and with such volubility, that I did not well comprehend him, but gathered from his discourse that we are all parts of the Deity. I observed that we had not these opinions in Europe, but understood that they were parts of the Brahmanic system. On my asking him for the foundation of his opinions, he said the first argument he was prepared to bring forward was this: God exists, man also exists, but existence is not twofold, therefore God and man are of the same nature. The minor I disputed: he defended it with many words. I replied by objecting the consequences, Is there no difference between right and wrong? There appeared a difference, he said, to us, but before God it was nothing. The waves of the sea are so many aspects and forms, but it is still but one and the same water. In the outset he spoke with great contempt of all revelation. ‘You know,’ said he, ‘that in the law and Koran, etc., it is said, God created heaven and the earth,’ etc. Reverting to this, I asked whether these opinions were agreeable to what the prophets had spoken. Perceiving me to be not quite philosophical enough for him, he pretended some little reverence for them, spoke of them as good men, etc., but added that there was no evidence for their truth but what was traditionary. I asked whether there was anything unreasonable in God’s making a revelation of His will. He said, No. Whether a miracle for that purpose was not necessary, at least useful, and therefore credible? He granted it. Was not evidence from testimony rational evidence? Yes. Have you then rational evidence for the religion of Mohammed? He said the division of the moon was generally brought forward, but he saw no sufficient evidence for believing it; he mentioned the Koran with some hesitation, as if conscious that it would not stand as a miracle. I said eloquence depended upon opinion; it was no miracle for any but Arabs, and that some one may yet rise up and write better. He allowed the force of the objection, and said the Persians were very far from thinking the eloquence of the Koran miraculous, however the Arabs might think so. The last observation he made was, that it was impossible not to think well of one by whose example and instructions others had become great and good; though therefore little was known of Mohammed, he must have been something to have formed such men as Ali. Here the conversation ceased. I told them in the course of our conversation that, according to our histories, the law and Gospel had been translated into Persian before the time of Mohammed. He said they were not to be found, because Omar in his ignorant zeal had probably destroyed them. He spoke with great contempt of the ‘Arab asses.’

June 13.—Seyd Ali breakfasted with us. Looking at one of the plates in Hutton’s Mathematical Dictionary, where there was a figure of a fountain produced by the rarefaction of the air, he inquired into the principle of it, which I explained; he disputed the principle, and argued for the exploded idea that nature abhors a vacuum. We soon got upon religion again. I showed him some verses in the Koran in which Mohammed disclaims the power of working miracles. He could not reply. We talked again on the evidence of testimony. The oldest book written by a Mohammedan was the sermons of Ali. Allowing these sermons to be really his, I objected to his testimony for Mohammed, because he was interested in the support of that religion. I asked him the meaning of a contested passage; he gave the usual explanation; but as soon as the servants were gone he turned round and said, ‘It is only to make a rhyme.’ This conversation seemed to be attended with good. Our amiable host, Jaffir Ali, Mirza Jan, and Seyd Ali seemed to be delighted with my arguments against Mohammedanism, and did not at last evince a wish to defend it. In the evening Jaffir Ali came and talked most agreeably on religious subjects, respecting the obvious tendency of piety and impiety, and the end to which they would lead in a future world. One of his remarks was, ‘If I am in love with any one, I shall dream of her at night; her image will meet me in my sleep. Now death is but a sleep; if therefore I love God, or Christ, when I fall asleep in death I shall meet Him, so also if I love Satan or his works.’ He could wish, he said, if he had not a wife and children, to go and live on the top of a mountain, so disgusted was he with the world and its concerns. I told him this was the first suggestion in the minds of devotees in all religions, but that in reality it was not the way to escape the pollution of the world, because a man’s wicked heart will go with him to the top of a mountain. It is the grace of God changing the heart which will alone raise us above the world. Christ commands His people to ‘abide in Him’; this is the secret source of fruitfulness, without which they are as branches cut off from the tree. He asked whether there was no mention of a prophet’s coming after Christ. I said, No. ‘Why then,’ said he, ‘was any mention made of Ahmed in the Koran?’ He said, ‘One day an English gentleman said to me, “I believe that Christ was no better than myself.” “Why then,” said I, “you are worse than a Mohammedan.”’

June 24.—Went early this morning to the Jewish synagogue with Jaffir Ali Khan. At the sight of a Mohammedan of such rank, the chief person stopped the service and came to the door to bring us in. He then showed us the little room where the copies of the law were kept. He said there were no old ones but at Baghdad and Jerusalem; he had a printed copy with the Targum, printed at Leghorn. The only European letters in it were the words ‘con approbazione,’ of which he was anxious to know the meaning. The congregation consisted chiefly of little boys, most of whom had the Psalter. I felt much distressed that the worship of the God of Israel was not there, and therefore I did not ask many questions. When he found I could read Hebrew, he was very curious to know who I might be, and asked my name. I told him Abdool Museeh, in hopes that he would ask more, but he did not, setting me down, I suppose, as a Mohammedan.

June 25.—Every day I hear stories of these bloody Tartars. They allow no Christian, not even a Soonni, to enter their country, except in very particular cases, such as merchants with a pass; but never allow one to return to Persia if they catch him. They argue, ‘If we suffer this creature to go back, he will become the father of other infidels, and thus infidelity will spread: so, for the sake of God and His prophet, let us kill him.’ About 150 years ago the men of Bokhara made an insidious attempt to obtain a confession from the people of Mushed that they were Shi’ahs. Their moulvies begged to know what evidence they had for the Khaliphat of Ali. But the men of Mushed, aware of their purpose, said, ‘We Shi’ahs! no, we acknowledge thee for friends.’ But the moollahs of Bokhara were not satisfied with this confession, and three of them deliberated together on what ought to be done. One said: ‘It is all hypocrisy; they must be killed.’ The other said: ‘No, if all be killed we shall kill some Soonnis.’ The third said: ‘If any can prove that their ancestors have ever been Soonnis they shall be saved, but not else.’ Another rejoined that, from being so long with Shi’ahs, their faith could not be pure, and so it was better to kill them. To this another agreed, observing that though it was no sin before men to let them live, he who spared them must be answerable for it to God. When the three bloody inquisitors had determined on the destruction of the Shi’ah city, they gave the signal, and 150,000 Tartars marched down and put all to the sword.

June 26.—We were to-day, according to our expectation, just about setting off for Ispahan, when, Mirza Ibrahim returning, gave us information that the Tartars and Koords had made an irruption into Persia, and that the whole Persian army was on its march to Kermanshah to meet them. Thus our road is impassable. I wrote instantly to the ambassador, to know what he would advise, and the minister sent off an express with it. Mirza Ibrahim, after reading my answer, had nothing to reply, but made such a remark as I did not expect from a man of his character, namely, that he was sufficiently satisfied the Koran was a miracle, though he had failed to convince me. Thus my labour is lost, except it be with the Lord. I have now lost all hope of ever convincing Mohammedans by argument. The most rational, learned, unprejudiced, charitable men confessedly in the whole town cannot escape from the delusion. I know not what to do but to pray for them. I had some warm conversation with Seyd Ali on his infidelity. I asked him what he wanted. Was there any one thing on earth, of the same antiquity, as well attested as the miracles, etc., of Christianity? He confessed not, but he did not know the reason he could not believe: perhaps it was levity and the love of the world, or the power of Satan, but he had no faith at all. He could not believe even in a future state. He asked at the end, ‘Why all this earnestness?’ I said, ‘For fear you should remain in hell for ever.’ He was affected, and said no more.

June 27.—The Prime Minister sent me, as a present, four mules-load of melons from Kaziroon. Seyd Ali reading the 2nd chapter of St. Matthew, where the star is said to go before the wise men, asked: ‘Then what do you say to that, after what you were proving yesterday about the stars?’ I said: ‘It was not necessary to suppose it was one of those heavenly bodies; any meteor that had the appearance of a star was sufficient for the purpose, and equally miraculous.’ ‘Then why call it a star?’ ‘Because the magi called it so, for this account was undoubtedly received from them. Philosophers still talk of a falling star, though every one knows that it is not a star.’

September 2 to 6.—At Mirza Ibrahim’s request we are employed in making out a proof of the Divine mission of Moses and Jesus. He fancies that my arguments against Mohammedanism are equally applicable against these two, and that as I triumphed when acting on the offensive, I shall be as weak as he when I act on the defensive.

September 7 to 11.—Employed much the same; daily disputes with Jaffir Ali Khan about the Trinity; if they may be called disputes in which I bring forward no arguments, but calmly refer them to the Holy Scriptures. They distress and perplex themselves without measure, and I enjoy a peace, as respects these matters, which passeth understanding. There is no passage that so frequently occurs to me now as this: ‘They shall be all taught of God, and great shall be the peace of thy children.’ I have this testimony that I have been taught of God.

1812, January 19.—Aga Baba coming in while we were translating, Mirza Seyd Ali told him he had been all the day decrying the law. It is a favourite tenet of the Soofis, that we should be subject to no law. Aga Baba said that if Christ, while He removed the old law, had also forborne to bring in His new way, He would have done still better. I was surprised as well as shocked at such a remark from him, but said nothing. The poor man, not knowing how to exist without amusement, then turned to a game at chess. How pitiable is the state of fallen man! Wretched, and yet he will not listen to any proposals of relief: stupidly ignorant, yet too wise to submit to learn anything from God. I have often wondered to see how the merest dunce thinks himself qualified to condemn and ridicule revealed religion. These Soofis pretend too to be latitudinarians, assigning idolaters the same rank as others in nearness to God, yet they have all in their turn spoken contemptuously of the Gospel. Perhaps because it is so decisively exclusive. I begin now to have some notion of Soofi-ism. The principle is this: Notwithstanding the good and evil, pleasure and pain that is in the world, God is not affected by it. He is perfectly happy with it all; if therefore we can become like God we shall also be perfectly happy in every possible condition. This, therefore, is salvation.

January 21.—Aga Boozong, the most magisterial of the Soofis, stayed most of the day with Mirza Seyd Ali and Jaffir Ali Khan in my room. His speech as usual—all things are only so many forms of God; paint as many figures as you will on a wall, it is still but the same wall. Tired of constantly hearing this same vapid truism, I asked him, ‘What then? With the reality of things we have nothing to do, as we know nothing about them.’ These forms, if he will have it that they are but forms, affect us with pleasure and pain, just as if they were more real. He said we were at present in a dream; in a dream we think visionary things real—when we wake we discover the delusion. I asked him how did he know but that this dream might continue for ever. But he was not at all disposed to answer objections, and was rather vexed at my proposing them. So I let him alone to dissent as he pleased. Mirza Seyd Ali read him some verses of St. Paul, which he condescended to praise, but in such a way as to be more offensive to me than if he had treated it with contempt. He repeated again how much he was pleased with the sentiments of Paul, as if his being pleased with them would be a matter of exultation to me. He said they were excellent precepts for the people of the world. The parts Mirza Seyd Ali read were Titus iii. and Hebrews viii. On the latter Mirza Seyd Ali observed that he (Paul) had not written ill, but something like a good reasoner. Thus they sit in judgment on God’s Word, never dreaming that they are to be judged by it. On the contrary, they regard the best parts, as they call them, as approaching only towards the heights of Soofi-ism. Aga Boozong finally observed that as for the Gospels he had not seen much in them, but the Epistles he was persuaded would make the book soon well known. There is another circumstance that gained Paul importance in the eyes of Mirza Seyd Ali, which is, that he speaks of Mark and Luke as his servants.

January 24.—Found Seyd Ali rather serious this evening. He said he did not know what to do to have his mind made up about religion. Of all the religions Christ’s was the best, but whether to prefer this to Soofi-ism he could not tell. In these doubts he was tossed to and fro, and is often kept awake the whole night in tears. He and his brother talk together on these things till they are almost crazed. Before he was engaged in this work of translation, he says, he used to read about two or three hours a day; now he can do nothing else; has no inclination for anything else, and feels unhappy if he does not correct his daily portion. His late employment has given a new turn to his thoughts as well as to those of his friends; they had not the most distant conception of the contents of the New Testament. He says his Soofi friends are exceedingly anxious to see the Epistles, from the accounts he gives of them, and also he is sure that almost the whole of Shiraz are so sensible of the load of unmeaning ceremonies in which their religion consists, that they will rejoice to see or hear of anything like freedom, and that they would be more willing to embrace Christ than the Soofis, who, after taking so much pains to be independent of all law, would think it degrading to submit themselves to any law again, however light.

February 4.—Mirza Seyd Ali, who has been enjoying himself in idleness and dissipation these two days instead of translating, returned full of evil and opposition to the Gospel. While translating 2 Peter iii., ‘Scoffers ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming?’ he began to ask ‘Well, they are in the right; where are any of His promises fulfilled?’ I said the heathen nations have been given to Christ for an inheritance. He said No; it might be more truly said that they are given to Mohammed, for what are the Christian nations compared with Arabia, Persia, India, Tartary, etc.? I set in opposition all Europe, Russia, Armenia, and the Christians in the Mohammedan countries. He added, at one time when the Abbasides carried their arms to Spain, the Christian name was almost extinct. I rejoined, however, that he was not yet come to the end of things, that Mohammedanism was in itself rather a species of heretical Christianity, for many professing Christians denied the Divinity of our Lord, and treated the Atonement as a fable. ‘They do right,’ said he; ‘it is contrary to reason that one person should be an atonement for all the rest. How do you prove it? it is nowhere said in the Gospels. Christ said He was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ I urged the authority of the Apostles, founded upon His word, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth,’ etc. ‘Why, what are we to think of them,’ said he, ‘when we see Paul and Barnabas quarrelling; Peter acting the hypocrite, sometimes eating with the Gentiles, and then withdrawing from fear; and again, all the Apostles, not knowing what to do about the circumcision of the Gentiles, and disputing among themselves about it?’ I answered, ‘The infirmities of the Apostles have nothing to do with their authority. It is not everything they do that we are commanded to imitate, nor everything they might say in private, if we knew it, that we are obliged to attend to, but the commands they leave for the Church; and here there is no difference among them. As for the discussions about circumcision, it does not at all appear that the Apostles themselves were divided in their opinions about it; the difficulty seems to have been started by those believers who had been Pharisees.’ ‘Can you give me a proof,’ said he, ‘of Christianity, that I may either believe, or be left without excuse if I do not believe—a proof like that of one of the theorems of Euclid?’ I said it is not to be expected, but enough may be shown to leave every man inexcusable. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘though this is only probability, I shall be glad of that.’ ‘As soon as our Testament is finished,’ I replied, ‘we will, if you please, set about our third treatise, in which, if I fail to convince you, I can at least state the reasons why I believed.’ ‘You had better,’ said he, ‘begin with Soofi-ism, and show that that is absurd’—meaning, I suppose, that I should premise something about the necessity of revelation. After a little pause, ‘I suppose,’ said he, ‘you think it sinful to sport with the characters of those holy men?’ I said I had no objection to hear all their objections and sentiments, but I could not bear anything spoken disrespectfully of the Lord Jesus; ‘and yet there is not one of your Soofis,’ I added, ‘but has said something against Him. Even your master, Mirza Abul Kasim, though he knows nothing of the Gospel or law, and has not even seen them, presumed to say that Moses, Christ, Mohammed, etc., were all alike. I did not act in this way. In India I made every inquiry, both about Hinduism and Mohammedanism. I read the Koran through twice. On my first arrival here I made it my business to ask for your proofs, so that if I condemned and rejected it, it was not without consideration. Your master, therefore, spoke rather precipitately.’ He did not attempt to defend him, but said, ‘You never heard me speak lightly of Jesus.’ ‘No; there is something so awfully pure about Him that nothing is to be said.’

March 18.—Sat a good part of the day with Abul Kasim, the Soofi sage, Mirza Seyd Ali, and Aga Mohammed Hasan, who begins to be a disciple of the old man’s. On my expressing a wish to see the Indian book, it was proposed to send for it, which they did, and then read it aloud. The stoicism of it I controverted, and said that the entire annihilation of the passions, which the stupid Brahman described as perfection, was absurd. On my continuing to treat other parts of the book with contempt, the old man was a little roused, and said that this was the way that pleased them, and my way pleased me. That thus God provided something for the tastes of all, and as the master of a feast provides a great variety, some eat pilao, others prefer kubab, etc. On my again remarking afterwards how useless all these descriptions of perfection were, since no rules were given for attaining it, the old man asked what in my opinion was the way. I said we all agreed in one point, namely, that union with God was perfection; that in order to that we must receive the Spirit of God, which Spirit was promised on condition of believing in Jesus. There was a good deal of disputing about Jesus, His being exclusively the visible God. Nothing came of it apparently, but that Mirza Seyd Ali afterwards said, ‘There is no getting at anything like truth or certainty. We know nothing at all; you are in the right, who simply believe because Jesus had said so.’

March 22.—These two days I have been thinking from morning to night about the Incarnation; considering if I could represent it in such a way as to obviate in any degree the prejudices of the Mohammedans; not that I wished to make it appear altogether agreeable to reason, but I wanted to give a consistent account of the nature and uses of this doctrine, as they are found in the different parts of the Holy Scriptures. One thing implied another to such an extent that I thought necessarily of the nature of life, death, spirit, soul, animal nature, state of separate spirits, personality, the person of Christ, etc., that I was quite worn out with fruitless thought. Towards evening Carapiet with another Armenian came and conversed on several points of theology, such as whether the fire of hell were literally fire or only remorse, whether the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, or from the Father only, and how we are to reconcile those two texts, that ‘for every idle word that men shall speak,’ etc., with the promises of salvation through faith? Happening to speak in praise of some person who practised needless austerities, I tried to make him understand that this was not the way of the Gospel. He urged these texts—‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ ‘Blessed are ye that weep now,’ etc. While we were discussing this point, Mohammed Jaffir, who on a former occasion had conversed with me a good deal about the Gospel, came in. I told him the question before us was an important one, namely, how the love of sin was to be got out of the heart. The Armenian proceeded, ‘If I wish to go to a dancing or drinking, I must deny myself.’ Whether he meant to say that this was sufficient I do not know, but the Mohammedan understanding him so, replied that he had read yesterday in the Gospel, ‘that whosoever looketh upon a woman,’ etc., from which he inferred that obedience of the heart was requisite. This he expressed with such propriety and gracefulness, that, added to the circumstance of his having been reading the Gospel, I was quite delighted, and thought with pleasure of the day when the Gospel should be preached by Persians. After the Armenians were gone we considered the doctrines of the Soofis a little. Finding me not much averse to what he thought some of their most exceptionable tenets, such as union with God, he brought this argument: ‘You will allow that God cannot bind, compel, command Himself.’ ‘No, He cannot.’ ‘Well, if we are one with God, we cannot be subject to any of His laws.’ I replied: ‘Our union with God is such an union as exists between the members of a body. Notwithstanding the union of the hand with the heart and head, it is still subject to the influence and control of the ruling power in the person.’ We had a great deal of conversation afterwards on the Incarnation. All his Mohammedan prejudices revolted. ‘Sir, what do you talk of? the self-existent become contained in space, and suffer need!’ I told him that it was the manhood of Christ that suffered need, and as for the essence of the Deity, if he would tell me anything about it, where or how it was, I would tell him how the Godhead was in Christ. After an effort or two he found that every term he used implied our frightful doctrine, namely, personality, locality, etc. This is a thought that is now much in my mind—that it is so ordered that, since men never can speak of God but through the medium of language, which is all material, nor think of God but through the medium of material objects, they do unwillingly come to God through the Word, and think of God by means of an Incarnation.

March 28.—The same person came again, and we talked incessantly for four hours upon the evidences of the two religions, the Trinity, Incarnation, etc., until I was quite exhausted, and felt the pain in my breast which I used to have in India.

April 7.—Observing a party of ten or a dozen poor Jews with their priest in the garden, I attacked them, and disputed a little with the Levite on Psalms ii., xvi. and xxiv. They were utterly unacquainted with Jesus, and were surprised at what I told them of His Resurrection and Ascension. The priest abruptly broke off the conversation, told me he would call and talk with me in my room, and carried away his flock. Reading afterwards the story of Joseph and his brethren, I was much struck with the exact correspondence between the type and antitype. Jesus will at last make Himself known to His brethren, and then they will find that they have been unknowingly worshipping Him while worshipping the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel.

April 8.—The Prince dining to-day at a house on the side of a hill, which commands a view of the town, issued an order for all the inhabitants to exhibit fireworks for his amusement, or at least to make bonfires on the roofs of their houses, under penalty of five tomans in case of neglect. Accordingly fire was flaming in all directions, enough to have laid any city in Europe in ashes. One man fell off a roof and was killed, and two others in the same way were so hurt that their lives were despaired of, and a woman lost an eye by the stick of a sky-rocket.

July 9.—Made an extraordinary effort, and as a Tartar was going off instantly to Constantinople, wrote letters to Mr. Grant for permission to come to England, and to Mr. Simeon and Lydia, informing them of it; but I have scarcely the remotest expectation of seeing it, except by looking at the Almighty power of God.

Dined at night at the ambassador’s, who said he was determined to give every possible éclat to my book, by presenting it himself to the King. My fever never ceased to rage till the 21st, during all which time every effort was made to subdue it, till I had lost all my strength and almost all my reason. They now administer bark, and it may please God to bless the tonics; but I seem too far gone, and can only say, ‘Having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.’

To Rev. D. Corrie

Shiraz: September 12, 1811.

Dearest Brother,—I can hardly conceive, or at least am not willing to believe, that you would forget me six successive months; I conclude, therefore, that you must have written, though I have not seen your handwriting since I left Calcutta.

The Persian translation goes on but slowly. I and my translator have been engaged in a controversy with his uncle, which has left us little leisure for anything else. As there is nothing at all in this dull place to take the attention of the people, no trade, manufactures, or news, every event at all novel is interesting to them. You may conceive, therefore, what a strong sensation was produced by the stab I aimed at the vitals of Mohammed. Before five people had seen what I wrote, defences of Islam swarmed into ephemeral being from all the moulvi maggots of the place, but the more judicious men were ashamed to let me see them. One moollah, called Aga Akbar, was determined to distinguish himself. He wrote with great acrimony on the margin of my pamphlet, but passion had blinded his reason, so that he smote the wind. One day I was on a visit of ceremony to the Prime Minister, and sitting in great state by his side, fifty visitors in the same hall, and five hundred clients without, when who should make his appearance but my tetric adversary, the said Aga Akbar, who came for the express purpose of presenting the Minister with a piece he had composed in defence of the prophet, and then sitting down told me he should present me with a copy that day. ‘There are four answers,’ said he, ‘to your objection against his using the sword.’ ‘Very well,’ said I, ‘I shall be glad to see them, though I made no such objection.’ Eager to display his attainments in all branches of science, he proceeded to call in question the truth of our European philosophy, and commanded me to show that the earth moved, and not the sun. I told him that in matters of religion, where the salvation of men was concerned, I would give up nothing to them, but as for points in philosophy they might have it all their own way. This was not what he wanted; so after looking at the Minister, to know if it was not a breach of good manners to dispute at such a time, and finding that there was nothing contrary to custom, but that, on the contrary, he rather expected an answer, I began, but soon found that he could comprehend nothing without diagrams. A moonshi in waiting was ordered to produce his implements, so there was I, drawing figures, while hundreds of men were looking on in silence.

But all my trouble was in vain—the moollah knew nothing whatever of mathematics, and therefore could not understand my proofs. The Persians are far more curious and clever than the Indians. Wherever I go they ask me questions in philosophy, and are astonished that I do not know everything. One asked me the reason of the properties of the magnet. I told him I knew nothing about it. ‘But what do your learned men say?’ ‘They know nothing about it.’ This he did not at all credit.

I do not find myself improving in Persian; indeed, I take no pains to speak it well, not perceiving it to be of much consequence. India is the land where we can act at present with most effect. It is true that the Persians are more susceptible, but the terrors of an inquisition are always hanging over them. I can now conceive no greater happiness than to be settled for life in India, superintending native schools, as we did at Patna and Chunar. To preach so as to be readily understood by the poor is a difficulty that appears to me almost insuperable, besides that grown-up people are seldom converted. However, why should we despair? If I live to see India again, I shall set to and learn Hindi in order to preach. The day may come when even our word may be with the Holy Ghost and with power. It is now almost a year since I left Cawnpore, and my journey is but beginning: when shall I ever get back again? I am often tempted to get away from this prison, but again I recollect that some years hence I shall say: ‘When I was at Shiraz why did not I get the New Testament done? What difference would a few months have made?’ In August I passed some days at a vineyard, about a parasang from the city, where my host pitched a tent for me, but it was so cold at night that I was glad to get back to the city again. Though I occupy a room in his house, I provide for myself. Victuals are cheap enough, especially fruit; the grapes, pears, and water-melons are delicious; indeed, such a country for fruit I had no conception of. I have a fine horse which I bought for less than a hundred rupees, on which I ride every morning round the walls. My vain servant, Zechariah, anxious that his master should appear like an ameer, furnished him (i.e. the horse) with a saddle, or rather a pillion, which fairly covers his whole back; it has all the colours of the rainbow, but yellow is predominant, and from it hang down four large tassels, also yellow. But all my finery does not defend me from the boys. Some cry out, ‘Ho, Russ!’ others cry out, ‘Feringhi!’ One day a brickbat was flung at me, and hit me in the hip with such force that I felt it quite a providential escape. Most of the day I am about the translation, sometimes, at a leisure hour, trying at Isaiah, in order to get help from the Persian Jews. My Hebrew reveries have quite disappeared, merely for want of leisure. I forgot to say that I have been to visit the ruins of Persepolis, but this, with many other things, must be reserved for a hot afternoon at Cawnpore.

What would I give for a few lines from you, to say how the men come on, and whether their numbers are increasing, whether you meet the Sherwoods at the evening repast, as when I was there! My kindest love to them, your sister, and all that love us in the truth. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, and with your faithful and affectionate brother,

H. Martyn.

The Secretary to the British Embassy to Persia, and afterwards himself Minister Plenipotentiary to its Court, Mr. James Morier, has given us a notable sketch of Henry Martyn as a controversialist for Christ, and of the impression that he made on the officials, priests, and people of all classes. As the author of the Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan and other life-like tales of the East, and as an accomplished traveller, the father of the present Ambassador to St. Petersburg is the first authority on such a subject. In his Second Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor to Constantinople[56] he thus writes:

The Persians, who were struck with his humility, his patience and resignation, called him a merdi khodai, a man of God, and indeed every action of his life seemed to be bent towards the one object of advancing the interest of the Christian religion. When he was living at Shiraz, employed in his translation, he neither sought nor shunned the society of the natives, many of whom constantly drew him into arguments about religion, with the intention of persuading him of the truth and excellence of theirs. His answers were such as to stimulate them to further arguments, and in spite of their pride the principal moollahs, who had heard of his reputation, paid him the first visit, and endeavoured in every way to entangle him in his talk. At length he thought that the best mode of silencing them was by writing a reply to the arguments which they brought against our belief and in favour of their own. His tract was circulated through different parts of Persia, and was sent from hand to hand to be answered. At length it made its way to the King’s court, and a moollah of high consideration, who resided at Hamadan, and who was esteemed one of the best controversialists in the country, was ordered to answer it. After the lapse of more than a year he did answer it, but such were the strong positions taken by Mr. Martyn that the Persians themselves were ashamed of the futility of their own attempts to break them down: for, after they had sent their answer to the ambassador, they requested that it might be returned to them again, as another answer was preparing to be given. Such answer has never yet been given; and we may infer from this circumstance that if, in addition to the Scriptures, some plain treatises of the evidences of Christianity, accompanied by strictures upon the falseness of the doctrines of Mohammed, were translated into Persian and disseminated throughout that country, very favourable effects would be produced. Mr. Martyn caused a copy of his translation to be beautifully written, and to be presented by the ambassador to the King, who was pleased to receive it very graciously. A copy of it was made by Mirza Baba, a Persian who gave us lessons in the Persian language, and he said that many of his countrymen asked his permission to take Mr. Martyn’s translation to their homes, where they kept it for several days, and expressed themselves much edified by its contents. But whilst he was employed in copying it, moollahs (the Persian scribes) used frequently to sit with him and revile him for undertaking such a work. On reading the passage where our Saviour is called ‘the Lamb of God,’ they scorned and ridiculed the simile, as if exulting in the superior designation of Ali, who is called Sheer Khodai, the Lion of God. Mirza Baba observed to them: ‘The lion is an unclean beast; it preys upon carcases, and you are not allowed to wear its skin because it is impure; it is destructive, fierce, and man’s enemy. The lamb, on the contrary, is in every way halal or lawful. You eat its flesh, you wear its skin on your head, it does no harm, and is an animal beloved. Whether is it best, then, to say the Lamb of God, or the Lion of God?’

Henry Martyn had not been two months in Shiraz when, as his attendant expressed it, he became the town-talk. The populace believed that he had come to declare himself a Mussulman, and would then bring five thousand men to the city and take possession of it. Dissatisfied with their own government, many Mohammedans began to desire English rule, such as was making India peaceful and prosperous, and as was supposed to enrich all who enjoyed it. Jewish perverts to Islam crowded to the garden, where at all times, even on Sunday, the saintly visitor was accessible. Armenians spoke to him with a freedom they dared not show in conversation with others. From Baghdad to Busrah, and from Bushire to Ispahan and even Etchmiatzin, visitors crowded to talk with the wonderful scholar and holy man. Thus on July 6 he was presented by Sir Gore Ouseley to the Governor, Prince Abbas Mirza.

Early this morning I went with the ambassador and his suite to court, wearing, agreeably to custom, a pair of red cloth stockings, with green high-heeled shoes. When we entered the great court of the palace a hundred fountains began to play. The prince appeared at the opposite side, in his talar, or hall of audience, seated on the ground. Here our first bow was made. When we came in sight of him we bowed a second time, and entered the room. He did not rise, nor take notice of any but the ambassador, with whom he conversed at the distance of the breadth of the room. Two of his ministers stood in front of the hall outside; the ambassador’s mihmander, and the master of the ceremonies, within at the door. We sat down in order, in a line with the ambassador, with our hats on. I never saw a more sweet and engaging countenance than the prince’s; there was such an appearance of good nature and humility in all his demeanour, that I could scarcely bring myself to believe that he would be guilty of anything cruel or tyrannical.

Mahommed Shareef Khan, one of the most renowned of the Persian generals, having served the present royal family for four generations, called to see me, out of respect to General Malcolm. An Armenian priest also, on his way from Busrah to Ispahan; he was as ignorant as the rest of his brethren. To my surprise I found that he was of the Latin Church, and read the service in Latin, though he confessed he knew nothing about the language.

The first of Henry Martyn’s public controversies with the Shi’ah doctors, as distinguished from the almost daily discussions already described in his Journal, took place in the house of the Moojtahid of Shiraz on July 15, 1811. The doctrine of Jesus, represented by such a follower, was beginning so to tell on Shi’ahs and Soofis, ever eager for something new, that the interference of the first authority of Islam in all Persia became necessary. Higher than all other Mohammedan divines, especially among the Shi’ahs, are the three or four Moojtahids.[57] They must be saintly, learned, and aloof from worldly ambition. In Persia each acts as an informal and final court of appeal; he alone dares to temper the tyranny of the Shah by his influence; his house is a sanctuary for the oppressed; the city of his habitation is often saved from violence by his presence. This was the position and the pretension of the man who, having first ascertained that the English man of God did not want demonstration, but admitted that the prophets had been sent, invited him to dinner, preliminary to a conflict. Martyn has left this description of the scene:

About eight o’clock at night we went, and after passing along many an avenue we entered a fine court, where was a pond, and, by the side of it, a platform eight feet high, covered with carpets. Here sat the Moojtahid in state, with a considerable number of his learned friends—among the rest, I perceived the Jew. One was at his prayers. I was never more disgusted at the mockery of this kind of prayer. He went through the evolutions with great exactness, and pretended to be unmoved at the noise and chit-chat of persons on each side of him. The Professor seated Seyd Ali on his right hand, and me on his left. Everything around bore the appearance of opulence and ease, and the swarthy obesity of the little personage himself led me to suppose that he had paid more attention to cooking than to science. But when he began to speak, I saw reason enough for his being so much admired. The substance of his speech was flimsy enough; but he spoke with uncommon fluency and clearness, and with a manner confident and imposing. He talked for a full hour about the soul; its being distinct from the body; superior to the brutes, etc.; about God; His unity, invisibility, and other obvious and acknowledged truths. After this followed another discourse. At length, after clearing his way for miles around, he said that philosophers had proved that a single being could produce but a single being; that the first thing God had created was Wisdom, a being perfectly one with Him; after that, the souls of men, and the seventh heaven; and so on till He produced matter, which is merely passive. He illustrated the theory by comparing all being to a circle; at one extremity of the diameter is God, at the opposite extremity of the diameter is matter, than which nothing in the world is meaner. Rising from thence, the highest stage of matter is connected with the lowest stage of vegetation; the highest of the vegetable world with the lowest of the animal; and so on, till we approach the point from which all proceeded. ‘But,’ said he, ‘you will observe that, next to God, something ought to be which is equal to God; for since it is equally near, it possesses equal dignity. What this is philosophers are not agreed upon. You,’ said he, ‘say it is Christ; but we, that it is the Spirit of the Prophets. All this is what the philosophers have proved, independently of any particular religion.’ I rather imagined that it was the invention of some ancient Oriental Christian, to make the doctrine of the Trinity appear more reasonable. There were a hundred things in the Professor’s harangue that might have been excepted against, as mere dreams, supported by no evidence; but I had no inclination to call in question dogmas on the truth or falsehood of which nothing in religion depended.

He was speaking at one time about the angels, and asserted that man was superior to them, and that no being greater than man could be created. Here the Jew reminded me of a passage in the Bible, quoting something in Hebrew. I was a little surprised, and was just about to ask where he found anything in the Bible to support such a doctrine, when the Moojtahid, not thinking it worth while to pay any attention to what the Jew said, continued his discourse. At last the Jew grew impatient, and finding an opportunity of speaking, said to me, ‘Why do not you speak? Why do not you bring forward your objections?’ The Professor, at the close of one of his long speeches, said to me, ‘You see how much there is to be said on these subjects; several visits will be necessary; we must come to the point by degrees.’ Perceiving how much he dreaded a close discussion, I did not mean to hurry him, but let him talk on, not expecting we should have anything about Muhammadanism the first night. But, at the instigation of the Jew, I said, ‘Sir, you see that Abdoolghunee is anxious that you should say something about Islam.’ He was much displeased at being brought so prematurely to the weak point, but could not decline accepting so direct a challenge. ‘Well,’ said he to me, ‘I must ask you a few questions. Why do you believe in Christ?’ I replied, ‘That is not the question. I am at liberty to say that I do not believe in any religion; that I am a plain man seeking the way of salvation; that it was, moreover, quite unnecessary to prove the truth of Christ to Muhammadans, because they allowed it.’ ‘No such thing,’ said he; ‘the Jesus we acknowledge is He who was a prophet, a mere servant of God, and one who bore testimony to Muhammad; not your Jesus, whom you call God,’ said he, with a contemptuous smile. He then enumerated the persons who had spoken of the miracles of Muhammad, and told a long story about Salmon the Persian, who had come to Muhammad. I asked whether this Salmon had written an account of the miracles he had seen. He confessed that he had not. ‘Nor,’ said I, ‘have you a single witness to the miracles of Muhammad.’ He then tried to show that, though they had not, there was still sufficient evidence. ‘For,’ said he, ‘suppose five hundred persons should say that they heard some particular thing of a hundred persons who were with Muhammad, would that be sufficient evidence or not?’ ‘Whether it be or not,’ said I, ‘you have no such evidence as that, nor anything like it; but if you have, as they are something like witnesses, we must proceed to examine them and see whether their testimony deserves credit.’

After this the Koran was mentioned; but as the company began to thin, and the great man had not a sufficient audience before whom to display his eloquence, the dispute was not so brisk. He did not indeed seem to think it worth while to notice my objections. He mentioned a well-known sentence in the Koran as being inimitable. I produced another sentence, and begged to know why it was inferior to the Koranic one. He declined saying why, under pretence that it required such a knowledge of rhetoric in order to understand his proofs as I probably did not possess. A scholar afterwards came to Seyd Ali, with twenty reasons for preferring Muhammad’s sentence to mine.

It was midnight when dinner, or rather supper, was brought in: it was a sullen meal. The great man was silent, and I was sleepy. Seyd Ali, however, had not had enough. While burying his hand in the dish of the Professor, he softly mentioned some more of my objections. He was so vexed that he scarcely answered anything; but after supper told a very long story, all reflecting upon me. He described a grand assembly of Christians, Jews, Guebres, and Sabeans (for they generally do us the honour of stringing us with the other three), before Imam Ruza. The Christians were of course defeated and silenced. It was a remark of the Imam’s, in which the Professor acquiesced, that ‘it is quite useless for Muhammadans and Christians to argue together, as they had different languages and different histories.’ To the last I said nothing; but to the former replied by relating the fable of the lion and man, which amused Seyd Ali so much that he laughed out before the great man, and all the way home.

The intervention of the Moojtahid only added to the sensation excited among all classes by the saintly Feringhi. The Shi’ah doctors had their second corrective almost ready. They resolved to check the spirit of inquiry by issuing, eleven days after the Moojtahid’s attempt, a defence of Muhammadanism by Mirza Ibrahim, described as ‘the preceptor of all the moollas.’[58] The event has an interest of its own, apart from Henry Martyn, in the light of a famous controversy which preceded it, and of spiritually fruitful discussions which followed it, all in India. Before Henry Martyn in this field of Christian apologetic was the Portuguese Jesuit, Hieronymo Xavier, and after him were the Scots missionary, John Wilson of Bombay, and the German agent of the Church Missionary Society, C.G. Pfander.

Among the representatives of all religions whom the tolerant Akbar invited to his court at Agra, that out of their teaching he might form an eclectic cult of his own, was Jerome, the nephew of the famous Francis Xavier, then at Goa. For Akbar P. Hieronymo Xavier wrote in Persian two histories, Christi and S. Petri. To his successor, the Emperor Jahangir, in whose suite he was the first European who visited Kashmir, H. Xavier in the year 1609 dedicated his third Persian book, entitled A Mirror showing the Truth, in which the doctrines of the Christian religion are discussed, the mysteries of the Gospel explained, and the vanity of (all) other religions is to be seen. He has been pronounced by a good authority[59] a man of considerable ability and energy, but one who trusted more to his own ingenuity than to the plain and unsophisticated declarations of the Holy Scriptures. Ludovicus de Dieu, the Dutch scholar, who translated his two first works into Latin, most fairly describes each on the title-page as ‘multis modis contaminata.’ Twelve years after, to the third or controversial treatise of P.H. Xavier an answer was published by ‘the most mean of those who stand in need of the mercy of a bounteous God, Ahmed ibn Zaín Elábidín Elálooi,’ under a title thus translated, The Divine Rays in refutation of Christian Error. To this a rejoinder in Latin appeared at Rome in 1631, from the pen of Philip Guadagnoli, Arabic Professor in the Propaganda College there. He calls it Apologia pro Christiana Religione. If we except Raimund Lull’s two spiritual treatises and Ars Major, and Pocock’s Arabic translation of the De Veritate Religionis Christianæ, which Grotius wrote as a text-book for the Dutch missionaries in the East Indies, Henry Martyn’s was the first attempt of Reformed Christendom to carry the pure doctrine of Jesus Christ to the Asiatic races whom the corruptions of Judaism and the Eastern Churches had blinded into accepting the Koran and all its consequences.

Mirza Ibrahim’s Arabic challenge to the Christian scholar is pronounced by so competent and fair an authority as Sir William Muir[60] as made by a man of talent and acuteness, and remarkable for its freedom from violent and virulent remarks.

This argument chiefly concerns the subject of miracles, which he accommodates to the Koran. He defines a miracle as an effect exceeding common experience, accompanied by a prophetic claim and a challenge to produce the like; and he holds that it may be produced by particular experience—that is, it may be confined to any single art, but must be attested by the evidence and confession of those best skilled in that art. Thus he assumes the miracles of Moses and Jesus to belong respectively to the arts of magic and physic, which had severally reached perfection in the times of these prophets; the evidence of the magicians is hence deemed sufficient for the miracles of Moses, and that of the physicians for those of Jesus; but had these miracles occurred in any other age than that in which those arts flourished, their proof would have been imperfect, and the miracles consequently not binding. This extraordinary doctrine—which Henry Martyn shows to be founded upon an inadequate knowledge of history—he proceeds to apply to the Koran, and proves entirely to his own satisfaction that it fulfils all the required conditions. This miracle belonged to the science of eloquence, and in that science the Arabs were perfect adepts. The Koran was accompanied by a challenge, and when they accordingly professed their inability to produce an equal, their evidence, like that of the magicians’ and physicians’, became universally binding. He likewise dilates upon the superior and perpetual nature of the Koran as an intellectual and a lasting miracle, which will remain unaltered when all others are forgotten. He touches slightly on Mohammed’s other miracles, and asserts the insufficiency of proof (except through the Koran) for those of all former prophets.

To this, which was accompanied by a treatise on the miracles of Mohammed by Aga Akbar, Henry Martyn wrote a reply in three parts. In what spirit he conducted the controversy, and what influence through him the Spirit of Christ had on some of the Shi’ahs and Soofis, this extract from his Journal unconsciously testifies:

1811, September 12 to 15. (Sunday.)—Finished what I had to say on the evidences of religion, and translated it into Persian. Aga Akbar sent me his treatise by one of his disciples. Aga Baba, his brother, but a very different person from him, called; he spoke without disguise of his dislike to Mohammedanism and good-will to Christianity. For his attachment to Mirza Abel, Kasim, his brother, sets him down as an infidel. Mirza Ibrahim is still in doubt, and thinks that he may be a Christian, and be saved without renouncing Mohammedanism; asks his nephew what is requisite to observe; he said, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘what harm is there in doing that?’ At another time Seyd Ali asked me, after a dispute, whether I would baptize any one who did not believe in the Divinity of Christ? I said, No. While translating Acts ii. and iii., especially where it is said all who believed had one heart and one mind, and had all things in common, he was much affected, and contrasted the beginning of Christianity with that of Mohammedanism, where they began their career with murdering men and robbing caravans; and oh, said he, ‘that I were sure the Holy Spirit would be given to me! I would become a Christian at once.’ Alas! both his faith and mine are very weak. Even if he were to desire baptism I should tremble to give it. He spake in a very pleasing way on other parts of the Gospel, and seems to have been particularly taken with the idea of a new birth. The state of a new-born child gives him the most striking view of that simplicity which he considers as the height of wisdom. Simplicity is that to which he aspires, he says, above all things. He was once proud of his knowledge, and vain of his superiority to others, but he found that fancied knowledge set him at a greater distance from happiness than anything else.

Martyn’s first reply in Persian to Mirza Ibrahim thus begins: ‘The Christian Minister thanks the celebrated Professor of Islamism for the favour he has done him in writing an answer to his inquiries, but confesses that, after reading it, a few doubts occurred to him, on account of which, and not for the mere purpose of dispute, he has taken upon himself to write the following pages.’ The reply is signed, ‘The Christian Minister, Henry Martyn.’ One Mirza Mahommed Ruza published in 1813, the year after Martyn’s death, a very prolix rejoinder. It is unworthy of lengthened notice, according to Sir William Muir, who thus summarises and comments on the defence made by the Christian scholar:

Henry Martyn’s first tract refers chiefly to the subject of miracles: he asserts that, to be conclusive, a miracle must exceed universal experience; that the testimony and opinion of the Arabs is therefore insufficient, besides being that of a party concerned; that, were the Koran allowed to be inimitable, that would not prove it to be a miracle; and that its being an intellectual miracle is not a virtue, but, by making it generally inappreciable, a defect. He concludes by denying the proof of Mohammed’s other miracles, in which two requisites are wanting: viz., their being recorded at or near the time of their occurrence, and the narrators being under no constraint.

The second tract directly attacks Mohammed’s mission, by alleging the debasing nature of some of the contents and precepts of the Koran, holds good works and repentance to be insufficient for salvation, and opens the subject of the true atonement as prefigured in types, fulfilled in Christ, and made public by the spread of Christianity which is mentioned as itself a convincing miracle.

The last tract commences with an attack on the absurdities of Soofi-ism, and proceeds to show that the love of God and union with Him cannot be obtained by contemplation, but only by a practical manifestation of His goodness towards us, accompanied by an assurance of our safety; and that this is fulfilled in Christianity not by the amalgamation of the soul with the Deity, but by the pouring out of God’s Spirit upon His children, and by the obedience and atonement of Christ. Vicarious suffering is then defended by analogy, the truth of the Mosaic and Christian miracles is upheld, and the whole argument closes with proving the authenticity of the Christian annals by their coincidence with profane history.

Sir William Muir agrees in the opinion of Professor Lee that, situated as Mr. Martyn was in Persia, with a short tract on the Mohammedan religion before him, and his health precarious, the course which he took was perhaps the only one practicable. Sir William adds: ‘In pursuing his argument Henry Martyn has displayed great wisdom and skill, and his reasoning appears to be in general perfectly conclusive; in a few instances, however, he has perhaps not taken up the most advantageous ground.’

The appeal of the Christian defender of the faith, at the close of his second part, on the incarnation and atonement, is marked by a loving courtesy:[61]

It is now the prayer of the humble Henry Martyn that these things may be considered with impartiality. If they become the means of procuring conviction, let not the fear of death or punishment operate for a moment to the contrary, but let this conviction have its legitimate effect; for the world, we know, passes away like the wind of the desert. But if what has here been stated do not produce conviction, my prayer is that God Himself may instruct you; that as hitherto ye have held what you believed to be the truth, ye may now become teachers of that which is really so; and that He may grant you to be the means of bringing others to the knowledge of the same, through Jesus Christ, who has loved us and washed us in His own blood, to whom be the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.

1811, July 26.—Mirza Ibrahim declared publicly before all his disciples, ‘that if I really confuted his arguments, he should be bound in conscience to become a Christian.’ Alas! from such a declaration I have little hope. His general good character for uprightness and unbounded kindness to the poor would be a much stronger reason with me for believing that he may perhaps be a Cornelius.

August 2.—Much against his will Mirza Ibrahim was obliged to go to his brother, who is governor of some town thirty-eight parasangs off. To the last moment he continued talking with his nephew on the subject of his book, and begged that, in case of his detention, my reply might be sent to him.

August 7.—My friends talked, as usual, much about what they call Divine love; but I do not very well comprehend what they mean. They love not the holy God, but the god of their own imagination—a god who will let them do as they please. I often remind Seyd Ali of one defect in his system, which is, that there is no one to stand between his sins and God. Knowing what I allude to, he says, ‘Well, if the death of Christ intervene, no harm; Soofi-ism can admit this too.’

August 14.—Returned to the city in a fever, which continued all the next day until the evening!

August 15.—Jani Khan, in rank corresponding to one of our Scottish dukes, as he is the head of all the military tribes of Persia, and chief of his own tribe, which consists of twenty thousand families, called on Jaffir Ali Khan with a message from the king. He asked me a great number of questions, and disputed a little. ‘I suppose,’ said he, ‘you consider us all as infidels!’ ‘Yes,’ replied I, ‘the whole of you.’ He was mightily pleased with my frankness, and mentioned it when he was going away.

August 22.—The copyist having shown my answer to Moodurris, called Moolla Akbar, he wrote on the margin with great acrimony but little sense. Seyd Ali having shown his remarks in some companies, they begged him not to show them to me, for fear I should disgrace them all through the folly of one man.

August 23.—Ruza Kooli Mirza, the great-grandson of Nadir Shah and Aga Mahommed Hasan, called. The prince’s nephew, hearing of my attack on Muhammad, observed that the proper answer to it was the sword; but the prince confessed that he began to have his doubts. On his inquiring what were the laws of Christianity—meaning the number of times of prayer, the different washings, &c.—I said that we 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.’ He asked, ‘What could be better?’ and continued praising them.

The Moolla Aga Mahommed Hasan, himself a Moodurris, and a very sensible, candid man, asked a good deal about the European philosophy, particularly what we did in metaphysics; for instance, ‘how, or in what sense, the body of Christ ascended into heaven?’ He talked of free-will and fate, and reasoned high, and at last reconciled them according to the doctrines of the Soofis by saying, that ‘as all being is an emanation of the Deity, the will of every being is only the will of the Deity, so that therefore, in fact, free-will and fate are the same.’ He has nothing to find fault with in Christianity, except the Divinity of Christ. It is this doctrine that exposes me to the contempt of the learned Mahometans, in whom it is difficult to say whether pride or ignorance predominates. Their sneers are more difficult to bear than the brick-bats which the boys sometimes throw at me; however, both are an honour of which I am not worthy. How many times in the day have I occasion to repeat the words:

If on my face, for Thy dear name,

Shame and reproaches be,

All hail, reproach, and welcome, shame,

If Thou remember me.

The more they wish me to give up this one point—the Divinity of Christ—the more I seem to feel the necessity of it, and rejoice and glory in it. Indeed, I trust I would sooner give up my life than surrender it.

In the evening we went to pay a long-promised visit to Mirza Abulkasim, one of the most renowned Soofis in all Persia. We found several persons sitting in an open court, in which a few greens and flowers were placed; the master was in a corner. He was a very fresh-looking old man with a silver beard. I was surprised to observe the downcast and sorrowful looks of the assembly, and still more at the silence which reigned. After sitting some time in expectation, and being not at all disposed to waste my time in sitting there, I said softly to Seyd Ali, ‘What is this?’ He said, ‘It is the custom here to think much and speak little.’ ‘May I ask the master a question?’ said I. With some hesitation he consented to let me; so I begged Jaffir Ali to inquire, ‘Which is the way to be happy?’

This he did in his own manner; he began by observing that ‘there was a great deal of misery in the world, and that the learned shared as largely in it as the rest; that I wished therefore to know what we must do to escape it.’ The master replied that ‘for his part he did not know, but that it was usually said that the subjugation of the passions was the shortest way to happiness.’ After a considerable pause I ventured to ask, ‘What were his feelings at the prospect of death—hope, or fear, or neither?’ ‘Neither,’ said he, and that ‘pleasure and pain were both alike.’ I then perceived that the Stoics were Greek Soofis. I asked ‘whether he had attained this apathy.’ He said, ‘No.’ ‘Why do you think it attainable?’ He could not tell. ‘Why do you think that pleasure and pain are not the same?’ said Seyd Ali, taking his master’s part. ‘Because,’ said I, ‘I have the evidence of my senses for it. And you also act as if there was a difference. Why do you eat, but that you fear pain?’ These silent sages sat unmoved.

One of the disciples is the son of the Moojtahid who, greatly to the vexation of his father, is entirely devoted to the Soofi doctor. He attended his kalean (pipe) with the utmost humility. On observing the pensive countenance of the young man, and knowing something of his history from Seyd Ali, how he had left all to find happiness in the contemplation of God, I longed to make known the glad tidings of a Saviour, and thanked God on coming away, that I was not left ignorant of the Gospel. I could not help being a little pleasant on Seyd Ali afterwards, for his admiration of this silent instructor. ‘There you sit,’ said I, ‘immersed in thought, full of anxiety and care, and will not take the trouble to ask whether God has said anything or not. No: that is too easy and direct a way of coming at the truth. I compare you to spiders, who weave their house of defence out of their own bowels; or to a set of people who are groping for a light in broad day.’

August 26.—Waited this morning on Mahommed Nubbee Khan, late ambassador at Calcutta, and now prime minister of Fars. There were a vast number of clients in his court, with whom he transacted business while chatting with us. Amongst the others who came and sat with us, was my tetric adversary—Aga Akbar, who came for the very purpose of presenting the minister with a little book he had written in answer to mine. After presenting it in due form, he sat down, and told me he meant to bring me a copy that day—a promise which he did not perform, through Seyd Ali’s persuasion, who told him it was a performance that would do him no credit.

August 29.—Mirza Ibrahim begins to inquire about the Gospel. The objections he made were such as these: How sins could be atoned for before they were committed? Whether, as Jesus died for all men, all would necessarily be saved? If faith be the condition of salvation, would wicked Christians be saved, provided they believe? I was pleased to see from the nature of the objections that he was considering the subject. To this last objection, I remarked that to those who felt themselves sinners, and came to God for mercy, through Christ, God would give His Holy Spirit, which would progressively sanctify them in heart and life.

August 30.—Mirza Ibrahim praises my answer, especially the first part.

It was on the sacred rock of Behistun, on the western frontiers of Media, on the high road eastward from Babylonia, that Darius Hystaspes, founder of the civil policy of ancient Persia, carved the wonderful cuneiform inscriptions which made that rock the charter of Achæmenian royalty. At Persepolis only the platform, the pillared colonnade, and the palace seem to have been built by him; the other buildings, with commemorative legends, were erected by Xerxes and Artaxerxes Ochus. Lassen, Westergaard, and our own Sir Henry Rawlinson,[62] did not decipher these inscriptions for some twenty years after Martyn’s visit. How deaf had Ormuzd proved all through the centuries to the prayer which Darius the king cut on a huge slab, twenty-six feet in length and six in height, in the southern wall of the great platform at Persepolis: ‘Let not war, nor slavery, nor decrepitude, nor lies obtain power over this province.’ Henry Martyn thus wrote of his visit:

After traversing these celebrated ruins, I must say that I felt a little disappointed: they did not at all answer my expectation. The architecture of the ancient Persians seems to me much more akin to that of their clumsy neighbours the Indians, than to that of the Greeks. I saw no appearance of grand design anywhere. The chapiters of the columns were almost as long as the shafts:—though they are not so represented in Niebuhr’s plate;—and the mean little passages into the square court, or room, or whatever it was, make it very evident that the taste of the Orientals was the same three thousand years ago as it is now. But it was impossible not to recollect that here Alexander and his Greeks passed and repassed; here they sat and sung, and revelled; now all is in silence, generation on generation lie mingled with the dust of their mouldering edifices:

Alike the busy and the gay,

But flutter in life’s busy day,

In fortune’s varying colours drest.

As soon as we recrossed the Araxes, the escort begged me to point out the Keblah to them, as they wanted to pray. After setting their faces towards Mecca, as nearly as I could, I went and sat down on the margin near the bridge, where the water, falling over some fragments of the bridge under the arches, produced a roar, which, contrasted with the stillness all around, had a grand effect. Here I thought again of the multitudes who had once pursued their labours and pleasures on its banks. Twenty-one centuries have passed away since they lived; how short, in comparison, must be the remainder of my days. What a momentary duration is the life of man! Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum, may be affirmed of the river; but men pass away as soon as they begin to exist. Well, let the moments pass:

They’ll waft us sooner o’er

This life’s tempestuous sea,

And land us on the peaceful shore

Of blest eternity.

The true character of Martyn’s Mohammedan and Soofi controversialists comes out in the fast of Ramazan, the ninth month of the lunar year, when from dawn to sunset of each day a strict fast is observed, most trying to the temper, and from sunset to dawn excess is too naturally the rule, especially, as in this case, when Ramazan falls on the long hot days of summer. Of this month the traditions declare that the doors of heaven are opened and the doors of hell shut, while the devils are chained. At this time the miracle play of Hasan and Husain[63] is acted in the native theatres from night to night. In scene xxxi. are enacted the conversion and murder of an English ambassador. Dean Stanley used to tell that Henry Martyn, horrified at the English oaths put into the mouth of the Persian who represented the ambassador in the tragedy, took him and taught him to repeat the Lord’s Prayer instead.

September 20.—First day of the fast of Ramazan. All the family had been up in the night, to take an unseasonable meal, in order to fortify themselves for the abstinence of the day. It was curious to observe the effects of the fast in the house. The master was scolding and beating his servants; they equally peevish and insolent, and the beggars more than ordinarily importunate and clamorous. At noon, all the city went to the grand mosque. My host came back with an account of new vexations there. He was chatting with a friend, near the door, when a great preacher, Hajji Mirza, arrived, with hundreds of followers. ‘Why do you not say your prayers?’ said the new-comers to the two friends. ‘We have finished,’ said they. ‘Well,’ said the other, ‘if you cannot pray a second time with us, you had better move out of the way.’ Rather than join such turbulent zealots they retired. The reason of this unceremonious address was, that these loving disciples had a desire to pray all in a row with their master, which, it seems, is the custom. There is no public service in the mosque; every man here prays for himself.

Coming out of the mosque some servants of the prince, for their amusement, pushed a person against a poor man’s stall, on which were some things for sale, a few European and Indian articles, also some valuable Warsaw plates, which were thrown down and broken. The servants went off without making compensation. No kazi will hear a complaint against the prince’s servants.

Hajji Mahommed Hasan preaches every day during the Ramazan. He takes a verse from the Koran, or more frequently tells stories about the Imams. If the ritual of the Christian Churches, their good forms and everything they have, is a mere shadow without a Divine influence attend on them, what must all this Mahometan stuff be? and yet how impossible is it to convince the people of the world, whether Christian or Mahometan, that what they call religion is merely an invention of their own, having no connection with God and His kingdom! This subject has been much on my mind of late. How senseless the zeal of Churchmen against dissenters, and of dissenters against the Church! The kingdom of God is neither meat nor drink, nor anything perishable; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.

Mirza Ibrahim never goes to the mosque, but he is so much respected that nothing is said: they conclude that he is employed in devotion at home. Some of his disciples said to Seyd Ali, before him: ‘Now the Ramazan is come, you should read the Koran and leave the Gospel.’ ‘No,’ said his uncle, ‘he is employed in a good work: let him go on with it.’ The old man continues to inquire with interest about the Gospel, and is impatient for his nephew to explain the evidences of Christianity, which I have drawn up.

September 22. (Sunday.)—My friends returned from the mosque, full of indignation at what they had witnessed there. The former governor of Bushire complained to the vizier, in the mosque, that some of his servants had treated him brutally. The vizier, instead of attending to his complaint, ordered them to do their work a second time; which they did, kicking and beating him with their slippers, in the most ignominious way, before all the mosque. This unhappy people groan under the tyranny of their governors; yet nothing subdues or tames them. Happy Europe! how has God favoured the sons of Japheth, by causing them to embrace the Gospel. How dignified are all the nations of Europe compared with this nation! Yet the people are clever and intelligent, and more calculated to become great and powerful than any of the nations of the East, had they a good government and the Christian religion.

September 29.—The Soofi, son of the Moojtahid, with some others, came to see me. For fifteen years he was a devout Mahometan; visited the sacred places, and said many prayers. Finding no benefit from austerities he threw up Mahommedanism altogether, and attached himself to the Soofi master. I asked him what his object was, all that time? He said, he did not know, but he was unhappy. I began to explain to him the Gospel; but he cavilled at it as much as any bigoted Mahommedan could do, and would not hear of there being any distinction between Creator and creature. In the midst of our conversation, the sun went down, and the company vanished for the purpose of taking an immediate repast.

Mirza Seyd Ali seems sometimes coming round to Christianity against Soofi-ism. The Soofis believe in no prophet, and do not consider Moses to be equal to Mirza Abulkasim. ‘Could they be brought,’ Seyd Ali says, ‘to believe that there has been a prophet, they would embrace Christianity.’ And what would be gained by such converts? ‘Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power.’ It will be an afflicted and poor people that shall call upon the name of the Lord, and such the Soofis are not: professing themselves to be wise, they have become fools.

October 7.—I was surprised by a visit from the great Soofi doctor, who, while most of the people were asleep, came to me for some wine. I plied him with questions innumerable; but he returned nothing but incoherent answers, and sometimes no answer at all. Having laid aside his turban, he put on his night-cap, and soon fell asleep upon the carpet. Whilst he lay there his disciples came, but would not believe, when I told them who was there, till they came and saw the sage asleep. When he awoke, they came in, and seated themselves at the greatest possible distance, and were all as still as if in a church. The real state of this man seems to be despair, and it will be well if it do not end in madness. I preached to him the kingdom of God: mentioning particularly how I had found peace from the Son of God and the Spirit of God; through the first, forgiveness; through the second, sanctification. He said it was good, but said it with the same unconcern with which he admits all manner of things, however contradictory. Poor soul! he is sadly bewildered.

As a Persian scholar and controversialist Henry Martyn found a worthy successor in the German, and afterwards Church Missionary Society’s missionary, C.G. Pfander, D.D. When for some twelve years stationed at Shushy Fort, on the Russian border of Georgia, he frequently visited Baghdad and travelled through Persia by Ispahan and Teheran. In 1836 the intolerant Russian Government expelled all foreign missionaries from its territories, and Dr. Pfander joined the Church Mission at Agra. In 1835 he first published at Shushy, in Persian, his famous Mizan ul Haqq, or Balance of Truth. A Hindustani translation was lithographed at Mirzapore in 1843, and Mr. R.H. Weakley, missionary at Constantinople, made an English translation, which was published by the Church Missionary Society in 1867. This, as yet, greatest of works which state the general argument for Christianity and against Islam, was followed by the Miftah ul Asrar, in proof of the Divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, and by the Tarik ul Hyat, or the nature of sin and the way of salvation, of both of which Hindustani translations appeared. In his little English Remarks on the Nature of Muhammadanism,[64] as shown in the Traditions, Dr. Pfander quotes from Martyn’s Controversy. By these writings and the personal controversy in India, Dr. Pfander, following Henry Martyn, was the means of winning to Christ, in tolerant British India, many Mohammedan moulvies like him who is now the Rev. Imad-ud-din, D.D.[65]

Henry Martyn’s description of the Persian is no less applicable to the Indian Mohammedan, in the opinion of Sir William Muir; ‘he is a compound of ignorance and bigotry, and all access to the one is hedged up by the other.’ The Koran and the whole system of Islam are based on partial truths, plagiarised from Scripture to an extent sufficient to feed the pride of those who hold them. But beyond these corruptions of Judaism and Christianity, for which the dead Eastern Churches of Mohammed’s time and since are responsible, Persians, Turks, Arabs, Afghans, and Hindustan Muhammadans know nothing either of history or Christian Divinity. All controversy, from P.H. Xavier’s time to Martyn’s, Wilson’s, and Pfander’s, shows that the key of the position is not the doctrine of the Trinity, as the Shi’ah Moojtahids of Shiraz and Lucknow and the Soonnis everywhere make it, but the genuineness and integrity of the Scriptures, by which the truth of the whole Christian faith will follow, the Trinity included. The Bible, in Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic, with its self-evidencing power, is the weapon which Henry Martyn was busied in forging.

CHAPTER XI: IN PERSIA—TRANSLATING THE SCRIPTURES

Great as saint and notable as scholar, in the twelve years of his young life from Senior Wrangler to martyr at thirty-one years of age, the highest title of Henry Martyn to everlasting remembrance is that he gave the Persians in their own tongue the Testament of the one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and the Hebrew Psalms. By that work, the fruit of which every successive century will reveal till the consummation of the ages, he unconsciously wrote his name beside those of the greatest missionaries in the history of the Church of Christ, the sacred scholars who were the first to give the master races of Asia and Africa, of Europe and America, the Word of God in their vernaculars. Let us write the golden list, which for modern Africa and Oceania also we might inscribe in letters of silver,[66] were not most of the translators still living and perfecting their at first tentative efforts, which time must try:

A.D.

350

Ulfilas

Gothic (Teutonic)

368

Frumentius and Edesius (Brothers)

Ethiopic

385

Hieronymus (Jerome)

Latin

410

Mesrobes (Miesrob)

Armenian

861

C. Cyrillus and Methodius (Brothers)

Slavonic (Bulgarian)

1380

Wiclif (Bede in 735)

English

1516

Erasmus (new translation)

Latin

1534

Luther (translation from Latin of Erasmus)

German

1661

John Eliot (first Bible printed in America)

Moheecan

1777

Fabricius (Ziegenbalg & Schultze first 1714)

Tamul

1801

William Carey (O.T. in 1802-9)

Bengali, &c.

1815

Henry Martyn

Persian

1816

Henry Martyn (Sabat’s N.T. version)

Arabic

1822

Joshua Marshman (Morrison & Milne 1823)

Chinese

1832

Adoniram Judson (O.T. 1834)

Burmese

1865

Van Dyck

Arabic

It was David Brown who was wont to call the Bible ‘The Great Missionary which would speak in all tongues the wonderful works of God.’

From first to last and above all Henry Martyn was a philologist. His school and college honours sprang from the root of all linguistic studies, Greek and Latin, in which he was twice appointed public examiner in his college and the University of Cambridge. For the uncritical time in which he lived, and the generations which followed his to the present, he was an enthusiastic and accomplished Hebraist. No young scholar in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was so well equipped for translating the Bible by a knowledge of its two original languages. True, he was the Senior Wrangler of the year 1801, but to him the honour was a ‘shadow,’ because the mathematical sciences could do nothing for him as a translator and preacher of the words of righteousness, compared with the linguistic. Only once, when the rapture of his holy work had carried him away to the borderland of a dark metaphysical theology, did he record the passing regret that he had abandoned the rationalistic ground of mathematical certainty. His devotion to the study of the languages which interpret and apply to the races of India, Arabia, and Persia, the books of the Christian Revelation, was so absorbing as to shorten his career. Like Carey, he never knew an idle moment, even when on shipboard, and he jealously guarded his time from correspondence, other than that with Lydia Grenfell, Brown and Corrie, that he might live to finish the Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic New Testaments at least. The spiritual motive it was, the desire to win every man to Christ, that urged his unresting course, and in the sacred toil he had the reflex joy of being himself won nearer and nearer by the Spirit.

What do I not owe to the Lord for permitting me to take part in a translation of His Word? Never did I see such wonder, and wisdom, and love in that blessed book as since I have been obliged to study every expression. All day on the translation, employed a good while at night in considering a difficult passage, and being much enlightened respecting it, I went to bed full of astonishment at the wonders of God’s Word. Never before did I see anything of the beauty of the language and the importance of the thoughts as I do now. I felt happy that I should never be finally separated from the contemplation of them, or of the things concerning which they are written. Knowledge shall vanish away, but it shall be because perfection has come.

On the other hand, he was ever on the watch against the deadening influence of routine or one-sided study. ‘So constantly engaged with outward works of translation of languages that I fear my inward man has declined in spirituality.’

Canon Edmonds expresses the experience of the present writer in the remark,[67] that to read Martyn’s Journal with the single object of noticing this point is to discover another Martyn, not a saint only, but a grammarian. ‘He read grammars as other men read novels, and to him they were more entertaining than novels.’ So early as September 28, 1804, in Cambridge we find him at prayer after dinner, before visiting Wall’s Lane, and then on his return finishing the Bengali Grammar which he had begun the day before. ‘I am anxious to get Carey’s Bengali New Testament,’ which could not long have reached London. Five days after, Thomas à Kempis, followed by hymns and the writing of a sermon, seemed but the preliminary to his Hindustani as well as Bengali studies. ‘Engaged all the rest of the morning by Gilchrist’s Hindustani Dictionary. After dinner began Halhed’s Bengali Grammar, for I found that the other grammar I had been reading was only for the corrupted Hindustani.’ The first traces of his Persian and Arabic studies have an interest all their own:

1804, June 27.—A funeral and calls of friends took up my time till eleven; afterwards read Persian, and made some calculations in trigonometry, in order to be familiar with the use of logarithms.

November 23.—Through shortness of time I was about to omit my morning portion of Scripture, yet after some deliberation conscience prevailed, and I enjoyed a solemn seriousness in learning ‘mem’ in the 119th Psalm. Wasted much time afterwards in looking over an Arabic grammar.

When fairly at work in Dinapore he wrote almost daily such passages in his Journal as these:

1807, August 25.—Translating the Epistles; reading Arabic grammar and Persian. 27 to 29.—Studies in Persian and Arabic the same. Delight in them, particularly the latter, so great, that I have been obliged to pray continually that they may not be a snare to me.... 31st.—Resumed the Arabic with an eagerness which I found it necessary to check. Began some extracts from Cashefi which Mr. Gladwin sent me, and thus the day passed rapidly away. Alas! how much more readily does the understanding do its work than the heart.

On reaching Calcutta in 1806 Martyn found this to be the position of the Bible translation work. Carey’s early labours had led to the formation of the other English and Scottish Missionary Societies at the close of the last century. By 1803 his experience and that of his colleagues had enabled them, with the encouragement of Brown and Buchanan, to formulate a magnificent plan for translating the Bible into all the languages of the far East. The Marquis Wellesley, though Governor-General, approved, and his College at Fort William, with its staff of learned men, including Carey himself and many Asiatics, had become a school of interpreters. In 1804, after all this, the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded, under the ex-Governor-General, Lord Teignmouth, as its first president. That Society, leaving India to the Serampore Brotherhood, at once directed its attention to the three hundred millions of Chinese, who also could be reached only through the East India Company. But, until six years after, when Dr. Marshman made the first reliable translation of the Bible into the language, in its Mandarin dialect, there was no Chinese translation save an anonymous MS. of a large portion of the New Testament in the British Museum, probably of Roman Catholic origin. At that time the infant Society did not see its way to spend two thousand guineas in producing an edition of a thousand copies of a work about which the few experts differed. So, while giving grants to the Serampore translators, it invited the opinions, as to the formation of a corresponding committee in Calcutta, of George Udny, who had by that time become Member of Council, and the Rev. Messrs. Brown, Buchanan, Carey, Ward, and Marshman. The Serampore plan and its rapid execution had been communicated to all the principal civil and military officials, who, after Lord Wellesley’s tolerant and reverent action, subscribed liberally to carry it out, and the Society continued its grants. But when in 1807, under Lord Minto, the anti-Christian reaction set in, caused by a groundless panic as to the Vellore Mutiny, and the Fort William College was reduced, Dr. Buchanan proposed to found ‘The Christian Institution,’ the Society preferred its original plan of a corresponding committee, which was formed in August 1809.

Martyn had not waited one hour for this. Almost from the day of landing at the capital he was engaged in Hindustani translation, and in studious preparation for his projected Persian and Arabic Bibles. In the brotherly intercourse at Aldeen with the Serampore missionaries it was arranged to leave these three languages entirely to him, under the direction of Mr. Brown. Part of the Society’s annual grant to India and Ceylon of a thousand pounds a year was assigned to pay his assistants, Mirza Fitrut, the Persian, and Nathanael Sabat, the Arabian, and to print the results. The Corresponding Committee caused an annual sermon to be preached in Calcutta, to rouse public intelligence and help. On the first day of 1810 Mr. Brown preached it in the old church, in the interest chiefly of the thousands of native Christians who had been baptized in Tanjor and Tinnevelli, both Reformed and Romanist, and needed copies of the Tamul Bible. Such was the result of this appeal, headed by the Commander-in-chief, General Hewett, with the sum of 2,000 Sicca-rupees (250l.), that the committee resolved on establishing a ‘Bibliotheca Biblica,’ combining a Bible Repository and a Translation Library. The Scottish poet and friend of Sir Walter Scott, Dr. Leyden, was foremost in the enterprise, and took charge of work in the languages of Siam and the Spice Islands, as well as in the Pushtu of Afghanistan.

On the first day of 1811 it fell to the Rev. Henry Martyn to preach the second annual sermon.[68] His appeal was for not only the growing native Church of India, but more particularly for the whole number of nominal Christians, of all sects, in India and Ceylon, whom he estimated at 900,000.[69] In 1881 the Government census returned these, in the Greater India of our day but without Ceylon, as upwards of 2,000,000, and in 1891 as 2,280,549. Martyn’s figures included 342,000 of the Singhalese, whom the Dutch had compelled by secular considerations outwardly to conform. The sermon, on Galatians vi. 10, was published at the time, and it appears as the last in the volume of Twenty Sermons by the late Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D.,[70] first printed at Calcutta with this passage in the preface: ‘The desire to know how such a man preached is natural and unavoidable.... His manner in the pulpit was distinguished by a holy solemnity, always suited to the high message which he was delivering, and accompanied by an unction which made its way to the hearts of his audience. With this was combined a fidelity at once forcible by its justice and intrepidity, and penetrating by its affection. There was, in short, a power of holy love and disinterested earnestness in his addresses which commended itself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.’

Addressing the well-paid servants of the East India Company in Calcutta, and its prosperous merchants and shopkeepers, the preacher said: ‘Do we not blush at the offers of assistance from home ... where all that is raised may be employed with such effect in benefiting the other three quarters of the globe? Asia must be our care; or, if not Asia, India at least must look to none but us. Honour calls as well as duty.’ He then continued:

Prove to our friends and the world that the Mother Country need never be ashamed of her sons in India. What a splendid spectacle does she present! Standing firm amidst the overthrow of the nations, and spreading wide the shadow of her wings for the protection of all, she finds herself at leisure, amidst the tumult of war, to form benevolent projects for the best interests of mankind. Her generals and admirals have caused the thunder of her power to be heard throughout the south; now her ministers of religion perform their part, and endeavour to fulfil the high destinies of Heaven in favour of their country. They called on their fellow-citizens to cheer the desponding nations with the Book of the promises of Eternal Life, and thus afford them that consolation from the prospect of a happier world, which they have little expectation of finding amidst the disasters and calamities of this. The summons was obeyed. As fast as the nature of the undertaking became understood, and was perceived to be clearly distinct from all party business and visionary project, great numbers of all ranks in society, and of all persuasions in religion, joined with one heart and one soul, and began to impart freely to all men that which, next to the Saviour, is God’s best gift to man....

Shall every town and hamlet in England engage in the glorious cause, and the mighty Empire of India do nothing? Will not our wealth and dignity be our disgrace if we do not employ it for God and our fellow-creatures? What plan could be proposed, so little open to objections, and so becoming our national character and religion, so simple and practicable, yet so extensively beneficial, as that of giving the Word of God to the Christian part of our native subjects?... Despise not their inferiority, nor reproach them for their errors; they cannot get a Bible to read; had they been blessed with your advantages, they would have been perhaps more worthy of your respect.

The brief decade of Henry Martyn’s working life fell at a time when the science of Comparative Philology was as yet unborn, but the materials were almost ready for generalisation. Sir William Jones, and still more his successor as a scholar—Henry Thomas Colebrooke—had used their opportunities in India well. The Bengal Asiatic Society, in its Asiatic Researches, was laboriously piling up facts and speculations. These awaited only the flash of hardworking genius to evolve the order and the laws which have made Comparative Grammar the most fruitful of the historical and psychological sciences. It might have been Martyn’s, had he lived to reach England, to manifest that genius. His Asiatic career was contemporary with the most fruitful part of Colebrooke’s. He toiled and he speculated, as he mastered the grammar and much of the vocabulary of the great classical and vernacular languages which made him a seven-tongued man. But his divine motive led him to grope for the philological solvent through the imperfect Semitic. The Germans, Schlegel and Bopp, found it rather, and later, in the richer Aryan or Indo-European family, in Sanskrit and old Persian.

His longing to give the Arabs the Scriptures in their purity intensified his devotion to the study of Hebrew; had he lived to give himself to the Persian, he might have anticipated the German critics who used, at second-hand, the materials that he and Colebrooke, and other servants of the East India Company, were annually accumulating. Nor did his Hebraism lead him, at the beginning of the century, to that fertile criticism of the text and the literary origin of the books of the Old Testament which, at the end of the century, is beginning to make the inspired historians and the prophets, the psalmists and the moralists of the old Jews live anew for the modern Church. But how true has proved his prediction to Corrie in the year 1809:

I think that when the construction of Hebrew is fully understood, all the scholars in the world will turn to it with avidity, in order to understand other languages, and then the Word of God will be studied universally.

Again in 1810:

I sit for hours alone contemplating this mysterious language. If light does not break upon me at last it will be a great loss of time, as I never read Arabic or Persian. I have no heart to do it; I cannot condescend any longer to tread in the paths of ignorant and lying grammarians. I sometimes say in my vain heart I will make a deep cut in the mine of philology, or I will do nothing; but you shall hear no more of Scriptural philology till I make some notable discoveries.

Again in 1811, when at Bombay:

Chiefly employed on the Arabic tract, writing letters to Europe, and my Hebrew speculations. The last encroached so much on my time and thoughts that I lost two nights’ sleep, and consequently the most of two days, without learning more than I did the first hour.

Happening to think this evening on the nature of language more curiously and deeply than I have yet done, I got bewildered, and fancied I saw some grounds for the opinions of those who deny the existence of matter.... Oh, what folly to be wise where ignorance is bliss!... The further I push my inquiries the more I am distressed. It must be now my prayer, not ‘Lord, let me obtain the knowledge which I think would be so useful,’ but ‘Oh, teach me just as much as Thou seest good for me.’ Compared with metaphysics, physics and mathematics appear with a kind and friendly aspect, because they seem to be within the limits in which man can move without danger, but on the other I find myself adrift. Synthesis is the work of God alone.

Henry Martyn’s first practical work was in Hindustani. His position in Dinapore and Patna, the capital of Bihar with its Hindi dialects, his duties to the native wives and families of the soldiers whom he taught and exhorted, his preaching to the Hindus and discussions with the Mohammedans, all led him to prepare three works—(1) portions of the Book of Common Prayer, which Corrie finished and published seventeen years after his death; (2) a Commentary on the Parables, in 1807; (3) the Four Gospels in 1809, and in 1810 the whole New Testament. Let us look at him in his spiritual and scholarly workshop.

1807, January 18. (Sunday.)—Preached on Numbers xxiii. 19: a serious attention from all. Most of the European tradesmen were present with their families; my soul enjoyed sweet peace and heavenly-mindedness for some time afterwards. The thought suddenly struck me to-day, how easy it would be to translate the chief part of the Church Service for the use of the soldiers’ wives, and women and children, and so have the service in Hindustani, by which a door would be opened to the heathen. This thought took such hold of me, that after in vain endeavouring to fix my thoughts on anything else, I sat down in the evening, and translated to the end of the Te Deum. But my conscience was not satisfied that this was a Sabbath employment, and I lost the sensible sweetness of the Divine presence. However, by leaving it off, and passing the rest of the evening in reading and singing hymns, I found comfort and joy. Oh, how shall I praise my Lord, that here in this solitude, with people enough indeed, but without any like-minded, I yet enjoy fellowship with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I see myself travelling on with them, and I hope I shall worship with them in His courts above.

January 19.—Passed the morning with the moonshi and pundit, dictating to the former a few ideas for the explanation of the Parable of the Rich Fool. When I came to say that there was no eating and drinking, etc., in heaven, but only the pleasures of God’s presence and holiness; and that, therefore, we must acquire a taste for such pleasures, the Mussulman was unwilling to write, but the Brahman was pleased, and said that all this was in the Puranas. Afterwards went on with the translation of the Liturgy.

March 23. (To Brown.)—It is with no small delight that I find the day arrived for my writing to my very dear brother. Many thanks for your two letters, and for all the consolation contained in them, and many thanks to our Lord and Saviour, who has given me such a help where I once expected to struggle on alone all my days. Concerning the character in the Nagri papers you have sent me I have to say, it is perfectly the same as the one used here, and I can read it easily; and the difference in both the dialects from the one here is so trifling, that I have not the smallest doubt of the Parables being understood at Benares and Bettia (a Roman Catholic village), and consequently through a vast tract of country. A more important inference is, that in whatever dialect of the Hindustani the translation of the Scriptures shall be made, it will be generally understood. The little book of Parables is at last finished, through the blessing of God. I cannot say I am very well pleased with it on the reperusal; but yet containing, as it does, such large portions of the Word of God, I ought not to doubt of its accomplishing that which He pleaseth.

July 13.—Mr. Ward has also sent me a long and learned letter. He is going to print the Parables without delay for me, and the modern Hindustani version of them for themselves. He says, ‘The enmity of the natives to the Gospel is indeed very great, but on this point the lower orders are angels compared with the moonshis and pundits. I believe the man you took from Serampore has his heart as full of this poison as most. The fear of loss of caste among the poor is a greater obstacle than their enmity. Our strait waistcoat makes our arms ache.’

December 29.—Translating from Hebrew into Hindustani in the morning. Wrote to Mr. Udny. Read Arabic and Persian as usual with Sabat. We had some conversation on this subject, whether we might not expect the Holy Spirit would endue us with extraordinary powers in the acquisition of languages, if we could pray for it only with a desire to be useful to the Church of God, and not with a wish for our own glory. There seemed to be no reason against such an expectation. I sometimes pray for the gifts of the spirit, but infinitely greater is the necessity to pray for grace, as I know by the sorrowful experience of my deceitfully corrupt heart.

1808, January 7.—As much of my time as was not employed for the Europeans has been devoted chiefly to translating the Epistles into Hindustani. This work is finished after a certain manner. But Sabat does not allow me to form a very high idea of the style in which it is executed. But if the work should fail—which, however, I am far from expecting—my labour will have been richly repaid by the profit and pleasure derived from considering the Word of God in the original with more attention than I had ever done.

March 31.—I am at present employed in the toilsome work of going through the Syriac Gospels, and writing out the names, in order to ascertain their orthography if possible, and correcting with Mirza the Epistles. This last work is incredibly difficult in Hindustani, and will be nearly as much so in Persian, but very easy and elegant in Arabic.

June 1 to 4.—Employed incessantly in reading the Persian of St. Matthew to Sabat. Met with the Italian padre, Julius, with whom I conversed in French.

June 6.—Going on with the Persian Gospel, visiting the hospital, and with the men at night. My spirit refreshed and revived by every night’s ministration to them. Sent the Persian of Matthew to Mr. Brown for the press, and went on with the remainder of the Hindustani of St. Matthew. I have not felt such trials of my temper for many months as to-day. The General declared he was an enemy to my design in translating the Scriptures. My poor harassed soul looked at last to God, and cast its burden of sin at the foot of the cross. Towards evening I found rest and peace. A son-in-law of the Qasi ool Qoorrat, of Patna, a very learned man, called on me. I put to him several questions about Mohammedanism, which confused him; and as he seemed a grave, honest man, they may produce lasting doubts.

1809, September 24.—Began with Mirza Fitrut the correction of the Hindustani Gospels: Quod felix faustumque sit. Began with my men a course of lectures from the beginning of the Bible.

September 25 to 28.—Revising Arabic version of Romans; going on in correction of Hindustani; preparing report of progress in translating for Bible Society. Reading occasionally Menishi’s Turkish Grammar.

Completed in 1810, Martyn’s Hindustani New Testament for Mohammedans was passing through the Serampore press when the great fire of March 11, 1812, destroyed all the sheets save the first thirteen chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, and melted the fount of Persian type. The Corresponding Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society, for which it had been prepared, put it to press the second time at Serampore, from finer type, and it appeared in 1814 in an edition of 2,000 copies, on English paper. The demand for portions for immediate use was such that 3,000 copies of the Gospels and Acts, on Patna paper, had been previously struck off. The longing translator—who had once written, ‘Oh, may I have the bliss of soon seeing the New Testament in Hindustani and Persian!’—had then been two years dead, but verily his works followed him. Such was the reputation of the version that it was read in the native schools at Agra and elsewhere; while an edition of 2,000 copies in the Deva-Nagri character, for Hindus, appeared in 1817, and was used up till a Hindi version was prepared from it by Mr. Bowley, the zealous agent of the Church Missionary Society at Chunar, by divesting it of the Persian and Arabic terms. Bishop Corrie’s revision of this work and portions of the Old Testament were circulated in many editions and extending numbers, in the Kaithi character also, among the millions of Hindus who speak the most widespread of Indian languages with many dialects. The Bible Society in London welcomed Martyn’s work, of which Professor Lee prepared a large edition. Learning that the lamented scholar had done some work on the Old Testament in Hindustani, and had taught Mirza Fitrut Hebrew, to enable that able moonshi to carry on the translation from the original, the Society first published Genesis in Hindustani, under Professor Lee’s care, in 1817, and then issued a revision of the rough draft of the entire version of the Old Testament, by Bishop Corrie and Mr. Thomason. In 1843 Mr. Schürmann, of the London Missionary Society, and Mr. Justice Hawkins, an elder of the Free Church of Scotland and an accomplished Bengal civilian, issued a uniform revision of the Old and New Testaments in the Arabic and Roman characters, in the course of which Mr. Schürmann ‘saw reason to revert in a great measure to the translation of Henry Martyn, especially in the latter half of the version.’[71] Of the different translations of the Bible into Hindustani, the Oordoo or ‘camp’ language understood by the sixty millions of Mussulmans in India, this criticism is just: ‘the idiomatic and faithful version of Henry Martyn still maintains its ground, although, from the lofty elegance of its style, it is better understood by educated than by illiterate Mohammedans.’[72]

In the first generation, from 1814 to 1847, after the appearance of Henry Martyn’s work, sixteen editions[73] of the Hindustani New Testament were published and sent into circulation among the then fifty millions of Mussulmans in India. Before Martyn’s work was printed, he and Corrie used to dictate to inquirers translations of Bible passages suited to their needs. When Corrie was at Chunar, he tells us, because ‘there was not at that time any translation of the Scriptures to put into his hands, a native Roman Catholic took down the translated texts on loose pieces of paper.’ Years after, Mr. Wilkinson, of Gorakpore, was called to visit the man on his death-bed, and found him so well acquainted with Scripture that he asked an explanation. ‘The poor man produced the loose slips of paper on which he had written my translations,’ says Corrie. ‘On these, it appeared, his soul had fed through life, and through them he died such a death that Mr. Wilkinson entertained no doubt of his having passed into glory.’ In the forty years since the sixteen editions made the Word of God known to thousands of India Mussulmans, the Oordoo Bible has caused the Word to grow mightily, and in many cases to prevail.

The entire Bible in Hindustani was again revised, by Dr. R.C. Mather, after many years’ experience in Benares and Mirzapore, and was published, in both the Arabic and Roman characters, in 1869, after continuous labour for more than six years. He stumbled, in the library of the British and Foreign Bible Society, on sixteen manuscript volumes of a Hindustani translation of nearly the whole Old Testament, beginning with Martyn’s Genesis. The folios were interleaved, and on the blank pages were thousands of notes in English. At the end of the Pentateuch the copyist records that ‘the above has been completed, by order of Paymaster Sherwood, for the Rev. Daniel Corrie, by me, Mákhdum Buksh.’ The copy seems to have been the accomplished Thomason’s, and to have been deposited in the library by his widow after his death at Port Louis, Mauritius. This practically complete translation of the Old Testament had been lost for forty years. The eulogy passed by Thomason on Martyn’s Hindustani New Testament, that it ‘will last as a model of elegant writing as well as of faithful translation,’ is pronounced by Dr. Mather,[74] after all that time, as, ‘in the main, just; the work has lasted and continued to be acceptable, and will perhaps always continue to be useful. All subsequent translators have, as a matter of course, proceeded upon it as a work of excellent skill and learning, and rigid fidelity.’

The modern Arabic translation of the New Testament, by Martyn and Sabat, was not printed (in Calcutta) till 1816, and the translation of the Old Testament was continued under the supervision of Mr. Thomason, who became virtually Martyn’s literary executor, and whose labours as Oriental translator and editor hurried him, like his friend, to a premature death. Both had the same biographer—the good Sargent, Rector of Lavington. As Thomason toiled at the Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani editions, he wrote: ‘I am filled with astonishment at the opening scenes of usefulness. Send us labourers—send us faithful laborious labourers!’[75] Martyn’s Arabic New Testament, produced with the assistance of an undoubtedly learned Arab, as conceited and of temper as intolerable as Sabat, did its work among the ‘learned and fastidious’ Mohammedans for whom chiefly it was prepared. Professor Lee issued a second edition in London, and Mr. Thomason a third in Calcutta. In common with the old translations, made for the land in which St. Paul began the first missionary work, and reproduced in various Polyglot Bibles, it has been superseded by the wonderfully perfect and altogether beautiful Arabic Bible (Beirut) of Dr. Eli Smith and Dr. Van Dyck, on which these American scholars, assisted by learned natives of Syria and Cairo, were occupied for nearly thirty years. In the Beirut Arabic Scriptures, Henry Martyn’s troubled life with Sabat found early and luxuriant fruit. How wisely and humbly the missionary chaplain of the East India Company estimated his own, and especially his Arabic, translations, and how at the same time he longed to live that he might do in 1812-20 what Eli Smith and Van Dyck did in 1837-65, may be seen from these early letters and journals:

To the Rev. David Brown, Calcutta

Cawnpore: June 11, 1810.

Dearest Sir,—The excessive heat, by depriving me of my rest at night, keeps me between sleeping and waking all day. This is one reason why I have been remiss in answering your letters. It must not, however, be concealed that the man Daniel Corrie has kept me so long talking that I have had no time for writing since his arrival.

Your idea about presenting splendid copies of the Scriptures to native great men has often struck me, but my counsel is, not to do it with the first edition. I have too little faith in the instruments to believe that the first editions will be excellent; and if they should be found defective, we cannot after once presenting the great men with one book, repeat the thing.

Before the second edition of the Arabic, what say you to my carrying the first with me to Arabia, having under the other arm the Persian, to be examined at Shiraz or Teheran? By the time they are both ready I shall have nearly finished my seven years, and may go on furlough.

I am glad to find you promising to give yourself wholly to your plans. I always tremble lest Mrs. Brown should order you home; but I must not suspect her, she has the soul of a missionary. If you go soon we shall all droop and die. Your Polyglot speculations are fine, but Polyglots are Biblical luxuries, intended for the gratification of men of two tongues or more. We must first feed those that have but one, especially as single tongues are growing upon us so fast.

June 12.—To-day I have requested the Commander of the forces to detain D. Corrie here to assist me; he said he did not like to make innovations, but would keep him here for two or three months. This will be a great relief to my labouring chest, for I am still far from being out of the fear of consumption. Tell me that you have prayed for me.

Yours, etc.

H.M.

August 22.—I want silence and diversion, a little dog to play with; or what would be best of all, a dear little child, such as Fanny was when I left her. Perhaps you could learn when the ships usually sail for Mocha. I have set my heart upon going there; I could be there and back in six months.

September 8.—Your tide rolls on with terrifying rapidity, at least I tremble while committing myself to it. You look to me, and I to Sabat; and Sabat I look upon as the staff of Egypt. May I prove mistaken! All, however, does not depend upon him. If my life is spared, there is no reason why the Arabic should not be done in Arabia, and the Persian in Persia, as well as the Indian in India. I hope your Shalome has not left you. I promise myself great advantage in reading Hebrew and Syriac with him.

September 9.—Yours of the 27th ult. is a heart-breaking business. Though I share so deeply in Sabat’s disgrace, I feel more for you than myself, but I can give you no comfort except by saying, ‘It is well that it was in thine heart.’ Your letter will give a new turn to my life. Henceforward I have done with India. Arabia shall hide me till I come forth with an approved New Testament in Arabic. I do not ask your advice, because I have made up my mind, but shall just wait your answer to this, and come down to you instantly. I have been calculating upon the means of support, and find that I shall have wherewithal to live. Besides, the Lord will provide. Before Him I have spread this affair, and do not feel that I shall be acting contrary to His will.... Will Government let me go away for three years before the time of my furlough arrives? If not, I must quit the service, and I cannot devote my life to a more important work than that of preparing the Arabic Bible.

Herewith you will receive the first seven chapters in Persian and Hindustani, though I suppose you have ceased to wish for them. The Persian will only prove that Sabat is not the man for it. I have protested against many things in it, but instead of sending you my objections I inclose a critique by Mirza, who must remain unknown. I am somewhat inclined to think the Arabic not quite so hopeless. Sabat is confident, and eager to meet his opponents. His version of the Romans was certainly not from the old one, because he translated it all before my face from the English; but then, as I hinted long ago, he is inaccurate and not to be depended upon. He entirely approves of my going to Busrah with his translations, and the old one, confident that the decision there will be in his favour. Dear Sir, take measures for transmitting me with the least possible delay; detain me not, for the King’s business requires haste.

The King sent His eager servant to Persia, and did not give him the desire of his heart to enter Arabia. Truly he hastened so unrestingly that the Spirit of God led him to complete the Persian New Testament, and then carried him away from the many tongues of mortal men, which as they sprang from disunion, so they are to ‘cease’ in the one speech of the multitudes of every nation and kindred and tribe and tongue who sing the new song.

The following letter to Charles Simeon, the original of which was presented by his biographer, Canon Carus, to Canon Moor, who permits it to be published here for the first time, fitly introduces Henry Martyn’s translation used in Persia. Simeon received it on January 21, 1812, and thus wrote of it to Thomason:

From whom, think you, did I receive a letter yesterday? From our beloved Martyn in Persia. He begins to find his strength improve, and he is ‘disputing daily’ with the learned, who, he says, are extremely subtile. They are not a little afraid of him, and are going to write a book on the evidences of their religion. The evidences of Mohammedanism! A fine comparison they will make with those of Christianity. Oh, that God may endue our brother with wisdom and strength to execute all that is in his heart. He is desirous of spending two years in Persia, and is willing to sacrifice his salary if the East India Company will not give him leave. I am going in an hour to Mr. Grant to consult him, and shall call on Mr. Astell if Mr. Grant thinks it expedient.

To Rev. C. Simeon

Shiraz: July 8, 1811.

My dearest Friend and Brother,—My last letter to you was from Bombay. I sailed thence on March 25, in the Company’s corvette, the Benares. As the ship was manned principally by Europeans, I had a good deal to do during the voyage, but through the mercy of our Heavenly Father I was so far from suffering that I rather gained strength, and am now apparently as well as ever I was. On Easter day we made the coast of Mekran, in Persia, and on the Sunday following landed at Muscat, in Arabia. Here I met with an African slave, who tried hard to persuade me that I was in the wrong and he in the right. The dispute ended in his asking for an Arabic Testament, which I gave him. We were about a month in the Persian Gulf, generally in sight of land. At last, on May 22, I was set down at Bushire, in Persia, and was kindly received by the English Resident. One day I went to the Armenian church, at the request of the priest, not expecting to see anything like Christian worship, and accordingly I did not. The Word of God was read, indeed, but in such a way that no man could have understood it. After church he desired me to notice that he had censed me four times because I was a priest. This will give you an idea of their excessive childishness. I took occasion from his remark to speak about the priest’s office, and the awful importance of it. Nothing can be conceived more vapid and inane than his observations.

As soon as my Persian dress was ready, I set off for the interior in a kafila, or small caravan, consisting chiefly of mules, and after a very fatiguing journey of ten days over the mountains, during which time the difference in the thermometer by day and night was often sixty degrees, I arrived at this place about a month ago.

I had no intention of making any stay here, but I found, on my producing Sabat’s Persian translation, that I must sit down with native Persians to begin the work once more. The fault found with Sabat’s work is that he uses words not only so difficult as to be unintelligible to the generality, but such as never were in use in the Persian.

When it is considered that the issue of all disputes with the Mohammedans is a reference to the Scriptures, and that the Persian and Arabic are known all over the Mohammedan world, it will be evident that we ought to spare no pains in obtaining good versions in these languages. Hence I look upon my staying here for a time as a duty paramount to every other, and I trust that the Government in India will look upon it in the same light. If they should stop my pay, it would not alter my purpose in the least, but it would be an inconvenience. I should be happy, therefore, if the Court of Directors would sanction my residence in these parts for a year or two. No one who has been in Persia will imagine that I am here for my own pleasure. India is a paradise to it. All is poverty and desolation without, and within I have no comfort but in my God. I am in the midst of enemies, who argue against the truth, sometimes with uncommon subtlety. But I pray for the fulfilment of the Lord’s promise, and I am assured that He will be with me and give me a mouth and a wisdom, which all my adversaries shall not be able to gainsay or resist. I am sometimes asked whether I am not afraid to speak so boldly against the Mohammedan religion. I tell them if I say or do anything against the laws I am not unwilling to suffer, but if I say nothing but what naturally comes in the course of argument—it is an argument too which you yourselves began—why should I fear? You know the power of the English too well to suppose that they would let any violence be offered to me with impunity.

The English ambassador, Sir Gore Ouseley, whom I met here on his way to Tabreez, carried me with him to the court of the prince, who, though tributary to his father, is a sovereign prince in Elam, as the S. Scriptures call the province of Fars. He has also recommended me to the prince’s favourite minister, so that I am in no danger. But there is certainly a great stir among the learned, and every effort is made to support their cause. They have now persuaded the father of all the moollas to write a book in Arabic on the evidences of the Mohammedan religion, a book which is to silence me for ever. I rather suppose that the more their cause is examined the worse it will appear.

I have had no news from India these four months, so I can say nothing of our friends there. Let your next letters be sent not to India, but direct to Persia, in this way: Rev. H.M., care of Sir Gore Ouseley, Bart., Ambassador Extraordinary, etc., Teheran; care of S. Morier, Esq., Constantinople; care of George Moore, Esq., Malta. My kindest love to all your dear people, Messrs. Bowman and Goodall, Farish, Port, Phillips, etc. I hope they continue to remember me once a week in their prayers; to the four godly professors;[76] to your young men though to me unknown, and especially to your brother. Believe me to be yours ever most affectionately,

H. Martyn.

1812, January 1 to 8.—Spared by mercy to see the beginning of another year. The last has been in some respects a memorable year; transported in safety to Shiraz, I have been led, by the particular providence of God, to undertake a work the idea of which never entered my mind till my arrival here, but which has gone on without material interruption and is now nearly finished. To all appearance the present year will be more perilous than any I have seen, but if I live to complete the Persian New Testament, my life after that will be of less importance. But whether life or death be mine, may Christ be magnified in me. If He has work for me to do, I cannot die.

He had just before written this pathetic letter, of exquisite friendliness:

To the Rev. D. Corrie

Shiraz: December 12, 1811.

Dearest Brother,—Your letters of January 28 and April 22 have just reached me. After being a whole year without any tidings of you, you may conceive how much they have tended to revive my spirits. Indeed, I know not how to be sufficiently thankful to our God and Father for giving me a brother who is indeed a brother to my soul, and thus follows me with affectionate prayers wherever I go, and more than supplies my place to the precious flock over whom the Holy Ghost hath made us overseers. There is only one thing in your letters that makes me uneasy, and that is, the oppression you complain of in the hot weather. As you will have to pass another hot season at Cawnpore, and I do not know how many more, I must again urge you to spare yourself. I am endeavouring to learn the true use of time in a new way, by placing myself in idea twenty or thirty years in advance, and then considering how I ought to have managed twenty or thirty years ago. In racing violently for a year or two, and then breaking down? In this way I have reasoned myself into contentment about staying so long at Shiraz. I thought at first, what will the Government in India think of my being away so long, or what will my friends think? Shall I not appear to all a wandering shepherd, leaving the flock and running about for my own pleasure! But placing myself twenty years on in time, I say, Why could not I stay at Shiraz long enough to get a New Testament done there, even if I had been detained there on that account three or six years? What work of equal importance can ever come from me? So that now I am resolved to wait here till the New Testament is finished, though I incur the displeasure of Government, or even be dismissed the service. I have been many times on the eve of my departure, as my translator promised to accompany me to Baghdad, but that city being in great confusion he is afraid to trust himself there; so I resolved to go westward through the north of Persia, but found it impossible, on account of the snow which blocks up the roads in winter, to proceed till spring. Here I am therefore, for three months more; our Testament will be finished, please God, in six weeks. I go on as usual, riding round the walls in the morning, and singing hymns at night over my milk and water, for tea I have none, though I much want it. I am with you in spirit almost every evening, and feel a bliss I cannot describe in being one with the dear saints of God all over the earth, through one Lord and one Spirit.

They continued throwing stones at me every day, till happening one day to tell Jaffir Ali Khan, my host, how one as big as my fist had hit me in the back, he wrote to the Governor, who sent an order to all the gates, that if any one insulted me he should be bastinadoed, and the next day came himself in state to pay me a visit. These measures have had the desired effect; they now call me the Feringhi Nabob, and very civilly offer me the kalean; but indeed the Persian commonalty are very brutes; the Soofis declare themselves unable to account for the fierceness of their countrymen, except it be from the influence of Islam. After speaking in my praise one of them added ‘and there are the Hindus too (who have brought the guns), when I saw their gentleness I was quite charmed with them; but as for our Iranees, they delight in nothing but tormenting their fellow creatures.’ These Soofis are quite the Methodists of the East. They delight in everything Christian, except in being exclusive. They consider that all will finally return to God, from whom they emanated, or rather of whom they are only different forms. The doctrine of the Trinity they admired, but not the atonement, because the Mohammedans, they say, consider Imam Husain as also crucified for the sins of men; and to everything Mohammedan they have a particular aversion. Yet withal they conform externally. From these, however, you will perceive the first Persian Church will be formed, judging after the manner of men. The employment of my leisure hours is translating the Psalms into Persian. What will poor Fitrut do when he gets to the poetical books? Job, I hope, you have let him pass over. The Books of Solomon are also in a very sorry condition in the English. The Prophets are all much easier, and consequently better done. I hear there is a man at Yezd that has fallen into the same way of thinking as myself about the letters, and professes to have found out all the arts and sciences from them. I should be glad to compare notes with him. It is now time for me to bid you good night. We have had ice on the pools some time, but no snow yet. They build their houses without chimneys, so if we want a fire we must take the smoke along with it. I prefer wrapping myself in my sheepskin.

Your accounts of the progress of the kingdom of God among you are truly refreshing. Tell dear H. and the men of both regiments that I salute them much in the Lord, and make mention of them in my prayers. May I continue to hear thus of their state, and if I am spared to see them again, may we make it evident that we have grown in grace. Affectionate remembrances to your sister and Sherwoods; I hope they continue to prosecute their labours of love. Remember me to the people of Cawnpore who inquire, etc. Why have not I mentioned Col. P.? It is not because he is not in my heart, for there is hardly a man in the world whom I love and honour more. My most Christian salutations to him.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, dearest brother. Yours affectionately,

H. Martyn.

Martyn’s Cambridge Persian studies were continued for practical Hindustani purposes at Dinapore, in 1809, and the following incident unconsciously lights up his Persian scholarship at that date. Writing to the impatient David Brown at Aldeen, from Patna, on March 28, he says:

You chide me for not trusting my Hindustani to the press. Last week we began the correction of it; present, a Sayyid of Delhi, a poet of Lucknow, three or four literates of Patna, and Baba Ali in the chair; Sabat and myself assessors.

I was amazed and mortified at observing that reference was had to the Persian for every verse, in order to understand the Hindustani. It was, however, a consolation to find that from the Persian they caught the meaning of it instantly, always expressing their admiration of the plainness of their translation.

But when the Persian translation of the four Gospels was printed at Serampore, nearly two years after, Martyn himself was dissatisfied with it. His Cawnpore and especially Lucknow experience had developed him in Persian style, and led him to see that in Persia itself only could the great work be done of translating the Word of God into a language spoken and read from Calcutta and Patna to Damascus and Tabreez.

When Henry Martyn did the noblest achievement of his life, the production of the Persian New Testament, he unknowingly linked himself with the greatest of the Greek Fathers, near whose dust his own was about to be laid. Until the Eastern Church ceased to be aggressive—that is, missionary—Persia, like Central Asia up to China itself, promised to be all Christian. Islam, a corrupted mixture of Judaism and Christianity, took its place. Persia sent a bishop to the Council of Nicæa in 325, and the great Constantine wrote a letter to King Sapor, recommending to his protection the Christian Churches in his empire.[77] Chrysostom (347-407), in his second homily on John, incidentally tells us that ‘the Persians, having translated the doctrines of the Gospel into their own tongue, had learned, though barbarians, the true philosophy.’ In his homily on the memorial of Mary he puts the Persians first, and our British forefathers last, in this remarkable passage: ‘The Persians, the Indians, Scythians, Thracians, Sarmatians, the race of the Moors, and the inhabitants of the British Isles, celebrate a deed performed in a private family in Judea by a woman that had been a sinner.’ The isles of Britain, Claudius Buchanan well remarks, then last, are now the first to restore this memorial to the Persians as well as to other Mohammedan nations. Even so late as 1740 the tyrant Nadir Shah, inquiring as to Jesus Christ, asked for a Persian copy of the Gospels, and had presented to him the combined work of an ignorant Romish priest and some Mohammedan moollas, which excited his ridicule. The traveller, Jonas Hanway, tells us that when Henry Martyn saw this production he exclaimed that he did not wonder at Nadir’s contempt of it.

Martyn arrived in Shiraz on June 11, 1811; in a week he began his Persian translation of the New Testament, and in February 1812 he completed the happy toil, carried on amidst disputations with Soofis and Shi’ahs, Jews and Christians of the Oriental rites, while consumption wasted his body. His ‘leisure’ he spent in translating the Hebrew Psalter. Let us look at him, in that South Persian summer and winter and summer again, now in the city of Shiraz, now driven by the sultry heat to the garden of roses and orange-trees outside the walls near the tomb of Hafiz. The Christian poet has pictured the scene—Alford, when Dean of Canterbury in 1851. Twenty years after, he himself was laid in the churchyard of the mother church of England, St. Martin’s, under this inscription—‘Diversorium Viatoris Hierosolymam Proficiscentis’:

HENRY MARTYN AT SHIRAZ

I

A vision of the bright Shiraz, of Persian bards the theme:

The vine with bunches laden hangs o’er the crystal stream;

The nightingale all day her notes in rosy thickets trills,

And the brooding heat-mist faintly lies along the distant hills.

II

About the plain are scattered wide, in many a crumbling heap,

The fanes of other days, and tombs where Iran’s poets sleep:

And in the midst, like burnished gems, in noonday light repose

The minarets of bright Shiraz—the City of the Rose.

III

One group beside the river bank in rapt discourse are seen,

Where hangs the golden orange on its boughs of purest green;

Their words are sweet and low, and their looks are lit with joy,

Some holy blessing seems to rest on them and their employ.

IV

The pale-faced Frank among them sits: what brought him from afar?

Nor bears he bales of merchandise, nor teaches skill in 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.

V

And Iran’s sons are round him, and one with solemn tone

Tells how the Lord of Glory was rejected by His own;

Tells, from the wondrous Gospel, of the Trial and the Doom,

The words Divine of Love and Might—the Scourge, the Cross, the Tomb.

VI

Far sweeter to the stranger’s ear those Eastern accents sound

Than music of the nightingale that fills the air around:

Lovelier than balmiest odours sent from gardens of the rose,

The fragrance from the contrite soul and chastened lip that flows.

VII

The nightingales have ceased to sing, the roses’ leaves are shed,

The Frank’s pale face in Tokat’s field hath mouldered with the dead:

Alone and all unfriended, midst his Master’s work he fell,

With none to bathe his fevered brow, with none his tale to tell.

VIII

But still those sweet and solemn tones about him sound in bliss,

And fragrance from those flowers of God for evermore is his:

For his the meed, by grace, of those who, rich in zeal and love,

Turn many unto righteousness, and shine as stars above.

This was the beginning of the Persian New Testament:

To Rev. David Brown

Shiraz: June 24, 1811.

Dearest Sir,—I believe I told you that the advanced state of the season rendered it necessary to go to Arabia circuitously by way of Persia. Behold me therefore in the Athens of Fars, the haunt of the Persian man. Beneath are the ashes of Hafiz and Sadi; above, green gardens and running waters, roses and nightingales. Does Mr. Bird envy my lot? Let him solace himself with Aldeen. How gladly would I give him Shiraz for Aldeen; how often while toiling through this miserable country have I sighed for Aldeen! If I am ever permitted to see India again nothing but dire necessity, or the imperious call of duty, will ever induce me to travel again. One thing is good here, the fruit; we have apples and apricots, plums, nectarines, greengages and cherries, all of which are served up with ice and snow. When I have said this for Shiraz I have said all.

But to have done with what grows out of the soil, let us come to the men. The Persians are, like ourselves, immortal; their language had passed a long way beyond the limits of Iran. The men of Shiraz propose to translate the New Testament with me. Can I refuse to stay? After much deliberation I have determined to remain here six months. It is sorely against my will, but I feel it to be a duty. From all that I can collect there appears no probability of our ever having a good translation made out of Persia. At Bombay I showed Moolla Firoz, the most learned man there, the three Persian translations, viz. the Polyglot, and Sabat’s two. He disapproved of them all. At Bushire, which is in Persia, the man of the greatest name was Sayyid Hosein. Of the three he liked Sabat’s Persian best, but said it seemed written by an Indian. On my arrival at this place I produced my specimens once more. Sabat’s Persian was much ridiculed; sarcastic remarks were made on the fondness for fine words so remarkable in the Indians, who seemed to think that hard words made fine writing. His Persic also was presently thrown aside, and to my no small surprise the old despised Polyglot was not only spoken of as superior to the rest, but it was asked, What fault is found in this?—this is the language we speak. The king has also signified that it is his wish that as little Arabic as possible may be employed in the papers presented to him. So that simple Persian is likely to become more and more fashionable. This is a change favourable certainly to our glorious cause. To the poor the Gospel will be preached. We began our work with the Gospel of St. John, and five chapters are put out of hand. It is likely to be the simplest thing imaginable; and I dare say the pedantic Arab will turn up his nose at it; but what the men of Shiraz approve who can gainsay? Let Sabat confine himself to the Arabic, and he will accomplish a great work. The forementioned Sayyid Hosein of Bushire is an Arab. I showed him Erpenius’s Arabic Testament, the Christian Knowledge Society, Sabat’s, and the Polyglot. After rejecting all but Sabat’s, he said this is good, very good, and then read off the 5th of Matthew in a fine style, giving it unqualified commendation as he went along. On my proposing to him to give a specimen of what he thought the best Persian style, he consented; but, said he, give me this to translate from, laying his hand on Sabat’s Arabic. At Muscat an Arab officer who had attended us as guard and guide one day when we walked into the country, came on board with his slave to take leave of us. The slave, who had argued with me very strenuously in favour of his religion, reminded me of a promise I had made him of giving him the Gospel. On my producing an Arabic New Testament, he seized it and began to read away upon deck, but presently stopped, and said it was not fine Arabic. However, he carried off the book.

In eight months the Persian translation of the New Testament was done. The Journal, during that period, from July 1811 to February 1812, as the sacred task went on, reveals the Holy Spirit moving the hearts of the translator’s Mohammedan assistant and Soofi disputants by ‘the things of Christ,’ while it shows His servant bearing witness, by the account of his own conversion, to His power to save and to make holy.

December 12.—Letters at last from India. Mirza Sayyid Ali was curious to know in what way we corresponded, and made me read Mr. Brown’s letter to me, and mine to Corrie. He took care to let his friends know that we wrote nothing about our own affairs: it was all about translations and the cause of Christ. With this he was delighted.

December 16.—In translating 2 Cor. i. 22, ‘Who hath given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts,’ he was much struck when it was explained to him. ‘Oh, that I had it,’ said he; ‘have you received it?’ I told him that, as I had no doubt of my acceptance through Christ, I concluded that I had. Once before, on the words, ‘Who are saved?’ he expressed his surprise at the confidence with which Christians spoke of salvation. On 1 Cor. xv. he observed, that the doctrine of the resurrection of the body was unreasonable; but that as the Mohammedans understood it, it was impossible; on which account the Soofis rejected it.

Christmas Day.—I made a great feast for the Russians and Armenians; and, at Jaffir Ali Khan’s request, invited the Soofi master, with his disciples. I hoped there would be some conversation on the occasion of our meeting, and, indeed, Mirza Sayyid Ali did make some attempts, and explained to the old man the meaning of the Lord’s Supper; but the sage maintaining his usual silence, the subject was dropped. I expressed my satisfaction at seeing them assembled on such an occasion, and my hope that they would remember the day in succeeding years, and that though they would never see me again in the succeeding years, they would not forget that I had brought them the Gospel. The old man coldly replied that ‘God would guide those whom He chose.’ Most of the time they continued was before dinner; the moment that was despatched, they rose and went away. The custom is, to sit five or six hours before dinner, and at great men’s houses singers attend.

December 31.—The accounts of the desolations of war during the last year, which I have been reading in some Indian newspapers, make the world appear more gloomy than ever. How many souls hurried into eternity unprepared! How many thousands of widows and orphans left to mourn! But admire, my soul, the matchless power of God, that out of this ruin He has prepared for Himself an inheritance. At last the scene shall change, and I shall find myself in a world where all is love.

1812.—The last has been in some respects a memorable year. I have been led, by what I have reason to consider as the particular providence of God, to this place; and have undertaken an important work, which has gone on without material interruption, and is now nearly finished. I like to find myself employed usefully, in a way I did not expect or foresee, especially if my own will is in any degree crossed by the work unexpectedly assigned me, as there is then reason to believe that God is acting. 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 upon 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 man. 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 it is refreshing to look at. A dried leaf or a straw makes me feel myself in good company: complacency and admiration take place of disgust.

I compared with pain our Persian translation with the original; to say nothing of the precision and elegance of the sacred text, its perspicuity is that which sets at defiance all attempts to equal it.

January 16.—Mirza Sayyid Ali told me accidentally to-day of a distich made by his friend Mirza Koochut, at Teheran, in honour of a victory gained by Prince Abbas Mirza over the Russians. The sentiment was, that he had killed so many of the Christians, that Christ, from the fourth heaven, took hold of Mahomet’s skirt to entreat him to desist. I was cut to the soul at this blasphemy. In prayer I could think of nothing else but that great day when the Son of God shall come in the clouds of heaven, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and convincing men of all their hard speeches which they have spoken against Him.

Mirza Sayyid Ali perceived that I was considerably disordered, and was sorry for having repeated the verse, but asked what it was that was so offensive. I told him that ‘I could not endure existence if Jesus was not glorified; it would be hell to me if He were to be always thus dishonoured.’ He was astonished, and again asked why. ‘If anyone pluck out your eyes,’ I replied, ‘there is no saying why you feel pain; it is feeling. It is because I am one with Christ that I am thus dreadfully wounded.’ On his again apologising, I told him that ‘I rejoiced at what had happened, inasmuch as it made me feel nearer the Lord than ever. It is when the head or heart is struck, that every member feels its membership.’ This conversation took place while we were translating. In the evening he mentioned the circumstance of a young man’s being murdered—a fine athletic youth, whom I had often seen in the garden. Some acquaintance of his in a slight quarrel had plunged a dagger in his breast. Observing me look sorrowful, he asked why. ‘Because,’ said I, ‘he was cut off in his sins, and had no time to repent.’ ‘It was just in that way,’ said he, ‘that I should like to die; not dragging out a miserable existence on a sick-bed, but transported at once into another state.’ I observed that ‘it was not desirable to be hurried into the immediate presence of God.’ ‘Do you think,’ said he, ‘that there is any difference in the presence of God here or there?’ ‘Indeed I do,’ said I. ‘Here we see through a glass darkly; but there, face to face.’ He then entered into some metaphysical Soofi disputation about the identity of sin and holiness, heaven and hell: to all which I made no reply.

January 18.—Aga Ali of Media came: and with him and Mirza Ali I had a long and warm discussion about the essentials of Christianity. The Mede, seeing us at work upon the Epistles, said, ‘he should be glad to read them; as for the Gospels they were nothing but tales, which were of no use to him; for instance,’ said he, ‘if Christ raised four hundred dead to life, what is that to me?’ I said, ‘it certainly was of importance, for His work furnished a reason for our depending upon His words.’ ‘What did He say,’ asked he, ‘that was not known before? the love of God, humility—who does not know these things?’ ‘Were these things,’ said I, ‘known before Christ, either among Greeks or Romans, with all their philosophy?’ They avowed that the Hindu book Juh contained precepts of this kind. I questioned its antiquity; ‘but however that may be,’ I added, ‘Christ came not to teach so much as to die; the truths I spoke of as confirmed by His miracles were those relating to His person, such as, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Here Mirza Sayyid Ali told him that I had professed to have no doubt of my salvation. He asked what I meant. I told him, ‘that though sin still remained, I was assured that it should not regain dominion; and that I should never come into condemnation, but was accepted in the Beloved.’ Not a little surprised, he asked Mirza Sayyid Ali whether he comprehended this. ‘No,’ said he, ‘nor Mirza Ibrahim, to whom I mentioned it.’ The Mede again turning to me asked, ‘How do you know this? how do you know you have experienced the second birth?’ ‘Because,’ said I, ‘we have the Spirit of the Father; what He wishes we wish; what He hates we hate.’ Here he began to be a little more calm and less contentious, and mildly asked how I had obtained this peace of mind: ‘Was it merely these books?’ said he, taking up some of our sheets. I told him, ‘These books, with prayer.’ ‘What was the beginning of it,’ said he, ‘the society of some friends?’ I related to him my religious history, the substance of which was, that I took my Bible before God in prayer, and prayed for forgiveness through Christ, assurance of it through His Spirit, and grace to obey His commandments. They then both asked whether the same benefit would be conferred on them. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘for so the Apostles preached, that all who were baptized in His name should receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.’ ‘Can you assure me,’ said Mirza Sayyid Ali, ‘that the Spirit will be given to me? if so, I will be baptized immediately.’ ‘Who am I that I should be surety?’ I replied; ‘I bring you this message from God, that he who, despairing of himself, rests for righteousness on the Son of God, shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost; and to this I can add my testimony, if that be worth anything, that I have found the promise fulfilled in myself. But if after baptism you should not find it so in you, accuse not the Gospel of falsehood. It is possible that your faith might not be sincere; indeed, so fully am I persuaded that you do not believe on the Son of God, that if you were to entreat ever so earnestly for baptism I should not dare to administer it at this time, when you have shown so many signs of an unhumbled heart.’ ‘What! would you have me believe,’ said he, ‘as a child?’ ‘Yes,’ said I. ‘True,’ said he, ‘I think that is the only way.’ Aga Ali said no more, except, ‘Certainly he is a good man!’

January 23.—Put on my English dress, and went to the Vizier’s, to see part of the tragedy of Husain’s death,[78] which they contrive to spin out so as to make it last the first ten days of the Mohurrum. All the apparatus consisted of a few boards for a stage, two tables and a pulpit, under an immense awning, in the court where the company were assembled. The dramatis personæ were two; the daughter of Husain, whose part was performed by a boy, and a messenger; they both read their parts. Every now and then loud sobs were heard all over the court. After this several feats of activity were exhibited; the Vizier sat with the moollas. I was appointed to a seat where indeed I saw as much as I wanted, but which, I afterwards perceived, was not the place of honour. As I trust I am far enough from desiring the chief seats in the synagogues, there was nothing in this that could offend me; but I do not think it right to let him have another opportunity of showing a slight to my country in my person.

January 24.—Found Sayyid Ali rather serious this evening. He said he did not know what to do to have his mind made up about religion. Of all the religions Christ’s was the best; but whether to prefer this to Soofi-ism he could not tell. In these doubts he is tossed to and fro, and is often kept awake the whole night in tears. He and his brother talk together on these things till they are almost crazed. Before he was engaged in this work of translation, he says he used to read about two or three hours a day, now he can do nothing else; has no inclination for anything else, and feels unhappy if he does not correct his daily portion. His late employment has given a new turn to his thoughts as well as to those of his friends; they had not the most distant conception of the contents of the New Testament. He says his Soofi friends are exceedingly anxious to see the Epistles, from the accounts he gives of them, and also he is sure that almost the whole of Shiraz are so sensible of the load of unmeaning ceremonies in which their religion consists, that they will rejoice to see or hear of anything like freedom, and that they would be more willing to embrace Christ than the Soofis, who, after taking so much pains to be independent of all law, would think it degrading to submit themselves to any law again, however light.

February 2.—From what I suffer in this city, I can understand the feelings of Lot. The face of the poor Russian appears to me like the face of an angel, because he does not tell lies. Heaven will be heaven because there will not be one liar there. The Word of God is more precious to me at this time than I ever remember it to have been; and of all the promises in it, none is more sweet to me than this—‘He shall reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet.’

February 3.—A packet arrived from India without a single letter for me. It was some disappointment to me: but let me be satisfied with my God, and if I cannot have the comfort of hearing from my friends, let me return with thankfulness to His Word, which is a treasure of which none envy me the possession, and where I can find what will more than compensate for the loss of earthly enjoyments. Resignation to the will of God is a lesson which I must learn, and which I trust He is teaching me.

February 9.—Aga Boozong came. After much conversation, he said, ‘Prove to me, from the beginning, that Christianity is the way: how will you proceed? what do you say must be done?’ ‘If you would not believe a person who wrought a miracle before you,’ said I, ‘I have nothing to say; I cannot proceed a step.’ ‘I will grant you,’ said Sayyid Ali, ‘that Christ was the Son of God, and more than that.’ ‘That you despair of yourself, and are willing to trust in Him alone for salvation?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And are ready to confess Christ before men, and act conformably to His Word?’ ‘Yes: what else must I do?’ ‘Be baptized in the name of Christ.’ ‘And what shall I gain?’ ‘The gift of the Holy Ghost. The end of faith is salvation in the world to come; but even here you shall have the Spirit to purify your heart, and to give you the assurance of everlasting happiness.’ Thus Aga Boozong had an opportunity of hearing those strange things from my own mouth, of which he had been told by his disciple the Mede. ‘You can say too,’ said he, ‘that you have received the Spirit?’ I told them I believed I had; ‘for, notwithstanding all my sins, the bent of my heart was to God in a way it never was before; and that, according to my present feeling, I could not be happy if God was not glorified, and if I had not the enjoyment of His presence, for which I felt that I was now educating.’ Aga Boozong shed tears.

After this came Aga Ali, the Mede, to hear, as he said, some of the sentences of Paul. Mirza Sayyid Ali had told them, ‘that if they had read nothing but the Gospels, they knew nothing of the religion of Christ.’ The sheet I happened to have by me was the one containing the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, which Aga Ali read out.

At this time the company had increased considerably. I desired Aga Ali to notice particularly the latter part of the fifth chapter, ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.’ He then read it a second time, but they saw not its glory; however, they spoke in high terms of the pith and solidity of Paul’s sentences. They were evidently on the watch for anything that tallied with their own sentiments. Upon the passage, ‘Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus,’ the Mede observed, ‘Do you not see that Jesus was in Paul, and that Paul was only another name for Jesus?’ And the text, ‘Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God; and whether we be sober, it is for your sakes,’ they interpreted thus: ‘We are absorbed in the contemplation of God, and when we recover, it is to instruct you.’

Walking afterwards with Mirza Sayyid Ali, he told me how much one of my remarks had affected him, namely, that he had no humility. He had been talking about simplicity and humility as characteristic of the Soofis. ‘Humility!’ I said to him, ‘if you were humble, you would not dispute in this manner; you would be like a child.’ He did not open his mouth afterwards, but to say, ‘True; I have no humility.’ In evident distress, he observed, ‘The truth is, we are in a state of compound ignorance—ignorant, yet ignorant of our ignorance.’

February 18.—While walking in the garden, in some disorder from vexation, two Mussulman Jews came up and asked me what would become of them in another world. The Mahometans were right in their way, they supposed, and we in ours, but what must they expect? After rectifying their mistake as to the Mahometans, I mentioned two or three reasons for believing that we are right: such as their dispersion, and the cessation of sacrifices immediately on the appearance of Jesus. ‘True, true,’ they said, with great feeling and seriousness; indeed, they seemed disposed to yield assent to anything I said. They confessed they had become Mahometans only on compulsion, and that Abdoolghuni wished to go to Baghdad, thinking he might throw off the mask there with safety, but they asked what I thought. I said that the Governor was a Mahometan. ‘Did I think Syria safer?’ ‘The safest place in the East,’ I said, ‘was India.’ Feelings of pity for God’s ancient people, and having the awful importance of eternal things impressed on my mind by the seriousness of their inquiries as to what would become of them, relieved me from the pressure of my comparatively insignificant distresses. I, a poor Gentile, blest, honoured, and loved; secured for ever by the everlasting covenant, whilst the children of the kingdom are still lying in outer darkness! Well does it become me to be thankful!

This is my birthday, on which I complete my thirty-first year. The Persian New Testament has been begun, and I may say finished in it, as only the last eight chapters of the Revelation remain. Such a painful year I never passed, owing to the privations I have been called to on the one hand, and the spectacle before me of human depravity on the other. But I hope that I have not come to this seat of Satan in vain. The Word of God has found its way into Persia, and it is not in Satan’s power to oppose its progress if the Lord hath sent it.

A week after, on February 24, 1812, Henry Martyn corrected the last page of the New Testament in Persian. As we read his words of thanksgiving to the Lord and his invocation of the Holy Spirit, in the already darkening light of his approaching end, before the beatific vision promised by the Master to the pure in heart, and the blessed companionship with Himself guaranteed to every true servant, we recall the Scottish Columba, whose last act was to transcribe the eleventh verse of the thirty-fourth Psalm, and the English Bede, who died when translating the ninth verse of the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.

I have many mercies for which to thank the Lord, and this is not the least. Now may that Spirit who gave the Word, and called me, I trust, to be an interpreter of it, graciously and powerfully apply it to the hearts of sinners, even to the gathering an elect people from amongst the long-estranged Persians!

CHAPTER XII: SHIRAZ TO TABREEZ—THE PERSIAN NEW TESTAMENT

The next three months were spent, still in Shiraz, in the preparation of copies of the precious Persian MS. of the New Testament, and in very close spiritual intercourse with the company of inquirers whom neither fanaticism, conceit, nor, in some cases, a previously immoral life, had prevented from reverencing the teaching of the man of God. Jaffir Ali Khan’s garden became to such a holy place, as the Persian spring passed into the heat of summer. There the privileged translator, Mirza Sayyid Ali; Aga Baba, the Mede; Aga Boozong, vizier of Prince Abbas Mirza, and ‘most magisterial of the Soofis;’ Mirza Ibrahim, the controversialist leader; Sheikh Abulhassan, and many a moolla to whom he testified that Christ was the Creator and Saviour, gathered round him as he read, ‘at their request,’ the Old Testament histories. ‘Their attention to the Word, and their love and attention to me, seemed to increase as the time of my departure approached. Aga Baba, who had been reading St. Matthew, related very circumstantially to the company the particulars of the death of Christ. The bed of roses on which we sat, and the notes of the nightingales warbling around us, were not so sweet to me as this discourse from the Persian.’

Telling Mirza Sayyid Ali one day that I wished to return to the city in the evening, to be alone and at leisure for prayer, he said with seriousness, ‘Though a man had no other religious society I suppose he might, with the aid of the Bible, live alone with God?’ This solitude will, in one respect, be his own state soon;—may he find it the medium of God’s gracious communications to his soul! He asked in what way God ought to be addressed: I told him as a Father, with respectful love; and added some other exhortations on the subject of prayer.

May 11.—Aga Baba came to bid me farewell, which he did in the best and most solemn way, by asking, as a final question, ‘whether, independently of external evidences, I had any internal proofs of the doctrine of Christ?’ I answered, ‘Yes, undoubtedly: the change from what I once was is a sufficient evidence to me.’ At last he took his leave, in great sorrow, and what is better, apparently in great solicitude about his soul.

The rest of the day I continued with Mirza Sayyid Ali, giving him instructions what to do with the New Testament in case of my decease, and exhorting him, as far as his confession allowed me, to stand fast. He had made many a good resolution respecting his besetting sins. I hope, as well as pray, that some lasting effects may be seen at Shiraz from the Word of God left among them.

For the Shah and for the heir-apparent, Prince Abbas Mirza, two copies of the Persian New Testament were specially written out in the perfect caligraphy which the Persians love, and carefully corrected with the translator’s own hand. That he might himself present them, especially the former, he left Shiraz on May 11, 1812, after a year’s residence in the country. The whole length of the great Persian plateau had to be traversed, by Ispahan to Teheran, thence to the royal camp at Sultania, and finally to Tabreez, where was Sir Gore Ouseley, the British ambassador, through whom alone the English man of God could be introduced to the royal presence. He was accompanied by Mr. Canning, an English clergyman.

The journey occupied eight weeks, and proved to be one of extreme hardship, which rapidly developed Henry Martyn’s disease. At one time his life was in danger, in spite of the letters which he carried from General Malcolm’s friend, and now his own, Jaffir Ali Khan, to the Persian prime minister at Teheran. Mrs. Bishop’s experience of travel by the same road[79] at a more favourable season, over the ‘great mud land’ to which centuries of misrule have changed the populous paradise of Darius, enables us to imagine what the brief record of the Journal only half reveals seventy years ago. The old village which the founder of the Kajar dynasty enlarged into Teheran, straggles within eleven miles of walls in the most depressed part of an uninteresting waste. Save for the exterior of the Shah’s palace, and those of some of his ministers, the suburb with the European legations, and now the large and handsome buildings of the American Presbyterian Mission, it is unworthy of being a capital city. Eager to present the sacred volume while life was left to him, Henry Martyn hurried away to find Mirza Shufi, the premier, and the Shah, who were in camp a night’s journey off at Karach.

May 13.—Remained all day at the caravanserai, correcting the Prince’s copy.

May 14.—Continued our journey through two ridges of mountains to Imanzadu: no cultivation to be seen anywhere, nor scarcely any natural vegetable production, except the broom and hawthorn. The weather was rather tempestuous, with cold gusts of wind and rain. We were visited by people who came to be cured of their distempers.

May 16.—We found a hoar frost, and ice on the pools. The excessive cold at this place is accounted for by its being the highest land between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. The baggage not having come up, we were obliged to pass another day in this uncomfortable neighbourhood, where nothing was to be procured for ourselves or our horses, the scarcity of rain this year having left the ground destitute of verdure, and the poor people of the village near us having nothing to sell.

May 21.—Finished the revision of the Prince’s copy. At eleven at night we started for Ispahan, where we arrived soon after sunrise on the 22nd, and were accommodated in one of the king’s palaces. Found my old Shiraz scribe here, and corrected with him the Prince’s copy.

May 23.—Called on the Armenian bishops at Julfa, and met Matteus. He is certainly vastly superior to any Armenian I have yet seen. We next went to the Italian missionary, Joseph Carabiciate, a native of Aleppo, but educated at Rome. He spoke Latin very sprightly, considering his age, which was sixty-six, but discovered no sort of inclination to talk about religion. Until lately he had been supported by the Propaganda; but weary at last of exercising his functions without remuneration, and even without the necessary provision, he talked of returning to Aleppo.

May 24. (Sunday.)—Went early this morning to the Armenian church attached to the episcopal residence. Within the rails were two out of the four bishops, and other ecclesiastics, but in the body of the church only three people. Most of the Armenians at Julfa, which is now reduced to five hundred houses, attended at their respective parish churches, of which there are twelve, served by twenty priests. After their pageantry was over, and we were satisfied with processions, ringing of bells, waving of colours, and other ceremonies, which were so numerous as entirely to remove all semblance of spiritual worship, we were condemned to witness a repetition of the same mockery at the Italian’s church, at his request. I could not stand it out, but those who did observed that the priest ate and drank all the consecrated elements himself, and gave none to the few poor women who composed his congregation, and who, the Armenian said, had been hired for the occasion.

Before returning to Ispahan we sat a short time in the garden with the bishops. They, poor things, had nothing to say, and could scarcely speak Persian; so that all the conversation was between me and Matteus. At my request he brought what he had of the Holy Scriptures in Persian and Arabic. They were Wheloi’s Persian Gospels, and an Arabic version of the Gospels printed at Rome. I tried in vain to bring him to any profitable discussion; with more sense than his brethren, he is not more advanced in spiritual knowledge. Returned much disappointed. Julfa had formerly twenty bishops and about one hundred clergy, with twenty-four churches.

June 2.—Soon after midnight we mounted our horses. It was a mild moonlight night and a nightingale filled the whole valley with his notes. Our way was along lanes, over which the wood on each side formed a canopy, and a murmuring rivulet accompanied us till it was lost in a lake. At daylight we emerged into the plain of Kashan, which seems to be a part of the great Salt Desert. On our arrival at the king’s garden, where we intended to put up, we were at first refused admittance, but an application to the Governor was soon attended to. We saw here huge snowy mountains on the north-east beyond Teheran.

June 5.—Reached Kum;[80] the country uniformly desolate. The chief Moojtahid in all Persia, being a resident of this city, I sent to know if a visit would be agreeable to him. His reply was, that if I had any business with him I might come; but if otherwise, his age and infirmities must be his excuse. Intending to travel a double stage, started soon after sunset.

June 8.—Arrived, two hours before daybreak, at the walls of Teheran. I spread my bed upon the high road, and slept till the gates were open; then entered the city, and took up my abode at the ambassador’s house.

I lost no time in forwarding Jaffir Ali Khan’s letter to the premier, who sent to desire that I would come to him. I found him lying ill in the verandah of the king’s tent of audience. Near him were sitting two persons, who, I was afterwards informed, were Mirza Khantar and Mirza Abdoolwahab; the latter being a secretary of state and a great admirer of the Soofi sage. They took very little notice, not rising when I sat down, as is their custom to all who sit with them; nor offering me kalean. The two secretaries, on learning my object in coming, began a conversation with me on religion and metaphysics, which lasted two hours. As they were both well-educated, gentlemanly men, the discussion was temperate, and, I hope, useful.

June 12.—I attended the Vizier’s levée, where there was a most intemperate and clamorous controversy kept up for an hour or two; eight or ten on one side, and I on the other. Amongst them were two moollas, the most ignorant of any I have yet met with in either Persia or India. It would be impossible to enumerate all the absurd things they said. Their vulgarity in interrupting me in the middle of a speech; their utter ignorance of the nature of an argument; their impudent assertions about the law and the Gospel, neither of which they had ever seen in their lives, moved my indignation a little. I wished, and I said it would have been well, if Mirza Abdoolwahab had been there; I should then have had a man of sense to argue with. The Vizier, who set us going at first, joined in it latterly, and said, ‘You had better say God is God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God.’ I said, ‘God is God,’ but added, instead of ‘Muhammad is the prophet of God,’ ‘and Jesus is the Son of God.’ They had no sooner heard this, which I had avoided bringing forward till then, than they all exclaimed, in contempt and anger, ‘He is neither born nor begets,’ and rose up, as if they would have torn me in pieces. One of them said, ‘What will you say when your tongue is burnt out for this blasphemy?’

One of them felt for me a little, and tried to soften the severity of this speech. My book, which I had brought expecting to present it to the king, lay before Mirza Shufi. As they all rose up after him to go, some to the king and some away, I was afraid they would trample on the book; so I went in among them to take it up, and wrapped it in a towel before them, while they looked at it and me with supreme contempt. Thus I walked away alone in my tent, to pass the rest of the day in heat and dirt. What have I done, thought I, to merit all this scorn? Nothing, I trust, but bearing testimony to Jesus. I thought over these things in prayer, and my troubled heart found that peace which Christ hath promised to His disciples.

To complete the trials of the day, a message came from the Vizier in the evening, to say that it was the custom of the king not to see any Englishman, unless presented by the ambassador, or accredited by a letter from him, and that I must, therefore, wait till the king reached Sultania, where the ambassador would be.

June 13.—Disappointed of my object in coming to the camp, I lost no time in leaving it, and proceeded in company with Mr. Canning, who had just joined me from Teheran, towards Kasbin, intending there to wait the result of an application to the ambassador. Started at eleven, and travelled till eleven next morning, having gone ten parasangs or forty miles, to Quishlang. The country all along was well watered and cultivated. The mules being too much tired to proceed, we passed the day at the village; indeed, we all wanted rest. As I sat down in the dust, on the shady side of a walled village by which we passed, and surveyed the plains over which our road lay, I sighed at the thought of my dear friends in India and England, of the vast regions I must traverse before I can get to either, and of the various and unexpected hindrances which present themselves to my going forward. I comfort myself with the hope that my God has something for me to do, by thus delaying my exit.

June 22.—We met with the usual insulting treatment at the caravanserai, where the king’s servants had got possession of a good room, built for the reception of the better order of guests; they seemed to delight in the opportunity of humbling an European. Sultania is still but a village, yet the Zengan prince has quartered himself and all his attendants, with their horses, on this poor little village. All along the road, where the king is expected, the people are patiently waiting, as for some dreadful disaster; plague, pestilence, or famine is nothing to the misery of being subject to the violence and extortion of this rabble soldiery.

June 25. (Zengan.)—After a restless night, rose so ill with the fever that I could not go on. My companion, Mr. Canning, was nearly in the same state. We touched nothing all day.

June 26.—After such another night I had determined to go on, but Mr. Canning declared himself unable to stir, so here we dragged through another miserable day. What added to our distress was that we were in danger, if detained here another day or two, of being absolutely in want of the necessaries of life before reaching Tabreez. We made repeated applications to the moneyed people, but none would advance a piastre. Where are the people who flew forth to meet General Malcolm with their purses and their lives? Another generation is risen up, ‘who know not Joseph.’ Providentially a poor muleteer, arriving from Tabreez, became security for us, and thus we obtained five tomans. This was a heaven-send; and we lay down quietly, free from apprehensions of being obliged to go a fatiguing journey of eight or ten hours, without a house or village in the way, in our present weak and reduced state. We had now eaten nothing for two days. My mind was much disordered from head-ache and giddiness, from which I was seldom free; but my heart, I trust, was with Christ and His saints. To live much longer in this world of sickness and pain seemed no way desirable; the most favourite prospects of my heart seemed very poor and childish; and cheerfully would I have exchanged them all for the unfading inheritance.

June 27.—My Armenian servant was attacked in the same way. The rest did not get me the things that I wanted, so that I passed the third day in the same exhausted state; my head, too, was tortured with shocking pains, such as, together with the horror I felt at being exposed to the sun, showed me plainly to what to ascribe my sickness. Towards evening, two more of our servants were attacked in the same way, and lay groaning from pains in the head.

June 28.—All were much recovered, but in the afternoon I again relapsed. During a high fever Mr. Canning read to me in bed the Epistle to the Ephesians, and I never felt the consolations of that Divine revelation of mysteries more sensibly and solemnly. Rain in the night prevented our setting off.

June 29.—My ague and fever returned, with such a head-ache that I was almost frantic. Again and again I said to myself, ‘Let patience have her perfect work,’ and kept pleading the promises, ‘When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee,’ etc.; and the Lord did not withhold His presence. I endeavoured to repel all the disordered thoughts that the fever occasioned, and to keep in mind that all was friendly; a friendly Lord presiding; and nothing exercising me but what would show itself at last friendly. A violent perspiration at last relieved the acute pain in my head, and my heart rejoiced; but as soon as that was over, the exhaustion it occasioned, added to the fatigue from the pain, left me in as low a state of depression as ever I was in. I seemed about to sink into a long fainting fit, and I almost wished it; but at this moment, a little after midnight, I was summoned to mount my horse, and set out, rather dead than alive. We moved on six parasangs. We had a thunder-storm with hail.

July 1.—A long and tiresome march to Sarehund; in seven parasangs there was no village. They had nothing to sell but buttermilk and bread; but a servant of Abbas Mirza, happening to be at the same caravanserai, sent us some flesh of a mountain cow which he had shot the day before. All day I had scarcely the right recollection of myself from the violence of the ague. We have now reached the end of the level ground which we have had all the way from Teheran, and are approaching the boundaries of Parthia and Media; a most natural boundary it is, as the two ridges of mountains we have had on the left and right come round and form a barrier.

July 2.—At two in the morning we set out. I hardly know when I have been so disordered. I had little or no recollection of things, and what I did remember at times of happy scenes in India or England, served only to embitter my present situation. Soon after removing into the air I was seized with a violent ague, and in this state I went on till sunrise. At three parasangs and a half we found a fine caravanserai, apparently very little used, as the grass was growing in the court. There was nothing all round but the barren rocks, which generally roughen the country before the mountain rears its height. Such an edifice in such a situation was cheering. Soon after we came to a river, over which was a high bridge; I sat down in the shade under it, with two camel drivers. The kafila, as it happened, forded the river, and passed on without my perceiving it. Mr. Canning seeing no signs of me, returned, and after looking about for some time, espied my horse grazing; he concluded immediately that the horse had flung me from the bridge into the river, and was almost ready to give me up for lost. My speedy appearance from under the bridge relieved his terror and anxiety. Half the people still continue ill; for myself, I am, through God’s infinite mercy, recovering.

July 4.—I so far prevailed as to get the kafila into motion at midnight. Lost our way in the night, but arriving at a village we were set right again. At eight came to Kilk caravanserai, but not stopping there, went on to a village, where we arrived at half-past nine. The baggage not coming up till long after, we got no breakfast till one o’clock. In consequence of all these things, want of sleep, want of refreshment, and exposure to the sun, I was presently in a high fever, which raged so furiously all the day that I was nearly delirious, and it was some time before I could get the right recollection of myself. I almost despaired, and do now, of getting alive through this unfortunate journey. Last night I felt remarkably well, calm and composed, and sat reflecting on my heavenly rest, with more sweetness of soul, abstraction from the world, and solemn views of God, than I have had for a long time. Oh, for such sacred hours! This short and painful life would scarcely be felt could I live thus at heaven’s gate. It being impossible to continue my journey in my present state, and one of the servants also being so ill that he could not move with safety, we determined to halt one day at the village, and sent on a messenger to Sir Gore, at Tabreez, informing him of our approach.

July 5.—As soon as it was day we found our way to the village where the Doctor was waiting for us. Not being able to stay for us, he went on to Tabreez, and we as far as Wasmuch, where he promised to procure for us a fine upper room furnished; but when we arrived, they denied that there was any such a place. At last, after an hour’s threatening, we got admittance to it. An hour before break of day I left it, in hopes of reaching Tabreez before sunrise. Some of the people seemed to feel compassion for me, and asked me if I was not very ill. At last I reached the gate, and feebly asked for a man to show me the way to the ambassador’s.

July 9.—Made an extraordinary effort, and as a Tartar was going off instantly to Constantinople, wrote letters to Mr. Grant for permission to come to England, and to Mr. Simeon and Lydia, informing them of it; but I have scarcely the remotest expectation of seeing it, except by looking at the almighty power of God.

Dined at night at the ambassador’s, who said he was determined to give every possible éclat to my book, by presenting it himself to the king. My fever never ceased to rage till the 21st, during all which time every effort was made to subdue it, till I had lost all my strength and almost all my reason. They now administer bark, and it may please God to bless the tonics; but I seem too far gone, and can only say, ‘having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.’

To Lydia Grenfell

Tabreez: July 12, 1812.

My dearest Lydia,—I have only time to say that I have received your letter of February 14. Shall I pain your heart by adding, that I am in such a state of sickness and pain, that I can hardly write to you? Let me rather observe, to obviate the gloomy apprehension my letters to Mr. Grant and Mr. Simeon may excite, that I am likely soon to be delivered from my fever. Whether I shall gain strength enough to go on, rests on our Heavenly Father, in whose hands are all my times. Oh, His precious grace! His eternal unchanging love in Christ to my soul never appeared more clear, more sweet, more strong. I ought to inform you that in consequence of the state to which I am reduced by travelling so far overland, without having half accomplished my journey, and the consequent impossibility of returning to India the same way, I have applied for leave to come on furlough to England. Perhaps you will be gratified by this intelligence; but oh, my dear Lydia, I must faithfully tell you that the probability of my reaching England alive is but small; and this I say, that your expectations of seeing me again may be moderate, as mine are of seeing you. Why have you not written more about yourself? However, I am thankful for knowing that you are alive and well. I scarcely know how to desire you to direct. Perhaps Alexandria in Egypt will be the best place; another may be sent to Constantinople, for though I shall not go there, I hope Mr. Morier will be kept informed of my movements. Kindest love to all the saints you usually mention. Yours ever most faithfully and affectionately,

H. Martyn.

To Rev. C. Simeon

Tabreez: July 12, 1812.

My dearest Friend and Brother,—The Tartar courier for Constantinople, who has been delayed some days on our account, being to be despatched instantly, my little strength also being nearly exhausted by writing to Mr. Grant a letter to be laid before the court: I have only to notice some of the particulars of your letter of February of this year. It is not now before me, neither have I strength to search for it among my papers; but from the frequent attentive perusals I gave it during my intervals of ease, I do not imagine that any of it has escaped my memory. At present I am in a high fever, and cannot properly recollect myself. I shall ever love and be grateful to Mr. Thornton for his kind attention to my family.

The increase of godly young men is precious news. If I sink into the grave in India, my place will be supplied an hundredfold. You will learn from Mr. Grant that I have applied for leave to come to England on furlough; a measure you will disapprove; but you would not, were you to see the pitiable condition to which I am reduced, and knew what it is to traverse the continent of Asia in the destitute state in which I am. If you wish not to see me, I can say that I think it most probable that you will not; the way before me being not better than that passed over, which has nearly killed me.

I would not pain your heart, my dear brother, but we who are in Jesus have the privilege of viewing life and death as nearly the same, since both are one; and I thank a gracious Lord that sickness never came at a time when I was more free from apparent reasons for living. Nothing seemingly remains for me to do but to follow the rest of my family to the tomb. Let not the book written against Muhammadanism be published till approved in India. A European who has not lived amongst them cannot imagine how differently they see, imagine, reason, object, from what we do. This I had full opportunity of observing during my eleven months’ residence at Shiraz. During that time I was engaged in a written controversy with one of the most learned and temperate doctors there. He began. I replied what was unanswerable, then I subjoined a second more direct attack on the glaring absurdities of Muhammadanism, with a statement of the nature and evidences of Christianity. The Soofis then as well as himself desired a demonstration, from the very beginning, of the truth of any revelation. As this third treatise contained an examination of the doctrine of the Soofis, and pointed out that their object was attainable by the Gospel, and by that only, it was read with interest and convinced many. There is not a single Europeanism in the whole that I know of, as my friend and interpreter would not write anything that he could not perfectly comprehend. But I am exhausted; pray for me, beloved brother, and believe that I am, as long as life and recollection lasts, yours affectionately,

H. Martyn.

Tabreez: August 8.

My dearest Brother and Friend,—Ever since I wrote, about a month, I believe, I have been lying upon the bed of sickness; for twenty days or more the fever raged with great violence, and for a long time every species of medicine was tried in vain. After I had given up every hope of recovery, it pleased God to abate the fever, but incessant head-aches succeeded, which allowed me no rest day or night. I was reduced still lower, and am now a mere skeleton; but as they are now less frequent, I suppose it to be the will of God that I should be raised up to life again. I am now sitting in my chair, and wrote the will with a strong hand; but as you see I cannot write so now. Kindest love to Mr. John Thornton, for whose temporal and spiritual prosperity I daily pray.—Your ever affectionate friend and brother,

H. Martyn.

Lydia Grenfell’s letter, to which Martyn’s of July 12, written in such circumstances, is a reply, was really dated February 1, 1812, and was the last received from her by him. Her Diary notes that she ‘wrote to India, August 30, September 30, 1812’; and on December 12 of that year, thus remarks on his letter of July 12:

Heard from Tabreez from Mr. Martyn with an account of his dangerous state of health and intention of returning to England if his life was spared. This intelligence affected me variously. The probability of his death, the certainty of his extreme sufferings, and distance from every friend, pressed heavily on my spirits; I was enabled to pray, and felt relieved. Of his return no very sanguine expectations can be entertained. Darkness and distress of mind have followed this information. I cannot collect my thoughts to write, or apply as I ought to anything. Oh, let me consider this as a call to prayer and watchfulness and self-examination. Lord, assist me!

December 16.—A season of great temptation, darkness, and distress. At no period of my life have I stood more in need of Divine help, and oh! may I earnestly seek it. Lord, I would pray, give me a right understanding, and enable me seriously to consider and weigh in the balance of the sanctuary all I do—yea, let my thoughts be watched. Sleep has fled from mine eyes, and a fearful looking for of trial and affliction, however this affair ends, possesses my mind. Oh! let me cast my burden on the Lord—it is too heavy for me. Lord, let me begin afresh to call upon Thy name, and, taking hold of Thee, I shall be borne up above my trials, carried through the difficulties I see before me, and be delivered.

December 17.—I desire, O Thou blessed God, to seek Thy face, to call on Thy name. Thou hast been my refuge; I have been happy in the sense of Thy love. With all my sins, my weaknesses and miseries, I come to Thee, and most seriously would I seek Thy guidance in the perplexing and difficult circumstances I am in. O Lord, suffer me not to run counter to Thy will nor to dishonour Thee.

December 25.—Bless the Lord, O my soul; bless His holy name for ever and ever. I sought the Lord in my distress, and He gave ear unto me. Gracious and merciful art Thou, O Lord, for Thou didst bend Thine ear to the most worthless of all creatures. This is for the glory of Thy name alone, to show how great Thy mercy is, how sure Thy truth. After a night of clouds and darkness, behold the clear sky.

December 26.—This joyful, holy season calls upon me for fresh praises, and a renewed dedication of myself to God. I rejoice in believing Christ was born; I rejoice in the end proposed of His appearance in the flesh, the recovery of mankind to holiness and to God. I welcome this salvation as that I most desire. My happiness, I know, consists in holiness and in the favour of God. Thought much to-day of my dear friend. I cannot think of him as having gained the heavenly crown, but as struggling with dangers and difficulties. Secure in them all of Thy favour, and defended by Thy power, he is safe, and pass but a few years or days, and he will enter into the rest of God. Let me, too, follow after him as he follows Christ.

1813, January 4.—After a night and day spent in great conflict and agony of mind, I, this evening, enjoy a respite from distressing apprehensions. I was reduced to the lowest, as to animal spirits and spiritual life, when it occurred to me I would go to the meeting, where I found a sweet—oh, may it be a lasting! relief from my cares. Having better things proposed for my consideration, my burden has chiefly been from a sense of inward weakness and a conviction of having lost the presence of God. The state of my beloved friend less occupies my mind than I sometimes think is reconcilable with a true affection for him; but the truth is, the concerns of my soul are the more pressing. Oh! may this trial truly answer this purpose of driving me to God, my refuge and rest.

January 6.—Still harassed and without strength to resist. I seem divested of the Spirit, yet, oh, let me not give way to this! I will try, as a helpless sinner, to seek Divine aid. Thou canst command peace within and increase my faith. I am amazed at the state of my mind—instead of having my thoughts exercised about my dear friend, I am filled with distressing fears for my soul, and left so to myself that all I can do is to pray for the Lord to return and lift upon me the light of His countenance. O Thou blessed Redeemer! hear my sighs and put my tears into Thy bottle. My wanderings are noted down in Thy book. Oh, have pity on my wretched state and revive Thy work, increase my faith. Thou art the resurrection and the life—let me rest on this Scripture.

February 1.—My beloved friend remembered every hour, but to-day with less distressing fears and perplexity of mind. I do from my inmost soul, O Lord, desire Thy will to be done, and that Thou mayest be glorified in this concern. Oh, direct us!

February 7.—I have been convinced to-day how by admitting into my heart, and suffering my first, my last, and every thought to be engrossed by an earthly object, I have grieved the Holy Spirit, and hindered God from dwelling in me. Oh! let me have done with idols and worship God.

More than six weeks after his letter of July 12, the fever-stricken missionary recovered strength to write to Lydia once again:

To Lydia Grenfell

Tabreez: August 28, 1812.

I wrote to you last, my dear Lydia, in great disorder. My fever had approached nearly to delirium, and my debility was so great that it seemed impossible I could withstand the power of disease many days. Yet it has pleased God to restore me to life and health again; not that I have recovered my former strength yet, but consider myself sufficiently restored to prosecute my journey. My daily prayer is, that my late chastisement may have its intended effect, and make me all the rest of my days more humble, and less self-confident. Self-confidence has often let me down fearful lengths, and would, without God’s gracious interference, prove my endless perdition. I seem to be made to feel this evil of my heart more than any other at this time. In prayer, or when I write or converse on the subject, Christ appears to me my life and strength, but at other times I am as thoughtless and bold as if I had all life and strength in myself, Such neglect on our part works a diminution of our joys; but the covenant, the covenant! stands fast with Him, for His people evermore.

I mentioned my conversing sometimes on Divine subjects, for though it is long enough since I have seen a child of God, I am sometimes led on by the Persians to tell them all I know of the very recesses of the sanctuary, and these are the things that interest them. But to give an account of all my discussions with these mystic philosophers must be reserved to the time of our meeting. Do I dream, that I venture to think and write of such an event as that? Is it possible that we shall ever meet again below? Though it is possible, I dare not indulge such a pleasing hope yet. I am still at a tremendous distance; and the countries I have to pass through are many of them dangerous to the traveller, from the hordes of banditti, whom a feeble government cannot chastise. In consequence of the bad state of the road between this and Aleppo, Sir Gore advises me to go first to Constantinople, and from thence to pass into Syria. In favour of this route, he urges that, by writing to two or three Turkish Governors on the frontiers, he can secure me a safe passage, at least half-way, and the latter half is probably not much infested. In three days, therefore, I intend setting my horse’s head towards Constantinople, distant above thirteen hundred miles. Nothing, I think, will occasion any further detention here, if I can procure servants who know both Persian and Turkish; but should I be taken ill on the road, my case would be pitiable indeed. The ambassador and his suite are still here: his and Lady Ouseley’s attentions to me, during my illness, have been unremitted. The Prince Abbas Mirza, the wisest of the king’s sons, and heir to the throne, was here some time after my arrival; I much wished to present a copy of the Persian New Testament to him, but I could not rise from my bed. The book will, however, be given to him by the ambassador. Public curiosity about the Gospel, now for the first time, in the memory of the modern Persians, introduced into the country, is a good deal excited here, at Shiraz, and other places; so that, upon the whole, I am thankful for having been led hither and detained, though my residence in this country has been attended with many unpleasant circumstances. The way of the kings of the East is preparing. This much may be said with safety, but little more. The Persians also will probably take the lead in the march to Zion, as they are ripe for a revolution in religion as well as politics.

Sabat, about whom you inquire so regularly, I have heard nothing of this long time. My friends in India have long since given me up as lost or gone out of reach, and if they wrote they would probably not mention him, as he is far from being a favourite with any of them. ——, who is himself of an impatient temper, cannot tolerate him; indeed, I am pronounced to be the only man in Bengal who could have lived with him so long. He is, to be sure, the most tormenting creature I ever yet chanced to deal with—peevish, proud, suspicious, greedy; he used to give daily more and more distressing proofs of his never having received the saving grace of God. But of this you will say nothing; while his interesting story is yet fresh in the memory of people, his failings had better not be mentioned. The poor Arab wrote me a querulous epistle from Calcutta, complaining that no one took notice of him now that I was gone; and then he proceeds to abuse his best friends. I have not yet written to reprove him for his unchristian sentiments, and when I do I know it will be to no purpose after all the private lectures I have given him. My course from Constantinople is so uncertain that I hardly know where to desire you to direct to me; I believe Malta is the only place, for there I must stop in my way home. Soon we shall have occasion for pen and ink no more; but I trust I shall shortly see thee face to face. Love to all the saints.

Believe me to be yours ever, most faithfully and affectionately,

H. Martyn.

These were Henry Martyn’s last words to Lydia Grenfell. Hasting home to be with her, in a few weeks his yearning spirit was with the Lord—

Love divine, all love excelling.

Tabreez was at this time the centre of diplomatic activity. While the Shah and his camp were not far off, the Turkish Ambassador was in the city, and Sir Gore Ouseley was busily mediating between the Turkish and Persian Governments after their hostilities on the Baghdad frontier. Turkey, moreover, had just before concluded a treaty with Russia, with consequences most offensive to the Shah. Only the personal influence and active interference of the British Ambassador prevented the renewal of hostilities. Mr. Morier, the Secretary of Embassy, gives us this contemporary picture of Martyn’s arrival:[81] ‘We had not long been at Tabreez before our party was joined by the Rev. William Canning and the Rev. Henry Martyn. The former was attached to our Embassy as chaplain; the latter, whom we had left at Shiraz employed in the translation of the New Testament into the Persian language, having completed that object, was on his way to Constantinople. Both these gentlemen had suffered greatly in health during their journey from Shiraz. Mr. Martyn had scarcely time to recover his strength before he departed again.’

Had Henry Martyn been induced by his hospitable friends to rest here for a time, had the physician constrained him to wait for a better season and more strength, he might have himself presented his sacred work to the Shah—might have repeated in the north what he had been permitted to do in one brief year in the south of Persia, and might have again seen the beloved Lydia and his Cambridge friends. For Tabreez, ‘the fever-dispeller,’ is said to have been so named by Zobeidah, the wife of the Kaliph Haroon’r Rashheed, who, at the close of the eighth century, beautified the ancient Tauris, capital of Tiridates III., King of Armenia in 297, because of its healthy climate. In spite of repeated earthquakes the city has been always rebuilt, low and mean, covering an area like that of Vienna, but the principal emporium from which Persia used to receive its European goods till the coasting steamers of India opened up the Persian Gulf and, of late, the Euphrates, Tigris, and Karoon rivers. Only the ark, or citadel of Ali Shah, a noble building of burnt brick, and the fine ruin of the Kabood Masjeed, or mosque of beautifully arabesqued blue tiles, redeemed the city in Martyn’s time from meanness. The Ambassador, his host, was then lodged in the house of its wealthiest citizen, Hajji Khan Muhammed, whom the Prince had turned out to make room for Sir Gore Ouseley. Now the British Consulate of Tabreez is a spacious residence, with a fine garden, and the city has become flourishing again. Henry Martyn left Tabreez on his fatal journey at the very time when the climate began to be at its best. All around, too, and especially in the hills of Sahand to the south, with the air of Scotland and of Wales, or on the natural pastures of Chaman, where the finest brood mares are kept, sloping down to the waters of Lake Ooroomia, he would have found in the hot season the loveliest land in Asia.[82]

Before we hasten on with the modern apostle of the Persians to the bitter but bright end, we must trace the history of the influence of his translation of the New Testament. The 20th August, 1812, he joyfully entered in his Journal as a day much to be remembered for the remarkable recovery of strength. He learned from Mirza Aga Meer that his ‘work,’ that is, his reply to Mirza Ibrahim, had been read to the Shah by Mirza Abdoolwahab, and that the king had observed to Mirza Boozong, his son’s vizier, that the Feringhis’ (Franks’) Government and army, and now one of their moollas, was come into the East. The Shah then directed Mirza Boozong to prepare an answer. In consequence of this information Sir Gore Ouseley, who doubtless desired to spare the little strength of his guest, directed that a certain moolla, who greatly wished to be introduced to the man of God, should not be brought to him. Nevertheless, ‘one day a moolla came and disputed a while for Muhammedan, but finished with professing Soofi sentiments.’

The great Shah, Fateh Ali Khan himself, and his son, were thus prepared for the Divine gift of Henry Martyn in due form through the British Ambassador. How it reached His Persian Majesty from Sir Gore Ouseley, and how the Shah-in-Shah received it, these letters tell, so honourable to the writers, even after all allowance is made for the diplomatic courtliness of the correspondence.[83] The Soofi controversialists and friends of the translator, who by that time had entered on his rest, must have, moreover, predisposed the eclectic mind of the always liberal Shah to treat with reverence the Injil, or Gospel.

From His Excellency Sir Gore Ouseley, Bart., Ambassador Extraordinary from His Britannic Majesty to the Court of Persia. Addressed to the Right Hon. Lord Teignmouth, President of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

St. Petersburg: September 20, 1814.

My dear Lord,—Finding that I am likely to be detained here some six or seven weeks, and apprehensive that my letters from Persia may not have reached your Lordship, I conceive it my duty to acquaint you, for the information of the society of Christians formed for the purpose of propagating the Sacred Writings, that, agreeably to the wishes of our poor friend, the late Rev. Henry Martyn, I presented in the name of the Society (as he particularly desired) a copy of his translation of the New Testament into the Persian language to His Persian Majesty, Fateh Ali Shah Kajar, having first made conditions that His Majesty was to peruse the whole, and favour me with his opinion of the style, etc.

Previous to delivering the book to the Shah, I employed transcribers to make some copies of it, which I distributed to Hajji Mahomed Hussein Khan, Prince of Maru, Mirza Abdulwahab, and other men of learning and rank immediately about the person of the king, who, being chiefly converts to the Soofi philosophy, would, I felt certain, give it a fair judgment, and, if called upon by the Shah for their opinion, report of it according to its intrinsic merits.

The enclosed translation of a letter from His Persian Majesty to me will show your Lordship that he thinks the complete work a great acquisition, and that he approves of the simple style adopted by my lamented friend Martyn and his able coadjutor, Mirza Sayyed Ali, so appropriate to the just and ready conception of the sublime morality of the Sacred Writings. Should the Society express a wish to possess the original letter from the Shah, or a copy of it in Persian, I shall be most happy to present either through your Lordship.

I beg leave to add that, if a correct copy of Mr. Martyn’s translation has not yet been presented to the Society, I shall have great pleasure in offering one that has been copied from and collated with the original left with me by Mr. Martyn, on which he had bestowed the greatest pains to render it perfect.

I also promise to devote my leisure to the correction of the press, in the event of your thinking proper to have it printed in England, should my Sovereign not have immediate occasion for my services out of England.—I am, etc.

Gore Ouseley.

Translation of His Persian Majesty’s Letter, referred to in the preceding.

In the Name of the Almighty God, whose glory is most excellent.

It is our august command that the dignified and excellent our trusty, faithful, and loyal well-wisher, Sir Gore Ouseley, Baronet, His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador Extraordinary (after being honoured and exalted with the expressions of our highest regard and consideration), should know that the copy of the Gospel, which was translated into Persian by the learned exertions of the late Rev. Henry Martyn, and which has been presented to us by your Excellency on the part of the high, dignified, learned, and enlightened Society of Christians, united for the purpose of spreading abroad the Holy Books of the religion of Jesus (upon whom, and upon all prophets, be peace and blessings!), has reached us, and has proved highly acceptable to our august mind.

In truth, through the learned and unremitted exertions of the Rev. Henry Martyn, it has been translated in a style most befitting sacred books, that is, in an easy and simple diction. Formerly, the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were known in Persia; but now the whole of the New Testament is completed in a most excellent manner: and this circumstance has been an additional source of pleasure to our enlightened and august mind. Even the four Evangelists which were known in this country had never been before explained in so clear and luminous a manner. We, therefore, have been particularly delighted with this copious and complete translation. If it please the most merciful God, we shall command the Select Servants, who are admitted to our presence, to read[84] to us the above-mentioned book from the beginning to the end, that we may, in the most minute manner, hear and comprehend its contents.

Your Excellency will be pleased to rejoice the hearts of the above-mentioned dignified, learned, and enlightened Society with assurances of our highest regard and approbation; and to inform those excellent individuals who are so virtuously engaged in disseminating and making known the true meaning and intent of the Holy Gospel, and other points in sacred books, that they are deservedly honoured with our royal favour. Your Excellency must consider yourself as bound to fulfil this royal request.

Given in Rebialavil, 1229.

(Sealed) Fateh Ali Shah Kajar.

Even here we see Martyn and Carey once more linked together. The same volume from which we have taken these letters contains, a few pages before them, these words written by Dr. Carey from Serampore: ‘Religion is the only thing in the world worth living for. And no work is so important as serving God in the Gospel of His Son; if, like the Apostle, we do this with one spirit, great will be our enjoyment and abundant our reward.’

Sir Gore Ouseley carried the original MS. to St. Petersburg, where, happening to mention the fact to the President of the Russian Bible Society, Prince Galitzin at once begged that his Society, always an honourable exception to the intolerance of the Tsar’s Greek Church, might be allowed to publish it. A set of Persian types was specially procured. Sir Gore Ouseley, assisted by the Persian Jaffir Khan, corrected the proofs, and the Rev. R. Pinkerton, one of the Scottish Mission to Karass, carefully superintended the printing. Several Persians, resident in that city, bespoke copies for their friends. The British and Foreign Bible Society granted 300l. towards the expenses of an edition of 5,000 copies. The first edition appeared there in September, 1815, on which Prince Galitzin wrote to Mr. Pinkerton, as representing the Bible Society in London:

Praise be given to the incomprehensible counsels of God, who, for the salvation of man, gave His Word, and causeth it to increase among all nations: who useth as His instruments the inhabitants of countries of different languages and tribes, not unfrequently the most distant from each other and altogether unacquainted with those for whom they labour! This is a true sign of the holy will of God respecting this work, who worketh all and in all. This is the case with the finished edition of the Persian New Testament, which was translated into that language in a far distant part of Asia, and prepared to be printed in another, but brought into Russia (where nothing of the kind was ever thought of) and printed off much sooner than was at first intended. Here men were found endowed with good-will and the requisite qualifications for the completion of this work, which at first seemed to be so difficult.

Meanwhile, Martyn himself having directed that a copy of the manuscript translation should be sent to Calcutta from Shiraz, when he left that city, four copies were made, lest any accident should befall it on the way to Bengal. It reached the Calcutta Corresponding Committee in 1814, and they invited Mirza Sayyid Ali to join them and pass it through the press. This second edition accordingly appeared at Calcutta in 1816. Professor Lee, of Cambridge, published a third edition of it in London in 1827, and a fourth in 1837. The most beautiful and valuable of all is the fifth, now before the writer, which Thomas Constable printed in Edinburgh in 1846 (corresponding to 1262 of the Hijrah) in three royal octavo volumes. This was also the most important because it accompanied a Persian translation of the Old Testament. Mirza Sayyid Ali had early informed the Calcutta Committee that he had his master’s original translation of the Psalter, and this also appeared at Calcutta in 1816. This formed the nucleus of the Persian Old Testament prepared by Dr. W. Glen, of the Scottish Missionary Society’s Mission, at Karass, Astrakhan, and printed along with Henry Martyn’s New Testament in the memorable and beautiful Edinburgh edition. That edition of the whole Bible was presented by Dr. Glen to the present Shah of Persia, Nassr-ed-Deen, on his accession to the throne in 1848. With Martyn’s New Testament His Majesty seemed to be well acquainted. Of the volume containing the Old Testament we read that ‘on handing the book to the servant in waiting he just kissed and then put it to his forehead, with the same indication of reverence which he would have shown had it been their own sacred book, the Koran.’ Archdeacon Robinson, of Poona, published another Persian translation of the Old Testament. The Church Missionary Society’s distinguished missionary at Julfa, Dr. Robert Bruce, has been for years engaged on a revision, or rather new translation of the Old Testament into Persian, the two versions of which are far inferior, in the opinion of one who is at the head of all living experts, to Henry Martyn’s translation of the New. Dr. Bruce’s work has now been completed.

I know no parallel to these achievements of Henry Martyn’s, writes Canon W.J. Edmonds, closing a survey of his powers and services as a translator of the Scriptures. There are in him the things that mark the born translator. He masters grammar, observes idioms, accumulates vocabulary, reads and listens, corrects and even reconstructs. Above all, he prays. He lives ‘in the Spirit,’ and rises from his knees full of the mind of the Spirit. Pedantry is not in him, nor vulgarity. He longs and struggles to catch the dialect in which men may speak worthily of the things of God. And so his work lives. In his own Hindustani New Testament, and in the recovered parts of the Old Testament in which he watched over the labours of Fitrut, his work is still a living influence; men find ‘reasons for reverting’ to it. His earlier Persian, and what is demonstrably distinct from it, his Persic translation, or rather Sabat’s, done under his superintendence, these indeed have gone. They did not survive his visit to Persia. Nor did the Arabic, which was the chief acknowledged motive of his journey. But what a gifted man is here, and what a splendid sum total of work, that can afford these deductions from the results of a five or six years’ struggle with illness, and still leave behind translations of the New Testament in Hindustani and in Persian; the Hindustani version living a double life, its own and that which William Bowley gave it in the humbler vocabulary of the Hindi villages! We live in hurrying times; our days are swifter than a shuttle. 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. It is time, though, to take care that he does not become simply the shadow of an angel passing by. His pinnacle is that lofty one which is only assigned to eminent goodness, but it rests upon, and is only the finial of, a broad-based tower of sound and solid intellectual endowment.

Henry Martyn’s Persian Testament called forth, in 1816, two Bulls from Pope Pius VIII., addressed to the Archbishops of Gnesne and Moghilev, within the Russian dominions, and letters from the Propaganda College at Rome to the Vicars Apostolic and Missionaries in Persia, Armenia, and other parts of the East. Wherever the Persian language was known the people were warned ‘against a version recently made into the Persian idiom.’ The Archbishops were told ‘that Bibles printed by heretics are numbered among the prohibited books by the rules of the Index (Nos. II. and III.), for it is evident, from experience, that from the Holy Scriptures which are published in the vulgar tongue, more injury than good has arisen through the temerity of men.’ Bible Societies in Russia and Great Britain are denounced as a ‘most crafty device, by which the very foundations of religion are undermined.’ So the Latin Church has ever put from it ‘The Great Missionary’ which the Reformation was the first to restore to Christendom and the world, and Henry Martyn gave to the Mohammedans in their own tongue.

CHAPTER XIII: IN PERSIA AND TURKEY—TABREEZ TO TOKAT AND THE TOMB

On the evening of September 2, 1812, Henry Martyn left Tabreez for Constantinople, on what he describes as ‘my long journey of thirteen hundred miles.’ The route marked out for him by Sir Gore Ouseley, who gave him letters to the Turkish governors of Erivan, Kars, and Erzroom, and to the British Minister at Constantinople, as well as to the Armenian Patriarch and Bishop Nestus at Etchmiatzin, was the old Roman road into Central Asia. Professor W.M. Ramsay describes it as clearly marked by Nature,[85] and still one of the most important trade routes. It was the safest and speediest, as well as the least forbidding. ‘Sir Gore, wishing me not to travel in the same unprotected way I had done, procured from the Prince a mehmandar for me, together with an order for the use of chappar horses all the way to Erivan.’ Thence he was passed on to Kars similarly attended, and thence to Erzroom. He took with him ‘near three hundred tomans in money,’ or about 130l. On the eve of his departure he wrote: ‘The delightful thought of being brought to the borders of Europe, without sustaining any injury, contributed more than anything else, I believe, to restore my health and spirits.’

But travelling in Persia and Asiatic Turkey, even at the best and for the strongest, is necessarily a work of hardship. The chappar, or post-stations, occur at a distance of from twenty to twenty-five miles, measured by the farsakh, the old parasang in Greek phrase, of four miles each. What Mrs. Bishop has recently described has always been true: ‘The custom is to ride through all the hours of daylight, whenever horses are to be got, doing from sixty to ninety miles a day.’ Henry Martyn rode his own horses, and his party of two Armenian servants (a groom and Turkish interpreter), with the mehmandar, had the post-horses. Out of the cities he had to trust, for rest and accommodation, to the post-stations, which at the best were enclosures of mud walls on three sides, deep in manure, with stabling on two sides, and two dark rooms at the entrance for the servants. Occasionally an erection (balakhana) above the gateway is available for the master, but how seldom Martyn was lodged in any way better than the animals, will be seen from his Journal. He had travelled in this way, in the heats of two summers, from Bushire to Shiraz, and from Shiraz to Tabreez, the whole extent of the Persian plateau from south to north. He had nearly died at Tabreez.

Yet now, with his Persian New Testament ready for the press and his longing for Lydia, he again set forth, sustained by ‘the delightful thought.’ With intensest interest we follow him in every step of his march north-west through the Persian province of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Eastern Asia Minor, the unconquerable spirit sustaining the feeble body for forty-five days, as Chrysostom’s was fed in his southern journey to the same place of departure almost within sight of the Euxine Sea.

1812, September 2.—At sunset we left the western gate of Tabreez behind us. The horses proved to be sorry animals. It was midnight before we arrived at Sangla, a village in the middle of the plain of Tabreez. There they procured me a place in the Zabit’s house. I slept till after sunrise of the 3rd, and did not choose to proceed at such an hour; so I passed most of the day in my room. At three in the afternoon proceeded towards Sofian. My health being again restored, through infinite and unbounded mercy, I was able to look round the creation with calm delight. The plain of Tabreez, towards the west and south-west, stretches away to an immense distance, and is bounded in these directions by mountains so remote as to appear, from their soft blue, to blend with the skies. The baggage having been sent on before, I ambled on with my mehmandar, looking all around me, and especially towards the distant hills, with gratitude and joy. Oh! it is necessary to have been confined to a bed of sickness to know the delight of moving freely through the works of God, with the senses left at liberty to enjoy their proper object. My attendant not being very conversant with Persian, we rode silently along; for my part, I could not have enjoyed any companion so much as I did my own feelings. At sunset we reached Sofian, a village with gardens, at the north-west end of the plain, which is usually the first stage from Tabreez. The Zabit was in his corn-field, under a little tent, inspecting his labourers, who were cutting the straw fine, so as to be fit to be eaten by cattle; this was done by drawing over it a cylinder, armed with blades of a triangular form, placed in different planes, so that their vertices should coincide in the cylinder.

The Zabit paid me no attention, but sent a man to show me a place to sleep in, who took me to one with only three walls. I demanded another with four, and was accordingly conducted to a weaver’s, where, notwithstanding the mosquitoes and other vermin, I passed the night comfortably enough. On my offering money, the mehmandar interfered, and said that if it were known that I had given money he should be ruined, and added: ‘They, indeed, dare not take it;’ but this I did not find to be the case.

September 4.—At sunrise mounted my horse, and proceeded north-west, through a pass in the mountains, towards Murun. By the way I sat down by the brook, and there ate my bread and raisins, and drank of the crystal stream; but either the coldness of this unusual breakfast, or the riding after it, did not at all agree with me. The heat oppressed me much, and the road seemed intolerably tedious. At last we got out from among the mountains, and saw the village of Murun, in a fine valley on the right. It was about eleven o’clock when we reached it. As the mehmandar could not immediately find a place to put me in, we had a complete view of this village. They stared at my European dress, but no disrespect was shown. I was deposited at last with a Khan, who was seated in a place with three walls. Not at all disposed to pass the day in company, as well as exposed, I asked for another room, on which I was shown to the stable, where there was a little place partitioned off, but so as to admit a view of the horses. The smell of the stable, though not in general disagreeable to me, was so strong that I was quite unwell, and strangely dispirited and melancholy. Immediately after dinner I fell fast asleep and slept four hours, after which I rose and ordered them to prepare for the next journey. The horses being changed here, it was some time before they were brought, but, by exerting myself, we moved off by midnight. It was a most mild and delightful night, and the pure air, after the smell of the stable, was quite reviving. For once, also, I travelled all the way without being sleepy; and beguiled the hours of the way by thinking of the 14th Psalm, especially the connection of the last three verses with the preceding.

September 5.—In five hours we were just on the hills which face the pass out of the valley of Murun (Marand), and in four hours and a half more emerged from between the two ridges of mountains into the valley of Gurjur. Gurjur is eight parasangs from Murun, and our course to it was nearly due north. This long march was far from being a fatiguing one. The air, the road, and my spirits were good. Here I was well accommodated, but had to mourn over my impatient temper towards my servants; there is nothing that disturbs my peace so much. How much more noble and godlike to bear with calmness, and observe with pity, rather than with anger, the failings and offences of others! Oh, that I may, through grace, be enabled to recollect myself in the time of temptation! Oh, that the Spirit of God may check my folly, and at such times bring the lowly Saviour to my view!

September 6.—Soon after twelve we started with fresh horses, and came to the Aras, or Araxes, distant two parasangs, and about as broad as the Isis, and a current as strong as that of the Ganges. The ferry-boat being on the north side, I lay down to sleep till it came; but observing my servants do the same, I was obliged to get up and exert myself. It dawned, however, before we got over. The boat was a huge fabric in the form of a rhombus. The ferryman had only a stick to push with; an oar, I dare say, he had never seen or heard of, and many of my train had probably never floated before;—so alien is a Persian from everything that belongs to shipping. We landed safely on the other side in about two minutes. We were four hours in reaching Nakshan, and for half an hour more I was led from street to street, till at last I was lodged in a wash-house belonging to a great man, a corner of which was cleaned out for me. It was near noon and my baggage was not arrived, so that I was obliged to go without my breakfast, which was hard after a ride of four hours in the sun. The baggage was delayed so long that I began to fear; at last, however, it arrived. All the afternoon I slept, and at sunset arose, and continued wakeful till midnight, when I aroused my people, and with fresh horses set out again. We travelled till sunrise. I scarcely perceived that we had been moving, a Hebrew word in the 16th Psalm having led me gradually into speculations on the eighth conjugation of the Arabic verb. I am glad my philological curiosity is revived, as my mind will be less liable to idleness.

September 7.—Arrived at Khok, a poor village, distant five and a half parasangs from Nakshan, nearly west. I should have mentioned that, on descending into the plain of Nakshan, my attention was arrested by the appearance of a hoary mountain opposite to us at the other end, rising so high above the rest that they sank into insignificance. It was truly sublime, and the interest it excited was not lessened when, on inquiring its name, I was told it was Agri, or Ararat. Thus I saw two remarkable objects in one day, the Araxes and Ararat. At four in the afternoon we set out for Shurour. The evening was pleasant; the ground over which we passed was full of rich cultivation and verdure, watered by many a stream, and containing forty villages, most of them with the usual appendage of gardens. To add to the scene, the great Ararat was on our left. On the peak of that hill the whole Church was once contained; it was now spread far and wide, even to the ends of the earth, but the ancient vicinity of it knows it no more. I fancied many a spot where Noah perhaps offered his sacrifices; and the promise of God, that seed-time and harvest should not cease, appeared to me to be more exactly fulfilled in the agreeable plain in which it was spoken than elsewhere, as I had not seen such fertility in any part of the Shah’s dominions. Here the blessed saint landed in a new world; so may I, safe in Christ, out-ride the storm of life, and land at last on one of the everlasting hills!

Night coming on we lost our way, and got intercepted by some deep ravines, into one of which the horse that carried my trunks sunk so deep that the water got into one of them, wetted the linen and spoiled some books. Finding it in vain to attempt gaining our munzil, we went to another village, where, after a long delay, two aged men with silver beards opened their house to us. Though it was near midnight I had a fire lighted to dry my books, took some coffee and sunk into deep sleep; from which awaking at the earliest dawn of

September 8, I roused the people, and had a delightful ride of one parasang to Shurour, distant four parasangs from Khok. Here I was accommodated by the great man with a stable, or winter room, for they built it in such a strange vicinity in order to have it warm in winter. At present, while the weather is still hot, the smell is at times overpowering. At eleven at night we moved off, with fresh horses, for Duwala; but though we had guides in abundance, we were not able to extricate ourselves from the ravines with which this village is surrounded. Procuring another man from a village we happened to wander into, we at last made our way, through grass and mire, to the pass, which led us to a country as dry as the one we had left was wet. Ararat was now quite near; at the foot of it is Duwala, six parasangs from Nakshan, where we arrived at seven in the morning of

September 9.—As I had been thinking all night of a Hebrew letter, I perceived little of the tediousness of the way. I tried also some difficulties in the 16th Psalm without being able to master them. All day on the 15th and 16th Psalms, and gained some light into the difficulties. The villagers not bringing the horses in time, we were not able to go on at night, but I was not much concerned, as I thereby gained some rest.

September 10.—All day at the village writing down notes on the 15th and 16th Psalms. Moved at midnight, and arrived early in the morning at Erivan.

September 11.—I alighted at Hosein Khan, the governor’s palace, as it may be called, for he seems to live in a style equal to that of a prince. Indeed, commanding a fortress on the frontier, within six hours of the Russians, he is entrusted with a considerable force, and is nearly independent of the Shah. After sleeping two hours I was summoned to his presence. He at first took no notice of me, but continued reading his Koran, it being the Mohurrum. After a compliment or two he resumed his devotions. The next ceremony was to exchange a rich shawl dress for a still richer pelisse, on pretence of its being cold. The next display was to call for his physician, who, after respectfully feeling his pulse, stood on one side: this was to show that he had a domestic physician. His servants were most richly clad. My letter from the ambassador, which till now had lain neglected on the ground, was opened and read by a moonshi. He heard with great interest what Sir Gore had written about the translation of the Gospels. After this he was very kind and attentive, and sent for Lieutenant M., of the Engineers, who was stationed, with two sergeants, at the fort. He ordered for me a mehmandar, a guard, and four horses with which a Turk had just come from Kars.

September 12.—The horses not being ready, I rode alone and found my way to Etchmiatzin (or Three Churches[86]), two and a half parasangs distant. Directing my course to the largest church, I found it enclosed by some other buildings and a wall. Within the entrance I found a large court, with monks cowled and gowned moving about. On seeing my Armenian letters they brought me to the Patriarch’s lodge, where I found two bishops, one of whom was Nestus, at breakfast on pilaos, kuwabs, wine, arrak, etc., and Serst (Serope) with them. As he spoke English, French, and Italian, I had no difficulty in communicating with my hosts.

Serope, considering the danger to which the cathedral-seat is exposed from its situation between Russia, Persia, and Turkey, is for building a college at Tiflis. The errors and superstitions of his people were the subject of Serope’s conversation the whole morning, and seemed to be the occasion of real grief to him. He intended, he said, after a few more months’ trial of what he could do here, to retire to India, and there write and print some works in Armenian, tending to enlighten the people with regard to religion, in order to introduce a reform. I said all I could to encourage him in such a blessed work: promising him every aid from the English, and proving to him, from the example of Luther and the other European reformers, that, however arduous the work might seem, God would surely be with him to help him. I mentioned the awful neglect of the Armenian clergy in never preaching; as thereby the glad tidings of a Saviour were never proclaimed. He made no reply to this, but that ‘it was to be lamented, as the people were never called away from vice.’

September 13.—I asked Serope about the 16th Psalm in the Armenian version; he translated it into correct Latin. In the afternoon I waited on the Patriarch; it was a visit of great ceremony. He was reclining on a sort of throne, placed in the middle of the room. All stood except the two senior bishops; a chair was set for me on the other side, close to the Patriarch; at my right hand stood Serope, to interpret. The Patriarch had a dignified rather than a venerable appearance. His conversation consisted in protestations of sincere attachment, in expressions of his hopes of deliverance from the Mohammedan yoke, and inquiries about my translations of the Scriptures; and he begged me to consider myself as at home in the monastery. Indeed, their attention and kindness are unbounded: Nestus and Serope anticipate my every wish. I told the Patriarch that I was so happy in being here that, did duty permit, I could almost be willing to become a monk with them. He smiled, and fearing, perhaps, that I was in earnest, said that they had quite enough. Their number is a hundred, I think. The church was immensely rich till about ten years ago, when, by quarrels between two contending patriarchs, one of whom is still in the monastery in disgrace, most of their money was expended in referring their disputes to the Mohammedans as arbitrators. There is no difficulty, however, in replenishing their coffers: their merchants in India are entirely at their command.

September 15.—Spent the day in preparing, with Serope, for the mode of travelling in Turkey. All my heavy and expensive preparations at Tabreez prove to be incumbrances which must be left behind: my trunks were exchanged for bags; and my portable table and chair, several books, large supplies of sugar, etc., were condemned to be left behind. My humble equipments were considered as too mean for an English gentleman; so Serope gave me an English bridle and saddle. The roads in Turkey being much more infested with robbers than those of Persia, a sword was brought for me.

September 16.—Upon the whole I hardly know what hopes to entertain from the projects of Serope. He is bold, authoritative, and very able; still only thirty-one years of age; but then he is not spiritual: perhaps this was the state of Luther himself at first. It is an interesting time in the world; all things proclaim the approach of the kingdom of God, and Armenia is not forgotten. There is a monastery of Armenian Catholics at Venice, which they employ merely in printing the Psalter, book of prayers, etc. Serope intends addressing his first work to them, as they are the most able divines of the Armenians, to argue them back from the Roman Catholic communion, in which case he thinks they would co-operate with him cordially; being as much concerned as himself at the gross ignorance of their countrymen. The Archbishop of Astrakhan has a press, also an agent at Madras and one at Constantinople, printing the Scriptures and books of prayers: there is none at Etchmiatzin. At Constantinople are three or four fellow-collegians of Serope, educated as well as he by the Propaganda, who used to entertain the same sentiments as he, and would, he thinks, declare them if he would begin.

September 17.—At six in the morning, accompanied by Serope, one bishop, the secretary, and several servants of the monastery, I left Etchmiatzin. My party now consisted of two men from the governor of Erivan, a mehmandar, and a guard; my servant Sergius, for whom the monks interceded, as he had some business at Constantinople; one trusty servant from the monastery, Melcom, who carried my money; and two baggage-horses with their owners. The monks soon returned, and we pursued our way over the plain of Ararat. At twelve o’clock reached Quila Gazki, about six parasangs from Etchmiatzin. The mehmandar rode on, and got a good place for me.

September 18.—Rose with the dawn, in hopes of going this stage before breakfast, but the horses were not ready. I set off at eight, fearing no sun, though I found it at times very oppressive when there was no wind. At the end of three hours we left the plain of Ararat, the last of the plains of modern Persia in this quarter. Meeting here with the Araxes again, I undressed and plunged into the stream.[87] While hastening forward with the trusty Melcom to rejoin my party, we were overtaken by a spearman with a lance of formidable length. I did not think it likely that one man would venture to attack two, both armed; but the spot was a noted one for robbers, and very well calculated, by its solitariness, for deeds of privacy; however, he was friendly enough. He had, however, nearly done me a mischief. On the bank of the river we sprang a covey of partridges; instantly he laid his lance under him across the horse’s back, and fired a horse-pistol at them. His horse, starting at the report, came upon mine, with the point of the spear directly towards me, so that I thought a wound for myself or horse was inevitable; but the spear passed under my horse. We were to have gone to Haji-Buhirem, but finding the head-man of it at a village a few furlongs nearer, we stopped there. We found him in a shed outside the walls, reading his Koran, with his sword, gun, and pistol by his side. He was a good-natured farmer-looking man, and spoke in Persian. He chanted the Arabic with great readiness, and asked me whether I knew what that book was: ‘Nothing less than the great Koran!’

September 19.—Left the village at seven in the morning, and as the stage was reputed to be very dangerous, owing to the vicinity of the famous Kara Beg, my mehmandar took three armed men from the village in addition to the one we brought from Erivan. We continued going along through the pass two or three parasangs, and crossed the Araxes three times. We then ascended the mountains on the north by a road, if not so steep, yet as long and difficult as any of the kotuls of Bushire. On the top we found a table-land, along which we moved many a tedious mile, expecting every minute that we should have a view of a fine champaign country below; but dale followed dale, apparently in endless succession, and though at such a height there was very little air to relieve the heat, and nothing to be seen but barren rocks. One part, however, must be excepted, where the prospect opened to the north, and we had a view of the Russian territory, so that we saw at once, Persia, Russia, and Turkey. At length we came to an Armenian village, situated in a hollow of these mountains, on a declivity. The village presented a singular appearance, being filled with conical piles of peat, for they have no fire-wood. Around there was a great deal of cultivation, chiefly corn. Most of the low land from Tabreez to this place is planted with cotton, Palma Christi, and rice. This is the first village in Turkey; not a Persian cap was to be seen, the respectable people wore a red Turkish cap. The great man of the village paid me a visit; he was a young Mussulman, and took care of all my Mussulman attendants; but he left me and my Armenians, where he found us, at the house of an Armenian, without offering his services. I was rather uncomfortably lodged, my room being a thoroughfare for horses, cows, buffaloes, and sheep. Almost all the village came to look at me. The name of this village is Fiwik, it is distant six parasangs from the last; but we were eight hours accomplishing it, and a kafila would have been twelve. We arrived at three o’clock; both horses and men much fatigued.

September 20.—From daybreak to sunrise I walked, then breakfasted and set out. Our course lay north, over a mountain, and here danger was apprehended. It was, indeed, dismally solitary all around. The appearance of an old castle on the top of a crag was the first occasion on which our guard got their pieces ready, and one rode forward to reconnoitre: but all there was as silent as the grave. At last, after travelling five hours, we saw some men: our guard again took their places in front. Our fears were soon removed by seeing carts and oxen. Not so the opposite party: for my baggage was so small as not to be easily perceived. They halted therefore at the bottom, towards which we were both descending, and those of them who had guns advanced in front and hailed us. We answered peaceably; but they, still distrusting us as we advanced nearer, cocked their pieces. Soon, however, we came to a parley. They were Armenians, bringing wood from Kars to their village in the mountain: they were hardy, fine young men, and some old men who were with them were particularly venerable. The dangerous spots being passed through, my party began to sport with their horses: galloping across the path, brandishing their spears or sticks, they darted them just at that moment of wheeling round their horses, as if that motion gave them an advantage. It struck me that this, probably, was the mode of fighting of the ancient Parthians which made them so terrible in flight. Presently after these gambols the appearance of some poor countrymen with their carts put into their heads another kind of sport; for knowing, from the ill-fame of the spot, that we should be easily taken for robbers, four of them galloped forward, and by the time we reached them one of the carters was opening a bag to give them something. I was, of course, very much displeased, and made signs to him not to do it. I then told them all, as we quickly pursued our course, that such kind of sport was not allowed in England; they said it was the Persian custom. We arrived at length at Ghanikew, having ridden six hours and a half without intermission. The mehmandar was for changing his route continually, either from real or pretended fear. One of the Kara Beg’s men saw me at the village last night, and as he would probably get intelligence of my pretended route, it was desirable to elude him. But after all we went the shortest way, through the midst of danger, if there was any, and a gracious Providence kept all mischief at a distance. Ghanikew is only two parasangs from Kars, but I stopped there, as I saw it was more agreeable to the people; besides which I wished to have a ride before breakfast. I was lodged in a stable-room; but very much at my ease, as none of the people of the village could come at me without passing through the house.

September 21.—Rode into Kars. Its appearance is quite European, not only at a distance but within. The houses all of stone; streets with carts passing; some of the houses open to the street; the fort on an uncommonly high rock; such a burying-ground I never saw, there must be thousands of gravestones. The mehmandar carried me directly to the governor, who, having just finished his breakfast, was of course asleep, and could not be disturbed; but his head-man carried me to an Armenian’s house, with orders to live at free quarter there. The room at the Armenian’s was an excellent one, upstairs, facing the street, fort, and river, with a bow containing five windows under which were cushions. As soon as the Pacha was visible, the chief Armenian of Kars, to whom I had a letter from Bishop Nestus, his relation, waited upon him on my business. On looking over my letters of recommendation from Sir Gore Ouseley, I found there was none for Abdallah, the Pacha of Kars; however, the letter to the Governor of Erivan secured all I wanted. He sent to say I was welcome; that if I liked to stay a few days he should be happy, but that if I was determined to go on to-morrow, the necessary horses and ten men for a guard were all ready. As no wish was expressed of seeing me, I was of course silent upon that subject.

September 22.—Promises were made that everything should be ready at sunrise, but it was half-past nine before we started, and no guard present but the Tartar. He presently began to show his nature by flogging the baggage-horse with his long whip, as one who was not disposed to allow loitering; but one of the poor beasts presently fell with his load at full length over a piece of timber lying in the road. While this was setting to rights, the people gathered about me, and seemed more engaged with my Russian boots than with any other part of my dress. We moved south-west, and after five hours and a half reached Joula. The Tartar rode forward and got the coffee-room at the post-house ready. The coffee-room has one side railed and covered with cushions, and on the opposite side cushions on the ground; the rest of the room was left with bare stones and timbers. As the wind blew very cold yesterday, and I had caught cold, the Tartar ordered a great fire to be made. In this room I should have been very much to my satisfaction, had not the Tartar taken part of the same bench, and many other people made use of it as a public room. They were continually consulting my watch to know how near the hour of eating approached. It was evident that the Tartar was the great man here; he took the best place for himself; a dinner of four or five dishes was laid before him. When I asked for eggs they brought me rotten ones; for butter they brought me ghee. The idle people of the village came all night and smoked till morning. It was very cold, there being a hoar frost.

September 23.—Our way to-day lay through a forest of firs, and the variety of prospect it afforded, of hill and dale, wood and lawn, was beautiful and romantic. No mark of human workmanship was anywhere visible for miles, except where some trees had fallen by the stroke of the woodman. We saw at last a few huts in the thickest clumps, which was all we saw of the Koords, for fear of whom I was attended by ten armed horsemen. We frightened a company of villagers again to-day. They were bringing wood and grass from the forest, and on seeing us drew up. One of our party advanced and fired; such a rash piece of sport I thought must have been followed by serious mischief, but all passed off very well. With the forest I was delighted; the clear streams in the valleys, the lofty trees crowning the summit of the hills, the smooth paths winding away and losing themselves in the dark woods, and, above all, the solitude that reigned throughout, composed a scene which tended to harmonise and solemnise the mind. What displays of taste and magnificence are found occasionally on this ruined earth! Nothing was wanting to-day but the absence of the Turks, to avoid the sight and sound of whom I rode on. After a ride of nine hours and a half, we reached Mijingui, in the territory of Erzroom, and having resolved not to be annoyed in the same way as last night, I left the Tartar in the undisturbed possession of the post-house, and took up my quarters at an Armenian’s, where, in the stable-room, I expected to be left alone; but a Georgian young man, on his way from Etchmiatzin, going on pilgrimage to Moosk, where John the Baptist is supposed to be buried, presumed on his assiduous attentions to me, and contrived to get a place for himself in the same room.

September 24.—A long and sultry march over many a hill and vale. In the way, two hours from the last stage, is a hot spring; the water fills a pool, having four porches. The porches instantly reminded me of Bethesda’s pool: they were semicircular arches about six feet deep, intended seemingly for shelter from the sun. In them all the party undressed and bathed. The Tartar, to enjoy himself more perfectly, had his kalean to smoke while up to his chin in water. We saw nothing else on the road to-day but a large and opulent family of Armenians—men, women, and children—in carts and carriages returning from a pilgrimage to Moosk. After eleven hours and a half, including the hour spent at the warm spring, we were overtaken by the dusk; so the Tartar brought us to Oghoomra, where I was placed in an Armenian’s stable-room.

September 25.—Went round to Husar-Quile, where we changed horses. I was surprised to find so strong a fort and so large a town. From thence we were five hours and a half reaching the entrance of Erzroom. All was busy and moving in the streets and shops—crowds passing along. Those who caught a sight of us were at a loss to define me. My Persian attendants and the lower part of the dress made me appear Persian; but the rest of my dress was new, for those only who had travelled knew it to be European. They were rather disposed, I thought, to be uncivil, but the two persons who preceded us kept all in order. I felt myself in a Turkish town; the red cap, and stateliness, and rich dress, and variety of turbans was realised as I had seen it in pictures. There are here four thousand Armenian families and but one church; there are scarcely any Catholics, and they have no church.

September 29.—Left Erzroom with a Tartar and his son at two in the afternoon. We moved to a village, where I was attacked with fever and ague; the Tartar’s son was also taken ill and obliged to return.

September 30.—Travelled first to Ashgula, where we changed horses, and from thence to Purnugaban, where we halted for the night. I took nothing all day but tea, and was rather better, but head-ache and loss of appetite depressed my spirits; yet my soul rests in Him who is ‘an anchor to the soul, sure and steadfast,’ which, though not seen, keeps me fast.

October 1.—Marched over a mountainous tract; we were out from seven in the morning till eight at night. After sitting a little by the fire, I was near fainting from sickness. My depression of spirits led me to the throne of grace as a sinful abject worm. When I thought of myself and my transgressions, I could find no text so cheering as ‘My ways are not as your ways.’ From the men who accompanied Sir Gore Ouseley to Constantinople I learned that the plague was raging at that place, and thousands dying every day. One of the Persians had died of it. They added that the inhabitants of Tokat were flying from their town from the same cause. Thus I am passing inevitably into imminent danger. O Lord, Thy will be done! Living or dying, remember me!

October 2.—Some hours before day I sent to tell the Tartar I was ready, but Hassan Aga was for once riveted to his bed. However, at eight, having got strong horses, he set off at a great rate; and over the level ground he made us gallop as fast as the horses would go to Chifflik, where we arrived at sunset. I was lodged, at my request, in the stables of the post-house, not liking the scrutinising impudence of the fellows who frequent the coffee-room. As soon as it began to grow a little cold the ague came on, and then the fever; after which I had a sleep, which let me know too plainly the disorder of my frame. In the night Hassan sent to summon me away, but I was quite unable to move. Finding me still in bed at the dawn, he began to storm furiously at my detaining him so long, but I quietly let him spend his ire, ate my breakfast composedly, and set out at eight. He seemed determined to make up for the delay, for we flew over hill and dale to Sherean, where he changed horses. From thence we travelled all the rest of the day and all night; it rained most of the time. Soon after sunset the ague came on again, which, in my wet state, was very trying; I hardly knew how to keep my life in me. About that time there was a village at hand, but Hassan had no mercy. At one in the morning we found two men under a wain, with a good fire; they could not keep the rain out, but their fire was acceptable. I dried my lower extremities, allayed the fever by drinking a good deal of water, and went on. We had little rain, but the night was pitchy dark so that I could not see the road under my horse’s feet. However, God being mercifully pleased to alleviate my bodily suffering, I went on contentedly to the munzil, where we arrived at break of day. After sleeping three or four hours, I was visited by an Armenian merchant for whom I had a letter. Hassan was in great fear of being arrested here; the Governor of the city had vowed to make an example of him for riding to death a horse belonging to a man of this place. He begged that I would shelter him in case of danger; his being claimed by an Englishman, he said, would be a sufficient security. I found, however, that I had no occasion to interfere. He hurried me away from this place without delay, and galloped furiously towards a village, which, he said, was four hours distant, which was all I could undertake in my present weak state; but village after village did he pass till, night coming on, and no signs of another, I suspected that he was carrying me on to the munzil; so I got off my horse and sat upon the ground, and told him ‘I neither could nor would go any farther.’ He stormed, but I was immovable, till, a light appearing at a distance, I mounted my horse and made towards it, leaving him to follow or not, as he pleased. He brought in the party, but would not exert himself to get a place for me. They brought me to an open verandah, but Sergius told them I wanted a place in which to be alone. This seemed very offensive to them. ‘And why must he be alone?’ they asked, ascribing this desire of mine to pride, I suppose. Tempted at last by money, they brought me to a stable-room, and Hassan and a number of others planted themselves there with me. My fever here increased to a violent degree; the heat in my eyes and forehead was so great that the fire almost made me frantic. I entreated that it might be put out, or that I might be carried out of doors. Neither was attended to; my servant, who, from my sitting in that strange way on the ground, believed me delirious, was deaf to all I said. At last I pushed my head among the luggage, and lodged it on the damp ground, and slept.

From Sherean, or Sheheran, out of which, after a night of burning fever in the stable of the Chifflik post-station, Hassan furiously compelled the dying man to ride, is a mountain track of a hundred and seventy miles to Tokat. ‘How wearisome and painful must have been his journey over the mountains and valleys!’ wrote the American missionaries, Eli Smith and H.O. Dwight, eighteen years after, when, in the vigour of health and at a better season, they made the same journey, called by his example and memory, to found the Mission to Eastern Anatolia. Think of him, wasting away from consumption, racked with ague, burning with fever, as, pressed by the merciless Turk, he ‘flew over hill and dale’ all the third day of October, from eight in the morning, then changed horses at Sheheran, then ‘travelled all the rest of the day and all night’ of the 3rd-4th, while the rain fell amid darkness that could be felt; then, after three or four hours’ sleep, on break of day again hurried on, lest his guide should be arrested for a former offence of ‘riding to death a horse belonging to a man of this place,’ all the fourth day, till almost expiring he sat on the ground and found refuge in a stable, refusing to go farther. ‘At last I pushed my head among the luggage, and lodged it on the damp ground, and slept.’ Since Chrysostom’s ride in the same region, the Church of Christ has seen no torture of a saint like that.

October 5.—Preserving mercy made me see the light of another morning. The sleep had refreshed me, but I was feeble and shaken; yet the merciless Hassan hurried me off. The munzil, however, not being distant, I reached it without much difficulty. I expected to have found it another strong fort at the end of the pass, but it is a poor little village within the jaws of the mountain. I was pretty well lodged, and felt tolerably well till a little after sunset, when the ague came on with a violence I had never before experienced; I felt as if in a palsy, my teeth chattering and my whole frame violently shaken. Aga Hosein and another Persian, on their way here from Constantinople, going to Abbas Mirza whom I had just before been visiting, came hastily to render me assistance if they could. These Persians appear quite brotherly after the Turks. While they pitied me, Hassan sat in perfect indifference, ruminating on the further delay this was likely to occasion. The cold fit, after continuing two or three hours, was followed by a fever, which lasted the whole night and prevented sleep.

October 6.—No horses being to be had, I had an unexpected repose. I sat in the orchard and thought with sweet comfort and peace of my God, in solitude my Company, my Friend, and Comforter. Oh! when shall time give place to eternity! When shall appear that new heaven and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness! There, there shall in no wise 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.

Sitting in the orchard, thinking with sweet comfort and peace of his God, and longing for that new heaven and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness—such is the last sight we have of Henry Martyn, on October 6, 1812. Two brotherly Persians, on their way from Constantinople, had sought to minister to him the day before. The Turkish Hassan, himself afraid of justice, ‘sat in perfect indifference, ruminating on the further delay’ caused by his illness. What happened when the dying apostle could write no more—in the ten days till God took him on October 16—who shall now tell? Did the Turk hurry him, as he was expiring, into Tokat, from ‘that poor little village within the jaws of the mountain,’ in which he was ‘pretty well lodged,’ or did his indomitable spirit give the poor body strength to ride into the town; and did the plague, then raging, complete what hereditary disease and fever had done? He had at least his Armenian servants, the ‘trusty’ Melcom and Sergius, with him to minister to his wants. He had written to Lydia of his journey to her by Constantinople, Syria, and Malta, saying: ‘Do I dream, that I venture to think and write of such an event as that!... Soon we shall have occasion for pen and ink no more, but I trust I shall shortly see thee face to face.’ He dreamed indeed; for He who is the only Love which is no dream, but the one transforming, abiding, absorbing reality, called him, while yet a youth of thirty-one, home to Himself.

CHAPTER XIV: THE TWO RESTING-PLACES—TOKAT AND BREAGE

The Armenians were a comparatively strong community in Tokat, where they formed a third of the population, for whom there were seven churches and thirty priests. Henry Martyn was known as a friend of this, the oldest church in Asia. He had sought out their priests and families all over Persia and the Araxes valley, and ministered to many of this oppressed people. The two servants with whom he had journeyed as far as Tokat were Armenians, and he especially trusted Sergius, whom he had engaged at Etchmiatzin, as one about to visit Constantinople, and not unfamiliar with the route. The body of the wearied traveller to the city of the Great King was laid to rest in the extensive cemetery of the church of Karasoon Manoog. Later research revealed the fact that the body was buried in simple and reverent Oriental fashion—not in a coffin, but in such a white winding-sheet as that which for forty hours enwrapped the Crucified. The story afterwards went that the chaplain-missionary of the East India Company was carried to the tomb with all the honours of an Armenian archbishop. That is most probable, for the Armenian clergy of Calcutta, Bushire, and Shiraz always gave him priestly honours during life. The other tradition—that his burial was hardly decent—has arisen from the circumstances that attended the search for his grave and the removal of his dust to the American Mission Cemetery forty years afterwards.

Far away, in the most distant corner of Asiatic Turkey, or Turkish Arabia, at Baghdad, there was one[88] Anglo-Indian scholar and Christian, who hastened to discharge the pious duty of carving on a limestone slab above the precious remains a Latin inscription. That was the East India Company’s civil servant, James Claudius Rich. Born near Dijon in 1787—six years after Martyn—and taken in his infancy to Bristol, he there manifested such extraordinary linguistic powers, even in boyhood, that Joshua Marshman, before he went out to Serampore, helped him with books and introduced him to Dr. Ryland. Robert Hall formed such an opinion of his powers, which the earliest Orientalist, Sir Charles Wilkins, tested, that he received an appointment to the Bombay Civil Service, and was introduced to Sir James Mackintosh. He went to India overland through Turkish Asia, disguised as a Georgian Turk, so that the Mecca pilgrims at Damascus did not discover him. He married Sir James’s eldest daughter,[89] and had set out as the Company’s Resident at Baghdad and Busrah, not long before Martyn arrived at Bombay. The two men never met, for Martyn’s attempt to enter Arabia from Persia through Baghdad was stopped. But the young Orientalist watched Martyn’s career with admiration, and seems to have followed his footsteps. In 1821 he himself was cut off by cholera, while ministering to the plague-stricken in Shiraz, leaving a name imperishably associated with that of Sir James Mackintosh, and dear to all Oriental scholars and travellers, but henceforth to be remembered above all as that of the man who was the first to perpetuate the memory of Henry Martyn.[90]

The sacred spot was immediately at the foot of slaty rocks down which the winter snows and summer rains washed enough of stony soil every year to cover up the horizontal slab. The first to visit it with reverent steps after the pious commission of Claudius James Rich had been executed, was Sir Robert Ker Porter. Although only a few years had elapsed, he seems to have failed to see the inscription which fitly commemorated the ‘Sacerdos ac Missionarius Anglorum,’ so that he thus beautifully wrote: ‘His remains sleep in a grave as humble as his own meekness; but while that high pyramidal hill, marked with its mouldering ruins of heathen ages, points to the sky, every European traveller must see in it their honoured countryman’s monument.’

In 1830, when the American Board’s missionaries, Eli Smith and H.G.O. Dwight, visited Tokat, they had little difficulty in finding the spot, from which they wrote: ‘An appropriate Latin inscription is all that distinguishes his tomb from the tombs of the Armenians who sleep by his side.’[91] They urged their Board to make Tokat its centre of operations for the people of Second Armenia, as Cæsarea for those of the First and Third Armenia, and Tarsus for those of Cilicia. As they, reversing his northward journey, reached Tabreez sick, they were cared for, first by Dr., afterwards Sir John McNeill, and then by Dr. Cormick, the same physician who healed Martyn of a similar disease when he was at this city. ‘He seemed to have retained the highest opinion of him as a Christian, a companion, and a scholar.’

In 1841 Mr. George Fowler published his Three Years in Persia, in which a chapter is filled with reminiscences of Henry Martyn.

Of this distinguished missionary and champion of the Cross, who fearlessly unfolded his banner and proclaimed Christ amongst the bigoted Mahometans, I have heard much in these countries, having made acquaintance with some persons who knew him, and saw (if I may so say) the last of him. At the General’s table at Erzroom (Paskevitch), I had the honour to meet graffs and princes, consisting of Russians, Georgians, Circassians, Germans, Spaniards, and Persians, all glittering in their stars and orders, such a mélange as is scarcely to be found again under one banner; looking more like a monarch’s levy than anything else. My neighbour was an Armenian bishop, who, with his long flowing hair and beard, and austere habits, the cross being suspended to his girdle, presented a great contrast to the military chiefs. There were many other priests at the table, of whom he was the principal. He addressed me in my native tongue very tolerably, asking if I had known anything of the missionary, Martyn. The name was magic to my ear, and immediately our colloquy became to me of great interest.

The bishop was the Serrafino of whom Martyn speaks in his Journal, I happening at the time to have it with me. He was very superior to the general caste of the Armenian clergy, having been educated at Rome, and had attained many European languages. He made Martyn’s acquaintance at Etchmiatzin, the Armenian monastery at Erivan, where he had gone to pay a visit to the Patriarch or chief of that people, and remained three days to recruit his exhausted strength. He described him to me as being of a very delicate frame, thin, and not quite of the middle stature, a beardless youth, with a countenance beaming with so much benignity as to bespeak an errand of Divine love. Of the affairs of the world he seemed to be so ignorant, that Serrafino was obliged to manage for him respecting his travelling arrangements, money matters, etc. Of the latter he had a good deal with him when he left the monastery, and seemed to be careless, and even profuse, in his expenditure. He was strongly recommended to postpone his journey, but from his extreme impatience to return to England these remonstrances were unavailing. A Tartar was employed to conduct him to Tokat. Serrafino accompanied him for an hour or two on the way—with considerable apprehensions, as he told me, of his ever arriving in his native country.[92] He was greatly surprised, he said, not only to find in him all the ornaments of a refined education, but that he was so eminent a Christian; ‘since (said he) all the English I have hitherto met with, not only make no profession of religion, but live seemingly in contempt of it.’

I endeavoured to convince him that his impression of the English character was in this respect erroneous; that although a Martyn on the Asiatic soil might be deemed a phœnix, yet many such existed in that country which gave him birth; and I instanced to him the Christian philanthropy of my countrymen, which induced them to search the earth’s boundaries to extend their faith. I told him of our immense voluntary taxation to aid the missionaries in that object, and of the numerous Christian associations,—for which the world was scarcely large enough to expend themselves upon.

He listened with great attention, and then threw in the compliment, ‘You English are very difficult to become acquainted with, but when once we know you we can depend on you.’ He complained of some part of Martyn’s Journal referring to himself, respecting his then idea of retiring to India, to write and print some works in the Armenian language, tending to enlighten that people with regard to religion. He said that what followed of the errors and superstitions of the Armenian Church should not have been inserted in the book, nor did he think it would be found in Martyn’s Journal. His complaint rested much on the compilers of the work in this respect; he said, ‘these opinions were not exactly so expressed, and certainly they were not intended to come before the public, whereby they might ultimately be turned against me.’

At Erzroom, on my way to Persia, I had met with an Italian doctor, then in the Pasha’s employ, from whom I heard many interesting particulars respecting Martyn. He was at Tokat at the time of our countryman’s arrival and death, which occurred on October 16, 1812; but whether occasioned by the plague, or from excessive fatigue by the brutal treatment of the Tartar, he could not determine. His remains were decently interred in the Armenian burying-ground, and for a time the circumstance was forgotten. Some years afterwards, a gentleman, at the request of the British ambassador in Constantinople, had a commemorative stone erected to his memory, and application was made to the Armenian bishop to seek the grave for that purpose. He seemed to have forgotten altogether such an occurrence, but referring to some memoranda which he had made of so remarkable a case as that of interring a Feringhi stranger, he was enabled to trace the humble tablet with which he had distinguished it. It is now ornamented with a white slab, stating merely the name, age, and time of death of the deceased.

I had many reminiscences of Martyn, at Marand particularly. I quitted this place at midnight, just at the time and under the circumstances which he describes. ‘It was a most mild and delightful night, and the pure air, after the smell of the stable, was reviving.’ I was equally solitary with himself. I had attached great interest to my resting-place, believing it to have been the same on which Martyn had reposed, from his own description, as it was the usual reception for travellers, the munzil, or post-house. Here I found myself almost alone, as with Aliverdy, my guide, not three words of understanding existed between us. Martyn says, ‘They stared at my European dress, but no disrespect was shown.’ Exactly so with me: the villagers stood around questioning my attendant, who was showing me off, I know not why.

Martyn’s description of the stable was precisely what I found it; thus—‘I was shown into the stable, where there was a little place partitioned off, but so as to admit a view of the horses.’ He was ‘dispirited and melancholy.’ I was not a little touched with this in my solitariness, and sensibly felt with the poet:

Thou dost not know how sad it is to stray

Amid a foreign land, thyself unknown,

And, when o’erwearied with the toilsome day,

To rest at eve and feel thyself alone.

At Khoi, on my return, I witnessed the Persian ceremony related by Martyn in his Journal of the death of Imam Hussein—the anniversary of which is so religiously observed in that country. At Tabreez I heard much of him who was

Faithful found

Among the faithless—faithful only he,

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrifed,

His loyalty he kept—his zeal—his love.

I scarcely remember so bright an ornament to the Christian profession, on heathen land, as this hero of the Cross, who was ‘patient in tribulation, rejoicing in hope;’ and I heard him thus spoken of by those who could estimate the man, and perhaps not appreciate the missionary—‘If ever there was a saint on earth, it was Martyn; and if there be now an angel in heaven, it is Martyn.’ Amidst the contumely of the bigoted Mussulmans, he had much to bear, as to the natural man, amongst whom he was called an ‘Isauvi’ (the term given to Christians).

I know of no people where, to all human calculation, so little prospect opens of planting the Cross. The moollas are by no means averse to religious discussion, and still remember the ‘enlightened infidel,’ as Martyn was called; but so bigoted are these benighted Moslems, and show so much zeal, as I noticed at their Ramazan, that they scorn us, and, I may say, they shame us. It is interesting, when looking at those dark regions, to inquire—when shall the Cross triumph over the Crescent? when shall the riches and power of the Gospel spread over their soil, root up the weeds of error, and produce the fruits of righteousness?

Since the days of Martyn but little effort has been made by the Missionary Society to turn the tide of Christian philanthropy towards this country; but I would say, spite of the discouragements, Send your missionaries to this stronghold of Mahomet; here plant your standard of redeeming love to the wretched devotee of the impostor; to the sometime worshipper of the sun hang out the banner of the Sun of Righteousness; kindle in his bosom the flame of Divine truth, that the Holy Spirit, of which his former god was the emblem, may enlighten and guide him into the fold of Christ.

It is gratifying to find from a paper in the Asiatic Register, the writer of which spent a few weeks at Shiraz, that the love and work of this distinguished missionary, although he saw no fruits from them, have in one instance proved that his labour has not been in vain in the Lord. He relates that in that city he met with an interesting character, Mahomed Rahim, who had been educated for a moolla; a man of considerable learning, and much attached to the English. He found him reading a volume of Cowper’s Poems, and was astonished at the precision with which he expressed himself in English; this led to the subject of religion, when he acknowledged himself to be a Christian, and related the following circumstance.

In the year of the Hegira 1223 there came to this city an Englishman, who taught the religion of Christ with a boldness hitherto unparalleled in Persia, in the midst of much scorn and ill-treatment from the moollas as well as the rabble. He was a beardless youth, and evidently enfeebled by disease; he dwelt among us for more than a year. I was then a decided enemy to infidels, as the Christians are termed by the followers of Mahomet, and I visited this teacher of the despised sect, for the purpose of treating him with scorn, and exposing his doctrines to contempt. Although I persevered in this conduct for some time, I found that every interview not only increased my respect for the individual, but diminished my confidence in the faith in which I was educated. His extreme forbearance towards the violence of his opponents, the calm and yet convincing manner in which he exposed the fallacies and sophistries by which he was assailed (for he spoke Persian excellently), gradually inclined me to listen to his arguments, to inquire dispassionately into the subject of them, and finally to read a tract which he had written in reply to A Defence of Islam, by our chief moollas. The result of my examination was a conviction that the young disputant was right. Shame, or rather fear, withheld me from this opinion; I even avoided the society of the Christian teacher, though he remained in the city so long. Just before he quitted Shiraz I could not refrain from paying him a farewell visit. Our conversation, the memory of which will never fade from the tablet of my mind, sealed my conversion. He gave me a book; it has been my constant companion; the study of it has formed my most delightful occupation; its contents have often consoled me. Upon this he put into my hand a copy of the New Testament in Persian; on one of the blank leaves was written, ‘There is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth. Henry Martyn.’

The memory of Henry Martyn was borne by Mussulmans to Northern Africa, and south to India again. The late Rev. Mr. Oakley, of St. Paul’s, Onslow Square, London, when travelling south of Algiers, met Mohammedans who asked him if he were of the same tribe as Henry Martyn, the man of God whose controversy at Shiraz and books they knew. A Persian of gentle manners, who had a surprising knowledge of the Mesnevi, that inexhaustible fountain of Soofi philosophy, received a copy of Martyn’s Persian New Testament. After fourteen years’ study of it, in silence, he applied to the nearest Christian, an Armenian bishop, for baptism unto Christ. Fearing the consequences, the bishop sent on the catechumen to the Armenian priests at Calcutta, who, equally afraid that the news would reach the Persian authorities, handed him over to the Rev. E.C. Stuart, then the Church Missionary Society’s secretary there, and a Persian scholar, now Bishop of Waiapu. Mr. Stuart took him as his guest, found that he delighted in instruction in the New Testament, and baptized him. Ultimately the convert went back to Persia as one who ‘had gained a sincere faith in Christ from the simple reading of H. Martyn’s Persian Testament.’

In 1842 the learned Bombay chaplain, George Percy Badger, visited Tokat on a mission from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London to the Nestorian tribes of Koordistan. He was guided to Henry Martyn’s first tomb by the Armenian priest who had performed the rites of Christian burial. While Mrs. Badger sought out and planted wild flowers around the stone, her husband, recalling the fervent zeal and ardent piety of the departed, ‘lifted up a secret prayer that God in His mercy would raise up many of a like spirit to labour among the benighted Mohammedans of the East.’[93]

Adopting the report of their missionaries in 1830, the American Board at Boston sent out Dr. Henry J. van Lennep, who first visited Tokat fourteen years after them, and thirty-two years after Henry Martyn’s death. The first object of his attention was the grave, which then he had great difficulty in discovering and identifying. It was this experience, and not any earlier facts, that must have led to the publication of these lines:

No stone marks the spot where these ashes are resting,

No tear has e’er hallowed thy cold, lonely grave,

But the wild warring winds whistle round thy bleak dwelling,

And the fierce wintry torrent sweeps o’er it with its wave.

In his Travels in Little Known Parts of Asia Minor,[94] Dr. van Lennep writes:

The Armenian burying-ground, where he was laid, is situated just outside of the town, and hard by the wretched gipsy quarter which forms its eastern extremity. It is a most barren and desolate spot, overhung by lofty cliffs of clay slate. Its only verdure, besides the rank weeds that spring up between the thickly set graves, consists of two scraggy wild pear-trees nearly dead for lack of moisture. The sexton of the church near by could give no information, and I was left to search for it alone. Beginning at the graves lying at the outer edge of the ground nearest the road, I advanced towards the hill, examining each in its turn, until just at the foot of the overhanging cliffs I came upon a slab of coarse limestone, some forty inches by twenty, bearing the following inscription:

Rev . Vir .

Gug[95] . Martino .

Sacer . Ac . Miss . Anglo .

Quem . In . Patr . Redi .

Dominus

Hic . Berisae . Ad . Sb . Voc .

Pium . D . Fidel . Q . Ser .

A.D. MDCCCXII.

Hunc . Lap . Consac .

C. I. R.

A.D. MDCCCXIII.

It was just ten years after this first visit that I was again in Tokat, not on a transient visit, but with the purpose of making that city my permanent abode. A little party of us soon repaired to the hallowed spot. Guided by my recollections and a drawing made at my previous visit, we were soon at the place; but in the last few years it had undergone a remarkable change. Instead of the slab of stone with its inscription, which we expected to see, we only found a smooth surface of pebbly and sandy soil overgrown with weeds, without vestige of stone or mound to indicate the presence of a grave; but the identical surroundings were there, too well remembered to be mistaken. Could it be that, as happens in these lawless regions, the stone had been removed by some ruthless hand and incorporated in the wall of a neighbouring building? We could not accept that unpleasant conclusion, and, calling the sexton, we directed him to dig where we pointed. It was at a depth of two feet from the surface that the stone came into view: the soil and rubbish accumulated upon the grave were then removed, and we hoped the place would hereafter need little attention. But, to our surprise, we found it again, the ensuing spring, covered to the same depth as before. The soil was washed upon it by the rains from the whole mountain side, and we found that were a wall built for its protection, the gipsy boys, who made this their playground, would soon have it down.

Some time after this, a correspondence took place with friends in London, which resulted in a grant being made by the late Hon. East India Company’s Board of Directors, for the purpose of erecting a more suitable monument to the memory of Henry Martyn, to be placed with his remains in the Mission Burying-ground. The monument was cut out of native marble, and made by native workmen at Tokat. The remains were removed under the inspection of the missionary physician, and though it was difficult positively to identify them, there can be no doubt that what was found once formed a portion of the earthly tenement of the devoted and lamented missionary. There were no remains of a coffin; Orientals never use them, and he was doubtless laid in immediate contact with the soil, literally ‘dust to dust.’ The monument under which we laid these remains was the first grave in our little cemetery, and well might it be said that it became sacred ground. The obelisk has four faces, on each of which the name, encircled with a wreath, is cut, severally in English, Armenian, Persian, and Turkish. The four sides of the base contain the following inscription in the same languages:

REV. HENRY MARTYN, M.A.

Chaplain of the Hon. East India Company,

Born at Truro, England, February 18, 1781,

Died at Tokat, October 16, 1812.

He laboured for many years in the East, striving to

Benefit mankind both in this world and that to come.

He translated the Holy Scriptures into Hindostanee

and Persian,

And preached the God and Saviour of whom they testify.

He will long be remembered in the East, where he was

known as a Man of God.

The grave now lies in a spot every way adapted to foster the holy memories which it recalls. It stands upon a broad and high terrace, overlooking the whole city for whose salvation we cannot doubt that he offered some of the last petitions ‘of the righteous man, which avail much.’ It is a solitude, immediately surrounded by the thick foliage of fruit trees, among which tall walnuts are conspicuous. We ourselves planted by its side the only weeping willows which exist in the whole region. The place is visited by many, who read the concise inscription and further inquire into the good man’s history. It has always been a favourite place of resort of our students and native Christians, and they have many a time sat under its shade and expounded to wondering strangers the very doctrines to propagate which that model of a missionary had sacrificed his life.

TOMB OF HENRY MARTYN

Tokat is now for ever memorable as the centre which links the names of Basiliscus, the martyr, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, and Henry Martyn. The cloud-crested fortress points almost straight up from the Jeshil-Irmak river, the ancient Iris, which, rising in the Anti-Taurus range of Pontus, finds its way to the Black Sea with a breadth and volume of water second only to the Halys. Still, as of old, the town crowds about the foot of the two spiral crags and straggles out with towered church, mosque and minaret, into the valley. The ruins of the embattled walls crowning every pinnacle of the insulated rocks of which they seem to form a part, tell of the days when Greek and Roman passed along the ‘royal road’ from Amisos or Samsoon on the Euxine to Sebaste, Caesareia, and Central Asia; and when the Saracens beat off the Emperor Michael (860) from what was then called Daximon.[96] The time is coming when there shall once more be here a highway of civilisation after the barren centuries of the Moslem.

Tokat represents Komana Pontica, six miles off, the oracle and emporium of the royal road, described by Strabo as a little Corinth for vice and traffic. Another step, and the Apostle Paul himself might have visited it from Galatia. In 312, in the persecution under Maximin, Basiliscus, the bishop of Komana, was martyred, being shod with red-hot iron shoes, beheaded, and thrown into the Iris. The Acta picture the saint as led on foot by soldiers along the road without food for four days, till he reached Komana; ‘and the road was much the same as the modern way, Tokat to Amaseia,’ along which Henry Martyn was violently hurried by his Tartar. In the martyrium, built a few miles out of Komana, in memory of Basiliscus, Chrysostom found rest in death, and a grave.

Basilius, the bishop of Caesareia, belonged to the neighbouring province of Cappadocia, but his missionary influence, and that of his bishop brother, Gregory Nyssen, and his sister, Macrina, spread all over Pontus, while Gregory Nazianzen was his fellow-student at Athens, and his admiring friend, as Julian also, the future Emperor, was for a time. Like Martyn, Basil owed to his sister his conversion, his call to the ministry, and his self-sacrifice all through life. It was on the banks of the Iris above Tokat that, secluded for five years, the great Father laid the foundation of the monastic communities of the Greek Church, and learned to be the future defender of orthodoxy against the Arians, and of the unity of the Oriental Church.

But it is the exile and death of John Chrysostom, just fourteen centuries before, that form the most touching parallel to the sufferings of Henry Martyn. Never has there been a greater missionary bishop than the ‘golden-mouthed’ preacher of Antioch and Constantinople. The victim first of a cabal of bishops, and then of the Empress Eudoxia, whose vices and sacrilege he rebuked, he was driven from Constantinople to the scorching plains of Cappadocia in the midsummer heat. His guard drove on the venerable man day and night, giving him no rest. When a halt was made, it was always in some filthy village where good water was not. Fever and ague were provoked, but still he was forced on to Basil’s city of Caesareia, to find Basil’s successor his bitter enemy. Taking a physician with him he reached his destination at Kokussos, where the Empress had hoped that the barbarians would make an end of him. As it seemed likely to prove his Tabreez, he was once more driven forth on foot, under two guards selected for their brutality. It took him three months to reach Komana—one long, slow martyrdom to the fever-stricken old man. ‘It was evident that Chrysostom’s strength was entirely worn out,’ writes Canon Venables, in words which exactly describe the experience of the young Henry Martyn. ‘But his pitiless guard hurried him through the town “as if its streets were no more than a bridge,” without a moment’s halt.’ Five miles farther on they halted at the chapel of the martyr Basiliscus, of whom Chrysostom dreamed that he saw him and heard him say: ‘Be of good cheer; on the morrow we shall be together.’ Canon Venables continues, unconsciously, the parallel with the experience of the nineteenth-century saint of the Evangel:

In the morning Chrysostom earnestly begged for a brief respite, but in vain. He was hurried off, but scarcely had he gone three or four miles when a violent attack of fever compelled them to retrace their steps.

On reaching the martyrium, Chrysostom, led within, stripped on his soiled garments, clothed himself in white baptismal vestments, joined in the communion of the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, offered his last prayer ‘for present needs,’ uttered his accustomed doxology: ‘Glory be to God for all things,’ and, having said ‘Amen,’ breathed his last on September 14, 407, in his sixtieth year. His body was laid beside that of Basiliscus. A generation after, the children of the Empress and Emperor who had thus slaughtered the saint brought back his body and gave it imperial sepulture in Constantinople, while they publicly asked Heaven to forgive the wrong of the past.

From Basiliscus, Basil, and Chrysostom to Henry Martyn, the fourteen centuries tell of the corruption of the Church of Christ in the East, and the rise upon its ruins of Mohammedanism, which covered the northern half of Africa, and Spain, and reached as far as Tours and Vienna in Europe. It is to the glory of Henry Martyn that he was the first missionary of the Reformed Church of the West to the Mohammedans, giving those of India and Central Asia the Gospel and the Psalms in two of their own vernaculars, and dying for them before he could complete his work at the Arabic Bible.

We shall see whom his example inspired to follow him. His death became a summons, first to his own evangelical circle in England and India, and then to the whole Church of Christ, to follow in the path that he marked out alike by his toiling and his writing.

Sergius, the Armenian, must at once have pursued the journey from Tokat to Constantinople, which is distant from Tabreez 1,542 miles, and not 1,300 as roundly estimated by Henry Martyn. He presented the letters of his master to Mr. Isaac Morier, in the Sultan’s capital, father of Sir Gore Ouseley’s secretary and successor. On February 12, 1813, Charles Simeon wrote thus to Mr. Thomason in Calcutta:

The day before yesterday a letter arrived from Mr. Isaac Morier, of Constantinople, announcing that on October 16 (or thereabouts) our beloved brother entered into the realms of glory, and rested for ever in the bosom of his God.... But what an event it is! How calamitous to his friends, to India, and to the world! Methinks I hear God say: ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ ... I had been forming plans in my mind with a view to the restoration of his health in England, and should now have been able to carry into execution whatever might have been judged expedient; but I am denied the joy of ministering to him!

Again on April 2:

We are making collections for Mr. Martyn’s brother’s family, who in him have lost their main support. We have got about 400l., and Mr. Thornton has sent you a paper for the purpose of getting them some aid in India.

The news reached Lydia Grenfell on February 14, 1813. She was then for a fortnight at Marazion, where every spot recalled the past. She thus communed with herself and God in her Diary:

Marazion: February 20, 1813.

I am fearful to retrace the last week on two accounts, lest the infirmity of nature prevail, and I give way to sorrow,—and lest, in recollecting the wondrous kindness and love of God my Saviour, I increase my pride and not my gratitude. Oh, shall I then remain silent? Shall Thy mercies be forgotten? Teach me, O Lord, to write and speak for Thy glory, and to my own deeper humiliation. Heard on the 14th of the removal of my most tender, faithful, and beloved friend to the joys of heaven. Oh, I could not wish his absence from them prolonged. What I only wished was, and now I am reconciled to that too,—I wished to have been honoured of God so far as to have been near him, or that some friend had been.[97] Lord, if this was wrong, forgive me. I will endeavour, yea, I am enabled to say of this too, ‘Thy will be done.’ Great has been the peace and tranquillity of my soul, such nearness to God, such a hold of Christ, such hope in the promises, such assurance of bliss and immortality, as I cannot express, and may have to forget. Oh, that I may never lose,—rather would I lose everything I most prize, every earthly friend, every earthly enjoyment, than this. Oh, the fear of doing so, or of the abatement of spiritual perceptions and affections, is the thing I most dread, and makes me long to die. It is not for the sake of rejoining that blessed spirit of my friend, though I have, and do, feel that too,—but to be again shut out from Thy possession is what I fear.

February 28.—A silent Sabbath, at least to me,—to my ears, I should say, for I trust God speaks to my heart. ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, My people,’ enables me to take comfort. I feel a submission to the will of God which is more blessed than when I had my own in the ministry of the Word,—yet this is a time which calls for prayer. Lord, pour out the spirit of prayer on me and many, and grant us grace to ask, fervently yet resignedly, the restoration of Thy preached gospel. Suddenly are we deprived of it,—may it be as quickly restored. Very weak in health, so powerless this morning,—I could not but think my earthly bed was preparing for me too, and that my soul would soon return to God, but I am better, and willing to stay my appointed time. True, to perform my work in a little time might be what I should rejoice in, but I am willing to live, so I may have the presence of God with me, and be engaged in His service. I have a pleasure in supposing it possible the blessed spirit of my friend may be, on some occasions, sent to protect, to console, and counsel me,—but this is a weakness, and perhaps should not be indulged. I felt this afternoon as if he was present, as I sat alone in the garden,—the thought only disposed me to solemnity and pensiveness of mind. I am afraid of my dependence on the creature, whether embodied or not, and I will rather trust to the sure support of God’s Word.

March 2.—Some sorrowful thoughts will enter my mind respecting my late dear friend, and call forth some sighs and tears from my heart,—yet is that heart resigned to the will of God, and confident of His having done all things well for His beloved servant. Oh, how shall I, with wonder and praise, listen in eternity to the relation of his last days! The excess of affection now, and the unwillingness I feel that he should have suffered, make it amongst my mercies that a veil is drawn over that period of his life. It is mercy all, and God is good to me in everything. I see His hand, I love and I adore. I submit and resign myself to His blessed disposal and to all His dispensations. I have been thinking how necessary for me it was that we are thus separated; for during his life I felt such a desire to please and to be worthy of the regard he entertained for me, that it was my bane, and caused me to forget God as the first object I was to think of and please. I accept the punishment sent for this offence, may it prove an effectual cure of this evil in my heart!

March 8.—During the last few days I have experienced much of the Divine support and consolation of the Gospel. It has been a time of conflict, not inward, blessed be the name of the Lord. I have enjoyed a constant, uninterrupted peace, a peace past an understanding, unless experienced. I never was more sensible of, or rejoiced more in the presence of God, and my heart rises to my Maker with delight and joy, as easily as I breathe. God, ‘as soon as sought, is found,’ through Jesus Christ,—but I have been put into the hands of a bitter enemy, and that enemy.... She has left me, and I pray that every uneasy feeling excited in my breast by her unkind and injurious treatment may depart with her. Oh, how I rejoice that no storms can molest the dead who die in the Lord,—they rest from their labours of every kind. Since the account reached me of the departure of my dear friend to be with Christ, which is far better than to be here,—every evil I suffer, or fear, is blessed in its purpose, from knowing he can never feel the same; and all I enjoy or behold that is delightful, is the more enjoyed from thinking ‘he has all this, and more, in perfection, and without interruption.’ May I accomplish my work of suffering, or ending, or labouring, and then enter into rest.

March 13.—Nature has its turn in my feelings. To-day I have been given to feel more of sorrow for the removal of my beloved friend, and, without desiring it to be otherwise, to mourn my own loss. The recollection of his unmerited kindness softens my heart, and I can hardly forbear indulging a tenderness which may weaken but cannot strengthen my mind. O Lord, I beseech Thee preserve me from whatever may injure my soul and unfit me for Thy service. I have the hope of heaven too, and that is enough. In heaven we shall meet and unite for ever in the work of praise. Life, with its trials and cares, will be but short. May I only desire to live to Thee, my God, and finish the work Thou hast given me to do. Lord, make me faithful, self-denying, and submissive to Thy will.

April 3.—My thoughts revert to the possible circumstances of my late dear friend’s sufferings and death, and I am sunk low by doing so. It was the last step he had to travel below, and one necessary to be taken, in order to reach the heights of glory. There let me view him triumphing with his Saviour, and through His meritorious sufferings and death made more than conqueror over all his enemies. I must think more of his glorious Lord, and less of the servant, either as suffering and labouring or glorified and resting. Lord, be graciously present, and in the contemplation of Thy perfections, and the review of Thy mercies, let me forget everything beside.

April 21.—A letter from Tabreez, dated August 28, reached me. O Thou who readest my heart, direct and sanctify every feeling. May the anguish of my soul be moderated, and let me endeavour to exercise faith in Thy Divine goodness, mercy, and power, and to believe it was well with him in all respects.

April 24.—I am tormented with fears that even in eternity I shall never be capable of enjoying the same happiness my departed friend does, and it seems as if no other would satisfy me. O Lord Jesus, weary and heavy laden I come to Thee; let me behold the light of Thy countenance, and praise Thee, and lose in the contemplation of Thy glories, and in the sense of Thy love to my soul,—let me lose the remembrance of every other excellence. When the sun shines the light of the stars is eclipsed; thus may it be with me!—Unless the genius which shone in his character make me admire and love God more, let me turn from viewing them. Oh, teach me to love Thy saints, whether living or dead, and for Thy sake and Thyself above them all. I have never felt I was not resigned to the will of God in our separation on earth, but my anxious mind dwells on another, which I cannot bear to think possible.

June 3.—For several days my mind has been occupied with recollections that weaken its hold of spiritual things. I think more of a departed saint than of the King of Saints. It is strange that now I should be more in danger of loving too well a creature passed into the skies than when he lived on earth. But so it is,—continually my thoughts revert to him. I pray God this may not be a snare unto me to divide me from Himself. Let me behold Jesus.

June 13.—Passed a very blessed Sabbath. My soul quickened,—Oh, let it live, and it shall praise Thee! A letter from my dearest Emma containing wholesome, though at first unwelcome, counsel, has been of singular use to me. The snare is seen, if not broken. Yes, I have lost my hold of everything that used, and ought, to support me by allowing, without restraint, the remembrance of my late dear friend to fill my mind. My almost constant thoughts were of him, and pride at the preference he showed me was fed, as well as affection. Now I have a painful, difficult part to act. A sacrifice I must offer of what has become so much my happiness as to interfere with my enjoyment of God. I must fly from the recollection of an earthly object, loved too well, viewed too much. Let me follow his faith, and consider the end of his conversation,—Jesus Christ, the same for ever. I have had the greatest peace to-day in only trying to resolve on this,—how merciful is God!

1814, January 28.—Found great sweetness yesterday and to-day in reading and sweet prayer in the garden; was sensibly refreshed in the exercise, and had a taste that the Lord was gracious. This evening my heart is sad, not from the withdrawing of those consolations, or darkness of soul, as is often the case, but from having the circumstances of my revered friend’s death brought to my recollection. I strive not to dwell on them, for oh, what a scope do they give to my busy fancy! I would fly from this subject as too high for me, and take refuge in this: the Lord did not forsake His servant, and precious was his death in His sight. Nature is weak, but faith can strengthen me.

February 12.—A twelvemonth, this day, since I heard of the death of my dear friend. My thoughts revert to this event, but more to the mercies of God to me at that season.

October 16.—My thoughts engaged often to-day by the event of this day in 1812. Twice has the earth performed its annual round since the honoured servant of God received the welcome mandate to cease from his labours, and join those who ‘see His face’ and ‘serve Him,’ unencumbered with flesh and blood. He no longer measures time by days and years, and there is no tedious six days between Sabbath and Sabbath, as it is here. ‘How blessed are those who die in the Lord.’ This expresses my feelings most at the remembrance of this departed saint. May I abide in Christ, and be with Him and His saints for ever. O blessed hope of everlasting life,—I will cherish it, exult in it, and may I pursue till I attain it.

It was April 18, 1813, when Corrie and Thomason in India learned what they had always feared since the dearest of all friends to them had passed through Calcutta on his way to Arabia. Corrie was at Agra, and he wrote to his brother-in-law, Mr. C. Shaw, in reply to a letter ‘containing the affecting intelligence of Martyn’s death, to us afflictive, to him happy beyond expression. I could find nothing but lamentations to express—lamentations for us, not for him. He was meet for “the inheritance of the saints in light.” My master is taken from me; oh, for a double portion of his spirit! The work of printing and distributing the Scriptures will henceforth go on more slowly.’ Again, to Simeon: ‘Could he look from heaven and see the Abdool Massee’h, with the translated New Testament in his hand, preaching to the listening throng, ... it would add fresh delight to his holy soul.’ Thomason, at once his disciple and his friend, wrote: ‘He was in our hearts; we honoured him; we loved him; we thanked God for him; we prayed for his longer continuance amongst us; we rejoiced in the good he was doing. We are sadly bereaved. Where such fervent piety, and extensive knowledge, and vigorous understanding, and classical taste, and unwearied application were all united, what might not have been expected?’ When, soon after, Thomason, as chaplain, accompanied the Governor-General, Lord Moira, through North India, and arrived at Cawnpore, he had eyes and thoughts only for his friend. ‘In these sandy plains I have been tracing again and again the days of Martyn. Close by me is the house that dear minister occupied, leading to which is the gloomy line of aloes spoken of by Mrs. Sherwood.... Oh, for Martyn’s humility and love!... His standard of every duty was the highest, and his feelings of joy, sorrow, love, most intense; whilst his conversation was always in heaven, the savour of his holy disposition was as ointment poured forth.... Woe unto us if we do not pray more, live more above the world and deny ourselves more, and love Christ more!’

John Sargent, Rector of Lavington, the earliest of Henry Martyn’s intimate friends, at once undertook to write a memoir of his life, for which Simeon charged himself with collecting ‘all possible materials from India and Persia.’ Bishop Corrie accordingly addressed Sargent thus:

Agra: November 1, 1813.

It will be of use for you to know that when he left Cawnpore in 1810 to seek change of air I was with him, and persuaded him to leave in my hands a number of memorandums he was about to destroy. They were sealed up, but on his death, being opened, they proved to be journals of the exercises of his mind from January 1803 to 1807 inclusive. They seem to me no less worthy of publication than the journal of Mr. Brainerd, if more books of that kind should be judged necessary. Since the beginning of 1807 Mr. Martyn favoured me with almost a weekly letter, in which his various employments and engagements for the furtherance of the Gospel in this country are detailed, with occasional very interesting remarks. This correspondence ceased on my being ordered by our Commander-in-chief to assist Mr. Martyn in the duties of the station of Cawnpore, when I took up my abode with him from June till his departure, October 1. Other letters passed between us after that time, and it is my intention to send you copies of all the above correspondence, together with his private memorandums. The latter, with copies of Martyn’s letters from February to July 1807, were sent off this day to Mr. Thomason in Calcutta, to be forwarded to England by the first opportunity, and the copies of the remaining letters shall follow as soon as may be. Of course I have omitted to copy what seems purely personal: yet much remains which you will perhaps judge unnecessary for publication, and will exercise your own judgment on that head. All the extracts seem to me, however, to cast light on the progress of missionary work in this land, and may perhaps be thought interesting to those who take a concern in Indian affairs. These extracts give so full a view of Mr. Martyn’s character that nothing remains for me to add. Only I may say a more perfect character I never met with, nor expect to see again on earth. During the four years we were fellow-labourers in this country, I had no less than six opportunities of enjoying his company; the last time for four months together, and under the same roof all the time; and each opportunity only increased my love and veneration for him.

I conclude the above intelligence will plead my excuse for writing to you without previous introduction, and I was anxious it should reach you through the nearest channel. Your brother in Calcutta has told me several times of your welfare, and during beloved Martyn’s life I used to hear of you sometimes. Your person, whilst a student at King’s College, was well known to me, and your character admired, though I had not steadiness of principle sufficient at that time to imitate you, and consequently had no pretensions to an acquaintance with you, though I often greatly desired it. To that ‘Father in Israel,’ Mr. Simeon, I owe all my comfort on earth and all my hopes respecting eternity: for through his instrumentality the seeds of grace, I trust, were, during my residence at Cambridge, especially during the latter part of my residence, implanted in my heart, and have influenced, though alas! unsteadily, my after days.

Lydia Grenfell was of course consulted as the work made progress, but none of her letters to Martyn have seen the light.

1815, December 26.—Wrote this day to Mr. Simeon. I have reason to search into my heart and watch the risings of pride there, both respecting the notice of this blessed saint, and the avowal to be expected of my being the object of so much regard from another still more eminent in the Church of Christ. I have ever stood amazed at this, and now that in the providence of God it seems certain that my being so favoured is likely to be made known, vanity besets me. Oh, how poor a creature am I! Lord, I pray, let me be enabled to trace some evidence of Thine eternal love to me, and let this greater wonder call off my thoughts from every other distinction. But how do I learn that in the whole of this notice my thoughts have not indeed been Thine, O Lord, nor my ways Thy ways? How much above all I could have conceived of have been the designs of God! I sought concealment, and lo! all is made known to many, and much will be even known to the world. It is strange for me to credit this, and strange that, with my natural reserve and the peculiar reasons that exist for my wishing to have this buried in silence, I am nevertheless composed about it. But, Lord, I would resign myself, and all things that concern me, to Thy sovereign will and pleasure. Preserve me blameless to Thine eternal kingdom, and grant me an everlasting union with thy servant above.

1816, January 28.—I feel an increased thankfulness that God has called me to live free from the many cares which fall on all in the married state, and for the peculiarly favourable circumstances He has placed me in here. The privilege of watching over my mother in the decline of life, the charge of a sweet child, the occupation of the schools, and a portion of this world’s goods for the use of the poor,—all, all call for more thankfulness and diligence. Lord, help me to abound in both, and with and above all I have peace and hope in God through Jesus Christ, in a measure—though unbelief often robs my soul of both. Oh, let me seek the grace of steadfast faith, and I have all I want or desire.

April 21.—Thought with delight of my loved friends, Mrs. Hoare and H.M., both before the Throne, led by the Lamb to living fountains of waters, and all tears wiped away from their eyes. Oh, I long to be there; yet I could willingly forego the joys of heaven if I might, by suffering or labours here, glorify my Lord and Saviour.

June 30.—Often have I thought, when desirous of pursuing a more consistent deportment, and of introducing spiritual subjects: ‘How can I appear so different before those I have been so trifling and merely worldly in all my intercourse with?’ The death of my esteemed and beloved brother in Christ, H.M., I thought would have been the period for my maintaining that serious watchfulness so essential to my enjoyment of God; but no, I have been worse since, I think, as a judgment for failing in my keeping my resolution.

In 1817 Lydia Grenfell’s Diary records the visits of such men as Mr. Fenn, ‘who came to preach in the great cause of the Church Missionary Society,’ and of Mr. Bickersteth, who at Penzance ‘stated what he had met with in Africa.’ The author of many immortal hymns, Francis Thomas Lyte, ‘opened his ministry’ of two years in Marazion at this time, to her joy and spiritual growth. She notes on August 31, 1817, that his hymn ‘Penitence’ was sung for the first time.

Marazion: March 6, 1819.

Received, a few days since, Mr. Sargent’s Memoir, and reading only a few pages has convinced me that, without a greater resemblance in the spirit to our friend, I never can partake of that blessedness now enjoyed by the happy subject of it in the presence of his Saviour. It is chiefly in humility, meekness, and love I see the sad, the total difference. This may be traced to a departure from the fountain of grace, Christ Jesus, to whom, oh, may I return, and I shall be replenished.

October 14.—Indulged a wandering imagination, and am sad in consequence. This season I ought to deem a sacred one. Oh, that, in my remembrance of Thy blessed ... and servant, I could entirely forget what feeds my vanity. Lord, help me to check all earthly sorrow at the recollection of his many sorrows, for were they not the appointed means of fitting him for his present felicity, and of manifesting Thy grace, by which Thou art glorified? I would make this season one of serious preparation for my own departure, and what does that preparation consist in?—faith in Jesus. Oh, strengthen it in me, and by following Thy blessed saint in all virtuous and godly living I may come to those eternal joys prepared for those that love Thee.

1820, June 25.—Oh, what a heaven for a creature, who has no strength, or wisdom, or righteousness, like myself, to be fixed in, beholding the glories of Jehovah manifested in Him who is my Saviour and my Lord. Gladly would I part from this dull clod of earth and come to Thee, and reach the pure pleasures of a spiritual state. There, there dwells the blessed Martyn, who bows before the throne, of a glorious company of saints, washed with him, and clothed in spotless robes. Oh, (that) I may be brought to them.

December 5.—Thought of the holy martyr, so humble, so self-denying, so devoted, and of his early-accomplished prayer for the heavenly country, where he dwells perfect in purity and love. Oh, to be a follower of him as he followed Christ, and to walk in the same paths, influenced by the same holy, humble, heavenly principles, upheld by the same arm of omnipotent grace, till I too reach the rest above.

1821, January 23.—Elevated rather than refreshed and humbled in worship to-day. Imagination has been too active and unrestrained. The remembrance of past events, in which that blessed saint now with God, H.M. (? figured), has been filling my mind. This should not be. This is not communion with him, now a glorified spirit, but merely the indulgence of a vain, sinful imagination. I would turn from all, from the most holy creatures, to the Holy One, and the just; spiritual, and moral, yea, Divine glory and beauty I may behold in Him, who is the chief among ten thousand, and altogether lovely.

October 18.—I have now survived my beloved friend eight years. Eight years have been given me to be prepared for that world of blessedness he has so long entered upon. Alas! I seem less so now than at any period.

1822, October 16.—The remembrance of the event of the day has been rendered useless by my absence from home a great part of it. It should be the occasion for renewed self-dedication, of more earnest prayer, and of humiliation; for the recollection of being the cause of increased sufferings to Thy saint, O Lord, is cause for constant humiliation. I would realise death, and look to eternity, and to that glorious Saviour, for whom the blessed subject of my thoughts lived only to serve and honour. Oh, never more shall I have intercourse with the beloved friend now with Christ, but by faith in Christ. Lord, help me to use the recollection of our earthly regard to promote this end.

October 19.—My birthday (forty-seventh) follows that of the anniversary of the death of Martyn.

December 31.—Read dear Martyn’s sermon on the Christian’s walk with greater enjoyment and unction than has been vouchsafed unto me for a long season. The holy simplicity of the directions, and persuasive motives to walk in, as well as receive, Christ, had influence in my heart.

1823, January 11.—Placed in my room yesterday the print of dear M. Felt affected greatly in doing so, and my tears, which seldom flow in the presence of anyone, I could not restrain before the person who was fixing it.[98] With the Saviour now, and the Saviour, doubtless, was with him in his greatest agony, even the agony of death—this thought will be the more familiar to me by viewing the representation of Christ’s Crucifixion, now placed over the picture of His servant. I trust, by a prudent and not too frequent sight of both, I may derive some advantage from possessing what is so affecting and so admonitory to me, who am declining in religious fervour and spirituality. Thus may I use both, not to exercise feelings, but faith. I cannot behold the resemblance of M. but I am reminded that God wrought powerfully on his soul, meeting him for a state of purity, and love, and spiritual enjoyment, and that he has entered upon it. His faithfulness, and diligence, and self-denial, and devotedness; his love to God, and love for souls; his meekness, and patience, and faith, should stimulate me to earnestness in prayer for a portion of that grace, through which alone he attained them, and was what he was.

January 19.—Read dear Martyn’s sermon on ‘Tribulation the Way to Heaven,’ with, I trust, a blessing attending it.

1825, October 16.—The anniversary of dear H.M. gaining the haven of rest after his labours. Oh, how little do I labour to enter into that rest he enjoyed upon earth.

1826, April 2.—God, the ever gracious and merciful God, Thee would I bless and everlastingly praise for granting me the favour of hearing ‘the joyful sound’ of His rich love, and abounding grace by Jesus Christ, this day, and by a messenger unexpected, and beloved as a friend and brother. The text was that I once heard preached from by the blessed Martyn, whose spirit I pined to join in offering praises to God after sermon: ‘Now then we are ambassadors for Christ.’

June 18.—My friends gone to heaven seem to reproach me, that I aim not to follow them, as they followed Christ. The beloved Martyn, the seraphic Louisa Hoare, and my dear[99] Georgina’s spirits are employed in perpetually beholding that God whom I neglect, and remain unconcerned when I do not delight in or serve (Him). Oh, let me be joined to them in the sweet work of adoration and praise to Him who hath loved us, to Jesus, our one Lord and Saviour. Amen.

So ends the Diary of Lydia Grenfell, the eight last years of her life afflicted by cancerous disease, and one year by a clouded mind.[100] To the manuscript ‘E. H,’—that is, her sister, Emma Hitchins—added these words: ‘This prayer was answered September 21, 1829;

And now they range the heavenly plains,

And sing in sweet, heart-melting strains.’

The motto on her memorial stone in the churchyard of Breage, where she lies near another holy woman, Margaret Godolphin, first wife of Queen Anne’s prime minister, is ‘For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee.’

CHAPTER XV: BAPTIZED FOR THE DEAD

Henry Martyn is, first of all, a spiritual force. Personally he was that to all who came in contact with him from the hour in which he gave himself to Jesus Christ. To Cambridge student and peasant alike; to Charles Simeon, his master, as to Kirke White and Sargent, Corrie and Thomason, his admiring friends; to women like Lydia Grenfell, his senior in years and experience, as to children like his cousin’s at Plymouth, and David Brown’s at Aldeen; to the rude soldiery of the Cape campaign and the East India Company’s raw recruits as to the cultured statesmen and scholars who were broadening the foundations of our Indian empire; to the caste-bound Hindu, but far more to the fanatical Arab and the Mohammedan mystic of Persia—to all he carried the witness of his saintly life and his Divine message with a simple power that always compelled attention, and often drew forth obedience and imitation. His meteor-like spirit burned and flamed as it passed across the first twelve years of the nineteenth century, from the Cam to the Fal, by Brazil and South Africa, by Calcutta and Serampore, by Patna and Cawnpore, by Bombay and Muscat, by Bushire and Shiraz and Tabreez, to the loneliness of the Armenian highlands, and the exile grave of the Turkish Tokat.

From the year in which Sargent published fragments of his Journal, and half revealed to the whole Church of Christ the personality known in its deep calling unto deep only to the few, Henry Martyn has been the companion of good men[101] and women of all the Churches, and the stimulus of the greatest workers and scholars of the century. The latest writer, the Hon. George N. Curzon, M.P., in his exhaustive work on Persia (1892), describes him as ‘this remarkable man, who impressed everyone, by his simplicity and godliness of character,’ though he ascribes the ‘effect in the short space of a year’ as much to the charm of his personality as to the character of his mission.

Perhaps the most representative of the many whom Martyn is known to have influenced was Daniel Wilson, of Islington and Calcutta. When visiting his vast diocese in 1838 and crossing the Bay of Bengal, Bishop Wilson[102] thus carefully compared the Journal with corresponding passages in his own life:

It is consoling to a poor sinner like myself, who has been placed in the full bustle of public business, to see how the soul even of a saint like H. Martyn faints and is discouraged, laments over defects of love, and finds an evil nature still struggling against the law of his mind. I remember there are similar confessions in J. Milner. It is this which explains the seventh of Romans. 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. In the next place, his delight in Holy Scripture, his meditations in it, the large portions he committed to memory, the nourishment he thence derived to his soul, are full of instruction. Then his humility is quite undoubted, unfeigned, profound, sincere. There seems, however, to have been a touch of natural melancholy and depression, which was increased by one of his greatest mistakes, the leaving England with his affections tied to Lydia Grenfell, whom he ought either not to have loved or else to have married and taken her with him. Such an ecstatic, warm creature as Henry Martyn could do nothing by halves. Separation was martyrdom to such a tender heart. But, oh, to imitate his excellences, his elevation of piety, his diligence, his spirituality, his superiority to the world, his love for souls, his anxiety to improve all occasions to do them good, his delight in the mystery of Christ, his heavenly temper! These, these are the secrets of the wonderful impression he made in India, joined as they were with first-rate talents, fine scholarship, habit of acquiring languages, quickness and promptitude of perception, and loftiness of imaginative powers.

Henry Martyn’s Journal holds a place of its own in the literature of mysticism. It stamps him as the mystic writer and worker of the first quarter of the century of modern missions (1792-1814), as his master, Robert Leighton, was of the more barren period that ended in 1688. The too little known Rules and Instructions for Devout Exercises, found among Leighton’s papers, written with his own hand and for his own use, was Martyn’s ‘usual’ companion, with results which made that work[103] as supplemented by the Journal, what the De Imitatione Christi and the Theologia Germanica were to the more passive dark ages of Christendom. At the close of the eighteenth century the young and impulsive Cornish student found himself in an age not less, to him, godless and anti-evangelical than that which had wrung from the heart of at least one good man the hopeless longing of the Theologia Germanica. He had seen his Divine Master crucified afresh in the person of Charles Simeon, whom he possibly, as Sargent certainly, had at first attended only to scoff and brawl. He had been denied a church in which to preach the goodness of God, in his own county, other than that of a kinsman. In the troopship and the Bengal barrack even his official authority could hardly win a hearing from officer or soldier. The young prophet waxed sore in heart, as the fire burned within him, at the unbelief and iniquity of his day, till his naturally sunny spirit scorched the souls he sought to warm with the Divine persuasiveness. He stood really at the opening of the Evangelical revival of Christendom, and like William Carey, who loved the youth, he was working out his own side of that movement, but, equally like Carey, he knew it not. He was to do as much by his death as by his life, but all he knew in his humility was that he must make haste while he lived to give the millions of Mohammedans the Word, and to reveal to them the Person of Jesus Christ. The multitude of his thoughts within him he committed to a Journal, written for himself alone, and rescued from burning only by the interference of his friend Corrie.

The mysticism of Martyn has been pronounced morbid. All the more that his searching introspection and severe judgment on himself are a contrast to the genial and merry conversation of the man who loved music and children’s play, the converse of friends and the conflict of controversy for the Lord, does every reader who knows his own heart value the vivisection. Martyn writes of sin and human nature as they are, and therefore he is clear and comforting in the answer he gives as to the remedy for the one and the permanent elevation of the other. Even more than Leighton he is the Evangelical saint, for where Leighton’s times paralysed him for service, Martyn’s called him to energise and die in the conflict with the greatest apostacy of the world. Both had a passion to win souls to the entrancing, transforming love they had found, but unless on the side against the Stewarts, how could that passion bear fruit in action? Both, like the author of the De Imitatione, wrote steeped in the spirit of sadness; but the joy of the dawn of the modern era of benevolence, as it was even then called, working unconsciously on the sunny Cornubian spirit, kept Martyn free alike from the selfish absorption which marked the monk of the Middle Ages, and the peace-loving compromise which neutralised Leighton. The one adored in his cell, the other wrestled in his study at Newbattle or Dunblane, and we love their writings. But Henry Martyn worked for his generation and all future ages as well as wrote, so that they who delight in his mystic communings are constrained to follow him in his self-sacrificing service. Beginning at March 1807, let us add some passages from the Journal to those which have been already extracted for autobiographical purposes.

I am thus taught to see what would become of me if God should let go His strong hand. Is there any depth into which Satan would not plunge me? Already I know enough of the nature of Satan’s cause to vow before God eternal enmity to it. Yes! in the name of Christ I say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’

Employed a great deal about one Hebrew text to little purpose. Much tried with temptation to vanity, but the Lord giveth me the victory through His mercy from day to day, or else I know not how I should keep out of hell.

May the Lord, in mercy to my soul, save me from setting up an idol of any sort in His room, as I do by preferring a work professedly for Him to communion with Him. How obstinate the reluctance of the natural heart to God. But, O my soul, be not deceived, the chief work on earth is to obtain sanctification, and to walk with God.

O great and gracious God, what should I do without Thee? but now Thou art manifesting Thyself as the God of all consolation to my soul. Never was I so near Thee; I stand on the brink, and I long to take my flight! Oh, there is not a thing in the world for which I would wish to live, except because it may please God to appoint me some work. And how shall my soul ever be thankful enough to Thee, O Thou most incomprehensibly glorious Saviour Jesus!

I walk according to my carnal wisdom, striving to excite seriousness by natural considerations, such as the thoughts of death and judgment, instead of bringing my soul to Christ to be sanctified by his spirit.

Preached on Luke xii. 20—‘This night thy soul,’ etc. The congregation was large, and more attentive than they have ever yet been. Some of the young officers and soldiers seemed to be in deep concern. I was willing to believe that the power of God was present, if a wretch so poor and miserable can be the instrument of good to souls. Four years have I been in the ministry, and I am not sure that I have been the means of converting four souls from the error of their ways. Why is this? The fault must be in myself. Prayer and secret duties seem to be where I fail; had I more power in intercession, more self-denial in persevering in prayer, it would be no doubt better for my hearers.

My heart sometimes shrinks from spiritual work, and especially at an increase of ministerial business; but now I hope, through grace, just at this time, that I can say I desire no carnal pleasure, no ease to the flesh, but that the whole of life should be filled up with holy employments and holy thoughts.

My heart at various times filled with a sense of Divine love, frequently in prayer was blessed in the bringing of my soul near to God. After dinner in my walk found sweet devotion; and the ruling thoughts were, that true happiness does not consist in the gratifying of self in ease or individual pleasure, but in conformity to God, in obeying and pleasing Him, in having no will of my own, in not being pleased with personal advantages, though I might be without guilt, nor in being displeased that the flesh is mortified. Oh, how short-lived will this triumph be! It is stretching out the arm at full length, which soon grows tired with its own weight.

I travel up hill, but I must learn, as I trust I am learning, to do the will of God without any expectation of any present pleasure attending it, but because it is the will of God. Oh, that my days of vanity were at an end, and that all my thoughts and conversation might have that deep tinge of seriousness which becomes a soldier of the cross.

To the women preached on the parable of the ten pieces of silver, and at night to the soldiers on Rev. i. 18. Afterwards in secret prayer drew near to the Lord. Alas! how my soul contracts a strangeness with Him; but this was a restoring season. I felt an indignation against all impure and sinful thoughts, and a solemn serenity of frame. Interceded for dear friends in England; this brought my late dear sister with pain to my recollection, but I felt relieved by resolving every event, with all its circumstances, into the will of God.

Read an account of Turkey. The bad effects of the book were so great that I found instant need of prayer, and I do not know when I have had such divine and animating feelings. Oh, it is Thy Spirit that makes me pant for the skies. It is He that shall make me trample the world and my lusts beneath my feet, and urge my onward course towards the crown of life.

Spent the day in reading and prayer, and found comfort particularly in intercession for friends, but my heart was pained with many a fear about my own soul. I felt the duty of praying for the conversion of these poor heathens, and yet no encouragement to it. How much was there of imagination before, or rather, how much of unbelief now; seeing no means ready now, no Word of God to put into their hands, no preachers, it sometimes seems to me idle to pray. Alas! wicked heart of unbelief, cannot God create means, or work without them? But I am weary of myself and my own sinfulness, and appear exceedingly odious even to myself, how much more to a holy God. Lord, pity and save; vile and contemptible is Thy sinful creature, even as a beast before Thee; help me to awake.

Some letters I received from Calcutta agitated my silly mind, because my magnificent self seemed likely to become more conspicuous. O wretched creature, where is thy place but the dust? it is good for men to trample upon thee. Various were my reveries on the events apparently approaching, and self was the prominent character in every transaction. I am yet a long way from real humility; oh, when shall I be dead to the world, and desire to be nothing and nobody, as I now do to be somebody?

Throughout the 18th enjoyed a solemn sense of Divine things. The promise was fulfilled, ‘Sin shall not have dominion over you.’ No enemy seemed permitted to approach. I sometimes saw naught in the creation but the works of God, and wondered that mean earthly concerns had ever drawn away my mind from contemplating their glorious Author. Oh, that I could be always so, seeing none but Thee, taught the secrets of Thy covenant, advancing in knowledge of Thee, growing in likeness to Thee. How much should I learn of God’s glory, were I an attentive observer of His Word and Providence. How much should I be taught of His purposes concerning His Church, did I keep my heart more pure for Him. And what gifts might I not expect to receive for her benefit, were I duly earnest to improve His grace for my own! Oh, how is a life wasted that is not spent with God and employed for God. What am I doing the greater part of my time; where is my heart?

Sabat lives almost without prayer, and this is sufficient to account for all evils that appear in saint or sinner.

I feel disposed to partake of the melancholy with which such persons (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) close their lives. Oh, what hath grace done for us! The thought sometimes bursts upon me in a way which I cannot describe. It is not future bliss, but present peace, which we have actually obtained, and which we cannot be mistaken in; the very thing which the world seeks for in vain; and yet how have we found it? By the grace of God we are what we are.

Truly love is better than knowledge. Much as I long to know what I seek after, I would rather have the smallest portion of humility and love than the knowledge of an archangel.

At night I spoke to them on ‘Enoch walked with God.’ My soul breathed after the same holy, happy state. Oh that the influence were more abiding; but I am the man that seeth his natural face in a glass.

This last short sickness has, I trust, been blessed much to me. I sought not immediately for consolations, but for grace patiently to endure and to glory in tribulation; in this way I found peace. Oh, this surely is bliss, to have our will absorbed in the Divine Will. In this state are the spirits of just men made perfect in heaven. The spread of the Gospel in these parts is now become an interesting subject to you—such is the universal change.

Perpetually assaulted with temptations, my hope and trust is that I shall yet be sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of my God. ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’ When I really strive after purity of heart—for my endeavours are too often little more than pretence—I find no consideration so effectual as that of the exalted dignity and infinitely precious privileges of the saints. Thus a few verses of 1 Eph. are more influential, purifying, and transforming than the most laboured reasoning. Indeed, there is no reasoning with such temptations, and no safety but in flight.

I would that all should adore, but especially that I myself should lie prostrate. As for self, contemptible self, I feel myself saying, Let it be forgotten for ever; henceforth let Christ live, let Christ reign, let Him be glorified for ever.

Henry Martyn, by service, escaped the weakness and the danger of the mystic who seeks absorption into God, in the mental sense, as the remedy for sin, instead of a free and purified individuality in Christ. He felt that the will sins; he saw the cure to lie not in the destruction of the will, but in its rectification and personal co-working with God. Absorption is spiritual suicide, not service. Martyn realised and taught that a free individuality is the best offering we can make to God after Christ has given it to us to offer to Him. With Martyn moral service helped spiritual contemplation to rise heavenward, and to raise men with it. The saint was also the sacred scholar and translator; the mystic was the prophet preacher, the Persian controversialist, the unresting missionary. His Christian life was guided by the motto, ‘To believe, to suffer, and to hope.’ His praying realised his own ideal of ‘a visit to the invisible world.’ His working was ever quickened like St. Paul’s by the summons, alike of the Old dispensation and the New, which he cut with a diamond on the window of his college rooms Ἕγειραι, ὁ καθεύδων, καὶ ἀνάστα, ‘Awake thou that sleepest and arise.’ When the fierce flame of his love and his service had burned out his frail body, his picture, painted at Calcutta the year before he died, spoke thus to Charles Simeon, and ever since it has whispered to every new generation of Cambridge men, ‘Be serious, be in earnest; don’t trifle—don’t trifle.’

The men whom Henry Martyn’s pioneering and early death have led to live and to die that Christ may be revealed to the Mohammedans, are not so many as the thousands who have been spiritually stimulated by his Journal. Such work is still ‘the forlorn hope’ of the Church which he was the first to lead. But in Persia and Arabia he has had such followers as Anthony Groves, John Wilson, George Maxwell Gordon, Ion Keith-Falconer, and Bishop French. Where he pointed the way the great missionary societies of the United States of America and of England and the Free Church of Scotland have sent their noblest men and women.

The death of Henry Martyn, followed not many years after by that of her husband, who had been the first to mark his grave with a memorial stone, led Mrs. James Claudius Rich, eldest daughter of Sir James Mackintosh, to appeal in 1831 for ‘contributions in aid of the school at Baghdad, and those hoped to be established in Persia and other parts of the territory of Baghdad.’ In the same year, 1829, that Alexander Duff sailed for Calcutta, there had gone forth by the Scots Mission at Astrakhan to Baghdad, that Catholic founder of the sect since known as ‘The Brethren,’ Anthony N. Groves, dentist, of Exeter. Taking the commands of Christ literally, in the spirit of Henry Martyn, he sold all he had, and became the first of Martyn’s successors in Persia. The record of his two attempts forms a romantic chapter in the history of Christian missions.[104] All theories apart, he lived and he worked for the Mohammedans of Persia in the spirit of Henry Martyn. When the plague first, and persecution the second time, extinguished this Mission to Baghdad, Dr. John Wilson,[105] from his central and commanding position in Bombay, flashed into Arabia and Persia such rays of Gospel light as were possible at that time. He sent Bible colporteurs by Aden and up the Persian Gulf; he summoned the old Church of Scotland to despatch a mission to the Jews of Arabia, Busrah, and Bombay. A missionary was ready in the person of William Burns who afterwards went to China, the support of a missionary at Aden was guaranteed by a friend, and Wilson had found a volunteer ‘for the purpose of exploring Arabia,’ when the disruption of the Church of Scotland arrested the movement, only, however, vastly to increase the missionary development in India and Africa, as well as church extension in Scotland. What John Wilson tried in vain to do during his life was effected by his death. It was his career that summoned the Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer and his wife to open their Mission in Yemen, at Sheikh Othman and Aden. Like Martyn at Tokat, in the far north, and just at Martyn’s age, by his dust in the Aden cemetery Ion Keith-Falconer has taken possession of Arabia for Christ. ‘The Memoirs of David Brainerd and Henry Martyn gave me particular pleasure,’ wrote young John Wilson in 1824. ‘Mind to get hold of the Life of John Wilson, the great Scotch missionary of India,’ wrote the young Ion Keith-Falconer in 1878.[106] So the apostolic succession goes on.

Gordon of Kandahar, ‘the pilgrim missionary of the Punjab,’ was not the least remarkable of Henry Martyn’s deliberate followers, alike in a life of toil and in a death of heroism for the Master. Born in 1839, he was of Trinity College, Cambridge, and had as his fellow-curate Thomas Valpy French, when the future bishop came back from his first missionary campaign in India. Dedicating himself, his culture, and his considerable property to the Lord, he placed his unpaid services at the disposal of the Church Missionary Society, as Martyn once did. Refusing a bishopric after his first furlough, and seeking to prepare himself for the work of French’s Divinity School of St. John at Lahore, he returned to India by Persia, to learn the language and to help Dr. Bruce for a little in 1871. The famine was sore in that land, and he lived for its people as ‘relieving officer, doctor, purveyor, poorhouse guardian, outfitter and undertaker. There is a cry like the cry of Egypt in the night of the Exodus—not a house in which there was not one dead.’ So he wrote.[107] From Julfa he carried relief to Shiraz, where he found himself in the midst of the associations made sacred by Henry Martyn’s residence there. ‘I have taken up my quarters in a Persian’s house, and have a large garden all to myself. I am in the very same house which Henry Martyn was in. I heard to-day that my host is the grandson of his host Jaffir Ali Khan, and that the house has come down from father to son.’

Eight years after Gordon was in Kandahar, sole (honorary) chaplain to the twenty regiments who were fighting the Ameer of Afghanistan. There he found the assistant to the political officer attached to the force to be the same Persian gentleman who had been his host at Shiraz, and with whom when a child Martyn must have played. Gordon learned from him that the roads and sanitary improvements made as relief works, as well as the orphanage started on the interest of the famine relief fund sent from London, were still blessing the people. When, after the black day of Maiwand, the British troops were besieged in Kandahar, till relieved by the march and the triumph of Lord Roberts, Gordon as chaplain attended a sortie to dislodge the enemy. Hearing that wounded men were lying in a shrine outside the Kabul gate, he led out some bearers with a litter, and found that the dying men were in another shrine still more distant. In spite of all remonstrance he dashed through the murderous fire of the enemy, was struck down, and was himself carried back on the litter he had provided for others. He did not live to wear the Victoria Cross, but was on the same day, August 16, laid in a soldier’s grave.

It would seem difficult to name a follower more worthy of Henry Martyn than that, but Bishop French was such a disciple. 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. In the next forty years, till he resigned the bishopric of Lahore that he might give the rest of his life to work out the aspirations of Martyn in Persia and Arabia, he consecrated himself and his all to Christ. It will be a wonderful story if it is well told. He then went home for rest, first of all, but took the way north through Persia and Turkey on Martyn’s track, so that in April 1888 he wrote from Armenia: ‘Were I ignorant both of Arabic and French, I should subside into the perfect rest, perhaps, which I require.’ So abundant were his labours to groups of Mohammedans and among the Syrian Christians, that he had nearly found a grave in the Tokat region.

After counselling the Archbishop of Canterbury as to the project of so reforming the Oriental Churches as to convert them themselves into the true apostles of the Mohammedan race, Bishop French returned to Asia and settled near Muscat, whence he wrote thus on March 10, 1891, his last letter to the Church Missionary Society:

Those three years of Arab study will not, I trust, be thrown away and proved futile. In memory of H. Martyn’s pleadings for Arabia, Arabs, and the Arabic, I seem almost trying at least to follow more directly in his footsteps and under his guidance, than even in Persia or India, however incalculable the distance at which the guided one follows the leader!...

I have scarcely expressed in the least degree the view I have of the extremely serious character of the work here to be entered upon; and the possible—nay probable—severity of the conflict to be expected and faithfully hazarded by the Church of Christ between two such strong and ancient forces, pledged to such hereditary and deep-grounded hostility. Yet The Lamb shall overcome them; for He is Lord of Lords, and King of Kings; and they also shall overcome that are with Him, called and chosen and faithful.

Two months after, on May 14, 1891, at the age of sixty-six, after exposure and toils like Martyn’s, he was laid to rest in the cemetery of Muscat by the sailors of H.M.S. Sphinx, to whom he had preached.

Henry Martyn at Tokat, John Wilson at Bombay, George Maxwell Gordon at Kandahar, Ion Keith-Falconer at Aden, and Thomas Valpy French at Muscat, have by their bodies taken possession of Mohammedan Asia for Christ till the resurrection. Of each we say to ourselves and to our generation:

Is it for nothing he is dead?

Send forth your children in his stead!

O Eastern lover from the West!

Thou hast out-soared these prisoning bars;

Thy memory, on thy Master’s breast,

Uplifts us like the beckoning stars.

We follow now as thou hast led,

Baptize us, Saviour, for the dead.[108]

Each, like not a few American missionaries, men and women, like Dr. Bruce and his colleagues of the Church Missionary Society, like Mr. W.W. Gardner and Dr. J.C. Young of the Scottish Keith-Falconer Mission, is a representative of the two great principles, as expressed by Dr. Bruce: (1) That the lands under the rule of Islam belong to Christ, and that it is the bounden duty of the Church to claim them for our Lord. (2) That duty can be performed only by men who are willing to die in carrying it out.

Henry Martyn’s words, almost his last, on his thirty-first birthday were these: ‘The Word of God has found its way into this land of Satan (Persia), and the devil will never be able to resist it if the Lord hath sent it.’ We have seen what sort of men the Lord raised up to follow him. This is what the Societies have done. In 1829 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions began, and in 1871 the Presbyterian Board shared, the mission to Persia and Asiatic Turkey. The former has missionaries at Aintab, Marash, Antioch, Aleppo, and Oorfa, to the south of the Taurus range, being its mission to Central Turkey; at Constantinople, Adrianople, Smyrna, Broosa, Nicomedia, Trebizond, Marsovan, Sivas, including Tokat, and Cæsarea, being its mission to Western Turkey; at Erzroom, Harpoot, and Arabkir, uniting with the Assyrian stations of Mardin and Diarbekir, its mission to Eastern Turkey. Taking up the evangelisation at Oroomiah, the American Presbyterians unite with that Tabreez, Mosul, and Salmas as their Western, and Teheran and Hamadan as their Eastern Persia Mission. In 1876 a letter of Henry Venn’s and the urgency of its principal missionary, Dr. Bruce, led the Church Missionary Society to charge itself with the evangelisation, by a revised version of the Persian Bible and medical missions, of the whole southern half of the ancient kingdom of Persia, the whole of Nimrod’s Babylonia, and the eastern coast of Arabia, from Julfa (Ispahan) and Baghdad as centres. Very recently the independent Arabian Mission of America has made Busrah its headquarters for Turkish Arabia. The Latin Church since 1838 has worked for the Papacy alone. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s mission since 1886 has sought to influence the Nestorian or Syrian Church, which in the seventh century sent forth missionaries to India from Seleucia, Nisibis, and Edessa, and now desires protection from Romish usurpation. All these represent a vast and geographically linked organisation claiming, at long intervals, the whole of Turkey, Persia, and Arabia for Christ since Henry Martyn pointed the way. Dr. Robert Bruce, writing to us from Julfa, thus sums up the results and the prospect:

I believe there is a great work going on at present in Persia, and Henry Martyn and his translations prepared the way for it, to say nothing of his life sacrifice and prayers for this dark land. The Babi movement is a very remarkable one, and is spreading far and wide, and doing much to break the power of the priesthood. Many of the Babis are finding their system unsatisfactory, and beginning to see that it is only a half-way house (in which there is no rest or salvation) to Christianity. Ispahan has been kept this year in a constant state of turmoil by the ineffectual efforts of two moollas to persecute both Babis and Jews.[109] They have caused very great suffering to some of both these faiths, but they have been really defeated, and all these persecutions have tended towards religious liberty. Our mission-house is the refuge of all such persecuted ones, and the light is beginning to dawn upon them.

While the whole Church, and every meditative soul seeking deliverance from self in Jesus Christ, claims Henry Martyn, he is specially the hero of the Church of England. An Evangelical, he is canonised, so far as ecclesiastical art can legitimately do that, in the baptistry of the new cathedral of his native city. A Catholic, his memory is enshrined in the heart of his own University of Cambridge. There, in the New Chapel of St. John’s College, in the nineteenth bay of its interior roof, his figure is painted first of the illustriories of the eighteenth Christian century, before those of Wilberforce, Wordsworth, and Thomas Whytehead, missionary to New Zealand. In the market place, beside Charles Simeon’s church, there was dedicated on October 18, 1887, ‘The Henry Martyn Memorial Hall.’ There, under the shadow of his name, gather daily the students who join in the University Prayer Meeting, and from time to time the members of the Church Missionary and Gospel Propagation Societies. ‘This was the hero-life of my boyhood,’ said Dr. Vaughan, the Master of the Temple and Dean of Llandaff, when he preached the opening sermon before the University. In Trinity Church, where Martyn had been curate, the new Master of Trinity preached so that men said: ‘What a power of saintliness must have been in Henry Martyn to have affected with such appreciative love one whose own life and character are so honoured as Dr. Butler’s!’ In the Memorial Hall itself, its founder, Mr. Barton, now Vicar of Trinity Church; Dr., now Bishop, Westcott, for the faculty of Divinity; Dr. Bailey, for St. John’s College and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; Mr. Barlow, Vicar of Islington, for the Church Missionary Society; and the Christian scholar, Professor Cowell, for all Orientalists and Anglo-Indians, spake worthily.

We would continue his work. The hopes, the faith, the truths which once animated him are still ours. Still, as on the day when he preached his first sermon from this pulpit, is it true that if each soul, if each society, if each heathen nation knew the gift of God, and Who the promised Saviour is, they would for very thirst’s sake ask of Him, and He would indeed give them His living water. And still it is the task of each true witness of Christ, and most of all of each ordained minister of His Word and Sacraments, first to arouse that thirst where it has not yet been felt, and then to allay it at once and perpetuate it from the one pure and undefiled spring. And still each true minister will feel, as Martyn felt, as St. Paul himself felt, ‘Who is sufficient for these things?’ The riper he is in his ministry, the more delicate his touch of human souls, alike in their strivings and in their inertness; the closer his walk with God and his wonder at the vastness and the silent secrecy of God’s ways, the more he will say in his heart what Martyn said but a few days after his feet had ceased to tread our Cambridge streets. ‘Alas! do I think that a schoolboy or a raw academic should be likely to lead the hearts of men! What a knowledge of men and acquaintance with Scriptures, what communion with God and study of my own heart, ought to prepare me for the awful work of a messenger from God on the business of the soul!’

To these lessons of Martyn’s life Dr. Butler added that which the eighty years since have suggested—the confidence of the soldier who has heard his Captain’s voice, and knows that it was never deceived or deceiving: Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

In that confidence let the Church Catholic preach Christ to the hundred and eighty millions of the Mohammedan peoples, more than half of whom are already the subjects of Christian rulers. Thus shall every true Christian best honour Henry Martyn.

PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

LONDON

* * * * * * * * * *

If you have been blessed by this volume, you may also be interested in some of our other Christian Classics Treasury collections:

MISSIONS COLLECTIONS:

- Amy Carmichael 8-in-1

- The Hudson Taylor Collection (7-in-1)

- David Livingstone Collection (5-in-1)

- Samuel Zwemer 7-in-1(Missions in Arabia)

- Samuel Zwemer, 7-in-1, Vol 2

- Key to the Missionary Problem (Andrew Murray)

- Classic Missions Texts  (Murray, Allen, Carey, Zwemer)

CLASSIC COLLECTIONS:

- 7 Catholic Classics

- 7 Classics on PRAYER

- 7 Classics on HOLINESS

- 7 Classics on EVANGELISM and SOUL-WINNING

- 5 Classics on the HOLY SPIRIT

- 5 Classics on POWER

- EDERSHEIM COLLECTION  (Sketches of Jewish Social Life; The Temple; Jesus the Messiah)

- The Didache (Teaching of the 12 Apostles)

PREACHERS AND REVIVALISTS:

- Biography of John Wesley Collection: 4-in-1

- Biography of Andrew Murray

- Charles Spurgeon: 40 sermons on Prayer

- Charles Spurgeon: Lectures to My Students

- The George Muller Collection

- The Revival Writings of Jonathan Edwards (7-in-1)

- The Works of Catherine Booth (7-in-1)

- The Works of Charles Finney

- The Works of D. L. Moody

- The Works of R. A. Torrey

- The Works of William Booth

4.  THE LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY (d. 1834)

THE LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY,

SHOEMAKER AND MISSIONARY

PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT, BENGALI, AND MARATHI IN THE

COLLEGE OF FORT WILLIAM, CALCUTTA

BY GEORGE SMITH, LL.D. C.I.E.

FELLOW OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL AND STATISTICAL SOCIETIES; MEMBER OF

COUNCIL OF THE SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY; AUTHOR OF THE

'LIFE OF DUFF' AND 'LIFE OF WILSON,' ETC.

WITH PORTRAIT AND ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET

1885

The right of translation is reserved.

Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.

TO

MY WIFE

FOR TWENTY YEARS MY FELLOW-WORKER IN

CALCUTTA AND SERAMPORE

IN THE SCENES CONSECRATED BY THE MEMORY OF

WILLIAM  CAREY

LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY, Shoemaker & Missionary

BY GEORGE SMITH C.I.E., LL.D.

FIRST ISSUE OF THIS EDITION 1909

REPRINTED...1913, 1922

Preface

ON the death of William Carey In 1834 Dr. Joshua Marshman promised to write the Life of his great colleague, with whom he had held almost daily converse since the beginning of the century, but he survived too short a time to begin the work. In 1836 the Rev. Eustace Carey anticipated him by issuing what is little better than a selection of mutilated letters and journals made at the request of the Committee of the Baptist Missionary Society. It contains one passage of value, however. Dr. Carey once said to his nephew, whose design he seems to have suspected, "Eustace, if after my removal any one should think it worth his while to write my Life, I will give you a criterion by which you may judge of its correctness. If he give me credit for being a plodder he will describe me justly. Anything beyond this will be too much. I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything."

In 1859 Mr. John Marshman, after his final return to England, published The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward, a valuable history and defence of the Serampore Mission, but rather a biography of his father than of Carey.

When I first went to Serampore the great missionary had not been twenty years dead. During my long residence there as Editor of the Friend of India, I came to know, in most of its details, the nature of the work done by Carey for India and for Christendom in the first third of the century. I began to collect such materials for his Biography as were to be found in the office, the press, and the college, and among the Native Christians and Brahman pundits whom he had influenced. In addition to such materials and experience I have been favoured with the use of many unpublished letters written by Carey or referring to him; for which courtesy I here desire to thank Mrs. S. Carey, South Bank, Red Hill; Frederick George Carey, Esq., LL.B., of Lincoln’s Inn; and the Rev. Jonathan P. Carey of Tiverton.

My Biographies of Carey of Serampore, Henry Martyn, Duff of Calcutta, and Wilson of Bombay, cover a period of nearly a century and a quarter, from 1761 to 1878. They have been written as contributions to that history of the Christian Church of India which one of its native sons must some day attempt; and to the history of English-speaking peoples, whom the Foreign Missions begun by Carey have made the rulers and civilisers of the non-Christian world.

SERAMPORE HOUSE, MERCHISTON;

EDINBURGH, 24th August 1885.

Illustrations:

Chapter 1: Carey’s College

1761-1785

The Heart of England--The Weaver Carey who became a Peer, and the weaver who was father of William Carey--Early training in Paulerspury--Impressions made by him on his sister--On his companions and the villagers--His experience as son of the parish clerk--Apprenticed to a shoemaker of Hackleton--Poverty--Famous shoemakers from Annianus and Crispin to Hans Sachs and Whittier--From Pharisaism to Christ--The last shall be first--The dissenting preacher in the parish clerk’s home--He studies Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Dutch and French--The cobbler’s shed is Carey’s College.

WILLIAM CAREY, the first of her own children of the Reformation whom England sent forth as a missionary to India, where he became the most extensive translator of the Bible and civiliser, was the son of a weaver, and was himself a village shoemaker till he was twenty-eight years of age. He was born on the 17th August 1761, in the very midland of England, in the heart of the district which had produced Shakspere, had fostered Wyclif and Hooker, had bred Fox and Bunyan, and had for a time been the scene of the lesser lights of John Mason and Doddridge, of John Newton and Thomas Scott. William Cowper, the poet of missions, made the land his chosen home, writing Hope and The Task in Olney, while the shoemaker was studying theology under Sutcliff on the opposite side of the market-place. Thomas Clarkson, born a year before Carey, was beginning his assaults on the slave-trade by translating into English his Latin essay on the day-star of African liberty when the shoemaker, whom no university knew, was writing his Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use means for the Conversion of the Heathens.

William Carey bore a name which had slowly fallen into forgetfulness after services to the Stewarts, with whose cause it had been identified. Professor Stephens, of Copenhagen, traces it to the Scando-Anglian Car, CAER or CARE, which became a place-name as CAR-EY. Among scores of neighbours called William, William of Car-ey would soon sink into Carey, and this would again become the family name. In Denmark the name Caròe is common. The oldest English instance is the Cariet who coined money in London for Æthelred II. in 1016. Certainly the name, through its forms of Crew, Carew, Carey, and Cary, still prevails on the Irish coast--from which depression of trade drove the family first to Yorkshire, then to the Northamptonshire village of Yelvertoft, and finally to Paulerspury, farther south--as well as over the whole Danegelt from Lincolnshire to Devonshire. If thus there was Norse blood in William Carey it came out in his persistent missionary daring, and it is pleasant even to speculate on the possibility of such an origin in one who was all his Indian life indebted to Denmark for the protection which alone made his career possible.

The Careys who became famous in English history sprang from Devon. For two and a half centuries, from the second Richard to the second Charles, they gave statesmen and soldiers, scholars and bishops, to the service of their country. Henry Carey, first cousin of Queen Elizabeth, was the common ancestor of two ennobled houses long since extinct--the Earls of Dover and the Earls of Monmouth. A third peerage won by the Careys has been made historic by the patriotic counsels and self-sacrificing fate of Viscount Falkland, whose representative was Governor of Bombay for a time. Two of the heroic Falkland’s descendants, aged ladies, addressed a pathetic letter to Parliament about the time that the great missionary died, praying that they might not be doomed to starvation by being deprived of a crown pension of £80 a year. The older branch of the Careys also had fallen on evil times, and it became extinct while the future missionary was yet four years old. The seventh lord was a weaver when he succeeded to the title, and he died childless. The eighth was a Dutchman who had to be naturalised, and he was the last. The Careys fell lower still. One of them bore to the brilliant and reckless Marquis of Halifax, Henry Carey, who wrote one of the few English ballads that live. Another, the poet’s granddaughter, was the mother of Edmund Kean, and he at first was known by her name on the stage.

At that time when the weaver became the lord the grandfather of the missionary was parish clerk and first schoolmaster of the village of Paulerspury, eleven miles south of Northampton, and near the ancient posting town of Towcester, on the old Roman road from London to Chester. The free school was at the east or "church end" of the village, which, after crossing the old Watling Street, straggles for a mile over a sluggish burn to the "Pury end." One son, Thomas, had enlisted and was in Canada. Edmund Carey, the second, set up the loom on which he wove the woollen cloth known as "tammy," in a two-storied cottage. There his eldest child, WILLIAM, was born, and lived for six years till his father was appointed schoolmaster, when the family removed to the free schoolhouse. The cottage was demolished in 1854 by one Richard Linnell, who placed on the still meaner structure now occupying the site the memorial slab that guides many visitors to the spot. The schoolhouse, in which William Carey spent the eight most important years of his childhood till he was fourteen, and the school made way for the present pretty buildings.

The village surroundings and the country scenery coloured the whole of the boy’s after life, and did much to make him the first agricultural improver and naturalist of Bengal, which he became. The lordship of Pirie, as it was called by Gitda, its Saxon owner, was given by the Conqueror, with much else, to his natural son, William Peverel, as we see from the Domesday survey. His descendants passed it on to Robert de Paveli, whence its present name, but in Carey’s time it was held by the second Earl Bathurst, who was Lord Chancellor. Up to the very schoolhouse came the royal forest of Whittlebury, its walks leading north to the woods of Salcey, of Yardley Chase and Rockingham, from the beeches which give Buckingham its name. Carey must have often sat under the Queen’s Oak, still venerable in its riven form, where Edward IV., when hunting, first saw Elizabeth, unhappy mother of the two princes murdered in the Tower. The silent robbery of the people’s rights called "inclosures" has done much, before and since Carey’s time, to sweep away or shut up the woodlands. The country may be less beautiful, while the population has grown so that Paulerspury has now nearly double the eight hundred inhabitants of a century ago. But its oolitic hills, gently swelling to above 700 feet, and the valleys of the many rivers which flow from this central watershed, west and east, are covered with fat vegetation almost equally divided between grass and corn, with green crops. The many large estates are rich in gardens and orchards. The farmers, chiefly on small holdings, are famous for their shorthorns and Leicester sheep. Except for the rapidly-developing production of iron from the Lias, begun by the Romans, there is but one manufacture--that of shoes. It is now centred by modern machinery and labour arrangements in Northampton itself, which has 24,000 shoemakers, and in the other towns, but a century ago the craft was common to every hamlet. For botany and agriculture, however, Northamptonshire was the finest county in England, and young Carey had trodden many a mile of it, as boy and man, before he left home for ever for Bengal.

Two unfinished autobiographical sketches, written from India at the request of Fuller and of Ryland, and letters of his youngest sister Mary, his favourite "Polly" who survived him, have preserved for us in still vivid characters the details of the early training of William Carey. He was the eldest of five children. He was the special care of their grandmother, a woman of a delicate nature and devout habits, who closed her sad widowhood in the weaver-son’s cottage. Encompassed by such a living influence the grandson spent his first six years. Already the child unconsciously showed the eager thirst for knowledge, and perseverance in attaining his object, which made him chiefly what he became. His mother would often be awoke in the night by the pleasant lisping of a voice "casting accompts; so intent was he from childhood in the pursuit of knowledge. Whatever he began he finished; difficulties never seemed to discourage his mind." On removal to the ancestral schoolhouse the boy had a room to himself. His sister describes it as full of insects stuck in every corner that he might observe their progress. His many birds he entrusted to her care when he was from home. In this picture we see the exact foreshadowing of the man. "Though I often used to kill his birds by kindness, yet when he saw my grief for it he always indulged me with the pleasure of serving them again; and often took me over the dirtiest roads to get at a plant or an insect. He never walked out, I think, when quite a boy, without observation on the hedges as he passed; and when he took up a plant of any kind he always observed it with care. Though I was but a child I well remember his pursuits. He always seemed in earnest in his recreations as well as in school. He was generally one of the most active in all the amusements and recreations that boys in general pursue. He was always beloved by the boys about his own age." To climb a certain tree was the object of their ambition; he fell often in the attempt, but did not rest till he had succeeded. His Uncle Peter was a gardener in the same village, and gave him his first lessons in botany and horticulture. He soon became responsible for his father’s official garden, till it was the best kept in the neighbourhood. Wherever after that he lived, as boy or man, poor or in comfort, William Carey made and perfected his garden, and always for others, until he created at Serampore the botanical park which for more than half a century was unique in Southern Asia.

We have in a letter from the Manse, Paulerspury, a tradition of the impression made on the dull rustics by the dawning genius of the youth whom they but dimly comprehended. He went amongst them under the nickname of Columbus, and they would say, "Well, if you won’t play, preach us a sermon," which he would do. Mounting on an old dwarf witch-elm about seven feet high, where several could sit, he would hold forth. This seems to have been a resort of his for reading, his favourite occupation. The same authority tells how, when suffering toothache, he allowed his companions to drag the tooth from his head with a violent jerk, by tying around it a string attached to a wheel used to grind malt, to which they gave a sharp turn.

The boy’s own peculiar room was a little library as well as museum of natural history. He possessed a few books, which indeed were many for those days, but he borrowed more from the whole country-side. Recalling the eight years of his intellectual apprenticeship till he was fourteen, from the serene height of his missionary standard, he wrote long after:--"I chose to read books of science, history, voyages, etc., more than any others. Novels and plays always disgusted me, and I avoided them as much as I did books of religion, and perhaps from the same motive. I was better pleased with romances, and this circumstance made me read the Pilgrim’s Progress with eagerness, though to no purpose." The new era, of which he was to be the aggressive spiritual representative from Christendom, had not dawned. Walter Scott was ten years his junior. Captain Cook had not discovered the Sandwich Islands, and was only returning from the second of his three voyages while Carey was still at school. The church services and the watchfulness of his father supplied the directly moral training which his grandmother had begun.

The Paulerspury living of St. James is a valuable rectory in the gift of New College, Oxford. Originally built in Early English, and rebuilt in 1844, the church must have presented a still more venerable appearance a century ago than it does now, with its noble tower in the Perpendicular, and chancel in the Decorated style, dominating all the county. Then, as still, effigies of a Paveli and his wife, and of Sir Arthur Throckmorton and his wife recumbent head to head, covered a large altar-tomb in the chancel, and with the Bathurst and other monuments called forth first the fear and then the pride of the parish clerk’s eldest son. In those days the clerk had just below the pulpit the desk from which his sonorous "Amen" sounded forth, while his family occupied a low gallery rising from the same level up behind the pulpit. There the boys of the free school also could be under the master’s eye, and with instruments of music like those of King David, but now banished from even village churches, would accompany him in the doggerel strains of Sternhold and Hopkins, immortalised by Cowper. To the far right the boys could see and long for the ropes under the tower, in which the bell-ringers of his day, as of Bunyan’s not long before, delighted. The preaching of the time did nothing more for young Carey than for the rest of England and Scotland, whom the parish church had not driven into dissent or secession. But he could not help knowing the Prayer-Book, and especially its psalms and lessons, and he was duly confirmed. The family training, too, was exceptionally scriptural, though not evangelical. "I had many stirrings of mind occasioned by being often obliged to read books of a religious character; and, having been accustomed from my infancy to read the Scriptures, I had a considerable acquaintance therewith, especially with the historical parts." The first result was to make him despise dissenters. But, undoubtedly, this eldest son of the schoolmaster and the clerk of the parish had at fourteen received an education from parents, nature, and books which, with his habits of observation, love of reading, and perseverance, made him better instructed than most boys of fourteen far above the peasant class to which he belonged.

Buried in this obscure village in the dullest period of the dullest of all centuries, the boy had no better prospect before him than that of a weaver or labourer, or possibly a schoolmaster like one of his uncles in the neighbouring town of Towcester. When twelve years of age, with his uncle there, he might have formed one of the crowd which listened to John Wesley, who, in 1773 and then aged seventy, visited the prosperous posting town. Paulerspury could indeed boast of one son, Edward Bernard, D.D., who, two centuries before, had made for himself a name in Oxford, where he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy. But Carey was not a Scotsman, and therefore the university was not for such as he. Like his school-fellows, he seemed born to the English labourer’s fate of five shillings a week, and the poorhouse in sickness and old age. From this, in the first instance, he was saved by a disease which affected his face and hands most painfully whenever he was long exposed to the sun. For seven years he had failed to find relief. His attempt at work in the field were for two years followed by distressing agony at night. He was now sixteen, and his father sought out a good man who would receive him as apprentice to the shoemaking trade. The man was not difficult to find, in the hamlet of Hackleton, nine miles off, in the person of one Clarke Nichols. The lad afterwards described him as "a strict churchman and, what I thought, a very moral man. It is true he sometimes drank rather too freely, and generally employed me in carrying out goods on the Lord’s Day morning; but he was an inveterate enemy to lying, a vice to which I was awfully addicted." The senior apprentice was a dissenter, and the master and his boys gave much of the talk over their work to disputes upon religious subjects. Carey "had always looked upon dissenters with contempt. I had, moreover, a share of pride sufficient for a thousand times my knowledge; I therefore always scorned to have the worst in an argument, and the last word was assuredly mine. I also made up in positive assertion what was wanting in argument, and generally came off with triumph. But I was often convinced afterwards that although I had the last word my antagonist had the better of the argument, and on that account felt a growing uneasiness and stings of conscience gradually increasing." The dissenting apprentice was soon to be the first to lead him to Christ.

William Carey was a shoemaker during the twelve years of his life from sixteen to twenty-eight, till he went to Leicester. Poverty, which the grace of God used to make him a preacher also from his eighteenth year, compelled him to work with his hands in leather all the week, and to tramp many a weary mile to Northampton and Kettering carrying the product of his labour. At one time, when minister of Moulton, he kept a school by day, made or cobbled shoes by night, and preached on Sunday. So Paul had made tents of his native Cilician goatskin in the days when infant Christianity was chased from city to city, and the cross was a reproach only less bitter, however, than evangelical dissent in Christian England in the eighteenth century. The providence which made and kept young Carey so long a shoemaker, put him in the very position in which he could most fruitfully receive and nurse the sacred fire that made him the most learned scholar and Bible translator of his day in the East. The same providence thus linked him to the earliest Latin missionaries of Alexandria, of Asia Minor, and of Gaul, who were shoemakers, and to a succession of scholars and divines, poets and critics, reformers and philanthropists, who have used the shoemaker’s life to become illustrious.   St. Mark chose for his successor, as first bishop of Alexandria, that Annianus whom he had been the means of converting to Christ when he found him at the cobbler’s stall. The Talmud commemorates the courage and the wisdom of "Rabbi Jochanan, the shoemaker," whose learning soon after found a parallel in Carey’s. Like Annianus, "a poor shoemaker named Alexander, despised in the world but great in the sight of God, who did honour to so exalted a station in the Church," became famous as Bishop of Comana in Cappadocia, as saint, preacher, and missionary-martyr. Soon after there perished in the persecutions of Diocletian, at Soissons, the two missionary brothers whose name of Crispin has ever since been gloried in by the trade, which they chose at once as a means of livelihood and of helping their poor converts. The Hackleton apprentice was still a child when the great Goethe was again adding to the then artificial literature of his country his own true predecessor, Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of Nürnberg, the friend of Luther, the meistersinger of the Reformation. And it was another German shoemaker, Boehme, whose exalted theosophy as expounded by William Law became one link in the chain that drew Carey to Christ, as it influenced Wesley and Whitefield, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge. George Fox was only nineteen when, after eight years’ service with a shoemaker in Drayton, Leicestershire, not far from Carey’s county, he heard the voice from heaven which sent him forth in 1643 to preach righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, till Cromwell sought converse with him, and the Friends became a power among men.

Carlyle has, in characteristic style, seized on the true meaning that was in the man when he made to himself a suit of leather and became the modern hero of Sartor Resartus. The words fit William Carey’s case even better than that of George Fox:--"Sitting in his stall, working on tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had nevertheless a Living Spirit belonging to him; also an antique Inspired Volume, through which, as through a window, it could look upwards and discern its celestial Home." That "shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any Vatican or Loretto-shrine...Stitch away, every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of slavery." Thirty-six years after Fox had begun to wear his leathern doublet he directed all Friends everywhere that had Indians or blacks to preach the Gospel to them.

But it would be too long to tell the list of workers in what has been called the gentle craft, whom the cobbler’s stall, with its peculiar opportunities for rhythmic meditation, hard thinking, and oft harder debating, has prepared for the honours of literature and scholarship, of philanthropy and reform. To mention only Carey’s contemporaries, the career of these men ran parallel at home with his abroad--Thomas Shillitoe, who stood before magistrates, bishops, and such sovereigns as George III. and IV. and the Czar Alexander I. in the interests of social reform; and John Pounds, the picture of whom as the founder of ragged schools led Thomas Guthrie, when he stumbled on it in an inn in Anstruther, to do the same Christlike work in Scotland. Coleridge, who when at Christ’s Hospital was ambitious to be a shoemaker’s apprentice, was right when he declared that shoemakers had given to the world a larger number of eminent men than any other handicraft. Whittier’s own early experience in Massachusetts fitted him to be the poet-laureate of the craft which for some years he adorned. His Songs of Labour, published in 1850, contain the best English lines on shoemakers since Shakspere put into the mouth of King Henry V. the address on the eve of Agincourt, which begins: "This day is called the feast of Crispin." But Whittier, Quaker, philanthropist, and countryman of Judson though he was, might have found a place for Carey when he sang so well of others:--

"Thy songs, Hans Sachs, are living yet,

In strong and hearty German;

And Bloomfield’s lay and Gifford’s wit

And patriot fame of Sherman;

"Still from his book, a mystic seer,

The soul of Behmen teaches,

And England’s priestcraft shakes to hear

Of Fox’s leathern breeches."

The confessions of Carey, made in the spiritual humility and self-examination of his later life, form a parallel to the Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, the little classic of John Bunyan second only to his Pilgrim’s Progress. The young Pharisee, who entered Hackleton with such hate in his heart to dissenters that he would have destroyed their meeting-place, who practised "lying, swearing, and other sins," gradually yielded so far to his brother apprentice’s importunity as to leave these off, to try to pray sometimes when alone, to attend church three times a day, and to visit the dissenting prayer-meeting. Like the zealot who thought to do God service by keeping the whole law, Carey lived thus for a time, "not doubting but this would produce ease of mind and make me acceptable to God." What revealed him to himself was an incident which he tells in language recalling at once Augustine and one of the subtlest sketches of George Eliot, in which the latter uses her half-knowledge of evangelical faith to stab the very truth that delivered Paul and Augustine, Bunyan and Carey, from the antinomianism of the Pharisee:--

"A circumstance which I always reflect on with a mixture of horror and gratitude occurred about this time, which, though greatly to my dishonour, I must relate. It being customary in that part of the country for apprentices to collect Christmas boxes [donations] from the tradesmen with whom their masters have dealings, I was permitted to collect these little sums. When I applied to an ironmonger, he gave me the choice of a shilling or a sixpence; I of course chose the shilling, and putting it in my pocket, went away. When I had got a few shillings my next care was to purchase some little articles for myself, I have forgotten what. But then, to my sorrow, I found that my shilling was a brass one. I paid for the things which I bought by using a shilling of my master’s. I now found that I had exceeded my stock by a few pence. I expected severe reproaches from my master, and therefore came to the resolution to declare strenuously that the bad money was his. I well remember the struggles of mind which I had on this occasion, and that I made this deliberate sin a matter of prayer to God as I passed over the fields towards home! I there promised that, if God would but get me clearly over this, or, in other words, help me through with the theft, I would certainly for the future leave off all evil practices; but this theft and consequent lying appeared to me so necessary, that they could not be dispensed with.

"A gracious God did not get me safe through. My master sent the other apprentice to investigate the matter. The ironmonger acknowledged the giving me the shilling, and I was therefore exposed to shame, reproach, and inward remorse, which preyed upon my mind for a considerable time. I at this time sought the Lord, perhaps much more earnestly than ever, but with shame and fear. I was quite ashamed to go out, and never, till I was assured that my conduct was not spread over the town, did I attend a place of worship.

"I trust that, under these circumstances, I was led to see much more of myself than I had ever done before, and to seek for mercy with greater earnestness. I attended prayer-meetings only, however, till February 10, 1779, which being appointed a day of fasting and prayer, I attended worship on that day. Mr. Chater [congregationalist] of Olney preached, but from what text I have forgotten. He insisted much on following Christ entirely, and enforced his exhortation with that passage, ‘Let us therefore go out unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach.’--Heb. xiii. 13. I think I had a desire to follow Christ; but one idea occurred to my mind on hearing those words which broke me off from the Church of England. The idea was certainly very crude, but useful in bringing me from attending a lifeless, carnal ministry to one more evangelical. I concluded that the Church of England, as established by law, was the camp in which all were protected from the scandal of the cross, and that I ought to bear the reproach of Christ among the dissenters; and accordingly I always afterwards attended divine worship among them."

At eighteen Carey was thus emptied of self and there was room for Christ. In a neighbouring village he consorted much for a time with some followers of William Law, who had not long before passed away in a village in the neighbourhood, and select passages from whose writings the Moravian minister, Francis Okely, of Northampton, had versified. These completed the negative process. "I felt ruined and helpless." Then to his spiritual eyes, purged of self, there appeared the Crucified One; and to his spiritual intelligence there was given the Word of God. The change was that wrought on Paul by a Living Person. It converted the hypocritical Pharisee into the evangelical preacher; it turned the vicious peasant into the most self-denying saint; it sent the village shoemaker far off to the Hindoos.

But the process was slow; it had been so even in Paul’s case. Carey found encouragement in fellowship with some old Christians in Hackleton, and he united with a few of them, including his fellow-apprentice, in forming a congregational church. The state of the parish may be imagined from its recent history. Hackleton is part of Piddington, and the squire had long appropriated the living of £300 a year, the parsonage, the glebe, and all tithes, sending his house minister "at times" to do duty. A Certificate from Northamptonshire, against the pluralities and other such scandals, published in 1641, declared that not a child or servant in Hackleton or Piddington could say the Lord’s Prayer. Carey sought the preaching of Doddridge’s successor at Northampton, of a Baptist minister at Road, and of Scott the commentator, then at Ravenstone. He had found peace, but was theologically "inquisitive and unsatisfied." Fortunately, like Luther, he "was obliged to draw all from the Bible alone."

When, at twenty years of age, Carey was slowly piecing together "the doctrines in the Word of God" into something like a system which would at once satisfy his own spiritual and intellectual needs, and help him to preach to others, a little volume was published, of which he wrote:--"I do not remember ever to have read any book with such raptures." It was Help to Zion’s Travellers; being an attempt to remove various Stumbling-Blocks out of the Way, relating to Doctrinal, Experimental, and Practical Religion, by Robert Hall. The writer was the father of the greater Robert Hall, a venerable man, who, in his village church of Arnsby, near Leicester, had already taught Carey how to preach. The book is described as an "attempt to relieve discouraged Christians" in a day of gloominess and perplexity, that they might devote themselves to Christ through life as well as be found in Him in death. Carey made a careful synopsis of it in an exquisitely neat hand on the margin of each page. The worm-eaten copy, which he treasured even in India, is now deposited in Bristol College.

A Calvinist of the broad missionary type of Paul, Carey somewhat suddenly, according to his own account, became a Baptist. "I do not recollect having read anything on the subject till I applied to Mr. Ryland, senior, to baptise me. He lent me a pamphlet, and turned me over to his son," who thus told the story when the Baptist Missionary Society held its first public meeting in London:--"October 5th, 1783: I baptised in the river Nen, a little beyond Dr. Doddridge’s meeting-house at Northampton, a poor journeyman shoemaker, little thinking that before nine years had elapsed, he would prove the first instrument of forming a society for sending missionaries from England to preach the gospel to the heathen. Such, however, as the event has proved, was the purpose of the Most High, who selected for this work not the son of one of our most learned ministers, nor of one of the most opulent of our dissenting gentlemen, but the son of a parish clerk."

The spot may still be visited at the foot of the hill, where the Nen fed the moat of the old castle, in which many a Parliament sat from the days of King John. The text of that morning’s sermon happened to be the Lord’s saying, "Many first shall be last, and the last first," which asserts His absolute sovereignty in choosing and in rewarding His missionaries, and introduces the parable of the labourers in the vineyard. As Carey wrote in the fulness of his fame, that the evangelical doctrines continued to be the choice of his heart, so he never wavered in his preference for the Baptist division of the Christian host. But from the first he enjoyed the friendship of Scott and Newton, and of his neighbour Mr. Robinson of St. Mary’s, Leicester, and we shall see him in India the centre of the Episcopal and Presbyterian chaplains and missionaries from Martyn Wilson to Lacroix and Duff. His controversial spirit died with the youthful conceit and self-righteousness of which it is so often the birth. When at eighteen he learned to know himself, he became for ever humble. A zeal like that of his new-found Master took its place, and all the energy of his nature, every moment of his time, was directed to setting Him forth.

In his monthly visits to the father-house at Paulerspury the new man in him could not be hid. His sister gives us a vivid sketch of the lad, whose going over to the dissenters was resented by the formal and stern clerk, and whose evangelicalism was a reproach to the others.

"At this time he was increasingly thoughtful, and very was jealous for the Lord of Hosts. Like Gideon, he seemed for throwing down all the altars of Baal in one night. When he came home we used to wonder at the change. We knew that before he was rather inclined to persecute the faith he now seemed to wish to propagate. At first, perhaps, his zeal exceeded the bounds of prudence; but he felt the importance of things we were strangers to, and his natural disposition was to pursue earnestly what he undertook, so that it was not to be wondered at, though we wondered at the change. He stood alone in his father’s house for some years. After a time he asked permission to have family prayer when he came home to see us, a favour which he very readily had granted. Often have I felt my pride rise while he was engaged in prayer, at the mention of those words in Isaiah, ‘that all our righteousness was like filthy rags.’ I did not think he thought his so, but looked on me and the family as filthy, not himself and his party. Oh, what pride is in the human heart! Nothing but my love to my brother would have kept me from showing my resentment."

"A few of the friends of religion wished our brother to exercise his gifts by speaking to a few friends in a house licensed at Pury; which he did with great acceptance. The next morning a neighbour of ours, a very pious woman, came in to congratulate my mother on the occasion, and to speak of the Lord’s goodness in calling her son, and my brother, two such near neighbours, to the same noble calling. My mother replied, ‘What, do you think he will be a preacher?’ ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and a great one, I think, if spared.’ From that time till he was settled at Moulton he regularly preached once a month at Pury with much acceptance. He was at that time in his twentieth year, and married. Our parents were always friendly to religion; yet, on some accounts, we should rather have wished him to go from home than come home to preach. I do not think I ever heard him, though my younger brother and my sister, I think, generally did. Our father much wished to hear his son, if he could do it unseen by him or any one. It was not long before an opportunity offered, and he embraced it. Though he was a man that never discovered any partiality for the abilities of his children, but rather sometimes went too far on the other hand, that often tended a little to discourage them, yet we were convinced that he approved of what he heard, and was highly gratified by it."

In Hackleton itself his expositions of Scripture were so valued that the people, he writes, "being ignorant, sometimes applauded to my great injury." When in poverty, so deep that he fasted all that day because he had not a penny to buy a dinner, he attended a meeting of the Association of Baptist Churches at Olney, not far off. There he first met with his lifelong colleague, the future secretary of the mission, Andrew Fuller, the young minister of Soham, who preached on being men in understanding, and there it was arranged that he should preach regularly to a small congregation at Earls Barton, six miles from Hackleton. His new-born humility made him unable to refuse the duty, which he discharged for more than three years while filling his cobbler’s stall at Hackleton all the week, and frequently preaching elsewhere also. The secret of his power which drew the Northamptonshire peasants and craftsmen to the feet of their fellow was this, that he studied the portion of Scripture, which he read every morning at his private devotions, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

This was Carey’s "college." On the death of his first master, when he was eighteen, he had transferred his apprenticeship to a Mr. T. Old. Hackleton stands on the high road from Bedford and Olney to Northampton, and Thomas Scott was in the habit of resting at Mr. Old’s on his not infrequent walks from Olney, where he had succeeded John Newton. There he had no more attentive listener or intelligent talker than the new journeyman, who had been more influenced by his preaching at Ravenstone than by that of any other man. Forty years after, just before Scott’s death, Dr. Ryland gave him this message from Carey:--"If there be anything of the work of God in my soul, I owe much of it to his preaching when I first set out in the ways of the Lord;" to which this reply was sent: "I am surprised as well as gratified at your message from Dr. Carey. He heard me preach only a few times, and that as far as I know in my rather irregular excursions; though I often conversed and prayed in his presence, and endeavoured to answer his sensible and pertinent inquiries when at Hackleton. But to have suggested even a single useful hint to such a mind as his must be considered as a high privilege and matter of gratitude." Scott had previously written this more detailed account of his fellowship with the preaching shoemaker, whom he first saw when he called on Mr. Old to tell him of the welfare of his mother:

"When I went into the cottage I was soon recognised, and Mr. Old came in, with a sensible-looking lad in his working-dress. I at first rather wondered to see him enter, as he seemed young, being, I believe, little of his age. We, however, entered into very interesting conversation, especially respecting my parishioner, their relative, and the excellent state of her mind, and the wonder of divine grace in the conversion of one who had been so very many years considered as a self-righteous Pharisee. I believe I endeavoured to show that the term was often improperly applied to conscientious but ignorant inquirers, who are far from self-satisfied, and who, when the Gospel is set before them, find the thing which they had long been groping after. However that may be, I observed the lad who entered with Mr. Old riveted in attention with every mark and symptom of intelligence and feeling; saying little, but modestly asking now and then an appropriate question. I took occasion, before I went forward, to inquire after him, and found that, young as he was, he was a member of the church at Hackleton, and looked upon as a very consistent and promising character. I lived at Olney till the end of 1785; and in the course of that time I called perhaps two or three times each year at Mr. Old’s, and was each time more and more struck with the youth’s conduct, though I said little; but, before I left Olney, Mr. Carey was out of his engagement with Mr. Old. I found also that he was sent out as a probationary preacher, and preached at Moulton; and I said to all to whom I had access, that he would, if I could judge, prove no ordinary man. Yet, though I often met both old Mr. Ryland, the present Dr. Ryland, Mr. Hall, Mr. Fuller, and knew almost every step taken in forming your Missionary Society, and though I sometimes preached very near Moulton, it so happened that I do not recollect having met with him any more, till he came to my house in London with Mr. Thomas, to desire me to use what little influence I had with Charles Grant, Esq., to procure them licence to go in the Company’s ships as missionaries to the British settlements in India, perhaps in 1792. My little influence was of no avail. What I said of Mr. Carey so far satisfied Mr. Grant that he said, if Mr. Carey was going alone, or with one equally to be depended on along with him, he would not oppose him; but his strong disapprobation of Mr. T., on what ground I knew not, induced his negative. I believe Mr. Old died soon after I left Olney, if not just before; and his shop, which was a little building apart from the house, was suffered to go to decay. While in this state I several times passed it, and said to my sons and others with me, that is Mr. Carey’s college."

This cobbler’s shed which was Carey’s college has been since restored, but two of the original walls still stand, forming the corner in which he sat, opposite the window that looks out into the garden he carefully kept. Here, when his second master died, Carey succeeded to the business, charging himself with the care of the widow, and marrying the widow’s sister, Dorothy or Dolly Placket. He was only twenty when he took upon himself such burdens, in the neighbouring church of Piddington, a village to which he afterwards moved his shop. Never had minister, missionary, or scholar a less sympathetic mate, due largely to that latent mental disease which in India carried her off; but for more than twenty years the husband showed her loving reverence. As we stand in the Hackleton shed, over which Carey placed the rude signboard prepared by his own hands, and now in the library of Regent’s Park College, "Second Hand Shoes Bought and--,"   we can realise the low estate to which Carey fell, even below his father’s loom and schoolhouse, and from which he was called to become the apostle of North India as Schwartz was of the South.

How was this shed his college? We have seen that he brought with him from his native village an amount of information, habits of observation, and a knowledge of books unusual in rustics of that day, and even of the present time. At twelve he made his first acquaintance with a language other than his own, when he mastered the short grammar in Dyche’s Latine Vocabulary, and committed nearly the whole book to memory. When urging him to take the preaching at Barton, Mr. Sutcliff of Olney gave him Ruddiman’s Latin Grammar. The one alleviation of his lot under the coarse but upright Nichols was found in his master’s small library. There he began to study Greek. In a New Testament commentary he found Greek words, which he carefully transcribed and kept until he should next visit home, where a youth whom dissipation had reduced from college to weaving explained both the words and their terminations to him. All that he wanted was such beginnings. Hebrew he seems to have learned by the aid of the neighbouring ministers; borrowing books from them, and questioning them "pertinently," as he did Scott.   At the end of Hopkins’s Three Sermons on the Effects of Sin on the Universe, preached in 1759, he had made this entry on 9th August 1787--"Gulielm. Careius perlegit." He starved himself to purchase a few books at the sale which attended Dr. Ryland’s removal from Northampton to Bristol. In an old woman’s cottage he found a Dutch quarto, and from that he so taught himself the language that in 1789 he translated for Ryland a discourse on the Gospel Offer sent to him by the evangelical Dr. Erskine of Edinburgh. The manuscript is in an extremely small character, unlike what might have been expected from one who had wrought with his hands for eight years. French he acquired, sufficiently for literary purposes, in three weeks from the French version of Ditton on the Resurrection, which he purchased for a few coppers. He had the linguistic gift which soon after made the young carpenter Mezzofanti of Bologna famous and a cardinal. But the gift would have been buried in the grave of his penury and his circumstances had his trade been almost any other, and had he not been impelled by the most powerful of all motives. He never sat on his stall without his book before him, nor did he painfully toil with his wallet of new-made shoes to the neighbouring towns or return with leather without conning over his lately-acquired knowledge, and making it for ever, in orderly array, his own. He so taught his evening school and his Sunday congregations that the teaching to him, like writing to others, stereotyped or lighted up the truths. Indeed, the school and the cobbling often went on together--a fact commemorated in the addition to the Hackleton signboard of the Piddington nail on which he used to fix his thread while teaching the children.

But that which sanctified and directed the whole throughout a working life of more than half a century, was the missionary idea and the missionary consecration. With a caution not often shown at that time by bishops in laying hands on those whom they had passed for deacon’s orders, the little church at Olney thus dealt with the Father of Modern Missions before they would recognise his call and send him out "to preach the gospel wherever God in His providence might call him:"

"June 17, 1785.--A request from William Carey of Moulton, in Northamptonshire, was taken into consideration. He has been and still is in connection with a society of people at Hackleton. He is occasionally engaged with acceptance in various places in speaking the Word. He bears a very good moral character. He is desirous of being sent out from some reputable church of Christ into the work of the ministry. The principal Question was--‘In what manner shall we receive him? by a letter from the people of Hackleton, or on a profession of faith, etc.?’ The final resolution of it was left to another church Meeting.

"July 14--Ch. Meeting. W. Carey appeared before the Church, and having given a satisfactory account of the work of God upon his soul, he was admitted a member. He had been formerly baptised by the Rev. Mr. Ryland, jun., of Northampton. He was invited by the Church to preach in public once next Lord’s Day.

"July 17.--Ch. Meeting, Lord’s Day Evening. W. Carey, in consequence of a request from the Church, preached this Evening. After which it was resolved that he should be allowed to go on preaching at those places where he has been for some time employed, and that he should engage again on suitable occasions for some time before us, in order that farther trial may be made of ministerial gifts.

"June 16, 1786.--C.M. The case of Bror. Carey was considered, and an unanimous satisfaction with his ministerial abilities being expressed, a vote was passed to call him to the Ministry at a proper time.

"August 10.--Ch. Meeting. This evening our Brother William Carey was called to the work of the Ministry, and sent out by the Church to preach the Gospel, wherever God in His providence might call him.

"April 29, 1787.--Ch. M. After the Orde. our Brother William Carey was dismissed to the Church of Christ at Moulton in Northamptonshire with a view to his Ordination there."

These were the last years at Olney of William Cowper before he removed to the Throckmortons’ house at Weston village, two miles distant. Carey must often have seen the poet during the twenty years which he spent in the corner house of the market-square, and in the walks around. He must have read the poems of 1782, which for the first time do justice to missionary enterprise. He must have hailed what Mrs. Browning calls "the deathless singing" which in 1785, in The Task, opened a new era in English literature. He may have been fired with the desire to imitate Whitefield, in the description of whom, though reluctant to name him, Cowper really anticipated Carey himself:--

"He followed Paul; his zeal a kindred flame,

His apostolic charity the same;

Like him crossed cheerfully tempestuous seas,

Forsaking country, kindred, friends and ease;

Like him he laboured and, like him, content

To bear it, suffered shame where’er he went."

Chapter 2: The Birth Of England’s Foreign Missions

1785-1792

Moulton the Mission’s birthplace--Carey’s fever and poverty--His Moulton school--Fired with the missionary idea--His very large missionary map--Fuller’s confession of the aged and respectable ministers’ opposition--Old Mr. Ryland’s rebuke--Driven to publish his Enquiry--Its literary character--Carey’s survey of the world in 1788--His motives, difficulties, and plans--Projects the first Missionary Society--Contrasted with his predecessors from Erasmus--Prayer concert begun in Scotland in 1742--Jonathan Edwards--The Northamptonshire Baptist movement in 1784--Andrew Fuller--The Baptists, Particular and General--Antinomian and Socinian extremes opposed to Missions--Met by Fuller’s writings and Clipstone sermon--Carey’s agony at continued delay--His work in Leicester--His sermon at Nottingham--Foundation of Baptist Missionary Society at last--Kettering and Jerusalem.

THE north road, which runs for twelve miles from Northampton to Kettering, passes through a country known last century for the doings of the Pytchley Hunt. Stories, by no means exaggerated, of the deep drinking and deeper play of the club, whose gatehouse now stands at the entrance of Overstone Park, were rife, when on Lady Day 1785 William Carey became Baptist preacher of Moulton village, on the other side of the road. Moulton was to become the birthplace of the modern missionary idea; Kettering, of evangelical missionary action

No man in England had apparently a more wretched lot or more miserable prospects than he. He had started in life as a journeyman shoemaker at eighteen, burdened with a payment to his first master’s widow which his own kind heart had led him to offer, and with the price of his second master’s stock and business. Trade was good for the moment, and he had married, before he was twenty, one who brought him the most terrible sorrow a man can bear. He had no sooner completed a large order for which his predecessor had contracted than it was returned on his hands. From place to place he wearily trudged, trying to sell the shoes. Fever carried off his first child and brought himself so near to the grave that he sent for his mother to help in the nursing. At Piddington he worked early and late at his garden, but ague, caused by a neighbouring marsh, returned and left him so bald that he wore a wig thereafter until his voyage to India. During his preaching for more than three years at Barton, which involved a walk of sixteen miles, he did not receive from the poor folks enough to pay for the clothes he wore out in their service. His younger brother delicately came to his help, and he received the gift with a pathetic tenderness. But a calling which at once starved him, in spite of all his method and perseverance, and cramped the ardour of his soul for service to the Master who had revealed Himself in him, became distasteful. He gladly accepted an invitation from the somewhat disorganised church at Moulton to preach to them. They could offer him only about £10 a year, supplemented by £5 from a London fund. But the schoolmaster had just left, and Carey saw in that fact a new hope. For a time he and his family managed to live on an income which is estimated as never exceeding £36 a year. We find this passage in a printed appeal made by the "very poor congregation" for funds to repair and enlarge the chapel to which the new pastor’s preaching had attracted a crowd:--"The peculiar situation of our minister, Mr. Carey, renders it impossible for us to send him far abroad to collect the Contributions of the Charitable; as we are able to raise him but about Ten Pounds per Annum, so that he is obliged to keep a School for his Support: And as there are other two Schools in the Town, if he was to leave Home to collect for the Building, he must probably quit his Station on his Return, for Want of a Maintenance."

His genial loving-kindness and his fast increasing learning little fitted him to drill peasant children in the alphabet. "When I kept school the boys kept me," he used to confess with a merry twinkle. In all that our Lord meant by it William Carey was a child from first to last. The former teacher returned, and the poor preacher again took to shoemaking for the village clowns and the shops in Kettering and Northampton. His house still stands, one of a row of six cottages of the dear old English type, with the indispensable garden behind, and the glad sunshine pouring in through the open window embowered in roses and honeysuckle.

There, and chiefly in the school-hours as he tried to teach the children geography and the Bible and was all the while teaching himself, the missionary idea arose in his mind, and his soul became fired with the self-consecration, unknown to Wyclif and Hus, Luther and Calvin, Knox and even Bunyan, for theirs was other work. All his past knowledge of nature and of books, all his favourite reading of voyages and of travels which had led his school-fellows to dub him Columbus, all his painful study of the Word, his experience of the love of Christ and expoundings of the meaning of His message to men for six years, were gathered up, were intensified, and were directed with a concentrated power to the thought that Christ died, as for him, so for these millions of dark savages whom Cook was revealing to Christendom, and who had never heard the glad tidings of great joy.

Carey had ceased to keep school when the Moulton Baptists, who could subscribe no more than twopence a month each for their own poor, formally called the preacher to become their ordained pastor, and Ryland, Sutcliff, and Fuller were asked to ordain him on the 10th August 1786. Fuller had discovered the value of a man who had passed through spiritual experience, and possessed a native common sense like his own, when Carey had been suddenly called to preach in Northampton to supply the place of another. Since that day he had often visited Moulton, and he thus tells us what he had seen:--

"The congregation being few and poor, he followed his business in order to assist in supporting his family. His mind, however, was much occupied in acquiring the learned languages, and almost every other branch of useful knowledge. I remember, on going into the room where he employed himself at his business, I saw hanging up against the wall a very large map, consisting of several sheets of paper pasted together by himself, on which he had drawn, with a pen, a place for every nation in the known world, and entered into it whatever he met with in reading, relative to its population, religion, etc. The substance of this was afterwards published in his Enquiry. These researches, on which his mind was naturally bent, hindered him, of course, from doing much of his business; and the people, as was said, being few and poor, he was at this time exposed to great hardships. I have been assured that he and his family have lived for a great while together without tasting animal food, and with but a scanty pittance of other provision."

"He would also be frequently conversing with his brethren in the ministry on the practicability and importance of a mission to the heathen, and of his willingness to engage in it. At several ministers’ meetings, between the year 1787 and 1790, this was the topic of his conversation. Some of our most aged and respectable ministers thought, I believe, at that time, that it was a wild and impracticable scheme that he had got in his mind, and therefore gave him no encouragement. Yet he would not give it up; but would converse with us, one by one, till he had made some impression upon us."

The picture is completed by his sister:--

"He was always, from his first being thoughtful, remarkably impressed about heathen lands and the slave-trade. I never remember his engaging in prayer, in his family or in public, without praying for those poor creatures. The first time I ever recollect my feeling for the heathen world, was from a discourse I heard my brother preach at Moulton, the first summer after I was thoughtful. It was from these words:--‘For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake will I give him no rest.’ It was a day to be remembered by me; a day set apart for prayer and fasting by the church. What hath God wrought since that time!"

Old Mr. Ryland always failed to recall the story, but we have it on the testimony of Carey’s personal friend, Morris of Clipstone, who was present at the meeting of ministers held in 1786 at Northampton, at which the incident occurred. Ryland invited the younger brethren to propose a subject for discussion. There was no reply, till at last the Moulton preacher suggested, doubtless with an ill-restrained excitement, "whether the command given to the Apostles, to teach all nations, was not obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent." Neither Fuller nor Carey himself had yet delivered the Particular Baptists from the yoke of hyper-calvinism which had to that hour shut the heathen out of a dead Christendom, and the aged chairman shouted out the rebuke--"You are a miserable enthusiast for asking such a question. Certainly nothing can be done before another Pentecost, when an effusion of miraculous gifts, including the gift of tongues, will give effect to the commission of Christ as at first." Carey had never before mentioned the subject openly, and he was for the moment greatly mortified. But, says Morris, he still pondered these things in his heart. That incident marks the wide gulf which Carey had to bridge. Silenced by his brethren, he had recourse to the press. It was then that he wrote his own contribution to the discussion he would have raised on a duty which was more than seventeen centuries old, and had been for fourteen of these neglected: An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, in which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings, are considered by WILLIAM CAREY. Then follows the great conclusion of Paul in his letter to the Romans (x. 12-15): "For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek...How shall they preach except they be sent?" He happened to be in Birmingham in 1786 collecting subscriptions for the rebuilding of the chapel in Moulton, when Mr. Thomas Potts, who had made a fortune in trade with America, discovering that he had prepared the manuscript, gave him £10 to publish it. And it appeared at Leicester in 1792, "price one shilling and sixpence," the profits to go to the proposed mission. The pamphlet form doubtless accounts for its disappearance now; only four copies of the original edition4 are known to be in existence.

This Enquiry has a literary interest of its own, as a contribution to the statistics and geography of the world, written in a cultured and almost finished style, such as few, if any, University men of that day could have produced, for none were impelled by such a motive as Carey had. In an obscure village, toiling save when he slept, and finding rest on Sunday only by a change of toil, far from libraries and the society of men with more advantages than his own, this shoemaker, still under thirty, surveys the whole world, continent by continent, island by island, race by race, faith by faith, kingdom by kingdom, tabulating his results with an accuracy, and following them up with a logical power of generalisation which would extort the admiration of the learned even of the present day.

Having proved that the commission given by our Lord to His disciples is still binding on us, having reviewed former undertakings for the conversion of the heathen from the Ascension to the Moravians and "the late Mr. Wesley" in the West Indies, and having thus surveyed in detail the state of the world in 1786, he removes the five impediments in the way of carrying the Gospel among the heathen, which his contemporaries advanced--their distance from us, their barbarism, the danger of being killed by them, the difficulty of procuring the necessaries of life, the unintelligibleness of their languages. These his loving heart and Bible knowledge enable him skilfully to turn in favour of the cause he pleads. The whole section is essential to an appreciation of Carey’s motives, difficulties, and plans:--

"FIRST, As to their distance from us, whatever objections might have been made on that account before the invention of the mariner’s compass, nothing can be alleged for it with any colour of plausibility in the present age. Men can now sail with as much certainty through the Great South Sea as they can through the Mediterranean or any lesser sea. Yea, and providence seems in a manner to invite us to the trial, as there are to our knowledge trading companies, whose commerce lies in many of the places where these barbarians dwell. At one time or other ships are sent to visit places of more recent discovery, and to explore parts the most unknown; and every fresh account of their ignorance or cruelty should call forth our pity, and excite us to concur with providence in seeking their eternal good. Scripture likewise seems to point out this method, ‘Surely the Isles shall wait for me; the ships of Tarshish first, to bring my sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, unto the name of the Lord, thy God.’--Isai. lx. 9. This seems to imply that in the time of the glorious increase of the church, in the latter days (of which the whole chapter is undoubtedly a prophecy), commerce shall subserve the spread of the gospel. The ships of Tarshish were trading vessels, which made voyages for traffic to various parts; thus much therefore must be meant by it, that navigation, especially that which is commercial, shall be one great mean of carrying on the work of God; and perhaps it may imply that there shall be a very considerable appropriation of wealth to that purpose.

"SECONDLY, As to their uncivilised and barbarous way of living, this can be no objection to any, except those whose love of ease renders them unwilling to expose themselves to inconveniences for the good of others. It was no objection to the apostles and their successors, who went among the barbarous Germans and Gauls, and still more barbarous Britons! They did not wait for the ancient inhabitants of these countries to be civilised before they could be christianised, but went simply with the doctrine of the cross; and Tertullian could boast that ‘those parts of Britain which were proof against the Roman armies, were conquered by the gospel of Christ.’ It was no objection to an Eliot or a Brainerd, in later times. They went forth, and encountered every difficulty of the kind, and found that a cordial reception of the gospel produced those happy effects which the longest fellowship with Europeans without it could never accomplish. It is no objection to commercial men. It only requires that we should have as much love to the souls of our fellow-creatures, and fellow-sinners, as they have for the profits arising from a few otter-skins, and all these difficulties would be easily surmounted.

"After all, the uncivilised state of the heathen, instead of affording an objection against preaching the gospel to them, ought to furnish an argument for it. Can we as men, or as Christians, hear that a great part of our fellow-creatures, whose souls are as immortal as ours, and who are as capable as ourselves of adorning the gospel and contributing by their preachings, writings, or practices to the glory of our Redeemer’s name and the good of his church, are enveloped in ignorance and barbarism? Can we hear that they are without the gospel, without government, without laws, and without arts, and sciences; and not exert ourselves to introduce among them the sentiments of men, and of Christians? Would not the spread of the gospel be the most effectual mean of their civilisation? Would not that make them useful members of society? We know that such effects did in a measure follow the afore-mentioned efforts of Eliot, Brainerd, and others amongst the American Indians; and if similar attempts were made in other parts of the world, and succeeded with a divine blessing (which we have every reason to think they would), might we not expect to see able divines, or read well-conducted treatises in defence of the truth, even amongst those who at present seem to be scarcely human?

"THIRDLY, In respect to the danger of being killed by them, it is true that whoever does go must put his life in his hand, and not consult with flesh and blood; but do not the goodness of the cause, the duties incumbent on us as the creatures of God and Christians, and the perishing state of our fellow-men, loudly call upon us to venture all, and use every warrantable exertion for their benefit? Paul and Barnabas, who hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, were not blamed as being rash, but commended for so doing; while John Mark, who through timidity of mind deserted them in their perilous undertaking, was branded with censure. After all, as has been already observed, I greatly question whether most of the barbarities practised by the savages upon those who have visited them, have not originated in some real or supposed affront, and were therefore, more properly, acts of self-defence, than proofs of ferocious dispositions. No wonder if the imprudence of sailors should prompt them to offend the simple savage, and the offence be resented; but Eliot, Brainerd, and the Moravian missionaries have been very seldom molested. Nay, in general the heathen have showed a willingness to hear the word; and have principally expressed their hatred of Christianity on account of the vices of nominal Christians.

"FOURTHLY, As to the difficulty of procuring the necessaries of life, this would not be so great as may appear at first sight; for, though we could not procure European food, yet we might procure such as the natives of those countries which we visit, subsist upon themselves. And this would only be passing through what we have virtually engaged in by entering on the ministerial office. A Christian minister is a person who in a peculiar sense is not his own; he is the servant of God, and therefore ought to be wholly devoted to him. By entering on that sacred office he solemnly undertakes to be always engaged, as much as possible, in the Lord’s work, and not to choose his own pleasure, or employment, or pursue the ministry as a something that is to subserve his own ends, or interests, or as a kind of bye-work. He engages to go where God pleases, and to do or endure what he sees fit to command, or call him to, in the exercise of his function. He virtually bids farewell to friends, pleasures, and comforts, and stands in readiness to endure the greatest sufferings in the work of his Lord, and Master. It is inconsistent for ministers to please themselves with thoughts of a numerous auditory, cordial friends, a civilised country, legal protection, affluence, splendour, or even a competency. The slights, and hatred of men, and even pretended friends, gloomy prisons, and tortures, the society of barbarians of uncouth speech, miserable accommodations in wretched wildernesses, hunger, and thirst, nakedness, weariness, and painfulness, hard work, and but little worldly encouragement, should rather be the objects of their expectation. Thus the apostles acted, in the primitive times, and endured hardness, as good soldiers of Jesus Christ; and though we, living in a civilised country where Christianity is protected by law, are not called to suffer these things while we continue here, yet I question whether all are justified in staying here, while so many are perishing without means of grace in other lands. Sure I am that it is entirely contrary to the spirit of the gospel for its ministers to enter upon it from interested motives, or with great worldly expectations. On the contrary, the commission is a sufficient call to them to venture all, and, like the primitive Christians, go everywhere preaching the gospel.

"It might be necessary, however, for two, at least, to go together, and in general I should think it best that they should be married men, and to prevent their time from being employed in procuring necessaries, two, or more, other persons, with their wives and families, might also accompany them, who should be wholly employed in providing for them. In most countries it would be necessary for them to cultivate a little spot of ground just for their support, which would be a resource to them, whenever their supplies failed. Not to mention the advantages they would reap from each other’s company, it would take off the enormous expense which has always attended undertakings of this kind, the first expense being the whole; for though a large colony needs support for a considerable time, yet so small a number would, upon receiving the first crop, maintain themselves. They would have the advantage of choosing their situation, their wants would be few; the women, and even the children, would be necessary for domestic purposes: and a few articles of stock, as a cow or two, and a bull, and a few other cattle of both sexes, a very few utensils of husbandry, and some corn to sow their land, would be sufficient. Those who attend the missionaries should understand husbandry, fishing, fowling, etc., and be provided with the necessary implements for these purposes. Indeed, a variety of methods may be thought of, and when once the work is undertaken, many things will suggest themselves to us, of which we at present can form no idea.

"FIFTHLY, As to learning their languages, the same means would be found necessary here as in trade between different nations. In some cases interpreters might be obtained, who might be employed for a time; and where these were not to be found, the missionaries must have patience, and mingle with the people, till they have learned so much of their language as to be able to communicate their ideas to them in it. It is well known to require no very extraordinary talents to learn, in the space of a year, or two at most, the language of any people upon earth, so much of it at least as to be able to convey any sentiments we wish to their understandings.

"The Missionaries must be men of great piety, prudence, courage, and forbearance; of undoubted orthodoxy in their sentiments, and must enter with all their hearts into the spirit of their mission; they must be willing to leave all the comforts of life behind them, and to encounter all the hardships of a torrid or a frigid climate, an uncomfortable manner of living, and every other inconvenience that can attend this undertaking. Clothing, a few knives, powder and shot, fishing-tackle, and the articles of husbandry above mentioned, must be provided for them; and when arrived at the place of their destination, their first business must be to gain some acquaintance with the language of the natives (for which purpose two would be better than one), and by all lawful means to endeavour to cultivate a friendship with them, and as soon as possible let them know the errand for which they were sent. They must endeavour to convince them that it was their good alone which induced them to forsake their friends, and all the comforts of their native country. They must be very careful not to resent injuries which may be offered to them, nor to think highly of themselves, so as to despise the poor heathens, and by those means lay a foundation for their resentment or rejection of the gospel. They must take every opportunity of doing them good, and labouring and travelling night and day, they must instruct, exhort, and rebuke, with all long suffering and anxious desire for them, and, above all, must be instant in prayer for the effusion of the Holy Spirit upon the people of their charge. Let but missionaries of the above description engage in the work, and we shall see that it is not impracticable.

"It might likewise be of importance, if God should bless their labours, for them to encourage any appearances of gifts amongst the people of their charge; if such should be raised up many advantages would be derived from their knowledge of the language and customs of their countrymen; and their change of conduct would give great weight to their ministrations."

This first and still greatest missionary treatise in the English language closes with the practical suggestion of these means--fervent and united prayer, the formation of a catholic or, failing that, a Particular Baptist Society of "persons whose hearts are in the work, men of serious religion and possessing a spirit of perseverance," with an executive committee, and subscriptions from rich and poor of a tenth of their income for both village preaching and foreign missions, or, at least, an average of one penny or more per week from all members of congregations. He thus concludes:--"It is true all the reward is of mere grace, but it is nevertheless encouraging; what a treasure, what an harvest must await such characters as Paul, and Eliot, and Brainerd, and others, who have given themselves wholly to the work of the Lord. What a heaven will it be to see the many myriads of poor heathens, of Britons amongst the rest, who by their labours have been brought to the knowledge of God. Surely a crown of rejoicing like this is worth aspiring to. Surely it is worth while to lay ourselves out with all our might, in promoting the cause and kingdom of Christ."

So Carey projected the first organisation which England had seen for missions to all the human race outside of Christendom; and his project, while necessarily requiring a Society to carry it out, as coming from an "independent" Church, provided that every member of every congregation should take a part to the extent of fervent and united prayer, and of an average subscription of a penny a week. He came as near to the New Testament ideal of all Christians acting in an aggressive missionary church as was possible in an age when the Established Churches of England, Scotland, and Germany scouted foreign missions, and the Free Churches were chiefly congregational in their ecclesiastical action. While asserting the other ideal of the voluntary tenth or tithe as both a Scriptural principle and Puritan practice, his common sense was satisfied to suggest an average penny a week, all over, for every Christian. At this hour, more than a century since Carey wrote, and after a remarkable missionary revival in consequence of what he wrote and did, all Christendom, Evangelical, Greek, and Latin, does not give more than five millions sterling a year to Christianise the majority of the race still outside its pale. It is not too much to say that were Carey’s penny a week from every Christian a fact, and the prayer which would sooner or later accompany it, the five millions would be fifty, and Christendom would become a term nearly synonymous with humanity. The Churches, whether by themselves or by societies, have yet to pray and organise up to the level of Carey’s penny a week.

The absolute originality as well as grandeur of the unconscious action of the peasant shoemaker who, from 1779, prayed daily for all the heathen and slaves, and organised his society accordingly, will be seen in the dim light or darkness visible of all who had preceded him. They were before the set time; he was ready in the fulness of the missionary preparation. They belonged not only to periods, but to nations, to churches, to communities which were failing in the struggle for fruitfulness and expansion in new worlds and fresh lands; he was a son of England, which had come or was about to come out of the struggle a victor, charged with the terrible responsibility of the special servant of the Lord, as no people had ever before been charged in all history, sacred or secular. William Carey, indeed, reaped the little that the few brave toilers of the wintry time had sown; with a humility that is pathetic he acknowledges their toll, while ever ignorant to the last of his own merit. But he reaped only as each generation garners such fruits of its predecessor as may have been worthy to survive. He was the first of the true Anastatosantes of the modern world, as only an English-speaking man could be--of the most thorough, permanent, and everlasting of all Reformers, the men who turn the world upside down, because they make it rise up and depart from deadly beliefs and practices, from the fear and the fate of death, into the life and light of Christ and the Father.

Who were his predecessors, reckoning from the Renascence of Europe, the discovery of America, and the opening up of India and Africa? Erasmus comes first, the bright scholar of compromise who in 1516 gave the New Testament again to Europe, as three centuries after Carey gave it to all Southern Asia, and whose missionary treatise, Ecclesiasties, in 1535 anticipated, theoretically at least, Carey’s Enquiry by two centuries and a half. The missionary dream of this escaped monk of Rotterdam and Basel, who taught women and weavers and cobblers to read the Scriptures, and prayed that the Book might be translated into all languages, was realised in the scandalous iniquities and frauds of Portuguese and Spanish and Jesuit missions in West and East. Luther had enough to do with his papal antichrist and his German translation of the Greek of the Testament of Erasmus. The Lutheran church drove missions into the hands of the Pietists and Moravians--Wiclif’s offspring--who nobly but ineffectually strove to do a work meant for the whole Christian community. The Church of England thrust forth the Puritans first to Holland and then to New England, where Eliot, the Brainerds, and the Mayhews sought to evangelise tribes which did not long survive themselves.

It was from Courteenhall, a Northamptonshire village near Paulerspury, that in 1644 there went forth the appeal for the propagation of the Gospel which comes nearest to Carey’s cry from the same midland region. Cromwell was in power, and had himself planned a Protestant Propaganda, so to the Long Parliament William Castell, "parson of Courteenhall," sent a petition which, with the "Eliot Tracts," resulted in an ordinance creating the Corporation for the Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England. Seventy English ministers had backed the petition, and six of the Church of Scotland, first of whom was Alexander Henderson. The corporation, which, in a restored form, Robert Boyle governed for thirty years, familiarised the nation with the duty of caring for the dark races then coming more and more under our sway alike in America and in India. It still exists, as well as Boyle’s Society for advancing the Faith in the West Indies. The Friends also, and then the Moravians, taught the Wesleys and Whitefield to care for the negroes. The English and Scottish Propagation Societies sought also to provide spiritual aids for the colonists and the highlanders.

The two great thinkers of the eighteenth century, who flourished as philosopher and moralist when Carey was a youth, taught the principles which he of all others was to apply on their spiritual and most effective side. Adam Smith put his finger on the crime which had darkened and continued till 1834 to shadow the brightness of geographical enterprise in both hemispheres--the treatment of the natives by Europeans whose superiority of force enabled them to commit every sort of injustice in the new lands. He sought a remedy in establishing an equality of force by the mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements by an extensive commerce.   Samuel Johnson rose to a higher level alike of wisdom and righteousness, when he expressed the indignation of a Christian mind that the propagation of truth had never been seriously pursued by any European nation, and the hope "that the light of the Gospel will at last illuminate the sands of Africa and the deserts of America, though its progress cannot but be slow when it is so much obstructed by the lives of Christians."

The early movement which is connected most directly with Carey’s and the Northamptonshire Baptists’ began in Scotland. Its Kirk, emasculated by the Revolution settlement and statute of Queen Anne, had put down the evangelical teaching of Boston and the "marrow" men, and had cast out the fathers of the Secession in 1733. In 1742 the quickening spread over the west country. In October 1744 several ministers in Scotland united, for the two years next following, in what they called, and what has since become familiar in America as, a "Concert to promote more abundant application to a duty that is perpetually binding--prayer that our God’s kingdom may come, joined with praises;" to be offered weekly on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, and more solemnly on the first Tuesday of every quarter. Such was the result, and so did the prayer concert spread in the United Kingdom that in August 1746 a memorial was sent to Boston inviting all Christians in North America to enter into it for the next seven years. It was on this that Jonathan Edwards wrote his Humble Attempt to promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth.

This work of Edwards, republished at Olney, came into the hands of Carey, and powerfully influenced the Northamptonshire Association of Baptist ministers and messengers. At their meeting in Nottingham in 1784 Sutcliff of Olney suggested and Ryland of Northampton drafted an invitation to the people to join them, for one hour on the first Monday of every month, in prayer for the effusion of the Holy Spirit of God. "Let the whole interest of the Redeemer be affectionately remembered," wrote these catholic men, and to give emphasis to their œcumenical missionary desires they added in italics--"Let the spread of the Gospel to the most distant parts of the habitable globe be the object of your most fervent requests. We shall rejoice if any other Christian societies of our own or other denominations will join with us, and we do now invite them most cordially to join heart and hand in the attempt." To this Carey prominently referred in his Enquiry, tracing to even the unimportunate and feeble prayers of these eight years the increase of the churches, the clearing of controversies, the opening of lands to missions, the spread of civil and religious liberty, the noble effort made to abolish the inhuman slave-trade, and the establishment of the free settlement of Sierra Leone. And then he hits the other blots in the movement, besides the want of importunity and earnestness--"We must not be contented with praying without exerting ourselves in the use of means...Were the children of light but as wise in their generation as the children of this world, they would stretch every nerve to gain so glorious a prize, nor ever imagine that it was to be obtained in any other way." A trading company obtain a charter and go to its utmost limits. The charter, the encouragements of Christians are exceeding great, and the returns promised infinitely superior. "Suppose a company of serious Christians, ministers and private persons, were to form themselves into a society."

The man was ready who had been specially fitted, by character and training, to form the home organisation of the society, while Carey created its foreign mission. For the next quarter of a century William Carey and Andrew Fuller worked lovingly, fruitfully together, with the breadth of half the world between them. The one showed how, by Bible and church and school, by physical and spiritual truth, India and all Asia could be brought to Christ; the other taught England, Scotland, and America to begin at last to play their part in an enterprise as old as Abraham; as divine in its warrant, its charge, its promise, as Christ Himself. Seven years older than Carey, his friend was born a farmer’s son and labourer in the fen country of Cromwell whom he resembled, was self-educated under conditions precisely similar, and passed through spiritual experiences almost exactly the same. The two, unknown to each other, found themselves when called to preach at eighteen unable to reconcile the grim dead theology of their church with the new life and liberty which had come to them direct from the Spirit of Christ and from His Word. Carey had left his ancestral church at a time when the biographer of Romaine could declare with truth that that preacher was the only evangelical in the established churches of all London, and that of twenty thousand clergymen in England, the number who preached the truth as it is in Jesus had risen from not twenty in 1749 to three hundred in 1789. The methodism of the Wesleys was beginning to tell, but the Baptists were as lifeless as the Established Church. In both the Church and Dissent there were individuals only, like Newton and Scott, the elder Robert Hall and Ryland, whose spiritual fervour made them marked men.

The Baptists, who had stood alone as the advocates of toleration, religious and civil, in an age of intolerance which made them the victims, had subsided like Puritan and Covenanter when the Revolution of 1688 brought persecution to an end. The section who held the doctrine of "general" redemption, and are now honourably known as General Baptists, preached ordinary Arminianism, and even Socinianism. The more earnest and educated among them clung to Calvinism, but, by adopting the unhappy term of "particular" Baptists, gradually fell under a fatalistic and antinomian spell. This false Calvinism, which the French theologian of Geneva would have been the first to denounce, proved all the more hostile to the preaching of the Gospel of salvation to the heathen abroad, as well as the sinner at home, that it professed to be an orthodox evangel while either emasculating the Gospel or turning the grace of God into licentiousness. From such "particular" preachers as young Fuller and Carey listened to, at first with bewilderment, then impatience, and then denunciation, missions of no kind could come. Fuller exposed and pursued the delusion with a native shrewdness, a masculine sagacity, and a fine English style, which have won for him the apt name of the Franklin of Theology. For more than twenty years Fullerism, as it was called, raised a controversy like that of the Marrow of Divinity in Scotland, and cleared the ground sufficiently at least to allow of the foundation of foreign missions in both countries. It now seems incredible that the only class who a century ago represented evangelicalism should have opposed missions to the heathen on the ground that the Gospel is meant only for the elect, whether at home or abroad; that nothing spiritually good is the duty of the unregenerate, therefore "nothing must be addressed to them in a way of exhortation excepting what relates to external obedience."

The same year, 1784, in which the Baptist concert for prayer was begun, saw the publication of Fuller’s Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation. Seven years later he preached at Clipstone a famous sermon, in which he applied the dealing of the Lord of Hosts (in Haggai) to the Jewish apathy--"The time is not come that the Lord’s house should be built"--with a power and directness which nevertheless failed practically to convince himself. The men who listened to him had been praying for seven years, yet had opposed Carey’s pleas for a foreign mission, had treated him as a visionary or a madman. When Fuller had published his treatise, Carey had drawn the practical deduction--"If it be the duty of all men, when the Gospel comes, to believe unto salvation, then it is the duty of those who are entrusted with the Gospel to endeavour to make it known among all nations for the obedience of faith." Now, after seven more years of waiting, and remembering the manuscript Enquiry, Carey thought action cannot be longer delayed. Hardly was the usual discussion that followed the meeting over when, as the story is told by the son of Ryland who had silenced him in a former ministers’ meeting, Carey appealed to his brethren to put their preaching into practice and begin a missionary society that very day. Fuller’s sermon bore the title of The Evil Nature and the Dangerous Tendency of Delay in the Concerns of Religion, and it had been preceded by one on being very jealous for the Lord God of Hosts, in which Sutcliff cried for the divine passion, the celestial fire that burned in the bosom and blazed in the life of Elijah. The Elijah of their own church and day was among them, burning and blazing for years, and all that he could induce them to promise was vaguely that, "something should be done," and to throw to his importunity the easy request that he would publish his manuscript and preach next year’s sermon.

Meanwhile, in 1789, Carey had left Moulton6 for Leicester, whither he was summoned to build up a congregation, ruined by antinomianism, in the mean brick chapel of the obscure quarter of Harvey Lane. This chapel his genius and Robert Hall’s eloquence made so famous in time that the Baptists sent off a vigorous hive to the fine new church. In an equally humble house opposite the chapel the poverty of the pastor compelled him to keep a school from nine in the morning till four in winter and five in summer. Between this and the hours for sleep and food he had little leisure; but that he spent, as he had done all his life before and did all his life after, with a method and zeal which doubled his working days. "I have seen him at work," writes Gardiner in his Music and Friends, "his books beside him, and his beautiful flowers in the windows." In a letter to his father we have this division of his leisure--Monday, "the learned languages;" Tuesday, "the study of science, history, composition, etc;" Wednesday, "I preach a lecture, and have been for more than twelve months on the Book of Revelation;" Thursday, "I visit my friends;" Friday and Saturday, "preparing for the Lord’s Day." He preached three times every Sunday in his own chapel or the surrounding villages, with such results that in one case he added hundreds to its Wesleyan congregation. He was secretary to the local committee of dissenters. "Add to this occasional journeys, ministers’ meetings, etc., and you will rather wonder that I have any time, than that I have so little. I am not my own, nor would I choose for myself. Let God employ me where he thinks fit, and give me patience and discretion to fill up my station to his honour and glory."

"After I had been probationer in this place a year and ten months, on the 24th of May 1791 I was solemnly set apart to the office of pastor. About twenty ministers of different denominations were witnesses to the transactions of the day. After prayer Brother Hopper of Nottingham addressed the congregation upon the nature of an ordination, after which he proposed the usual questions to the church, and required my Confession of Faith; which being delivered, Brother Ryland prayed the ordination prayer, with laying on of hands. Brother Sutcliff delivered a very solemn charge from Acts vi. 4--‘But we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word.’ And Brother Fuller delivered an excellent address to the people from Eph. v. 2--‘Walk in love.’ In the evening Brother Pearce of Birmingham preached from Gal. vi. 14--‘God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world.’ The day was a day of pleasure, and I hope of profit to the greatest part of the Assembly."

Carey became the friend of his neighbour, Thomas Robinson, evangelical rector of St. Mary’s, to whom he said on one occasion when indirectly charged in humorous fashion with "sheep-stealing:" "Mr. Robinson, I am a dissenter, and you are a churchman; we must each endeavour to do good according to our light. At the same time, you may be assured that I had rather be the instrument of converting a scavenger that sweeps the streets than of merely proselyting the richest and best characters in your congregation." Dr. Arnold and Mr. R. Brewin, a botanist, opened to him their libraries, and all good men in Leicester soon learned to be proud of the new Baptist minister. In the two chapels, as in that of Moulton, enlarged since his time, memorial tablets tell succeeding generations of the virtues and the deeds of "the illustrious W. Carey, D.D."

The ministers’ meeting of 1792 came round, and on 31st May Carey seized his opportunity. The place was Nottingham, from which the 1784 invitation to prayer had gone forth. Was the answer to come just there after nine years’ waiting? His Enquiry had been published; had it prepared the brethren? Ryland had been always loyal to the journeyman shoemaker he had baptised in the river, and he gives us this record:--"If all the people had lifted up their voices and wept, as the children of Israel did at Bochim, I should not have wondered at the effect. It would only have seemed proportionate to the cause, so clearly did he prove the criminality of our supineness in the cause of God." The text was Isaiah’s (liv. 2, 3) vision of the widowed church’s tent stretching forth till her children inherited the nations and peopled the desolate cities, and the application to the reluctant brethren was couched in these two great maxims written ever since on the banners of the missionary host of the kingdom--

EXPECT GREAT THINGS FROM GOD.

ATTEMPT GREAT THINGS FOR GOD.

The service was over; even Fuller was afraid, even Ryland made no sign, and the ministers were leaving the meeting. Seizing Fuller’s arm with an imploring look, the preacher, whom despair emboldened to act alone for his Master, exclaimed: "And are you, after all, going again to do nothing?" What Fuller describes as the "much fear and trembling" of these inexperienced, poor, and ignorant village preachers gave way to the appeal of one who had gained both knowledge and courage, and who, as to funds and men, was ready to give himself. They entered on their minutes this much:--"That a plan be prepared against the next ministers’ meeting at Kettering for forming a Baptist Society for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen." There was more delay, but only for four months. The first purely English Missionary Society, which sent forth its own English founder, was thus constituted as described in the minutes of the Northampton ministers’ meeting.

"At the ministers’ meeting at Kettering, October 2, 1792, after the public services of the day were ended, the ministers retired to consult further on the matter, and to lay a foundation at least for a society, when the following resolutions were proposed, and unanimously agreed to:--

"1. Desirous of making an effort for the propagation of the gospel among the heathen, agreeably to what is recommended in brother Carey’s late publication on that subject, we, whose names appear to the subsequent subscription, do solemnly agree to act in society together for that purpose

"2. As in the present divided state of Christendom, it seems that each denomination, by exerting itself separately, is most likely to accomplish the great ends of a mission, it is agreed that this society be called The Particular [Calvinistic] Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen.

"3. As such an undertaking must needs be attended with expense, we agree immediately to open a subscription for the above purpose, and to recommend it to others.

"4. Every person who shall subscribe ten pounds at once, or ten shillings and sixpence annually, shall be considered a member of the society.

"5. That the Rev. John Ryland, Reynold Hogg, William Carey, John Sutcliff, and Andrew Fuller, be appointed a committee, three of whom shall be empowered to act in carrying into effect the purposes of this society.

"6. That the Rev. Reynold Hogg be appointed treasurer, and the Rev. Andrew Fuller secretary.

"7. That the subscriptions be paid in at the Northampton ministers’ meeting, October 31, 1792, at which time the subject shall be considered more particularly by the committee, and other subscribers who may be present.

"Signed, John Ryland, Reynold Hogg, John Sutcliff, Andrew Fuller, Abraham Greenwood, Edward Sherman, Joshua Burton, Samuel Pearce, Thomas Blundel, William Heighton, John Eayres, Joseph Timms; whose subscriptions in all amounted to £13:2:6."

The procedure suggested in "brother Carey’s late publication" was strictly followed--a society of subscribers, 2d. a week, or 10s. 6d. a year as a compromise between the tithes and the penny a week of the Enquiry. The secretary was the courageous Fuller, who once said to Ryland and Sutcliff: "You excel me in wisdom, especially in foreseeing difficulties. I therefore want to advise with you both, but to execute without you." The frequent chairman was Ryland, who was soon to train missionaries for the work at Bristol College. The treasurer was the only rich man of the twelve, who soon resigned his office into a layman’s hands, as was right. Of the others we need now point only to Samuel Pearce, the seraphic preacher of Birmingham, who went home and sent £70 to the collection, and who, since he desired to give himself like Carey, became to him dearer than even Fuller was. The place was a low-roofed parlour in the house of Widow Wallis, looking on to a back garden, which many a pilgrim still visits, and around which there gathered thousands in 1842 to hold the first jubilee of modern missions, when commemorative medals were struck. There in 1892 the centenary witnessed a still vaster assemblage.

Can any good come out of Kettering? was the conclusion of the Baptist ministers of London with the one exception of Booth, when they met formally to decide whether, like those of Birmingham and other places, they should join the primary society. Benjamin Beddome, a venerable scholar whom Robert Hall declared to be chief among his brethren, replied to Fuller in language which is far from unusual even at the present day, but showing the position which the Leicester minister had won for himself even then:--

"I think your scheme, considering the paucity of well-qualified ministers, hath a very unfavourable aspect with respect to destitute churches at home, where charity ought to begin. I had the pleasure once to see and hear Mr. Carey; it struck me he was the most suitable person in the kingdom, at least whom I knew, to supply my place, and make up my great deficiencies when either disabled or removed. A different plan is formed and pursued, and I fear that the great and good man, though influenced by the most excellent motives, will meet with a disappointment. However, God hath his ends, and whoever is disappointed He cannot be so. My unbelieving heart is ready to suggest that the time is not come, the time that the Lord’s house should be built."

The other Congregationalists made no sign. The Presbyterians, with a few noble exceptions like Dr. Erskine, whose Dutch volume Carey had translated, denounced such movements as revolutionary in a General Assembly of Socinianised "moderates." The Church of England kept haughtily or timidly aloof, though king and archbishop were pressed to send a mission. "Those who in that day sneered that England had sent a cobbler to convert the world were the direct lineal descendants of those who sneered in Palestine 2000 years ago, ‘Is not this the carpenter?’" said Archdeacon Farrar in Westminster Abbey on 6th March 1887. Hence Fuller’s reference to this time:--"When we began in 1792 there was little or no respectability among us, not so much as a squire to sit in the chair or an orator to address him with speeches. Hence good Dr. Stennett advised the London ministers to stand aloof and not commit themselves."

One man in India had striven to rouse the Church to its duty as Carey had done at home. Charles Grant had in 1787 written from Malda to Charles Simeon and Wilberforce for eight missionaries, but not one Church of England clergyman could be found to go. Thirty years after, when chairman of the Court of Directors and father of Lord Glenelg and Sir Robert Grant, he wrote:--"I had formed the design of a mission to Bengal: Providence reserved that honour for the Baptists." After all, the twelve village pastors in the back parlour of Kettering were the more really the successors of the twelve apostles in the upper room of Jerusalem

Chapter 3: India As Carey Found It

1793

Tahiti v. Bengal--Carey and Thomas appointed missionaries to Bengal--The farewell at Leicester--John Thomas, first medical missionary--Carey’s letter to his father--The Company’s "abominable monopoly"--The voyage--Carey’s aspirations for world-wide missions--Lands at Calcutta--His description of Bengal in 1793--Contrast presented by Carey to Clive, Hastings, and Cornwallis--The spiritual founder of an Indian Empire of Christian Britain--Bengal and the famine of 1769-70--The Decennial Settlement declared permanent--Effects on the landed classes--Obstacles to Carey’s work--East India Company at its worst--Hindooism and the Bengalees in 1793--Position of Hindoo women--Missionary attempts before Carey’s--Ziegenbalg and Schwartz--Kiernander and the chaplains--Hindooised state of Anglo-Indian society and its reaction on England--Guneshan Dass, the first caste Hindoo to visit England--William Carey had no predecessor.

CAREY had desired to go first to Tahiti or Western Africa. The natives of North America and the negroes of the West Indies and Sierra Leone were being cared for by Moravian and Wesleyan evangelists. The narrative of Captain Cook’s two first voyages to the Pacific and discovery of Tahiti had appeared in the same year in which the Northampton churches began their seven years’ concert of prayer, just after his own second baptism. From the map, and a leather globe which also he is said to have made, he had been teaching the children of Piddington, Moulton, and Leicester the great outlines and thrilling details of expeditions round the world which roused both the scientific and the simple of England as much as the discoveries of Columbus had excited Europe. When the childlike ignorance and natural grace of the Hawaiians, which had at first fired him with the longing to tell them the good news of God, were seen turned into the wild justice of revenge, which made Cook its first victim, Carey became all the more eager to anticipate the disasters of later days. That was work for which others were to be found. It was not amid the scattered and decimated savages of the Pacific or of America that the citadel of heathenism was found, nor by them that the world, old and new, was to be made the kingdom of Christ. With the cautious wisdom that marked all Fuller’s action, though perhaps with the ignorance that was due to Carey’s absence, the third meeting of the new society recorded this among other articles "to be examined and discussed in the most diligent and impartial manner--In what part of the heathen world do there seem to be the most promising openings?"

The answer, big with consequence for the future of the East, was in their hands, in the form of a letter from Carey, who stated that "Mr. Thomas, the Bengal missionary," was trying to raise a fund for that province, and asked "whether it would not be worthy of the Society to try to make that and ours unite with one fund for the purpose of sending the gospel to the heathen indefinitely." Tahiti was not to be neglected, nor Africa, nor Bengal, in "our larger plan," which included above four hundred millions of our fellowmen, among whom it was an object "worthy of the most ardent and persevering pursuit to disseminate the humane and saving principles of the Christian Religion." If this Mr. Thomas were worthy, his experience made it desirable to begin with Bengal. Thomas answered for himself at the next meeting, when Carey fell upon his neck and wept, having previously preached from the words--"Behold I come quickly, and My reward is with Me." "We saw," said Fuller afterwards, "there was a gold mine in India, but it was as deep as the centre of the earth. Who will venture to explore it? ‘I will venture to go down,’ said Carey, ‘but remember that you (addressing Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland) must hold the ropes.’ We solemnly engaged to him to do so, nor while we live shall we desert him."

Carey and Thomas, an ordained minister and a medical evangelist, were at this meeting in Kettering, on 10th January 1793, appointed missionaries to "the East Indies for preaching the gospel to the heathen," on "£100 or £150 a year between them all,"--that is, for two missionaries, their wives, and four children,--until they should be able to support themselves like the Moravians. As a matter of fact they received just £200 in all for the first three years when self-support and mission extension fairly began. The whole sum at credit of the Society for outfit, passage, and salaries was £130, so that Fuller’s prudence was not without justification when supported by Thomas’s assurances that the amount was enough, and Carey’s modest self-sacrifice. "We advised Mr. Carey," wrote Fuller to Ryland, "to give up his school this quarter, for we must make up the loss to him." The more serious cost of the passage was raised by Fuller and by the preaching tours of the two missionaries. During one of these, at Hull, Carey met the printer and newspaper editor, William Ward, and cast his mantle over him thus--"If the Lord bless us, we shall want a person of your business to enable us to print the Scriptures; I hope you will come after us." Ward did so in five years.

The 20th March 1793 was a high day in the Leicester chapel, Harvey Lane, when the missionaries were set apart like Barnabas and Paul--a forenoon of prayer; an afternoon of preaching by Thomas from Psalm xvi. 4; "Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another God;" an evening of preaching by the treasurer from Acts xxi. 14, "And when he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, the will of the Lord be done;" and the parting charge by Fuller the secretary, from the risen Lord’s own benediction and forthsending of His disciples, "Peace be unto you, as My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you." Often in after days of solitude and reproach did Carey quicken his faith by reading the brave and loving words of Fuller on "the objects you must keep in view, the directions you must observe, the difficulties you must encounter, the reward you may expect."

Under date four days after we find this entry in the Church Book--"Mr. Carey, our minister, left Leicester to go on a mission to the East Indies, to take and propagate the Gospel among those idolatrous and superstitious heathens. This is inserted to show his love to his poor miserable fellow-creatures. In this we concurred with him, though it is at the expense of losing one whom we love as our own souls." When Carey’s preaching had so filled the church that it became necessary to build a front gallery at a cost of £98, and they had applied to several other churches for assistance in vain, he thus taught them to help themselves. The minister and many of the members agreed to pay off the debt "among ourselves" by weekly subscriptions,--a process, however, which covered five years, so poor were they. Carey left this as a parting lesson to home congregations, while his people found it the easier to pay the debt that they had sacrificed their best, their own minister, to the work of missions for which he had taught them to pray.

John Thomas, four years older than Carey, was a surgeon, who had made two voyages to Calcutta in the Oxford Indiaman, had been of spiritual service to Charles Grant, Mr. George Udny, and the Bengal civilian circle at Malda, and had been supported by Mr. Grant as a missionary for a time until his eccentricities and debts outraged his friends and drove him home at the time of the Kettering meetings. Full justice has been done to a character and a career somewhat resembling those of John Newton, by his patient and able biographer the Rev. C. B. Lewis. John Thomas has the merit of being the first medical missionary, at a time when no other Englishman cared for either the bodies or souls of our recently acquired subjects in North India, outside of Charles Grant’s circle. He has more; he was used by God to direct Carey to the dense Hindoo population of Bengal--to the people and to the centre, that is, where Brahmanism had its seat, and whence Buddhism had been carried by thousands of missionaries all over Southern, Eastern, and Central Asia. But there our ascription of merit to Thomas must stop. However well he might speak the uncultured Bengali, he never could write the language or translate the Bible into a literary style so that it could be understood by the people or influence their leaders. His temper kept Charles Grant back from helping the infant mission, though anxious to see Mr. Carey and to aid him and any other companion. The debts of Thomas caused him and Carey to be excluded from the Oxford, in which his friend the commander had agreed to take them and their party without a licence; clouded the early years of the enterprise with their shadow, and formed the heaviest of the many burdens Carey had to bear at starting. If, afterwards, the old association of Thomas with Mr. Udny at Malda gave Carey a home during his Indian apprenticeship, this was a small atonement for the loss of the direct help of Mr. Grant. If Carey proved to be the John among the men who began to make Serampore illustrious, Thomas was the Peter, so far as we know Peter in the Gospels only.

Just before being ejected from the Oxford, as he had been deprived of the effectual help of Charles Grant through his unhappy companion, when with only his eldest son Felix beside him, how did Carey view his God-given mission? The very different nature of his wife, who had announced to him the birth of a child, clung anew to the hope that this might cause him to turn back. Writing from Ryde on the 6th May he thus replied with sweet delicacy of human affection, but with true loyalty to his Master’s call:--

"Received yours, giving me an account of your safe delivery. This is pleasant news indeed to me; surely goodness and mercy follow me all my days. My stay here was very painful and unpleasant, but now I see the goodness of God in it. It was that I might hear the most pleasing accounts that I possibly could hear respecting earthly things. You wish to know in what state my mind is. I answer, it is much as when I left you. If I had all the world, I would freely give it all to have you and my dear children with me; but the sense of duty is so strong as to overpower all other considerations; I could not turn back without guilt on my soul. I find a longing desire to enjoy more of God; but, now I am among the people of the world, I think I see more beauties in godliness than ever, and, I hope, enjoy more of God in retirement than I have done for some time past...You want to know what Mrs. Thomas thinks, and how she likes the voyage...She would rather stay in England than go to India; but thinks it right to go with her husband...Tell my dear children I love them dearly, and pray for them constantly. Felix sends his love. I look upon this mercy as an answer to prayer indeed. Trust in God. Love to Kitty, brothers, sisters, etc. Be assured I love you most affectionately. Let me know my dear little child’s name.--I am, for ever, your faithful and affectionate husband,

"WILLIAM CAREY.

"My health never was so well. I believe the sea makes Felix and me both as hungry as hunters. I can eat a monstrous meat supper, and drink a couple of glasses of wine after it, without hurting me at all. Farewell."

She was woman and wife enough, in the end, to do as Mrs. Thomas had done, but she stipulated that her sister should accompany her.

By a series of specially providential events, as it seemed, such as marked the whole early history of this first missionary enterprise of modern England, Carey and Thomas secured a passage on board the Danish Indiaman Kron Princessa Maria, bound from Copenhagen to Serampore. At Dover, where they had been waiting for days, the eight were roused from sleep by the news that the ship was off the harbour. Sunrise on the 13th June saw them on board. Carey had had other troubles besides his colleague and his wife. His father, then fifty-eight years old, had not given him up without a struggle. "Is William mad?" he had said when he received the letter in which his son thus offered himself up on the missionary altar. His mother had died six years before:--

"LEICESTER, Jan. 17th, 1793.

"DEAR AND HONOURED FATHER,--The importance of spending our time for God alone, is the principal theme of the gospel. I beseech you, brethren, says Paul, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is your reasonable service. To be devoted like a sacrifice to holy uses, is the great business of a Christian, pursuant to these requisitions. I consider myself as devoted to the service of God alone, and now I am to realise my professions. I am appointed to go to Bengal, in the East Indies, a missionary to the Hindoos. I shall have a colleague who has been there five or six years already, and who understands their language. They are the most mild and inoffensive people in all the world, but are enveloped in the greatest superstition, and in the grossest ignorance...I hope, dear father, you may be enabled to surrender me up to the Lord for the most arduous, honourable, and important work that ever any of the sons of men were called to engage in. I have many sacrifices to make. I must part with a beloved family, and a number of most affectionate friends. Never did I see such sorrow manifested as reigned through our place of worship last Lord’s-day. But I have set my hand to the plough.--I remain, your dutiful son,

"WILLIAM CAREY."

When in London Carey had asked John Newton, "What if the Company should send us home on our arrival in Bengal?" "Then conclude," was the reply, "that your Lord has nothing there for you to accomplish. But if He have, no power on earth can hinder you." By Act of Parliament not ten years old, every subject of the King going to or found in the East Indies without a licence from the Company, was guilty of a high crime and misdemeanour, and liable to fine and imprisonment. Only four years previously a regulation had compelled every commander to deliver to the Hoogli pilot a return of the passengers on board that the Act might be enforced. The Danish nationality of the ship and crew saved the missionary party. So grievously do unjust laws demoralise contemporary opinion, that Fuller was constrained to meet the objections of many to the "illegality" of the missionaries’ action by reasoning, unanswerable indeed, but not now required: "The apostles and primitive ministers were commanded to go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature; nor were they to stop for the permission of any power upon earth, but to go, and take the consequences. If a man of God, conscious of having nothing in his heart unfriendly to any civil government whatever, but determined in all civil matters to obey and teach obedience to the powers that are, put his life in his hand, saying, I will go, and if I am persecuted in one city I will flee to another’...whatever the wisdom of this world may decide upon his conduct, he will assuredly be acquitted, and more than acquitted, at a higher tribunal."

Carey’s journal of the voyage begins with an allusion to "the abominable East Indian monopoly," which he was to do more than any other man to break down by weapons not of man’s warfare. The second week found him at Bengali, and for his companion the poems of Cowper. Of the four fellow-passengers one was a French deist, with whom he had many a debate.

"Aug. 2.--I feel myself to be much declined, upon the whole, in the more spiritual exercises of religion; yet have had some pleasant exercises of soul, and feel my heart set upon the great work upon which I am going. Sometimes I am quite dejected when I see the impenetrability of the hearts of those with us. They hear us preach on the Lord’s-day, but we are forced to witness their disregard to God all the week. O may God give us greater success among the heathen. I am very desirous that my children may pursue the same work; and now intend to bring up one in the study of Sanskrit, and another of Persian. O may God give them grace to fit them for the work! I have been much concerned for fear the power of the Company should oppose us...

"Aug. 20.--I have reason to lament over a barrenness of soul, and am sometimes much discouraged; for if I am so dead and stupid, how can I expect to be of any use among the heathen? Yet I have of late felt some very lively desires after the success of our undertaking. If there is anything that engages my heart in prayer to God, it is that the heathen may be converted, and that the society which has so generously exerted itself may be encouraged, and excited to go on with greater vigour in the important undertaking...

"Nov. 9.--I think that I have had more liberty in prayer, and more converse with God, than for some time before; but have, notwithstanding, been a very unfruitful creature, and so remain. For near a month we have been within two hundred miles of Bengal, but the violence of the currents set us back when we have been at the very door. I hope I have learned the necessity of bearing up in the things of God against wind and tide, when there is occasion, as we have done in our voyage."

To the Society he writes for a Polyglot Bible, the Gospels in Malay, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, and Sowerby’s English Botany, at his own cost, and thus plans the conquest of the world:--"I hope the Society will go on and increase, and that the multitudes of heathen in the world may hear the glorious words of truth. Africa is but a little way from England; Madagascar but a little way farther; South America, and all the numerous and large islands in the Indian and Chinese seas, I hope will not be passed over. A large field opens on every side, and millions of perishing heathens, tormented in this life by idolatry, superstition, and ignorance, and exposed to eternal miseries in the world to come, are pleading; yea, all their miseries plead as soon as they are known, with every heart that loves God, and with all the churches of the living God. Oh, that many labourers may be thrust out into the vineyard of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the gentiles may come to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Him!"

On the 7th November, as the ship lay in the roads of Balasore, he and Thomas landed and "began our labours." For three hours the people of the bazaar listened with great attention to Thomas, and one prepared for them a native dinner with plantain leaf for dish, and fingers for knives and forks. Balasore--name of Krishna--was one of the first settlements of the English in North India in 1642, and there the American Baptist successors of Carey have since carried on his work. On the 11th November, after a five months’ voyage, they landed at Calcutta unmolested. The first fortnight’s experience of the city, whose native population he estimated at 200,000, and of the surrounding country, he thus condenses:--"I feel something of what Paul felt when he beheld Athens, and ‘his spirit was stirred within him.’ I see one of the finest countries in the world, full of industrious inhabitants; yet three-fifths of it are an uncultivated jungle, abandoned to wild beasts and serpents. If the gospel flourishes here, ‘the wilderness will in every respect become a fruitful field.’"

Clive, Hastings (Macpherson during an interregnum of twenty-two months), and Cornwallis, were the men who had founded and administered the empire of British India up to this time. Carey passed the last Governor-General in the Bay of Bengal as he retired with the honours of a seven years’ successful generalship and government to atone for the not unhappy surrender of York Town, which had resulted in the independence of the United States. Sir John Shore, afterwards Lord Teignmouth, who had been selected by Pitt to carry out the reforms which he had elaborated along with his predecessor, had entered on his high office just a fortnight before. What a contrast was presented, as man judges, by the shy shoemaker, schoolmaster, and Baptist preacher, who found not a place in which to lay his head save a hovel lent to him by a Hindoo, to Clive, whose suicide he might have heard of when a child; to Hastings, who for seventeen years had stood before his country impeached. They were men described by Macaulay as of ancient, even illustrious lineage, and they had brought into existence an empire more extensive than that of Rome. He was a peasant craftsman, who had taught himself with a skill which Lord Wellesley, their successor almost as great as themselves, delighted publicly to acknowledge--a man of the people, of the class who had used the Roman Empire to build out of it a universal Christendom, who were even then turning France upside down, creating the Republic of America, and giving new life to Great Britain itself. The little Englishman was about to do in Calcutta and from Serampore what the little Jew, Paul, had done in Antioch and Ephesus, from Corinth and Rome. England might send its nobly born to erect the material and the secular fabric of empire, but it was only, in the providence of God, that they might prepare for the poor village preacher to convert the empire into a spiritual force which should in time do for Asia what Rome had done for Western Christendom. But till the last, as from the first, Carey was as unconscious of the part which he had been called to play as he was unresting in the work which it involved. It is no fanatical criticism, but the true philosophy of history, which places Carey over against Clive, the spiritual and secular founders, and Duff beside Hastings, the spiritual and secular consolidators of our Indian Empire.

Carey’s work for India underlay the first period of forty years of transition from Cornwallis to Bentinck, as Duff’s covered the second of thirty years to the close of Lord Canning’s administration, which introduced the new era of full toleration and partial but increasing self-government directed by the Viceroy and Parliament.

Carey had been sent not only to the one people outside of Christendom whose conversion would tell most powerfully on all Asia, Africa, and their islands--the Hindoos; but to the one province which was almost entirely British, and could be used as it had been employed to assimilate the rest of India--Bengal. Territorially the East India Company possessed, when he landed, nothing outside of the Ganges valley of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares, save a few spots on the Madras and Malabar coasts and the portion just before taken in the Mysore war. The rest was desolated by the Marathas, the Nizam, Tipoo, and other Mohammedan adventurers. On the Gangetic delta and right up to Allahabad, but not beyond, the Company ruled and raised revenue, leaving the other functions of the state to Mohammedans of the type of Turkish pashas under the titular superiority of the effete Emperor of Delhi. The Bengali and Hindi-speaking millions of the Ganges and the simpler aborigines of the hills had been devastated by the famine of 1769-70, which the Company’s officials, who were powerless where they did not intensify it by interference with trade, confessed to have cut off from ten to twelve millions of human beings. Over three-fifths of the area the soil was left without a cultivator. The whole young of that generation perished, so that, even twenty years after, Lord Cornwallis officially described one-third of Bengal as a jungle inhabited only by wild beasts. A quarter of a century after Carey’s language was, as we have seen, "three-fifths of it are an uncultivated jungle abandoned to wild beasts and serpents."

But the British peace, in Bengal at least, had allowed abundant crops to work their natural result on the population. The local experience of Shore, who had witnessed the horrors he could do so little to relieve, had united with the statesmanship of Cornwallis to initiate a series of administrative reforms that worked some evil, but more good, all through Carey’s time. First of all, as affecting the very existence and the social development of the people, or their capacity for being educated, Christianised, civilised in the highest sense, there was the relation of the Government to the ryots ("protected ones") and the zameendars ("landholders"). In India, as nearly all over the world except in feudalised Britain, the state is the common landlord in the interests of all classes who hold the soil subject to the payment of customary rents, directly or through middlemen, to the Government. For thirty years after Plassey the Government of India had been learning its business, and in the process had injured both itself and the landed classes, as much as has been done in Ireland. From a mere trader it had been, more or less consciously, becoming a ruler. In 1786 the Court of Directors, in a famous letter, tried to arrest the ruin which the famine had only hastened by ordering that a settlement of the land-tax or revenue or rent be made, not with mere farmers like the pashas of Turkey, but with the old zameendars, and that the rate be fixed for ten years. Cornwallis and Shore took three years to make the detailed investigations, and in 1789 the state rent-roll of Bengal proper was fixed at £2,858,772 a year. The English peer, who was Governor-General, at once jumped to the conclusion that this rate should be fixed not only for ten years, but for ever. The experienced Bengal civilian protested that to do that would be madness when a third of the rich province was out of cultivation, and as to the rest its value was but little known, and its estates were without reliable survey or boundaries.

We can now see that, as usual, both were right in what they asserted and wrong in what they denied. The principle of fixity of tenure and tax cannot be over-estimated in its economic, social, and political value, but it should have been applied to the village communities and cultivating peasants without the intervention of middlemen other than the large ancestral landholders with hereditary rights, and that on the standard of corn rents. Cornwallis had it in his power thus to do what some years afterwards Stein did in Prussia, with the result seen in the present German people and empire. The dispute as to a permanent or a decennial settlement was referred home, and Pitt, aided by Dundas and Charles Grant, took a week to consider it. His verdict was given in favour of feudalism. Eight months before Carey landed at Calcutta the settlement had been declared perpetual; in 1795 it was extended to Benares also.

During the next twenty years mismanagement and debt revolutionised the landed interest, as in France at the same time, but in a very different direction. The customary rights of the peasant proprietors had been legislatively secured by reserving to the Governor-General the power "to enact such regulations as he may think necessary for the protection and welfare of the dependent talookdars, ryots, and other cultivators of the soil." The peasants continued long to be so few that there was competition for them; the process of extortion with the aid of the courts had hardly begun when they were many, and the zameendars were burdened with charges for the police. But in 1799 and again in 1812 the state, trembling for its rent, gave the zameendars further authority. The principle of permanence of assessment so far co-operated with the splendid fertility of the Ganges valley and the peaceful multiplication of the people and spread of cultivation, that all through the wars and annexations, up to the close of the Mutiny, it was Bengal which enabled England to extend the empire up to its natural limits from the two seas to the Himalaya. But in 1859 the first attempt was made by the famous Act X. to check the rack-renting power of the zameendars. And now, more than a century since the first step was taken to arrest the ruin of the peasantry, the legislature of India has again tried to solve for the whole country these four difficulties which all past landed regulations have intensified--to give the state tenants a guarantee against uncertain enhancements of rent, and against taxation of improvements; to minimise the evil of taking rent in cash instead of in kind by arranging the dates on which rent is paid; and to mitigate if not prevent famine by allowing relief for failure of crops. As pioneering, the work of Carey and his colleagues all through was distinctly hindered by the treatment of the land question, which at once ground down the mass of the people and created a class of oppressive landlords destitute for the most part of public spirit and the higher culture. Both were disinclined by their circumstances to lend an ear to the Gospel, but these circumstances made it the more imperative on the missionaries to tell them, to teach their children, to print for all the glad tidings. Carey, himself of peasant extraction, cared for the millions of the people above all; but his work in the classical as well as the vernacular languages was equally addressed to their twenty thousand landlords. The time of his work--before Bentinck; and the centre of it--outside the metropolis, left the use of the English weapon against Brahmanism largely for Duff.

When Cornwallis, following Warren Hastings, completed the substitution of the British for the Mohammedan civil administration by a system of courts and police and a code of regulations, he was guilty of one omission and one mistake that it took years of discussion and action to rectify. He did not abolish from the courts the use of Persian, the language of the old Mussulman invaders, now foreign to all parties; and he excluded from all offices above £30 a year the natives of the country, contrary to their fair and politic practice. Bengal and its millions, in truth, were nominally governed in detail by three hundred white and upright civilians, with the inevitable result in abuses which they could not prevent, and oppression of native by native which they would not check, and the delay or development of reforms which the few missionaries long called for in vain. In a word, after making the most generous allowance for the good intentions of Cornwallis, and conscientiousness of Shore, his successor, we must admit that Carey was called to become the reformer of a state of society which the worst evils of Asiatic and English rule combined to prevent him and other self-sacrificing or disinterested philanthropists from purifying. The East India Company, at home and in India, had reached that depth of opposition to light and freedom in any form which justifies Burke’s extremest passages--the period between its triumph on the exclusion of "the pious clauses" from the Charter of 1793 and its defeat in the Charter of 1813. We shall reproduce some outlines of the picture which Ward drew:--

"On landing in Bengal, in the year 1793, our brethren found themselves surrounded with a population of heathens (not including the Mahometans) amounting to at least one hundred millions of souls.

"On the subject of the divine nature, with the verbal admission of the doctrine of the divine unity, they heard these idolaters speak of 330,000,000 of gods. Amidst innumerable idol temples they found none erected for the worship of the one living and true God. Services without end they saw performed in honour of the elements and deified heroes, but heard not one voice tuned to the praise or employed in the service of the one God. Unacquainted with the moral perfections of Jehovah, they saw this immense population prostrate before dead matter, before the monkey, the serpent, before idols the very personifications of sin; and they found this animal, this reptile, and the lecher Krishnu {u with inverted ^ like sÿ} and his concubine Radha, among the favourite deities of the Hindoos...

"Respecting the real nature of the present state, the missionaries perceived that the Hindoos laboured under the most fatal misapprehensions; that they believed the good or evil actions of this birth were not produced as the volitions of their own wills, but arose from, and were the unavoidable results of, the actions of the past birth; that their present actions would inevitably give rise to the whole complexion of their characters and conduct in the following birth; and that thus they were doomed to interminable transmigrations, to float as some light substance upon the bosom of an irresistible torrent...

"Amongst these idolaters no Bibles were found; no sabbaths; no congregating for religious instruction in any form; no house for God; no God but a log of wood, or a monkey; no Saviour but the Ganges; no worship but that paid to abominable idols, and that connected with dances, songs, and unutterable impurities; so that what should have been divine worship, purifying, elevating, and carrying the heart to heaven, was a corrupt but rapid torrent, poisoning the soul and carrying it down to perdition; no morality, for how should a people be moral whose gods are monsters of vice; whose priests are their ringleaders in crime; whose scriptures encourage pride, impurity, falsehood, revenge, and murder; whose worship is connected with indescribable abominations, and whose heaven is a brothel? As might be expected, they found that men died here without indulging the smallest vestige of hope, except what can arise from transmigration, the hope, instead of plunging into some place of misery, of passing into the body of some reptile. To carry to such a people the divine word, to call them together for sacred instruction, to introduce amongst them a pure and heavenly worship, and to lead them to the observance of a Sabbath on earth, as the preparative and prelude to a state of endless perfection, was surely a work worthy for a Saviour to command, and becoming a christian people to attempt."

The condition of women, who were then estimated at "seventy-five millions of minds," and whom the census shows to be now above 144,000,000, is thus described after an account of female infanticide:--

"To the Hindoo female all education is denied by the positive injunction of the shastru {u with inverted ^ like sÿ}, and by the general voice of the population. Not a single school for girls, therefore, all over the country! With knitting, sewing, embroidery, painting, music, and drawing, they have no more to do than with letters; the washing is done by men of a particular tribe. The Hindoo girl, therefore, spends the ten first years of her life in sheer idleness, immured in the house of her father.

"Before she has attained to this age, however, she is sought after by the ghutuks, men employed by parents to seek wives for their sons. She is betrothed without her consent; a legal agreement, which binds her for life, being made by the parents on both sides while she is yet a child. At a time most convenient to the parents, this boy and girl are brought together for the first time, and the marriage ceremony is performed; after which she returns to the house of her father.

"Before the marriage is consummated, in many instances, the boy dies, and this girl becomes a widow; and as the law prohibits the marriage of widows, she is doomed to remain in this state as long as she lives. The greater number of these unfortunate beings become a prey to the seducer, and a disgrace to their families. Not long since a bride, on the day the marriage ceremony was to have been performed, was burnt on the funeral pile with the dead body of the bridegroom, at Chandernagore, a few miles north of Calcutta. Concubinage, to a most awful extent, is the fruit of these marriages without choice. What a sum of misery is attached to the lot of woman in India before she has attained even her fifteenth year!

"In some cases as many as fifty females, the daughters of so many Hindoos, are given in marriage to one bramhun {u with inverted ^ like sÿ}, in order to make these families something more respectable, and that the parents may be able to say, we are allied by marriage to the kooleens…

"But the awful state of female society in this miserable country appears in nothing so much as in dooming the female, the widow, to be burnt alive with the putrid carcase of her husband. The Hindoo legislators have sanctioned this immolation, showing herein a studied determination to insult and degrade woman. She is, therefore, in the first instance, deluded into this act by the writings of these bramhuns {u with inverted ^ like sÿ}; in which also she is promised, that if she will offer herself, for the benefit of her husband, on the funeral pile, she shall, by the extraordinary merit of this action, rescue her husband from misery, and take him and fourteen generations of his and her family with her to heaven, where she shall enjoy with them celestial happiness until fourteen kings of the gods shall have succeeded to the throne of heaven (that is, millions of years!) Thus ensnared, she embraces this dreadful death. I have seen three widows, at different times, burnt alive; and had repeated opportunities of being present at similar immolations, but my courage failed me...

"The burying alive of widows manifests, if that were possible, a still more abominable state of feeling towards women than the burning them alive. The weavers bury their dead. When, therefore, a widow of this tribe is deluded into the determination not to survive her husband, she is buried alive with the dead body. In this kind of immolation the children and relations dig the grave. After certain ceremonies have been attended to, the poor widow arrives, and is let down into the pit. She sits in the centre, taking the dead body on her lap and encircling it with her arms. These relations now begin to throw in the soil; and after a short space, two of them descend into the grave, and tread the earth firmly round the body of the widow. She sits a calm and unremonstrating spectator of the horrid process. She sees the earth rising higher and higher around her, without upbraiding her murderers, or making the least effort to arise and make her escape. At length the earth reaches her lips--covers her head. The rest of the earth is then hastily thrown in, and these children and relations mount the grave, and tread down the earth upon the head of the suffocating widow--the mother!"

Before Carey, what had been done to turn the millions of North India from such darkness as that? Nothing, beyond the brief and impulsive efforts of Thomas. There does not seem to have been there one genuine convert from any of the Asiatic faiths; there had never been even the nucleus of a native church.

In South India, for the greater part of the century, the Coast Mission, as it was called, had been carried on from Tranquebar as a centre by the Lutherans whom, from Ziegenbalg to Schwartz, Francke had trained at Halle and Friedrich IV. of Denmark had sent forth to its East India Company’s settlement. From the baptism of the first convert in 1707 and translation of the New Testament into Tamil, to the death in 1798 of Schwartz, with whom Carey sought to begin a correspondence then taken up by Guericke, the foundations were laid around Madras, in Tanjore, and in Tinnevelli of a native church which now includes nearly a million. But, when Carey landed, rationalism in Germany and Denmark, and the Carnatic wars between the English and French, had reduced the Coast Mission to a state of inanition. Nor was Southern India the true or ultimate battlefield against Brahmanism; the triumphs of Christianity there were rather among the demon-worshipping tribes of Dravidian origin than among the Aryan races till Dr. W. Miller developed the Christian College. But the way for the harvest now being reaped by the Evangelicals and Anglicans of the Church of England, by the Independents of the London Missionary Society, the Wesleyans, and the Presbyterians of Scotland and America, was prepared by the German Ziegenbalg and Schwartz under Danish protection. The English Propagation and Christian Knowledge Societies sent them occasional aid, the first two Georges under the influence of their German chaplains wrote to them encouraging letters, and the East India Company even gave them a free passage in its ships, and employed the sculptor Bacon to prepare the noble group of marble which, in St. Mary’s Church, Madras, expresses its gratitude to Schwartz for his political services.

It was Clive himself who brought to Calcutta the first missionary, Kiernander the Swede, but he was rather a chaplain, or a missionary to the Portuguese, who were nominal Christians of the lowest Romanist type. The French had closed the Danish mission at Cuddalore, and in 1758 Calcutta was without a Protestant clergyman to bury the dead or baptise or marry the living. Two years before one of the two chaplains had perished in the tragedy of the Black Hole, where he was found lying hand in hand with his son, a young lieutenant. The other had escaped down the river only to die of fever along with many more. The victory of Plassey and the large compensation paid for the destruction of Old Calcutta and its church induced thousands of natives to flock to the new capital, while the number of the European troops and officials was about 2000. When chaplains were sent out, the Governor-General officially wrote of them to the Court of Directors so late as 1795:--"Our clergy in Bengal, with some exceptions, are not respectable characters." From the general relaxation of morals, he added, "a black coat is no security." They were so badly paid--from £50 to £230 a year, increased by £120 to meet the cost of living in Calcutta after 1764--that they traded. Preaching was the least of the chaplains’ duties; burying was the most onerous. Anglo-Indian society, cut off from London, itself not much better, by a six months’ voyage, was corrupt. Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, his hostile colleague in Council, lived in open adultery. The majority of the officials had native women, and the increase of their children, who lived in a state worse than that of the heathen, became so alarming that the compensation paid by the Mohammedan Government of Moorshedabad for the destruction of the church was applied to the foundation of the useful charity still known as the Free School. The fathers not infrequently adopted the Hindoo pantheon along with the zanana. The pollution, springing from England originally, was rolled back into it in an increasing volume, when the survivors retired as nabobs with fortunes, to corrupt social and political life, till Pitt cried out; and it became possible for Burke almost to succeed in his eighteen years’ impeachment of Hastings. The literature of the close of the eighteenth century is full of alarm lest the English character should be corrupted, and lest the balance of the constitution should be upset.

Kiernander is said to have been the means of converting 209 heathens and 380 Romanists, of whom three were priests, during the twenty-eight years of his Calcutta career. Claudius Buchanan declares that Christian tracts had been translated into Bengali--one written by the Bishop of Sodor and Man--and that in the time of Warren Hastings Hindoo Christians had preached to their countrymen in the city. The "heathen" were probably Portuguese descendants, in whose language Kiernander preached as the lingua franca of the time. He could not even converse in Bengali or Hindostani, and when Charles Grant went to him for information as to the way of a sinner’s salvation this happened--"My anxious inquiries as to what I should do to be saved appeared to embarrass and confuse him exceedingly. He could not answer my questions, but he gave me some good instructive books." On Kiernander’s bankruptcy, caused by his son when the father was blind, the "Mission Church" was bought by Grant, who wrote that its labours "have been confined to the descendants of Europeans, and have hardly ever embraced a single heathen, so that a mission to the Hindoos and Mohammedans would be a new thing." The Rev. David Brown, who had been sent out the year after as master and chaplain of the Military Orphan Society, for the education of the children of officers and soldiers, and was to become one of the Serampore circle of friends, preached to Europeans only in the Mission Church. Carey could find no trace of Kiernander’s work among the natives six years after his death. The only converted Hindoo known of in Northern India up to that time was Guneshan Dass, of Delhi, who when a boy joined Clive’s army, who was the first man of caste to visit England, and who, on his return with the Calcutta Supreme Court Judges in 1774 as Persian interpreter and translator, was baptised by Kiernander, Mr. justice Chambers being sponsor.

William Carey had no predecessor in India as the first ordained Englishman who was sent to it as a missionary; he had no predecessor in Bengal and Hindostan proper as the first missionary from any land to the people. Even the Moravians, who in 1777 had sent two brethren to Serampore, Calcutta, and Patna, had soon withdrawn them, and one of them became the Company’s botanist in Madras--Dr. Heyne. Carey practically stood alone at the first, while he unconsciously set in motion the double revolution, which was to convert the Anglo-Indian influence on England from corrupting heathenism to aggressive missionary zeal, and to change the Bengal of Cornwallis into the India of Bentinck, with all the possibilities that have made it grow, thus far, into the India of the Lawrences.

Chapter 4: Six Years In North Bengal--Missionary And Indigo Planter

1794-1799

Carey’s two missionary principles--Destitute in Calcutta--Bandel and Nuddea--Applies in vain to be under-superintendent of the Botanic Garden--Housed by a native usurer--Translation and preaching work in Calcutta--Secures a grant of waste land at Hasnabad--Estimate of the Bengali language, and appeal to the Society to work in Asia and Africa rather than in America--The Udny family--Carey’s summary of his first year’s experience--Superintends the indigo factory of Mudnabati--Indigo and the East India Company’s monopolies--Carey’s first nearly fatal sickness--Death of his child and chronic madness of his wife--Formation of first Baptist church in India--Early progress of Bible translation--Sanskrit studies; the Mahabarata--The wooden printing-press set up at Mudnabati--His educational ideal; school-work--The medical mission--Lord Wellesley--Carey seeks a mission centre among the Bhooteas--Describes his first sight of a Sati--Projects a mission settlement at Kidderpore.

CAREY was in his thirty-third year when he landed in Bengal. Two principles regulated the conception, the foundation, and the whole course of the mission which he now began. He had been led to these by the very genius of Christianity itself, by the example and teaching of Christ and of Paul, and by the experience of the Moravian brethren. He had laid them down in his Enquiry, and every month’s residence during forty years in India confirmed him in his adhesion to them. These principles are that (1) a missionary must be one of the companions and equals of the people to whom he is sent; and (2) a missionary must as soon as possible become indigenous, self-supporting, self-propagating, alike by the labours of the mission and of the converts. Himself a man of the people yet a scholar, a shoemaker and a schoolmaster yet a preacher and pastor to whom the great Robert Hall gloried in being a successor, Carey had led the two lives as Paul had done. Now that he was fairly in Calcutta he resumed the divine toil, and ceased it not till he entered on the eternal rest. He prepared to go up country to Malda to till the ground among the natives of the rich district around the ruined capital of Gour. He engaged as his pundit and interpreter Ram Basu, one of the professing inquirers whom Thomas had attracted in former days. Experience soon taught him that, however correct his principle, Malda is not a land where the white man can be a farmer. So he became, in the different stages of his career, a captain of labour as an indigo planter, a teacher of Bengali, and professor of Sanskrit and Marathi, and the Government translator of Bengali. Nor did he or his associates ever make the mistake--or commit the fraud--of the Jesuit missionaries, whose idea of equality with the people was not that of brotherhood in Christ, but that of dragging down Christian doctrine, worship and civilisation, to the level of idolatrous heathenism, and deluding the ignorant into accepting the blasphemous compromise.

Alas! Carey could not manage to get out of Calcutta and its neighbourhood for five months. As he thought to live by farming, Thomas was to practise his profession; and their first year’s income of £150 had, in those days when the foreign exchanges were unknown, to be realised by the sale of the goods in which it had been invested. As usual, Thomas had again blundered, so that even his gentle colleague himself half-condemned, half-apologised for him by the shrewd reflection that he was only fit to live at sea, where his daily business would be before him, and daily provision would be made for him. Carey found himself penniless. Even had he received the whole of his £75, as he really did in one way or other, what was that for such a family as his at the beginning of their undertaking? The expense of living at all in Calcutta drove the whole party thirty miles up the river to Bandel, an old Portuguese suburb of the Hoogli factory. There they rented a small house from the German hotel-keeper, beside the Augustinian priory and oldest church in North India, which dates from 1599 and is still in good order. There they met Kiernander, then at the great age of eighty-four. Daily they preached or talked to the people. They purchased a boat for regular visitation of the hamlets, markets, and towns which line both banks of the river. With sure instinct Carey soon fixed on Nuddea, as the centre of Brahmanical superstition and Sanskrit learning, where "to build me a hut and live like the natives," language recalled to us by the words of the dying Livingstone in the swamps of Central Africa. There, in the capital of the last of the Hindoo kings, beside the leafy tols or colleges of a river port which rivals Benares, Poona, and Conjeeveram in sanctity, where Chaitanya the Vaishnaiva reformer was born, Carey might have attacked Brahmanism in its stronghold. A passage in his journal shows how he realised the position. Thomas, the pundit, and he "sought the Lord by prayer for direction," and this much was the result--"Several of the most learned Pundits and Brahmans wished us to settle there; and, as that is the great place for Eastern learning, we seemed inclined, especially as it is the bulwark of heathenism, which, if once carried, all the rest of the country must be laid open to us." But there was no available land there for an Englishman’s cultivation. From Bandel he wrote home these impressions of Anglo-Indian life and missionary duty:--

"26th Dec. 1793.--A missionary must be one of the companions and equals of the people to whom he is sent, and many dangers and temptations will be in his way. One or two pieces of advice I may venture to give. The first is to be exceedingly cautious lest the voyage prove a great snare. All the discourse is about high life, and every circumstance will contribute to unfit the mind for the work and prejudice the soul against the people to whom he goes; and in a country like this, settled by Europeans, the grandeur, the customs, and prejudices of the Europeans are exceeding dangerous. They are very kind and hospitable, but even to visit them, if a man keeps no table of his own, would more than ten times exceed the allowance of a mission; and all their discourse is about the vices of the natives, so that a missionary must see thousands of people treating him with the greatest kindness, but whom he must be entirely different from in his life, his appearance in everything, or it is impossible for him to stand their profuse way of living, being so contrary to his character and so much above his ability. This is a snare to dear Mr. Thomas, which will be felt by us both in some measure. It will be very important to missionaries to be men of calmness and evenness of temper, and rather inclined to suffer hardships than to court the favour of men, and such who will be indefatigably employed in the work set before them, an inconstancy of mind being quite injurious to it."

He had need of such faith and patience. Hearing of waste land in Calcutta, he returned there only to be disappointed. The Danish captain, knowing that he had written a botanical work, advised him to take it to the doctor in charge of the Company’s Botanic Garden, and offer himself for a vacant appointment to superintend part of it. The doctor, who and whose successors were soon to be proud of his assistance on equal terms, had to tell him that the office had been filled up, but invited the weary man to dine with him. Houseless, with his maddened wife, and her sister and two of his four children down with dysentery, due to the bad food and exposure of six weeks in the interor, Carey found a friend, appropriately enough, in a Bengali money-lender.   Nelu Dutt, a banker who had lent money to Thomas, offered the destitute family his garden house in the north-eastern quarter of Manicktolla until they could do better. The place was mean enough, but Carey never forgot the deed, and he had it in his power long after to help Nelu Dutt when in poverty. Such, on the other hand, was the dislike of the Rev. David Brown to Thomas, that when Carey had walked five miles in the heat of the sun to visit the comparatively prosperous evangelical preacher, "I left him without his having so much as asked me to take any refreshment."

Carey would not have been allowed to live in Calcutta as a missionary. Forty years were to pass before that could be possible without a Company’s passport. But no one was aware of the existence of the obscure vagrant, as he seemed, although he was hard at work. All around him was a Mohammedan community whom he addressed with the greatest freedom, and with whom he discussed the relative merits of the Koran and the Bible in a kindly spirit, "to recommend the Gospel and the way of life by Christ." He had helped Thomas with a translation of the book of Genesis during the voyage, and now we find this in his journal two months and a half after he had landed:--

"Through the delays of my companion I have spent another month, and done scarcely anything, except that I have added to my knowledge of the language, and had opportunity of seeing much more of the genius and disposition of the natives than I otherwise could have known. This day finished the correction of the first chapter of Genesis, which moonshi says is rendered into very good Bengali. Just as we had finished it, a pundit and another man from Nuddea came to see me. I showed it to them; and the pundit seemed much pleased with the account of the creation; only they have an imaginary place somewhere beneath the earth, and he thought that should have been mentioned likewise...

"Was very weary, having walked in the sun about fifteen or sixteen miles, yet had the satisfaction of discoursing with some money-changers at Calcutta, who could speak English, about the importance and absolute necessity of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. One of them was a very crafty man, and tried much to entangle me with hard questions; but at last, finding himself entangled, he desisted, and went to his old occupation of money-changing again. If once God would by his Spirit convince them of sin, a Saviour would be a blessing indeed to them: but human nature is the same all the world over, and all conviction fails except it is produced by the effectual working of the Holy Spirit."

Ram Basu was himself in debt, was indeed all along a self-interested inquirer. But the next gleam of hope came from him, that the Carey family should move to the waste jungles of the Soondarbans, the tiger-haunted swamps south-east of Calcutta, and there cultivate a grant of land. With a sum of £16 borrowed from a native at twelve per cent. by Mr. Thomas, a boat was hired, and on the fourth day, when only one more meal remained, the miserable family and their stout-hearted father saw an English-built house. As they walked up to it the owner met them, and with Anglo-Indian hospitality invited them all to become his guests. He proved to be Mr. Charles Short, in charge of the Company’s salt manufacture there. As a deist he had no sympathy with Carey’s enterprise, but he helped the missionary none the less, and the reward came to him in due time in the opening of his heart to the love of Christ. He afterwards married Mrs. Carey’s sister, and in England the two survived the great missionary, to tell this and much more regarding him. Here, at the place appropriately named Hasnabad, or the "smiling spot," Carey took a few acres on the Jamoona arm of the united Ganges and Brahmapootra, and built him a bamboo house, forty miles east of Calcutta. Knowing that the sahib’s gun would keep off the tigers, natives squatted around to the number of three or four thousand. Such was the faith, the industry, and the modesty of the brave little man that, after just three months, he wrote thus:--"When I know the language well enough to preach in it, I have no doubt of having a stated congregation, and I much hope to send you pleasing accounts. I can so far converse in the language as to be understood in most things belonging to eating and drinking, buying and selling, etc. My ear is somewhat familiarised to the Bengali sounds. It is a language of a very singular construction, having no plural except for pronouns, and not a single preposition in it: but the cases of nouns and pronouns are almost endless, all the words answering to our prepositions being put after the word, and forming a new case. Except these singularities, I find it an easy language. I feel myself happy in my present undertaking; for, though I never felt the loss of social religion so much as now, yet a consciousness of having given up all for God is a support; and the work, with all its attendant inconveniences, is to me a rich reward. I think the Society would do well to keep their eye towards Africa or Asia, countries which are not like the wilds of America, where long labour will scarcely collect sixty people to hear the Word: for here it is almost impossible to get out of the way of hundreds, and preachers are wanted a thousand times more than people to preach to. Within India are the Maratha country and the northern parts to Cashmere, in which, as far as I can learn, there is not one soul that thinks of God aright...My health was never better. The climate, though hot, is tolerable; but, attended as I am with difficulties, I would not renounce my undertaking for all the world."

It was at this time that he drew his strength often from the experience of the first missionary, described by Isaiah, in all his solitude:--"Look unto Abraham your father, for I called him alone and blessed him and increased him. For the Lord shall comfort Zion; He will comfort all her waste places." The sun of His comfort shone forth at last.

Carey’s original intention to begin his mission near Malda was now to be carried out. In the opening week of 1794 the small English community in Bengal were saddened by the news that, when crossing the Hoogli at Calcutta, a boat containing three of its principal merchants and the wife of one of them, had been upset, and all had been drowned. It turned out that two of the men recovered, but Mr. R. Udny and his young wife perished. His aged mother had been one of the godly circle in the Residency at Malda to whom Thomas had ministered; and Mr. G. Udny, her other son, was still the Company’s commercial Resident there. A letter of sympathy which Thomas sent to them restored the old relations, and resulted in Mr. G. Udny inviting first the writer and then Carey to become his assistants in charge of new indigo factories which he was building on his own account. Each received a salary equivalent to £250 a year, with the prospect of a commission on the out-turn, and even a proprietary share. Carey’s remark in his journal on the day he received the offer was:--"This appearing to be a remarkable opening in divine providence for our comfortable support, I accepted it...I shall likewise be joined with my colleague again, and we shall unitedly engage in our work." Again:--"The conversion of the heathen is the object which above all others I wish to pursue. If my situation at Malda should be tolerable, I most certainly will publish the Bible in numbers." On receiving the rejoinder to his acceptance of the offer he set this down:--"I am resolved to write to the Society that my circumstances are such that I do not need future help from them, and to devote a sum monthly for the printing of the Bengali Bible." This he did, adding that it would be his glory and joy to stand in the same relation to the Society as if he needed support from them. He hoped they would be the sooner able to send another mission somewhere--to Sumatra or some of the Indian Islands. From the first he lived with such simplicity that he gave from one-fourth to one-third of his little income to his own mission at Mudnabati.

Carey thus sums up his first year’s experience before leaving his jungle home on a three weeks’ voyage up the Ganges, and records his first deliberate and regular attempt to preach in Bengali on the way.

"8th April 1794.--All my hope is in, and all my comfort arises from, God; without His power no European could possibly be converted, and His power can convert any Indian; and when I reflect that He has stirred me up to the work, and wrought wonders to prepare the way, I can hope in His promises, and am encouraged and strengthened...

"19th April.--O how glorious are the ways of God! ‘My soul longeth and fainteth for God, for the living God, to see His glory and beauty as I have seen them in the sanctuary.’ When I first left England, my hope of the conversion of the heathen was very strong; but, among so many obstacles, it would entirely die away unless upheld by God. Nothing to exercise it, but plenty to obstruct it, for now a year and nineteen days, which is the space since I left my dear charge at Leicester. Since that I have had hurrying up and down; a five months’ imprisonment with carnal men on board the ship; five more learning the language; my moonshi not understanding English sufficiently to interpret my preaching; my colleague separated from me; long delays and few opportunities for social worship; no woods to retire to, like Brainerd, for fear of tigers (no less than twenty men in the department of Deharta, where I am, have been carried away by them this season from the salt-works); no earthly thing to depend upon, or earthly comfort, except food and raiment. Well, I have God, and His Word is sure; and though the superstitions of the heathen were a million times worse than they are, if I were deserted by all, and persecuted by all, yet my hope, fixed on that sure Word, will rise superior to all obstructions, and triumph over all trials. God’s cause will triumph, and I shall come out of all trials as gold purified by fire. I was much humbled to-day by reading Brainerd. O what a disparity betwixt me and him, he always constant, I as inconstant as the wind!

"22nd April.--Bless God for a continuance of the happy frame of yesterday. I think the hope of soon acquiring the language puts fresh life into my soul; for a long time my mouth has been shut, and my days have been beclouded with heaviness; but now I begin to be something like a traveller who has been almost beaten out in a violent storm, and who, with all his clothes about him dripping wet, sees the sky begin to clear: so I, with only the prospect of a more pleasant season at hand, scarcely feel the sorrows of the present.

"23rd.--With all the cares of life, and all its sorrows, yet I find that a life of communion with God is sufficient to yield consolation in the midst of all, and even to produce a holy joy in the soul, which shall make it to triumph over all affliction. I have never yet repented of any sacrifice that I have made for the Gospel, but find that consolation of mind which can come from God alone.

"26th May.--This day kept Sabbath at Chandureea; had a pleasant day. In the morning and afternoon addressed my family, and in the evening began my work of publishing the Word of God to the heathen. Though imperfect in the knowledge of the language, yet, with the help of moonshi, I conversed with two Brahmans in the presence of about two hundred people, about the things of God. I had been to see a temple, in which were the images of Dukkinroy, the god of the woods, riding on a tiger; Sheetulla, goddess of the smallpox, without a head, riding on a horse without a head; Punchanon, with large ears; and Colloroy, riding on a horse. In another apartment was Seeb, which was only a smooth post of wood, with two or three mouldings in it, like the base of a Tuscan pillar. I therefore discoursed with them upon the vanity of idols, the folly and wickedness of idolatry, the nature and attributes of God, and the way of salvation by Christ. One Brahman was quite confounded, and a number of people were all at once crying out to him, ‘Why do you not answer him? Why do you not answer him?’ He replied, ‘I have no words.’ Just at this time a very learned Brahman came up, who was desired to talk with me, which he did, and so acceded to what I said, that he at last said images had been used of late years, but not from the beginning. I inquired what I must do to be saved; he said I must repeat the name of God a great many times. I replied, would you, if your son had offended you, be so pleased with him as to forgive him if he were to repeat the word ‘father’ a thousand times? This might please children or fools, but God is wise. He told me that I must get faith; I asked what faith was, to which he gave me no intelligible reply, but said I must obey God. I answered, what are His commands? what is His will? They said God was a great light, and as no one could see him, he became incarnate, under the threefold character of Brhumma, Bishno, and Seeb, and that either of them must be worshipped in order to life. I told them of the sure Word of the Gospel, and the way of life by Christ; and, night coming on, left them. I cannot tell what effect it may have, as I may never see them again."

At the beginning of the great rains in the middle of June Carey joined Mr. Udny and his mother at the chief factory. On each of the next two Sabbaths he preached twice in the hall of the Residency of the Company, which excluded all Christian missionaries by Act of Parliament. As an indigo planter he received the Company’s licence to reside for at least five years. So on 26th June he began his secular duties by completing for the season of indigo manufacture the buildings at Mudnabati, and making the acquaintance of the ninety natives under his charge. Both Mr. Udny and he knew well that he was above all things a Christian missionary. "These will furnish a congregation immediately, and, added to the extensive engagements which I must necessarily have with the natives, will open a very wide door for activity. God grant that it may not only be large but effectual."

These were the days, which continued till the next charter, when the East India Company was still not only a body of merchants but of manufacturers. Of all the old monopolies only the most evil one is left, that of the growth, manufacture, and sale of opium. The civil servants, who were termed Residents, had not political duties with tributary sovereigns as now, but from great factory-like palaces, and on large salaries, made advances of money to contractors, native and European, who induced the ryots to weave cloth, to breed and feed the silkworm, and to grow and make the blue dye to which India had long given the name of "indigo." Mr. Carey was already familiar with the system of advances for salt, and the opium monopoly was then in its infancy. The European contractors were "interlopers," who introduced the most valuable cultivation and processes into India, and yet with whom the "covenanted" Residents were often at war. The Residents had themselves liberty of private trade, and unscrupulous men abused it. Clive had been hurried out thirty years before to check the abuse, which was ruining not only the Company’s investments but the people. It had so spread on his departure that even judges and chaplains shared in the spoils till Cornwallis interfered. In the case of Mr. G. Udny and purely commercial agents the evil was reduced to a minimum, and the practice had been deliberately sanctioned by Sir John Shore on the ground that it was desirable to make the interests of the Company and of individuals go hand in hand.

The days when Europe got its cotton cloth from India, calling it "calico," from Calicut, and its rich yellow silks, have long since passed, although the latter are still supplied in an inferior form, and the former is once more raising its head, from the combination of machinery and cheap labour. For the old abuses of the Company the Government by Parliament has to some extent atoned by fostering the new cultures of tea, coffee, and cinchona, jute and wheat. The system of inducing the ryots to cultivate by advances, protected by a stringent contract law, still exists in the case of opium. The indigo culture system of Carey’s time broke down in 1860 in the lower districts, where, following the Company itself, the planter made cash advances to the peasant, who was required to sow indigo on land which he held as a tenant but often as a proprietor, to deliver it at a fixed rate, and to bear the risk of the crop as well as the exactions of the factory servants. It still exists in the upper districts of Bihar, especially in Tirhoot, on a system comparatively free from economic objections.

The plant known as "Indigofera Tinctoria" is sown in March in soil carefully prepared, grows to about 5 feet, is cut down early in July, is fermented in vats, and the liquor is beaten till it precipitates the precious blue dye, which is boiled, drained, cut in small cakes, and dried. From first to last the growth and the manufacture are even more precarious than most tropical crops. An even rainfall, rigorous weeding, the most careful superintendence of the chemical processes, and conscientious packing, are necessary. One good crop in three years will pay where the factory is not burdened by severe interest on capital; one every other year will pay very well. Personally Carey had more than the usual qualifications of a successful planter, scientific knowledge, scrupulous conscientiousness and industry, and familiarity with the native character, so soon as he acquired the special experience necessary for superintending the manufacture. That experience he spared no effort to gain at once.

"1st, 2nd, and 3rd July.--Much engaged in the necessary business of preparing our works for the approaching season of indigo-making, which will commence in about a fortnight. I had on the evening of each of these days very precious seasons of fervent prayer to God. I have been on these evenings much drawn out in prayer for my dear friends at Leicester, and for the Society that it may be prosperous; likewise for the ministers of my acquaintance, not only of the Baptist but other denominations. I was engaged for the churches in America and Holland, as well as England, and much concerned for the success of the Gospel among the Hindoos. At present I know not of any success since I have been here. Many say that the Gospel is the word of truth; but they abound so much in flattery and encomiums, which are mere words of course, that little can be said respecting their sincerity. The very common sins of lying and avarice are so universal also, that no European who has not witnessed it can form any idea of their various appearances: they will stoop to anything whatsoever to get a few cowries, and lie on every occasion. O how desirable is the spread of the Gospel!

"4th July.--Rather more flat, perhaps owing to the excessive heat; for in the rainy season, if there be a fine day, it is very hot indeed. Such has been this day, and I was necessitated to be out in it from morning till evening, giving necessary directions. I felt very much fatigued indeed, and had no spirits left in the evening, and in prayer was very barren...

"9th July to 4th Aug.--Employed in visiting several factories to learn the process of indigo-making. Had some very pleasant seasons at Malda, where I preached several times, and the people seemed much affected with the Word. One day, as Mr. Thomas and I were riding out, we saw a basket hung in a tree, in which an infant had been exposed; the skull remained, the rest having been devoured by ants."

Success in the indigo culture was indeed never possible in Mudnabati. The factory stood on the river Tangan, within what is now the district of Dinajpoor, thirty miles north of Malda. To this day the revenue surveyors of Government describe it as low and marshy, subject to inundation during the rains, and considered very unhealthy. Carey had not been there a fortnight when he had to make this record:--

"5th, 6th, 7th July.--Much employed in settling the affairs of the buildings, etc., having been absent so long, and several of our managing and principal people being sick. It is indeed an awful time here with us now, scarcely a day but some are seized with fevers. It is, I believe, owing to the abundance of water, there being rice-fields all around us, in which they dam up the water, so that all the country hereabouts is about a foot deep in water; and as we have rain, though moderate to what I expected the rainy season to be, yet the continual moisture occasions fevers in such situations where rice is cultivated...Felt at home and thankful these days. O that I may be very useful! I must soon learn the language tolerably well, for I am obliged to converse with the natives every day, having no other persons here except my family."

Soon in September, the worst of all the months in Bengal, he himself was brought near to the grave by a fever, one of the paroxysms continuing for twenty-six hours without intermission, "when providentially Mr. Udny came to visit us, not knowing that I was ill, and brought a bottle of bark with him." He slowly recovered, but the second youngest child, Peter, a boy of five, was removed by dysentery, and caste made it long difficult to find any native to dig his grave. But of this time the faithful sufferer could write:--

"Sometimes I enjoyed sweet seasons of self-examination and prayer, as I lay upon my bed. Many hours together I sweetly spent in contemplating subjects for preaching, and in musing over discourses in Bengali; and when my animal spirits were somewhat raised by the fever, I found myself able to reason and discourse in Bengali for some hours together, and words and phrases occurred much more readily than when I was in health. When my dear child was ill I was enabled to attend upon him night and day, though very dangerously ill myself, without much fatigue; and now, I bless God that I feel a sweet resignation to his will."

A still harder fate befell him. The monomania of his wife became chronic. A letter which she wrote and sent by special messenger called forth from Thomas this loving sympathy:--"You must endeavour to consider it a disease. The eyes and ears of many are upon you, to whom your conduct is unimpeachable with respect to all her charges; but if you show resentment, they have ears, and others have tongues set on fire. Were I in your case, I should be violent; but blessed be God, who suits our burdens to our backs. Sometimes I pray earnestly for you, and I always feel for you. Think of Job, Think of Jesus. Think of those who were ‘destitute, afflicted, tormented.’"

A voyage up the Tangan in Mr. Udny’s pinnace as far as the north frontier, at a spot now passed by the railway to Darjeeling, restored the invalid. "I am no hunter," he wrote, while Thomas was shooting wild buffaloes, but he was ever adding to his store of observations of the people, the customs and language. Meanwhile he was longing for letters from Fuller and Pearce and Ryland. At the end of January 1795 the missionary exile thus talks of himself in his journal:--"Much engaged in writing, having begun to write letters to Europe; but having received none, I feel that hope deferred makes the heart sick. However, I am so fully satisfied of the firmness of their friendship that I feel a sweet pleasure in writing to them, though rather of a forlorn kind; and having nothing but myself to write about, feel the awkwardness of being an egotist. I feel a social spirit though barred from society...I sometimes walk in my garden, and try to pray to God; and if I pray at all it is in the solitude of a walk. I thought my soul a little drawn out to-day, but soon gross darkness returned. Spoke a word or two to a Mohammedan upon the things of God, but I feel to be as bad as they...9th May. I have added nothing to these memoirs since the 19th of April. Now I observe that for the last three sabbaths my soul has been much comforted in seeing so large a congregation, and more especially as many who are not our own workmen come from the parts adjacent, whose attendance must be wholly disinterested. I therefore now rejoice in seeing a regular congregation of from two to six hundred people of all descriptions--Mussulmans, Brahmans and other classes of Hindus, which I look upon as a favourable token from God...Blessed be God, I have at last received letters and other articles from our friends in England...from dear brethren Fuller, Morris, Pearce, and Rippon, but why not from others?...14th June. I have had very sore trials in my own family, from a quarter which I forbear to mention. Have greater need for faith and patience than ever I had, and I bless God that I have not been altogether without supplies of these graces...Mr. Thomas and his family spent one Lord’s day with us, May 23rd...We spent Wednesday, 26th, in prayer, and for a convenient place assembled in a temple of Seeb, which was near to our house...I was from that day seized with a dysentery, which continued nearly a week with fearful violence; but then I recovered, through abundant mercy. That day of prayer was a good day to our souls. We concerted measures for forming a Baptist church."

To his sister he wrote, on the 11th March, of the church, which was duly formed of Europeans and Eurasians. No native convert was made in this Dinapoor mission till 1806, after Carey had removed to Serampore. "We have in the neighbourhood about fifteen or sixteen serious persons, or those I have good hopes of, all Europeans. With the natives I have very large concerns; almost all the farmers for nearly twenty miles round cultivate indigo for us, and the labouring people working here to the number of about five hundred, so that I have considerable opportunity of publishing the Gospel to them. I have so much knowledge of the language as to be able to preach to them for about half an hour, so as to be understood, but am not able to vary my subjects much. I tell them of the evil and universality of sin, the sins of a natural state, the justice of God, the incarnation of Christ and his sufferings in our stead, and of the necessity of conversion, holiness, and faith, in order to salvation. They hear with attention in general, and some come to me for instruction in the things of God."

"It was always my opinion that missionaries may and must support themselves after having been sent out and received a little support at first, and in consequence I pursue a very little worldly employment which requires three months’ closish attendance in the year; but this is in the rains--the most unfavourable season for exertion. I have a district of about twenty miles square, where I am continually going from village to village to publish the Gospel; and in this space are about two hundred villages, whose inhabitants from time to time hear the Word. My manner of travelling is with two small boats; one serves me to live in, and the other for cooking my food. I carry all my furniture and food with me from place to place--viz. a chair, a table, a bed, and a lamp. I walk from village to village, but repair to my boat for lodging and eating. There are several rivers in this extent of country, which is very convenient for travelling."

Carey’s first convert seems to have been Ignatius Fernandez, a Portuguese descendant who had prospered as a trader in Dinapoor station. The first Protestant place of worship in Bengal, outside of Calcutta, was built by him, in 1797, next to his own house. There he conducted service both in English and Bengali, whenever Carey and Thomas, and Fountain afterwards, were unable to go out to the station, and in his house Thomas and Fountain died. He remained there as a missionary till his own death, four years before Carey’s, when he left all his property to the mission. The mission-house, as it is now, is a typical example of the bungalow of one story, which afterwards formed the first chapel in Serampore, and is still common as officers’ quarters in Barrackpore and other military stations.

Side by side with his daily public preaching and more private conversations with inquirers in Bengali, Carey carried on the work of Bible translation. As each new portion was prepared it was tested by being read to hundreds of natives. The difficulty was that he had at once to give a literary form to the rich materials of the language, and to find in these or adapt from them terms sufficiently pure and accurate to express the divine ideas and facts revealed through the Hebrew and the Greek of the original. He gives us this unconscious glimpse of himself at work on this loftiest and most fruitful of tasks, which Jerome had first accomplished for Latin Christendom, Ulfila for our Scandinavian forefathers, Wiclif for the English, and Luther for the Germans of the time.

"Now I must mention some of the difficulties under which we labour, particularly myself. The language spoken by the natives of this part, though Bengali, is yet so different from the language itself, that, though I can preach an hour with tolerable freedom so as that all who speak the language well, or can write or read, perfectly understand me, yet the poor labouring people can understand but little; and though the language is rich, beautiful, and expressive, yet the poor people, whose whole concern has been to get a little rice to satisfy their wants, or to cheat their oppressive merchants and zameendars, have scarcely a word in use about religion. They have no word for love, for repent, and a thousand other things; and every idea is expressed either by quaint phrases or tedious circumlocutions. A native who speaks the language well finds it a year’s work to obtain their idiom. This sometimes discourages me much; but blessed be God I feel a growing desire to be always abounding in the work of the Lord, and I know that my labour shall not be in vain in the Lord. I am much encouraged by our Lord’s expression, ‘He who reapeth’ (in the harvest) ‘receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto eternal life.’ If I, like David, only am an instrument of gathering materials, and another build the house, I trust my joy will not be the less." This was written to the well-beloved Pearce, whom he would fain have had beside him at Mudnabati. To guide the two missionaries whom the Society were about to send to Africa on the salaries which he and Thomas had set free for this extension, Carey adds:--"They will do well to associate as much as possible with the natives, and to write down every word they can catch, with its meaning. But if they have children with them, it is by far the readiest way of learning to listen to them, for they will catch up every idiom in a little time. My children can speak nearly as well as the natives, and know many things in Bengali which they do not know in English. I should also recommend to your consideration a very large country, perhaps unthought of: I mean Bhootan or Tibet. Were two missionaries sent to that country, we should have it in our power to afford them much help...The day I received your letter I set about composing a grammar and dictionary of the Bengal language to send to you. The best account of Hindu mythology extant, and which is pretty exact, is Sonnerat’s Voyage, undertaken by order of the king of France."

Without Sanskrit Carey found that he could neither master its Bengali offshoot nor enrich that vernacular with the words and combinations necessary for his translations of Scripture. Accordingly, with his usual rapidity and industry, we find that he had by April 1796 so worked his way through the intricate difficulties of the mother language of the Aryans that he could thus write to Ryland, with more than a mere scholar’s enthusiasm, of one of the two great Vedic epics:--"I have read a considerable part of the Mahabarata, an epic poem written in most beautiful language, and much upon a par with Homer; and it was, like his Iliad, only considered as a great effort of human genius, I should think it one of the first productions in the world; but alas! it is the ground of faith to millions of the simple sons of men, and as such must be held in the utmost abhorrence." At the beginning of 1798 he wrote to Sutcliff:--"I am learning the Sanskrit language, which, with only the helps to be procured here, is perhaps the hardest language in the world. To accomplish this, I have nearly translated the Sanskrit grammar and dictionary into English, and have made considerable progress in compiling a dictionary, Sanskrit, including Bengali and English."

By this year he had completed his first translation of the Bible except the historical books from Joshua to Job, and had gone to Calcutta to obtain estimates for printing the New Testament, of which he had reported to Mr. Fuller:--"It has undergone one correction, but must undergo several more. I employ a pundit merely for this purpose, with whom I go through the whole in as exact a manner as I can. He judges of the style and syntax, and I of the faithfulness of the translation. I have, however, translated several chapters together, which have not required any alteration in the syntax whatever: yet I always submit this article entirely to his judgment. I can also, by hearing him read, judge whether he understands his subject by his accenting his reading properly and laying the emphasis on the right words. If he fails in this, I immediately suspect the translation; though it is not an easy matter for an ordinary reader to lay the emphasis properly in reading Bengali, in which there is no pointing at all. The mode of printing, i.e. whether a printing-press, etc., shall be sent from England, or whether it shall be printed here, or whether it shall be printed at all, now rests with the Society."

Fuller was willing, but the ardent scholar anticipated him. Seeing a wooden printing-press advertised in Calcutta for £40, Carey at once ordered it. On its arrival in 1798, "after worship" he "retired and thanked God for furnishing us with a press." When set up in the Mudnabati house its working was explained to the natives, on whom the delighted missionary’s enthusiasm produced only the impression that it must be the idol of the English.

But Carey’s missionary organisation would not have been complete without schools, and in planning these from the very first he gives us the germs which blossomed into the Serampore College of 1818 on the one hand, and the primary school circles under native Christian inspectors on the other, a system carried out since the Mutiny of 1857 by the Christian Literature Society, and adopted by the state departments of public instruction.

"MUDNABATI, 27th January 1795.--Mr. Thomas and I (between whom the utmost harmony prevails) have formed a plan for erecting two colleges (Chowparis, Bengali), one here and the other at his residence, where we intend to educate twelve lads, viz. six Mussulmans and six Hindoos at each place. A pundit is to have the charge of them, and they are to be taught Sanskrit, Bengali, and Persian; the Bible is to be introduced, and perhaps a little philosophy and geography. The time of their education is to be seven years, and we find them meat, clothing, lodging, etc. We are now inquiring for children proper for the purpose. We have also determined to require that the Society will advance money for types to print the Bengali Bible, and make us their debtors for the sum, which we hope to be able to pay off in one year: and it will also be requisite to send a printing-press from England. We will, if our lives are spared, repay the whole, and print the Bible at our own expense, and I hope the Society will become our creditors by paying for them when delivered. Mr. Thomas is now preparing letters for specimens, which I hope will be sent by this conveyance.

"We are under great obligation to Mr. G. Udny for putting us in these stations. He is a very friendly man and a true Christian. I have no spirit for politics here; for whatever the East India Company may be in England, their servants and officers here are very different; we have a few laws, and nothing to do but to obey." Of his own school he wrote in 1799 that it consisted of forty boys. "The school would have been much larger, had we been able to have borne the expense; but, as among the scholars there are several orphans whom we wholly maintain, we could not prudently venture on any further expense...The boys have hitherto learned to read and write, especially parts of the Scriptures, and to keep accounts. We may now be able to introduce some other useful branches of knowledge among them...I trust these schools may tend to promote curiosity and inquisitiveness among the rising generation; qualities which are seldom found in the natives of Bengal."

The Medical Mission completed the equipment. "I submit it to the consideration of the Society whether we should not be furnished with medicines gratis. No medicines will be sold by us, yet the cost of them enters very deeply into our allowance. The whole supply sent in the Earl Howe, amounting to £35, besides charges amounting to thirty per cent., falls on me; but the whole will either be administered to sick poor, or given to any neighbour who is in want, or used in our own families. Neighbouring gentlemen have often supplied us. Indeed, considering the distance we are from medical assistance, the great expensiveness of it far beyond our ability, and the number of wretched, afflicted objects whom we continually see and who continually apply for help, we ought never to sell a pennyworth. Brother Thomas has been the instrument of saving numbers of lives. His house is constantly surrounded with the afflicted; and the cures wrought by him would have gained any physician or surgeon in Europe the most extensive reputation. We ought to be furnished yearly with at least half a hundredweight of Jesuit’s bark."

Around and as the fruit of the completely organised mission, thus conducted by the ordained preacher, teacher, scholar, scientist, printer, and licensed indigo planter in one station, and by his medical colleague sixteen miles to the north of him at Mahipal, there gathered many native inquirers. Besides the planters, civil officials, and military officers, to whom he ministered in Malda and Dinapoor stations, there was added the most able and consistent convert, Mr. Cunninghame of Lainshaw, the assistant judge, who afterwards in England fought the battle of missions, and from his Ayrshire estate, where he built a church, became famous as an expounder of prophecy. Carey looked upon this as "the greatest event that has occurred since our coming to this country." The appointment of Lord Mornington, soon to be known as the Marquis Wellesley, "the glorious little man," as Metcalfe called him, and hardly second to his younger brother Wellington, having led Fuller to recommend that Carey should wait upon his Excellency at Calcutta, this reply was received:--"I would not, however, have you suppose that we are obliged to conceal ourselves, or our work: no such thing. We preach before magistrates and judges; and were I to be in the company with Lord Mornington, I should not hesitate to declare myself a missionary to the heathen, though I would not on any account return myself as such to the Governor-General in Council."

Two years before this, in 1797, Carey had written:--"This mission should be strengthened as much as possible, as its situation is such as may put it in our power, eventually, to spread the Gospel through the greatest part of Asia, and almost all the necessary languages may be learned here." He had just returned from his first long missionary tour among the Bhooteas, who from Tibet had overrun the eastern Himalaya from Darjeeling to Assam. Carey and Thomas were received as Christian Lamas by the Soobah or lieutenant-governor of the country below the hills, which in 1865 we were compelled to annex and now administer as Jalpaigori District. They seemed to have been the first Englishmen who had entered the territory since the political and commercial missions of Bogle and Buchanan-Hamilton sent by Warren Hastings.

"The genuine politeness and gentleman-like behaviour of the Soobah exceeded everything that can be imagined, and his generosity was astonishing. He insisted on supplying all our people with everything they wanted; and if we did but cast our eyes to any object in the room, he immediately presented us with one of the same sort. Indeed he seemed to interpret our looks before we were aware; and in this manner he presented each of us that night with a sword, shield, helmet, and cup, made of a very light beautiful wood, and used by all the Bhooteas for drinking in. We admiring the wood, he gave us a large log of it; which appears to be like fir, with a very dark beautiful grain: it is full of a resin or turpentine, and burns like a candle if cut into thin pieces, and serves for that use. In eating, the Soobah imitated our manners so quickly and exactly, that though he had never seen a European before, yet he appeared as free as if he had spent his life with them. We ate his food, though I confess the thoughts of the Jinkof’s bacon made me eat rather sparingly. We had much talk about Bhootan, and about the Gospel.

"We found that he had determined to give all the country a testimony of his friendship for us in a public manner; and the next day was fixed on to perform the ceremony in our tent on the market-place. Accordingly we got instructed in the necessary etiquette; and informed him we were only coming a short journey to see the country, were not provided with English cloth, etc., for presents. The time being come, we were waited on by the Soobah, followed by all his servants, both Bhooteas and Hindus. Being seated, we exchanged each five rupees and five pieces of betel, in the sight of the whole town; and having chewed betel for the first time in our lives, we embraced three times in the Eastern manner, and then shook hands in the English manner; after which, he made us a present of a piece of rich debang wrought with gold, each a Bhootan blanket, and the tail of an animal called the cheer cow, as bushy as a horse’s, and used in the Hindu worship...In the morning, the Soobah came with his usual friendship, and brought more presents, which we received, and took our leave. He sent us away with every honour he could heap upon us; as a band of music before us, guides to show us the way, etc....The Soobah is to pay us a visit in a little time, which I hope to improve for the great end of settling a mission in that country."

Carey applied his unusual powers of detailed observation and memory in noting the physical and mental characteristics of these little Buddhists, the structure of the language and nature of their books, beliefs, and government, all of which he afterwards utilised. He was often in sight of snowy Kinchinjinga (28,156 feet), behind Darjeeling, and when the Soobah, being sick, afterwards sent messengers with gifts to induce him to return, he wrote:--"I hope to ascend those stupendous mountains, which are so high as to be seen at a distance of 200 or 250 miles. One of these distant mountains, which is seen at Mahipal, is concealed from view by the tops of a nearer range of hills, when you approach within sixty miles of them. The distant range forms an angle of about ten degrees with the horizon." But the time did not come for a mission to that region till the sanitarium of Darjeeling became the centre of another British district opened up by railway from Calcutta, and now the aboriginal Lepchas are coming in large numbers into the church. Subsequent communications from the Soobah informed them of the Garos of Assam.

On his last visit to Calcutta, in 1799, "to get types cast for printing the Bible," Carey witnessed that sight of widow-burning which was to continue to disgrace alike the Hindoos and the Company’s Government until his incessant appeals in India and in England led to its prevention in 1829. In a letter to Dr. Ryland he thus describes the horrid rite:--

"MUDNABATI, 1st April 1799.--As I was returning from Calcutta I saw the Sahamaranam, or, a woman burning herself with the corpse of her husband, for the first time in my life. We were near the village of Noya Serai, or, as Rennell calls it in his chart of the Hoogli river, Niaverai. Being evening, we got out of the boat to walk, when we saw a number of people assembled on the river-side. I asked them what they were met for, and they told me to burn the body of a dead man. I inquired if his wife would die with him; they answered Yes, and pointed to the woman. She was standing by the pile, which was made of large billets of wood, about two and a half feet high, four feet long, and two wide, on the top of which lay the dead body of her husband. Her nearest relation stood by her, and near her was a small basket of sweetmeats called Thioy. I asked them if this was the woman’s choice, or if she were brought to it by any improper influence? They answered that it was perfectly voluntary. I talked till reasoning was of no use, and then began to exclaim with all my might against what they were doing, telling them that it was a shocking murder. They told me it was a great act of holiness, and added in a very surly manner, that if I did not like to see it I might go farther off, and desired me to go. I told them that I would not go, that I was determined to stay and see the murder, and that I should certainly bear witness of it at the tribunal of God. I exhorted the woman not to throw away her life; to fear nothing, for no evil would follow her refusal to burn. But she in the most calm manner mounted the pile, and danced on it with her hands extended, as if in the utmost tranquillity of spirit. Previous to her mounting the pile the relation, whose office it was to set fire to the pile, led her six times round it, at two intervals--that is, thrice at each circumambulation. As she went round she scattered the sweetmeat above mentioned among the people, who picked it up and ate it as a very holy thing. This being ended, and she having mounted the pile and danced as above mentioned (N.B.--The dancing only appeared to be to show us her contempt of death, and prove to us that her dying was voluntary), she lay down by the corpse, and put one arm under its neck and the other over it, when a quantity of dry cocoa-leaves and other substances were heaped over them to a considerable height, and then Ghee, or melted preserved butter, poured on the top. Two bamboos were then put over them and held fast down, and fire put to the pile, which immediately blazed very fiercely, owing to the dry and combustible materials of which it was composed. No sooner was the fire kindled than all the people set up a great shout--Hurree-Bol, Hurree-Bol, which is a common shout of joy, and an invocation of Hurree, or Seeb. It was impossible to have heard the woman had she groaned, or even cried aloud, on account of the mad noise of the people, and it was impossible for her to stir or struggle on account of the bamboos which were held down on her like the levers of a press. We made much objection to their using these bamboos, and insisted that it was using force to prevent the woman from getting up when the fire burned her. But they declared that it was only done to keep the pile from falling down. We could not bear to see more, but left them, exclaiming loudly against the murder, and full of horror at what we had seen." In the same letter Carey communicates the information he had collected regarding the Jews and Syrian Christians of the Malabar coast.

Mr. G. Udny had now found his private indigo enterprise to be disastrous. He resolved to give it up and retire to England. Thomas had left his factory, and was urging his colleague to try the sugar trade, which at that time meant the distillation of rum. Carey rather took over from Mr. Udny the out-factory of Kidderpore, twelve miles distant, and there resolved to prepare for the arrival of colleagues, the communistic missionary settlement on the Moravian plan, which he had advocated in his Enquiry. Mr. John Fountain had been sent out as the first reinforcement, but he proved to be almost as dangerous to the infant mission from his outspoken political radicalism as Thomas had been from his debts. Carey seriously contemplated the setting up of his mission centre among the Bhooteas, so as to be free from the East India Company. The authorities would not license Fountain as his assistant. Would they allow future missionaries to settle with him? Would they always renew his own licence? And what if he must cease altogether to work with his hands, and give himself wholly to the work of the mission as seemed necessary?

Four new colleagues and their families were already on the sea, but God had provided a better refuge for His servants till the public conscience which they were about to quicken and enlighten should cause the persecution to cease.

Chapter 5: The New Crusade--Serampore And The Brotherhood

1800

Effects of the news in England on the Baptists--On the home churches--In the foundation of the London and other Missionary Societies--In Scotland--In Holland and America--The missionary home--Joshua Marshman, William Ward, and two others sent out--Landing at the Iona of Southern Asia--Meeting of Ward and Carey--First attempt to evangelise the non-Aryan hill tribes--Carey driven by providences to Serampore--Dense population of Hoogli district--Adapts his communistic plan to the new conditions--Purchase of the property--Constitution of the Brotherhood--His relations to Marshman and Ward--Hannah Marshman, the first woman missionary--Daily life of the Brethren--Form of Agreement--Carey’s ideal system of missionary administration realised for fifteen years--Spiritual heroism of the Brotherhood.

THE first two English missionaries to India seemed to those who sent them forth to have disappeared for ever. For fourteen months, in those days of slow Indiamen and French privateers, no tidings of their welfare reached the poor praying people of the midlands, who had been emboldened to begin the heroic enterprise. The convoy, which had seen the Danish vessel fairly beyond the French coast, had been unable to bring back letters on account of the weather. At last, on the 29th July 1794, Fuller, the secretary; Pearce, the beloved personal friend of Carey; Ryland in Bristol; and the congregation at Leicester, received the journals of the voyage and letters which told of the first six weeks’ experience at Balasore, in Calcutta, Bandel, and Nuddea, just before Carey knew the worst of their pecuniary position. The committee at once met. They sang "with sacred joy" what has ever since been the jubilee hymn of missions, that by William Williams--

"O’er those gloomy hills of darkness.

They "returned solemn thanks to the everlasting God whose mercy endureth for ever, for having preserved you from the perils of the sea, and hitherto made your ways prosperous. In reading the short account of your labours we feel something of that spirit spoken of in the prophet, ‘Thine heart shall fear and be enlarged.’ We cordially thank you for your assiduity in learning the languages, in translating, and in every labour of love in which you have engaged. Under God we cheerfully confide in your wisdom, fidelity, and prudence, with relation to the seat of your labours or the means to carry them into effect. If there be one place, however, which strikes us as of more importance than the rest, it is Nuddea. But you must follow where the Lord opens a door for you." The same spirit of generous confidence marked the relations of Carey and the committee so long as Fuller was secretary. When the news came that the missionaries had become indigo planters, some of the weaker brethren, estimating Carey by themselves, sent out a mild warning against secular temptations, to which he returned a half-amused and kindly reply. John Newton, then the aged rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, on being consulted, reassured them: "If the heart be fired with a zeal for God and love to souls," he said, "such attention to business as circumstances require will not hurt it." Since Carey, like the Moravians, meant that the missionaries should live upon a common stock, and never lay up money, the weakest might have recognised the Paul-like nobleness, which had marked all his life, in relinquishing the scanty salary that it might be used for other missions to Africa and Asia.

The spiritual law which Duff’s success afterwards led Chalmers to formulate, that the relation of foreign to home missions acts not by exhaustion but by fermentation, now came to be illustrated on a great scale, and to result in the foundation of the catholic missionary enterprise of the evangelicals of England, Scotland, Ireland, America, Germany, and France, which has marked the whole nineteenth century. We find it first in Fuller himself. In comforting Thomas during his extremest dejection he quoted to him from his own journal of 1789 the record of a long period of spiritual inactivity, which continued till Carey compelled him to join in the mission. "Before this I did little but pine over my misery, but since I have betaken myself to greater activity for God, my strength has been recovered and my soul replenished." "Your work is a great work, and the eyes of the religious world are upon you. Your undertaking, with that of your dear colleague, has provoked many. The spirit of missions is gone forth. I wish it may never stop till the Gospel is sent unto all the world."

Following the pietist Francke, who in 1710 published the first missionary reports, and also the Moravians, Fuller and his coadjutors issued from the press of J. W. Morris at Clipstone, towards the end of 1794, No. I. of their Periodical Accounts relative to a Society formed among the Particular Baptists for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen. That contained a narrative of the foundation of the Society and the letters of Carey up to 15th February 1794 from the Soondarbans. Six of these Accounts appeared up to the year 1800, when they were published as one volume with an index and illustrations. The volume closes with a doggerel translation of one of several Gospel ballads which Carey had written in Bengali in 1798. He had thus early brought into the service of Christ the Hindoo love of musical recitative, which was recently re-discovered--as it were--and now forms an important mode of evangelistic work when accompanied by native musical instruments. The original has a curious interest and value in the history of the Bengali language, as formed by Carey. As to the music he wrote:--"We sometimes have a melody that cheers my heart, though it would be discordant upon the ears of an Englishman."

Such was the immediate action of the infant Baptist Society. The moment Dr. Ryland read his letter from Carey he sent for Dr. Bogue and Mr. Stephen, who happened to be in Bristol, to rejoice with him. The three returned thanks to God, and then Bogue and Stephen, calling on Mr. Hey, a leading minister, took the first step towards the foundation of a similar organisation of non-Baptists, since known as the London Missionary Society. Immediately Bogue, the able Presbyterian, who had presided over a theological school at Gosport from which missionaries went forth, and who refused the best living in Edinburgh when offered to him by Dundas, wrote his address, which appeared in the Evangelical Magazine for September, calling on the churches to send out at least twenty or thirty missionaries. In the sermon of lofty eloquence which he preached the year after, he declared that the missionary movement of that time would form an epoch in the history of man,--"the time will be ever remembered by us, and may it be celebrated by future ages as the Æra of Christian Benevolence."

On the same day the Rev. T. Haweis, rector of All Saints, Aldwinkle, referring to the hundreds of ministers collected to decide where the first mission should be sent, thus burst forth: "Methinks I see the great Angel of the Covenant in the midst of us, pluming his wings, and ready to fly through the midst of heaven with his own everlasting Gospel, to every nation and tribe and tongue and people." In Hindostan "our brethren the Baptists have at present prevented our wishes...there is room for a thousand missionaries, and I wish we may be ready with a numerous host for that or any other part of the earth."

"Scotland10 was the next to take up the challenge sent by Carey. Greville Ewing, then a young minister of the kirk in Edinburgh, published in March 1796 the appeal of the Edinburgh or Scottish Missionary Society, which afterwards sent John Wilson to Bombay, and that was followed by the Glasgow Society, to which we owe the most successful of the Kafir missions in South Africa. Robert Haldane sold all that he had when he read the first number of the Periodical Accounts, and gave £35,000 to send a Presbyterian mission of six ministers and laymen, besides himself, to do from Benares what Carey had planned from Mudnabati; but Pitt as well as Dundas, though his personal friends, threatened him with the Company’s intolerant Act of Parliament. Evangelical ministers of the Church of England took their proper place in the new crusade, and a year before the eighteenth century closed they formed the agency, which has ever since been in the forefront of the host of the Lord as the Church Missionary Society, with Carey’s friend, Thomas Scott, as its first secretary. The sacred enthusiasm was caught by the Netherlands on the one side under the influence of Dr. Van der Kemp, who had studied at Edinburgh University, and by the divinity students of New England, of whom Adoniram Judson was even then in training to receive from Carey the apostolate of Burma. Soon too the Bengali Bible translations were to unite with the needs of the Welsh at home to establish the British and Foreign Bible Society.

As news of all this reached Carey amid his troubles and yet triumphs of faith in the swamps of Dinajpoor, and when he learned that he was soon to be joined by four colleagues, one of whom was Ward whom he himself had trysted to print the Bengali Bible for him, he might well write, in July 1799:--"The success of the Gospel and, among other things, the hitherto unextinguishable missionary flame in England and all the western world, give us no little encouragement and animate our hearts." To Sutcliff he had written eighteen months before that:--"I rejoice much at the missionary spirit which has lately gone forth: surely it is a prelude to the universal spread of the Gospel! Your account of the German Moravian Brethren’s affectionate regard towards me is very pleasing. I am not much moved by what men in general say of me; yet I cannot be insensible to the regards of men eminent for godliness...Staying at home is now become sinful in many cases, and will become so more and more. All gifts should be encouraged, and spread abroad."

The day was breaking now. Men as well as money were offered for Carey’s work. In Scotland especially Fuller found that he had but to ask, but to appear in any evangelical pulpit, and he would receive sums which, in that day of small things, rebuked his little faith. Till the last Scotland was loyal to Carey and his colleagues, and with almost a prevision of this he wrote so early as 1797:--"It rejoices my heart much to hear of our brethren in Scotland having so liberally set themselves to encourage the mission." They approved of his plans, and prayed for him and his work. When Fuller called on Cecil for help, the "churchy" evangelical told him he had a poor opinion of all Baptists except one, the man who wrote The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. When he learned that its author was before him, the hasty offender apologised and offered a subscription. "Not a farthing, sir!" was the reply, "you do not give in faith;" but the persistent Cecil prevailed. Men, however, were a greater want than money at that early stage of the modern crusade. Thomas and Fountain had each been a mistake. So were the early African missionaries, with the exception of the first Scotsman, Peter Greig. Of the thirty sent out by the London Missionary Society in the Duff only four were fit for ordination, and not one has left a name of mark. The Church Mission continued to send out only Germans till 1815. In quick succession four young men offered themselves to the Baptist Society to go out as assistants to Carey, in the hope that the Company would give them a covenant to reside--Brunsdon and Grant, two of Ryland’s Bristol flock; Joshua Marshman with his wife Hannah Marshman, and William Ward called by Carey himself.

In nine months Fuller had them and their families shipped in an American vessel, the Criterion, commanded by Captain Wickes, a Presbyterian elder of Philadelphia, who ever after promoted the cause in the United States. Charles Grant helped them as he would have aided Carey alone. Though the most influential of the Company’s directors, he could not obtain a passport for them, but he gave them the very counsel which was to provide for the young mission its ark of defence: "Do not land at Calcutta but at Serampore, and there, under the protection of the Danish flag, arrange to join Mr. Carey." After five months’ prosperous voyage the party reached the Hoogli. Before arriving within the limits of the port of Calcutta Captain Wickes sent them off in two boats under the guidance of a Bengali clerk to Serampore, fifteen miles higher up on the right bank of the river. They had agreed that he should boldly enter them, not as assistant planters, but as Christian missionaries, rightly trusting to Danish protection. Charles Grant had advised them well, but it is not easy now, as in the case of their predecessors in 1795 and of their successors up to 1813, to refrain from indignation that the British Parliament, and the party led by William Pitt, should have so long lent all the weight of their power to the East India Company in the vain attempt to keep Christianity from the Hindoos. Ward’s journal thus simply tells the story of the landing of the missionaries at this Iona, this Canterbury of Southern Asia:--

"Lord’s-day, Oct. 13, 1799.--Brother Brunsdon and I slept in the open air on our chests. We arrived at Serampore this morning by daylight, in health and pretty good spirits. We put up at Myerr’s, a Danish tavern to which we had been recommended. No worship to-day. Nothing but a Portuguese church here.

"Oct. 14.--Mr. Forsyth from Calcutta, missionary belonging to the London Missionary Society, astonished us by his presence this afternoon. He was wholly unknown, but soon became well known. He gave us a deal of interesting information. He had seen brother Carey, who invited him to his house, offered him the assistance of his Moonshi, etc.

"Oct. 16--The Captain having been at Calcutta came and informed us that his ship could not be entered unless we made our appearance. Brother Brunsdon and I went to Calcutta, and the next day we were informed that the ship had obtained an entrance, on condition that we appeared at the Police Office, or would continue at Serampore. All things considered we preferred the latter, till the arrival of our friends from Kidderpore to whom we had addressed letters. Captain Wickes called on Rev. Mr. Brown, who very kindly offered to do anything for us in his power. Our Instructions with respect to our conduct towards Civil Government were read to him. He promised to call at the Police Office afterwards, and to inform the Master that we intended to stay at Serampore, till we had leave to go up the country. Captain Wickes called at the office afterwards, and they seemed quite satisfied with our declaration by him. In the afternoon we went to Serampore.

"Oct. 19.--I addressed a letter to the Governor to-day begging his acceptance of the last number of our Periodical Accounts, and informing him that we proposed having worship to-morrow in our own house, from which we did not wish to exclude any person.

"Lord’s-day, Oct. 20.--This morning the Governor sent to inquire the hours of our worship. About half-past ten he came to our house with a number of gentlemen and their retinue. I preached from Acts xx. 24. We had a very attentive congregation of Europeans: several appeared affected, among whom was the Governor."

The text was well chosen from Paul’s words to the elders of Ephesus, as he turned his face towards the bonds and afflictions that awaited him--"But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God." It proved to be a history of the three men thenceforth best known as the Serampore Missionaries. Ward, too, the literary member of the mission, composed the hymn which thus concluded:--

"Yes, we are safe beneath Thy shade,

And shall be so ‘midst India’s heat:

What should a missionary dread,

For devils crouch at Jesus’ feet.

"There, sweetest Saviour! let Thy cross

Win many Hindoo hearts to Thee;

This shall make up for every loss,

While Thou art ours eternally."

In his first letter to a friend in Hull Ward used language which unconsciously predicted the future of the mission:--"With a Bible and a press posterity will see that a missionary will not labour in vain, even in India." But one of their number, Grant, was meanwhile removed by death, and, while they waited for a month, Carey failed to obtain leave for them to settle as his assistants in British territory. He had appealed to Mr. Brown, and to Dr. Roxburgh, his friend in charge of the Botanic Garden, to use his influence with the Government through Colebrooke, the Oriental scholar, then high in the service. But it was in vain. The police had seen with annoyance the missionaries slip from their grasp because of the liberality of the Governor-General of whom Carey had written to Ryland a year before: "At Calcutta, I saw much dissipation; but yet I think less than formerly. Lord Mornington has set his face against sports, gaming, horse-racing, and working on the Lord’s-day; in consequence of which these infamous practices are less common than formerly." The missionaries, too, had at first been reported not as Baptist but as "Papist," and the emissaries of France, believed to be everywhere, must be watched against. The brave little Governor let it be understood that he would protect to the last the men who had been committed to his care by the Danish consul in London. So Ward obtained a Danish passport to enable him to visit Dinapoor and consult with Carey.

It was Sunday morning when he approached the Mudnabati factory, "feeling very unusual sensations," greatly excited. "At length I saw Carey! He is less altered than I expected: has rather more flesh than when in England, and, blessed be God! he is a young man still." It was a wrench to sacrifice his own pioneer mission, property worth £500, the school, the church, the inquirers, but he did not hesitate. He thus stated the case on the other side:--"At Serampore we may settle as missionaries, which is not allow here; and the great ends of the mission, particularly the printing of the Scriptures, seem much more likely to be answered in that situation than in this. There also brother Ward can have the inspection of the press; whereas here we should be deprived of his important assistance. In that part of the country the inhabitants are far more numerous than in this; and other missionaries may there be permitted to join us, which here it seems they will not." On the way down, during a visit to the Rajmahal Hills, round which the great Ganges sweeps, Carey and Ward made the first attempt to evangelise the Santal and other simple aboriginal tribes, whom the officials Brown and Cleveland had partly tamed. The Paharis are described, at that time, as without caste, priests, or public religion, as living on Indian corn and by hunting, for which they carry bows and arrows. "Brother Carey was able to converse with them." Again, Ward’s comment on the Bengali services on the next Sunday, from the boats, is "the common sort wonder how brother Carey can know so much of the Shasters." "I long," wrote Carey from the spot to his new colleagues, "to stay here and tell these social and untutored heathen the good news from heaven. I have a strong persuasion that the doctrine of a dying Saviour would, under the Holy Spirit’s influence, melt their hearts." From Taljheri and Pokhuria, near that place, to Parisnath, Ranchi, and Orissa, thousands of Santals and Kols have since been gathered into the kingdom.

On the 10th January 1800 Carey took up his residence at Serampore, on the 11th he was presented to the Governor, and "he went out and preached to the natives." His apprenticeship was over; so began his full apostolate, instant in season and out of season, to end only with his life thirty-four years after.

Thus step by step, by a way that he knew not, the shoemaker lad--who had educated himself to carry the Gospel to Tahiti, had been sent to Bengal in spite of the Company which cast him out of their ship, had starved in Calcutta, had built him a wooden hut in the jungles of the Delta, had become indigo planter in the swamps of Dinapoor that he might preach Christ without interference, had been forced to think of seeking the protection of a Buddhist in the Himalaya morass--was driven to begin anew in the very heart of the most densely peopled part of the British Empire, under the jealous care of the foreign European power which had a century before sent missionaries to Tranquebar and taught Zinzendorf and the Moravians the divine law of the kingdom; encouraged by a Governor, Colonel Bie, who was himself a disciple of Schwartz. To complete this catalogue of special providences we may add that, if Fuller had delayed only a little longer, even Serampore would have been found shut against the missionaries. For the year after, when Napoleon’s acts had driven us to war with Denmark, a detachment of British troops, under Lord Minto’s son, took possession of Fredericksnagore, as Serampore was officially called, and of the Danish East India Company’s ship there, without opposition.

The district or county of Hoogli and Howrah, opposite Calcutta and Barrackpore, of which Serampore is the central port, swarms with a population, chiefly Hindoo but partly Mussulman, unmatched for density in any other part of the world. If, after years of a decimating fever, each of its 1701 square miles still supports nearly a thousand human beings or double the proportion of Belgium, we cannot believe that it was much less dense at the beginning of the century. From Howrah, the Surrey side of Calcutta, up to Hoogli the county town, the high ridge of mud between the river and the old channel of the Ganges to the west, has attracted the wealthiest and most intellectually active of all the Bengalees. Hence it was here that Portuguese and Dutch, French and English, and Danish planted their early factories. The last to obtain a site of twenty acres from the moribund Mussulman Government at Moorshedabad was Denmark, two years before Plassey. In the half century the hut of the first Governor sent from Tranquebar had grown into the "beautiful little town" which delighted the first Baptist missionaries. Its inhabitants, under only British administration since 1845, now number 45,000. Then they were much fewer, but then even more than now the town was a centre of the Vishnoo-worship of Jagganath, second only to that of Pooree in all India. Not far off, and now connected with the port by railway, is the foul shrine of Tarakeswar, which attracts thousands of pilgrims, many of them widows, who measure the road with their prostrate bodies dripping from the bath. Commercially Serampore sometimes distanced Calcutta itself, for all the foreign European trade was centred in it during the American and French wars, and the English civilians used its investments as the best means of remitting their savings home. When the missionaries landed there was nothing but a Portuguese Catholic church in the settlement, and the Governor was raising subscriptions for that pretty building in which Carey preached till he died, and the spire of which the Governor-General is said to have erected to improve the view of the town from the windows of his summer palace at Barrackpore opposite.

Removed from the rural obscurity of a Bengali village, where the cost of housing, clothing, and living was small, to a town in the neighbourhood of the capital much frequented by Europeans, Carey at once adapted the practical details of his communistic brotherhood to the new circumstances. With such wisdom was he aided in this by the business experience of Marshman and Ward, that a settlement was formed which admitted of easy development in correspondence with the rapid growth of the mission. At first the community consisted of ten adults and nine children. Grant had been carried off in a fever caused by the dampness of their first quarters. The promising Brunsdon was soon after removed by liver complaint caught from standing on an unmatted floor in the printing-office. Fountain, who at first continued the mission at Dinapoor, soon died there a happy death. Thomas had settled at Beerbhoom, but joined the Serampore brethren in time to do good though brief service before he too was cut off. But, fortunately as it proved for the future, Carey had to arrange for five families at the first, and this is how it was done as described by Ward:--

"The renting of a house, or houses, would ruin us. We hoped therefore to have been able to purchase land, and build mat houses upon it; but we can get none properly situated. We have in consequence purchased of the Governor’s nephew a large house in the middle of the town for Rs.6000, or about £800; the rent in four years would have amounted to the purchase. It consists of a spacious verandah (portico) and hall, with two rooms on each side. Rather more to the front are two other rooms separate, and on one side is a storehouse, separate also, which will make a printing-office. It stands by the river-side upon a pretty large piece of ground, walled round, with a garden at the bottom, and in the middle a fine tank or pool of water. The price alarmed us, but we had no alternative; and we hope this will form a comfortable missionary settlement. Being near to Calcutta, it is of the utmost importance to our school, our press, and our connection with England."

"From hence may the Gospel issue and pervade all India," they wrote to Fuller. "We intend to teach a school, and make what we can of our press. The paper is all arrived, and the press, with the types, etc., complete. The Bible is wholly translated, except a few chapters, so that we intend to begin printing immediately, first the New and then the Old Testament. We love our work, and will do all we can to lighten your expenses."

This house-chapel, with two acres of garden land and separate rooms on either side, continued till 1875 to be the nucleus of the settlement afterwards celebrated all over South Asia and Christendom. The chapel is still sacred to the worship of God. The separate rooms to the left, fronting the Hoogli, became enlarged into the stately residence of Mr. John Marshman, C.S.I., and his two successors in the Friend of India, while beyond were the girl’s school, now removed, the residence of Dr. Joshua Marshman before his death, and the boys’ school presented to the mission by the King of Denmark. The separate rooms to the right grew into the press; farther down the river was the house of the Lady Rumohr who became Carey’s second wife, with the great paper-mill behind; and, still farther, the second park in which the Serampore College was built, with the principal’s house in which Carey died, and a hostel for the Native Christian students behind. The whole settlement finally formed a block of at least five acres, with almost palatial buildings, on the right bank of the Hoogli, which, with a breadth of half a mile when in flood, rolls between it and the Governor-General’s summer house and English-like park of Barrackpore. The original two acres became Carey’s Botanic Garden; the houses he surrounded and connected by mahogany trees, which grew to be of umbrageous beauty. His favourite promenade between the chapel and the mill, and ultimately the college, was under an avenue of his own planting, long known as "Carey’s Walk."

The new colleagues who were to live with him in loving brotherhood till death removed the last in 1837 were not long in attracting him. The two were worthy to be associated with him, and so admirably supplemented his own deficiencies that the brotherhood became the most potent and permanent force in India. He thus wrote to Fuller his first impressions of them, with a loving self-depreciation:--"Brother Ward is the very man we wanted: he enters into the work with his whole soul. I have much pleasure in him, and expect much from him. Brother Marshman is a prodigy of diligence and prudence, as is also his wife in the latter: learning the language is mere play to him; he has already acquired as much as I did in double the time." After eight months of study and evangelising work they are thus described:--"Our brother Marshman, who is a true missionary, is able to talk a little; he goes out frequently, nay almost every day, and assaults the fortress of Satan. Brother Brunsdon can talk a little, though not like Marshman. Brother Ward is a great prize; he does not learn the language so quickly, but he is so holy, so spiritual a man, and so useful among the children."

Thus early did Carey note the value of Hannah Marshman, the first woman missionary to India. Granddaughter of the Baptist minister of Crockerton in Wiltshire, she proved to be for forty-six years at once a loving wife, and the equal of the three missionaries of Christ and of civilisation whom she aided in the common home, in the schools, in the congregation, in the Native Christian families, and even, at that early time, in purely Hindoo circles. Without her the mission must have been one-sided indeed. It gives us a pathetic interest to turn to her household books, where we find entered with loving care and thoughtful thrift all the daily details which at once form a valuable contribution to the history of prices, and show how her "prudence" combined with the heroic self-denial of all to make the Serampore mission the light of India. Ward’s journal supplies this first sketch of the brotherhood, who realised, more than probably any in Protestant, Romanist, or Greek hagiology, the life of the apostolic community in Jerusalem:--

"January 18, 1800.--This week we have adopted a set of rules for the government of the family. All preach and pray in turn; one superintends the affairs of the family for a month, and then another; brother Carey is treasurer, and has the regulation of the medicine chest; brother Fountain is librarian. Saturday evening is devoted to adjusting differences, and pledging ourselves to love one another. One of our resolutions is, that no one of us do engage in private trade; but that all be done for the benefit of the mission...

"August 1.--Our labours for every day are now regularly arranged. About six o’clock we rise; brother Carey to his garden; brother Marshman to his school at seven; brother Brunsdon, Felix, and I, to the printing-office. At eight the bell rings for family worship: we assemble in the hall; sing, read, and pray. Breakfast. Afterwards, brother Carey goes to the translation, or reading proofs: brother Marshman to school, and the rest to the printing-office. Our compositor having left us, we do without: we print three half-sheets of 2000 each in a week; have five pressmen, one folder, and one binder. At twelve o’clock we take a luncheon; then most of us shave and bathe, read and sleep before dinner, which we have at three. After dinner we deliver our thoughts on a text or question: this we find to be very profitable. Brother and sister Marshman keep their schools till after two. In the afternoon, if business be done in the office, I read and try to talk Bengali with the bràmmhàn. We drink tea about seven, and have little or no supper. We have Bengali preaching once or twice in the week, and on Thursday evening we have an experience meeting. On Saturday evening we meet to compose differences and transact business, after prayer, which is always immediately after tea. Felix is very useful in the office; William goes to school, and part of the day learns to bind. We meet two hours before breakfast on the first Monday in the month, and each one prays for the salvation of the Bengal heathen. At night we unite our prayers for the universal spread of the Gospel."

The "Form of Agreement" which regulated the social economy and spiritual enterprise of the brotherhood, and also its legal relations to the Baptist Society in England, deserves study, in its divine disinterestedness, its lofty aims, and its kindly common sense. Fuller had pledged the Society in 1798 to send out £360 a year for the joint family of six missionaries, their wives, and children. The house and land at Serampore cost the Society Rs.6000. On Grant’s death, leaving a widow and two children, the five missionaries made the first voluntary agreement, which "provided that no one should trade on his own private account, and that the product of their labour should form a common fund to be applied at the will of the majority, to the support of their respective families, of the cause of God around them, and of the widow and family of such as might be removed by death." The first year the schools and the press enabled the brotherhood to be more than self-supporting. In the second year Carey’s salary from the College of Fort-William, and the growth of the schools and press, gave them a surplus for mission extension. They not only paid for the additional two houses and ground required by such extension, but they paid back to the Society all that it had advanced for the first purchase in the course of the next six years. They acquired all the property for the Serampore Mission, duly informing the home Committee from time to time, and they vested the whole right, up to Fuller’s death in 1815, in the Society, "to prevent the premises being sold or becoming private property in the families." But "to secure their own quiet occupation of them, and enable them to leave them in the hands of such as they might associate with themselves in their work, they declared themselves trustees instead of proprietors."

The agreement of 1800 was expanded into the "Form of Agreement" of 1805 when the spiritual side of the mission had grown. Their own authoritative statement, as given above, was lovingly recognised by Fuller. In 1817, and again in 1820, the claims of aged and destitute relatives, and the duty of each brother making provision for his own widow and orphans, and, occasionally, the calls of pity and humanity, led the brotherhood to agree that "each shall regularly deduct a tenth of the net product of his labour to form a fund in his own hands for these purposes." We know nothing in the history of missions, monastic or evangelical, which at all approaches this in administrative perfectness as well is in Christlike self-sacrifice. It prevents secularisation of spirit, stimulates activity of all kinds, gives full scope to local ability and experience, calls forth the maximum of local support and propagation, sets the church at home free to enter incessantly on new fields, provides permanence as well as variety of action and adaptation to new circumstances, and binds the whole in a holy bond of prayerful co-operation and loving brotherhood. This Agreement worked for seventeen years, with a success in England and India which we shall trace, or as long as Fuller, Ryland, and Sutcliff lived "to hold the ropes," while Carey, Marshman, and Ward excavated the mine of Hindooism.

The spiritual side of the Agreement we find in the form which the three drew up in 1805, to be read publicly at all their stations thrice every year, on the Lord’s Day. It is the ripe fruit of the first eleven years of Carey’s daily toil and consecrated genius, as written out by the fervent pen of Ward. In the light of it the whole of Carey’s life must be read. In these concluding sentences the writer sketches Carey himself:--"Let us often look at Brainerd in the woods of America, pouring out his very soul before God for the perishing heathen, without whose salvation nothing could make you happy. Prayer, secret, fervent, believing prayer, lies at the root of all personal godliness. A competent knowledge of the languages current where a missionary lives, a mild and winning temper, and a heart given up to God in closet religion; these, these are the attainments which more than all knowledge or all other gifts, will fit us to become the instruments of God in the great work of human redemption. Finally, let us give ourselves unreservedly to this glorious cause. Let us never think that our time, our gifts, our strength, our families, or even the clothes we wear are our own. Let us sanctify them all to God and His cause. Oh! that He may sanctify us for His work. Let us for ever shut out the idea of laying up a cowrie (mite) for ourselves or our children. If we give up the resolution which was formed on the subject of private trade, when we first united at Serampore, the mission is from that hour a lost cause. Let us continually watch against a worldly spirit, and cultivate a Christian indifference towards every indulgence. Rather let us bear hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. No private family ever enjoyed a greater portion of happiness, even in the most prosperous gale of worldly prosperity, than we have done since we resolved to have all things in common. If we are enabled to persevere in the same principles, we may hope that multitudes of converted souls will have reason to bless God to all eternity for sending His Gospel into this country."

Such was the moral heroism, such the spiritual aim of the Serampore brotherhood; how did it set to work?

Chapter 6: The First Native Converts And Christian Schools

1800-1810

A carpenter the first Bengali convert--Krishna Pal’s confession--Caste broken for the first time--Carey describes the baptism in the Hoogli--The first woman convert--The first widow convert--The first convert of writer caste--The first Christian Brahman--The first native chapel--A Bengali "experience" meeting--Carey founding a new community as well as church--Marriage difficulties solved--The first native Christian marriage feast in North India--Hindoo Christian death and burial--The first Christian schools and school-books in North India--The first native Sunday school--Boarding schools for the higher education of country-born Christians--Carey on the mixed Portuguese, Eurasians, and Armenians--The Benevolent Institution for destitute children of all races--A hundred schools--English only postponed--Effect on native opinion and action--The leaven of the Kingdom--The Mission breaks forth into five at the close of 1810.

FOR seven years Carey had daily preached Christ in Bengali without a convert. He had produced the first edition of the New Testament. He had reduced the language to literary form. He had laid the foundations in the darkness of the pit of Hindooism, while the Northamptonshire pastors, by prayer and self-sacrifice, held the ropes. The last disappointment was on 25th November 1800, when "the first Hindoo" catechumen, Fakeer, offered himself for baptism, returned to his distant home for his child, and appeared no more, probably "detained by force." But on the last Sunday of that year Krishna Pal was baptised in the Hoogli and his whole family soon followed him. He was thirty-five years of age. Not only as the first native Christian of North India of whom we have a reliable account, but as the first missionary to Calcutta and Assam, and the first Bengali hymn-writer, this man deserves study.

Carey’s first Hindoo convert was three years younger than himself, or about thirty-six, at baptism. Krishna Pal, born in the neighbouring French settlement of Chandernagore, had settled in the suburbs of Serampore, where he worked as a carpenter. Sore sickness and a sense of sin led him to join the Kharta-bhojas, one of the sects which, from the time of Gautama Buddha, and of Chaitanya, the reformer of Nuddea, to that of Nanak, founder of the Sikh brotherhood have been driven into dissent by the yoke of Brahmanism. Generally worshippers of some form of Vishnoo, and occasionally, as in Kabeer’s case, influenced by the monotheism of Islam, these sects begin by professing theism and opposition to caste, though Hindooism is elastic enough to keep them always within its pale and ultimately to absorb them again. For sixteen years Krishna Pal was himself a gooroo of the Ghospara sect, of which from Carey’s to Duff’s earlier days the missionaries had a hope which proved vain. He recovered from sickness, but could not shake off the sense of the burden of sin, when this message came to him, and, to his surprise, through the Europeans--"Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." At the same time he happened to dislocate his right arm by falling down the slippery side of his tank when about to bathe. He sent two of the children to the Mission House for Thomas, who immediately left the breakfast table at which the brethren had just sat down, and soon reduced the luxation, while the sufferer again heard the good news that Christ was waiting to heal his soul, and he and his neighbour Gokool received a Bengali tract. He himself thus told the story:--"In this paper I read that he who confesseth and forsaketh his sins, and trusteth in the righteousness of Christ, obtains salvation. The next morning Mr. Carey came to see me, and after inquiring how I was, told me to come to his house, that he would give me some medicine, by which, through the blessing of God, the pain in my arm would be removed. I went and obtained the medicine, and through the mercy of God my arm was cured. From this time I made a practice of calling at the mission house, where Mr. Ward and Mr. Felix Carey used to read and expound the Holy Bible to me. One day Dr. Thomas asked me whether I understood what I heard from Mr. Ward and Mr. Carey. I said I understood that the Lord Jesus Christ gave his life up for the salvation of sinners, and that I believed it, and so did my friend Gokool. Dr. T. said, ‘Then I call you brother--come and let us eat together in love.’ At this time the table was set for luncheon, and all the missionaries and their wives, and I and Gokool, sat down and ate together."

The servants spread the news, most horrible to the people, that the two Hindoos had "become Europeans," and they were assaulted on their way home. Just thirty years after, in Calcutta, the first public breach of caste by the young Brahman students of Duff raised a still greater commotion, and resulted in the first converts there. Krishna Pal and his wife, his wife’s sister and his four daughters; Gokool, his wife, and a widow of forty who lived beside them, formed the first group of Christian Hindoos of caste in India north of Madras. Two years after Krishna Pal sent to the Society this confession of his faith. Literally translated, it is a record of belief such as Paul himself might have written, illustrated by an apostolic life of twenty-two years. The carpenter’s confession and dedication has, in the original, an exquisite tenderness, reflected also in the hymn11 which he wrote for family worship:--

"SERAMPORE, 12th Oct. 1802.

"To the brethren of the church of our Saviour Jesus Christ, our souls’ beloved, my affectionately embracing representation. The love of God, the gospel of Jesus Christ, was made known by holy brother Thomas. In that day our minds were filled with joy. Then judging, we understood that we were dwelling in darkness. Through the door of manifestation we came to know that, sin confessing, sin forsaking, Christ’s righteousness embracing, salvation would be obtained. By light springing up in the heart, we knew that sinners becoming repentant, through the sufferings of Christ, obtain salvation. In this rejoicing, and in Christ’s love believing, I obtained mercy. Now it is in my mind continually to dwell in the love of Christ: this is the desire of my soul. Do you, holy people, pour down love upon us, that as the chatookee we may be satisfied.   I was the vilest of sinners: He hath saved me. Now this word I will tell to the world. Going forth, I will proclaim the love of Christ with rejoicing. To sinners I will say this word: Here sinner, brother! Without Christ there is no help. Christ, the world to save, gave his own soul! Such love was never heard: for enemies Christ gave his own soul! Such compassion, where shall we get? For the sake of saving sinners he forsook the happiness of heaven. I will constantly stay near him. Being awakened by this news, I will constantly dwell in the town of joy. In the Holy Spirit I will live: yet in Christ’s sorrow I will be sorrowful. I will dwell along with happiness, continually meditating on this;--Christ will save the world! In Christ not taking refuge, there is no other way of life. I was indeed a sinner, praise not knowing.--This is the representation of Christ’s servant,

"KRISTNO."

Such is the first epistle of the Church of India. Thus the first medical missionary had his reward; but the joy proved to be too much for him. When Carey led Krishna and his own son Felix down into the water of baptism the ravings of Thomas in the schoolhouse on the one side, and of Mrs. Carey on the other, mingled with the strains of the Bengali hymn of praise. The Mission Journal, written by Ward, tells with graphic simplicity how caste as well as idol-worship was overcome not only by the men but the women representatives of a race whom, thirty years after, Macaulay described as destitute of courage, independence, and veracity, and bold only in deceit. Christ is changing all that.

"Nov. 27.--Krishna, the man whose arm was set, overtook Felix and me, and said he would come to our house daily for instruction; for that we had not only cured his arm, but brought him the news of salvation...

"Dec. 5.--Yesterday evening Gokool and Krishna prayed in my room. This morning Gokool called upon us, and told us that his wife and two or three more of his family had left him on account of the gospel. He had eaten of Krishna’s rice, who being of another caste, Gokool had lost his. Krishna says his wife and family are all desirous of becoming Christians. They declare their willingness to join us, and obey all our Saviour’s commands. Gokool and his wife had a long talk; but she continued determined, and is gone to her relations.

"Dec. 6.--This morning brother Carey and I went to Krishna’s house. Everything was made very clean. The women sat within the house, the children at the door, and Krishna and Gokool with brother Carey and I in the court. The houses of the poor are only calculated for sleeping in. Brother Carey talked; and the women appeared to have learned more of the gospel than we expected. They declared for Christ at once. This work was new, even to brother Carey. A whole family desiring to hear the gospel, and declaring in favour of it! Krishna’s wife said she had received great joy from it.

"Lord’s-day, Dec. 7.--This morning brother Carey went to Krishna’s house, and spoke to a yard full of people, who heard with great attention though trembling with cold. Brother Brunsdon is very poorly. Krishna’s wife and her sister were to have been with us in the evening; but the women have many scruples to sitting in the company of Europeans. Some of them scarcely ever go out but to the river; and if they meet a European run away. Sometimes when we have begun to speak in a street, some one desires us to remove to a little distance; for the women dare not come by us to fill their jars at the river. We always obey...

"Dec. 11.--Gokool, Krishna, and family continue to seek after the Word, and profess their entire willingness to join us. The women seem to have learnt that sin is a dreadful thing, and to have received joy in hearing of Jesus Christ. We see them all every day almost. They live but half a mile from us. We think it right to make many allowances for ignorance, and for a state of mind produced by a corrupt superstition. We therefore cannot think of demanding from them, previous to baptism, to more than a profession of dependence on Christ, from a knowledge of their need of Him, and submission to Him in all things. We now begin to talk of baptism. Yesterday we fixed upon the spot, before our gate, in the river. We begin to talk also of many other things concerning the discipled natives. This evening Felix and I went to Gokool’s house. Krishna and his wife and a bràmmhàn were present. I said a little. Felix read the four last chapters of John to them, and spoke also. We sat down upon a piece of mat in the front of the house. (No chairs.) It was very pleasant. To have natives who feel a little as we do ourselves, is so new and different. The country itself seems to wear a new aspect to me...

"Dec. 13.--This evening Felix and I went to see our friends Gokool and Krishna. The latter was out. Gokool gave a pleasing account of the state of his mind, and also of that of Krishna and his family. While we were there, Gokool’s gooroo (teacher) came for the first time since his losing caste. Gokool refused to prostrate himself at his feet while he should put his foot on his head; for which his gooroo was displeased...

"Dec. 22.--This day Gokool and Krishna came to eat tiffin (what in England is called luncheon) with us, and thus publicly threw away their caste. Brethren Carey and Thomas went to prayer with the two natives before they proceeded to this act. All our servants were astonished: so many had said that nobody would ever mind Christ or lose caste. Brother Thomas has waited fifteen years, and thrown away much upon deceitful characters: brother Carey has waited till hope of his own success has almost expired; and after all, God has done it with perfect ease! Thus the door of faith is open to the gentiles; who shall shut it? The chain of the caste is broken; who shall mend it?"

Carey thus describes the baptism:--"Dec. 29.--Yesterday was a day of great joy. I had the happiness to desecrate the Gunga, by baptising the first Hindoo, viz. Krishna, and my son Felix: some circumstances turned up to delay the baptism of Gokool and the two women. Krishna’s coming forward alone, however, gave us very great pleasure, and his joy at both ordinances was very great. The river runs just before our gate, in front of the house, and, I think, is as wide as the Thames at Gravesend. We intended to have baptised at nine in the morning; but, on account of the tide, were obliged to defer it till nearly one o’clock, and it was administered just after the English preaching. The Governor and a good number of Europeans were present. Brother Ward preached a sermon in English, from John v. 39--‘Search the Scriptures.’ We then went to the water-side, where I addressed the people in Bengali; after having sung a Bengali translation of ‘Jesus, and shall it ever be?’ and engaging in prayer. After the address I administered the ordinance, first to my son, then to Krishna. At half-past four I administered the Lord’s Supper; and a time of real refreshing it was...

"Thus, you see, God is making way for us, and giving success to the word of His grace! We have toiled long, and have met with many discouragements; but, at last, the Lord has appeared for us. May we have the true spirit of nurses, to train them up in the words of faith and sound doctrine! I have no fear of any one, however, in this respect, but myself. I feel much concerned that they may act worthy of their vocation, and also that they may be able to teach others. I think it becomes us to make the most of every one whom the Lord gives us."

Jeymooni, Krishna’s wife’s sister, was the first Bengali woman to be baptised, and Rasoo, his wife, soon followed; both were about thirty-five years old. The former said she had found a treasure in Christ greater than anything in the world. The latter, when she first heard the good news from her husband, said "there was no such sinner as I, and I felt my heart immediately unite to Him. I wish to keep all His commands so far as I know them." Gokool was kept back for a time by his wife, Komal, who fled to her father’s, but Krishna and his family brought in, first the husband, then the wife, whose simplicity and frankness attracted the missionaries. Unna, their widowed friend of forty, was also gathered in, the first of that sad host of victims to Brahmanical cruelty, lust, and avarice, to whom Christianity has ever since offered the only deliverance. Of 124,000,000 of women in India in 1881, no fewer than 21,000,000 were returned by the census as widows, of whom 669,000 were under nineteen years, 286,000 were under fifteen, and 79,000 were under nine, all figures undoubtedly within the appalling truth. Jeymooni and Unna at once became active missionaries among their country-women, not only in Serampore but in Chandernagore and the surrounding country.

The year 1800 did not close without fruit from the other and higher castes. Petumber Singh, a man of fifty of the writer caste, had sought deliverance from sin for thirty years at many a Hindoo shrine and in many a Brahmanical scripture. One of the earliest tracts of the Serampore press fell into his hands, and he at once walked forty miles to seek fuller instruction from its author. His baptism gave Carey just what the mission wanted, a good schoolmaster, and he soon proved to be, even before Krishna in time, the first preacher to the people. Of the same writer caste were Syam Dass, Petumber Mitter, and his wife Draupadi, who was as brave as her young husband. The despised soodras were represented by Syam’s neighbour, Bharut, an old man, who said he went to Christ because he was just falling into hell and saw no other way of safety. The first Mohammedan convert was Peroo, another neighbour of Syam Dass. From the spot on the Soondarbans where Carey first began his life of missionary farmer, there came to him at the close of 1802, in Calcutta, the first Brahman who had bowed his neck to the Gospel in all India up to this time, for we can hardly reckon Kiernander’s case. Krishna Prosad, then nineteen, "gave up his friends and his caste with much fortitude, and is the first Brahman who has been baptised. The word of Christ’s death seems to have gone to his heart, and he continues to receive the Word with meekness." The poita or sevenfold thread which, as worn over the naked body, betokened his caste, he trampled under foot, and another was given to him, that when preaching Christ he might be a witness to the Brahmans at once that Christ is irresistible and that an idol is nothing in the world. This he voluntarily ceased to wear in a few years. Two more Brahmans were brought in by Petumber Singhee in 1804, by the close of which year the number of baptised converts was forty-eight, of whom forty were native men and women. With the instinct of a true scholar and Christian Carey kept to the apostolic practice, which has been too often departed from--he consecrated the convert’s name as well as soul and body to Christ. Beside the "Hermes" of Rome to whom Paul sent his salutation, he kept the "Krishna" of Serampore and Calcutta.

The first act of the first convert, Krishna Pal, was of his own accord to build a house for God immediately opposite his own, the first native meeting-house in Bengal. Carey preached the first sermon in it to twenty natives besides the family. On the side of the high road, along which the car of Jagganath is dragged every year, the missionaries purchased a site and built a preaching place, a school, a house for Gokool, and a room for the old widow, at the cost of Captain Wickes, who had rejoiced to witness their baptism. The Brahman who owned the neighbouring land wished to sell it and leave the place, "so much do these people abhor us." This little purchase for £6 grew in time into the extensive settlement of Jannagur, where about 1870 the last of Carey’s converts passed away. From its native chapel, and in its village tank, many Hindoos have since been led by their own ordained countrymen to put on Christ. In time the church in the chapel on the Hoogli became chiefly European and Eurasian, but on the first Sunday of the year, the members of both churches meet together for solemn and joyful communion, when the services are alternately in Bengali and English.

The longing for converts now gave place to anxiety that they might continue to be Christians indeed. As in the early Corinthian Church, all did not perceive at once the solemnities of the Lord’s Supper. Krishna Pal, for instance, jealous because the better educated Petumber had been ordained to preach before him, made a schism by administering it, and so filled the missionaries with grief and fear; but he soon became penitent. Associated with men who gave their all to Christ, the native members could not but learn the lesson of self-support, so essential for a self-propagating church, and so often neglected in the early history of missions, and even still. On baptism Krishna received a new white dress with six shillings; but such a gift, beautiful in itself, was soon discontinued. A Mohammedan convert asked assistance to cultivate a little ground and rear silkworms, but, writes Mr. Ward bowed down with missionary cares, "We are desirous to avoid such a precedent." Although these first converts were necessarily missionaries rather than pastors for a time, each preacher received no more than six rupees a month while in his own village, and double that when itinerating. Carey and his colleagues were ever on the watch to foster the spiritual life and growth of men and women born, and for thirty or fifty years trained, in all the ideas and practices of a system which is the very centre of opposition to teaching like theirs. This record of an "experience meeting" of three men and five women may be taken as a type of Bengali Christianity when it was but two years old, and as a contrast to that which prevails a century after:--

"Gokool. I have been the greatest of sinners, but I wish only to think of the death of Christ. I rejoice that now people can no longer despise the Gospel, and call us feringas; but they begin to judge for themselves.

"Krishna Prosad. I have this week been thinking of the power of God, that he can do all things; and of the necessity of minding all his commands. I have thought also of my mother a great deal, who is now become old, and who is constantly crying about me, thinking that I have dishonoured the family and am lost. Oh that I could but once go and tell her of the good news, as well as my brothers and sisters, and open their eyes to the way of salvation!

"Ram Roteen. In my mind there is this: I see that all the debtahs (idols) are nothing, and that Jesus Christ is the only Saviour. If I can believe in him, and walk in his commandments, it may be well with me.

"Rasoo. I am a great sinner; yet I wish continually to think of the death of Christ. I had much comfort in the marriage of my daughter (Onunda to Krishna Prosad). The neighbours talked much about it, and seemed to think that it was much better that a man should choose his own wife, than that people should be betrothed in their infancy by their parents. People begin to be able to judge a little now about the Christian ways.

"Jeymooni. In this country are many ways: the way of the debtahs; the way of Jagganath, where all eat together; the way of Ghospara, etc. Yet all these are vain. Yesoo Kreest’s death, and Yesoo Kreest’s commands--this is the way of life! I long to see Kreest’s kingdom grow. This week I had much joy in talking to Gokool’s mother, whose heart is inclined to judge about the way of Kreest. When I was called to go and talk with her, on the way I thought within myself, but how can I explain the way of Kreest? I am but a woman, and do not know much. Yet I recollected that the blessing does not come from us: God can bless the weakest words. Many Bengali women coming from the adjoining houses, sat down and heard the word; and I was glad in hoping that the mercy of God might be found by this old woman. [Gokool’s mother.]

"Komal. I am a great sinner; yet I have been much rejoiced this week in Gokool’s mother coming to inquire about the Gospel. I had great sorrow when Gokool was ill; and at one time I thought he would have died; but God has graciously restored him. We have worldly sorrow, but this lasts only for a time.

"Draupadi. This week I have had much sorrow on account of Petumber. His mind is very bad: he sits in the house, and refuses to work; and I know not what will become of him: yet Kreest’s death is a true word.

"Golook. I have had much joy in thinking of God’s goodness to our family. My sisters Onunda and Kesaree wish to be baptised, and to come into the church. If I can believe in Kreest’s death, and keep his commands till death, then I shall be saved."

Carey was not only founding the Church of North India; he was creating a new society, a community, which has its healthy roots in the Christian family. Krishna Pal had come over with his household, like the Philippian, and at once became his own and their gooroo or priest. But the marriage difficulty was early forced on him and on the missionaries. The first shape which persecution took was an assault on his eldest daughter, Golook, who was carried off to the house in Calcutta of the Hindoo to whom in infancy she had been betrothed, or married according to Hindoo law enforced by the Danish and British courts. As a Christian she loathed a connection which was both idolatrous and polygamous. But she submitted for a time, continuing, however, secretly to pray to Christ when beaten by her husband for openly worshipping Him, and refusing to eat things offered to the idol. At last it became intolerable. She fled to her father, was baptised, and was after a time joined by her penitent husband. The subject of what was to be done with converts whose wives would not join them occupied the missionaries in discussion every Sunday during 1803, and they at last referred it to Andrew Fuller and the committee. Practically they anticipated the Act in which Sir Henry Maine gave relief after the Scriptural mode. They sent the husband to use every endeavour to induce his heathen wife to join him; long delay or refusal they counted a sufficient ground for divorce, and they allowed him to marry again. The other case, which still troubles the native churches, of the duty of a polygamous Christian, seems to have been solved according to Dr. Doddridge’s advice, by keeping such out of office in the church, and pressing on the conscience of all the teaching of our Lord in Matthew xix., and of Paul in 1st Corinthians vii.

In 1802 Carey drew up a form of agreement and of service for native Christian marriages not unlike that of the Church of England. The simple and pleasing ceremony in the case of Syam Dass presented a contrast to the prolonged, expensive, and obscene rites of the Hindoos, which attracted the people. When, the year after, a Christian Brahman was united to a daughter of Krishna Pal, in the presence of more than a hundred Hindoos, the unity of all in Christ Jesus was still more marked:--

"Apr. 4, 1803.--This morning early we went to attend the wedding of Krishna Prosad with Onunda, Krishna’s second daughter. Krishna gave him a piece of ground adjoining his dwelling, to build him a house, and we lent Prosad fifty rupees for that purpose, which he is to return monthly, out of his wages. We therefore had a meeting for prayer in this new house, and many neighbours were present. Five hymns were sung: brother Carey and Marshman prayed in Bengali. After this we went under an open shed close to the house, where chairs and mats were provided: here friends and neighbours sat all around. Brother Carey sat at a table; and after a short introduction, in which he explained the nature of marriage, and noticed the impropriety of the Hindoo customs in this respect, he read 2 Cor. vi. 14-18, and also the account of the marriage at Cana. Then he read the printed marriage agreement, at the close of which Krishna Prosad and Onunda, with joined hands, one after the other, promised love, faithfulness, obedience, etc. They then signed the agreement, and brethren Carey, Marshman, Ward, Chamberlain, Ram Roteen, etc., signed as witnesses. The whole was closed with prayer by brother Ward. Everything was conducted with the greatest decorum, and it was almost impossible not to have been pleased. We returned home to breakfast, and sent the new-married couple some sugar-candy, plantains, and raisins; the first and last of these articles had been made a present of to us, and the plantains were the produce of the mission garden. In the evening we attended the monthly prayer-meeting.

"Apr. 5.--This evening we all went to supper at Krishna’s, and sat under the shade where the marriage ceremony had been performed. Tables, knives and forks, glasses, etc., having been taken from our house, we had a number of Bengali plain dishes, consisting of curry, fried fish, vegetables, etc., and I fancy most of us ate heartily. This is the first instance of our eating at the house of our native brethren. At this table we all sat with the greatest cheerfulness, and some of the neighbours looked on with a kind of amazement. It was a new and very singular sight in this land where clean and unclean is so much regarded. We should have gone in the daytime, but were prevented by the heat and want of leisure. We began this wedding supper with singing, and concluded with prayer: between ten and eleven we returned home with joy. This was a glorious triumph over the caste! A Brahman married to a soodra, in the Christian way: Englishmen eating with the married couple and their friends, at the same table, and at a native house. Allowing the Hindoo chronology to be true, there has not been such a sight in Bengal these millions of years!"

In the same year the approaching death of Gokool led the missionaries to purchase the acre of ground, near the present railway station, in which lies the dust of themselves and their converts, and of a child of the Judsons, till the Resurrection. Often did Carey officiate at the burial of Europeans in the Danish cemetery. Previous to his time the only service there consisted in the Government secretary dropping a handful of earth on the coffin. In the native God’s-acre, as in the Communion of the Lord’s Table, and in the simple rites which accompanied the burial of the dead in Christ, the heathen saw the one lofty platform of loving self-sacrifice to which the Cross raises all its children:--

"Oct. 7.--Our dear friend Gokool is gone: he departed at two this morning. At twelve he called the brethren around him to sing and pray; was perfectly sensible, resigned, and tranquil. Some of the neighbours had been persuading him the day before to employ a native doctor; he however refused, saying he would have no physician but Jesus Christ. On their saying, How is it that you who have turned to Christ should be thus afflicted? He replied, My affliction is on account of my sins; my Lord does all things well! Observing Komal weep (who had been a most affectionate wife), he said, Why do you weep for me? Only pray, etc. From the beginning of his illness he had little hope of recovery; yet he never murmured, nor appeared at all anxious for medicine. His answer constantly was, "I am in my Lord’s hands, I want no other physician!’ His patience throughout was astonishing: I never heard him say once that his pain was great. His tranquil and happy end has made a deep impression on our friends: they say one to another, ‘May my mind be as Gokool’s was!’ When we consider, too, that this very man grew shy of us three years ago, because we opposed his notion that believers would never die, the grace now bestowed upon him appears the more remarkable. Knowing the horror the Hindoos have for a dead body, and how unwilling they are to contribute any way to its interment, I had the coffin made at our house the preceding day, by carpenters whom we employ. They would not, however, carry it to the house. The difficulty now was, to carry him to the grave. The usual mode of Europeans is to hire a set of men (Portuguese), who live by it. But besides that our friends could never constantly sustain that expense, I wished exceedingly to convince them of the propriety of doing that last kind office for a brother themselves. But as Krishna had been ill again the night before, and two of our brethren were absent with brother Ward, we could only muster three persons. I evidently saw the only way to supply the deficiency; and brother Carey being from home, I sounded Felix and William, and we determined to make the trial; and at five in the afternoon repaired to the house. Thither were assembled all our Hindoo brethren and sisters, with a crowd of natives that filled the yard, and lined the street. We brought the remains of our dear brother out, whose coffin Krishna had covered within and without with white muslin at his own expense; then, in the midst of the silent and astonished multitude, we improved the solemn moment by singing a hymn of Krishna’s, the chorus of which is ‘Salvation by the death of Christ.’ Bhairub the brahmàn, Peroo the mussulman, Felix and I took up the coffin; and, with the assistance of Krishna and William, conveyed it to its long home: depositing it in the grave, we sung two appropriate hymns. After this, as the crowd was accumulating, I endeavoured to show the grounds of our joyful hope even in death, referring to the deceased for a proof of its efficacy: told them that indeed he had been a great sinner, as they all knew, and for that reason could find no way of salvation among them; but when he heard of Jesus Christ, he received him as a suitable and all-sufficient Saviour, put his trust in him, and died full of tranquil hope. After begging them to consider their own state, we prayed, sung Moorad’s hymn, and distributed papers. The concourse of people was great, perhaps 500: they seemed much struck with the novelty of the scene, and with the love and regard Christians manifest to each other, even in death; so different from their throwing their friends, half dead and half living, into the river; or burning their body, with perhaps a solitary attendant."

Preaching, teaching, and Bible translating were from the first Carey’s three missionary methods, and in all he led the missionaries who have till the present followed him with a success which he never hesitated to expect, as one of the "great things" from God. His work for the education of the people of India, especially in their own vernacular and classical languages, was second only to that which gave them a literature sacred and pure. Up to 1794, when at Mudnabati he opened the first primary school worthy of the name in all India at his own cost, and daily superintended it, there had been only one attempt to improve upon the indigenous schools, which taught the children of the trading castes only to keep rude accounts, or upon the tols in which the Brahmans instructed their disciples for one-half the year, while for the other half they lived by begging. That attempt was made by Schwartz at Combaconum, the priestly Oxford of South India, where the wars with Tipoo soon put an end to a scheme supported by both the Raja of Tanjore and the British Government. When Carey moved to Serampore and found associated with him teachers so accomplished and enthusiastic as Marshman and his wife, education was not long in taking its place in the crusade which was then fully organised for the conversion of Southern and Eastern Asia. At Madras, too, Bell had stumbled upon the system of "mutual instruction" which he had learned from the easy methods of the indigenous schoolmaster, and which he and Lancaster taught England to apply to the clamant wants of the country, and to improve into the monitorial, pupil-teacher and grant-in-aid systems. Carey had all the native schools of the mission "conducted upon Lancaster’s plan."

In Serampore, and in every new station as it was formed, a free school was opened. We have seen how the first educated convert, Petumber, was made schoolmaster. So early as October 1800 we find Carey writing home:--"The children in our Bengali free school, about fifty, are mostly very young. Yet we are endeavouring to instil into their minds Divine truth, as fast as their understandings ripen. Some natives have complained that we are poisoning the minds even of their very children." The first attempt to induce the boys to write out the catechism in Bengali resulted, as did Duff’s to get them to read aloud the Sermon on the Mount thirty years after, in a protest that their caste was in danger. But the true principles of toleration and discipline were at once explained--"that the children will never be compelled to do anything that will make them lose caste; that though we abhor the caste we do not wish any to lose it but by their own choice. After this we shall insist on the children doing what they have been ordered." A few of the oldest boys withdrew for a time, declaring that they feared they would be sent on board ship to England, and the baptism of each of the earlier converts caused a panic. But instruction on honest methods soon worked out the true remedy. Two years after we find this report:--"The first class, consisting of catechumens, are now learning in Bengali the first principles of Christianity; and will hereafter be instructed in the rudiments of history, geography, astronomy, etc. The second class, under two other masters, learn to read and write Bengali and English. The third class, consisting of the children of natives who have not lost caste, learn only Bengali. This school is in a promising state, and is liberally supported by the subscriptions of Europeans in this country."

Carey’s early success led Mr. Creighton of Malda to open at Goamalty several Bengali free schools, and to draw up a scheme for extending such Christian nurseries all over the country at a cost of £10 for the education of fifty children. Only by the year 1806 was such a scheme practicable, because Carey had translated the Scriptures, and, as Creighton noted, "a variety of introductory and explanatory tracts and catechisms in the Bengali and Hindostani tongues have already been circulated in some parts of the country, and any number may be had gratis from the Mission House, Serampore." As only a few of the Brahman and writer castes could read, and not one woman, "a general perusal of the Scriptures amongst natives will be impracticable till they are taught to read." But nothing was done, save by the missionaries, till 1835, when Lord William Bentinck received Adam’s report on the educational destitution of Bengal.

Referring to Creighton’s scheme, Mr. Ward’s journal thus chronicles the opening of the first Sunday school in India in July 1803 by Carey’s sons:--

"Last Lord’s day a kind of Sunday school was opened, which will be superintended principally by our young friends Felix and William Carey, and John Fernandez. It will chiefly be confined to teaching catechisms in Bengali and English, as the children learn to read and write every day. I have received a letter from a gentleman up the country, who writes very warmly respecting the general establishment of Christian schools all over Bengal."

Not many years had passed since Raikes had begun Sunday schools in England. Their use seems to have passed away with the three Serampore missionaries for a time, and to have been again extended by the American missionaries about 1870. There are now above 200,000 boys and girls at such schools in India, and three-fourths of these are non-Christians.

As from the first Carey drew converts from all classes, the Armenians, the Portuguese, and the Eurasians, as well as the natives of India, he and Mr. and Mrs. Marshman especially took care to provide schools for their children. The necessity, indeed, of this was forced upon them by the facts that the brotherhood began with nine children, and that boarding-schools for these classes would form an honourable source of revenue to the mission. Hence this advertisement, which appeared in March 1800:--"Mission, House, Serampore.--On Thursday, the 1st of May 1800, a school will be opened at this house, which stands in a very healthy and pleasant situation by the side of the river. Letters add to Mr. Carey will be immediately attended to." The cost of boarding and fees varied from £45 to £50 a year, according as "Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, or Sanskrit" lessons were included. "Particular attention will be paid to the correct pronunciation of the English language" was added for reasons which the mixed parentage of the pupils explains. Such was the first sign of a care for the Eurasians not connected with the army, which, as developed by Marshman and Mack, began in 1823 to take the form of the Doveton College. The boys’ school was soon followed by a girls’ school, through which a stream of Christian light radiated forth over resident Christian society, and from which many a missionary came.

Carey’s description of the mixed community is the best we have of its origin as well as of the state of European society in India, alike when the Portuguese were dominant, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the East India Company were most afraid of Christianity:--"The Portuguese are a people who, in the estimation of both Europeans and natives, are sunk below the Hindoos or Mussulmans. However, I am of opinion that they are rated much too low. They are chiefly descendants of the slaves of the Portuguese who first landed here, or of the children of those Portuguese by their female slaves; and being born in their house, were made Christians in their infancy by what is called baptism, and had Portuguese names given them. It is no wonder that these people, despised as they are by Europeans, and being consigned to the teachings of very ignorant Popish priests, should be sunk into such a state of degradation. So gross, indeed, are their superstitions, that I have seen a Hindoo image-maker carrying home an image of Christ on the cross between two thieves, to the house of a Portuguese. Many of them, however, can read and write English well and understand Portuguese...

"Besides these, there are many who are the children of Europeans by native women, several of whom are well educated, and nearly all of them Protestants by profession. These, whether children of English, French, Dutch, or Danes, by native women, are called Portuguese. Concubinage here is so common, that few unmarried Europeans are without a native woman, with whom they live as if married; and I believe there are but few instances of separation, except in case of marriage with European women, in which case the native woman is dismissed with an allowance: but the children of these marriages are never admitted to table with company, and are universally treated by the English as an inferior species of beings. Hence they are often shame-faced yet proud and conceited, and endeavour to assume that honour to themselves which is denied them by others. This class may be regarded as forming a connecting link between Europeans and natives. The Armenians are few in number, but chiefly rich. I have several times conversed with them about religion: they hear with patience, and wonder that any Englishman should make that a subject of conversation."

While the Marshmans gave their time from seven in the morning till three in the afternoon to these boarding-schools started by Carey in 1800 for the higher education of the Eurasians, Carey himself, in Calcutta, early began to care for the destitute. His efforts resulted in the establishment of the "Benevolent Institution for the Instruction of Indigent Children," which the contemporary Bengal civilian, Charles Lushington, in his History extols as one of the monuments of active and indefatigable benevolence due to Serampore. Here, on the Lancaster system, and superintended by Carey, Mr. and Mrs. Penney had as many as 300 boys and 100 girls under Christian instruction of all ages up to twenty-four, and of every race:--"Europeans, native Portuguese, Armenians, Mugs, Chinese, Hindoos, Mussulmans, natives of Sumatra, Mozambik, and Abyssinia." This official reporter states that thus more than a thousand youths had been rescued from vice and ignorance and advanced in usefulness to society, in a degree of opulence and respectability. The origin of this noble charity is thus told to Dr. Ryland by Carey himself in a letter which unconsciously reveals his own busy life, records the missionary influence of the higher schools, and reports the existence of the mission over a wide area. He writes from Calcutta on 24th May 1811:--

"A year ago we opened a free school in Calcutta. This year we added to it a school for girls. There are now in it about 140 boys and near 40 girls. One of our deacons, Mr. Leonard, a most valuable and active man, superintends the boys, and a very pious woman, a member of the church, is over the girls. The Institution meets with considerable encouragement, and is conducted upon Lancaster’s plan. We meditate another for instruction of Hindoo youths in the Sanskrit language, designing, however, to introduce the study of the Sanskrit Bible into it; indeed it is as good as begun; it will be in Calcutta. By brother and sister Marshman’s encouragement there are two schools in our own premises at Serampore for the gratuitous instruction of youth of both sexes, supported and managed wholly by the male and female scholars in our own school. These young persons appear to enter with pleasure into the plan, contribute their money to its support, and give instruction in turns to the children of these free schools. I trust we shall be able to enlarge this plan, and to spread its influence far about the country. Our brethren in the Isles of France and Bourbon seem to be doing good; some of them are gone to Madagascar, and, as if to show that Divine Providence watches over them, the ship on which they went was wrecked soon after they had landed from it. A number of our members are now gone to Java; I trust their going thither will not be in vain. Brother Chamberlain is, ere this, arrived at Agra...We preach every week in the Fort and in the public prison, both in English and Bengali."

Carey had not been six months at Serampore when he saw the importance of using the English language as a missionary weapon, and he proposed this to Andrew Fuller. The other pressing duties of a pioneer mission to the people of Bengal led him to postpone immediate action in this direction; we shall have occasion to trace the English influence of the press and the college hereafter. But meanwhile the vernacular schools, which soon numbered a hundred altogether, were most popular, and then as now proved most valuable feeders of the infant Church. Without them, wrote the three missionaries to the Society, "the whole plan must have been nipped in the bud, since, if the natives had not cheerfully sent their children, everything else would have been useless. But the earnestness with which they have sought these schools exceeds everything we had previously expected. We are still constantly importuned for more schools, although we have long gone beyond the extent of our funds." It was well that thus early, in schools, in books and tracts, and in providing the literary form and apparatus of the vernacular languages, Carey laid the foundation of the new national or imperial civilisation. When the time for English came, the foundations were at least above the ground. Laid deep and strong in the very nature of the people, the structure has thus far promised to be national rather than foreign, though raised by foreign hands, while marked by the truth and the purity of its Western architects.

The manifestation of Christ to the Bengalees could not be made without rousing the hate and the opposition of the vested interests of Brahmanism. So long as Carey was an indigo planter as well as a proselytiser in Dinapoor and Malda he met with no opposition, for he had no direct success. But when, from Serampore, he and the others, by voice, by press, by school, by healing the sick and visiting the poor, carried on the crusade day by day with the gentle persistency of a law of nature, the cry began. And when, by the breaking of caste and the denial of Krishna’s Christian daughter Golook to the Hindoo to whom she had been betrothed from infancy, the Brahmans began dimly to apprehend that not only their craft but the whole structure of society was menaced, the cry became louder, and, as in Ephesus of old, an appeal was made to the magistrates against the men who were turning the world upside down. At first the very boys taunted the missionaries in the streets with the name of Jesus Christ. Then, after Krishna and his family had broken caste, they were seized by a mob and hurried before the Danish magistrate, who at first refused to hand over a Christian girl to a heathen, and gave her father a guard to prevent her from being murdered, until the Calcutta magistrate decided that she must join her husband but would be protected in the exercise of her new faith. The commotion spread over the whole densely-peopled district. But the people were not with the Brahmans, and the excitement sent many a sin-laden inquirer to Serampore from a great distance. "The fire is now already kindled for which our Redeemer expressed his strong desire," wrote Carey to Ryland in March 1801. A year later he used this language to his old friend Morris at Clipstone village:--"I think there is such a fermentation raised in Bengal by the little leaven, that there is a hope of the whole lump by degrees being leavened. God is carrying on his work; and though it goes forward, yet no one can say who is the instrument. Doubtless, various means contribute towards it; but of late the printing and dispersing of New Testaments and small tracts seem to have the greatest effect."

In a spirit the opposite of Jonah’s the whole brotherhood, then consisting of the three, of Carey’s son Felix, and of a new missionary, Chamberlain, sent home this review of their position at the close of 1804:--

"We are still a happy, healthful, and highly favoured family. But though we would feel incessant gratitude for these gourds, yet we would not feel content unless Nineveh be brought to repentance. We did not come into this country to be placed in what are called easy circumstances respecting this world; and we trust that nothing but the salvation of souls will satisfy us. True, before we set off, we thought we could die content if we should be permitted to see the half of what we have already seen; yet now we seem almost as far from the mark of our missionary high calling as ever. If three millions of men were drowning, he must be a monster who should be content with saving one individual only; though for the deliverance of that one he would find cause for perpetual gratitude."

In 1810 the parent mission at Serampore had so spread into numerous stations and districts that a new organisation became necessary. There were 300 converts, of whom 105 had been added in that year. "Did you expect to see this eighteen years ago?" wrote Marshman to the Society. "But what may we not expect if God continues to bless us in years to come?" Marshman forgot how Carey had, in 1792, told them on the inspired evangelical prophet’s authority to "expect great things from God." Henceforth the one mission became fivefold for a time.

Chapter 7:  Calcutta And The Mission Centres From Delhi To Amboyna

1802-1817

The East India Company an unwilling partner of Carey--Calcutta opened to the Mission by his appointment as Government teacher of Bengali--Meeting of 1802 grows into the Lall Bazaar mission--Christ-like work among the poor, the sick, the prisoners, the soldiers and sailors and the natives--Krishna Pal first native missionary in Calcutta--Organisation of subordinate stations--Carey’s "United Missions in India"--The missionary staff thirty strong--The native missionaries--The Bengali church self-propagating--Carey the pioneer of other missionaries--Benares--Burma and Indo-China--Felix Carey--Instructions to missionaries--The missionary shrivelled into an ambassador--Adoniram and Ann Judson--Jabez Carey--Mission to Amboyna--Remarkable letter from Carey to his third son.

THE short-sighted regulation of the East India Company, which dreamed that it could keep Christianity out of Bengal by shutting up the missionaries within the little territory of Danish Serampore, could not be enforced with the same ease as the order of a jailer. Under Danish passports, and often without them, missionary tours were made over Central Bengal, aided by its network of rivers. Every printed Bengali leaf of Scripture or pure literature was a missionary. Every new convert, even the women, became an apostle to their people, and such could not be stopped. Gradually, as not only the innocency but the positive political usefulness of the missionaries’ character and work came to be recognised by the local authorities, they were let alone for a time. And soon, by the same historic irony which has marked so many of the greatest reforms--"He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh"--the Government of India became, though unwittingly, more of a missionary agency than the Baptist Society itself. The only teacher of Bengal who could be found for Lord Wellesley’s new College of Fort William was William Carey. The appointment, made and accepted without the slightest prejudice to his aggressive spiritual designs and work, at once opened Calcutta itself for the first time to the English proselytising of natives, and supplied Carey with the only means yet lacking for the translation of the Scriptures into all the languages of the farther East. In spite of its own selfish fears the Company became a principal partner in the Christianisation of India and China.

From the middle of the year 1801 and for the next thirty years Carey spent as much of his time in the metropolis as in Serampore. He was generally rowed down the eighteen miles of the winding river to Calcutta at sunset on Monday evening and returned on Friday night every week, working always by the way. At first he personally influenced the Bengali traders and youths who knew English, and he read with many such the English Bible. His chaplain friends, Brown and Buchanan, with the catholicity born of their presbyterian and evangelical training, shared his sympathy with the hundreds of poor mixed Christians for whom St. John’s and even the Mission Church made no provision, and encouraged him to care for them. In 1802 he began a weekly meeting for prayer and conversation in the house of Mr. Rolt, and another for a more ignorant class in the house of a Portuguese Christian. By 1803 he was able to write to Fuller: "We have opened a place of worship in Calcutta, where we have preaching twice on Lord’s day in English, on Wednesday evening in Bengali, and on Thursday evening in English." He took all the work during the week and the Sunday service in rotation with his brethren. The first church was the hall of a well-known undertaker, approached through lines of coffins and the trappings of woe. In time most of the evangelical Christians in the city promised to relieve the missionaries of the expense if they would build an unsectarian chapel more worthy of the object. This was done in Lall Bazaar, a little withdrawn from that thoroughfare to this day of the poor and abandoned Christians, of the sailors and soldiers on leave, of the liquor-shops and the stews. There, as in Serampore, at a time when the noble hospitals of Calcutta were not, and the children of only the "services" were cared for, "Brother Carey gave them medicine for their bodies and the best medicine for their poor souls," as a contemporary widow describes it. The site alone cost so much--a thousand pounds--that only a mat chapel could be built. Marshman raised another £1100 in ten days, and after delays caused by the police Government sanctioned the building which Carey opened on Sunday, 1st January 1809. But he and his colleagues "not episcopally ordained" were forbidden to preach to British soldiers and to the Armenians and Portuguese. "Carey’s Baptist Chapel" is now its name. Here was for nearly a whole generation a sublime spectacle--the Northamptonshire shoemaker training the governing class of India in Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi all day, and translating the Ramayana and the Veda, and then, when the sun went down, returning to the society of "the maimed, the halt, and the blind, and many with the leprosy," to preach in several tongues the glad tidings of the Kingdom to the heathen of England as well as of India, and all with a loving tenderness and patient humility learned in the childlike school of Him who said, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?"

Street preaching was added to the apostolic agencies, and for this prudence dictated recourse to the Asiatic and Eurasian converts. We find the missionaries writing to the Society at the beginning of 1807, after the mutiny at Vellore, occasioned as certainly by the hatlike turban then ordered, as the mutiny of Bengal half a century after was by the greased cartridges:--

"We now return to Calcutta; not, however, without a sigh. How can we avoid sighing when we think of the number of perishing souls which this city contains, and recollect the multitudes who used of late to hang upon our lips; standing in the thick-wedged crowd for hours together, in the heat of a Bengal summer, listening to the word of life! We feel thankful, however, that nothing has been found against us, except in the matters of our God. Conscious of the most cordial attachment to the British Government, and of the liveliest interest in its welfare, we might well endure reproach were it cast upon us; but the tongue of calumny itself has not to our knowledge been suffered to bring the slightest accusation against us. We still worship at Calcutta in a private house, and our congregation rather increases. We are going on with the chapel. A family of Armenians also, who found it pleasant to attend divine worship in the Bengali language, have erected a small place on their premises for the sake of the natives."

Krishna Pal became the first native missionary to Calcutta, where he in 1810 had preached at fourteen different places every week, and visited forty-one families, to evangelise the servants of the richer and bring in the members of the poorer. Sebuk Ram was added to the staff. Carey himself thus sums up the labours of the year 1811, when he was still the only pastor of the Christian poor, and the only resident missionary to half a million of natives:--

"Calcutta is three miles long and one broad, very populous; the environs are crowded with people settled in large villages, resembling (for population, not elegance) the environs of Birmingham. The first is about a mile south of the city; at nearly the same distance are the public jail and the general hospital. Brother Gordon, one of our deacons, being the jailer we preach there in English every Lord’s day. We did preach in the Fort; but of late a military order has stopped us. Krishna and Sebuk Ram, however, preach once or twice a week in the Fort notwithstanding; also at the jail; in the house of correction; at the village of Alipore, south of the jail; at a large factory north of the city, where several hundreds are employed; and at ten or twelve houses in different parts of the city itself. In several instances Roman Catholics, having heard the word, have invited them to their houses, and having collected their neighbours, the one or the other have received the word with gladness.

"The number of inquirers constantly coming forward, awakened by the instrumentality of these brethren, fills me with joy. I do not know that I am of much use myself, but I see a work which fills my soul with thankfulness. Not having time to visit the people, I appropriate every Thursday evening to receiving the visits of inquirers. Seldom fewer than twenty come; and the simple confessions of their sinful state, the unvarnished declaration of their former ignorance, the expressions of trust in Christ and gratitude to him, with the accounts of their spiritual conflicts often attended with tears which almost choke their utterance, presents a scene of which you can scarcely entertain an adequate idea. At the same time, meetings for prayer and mutual edification are held every night in the week; and some nights, for convenience, at several places at the same time: so that the sacred leaven spreads its influence through the mass."

On his voyage to India Carey had deliberately contemplated the time when the Society he had founded would influence not only Asia, but Africa, and he would supply the peoples of Asia with the Scriptures in their own tongues. The time had come by 1804 for organising the onward movement, and he thus describes it to Ryland:--

"14th December 1803.--Another plan has lately occupied our attention. It appears that our business is to provide materials for spreading the Gospel, and to apply those materials. Translations, pamphlets, etc., are the materials. To apply them we have thought of setting up a number of subordinate stations, in each of which a brother shall be fixed. It will be necessary and useful to carry on some worldly business. Let him be furnished from us with a sum of money to begin and purchase cloth or whatever other article the part produces in greatest perfection: the whole to belong to the mission, and no part even to be private trade or private property. The gains may probably support the station. Every brother in such a station to have one or two native brethren with him, and to do all he can to preach, and spread Bibles, pamphlets, etc., and to set up and encourage schools where the reading of the Scriptures shall be introduced. At least four brethren shall always reside at Serampore, which must be like the heart while the other stations are the members. Each one must constantly send a monthly account of both spirituals and temporals to Serampore, and the brethren at Serampore (who must have a power of control over the stations) must send a monthly account likewise to each station, with advice, etc., as shall be necessary. A plan of this sort appears to be more formidable than it is in reality. To find proper persons will be the greatest difficulty; but as it will prevent much of that abrasion which may arise from a great number of persons living in one house, so it will give several brethren an opportunity of being useful, whose temper may not be formed to live in a common family, and at the same time connect them as much to the body as if they all lived together. We have judged that about 2000 rupees will do to begin at each place, and it is probable that God will enable us to find money (especially if assisted in the translations and printing by our brethren in England) as fast as you will be able to find men.

"This plan may be extended through a circular surface of a thousand miles’ radius, and a constant communication kept up between the whole, and in some particular cases it may extend ever farther. We are also to hope that God may raise up some missionaries in this country who may be more fitted for the work than any from England can be. At present we have not concluded on anything, but when Brother Ward comes down we hope to do so, and I think one station may be fixed on immediately which Brother Chamberlain may occupy. A late favourable providence will, I hope, enable us to begin, viz., the College have subscribed for 100 copies of my Sanskrit Grammar, which will be 6400 rupees or 800 pounds sterling. The motion was very generously made by H. Colebrooke, Esq., who is engaged in a similar work, and seconded by Messrs. Brown and Buchanan; indeed it met with no opposition. It will scarcely be printed off under twelve months more, but it is probable that the greatest part of the money will he advanced. The Maratha war and the subjugation of the country of Cuttak to the English may be esteemed a favourable event for the spreading of the Gospel, and will certainly contribute much to the comfort of the inhabitants."

Two years later he thus anticipates the consent of the local Government, in spite of the Company’s determined hostility in England, but the Vellore mutiny panic led to further delay:--

"25th December 1805.--It has long been a favourite object with me to fix European brethren in different parts of the country at about two hundred miles apart, so that each shall be able to visit a circle of a hundred miles’ radius, and within each of the circuits to place native brethren at proper distances, who will, till they are more established, be under the superintendence of the European brethren situated in the centre. Our brethren concur with me in this plan. In consequence of this, I thought it would be desirable to have leave of Government for them to settle, and preach, without control, in any part of the country. The Government look on us with a favourable eye; and owing to Sir G. Barlow, the Governor-General, being up the country, Mr. Udny is Vice-President and Deputy-Governor. I therefore went one morning, took a breakfast with him, and told him what we were doing and what we wished to do. He, in a very friendly manner, desired me to state to him in a private letter all that we wished, and offered to communicate privately with Sir G. Barlow upon the subject, and inform me of the result. I called on him again last week, when he informed me that he had written upon the subject and was promised a speedy reply. God grant that it may be favourable. I know that Government will allow it if their powers are large enough."

Not till 1810 could Carey report that "permission was obtained of Government for the forming of a new station at Agra, a large city in upper Hindostan, not far from Delhi and the country of the Sikhs," to which Chamberlain and an assistant were sent. From that year the Bengal became only the first of "The United Missions in India." These were five in number, each under its own separate brotherhood, on the same principles of self-denial as the original, each a Lindisfarne sprung from the parent Iona. These five were the Bengal, the Burman, the Orissa, the Bhootan, and the Hindostan Missions. The Bengal mission was fourfold--Serampore and Calcutta reckoned as one station; the old Dinapoor and Sadamahal which had taken the place of Mudnabati; Goamalty, near Malda; Cutwa, an old town on the upper waters of the Hoogli; Jessor, the agricultural capital of its lower delta; and afterwards Monghyr, Berhampore, Moorshedabad, Dacca, Chittagong, and Assam. The Bhootan missionaries were plundered and driven out. The Hindostan mission soon included Gaya, Patna, Deegah, Ghazeepore, Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Ajmer, and Delhi itself. From Nagpoor, in the very centre of India, and Surat to the north of Bombay, Carey sought to bring Marathas and Goojaratees under the yoke of Christ. China, where the East India Company was still master, was cared for by the press, as we shall see. Not content with the continent of Asia, Carey’s mission, at once forced by the intolerance which refused to allow new missionaries to land in India proper, and led by the invitations of Sir Stamford Raffles, extended to Java and Amboyna, Penang, Ceylon, and even Mauritius. The elaborate review of their position, signed by the three faithful men of Serampore, at the close of 1817, amazes the reader at once by the magnitude and variety of the operations, the childlike modesty of the record, and the heroism of the toil which supplied the means.

At the time of the organisation into the Five United Missions the staff of workers had grown to be thirty strong. From England there were nine surviving:--Carey, Marshman, Ward, Chamberlain, Mardon, Moore, Chater, Rowe, and Robinson. Raised up in India itself there were seven--the two sons of Carey, Felix and William; Fernandez, his first convert at Dinapoor; Peacock and Cornish, and two Armenians, Aratoon and Peters; two were on probation for the ministry, Leonard and Forder. Besides seven Hindoo evangelists also on probation, there were five survivors of the band of converts called from time to time to the ministry--Krishna Pal, the first, who is entered on the list as "the beloved"; Krishna Dass, Ram Mohun, Seeta Ram, and Seeta Dass. Carey’s third son Jabez was soon to become the most advanced of the three brothers away in far Amboyna. His father had long prayed, and besought others to pray, that he too might be a missionary. For the last fifteen years of his life Jabez was his closest and most valued correspondent.

But only less dear than his own sons to the heart of the father, already in 1817 described in an official letter as "our aged brother Carey," were the native missionaries and pastors, his sons in the faith. He sent forth the educated Petumber Singh, first in November 1802, to his countrymen at Sooksagar, and "gave him a suitable and solemn charge: the opportunity was very pleasant." In May 1803 Krishna Pal was similarly set apart. At the same time the young Brahman, Krishna Prosad, "delivered his first sermon in Bengali, much to the satisfaction of our brethren." Six months after, Ward reports of him in Dinapoor:--"The eyes of the people were fixed listening to Prosad; he is becoming eloquent." In 1804 their successful probation resulted in their formal ordination by prayer and the laying on of the hands of the brethren, when Carey addressed them from the divine words, "As my Father hath sent me so send I you," and all commemorated the Lord’s death till He come. Krishna Dass was imprisoned unjustly, for a debt which he had paid, but "he did not cease to declare to the native men in power that he was a Christian, when they gnashed upon him with their teeth. He preached almost all night to the prisoners, who heard the word with eagerness." Two years after he was ordained, Carey charged him as Paul had written to Timothy, "in the sight of God and of Christ Jesus, who shall judge the quick and the dead," to be instant in season and out of season, to reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long-suffering and teaching. Ram Mohun was a Brahman, the fruit of old Petumber’s ministry, and had his ability as a student and preacher of the Scriptures consecrated to Christ on the death of Krishna Prosad, while the missionaries thus saw again answered the invocation they had sung, in rude strains, in the ship which brought them to India:--

"Bid Brahmans preach the heavenly word

Beneath the banian’s shade;

Oh let the Hindoo feel its power

And grace his soul pervade."

So early as 1806 the missionaries thus acknowledged the value of the work of their native brethren, and made of all the native converts a Missionary Church. In the delay and even failure to do this of their successors of all Churches we see the one radical point in which the Church in India has as yet come short of its duty and its privilege:--

"We have availed ourselves of the help of native brethren ever since we had one who dared to speak in the name of Christ, and their exertions have chiefly been the immediate means by which our church has been increased. But we have lately been revolving a plan for rendering their labours more extensively useful; namely, that of sending them out, two and two, without any European brother. It appeared also a most desirable object to interest in this work, as much as possible, the whole of the native church among us: indeed, we have had much in them of this nature to commend. In order, then, more effectually to answer this purpose, we called an extraordinary meeting of all the brethren on Friday evening, Aug. 8, 1806, and laid before them the following ideas:--

"1. That the intention of the Saviour, in calling them out of darkness into marvellous light, was that they should labour to the uttermost in advancing his cause among their countrymen.

"2. That it was therefore their indispensable duty, both collectively and individually, to strive by every means to bring their countrymen to the knowledge of the Saviour; that if we, who were strangers, thought it our duty to come from a country so distant, for this purpose, much more was it incumbent on them to labour for the same end. This was therefore the grand business of our lives.

"3. That if a brother in discharge of this duty went out forty or fifty miles, he could not labour for his family; it therefore became the church to support such, seeing they were hindered from supporting themselves, by giving themselves wholly to that work in which it was equally the duty of all to take a share.

"4. We therefore proposed to unite the support of itinerant brethren with the care of the poor, and to throw them both upon the church fund, as being both, at least in a heathen land, equally the duty of a church.

"Every one of these ideas our native brethren entered into with the greatest readiness and the most cordial approbation."

Carey’s scheme so early as 1810 included not only the capital of the Great Mogul, Surat far to the west, and Maratha Nagpoor to the south, but Lahore, where Ranjeet Singh had consolidated the Sikh power, Kashmeer, and even Afghanistan to which he had sent the Pushtoo Bible. To set Chamberlain free for this enterprise he sent his second son William to relieve him as missionary in charge of Cutwa. "This would secure the gradual perfection of the version of the Scriptures in the Sikh language, would introduce the Gospel among the people, and would open a way for introducing it into Kashmeer, and eventually to the Afghans under whose dominion Kashmeer at present is." Carey and his two colleagues took possession for Christ of the principal centres of Hindoo and Mohammedan influence in India only because they were unoccupied, and provided translations of the Bible into the principal tongues, avowedly as a preparation for other missionary agencies. All over India and the far East he thus pioneered the way of the Lord, as he had written to Ryland when first he settled in Serampore:--"It is very probable we may be only as pioneers to prepare the way for most successful missionaries, who perhaps may not be at liberty to attend to those preparatory labours in which we have been occupied--the translation and printing of the Scriptures," etc. His heart was enlarged like his Master’s on earth, and hence his humbleness of mind. When the Church Missionary Society, for instance, occupied Agra as their first station in India, he sent the Baptist missionary thence to Allahabad. To Benares "Brother William Smith, called in Orissa under Brother John Peters," the Armenian, was sent owing to his acquaintance with the Hindi language; he was the means of bringing to the door of the Kingdom that rich Brahman Raja Jay Narain Ghosal, whom he encouraged to found in 1817 the Church Mission College there which bears the name of this "almost Christian" Hindoo, who was "exceedingly desirous of diffusing light among his own countrymen."

The most striking illustrations of this form of Carey’s self-sacrifice are, however, to be found outside of India as it then was, in the career of his other two sons in Burma and the Spice Islands. The East India Company’s panic on the Vellore mutiny led Carey to plan a mission to Burma, just as he had been guided to settle in Danish Serampore ten years before. The Government of India had doubled his salary as Bengali, Marathi, and Sanskrit Professor, and thus had unconsciously supplied the means. Since 1795 the port of Rangoon had been opened to the British, although Colonel Symes had been insulted eight years after, during his second embassy to Ava. Rangoon, wrote the accurate Carey to Fuller in November 1806, is about ten days’ sail from Calcutta. "The Burman empire is about eight hundred miles long, lying contiguous to Bengal on the east; but is inaccessible by land, on account of the mountains covered with thick forests which run between the two countries. The east side of this empire borders upon China, Cochin China, and Tongking, and may afford us the opportunity ultimately of introducing the Gospel into those countries. They are quite within our reach, and the Bible in Chinese will be understood by them equally as well as by the Chinese themselves. About twenty chapters of Matthew are translated into that language, and three of our family have made considerable progress in it."

This was the beginning of Reformed missions to Eastern Asia. A year was to pass before Dr. Robert Morrison landed at Macao. From those politically aggressive and therefore opposed Jesuit missions, which alone had worked in Anam up to this time, a persecuted bishop was about to find an asylum at Serampore, and to use its press and its purse for the publication of his Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum. The French have long sought to seize an empire there. That, at its best, must prove far inferior to the marvellous province and Christian Church of Burma, of which Carey laid the foundation. Judson, and the Governors Durand, Phayre, Aitchison, and Bernard, Henry Lawrence’s nephew, built well upon it.

On 24th January 1807 Mardon and Chater went forth, after Carey had charged them from the words, "And thence sailed to Antioch from whence they had been recommended to the grace of God, which they fulfilled." Carey’s eldest son Felix soon took the place of Mardon. The instructions, which bear the impress of the sacred scholar’s pen, form a model still for all missionaries. These two extracts give counsels never more needed than now:--

"4. With respect to the Burman language, let this occupy your most precious time and your most anxious solicitude. Do not be content with acquiring this language superficially, but make it your own, root and branch. To become fluent in it, you must attentivly listen, with prying curiosity, into the forms of speech, the construction and accent of the natives. Here all the imitative powers are wanted; yet these powers and this attention, without continued effort to use all you acquire, and as fast as you acquire it, will be comparatively of little use.

"5. As soon as you shall feel your ground well in this language you may compose a grammar, and also send us some Scripture tract, for printing; small and plain; simple Christian instruction, and Gospel invitation, without any thing that can irritate the most superstitious mind.

"6. We would recommend you to begin the translation of the Gospel of Mark as soon as possible, as one of the best and most certain ways of acquiring the language. This translation will of course be revised again and again. In these revisions you will be very careful respecting the idiom and construction, that they be really Burman, and not English. Let your instructor be well acquainted with the language, and try every word of importance, in every way you can, before it be admitted...

"In prosecuting this work, there are two things to which especially we would call your very close attention, viz. the strictest and most rigid economy, and the cultivation of brotherly love.

"Remember, that the money which you will expend is neither ours nor yours, for it has been consecrated to God; and every unnecessary expenditure will be robbing God, and appropriating to unnecessary secular uses what is sacred, and consecrated to Christ and his cause. In building, especially, remember that you are poor men, and have chosen a life of poverty and self-denial, with Christ and his missionary servants. If another person is profuse in expenditure, the consequence is small, because his property would perhaps fall into hands where it might be devoted to the purposes of iniquity; but missionary funds are in their very circumstances the most sacred and important of any thing of this nature on earth. We say not this, Brethren, because we suspect you, or any of our partners in labour; but we perceive that when you have done all, the Rangoon mission will lie heavy upon the Missionary Funds, and the field of exertion is very wide."

Felix Carey was a medical missionary of great skill, a printer of the Oriental languages trained by Ward, and a scholar, especially in Sanskrit and Pali, Bengali and Burman, not unworthy of his father. He early commended himself to the goodwill of the Rangoon Viceroy, and was of great use to Captain Canning in the successful mission from the Governor-General in 1809. At his intercession the Viceroy gave him the life of a malefactor who had hung for six hours on the cross. Reporting the incident to Ryland, Dr. Carey wrote that "crucifixion is not performed on separate crosses, elevated to a considerable height, after the manner of the Romans; but several posts are erected which are connected by a cross piece near the top, to which the hands are nailed, and by another near the bottom, to which the feet are nailed in a horizontal direction." He prepared a folio dictionary of Burmese and Pali, translated several of the Buddhist Sootras into English, and several books of Holy Scripture into the vernacular. His medical and linguistic skill so commended him to the king that he was loaded with honours and sent as Burmese ambassador to the Governor-General in 1814, when he withdrew from the Christian mission. On his way back up the Irawadi he alone was saved from the wreck of his boat, in which his second wife and children and the MS. of his dictionary went down. Of this his eldest son, who "procured His Majesty’s sanction for printing the Scriptures in the Burman and adjacent languages, which step he highly approved," and at the same time "the orders of my rank, which consist of a red umbrella with an ivory top, gold betel box, gold lefeek cup, and a sword of state," the father wrote lamenting to Ryland:--"Felix is shrivelled from a missionary into an ambassador." To his third son the sorrowing father said:--"The honours he has received from the Burmese Government have not been beneficial to his soul. Felix is certainly not so much esteemed since his visit as he was before it. It is a very distressing thing to be forced to apologise for those you love." Mr. Chater had removed to Ceylon to begin a mission in Colombo.

In July 1813, when Felix Carey was in Ava, two young Americans, Adoniram Judson and his wife Ann, tempest-tossed and fleeing before the persecution of the East India Company, found shelter in the Mission House at Rangoon. Judson was one of a band of divinity students of the Congregational Church of New England, whose zeal had almost compelled the institution of the American Board of Foreign Missions. He, his wife, and colleague Rice had become Baptists by conviction on their way to Serampore, to the brotherhood of which they had been commended. Carey and his colleagues made it "a point to guard against obtruding on missionary brethren of different sentiments any conversation relative to baptism;" but Judson himself sent a note to Carey requesting baptism by immersion. The result was the foundation at Boston of the American Baptist Missionary Society, which was to win such triumphs in Burma and among the Karens. For a time, however, Judson was a missionary from Serampore, and supported by the brotherhood. As such he wrote thus:--

"RANGOON, Sept. 1, 1814.--Brother Ward wishes to have an idea of the probable expense of each station; on which I take occasion to say that it would be more gratifying to me, as presenting a less temptation, and as less dangerous to my habits of economy and my spiritual welfare, to have a limited monthly allowance. I fear that, if I am allowed as much as I want, my wants will enlarge with their gratification, and finally embrace many things, which at first I should have thought incompatible with economical management, as well as with that character among the heathen which it becomes the professed followers of Him who for our sakes became poor, even to sustain. It is better for a missionary, especially a young man, to have rather too little than rather too much. Your case, on coming out from England, was quite different from mine. You had all that there was, and were obliged to make the most of it.

"If these things meet the ideas of the brethren, I will be obliged to them to say, what sum, in Sicca Rupees, payable in Bengal, they think sufficient for a small family in Rangoon--sufficient to meet all common expenses, and indeed all that will be incurred at present, except that of passages by sea. You have all the accounts before you, especially of things purchased in Bengal, which I have not; and from having seen the mission pass through various changes, will be more competent to make an estimate of expense than I am. And while you are making this estimate for one family, say also what will be sufficient for two small families, so that if Brother Rice, or any other should soon join me, it may not be necessary to bring the subject again under consideration. This sum I will receive under the same regulations as other stations are subject to, and which I heartily approve. And if, on experiment, it be found much too large, I shall be as glad to diminish it, as to have you increase it, if it be found much too small.

"Sept. 7.--Since writing the above, we have received the distressing intelligence, that a few days after Mr. Carey left us, and soon after he had reached the brig (which had previously gone into the great river) on the 31st of August, about noon, she was overtaken by a squall of wind, upset, and instantly sunk. Those who could swim, escaped with their lives merely, and those who could not, perished. Among the saved, were Mr. Carey and most of the Bengalees. Mrs. Carey, the two children, her women and girls, and several men--in all, ten persons, perished. Every article of property had been transferred from the boats to the vessel, and she had just left the place, where she had been long waiting the arrival of Mr. Carey, and had been under sail about three hours. Several boats were not far distant; the gold-boat was within sight, but so instantaneous was the disaster, that not a single thing was saved. Some attempts were made by the lascars to save Mrs. Carey and William, but they were unsuccessful. Mr. Carey staid on the shore through the following night; a neighbouring governor sent him clothes and money; and the next morning he took the gold-boat, and proceeded up the river. A large boat, on which were several servants, men and women, beside those that were in the vessel, followed the gold-boat. The jolly boat has returned here, bringing the surviving lascars.

"The dreadful situation to which our poor brother was thus reduced in a moment, from the height of prosperity, fills our minds continually with the greatest distress. We are utterly unable to afford him the least relief, and can only pray that this awful dispensation may prove a paternal chastisement from his Heavenly Father, and be sanctified to his soul."

While Judson wrote to Serampore, which he once again visited, leaving the dust of a child in the mission burial-ground, "I am glad to hear you say that you will not abandon this mission," Carey pressed on to the "regions beyond." Judson lived till 1850 to found a church and to prepare a Burmese dictionary, grammar, and translation of the Bible so perfect that revision has hardly been necessary up to the present day. He and Hough, a printer who joined him, formed themselves into a brotherhood on the same self-denying principles as that of Serampore, whom they besought to send them frequent communications to counsel, strengthen, and encourage them. On 28th September 1814 Judson again wrote to Carey from Rangoon:--

"DEAR BROTHER CAREY--If copies of Colebrooke’s Sungskrita Dictionary, and your Sungskrita Grammar are not too scarce, I earnestly request a copy of each. I find it will be absolutely necessary for me to pick up a little of the Pali, chiefly on account of many theological terms, which have been incorporated from that language into the Burman. I have found a dictionary, which I suppose is the same as that which Mr. Colebrooke translated, adapted to the Burman system. This I intend to read. I want also Leyden’s Vocabulary, and a copy or two of your son’s grammar, when it is completed. I gave your son on his going up to Ava, my copy of Campbell’s Gospels, together with several other books, all of which are now lost. The former I chiefly regret, and know not whence I can procure another copy.

"There is a vessel now lying here, which is destined to take round an Ambassador from this Government to Bengal. He expects to go in about a month, as he told me. He is now waiting for final instructions from Ava. If Felix be really to be sent to Bengal again, I think it most probable that he will be ordered to accompany this ambassador.

"Mrs. J. was on the point of taking passage with Captain Hitchins, to obtain some medical advice in Bengal; but she has been a little better for a few days, and has given up the plan for the present. This is a delightful climate. We have now seen all the seasons, and can therefore judge. The hot weather in March and April is the chief exception. Nature has done everything for this country; and the Government is very indulgent to all foreigners. When we see how we are distinguished above all around, even in point of worldly comforts, we feel that we want gratitude. O that we may be faithful in the improvement of every mercy, and patient under every trial which God may have in store for us. We know not how the Gospel can ever be introduced here: everything, in this respect, appears as dark as midnight."

By 1816 Judson had prepared the Gospel of Matthew in Burmese, following up short tracts "accommodated to the optics of a Burman."

Carey’s third son Jabez was clerk to a Calcutta attorney at the time, in 1812, when Dr. Ryland preached in the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, the anniversary sermon on the occasion of the removal of the headquarters of the Society to London. Pausing in the midst of his discourse, after a reference to Carey, the preacher called on the vast congregation silently to pray for the conversion of Jabez Carey. The answer came next year in a letter from his father:--"My son Jabez, who has been articled to an attorney, and has the fairest prospects as to this world, is become decidedly religious, and prefers the work of the Lord to every other." Lord Minto’s expeditions of 1810 and 1811 had captured the islands swept by the French privateers from Madagascar to Java, and there was soon an end of the active hostility of the authorities to Christianity. Sir Stamford Raffles governed Java in the spirit of a Christian statesman. The new Governor-General, Lord Moira, afterwards Marquis of Hastings, proved to be the most enlightened and powerful friend the mission had had. In these circumstances, after the charter of 1813 had removed the legislative excuse for intolerance, Dr. Carey was asked by the Lieutenant-Governor to send missionaries and Malay Bibles to the fifty thousand natives of Amboyna. The Governor-General repeated the request officially. Jabez Carey was baptised, married, and despatched at the cost of the state before he could be ordained. Amboyna, it will be perceived, was not in India, but far enough away to give the still timid Company little apprehension as to the influence of the missionaries there. The father’s heart was very full when he sent forth the son:--

"24th January 1814.--You are now engaging in a most important undertaking, in which not only you will have our prayers for your success, but those of all who love our Lord Jesus Christ, and who know of your engagement. I know that a few hints for your future conduct from a parent who loves you very tenderly will be acceptable, and I shall therefore now give you them, assured that they will not be given in vain.

"1st. Pay the utmost attention at all times to the state of your own mind both towards God and man: cultivate an intimate acquaintance with your own heart; labour to obtain a deep sense of your depravity and to trust always in Christ; be pure in heart, and meditate much upon the pure and holy character of God; live a life of prayer and devotedness to God; cherish every amiable and right disposition towards men; be mild, gentle, and unassuming, yet firm and manly. As soon as you perceive anything wrong in your spirit or behaviour set about correcting it, and never suppose yourself so perfect as to need no correction.

"2nd. You are now a married man, be not satisfied with conducting yourself towards your wife with propriety, but let love to her be the spring of your conduct towards her. Esteem her highly, and so act that she may be induced thereby to esteem you highly. The first impressions of love arising from form and beauty will soon wear off, but the esteem arising from excellency of disposition and substance of character will endure and increase. Her honour is now yours, and she cannot be insulted without your being degraded. I hope as soon as you get on board, and are settled in your cabin, you will begin and end each day by uniting together to pray and praise God. Let religion always have a place in your house. If the Lord bless you with children, bring them up in the fear of God, and be always an example to others of the power of godliness. This advice I give also to Eliza, and if it is followed you will be happy.

"3rd. Behave affably and genteelly to all, but not cringingly towards any. Feel that you are a man, and always act with that dignified sincerity and truth which will command the esteem of all. Seek not the society of worldly men, but when called to be with them act and converse with propriety and dignity. To do this labour to gain a good acquaintance with history, geography, men, and things. A gentleman is the next best character after a Christian, and the latter includes the former. Money never makes a gentleman, neither does a fine appearance, but an enlarged understanding joined to engaging manners.

"4th. On your arrival at Amboyna your first business must be to wait on Mr. Martin. You should first send a note to inform him of your arrival, and to inquire when it will suit him to receive you. Ask his advice upon every occasion of importance, and communicate freely to him all the steps you take.

"5th. As soon as you are settled begin your work. Get a Malay who can speak a little English, and with him make a tour of the island, and visit every school. Encourage all you see worthy of encouragement, and correct with mildness, yet with firmness. Keep a journal of the transactions of the schools, and enter each one under a distinct head therein. Take account of the number of scholars, the names of the schoolmasters, compare their progress at stated periods, and, in short, consider this as the work which the Lord has given you to do.

"6th. Do not, however, consider yourself as a mere superintendent of schools; consider yourself as the spiritual instructor of the people, and devote yourself to their good. God has committed the spiritual interests of this island--20,000 men or more--to you; a vast charge, but He can enable you to be faithful to it. Revise the catechism, tracts, and school-books used among them, and labour to introduce among them sound doctrine and genuine piety. Pray with them as soon as you can, and labour after a gift to preach to them. I expect you will have much to do with them respecting baptism. They all think infant sprinkling right, and will apply to you to baptise their children; you must say little till you know something of the language, and then prove to them from Scripture what is the right mode of baptism and who are the proper persons to be baptised. Form them into Gospel churches when you meet with a few who truly fear God; and as soon as you see any fit to preach to others, call them to the ministry and settle them with the churches. You must baptise and administer the Lord’s Supper according to your own discretion when there is a proper occasion for it. Avoid indolence and love of ease, and never attempt to act the part of the great and carefree in this world.

"7th. Labour incessantly to become a perfect master of the Malay language. In order to this, associate with the natives, walk out with them, ask the name of everything you see, and note it down; visit their houses, especially when any of them are sick. Every night arrange the words you get in alphabetical order. Try to talk as soon as you get a few words, and be as much as possible one of them. A course of kind and attentive conduct will gain their esteem and confidence and give you an opportunity of doing much good

"8th. You will soon learn from Mr. Martin the situation and disposition of the Alfoors or aboriginal inhabitants, and will see what can be done for them. Do not unnecessarily expose your life, but incessantly contrive some way of giving them the word of life.

"9th. I come now to things of inferior importance, but which I hope you will not neglect. I wish you to learn correctly the number, size, and geography of the islands; the number and description of inhabitants; their customs and manners, and everything of note relative to them; and regularly communicate these things to me.

"Your great work, my dear Jabez, is that of a Christian minister. You would have been solemnly set apart thereto if you could have stayed long enough to have permitted it. The success of your labours does not depend upon an outward ceremony, nor does your right to preach the Gospel or administer the ordinances of the Gospel depend on any such thing, but only on the Divine call expressed in the Word of God. The Church has, however, in their intentions and wishes borne a testimony to the grace given to you, and will not cease to pray for you that you may be successful. May you be kept from all temptations, supported under every trial, made victorious in every conflict; and may our hearts be mutually gladdened with accounts from each other of the triumphs of Divine grace. God has conferred a great favour upon you in committing to you this ministry. Take heed to it therefore in the Lord that thou fulfil it. We shall often meet at the throne of grace. Write me by every opportunity, and tell Eliza to write to your mother.

"Now, my dear Jabez, I commit you both to God, and to the word of His grace, which is able to make you perfect in the knowledge of His will. Let that word be near your heart. I give you both up to God, and should I never more see you on earth I trust we shall meet with joy before His throne of glory at last."

Under both the English and the Dutch for a time, to whom the island was restored, Jabez Carey proved to be a successful missionary, while he supported the mission by his official income as superintendent of schools and second member of the College of Justice. The island contained 18,000 native Christians of the Dutch compulsory type, such as we found in Ceylon on taking it over. Thus by the labours of himself, his sons, his colleagues, and his children in the faith, William Carey saw the Gospel, the press, and the influence of a divine philanthropy extending among Mohammedans, Buddhists, and Hindoos, from the shores of the Pacific Ocean west to the Arabian Sea.

Chapter 8: Carey’s Family And Friends

1807-1812

The type of a Christian gentleman--Carey and his first wife--His second marriage--The Lady Rumohr--His picture of their married life--His nearly fatal illness when forty-eight years old--His meditations and dreams--Aldeen House--Henry Martyn’s pagoda--Carey, Marshman, and the Anglican chaplains in the pagoda--Corrie’s account of the Serampore Brotherhood--Claudius Buchanan and his Anglican establishment--Improvement in Anglo-Indian Society--Carey’s literary and scientific friends--Desire in the West for a likeness of Carey--Home’s portrait of him--Correspondence with his son William on missionary consecration, Buonaparte, botany, the missionary a soldier, Felix and Burma, hunting, the temporal power of the Pope, the duty of reconciliation--Carey’s descendants.

"A GENTLEMAN is the next best character after a Christian, and the latter includes the former," were the father’s words to the son whom he was sending forth as a Christian missionary and state superintendent of schools. Carey wrote from his own experience, and he unwittingly painted his own character. The peasant bearing of his early youth showed itself throughout his life in a certain shyness, which gave a charm to his converse with old and young. Occasionally, as in a letter which he wrote to his friend Pearce of Birmingham, at a time when he did not know whether his distant correspondent was alive or dead, he burst forth into an unrestrained enthusiasm of affection and service. But his was rather the even tenor of domestic devotion and friendly duty, unbroken by passion or coldness, and ever lighted up by a steady geniality. The colleagues who were associated with him for the third of a century worshipped him in the old English sense of the word. The younger committee-men and missionaries who came to the front on the death of Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland, in all their mistaken conflicts with these colleagues, always tried to separate Carey from those they denounced, till even his saintly spirit burst forth into wrath at the double wrong thus done to his coadjutors. His fellowship with the chaplains and bishops of the Church of England, and with the missionaries of other Churches and societies, was as loving in its degree as his relations to his own people. With men of the world, from the successive Governor-Generals, from Wellesley, Hastings, and Bentinck, down to the scholars, merchants, and planters with whom he became associated for the public good, William Carey was ever the saint and the gentleman whom it was a privilege to know.

In nothing perhaps was Carey’s true Christian gentlemanliness so seen as in his relations with his first wife, above whom grace and culture had immeasurably raised him, while she never learned to share his aspirations or to understand his ideals. Not only did she remain to the last a peasant woman, with a reproachful tongue, but the early hardships of Calcutta and the fever and dysentery of Mudnabati clouded the last twelve years of her life with madness. Never did reproach or complaint escape his lips regarding either her or Thomas, whose eccentric impulses and oft-darkened spirit were due to mania also. Of both he was the tender nurse and guardian when, many a time, the ever-busy scholar would fain have lingered at his desk or sought the scanty sleep which his jealous devotion to his Master’s business allowed him. The brotherhood arrangement, the common family, Ward’s influence over the boys, and Hannah Marshman’s housekeeping relieved him of much that his wife’s illness had thrown upon him at Mudnabati, so that a colleague describes him, when he was forty-three years of age, as still looking young in spite of the few hairs on his head, after eleven years in Lower Bengal of work such as never Englishman had before him. But almost from the first day of his early married life he had never known the delight of daily converse with a wife able to enter into his scholarly pursuits, and ever to stimulate him in his heavenly quest. When the eldest boy, Felix, had left for Burma in 1807 the faithful sorrowing husband wrote to him:--"Your poor mother grew worse and worse from the time you left us, and died on the 7th December about seven o’clock in the evening. During her illness she was almost always asleep, and I suppose during the fourteen days that she lay in a severe fever she was not more than twenty-four hours awake. She was buried the next day in the missionary burying-ground."

About the same time that Carey himself settled in Serampore there arrived the Lady Rumohr. She built a house on the Hoogli bank immediately below that of the missionaries, whose society she sought, and by whom she was baptised. On the 9th May 1808 she became Carey’s wife; and in May 1821 she too was removed by death in her sixty-first year, after thirteen years of unbroken happiness.

Charlotte Emilia, born in the same year as Carey in the then Danish duchy of Schleswick, was the only child of the Chevalier de Rumohr, who married the Countess of Alfeldt, only representative of a historic family. Her wakefulness when a sickly girl of fifteen saved the whole household from destruction by fire, but she herself became so disabled that she could never walk up or down stairs. She failed to find complete recovery in the south of Europe, and her father’s friend, Mr. Anker, a director of the Danish East India Company, gave her letters to his brother, then Governor of Tranquebar, in the hope that the climate of India might cause her relief. The Danish ship brought her first to Serampore, where Colonel Bie introduced her to the brotherhood, and there she resolved to remain. She knew the principal languages of Europe; a copy of the Pensées of Pascal, given to her by Mr. Anker before she sailed, for the first time quickened her conscience. She speedily learned English, that she might join the missionaries in public worship. The barren orthodoxy of the Lutheranism in which she had been brought up had made her a sceptic. This soon gave way to the evangelical teaching of the same apostle who had brought Luther himself to Christ. She became a keen student of the Scriptures, then an ardent follower of Jesus Christ.

On her marriage to Dr. Carey, in May 1808, she made over her house to the mission, and when, long after, it became famous as the office of the weekly Friend of India, the rent was sacredly devoted to the assistance of native preachers. She learned Bengali that she might be as a mother to the native Christian families. She was her husband’s counsellor in all that related to the extension of the varied enterprise of the brethren. Especially did she make the education of Hindoo girls her own charge, both at Serampore and Cutwa. Her leisure she gave to the reading of French Protestant writers, such as Saurin and Du Moulin. She admired, wrote Carey, "Massillon’s language, his deep knowledge of the human heart, and his intrepidity in reproving sin; but felt the greatest dissatisfaction with his total neglect of his Saviour, except when He is introduced to give efficacy to works of human merit. These authors she read in their native language, that being more familiar to her than English. She in general enjoyed much of the consolations of religion. Though so much afflicted, a pleasing cheerfulness generally pervaded her conversation. She indeed possessed great activity of mind. She was constantly out with the dawn of the morning when the weather permitted, in her little carriage drawn by one bearer; and again in the evening, as soon as the sun was sufficiently low. She thus spent daily nearly three hours in the open air. It was probably this vigorous and regular course which, as the means, carried her beyond the age of threescore years (twenty-one of them spent in India), notwithstanding the weakness of her constitution."

It is a pretty picture, the delicate invalid lady, drawn along the mall morning and evening, to enjoy the river breeze, on her way to and from the schools and homes of the natives. But her highest service was, after all, to her husband, who was doing a work for India and for humanity, equalled by few, if any. When, on one occasion, they were separated for a time while she sought for health at Monghyr, she wrote to him the tenderest yet most courtly love-letters.

"MY DEAREST LOVE,--I felt very much in parting with thee, and feel much in being so far from thee...I am sure thou wilt be happy and thankful on account of my voice, which is daily getting better, and thy pleasure greatly adds to mine own.

"I hope you will not think I am writing too often; I rather trust you will be glad to hear of me...Though my journey is very pleasant, and the good state of my health, the freshness of the air, and the variety of objects enliven my spirits, yet I cannot help longing for you. Pray, my love, take care of your health that I may have the joy to find you well.

"I thank thee most affectionately, my dearest love, for thy kind letter. Though the journey is very useful to me, I cannot help feeling much to be so distant from you, but I am much with you in my thoughts...The Lord be blessed for the kind protection He has given to His cause in a time of need. May He still protect and guide and bless His dear cause, and give us all hearts growing in love and zeal...I felt very much affected in parting with thee. I see plainly it would not do to go far from you; my heart cleaves to you. I need not say (for I hope you know my heart is not insensible) how much I feel your kindness in not minding any expense for the recovery of my health. You will rejoice to hear me talk in my old way, and not in that whispering manner.

"I find so much pleasure in writing to you, my love, that I cannot help doing it. I was nearly disconcerted by Mrs.--laughing at my writing so often; but then, I thought, I feel so much pleasure in receiving your letters that I may hope you do the same. I thank thee, my love, for thy kind letter. I need not say that the serious part of it was welcome to me, and the more as I am deprived of all religious fellowship...I shall greatly rejoice, my love, in seeing thee again; but take care of your health that I may find you well. I need not say how much you are in my thoughts day and night."

His narrative of their fellowship, written after her death, lets in a flood of light on his home life:--

"During the thirteen years of her union with Dr. Carey, they had enjoyed the most entire oneness of mind, never having a single circumstance which either of them wished to conceal from the other. Her solicitude for her husband’s health and comfort was unceasing. They prayed and conversed together on those things which form the life of personal religion, without the least reserve; and enjoyed a degree of conjugal happiness while thus continued to each other, which can only arise from a union of mind grounded on real religion. On the whole, her lot in India was altogether a scene of mercy. Here she was found of the Saviour, gradually ripened for glory, and after having her life prolonged beyond the expectation of herself and all who knew her, she was released from this mortal state almost without the consciousness of pain, and, as we most assuredly believe, had ‘an abundant entrance ministered unto her into the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’

When, on 24th June 1809, Carey announced at the dinner table that he had that morning finished the Bengali translation of the whole Bible, and he was asked how much more he thought of doing, he answered: "The work I have allotted to myself, in translating, will take me about twenty years." But he had kept the bow too long and too tightly bent, and it threatened to snap. That evening he was seized with bilious fever, and on the eighteenth day thereafter his life was despaired of. "The goodness of God is eminently conspicuous in raising up our beloved brother Carey," wrote Marshman. "God has raised him up again and restored him to his labours; may he live to accomplish all that is in his heart," wrote Rowe. He was at once at his desk again, in college and in his study. "I am this day forty-eight years old," he wrote to Ryland on the 17th August, and sent him the following letters, every line of which reveals the inner soul of the writer:--

"CALCUTTA, 16th August 1809.--I did not expect, about a month ago, ever to write to you again. I was then ill of a severe fever, and for a week together scarcely any hopes were entertained of my life. One or two days I was supposed to be dying, but the Lord has graciously restored me; may it be that I may live more than ever to His glory. Whilst I was ill I had scarcely any such thing as thought belonging to me, but, excepting seasons of delirium, seemed to be nearly stupid; perhaps some of this arose from the weak state to which I was reduced, which was so great that Dr. Hare, one of the most eminent physicians in Calcutta, who was consulted about it, apprehended more danger from that than from the fever. I, however, had scarcely a thought of death or eternity, or of life, or anything belonging thereto. In my delirium, greatest part of which I perfectly remember, I was busily employed in carrying a commission from God to all the princes and governments in the world, requiring them instantly to abolish every political establishment of religion, and to sell the parish and other churches to the first body of Christians that would purchase them. Also to declare war infamous, to esteem all military officers as men who had sold themselves to destroy the human race, to extend this to all those dead men called heroes, defenders of their country, meritorious officers, etc.   I was attended by angels in all my excursions, and was universally successful. A few princes in Germany were refractory, but my attendants struck them dead instantly. I pronounced the doom of Rome to the Pope, and soon afterwards all the territory about Rome, the March of Ancona, the great city and all its riches sank into that vast bed of burning lava which heats Nero’s bath. These two considerations were the delirious wanderings of the mind, but I hope to feel their force, to pray and strive for their accomplishment to the end of my life. But it is now time to attend to something not merely ideal.

"The state of the world occupied my thoughts more and more; I mean as it relates to the spread of the Gospel. The harvest truly is great, and labourers bear scarcely any proportion thereto. I was forcibly struck this morning with reading our Lord’s reply to His disciples, John iv. When He had told them that He had meat to eat the world knew not of, and that His meat was to do the will of His Father and to finish His work, He said, ‘Say not ye there are three months and then cometh harvest?’ He by this plainly intended to call their attention to the conduct of men when harvest was approaching, for that being the season upon which all the hopes of men hang for temporal supplies, they provide men and measures in time for securing it. Afterwards directing their attention to that which so occupied His own as to be His meat and drink, He said, ‘Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields (of souls to be gathered in), for they are white already to harvest.’ After so many centuries have elapsed and so many fields full of this harvest have been lost for want of labourers to gather it in, shall we not at last reflect seriously on our duty? Hindostan requires ten thousand ministers of the Gospel, at the lowest calculation, China as many, and you may easily calculate for the rest of the world. I trust that many will eventually be raised up here, but be that as it may the demands for missionaries are pressing to a degree seldom realised. England has done much, but not the hundredth part of what she is bound to do. In so great a want of ministers ought not every church to turn its attention chiefly to the raising up and maturing of spiritual gifts with the express design of sending them abroad? Should not this be a specific matter of prayer, and is there not reason to labour hard to infuse this spirit into the churches?

"A mission into Siam would be comparatively easy of introduction and support on account of its vicinity to Prince of Wales Island, from which vessels can often go in a few hours. A mission to Pegu and another to Arakan would not be difficult of introduction, they being both within the Burman dominions, Missions to Assam and Nepal should be speedily tried. Brother Robinson is going to Bhootan. I do not know anything about the facility with which missions could be introduced into Cochin China, Cambodia, and Laos, but were the trial made I believe difficulties would remove. It is also very desirable that the Burman mission should be strengthened. There is no full liberty of conscience, and several stations might be occupied; even the borders of China might be visited from that country if an easier entrance into the heart of the country could not be found. I have not mentioned Sumatra, Java, the Moluccas, the Philippines, or Japan, but all these countries must be supplied with missionaries. This is a very imperfect sketch of the wants of Asia only, without including the Mahometan countries; but Africa and South America call as loudly for help, and the greatest part of Europe must also be holpen by the Protestant churches, being nearly as destitute of real godliness as any heathen country on the earth. What a pressing call, then, is here for labourers in the spiritual harvest, and what need that the attention of all the churches in England and America should be drawn to this very object!"

Two years after the establishment of the mission at Serampore, David Brown, the senior chaplain and provost of Fort William College, took possession of Aldeen House, which he occupied till the year of his death in 1812. The house is the first in the settlement reached by boat from Calcutta. Aldeen is five minutes’ walk south of the Serampore Mission House, and a century ago there was only a park between them. The garden slopes down to the noble river, and commands the beautiful country seat of Barrackpore, which Lord Wellesley had just built. The house itself is embosomed in trees, the mango, the teak, and the graceful bamboo. Just below it, but outside of Serampore, are the deserted temple of Bullubpoor and the Ghat of the same name, a fine flight of steps up which thousands of pilgrims flock every June to the adjoining shrine and monstrous car of Jagganath. David Brown had not been long in Aldeen when he secured the deserted temple and converted it into a Christian oratory, ever since known as Henry Martyn’s Pagoda. For ten years Aldeen and the pagoda became the meeting-place of Carey and his Nonconformist friends, with Claudius Buchanan, Martyn, Bishop Corrie, Thomason, and the little band of evangelical Anglicans who, under the protection of Lords Wellesley and Hastings, sweetened Anglo-Indian society, and made the names of "missionary" and of "chaplain" synonymous. Here too there gathered, as also to the Mission House higher up, many a civilian and officer who sought the charms of that Christian family life which they had left behind. A young lieutenant commemorated these years when Brown was removed, in a pleasing elegy, which Charles Simeon published in the Memorials of his friend. Many a traveller from the far West still visits the spot, and recalls the memories of William Carey and Henry Martyn, of Marshman and Buchanan, of Ward and Corrie, which linger around the fair scene. When first we saw it the now mutilated ruin was perfect, and under the wide-spreading banian tree behind a Brahman was reciting, for a day and a night, the verses of the Mahabharata epic to thousands of listening Hindoos.

"Long, Hoogli, has thy sullen stream

Been doomed the cheerless shores to lave;

Long has the Suttee’s baneful gleam

Pale glimmered o’er thy midnight wave.

"Yet gladdened seemed to flow thy tide

Where opens on the view--Aldeen;

For there to grace thy palmy side

Loved England’s purest joys were seen.

"Yon dome, ‘neath which in former days

Grim idols marked the pagan shrine,

Has swelled the notes of pious praise,

Attuned to themes of love divine."

We find this allusion to the place in Carey’s correspondence with Dr. Ryland:--"20th January 1807.--It would have done your heart good to have joined us at our meetings at the pagoda. From that place we have successively recommended Dr. Taylor to the work of the Lord at Bombay, Mr. Martyn to his at Dinapoor, Mr. Corrie to his at Chunar, Mr. Parsons to his at Burhampore, Mr. Des Granges to his at Vizagapatam, and our two brethren to theirs at Rangoon, and from thence we soon expect to commend Mr. Thomason to his at Madras. In these meetings the utmost harmony prevails and a union of hearts unknown between persons of different denominations in England." Dr. Taylor and Mr. Des Granges were early missionaries of the London Society; the Rangoon brethren were Baptists; the others were Church of England chaplains. Sacramentarianism and sacerdotalism had not then begun to afflict the Church of India. There were giants in those days, in Bengal, worthy of Carey and of the one work in which all were the servants of one Master.

Let us look a little more closely at Henry Martyn’s Pagoda. It is now a picturesque ruin, which the peepul tree that is entwined among its fine brick masonry, and the crumbling river-bank, may soon cause to disappear for ever. The exquisite tracery of the moulded bricks may be seen, but not the few figures that are left of the popular Hindoo idols just where the two still perfect arches begin to spring. The side to the river has already fallen down, and with it the open platform overhanging the bank on which the missionary sat in the cool of the morning and evening, and where he knelt to pray for the people. We have accompanied many a visitor there, from Dr. Duff to Bishop Cotton, and John Lawrence, and have rarely seen one unmoved. This pagoda had been abandoned long before by the priests of Radhabullub, because the river had encroached to a point within 300 feet of it, the limit within which no Brahman is allowed to receive a gift or take his food. The little black doll of an idol, which is famous among Hindoos alike for its sanctity and as a work of art--for had it not been miraculously wafted to this spot like the Santa Casa to Loretto?--was removed with great pomp to a new temple after it had paid a visit to Clive’s moonshi, the wealthy Raja Nobokissen in Calcutta, who sought to purchase it outright.

In this cool old pagoda Henry Martyn, on one of his earliest visits to Aldeen after his arrival as a chaplain in 1806, found an appropriate residence. Under the vaulted roof of the shrine a place of prayer and praise was fitted up with an organ, so that, as he wrote, "the place where once devils were worshipped has now become a Christian oratory." Here, too, he laid his plans for the evangelisation of the people. When suffering from one of his moods of depression as to his own state, he thus writes of this place:--"I began to pray as on the verge of eternity; and the Lord was pleased to break my hard heart. I lay in tears, interceding for the unfortunate natives of this country; thinking within myself that the most despicable soodra of India was of as much value in the sight of God as the King of Great Britain." It was from such supplication that he was once roused by the blaze of a Suttee’s funeral pyre, on which he found that the living widow had been consumed with the dead before he could interfere. He could hear the hideous drums and gongs and conch-shells of the temple to which Radhabullub had been removed. There he often tried to turn his fellow-creatures to the worship of the one God, from their prostrations "before a black image placed in a pagoda, with lights burning around it," whilst, he says, he "shivered as if standing, as it were, in the neighbourhood of hell." It was in the deserted pagoda that Brown, Corrie, and Parsons met with him to commend him to God before he set out for his new duties at Dinapoor. "My soul," he writes of this occasion, "never yet had such divine enjoyment. I felt a desire to break from the body, and join the high praises of the saints above. May I go ‘in the strength of this many days.’ Amen." "I found my heaven begun on earth. No work so sweet as that of praying and living wholly to the service of God." And as he passed by the Mission House on his upward voyage, with true catholicity "Dr. Marshman could not resist joining the party: and after going a little way, left them with prayer." Do we wonder that these men have left their mark on India?

As years went by, the temple, thus consecrated as a Christian oratory, became degraded in other hands. The brand "pagoda distillery" for a time came to be known as marking the rum manufactured there. The visits of so many Christian pilgrims to the spot, and above all, the desire expressed by Lord Lawrence when Governor-General to see it, led the Hindoo family who own the pagoda to leave it at least as a simple ruin.

Corrie, afterwards the first bishop of Madras, describes the marriage of Des Granges in the oratory, and gives us a glimpse of life in the Serampore Mission House:--

"1806.--Calcutta strikes me as the most magnificent city in the world; and I am made most happy by the hope of being instrumental to the eternal good of many. A great opposition, I find, is raised against Martyn and the principles he preaches...Went up to Serampore yesterday, and in the evening was present at the marriage of Mr. Des Granges. Mr. Brown entered into the concern with much interest. The pagoda was fixed on, and lighted up for the celebration of the wedding; at eight o’clock the parties came from the Mission House [at Serampore], attended by most of the family. Mr. Brown commenced with the hymn, ‘Come, gracious Spirit, heavenly dove!’ A divine influence seemed to attend us, and most delightful were my sensations. The circumstance of so many being engaged in spreading the glad tidings of salvation,--the temple of an idol converted to the purpose of Christian worship, and the Divine presence felt among us,--filled me with joy unspeakable. After the marriage service of the Church of England, Mr. Brown gave out ‘the Wedding Hymn’; and after signing certificates of the marriage we adjourned to the house, where Mr. Brown had provided supper. Two hymns given out by Mr. Marshman were felt very powerfully. He is a most lively, sanguine missionary; his conversation made my heart burn within me, and I find desires of spreading the Gospel growing stronger daily, and my zeal in the cause more ardent...I went to the Mission House, and supped at the same table with about fifty native converts. The triumph of the Cross was most evident in breaking down their prejudices, and uniting them with those who formerly were an abomination in their eyes. After supper they sang a Bengali hymn, many of them with tears of joy; and they concluded with prayer in Bengali, with evident earnestness and emotion. My own feelings were too big for utterance. O may the time be hastened when every tongue shall confess Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father!

"On Friday evening [Oct. 10th], we had a meeting in the pagoda, at which almost all the missionaries, some of their wives, and Captain Wickes attended, with a view to commend Martyn to the favour and protection of God in his work. The Divine presence was with us. I felt more than it would have been proper to express. Mr. Brown commenced with a hymn and prayer, Mr. Des Granges succeeded him, with much devotion and sweetness of expression: Mr. Marshman followed, and dwelt particularly on the promising appearance of things; and, with much humility, pleaded God’s promises for the enlargement of Zion; with many petitions for Mr. Brown and his family. The service was concluded by Mr. Carey, who was earnest in prayer for Mr. Brown: the petition that ‘having laboured for many years without encouragement or support, in the evening it might be light,’ seemed much to affect his own mind, and greatly impressed us all. Afterwards we supped together at Mr. Brown’s...

"13th Oct.--I came to Serampore to dinner. Had a pleasant sail up the river: the time passed agreeably in conversation. In the evening a fire was kindled on the opposite bank; and we soon perceived that it was a funeral pile, on which the wife was burning with the dead body of her husband. It was too dark to distinguish the miserable victim...On going out to walk with Martyn to the pagoda, the noise so unnatural, and so little calculated to excite joy, raised in my mind an awful sense of the presence and influence of evil spirits."

Corrie married the daughter of Mrs. Ellerton, who knew Serampore and Carey well. It was Mr. Ellerton who, when an indigo-planter at Malda, opened the first Bengali school, and made the first attempt at translating the Bible into that vernacular. His young wife, early made a widow, witnessed accidentally the duel in which Warren Hastings shot Philip Francis. She was an occasional visitor at Aldeen, and took part in the pagoda services. Fifty years afterwards, not long before her death at eighty-seven, Bishop Wilson, whose guest she was, wrote of her: "She made me take her to Henry Martyn’s pagoda. She remembers the neighbourhood, and Gharetty Ghat and House in Sir Eyre Coote’s time (1783). The ancient Governor of Chinsurah and his fat Dutch wife are still in her mind. When she visited him with her first husband (she was then sixteen) the old Dutchman cried out, ‘Oh, if you would find me such a nice little wife I would give you ten thousand rupees.’"

It was in Martyn’s pagoda that Claudius Buchanan first broached his plan of an ecclesiastical establishment for India, and invited the discussion of it by Carey and his colleagues. Such a scheme came naturally from one who was the grandson of a Presbyterian elder of the Church of Scotland, converted in the Whitefield revival at Cambuslang. It had been suggested first by Bishop Porteous when he reviewed the Company’s acquisitions in Asia. It was encouraged by Lord Wellesley, who was scandalised on his arrival in India by the godlessness of the civil servants and the absence of practically any provision for the Christian worship and instruction of its officers and soldiers, who were all their lives without religion, not a tenth of them ever returning home. Carey thus wrote, at Ryland’s request, of the proposal, which resulted in the arrival in Calcutta of Bishop Middleton and Dr. Bryce in 1814:--"I have no opinion of Dr. Buchanan’s scheme for a religious establishment here, nor could I from memory point out what is exceptionable in his memoir. All his representations must be taken with some grains of allowance." When, in the Aldeen discussions, Dr. Buchanan told Marshman that the temple lands would eventually answer for the established churches and the Brahmans’ lands for the chaplains, the stout Nonconformist replied with emphasis, "You will never obtain them." We may all accept the conversion of the idol shrine into a place of prayer--as Gregory I. taught Augustine of Canterbury to transform heathen temples into Christian churches--as presaging the time when the vast temple and mosque endowments will be devoted by the people themselves to their own moral if not spiritual good through education, both religious and secular.

The change wrought in seventeen years by Carey and such associates as these on society in Bengal, both rich and poor, became marked by the year 1810. We find him writing of it thus:--"When I arrived I knew of no person who cared about the Gospel except Mr. Brown, Mr. Udny, Mr. Creighton, Mr. Grant, and Mr. Brown an indigo-planter, besides Brother Thomas and myself. There might be more, and probably were, though unknown to me. There are now in India thirty-two ministers of the Gospel. Indeed, the Lord is doing great things for Calcutta; and though infidelity abounds, yet religion is the theme of conversation or dispute in almost every house. A few weeks ago (October 1810), I called upon one of the Judges to take breakfast with him, and going rather abruptly upstairs, as I had been accustomed to do, I found the family just going to engage in morning worship. I was of course asked to engage in prayer, which I did. I afterwards told him that I had scarcely witnessed anything since I had been in Calcutta which gave me more pleasure than what I had seen that morning. The change in this family was an effect of Mr. Thomason’s ministry...About ten days ago I had a conversation with one of the Judges of the Supreme Court, Sir John Boyd, upon religious subjects. Indeed there is now scarcely a place where you can pay a visit without having an opportunity of saying something about true religion."

Carey’s friendly fellowship, by person and letter, was not confined to those who were aggressively Christian or to Christian and ecclesiastical questions. As we shall soon see, his literary and scientific pursuits led him to constant and familiar converse with scholars like Colebrooke and Leyden, with savants like Roxburgh, the astronomer Bentley, and Dr. Hare, with publicists like Sir James Mackintosh and Robert Hall, with such travellers and administrators as Manning, the friend of Charles Lamb, and Raffles.

In Great Britain the name of William Carey had, by 1812, become familiar as a household word in all evangelical circles. The men who had known him in the days before 1793 were few and old, were soon to pass away for ever. The new generation had fed their Christian zeal on his achievements, and had learned to look on him, in spite of all his humility which only inflamed that zeal, as the pioneer, the father, the founder of foreign missions, English, Scottish, and American. They had never seen him; they were not likely to see him in the flesh. The desire for a portrait of him became irresistible. The burning of the press, to be hereafter described, which led even bitter enemies of the mission like Major Scott Waring to subscribe for its restoration, gave the desired sympathetic voice, so that Fuller wrote to the missionaries:--"The public is now giving us their praises. Eight hundred guineas have been offered for Dr. Carey’s likeness...When you pitched your tents at Serampore you said, ‘We will not accumulate riches but devote all to God for the salvation of the heathen.’ God has given you what you desired and what you desired not. Blessed men, God will bless you and make you a blessing. I and others of us may die, but God will surely visit you...Expect to be highly applauded, bitterly reproached, greatly moved, and much tried in every way. Oh that, having done all, you may stand!"

Carey was, fortunately for posterity, not rebellious in the matter of the portrait; he was passive. As he sat in his room in the college of Fort William, his pen in hand, his Sanskrit Bible before him, and his Brahman pundit at his left hand, the saint and the scholar in the ripeness of his powers at fifty was transferred to the canvas which has since adorned the walls of Regent’s Park College. A line engraving of the portrait was published in England the year after at a guinea, and widely purchased, the profit going to the mission. The painter was Home, famous in his day as the artist whom Lord Cornwallis had engaged during the first war with Tipoo to prepare those Select Views in Mysore, the Country of Tipoo Sultaun, from Drawings taken on the Spot, which appeared in 1794.

Of his four sons, Felix, William, Jabez, and Jonathan, Carey’s correspondence was most frequent at this period with William, who went forth in 1807 to Dinapoor to begin his independent career as a missionary by the side of Fernandez.

"2nd April 1807.--We have the greatest encouragement to go forward in the work of our Lord Jesus, because we have every reason to conclude that it will be successful at last. It is the cause which God has had in His mind from eternity, the cause for which Christ shed His blood, that for which the Spirit and word of God were given, that which is the subject of many great promises, that for which the saints have been always praying, and which God Himself bears an infinite regard to in His dispensations of Providence and Grace. The success thereof is therefore certain. Be encouraged, therefore, my dear son, to devote yourself entirely to it, and to pursue it as a matter of the very first importance even to your dying day.

"Give my love to Mr. and Mrs. Creighton and to Mr. Ellerton, Mr. Grant, or any other who knows me about Malda, also to our native Brethren."

"CALCUTTA, 29th September 1808.--A ship is just arrived which brings the account that Buonaparte has taken possession of the whole kingdom of Spain, and that the Royal family of that country are in prison at Bayonne. It is likely that Turkey is fallen before now, and what will be the end of these wonders we cannot tell. I see the wrath of God poured out on the nations which have so long persecuted His Gospel, and prevented the spread of His truth. Buonaparte is but the minister of the Divine vengeance, the public executioner now employed to execute the sentence of God upon criminal men. He, however, has no end in view but the gratifying his own ambition."

"22nd December 1808.--DEAR WILLIAM--Be steadfast...Walk worthy of your high calling, and so as to be a pattern to others who may engage in similar undertakings. Much depends upon us who go first to the work of the Lord in this country; and we have reason to believe that succeeding Ministers of the Gospel in this country will be more or less influenced by our example...All, even the best of men, are more likely to be influenced by evil example than benefited by good: let it, therefore, be your business and mine to live and act for God in all things and at all times.

"I am very glad you wrote to Jabez and Jonathan. O that I could see them converted!"

"30th May 1809.--When you come down take a little pains to bring down a few plants of some sort. There is one grows plentifully about Sadamahal which grows about as high as one’s knee, and produces a large red flower. Put half a dozen plants in pots (with a hole in the bottom). There is at Sadamahal (for I found it there) a plant which produces a flower like Bhayt, of a pale bluish colour, almost white; and indeed several other things there. Try and bring something. Can’t you bring the grasshopper which has a saddle on its back, or the bird which has a large crest which he opens when he settles on the ground? I want to give you a little taste for natural objects. Felix is very good indeed in this respect."

"26th April 1809.--You, my dear William, are situated in a post which is very dear to my remembrance because the first years of my residence in India were spent in that neighbourhood. I therefore greatly rejoice in any exertions which you are enabled to make for the cause of our Redeemer...Should you, after many years’ labour, be instrumental in the conversion of only one soul, it would be worth the work of a whole life...I am not sure that I have been of real use to any one person since I have been in this country, yet I dare not give up the work in which I am engaged. Indeed, notwithstanding all the discouragements which I feel from my own unfitness for any part of it, I prefer it to everything else, and consider that in the work of my Redeemer I have a rich reward. If you are enabled to persevere you will feel the same, and will say with the great Apostle--‘I count not my life dear to me that I may fulfil the ministry which I have received of the Lord.’ ‘Unto me is this grace (favour) given that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.’ Hold on, therefore, be steady in your work, and leave the result with God.

"I have been thinking of a mission to the Ten Tribes of Israel, I mean the Afghans, who inhabit Cabul...I leave the other side for your mother to write a few lines to Mary, to whom give my love."

"CALCUTTA, 1st November 1809.--Yesterday was the day for the Chinese examination, at which Jabez acquitted himself with much honour. I wish his heart were truly set on God. One of the greatest blessings which I am now anxious to see before my death is the conversion of him and Jonathan, and their being employed in the work of the Lord.

"Now, dear William, what do we live for but to promote the cause of our dear Redeemer in the world? If that be carried on we need not wish for anything more; and if our poor labours are at all blessed to the promotion of that desirable end, our lives will not be in vain. Let this, therefore, be the great object of your life, and if you should be made the instrument of turning only one soul from darkness to marvellous light, who can say how many more may be converted by his instrumentality, and what a tribute of glory may arise to God from that one conversion. Indeed, were you never to be blessed to the conversion of one soul, still the pleasure of labouring in the work of the Lord is greater than that of any other undertaking in the world, and is of itself sufficient to make it the work of our choice. I hope Sebuk Ram is arrived before now, and that you will find him to be a blessing to you in your work. Try your utmost to make him well acquainted with the Bible, labour to correct his mistakes, and to establish him in the knowledge of the truth.

"You may always enclose a pinch of seeds in a letter."

"17th January 1810.--Felix went with Captain Canning, the English ambassador to the Burman Empire, to the city of Pegu. On his way thither he observed to Captain Canning that he should be greatly gratified in accompanying the Minister to the mountains of Martaban and the country beyond them. Captain Canning at his next interview with the Minister mentioned this to him, which he was much pleased with, and immediately ordered several buffalo-carts to be made ready, and gave him a war-boat to return to Rangoon to bring his baggage, medicines, etc. He had no time to consult Brother Chater before he determined on the journey, and wrote to me when at Rangoon, where he stayed only one night, and returned to Pegu the next morning. He says the Minister has now nearly the whole dominion over the Empire, and is going to war. He will accompany the army to Martaban, when he expects to stay with the Minister there. He goes in great spirits to explore those countries where no European has been before him, and where he goes with advantages and accommodations such as a traveller seldom can obtain. Brother and Sister Chater do not approve of his undertaking, perhaps through fear for his safety. I feel as much for that as any one can do, yet I, and indeed Brethren Marshman, Ward, and Rowe, rejoice that he has undertaken the journey. It will assist him in acquiring the language; it will gratify the Minister, it will serve the interests of literature, and perhaps answer many other important purposes, as it respects the mission; and as much of the way will be through uninhabited forests, it could not have been safely undertaken except with an army. He expects to be absent three months. I shall feel a great desire to hear from him when he returns, and I doubt not but you will join me in prayer for his safety both of mind and body...

"One or two words about natural history. Can you not get me a male and female khokora--I mean the great bird like a kite, which makes so great a noise, and often carries off a duck or a kid? I believe it is an eagle, and want to examine it. Send me also all the sorts of ducks and waterfowls you can get, and, in short, every sort of bird you can obtain which is not common here. Send their Bengali names. Collect me all the sorts of insects, and serpents, and lizards you can get which are not common here. Put all the insects together into a bottle of rum, except butterflies, which you may dry between two papers, and the serpents and lizards the same. I will send you a small quantity of rum for that purpose. Send all the country names. Let me have the birds alive; and when you have got a good boat-load send a small boat down with them under charge of a careful person, and I will pay the expenses. Spare no pains to get me seeds and roots, and get Brother Robinson to procure what he can from Bhootan or other parts.

"Remember me affectionately to Sebuk Ram and his wife, and to all the native brethren and sisters."

"5th February 1810.--Were you hunting the buffalo, or did it charge you without provocation? I advise you to abstain from hunting buffaloes or other animals, because, though I think it lawful to kill noxious animals, or to kill animals for food, yet the unnecessary killing of animals, and especially the spending much time in the pursuit of them, is wrong, and your life is too valuable to be thrown away by exposing it to such furious animals as buffaloes and tigers. If you can kill them without running any risk ‘tis very well, but it is wrong to expose yourself to danger for an end so much below that to which you are devoted..

"I believe the cause of our Redeemer increases in the earth, and look forward to more decided appearances of divine power. The destruction of the temporal power of the Pope is a glorious circumstance, and an answer to the prayers of the Church for centuries past...

"I send you a small cask of rum to preserve curiosities in, and a few bottles; but your best way will be to draw off a couple of gallons of the rum, which you may keep for your own use, and then put the snakes, frogs, toads, lizards, etc., into the cask, and send them down. I can easily put them into proper bottles, etc., afterwards. You may, however, send one or two of the bottles filled with beetles, grasshoppers, and other insects."

In the absence of Mr. Fernandez, the pastor, William had excluded two members of the Church.

"4th April 1810.--A very little knowledge of human nature will convince you that this would have been thought an affront in five instances out of six. You would have done better to have advised them, or even to have required them to have kept from the Lord’s table till Mr. Fernandez’s return, and to have left it to him to preside over the discipline of the church. You, no doubt, did it without thinking of the consequences, and in the simplicity of your heart, and I think Mr. Fernandez is wrong in treating you with coolness, when a little conversation might have put everything to rights. Of that, however, I shall say no more to you, but one of us shall write to him upon the subject as soon as we can.

"The great thing to be done now is the effecting of a reconciliation between you, and whether you leave Sadamahal, or stay there, this is absolutely necessary. In order to this you both must be willing to make some sacrifice of your feelings; and as those feelings, which prevent either of you from making concessions where you have acted amiss, are wrong, the sooner they are sacrificed the better. I advise you to write to Mr. Fernandez immediately, and acknowledge that you did wrong in proceeding to the exclusion of the members without having first consulted with him, and state that you had no intention of hurting his feelings, but acted from what you thought the urgency of the case, and request of him a cordial reconciliation. I should like much to see a copy of the letter you send to him. I have no object in view but the good of the Church, and would therefore rather see you stoop as low as you can to effect a reconciliation, than avoid it through any little punctilio of honour or feeling of pride. You will never repent of having humbled yourself to the dust that peace may be restored, nothing will be a more instructive example to the heathen around you, nothing will so completely subdue Brother Fernandez’s dissatisfaction, and nothing will make you more respected in the Church of God.

"It is highly probable that you will some time or other be removed to another situation, but it cannot be done till you are perfectly reconciled to each other, nor can it possibly be done till some time after your reconciliation, as such a step would be considered by all as an effect of resentment or dissatisfaction, and would be condemned by every thinking person. We shall keep our minds steadily on the object, and look out for a proper station; but both we and you must act with great caution and tenderness in this affair. For this reason also I entreat you not to withdraw yourself from the church, or from any part of your labours, but go on steadily in the path of duty, suppress and pray against every feeling of resentment, and bear anything rather than be accessory to a misunderstanding, or the perpetuating of one. ‘Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ, who made himself of no reputation.’ I hope what I have said will induce you to set in earnest about a reconciliation with Brother Fernandez, and to spare no pains or concession (consistent with truth) to effect it."

William had applied to be transferred to Serampore.

"3rd August 1811.--The necessities of the mission must be consulted before every other consideration. Native brethren can itinerate, but Europeans must be employed to open new missions and found new stations. For were we to go upon the plan of sending Europeans where natives could possibly be employed, no subscriptions or profits could support them. We intend to commence a new station at Dacca, and if you prefer that to Cutwa you may go thither. One of the first things to be done there will be to open a charity school, and to overlook it. Dacca itself is a very large place, where you may often communicate religious instructions without leaving the town. There are also a number of Europeans there, so that Mary would not be so much alone, and at any rate help would be near. We can obtain the permission of Government for you to settle there.

"I ought, however, to say that I think there is much guilt in your fears. You and Mary will be a thousand times more safe in committing yourselves to God in the way of duty than in neglecting obvious duty to take care of yourselves. You see what hardships and dangers a soldier meets in the wicked trade of war. They are forced to leave home and expose themselves to a thousand dangers, yet they never think of objecting, and in this the officers are in the same situation as the men. I will engage to say that no military officer would ever refuse to go any whither on service because his family must be exposed to danger in his absence; and yet I doubt not but many of them are men who have great tenderness for their wives and families. However, they must be men and their wives must be women. Your undertaking is infinitely superior to theirs in importance. They go to kill men, you to save them. If they leave their families to chance for the sake of war, surely you can leave yours to the God of providence while you go about His work. I speak thus because I am much distressed to see you thus waste away the flower of your life in inactivity, and only plead for it what would not excuse a child. Were you in any secular employment you must go out quite as much as we expect you to do in the Mission. I did so when at Mudnabati, which was as lonesome a place as could have been thought of, and when I well knew that many of our own ryots were dakoits (robbers)."

William finally settled at Cutwa, higher up the Hoogli than Serampore, and did good service there.

"1st December 1813.--I have now an assistant at College, notwithstanding which my duties are quite as heavy as they ever were, for we are to receive a number of military students--I suppose thirty at least. The translation, and printing also, is now so much enlarged that I am scarcely able to get through the necessary labour of correcting proofs and learning the necessary languages. All these things are causes of rejoicing more than of regret, for they are the very things for which I came into the country, and to which I wish to devote my latest breath...Jabez has offered himself to the Mission, a circumstance which gives me more pleasure than if he had been appointed Chief Judge of the Supreme Court...Your mother has long been confined to her couch, I believe about six months."

The following was written evidently in reply to loving letters on the death of his wife, Charlotte Emilia:-

"4th June 1821.--MY DEAR JONATHAN--I feel your affectionate care for me very tenderly. I have just received very affectionate letters from William and Brother Sutton (Orissa). Lord and Lady Hastings wrote to Brother Marshman, thinking it would oppress my feelings to write to me directly, to offer their kind condolence to me through him. Will you have the goodness to send five rupees to William for the Cutwa school, which your dear mother supported. I will repay you soon, but am now very short of money.--I am your very affectionate father, W. CAREY."

Of the many descendants of Dr. Carey, one great grandson is now an ordained missionary in Bengal, another a medical missionary in Delhi, and a third is a member of the Civil Service, who has distinguished himself by travels in Northern Tibet and Chinese Turkestan, which promise to unveil much of the unexplored regions of Asia to the scholar and the missionary.

Thus far we have confined our study of William Carey to his purely missionary career, and that in its earlier half. We have now to see him as the scholar, the Bible translator, the philanthropist, the agriculturist, and the founder of a University.

Chapter 9: Professor Of Sanskrit, Bengali, And Marathi

1801-1830

Carey the only Sanskrit scholar in India besides Colebrooke--The motive of the missionary scholar--Plans translation of the sacred books of the East--Comparative philology from Leibniz to Carey--Hindoo and Mohammedan codes and colleges of Warren Hastings--The Marquis Wellesley--The College of Fort William founded--Character of the Company’s civil and military servants--Curriculum of study, professors and teachers--The vernacular languages--Carey’s account of the college and his appointment--How he studied Sanskrit--College Disputation Day in the new Government House--Carey’s Sanskrit speech--Lord Wellesley’s eulogy--Sir James Mackintosh--Carey’s pundits--He projects the Bibliotheca Asiatica--On the Committee of the Bengal Asiatic Society--Edition and translation of the Ramayana epic--The Hitopadesa--His Universal Dictionary--Influence of Carey on the civil and military services--W. B. Bayley; B. H. Hodgson; R. Jenkins; R. M. and W. Bird; John Lawrence.

WHEN, in the opening days of the nineteenth century, William Carey was driven to settle in Danish Serampore, he was the only member of the governing race in North India who knew the language of the people so as to teach it; the only scholar, with the exception of Colebrooke, who could speak Sanskrit as fluently as the Brahmans. The Bengali language he had made the vehicle of the teaching of Christ, of the thought of Paul, of the revelation of John. Of the Sanskrit, hitherto concealed from alien eyes or diluted only through the Persian, he had prepared a grammar and begun a dictionary, while he had continually used its great epics in preaching to the Brahmans, as Paul had quoted the Greek poets on the Areopagus. And all this he had done as the missionary of Christ and the scholar afterwards. Reporting to Ryland, in August 1800, the publication of the Gospels and of "several small pieces" in Bengali, he excused his irregularity in keeping a journal, "for in the printing I have to look over the copy and correct the press, which is much more laborious than it would be in England, because spelling, writing, printing, etc., in Bengali is almost a new thing, and we have in a manner to fix the orthography." A little later, in a letter to Sutcliff, he used language regarding the sacred books of the Hindoos which finds a parallel more than eighty years after in Professor Max Müller’s preface to his series of the sacred books of the East, the translation of which Carey was the first to plan and to begin from the highest of all motives. Mr. Max Müller calls attention to the "real mischief that has been and is still being done by the enthusiasm of those pioneers who have opened the first avenues through the bewildering forests of the sacred literature of the East." He declares that "Eastern nations themselves would not tolerate, in any of their classical literary compositions, such violations of the simplest rules of taste as they have accustomed themselves to tolerate, if not to admire, in their sacred books." And he is compelled to leave untranslated, while he apologises for them, the frequent allusions to the sexual aspects of nature, "particularly in religious books." The revelations of the Maharaj trial in Bombay are the practical fruit of all this.

"CALCUTTA, 17th March 1802.--I have been much astonished lately at the malignity of some of the infidel opposers of the Gospel, to see how ready they are to pick every flaw they can in the inspired writings, and even to distort the meaning, that they may make it appear inconsistent; while these very persons will labour to reconcile the grossest contradictions in the writings accounted sacred by the Hindoos, and will stoop to the meanest artifices in order to apologise for the numerous glaring falsehoods and horrid violations of all decency and decorum, which abound in almost every page. Any thing, it seems, will do with these men but the word of God. They ridicule the figurative language of Scripture, but will run allegory-mad in support of the most worthless productions that ever were published. I should think it time lost to translate any of them; and only a sense of duty excites me to read them. An idea, however, of the advantage which the friends of Christianity may obtain by having these mysterious sacred nothings (which have maintained their celebrity so long merely by being kept from the inspection of any but interested Brahmans) exposed to view, has induced me, among other things, to write the Sanskrit grammar, and to begin a dictionary of that language. I sincerely pity the poor people, who are held by the chains of an implicit faith in the grossest of lies; and can scarcely help despising the wretched infidel who pleads in their favour and tries to vindicate them. I have long wished to obtain a copy of the Veda; and am now in hopes I shall be able to procure all that are extant. A Brahman this morning offered to get them for me for the sake of money. If I succeed, I shall be strongly tempted to publish them with a translation, pro bono publico."

It was not surprising that the Governor-General, even if he had been less enlightened than Lord Wellesley, found in this missionary interloper, as the East India Company officially termed the class to which he belonged, the only man fit to be Professor of Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi in the College of Fort William, and also translator of the laws and regulations of the Government.

In a memoir read before the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which he had founded in the first year of the eighteenth century, Leibniz first sowed the seed of the twin sciences of comparative philology and ethnology, to which we owe the fruitful results of the historical and critical school. That century was passed in the necessary collection of facts, of data. Carey introduced the second period, so far as the learned and vernacular languages of North India are concerned--of developing from the body of facts which his industry enormously extended, the principles upon which these languages were constructed, besides applying these principles, in the shape of grammars, dictionaries, and translations, to the instruction and Christian civilisation alike of the learned and of the millions of the people. To the last, as at the first, he was undoubtedly only what he called himself, a pioneer to prepare the way for more successful civilisers and scholars. But his pioneering was acknowledged by contemporary14 and later Orientalists, like Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson, to be of unexampled value in the history of scientific research and industry, while the succeeding pages will show that in its practical results the pioneering came as nearly to victory as is possible, until native India lives its own national Christian life.

When India first became a united British Empire under one Governor-General and the Regulating Act of Parliament of 1773, Warren Hastings had at once carried out the provision he himself had suggested for using the moulavies and pundits in the administration of Mussulman and Hindoo law. Besides colleges in Calcutta and Benares to train such, he caused those codes of Mohammedan and Brahmanical law to be prepared which afterwards appeared as The Hedaya and The Code of Gentoo Laws. The last was compiled in Sanskrit by pundits summoned from all Bengal and maintained in Calcutta at the public cost, each at a rupee a day. It was translated through the Persian, the language of the courts, by the elder Halhed into English in 1776. That was the first step in English Orientalism. The second was taken by Sir William Jones, a predecessor worthy of Carey, but cut off all too soon while still a young man of thirty-four, when he founded the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1784 on the model of Boyle’s Royal Society. The code of Warren Hastings had to be arranged and supplemented into a reliable digest of the original texts, and the translation of this work, as done by pundit Jaganatha, was left, by the death of Jones, to Colebrooke, who completed it in 1797. Charles Wilkins had made the first direct translation from the Sanskrit into English in 1785, when he published in London The Bhagavat-Geeta or Dialogue of Krishna and Arjoon, and his is the imperishable honour thus chronicled by a contemporary poetaster:--

"But he performed a yet more noble part,

He gave to Asia typographic art."

In Bengali Halhed had printed at Hoogli in 1783, with types cut by Wilkins, the first grammar, but it had become obsolete and was imperfect. Such had been the tentative efforts of the civilians and officials of the Company when Carey began anew the work from the only secure foundation, the level of daily sympathetic fellowship with the people and their Brahmans, with the young as well as the old.

The Marquis Wellesley was of nearly the same age as Carey, whom he soon learned to appreciate and to use for the highest good of the empire. Of the same name and original English descent as John and Charles Wesley, the Governor-General was the eldest and not the least brilliant of the Irish family which, besides him, gave to the country the Duke of Wellington and Lord Cowley. While Carey was cobbling shoes in an unknown hamlet of the Midlands and was aspiring to convert the world, young Wellesley was at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, acquiring the classical scholarship which, as we find its fruits in his Primitiœ et Reliquiœ, extorted the praise of De Quincey. When Carey was starving in Calcutta unknown the young lord was making his mark in the House of Commons by a speech against the Jacobins of France in the style of Burke. The friend of Pitt, he served his apprenticeship to Indian affairs in the Board of Control, where he learned to fight the directors of the East India Company, and he landed at Calcutta in 1798, just in time to save the nascent empire from ruin by the second Mysore war and the fall of Tipoo at Seringapatam. Like that other marquis who most closely resembled him half a century after, the Scottish Dalhousie, his hands were no sooner freed from the uncongenial bonds of war than he became even more illustrious by his devotion to the progress which peace makes possible. He created the College of Fort William, dating the foundation of what was fitted and intended to be the greatest seat of learning in the East from the first anniversary of the victory of Seringapatam. So splendidly did he plan, so wisely did he organise, and with such lofty aims did he select the teachers of the college, that long after his death he won from De Quincey the impartial eulogy, that of his three services to his country and India this was the "first, to pave the way for the propagation of Christianity--mighty service, stretching to the clouds, and which in the hour of death must have given him consolation."

When Wellesley arrived at Calcutta he had been shocked by the sensual ignorance of the Company’s servants. Sunday was universally given up to horse-racing and gambling. Boys of sixteen were removed from the English public schools where they had hardly mastered the rudiments of education to become the magistrates, judges, revenue collectors, and governors of millions of natives recently brought under British sway. At a time when the passions most need regulation and the conscience training, these lads found themselves in India with large incomes, flattered by native subordinates, encouraged by their superiors to lead lives of dissipation, and without the moral control even of the weakest public opinion. The Eton boy and Oxford man was himself still young, and he knew the world, but he saw that all this meant ruin to both the civil and military services, and to the Company’s system. The directors addressed in a public letter, dated 25th May 1798, "an objurgation on the character and conduct" of their servants. They re-echoed the words of the new Governor-General in their condemnation of a state of things, "highly discreditable to our Government, and totally incompatible with the religion we profess." Such a service as this, preceding the creation of the college, led Pitt’s other friend, Wilberforce, in the discussions on the charter of 1813, to ascribe to Lord Wellesley, when summoning him to confirm and revise it, the system of diffusing useful knowledge of all sorts as the true foe not only of ignorance but of vice and of political and social decay.

Called upon to prevent the evils he had been the first to denounce officially, Lord Wellesley wrote his magnificent state paper of 1800, which he simply termed Notes on the necessity of a special collegiate training of Civil Servants. The Company’s factories had grown into the Indian Empire of Great Britain. The tradesmen and clerks, whom the Company still called "writer," "factor," and "merchant," in their several grades, had, since Clive obtained a military commission in disgust at such duties, become the judges and rulers of millions, responsible to Parliament. They must be educated in India itself, and trained to be equal to the responsibilities and temptations of their position. If appointed by patronage at home when still at school, they must be tested after training in India so that promotion shall depend on degrees of merit. Lord Wellesley anticipated the modified system of competition which Macaulay offered to the Company in 1853, and the refusal of which led to the unrestricted system which has prevailed with varying results since that time. Nor was the college only for the young civilians as they arrived. Those already at work were to be encouraged to study. Military officers were to he invited to take advantage of an institution which was intended to be "the university of Calcutta," "a light amid the darkness of Asia," and that at a time when in all England there was not a military college. Finally, the college was designed to be a centre of Western learning in an Eastern dress for the natives of India and Southern Asia, alike as students and teachers. A noble site was marked out for it on the stately sweep of Garden Reach, where every East Indiaman first dropped its anchor, and the building was to be worthy of the founder who erected Government House.

The curriculum of study included Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit; Bengali, Marathi, Hindostani (Hindi), Telugoo, Tamil, and Kanarese; English, the Company’s, Mohammedan and Hindoo law, civil jurisprudence, and the law of nations; ethics; political economy, history, geography, and mathematics; the Greek, Latin, and English classics, and the modern languages of Europe; the history and antiquities of India; natural history, botany, chemistry, and astronomy. The discipline was that of the English universities as they then were, under the Governor-General himself, his colleagues, and the appellate judges. The senior chaplain, the Rev. David Brown, was provost in charge of the discipline; and Dr. Claudius Buchanan was vice-provost in charge of the studies, as well as professor of Greek, Latin, and English. Dr. Gilchrist was professor of Hindostani, in teaching which he had already made a fortune; Lieutenant J. Baillie of Arabic; and Mr. H. B. Edmonstone of Persian. Sir George Barlow expounded the laws or regulations of the British Government in India. The Church of England constitution of the college at first, to which Buchanan had applied the English Test Act, and his own modesty, led Carey to accept of his appointment, which was thus gazetted:--"The Rev. William Carey, teacher of the Bengali and Sanskrit languages."

The first notice of the new college which we find in Carey’s correspondence is this, in a letter to Sutcliff dated 27th November 1800:--"There is a college erected at Fort William, of which the Rev. D. Brown is appointed provost, and C. Buchanan classical tutor: all the Eastern languages are to be taught in it." "All" the languages of India were to be taught, the vernacular as well as the classical and purely official. This was a reform not less radical and beneficial in its far-reaching influence, and not less honourable to the scholarly foresight of Lord Wellesley, than Lord William Bentinck’s new era of the English language thirty-five years after. The rulers and administrators of the new empire were to begin their career by a three years’ study of the mother tongue of the people, to whom justice was administered in a language foreign alike to them and their governors, and of the Persian language of their foreign Mohammedan conquerors. That the peoples of India, "every man in his own language," might hear and read the story of what the one true and living God had done for us men and our salvation, Carey had nine years before given himself to acquire Bengali and the Sanskrit of which it is one of a numerous family of daughters, as the tongues of the Latin nations of Europe and South America are of the offspring of the speech of Caesar and Cicero. Now, following the missionary pioneer, as educational, scientific, and even political progress has ever since done in the India which would have kept him out, Lord Wellesley decreed that, like the missionary, the administrator and the military officer shall master the language of the people. The five great vernaculars of India were accordingly named, and the greatest of all, the Hindi, which was not scientifically elaborated till long after, was provided for under the mixed dialect or lingua franca known as Hindostani.

When Carey and his colleagues were congratulating themselves on a reform which has already proved as fruitful of results as the first century of the Renascence of Europe, he little thought, in his modesty, that he would be recognised as the only man who was fit to carry it out. Having guarded the college, as they thought, by a test, Brown and Buchanan urged Carey to take charge of the Bengali and Sanskrit classes as "teacher" on Rs. 500 a month or £700 a year. Such an office was entirely in the line of the constitution of the missionary brotherhood. But would the Government which had banished it to Serampore recognise the aggressively missionary character of Carey, who would not degrade his high calling by even the suspicion of a compromise? To be called and paid as a teacher rather than as the professor whose double work he was asked to do, was nothing to the modesty of the scholar who pleaded his sense of unfitness for the duties. His Master, not himself, was ever Carey’s first thought, and the full professorship, rising to £1800 a year, was soon conferred on the man who proved himself to be almost as much the college in his own person as were the other professors put together. A month after his appointment he thus told the story to Dr. Ryland in the course of a long letter devoted chiefly to the first native converts:--

"SERAMPORE, 15th June 1801...We sent you some time ago a box full of gods and butterflies, etc., and another box containing a hundred copies of the New Testament in Bengali...Mr. Lang is studying Bengali, under me, in the college. What I have last mentioned requires some explanation, though you will probably hear of it before this reaches you. You must know, then, that a college was founded last year in Fort William, for the instruction of the junior civil servants of the Company, who are obliged to study in it three years after their arrival. I always highly approved of the institution, but never entertained a thought that I should be called to fill a station in it. To my great surprise I was asked to undertake the Bengali professorship. One morning a letter from Mr. Brown came, inviting me to cross the water, to have some conversation with him upon this subject. I had but just time to call our brethren together, who were of opinion that, for several reasons, I ought to accept it, provided it did not interfere with the work of the mission. I also knew myself to be incapable of filling such a station with reputation and propriety. I, however, went over, and honestly proposed all my fears and objections. Both Mr. Brown and Mr. Buchanan were of opinion that the cause of the mission would be furthered by it; and I was not able to reply to their arguments. I was convinced that it might. As to my ability, they could not satisfy me; but they insisted upon it that they must be the judges of that. I therefore consented, with fear and trembling. They proposed me that day, or the next, to the Governor-General, who is patron and visitor of the college. They told him that I had been a missionary in the country for seven years or more; and as a missionary I was appointed to the office. A clause had been inserted in the statutes to accommodate those who are not of the Church of England (for all professors are to take certain oaths, and make declarations); but, for the accommodation of such, two other names were inserted, viz., lecturers and teachers, who are not included under that obligation. When I was proposed, his lordship asked if I was well affected to the state, and capable of fulfilling the duties of the station; to which Mr. B. replied that he should never have proposed me if he had had the smallest doubt on those heads. I wonder how people can have such favourable ideas of me. I certainly am not disaffected to the state; but the other is not clear to me.

"When the appointment was made, I saw that I had a very important charge committed to me, and no books or helps of any kind to assist me. I therefore set about compiling a grammar, which is now half printed. I got Ram Basu to compose a history of one of their kings, the first prose book ever written in the Bengali language; which we are also printing. Our pundit has also nearly translated the Sanskrit fables, one or two of which Brother Thomas sent you, which we are also going to publish, These, with Mr. Foster’s vocabulary, will prepare the way to reading their poetical books; so that I hope this difficulty will be gotten through. But my ignorance of the way of conducting collegiate exercises is a great weight upon my mind. I have thirteen students in my class; I lecture twice a week, and have nearly gone through one term, not quite two months. It began 4th May. Most of the students have gotten through the accidents, and some have begun to translate Bengali into English. The examination begins this week. I am also appointed teacher of the Sanskrit language; and though no students have yet entered in that class, yet I must prepare for it. I am, therefore, writing a grammar of that language, which I must also print, if I should be able to get through with it, and perhaps a dictionary, which I began some years ago. I say all this, my dear brother, to induce you to give me your advice about the best manner of conducting myself in this station, and to induce you to pray much for me, that God may, in all things, be glorified by me. We presented a copy of the Bengali New Testament to Lord Wellesley, after the appointment, through the medium of the Rev. D. Brown, which was graciously received. We also presented Governor Bie with one.

"Serampore is now in the hands of the English. It was taken while we were in bed and asleep; you may therefore suppose that it was done without bloodshed. You may be perfectly easy about us: we are equally secure under the English or Danish Government, and I am sure well disposed to both."

For seven years, since his first settlement in the Dinapoor district, Carey had given one-third of his long working day to the study of Sanskrit. In 1796 he reported:--"I am now learning the Sanskrit language, that I may be able to read their Shasters for myself; and I have acquired so much of the Hindi or Hindostani as to converse in it and speak for some time intelligibly...Even the language of Ceylon has so much affinity with that of Bengal that out of twelve words, with the little Sanskrit that I know, I can understand five or six." In 1798 he wrote:--"I constantly employ the forenoon in temporal affairs; the afternoon in reading, writing, learning Sanskrit, etc.; and the evening by candle light in translating the Scriptures...Except I go out to preach, which is often the case, I never deviate from this rule." Three years before that he had been able to confute the Brahmans from their own writings; in 1798 he quoted and translated the Rig Veda and the Purana in reply to a request for an account of the beliefs of the priesthood, apologising, however, with his usual self-depreciation:--"I am just beginning to see for myself by reading the original Shasters." In 1799 we find him reading the Mahabharata epic with the hope of finding some allusion or fact which might enable him to equate Hindoo chronology with reliable history, as Dr. John Wilson of Bombay and James Prinsep did a generation later, by the discovery of the name of Antiochus the Great in two of the edicts of Asoka, written on the Girnar rock.

By September 1804 Carey had completed the first three years’ course of collegiate training in Sanskrit. The Governor-General summoned a brilliant assembly to listen to the disputations and declamations of the students who were passing out, and of their professors, in the various Oriental languages. The new Government House, as it was still called, having been completed only the year before at a cost of £140,000, was the scene, in "the southern room on the marble floor," where, ever since, all through the century, the Sovereign’s Viceroys have received the homage of the tributary kings of our Indian empire. There, from Dalhousie and Canning to Lawrence and Mayo, and their still surviving successors, we have seen pageants and durbars more splendid, and representing a wider extent of territory, from Yarkand to Bangkok, than even the Sultanised Englishman as Sir James Mackintosh called Wellesley, ever dreamed of in his most imperial aspirations. There councils have ever since been held, and laws have been passed affecting the weal of from two to three hundred millions of our fellow-subjects. There, too, we have stood with Duff and Cotton, Ritchie and Outram, representing the later University of Calcutta which Wellesley would have anticipated. But we question if, ever since, the marble hall of the Governor-General’s palace has witnessed a sight more profoundly significant than that of William Carey addressing the Marquis Wellesley in Sanskrit, and in the presence of the future Duke of Wellington, in such words as follow.

The seventy students, their governors, officers, and professors, rose to their feet, when, at ten o’clock on Thursday the 20th of September 1804, His Excellency the Visitor entered the room, accompanied, as the official gazette duly chronicles, by "the Honourable the Chief Justice, the judges of the Supreme Court, the members of the Supreme Council, the members of the Council of the College, Major-General Cameron, Major-General the Honourable Arthur Wellesley, Major-General Dowdeswell, and Solyman Aga, the envoy from Baghdad. All the principal civil and military officers at the Presidency, and many of the British inhabitants, were present on this occasion; and also many learned natives."

After Romer had defended, in Hindostani, the thesis that the Sanskrit is the parent language in India, and Swinton, in Persian, that the poems of Hafiz are to be understood in a figurative or mystical sense, there came a Bengali declamation by Tod senior on the position that the translations of the best works extant in the Sanskrit with the popular languages of India would promote the extension of science and civilisation, opposed by Hayes; then Carey, as moderator, made an appropriate Bengali speech. A similar disputation in Arabic and a Sanskrit declamation followed, when Carey was called on to conclude with a speech in Sanskrit. Two days after, at a second assemblage of the same kind, followed by a state dinner. Lord Wellesley presented the best students with degrees of merit inscribed on vellum in Oriental characters, and delivered an oration, in which he specially complimented the Sanskrit classes, urged more general attention to the Bengali language, and expressed satisfaction that a successful beginning had been made in the study of Marathi.

It was considered a dangerous experiment for a missionary, speaking in Sanskrit, to avow himself such not only before the Governor-General in official state but before the Hindoo and Mohammedan nobles who surrounded him. We may be sure that Carey would not show less of his Master’s charity and wisdom than he had always striven to do. But the necessity was the more laid on him that he should openly confess his great calling, for he had told Fuller on Lord Wellesley’s arrival he would do so if it were possible. Buchanan, being quite as anxious to bring the mission forward on this occasion, added much to the English draft--"the whole of the flattery is his," wrote Carey to Fuller--and sent it on to Lord Wellesley with apprehension. This answer came back from the great Proconsul:--"I am much pleased with Mr. Carey’s truly original and excellent speech. I would not wish to have a word altered. I esteem such a testimony from such a man a greater honour than the applause of Courts and Parliaments."

"MY LORD, it is just that the language which has been first cultivated under your auspices should primarily be employed in gratefully acknowledging the benefit, and in speaking your praise. This ancient language, which refused to disclose itself to the former Governors of India, unlocks its treasures at your command, and enriches the world with the history, learning, and science of a distant age. The rising importance of our collegiate institution has never been more clearly demonstrated than on the present occasion; and thousands of the learned in distant nations will exult in this triumph of literature.

"What a singular exhibition has been this day presented to us! In presence of the supreme Governor of India, and of its most learned and illustrious characters, Asiatic and European, an assembly is convened, in which no word of our native tongue is spoken, but public discourse is maintained on interesting subjects in the languages of Asia. The colloquial Hindostani, the classic Persian, the commercial Bengali, the learned Arabic, and the primæval Sanskrit are spoken fluently, after having been studied grammatically, by English youth. Did ever any university in Europe, or any literary institution in any other age or country, exhibit a scene so interesting as this? And what are the circumstances of these youth? They are not students who prosecute a dead language with uncertain purpose, impelled only by natural genius or love of fame. But having been appointed to the important offices of administering the government of the country in which these languages are spoken, they apply their acquisitions immediately to useful purpose; in distributing justice to the inhabitants; in transacting the business of the state, revenual and commercial; and in maintaining official fellowship with the people, in their own tongue, and not, as hitherto, by an interpreter. The acquisitions of our students may be appreciated by their affording to the suppliant native immediate access to his principal; and by their elucidating the spirit of the regulations of our Government by oral communication, and by written explanations, varied according to the circumstances and capacities of the people.

"The acquisitions of our students are appreciated at this moment by those learned Asiatics now present in this assembly, some of them strangers from distant provinces; who wonder every man to hear in his own tongue important subjects discussed, and new and noble principles asserted, by the youth of a foreign land. The literary proceedings of this day amply repay all the solicitude, labour, and expense that have been bestowed on this institution. If the expense had been a thousand times greater, it would not have equalled the immensity of the advantage, moral and political, that will ensue.

"I, now an old man, have lived for a long series of years among the Hindoos. I have been in the habit of preaching to multitudes daily, of discoursing with the Brahmans on every subject, and of superintending schools for the instruction of the Hindoo youth. Their language is nearly as familiar to me as my own. This close fellowship with the natives for so long a period, and in different parts of our empire, has afforded me opportunities of information not inferior to those which have hitherto been presented to any other person. I may say indeed that their manners, customs, habits, and sentiments are as obvious to me as if I was myself a native. And knowing them as I do, and hearing as I do their daily observations on our government, character, and principles, I am warranted to say (and I deem it my duty to embrace the public opportunity now afforded me of saying it) that the institution of this college was wanting to complete the happiness of the natives under our dominion; for this institution will break down that barrier (our ignorance of their language) which has ever opposed the influence of our laws and principles, and has despoiled our administration of its energy and effect.

"Were the institution to cease from this moment, its salutary effects would yet remain. Good has been done, which cannot be undone. Sources of useful knowledge, moral instruction, and political utility have been opened to the natives of India which can never be closed; and their civil improvement, like the gradual civilisation of our own country, will advance in progression for ages to come.

"One hundred original volumes in the Oriental languages and literature will preserve for ever in Asia the name of the founder of this institution. Nor are the examples frequent of a renown, possessing such utility for its basis, or pervading such a vast portion of the habitable globe. My lord, you have raised a monument of fame which no length of time or reverse of fortune is able to destroy; not chiefly because it is inscribed with Maratha and Mysore, with the trophies of war and the emblems of victory, but because there are inscribed on it the names of those learned youth who have obtained degrees of honour for high proficiency in the Oriental tongues.

"These youth will rise in regular succession to the Government of this country. They will extend the domain of British civilisation, security, and happiness, by enlarging the bounds of Oriental literature and thereby diffusing the spirit of Christian principles throughout the nations of Asia. These youth, who have lived so long amongst us, whose unwearied application to their studies we have all witnessed, whose moral and exemplary conduct has, in so solemn a manner, been publicly declared before this august assembly, on this day; and who, at the moment of entering on the public service, enjoy the fame of possessing qualities (rarely combined) constituting a reputation of threefold strength for public men, genius, industry, and virtue;--these illustrious scholars, my lord, the pride of their country, and the pillars of this empire, will record your name in many a language and secure your fame for ever. Your fame is already recorded in their hearts. The whole body of youth of this service hail you as their father and their friend. Your honour will ever be safe in their hands. No revolution of opinion or change of circumstances can rob you of the solid glory derived from the humane, just, liberal, and magnanimous principles which have been embodied by your administration.

"To whatever situation the course of future events may call you, the youth of this service will ever remain the pledges of the wisdom and purity of your government. Your evening of life will be constantly cheered with new testimonies of their reverence and affection, with new proofs of the advantages of the education you have afforded them, and with a demonstration of the numerous benefits, moral, religious, and political, resulting from this institution;--benefits which will consolidate the happiness of millions of Asia, with the glory and welfare of our country."

The Court of Directors had never liked Lord Wellesley, and he had, in common with Colebrooke, keenly wounded them by proposing a free trade movement against their monopoly. They ordered that his favourite college should be immediately abolished. He took good care so to protract the operation as to give him time to call in the aid of the Board of Control, which saved the institution, but confined it to the teaching of languages to the civilians of the Bengal Presidency only. The Directors, when thus overruled chiefly by Pitt, created a similar college at Haileybury, which continued till the open competitive system of 1854 swept that also away; and the Company itself soon followed, as the march of events had made it an anachronism.

The first law professor at Haileybury was James Mackintosh, an Aberdeen student who had leaped into the front rank of publicists and scholars by his answer to Burke, in the Vindiciœ Gallicœ, and his famous defence of M. Peltier accused of a libel on Napoleon Buonaparte. Knighted and sent out to Bombay as its first recorder, Sir James Mackintosh became the centre of scholarly society in Western India, as Sir William Jones had been in Bengal. He was the friend of Robert Hall, the younger, who was filling Carey’s pulpit in Leicester, and he soon became the admiring correspondent of Carey himself. His first act during his seven years’ residence in Bombay was to establish the "Literary Society." He drew up a "Plan of a comparative vocabulary of Indian languages," to be filled up by the officials of every district, like that which Carey had long been elaborating for his own use as a philologist and Bible translator. In his first address to the Literary Society he thus eulogised the College of Fort William, though fresh from a chair in its English rival, Haileybury:--"The original plan was the most magnificent attempt ever made for the promotion of learning in the East...Even in its present mutilated state we have seen, at the last public exhibition, Sanskrit declamation by English youth, a circumstance so extraordinary, that if it be followed by suitable advances it will mark an epoch in the history of learning."

Carey continued till 1831 to be the most notable figure in the College of Fort William. He was the centre of the learned natives whom it attracted, as pundits and moonshees, as inquirers and visitors. His own special pundit was the chief one, Mrityunjaya Vidyalankar, whom Home has immortalised in Carey’s portrait. In the college for more than half the week, as in his study at Serampore, Carey exhausted three pundits daily. His college-room was the centre of incessant literary work, as his Serampore study was of Bible translation. When he declared that the college staff had sent forth one hundred original volumes in the Oriental languages and literature, he referred to the grammars and dictionaries, the reading-books, compilations, and editions prepared for the students by the professors and their native assistants. But he contributed the largest share, and of all his contributions the most laborious and valuable was this project of the Bibliotheca Asiatica.

"24th July, 1805.--By the enclosed Gazette you will see that the Asiatic Society and the College have agreed to allow us a yearly stipend for translating Sanskrit works: this will maintain three missionary stations, and we intend to apply it to that purpose. An augmentation of my salary has been warmly recommended by the College Council, but has not yet taken place, and as Lord Cornwallis is now arrived and Lord Wellesley going away, it may not take place. If it should, it will be a further assistance. The business of the translation of Sanskrit works is as follows: About two years ago I presented proposals (to the Council of the College) to print the Sanskrit books at a fixed price, with a certain indemnity for 100 copies. The plan was thought too extensive by some, and was therefore laid by. A few months ago Dr. Francis Buchanan came to me, by desire of Marquis Wellesley, about the translation of his manuscripts. In the course of conversation I mentioned the proposal I had made, of which he much approved, and immediately communicated the matter to Sir John Anstruther, who is president of the Asiatic Society. Sir John had then been drawing out a proposal to Lord Wellesley to form a catalogue raisonnè of the ancient Hindoo books, which he sent to me, and entering warmly into my plan, desired that I would send in a set of proposals. After some amendments it was agreed that the College of Fort William and the Asiatic Society should subscribe in equal shares 300 rupees a month to defray the current expenses, that we should undertake any work approved of by them, and print the original with an English translation on such paper and with such a type as they shall approve; the copy to be ours. They have agreed to recommend the work to all the learned bodies in Europe. I have recommended the Ramayana to begin with, it being one of the most popular of all the Hindoo books accounted sacred. The Veda are so excessively insipid that, had we begun with them, we should have sickened the public at the outset. The Ramayana will furnish the best account of Hindoo mythology that any one book will, and has extravagancy enough to excite a wish to read it through."

In 1807 Carey became one of the most active members of the Bengal Asiatic Society. His name at once appears as one of the Committee of Papers. In the ninth volume of the Asiatic Researches for that year, scholars were invited to communicate translations and descriptive accounts of Asiatic books. Carey’s edition of The Ramayana of Valmeeki, in the original Sanskrit, with a prose translation and explanatory notes, appeared from the Serampore press in three successive quartos from 1806 to 1810. The translation was done by "Dr. Carey and Joshua Marshman." Until Gorresio published his edition and Italian translation of the whole poem this was the first and only attempt to open the seal of the second great Sankrit epic to the European world. In 1802 Carey had encouraged the publication at his own press of translations of both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into Bengali. Carey’s Ramayana excited a keen interest not only among the learned of Europe, but among poetical students. Southey eagerly turned to it for materials for his Curse of Kehama, in the notes to which he makes long quotations from "the excellent and learned Baptist missionaries of Serampore." Dean Milman, when professor of poetry in Oxford, drew from the same storehouse many of the notes with which he enriched his verse translations from both epics. A. W. von Schlegel, the death of whose eldest brother at Madras early led him to Oriental studies, published two books with a Latin translation. Mr. Ralph T. H. Griffith most pleasantly opened the treasures of this epic to English readers in his verse translations published since 1868. Carey’s translation has always been the more rare that the edition despatched for sale in England was lost at sea, and only a few presentation copies are extant, one of which is in the British Museum.

Carey’s contributions to Sanskrit scholarship were not confined to what he published or to what appeared under his own name. We are told by H. H. Wilson that he had prepared for the press translations of treatises on the metaphysical system called Sankhya. "It was not in Dr. Carey’s nature to volunteer a display of his erudition, and the literary labours already adverted to arose in a great measure out of his connection with the college of Calcutta, or were suggested to him by those whose authority he respected, and to whose wishes he thought it incumbent upon him to attend. It may be added that Dr. Carey spoke Sanskrit with fluency and correctness."

He edited for the college the Sanskrit text of the Hitopadesa, from six MSS. recensions of this the first revelation to Europe of the fountain of Aryan folk-tales, of the original of Pilpay’s Fables.   H. H. Wilson remarks that the errors are not more than might have been expected from the variations and defects of the manuscripts and the novelty of the task, for this was the first Sanskrit book ever printed in the Devanagari character. To this famous work Carey added an abridgment of the prose Adventures of Ten Princes (the Dasa Kumara Carita), and of Bhartri-hari’s Apophthegms. Colebrooke records his debt to Carey for carrying through the Serampore press the Sanskrit dictionary of Amara Sinha, the oldest native lexicographer, with an English interpretation and annotations. But the magnum opus of Carey was what in 1811 he described as A Universal Dictionary of the Oriental Languages, derived from the Sanskrit, of which that language is to be the groundwork. The object for which he had been long collecting the materials of this mighty work was the assisting of "Biblical students to correct the translation of the Bible in the Oriental languages after we are dead."

Through the College of Fort William during thirty long years Carey influenced the ablest men in the Bengal Civil Service, and not a few in Madras and Bombay. "The college must stand or the empire must fall," its founder had written to his friends in the Government, so convinced was he that only thus could proper men be trained for the public service and the welfare of our native subjects be secured. How right he was Carey’s experience proved. The young civilians turned out after the first three years’ course introduced that new era in the administration of India which has converted traders into statesmen and filibusters into soldier-politicals, so that the East Indian services stand alone in the history of the administration of imperial dependencies for spotless integrity and high average ability. Contrast with the work of these men, from the days of Wellesley, the first Minto, and Dalhousie, from the time of Canning to Lawrence and the second Minto, the provincial administration of imperial Rome, of Spain and Portugal at their best, of even the Netherlands and France. For a whole generation of thirty years the civilians who studied Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi came daily under the gentle spell of Carey, who, though he had failed to keep the village school of Moulton in order, manifested the learning and the modesty, the efficiency and the geniality, which won the affectionate admiration of his students in Calcutta.

A glance at the register of the college for its first five years reveals such men as these among his best students. The first Bengali prizeman of Carey was W. Butterworth Bayley, whose long career of blameless uprightness and marked ability culminated in the temporary seat of Governor-General, and who was followed in the service by a son worthy of him. The second was that Brian H. Hodgson who, when Resident of Nepal, of all his contemporaries won for himself the greatest reputation as a scholar, who fought side by side with the Serampore brotherhood the battle of the vernaculars of the people. Charles, afterwards Lord Metcalfe, had been the first student to enter the college. He was on its Persian side, and he learned while still under its discipline that "humility, patience, and obedience to the divine will" which unostentatiously marked his brilliant life and soothed his spirit in the agonies of a fatal disease. He and Bayley were inseparable. Of the first set, too, were Richard Jenkins, who was to leave his mark on history as Nagpoor Resident and author of the Report of 1826; and Romer, who rose to be Governor of Bombay for a time. In those early years the two Birds passed through the classes--Robert Mertins Bird, who was to found the great land revenue school of Hindostan; and Wilberforce Bird, who governed India while Lord Ellenborough played at soldiers, and to whom the legal suppression of slavery in Southern Asia is due. Names of men second to those, such as Elliot and Thackeray, Hamilton and Martin, the Shakespeares and Plowdens, the Moneys, the Rosses and Keenes, crowd the honour lists. One of the last to enjoy the advantages of the college before its abolition was John Lawrence, who used to confess that he was never good at languages, but whose vigorous Hindostani made many an ill-doing Raja tremble, while his homely conversation, interspersed with jokes, encouraged the toiling ryot.

These, and men like these, sat at the feet of Carey, where they learned not only to be scholars but to treat the natives kindly, and--some of them--even as brethren in Christ. Then from teaching the future rulers of the East, the missionary-professor turned to his Bengali preaching and his Benevolent Institution, to his visits to the prisoners and his fellowship with the British soldiers in Fort William. And when the four days’ work in Calcutta was over, the early tide bore him swiftly up the Hoogli to the study where, for the rest of the week, he gave himself to the translation of the Bible into the languages of the people and of their leaders.

Chapter 10: The Wyclif Of The East--Bible Translation

1801-1832

The Bible Carey’s missionary weapon--Other vernacular translators--Carey’s modest but just description of his labours--His philological key--Type-cutting and type-casting by a Hindoo blacksmith--The first manufacture of paper and steam-engines in the East--Carey takes stock of the translation work at the opening of 1808--In his workshop--A seminary of Bible translators--William Yates, shoemaker, the Coverdale of the Bengali Bible--Wenger--A Bengali Luther wanted--Carey’s Bengali Bible--How the New Testament was printed--The first copy offered to God--Reception of the volume by Lord Spencer and George III.--Self-evidencing power of the first edition--The Bible in Ooriya--In Maghadi, Assamese, Khasi, and Manipoori--Marathi, Konkani, and Goojarati versions--The translation into Hindi and its many dialects--The Dravidian translations--Tale of the Pushtoo Bible--The Sikhs and the Bible--The first Burman version and press--The British and Foreign Bible Society--Deaths, earthquake, and fire in 1812--Destruction of the press--Thomason’s description of the smoking ruins--Carey’s heroism as to his manuscripts--Enthusiastic sympathy of India and Christendom--The phœnix and its feathers.

EVERY great reform in the world has been, in the first instance, the work of one man, who, however much he may have been the product of his time, has conceived and begun to execute the movement which transforms society. This is true alike of the moral and the physical forces of history, of contemporaries so apparently opposite in character and aims as Carey and Clarkson on the one side and Napoleon and Wellington on the other. Carey stood alone in his persistent determination that the Church should evangelise the world. He was no less singular in the means which he insisted on as the first essential condition of its evangelisation--the vernacular translation of the Bible. From the Scriptures alone, while yet a journeyman shoemaker of eighteen, "he had formed his own system," and had been filled with the divine missionary idea. That was a year before the first Bible Society was formed in 1780 to circulate the English Bible among soldiers and sailors; and, a quarter of a century before his own success led to the formation in 1804 of the British and Foreign Bible Society. From the time of his youth, when he realised the self-evidencing power of the Bible, Carey’s unbroken habit was to begin every morning by reading one chapter of the Bible, first in English, and then in each of the languages, soon, numbering six, which he had himself learned.

Hence the translation of the Bible into all the languages and principal dialects of India and Eastern Asia was the work above all others to which Carey set himself from the time, in 1793, when he acquired the Bengali. He preached, he taught, he "discipled" in every form then reasonable and possible, and in the fullest sense of his Master’s missionary charge. But the one form of most pressing and abiding importance, the condition without which neither true faith, nor true science, nor true civilisation could exist or be propagated outside of the narrow circle to be reached by the one herald’s voice, was the publishing of the divine message in the mother tongues of the millions of Asiatic men and women, boys and girls, and in the learned tongues also of their leaders and priests. Wyclif had first done this for the English-reading races of all time, translating from the Latin, and so had begun the Reformation, religious and political, not only in Britain but in Western Christendom. Erasmus and Luther had followed him--the former in his Greek and Latin New Testament and in his Paraphrase of the Word for "women and cobblers, clowns, mechanics, and even the Turks"; the latter in his great vernacular translation of the edition of Erasmus, who had never ceased to urge his contemporaries to translate the Scriptures "into all tongues." Tyndale had first given England the Bible from the Hebrew and the Greek. And now one of these cobblers was prompted and enabled by the Spirit who is the author of the truth in the Scriptures, to give to South and Eastern Asia the sacred books which its Syrian sons, from Moses and Ezra to Paul and John, had been inspired to write for all races and all ages. Emphatically, Carey and his later coadjutors deserve the language of the British and Foreign Bible Society, when, in 1827, it made to Serampore a last grant of money for translation--"Future generations will apply to them the words of the translators of the English Bible--‘Therefore blessed be they and most honoured their names that break the ice and give the onset in that which helped them forward to the saving of souls. Now what can be more available thereto than to deliver God’s book unto God’s people in a tongue which they understand?’" Carey might tolerate interruption when engaged in other work, but for forty years he never allowed anything to shorten the time allotted to the Bible work. "You, madam," he wrote in 1797 to a lady as to many a correspondent, "will excuse my brevity when I inform you that all my time for writting letters is stolen from the work of transcribing the Scriptures into the Bengali language."

From no mere humility, but with an accurate judgment in the state of scholarship and criticism at the opening of last century, Carey always insisted that he was a forerunner, breaking up the way for successors like Yates, Wenger, and Rouse, who, in their turn, must be superseded by purely native Tyndales and Luthers in the Church of India. He more than once deprecated the talk of his having translated the Bible into forty languages and dialects.   As we proceed that will be a apparent which he did with his own hand, that which his colleagues accomplished, that which he revised and edited both of their work and of the pundits’, and that which he corrected and printed for others at the Serampore press under the care of Ward. It is to these four lines of work, which centred in him, as most of them originally proceeded from his conception and advocacy, that the assertion as to the forty translations is strictly applicable. The Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit translations were his own. The Chinese was similarly the work of Marshman. The Hindi versions, in their many dialects, and the Ooriya, were blocked out by his colleagues and the pundits. He saw through the press the Hindostani, Persian, Malay, Tamil, and other versions of the whole or portions of the Scriptures. He ceased not, night and day, if by any means, with a loving catholicity, the Word of God might be given to the millions.

Writing in 1904 on the centenary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Mr. George A. Grierson, C.I.E., Ph.D., D.Litt., the head of the Linguistic Survey of India, sums up authoritatively the work of Carey and his assistants. "The great-hearted band of Serampore missionaries issued translations of the Bible or of the New Testament in more than forty languages. Before them the number of Protestant versions of the Bible in the speeches of India could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Dutch of Ceylon undertook a Tamil New Testament in 1688, which was followed in 1715 by another version from the pen of Ziegenbalg. The famous missionary, Schultze, between 1727 and 1732 made a Telugu version which was never printed, and later, between 1745 and 1758, he published at Halle a Hindostani translation of the New Testament and of a portion of Genesis. A manuscript version of portions of the Bible in Bengali was made by Thomas in 1791; and then the great Serampore series began with Carey’s Bengali New Testament published in 1801. Most of these Serampore versions were, it is true, first attempts and have been superseded by more accurate versions, but the first step is always the most important one, and this was taken by Carey and his brethren."

Carey’s correspondent in this and purely scholarly subjects was Dr. Ryland, an accomplished Hebraist and Biblical critic for that day, at the head of the Bristol College. Carey’s letters, plentifully sprinkled with Hebrew and Greek, show the jealousy with which he sought to convey the divine message accurately, and the unwearied sense of responsibility under which he worked. Biblical criticism, alike as to the original text and to the exegesis of the sacred writings, is so very modern a science, that these letters have now only a historical interest. But this communication to Ryland shows how he worked from the first:--

"CALCUTTA, 14th Dec. 1803.--We some time ago engaged in an undertaking, of which we intended to say nothing until it was accomplished; but an unforeseen providence made it necessary for us to disclose it. It is as follows: About a year and a half ago, some attempts were made to engage Mr. Gilchrist in the translation of the Scriptures into the Hindostani language. By something or other it was put by. The Persian was also at the same time much talked of, but given up, or rather not engaged in. At this time several considerations prevailed on us to set ourselves silently upon a translation into these languages. We accordingly hired two moonshees to assist us in it, and each of us took our share; Brother Marshman took Matthew and Luke; Brother Ward, Mark and John; and myself the remaining part of the New Testament into Hindostani. I undertook no part of the Persian; but, instead thereof, engaged in translating it into Maharastra, commonly called the Mahratta language, the person who assists me in the Hindostani being a Mahratta. Brother Marshman has finished Matthew, and, instead of Luke, has begun the Acts. Brother Ward has done part of John, and I have done the Epistles, and about six chapters of the Revelation; and have proceeded as far as the second epistle of the Corinthians in the revisal: they have done a few chapters into Persian, and I a few into Mahratta. Thus the matter stood, till a few days ago Mr. Buchanan informed me that a military gentleman had translated the Gospels into Hindostani and Persian, and had made a present of them to the College, and that the College Council had voted the printing of them. This made it necessary for me to say what we had been about; and had it not been for this circumstance we should not have said anything till we had got the New Testament at least pretty forward in printing. I am very glad that Major Colebrooke has done it. We will gladly do what others do not do, and wish all speed to those who do anything in this way. We have it in our power, if our means would do for it, in the space of about fifteen years to have the word of God translated and printed in all the languages of the East. Our situation is such as to furnish us with the best assistance from natives of the different countries. We can have types of all the different characters cast here; and about 700 rupees per month, part of which I hope we shall be able to furnish, would complete the work. The languages are the Hindostani (Hindi), Maharastra, Ooriya, Telinga, Bhotan, Burman, Chinese, Cochin Chinese, Tongkinese, and Malay. On this great work we have fixed our eyes. Whether God will enable us to accomplish it, or any considerable part of it, is uncertain."

But all these advantages, his own genius for languages, his unconquerable plodding directed by a divine motive, his colleagues’ co-operation, the encouragement of learned societies and the public, and the number of pundits and moonshees increased by the College of Fort William, would have failed to open the door of the East to the sacred Scriptures had the philological key of the Sanskrit been wanting or undiscovered. In the preface to his Sanskrit grammar, quoted by the Quarterly Review with high approbation, Carey wrote that it gave him the meaning of four out of every five words of the principal languages of the whole people of India:--"The peculiar grammar of any one of these may be acquired in a couple of months, and then the language lies open to the student. The knowledge of four words in five enables him to read with pleasure, and renders the acquisition of the few new words, as well as the idiomatic expressions, a matter of delight rather than of labour. Thus the Ooriya, though possessing a separate grammar and character, is so much like the Bengali in the very expression that a Bengali pundit is almost equal to the correction of an Orissa proof sheet; and the first time that I read a page of Goojarati the meaning appeared so obvious as to render it unnecessary to ask the pundit questions."

The mechanical apparatus of types, paper, and printing seem to have been provided by the same providential foresight as the intellectual and the spiritual. We have seen how, when he was far enough advanced in his translation, Carey amid the swamps of Dinapoor looked to England for press, type, paper, and printer. He got the last, William Ward, a man of his own selection, worthy to be his colleague. But he had hardly despatched his letter when he found or made all the rest in Bengal itself. It was from the old press bought in Calcutta, set up in Mudnabati, and removed to Serampore, that the first edition of the Bengali New Testament was printed. The few rare and venerable copies have now a peculiar bibliographic interest; the type and the paper alike are coarse and blurred.

Sir Charles Wilkins, the Caxton of India, had with his own hands cut the punches and cast the types from which Halhed’s Bengali grammar was printed at Hoogli in 1778. He taught the art to a native blacksmith, Panchanan, who went to Serampore in search of work just when Carey was in despair for a fount of the sacred Devanagari type for his Sanskirt grammar, and for founts of the other languages besides Bengali which had never been printed. They thus tell the story in a Memoir Relative to the Translations, published in 1807:--

"It will be obvious that in the present state of things in India it was in many instances necessary to cast new founts of types in several of these languages. Happily for us and India at large Wilkins had led the way in this department; and by persevering industry, the value of which can scarcely be appreciated, under the greatest disadvantages with respect to materials and workmen, had brought the Bengali to a high degree of perfection. Soon after our settling at Serampore the providence of God brought to us the very artist who had wrought with Wilkins in that work, and in a great measure imbibed his ideas. By his assistance we erected a letter-foundry; and although he is now dead, he had so fully communicated his art to a number of others, that they carry forward the work of type-casting, and even of cutting the matrices, with a degree of accuracy which would not disgrace European artists. These have cast for us two or three founts of Bengali; and we are now employing them in casting a fount on a construction which bids fair to diminish the expense of paper, and the size of the book at least one-fourth, without affecting the legibility of the character. Of the Devanagari character we have also cast an entire new fount, which is esteemed the most beautiful of the kind in India. It consists of nearly 1000 different combinations of characters, so that the expense of cutting the patterns only amounted to 1500 rupees, exclusive of metal and casting.

"In the Orissa we have been compelled also to cast a new fount of types, as none before existed in that character. The fount consists of about 300 separate combinations, and the whole expense of cutting and casting has amounted to at least 1000 rupees. The character, though distinct, is of a moderate size, and will comprise the whole New Testament in about 700 pages octavo, which is about a fourth less than the Bengali. Although in the Mahratta country the Devanagari character is well known to men of education, yet a character is current among the men of business which is much smaller, and varies considerably in form from the Nagari, though the number and power of the letters nearly correspond. We have cast a fount in this character, in which we have begun to print the Mahratta New Testament, as well as a Mahratta dictionary. This character is moderate in size, distinct and beautiful. It will comprise the New Testament in perhaps a less number of pages than the Orissa. The expense of casting, etc., has been much the same. We stand in need of three more founts; one in the Burman, another in the Telinga and Kernata, and a third in the Seek’s character. These, with the Chinese characters, will enable us to go through the work. An excellent and extensive fount of Persian we received from you, dear brethren, last year."

Panchanan’s apprentice, Monohur, continued to make elegant founts of type in all Eastern languages for the mission and for sale to others for more than forty years, becoming a benefactor not only to literature but to Christian civilisation to an extent of which he was unconscious, for he remained a Hindoo of the blacksmith caste. In 1839, when he first went to India as a young missionary, the Rev. James Kennedy17 saw him, as the present writer has often since seen his successor, cutting the matrices or casting the type for the Bibles, while he squatted below his favourite idol, under the auspices of which alone he would work. Serampore continued down till 1860 to be the principal Oriental typefoundry of the East.

Hardly less service did the mission come to render to the manufacture of paper in course of time, giving the name of Serampore to a variety known all over India. At first Carey was compelled to print his Bengali Testament on a dingy, porous, rough substance called Patna paper. Then he began to depend on supplies from England, which in those days reached the press at irregular times, often impeding the work, and was most costly. This was not all. Native paper, whether mill or hand-made, being sized with rice paste, attracted the bookworm and white ant, so that the first sheets of a work which lingered in the press were sometimes devoured by these insects before the last sheets were printed off. Carey used to preserve his most valuable manuscripts by writing on arsenicated paper, which became of a hideous yellow colour, though it is to this alone we owe the preservation in the library of Serampore College of five colossal volumes of his polyglot dictionary prepared for the Bible translation work. Many and long were the experiments of the missionaries to solve the paper difficulty, ending in the erection of a tread-mill on which relays of forty natives reduced the raw material in the paper-engine, until one was accidentally killed.

The enterprise of Mr. William Jones, who first worked the Raneegunj coal-field, suggested the remedy in the employment of a steam-engine. One of twelve-horse power was ordered from Messrs. Thwaites and Rothwell of Bolton. This was the first ever erected in India, and it was a purely missionary locomotive. The "machine of fire," as they called it, brought crowds of natives to the mission, whose curiosity tried the patience of the engineman imported to work it; while many a European who had never seen machinery driven by steam came to study and to copy it. The date was the 27th of March 1820, when "the engine went in reality this day." From that time till 1865 Serampore became the one source of supply for local as distinguished from imported and purely native hand-made paper. Even the cartridges of Mutiny notoriety in 1857 were from this factory, though it had long ceased to be connected with the mission.

Dr. Carey thus took stock of the translating enterprise in a letter to Dr. Ryland:--

"22nd January 1808.--Last year may be reckoned among the most important which this mission has seen--not for the numbers converted among the natives, for they have been fewer than in some preceding years, but for the gracious care which God has exercised towards us. We have been enabled to carry on the translation and printing of the Word of God in several languages. The printing is now going on in six and the translation into six more. The Bengali is all printed except from Judges vii. to the end of Esther; Sanskrit New Testament to Acts xxvii.; Orissa to John xxi.; Mahratta, second edition, to the end of Matthew; Hindostani (new version) to Mark v., and Matthew is begun in Goojarati. The translation is nearly carried on to the end of John in Chinese, Telinga Kurnata, and the language of the Seeks. It is carried on to a pretty large extent in Persian and begun in Burman. The whole Bible was printed in Malay at Batavia some years ago. The whole is printed in Tamil, and the Syrian Bishop at Travancore is now superintending a translation from Syriac into Malayala. I learnt this week that the language of Kashmeer is a distinct language.

"I have this day been to visit the most learned Hindoo now living; he speaks only Sanskrit, is more than eighty years old, is acquainted with the writings and has studied the sentiments of all their schools of philosophy (usually called the Darshunas of the Veda). He tells me that this is the sixteenth time that he has travelled from Rameshwaram to Harhu (viz. from the extreme cape of the Peninsula to Benares). He was, he says, near Madras when the English first took possession of it. This man has given his opinion against the burning of women."

Four years later, in another letter to Ryland, he takes us into his confidence more fully, showing us not only his sacred workshop, but ingenuously revealing his own humility and self-sacrifice:--"10th December 1811.--I have of late been much impressed with the vast importance of laying a foundation for Biblical criticism in the East, by preparing grammars of the different languages into which we have translated or may translate the Bible. Without some such step, they who follow us will have to wade through the same labour that I have, in order to stand merely upon the same ground that I now stand upon. If, however, elementary books are provided, the labour will be greatly contracted; and a person will be able in a short time to acquire that which has cost me years of study and toil.

"The necessity which lies upon me of acquiring so many languages, obliges me to study and write out the grammar of each of them, and to attend closely to their irregularities and peculiarities. I have therefore already published grammars of three of them; namely, the Sanskrit, the Bengali, and the Mahratta. To these I have resolved to add grammars of the Telinga, Kurnata, Orissa, Punjabi, Kashmeeri, Goojarati, Nepalese, and Assam languages. Two of these are now in the press, and I hope to have two or three more of them out by the end of the next year.

"This may not only be useful in the way I have stated, but may serve to furnish an answer to a question which has been more than once repeated, ‘How can these men translate into so great a number of languages?’ Few people know what may be done till they try, and persevere in what they undertake.

"I am now printing a dictionary of the Bengali, which will be pretty large, for I have got to page 256, quarto, and am not near through the first letter. That letter, however, begins more words than any two others.

"To secure the gradual perfection of the translations, I have also in my mind, and indeed have been long collecting materials for, An Universal Dictionary of the Oriental languages derived from the Sanskrit. I mean to take the Sanskrit, of course, as the groundwork, and to give the different acceptations of every word, with examples of their application, in the manner of Johnson, and then to give the synonyms in the different languages derived from the Sanskrit, with the Hebrew and Greek terms answering thereto; always putting the word derived from the Sanskrit term first, and then those derived from other sources. I intend always to give the etymology of the Sanskrit term, so that that of the terms deduced from it in the cognate languages will be evident. This work will be great, and it is doubtful whether I shall live to complete it; but I mean to begin to arrange the materials, which I have been some years collecting for this purpose, as soon as my Bengali dictionary is finished. Should I live to accomplish this, and the translations in hand, I think I can then say, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’"

The ardent scholar had twenty-three years of toil before him in this happy work. But he did not know this, while each year the labour increased, and the apprehension grew that he and his colleagues might at any time be removed without leaving a trained successor. They naturally looked first to the sons of the mission for translators as they had already done for preachers.

To Dr. Carey personally, however, the education of a young missionary specially fitted to be his successor, as translator and editor of the translations, was even more important. Such a man was found in William Yates, born in 1792, and in the county, Leicestershire, in which Carey brought the Baptist mission to the birth. Yates was in his early years also a shoemaker, and member of Carey’s old church in Harvey Lane, when under the great Robert Hall, who said to the youth’s father, "Your son, sir, will be a great scholar and a good preacher, and he is a holy young man." In 1814 he became the last of the young missionaries devoted to the cause by Fuller, soon to pass away, Ryland, and Hall. Yates had not been many months at Serampore when, with the approval of his brethren, Carey wrote to Fuller, on 17th May 1815:--"I am much inclined to associate him with myself in the translations. My labour is greater than at any former period. We have now translations of the Bible going forward in twenty-seven languages, all of which are in the press except two or three. The labour of correcting and revising all of them lies on me." By September we find Yates writing:--"Dr. Carey sends all the Bengali proofs to me to review. I read them over, and if there is anything I do not understand, or think to be wrong, I mark it. We then converse over it, and if it is wrong, he alters it; but if not, he shows me the reason why it is right, and thus will initiate me into the languages as fast as I can learn them. He wishes me to begin the Hindi very soon. Since I have been here I have read three volumes in Bengali, and they have but six of consequence in prose. There are abundance in Sanskrit." "Dr. Carey has treated me with the greatest affection and kindness, and told me he will give me every information he can, and do anything in his power to promote my happiness." What Baruch was to the prophet Jeremiah, that Yates might have been to Carey, who went so far in urging him to remain for life in Serampore as to say, "if he did not accept the service it would be, in his judgment, acting against Providence, and the blessing of God was not to be expected." Yates threw in his lot with the younger men who, in Calcutta after Fuller’s death, began the Society’s as distinct from the Serampore mission. If Carey was the Wyclif and Tyndale, Yates was the Coverdale of the Bengali and Sanskrit Bible. Wenger, their successor, was worthy of both. Bengal still waits for the first native revision of the great work which these successive pioneers have gradually improved. When shall Bengal see its own Luther?

The Bengali Bible was the first as it was the most important of the translations. The province, or lieutenant-governorship then had the same area as France, and contained more than double its population, or eighty millions. Of the three principal vernaculars, Bengali is spoken by forty-five millions of Hindoos and Mohammedans. It was for all the natives of Bengal and of India north of the Dekhan ("south") tableland, but especially for the Bengali-speaking people, that William Carey created a literary language a century ago.

The first Bengali version of the whole New Testament Carey translated from the original Greek before the close of 1796. The only English commentary used was the Family Expositor of Doddridge, published in 1738, and then the most critical in the language. Four times he revised the manuscript, with a Greek concordance in his hand, and he used it not only with Ram Basu by his side, the most accomplished of early Bengali scholars, but with the natives around him of all classes. By 1800 Ward had arrived as printer, the press was perfected at Serampore, and the result of seven years of toil appeared in February 1801, in the first edition of 2000 copies, costing £612. The printing occupied nine months. The type was set up by Ward and Carey’s son Felix with their own hands; "for about a month at first we had a Brahman compositor, but we were quite weary of him. We kept four pressmen constantly employed." A public subscription had been opened for the whole Bengali Bible at Rs. 32, or £4 a copy as exchange then was, and nearly fifty copies had been at once subscribed for. It was this edition which immediately led to Carey’s appointment to the College of Fort William, and it was that appointment which placed Carey in a position, philological and financial, to give the Bible to the peoples of the farther East in their own tongue.

Some loving memories cluster round the first Bengali version of the New Testament which it is well to collect. On Tuesday, 18th March 1800, Ward’s journal19 records: "Brother Carey took an impression at the press of the first page in Matthew." The translator was himself the pressman. As soon as the whole of this Gospel was ready, 500 copies of it were struck off for immediate circulation, "which we considered of importance as containing a complete life of the Redeemer." Four days after an advertisement in the official Calcutta Gazette, announcing that the missionaries had established a press at Serampore and were printing the Bible in Bengali, roused Lord Wellesley, who had fettered the press in British India. Mr. Brown was able to inform the Governor-General that this very Serampore press had refused to print a political attack on the English Government, and that it was intended for the spiritual instruction only of the natives. This called forth the assurance from that liberal statesman that he was personally favourable to the conversion of the heathen. When he was further told that such an Oriental press would be invaluable to the College of Fort William, he not only withdrew his opposition but made Carey first teacher of Bengali. It was on the 7th February 1801 that the last sheet with the final corrections was put into Carey’s hands. When a volume had been bound it was reverently offered to God by being placed on the Communion-table of the chapel, and the mission families and the new-made converts gathered around it with solemn thanksgiving to God led by Krishna Pal. Carey preached from the words (Col. iii. 11) "Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom." The centenary was celebrated in Calcutta in 1901, under Dr. Rouse, whose fine scholarship had just revised the translation.

When the first copies reached England, Andrew Fuller sent one to the second Earl Spencer, the peer who had used the wealth of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, to collect the great library at Althorp. Carey had been a poor tenant of his, though the Earl knew it not. When the Bengali New Testament reached him, with its story, he sent a cheque for £50 to help to translate the Old Testament, and he took care that a copy should be presented to George III., as by his own request. Mr. Bowyer was received one morning at Windsor, and along with the volume presented an address expressing the desire that His Majesty might live to see its principles universally prevail throughout his Eastern dominions. On this the lord in waiting whispered a doubt whether the book had come through the proper channel. At once the king replied that the Board of Control had nothing to do with it, and turning to Mr. Bowyer said, "I am greatly pleased to find that any of my subjects are employed in this manner."

This now rare volume, to be found on the shelves of the Serampore College Library, where it leads the host of the Carey translations, is coarse and unattractive in appearance compared with its latest successors. In truth the second edition, which appeared in 1806, was almost a new version. The criticism of his colleagues and others, especially of a ripe Grecian like Dr. Marshman, the growth of the native church, and his own experience as a Professor of Sanskrit and Marathi as well as Bengali, gave Carey new power in adapting the language to the divine ideas of which he made it the medium. But the first edition was not without its self-evidencing power. Seventeen years after, when the mission extended to the old capital of Dacca, there were found several villages of Hindoo-born peasants who had given up idol-worship, were renowned for their truthfulness, and, as searching for a true teacher come from God, called themselves "Satya-gooroos." They traced their new faith to a much-worn book kept in a wooden box in one of their villages. No one could say whence it had come; all they knew was that they had possessed it for many years. It was Carey’s first Bengali version of the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. In the wide and elastic bounds of Hindooism, and even, as we shall see, amid fanatical Mussulmans beyond the frontier, the Bible, dimly understood without a teacher, has led to puritan sects like this, as to earnest inquirers like the chamberlain of Queen Candace.

The third edition of the Bengali Testament was published in 1811 in folio for the use of the native congregations by that time formed. The fourth, consisting of 5000 copies, appeared in 1816, and the eighth in 1832. The venerable scholar, like Columba at Iona over the thirty-fourth psalm, and Baeda at Jarrow over the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, said as he corrected the last sheet--the last after forty years’ faithful and delighted toil: "My work is done; I have nothing more to do but to wait the will of the Lord." The Old Testament from the Hebrew appeared in portions from 1802 to 1809. Such was the ardour of the translator, that he had finished the correction of his version of the first chapter of Genesis in January 1794. When he read it to two pundits from Nuddea, he told Fuller in his journal of that month they seemed much pleased with the account of the creation, but they objected to the omission of patala, their imaginary place beneath the earth, which they thought should have been mentioned. At this early period Carey saw the weakness of Hindooism as a pretended revelation, from its identification with false physics, just as Duff was to see and use it afterwards with tremendous effect, and wrote:--"There is a necessity of explaining to them several circumstances relative to geography and chronology, as they have many superstitious opinions on those subjects which are closely connected with their systems of idolatry." The Bengali Bible was the result of fifteen years’ sweet toil, in which Marshman read the Greek and Carey the Bengali; every one of their colleagues examined the proof sheets, and Carey finally wrote with his own pen the whole of the five octavo volumes. In the forty years of his missionary career Carey prepared and saw through the press five editions of the Old Testament and eight editions of the New in Bengali.

The Sanskrit version was translated from the original, and written out by the toiling scholar himself. Sir William Jones is said to have been able to secure his first pundit’s help only by paying him Rs. 500 a month, or £700 a year. Carey engaged and trained his many pundits at a twentieth of that sum. He well knew that the Brahmans would scorn a book in the language of the common people. "What," said one who was offered the Hindi version, "even if the books should contain divine knowledge, they are nothing to us. The knowledge of God contained in them is to us as milk in a vessel of dog’s skin, utterly polluted." But, writes the annalist of Biblical Translations in India, Carey’s Sanskrit version was cordially received by the Brahmans. Destroyed in the fire in 1812, the Old Testament historical books were again translated, and appeared in 1815. In 1827 the aged saint had strength to bring out the first volume of a thorough revision, and to leave the manuscript of the second volume, on his death, as a legacy to his successors, Yates and Wenger. Against Vedas and Upanishads, Brahmanas and Epics, he set the Sanskrit Bible.

The whole number of completely translated and published versions of the sacred Scriptures which Carey sent forth was twenty-eight. Of these seven included the whole Bible, and twenty-one contained the books of the New Testament. Each translation has a history, a spiritual romance of its own. Each became almost immediately a silent but effectual missionary to the peoples of Asia, as well as the scholarly and literary pioneer of those later editions and versions from which the native churches of farther Asia derive the materials of their lively growth.

The Ooriya version was almost the first to be undertaken after the Bengali, to which language it bears the same relation as rural Scotch to English, though it has a written character of its own. What is now the Orissa division of Bengal, separating it from Madras to the south-west, was added to the empire in 1803. This circumstance, and the fact that its Pooree district, after centuries of sun-worship and then shiva-worship, had become the high-place of the vaishnava cult of Jaganath and his car, which attracted and often slew hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year, led Carey to prepare at once for the press the Ooriya Bible. The chief pundit, Mritunjaya, skilled in both dialects, first adapted the Bengali version to the language of the Ooriyas, which was his own. Carey then took the manuscript, compared it with the original Greek, and corrected it verse by verse. The New Testament was ready in 1809, and the Old Testament in 1815, the whole in four volumes. Large editions were quickly bought up and circulated. These led to the establishment of the General Baptist Society’s missionaries at Cuttak, the capital.

In 1814 the Serampore Bible translation college, as we may call it, began the preparation of the New Testament in Maghadi, another of the languages allied to the Bengali, and derived from the Sanskrit through the Pali, because that was the vernacular of Buddhism in its original seat; an edition of 1000 copies appeared in 1824. It was intended to publish a version in the Maithili language of Bihar, which has a literature stretching back to the fourteenth century, that every class might have the Word of God in their own dialect. But Carey’s literary enthusiasm and scholarship had by this time done so much to develop and extend the power of Bengali proper, that it had begun to supersede all such dialects, except Ooriya and the northern vernaculars of the valley of the Brahmapootra. In 1810 the Serampore press added the Assamese New Testament to its achievements. In 1819 the first edition appeared, in 1826 the province became British, and in 1832 Carey had the satisfaction of issuing the Old Testament, and setting apart Mr. Rae, a Scottish soldier, who had settled there, as the first missionary at Gowhatti. To these must be added, as in the Bengali character though non-Aryan languages, versions in Khasi and Manipoori, the former for the democratic tribes of the Khasia hills among whom the Welsh Calvinists have since worked, and the latter for the curious Hindoo snake-people on the border of Burma, who have taught Europe the game of polo.

Another immediate successor of the Bengali translation was the Marathi, of which also Carey was professor in the College of Fort William. By 1804 he was himself hard at work on this version, by 1811 the first edition of the New Testament appeared, and by 1820 the Old Testament left the press. It was in a dialect peculiar to Nagpoor, and was at first largely circulated by Lieutenant Moxon in the army there. In 1812 Carey sent the missionary Aratoon to Bombay and Surat just after Henry Martyn had written that the only Christian in the city who understood his evangelical sermon was a ropemaker just arrived from England. At the same time he was busy with a version in the dialect of the Konkan, the densely-peopled coast district to the south of Bombay city, inhabited chiefly by the ablest Brahmanical race in India. In 1819 the New Testament appeared in this translation, having been under preparation at Serampore for eleven years. Thus Carey sought to turn to Christ the twelve millions of Hindoos who, from Western India above and below the great coast-range known as the Sahyadri or "delectable" mountains, had nearly wrested the whole peninsula from the Mohammedans, and had almost anticipated the life-giving rule of the British, first at Panipat and then as Assye. Meanwhile new missionaries had been taking possession of those western districts where the men of Serampore had sowed the first seed and reaped the first fruits. The charter of 1813 made it possible for the American Missionaries to land there, and for the local Bible Society to spring into existence. Dr. John Wilson and his Scottish colleagues followed them. Carey and his brethren welcomed these and retired from that field, confining themselves to providing, during the next seven years, a Goojarati version for the millions of Northern Bombay, including the hopeful Parsees, and resigning that, too, to the London Missionary Society after issuing the New Testament in 1820.

Mr. Christopher Anderson justly remarks, in his Annals of the English Bible, published half a century ago:--"Time will show, and in a very singular manner, that every version, without exception, which came from Carey’s hands, has a value affixed to it which the present generation, living as it were too near an object, is not yet able to estimate or descry. Fifty years hence the character of this extraordinary and humble man will be more correctly appreciated."

In none of the classes of languages derived from the Sanskrit was the zeal of Carey and his associates so remarkable as in the Hindi. So early as 1796 he wrote of this the most widely extended offspring of the Sanskrit:--"I have acquired so much of the Hindi as to converse in it and preach for some time intelligibly...It is the current language of all the west from Rajmahal to Delhi, and perhaps farther. With this I can be understood nearly all over Hindostan." By the time that he issued the sixth memoir of the translations Chamberlain’s experiences in North-Western India led Carey to write that he had ascertained the existence of twenty dialects of Hindi, with the same vocabulary but different sets of terminations. The Bruj or Brijbhasa Gospels were finished in 1813, two years after Chamberlain had settled in Agra, and the New Testament was completed nine years after. This version of the Gospels led the Brahman priest, Anand Masih, to Christ. In their eagerness for a copy of the Old Testament, which appeared in 1818, many Sepoys brought testimonials from their commanding officers, and in one year it led eighteen converts to Christ. The other Hindi dialects, in which the whole New Testament or the Gospels appeared, will be found at page 177. The parent Hindi translation was made by Carey with his own hand from the original languages between 1802 and 1807, and ran through many large editions till Mr. Chamberlain’s was preferred by Carey himself in 1819.

We may pass over the story of the Dravidian versions, the Telugoo20 New Testament and Pentateuch, and the Kanarese. Nor need we do more than refer to the Singhalese, "derived from the previous labours of Dr. Carey" by Tolfrey, the Persian, Malayalam, and other versions made by others, but edited or carefully carried through the press by Carey. The wonderful tale of his Bible work is well illustrated by a man who, next to the Lawrences, was the greatest Englishman who has governed the Punjab frontier, the hero of Mr. Ruskin’s book, A Knight’s Faith. In that portion of his career which Sir Herbert Edwardes gave to the world under the title of A Year on the Punjab Frontier in 1848-49, and in which he describes his bloodless conquest of the wild valley of Bunnoo, we find this gem embedded. The writer was at the time in the Gundapoor country, of which Kulachi is the trade-centre between the Afghan pass of Ghwalari and Dera Ismail Kan, where the dust of Sir Henry Durand now lies:--

"A highly interesting circumstance connected with the Indian trade came under my notice. Ali Khan, Gundapoor, the uncle of the present chief, Gooldâd Khan, told me he could remember well, as a youth, being sent by his father and elder brother with a string of Cabul horses to the fair of Hurdwâr, on the Ganges. He also showed me a Pushtoo version of the Bible, printed at Serampore in 1818, which he said had been given him thirty years before at Hurdwâr by an English gentleman, who told him to ‘take care of it, and neither fling it into the fire nor the river; but hoard it up against the day when the British should be rulers of his country!’ Ali Khan said little to anybody of his possessing this book, but put it carefully by in a linen cover, and produced it with great mystery when I came to settle the revenue of his nephew’s country, ‘thinking that the time predicted by the Englishman had arrived!’ The only person, I believe, to whom he had shown the volume was a Moolluh, who read several passages in the Old Testament, and told Ali Khan ‘it was a true story, and was all about their own Muhommudan prophets, Father Moses and Father Noah.

"I examined the book with great interest. It was not printed in the Persian character, but the common Pushtoo language of Afghanistan; and was the only specimen I had ever seen of Pushtoo reduced to writing. The accomplishment of such a translation was a highly honourable proof of the zeal and industry of the Serampore mission; and should these pages ever meet the eye of Mr. John Marshman, of Serampore,   whose own pen is consistently guided by a love of civil order and religious truth, he may probably be able to identify ‘the English gentleman’ who, thirty-two years ago on the banks of the Ganges, at the then frontier of British India, gave to a young Afghan chief, from beyond the distant Indus, a Bible in his own barbarous tongue, and foresaw the day when the followers of the ‘Son of David’ should extend their dominion to the ‘Throne of Solomon.’"

Hurdwâr, as the spot at which the Ganges debouches into the plains, is the scene of the greatest pilgrim gathering in India, especially every twelfth year. Then three millions of people used to assemble, and too often carried, all over Asia, cholera which extended to Europe. The missionaries made this, like most pilgrim resorts, a centre of preaching and Bible circulation, and doubtless it was from Thompson, Carey’s Missionary at Delhi, that this copy of the Pushtoo Bible was received. It was begun by Dr. Leyden, and continued for seven years by the same Afghan maulavee under Carey, in the Arabic character. The Punjabi Bible, nearly complete, issued first in 1815, had become so popular by 1820 as to lead Carey to report of the Sikhs that no one of the nations of India had discovered a stronger desire for the Scriptures than this hardy race. At Amritsar and Lahore "the book of Jesus is spoken of, is read, and has caused a considerable stir in the minds of the people." A Thug, asked how he could have committed so many murders, pointed to it and said, "If I had had this book I could not have done it." A fakeer, forty miles from Lodiana, read the book, founded the community of worshippers of the Sachi Pitè Isa, and suffered much persecution in a native State.

When Felix Carey returned to Serampore in 1812 to print his Burmese version of the Gospel of Matthew and his Burmese grammar, his father determined to send the press at which they were completed to Rangoon. The three missionaries despatched with it a letter to the king of Ava, commending to his care "their beloved brethren, who from love to his majesty’s subjects had voluntarily gone to place themselves under his protection, while they translated the Bible, the Book of Heaven, which was received and revered" by all the countries of Europe and America as "the source whence all the knowledge of virtue and religion was drawn." The king at once ordered from Serampore a printing-press, like that at Rangoon, for his own palace at Ava, with workmen to use it. In this Carey saw the beginning of a mission in the Burman capital, but God had other designs which the sons and daughters of America, following Judson first of all, are still splendidly developing, from Rangoon to Kareng-nee, Siam, and China. The ship containing the press sank in the Rangoon river, and the first Burmese war soon followed.

Three months after the complete and magnificent plan of translating the Bible into all the languages of the far East, which the assistance of his two colleagues and the college of Fort William led Carey to form, had been laid before Fuller in Northamptonshire, the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in London. Joseph Hughes, the Nonconformist who was its first secretary, had been moved by the need of the Welsh for the Bible in their own tongue. But the ex-Governor-General, Lord Teignmouth, became its first president, and the Serampore translators at once turned for assistance to the new organisation whose work Carey had individually been doing for ten years at the cost of his two associates and himself. The catholic Bible Society at once asked Carey’s old friend, Mr. Udny, then a member of the Government in Calcutta, to form a corresponding committee there of the three missionaries--their chaplain friends, Brown and Buchanan, and himself. The chaplains delayed the formation of the committee till 1809, but liberally helped meanwhile in the circulation of the other appeals issued from Serampore, and even made the proposal which resulted in Dr. Marshman’s wonderful version of the Bible in Chinese and Ward’s improvements in Chinese printing. To the principal tributary sovereigns of India Dr. Buchanan sent copies of the vernacular Scriptures already published.

From 1809 till 1830, or practically through the rest of Carey’s life, the co-operation of Serampore and the Bible Society was honourable to both. Carey loyally clung to it when in 1811, under the spell of Henry Martyn’s sermon on Christian India, the chaplains established the Calcutta Auxiliary Bible Society in order to supersede its corresponding committee. In the Serampore press the new auxiliary, like the parent Society, found the cheapest and best means of publishing editions of the New Testament in Singhalese, Malayalam, and Tamil. The press issued also the Persian New Testament, first of the Romanist missionary, Sebastiani--"though it be not wholly free from imperfections, it will doubtless do much good," wrote Dr. Marshman to Fuller--and then of Henry Martyn, whose assistant, Sabat, was trained at Serampore. Those three of Serampore had a Christ-like tolerance, which sprang from the divine charity of their determination to live only that the Word of God might sound out through Asia. When in 1830 this auxiliary--which had at first sought to keep all missionaries out of its executive in order to conciliate men like Sydney Smith’s brother, the Advocate-General of Bengal--refused to use the translations of Carey and Yates, and inclined to an earlier version of Ellerton, because of the translation or transliteration of the Greek words for "baptism," these two scholars acted thus, as described by the Bible Society’s annalist--they, "with a liberality which does them honour, permitted the use of their respective versions of the Bengali Scriptures, with such alterations as were deemed needful in the disputed word for ‘baptism,’ they being considered in no way parties to such alterations." From first to last the British and Foreign Bible Society, to use its own language, "had the privilege of aiding the Serampore brethren by grants, amounting to not less than £13,500." Of this £1475 had been raised by Mr. William Hey, F.R.S., a surgeon at Leeds, who had been so moved by the translation memoir of 1816 as to offer £500 for the publication of a thousand copies of every approved first translation of the New Testament into any dialect of India. It was with this assistance that most of the Hindi and the Pushtoo and Punjabi versions were produced.

The cold season of 1811-12 was one ever to be remembered. Death entered the home of each of the staff of seven missionaries and carried off wife or children. An earthquake of unusual violence alarmed the natives. Dr. Carey had buried a grandson, and was at his weekly work in the college at Calcutta. The sun had just set on the evening of the 11th March 1812, and the native typefounders, compositors, pressmen, binders, and writers had gone. Ward alone lingered in the waning light at his desk settling an account with a few servants. His two rooms formed the north end of the long printing-office.  The south rooms were filled with paper and printed materials. Close beyond was the paper-mill. The Bible-publishing enterprise was at its height. Fourteen founts of Oriental types, new supplies of Hebrew, Greek, and English types, a vast stock of paper from the Bible Society, presses, priceless manuscripts of dictionaries, grammars, and translations, and, above all, the steel punches of the Eastern letters--all were there, with the deeds and account-books of the property, and the iron safe containing notes and rupees. Suffocating smoke burst from the long type-room into the office. Rushing through it to observe the source of the fire, he was arrested at the southern rooms by the paper store. Returning with difficulty and joined by Marshman and the natives, he had every door and window closed, and then mounting the south roof, he had water poured through it upon the burning mass for four hours, with the most hopeful prospect of arresting the ruin. While he was busy with Marshman in removing the papers in the north end some one opened a window, when the air set the entire building on flame. By midnight the roof fell in along its whole length, and the column of fire leapt up towards heaven. With "solemn serenity" the members of the mission family remained seated in front of the desolation.

The ruins were still smoking when next evening Dr. Carey arrived from Calcutta, which was ringing with the sad news. The venerable scholar had suffered most, for his were the manuscripts; the steel punches were found uninjured. The Sikh and Telugoo grammars and ten Bible versions in the press were gone. Second editions of Confucius. A Dissertation on the Chinese Language, and of Ward on the Hindoos, and smaller works were destroyed. The translation of the Ramayana, on which he and Marshman had been busy for a year, was stopped for ever; fifty years after the present writer came upon some charred sheets of the fourth volume, which had been on the press and rescued. The Circular Letter for April 1812 is printed on paper scorched at the edge. Worst of all was the loss of that polyglot dictionary of all the languages derived from the Sanskrit which, if Carey had felt any of this world’s ambition, would have perpetuated his name in the first rank of philologists.

With the delicacy which always marked him Dr. Marshman had himself gone down to Calcutta next morning to break the news to Carey, who received it with choking utterance. The two then called on the friendly chaplain, Thomason, who burst into tears. When the afternoon tide enabled the three to reach Serampore, after a two hours’ hard pull at the flood, they found Ward rejoicing. He had been all day clearing away the rubbish, and had just discovered the punches and matrices unharmed. The five presses too were untouched. He had already opened out a long warehouse nearer the river-shore, the lease of which had fallen in to them, and he had already planned the occupation of that uninviting place in which the famous press of Serampore and, at the last, the Friend of India weekly newspaper found a home till 1875. The description of the scene and of its effect on Carey by an eye-witness like Thomason has a value of its own:--

"The year 1812 was ushered in by an earthquake which was preceded by a loud noise; the house shook; the oil in the lamps on the walls was thrown out; the birds made a frightful noise; the natives ran from their houses, calling on the names of their gods; the sensation is most awful; we read the forty-sixth Psalm. This fearful prodigy was succeeded by that desolating disaster, the Serampore fire. I could scarcely believe the report; it was like a blow on the head which stupefies. I flew to Serampore to witness the desolation. The scene was indeed affecting. The immense printing-office, two hundred feet long and fifty broad, reduced to a mere shell. The yard covered with burnt quires of paper, the loss in which article was immense. Carey walked with me over the smoking ruins. The tears stood in his eyes. ‘In one short evening,’ said he, ‘the labours of years are consumed. How unsearchable are the ways of God! I had lately brought some things to the utmost perfection of which they seemed capable, and contemplated the missionary establishment with perhaps too much self-congratulation. The Lord has laid me low, that I may look more simply to Him.’ Who could stand in such a place, at such a time, with such a man, without feelings of sharp regret and solemn exercise of mind. I saw the ground strewed with half-consumed paper, on which in the course of a very few months the words of life would have been printed. The metal under our feet amidst the ruins was melted into misshapen lumps--the sad remains of beautiful types consecrated to the service of the sanctuary. All was smiling and promising a few hours before--now all is vanished into smoke or converted into rubbish! Return now to thy books, regard God in all thou doest. Learn Arabic with humility. Let God be exalted in all thy plans, and purposes, and labours; He can do without thee.

Carey himself thus wrote of the disaster to Dr. Ryland:--"25th March 1812.--The loss is very great, and will long be severely felt; yet I can think of a hundred circumstances which would have made it much more difficult to bear. The Lord has smitten us, he had a right to do so, and we deserve his corrections. I wish to submit to His sovereign will, nay, cordially to acquiesce therein, and to examine myself rigidly to see what in me has contributed to this evil.

"I now, however, turn to the bright side; and here I might mention what still remains to us, and the merciful circumstances which attend even this stroke of God’s rod; but I will principally notice what will tend to cheer the heart of every one who feels for the cause of God. Our loss, so far as I can see, is reparable in a much shorter time than I should at first have supposed. The Tamil fount of types was the first that we began to recast. I expect it will be finished by the end of this week, just a fortnight after it was begun. The next will be the small Devanagari, for the Hindostani Scriptures, and next the larger for the Sanskrit. I hope this will be completed in another month. The other founts, viz., Bengali, Orissa, Sikh, Telinga, Singhalese, Mahratta, Burman, Kashmeerian, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese, will follow in order, and will probably be finished in six or seven months, except the Chinese, which will take more than a year to replace it. I trust, therefore, that we shall not be greatly delayed. Our English works will be delayed the longest; but in general they are of the least importance. Of MSS. burnt I have suffered the most; that is, what was actually prepared by me, and what owes its whole revision for the press to me, comprise the principal part of the MSS. consumed. The ground must be trodden over again, but no delay in printing need arise from that. The translations are all written out first by pundits in the different languages, except the Sanskrit which is dictated by me to an amanuensis. The Sikh, Mahratta, Hindostani, Orissa, Telinga, Assam, and Kurnata are re-translating in rough by pundits who have been long accustomed to their work, and have gone over the ground before. I follow them in revise, the chief part of which is done as the sheets pass through the press, and is by far the heaviest part of the work. Of the Sanskrit only the second book of Samuel and the first book of Kings were lost. Scarcely any of the Orissa, and none of the Kashmeerian or of the Burman MSS. were lost--copy for about thirty pages of my Bengali dictionary, the whole copy of a Telinga grammar, part of the copy of the grammar of Punjabi or Sikh language, and all the materials which I had been long collecting for a dictionary of all the languages derived from the Sanskrit. I hope, however, to be enabled to repair the loss, and to complete my favourite scheme, if my life be prolonged."

Little did these simple scholars, all absorbed in their work, dream that this fire would prove to be the means of making them and their work famous all over Europe and America as well as India. Men of every Christian school, and men interested only in the literary and secular side of their enterprise, had their active sympathy called out. The mere money loss, at the exchange of the day, was not under ten thousand pounds. In fifty days this was raised in England and Scotland alone, till Fuller, returning from his last campaign, entered the room of his committee, declaring "we must stop the contributions." In Greenock, for instance, every place of worship on one Sunday collected money. In the United States Mr. Robert Ralston, a Presbyterian, a merchant of Philadelphia, who as Carey’s correspondent had been the first American layman to help missions to India, and Dr. Staughton, who had taken an interest in the formation of the Society in 1792 before he emigrated, had long assisted the translation work, and now that Judson was on his way out they redoubled their exertions. In India Thomason’s own congregation sent the missionaries £800, and Brown wrote from his dying bed a message of loving help. The newspapers of Calcutta caught the enthusiasm; one leading article concluded with the assurance that the Serampore press would, "like the phoenix of antiquity, rise from its ashes, winged with new strength, and destined, in a lofty and long-enduring flight, widely to diffuse the benefits of knowledge throughout the East." The day after the fire ceased to smoke Monohur was at the task of casting type from the lumps of the molten metal.

In two months after the first intelligence Fuller was able to send as "feathers of the phoenix" slips of sheets of the Tamil Testament, printed from these types, to the towns and churches which had subscribed. Every fortnight a fount was cast; in a month all the native establishment was at work night and day. In six months the whole loss in Oriental types was repaired. The Ramayana version and Sanskrit polyglot dictionary were never resumed. But of the Bible translations and grammars, Carey and his two heroic brethren wrote:--"We found, on making the trial, that the advantages in going over the same ground a second time were so great that they fully counter-balanced the time requisite to be devoted thereto in a second translation." The fire, in truth, the cause of which was never discovered, and insurance against which did not exist in India, had given birth to revised editions.

Chapter 11: What Carey Did For Literature And For Humanity

The growth of a language--Carey identified with the transition stage of Bengali--First printed books--Carey’s own works--His influence on indigenous writers--His son’s works--Bengal the first heathen country to receive the press--The first Bengali newspaper--The monthly and quarterly Friend of India--The Hindoo revival of the eighteenth century fostered by the East India Company--Carey’s three memorials to Government on female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and widow-burning--What Jonathan Duncan and Col. Walker had done--Wellesley’s regulation to prevent the sacrifice of children--Beginning of the agitation against the Suttee crime--Carey’s pundits more enlightened than the Company’s judges--Humanity triumphs in 1832--Carey’s share in Ward’s book on the Hindoos--The lawless supernaturalism of Rome and of India--Worship of Jaganath--Regulation identifying Government with Hindooism--The swinging festival--Ghat murders--Burning of lepers--Carey establishes the Leper Hospital in Calcutta--Slavery in India loses its legal status--Cowper, Clarkson, and Carey.

LIKE the growth of a tree is the development of a language, as really and as strictly according to law. In savage lands like those of Africa the missionary finds the living germs of speech, arranges them for the first time in grammatical order, expresses them in written and printed form, using the simplest, most perfect, and most universal character of all--the Roman, and at one bound gives the most degraded of the dark peoples the possibility of the highest civilisation and the divinest future. In countries like India and China, where civilisation has long ago reached its highest level, and has been declining for want of the salt of a universal Christianity, it is the missionary again who interferes for the highest ends, but by a different process. Mastering the complex classical speech and literature of the learned and priestly class, and living with his Master’s sympathy among the people whom that class oppresses, he takes the popular dialects which are instinct with the life of the future; where they are wildly luxuriant he brings them under law, where they are barren he enriches them from the parent stock so as to make them the vehicle of ideas such as Greek gave to Europe, and in time he brings to the birth nations worthy of the name by a national language and literature lighted up with the ideas of the Book which he is the first to translate.

This was what Carey did for the speech of the Bengalees. To them, as the historians of the fast approaching Christian future will recognise, he was made what the Saxon Boniface had become to the Germans, or the Northumbrian Baeda and Wyclif to the English. The transition period of English, from 1150 when its modern grammatical form prevailed, to the fifteenth century when the rich dialects gave place to the literary standard, has its central date in 1362. Then Edward the Third made English take the place of French as the public language of justice and legislation, closely followed by Wyclif’s English Bible. Carey’s one Indian life of forty years marks the similar transition stage of Bengali, including the parallel regulation of 1829, which abolished Persian, made by the Mohammedan conquerors the language of the courts, and put in its place Bengali and the vernaculars of the other provinces.

When Carey began to work in Calcutta and Dinapoor in 1792-93 Bengali had no printed and hardly any written literature. The very written characters were justly described by Colebrooke as nothing else but the difficult and beautiful Sanskrit Devanagari deformed for the sake of expeditious writings, such as accounts. It was the new vaishnava faith of the Nuddea reformer Chaitanya which led to the composition of the first Bengali prose.   The Brahmans and the Mohammedan rulers alike treated Bengali--though "it arose from the tomb of the Sanskrit," as Italian did from Latin under Dante’s inspiration--as fit only for "demons and women." In the generation before Carey there flourished at the same Oxford of India, as Nuddea has been called, Raja Krishna Rai, who did for Bengali what our own King Alfred accomplished for English prose. Moved, however, chiefly by a zeal for Hindooism, which caused him to put a Soodra to death for marrying into a Brahman family, he himself wrote the vernacular and spent money in gifts, which "encouraged the people to study Bengali with unusual diligence." But when, forty years after that, Carey visited Nuddea he could not discover more than forty separate works, all in manuscript, as the whole literature of 30,000,000 of people up to that time. A press had been at work on the opposite side of the river for fifteen years, but Halhed’s grammar was still the only as it was the most ancient printed book. One Baboo Ram, from Upper India, was the first native who established a press in Calcutta, and that only under the influence of Colebrooke, to print the Sanskrit classics. The first Bengali who, on his own account, printed works in the vernacular on trade principles, was Gunga Kishore, whom Carey and Ward had trained at Serampore. He soon made so large a fortune by his own press that three native rivals had sprung up by 1820, when twenty-seven separate books, or 15,000 copies, had been sold to natives within ten years.

For nearly all these Serampore supplied the type. But all were in another sense the result of Carey’s action. His first edition of the Bengali New Testament appeared in 1801, his Grammar in the same year, and at the same time his Colloquies, or "dialogues intended to facilitate the acquiring of the Bengali language," which he wrote out of the abundance of his knowledge of native thought, idioms, and even slang, to enable students to converse with all classes of society, as Erasmus had done in another way. His Dictionary of 80,000 words began to appear in 1815. Knowing, however, that in the long run the literature of a nation must be of indigenous growth, he at once pressed the natives into this service. His first pundit, Ram Basu, was a most accomplished Bengali scholar. This able man, who lacked the courage to profess Christ in the end, wrote the first tract, the Gospel Messenger, and the first pamphlet exposing Hindooism, both of which had an enormous sale and caused much excitement. On the historical side Carey induced him to publish in 1801 the Life of Raja Pratapaditya, the last king of Sagar Island. At first the new professor could not find reading books for his Bengali class in the college of Fort William. He, his pundits, especially Mritunjaya who has been compared in his physique and knowledge to Dr. Samuel Johnson, and even the young civilian students, were for many years compelled to write Bengali text-books, including translations of Virgil’s Æneid and Shakspere’s Tempest. The School Book Society took up the work, encouraging such a man as Ram Komal Sen, the printer who became chief native official of the Bank of Bengal and father of the late Keshab Chunder Sen, to prepare his Bengali dictionary. Self-interest soon enlisted the haughtiest Brahmans in the work of producing school and reading books, till now the Bengali language is to India what the Italian is to Europe, and its native literature is comparatively as rich. Nor was Carey without his European successor in the good work for a time. When his son Felix died in 1823 he was bewailed as the coadjutor of Ram Komal Sen, as the author of the first volume of a Bengali encyclopædia on anatomy, as the translator of Bunyan’s Pilgrim, Goldsmith’s History of England, and Mill’s History of India.

Literature cannot be said to exist for the people till the newspaper appears. Bengal was the first non-Christian country into which the press had ever been introduced. Above all forms of truth and faith Christianity seeks free discussion; in place of that the missionaries lived under a shackled press law tempered by the higher instincts of rulers like Wellesley, Hastings, and Bentinck, till Macaulay and Metcalfe gained for it liberty. When Dr. Marshman in 1818 proposed the publication of a Bengali periodical, Dr. Carey, impressed by a quarter of a century’s intolerance, consented only on the condition that it should be a monthly magazine, and should avoid political discussion. Accordingly the Dig-darshan appeared, anticipating in its contents and style the later Penny and Saturday Magazines, and continued for three years. Its immediate success led to the issue from the Serampore press on the 31st May 1818, of "the first newspaper ever printed in any Oriental language"--the Samachar Darpan, or News Mirror.

It was a critical hour when the first proof of the first number was laid before the assembled brotherhood at the weekly meeting on Friday evening. Dr. Carey, fearing for his spiritual work, but eager for this new avenue to the minds of the people who were being taught to read, and had little save their own mythology, consented to its publication when Dr. Marshman promised to send a copy, with an analysis of its contents in English, to the Government, and to stop the enterprise if it should be officially disapproved. Lord Hastings was fighting the Pindarees, and nothing was said by his Council. On his return he declared that "the effect of such a paper must be extensively and importantly useful." He allowed it to circulate by post at one-fourth the then heavy rate. The natives welcomed their first newspaper. Although it avoided religious controversy, in a few weeks an opposition journal was issued by a native, who sought to defend Hindooism under the title of the Destroyer of Darkness. To the Darpan the educated natives looked as the means of bringing the oppression of their own countrymen to the knowledge of the public and the authorities. Government found it most useful for contradicting silly rumours and promoting contentment if not loyalty. The paper gave a new development to the Bengali language as well as to the moral and political education of the people.

The same period of liberty to the press and to native advancement, with which the names of the Marquis of Hastings and his accomplished wife will ever be associated, saw the birth of an English periodical which, for the next fifty-seven years, was to become not merely famous but powerfully useful as the Friend of India. The title was the selection of Dr. Marshman, and the editorial management was his and his able son’s down to 1852, when it passed into the hands of Mr. Meredith Townsend, long the most brilliant of English journalists, and finally into those of the present writer. For some years a monthly and for a time a quarterly magazine till 1835, when Mr. John Marshman made it the well-known weekly, this journal became the means through which Carey and the brotherhood fought the good fight of humanity. In the monthly and quarterly Friend, moreover, reprinted as much of it was in London, the three philanthropists brought their ripe experience and lofty principles to bear on the conscience of England and of educated India alike. As, on the Oriental side, Carey chose for his weapon the vernacular, on the other he drew from Western sources the principles and the thoughts which he clothed in a Bengali dress.

We have already seen how Carey at the end of the eighteenth century found Hindooism at its worst. Steadily had the Pooranic corruption and the Brahmanical oppression gone on demoralising the whole of Hindoo society. In the period of virtual anarchy, which covered the seventy-five years from the death of Aurangzeb to the supremacy of Warren Hastings and the reforms of Lord Cornwallis, the healthy zeal of Islam against the idolatrous abominations of the Hindoos had ceased. In its place there was not only a wild licence amounting to an undoubted Hindoo revival, marked on the political side by the Maratha ascendency, but there came to be deliberate encouragement of the worst forms of Hindooism by the East India Company and its servants. That "the mischievous reaction" on England from India--its idolatry, its women, its nabobs, its wealth, its absolutism--was prevented, and European civilisation was "after much delay and hesitation" brought to bear on India, was due indeed to the legislation of Governor-Generals from Cornwallis to Bentinck, but much more, to the persistent agitation of Christian missionaries, notably Carey and Duff. For years Carey stood alone in India, as Grant and Wilberforce did in England, in the darkest hour of England’s moral degradation and spiritual death, when the men who were shaping the destinies of India were the Hindooising Stewarts and Youngs, Prendergasts, Twinings, and Warings, some of whom hated missions from the dread of sedition, others because their hearts "seduced by fair idolatresses had fallen to idols foul."

The most atrociously inhuman of all the Brahmanical customs, and yet the most universal, from the land of the five rivers at Lahore to the far spice islands at Bali, was the murder of widows by burning or burying them alive with the husband’s corpse. We have seen how the first of the many such scenes which he was doomed to witness for the next thirty years affected Carey. After remonstrances, which the people met first by argument and then by surly threats, Carey wrote:--"I told them I would not go, that I was determined to stay and see the murder, and that I should certainly bear witness of it at the tribunal of God." And when he again sought to interfere because the two stout bamboos always fixed for the purpose of preventing the victim’s escape were pressed down on the shrieking woman like levers, and they persisted, he wrote: "We could not bear to see more, but left them exclaiming loudly against the murder and full of horror at what we had seen." The remembrance of that sight never left Carey. His naturally cheerful spirit was inflamed to indignation all his life through, till his influence, more than that of any other one man, at last prevailed to put out for ever the murderous pyre. Had Lord Wellesley remained Governor-General a year longer Carey would have succeeded in 1808, instead of having to wait till 1829, and to know as he waited and prayed that literally every day saw the devilish smoke ascending along the banks of the Ganges, and the rivers and pools considered sacred by the Hindoos. Need we wonder that when on a Sunday morning the regulation of Lord William Bentinck prohibiting the crime reached him as he was meditating his sermon, he sent for another to do the preaching, and taking his pen in his hand, at once wrote the official translation, and had it issued in the Bengali Gazette that not another day might be added to the long black catalogue of many centuries?

On the return of the Marquis Wellesley to Calcutta from the Tipoo war, and his own appointment to the College of Fort William, Carey felt that his time had come to prevent the murder of the innocents all over India in the three forms of female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and widow-burning or burying alive. His old friend, Udny, having become a member of Council or colleague of the Governor-General, he prepared three memorials to Government on each of these crimes. When afterwards he had enlisted Claudius Buchanan in the good work, and had employed trustworthy natives to collect statistics proving that in the small district around Calcutta 275 widow murders thus took place in six months of 1803, and when he was asked by Dr. Ryland to state the facts which, with his usual absence of self-regarding, he had not reported publicly, or even in letters home, he thus replied:--

"27th April 1808.--The report of the burning of women, and some others, however, were made by me. I, at his expense, however, made the inquiries and furnished the reports, and believe they are rather below the truth than above it. I have, since I have been here, through a different medium, presented three petitions or representations to Government for the purpose of having the burning of women and other modes of murder abolished, and have succeeded in the case of infanticide and voluntary drowning in the river. Laws were made to prevent these, which have been successful."

But there was a crime nearer home, committed in the river flowing past his own door, and especially at Sagar Island, where the Ganges loses itself in the ocean. At that tiger-haunted spot, shivering in the cold of the winter solstice, every year multitudes of Hindoos, chiefly wives with children and widows with heavy hearts, assembled to wash away their sins--to sacrifice the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul. Since 1794, when Thomas and he had found in a basket hanging on a tree the bones of an infant exposed, to be devoured by the white ants, by some mother too poor to go on pilgrimage to a sacred river-spot, Carey had known this unnatural horror. He and his brethren had planned a preaching tour to Sagar, where not only mothers drowned their first born in payment of a vow, with the encouragement of the Brahmans, but widows and even men walked into the deep sea and drowned themselves at the spot where Ganga and Sagar kiss each other, "as the highest degree of holiness, and as securing immediate heaven." The result of Carey’s memorial was the publication of the Regulation for preventing the sacrifice of children at Sagar and other places on the Ganges:--"It has been represented to the Governor-General in Council that a criminal and inhuman practice of sacrificing children, by exposing them to be drowned or devoured by sharks, prevails...Children thrown into the sea at Sagar have not been generally rescued...but the sacrifice has been effected with circumstances of peculiar atrocity in some instances. This practice is not sanctioned by the Hindoo law, nor countenanced by the religious orders." It was accordingly declared to be murder, punishable with death. At each pilgrim gathering sepoys were stationed to check the priests and the police, greedy of bribes, and to prevent fanatical suicides as well as superstitious murders.

The practice of infanticide was really based on the recommendation of Sati, literally the "method of purity" which the Hindoo shastras require when they recommend the bereaved wife to burn with her husband. Surely, reasoned the Rajpoots, we may destroy a daughter by abortion, starvation, suffocation, strangulation, or neglect, of whose marriage in the line of caste and dignity of family there is little prospect, if a widow may be burned to preserve her chastity!

In answer to Carey’s third memorial Lord Wellesley took the first step, on 5th February 1805, in the history of British India, two centuries after Queen Elizabeth had given the Company its mercantile charter, and half a century after Plassey had given it political power, to protect from murder the widows who had been burned alive, at least since the time of Alexander the Great. This was the first step in the history of British but not of Mohammedan India, for our predecessors had by decree forbidden and in practice discouraged the crime. Lord Wellesley’s colleagues were still the good Udny, the great soldier Lord Lake and Sir George Barlow. The magistrate of Bihar had on his own authority prevented a child-widow of twelve, when drugged by the Brahmans, from being burned alive, after which, he wrote, "the girl and her friends were extremely grateful for my interposition." Taking advantage of this case, the Government asked the appellate judges, all Company’s servants, to "ascertain how far the practice is founded on the religious opinions of the Hindoos. If not founded on any precept of their law, the Governor-General in Council hopes that the custom may gradually, if not immediately, be altogether abolished. If, however, the entire abolition should appear to the Court to be impracticable in itself, or inexpedient, as offending any established religious opinion of the Hindoos," the Court were desired to consider the best means of preventing the abuses, such as the use of drugs and the sacrifice of those of immature age. But the preamble of this reference to the judges declared it to be one of the fundamental principles of the British Government to consult the religious opinions of the natives, "consistently with the principles of morality, reason, and humanity." There spoke Carey and Udny, and Wellesley himself. But for another quarter of a century the funeral pyres were to blaze with the living also, because that caveat was set aside, that fundamental maxim of the constitution of much more than the British Government--of the conscience of humanity, was carefully buried up. The judges asked the pundits whether the woman is "enjoined" by the shaster voluntarily to burn herself with the body of her husband. They replied "every woman of the four castes is permitted to burn herself," except in certain cases enumerated, and they quoted Manoo, who is against the custom in so far as he says that a virtuous wife ascends to heaven if she devotes herself to pious austerities after the decease of her lord.

This opinion would have been sufficient to give the requisite native excuse to Government for the abolition, but the Nizamat Adawlat judges urged the "principle" of "manifesting every possible indulgence to the religious opinions and prejudices of the natives," ignoring morality, reason, and humanity alike. Lord Wellesley’s long and brilliant administration of eight years was virtually at an end: in seven days he was to embark for home. The man who had preserved the infants from the sharks of Sagar had to leave the widows and their children to be saved by the civilians Carey and he had personally trained, Metcalfe and Bayley, who by 1829 had risen to Council and become colleagues of Lord W. Bentinck. But Lord Wellesley did this much, he declined to notice the so-called "prohibitory regulations" recommended by the civilian judges. These, when adopted in the year 1812, made the British Government responsible by legislation for every murder thereafter, and greatly increased the number of murders. From that date the Government of India decided "to allow the practice," as recognised and encouraged by the Hindoo religion, except in cases of compulsion, drugging, widows under sixteen, and proved pregnancy. The police--natives--were to be present, and to report every case. At the very time the British Parliament were again refusing in the charter discussions of 1813 for another twenty years to tolerate Christianity in its Eastern dependency, the Indian legislature legalised the burning and burying alive of widows, who numbered at least 6000 in nine only of the next sixteen years, from 1815 to 1823 inclusive.

From Plassey in 1757 to 1829, three quarters of a century, Christian England was responsible, at first indirectly and then most directly, for the known immolation of at least 70,000 Hindoo widows. Carey was the first to move the authorities; Udny and Wellesley were the first to begin action against an atrocity so long continued and so atrocious. While the Governor-Generals and their colleagues passed away, Carey and his associates did not cease to agitate in India and to stir up Wilberforce and the evangelicals in England, till the victory was gained. The very first number of the Friend of India published their essay on the burning of widows, which was thereafter quoted on both sides of the conflict, as "a powerful and convincing statement of the real facts and circumstances of the case," in Parliament and elsewhere. Nor can we omit to record the opinion of Carey’s chief pundit, with whom he spent hours every day as a fellow-worker. The whole body of law-pundits wrote of Sati as only "permitted." Mritunjaya, described as the head jurist of the College of Fort William and the Supreme Court, decided that, according to Hindooism, a life of mortification is the law for a widow. At best burning is only an alternative for mortification, and no alternative can have the force of direct law. But in former ages nothing was ever heard of the practice, it being peculiar to a later and more corrupt era. "A woman’s burning herself from the desire of connubial bliss ought to be rejected with abhorrence," wrote this colossus of pundits. Yet before he was believed, or the higher law was enforced, as it has ever since been even in our tributary States, mothers had burned with sons, and forty wives, many of them sisters, at a time, with polygamous husbands. Lepers and the widows of the devotee class had been legally buried alive. Magistrates, who were men like Metcalfe, never ceased to prevent widow-murder on any pretext, wherever they might be placed, in defiance of their own misguided Government.

Though from 4th December 1829--memorable date, to be classed with that on which soon after 800,000 slaves were set free--"the Ganges flowed unblooded to the sea" for the first time, the fight lasted a little longer. The Calcutta "orthodox" formed a society to restore their right of murdering their widows, and found English lawyers ready to help them in an appeal to the Privy Council under an Act of Parliament of 1797. The Darpan weekly did good service in keeping the mass of the educated natives right on the subject. The Privy Council, at which Lord Wellesley and Charles Grant, venerable in years and character, were present, heard the case for two days, and on 24th June 1832 dismissed the petition!

Though the greatest, this was only one of the crimes against humanity and morality which Carey opposed all his life with a practical reasonableness till he saw the public opinion he had done so much to create triumph. He knew the people of India, their religious, social, and economic condition, as no Englishman before him had done. He stood between them and their foreign Government at the beginning of our intimate contact with all classes as detailed administrators and rulers. The outcome of his peculiar experience is to be found not only in the writings published under his own name but in the great book of his colleague William Ward, every page of which passed under his careful correction as well as under the more general revision of Henry Martyn. Except for the philosophy of Hindooism, the second edition of A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos, including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Principal Works, published in 1818 in two quarto volumes, stands unrivalled as the best authority on the character and daily life and beliefs of the 200,000,000 to whom Great Britain had been made a terrestrial providence, till Christianity teaches them to govern themselves and to become to the rest of Asia missionaries of nobler truth than that wherewith their Buddhist fathers covered China and the farther East.

All the crimes against humanity with which the history of India teems, down to the Mutiny and the records of our courts and tributary states at this hour, are directly traceable to lawless supernaturalism like that of the civilised world before the triumph of Christianity. In nothing does England’s administration of India resemble Rome’s government of its provinces in the seven centuries from the reduction of Sicily, 240 B.C., to the fall of the Western Empire, 476 A.D., so much as in the relation of nascent Christianity to the pagan cults which had made society what it was. Carey and the brotherhood stood alone in facing, in fighting with divine weapons, in winning the first victories over the secular as well as spiritual lawlessness which fell before Paul and his successors down to Augustine and his City of God. The gentle and reasonable but none the less divinely indignant father of modern missions brings against Hindoo and Mohammedan society accusations no more railing than those in the opening passage of the Epistle to the Romans, and he brings these only that, following Paul, he may declare the more excellent way.

As Serampore, or its suburbs, is the most popular centre of Jaganath worship next to Pooree in Orissa, the cruelty and oppression which marked the annual festival were ever before the missionaries’ eyes. In 1813 we find Dr. Claudius Buchanan establishing his veracity as an eye-witness of the immolation of drugged or voluntary victims under the idol car, by this quotation from Dr. Carey, whom he had to describe at that time to his English readers, as a man of unquestionable integrity, long held in estimation by the most respectable characters in Bengal, and possessing very superior opportunities of knowing what is passing in India generally: "Idolatry destroys more than the sword, yet in a way which is scarcely perceived. The numbers who die in their long pilgrimages, either through want or fatigue, or from dysenteries and fevers caught by lying out, and want of accommodation, is incredible. I only mention one idol, the famous Juggernaut in Orissa, to which twelve or thirteen pilgrimages are made every year. It is calculated that the number who go thither is, on some occasions, 600,000 persons, and scarcely ever less than 100,000. I suppose, at the lowest calculation, that in the year 1,200,000 persons attend. Now, if only one in ten died, the mortality caused by this one idol would be 120,000 in a year; but some are of opinion that not many more than one in ten survive and return home again. Besides these, I calculate that 10,000 women annually burn with the bodies of their deceased husbands, and the multitudes destroyed in other methods would swell the catalogue to an extent almost exceeding credibility."

After we had taken Orissa from the Marathas the priests of Jaganath declared that the night before the conquest the god had made known its desire to be under British protection. This was joyfully reported to Lord Wellesley’s Government by the first British commissioner. At once a regulation was drafted vesting the shrine and the increased pilgrim-tax in the Christian officials. This Lord Wellesley indignantly refused to sanction, and it was passed by Sir George Barlow in spite of the protests of Carey’s friend, Udny. In Conjeeveram a Brahmanised civilian named Place had so early as 1796 induced Government to undertake the payment of the priests and prostitutes of the temples, under the phraseology of "churchwardens" and "the management of the church funds." Even before the Madras iniquity, the pilgrims to Gaya from 1790, if not before, paid for authority to offer funeral cakes to the manes of their ancestors and to worship Vishnoo under the official seal and signature of the English Collector. Although Charles Grant’s son, Lord Glenelg, when President of the Board of Control in 1833, ordered, as Theodosius had done on the fall of pagan idolatry in A.D. 390, that "in all matters relating to their temples, their worship, their festivals, their religious practices, their ceremonial observances, our native subjects be left entirely to themselves," the identification of Government with Hindooism was not completely severed till a recent period.

The Charak, or swinging festival, has been frequently witnessed by the present writer in Calcutta itself. The orgie has been suppressed by the police in great cities, although it has not ceased in the rural districts. In 1814 the brotherhood thus wrote home:--

"This abominable festival was held, according to the annual custom, on the last day of the Hindoo year. There were fewer gibbet posts erected at Serampore, but we hear that amongst the swingers was one female. A man fell from a stage thirty cubits high and broke his back; and another fell from a swinging post, but was not much hurt. Some days after the first swinging, certain natives revived the ceremonies. As Mr. Ward was passing through Calcutta he saw several Hindoos hanging by the heels over a slow fire, as an act of devotion. Several Hindoos employed in the printing-office applied this year to Mr. Ward for protection, to escape being dragged into these pretendedly voluntary practices. This brought before us facts which we were not aware of. It seems that the landlords of the poor and other men of property insist upon certain of their tenants and dependants engaging in these practices, and that they expect and compel by actual force multitudes every year to join the companies of sunyassees in parading the streets, piercing their sides, tongues, etc. To avoid this compulsion, many poor young men leave their houses and hide themselves; but they are sure of being beaten if caught, or of having their huts pulled down. The influence and power of the rich have a great effect on the multitude in most of the idolatrous festivals. When the lands and riches of the country were in few hands, this influence carried all before it. It is still very widely felt, in compelling dependants to assist at public shows, and to contribute towards the expense of splendid ceremonies.

The Ghat murders, caused by the carrying of the dying to the Ganges or a sacred river, and their treatment there, continue to this day, although Lord Lawrence attempted to interfere. Ward estimated the number of sick whose death is hastened on the banks of the Ganges alone at five hundred a year, in his anxiety to "use no unfair means of rendering even idolatry detestable," but he admits that, in the opinion of others, this estimate is far below the truth. We believe, from our own recent experience, that still it fails to give any just idea of the destruction of parents by children in the name of religion.

One class who had been the special objects of Christ’s healing power and divine sympathy was specially interesting to Carey in proportion to their misery and abandonment by their own people--lepers. When at Cutwa in 1812, where his son was stationed as missionary, he saw the burning of a leper, which he thus described:--"A pit about ten cubits in depth was dug and a fire placed at the bottom of it. The poor man rolled himself into it; but instantly, on feeling the fire, begged to be taken out, and struggled hard for that purpose. His mother and sister, however, thrust him in again; and thus a man, who to all appearance might have survived several years, was cruelly burned to death. I find that the practice is not uncommon in these parts. Taught that a violent end purifies the body and ensures transmigration into a healthy new existence, while natural death by disease results in four successive births, and a fifth as a leper again, the leper, like the even more wretched widow, has always courted suicide." Carey did not rest until he had brought about the establishment of a leper hospital in Calcutta, near what became the centre of the Church Missionary Society’s work, and there benevolent physicians, like the late Dr. Kenneth Stuart, and Christian people, have made it possible to record, as in Christ’s days, that the leper is cleansed and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.

By none of the many young civilians whom he trained, or, in the later years of his life, examined, was Carey’s humane work on all its sides more persistently carried out than by John Lawrence in the Punjab. When their new ruler first visited their district, the Bedi clan amazed him by petitioning for leave to destroy their infant daughters. In wrath he briefly told them he would hang every man found guilty of such murder. When settling the land revenue of the Cis-Sutlej districts he caused each farmer, as he touched the pen in acceptance of the assessment, to recite this formula--

"Bewa mat jaláo,

Beti mat máro,

Korhi mat dabao"

("Thou shalt not burn thy widow, thou shalt not kill thy daughters, thou shalt not bury thy lepers.")

From the hour of Carey’s conversion he never omitted to remember in prayer the slave as well as the heathen. The same period which saw his foundation of modern missions witnessed the earliest efforts of his contemporary, Thomas Clarkson of Wisbeach, in the neighbouring county of Cambridge, to free the slave. But Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and their associates were so occupied with Africa that they knew not that Great Britain was responsible for the existence of at least nine millions of slaves in India, many of them brought by Hindoo merchants as well as Arabs from Eastern Africa to fill the hareems of Mohammedans, and do domestic service in the zananas of Hindoos. The startling fact came to be known only slowly towards the end of Carey’s career, when his prayers, continued daily from 1779, were answered in the freedom of all our West India slaves. The East India answer came after he had passed away, in Act V. of 1843, which for ever abolished the legal status of slavery in India. The Penal Code has since placed the prædial slave in such a position that if he is not free it is his own fault. It is penal in India to hold a slave "against his will," and we trust the time is not far distant when the last three words may be struck out.

With true instinct Christopher Anderson, in his Annals of the English Bible, associates Carey, Clarkson, and Cowper, as the triumvirate who, unknown to each other, began the great moral changes, in the Church, in society, and in literature, which mark the difference between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Little did Carey think, as he studied under Sutcliff within sight of the poet’s house, that Cowper was writing at that very time these lines in The Task while he himself was praying for the highest of all kinds of liberty to be given to the heathen and the slaves, Christ’s freedom which had up till then remained

"...unsung

By poets, and by senators unpraised,

Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the powers

Of earth and hell confederate take away;

A liberty which persecution, fraud,

Oppression, prisons, have no power to bind:

Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more."

Chapter 12: What Carey Did For Science--Founder Of The Agricultural And Horticultural Society Of India

Carey’s relation to science and economics--State of the peasantry--Carey a careful scientific observer--Specially a botanist--Becomes the friend of Dr. Roxburgh of the Company’s Botanic Garden--Orders seeds and instruments of husbandry--All his researches subordinate to his spiritual mission--His eminence as a botanist acknowledged in the history of the science--His own botanic garden and park at Serampore--The poet Montgomery on the daisies there--Borneo--Carey’s paper in the Asiatic Researches on the state of agriculture in Bengal--The first to advocate Forestry in India--Founds the Agri-Horticultural Society of India--Issues queries on agriculture and horticulture--Remarkable results of his action--On the manufacture of paper--His expanded address on agricultural reform--His political foresight on the importance of European capital and the future of India--An official estimate of the results in the present day--On the usury of the natives and savings banks--His academic and scientific honours--Destruction of his house and garden by the Damoodar flood of 1823--Report on the Horticultural Society’s garden--The Society honours its founder.

NOT only was the first Englishman, who in modern times became a missionary, sent to India when he desired to go to Tahiti or West Africa; and sent to Bengal from which all Northern India was to be brought under British rule; and to Calcutta--with a safe asylum at Danish Serampore--then the metropolis and centre of all Southern Asia; but he was sent at the very time when the life of the people could best be purified and elevated on its many sides, and he was specially fitted to influence each of these sides save one. An ambassador for Christ above all things like Paul, but, also like him, becoming all things to all men that he might win some to the higher life, Carey was successively, and often at the same time, a captain of labour, a schoolmaster, a printer, the developer of the vernacular speech, the expounder of the classical language, the translator of both into English and of the English Bible into both, the founder of a pure literature, the purifier of society, the watchful philanthropist, the saviour of the widow and the fatherless, of the despairing and the would-be suicide, of the downtrodden and oppressed. We have now to see him on the scientific or the physical and economic side, while he still jealously keeps his strength for the one motive power of all, the spiritual, and with almost equal care avoids the political or administrative as his Master did. But even then it was his aim to proclaim the divine principles which would use science and politics alike to bring nations to the birth, while, like the apostles, leaving the application of these principles to the course of God’s providence and the consciences of men. In what he did for science, for literature, and for humanity, as in what he abstained from doing in the practical region of public life, the first English missionary was an example to all of every race who have followed him in the past century. From Carey to Livingstone, alike in Asia and Africa, the greatest Christian evangelists have been those who have made science and literature the handmaids of missions.

Apart from the extreme south of the peninsula of India, where the Danish missionaries had explored with hawk’s eyes, almost nothing was known of its plants and animals, its men, as well as its beasts, when Carey found himself in a rural district of North Bengal in the closing decade of the eighteenth century. Nor had any writer, official or missionary, anywhere realised the state of India and the needs of the Hindoo and Mohammedan cultivators as flowing from the relation of the people to the soil. India was in truth a land of millions of peasant proprietors on five-acre farms, rack-rented or plundered by powerful middlemen, both squeezed or literally tortured by the Government of the day, and driven to depend on the usurer for even the seed for each crop. War and famine had alternated in keeping down the population. Ignorance and fear had blunted the natural shrewdness of the cultivator. A foul mythology, a saddening demon-worship, and an exacting social system, covered the land as with a pall. What even Christendom was fast becoming in the tenth century, India had been all through the eighteen Christian centuries.

The boy who from eight to fourteen "chose to read books of science, history, voyages, etc., more than others"; the youth whose gardener uncle would have had him follow that calling, but whose sensitive skin kept him within doors, where he fitted up a room with his botanical and zoological museum; the shoemaker-preacher who made a garden around every cottage-manse in which he lived, and was familiar with every beast, bird, insect, and tree in the Midlands of England, became a scientific observer from the day he landed at Calcutta, an agricultural reformer from the year he first built a wooden farmhouse in the jungle, as the Manitoba emigrant now does under very different skies, and then began to grow and make indigo amid the peasantry at Dinapoor. He thus unconsciously reveals himself and his method of working in a letter to Morris of Clipstone:--

"MUDNABATI, 5th December 1797.--To talk of continuance of friendship and warm affection to you would be folly. I love you; and next to seeing your face, a letter from you is one of my greatest gratifications. I see the handwriting, and read the heart of my friend; nor can the distance of one-fourth of the globe prevent a union of hearts.

"Hitherto I have refrained from writing accounts of the country, because I concluded that those whose souls were panting after the conversion of the heathen would feel but little gratified in having an account of the natural productions of the country. But as intelligence of this kind has been frequently solicited by several of my friends, I have accordingly opened books of observation, which I hope to communicate when they are sufficiently authenticated and matured. I also intend to assign a peculiar share to each of my stated correspondents. To you I shall write some accounts of the arts, utensils, and manufactures of the country; to Brother Sutcliff their mythology and religion; to Brother Ryland the manners and customs of the inhabitants; to Brother Fuller the productions of the country; to Brother Pearce the language, etc.; and to the Society a joint account of the mission."

He had "separate books for every distinct class, as birds, beasts, fishes, reptiles, etc." Long before this, on 13th March 1795, he had written to the learned Ryland, his special correspondent on subjects of science and on Hebrew, his first impressions of the physiography of Bengal, adding: "The natural history of Bengal would furnish innumerable novelties to a curious inquirer. I am making collections and minute descriptions of whatever I can obtain; and intend at some future time to transmit them to Europe."

"MUDNABATI, 26th November 1796.--I observed in a former letter that the beasts have been in general described, but that the undescribed birds were surprisingly numerous; and, in fact, new species are still frequently coming under my notice. We have sparrows and water-wagtails, one species of crow, ducks, geese, and common fowls; pigeons, teal, ortolans, plovers, snipes like those in Europe; but others, entirely unlike European birds, would fill a volume. Insects are very numerous. I have seen about twelve sorts of grylli, or grasshoppers and crickets. Ants are the most omnivorous of all insects; we have eight or ten sorts very numerous. The termes, or white ants, destroy everything on which they fasten; they will eat through an oak chest in a day or two and devour all its contents. Butterflies are not so numerous as in England, but I think all different. Common flies and mosquitoes (or gnats) are abundant, and the latter so tormenting as to make one conclude that if the flies in Egypt were mosquitoes, the plague must be almost insupportable. Here are beetles of many species; scorpions of two sorts, the sting of the smallest not mortal; land crabs in abundance, and an amazing number of other kinds of insects. Fish is very plentiful, and the principal animal food of the inhabitants. I find fewer varieties of vegetables than I could have conceived in so large a country. Edible vegetables are scarce, and fruit far from plentiful. You will perhaps wonder at our eating many things here which no one eats in England: as arum, three or four sorts, and poppy leaves (Papaver somniferum). We also cut up mallows by the bushes for our food (Job xxx. 4). Amaranths, of three sorts, we also eat, besides capsicums, pumpkins, gourds, calabashes, and the egg-plant fruit; yet we have no hardships in these respects. Rice is the staple article of food...

"My love to the students. God raise them up for great blessings. Great things are certainly at hand."

But he was also an erudite botanist. Had he arrived in Calcutta a few days earlier than he did, he would have been appointed to the place for which sheer poverty led him to apply, in the Company’s Botanical Garden, established on the right bank of the Hoogli a few miles below Calcutta, by Colonel Alexander Kyd, for the collection of indigenous and acclimatisation of foreign plants. There he at once made the acquaintance, and till 1815 retained the loving friendship, of its superintendent, Dr. Roxburgh, the leader of a series of eminent men, Buchanan and Wallich, Griffith, Falconer, T. Thomson, and Thomas Anderson, the last two cut off in the ripe promise of their manhood. One of Carey’s first requests was for seeds and instruments, not merely from scientific reasons, but that he might carry out his early plan of working with his hands as a farmer while he evangelised the people. On 5th August 1794 he wrote to the Society:--"I wish you also to send me a few instruments of husbandry, viz., scythes, sickles, plough-wheels, and such things; and a yearly assortment of all garden and flowering seeds, and seeds of fruit trees, that you can possibly procure; and let them be packed in papers, or bottles well stopped, which is the best method. All these things, at whatever price you can procure them, and the seeds of all sorts of field and forest trees, etc., I will regularly remit you the money for every year; and I hope that I may depend upon the exertions of my numerous friends to procure them. Apply to London seedsmen and others, as it will be a lasting advantage to this country; and I shall have it in my power to do this for what I now call my own country. Only take care that they are new and dry." Again he addressed Fuller on 22nd June 1797:--

"MY VERY DEAR BROTHER--I have yours of August 9, 16, which informs me that the seeds, etc., were shipped. I have received those seeds and other articles in tolerable preservation, and shall find them a very useful article. An acquaintance which I have formed with Dr. Roxburgh, Superintendent of the Company’s Botanic Garden, and whose wife is daughter of a missionary on the coast, may be of future use to the mission, and make that investment of vegetables more valuable."

Thus towards the close of his six years’ sacrifice for the people of Dinapoor does he estimate himself and his scientific pursuits in the light of the great conflict to which the Captain of Salvation had called him. He is opening his heart to Fuller again, most trusted of all:--

"MUDNABATI, 17th July 1799.--Respecting myself I have nothing interesting to say; and if I had, it appears foreign to the design of a mission for the missionaries to be always speaking of their own experiences. I keep several journals, it is true, relating to things private and public, respecting the mission, articles of curiosity and science; but they are sometimes continued and sometimes discontinued: besides, most things contained in them are of too general or trivial a nature to send to England, and I imagine could have no effect, except to mock the expectations of our numerous friends, who are waiting to hear of the conversion of the heathen and overthrow of Satan’s kingdom.

"I therefore only observe, respecting myself, that I have much proof of the vileness of my heart, much more than I thought of till lately: and, indeed, I often fear that instead of being instrumental in the conversion of the heathen, I may some time dishonour the cause in which I am engaged. I have hitherto had much experience of the daily supports of a gracious God; but I am conscious that if those supports were intermitted but for a little time, my sinful dispositions would infallibly predominate. At present I am kept, but am not one of those who are strong and do exploits.

"I have often thought that a spirit of observation is necessary in order to our doing or communicating much good; and were it not for a very phlegmatic habit, I think my soul would be richer. I, however, appear to myself to have lost much of my capacity for making observations, improvements, etc., or of retaining what I attend to closely. For instance, I have been near three years learning the Sanskrit language, yet know very little of it. This is only a specimen of what I feel myself to be in every respect. I try to observe, to imprint what I see and hear on my memory, and to feel my heart properly affected with the circumstances; yet my soul is impoverished, and I have something of a lethargic disease cleaving to my body...

"I would communicate something on the natural history of the country in addition to what I have before written, but no part of that pleasing study is so familiar to me as the vegetable world."

His letters of this period to Fuller on the fruits of India, and to Morris on the husbandry of the natives, might be quoted still as accurate and yet popular descriptions of the mango, guava, and custard apple; plantain, jack, and tamarind; pomegranate, pine-apple, and rose-apple; papaya, date, and cocoa-nut; citron, lime, and shaddock. Of many of these, and of foreign fruits which he introduced, it might be said he found them poor, and he cultivated them till he left to succeeding generations a rich and varied orchard.

While still in Dinapoor, he wrote on 1st January 1798: "Seeds of sour apples, pears, nectarines, plums, apricots, cherries, gooseberries, currants, strawberries, or raspberries, put loose into a box of dry sand, and sent so as to arrive in September, October, November, or December, would be a great acquisition, as is every European production. Nuts, filberts, acorns, etc., would be the same. We have lately obtained the cinnamon tree, and nutmeg tree, which Dr. Roxburgh very obligingly sent to me. Of timber trees I mention the sissoo, the teak, and the saul tree, which, being an unnamed genus, Dr. Roxburgh, as a mark of respect to me, has called Careya saulea."

The publication of the last name caused Carey’s sensitive modesty extreme annoyance. "Do not print the names of Europeans. I was sorry to see that you printed that Dr. Roxburgh had named the saul tree by my name. As he is in the habit of publishing his drawings of plants, it would have looked better if it had been mentioned first by him." Whether he prevailed with his admiring friend in the Company’s Botanic Garden to change the name to that which the useful sal tree now bears, the Shorea robusta, we know not, but the term is derived from Lord Teignmouth’s name. Carey will go down to posterity in the history of botanical research, notwithstanding his own humility and the accidents of time. For Dr. Roxburgh gave the name of Careya to an interesting genus of Myrtaceœ. The great French botanist M. Benjamin Delessert duly commemorates the labours of Dr. Carey in the Musée Botanique.

It was in Serampore that the gentle botanist found full scope for the one recreation which he allowed himself, in the interest of his body as well as of his otherwise overtasked spirit. There he had five acres of ground laid out, and, in time, planted on the Linnæan system. The park around, from which he had the little paradise carefully walled in, that Brahmani bull and villager’s cow, nightly jackal and thoughtless youth, might not intrude, he planted with trees then rare or unknown in lower Bengal, the mahogany and deodar, the teak and tamarind, the carob and eucalyptus. The fine American Mahogany has so thriven that the present writer was able, seventy years after the trees had been planted, to supply Government with plentiful seed. The trees of the park were so placed as to form a noble avenue, which long shaded the press and was known as Carey’s Walk. The umbrageous tamarind formed a dense cover, under which more than one generation of Carey’s successors rejoiced as they welcomed visitors to the consecrated spot from all parts of India, America, and Great Britain. Foresters like Sir D. Brandis and Dr. Cleghorn at various times visited this arboretum, and have referred to the trees, whose date of planting is known, for the purpose of recording the rate of growth.

For the loved garden Carey himself trained native peasants who, with the mimetic instinct of the Bengali, followed his instructions like those of their own Brahmans, learned the Latin names, and pronounced them with their master’s very accent up till a late date, when Hullodhur, the last of them, passed away. The garden with its tropical glories and more modest exotics, every one of which was as a personal friend, and to him had an individual history, was more than a place of recreation. It was his oratory, the scene of prayer and meditation, the place where he began and ended the day of light--with God. What he wrote in his earlier journals and letters of the sequestered spot at Mudnabati was true in a deeper and wider sense of the garden of Serampore:--"23rd September, Lord’s Day.--Arose about sunrise, and, according to my usual practice, walked into my garden for meditation and prayer till the servants came to family worship." We have this account from his son Jonathan:--

"In objects of nature my father was exceedingly curious. His collection of mineral ores, and other subjects of natural history, was extensive, and obtained his particular attention in seasons of leisure and recreation. The science of botany was his constant delight and study; and his fondness for his garden remained to the last. No one was allowed to interfere in the arrangements of this his favourite retreat; and it is here he enjoyed his most pleasant moments of secret devotion and meditation. The arrangements made by him were on the Linnæan system; and to disturb the bed or border of the garden was to touch the apple of his eye. The garden formed the best and rarest botanical collection of plants in the East; to the extension of which, by his correspondence with persons of eminence in Europe and other parts of the world, his attention was constantly directed; and, in return, he supplied his correspondents with rare collections from the East. It was painful to observe with what distress my father quitted this scene of his enjoyments, when extreme weakness, during his last illness, prevented his going to his favourite retreat. Often, when he was unable to walk, he was drawn into the garden in a chair placed on a board with four wheels.

"In order to prevent irregularity in the attendance of the gardeners he was latterly particular in paying their wages with his own hands; and on the last occasion of doing so, he was much affected that his weakness had increased and confined him to the house. But, notwithstanding he had closed this part of his earthly scene, he could not refrain from sending for his gardeners into the room where he lay, and would converse with them about the plants; and near his couch, against the wall, he placed the picture of a beautiful shrub, upon which he gazed with delight.

"On this science he frequently gave lectures, which were well attended, and never failed to prove interesting. His publication of Roxburgh’s Flora Indica is a standard work with botanists. Of his botanical friends he spoke with great esteem; and never failed to defend them when erroneously assailed. He encouraged the study of the science wherever a desire to acquire it was manifested. In this particular he would sometimes gently reprove those who had no taste for it; but he would not spare those who attempted to undervalue it. His remark of one of his colleagues was keen and striking. When the latter somewhat reprehended Dr. Carey, to the medical gentleman attending him, for exposing himself so much in the garden, he immediately replied, that his colleague was conversant with the pleasures of a garden, just as an animal was with the grass in the field."

As from Dinapoor, so from Serampore after his settlement there, an early order was this on 27th November 1800:--"We are sending an assortment of Hindoo gods to the British Museum, and some other curiosities to different friends. Do send a few tulips, daffodils, snowdrops, lilies, and seeds of other things, by Dolton when he returns, desiring him not to put them into the hold. Send the roots in a net or basket, to be hung up anywhere out of the reach of salt water, and the seeds in a separate small box. You need not be at any expense, any friend will supply these things. The cowslips and daisies of your fields would be great acquisitions here." What the daisies of the English fields became to Carey, and how his request was long after answered, is told by James Montgomery, the Moravian, who formed after Cowper the second poet of the missionary reformation:--

THE DAISY IN INDIA

"A friend of mine, a scientific botanist, residing near Sheffield, had sent a package of sundry kinds of British seeds to the learned and venerable Doctor WILLIAM CAREY. Some of the seeds had been enclosed in a bag, containing a portion of their native earth. In March 1821 a letter of acknowledgment was received by his correspondent from the Doctor, who was himself well skilled in botany, and had a garden rich in plants, both tropical and European. In this enclosure he was wont to spend an hour every morning, before he entered upon those labours and studies which have rendered his name illustrious both at home and abroad, as one of the most accomplished of Oriental scholars and a translator of the Holy Scriptures into many of the Hindoo languages. In the letter aforementioned, which was shown to me, the good man says:--‘That I might be sure not to lose any part of your valuable present, I shook the bag over a patch of earth in a shady place: on visiting which a few days afterwards I found springing up, to my inexpressible delight, a Bellis perennis of our English pastures. I know not that I ever enjoyed, since leaving Europe, a simple pleasure so exquisite as the sight of this English Daisy afforded me; not having seen one for upwards of thirty years, and never expecting to see one again.’

"On the perusal of this passage, the following stanzas seemed to spring up almost spontaneously in my mind, as the ‘little English flower’ in the good Doctor’s garden, whom I imagined to be thus addressing it on its sudden appearance:--

"Thrice welcome, little English flower!

My mother-country’s white and red,

In rose or lily, till this hour,

Never to me such beauty spread:

Transplanted from thine island-bed,

A treasure in a grain of earth,

Strange as a spirit from the dead,

Thine embryo sprang to birth.

"Thrice welcome, little English flower!

Whose tribes, beneath our natal skies,

Shut close their leaves while vapours lower;

But, when the sun’s bright beams arise,

With unabashed but modest eyes,

Follow his motion to the west,

Nor cease to gaze till daylight dies,

Then fold themselves to rest.

"Thrice welcome, little English flower!

To this resplendent hemisphere,

Where Flora’s giant offspring tower

In gorgeous liveries all the year:

Thou, only thou, art little here,

Like worth unfriended and unknown,

Yet to my British heart more dear

Than all the torrid zone.

"Thrice welcome, little English flower!

Of early scenes beloved by me,

While happy in my father’s bower,

Thou shalt the blythe memorial be;

The fairy sports of infancy,

Youth’s golden age, and manhood’s prime.

Home, country, kindred, friends,--with thee,

I find in this far clime.

"Thrice welcome, little English flower!

I’ll rear thee with a trembling hand:

Oh, for the April sun and shower,

The sweet May dews of that fair land.

Where Daisies, thick as starlight, stand

In every walk!--that here may shoot

Thy scions, and thy buds expand

A hundred from one root.

"Thrice welcome, little English flower!

To me the pledge of hope unseen:

When sorrow would my soul o’erpower,

For joys that were, or might have been,

I’ll call to mind, how, fresh and green,

I saw thee waking from the dust;

Then turn to heaven with brow serene,

And place in GOD my trust."

From every distant station, from Amboyna to Delhi, he received seeds and animals and specimens of natural history. The very schoolboys when they went out into the world, and the young civilians of Fort William College, enriched his collections. To Jabez, his son in Amboyna, we find him thus writing:--"I have already informed you of the luckless fate of all the animals you have sent. I know of no remedy for the living animals dying, but by a little attention to packing them you may send skins of birds and animals of every kind, and also seeds and roots. I lately received a parcel of seeds from Moore (a large boy who, you may remember, was at school when the printing-office was burnt), every one of which bids fair to grow. He is in some of the Malay islands. After all you have greatly contributed to the enlargement of my collection."

"17th September 1816.--I approve much of Bencoolen as a place for your future labours, unless you should rather choose the island of Borneo...The English may send a Resident thither after a time. I mention this from a conversation I had some months ago on the subject with Lord Moira, who told me that there is a large body of Chinese on that island." They "applied to the late Lieut.-Governor of Java, requesting that an English Resident may be sent to govern them, and offering to be at the whole expense of his salary and government. The Borneo business may come to nothing, but if it should succeed it would be a glorious opening for the Gospel in that large island. Sumatra, however, is larger than any one man could occupy." As we read this we see the Serampore apostle’s hope fulfilled after a different fashion, in Rajah Brooke’s settlement at Sarawak, in the charter of the North Borneo Company, in the opening up of New Guinea and in the civilisation of the Philippines by the United States of America.

To Roxburgh and his Danish successor Wallich, to Voigt who succeeded Wallich in Serampore, and hundreds of correspondents in India and Germany, Great Britain and America, Carey did many a service in sending plants and--what was a greater sacrifice for so busy a man--writing letters. What he did for the Hortus Bengalensis may stand for all.

When, in 1814, Dr. Roxburgh was sent to sea almost dying, Dr. Carey edited and printed at his own press that now very rare volume, the Hortus Bengalensis, or a Catalogue of the Plants of the Honourable East India Company’s Botanic Garden in Calcutta. Carey’s introduction of twelve large pages is perhaps his most characteristic writing on a scientific subject. His genuine friendliness and humility shine forth in the testimony he bears to the abilities, zeal, and success of the great botanist who, in twenty years, had created a collection of 3200 species. Of these 3000 at least had been given by the European residents in India, himself most largely of all. Having shown in detail the utility of botanical gardens, especially in all the foreign settlements of Great Britain, he declared that only a beginning had been made in observing and cataloguing the stock of Asiatic productions. He urged English residents all over India to set apart a small plot for the reception of the plants of their neighbourhood, and when riding about the country to mark plants, which their servants could bring on to the nursery, getting them to write the native name of each. He desiderated gardens at Hurdwar, Delhi, Dacca, and Sylhet, where plants that will not live at Calcutta might prosper, a suggestion which was afterwards carried out by the Government in establishing a garden at Saharanpoor, in a Sub-Himalayan region, which has been successfully directed by Royle, Falconer, and Jameson.

On Dr. Roxburgh’s death in 1815 Dr. Carey waited to see whether an English botanist would publish the fruit of thirty years’ labour of his friend in the description of more than 2000 plants, natives of Eastern Asia. At his own risk he then, in 1820, undertook this publication, or the Flora Indica, placing on the title-page, "All Thy works praise Thee, O Lord--David." When the Roxburgh MSS. were made over to the library of the Botanic Garden at Calcutta, the fourth and final volume appeared with this note regarding the new edition:--"The work was printed from MSS. in the possession of Dr. Carey, and it was carried through the press when he was labouring under the debility of great age...The advanced age of Dr. Carey did not admit of any longer delay."

His first public attempt at agricultural reform was made in the paper which he contributed to the Transactions of the Bengal Asiatic Society, and which appeared in 1811 in the tenth volume of the Asiatic Researches. In the space of an ordinary Quarterly Review article he describes the "State of Agriculture in the District of Dinapoor," and urges improvements such as only the officials, settlers, and Government could begin. The soils, the "extremely poor" people, their "proportionally simple and wretched farming utensils," the cattle, the primitive irrigation alluded to in Deuteronomy as "watering with the foot," and the modes of ploughing and reaping, are rapidly sketched and illustrated by lithographed figures drawn to scale. In greater detail the principal crops are treated. The staple crop of rice in its many varieties and harvests at different seasons is lucidly brought before the Government, in language which it would have been well to remember or reproduce in the subsequent avoidable famines of Orissa and North Bihar. Indigo is set before us with the skill of one who had grown and manufactured it for years. The hemp and jute plants are enlarged on in language which unconsciously anticipates the vast and enriching development given to the latter as an export and a local manufacture since the Crimean War. An account of the oil-seeds and the faulty mode of expressing the oil, which made Indian linseed oil unfit for painting, is followed by remarks on the cultivation of wheat, to which subsequent events have given great importance. Though many parts, even of Dinapoor, were fit for the growth of wheat and barley, the natives produced only a dark variety from bad seed. "For the purpose of making a trial I sowed Patna wheat on a large quantity of land in the year 1798, the flour produced from which was of a very good quality." The pulses, tobacco, the egg-plant, the capsicums, the cucumbers, the arum roots, turmeric, ginger, and sugar-cane, all pass in review in a style which the non-scientific reader may enjoy and the expert must appreciate. Improvements in method and the introduction of the best kinds of plants and vegetables are suggested, notwithstanding "the poverty, prejudices, and indolence of the natives."

This paper is most remarkable, however, for the true note which its writer was the first to strike on the subject of forestry. If we reflect that it was not till 1846 that the Government made the first attempt at forest conservancy, in order to preserve the timber of Malabar for the Bombay dockyard; and not till the conquest of Pegu, in 1855, that the Marquis of Dalhousie was led by the Friend of India to appoint Dietrich Brandis of Bonn to care for the forests of Burma, and Dr. Cleghorn for those of South India, we shall appreciate the wise foresight of the missionary-scholar, who, having first made his own park a model of forest teaching, wrote such words as these early in the century:--"The cultivation of timber has hitherto, I believe, been wholly neglected. Several sorts have been planted...all over Bengal, and would soon furnish a very large share of the timber used in the country. The sissoo, the Andaman redwood, the teak, the mahogany, the satin-wood, the chikrasi, the toona, and the sirisha should be principally chosen. The planting of these trees single, at the distance of a furlong from each other, would do no injury to the crops of corn, but would, by cooling the atmosphere, rather be advantageous. In many places spots now unproductive would be improved by clumps or small plantations of timber, under which ginger and turmeric might be cultivated to great advantage. In some situations saul...would prosper. Indeed the improvements that might be made in this country by the planting of timber can scarcely be calculated. Teak is at present brought from the Burman dominions...The French naturalists have already begun to turn their attention to the culture of this valuable tree as an object of national utility. This will be found impracticable in France, but may perhaps be attempted somewhere else. To England, the first commercial country in the world, its importance must be obvious."

Ten years passed, Carey continued to watch and to extend his agri-horticultural experiments in his own garden, and to correspond with botanists in all parts of the world, but still nothing was done publicly in India. At last, on 15th April 1820, when "the advantages arising from a number of persons uniting themselves as a Society for the purpose of carrying forward any undertaking" were generally acknowledged, the shoemaker and preacher who had a generation before tested these advantages in the formation of the first Foreign Mission Society, issued a Prospectus of an Agricultural and Horticultural Society in India, from the "Mission House, Serampore." The prospectus thus concluded:--"Both in forming such a Society and in subsequently promoting its objects, important to the happiness of the country as they regard them, the writer and his colleagues will be happy in doing all their other avocations will permit." Native as well as European gentlemen were particularly invited to co-operate. "It is peculiarly desirable that native gentlemen should be eligible as members of the Society, because one of its chief objects will be the improvement of their estates and of the peasantry which reside thereon. They should therefore not only be eligible as members but also as officers of the Society in precisely the same manner as Europeans." At the first meeting in the Town Hall of Calcutta, Carey and Marshman found only three Europeans beside themselves. They resolved to proceed, and in two months they secured more than fifty members, several of whom were natives. The first formal meeting was held on 14th September, when the constitution was drawn up on the lines laid down in the prospectus, it being specially provided "that gentlemen of every nation be eligible as members."

At the next meeting Dr. Carey was requested to draw up a series of queries, which were circulated widely, in order to obtain "correct information upon every circumstance which is connected with the state of agriculture and horticulture in the various provinces of India." The twenty queries show a grasp of principles, a mastery of detail, and a kindliness of spirit which reveal the practical farmer, the accomplished observer, and the thoughtful philanthropist all in one. One only we may quote:--"19. In what manner do you think the comforts of the peasantry around you could be increased, their health better secured, and their general happiness promoted?" The Marquis of Hastings gladly became patron, and ever since the Government has made a grant to the Society. His wife showed such an interest in its progress that the members obtained her consent to sit to Chinnery for her portrait to fill the largest panel in the house at Titigur. Lord Hastings added the experimental farm, formed near Barrackpore, to the Botanic Garden, with an immediate view to its assisting the Agricultural Society in their experiments and pursuits. The Society became speedily popular, for Carey watched its infancy with loving solicitude, and was the life of its meetings. In the first eighty-seven years of its existence seven thousand of the best men in India have been its members, of whom seven hundred are Asiatics. Agriculturists, military and medical officers, civilians, clergy, and merchants, are represented on its roll in nearly equal proportions. The one Society has grown into three in India, and formed the model for the Royal Agricultural Society of England, which was not founded till 1838.

Italy and Scotland alone preceded Carey in this organisation, and he quotes with approbation the action of Sir John Sinclair in 1790, which led to the first inquiry into the state of British agriculture. The Transactions which Carey led the Society to promise to publish in English, Bengali, and Hindostani, have proved to be only the first of a series of special periodicals representing Indian agriculture generally, tea, and forestry. The various Governments in India have economic museums; and the Government of India, under Lord Mayo, established a Revenue and Agricultural Department expanded by Lord Curzon. Carey’s early proposal of premiums, each of a hundred rupees, or the Society’s gold medal, for the most successful cultivation on a commercial scale of coffee and improved cotton, for the successful introduction of European fruits, for the improvement of indigenous fruits, for the successful introduction from the Eastern Islands of the mangosteen or doorian, and for the manufacture of cheese equal to Warwickshire, had the best results in some cases. In 1825 Mr. Lamb of Dacca was presented by "Rev. Dr. Carey in the chair" with the gold medal for 80 lbs. of coffee grown there. Carey’s own head gardener became famous for his cabbages; and we find this sentence in the Society’s Report just after the founder’s death:--"Who would have credited fifteen years ago that we could have exhibited vegetables in the Town Hall of Calcutta equal to the choicest in Covent Garden?" The berries two centuries ago brought from Arabia in his wallet by the pilgrim Baba Booden to the hills of Mysore, which bear his name, have, since that Dacca experiment, covered the uplands of South India and Ceylon. Before Carey died he knew of the discovery of the indigenous tea-tree in its original home on the Assam border of Tibet--a discovery which has put India in the place of China as a producer.

In the Society’s Proceedings for 9th January 1828 we find this significant record:--"Resolved, at the suggestion of the Rev. Dr. Carey, that permission be given to Goluk Chundra, a blacksmith of Titigur, to exhibit a steam engine made by himself without the aid of any European artist." At the next meeting, when 109 malees or native gardeners competed at the annual exhibition of vegetables, the steam engine was submitted and pronounced "useful for irrigating lands made upon the model of a large steam engine belonging to the missionaries at Serampore." A premium of Rs. 50 was presented to the ingenious blacksmith as an encouragement to further exertions of his industry. When in 1832 the afterwards well-known Lieutenant-Governor Thomason was deputy-secretary to Government, he applied to the Society for information regarding the manufacture of paper. Dr. Carey and Ram Komal Sen were referred to, and the former thus replied in his usual concise and clear manner:--

"When we commenced paper-making several years ago, having then no machinery, we employed a number of native papermakers to make it in the way to which they had been accustomed, with the exception of mixing conjee or rice gruel with the pulp and using it as sizing; our object being that of making paper impervious to insects. Our success at first was very imperfect, but the process was conducted as follows:--

"A quantity of sunn, viz., the fibres of Crotolaria juncea, was steeped repeatedly in limewater, and then exposed to the air by spreading it on the grass; it was also repeatedly pounded by the dhenki or pedal, and when sufficiently reduced by this process to make a pulp, it was mixed in a gumla with water, so as to make it of the consistence of thick soup. The frames with which the sheets were taken up were made of mat of the size of a sheet of paper. The operator sitting by the gumla dipped this frame in the pulp, and after it was drained gave it to an assistant, who laid it on the grass to dry: this finished the process with us; but for the native market this paper is afterwards sized by holding a number of sheets by the edge and dipping them carefully in conjee, so as to keep the sheets separate. They are afterwards dried, folded, and pressed by putting them between two boards, the upper board of which is loaded with one or more large stones.

"In the English method the pulp is prepared by the mill and put into cisterns; the frames are made of fine wire, and the workman stands by the cistern and takes up the pulp on the frames. The sheets when sufficiently dry are hung on lines to dry completely, after which they are sized, if sizing be required.

"We now make our paper by machinery, in which the pulp is let to run on a web of wire, and passing over several cylinders, the last of which is heated by steam, it is dried and fit for use in about two minutes from its having been in a liquid state."

Since that reply the Government of India, under the pressure of the home authorities, has alternately discouraged and fostered the manufacture of paper on the spot. At present it is in the wiser position of preferring to purchase its supplies in India, at once as being cheaper, and that it may develop the use of the many paper-making fibres there. Hence at the Calcutta Exhibition of 1881-82 the jurors began their report on the machine and hand-made paper submitted to them, with a reference to Carey and this report of his. The Serampore mills were gradually crushed by the expensive and unsatisfactory contracts made at home by the India Office. The neighbouring Bally mills seem to flourish since the abandonment of that virtual monopoly, and Carey’s anticipations as to the utilisation of the plantain and other fibres of India are being realised nearly a century after he first formed them.

Carey expanded and published his "Address respecting an Agricultural Society in India" in the quarterly Friend of India. He still thinks it necessary to apologise for his action by quoting his hero, Brainerd, who was constrained to assist his Indian converts with his counsels in sowing their maize and arranging their secular concerns. "Few," he adds with the true breadth of genius which converted the Baptist shoemaker into the Christian statesman and scholar, "who are extensively acquainted with human life, will esteem these cares either unworthy of religion or incongruous with its highest enjoyments." When Carey wrote, the millions of five-acre farmers in India were only beginning to recover from the oppression and neglect of former rulers and the visitation of terrific famines. Trade was as depressed as agriculture. Transit duties, not less offensive than those of the Chinese, continued to weigh down agricultural industry till Lord W. Bentinck’s time and later. The English Government levied an unequal scale of duties on the staples of the East and West Indies, against which the former petitioned in vain. The East India Company kept the people in ignorance, and continued to exclude the European capitalist and captain of labour. The large native landholders were as uneducated as the cultivators. Before all Carey set these reforms: close attention to the improvement of land, the best method of cropping land, the introduction of new and useful plants, the improvement of the implements of husbandry, the improvement of live stock, the bringing of waste lands under cultivation, the improvement of horticulture. He went on to show that, in addition to the abundance which an improved agriculture would diffuse throughout the country, the surplus of grain exported, besides "her opium, her indigo, her silk, and her cotton," would greatly tend to enrich India and endear Britain to her. "Whatever may be thought of the Government of Mr. Hastings and those who immediately preceded him for these last forty years, India has certainly enjoyed such a Government as none of the provinces of the Persian or the Roman Empire ever enjoyed for so great a length of time in succession, and, indeed, one almost as new in the annals of modern Europe as in those of India."

Carey found one of the greatest obstacles to agricultural progress to be the fact that not one European owned a single foot of the soil, "a singular fact in the history of nations," removed only about the time of his own death. His remarks on this have a present significance:--

"It doubtless originated in a laudable care to preserve our Indian fellow-subjects from insult and violence, which it was feared could scarcely be done if natives of Britain, wholly unacquainted with the laws and customs of the people, were permitted to settle indiscriminately in India. While the wisdom of this regulation at that time is not impugned, however, it may not be improper to inquire whether at the present time a permission to hold landed property, to be granted by Government to British subjects in India, according to their own discretion, might not be of the highest benefit to the country, and in some degree advantageous to the Government itself.

"The objections which have been urged against any measure of this nature are chiefly that the indiscriminate admission of Europeans into the country might tend to alienate the minds of the inhabitants from Britain, or possibly lead to its disruption from Britain in a way similar to that of America. Respecting this latter circumstance, it is certain that, in the common course of events, a greater evil could scarcely befall India. On the continuance of her connection with Britain is suspended her every hope relative to improvement, security, and happiness. The moment India falls again under the dominion of any one or any number of native princes, all hope of mental improvement, or even of security for person or property, will at once vanish. Nothing could be then expected but scenes of rapine, plunder, bloodshed, and violence, till its inhabitants were sealed over to irremediable wretchedness, without the most distant ray of hope respecting the future. And were it severed from Britain in any other way, the reverse felt in India would be unspeakably great. At present all the learning, the intelligence, the probity, the philanthropy, the weight of character existing in Britain, are brought to bear on India. There is scarcely an individual sustaining a part in the administration of affairs who does not feel the weight of that tribunal formed by the suffrages of the wise and the good in Britain, though he be stationed in the remotest parts of India. Through the medium of a free press the wisdom, probity, and philanthropy which pervade Britain exercise an almost unbounded sway over every part of India, to the incalculable advantage of its inhabitants; constituting a triumph of virtue and wisdom thus unknown to the ancients, and which will increase in its effects in exact proportion to the increase in Britain of justice, generosity, and love to mankind. Let India, however, be severed from Britain, and the weight of these is felt no more...

"It is a fact that in case of outrage or injury it is in most cases easier for a native to obtain justice against a European, than for a European to obtain redress if insulted or wronged by a native. This circumstance, attended as it may be with some inconvenience, reflects the highest honour on the British name; it is a fact of which India affords almost the first instance on record in the annals of history. Britain is nearly the first nation in whose foreign Courts of Justice a tenderness for the native inhabitants habitually prevails over all the partialities arising from country and education. If there ever existed a period, therefore, in which a European could oppress a native of India with impunity, that time is passed away--we trust for ever. That a permission of this nature might tend to sever India from Britain after the example of America is of all things the most improbable...

"Long before the number of British landholders in India shall have become considerable, Penang and the Eastern Isles, Ceylon, the Cape, and even the Isles of New South Wales, may in European population far exceed them in number; and unitedly, if not singly, render the most distant step of this nature as impracticable, as it would be ruinous, to the welfare and happiness of India...

"British-born landholders would naturally maintain all their national attachments, for what Briton can lose them? and derive their happiness from corresponding with the wise and good at home. If sufficiently wealthy, they would no doubt occasionally visit Britain, where indeed it might be expected that some of them would reside for years together, as do the owners of estates in the West Indies. While Britain shall remain what she now is, it will be impossible for those who have once felt the force of British attachments, ever to forego them. Those feelings would animate their minds, occupy their conversation, and regulate the education and studies of their children, who would be in general sent home that they might there imbibe all those ideas of a moral and intellectual nature for which our beloved country is so eminent. Thus a new fellowship would be established between Britain and the proprietors of land in India, highly to the advantage of both countries. While they derived their highest happiness from the religion, the literature, the philanthropy and public spirit of Britain, they would, on the other hand, be able to furnish Britain with the most accurate and ample information relative to the state of things in a country in which the property they held there constrained them to feel so deep an interest. The fear of all oppression being out of the question, while it would be so evidently the interest not only of every Briton but of every Christian, whether British or native, to secure the protecting aid of Britain, at least as long as two-thirds of the inhabitants of India retained the Hindoo or Mussulman system of religion, few things would be more likely to cement and preserve the connection between both countries than the existence of such a class of British-born landholders in India."

It is profitable to read this in the light of subsequent events--of the Duff-Bentinck reforms, the Sepoy mutiny, the government of the Queen-Empress, the existence of more than three millions of Christians in India, the social and commercial development due to the non-officials from Great Britain and America, and the administrative progress under Lord Curzon and Lord Minto.

There is one evil which Carey never ceased to point out, but which the very perfection of our judicial procedure and the temporary character of our land assessments have intensified--"the borrowing system of the natives." While 12 per cent. is the so-called legal rate of interest; it is never below 36, and frequently rises to 72 per cent. Native marriage customs, the commercial custom of "advances," agricultural usage, and our civil procedure combine to sink millions of the peasantry lower than they were, in this respect, in Carey’s time. For this, too, he had a remedy so far as it was in his power to mitigate an evil which only practical Christianity will cure. He was the first to apply in India that system of savings banks which the Government has of late sought to encourage.

At a time when the English and even Scottish universities denied their honorary degrees to all British subjects who were not of the established churches, Brown University, in the United States--Judson’s--spontaneously sent Carey the diploma of Doctor of Divinity. That was in the year 1807. In 1823 he was elected a corresponding member of the Horticultural Society of London, a member of the Geological Society, and a Fellow of the Linnæan Society. To him the latter year was ever memorable, not for such honours which he had not sought, but for a flood of the Damoodar river, which, overflowing its embankments and desolating the whole country between it and the Hoogli, submerged his garden and the mission grounds with three feet of water, swept away the botanic treasures or buried them under sand, and destroyed his own house. Carey was lying in bed at the time, under an apparently fatal fever following dislocation of the hip-joint. He had lost his footing when stepping from his boat. Surgical science was then less equal to such a case than it is now, and for nine days he suffered agony, which on the tenth resulted in fever. When hurriedly carried out of his tottering house, which in a few hours was scoured away by the rush of the torrent into a hole fifty feet deep, his first thought was of his garden. For six months he used crutches, but long before he could put foot to the ground he was carefully borne all over the scene of desolation. His noble collection of exotic plants, unmatched in Asia save in the Company’s garden, was gone. His scientific arrangement of orders and families was obliterated. It seemed as if the fine barren sand of the mountain torrent would make the paradise a desert for ever. The venerable botanist was wounded in his keenest part, but he lost not an hour in issuing orders and writing off for new supplies of specimens and seeds, which years after made the place as lovely if not so precious, as before. He thus wrote to Dr. Ryland:--

"SERAMPORE, 22nd December 1823.

"MY DEAR BROTHER--I once more address you from the land of the living, a mercy which about two months ago I had no expectation of, nor did any one expect it more than, nor perhaps so much as, myself. On the 1st of October I went to Calcutta to preach, and returned with another friend about midnight. When I got out of the boat close to our own premises, my foot slipped and I fell; my friend also fell in the same place. I however perceived that I could not rise, nor even make the smallest effort to rise. The boatmen carried me into the house, and laid me on a couch, and my friend, who was a medical man, examined my hurt.--From all this affliction I am, through mercy, nearly restored. I am still very weak, and the injured limb is very painful. I am unable to walk two steps without crutches; yet my strength is sensibly increasing, and Dr. Mellis, who attended me during the illness, says he has no doubts of my perfect recovery.

"During my confinement, in October, such a quantity of water came down from the western hills, that it laid the whole country for about a hundred miles in length and the same in breadth, under water. The Ganges was filled by the flood, so as to spread far on every side. Serampore was under water; we had three feet of water in our garden for seven or eight days. Almost all the houses of the natives in that vast extent of country fell; their cattle were swept away, and the people, men, women, and children. Some gained elevated spots, where the water still rose so high as to threaten them with death; others climbed trees, and some floated on the roofs of their ruined houses. One of the Church missionaries, Mr. Jetter, who had accompanied Mr. Thomason and some other gentlemen to Burdwan to examine the schools there, called on me on his return and gave me a most distressing account of the fall of houses, the loss of property, the violent rushing of waters, so that none, not even the best swimmers, dared to leave the place where they were.

"This inundation was very destructive to the Mission house, or rather the Mission premises. A slip of the earth (somewhat like that of an avalanche), took place on the bank of the river near my house, and gradually approached it until only about ten feet of space were left between that and the house; and that space soon split. At last two fissures appeared in the foundation and wall of the house itself. This was a signal for me to remove; and a house built for a professor in the College being empty, I removed to it, and through mercy am now comfortably settled there.

"I have nearly filled my letter with this account, but I must give you a short account of the state of my mind when I could think, and that was generally when excited by an access of friends; at other times I could scarcely speak or think. I concluded one or two days that my death was near. I had no joys; nor any fear of death, or reluctance to die; but never was I so sensibly convinced of the value of an ATONING Saviour as then. I could only say, ‘Hangs my helpless soul on thee;’ and adopt the language of the first and second verses of the fifty-first Psalm, which I desired might be the text for my funeral sermon. A life of faith in Christ as the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world, appeared more than ordinarily important to my mind, and I expressed these feelings to those about me with freedom and pleasure.

"Now, through the gracious providence of God, I am again restored to my work, and daily do a little as my strength will admit. The printing of the translations is now going forward almost as usual, but I have not yet been able to attend to my duties in College. The affairs of the Mission are more extended, and I trust in as prosperous a state as at any former time. There are now many of other denominations employed in Missions, and I rejoice to say that we are all workers together in the work. The native churches were never in a better state, and the face of the Mission is in every respect encouraging. Give my love to all who know me.--I am very affectionately yours, W. CAREY."

Still more severe and disastrous in its effects was the cyclone of 1831. The former had desolated the open garden, but this laid low some of the noblest trees which, in their fall, crushed his splendid conservatory. One of his brethren represents the old man as weeping over the ruin of the collections of twenty years. Again the Hoogli, lashed into fury and swollen by the tidal wave, swept away the lately-formed road, and, cutting off another fourth of the original settlement of the Mission, imperilled the old house of Mr. Ward. Its ruins were levelled to form another road, and ever since the whole face of the right bank of the river has been a source of apprehension and expense. Just before this, Dr. Staughton had written from America that the interest on the funds raised there by Ward for the College would not be sent until the trustees were assured that the money was not to be spent on the teaching of science in the College, but only on the theological education of Hindoo converts. "I must confess," was Carey’s reply, "I never heard anything more illiberal. Pray can youth be trained up for the Christian ministry without science? Do you in America train up youths for it without any knowledge of science?"

One of Dr. Carey’s latest visits to Calcutta was to inspect the Society’s Garden then at Alipore, and to write the elaborate report of the Horticultural Committee which appeared in the second volume of the Transactions after his death. He there records the great success of the cultivation of the West India arrowroot. This he introduced into his own garden, and after years of discontinued culture we raised many a fine crop from the old roots. The old man "cannot but advert, with feelings of the highest satisfaction, to the display of vegetables on the 13th January 1830, a display which would have done honour to any climate, or to any, even the most improved system of horticulture...The greater part of the vegetables then produced were, till within these last few years, of species wholly unknown to the native gardeners."

When, in 1842, the Agri-Horticultural Society resolved to honour its founder, it appropriately fell to Dr. Wallich, followed by the president Sir J. P. Grant, to do what is thus recorded:--"Dr. Wallich addressed the meeting at some length, and alluded to the peculiar claims which their late venerable founder had on the affection of all classes for his untiring exertions in advancing the prosperity of India, and especially so on the members of the Society. He concluded his address by this motion:--‘That the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, duly estimating the great and important services rendered to the interests of British India by the founder of the institution, the late Reverend Dr. William Carey, who unceasingly applied his great talents, abilities, and influence in advancing the happiness of India--more especially by the spread of an improved system of husbandry and gardening--desire to mark, by some permanent record, their sense of his transcendent worth, by placing a marble bust to his memory in the Society’s new apartments at the Metcalfe Hall, there to remain a lasting testimony to the pure and disinterested zeal and labours of so illustrious a character: that a subscription, accordingly, from among the members of the Society, be urgently recommended for the accomplishment of the above object.’"

One fact in the history of the marble bust of Carey, which since 1845 has adorned the hall of the Agricultural Society of India, would have delighted the venerable missionary. Following the engraving from Home’s portrait, and advised by one of the sons, Nobo Koomar Pal, a self-educated Bengali artist, modelled the clay. The clay bust was sent to England for the guidance of Mr. J. C. Lough, the sculptor selected by Dr. Royle to finish the work in marble. Mr. Lough had executed the Queen’s statue for the Royal Exchange, and the monument with a reclining figure of Southey. In sending out the marble bust of Carey to Calcutta Dr. Royle wrote,--"I think the bust an admirable one; General Macleod immediately recognised it as one of your much esteemed Founder."

The Bengal Asiatic Society, on the motion of the Lord Bishop and Colonel Sir Jer. Bryant, entered these words on their Journal:--"The Asiatic Society cannot note upon their proceedings the death of the Rev. W. Carey, D.D., so long an active member and an ornament of this Institution, distinguished alike for his high attainments in the Oriental languages, for his eminent services in opening the stores of Indian literature to the knowledge of Europe, and for his extensive acquaintance with the sciences, the natural history and botany of this country, and his useful contributions on every hand towards the promotion of the objects of the Society, without placing on record this expression of their high sense of his value and merits as a scholar and a man of science; their esteem for the sterling and surpassing religious and moral excellencies of his character, and their sincere grief for his irreparable loss."

Chapter 13: Carey’s Immediate Influence In Great Britain And America

1813-1830

Carey’s relation to the new era--The East India Company’s Charters of 1793, 1813, and 1833--His double influence on the churches and public opinion--The great missionary societies--Missionary journals and their readers--Bengal and India recognised as the most important mission fields--Influence on Robert Haldane--Reflex effect of foreign on home missions--Carey’s power over individuals--Melville Horne and Douglas of Cavers--Henry Martyn--Charles Simeon and Stewart of Moulin--Robert Hall and John Foster--Heber and Chalmers--William Wilberforce on Carey--Mr. Prendergast and the tub story--Last persecution by the Company’s Government--Carey on the persecution and the charter controversy--The persecuting clause and the resolution legalising toleration--The Edinburgh Review and Sydney Smith’s fun--Sir James Mackintosh’s opinion--Southey’s defence and eulogy of Carey and the brotherhood in the Quarterly Review--Political value of Carey’s labours--Andrew Fuller’s death--A model foreign mission secretary--His friendship with Carey--The sixteen years’ dispute--Dr. Carey’s position--His defence of Marshman--His chivalrous seIf-sacrifice--His forgiveness of the younger brethren in Calcutta--His fidelity to righteousness and to friendship.

HIMSELF the outcome of the social and political forces which began in the French Revolution, and are still at work, William Carey was made a living personal force to the new era. The period which was introduced in 1783 by the Peace of Versailles in Europe following the Independence of the United States of America, was new on every side--in politics, in philosophy, in literature, in scientific research, in a just and benevolent regard for the peoples of every land, and in the awakening of the churches from the sleep of formalism. Carey was no thinker, but with the reality and the vividness of practical action and personal sacrifice he led the English-speaking races, to whom the future of the world was then given, to substitute for the dreams of Rousseau and all other theories the teaching of Christ as to His kingdom within each man, and in the progress of mankind.

Set free from the impossible task of administering North America on the absolutist system which the Georges would fain have continued, Great Britain found herself committed to the duty of doing for India what Rome had done for Europe. England was compelled to surrender the free West to her own children only that she might raise the servile and idolatrous East to such a Christian level as the genius of its peoples could in time enable them to work out. But it took the thirty years from 1783 to 1813 to convince British statesmen, from Pitt to Castlereagh, that India is to be civilised not according to its own false systems, but by truth in all forms, spiritual and moral, scientific and historical. It took other twenty years, to the Charter of 1833, to complete the conversion of the British Parliament to the belief that the principles of truth and freedom are in their measure as good for the East as for the West. At the beginning of this new period William Pitt based his motion for Parliamentary reform on this fact, that "our senators are no longer the representatives of British virtue but of the vices and pollutions of the East." At the close of it Lord William Bentinck, Macaulay, and Duff, co-operated in the decree which made truth, as most completely revealed through the English language and literature, the medium of India’s enlightenment. William Carey’s career of fifty years, from his baptism in 1783 and the composition of his Enquiry to his death in 1834, covered and influenced more than any other one man’s the whole time; and he represented in it an element of permanent healthy nationalisation which these successors overlooked,--the use of the languages of the peoples of India as the only literary channels for allowing the truth revealed through English to reach the millions of the people

It was by this means that Carey educated Great Britain and America to rise equal to the terrible trust of jointly creating a Christian Empire of India, and ultimately a series of self-governing Christian nations in Southern and Eastern Asia. He consciously and directly roused the Churches of all names to carry out the commission of their Master, and to seek the promised impulse of His Spirit or Divine Representative on earth, that they might do greater things than even those which He did. And he, less directly but not less consciously, brought the influence of public opinion, which every year purified and quickened, to bear upon Parliament and upon individual statesmen, aided in this up till 1815 by Andrew Fuller. He never set foot in England again, and the influence of his brethren Ward and Marshman during their visits was largely neutralised by some leaders of their own church. But Carey’s character and career, his letters and writings, his work and whole personality, stood out in England, Scotland, and America as the motive power which stimulated every church and society, and won the triumph of toleration in the charter of 1813, of humanity, education, and administrative reform in the legislation of Lord William Bentinck.

We have already seen how the immediate result of Carey’s early letters was the foundation on a catholic basis of the London Missionary Society, which now represents the great Nonconformist half of England; of the Edinburgh or Scottish and Glasgow Societies, through which the Presbyterians sent forth missionaries to West and South Africa and to Western India, until their churches acted as such; of the Church Missionary Society which the evangelical members of the Church of England have put in the front of all the societies; and of Robert Haldane’s splendid self-sacrifice in selling all that he had to lead a large Presbyterian mission to Hindostan. Soon (1797) the London Society became the parent of that of the Netherlands, and of that which is one of the most extensive in Christendom, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The latter, really founded (1810) by Judson and some of his fellow-students, gave birth (1814) to the almost equally great American Baptist Union when Judson and his colleague became Baptists, and the former was sent by Carey to Burma. The Religious Tract Society (1799), and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804)--each a handmaid of the missionary agencies--sprang as really though less directly from Carey’s action. Such organised efforts to bring in heathen and Mohammedan peoples led in 1809 to the at first catholic work begun by the London Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews. The older Wesleyan Methodist and Gospel Propagation Societies, catching the enthusiasm as Carey succeeded in opening India and the East, entered on a new development under which the former in 1813, and the latter in 1821, no longer confined their operations to the slaves of America and the English of the dispersion in the colonies and dependencies of Great Britain. In 1815 Lutheran Germany also, which had cast out the Pietists and the Moravian brethren as the Church of England had rejected the Wesleyans, founded the principal representative of its evangelicalism at Basel. The succeeding years up to Carey’s death saw similar missionary centres formed, or reorganised, in Leipzig (1819), Berlin (1823), and Bremen (1836).

The Periodical Accounts sent home from Mudnabati and Serampore, beginning at the close of 1794, and the Monthly Circular Letters after 1807, gave birth not only to these great missionary movements but to the new and now familiar class of foreign missionary periodicals. The few magazines then existing, like the Evangelical, became filled with a new spirit of earnest aggressiveness. In 1796 there appeared in Edinburgh The Missionary Magazine, "a periodical publication intended as a repository of discussion and intelligence respecting the progress of the Gospel throughout the world." The editors close their preface in January 1797 with this statement:--"With much pleasure they have learned that there was never a greater number of religious periodical publications carried on than at present, and never were any of them more generally read. The aggregate impression of those alone which are printed in Britain every month considerably exceeds thirty thousand." The first article utilises the facts sent home by Dr. Carey as the fruit of his first two years’ experience, to show "The Peculiar Advantages of Bengal as a Field for Missions from Great Britain." After describing, in the style of an English statesman, the immense population, the highly civilised state of society, the eagerness of the natives in the acquisition of knowledge, and the principles which the Hindoos and Mohammedans hold in common with Christians, the writer thus continues:--

"The attachment of both the Mohammedans and Hindoos to their ancient systems is lessening every day. We have this information from the late Sir William Jones, one of the Judges of that country, a name dear to literature, and a lover of the religion of Jesus. The Mussulmans in Hindostan are in general but little acquainted with their system, and by no means so zealous for it as their brethren in the Turkish and Persian empires. Besides, they have not the strong arm of civil authority to crush those who would convert them. Mr. Carey’s letters seem to intimate the same relaxation among the Hindoos. This decay of prejudice and bigotry will at least incline them to listen with more patience, and a milder temper, to the doctrines and evidences of the Christian religion. The degree of adhesion to their castes, which still remains, is certainly unfavourable, and must be considered as one of Satan’s arts to render men unhappy; but it is not insuperable. The Roman Catholics have gained myriads of converts from among them. The Danish missionaries record their thousands too: and one (Schwartz) of the most successful missionaries at present in the world is labouring in the southern part of Hindostan. Besides a very considerable number who have thrown aside their old superstition, and make a profession of the Christian religion, he computes that, in the course of his ministry, he has been the instrument of savingly converting two thousand persons to the faith of Christ. Of these, above five hundred are Mohammedans: the rest are from among the different castes of the Hindoos. In addition to these instances, it is proper to notice the attention which the Hindoos are paying to the two Baptist missionaries, and which gives a favourable specimen of their readiness to listen to the preaching of the Gospel...

"Reflect, O disciple of Jesus! on what has been presented to thy view. The cause of Christ is thy own cause. Without deep criminality thou canst not be indifferent to its success. Rejoice that so delightful a field of missions has been discovered and exhibited. Rouse thyself from the slumbers of spiritual languor. Exert thyself to the utmost of thy power; and let conscience be able to testify, without a doubt, even at the tribunal of Jesus Christ, If missionaries are not speedily sent to preach she glorious Gospel in Bengal, it shall not be owing to me."

That is remarkable writing for an Edinburgh magazine in the year 1797, and it was Carey who made it possible. Its author followed up the appeal by offering himself and his all, for life and death, in a "Plan of the Mission to Bengal," which appeared in the April number. Robert Haldane, whose journal at this time was full of Carey’s doings, and his ordained associates, Bogue, Innes, and Greville Ewing, accompanied by John Ritchie as printer, John Campbell as catechist, and other lay workers, determined to turn the very centre of Hindooism, Benares, into a second Serampore. Defeated by one set of Directors of the East India Company, he waited for the election of their successors, only to find the East India Company as hostile to the Scottish gentleman as they had been to the English shoemaker four years before.

The formation of the great Missionary and Bible Societies did not, as in the case of the Moravian Brethren and the Wesleyans, take their members out of the Churches of England and Scotland, of the Baptists and Independents. It supplied in each case an executive through which they worked aggressively not only on the non-christian world, but still more directly on their own home congregations and parishes. The foreign mission spirit directly gave birth to the home mission on an extensive scale. Not merely did the Haldanes and their agents, following Whitefield and the Scottish Secession of 1733, become the evangelists of the north when they were not suffered to preach the Gospel in South Asia; every member of the churches of Great Britain and America, as he caught the enthusiasm of humanity, in the Master’s sense, from the periodical accounts sent home from Serampore, and soon from Africa and the South Seas, as well as from the Red Indians and Slaves of the West, began to work as earnestly among the neglected classes around him, as to pray and give for the conversion of the peoples abroad. From first to last, from the early days of the Moravian influence on Wesley and Whitefield, and the letters of Carey, to the successive visits to the home churches of missionaries like Duff and Judson, Ellis and Williams, Moffat and Livingstone, it is the enterprise of foreign missions which has been the leaven of Christendom no less really than of the rest of the world. Does the fact that at the close of the year 1796 there were more than thirty thousand men and women in Great Britain who every month read and prayed about the then little known world of heathenism, and spared not their best to bring that world to the Christ whom they had found, seem a small thing? How much smaller, even to contemptible insignificance, must those who think so consider the arrival of William Carey in Calcutta to be three years before! Yet the thirty thousand sprang from the one, and to-day the thirty thousand have a vast body of Christians really obedient to the Master, in so far as, banded together in five hundred churches and societies, they have sent out eighteen thousand missionaries instead of one or two; they see eighty thousand Asiatics, Africans, and Polynesians proclaiming the Christ to their countrymen, and their praying is tested by their giving annually a sum of £5,000,000, to which every year is adding.

The influence of Carey and his work on individual men and women in his generation was even more marked, inasmuch as his humility kept him so often from magnifying his office and glorifying God as the example of Paul should have encouraged him to do. Most important of all for the cause, he personally called Ward to be his associate, and his writings drew Dr. and Mrs. Marshman to his side, while his apostolic charity so developed and used all that was good in Thomas and Fountain, that not even in the churches of John and James, Peter and Paul, Barnabas and Luke, was there such a brotherhood. When troubles came from outside he won to himself the younger brethren, Yates and Pearce, and healed half the schism which Andrew Fuller’s successors made. His Enquiry, followed "by actually embarking on a mission to India," led to the publication of the Letters on Missions addressed to the Protestant Ministers of the British Churches by Melville Horne, who, after a brief experience as Church of England chaplain in Zachary Macaulay’s settlement of Sierra Leone, published that little book to excite in all Christians a passion for missions like the Master’s. Referring to the English churches, Established and Nonconformist, he wrote:--"Except the Reverend Mr. Carey and a friend who accompanies him, I am not informed of any...ministers who are engaged in missions." Such was the impression made by Carey on John Newton that, in 1802, he rebuked his old curate, Claudius Buchanan, for depreciating the Serampore missionaries, adding, "I do not look for miracles, but if God were to work one in our day, I should not wonder if it were in favour of Dr. Carey."

The Serampore Mission, at an early period, called forth the admiration of the Scottish philanthropist and essayist, James Douglas of Cavers, whose Hints on Missions (1822), a book still full of suggestiveness, contains this passage:--"Education and the press have only been employed to purpose of very late years, especially by the missionaries of Serampore; every year they have been making some improvements upon their former efforts, and...it only requires to increase the number of printing presses, schools, teachers, translators, and professors, to accelerate to any pitch the rate of improvement...To attempt to convert the world without educating it, is grasping at the end and neglecting the means." Referring to what Carey had begun and the Serampore College had helped to develop in Asia, as in Africa and America, Douglas of Cavers well described the missionary era, the new crusade:--"The Reformation itself needed anew a reform in the spirit if not in the letter. That second Reformation has begun; it makes less noise than that of Luther, but it spreads wider and deeper; as it is more intimate it will be more enduring. Like the Temple of Solomon, it is rising silently, without the din of pressure or the note of previous preparation, but notwithstanding it will be not less complete in all its parts nor less able to resist the injuries of time!"

Henry Martyn died, perhaps the loftiest and most loving spirit of the men whom Carey drew to India. Son of a Cornish miner-captain, after passing through the Truro Grammar School, he was sixteen--the age at which Carey became a shoemaker’s apprentice--when he was entered at St. John’s, and made that ever since the most missionary of all the colleges of Cambridge. When not yet twenty he came out Senior Wrangler. His father’s death drove him to the Bible, to the Acts of the Apostles, which he began to study, and the first whisper of the call of Christ came to him in the joy of the Magnificat as its strains pealed through the chapel. Charles Simeon’s preaching drew him to Trinity Church. In the vicarage, when he had come to be tutor of his college, and was preparing for the law, he heard much talk of William Carey, of his self-sacrifice and his success in India. It was the opening year of the nineteenth century, the Church Missionary Society had just been born as the fruit partly of a paper written by Simeon four years previously, and he offered himself as its first English missionary. He was not twenty-one, he could not be ordained for two years. Meanwhile a calamity made him and his unmarried sister penniless; he loved Lydia Grenfell with a pure passion which enriched while it saddened his short life, and a chaplaincy became the best mode in every way of his living and dying for India. What a meeting must that have been between him and Carey when, already stricken by fever, he found a sanctuary in Aldeen, and learned at Serampore the sweetness of telling to the natives of India in one of their own tongues the love of God. William Carey and Henry Martyn were one in origin, from the people; in industry, as scholars; in genius, as God-devoted; in the love of a great heart not always returned. The older man left the church of his fathers because there was no Simeon and no missionary society, and he made his own university; he laid the foundation of English missions deep and broad in no sect but in Christ, to whom he and Martyn alike gave themselves.

The names of Carey and Simeon, thus linked to each other by Martyn, find another pleasant and fruitful tie in the Rev. Alexander Stewart, D.D., Gaelic scholar and Scottish preacher. It was soon after Carey went out to India that Simeon, travelling in the Highlands, spent a Sunday in the manse of Moulin, where his personal fellowship and his evening sermon after a season of Communion were blessed to the evangelical enlightenment of Stewart. Moulin was the birthplace ten years after of Alexander Duff, whose parents previously came under the power of the minister’s new-found light.   Like Simeon, Dr. Stewart thenceforth became a warm supporter of foreign missions. Finding in the Periodical Accounts a letter in which Carey asked Fuller to send him a copy of Van der Hooght’s edition of the Hebrew Bible because of the weakness of his eyesight, Dr. Stewart at once wrote offering his own copy. Fuller gladly accepted the kindness. "I with great pleasure," writes Dr. Stewart, "followed the direction, wrote a letter of some length to Carey, and sent off my parcel to London. I daresay you remember my favourite Hebrew Bible in two volumes. I parted with it with something of the same feelings that a pious parent might do with a favourite son going on a mission to the heathen--with a little regret but with much goodwill." This was the beginning of an interesting correspondence with Carey and Fuller.

Next to Andrew Fuller, and in the region of literature, general culture and eloquence before him, the strongest men among the Baptists were the younger Robert Hall and John Foster. Both were devoted to Carey, and were the most powerful of the English advocates of his mission. The former, for a time, was led to side with the Society in some of the details of its dispute with Dr. Marshman, but his loyalty to Carey and the principles of the mission fired some of the most eloquent orations in English literature. John Foster’s shrewder common sense never wavered, but inspired his pen alike in the heat of controversy and in his powerful essays and criticisms. Writing in 1828, he declared that the Serampore missionaries "have laboured with the most earnest assiduity for a quarter of a century (Dr. Carey much longer) in all manner of undertakings for promoting Christianity, with such a renunciation of self-interest as will never be surpassed; that they have conveyed the oracles of divine truth into so many languages; that they have watched over diversified missionary operations with unremitting care; that they have conducted themselves through many trying and some perilous circumstances with prudence and fortitude; and that they retain to this hour an undiminished zeal to do all that providence shall enable them in the same good cause." The expenditure of the Serampore Brotherhood up to that time, leaving out of account the miscellaneous missionary services, he showed to have been upwards of £75,000. Dr. Chalmers in Scotland was as stoutly with Carey and his brethren as Foster was in England, so that Marshman wrote:--"Thus two of the greatest and wisest men of England are on our side, and, what is more, I trust the Lord God is with us." What Heber thought, alike as man and bishop, his own loving letter and proposal for "reunion of our churches" in the next chapter will show.

Of all the publicists in the United Kingdom during Carey’s long career the foremost was William Wilberforce; he was not second even to Charles Grant and his sons. Defeated in carrying into law the "pious clauses" of the charter which would have opened India to the Christian missionary and schoolmaster in 1793, he nevertheless succeeded by his persuasive eloquence and the weight of his character in having them entered as Resolutions of the House of Commons. He then gave himself successfully to the abolition of the slave-trade. But he always declared the toleration of Christianity in British India to be "that greatest of all causes, for I really place it before the abolition, in which, blessed be God, we gained the victory." His defeat in 1793, when Dundas and the Government were with him, was due to the apathy of public opinion, and especially of the dumb churches. But in the next twenty years Carey changed all that. Not merely was Andrew Fuller ever on the watch with pen and voice, but all the churches were roused, the Established to send out bishops and chaplains, the Nonconformist and Established Evangelicals together to secure freedom for missionaries and schoolmasters. In 1793 an English missionary was an unknown and therefore a much-dreaded monster, for Carey was then on the sea. In 1813 Carey and the Serampore Brotherhood were still the only English missionaries continuously at work in India, and not the churches only, but governor-generals like Teignmouth and Wellesley, and scholars like Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson, were familiar with the grandeur and political innocency of their labours. Hence this outburst of Wilberforce in the House of Commons on the 16th July 1813, when he used the name of Carey to defeat an attempt of the Company to prevent toleration by omitting the declaratory clauses of the Resolution, which would have made it imply that the privilege should never be exerted though the power of licensing missionaries was nominally conceded.

"One great argument of his opponents was grounded on the enthusiastic character which they imputed to the missionary body. India hitherto has seen no missionary who was a member of the English Church, and imputations could be cast more readily on ‘Anabaptists and fanatics.’ These attacks Mr. Wilberforce indignantly refuted, and well had the noble conduct of the band at Serampore deserved this vindication. ‘I do not know,’ he often said, ‘a finer instance of the moral sublime, than that a poor cobbler working in his stall should conceive the idea of converting the Hindoos to Christianity; yet such was Dr. Carey. Why Milton’s planning his Paradise Lost in his old age and blindness was nothing to it. And then when he had gone to India, and was appointed by Lord Wellesley to a lucrative and honourable station in the college of Fort William, with equal nobleness of mind he made over all his salary (between £1000 and £1500 per annum) to the general objects of the mission. By the way, nothing ever gave me a more lively sense of the low and mercenary standard of your men of honour, than the manifest effect produced upon the House of Commons by my stating this last circumstance. It seemed to be the only thing which moved them.’ Dr. Carey had been especially attacked, and ‘a few days afterwards the member who had made this charge came to me, and asked me in a manner which in a noted duellist could not be mistaken, "Pray, Mr. Wilberforce, do you know a Mr. Andrew Fuller, who has written to desire me to retract the statement which I made with reference to Dr. Carey?" "Yes," I answered with a smile, "I know him perfectly, but depend upon it you will make nothing of him in your way; he is a respectable Baptist minister at Kettering." In due time there came from India an authoritative contradiction of the slander. It was sent to me, and for two whole years did I take it in my pocket to the House of Commons to read it to the House whenever the author of the accusation should be present; but during that whole time he never once dared show himself in the House.’"

The slanderer was a Mr. Prendergast, who affirmed that Dr. Carey’s conduct had changed so much for the worse since the departure of Lord Wellesley, that he himself had seen the missionary on a tub in the streets of Calcutta haranguing the mob and abusing the religion of the people in such a way that the police alone saved him from being killed. So, and for the same object of defeating the Resolutions on Toleration, Mr. Montgomerie Campbell had asserted that when Schwartz was in the heat of his discourse in a certain village and had taken off his stock, "that and his gold buckle were stolen by one of his virtuous and enlightened congregation; in such a description of natives did the doctrine of the missionaries operate." Before Dr. Carey’s exposure could reach England this "tub" story became the stock argument of the anti-christian orators. The Madras barrister, Marsh, who was put up to answer Wilberforce, was driven to such language as this:--

"Your struggles are only begun when you have converted one caste; never will the scheme of Hindoo conversion be realised till you persuade an immense population to suffer by whole tribes the severest martyrdom that has yet been sustained for the sake of religion--and are the missionaries whom this bill will let loose on India fit engines for the accomplishment of this great revolution? Will these people, crawling from the holes and caverns of their original destinations, apostates from the loom and the anvil--he should have said the awl--and renegades from the lowest handicraft employments, be a match for the cool and sedate controversies they will have to encounter should the Brahmans condescend to enter into the arena against the maimed and crippled gladiators that presume to grapple with their faith? What can be apprehended but the disgrace and discomfiture of whole hosts of tub preachers in the conflict?"

Lord Wellesley’s eulogy of the Serampore mission in the House of Lords was much more pronounced than appears from the imperfect report. But even in that he answered the Brahmanised member of the House of Commons thus:--

"With regard to the missionaries, he must say that while he was in India he never knew of any danger arising from their proceedings, neither had he heard of any impression produced by them in the way of conversion. The greater number of them were in the Danish settlement of Serampore; but he never heard of any convulsions or any alarm produced by them. Some of them, particularly Mr. Carey, were very learned men, and had been employed in the College of Fort William. He had always considered the missionaries who were in India in his time a quiet, orderly, discreet, and learned body; and he had employed them in the education of youth and the translation of the Scriptures into the eastern languages. He had thought it his duty to have the Sacred Scriptures translated into the languages of the East, and to give the learned natives employed in the translation the advantage of access to the sacred fountain of divine truth. He thought a Christian governor could not have done less; and he knew that a British governor ought not to do more."

Carey’s letters to Fuller in 1810-12 are filled with importunate appeals to agitate, so that the new charter might legalise Christian mission work in India. Fuller worked outside of the House as hard as Wilberforce. In eight weeks of the session no fewer than nine hundred petitions were presented, in twenties and thirties, night after night, till Lord Castlereagh exclaimed, "This is enough, Mr. Fuller." There was more reason for Carey’s urgency than he knew at the time he was pressing Fuller. The persecution of the missionaries in Bengal, excused by the Vellore mutiny, which had driven Judson to Burma and several other missionaries elsewhere, was renewed by the Indian Government’s secretaries and police. The Ministry had informed the Court of Directors that they had resolved to permit Europeans to settle in India, yet after five weeks’ vacillation the Governor-General yielded to his subordinates so far as to issue an order on 5th March 1812, for the expulsion of three missionaries, an order which was so executed that one of them was conducted like a felon through the streets and lodged in the native jail for two hours. Carey thus wrote to Ryland on the persecution:--

"CALCUTTA, 14th April 1813.--Before this reaches you it is probable that you will have heard of the resolution of Government respecting our brethren Johns, Lawson, and Robinson, and will perhaps have even seen Brother Johns, who was by that cruel order sent home on the Castlereagh. Government have agreed that Brother Lawson shall stay till the pleasure of the Court of Directors is known, to whom a reference will be made. Brother Robinson was gone down the river, and was on board a ship bound to Java when the order was issued; he therefore got out without hearing of it, but I understand it will be sent thither after him. Jehovah reigneth!

"Since Brother Johns’s departure I have tried to ascertain the cause of the severity in Government. I had a long conversation with H. T. Colebrooke, Esq., who has been out of Council but a few months, upon the matter. I cannot learn that Government has any specific dislike to us, but find that ever since the year 1807 the orders of the Court of Directors to send home all Europeans not in the service of Her Majesty or the Company, and who come out without leave of the Directors, have been so peremptory and express that Government cannot now overlook any circumstance which brings such persons to notice. Notwithstanding the general way in which the Court of Directors have worded their orders, I cannot help putting several circumstances together, which make me fear that our Mission was the cause of the enforcement of that general law which forbids Europeans to remain in India without the leave of the Court of Directors.

"Whether Twining’s pamphlet excited the alarm, or was only an echo of the minds of a number of men hostile to religion, I cannot say, but if I recollect dates aright the orders of the Court of Directors came as soon as possible after that pamphlet was published; and as it would have been too barefaced to have given a specific order to send home missionaries, they founded their orders on an unjust and wicked clause in the charter, and so enforced it that it should effectually operate on missionaries.

"I hope the friends of religion will persevere in the use of all peaceful and lawful means to prevail on the legislature to expunge that clause, or so to modify it that ministers of the Gospel may have leave to preach, form and visit churches, and perform the various duties of their office without molestation, and that they may have a right to settle in and travel over any part of India for that purpose. Nothing can be more just than this wish, and nothing would be more politic than for it to be granted; for every one converted from among the heathen is from that time a staunch friend of the English Government. Our necks have, however, been more or less under the yoke ever since that year, and preaching the Gospel stands in much the same political light as committing an act of felony. Witness what has been done to Mr. Thompson, the five American brethren, and our three brethren. Mr. Thomason, the clergyman, has likewise hard work to stand his ground.

"I trust, however, it is too late to eradicate the Gospel from Bengal. The number of those born in the country who preach the Word is now very considerable. Fifteen of this description preach constantly, and seven or eight more occasionally exhort their countrymen, besides our European brethren. The Gospel is stationed at eighteen or twenty stations belonging to our Mission alone, and at several of them there are churches. The Bible is either translated or under translation into twenty-four of the languages of the East, eighteen of which we are employed about, besides printing most of the others. Thirteen out of these eighteen are now in the press, including a third edition of the Bengali New Testament. Indeed, so great is the demand for Bibles that though we have eight presses constantly at work I fear we shall not have a Bengali New Testament to sell or give away for the next twelve months, the old edition being entirely out of print. We shall be in almost the same predicament with the Hindostani. We are going to set up two more presses, which we can get made in Calcutta, and are going to send another to Rangoon. In short, though the publishing of the Word of God is a political crime, there never was a time when it was so successful. ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.’

"Through divine mercy we are all well, and live in peace and love. A small cloud which threatened at the time Brother Johns left us has mercifully blown over, and we are now in the utmost harmony. I will, if possible, write to my nephew Eustace by these ships, but I am so pressed for time that I can never promise to write a letter. The Lord has so blessed us that we are now printing in more languages than we could do before the fire took place.

"Give my love to Eustace, also to all who recollect or think of me. I am now near fifty-two years of age; yet through mercy I am well and am enabled to keep close to work twelve or fourteen hours a day. I hope to see the Bible printed in most of the languages in which it is begun.--I am, very affectionately yours, WM. CAREY."

Carey had previously written thus to Fuller:--"The fault lies in the clause which gives the Company power thus to send home interlopers, and is just as reasonable as one which should forbid all the people in England--a select few excepted--to look at the moon. I hope this clause will be modified or expunged in the new charter. The prohibition is wrong, and nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right."

It was left to the charter of 1853 fully to liberalise the Company, but each step was taken too late to save it from the nemesis of 1857 and extinction in 1858. "Let no man think," Wilberforce had said to the House of Commons in 1813, "that the petitions which have loaded our table have been produced by a burst of momentary enthusiasm. While the sun and moon continue to shine in the firmament so long will this object be pursued with unabated ardour until the great work be accomplished."

The opposition of Anglo-Indian officials and lawyers, which vainly used no better weapons than such as Mr. Prendergast and his "tub" fabrication, had been anticipated and encouraged by the Edinburgh Review. That periodical was at the height of its influence in 1808, the year before John Murray’s Quarterly was first published. The Rev. Sydney Smith, as the literary and professional representative of what he delighted to call "the cause of rational religion," was the foe of every form of earnest Christianity, which he joined the mob in stigmatising as "Methodism." He was not unacquainted with Indian politics, for his equally clever brother, known as Bobus Smith, was long Advocate-General in Calcutta, and left a very considerable fortune made there to enrich the last six years of the Canon’s life. Casting about for a subject on which to exercise at once his animosity and his fun, he found it in the Periodical Accounts, wherein Fuller had undoubtedly too often published letters and passages of journals written only for the eye of the private friend. Carey frequently remonstrated against the publicity given to some of his communications, and the fear of this checked his correspondence. In truth, the new-born enthusiasm was such that, at first, the Committee kept nothing back. It was easy for a litterateur like Sydney Smith in those days to extract passages and to give them such headings as "Brother Carey’s Piety at Sea," "Hatred of the Natives to the Gospel." Smith produced an article which, as republished in his collected essays, has a historical value as a test of the bitterness of the hate which the missionary enterprise had to meet in secular literature till the death of Livingstone, Wilson, and Duff opened the eyes of journalism to the facts. In itself it must be read in the light of its author’s own criticism of his articles, thus expressed in a letter to Francis Jeffrey, and of the regret that he had written it which, Jeffrey told Dr. Marshman, he lived to utter:--"Never mind; let them" (his articles) "go away with their absurdity unadulterated and pure. If I please, the object for which I write is attained; if I do not, the laughter which follows my error is the only thing which can make me cautious and tremble." But for that picture by himself we should have pronounced Carlyle’s drawing of him to be almost as malicious as his own of the Serampore missonaries--"A mass of fat and muscularity, with massive Roman nose, piercing hazel eyes, shrewdness and fun--not humour or even wit--seemingly without soul altogether."

The attack called forth a reply by Mr. Styles so severe that Sydney Smith wrote a rejoinder which began by claiming credit for "rooting out a nest of consecrated cobblers." Sir James Mackintosh, then in Bombay, wrote of a similar assault by Mr. Thomas Twining on the Bible Societies, that it "must excite general indignation. The only measure which he could consistently propose would be the infliction of capital punishment on the crime of preaching or embracing Christianity in India, for almost every inferior degree of persecution is already practised by European or native anti-christians. But it fell to Southey, in the very first number of the Quarterly Review, in April 1809, to deal with the Rev. Sydney Smith, and to defend Carey and the Brotherhood as both deserved. The layman’s defence was the more effective for its immediate purpose that he started from the same prejudice as that of the reverend Whig rationalist--"the Wesleyans, the Orthodox dissenters of every description, and the Evangelical churchmen may all be comprehended under the generic name of Methodists. The religion which they preach is not the religion of our fathers, and what they have altered they have made worse." But Southey had himself faith as well as a literary canon higher than that of his opponent who wrote only to "please" his patrons. He saw in these Methodists alone that which he appreciated as the essence of true faith--"that spirit of enthusiasm by which Europe was converted to Christianity they have in some measure revived, and they have removed from Protestantism a part of its reproach." He proceeded to tell how "this Mission, which is represented by its enemies as so dangerous to the British Empire in India, and thereby, according to a logic learnt from Buonaparte, to England also, originated in a man by name William Carey, who till the twenty-fourth year of his age was a working shoemaker. Sectarianism has this main advantage over the Established Church, that its men of ability certainly find their station, and none of its talents are neglected or lost. Carey was a studious and pious man, his faith wrong, his feelings right. He made himself competently versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He is now probably a far more learned orientalist than any European has ever been before him, and has been appointed Professor of Sanskrit and Bengali at the College of Fort William." Then follow a history of the Mission written in a style worthy of the author of the Life of Nelson, and these statements of the political and the purely missionary questions, which read now almost as predictions:--

"The first step towards winning the natives to our religion is to show them that we have one. This will hardly be done without a visible church. There would be no difficulty in filling up the establishment, however ample; but would the archbishop, bishops, deans, and chapters of Mr. Buchanan’s plan do the work of missionaries? Could the Church of England supply missionaries?--where are they to be found among them? In what school for the promulgation of sound and orthodox learning are they trained up? There is ability and there is learning in the Church of England, but its age of fermentation has long been over; and that zeal which for this work is the most needful is, we fear, possessed only by the Methodists...

"Carey and his son have been in Bengal fourteen years, the other brethren only nine; they had all a difficult language to acquire before they could speak to a native, and to preach and argue in it required a thorough and familiar knowledge. Under these circumstances the wonder is, not that they have done so little, but that they have done so much; for it will be found that, even without this difficulty to retard them, no religious opinions have spread more rapidly in the same time, unless there was some remarkable folly or extravagance to recommend them, or some powerful worldly inducement. Their progress will be continually accelerating; the difficulty is at first, as in introducing vaccination into a distant land; when the matter has once taken one subject supplies infection for all around him, and the disease takes root in the country. The husband converts the wife, the son converts the parent, the friend his friend, and every fresh proselyte becomes a missionary in his own neighbourhood. Thus their sphere of influence and of action widens, and the eventual issue of a struggle between truth and falsehood is not to be doubted by those who believe in the former. Other missionaries from other societies have now entered India, and will soon become efficient labourers in their station. From Government all that is asked is toleration for themselves and protection for their converts. The plan which they have laid for their own proceedings is perfectly prudent and unexceptionable, and there is as little fear of their provoking martyrdom as there would be of their shrinking from it, if the cause of God and man require the sacrifice. But the converts ought to be protected from violence, and all cramming with cow-dung prohibited on pain of retaliation with beef-tea.

"Nothing can be more unfair than the manner in which the scoffers and alarmists have represented the missionaries. We, who have thus vindicated them, are neither blind to what is erroneous in their doctrine or ludicrous in their phraseology; but the anti-missionaries cull out from their journals and letters all that is ridiculous sectarian, and trifling; call them fools, madmen, tinkers, Calvinists, and schismatics; and keep out of sight their love of man, and their zeal for God, their self-devotement, their indefatigable industry, and their unequalled learning. These low-born and low-bred mechanics have translated the whole Bible into Bengali, and have by this time printed it. They are printing the New Testament in the Sanskrit, the Orissa, Mahratta, Hindostan, and Guzarat, and translating it into Persic, Telinga, Karnata, Chinese, the language of the Sieks and of the Burmans, and in four of these languages they are going on with the Bible. Extraordinary as this is, it will appear more so when it is remembered that of these men one was originally a shoemaker, another a printer at Hull, and a third the master of a charity-school at Bristol. Only fourteen years have elapsed since Thomas and Carey set foot in India, and in that time have these missionaries acquired this gift of tongues, in fourteen years these low-born, low-bred mechanics have done more towards spreading the knowledge of the Scriptures among the heathen than has been accomplished, or even attempted, by all the princes and potentates of the world--and all the universities and establishments into the bargain.

"Do not think to supersede the Baptist missionaries till you can provide from your own church such men as these, and, it may be added, such women also as their wives."

Soon after the Charter victory had been gained "that fierce and fiery Calvinist," whose dictum Southey adopted, that the question in dispute is not whether the natives shall enjoy toleration, but whether that toleration shall be extended to the teachers of Christianity, Andrew Fuller, entered into rest on the 7th May 1815, at the age of sixty-two. Sutcliff of Olney had been the first of the three to be taken away25 a year before, at the same age. The scholarly Dr. Ryland of Bristol was left alone, and the home management of the Mission passed into the hands of another generation. Up to Fuller’s death that management had been almost ideally perfect. In 1812 the Committee had been increased by the addition of nineteen members, to represent the growing interest of the churches in Serampore, and to meet the demand of the "respectable" class who had held aloof at the first, who were eager that the headquarters of so renowned an enterprise should be removed to London. But Fuller prevailed to keep the Society a little longer at Kettering, although he failed to secure as his assistant and successor the one man whose ability, experience, and prudence would have been equal to his own, and have prevented the troubles that followed--Christopher Anderson. As Fuller lay dying, he dictated a letter to Ryland wherein he thus referred to the evangelical doctrine of grace which he had been the one English theologian of his day to defend from the hyper-calvinists, and to use as the foundation of the modern missionary enterprise:--"I have preached and written much against the abuse of the doctrine of grace, but that doctrine is all my salvation and all my desire. I have no other hope than from salvation by mere sovereign, efficacious grace through the atonement of my Lord and Saviour: with this hope I can go into eternity with composure. We have some who have been giving it out of late that if Sutcliff and some others had preached more of Christ and less of Jonathan Edwards they would have been more useful. If those who talk thus had preached Christ half as much as Jonathan Edwards did, and were half as useful as he was, their usefulness would be double what it is. It is very singular that the Mission to the East originated with one of these principles, and without pretending to be a prophet, I may say if it ever falls into the hands of men who talk in this strain (of hyper-calvinism) it will soon come to nothing."

Andrew Fuller was not only the first of Foreign Mission Secretaries; he was a model for all. To him his work was spiritual life, and hence, though the most active preacher and writer of his day, he was like Carey in this, that his working day was twice as long as that of most men, and he could spend half of his time in the frequent journeys all over the kingdom to raise funds, in repeated campaigns in London to secure toleration, and in abundant letters to the missionaries. His relation to the Committee, up to the last, was equally exemplary. In the very earliest missionary organisation in England it is due to him that the line was clearly drawn between the deliberative and judicial function which is that of the members, and the executive which is that of the secretary. Wisdom and efficiency, clearness of perception and promptitude of action, were thus combined. Fuller’s, too, was the special merit of realising that, while a missionary committee or church are fellow-workers only with the men and women abroad, the Serampore Brotherhood was a self-supporting, and to that extent a self-governing body in a sense true of no foreign mission ever since. The two triumvirates, moreover, consisted of giants--Carey, Marshman, and Ward abroad; Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland at home. To Carey personally the death of Fuller was more than to any other. For almost the quarter of a century he had kept his vow that he would hold the rope. When Pearce died all too soon there was none whom Carey loved like Fuller, while Fuller’s devotion to Carey was all the greater that it was tempered by a wise jealousy for his perfectness. So early as 1797, Fuller wrote thus to the troublesome Fountain:--"It affords us good hope of your being a useful missionary that you seem to love and revere the counsels of Brother Carey. A humble, peaceful, circumspect, disinterested, faithful, peaceable, and zealous conduct like his will render you a blessing to society. Brother Carey is greatly respected and beloved by all denominations here. I will tell you what I have foreborne to tell him lest it should hurt his modesty. Good old Mr. Newton says: ‘Mr. Carey has favoured me with a letter, which, indeed, I accept as a favour, and I mean to thank him for it. I trust my heart as cordially unites with him as though I were a brother Baptist myself. I look to such a man with reverence. He is more to me than bishop or archbishop; he is an apostle. May the Lord make all who undertake missions like-minded with Brother Carey!’" As the home administrator, no less than as the theological controversialist, Andrew Fuller stands only second to William Carey, the founder of Modern English Missions.

Fuller’s last letter to Carey forms the best introduction to the little which it is here necessary to record of the action of the Baptist Missionary Society when under the secretaryship of the Rev. John Dyer. Mr. John Marshman, C.S.I., has written the detailed history of that controversy not only with filial duty, but with a forgiving charity which excites our admiration for one who suffered more from it than all his predecessors in the Brotherhood, of which he was the last representative. The Society has long since ceased to approve of that period. Its opinion has become that of Mr. Marshman, to which a careful perusal of all the documents both in Serampore and England has led us--"Had it been possible to create a dozen establishments like that of Serampore, each raising and managing its own funds, and connected with the Society as the centre of unity in a common cause, it ought to have been a subject of congratulation and not of regret." The whole policy of every missionary church and society is now and has long been directed to creating self-supporting and self-propagating missions, like Serampore, that the regions beyond may be evangelised--whether these be colleges of catechumens and inquirers, like those of Duff and Wilson, Hislop and Dr. Miller in India, and of Govan and Dr. Stewart in Lovedale, Kafraria; or the indigenous churches of the West Indies, West Africa, the Pacific Ocean, and Burma. To us the long and bitter dispute is now of value only in so far as it brings out in Christ-like relief the personality of William Carey.

At the close of 1814 Dr. Carey had asked Fuller to pay £50 a year to his father, then in his eightieth year, and £20 to his (step) mother if she survived the old man. Protesting that an engraving of his portrait had been published in violation of the agreement which he had made with the artist, he agreed to the wish of each of his relatives for a copy. To these requests Fuller had replied:--"You should not insist on these things being charged to you, nor yet your father’s £50, nor the books, nor anything necessary to make you comfortable, unless it be to be paid out of what you would otherwise give to the mission. To insist on their being paid out of your private property seems to be dictated by resentment. It is thus we express our indignation when we have an avaricious man to deal with."

The first act of the Committee, after Fuller’s funeral, led Dr. Ryland to express to Carey his unbounded fears for the future. There were two difficulties. The new men raised the first question, in what sense the Serampore property belonged to the Society? They then proceeded to show how they would answer it, by appointing the son of Samuel Pearce to Serampore as Mr. Ward’s assistant. On both sides of their independence, as trustees of the property which they had created and gifted to the Society on this condition, and as a self-supporting, self-elective brotherhood, it became necessary, for the unbroken peace of the mission and the success of their work, that they should vindicate their moral and legal position. The correspondence fell chiefly to Dr. Marshman. Ward and he successively visited England, to which the controversy was transferred, with occasional references to Dr. Carey in Serampore. All Scotland, led by Christopher Anderson, Chalmers, and the Haldanes--all England, except the Dyer faction and Robert Hall for a time, among the Baptists, and nearly all America, held with the Serampore men; but their ever-extending operations were checked by the uncertainty, and their hearts were nearly broken. The junior missionaries in India formed a separate union and congregation by themselves in Calcutta, paid by the Society, though professing to carry out the organisation of the Serampore Brotherhood in other respects. The Committee’s controversy lasted sixteen years, and was closed in 1830, after Ward’s death, by Carey and Marshman drawing up a new trust-deed, in which, having vindicated their position, the old men made over properties which had cost them £7800 to eleven trustees in England, stipulating only that they should occupy them rent free till death, and that their colleagues--who were John Marshman and John Mack, of Edinburgh University--might continue in them for three years thereafter, paying rent to the Society. Such self-sacrifice would be pronounced heroic, but it was only the outcome of a life of self-devotion, marked by the spirit of Him who spake the Sermon on the Mount, and said to the first missionaries He sent forth:--"Be wise as serpents, harmless as doves." The story is completed by the fact that John Marshman, on his father’s death, again paid the price of as much of the property as the Hoogli had not swallowed up when the Committee were about to put it in the market.

Such was Dr. Carey’s position in the Christian world that the Dyer party considered it important for their interest to separate him from his colleagues, and if not to claim his influence for their side, at least to neutralise it. By trying to hold up Dr. Marshman to odium, they roused the righteous indignation of Carey, while outraging his sense of justice by their blows at the independence of the Brotherhood. Dr. Marshman, when in England, met this course by frankly printing the whole private correspondence of Carey on the subject of the property, or thirty-two letters ranging from the year 1815 to 1828. One of the earliest of these is to Mr. Dyer, who had so far forgotten himself as to ask Dr. Carey to write home, alone, his opinion of his "elder brethren," and particularly of Dr. Marshman. The answer, covering eleven octavo pages of small type, is a model for all controversialists, and especially for any whom duty compels to rebuke the minister who has failed to learn the charity which envieth not. We reproduce the principal passages, and the later letters to Christopher Anderson and his son Jabez, revealing the nobleness of Carey and the inner life of the Brotherhood:--

"SERAMPORE, 15th July 1819.

"MY DEAR BROTHER--I am sorry you addressed your letter of January the 9th to me alone, because it places me in a most awkward situation, as it respects my elder brethren, with whom I have acted in concert for the last nineteen years, with as great a share of satisfaction and pleasure as could reasonably be expected from a connection with imperfect creatures, and whom I am thereby called to condemn contrary to my convictions, or to justify at the expense of their accusers. It also places me in a disagreeable situation as it respects my younger brethren, whom I highly respect as Christians; but whose whole conduct, as it respects the late unhappy differences, has been such as makes it impossible for me to do otherwise than condemn it...

"You ask, ‘Is there no ground for the charges of profusion, etc., preferred against Brother Marshman?’ Brother Marshman has always been ardently engaged in promoting the cause of God in India, and, being of a very active mind, has generally been chosen by us to draw up our Reports, to write many of our public letters, to draw up plans for promoting the objects of the mission, founding and managing schools, raising subscriptions, and other things of a like nature; so that he has taken a more active part than Brother Ward or myself in these public acts of the mission. These things placed him in the foreground, and it has been no uncommon thing for him to bear the blame of those acts which equally belong to Brother Ward and myself, merely because he was the instrument employed in performing them.

"The charge of profusion brought against Dr. Marshman is more extensive than you have stated in your letter. He is charged with having his house superbly furnished, with keeping several vehicles for the use of his family, and with labouring to aggrandise and bring them into public notice to a culpable extent. The whole business of furniture, internal economy, etc., of the Serampore station, must exclusively belong to ourselves, and I confess I think the question about it an unlovely one. Some person, we know not whom, told some one, we know not whom, ‘that he had been often at Lord Hastings’s table, but that Brother Marshman’s table far exceeded his.’ I have also often been at Lord Hastings’s table (I mean his private table), and I do therefore most positively deny the truth of the assertion; though I confess there is much domestic plainness at the table of the Governor-General of India (though nothing of meanness; on the contrary, everything is marked with a dignified simplicity). I suspect the informant never was at Lord Hastings’s table, or he could have not been guilty of such misrepresentation. Lord Hastings’s table costs more in one day than Brother Marshman’s in ten.

"The following statement may explain the whole business of Brother Marshman’s furniture, etc., which you have all been so puzzled to account for, and have certainly accounted for in a way that is not the true one. We have, you know, a very large school, perhaps the largest in India. In this school are children of persons of the first rank in the country. The parents or guardians of these children frequently call at the Mission-house, and common propriety requires that they should be respectfully received, and invited to take a breakfast or dinner, and sometimes to continue there a day or two. It is natural that persons who visit the Mission-house upon business superintended by Brother Marshman should be entertained at his house rather than elsewhere. Till within the last four or five years we had no particular arrangement for the accommodation of visitors who came to see us; but as those who visited us on business were entertained at Brother Marshman’s, it appeared to be the most eligible method to provide for the entertainment of other visitors there also; but at that time Brother Marshman had not a decent table for persons of the above description to sit down to. We, therefore, voted him a sum to enable him to provide such articles as were necessary to entertain them with decency; and I am not aware that he has been profuse, or that he has provided anything not called for by the rules of propriety. I have no doubt but Brother Ward can enumerate and describe all these articles of furniture. It is, however, evident that you must be very imperfect judges of their necessity, unless you could at the same time form a just estimate of the circumstances in which we stand. It ought also to be considered that all these articles are public property, and always convertible into their full value in cash. I hope, however, that things are not yet come to that pass, that a man who, with his wife, has for nineteen or twenty years laboured night and day for the mission, who by their labour disinterestedly contribute between 2000 and 3000 rupees monthly to it, and who have made sacrifices which, if others have not seen, Brother Ward and I have,--sacrifices which ought to put to the blush all his accusers, who, notwithstanding their cries against him, have not only supported themselves, but also have set themselves up in a lucrative business at the Society’s expense; and who, even to this day, though they have two prosperous schools, and a profitable printing-office, continue to receive their monthly allowance, amounting (including Miss Chaffin’s) to 700 rupees a month from the Society; I feel indignant at their outcry on the subject of expense, and I say, merely as a contrast to their conduct, So did not Brother Marshman. Surely things are not come to that pass, that he or any other brother must give an account to the Society of every plate he uses, and every loaf he cuts.

"Till a very few years ago we had no vehicle except a single horse chaise for me to go backwards and forwards to Calcutta. That was necessarily kept on the opposite side of the river; and if the strength of the horse would have borne it, could not have been used for the purposes of health. Sister Marshman was seized with a disease of the liver, a disease which proves fatal in three cases out of four. Sister Ward was ill of the same disorder, and both of them underwent a long course of mercurial treatment, as is usual in that disease. Exercise was considered by the physicians as of the first importance, and we certainly thought no expense too great to save the valuable lives of our sisters. A single horse chaise, and an open palanquin, called a Tonjon, were procured. I never ride out for health; but usually spend an hour or two, morning and evening, in the garden. Sister Ward was necessitated to visit England for hers. Brother Ward had a saddle horse presented to him by a friend. My wife has a small carriage drawn by a man. These vehicles were therefore almost exclusively used by Brother Marshman’s family. When our brethren arrived from England they did not fail to put this equipage into the account against Brother Marshman. They now keep three single horse chaises, besides palanquins; but we do not think they keep more than are necessary.

"Brother Marshman retains for the school a French master, a music master, and a drawing master. The expenses of these are amply repaid by the school, but Brother Marshman’s children, and all those belonging to the family, have the advantage of their instructions. Brother Marshman’s children are, however, the most numerous, and envy has not failed to charge him with having retained them all for the sake of his own children. Surely a man’s caring for his family’s health and his children’s education is, if a crime, a venial one, and ought not to be held up to blacken his reputation. Brother Marshman is no more perfect than other men, partakers like him of the grace of God. His natural bias and habits are his own, and differ as much from those of other men as theirs differ from one another. I do not deny that he has an inclination to display his children to advantage. This, however, is a foible which most fond parents will be inclined to pardon. I wish I had half his piety, energy of mind, and zeal for the cause of God. These excellencies, in my opinion, so far overbalance all his defects that I am constrained to consider him a Christian far above the common run. I must now close this defence of Brother Marshman by repeating that all matters of furniture, convenience, etc., are things belonging to the economy of the station at Serampore, and that no one beside ourselves has the smallest right to interfere therewith. The Calcutta brethren are now acting on the same principle, and would certainly repel with indignation any attempt made by us to regulate their affairs.

"I have said that ‘I never ride out for the sake of health’; and it may therefore be inquired, ‘Why are vehicles, etc., for the purpose of health more necessary for the other members of the family than for you?’ I reply that my health is in general good, and probably much benefited by a journey to and from Calcutta two or three times a week. I have also a great fondness for natural science, particularly botany and horticulture. These, therefore, furnish not only exercise, but amusement for me. These amusements of mine are not, however, enjoyed without expense, any more than those of my brethren, and were it not convenient for Brother Marshman’s accusers to make a stepping-stone of me, I have no doubt but my collection of plants, aviary, and museum, would be equally impeached as articles of luxury and lawless expenses; though, except the garden, the whole of these expenses are borne by myself.

"John Marshman is admitted a member of the union, but he had for some time previously thereto been a member of the church. I perceive plainly that all your objections to him have been excited by the statements of the Calcutta brethren, which you certainly ought to receive with much caution in all things which regard Bother Marshman and his family. You observe that the younger brethren especially look up to me with respect and affection. It may be so; but I confess I have frequently thought that, had it been so, they would have consulted me, or at least have mentioned to me the grounds of their dissatisfaction before they proceeded to the extremity of dividing the mission. When I engaged in the mission, it was a determination that, whatever I suffered, a breach therein should never originate with me. To this resolution I have hitherto obstinately adhered. I think everything should be borne, every sacrifice made, and every method of accommodation or reconciliation tried, before a schism is suffered to take place...

"I disapprove as much of the conduct of our Calcutta brethren as it is possible for me to disapprove of any human actions. The evil they have done is, I fear, irreparable; and certainly the whole might have been prevented by a little frank conversation with either of us; and a hundredth part of that self-denial which I found it necessary to exercise for the first few years of the mission, would have prevented this awful rupture. I trust you will excuse my warmth of feeling upon this subject, when you consider that by this rupture that cause is weakened and disgraced, in the establishment and promotion of which I have spent the best part of my life. A church is attempted to be torn in pieces, for which neither I nor my brethren ever thought we could do enough. We laboured to raise it: we expended much money to accomplish that object; and in a good measure saw the object of our desire accomplished. But now we are traduced, and the church rent by the very men who came to be our helpers. As to Brother Marshman, seriously, what do they want? Would they attempt to deny his possessing the grace of God? He was known to and esteemed by Brother Ryland as a Christian before he left England. I have lived with him ever since his arrival in India, and can witness to his piety and holy conduct. Would they exclude him from the mission? Judge yourself whether it is comely that a man, who has laboriously and disinterestedly served the mission so many years--who has by his diligence and hard labour raised the most respectable school in India, as well as given a tone to all the others--who has unvaryingly consecrated the whole of that income, as well as his other labours, to the cause of God in India,--should be arraigned and condemned without a hearing by a few young men just arrived, and one of whom had not been a month in the country before he joined the senseless outcry? Or would they have his blood? Judge, my dear brother, yourself, for I am ashamed to say more on this subject.

"I need not say that circumstances must in a great measure determine where missionaries should settle. The chief town of each of these countries would be preferable, if other circumstances permit; but sometimes Government would not allow this, and sometimes other things may close the door. Missionaries however must knock loud and push hard at the door, and if there be the smallest opening, must force themselves in; and, once entered, put their lives in their hands and exert themselves to the utmost in dependence upon divine support, if they ever hope to do much towards evangelising the heathen world. My situation in the college, and Brother Marshman’s as superintending the first academy in India, which, I likewise observe, has been established and brought to its present flourishing state wholly by his care and application, have made our present situation widely different from what it was when first engaged in the mission. As a missionary I could go in a straw hat and dine with the judge of the district, and often did so; but as a Professor in the College I cannot do so. Brother Marshman is placed in the same predicament. These circumstances impose upon us a necessity of making a different appearance to what we formerly did as simple missionaries; but they furnish us with opportunities of speaking to gentlemen of the first power and influence in government, upon matters of the highest importance to the great work in which we are engaged; and, as a proof that our opportunities of this nature have not been in vain, I need only say that, in a conversation which I had some time ago with one of the secretaries to Government, upon the present favourable bias of government and the public in general to favour all plans for doing good, he told me that he believed the whole was owing to the prudent and temperate manner in which we had acted; and that if we had acted with precipitancy and indiscretion, he had every reason to believe the general feeling would have been as hostile to attempts to do good as it is now favourable to them.

"I would not wish you to entertain the idea that we and our brethren in Calcutta are resolved upon interminable hatred. On the contrary, I think that things are gone as far as we may expect them to go; and I now expect that the fire of contention will gradually go out. All the distressing and disagreeable circumstances are, I trust, past; and I expect we shall be in a little time on a more friendly footing. Much of what has taken place originated in England. Mistakes and false conclusions were followed by all the circumstances I have detailed. I think the whole virulence of opposition has now spent itself. Our brethren have no control over us, nor we over them. And, if I am not mistaken, each side will soon acknowledge that it has gone too far in some instances; and ultimate good will arise from the evil I so much deplore.

"Having now written to you my whole sentiments upon the business, and formerly to my very dear Brother Ryland, allow me to declare my resolution not to write anything further upon the subject, however much I may be pressed thereto. The future prosperity of the mission does not depend upon the clearing up of every little circumstance to the satisfaction of every captious inquirer, but upon the restoration of mutual concord among us, which must be preceded by admitting that we are all subject to mistake, and to be misled by passion, prejudice, and false judgment. Let us therefore strive and pray that the things which make for peace and those by which we may edify one another may abound among us more and more. I am, my dear brother, very affectionately, yours in our Lord Jesus Christ, W. CAREY."

"14th May 1828.

"MY DEAR BROTHER ANDERSON--Yours by the Louisa, of October last, came to hand a few days ago with the copies of Brother Marshman’s brief Memoir of the Serampore Mission. I am glad it is written in so temperate and Christian a spirit, and I doubt not but it will be ultimately productive of good effects. There certainly is a great contrast between the spirit in which that piece is written and that in which observations upon it, both in the Baptist and Particular Baptist Magazines, are written. The unworthy attempts in those and other such like pieces to separate Brother Marshman and me are truly contemptible. In plain English, they amount to thus much--‘The Serampore Missionaries, Carey, Marshman, and Ward, have acted a dishonest part, alias are rogues. But we do not include Dr. Carey in the charge of dishonesty; he is an easy sort of a man, who will agree to anything for the sake of peace, or in other words, he is a fool. Mr. Ward, it is well known,’ say they, ‘was the tool of Dr. Marshman, but he is gone from the present scene, and it is unlovely to say any evil of the dead.’ Now I certainly hold those persons’ exemption of me from the blame they attach to Brother Marshman in the greatest possible contempt. I may have subscribed my name thoughtlessly to papers, and it would be wonderful if there had been no instance of this in so long a course of years. The great esteem I had for the Society for many years, undoubtedly on more occasions than one put me off my guard, and I believe my brethren too; so that we have signed writings which, if we could have foreseen the events of a few years, we should not have done. These, however, were all against our own private interest, and I believe I have never been called an easy fool for signing of them. It has only been since we found it necessary to resist the claims of the Committee that I have risen to this honour.

"It has also been hinted that I intend to separate from Brother Marshman. I cannot tell upon what such hints or reports are founded, but I assure you, in the most explicit manner, that I intend to continue connected with him and Serampore as long as I live; unless I should be separated from him by some unforeseen stroke of Providence. There may be modifications of our union, arising from circumstances; but it is my wish that it should remain in all things essential to the mission as long as I live.

"I rejoice to say that there is very little of that spirit of hostility which prevails in England in India, and I trust what still remains will gradually decrease till scarcely the remembrance of it will continue. Our stations, I mean those connected with Serampore, are of great importance, and some of them in a flourishing state. We will do all we can to maintain them, and I hope the friends to the cause of God in Britain will not suffer them to sink for want of that pecuniary help which is necessary. Indeed I hope we shall be assisted in attempting other stations beside those already occupied; and many such stations present themselves to my mind which nothing prevents being immediately occupied but want of men and money. The college will also require assistance, and I hope will not be without it; I anticipate the time when its salutary operation in the cause of God in India will be felt and acknowledged by all.

"These observations respecting my own conduct you are at liberty to use as you please. I hope now to take my final leave of this unpleasant subject, and have just room to say that I am very affectionately yours, W. CAREY."

Throughout the controversy thus forced upon him, we find Dr. Carey’s references, in his unpublished letters to the brethren in Calcutta, all in the strain of the following to his son Jabez:--

"15th August 1820.--This week we received letters from Mr. Marshman, who had safely arrived at St. Helena. I am sure it will give you pleasure to learn that our long-continued dispute with the younger brethren in Calcutta is now settled. We met together for that purpose about three weeks ago, and after each side giving up some trifling ideas and expressions, came to a reconciliation, which, I pray God, may be lasting. Nothing I ever met with in my life--and I have met with many distressing things--ever preyed so much upon my spirits as this difference has. I am sure that in all disputes very many wrong things must take place on both sides for which both parties ought to be humbled before God and one another.

"I wish you could succeed in setting up a few more schools...Consider that and the spread of the gospel as the great objects of your life, and try to promote them by all the wise and prudent methods in your power. Indeed we must always venture something for the sake of doing good. The cause of our Lord Jesus Christ continues to prosper with us. I have several persons now coming in who are inquirers; two or three of them, I hope, will be this evening received into the Church. Excuse my saying more as my room is full of people."

Eight years after, on the 17th April 1828, he thus censured Jabez in the matter of the Society’s action at home:--"From a letter of yours to Jonathan, in which you express a very indecent pleasure at the opposition which Brother Marshman has received, not by the Society but by some anonymous writer in a magazine, I perceive you are informed of the separation which has taken place between them and us. What in that anonymous piece you call a ‘set-down’ I call a ‘falsehood.’ You ought to know that I was a party in all public acts and writings, and that I never intend to withdraw from all the responsibility connected therewith. I utterly despise all the creeping, mean assertions of that party when they say they do not include me in their censures, nor do I work for their praise. According to their and according to your rejoicing...I am either a knave or a fool--a knave if I joined with Brother Marshman; but if, as those gentlemen say, and as you seem to agree with them, I was only led as he pleased, and was a mere cat’s-paw, then of course I am a fool. In either way your thoughts are not very high as it respects me. I do not wonder that Jonathan should express himself unguardedly; his family connection with Mr. Pearce sufficiently accounts for that. We have long been attacked in this country--first by Mr. Adam,   and afterwards by Dr. Bryce.   Bryce is now silenced by two or three pieces by John Marshman in his own newspaper, the John Bull; and as to some of the tissues of falsehood published in England, I shall certainly never reply to them, and I hope no one else will. That cause must be bad which needs such means to support it. I believe God will bring forth our righteousness as the noonday."

On the 12th July 1828 the father again writes to his son Jabez thus:--"Your apologies about Brother Marshman are undoubtedly the best you can offer. I should be sorry to harbour hostile sentiments against any man on the earth upon grounds so slight. Indeed, were all you say matter of fact you ought to forgive it as God for Christ’s sake forgives us. We are required to lay aside all envy and strife and animosities, to forgive each other mutually and to love one another with a pure heart fervently. ‘Thine own friend and thy father’s friend forsake not.’"

Chapter 14: Carey As An Educator--The First Christian College In The East

1818-1830

A college the fourth and perfecting corner-stone of the mission--Carey on the importance of English in 1800--Anticipates Duff’s policy of undermining Brahmanism--New educational era begun by the charter of 1813 and Lord Hastings--Plan of the Serampore College in 1818--Anticipates the Anglo-Orientalism of the Punjab University--The building described by John Marshman--Bishop Middleton follows--The Scottish and other colleges--Action of the Danish Government--The royal charter--Visit of Maharaja Serfojee--Death of Ward, Charles Grant and Bentley--Bishop Heber and his catholic letter--Dr. Carey’s reply--Progress of the college--Cause of its foundation--The college directly and essentially a missionary undertaking--Action of the Brotherhood from the first vindicated--Carey appeals to posterity--The college and the systematic study of English--Carey author of the Grant in Aid system--Economy in administering missions--The Serampore Mission has eighteen stations and fifty missionaries of all kinds--Subsequent history of the Serampore College to 1883.

THE first act of Carey and Marshman when their Committee took up a position of hostility to their self-denying independence, was to complete and perpetuate the mission by a college. As planned by Carey in 1793, the constitution had founded the enterprise on these three corner-stones--preaching the Gospel in the mother tongue of the people; translating the Bible into all the languages of Southern and Eastern Asia; teaching the young, both heathen and Christian, both boys and girls, in vernacular schools. But Carey had not been a year in Serampore when, having built well on all three, he began to see that a fourth must be laid some day in the shape of a college. He and his colleagues had founded and supervised, by the year 1818, no fewer than 126 native schools, containing some 10,000 boys, of whom more than 7000 were in and around Serampore. His work among the pundit class, both in Serampore and in the college of Fort William, and the facilities in the mission-house for training natives, Eurasians, and the missionaries’ sons to be preachers, translators, and teachers, seemed to meet the immediate want. But as every year the mission in all its forms grew and the experience of its leaders developed, the necessity of creating a college staff in a building adapted to the purpose became more urgent. Only thus could the otherwise educated natives be reached, and the Brahmanical class especially be permanently influenced. Only thus could a theological institute be satisfactorily conducted to feed the native Church.

On 10th October 1800 the missionaries had thus written home:--"There appears to be a favourable change in the general temper of the people. Commerce has roused new thoughts and awakened new energies; so that hundreds, if we could skilfully teach them gratis, would crowd to learn the English language. We hope this may be in our power some time, and may be a happy means of diffusing the gospel. At present our hands are quite full." A month after that Carey wrote to Fuller:--"I have long thought whether it would not be desirable for us to set up a school to teach the natives English. I doubt not but a thousand scholars would come. I do not say this because I think it an object to teach them the English tongue; but, query, is not the universal inclination of the Bengalees to learn English a favourable circumstance which may be improved to valuable ends? I only hesitate at the expense." Thirty years after Duff reasoned in the same way, after consulting Carey, and acted at once in Calcutta.

By 1816, when, on 25th June, Carey wrote a letter, for his colleagues and himself, to the Board of the American Baptist General Convention, the great idea, destined slowly to revolutionise not only India, but China, Japan, and the farther East, had taken this form:--

"We know not what your immediate expectations are relative to the Burman empire, but we hope your views are not confined to the immediate conversion of the natives by the preaching of the Word. Could a church of converted natives be obtained at Rangoon, it might exist for a while, and be scattered, or perish for want of additions. From all we have seen hitherto we are ready to think that the dispensations of Providence point to labours that may operate, indeed, more slowly on the population, but more effectually in the end: as knowledge, once put into fermentation, will not only influence the part where it is first deposited, but leaven the whole lump. The slow progress of conversion in such a mode of teaching the natives may not be so encouraging, and may require, in all, more faith and patience; but it appears to have been the process of things, in the progress of the Reformation, during the reigns of Henry, Edward, Elizabeth, James, and Charles. And should the work of evangelising India be thus slow and silently progressive, which, however, considering the age of the world, is not perhaps very likely, still the grand result will amply recompense us, and you, for all our toils. We are sure to take the fortress, if we can but persuade ourselves to sit down long enough before it. ‘We shall reap if we faint not.’

"And then, very dear brethren, when it shall be said of the seat of our labours, the infamous swinging-post is no longer erected; the widow burns no more on the funeral pile; the obscene dances and songs are seen and heard no more; the gods are thrown to the moles and to the bats, and Jesus is known as the God of the whole land; the poor Hindoo goes no more to the Ganges to be washed from his filthiness, but to the fountain opened for sin and uncleanness; the temples are forsaken; the crowds say, ‘Let us go up to the house of the Lord, and He shall teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His statutes;’ the anxious Hindoos no more consume their property, their strength, and their lives, in vain pilgrimages, but they come at once to Him who can save to ‘the uttermost’; the sick and the dying are no more dragged to the Ganges, but look to the Lamb of God, and commit their souls into His faithful hands; the children, no more sacrificed to idols, are become ‘the seed of the Lord, that He may be glorified’; the public morals are improved; the language of Canaan is learnt; benevolent societies are formed; civilisation and salvation walk arm in arm together; the desert blossoms; the earth yields her increase; angels and glorified spirits hover with joy over India, and carry ten thousand messages of love from the Lamb in the midst of the throne; and redeemed souls from the different villages, towns, and cities of this immense country, constantly add to the number, and swell the chorus of the redeemed, ‘Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, unto HIM be the glory;’--when this grand result of the labours of God’s servants in India shall be realised, shall we then think that we have laboured in vain, and spent our strength for nought? Surely not. Well, the decree is gone forth! ‘My word shall prosper in the thing whereunto I sent it.’"

India was being prepared for the new missionary policy. On what we may call its literary side Carey had been long busy. On its more strictly educational side, the charter of 1813 had conceded what had been demanded in vain by a too feeble public opinion in the charter of 1793. A clause was inserted at the last moment declaring that a sum of not less than a lakh of rupees (or ten thousand pounds) a year was to be set apart from the surplus revenues, and applied to the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories there. The clause was prompted by an Anglo-Indian of oriental tastes, who hoped that the Brahman and his Veda might thus be made too strong for the Christian missionary and the Bible as at last tolerated under the 13th resolution. For this reason, and because the money was to be paid only out of any surplus, the directors and their friends offered no opposition. For the quarter of a century the grant was given, and was applied in the spirit of its proposer. But the scandals of its application became such that it was made legally by Bentinck and Macaulay, and practically by Duff, the fountain of a river of knowledge and life which is flooding the East.

The first result of the liberalism of the charter of 1813 and the generous views of Lord Hastings was the establishment in Calcutta by the Hindoos themselves, under the influence of English secularists, of the Hindoo, now the Presidency College. Carey and Marshman were not in Calcutta, otherwise they must have realised even then what they left to Duff to act on fourteen years after, the importance of English not only as an educating but as a Christianising instrument. But though not so well adapted to the immediate need of the reformation which they had begun, and though not applied to the very heart of Bengal in Calcutta, the prospectus of their "College for the Instruction of Asiatic, Christian, and Other Youth in Eastern Literature and European Science," which they published on the 15th July 1818, sketched a more perfect and complete system than any since attempted, if we except John Wilson’s almost unsupported effort in Bombay. It embraced the classical or learned languages of the Hindoos and Mohammedans, Sanskrit and Arabic; the English language and literature, to enable the senior students "to dive into the deepest recesses of European science, and enrich their own language with its choicest treasures"; the preparation of manuals of science, philosophy, and history in the learned and vernacular languages of the East; a normal department to train native teachers and professors; as the crown of all, a theological institute to equip the Eurasian and native Christian students, by a quite unsectarian course of study, in apologetics, exegetics, and the Bible languages, to be missionaries to the Brahmanical classes. While the Government and the Scottish missionaries have in the university and grant in aid systems since followed too exclusively the English line, happily supplanting the extreme Orientalists, it is the glory of the Serampore Brotherhood that they sought to apply both the Oriental and the European, the one as the form, the other as the substance, so as to evangelise and civilise the people through their mother tongue. They were the Vernacularists in the famous controversy between the Orientalists and the Anglicists raised by Duff. In 1867 the present writer in vain attempted to induce the University of Calcutta to follow them in this. It was left to Sir Charles Aitchison, when he wielded the power and the influence of the Lieutenant-Governor, to do in 1882 what the Serampore College would have accomplished had its founders been young instead of old men, by establishing the Punjab University.

Lord Hastings and even Sir John Malcolm took a personal interest in the Serampore College. The latter, who had visited the missionaries since his timid evidence before the House of Lords in 1813, wrote to them:--"I wish I could be certain that your successors in the serious task you propose would have as much experience as you and your fellow-labourers at Serampore--that they would walk, not run, in the same path--I would not then have to state one reserve." Lord Hastings in Council passed an order encouraging the establishment of a European Medical Professorship in Serampore College, and engaged to assist in meeting the permanent expense of the chair when established. His Excellency "interrupted pressing avocations" to criticise both the architectural plan of the building and the phraseology of the draft of the first report, and his suggestions were followed. Adopting one of the Grecian orders as most suitable to a tropical climate, the Danish Governor’s colleague, Major Wickedie, planned the noble Ionic building which was then, and is still, the finest edifice of the kind in British India.

"The centre building, intended for the public rooms, was a hundred and thirty feet in length, and a hundred and twenty in depth. The hall on the ground floor, supported on arches, and terminated at the south by a bow, was ninety-five feet in length, sixty-six in breadth, and twenty in height. It was originally intended for the library, but is now occupied by the classes. The hall above, of the same dimensions and twenty-six feet in height, was supported by two rows of Ionic columns; it was intended for the annual examinations. Of the twelve side-rooms above and below, eight were of spacious dimensions, twenty-seven feet by thirty-five. The portico which fronted the river was composed of six columns, more than four feet in diameter at the base. The staircase-room was ninety feet in length, twenty-seven in width, and forty-seven in height, with two staircases of cast-iron, of large size and elegant form, prepared at Birmingham. The spacious grounds were surrounded with iron railing, and the front entrance was adorned with a noble gate, likewise cast at Birmingham...

"The scale on which it was proposed to establish the college, and to which the size of the building was necessarily accommodated, corresponded with the breadth of all the other enterprises of the Serampore missionaries,--the mission, the translations, and the schools. While Mr. Ward was engaged in making collections for the support of the institution in England, he wrote to his brethren, ‘the buildings you must raise in India;’ and they determined to respond to the call, and, if possible, to augment their donation from £2500 to £8000, and to make a vigorous effort to erect the buildings from their own funds. Neither the ungenerous suspicion, nor the charge of unfaithfulness, with which their character was assailed in England, was allowed to slacken the prosecution of this plan. It was while their reputation was under an eclipse in England, and the benevolent hesitated to subscribe to the society till they were assured that their donations would not be mixed up with the funds of the men at Serampore, that those men were engaged in erecting a noble edifice for the promotion of religion and knowledge, at their

own cost, the expense of which eventually grew under their hands to the sum of £15,000. To the charge of endeavouring to alienate from the society premises of the value of £3000, their own gift, they replied by erecting a building at five times the cost, and vesting it in eleven trustees,--seven besides themselves. It was thus they vindicated the purity of their motives in their differences with the society, and endeavoured to silence the voice of calumny. They were the first who maintained that a college was an indispensable appendage to an Indian mission."

The next to follow Carey in this was Bishop Middleton, who raised funds to erect a chaste Gothic pile beside the Botanic Garden, since to him the time appeared "to have arrived when it is desirable that some missionary endeavours, at least, should have some connection with the Church establishment." That college no longer exists, in spite of the saintly scholarship of such Principals as Mill and Kay; the building is now utilised as a Government engineering college. But in Calcutta the Duff College, with the General Assembly’s Institution (now united as the Scottish Churches College), the Cathedral Mission Divinity School, and the Bhowanipore Institution; in Bombay the Wilson College, in Madras the Christian College, in Nagpoor the Hislop College, in Agra St. John’s College, in Lahore the Church Mission Divinity School, in Lucknow the Reid College, and others, bear witness to the fruitfulness of the Alma Mater of Serampore.

The Serampore College began with thirty-seven students, of whom nineteen were native Christians and the rest Hindoos. When the building was occupied in 1821 Carey wrote to his son:--"I pray that the blessing of God may attend it, and that it may be the means of preparing many for an important situation in the Church of God...The King of Denmark has written letters signed with his own hand to Brothers Ward, Marshman, and myself, and has sent each of us a gold medal as a token of his approbation. He has also made over the house in which Major Wickedie resides, between Sarkies’s house and ours, to us three in perpetuity for the college. Thus Divine generosity appears for us and supplies our expectations." The missionaries had declined the Order of the Dannebrog. When, in 1826, Dr. Marshman visited Europe, one of his first duties was to acknowledge this gift to Count Moltke, Danish Minister in London and ancestor of the great strategist, and to ask for a royal charter. The Minister and Count Schulin, whose wife had been a warm friend of Mrs. Carey, happened to be on board the steamer in which Dr. Marshman, accompanied by Christopher Anderson, sailed to Copenhagen. Raske, the Orientalist, who had visited Serampore, was a Professor in the University there. The vellum charter was prepared among them, empowering the College Council, consisting of the Governor of Serampore and the Brotherhood, to confer degrees like those of the Universities of Copenhagen and Kiel, but not carrying the rank in the State implied in Danish degrees unless with the sanction of the Crown. The King, in the audience which he gave, informed Dr. Marshman that, having in 1801 promised the mission protection, he had hitherto refused to transfer Serampore to the East India Company, since that would prevent him from keeping his word. When, in 1845, the Company purchased both Tranquebar and Serampore, it could be no longer dangerous to the Christian Mission, but the Treaty expressly provided that the College should retain all its powers, and its Christian character, under the Danish charter, which it does. It was thus the earliest degree-conferring college in Asia, but it has never exercised the power. Christian VIII., then the heir to the throne, showed particular interest in the Bible translation work of Carey. When, in 1884, the Evangelical Alliance held its session in Copenhagen, and was received by Christian IX.,   it did well, by special resolution, to express the gratitude of Protestant Christendom to Denmark for such courageous and continued services to the first Christian mission from England to India.

How Dr. Carey valued the gift of the King is seen in this writing, on the lining of the case of the gold medal, dated 6th November 1823:--

"It is my desire that this medal, and the letter of the King of Denmark, which accompanied it, be given at my death to my dear son Jonathan, that he may keep it for my sake."

The letter of King Frederic VI. is as follows:--

"MONSIEUR LE DOCTEUR ET PROFESSEUR WILLIAM CAREY--

C’est avec beaucoup d’intérêt que nous avons appris le mérite qu’en qualité de membre dirigeant de la Société de la Mission, vous avez acquis, ainsi que vos co-directeurs, et les effèts salutaires que vos louables travaux ont produits et partout où votre influence a pu atteindre. Particulierement informés qu’en votre dite qualité vous avez contribué a effectuer bien des choses utiles, dont l’établissement à Frédéricsnagore a à se louer, et voulant vous certifier que nous vous en avons gré, nous avons chargé le chef du dit établissement,--notre Lieutenant-Colonel Kraefting, de vous remettre cette lettre; et en même temps une medaille d’or, comme une marque de notre bienveillance et de notre protection, que vous assurera toujours une conduite meritoire

"Sur ce nous prions Dieu de vous avoir dans Sa sainte et digne garde.--Votre affectionné FREDERIC.

"Copenhague, ce 7 Juin 1820.

"Au Docteur et Professeur WILLIAM CAREY,

Membre dirigeant de la Société de la Mission à Frédéricsnagore."

The new College formed an additional attraction to visitors to the mission. One of these, in 1821, was the Maharaja Serfojee, the prince of Tanjore, whom Schwartz had tended, but who was on pilgrimage to Benares. Hand in hand with Dr. Carey he walked through the missionary workshop, noticed specially the pundits who were busy with translation to which Lord Hastings had directed his attention, and dilated with affectionate enthusiasm on the deeds and the character of the apostle of South India. In 1823 cholera suddenly cut off Mr. Ward in the midst of his labours. The year after that Charles Grant died, leaving a legacy to the mission. Almost his last act had been to write to Carey urging him to publish a reply to the attack of the Abbé Dubois on all Christian missions. Another friend was removed in Bentley, the scholar who put Hindoo astronomy in its right place. Bishop Heber began his too brief episcopate in 1824, when the college, strengthened by the abilities of the Edinburgh professor, John Mack, was accomplishing all that its founders had projected. The Bishop of all good Christian men never penned a finer production--not even his hymns--than this letter, called forth by a copy of the Report on the College sent to him by Dr. Marshman:--

"I have seldom felt more painfully than while reading your appeal on the subject of Serampore College, the unhappy divisions of those who are the servants of the same Great Master! Would to God, my honoured brethren, the time were arrived when not only in heart and hope, but visibly, we shall be one fold, as well as under one shepherd! In the meantime I have arrived, after some serious considerations, at the conclusion that I shall serve our great cause most effectually by doing all which I can for the rising institutions of those with whom my sentiments agree in all things, rather than by forwarding the labours of those from whom, in some important points, I am conscientiously constrained to differ. After all, why do we differ? Surely the leading points which keep us asunder are capable of explanation or of softening, and I am expressing myself in much sincerity of heart--(though, perhaps, according to the customs of the world, I am taking too great a freedom with men my superiors both in age and in talent), that I should think myself happy to be permitted to explain, to the best of my power, those objections which keep you and your brethren divided from that form of church government which I believe to have been instituted by the apostles, and that admission of infants to the Gospel Covenants which seem to me to be founded on the expressions and practice of Christ himself. If I were writing thus to worldly men I know I should expose myself to the imputation of excessive vanity or impertinent intrusion. But of you and Dr. Carey I am far from judging as of worldly men, and I therefore say that, if we are spared to have any future fellowship, it is my desire, if you permit, to discuss with both of you, in the spirit of meekness and conciliation, the points which now divide us, convinced that, if a reunion of our Churches could be effected, the harvest of the heathen would ere long be reaped, and the work of the Lord would advance among them with a celerity of which we have now no experience.

"I trust, at all events, you will take this hasty note as it is intended, and believe me, with much sincerity, your friend and servant in Christ, REGINALD CALCUTTA.

"3rd June 1824."

This is how Carey reciprocated these sentiments, when writing to Dr. Ryland:--

"SERAMPORE, 6th July 1824.

"I rejoice to say that there is the utmost harmony between all the ministers of all denominations. Bishop Heber is a man of liberal principles and catholic spirit. Soon after his arrival in the country he wrote me a very friendly letter, expressing his wish to maintain all the friendship with us which our respective circumstances would allow. I was then confined, but Brother Marshman called on him. As soon as I could walk without crutches I did the same, and had much free conversation with him. Some time after this he wrote us a very friendly letter, saying that it would highly gratify him to meet Brother Marshman and myself, and discuss in a friendly manner all the points of difference between himself and us, adding that there was every reason to expect much good from a calm and temperate discussion of these things, and that, if we could at any rate come so near to each other as to act together, he thought it would have a greater effect upon the spread of the gospel among the heathen than we could calculate upon. He was then just setting out on a visitation which will in all probability take a year. We, however, wrote him a reply accepting his proposal, and Brother Marshman expressed a wish that the discussion might be carried on by letter, to which in his reply he partly consented. I have such a disinclination to writing, and so little leisure for it, that I wished the discussion to be viva voce; it will, however, make little difference, and all I should have to say would be introduced into the letter."

On the death of Mr. Ward and departure of Dr. Marshman for Great Britain on furlough, after twenty-six years’ active labours, his son, Mr. John Marshman, was formally taken into the Brotherhood. He united with Dr. Carey in writing to the Committee two letters, dated 21st January 1826 and 15th November 1827, which show the progress of the college and the mission from the first as one independent agency, and closed with Carey’s appeal to the judgment of posterity.

"About seven years ago we felt convinced of the necessity of erecting a College for native Christian youth, in order to consolidate our plans for the spread of gospel truth in India; and, as we despaired of being able to raise from public subscriptions a sum equal to the expense of the buildings, we determined to erect them from our own private funds. Up to the present date they have cost us nearly £14,000, and the completion of them will require a further sum of about £5000, which, if we are not enabled to advance from our own purse, the undertaking must remain incomplete. With this burden upon our private funds we find it impossible any longer to meet, to the same extent as formerly, the demands of our out-stations. The time is now arrived when they must cease to be wholly dependent on the private donations of three individuals, and must be placed on the strength of public contributions. As two out of three of the members of our body are now beyond the age of fifty-seven, it becomes our duty to place them on a more permanent footing, as it regards their management, their support, and their increase. We have therefore associated with ourselves, in the superintendence of them, the Rev. Messrs. Mack and Swan, the two present professors of the college, with the view of eventually leaving them entirely in the hands of the body of professors, of whom the constitution of the college provides that there shall be an unbroken succession.

"To secure an increase of missionaries in European habits we have formed a class of theological students in the college, under the Divinity Professor. It contains at present six promising youths, of whose piety we have in some cases undoubted evidence, in others considerable ground for hope. The class will shortly be increased to twelve, but none will be continued in it who do not manifest undeniable piety and devotedness to the cause of missions. As we propose to allow each student to remain on an average four years, we may calculate upon the acquisition of two, and perhaps three, additional labourers annually, who will be eminently fitted for active service in the cause of missions by their natural familiarity with the language and their acquisitions at college. This arrangement will, we trust, secure the speedy accomplishment of the plan we have long cherished, that of placing one missionary in each province in Bengal, and eventually, if means be afforded, in Hindostan.

"As the completion of the buildings requires no public contribution, the sole expense left on the generosity of its friends is that of its existing establishment. Our subscriptions in India, with what we receive as the interest of money raised in Britain and America, average £1000 annually; about £500 more from England would cover every charge, and secure the efficiency of the institution. Nor shall we require this aid beyond a limited period.

"Of the three objects connected with the College, the education of non-resident heathen students, the education of resident Christian students, and the preparation of missionaries from those born in the country, the first is not strictly a missionary object, the two latter are intimately connected with the progress of the good cause. The preparation of missionaries in the country was not so much recommended as enforced by the great expense which attends the despatch of missionaries from Europe. That the number of labourers in this country must be greatly augmented, before the work of evangelising the heathen can be said to have effectively commenced, can admit of no doubt.

"The education of the increasing body of Native Christians likewise, necessarily became a matter of anxiety. Nothing could be more distressing than the prospect of their being more backward in mental pursuits than their heathen neighbours. The planting of the gospel in India is not likely to be accomplished by the exertions of a few missionaries in solitary and barren spots in the country, without the aid of some well-digested plan which may consolidate the missionary enterprise, and provide for the mental and religious cultivation of the converts. If the body of native Christians required an educational system, native ministers, who must gradually take the spiritual conduct of that body, demanded pre-eminent attention. They require a knowledge of the ingenious system they will have to combat, of the scheme of Christian theology they are to teach, and a familiarity with the lights of modern science. We cannot discharge the duty we owe as Christians to India, without some plan for combining in the converts of the new religion, and more especially in its ministers, the highest moral refinement of the Christian character, and the highest attainable progress in the pursuits of the mind.

"During the last ten years of entire independence the missionary cause has received from the product of our labour, in the erection of the college buildings, in the support of stations and schools, and in the printing of tracts, much more than £23,000. The unceasing calumny with which we have been assailed, for what has been called ‘our declaration of independence’ (which, by the bye, Mr. Fuller approved of our issuing almost with his dying breath), it is beneath us to notice, but it has fully convinced us of the propriety of the step. This calumny is so unreasonable that we confidently appeal from the decision of the present age to the judgment of posterity."

Under Carey, as Professor of Divinity and Lecturer on Botany and Zoology, Mack and John Marshman, with pundits and moulavies, the college grew in public favour, even during Dr. Marshman’s absence, while Mrs. Marshman continued to conduct the girls’ school and superintend native female education with a vigorous enthusiasm which advancing years did not abate and misrepresentation in England only fed. The difficulties in which Carey found himself had the happy result of forcing him into the position of being the first to establish practically the principle of the Grant in Aid system. Had his Nonconformist successors followed him in this, with the same breadth of view and clear distinction between the duty of aiding the secular education, while giving absolute liberty to the spiritual, the splendid legacy which he left to India would have been both perpetuated and extended. As it is, it was left to his young colleague, John Marshman, and to Dr. Duff, to induce Parliament, by the charter of 1853, and the first Lord Halifax in the Educational Despatch of 1854, to sanction the system of national education for the multifarious classes and races of our Indian subjects, under which secular instruction is aided by the state on impartial terms according to its efficiency, and Christianity delights to take its place, unfettered and certain of victory, with the Brahmanical and aboriginal cults of every kind.

In 1826 Carey, finding that his favourite Benevolent Institution in Calcutta was getting into debt, and required repair, applied to Government for aid. He had previously joined the Marchioness of Hastings in founding the Calcutta School Book and School Society, and had thus been relieved of some of the schools. Government at once paid the debt, repaired the building, and continued to give an annual grant of £240 for many years. John Marshman did not think it necessary, "to defend Dr. Carey from the charge of treason to the principles of dissent in having thus solicited and accepted aid from the state for an educational establishment; the repudiation of that aid is a modern addition to those principles." He tells us that "when conversation happened to turn upon this subject at Serampore, his father was wont to excuse any warmth which his colleague might exhibit by the humorous remark that renegades always fought hardest. There was one question on which the three were equally strenuous--that it was as much the duty of Government to support education as to abstain from patronising missions.

A letter written in 1818 to his son William, then one of the missionaries, shows with what jealous economy the founder of the great modern enterprise managed the early undertakings.

"MY DEAR WILLIAM--Yours of the 3rd instant I have received, and must say that it has filled me with distress. I do not know what the allowance of 200 rupees includes, nor how much is allotted for particular things; but it appears that Rs. 142:2 is expended upon your private expenses, viz., 78:2 on table expenses, and 64 on servants. Now neither Lawson nor Eustace have more than 140 rupees for their allowance, separate from house rent, for which 80 rupees each is allowed, and I believe all the brethren are on that, or a lower allowance, Brother Yates excepted, who chooses for himself. I cannot therefore make an application for more with any face. Indeed we have no power to add or diminish salaries, though the Society would agree to our doing so if we showed good reasons for it. I believe the allowances of the missionaries from the London Society are about the same, or rather less--viz. £200 sterling, or 132 rupees a month, besides extra expenses; so that your income, taking it at 140 rupees a month, is quite equal to that of any other missionary. I may also mention that neither Eustace nor Lawson can do without a buggy, which is not a small expense.

"I suppose the two articles you have mentioned of table expenses and servants include a number of other things; otherwise I cannot imagine how you can go to that expense. When I was at Mudnabati my income was 200 per month, and during the time I stayed there I had saved near 2000 rupees. My table expenses scarcely ever amounted to 50 rupees, and though I kept a moonshi at 20 rupees and four gardeners, yet my servants’ wages did not exceed 60 rupees monthly. I kept a horse and a farmyard, and yet my expenses bore no proportion to yours. I merely mention this without any reflection on you, or even a wish to do it; but I sincerely think your expenses upon these two articles are very greater.--I am your affectionate father, W. CAREY."

In 1825 Carey completed his great Dictionary of Bengali and English in three quarto volumes, abridged two years afterwards. No language, not even in Europe, could show a work of such industry, erudition, and philological completeness at that time. Professor H. H. Wilson declared that it must ever be regarded as a standard authority, especially because of its etymological references to the Sanskrit, which supplies more than three-fourths of the words; its full and correct vocabulary of local terms, with which the author’s "long domestication amongst the natives" made him familiar, and his unique knowledge of all natural history terms. The first copy which issued from the press he sent to Dr. Ryland, who had passed away at seventy-two, a month before the following letter was written:--

"June 7th, 1825.--On the 17th of August next I shall be sixty-four years of age; and though I feel the enervating influence of the climate, and have lost something of my bodily activity, I labour as closely, and perhaps more so than I have ever done before. My Bengali Dictionary is finished at press. I intend to send you a copy of it by first opportunity, which I request you to accept as a token of my unshaken friendship to you. I am now obliged, in my own defence, to abridge it, and to do it as quickly as possible, to prevent another person from forestalling me and running away with the profits.

"On Lord’s day I preached a funeral sermon at Calcutta for one of our deacons, who died very happily; administered the Lords’ Supper, and preached again in the evening. It was a dreadfully hot day, and I was much exhausted. Yesterday the rain set in, and the air is somewhat cooled. It is still uncertain whether Brothers Judson and Price are living. There was a report in the newspaper that they were on their way to meet Sir Archibald Campbell with proposals of peace from the Burman king; but no foundation for the report can be traced out. Living or dead they are secure."

On hearing of the death of Dr. Ryland, he wrote:--"There are now in England very few ministers with whom I was acquainted. Fuller, Sutcliff, Pearce, Fawcett, and Ryland, besides many others whom I knew, are gone to glory. My family connections also, those excepted who were children when I left England, or have since that time been born, are all gone, two sisters only excepted. Wherever I look in England I see a vast blank; and were I ever to revisit that dear country I should have an entirely new set of friendships to form. I, however, never intended to return to England when I left it, and unless something very unexpected were to take place I certainly shall not do it. I am fully convinced I should meet with many who would show me the utmost kindness in their power, but my heart is wedded to India, and though I am of little use I feel a pleasure in doing the little I can, and a very high interest in the spiritual good of this vast country, by whose instrumentality soever it is promoted."

By 1829 the divinity faculty of the College had become so valuable a nursery of Eurasian and Native missionaries, and the importance of attracting more of the new generation of educated Hindoos within its influence had become so apparent that Oriental gave place to English literature in the curriculum. Mr. Rowe, as English tutor, took his place in the staff beside Dr. Carey, Dr. Marshman, Mr. Mack, and Mr. John Marshman. Hundreds of native youths flocked to the classes. Such was the faith, such the zeal of Carey, that he continued to add new missions to the ten of which the College was the life-giving centre; so that when he was taken away he left eighteen, under eleven European, thirteen Eurasian, seventeen Bengali, two Hindostani, one Telugoo, and six Arakanese missionaries. When Mr. David Scott, formerly a student of his own in Fort William College, and in 1828 Commissioner of Assam (then recently annexed to the empire), asked for a missionary, Carey’s importunity prevailed with his colleagues only when he bound himself to pay half the cost by stinting his personal expenditure. Similarly it was the generous action of Mr. Garrett, when judge of Barisal, that led him to send the best of his Serampore students to found that afterwards famous mission.

Having translated the Gospels into the language of the Khasias in the Assam hills, he determined in 1832 to open a new mission at the village of Cherra, which the Serampore Brotherhood were the first to use as a sanitarium in the hot season. For this he gave up £60 of his Government pension and Mr. Garrett gave a similar sum. He sent another of his students, Mr. Lisk, to found the mission, which prospered until it was transferred to the Welsh Calvinists, who have made it the centre of extensive and successful operations. Thus the influence of his middle age and old age in the Colleges of Fort William and of Serampore combined to make the missionary patriarch the father of two bands--that of the Society and that of the Brotherhood.

Dr. Carey’s last report, at the close of 1832, was a defence of what has since been called, and outside of India and of Scotland has too often been misunderstood as, educational missions or Christian Colleges. To a purely divinity college for Asiatic Christians he preferred a divinity faculty as part of an Arts and Science College,   in which the converts study side by side with their inquiring countrymen, the inquirers are influenced by them as well as by the Christian teaching and secular teaching in a Christian spirit, and the Bible consecrates the whole. The United Free Church of Scotland has, alike in India, China and Africa, proved the wisdom, the breadth, and the spiritual advantage of Carey’s policy. When the Society opposed him, scholars like Mack from Edinburgh and Leechman from Glasgow rejoiced to work out his Paul-like conception. When not only he, but Dr. Marshman, had passed away Mack bravely held aloft the banner they bequeathed, till his death in 1846. Then John Marshman, who in 1835 had begun the Friend of India as a weekly paper to aid the College, transferred the mission to the Society under the learned W. H. Denham. When in 1854 a new generation of the English Baptists accepted the College also as their own, it received a Principal worthy to succeed the giants of those days, the Rev. John Trafford, M.A., a student of Foster’s and of Glasgow University. For twenty-six years he carried out the principles of Carey. On his retirement the College as such was suspended in the year 1883, and in the same building a purely native Christian Training Institution took its place. There, however, the many visitors from Christendom still found the library and museum; the Bibles, grammars, and dictionaries; the natural history collections, and the Oriental MSS.; the Danish Charter, the historic portraits, and the British Treaty; as well as the native Christian classes--all of which re-echo William Carey’s appeal to posterity.

Chapter 15: Carey’s Last Days

1830-1834

The college and mission stripped of all their funds--Failure of the six firms for sixteen millions--Carey’s official income reduced from £1560 to £600--His Thoughts and Appeal published in England--His vigour at seventy--Last revision of the Bengali Bible--Final edition of the Bengali New Testament--Carey rejoices in the reforms of Lord William Bentinck’s Government--In the emancipation of the slaves--Carey sketched by his younger contemporaries--His latest letters and last message to Christendom--Visits of Lady William Bentinck and Bishop Daniel Wilson--Marshman’s affection and promise as to the garden--The English mail brings glad news a fortnight before his death--His last Sabbath--He dies--Is buried--His tomb among his converts--His will--The Indian press on his poverty and disinterestedness--Dr. Marshman and Mack, Christopher Anderson and John Wilson of Bombay on his character--His influence still as the founder of missions--Dr. Cox and Robert Hall on Carey as a man--Scotland’s estimate of the father of the Evangelical Revival and its foreign missions.

THE last days of William Carey were the best. His sun went down in all the splendour of a glowing faith and a burning self-sacrifice. Not in the penury of Hackleton and Moulton, not in the hardships of Calcutta and the Soondarbans, not in the fevers of the swamps of Dinapoor, not in the apprehensions twice excited by official intolerance, not in the most bitter sorrow of all--the sixteen years’ persecution by English brethren after Fuller’s death, had the father of modern missions been so tried as in the years 1830-1833. Blow succeeded blow, but only that the fine gold of his trust, his humility, and his love might be seen to be the purer.

The Serampore College and Mission lost all the funds it had in India. By 1830 the financial revolution which had laid many houses low in Europe five years before, began to tell upon the merchant princes of Calcutta. The six firms, which had developed the trade of Northern India so far as the Company’s monopolies allowed, had been the bankers of the Government itself, of states like Haidarabad, and of all the civil and military officials, and had enriched a succession of partners for half a century, fell one by one--fell for sixteen millions sterling among them. Palmer and Co. was the greatest; the house at one time played a large part in the history of India, and in the debates and papers of Parliament. Mr. John Palmer, a personal friend of the Serampore men, had advanced them money at ten per cent. four years previously, when the Society’s misrepresentation had done its worst. The children in the Eurasian schools, which Dr. and Mrs. Marshman conducted with such profit to the mission, depended chiefly on funds deposited with this firm. It suddenly failed for more than two millions sterling. Although the catastrophe exposed the rottenness of the system of credit on which commerce and banking were at that time conducted, in the absence of a free press and an intelligent public opinion, the alarm soon subsided, and only the more business fell to the other firms. But the year 1833 had hardly opened when first the house of Alexander and Co., then that of Mackintosh and Co., and then the three others, collapsed without warning. The English in India, officials and merchants, were reduced to universal poverty. Capital disappeared and credit ceased at the very time that Parliament was about to complete the partial concession of freedom of trade made by the charter of 1813, by granting all Carey had argued for, and allowing Europeans to hold land.

The funds invested for Jessor and Delhi; the legacy of Fernandez, Carey’s first convert and missionary; his own tenths with which he supported three aged relatives in England; the property of the partner of his third marriage, on whom the money was settled, and who survived him by a year; the little possessed by Dr. Marshman, who had paid all his expenses in England even while working for the Society--all was swept away. Not only was the small balance in hand towards meeting the college and mission expenditure gone, but it was impossible to borrow even for a short time. Again one of Dr. Carey’s old civilian students came to the rescue. Mr. Garrett, grandson of Robert Raikes who first began Sunday schools, pledged his own credit with the Bank of Bengal, until Samuel Hope of Liverpool, treasurer of the Serampore Mission there, could be communicated with. Meanwhile the question of giving up any of the stations or shutting the college was not once favoured. "I have seen the tears run down the face of the venerable Dr. Carey at the thought of such a calamity," wrote Leechman; "were it to arrive we should soon have to lay him in his grave." When the interest of the funds raised by Ward in America ceased for a time because of the malicious report from England that it might be applied by Dr. Marshman to the purposes of family aggrandisement, Carey replied in a spirit like that of Paul under a similar charge: "Dr. Marshman is as poor as I am, and I can scarcely lay by a sum monthly to relieve three or four indigent relatives in Europe. I might have had large possessions, but I have given my all, except what I ate, drank, and wore, to the cause of missions, and Dr. Marshman has done the same, and so did Mr. Ward.

Carey’s trust in God, for the mission and for himself, was to be still further tried. On 12th July 1828 we find him thus writing from Calcutta to Jabez:--"I came down this morning to attend Lord W. Bentinck’s first levée. It was numerously attended, and I had the pleasure of seeing there a great number of gentlemen who had formerly studied under me, and for whom I felt a very sincere regard. I hear Lady Bentinck is a pious woman, but have not yet seen her. I have a card to attend at her drawing-room this evening, but I shall not go, as I must be at home for the Sabbath, which is to-morrow." It soon fell to Lord William Bentinck to meet the financial consequences of his weak predecessor’s administration. The College of Fort William had to be sacrificed. Metcalfe and Bayley, Carey’s old students whom he had permanently influenced in the higher life, were the members of council, and he appealed to them. They sent him to the good Governor-General, to whose sympathy he laid bare all the past and present of the mission’s finance. He was told to have no fear, and indeed the Council held a long sitting on this one matter. But from June 1830 the college ceased to be a teaching, and became an examining body. When the salary was reduced one-half, from Rs. 1000 a month, the Brotherhood met to pray for light and strength. Mr. Robinson, the Java missionary who had attached himself to Serampore, and whose son long did good service as a Bengali scholar and preacher, gives us this glimpse of its inner life at this time:--

"The two old men were dissolved in tears while they were engaged in prayer, and Dr. Marshman in particular could not give expressions to his feelings. It was indeed affecting to see these good old men, the fathers of the mission, entreating with tears that God would not forsake them now grey hairs were come upon them, but that He would silence the tongue of calumny, and furnish them with the means of carrying on His own cause."

They sent home an appeal to England, and Carey himself published what is perhaps the most chivalrous, just, and weighty of all his utterances on the disagreeable subject--Thoughts upon the Discussions which have arisen from the Separation between the Baptist Missionary Society and the Serampore Missions. "From our age and other circumstances our contributions may soon cease. We have seen a great work wrought in India, and much of it, either directly or indirectly, has been done by ourselves. I cannot, I ought not to be indifferent about the permanency of this work, and cannot therefore view the exultation expressed at the prospect of our resources being crippled otherwise than being of a character too satanic to be long persisted in by any man who has the love of God in his heart."

The appeal to all Christians for "a few hundred pounds per annum" for the mission station closed thus: "But a few years have passed away since the Protestant world was awakened to missionary effort. Since that time the annual revenues collected for this object have grown to the then unthought-of sum of £400,000. And is it unreasonable to expect that some unnoticeable portion of this should be intrusted to him who was amongst the first to move in this enterprise and to his colleagues?" The Brotherhood had hardly despatched this appeal to England with the sentence, "Our present incomes even are uncertain," when the shears of financial reduction cut off Dr. Carey’s office of Bengali translator to Government, which for eight years had yielded him Rs. 300 a month. But such was his faith this final stroke called forth only an expression of regret that he must reduce his contributions to the missionary cause by so much. He was a wonder to his colleagues, who wrote of him: "Though thus reduced in his circumstances the good man, about to enter on his seventieth year, is as cheerful and as happy as the day is long. He rides out four or five miles every morning, returning home by sunrise; goes on with the work of translation day by day; gives two lectures on divinity and one on natural history every week in the college, and takes his turn of preaching both in Bengali and in English."

When the Christian public responded heartily to his appeal Carey was loud and frequent in his expressions of gratitude to God, who, "in the time of our great extremity, appeared and stirred up His people thus willingly to offer their substance for His cause." With respect to myself, I consider my race as nearly run. The days of our years are three score years and ten, and I am now only three months short of that age, and repeated bilious attacks have weakened my constitution. But I do not look forward to death with any painful anticipations. I cast myself on and plead the efficacy of that atonement which will not fail me when I need it."

Dr. Marshman gives us a brighter picture of him. "I met with very few friends in England in their seventieth year so lively, as free from the infirmities of age, so interesting in the pulpit, so completely conversible as he is now." The reason is found in the fact that he was still useful, still busy at the work he loved most of all. He completed his last revision of the entire Bible in Bengali--the fifth edition of the Old Testament and the eighth edition of the New--in June 1832. Immediately thereafter, when presiding at the ordination of Mr. Mack as co-pastor with Dr. Marshman and himself over the church at Serampore, he took with him into the pulpit the first copy of the sacred volume which came from the binder’s hands, and addressed the converts and their children from the words of Simeon--"Lord now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation." As the months went on he carried through the press still another and improved edition of the New Testament, and only then he felt and often said that the work of his heart was done.

He had other sources of saintly pleasure as he lay meditating on the Word, and praising God for His goodness to the college and the mission stations increased to nineteen by young Sir Henry Havelock, who founded the church at Agra. Lord William Bentinck, having begun his reign with the abolition of the crime of suttee, was, with the help of Carey’s old students, steadily carrying out the other reforms for which in all his Indian career the missionary had prayed and preached and published. The judicial service was reorganised so as to include native judges. The uncovenanted civil service was opened to all British subjects of every creed. The first act of justice to native Christians was thus done, so that he wrote of the college:--"The students are now eligible to every legal appointment in India which a native can hold; those who may possess no love for the Christian ministry have the prospect of a profitable profession as advocates in the judicial courts, and the hope of rising to posts of honourable distinction in their native land." The Hindoo law of inheritance which the Regulating Act of Parliament had so covered that it was used to deprive converts to Christianity of all civil rights, was dealt with so far as a local regulation could do so, and Carey, advised by such an authority as Harington, laid it on his successor in the apostolate, the young Alexander Duff, to carry the act of justice out fully, which was done under the Marquis of Dalhousie. The orders drawn up by Charles Grant’s sons at last, in February 1833, freed Great Britain from responsibility for the connection of the East India Company with Temple and mosque endowments and the pilgrim tax.

His son Jonathan wrote this of him two years after his death:--

"In principle my father was resolute and firm, never shrinking from avowing and maintaining his sentiments. He had conscientious scruples against taking an oath; and condemned severely the manner in which oaths were administered, and urged vehemently the propriety of altogether dispensing with them. I remember three instances in which he took a conspicuous part in regard to oaths, such as was characteristic of the man. On one occasion, when a respectable Hindoo servant of the college of Fort William, attached to Dr. Carey’s department, was early one morning proceeding to the Ganges to bathe, he perceived a dead body lying near the road; but it being dark, and no person being present, he passed on, taking no further notice of the circumstance. As he returned from the Ganges after sunrise, he saw a crowd near the body, and then happened to say to one of the watchmen present that in the morning he saw the body on the other side of the road. The watchman took him in custody, as a witness before the coroner; but, when brought before the coroner, he refused to take an oath, and was, consequently, committed to prison for contempt. The Hindoo being a respectable person, and never having taken an oath, refused to take any nourishment in the prison. In this state he continued a day and a half, my father being then at Serampore; but upon his coming to Calcutta, the circumstances were mentioned to him. The fact of the man having refused to take an oath was enough to make him interest himself in his behalf. He was delighted with the resolution the man took--rather to go to prison than take an oath; and was determined to do all he could to procure his liberation. He first applied to the coroner, but was directed by him to the sheriff. To that functionary he proceeded, but was informed by him that he could make no order on the subject. He then had an interview with the then chief judge, by whose interference the man was set at liberty.

"Another instance relates to him personally. On the occasion of his last marriage, the day was fixed on which the ceremony was to take place--friends were invited--and all necessary arrangements made; but, three or four days prior to the day fixed, he was informed that it would be necessary for him to obtain a licence, in doing which, he must either take an oath or have banns published. To taking an oath he at once objected, and applied to the then senior judge, who informed him that, as he was not a quaker, his oath was indispensable; but, rather than take an oath, he applied to have the banns published, and postponed the arrangements for his marriage for another three weeks.

"The third instance was as follows:--It was necessary, in a certain case, to prove a will in court, in which the name of Dr. Carey was mentioned, in connection with the Serampore missionaries as executors. An application was made by one of his colleagues, which was refused by the court, on account of the vagueness of the terms, ‘Serampore missionaries;’ but as Dr. Carey’s name was specifically mentioned, the court intimated that they would grant the application if made by him. The communication was made: but when he was informed that an oath was necessary, he shrunk with abhorrence from the idea; but after much persuasion, he consented to make the application, if taking an oath would be dispensed with. He did attend, and stated his objections to the then chief judge, which being allowed, his affirmation was received and recorded by the court.

"The duties connected with the College of Fort William afforded him a change of scene, which relieved his mind, and gave him opportunities of taking exercise, and conduced much to his health. During the several years he held the situation of professor to the college, no consideration would allow him to neglect his attendance; and though he had to encounter boisterous weather in crossing the river at unseasonable hours, he was punctual in his attendance, and never applied for leave of absence. And when he was qualified by the rules of the service to retire on a handsome pension, he preferred being actively employed in promoting the interests of the college, and remained, assiduously discharging his duties, till his department was abolished by Government. The business of the college requiring his attendance in Calcutta, he became so habituated to his journeys to and fro, that at his age he painfully felt the retirement he was subjected to when his office ceased. After this circumstance his health rapidly declined; and though he occasionally visited Calcutta, he complained of extreme debility. This increased daily, and made him a constant sufferer; until at length he was not able to leave his house."

Nor was it in India alone that the venerable saint found such causes of satisfaction. He lived long enough to thank God for the emancipation of the slaves by the English people, for which he had prayed daily for fifty years.

We have many sketches of the Father of English Missions in his later years by young contemporaries who, on their first arrival in Bengal, sought him out. In 1824 Mr. Leslie, an Edinburgh student, who became in India the first of Baptist preachers, and was the means of the conversion of Henry Havelock who married Dr. Marshman’s youngest daughter, wrote thus of Carey after the third great illness of his Indian life:--

"Dr. Carey, who has been very ill, is quite recovered, and bids fair to live many years; and as for Dr. Marshman, he has never known ill-health is, during the whole period of his residence in India. They are both active to a degree which you would think impossible in such a country. Dr. Carey is a very equable and cheerful old man, in countenance very like the engraving of him with his pundit, though not so robust as he appears to be there. Next to his translations Botany is his grand study. He has collected every plant and tree in his garden that will possibly grow in India, and is so scientific withal that he calls everything by its classical name. If, therefore, I should at any time blunder out the word Geranium, he would say Pelargonium, and perhaps accuse me of ignorance, or blame me for vulgarity. We had the pleasure of hearing him preach from Rom. vii. 13, when he gave us an excellent sermon. In manner he is very animated, and in style very methodical. Indeed he carries method into everything he does; classification is his grand hobby, and wherever anything can be classified, there you find Dr. Carey; not only does he classify and arrange the roots of plants and words, but visit his dwelling and you find he has fitted up and classified shelves full of minerals, stones, shells, etc., and cages full of birds. He is of very easy access, and great familiarity. His attachments are strong, and extend not merely to persons but places. About a year ago, so much of the house in which he had lived ever since he had been at Serampore, fell down so that he had to leave it, at which he wept bitterly. One morning at breakfast, he was relating to us an anecdote of the generosity of the late excellent John Thornton, at the remembrance of whom the big tear filled his eye. Though it is an affecting sight to see the venerable man weep; yet it is a sight which greatly interests you, as there is a manliness in his tears--something far removed from the crying of a child."

The house in which for the last ten years he lived, and where he died, was the only one of two or three, planned for the new professors of the college, that was completed. Compared with the adjoining college it was erected with such severe simplicity that it was said to have been designed for angels rather than for men. Carey’s room and library looked towards the river with the breadth of the college garden between. On the other side, in the upper verandah, in the morning he worked at his desk almost to the last, and in the evening towards sunset he talked with his visitors. In 1826 the London Missionary Society sent out to Calcutta the first of its deputations. Dr. Carey sent his boat for them, and in the absence of her husband in England, Mrs. Marshman entertained the guests. They wrote:--

"We found Dr. Carey in his study, and we were both pleased and struck with his primitive, and we may say, apostolical appearance. He is short of stature, his hair white, his countenance equally bland and benevolent in feature and expression. Two Hindoo men were sitting by, engaged in painting some small subjects in natural history, of which the doctor, a man of pure taste and highly intellectual cast of feeling, irrespective of his more learned pursuits, has a choice collection, both in specimens and pictorial representations. Botany is a favourite study with him, and his garden is curiously enriched with rarities."

Of all the visits paid to Carey none are now so interesting to the historian of the Church of India, as those of the youth who succeeded him as he had succeeded Schwartz. Alexander Duff was twenty-four years of age when, in 1830, full of hesitation as to carrying out his own plans in opposition to the experience of all the missionaries he had consulted, he received from Carey alone the most earnest encouragement to pursue in Calcutta the Christian college policy so well begun in the less central settlement of Serampore. We have elsewhere32 told the story:--

"Landing at the college ghaut one sweltering July day, the still ruddy highlander strode up to the flight of steps that leads to the finest modern building in Asia. Turning to the left, he sought the study of Carey in the house--‘built for angels,’ said one, so simple is it--where the greatest of missionary scholars was still working for India. There he beheld what seemed to be a little yellow old man in a white jacket, who tottered up to the visitor of whom he had already often heard, and with outstretched hands solemnly blessed him. A contemporary soon after wrote thus of the childlike saint--

"‘Thou’rt in our heart--with tresses thin and grey,

And eye that knew the Book of Life so well,

And brow serene, as thou wert wont to stray

Amidst thy flowers--like Adam ere he fell.’

"The result of the conference was a double blessing; for Carey could speak with the influence at once of a scholar who had created the best college at that time in the country, and of a vernacularist who had preached to the people for half a century. The young Scotsman left his presence with the approval of the one authority whose opinion was best worth having...

"Among those who visited him in his last illness was Alexander Duff, the Scots missionary. On one of the last occasions on which he saw him--if not the very last--he spent some time talking chiefly about Carey’s missionary life, till at length the dying man whispered, Pray. Duff knelt down and prayed, and then said Good-bye. As he passed from the room, he thought he heard a feeble voice pronouncing his name, and, turning, he found that he was recalled. He stepped back accordingly, and this is what he heard, spoken with a gracious solemnity: ‘Mr. Duff, you have been speaking about Dr. Carey, Dr. Carey; When I am gone, say nothing about Dr. Carey--speak about Dr. Carey’s Saviour.’ Duff went away rebuked and awed, with a lesson in his heart that he never forgot."

When with his old friends he dwelt much on the past. Writing of May 1832, Dr. Marshman mentioned: "I spent an hour at tea with dear Brother Carey last night, now seventy and nine months. He was in the most comfortable state of health, talking over his first feelings respecting India and the heathen, and the manner in which God kept them alive, when even Fuller could not yet enter into them, and good old John Ryland (the doctor’s father) denounced them as unscriptural. Had these feelings died away, in what a different state might India now have been!" In September of that year, when burying Mrs. Ward, he seemed, in his address at the grave, to long for renewed fellowship with the friends who had preceded him in entering into the joy of the Lord.

On Mr. Leechman’s arrival from Scotland to be his colleague, he found the old man thus vigorous even in April 1833, or if "faint, yet pursuing":--

"Our venerable Dr. Carey is in excellent health, and takes his turn in all our public exercises. Just forty years ago, the first of this month, he administered the Lord’s Supper to the church at Leicester, and started on the morrow to embark for India. Through this long period of honourable toil the Lord has mercifully preserved him; and at our missionary prayer meeting, held on the first of this month, he delivered an interesting address to encourage us to persevere in the work of the Lord. We have also a private monthly prayer meeting held in Dr. Carey’s study, which is to me a meeting of uncommon interest. On these occasions we particularly spread before the Lord our public and private trials, both those which come upon us from the cause of Christ, with which it is our honour and privilege to be connected, and those also which we as individuals are called to bear. At our last meeting Dr. Carey read part of the history of Gideon, and commented with deep feeling on the encouragement which that history affords, that the cause of God can be carried on to victory and triumph, by feeble and apparently inefficient means."

Carey’s successor, Mack, wrote thus to Christopher Anderson ten months later:--

"SERAMPORE, 31st January 1834.--Our venerable father, Dr. Carey, is yet continued to us, but in the same state in which he has been for the last three months or so. He is quite incapable of work, and very weak. He can walk but a few yards at a time, and spends the day in reading for profit and entertainment, and in occasionally nodding and sleeping. He is perfectly tranquil in mind. His imagination does not soar much in vivid anticipations of glory; and it never disquiets him with restless misgivings respecting his inheritance in God. To him it is everything that the gospel is true, and he believes it; and, as he says, if he can say he knows anything, he knows that he believes it. When his attention is turned to his dismissal from earth, or his hope of glory, his emotions are tender and sweet. They are also very simple, and express themselves in a few brief and pithy sentences. His interest in all the affairs of the mission is unabated, and although he can no longer join us either in deliberation or associated prayer, he must be informed of all that occurs, and his heart is wholly with us in whatever we do. I do not conceive it possible that he can survive the ensuing hot season, but he may, and the Lord will do in this as in all other things what is best.

"When our necessities were coming to their climax I concluded that I must leave Serampore in order to find food to eat, and I fixed upon Cherra-poonjee as my future residence. I proposed establishing a first-class school there, and then with some warmth of imagination I began anticipating a sort of second edition of Serampore up in the Khasia hills, to be a centre of diffusing light in the western provinces. I became really somewhat enamoured of the phantom of my imagination, but it was not to be. The brethren here would not see it as I did."

This last sketch, by Mr. Gogerly, whom the London Missionary Society had sent out in 1819, brings us still nearer the end:--

"At this time I paid him my last visit. He was seated near his desk, in the study, dressed in his usual neat attire; his eyes were closed, and his hands clasped together. On his desk was the proof-sheet of the last chapter of the New Testament, which he had revised a few days before. His appearance, as he sat there, with the few white locks which adorned his venerable brow, and his placid colourless face, filled me with a kind of awe; for he appeared as then listening to the Master’s summons, and as waiting to depart. I sat, in his presence, for about half an hour, and not one word was uttered; for I feared to break that solemn silence, and call back to earth the soul that seemed almost in heaven. At last, however, I spoke; and well do I remember the identical words that passed between us, though more than thirty-six years have elapsed since then. I said, ‘My dear friend, you evidently are standing on the borders of the eternal world; do not think it wrong, then, if I ask, What are your feelings in the immediate prospect of death?’ The question roused him from his apparent stupor, and opening his languid eyes, he earnestly replied, ‘As far as my personal salvation is concerned, I have not the shadow of a doubt; I know in Whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day; but when I think that I am about to appear in the presence of a holy God, and remember all my sins and manifold imperfections--I tremble.’ He could say no more. The tears trickled down his cheeks, and after a while he relapsed into the same state of silence from which I had aroused him.

"Deeply solemn was that interview, and important the lesson I then received. Here was one of the most holy and harmless men whom I ever knew--who had lived above the breath of calumny for upwards of forty years, surrounded by and in close intimacy with many, both Europeans and natives, who would have rejoiced to have witnessed any inconsistency in his conduct, but who were constrained to admire his integrity and Christian character--whilst thus convinced of the certainty of his salvation, through the merits of that Saviour whom he had preached, yet so impressed with the exceeding sinfulness of sin, that he trembled at the thought of appearing before a holy God! A few days after this event, Dr. Carey retired to his bed, from which he never rose."

So long before this as 17th March 1802, Carey had thus described himself to Dr. Ryland:--"A year or more ago you, or some other of my dear friends, mentioned an intention of publishing a volume of sermons as a testimony of mutual Christian love, and wished me to send a sermon or two for that purpose. I have seriously intended it, and more than once sat down to accomplish it, but have as constantly been broken off from it. Indolence is my prevailing sin, and to that are now added a number of avocations which I never thought of; I have also so continual a fear that I may at last fall some way or other so as to dishonour the Gospel that I have often desired that my name may be buried in oblivion; and indeed I have reason for those fears, for I am so prone to sin that I wonder every night that I have been preserved from foul crimes through the day, and when I escape a temptation I esteem it to be a miracle of grace which has preserved me. I never was so fully persuaded as I am now that no habit of religion is a security from falling into the foulest crimes, and I need the immediate help of God every moment. The sense of my continual danger has, I confess, operated strongly upon me to induce me to desire that no publication of a religious nature should be published as mine whilst I am alive. Another reason is my sense of incapacity to do justice to any subject, or even to write good sense. I have, it is true, been obliged to publish several things, and I can say that nothing but necessity could have induced me to do it. They are, however, only grammatical works, and certainly the very last things which I should have written if I could have chosen for myself."

On 15th June 1833 the old man was still able to rejoice with others. He addressed to his son Jonathan the only brief letter which the present writer possesses from his pen, in a hand as clear as that of a quarter of a century before:--

"MY DEAR JONATHAN--I congratulate you upon the good news you have received. But am sorry Lucy continues so ill. I am too weak to write more than to say your mother is as well as the weather will permit us to expect. I could scarcely have been worse to live than I have been the last fortnight.--Your affectionate father, W. CAREY."

The hot season had then reached its worst.

His last letters were brief messages of love and hope to his two sisters in England. On 27th July 1833 he wrote to them:--

"About a week ago so great a change took place in me that I concluded it was the immediate stroke of death, and all my children were informed of it and have been here to see me. I have since that revived in an almost miraculous manner, or I could not have written this. But I cannot expect it to continue. The will of the Lord be done. Adieu, till I meet you in a better world.--Your affectionate brother, "W. CAREY."

Two months later he was at his old work, able "now and then to read a proof sheet of the Scriptures."

"SERAMPORE, 25th Sept. 1833.

"MY DEAR SISTERS--My being able to write to you now is quite unexpected by me, and, I believe, by every one else; but it appears to be the will of God that I should continue a little time longer. How long that may be I leave entirely with Him, and can only say, ‘All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come.’ I was, two months or more ago, reduced to such a state of weakness that it appeared as if my mind was extinguished; and my weakness of body, and sense of extreme fatigue and exhaustion, were such that I could scarcely speak, and it appeared that death would be no more felt than the removing from one chair to another. I am now able to sit and to lie on my couch, and now and then to read a proof sheet of the Scriptures. I am too weak to walk more than just across the house, nor can I stand even a few minutes without support. I have every comfort that kind friends can yield, and feel, generally, a tranquil mind. I trust the great point is settled, and I am ready to depart; but the time when, I leave with God.

"3rd Oct.--I am not worse than when I began this letter.--I am, your very affectionate brother, WM. CAREY."

His latest message to Christendom was sent on the 30th September, most appropriately to Christopher Anderson:--"As everything connected with the full accomplishment of the divine promises depends on the almighty power of God, pray that I and all the ministers of the Word may take hold of His strength, and go about our work as fully expecting the accomplishment of them all, which, however difficult and improbable it may appear, is certain, as all the promises of God are in Him, yea, and in Him, Amen." Had he not, all his career, therefore expected and attempted great things?

He had had a chair fixed on a small platform, constructed after his own direction, that he might be wheeled through his garden. At other times the chief gardener Hullodhur, reported to him the state of the collection of plants, then numbering about 2000. Dr. Marshman saw his friend daily, sometimes twice a day, and found him always what Lord Hastings had described him to be--"the cheerful old man." On the only occasion on which he seemed sad, Dr. Marshman as he was leaving the room turned and asked why. With deep feeling the dying scholar looked to the others and said, "After I am gone Brother Marshman will turn the cows into my garden." The reply was prompt, "Far be it from me; though I have not your botanical tastes, the care of the garden in which you have taken so much delight, shall be to me a sacred duty."

Of strangers his most frequent visitor was the Governor-General’s wife, Lady William Bentinck. Her husband was in South India, and she spent most of her time in Barrackpore Park retreat opposite to Carey’s house. From her frequent converse with him, in his life as well as now, she studied the art of dying. Daniel Wilson, Bishop of Calcutta, learned to delight in Serampore almost from the beginning of his long episcopate, and in later years he lived there more than in Calcutta. On the 14th February 1833 he first visited Carey, "his interview with whom, confined as he was to his room, and apparently on the verge of the celestial world, was peculiarly affecting." In the last of subsequent visits the young Bishop asked the dying missionary’s benediction. With all the talk was the same, a humble resignation to the will of God, firm trust in the Redeemer of sinners, a joyful gratitude for the wonderful progress of His Kingdom. What a picture is this that his brethren sent home six weeks before he passed away. "Our aged and venerable brother feels himself growing gradually weaker. He can scarcely rise from his couch, and it is with great difficulty that he is carried out daily to take the air. Yet he is free from all pain as to disease, and his mind is in a most serene and happy state. He is in full possession of his faculties, and, although with difficulty, on account of his weakness, he still converses with his friends from day to day."

The hottest season of the year crept wearily on during the month of May and the first week of June. Each night he slept well, and each day he was moved to his couch in the dining-room for air. There he lay, unable to articulate more than a word or two, but expressing by his joyful features union in prayer and interest in conversation. On the 22nd May the English mail arrived with gladdening intelligence from Mr. Hope--God’s people were praying and giving anew for the mission. Especially was his own latest station of Cherra-poonjee remembered. As he was told that a lady, anonymously, had offered £500 for that mission, £500 for the college, £500 for the translations, and £100 for the mission generally, he raised his emaciated hands to heaven and murmured praise to God. When the delirium of departure came he strove to reach his desk that he might write a letter of thanks, particularly for Cherra. Then he would recall the fact that the little church he at first formed had branched out into six and twenty churches, in which the ordinances of the Gospel were regularly administered, and he would whisper, "What has God wrought!"

The last Sabbath had come--and the last full day. The constant Marshman was with him. "He was scarcely able to articulate, and after a little conversation I knelt down by the side of his couch and prayed with him. Finding my mind unexpectedly drawn out to bless God for His goodness, in having preserved him and blessed him in India for above forty years, and made him such an instrument of good to His church; and to entreat that on his being taken home, a double portion of his spirit might rest on those who remained behind; though unable to speak, he testified sufficiently by his countenance how cordially he joined in this prayer. I then asked Mrs. Carey whether she thought he could now see me. She said yes, and to convince me, said, ‘Mr. Marshman wishes to know whether you now see him?’ He answered so loudly that I could hear him, ‘Yes, I do,’ and shook me most cordially by the hand. I then left him, and my other duties did not permit me to reach him again that day. The next morning, as I was returning home before sunrise, I met our Brethren Mack and Leechman out on their morning ride, when Mack told me that our beloved brother had been rather worse all the night, and that he had just left him very ill. I immediately hastened home, through the college in which he has lived these ten years, and when I reached his room, found that he had just entered into the joy of his Lord--Mrs. Carey, his son Jabez, my son John, and Mrs. Mack being present."

It was Monday the 9th June 1834, at half-past five, as the morning sun was ascending the heavens towards the perfect day. The rain-clouds burst and covered the land with gloom next morning when they carried William Carey to the converts’ burial-ground and made great lamentation. The notice was too short for many to come up from Calcutta in those days. "Mr. Duff, of the Scottish Church, returned a most kind letter." Sir Charles Metcalfe and the Bishop wrote very feelingly in reply. Lady Bentinck sent the Rev. Mr. Fisher to represent the Governor-General and herself, and "a most kind and feeling answer, for she truly loved the venerable man," while she sadly gazed at the mourners as they followed the simple funeral up the right bank of the Hoogli, past the College and the Mission chapel. Mr. Yates, who had taken a loving farewell of the scholar he had been reluctant to succeed, represented the younger brethren; Lacroix, Micaiah Hill, and Gogerly, the London Missionary Society. Corrie and Dealtry do not seem to have reached the spot in time. The Danish Governor, his wife, and the members of council were there, and the flag drooped half-mast high as on the occasion of a Governor’s death. The road was lined by the poor, Hindoo and Mohammedan, for whom he had done so much. When all, walking in the rain, had reached the open grave, the sun shone out, and Leechman led them in the joyous resurrection hymn, "Why do we mourn departing friends?" "I then addressed the audience," wrote Marshman, "and, contrary to Brother Mack’s foretelling that I should never get through it for tears, I did not shed one. Brother Mack was then asked to address the native members, but he, seeing the time so far gone, publicly said he would do so at the village. Brother Robinson then prayed, and weeping--then neither myself nor few besides could refrain." In Jannuggur village chapel in the evening the Bengali burial hymn was sung, Pœritran Christer Morone, "Salvation by the death of Christ," and Pran Krishna, the oldest disciple, led his countrymen in prayer. Then Mack spoke to the weeping converts with all the pathos of their own sweet vernacular from the words, "For David, after he had served his own generation, by the will of God fell on sleep." Had not Carey’s been a royal career, even that of a king and a priest unto God?

"We, as a mission," wrote Dr. Marshman to Christopher Anderson, "took the expense on ourselves, not suffering his family to do so, as we shall that of erecting a monument for him. Long before his death we had, by a letter signed by us all, assured him that the dear relatives, in England and France, should have their pensions continued as though he were living, and that Mrs. Carey, as a widow, should have Rs. 100 monthly, whatever Mackintosh’s house might yield her."

Twenty-two years before, when Chamberlain was complaining because of the absence of stone, or brick, or inscription in the mission burial-ground, Carey had said, "Why should we be remembered? I think when I am dead the sooner I am forgotten the better." Dr. Johns observed that it is not the desire of the persons themselves but of their friends for them, to which Carey replied, "I think of others in that respect as I do of myself." When his second wife was taken from him, his affection so far prevailed that he raised a memorial stone, and in his will left this "order" to Mack and William Robinson, his executors: "I direct that my funeral be as plain as possible; that I be buried by the side of my second wife, Charlotte Emilia Carey; and that the following inscription and nothing more may be cut on the stone which commemorates her, either above or below, as there may be room, viz.:--

WILLIAM CAREY, BORN AUGUST 17, 1761; DIED

A wretched, poor, and helpless worm,

On Thy kind arms I fall."

The surviving brethren seem to have taken the small oblong stone, with the inscription added as directed, and to have placed it on the south side of the domed square block of brick and white plaster--since renewed from time to time--which stands in the left corner of the God’s-acre, now consecrated by the mingled dust of four generations of missionaries, converts, and Christian people. Ward’s monument stands in the centre, and that of the Marshman family at the right hand. Three and a half years afterwards Joshua Marshman followed Carey; not till 1847 was Hannah Marshman laid beside him, after a noble life of eighty years. Mack had gone the year before, cut off by cholera like Ward. But the brotherhood cannot be said to have ended till John Marshman, C.S.I., died in London in 1877. From first to last the three families contributed to the cause of God from their own earnings, ninety thousand pounds, and the world would never have known it but for the lack of the charity that envieth not on the part of Andrew Fuller’s successors.

Carey’s last will and testament begins: "I utterly disclaim all or any right or title to the premises at Serampore, called the mission premises, and every part and parcel thereof; and do hereby declare that I never had, or supposed myself to have, any such right or title. I give and bequeath to the College of Serampore the whole of my museum, consisting of minerals, shells, corals, insects, and other natural curiosities, and a Hortus Siccus; also the folio edition of Hortus Woburnensis, which was presented to me by Lord Hastings; Taylor’s Hebrew Concordance, my collection of Bibles in foreign languages, and all my books in the Italian and German languages." His widow, Grace, who survived him a short time, had the little capital that was hers before her marriage to him, and he desired that she would choose from his library whatever English books she valued. His youngest son, Jonathan, was not in want of money. He had paid Felix and William Rs. 1500 each in his lifetime. In order to leave a like sum to Jabez, he thus provided: "From the failure of funds to carry my former intentions into effect, I direct that my library be sold." In dying as in living he is the same--just to others because self-devoted to Him to whom he thus formally willed himself, "On Thy kind arms I fall."

The Indian journals rang with the praises of the missionary whose childlike humility and sincerity, patriotism and learning, had long made India proud of him. After giving himself, William Carey had died so poor that his books had to be sold to provide £187 10s. for one of his sons. One writer asserted that this man had contributed "sixteen lakhs of rupees" to the cause of Christ while connected with the Serampore Mission, and the statement was everywhere repeated. Dr. Marshman thereupon published the actual facts, "as no one would have felt greater abhorrence of such an attempt to impose on the Christian public than Dr. Carey himself, had he been living." At a time when the old Sicca Rupee was worth half a crown, Carey received, in the thirty-four and a half years of his residence at Serampore, from the date of his appointment to the College of Fort William, £45,000.   Of this he spent £7500 on his Botanic Garden in that period. If accuracy is of any value in such a question, which has little more than a curious biographical interest, then we must add the seven years previous to 1801, and we shall find that the shoemaker of Hackleton received in all for himself and his family £600 from the Society which he called into existence, and which sent him forth, while he spent on the Christianisation and civilisation of India £1625 received as a manufacturer of indigo; and £45,000 as Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi, and Bengali Translator to Government, or £46,625 in all.

"It is possible," wrote Dr. Marshman, "that if, instead of thus living to God and his cause with his brethren at Serampore, Dr. Carey had, like the other professors in the college, lived in Calcutta wholly for himself and his family, he might have laid by for them a lakh of rupees in the thirty years he was employed by Government, and had he been very parsimonious, possibly a lakh and a half. But who that contrasts the pleasures of such a life with those Dr. Carey enjoyed in promoting with his own funds every plan likely to plant Christianity among the natives around him, without having to consult any one in thus doing, but his two brethren of one heart with him, who contributed as much as himself to the Redeemer’s cause, and the fruit of which he saw before his death in Twenty-six Gospel Churches planted in India within a surface of about eight hundred miles, and above Forty labouring brethren raised up on the spot amidst them--would not prefer the latter? What must have been the feelings on a deathbed of a man who had lived wholly to himself, compared with the joyous tranquillity which filled Carey’s soul in the prospect of entering into the joy of his Lord, and above all with what he felt when, a few days before his decease, he said to his companion in labour for thirty-four years: ‘I have no fears; I have no doubts; I have not a wish left unsatisfied.’"

In the Danish Church of Serampore, and in the Mission Chapel, and afterwards in the Union Chapel of Calcutta, Dr. Marshman and Mr. Mack preached sermons on William Carey. These and the discourse delivered in Charlotte Chapel, Edinburgh, on the 30th of November, by Christopher Anderson, were the only materials from which a just estimate of Carey and his work could be formed for the next quarter of a century. All, and especially the last, were as worthy of their theme as éloges pronounced in such circumstances could be. Marshman spoke from the text chosen by Carey himself a few weeks before his death as containing the foundation of his hope and the source of his calm and tranquil assurance--"For by grace are ye saved." Mack found his inspiration again, as he had done in the Bengali village, in Paul’s words--"David, after he had served his own generation, by the will of God fell on sleep." The Edinburgh preacher turned to the message of Isaiah wherewith Carey used to comfort himself in his early loneliness, and which the Revised Version renders--"Look unto Abraham your father; for when he was but one I called him and I blessed him and made him many." And in Bombay the young contemporary missionary who most nearly resembled Carey in personal saintliness, scholarship, and self-devotion, John Wilson, thus wrote:--

"Dr. Carey, the first of living missionaries, the most honoured and the most successful since the time of the Apostles, has closed his long and influential career. Indeed his spirit, his life, and his labours, were truly apostolic...The Spirit of God which was in him led him forward from strength to strength, supported him under privation, enabled him to overcome in a fight that seemed without hope. Like the beloved disciple, whom he resembled in simplicity of mind, and in seeking to draw sinners to Christ altogether by the cords of love, he outlived his trials to enjoy a peaceful and honoured old age, to know that his Master’s cause was prospering, and that his own name was named with reverence and blessing in every country where a Christian dwelt. Perhaps no man ever exerted a greater influence for good on a great cause. Who that saw him, poor and in seats of learning uneducated, embark on such an enterprise, could ever dream that, in little more than forty years, Christendom should be animated with the same spirit, thousands forsake all to follow his example, and that the Word of Life should be translated into almost every language and preached in almost every corner of the earth?"

As the Founder and Father of Modern Missions, the character and career of William Carey are being revealed every year in the progress, and as yet, the purity of the expansion of the Church and of the English-speaking races in the two-thirds of the world which are still outside of Christendom. The £13:2:6 of Kettering became £400,000 before he died, and is now £5,000,000 a year. The one ordained English missionary is now a band of 20,000 men and women sent out by 558 agencies of the Reformed Churches. The solitary converts, each with no influence on his people, or country, or generation, are now a community of 3,000,000 in India alone, and in all the lands outside of Christendom 5,000,000, of whom 80,000 are missionaries to their own countrymen, and many are leaders of the native communities. Since the first edition of the Bengali New Testament appeared at the beginning of the century 250,000,000 of copies of the Holy Scriptures have been printed, of which one half are in 370 of the non-English tongues of the world. The Bengali School of Mudnabati, the Christian College of Serampore, have set in motion educational forces that are bringing nations to the birth, are passing under Bible instruction every day more than a million boys and girls, young men and maidens of the dark races of mankind.

The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the greatest and most practical Evangelical of the nineteenth century after William Wilberforce, wrote thus in his Journal of the class whom Carey headed in the eighteenth, and whom Wordsworth commemorated as

"Not sedentary all, there are who roam

To scatter seeds of Life on barbarous shores."

1847. "Aug. 30th--RYDE.--Reading Missionary Enterprises by Williams...Zeal, devotion, joy, simplicity of heart, faith, love; and we here have barely affection enough to thank God that such deeds have been done. Talk of ‘doing good’ and being ‘useful in one’s generation,’ why, these admirable men performed more in one month than I or many others shall perform in a whole life!"

The eloquent Dr. Richard Winter Hamilton, reflecting that sacrifice to heroes is reserved until after sunset, recalled William Carey, eight years after his death, as "wielding a power to which all difficulties yielded, but that power noiseless as a law of nature; great in conception as well as in performance; profound as those deep combinations of language in which the Indian philosophy and polytheism hide themselves, but gentle as the flower which in his brief recreation he loved to train; awful as the sage, simple as the child; speaking through the Eastern world in as many languages, perhaps, as ‘the cloven tongues of fire’ represented; to be remembered and blessed as long as Ganges rolls!"

The historian of the Baptist Missionary Society, and Robert Hall, whom Sir James Mackintosh pronounced the greatest English orator, have both attempted an estimate of Carey’s genius and influence. Dr. F. A. Cox remarks:--"Had he been born in the sixteenth century he might have been a Luther, to give Protestantism to Europe; had he turned his thought and observations merely to natural philosophy he might have been a Newton; but his faculties, consecrated by religion to a still higher end, have gained for him the sublime distinction of having been the Translator of the Scriptures and the Benefactor of Asia." Robert Hall spoke thus of Carey in his lifetime:--"That extraordinary man who, from the lowest obscurity and poverty, without assistance, rose by dint of unrelenting industry to the highest honours of literature, became one of the first of Orientalists, the first of Missionaries, and the instrument of diffusing more religious knowledge among his contemporaries than has fallen to the lot of any individual since the Reformation; a man who unites with the most profound and varied attainments the fervour of an evangelist, the piety of a saint, and the simplicity of a child."

Except the portrait in London and the bust in Calcutta, no memorial, national, catholic, or sectarian, marks the work of Carey. That work is meanwhile most appropriately embodied in the College for natives at Serampore, in the Lall Bazaar chapel and Benevolent Institution for the poor of Calcutta. The Church of England, which he left, like John Wesley, has allowed E. S. Robinson, Esq., of Bristol, to place an inscription, on brass, in the porch of the church of his native village, beside the stone which he erected over the remains of his father, Edmund, the parish clerk:--"To the Glory of God and in memory of Dr. Wm. Carey, Missionary and Orientalist.

Neither Baptist nor Anglican, the present biographer would, in the name of the country which stood firm in its support of Carey and Serampore all through the forty-one years of his apostolate, add this final eulogy, pronounced in St. George’s Free Church, Edinburgh, on the man who, more than any other and before all others, made the civilisation of the modern world by the English-speaking races a Christian force.   Carey, childlike in his humility, is the most striking illustration in all Hagiology, Protestant or Romanist, of the Lord’s declaration to the Twelve when He had set a little child in the midst of them, "Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven." Yet we, nigh a century after he went forth with the Gospel to Hindostan, may venture to place him where the Church History of the future is likely to keep him--amid the uncrowned kings of men who have made Christian England what it is, under God, to its own people and to half the human race. These are Chaucer, the Father of English Verse; Wyclif the Father of the Evangelical Reformation in all lands; Hooker, the Father of English Prose; Shakspere, the Father of English Literature; Milton, the Father of the English Epic; Bunyan, the Father of English Allegory; Newton, the father of English Science; Carey, the Father of the Second Reformation through Foreign Missions.

APPENDIX

I.--Charter Of Incorporation Of Serampore College

WE, Frederick the Sixth, by the Grace of God King of Denmark, the Venders and Gothers, Duke of Slesvig Holsten, Stormarn, Ditmarsken, Limessborg and Oldenborg, by writings these make known and publicly declare, that whereas William Carey and Joshua Marshman, Doctors of Divinity, and John Clark Marshman, Esq., inhabitants of our town of Fredericksnagore (or Serampore) in Bengal, being desirous of founding a College to promote piety and learning particularly among the native Christian population of India, have to secure this object erected suitable buildings and purchased and collected suitable books, maps, etc., and have humbly besought us to grant unto them and such persons as shall be elected by them and their successors to form the Council of the College in the manner to be hereafter named, our Royal Charter of Incorporation that they may the more effectually carry into execution the purposes above-mentioned:--We, being desirous to encourage so laudable an undertaking, have of our special grace and free motion ordained, constituted, granted and declared, and by the presents We do for ourselves, our heirs and successors ordain, constitute, grant and declare:

1. That the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman, and such other person or persons as shall successively be elected and appointed the Council of the said College, in the manner hereafter mentioned, shall by virtue of the presents be for ever hereafter one body politic and incorporate by the name of the Serampore College for the purposes aforesaid to have perpetual succession and to have a common seal, and by the said name to sue and be sued, to implead and be impleaded, and to answer and be answered unto in every court and place belonging to us, our heirs and successors.

2. And We do hereby ordain, constitute and declare that the persons hereby incorporated and their successors shall for ever be competent in law to purchase, hold and enjoy for them and their successors any goods and chattels whatsoever and to receive, purchase, hold and enjoy, they and their successors, any lands, tenements or hereditaments whatever, and that they shall have full power and authority to sell, exchange or otherwise dispose of any real or personal property to be by them acquired as aforesaid, unless the sale or alienation of such property be specially prohibited by the donor or donors thereof, and to do all things relating to the said College or Corporation in as ample a manner or form as any of our liege subjects, or any other body politic or corporate in our said kingdom or its dependencies may or can do.

3. And We do hereby ordain, grant and declare that the number of Professors, Fellows or Student Tutors and Students, shall be indefinite and that the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman, shall be the first Council of the said College, and that in the event of its appearing to them necessary during their life-time, or in the case of the death of any one of the three members of the said first Council, the survivors or survivor shall and may under their respective hands and seals appoint such other person or persons to be members of the Council of the College, and to succeed each other so as to become Members of the said Council in the order in which they shall be appointed, to the intent that the Council of the said College shall for ever consist of at least three persons.

4. And We do hereby further ordain, grant and declare, that for the better government of the said College, and the better management of its concerns, the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman, the members of the first Council, shall have full power and authority for the space of ten years from the date of these presents, to make and establish such statutes as shall appear to them useful and necessary for the government of the said College, in which statutes they shall define the powers to be entrusted to their successors, to the Professors, the Fellows or Student Tutors and the other Officers thereof, and the duties to be performed by these respectively for the management of the estates, lands, revenues and goods--and of the business of the said College, and the manner of proposing, electing, admitting and removing all and every one of the Council, the Professors, the Fellows or Tutors, the officers, the students and the servants thereof, and shall make and establish generally all such other statutes as may appear to them necessary for the future good government and prosperity of the said College, provided that these statutes be not contrary to the laws and statutes of our realm.

5. And we do hereby further ordain, grant and declare, that the statutes thus made and established by the said three members of the first Council, and given or left in writing under their respective hands, shall be valid and in full force at the expiration of ten years from the date of these presents, so that no future Council of the College shall have power to alter, change or vary them in any manner whatever and that the statutes shall for ever be considered the constitution of the said College. And we do hereby appoint and declare that these statutes shall be made and established by the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman alone, so that in case either of them should die before the expiration of ten years, the power of completing or perfecting these statutes shall devolve wholly on the survivors or survivor; and that in case all three of them should die before the expiration of ten years, the statutes which they have left in writing under their hands, or under the hand of the last survivor among them shall be considered "The Fundamental Statutes and Constitution of Serampore College," incapable of receiving either addition or alteration, and shall and may be registered in our Royal Court of Chancery as "The Statutes and Constitution of Serampore College."

6. And We do hereby further appoint, grant and declare that from and after the completion of the statutes of the said College in the above said time of ten years, the said Council of the College shall be deemed to consist of a Master or President and two or four members who may be Professors or otherwise as the Statutes may direct so that the said Council shall not contain less than three, nor more than five persons, as shall be defined in the Statutes. The Council shall ever be elected as the Statutes of the College may direct, yet the said Master or President shall always previously have been a Member of the said College; and upon the decease of the said Master or President, the Council of the said College shall be unable to do any act or deed until the appointment of a new Master or President, save and except the appointment of such a Master.

7. And We further appoint, grant and declare, that the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman, the members of the first Council, and their successors for ever, shall have the power of conferring upon the students of the said College, Native Christians as well as others, degrees of rank and honour according to their proficiency in as ample a manner as any other such College, yet the said Serampore College shall only have the power of conferring such degrees on the students that testify their proficiency in Science and no rank or other special right shall be connected therewith in our dominions. And We do hereby further appoint, grant and declare, that after the expiration of the said ten years, the said Council of the College and their successors for ever shall have power to make and establish such orders and bye-laws as shall appear to them useful and necessary for the government of the said College, and to alter, suspend or repeal those already made, and from time to time make such new ones in their room as shall appear to them most proper and expedient provided the same be not repugnant to the Statutes of the College, or to the laws of our realm, and that after the expiration of these ten years any member of the Council shall have power to move the enactment of any new bye-law, or the alteration, suspension or repeal of any existing one provided notice of such motion shall have been delivered in writing to the Master and read from the Chair at one previous meeting of the Council of the said College, but that no such motion shall be deemed to have passed in the affirmative, until the same shall have been discussed and decided by ballot at another meeting summoned especially for that purpose, a majority of the members then present having voted in the affirmative; and in this, as in all other cases, if the votes be equal, the Master or President shall have the casting vote.

Given at our Royal Palace in Copenhagen on the twenty-third day of February, in the year of our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-seven, in the nineteenth year of our reign.

Under our Royal Hand and Seal.

FREDERICK R.

II.--Statutes And Regulations Of Serampore College

June 12th, 1833.

1. Article the Third of the Charter granted by his Danish Majesty, having authorised the first Council of Serampore College in their lifetime to nominate under their hand and seal such other person or persons for colleagues or successors as may to them appear most proper, so that the Council shall always consist of at least three persons, their successors in the Council shall be competent in like manner to nominate in their lifetime, under their separate hand and seal, such person or persons as they may deem most proper to fill vacancies then existing or which may occur on their demise; members thus nominated and chosen shall succeed to the Council in order of their nomination.

2. It being fixed in the Charter that the Council must consist of the Master or President and at least two, but no more than four Members, and that on the demise of the Master no act shall be done until another be elected, the Master and Council for the time being shall appoint the next Master under their separate hand and seal. If on the demise of a Master no one be found thus appointed under the hand and seal of a majority of the Council, the Senior Member of the Council shall succeed as Master.

3. The Charter having given the casting vote to the Master, in all cases when the votes are equal the casting vote shall lie with the Master, and if there be no Master, it shall lie with the Senior Member of the Council.

4. Learning and piety being peculiar to no denomination of Christians, one member of the Council may at all times be of any other denomination besides the Baptist, to preserve the original design of the Institution; however, if on the election of a Master a number of the Council be equally divided, that part which is entirely of the Baptist denomination shall have the casting vote, whether it includes the Master or not.

5. The management of the College, including its revenues and property, the choice of Professor and Tutors, the admission of Students, the appointment of all functionaries and servants, and the general order and government of the College, shall ever be vested in the Master and the Council. The Master shall see that the Statutes and Regulations of the Council be duly carried into effect, and take order for the good government of the College in all things. His signature is necessary to the validity of all deeds, instruments, documents and proceedings.

6. "The first Council and their successor for ever" being authorised by the Charter "to confer such degrees of rank and honour as shall encourage learning" in the same manner as other Colleges and Universities, they shall from time to time confer degrees in such branches of Knowledge and Science as may be studied there, in the same manner as the Universities in Denmark, Germany and Great Britain. In doing this the Master and Council shall ad libitum call in the aid of any or all the Professors of Serampore College. All such degrees shall be perfectly free of expense to the person on whom they may be conferred, whether he be in India, Europe or America.

7. No oaths shall be administered in Serampore College, either to the Members of Council, the Professors and Tutors, or the Students. In all cases a solemn promise, duly recorded and signed by the party, shall be accepted instead of an oath.

8. Marriage shall be no bar to any office or situation in Serampore College, from that of the Master to that of the lowest student.

9. The salaries of the Professors and Tutors in Serampore College shall be appointed, and the means of support for all functionaries, students and servants be regulated by the Council in such manner as shall best promote the objects of the Institution.

10. It is intended that neither the Master nor any Member of the Council in general shall receive any salary. But any Master who may not previously reside in the College shall have a residence there free of rent for himself and his family. And if the Council shall elect any one in Europe or in America, whom they deem eminent for learning and piety, a Member of the Council, with a view to choosing him Master, should they on trial deem him worthy, the Council shall be competent to appoint him such salary as they may deem necessary, not exceeding, however, the highest given to a Professor.

11. As the founders of the College deem the belief of Christ’s Divinity and Atonement essential to vital Christianity, the promotion of which is the grand object of this Institution, no one shall be eligible to the College Council or to any Professorship who is known to oppose these doctrines, and should any one of the Professors or any member of the Council unhappily so change his views after his election as to oppose these fundamental doctrines of Christianity, on this being clearly and decidedly proved from his teaching or his writings, he shall vacate the office he previously held. But every proceeding of this nature on the part of the College Council shall be published to the Christian world, with the proofs on which it may rest, as an Appendix to the succeeding Report.

12. Members of the Council are eligible from among the Professors of the College, or from among any in India, Europe, or America whom the College Council may deem suitable in point of learning, piety, and talent.

13. Students are admissible at the discretion of the Council from any body of Christians, whether Protestant, Roman Catholic, the Greek, or the Armenian Church; and for the purpose of study, from the Mussulman and Hindu youth, whose habits forbid their living in the College. No caste, colour, or country shall bar any man from admission into Serampore College.

14. Expulsion shall be awarded in cases of open immorality, incorrigible idleness, neglect of the College Statutes and regulations, or repeated disobedience to the officers of the College.

15. Any person in India, Europe, or America shall be at liberty to found any Professorship, or to attach to Serampore College any annual exhibition or prize for the encouragement of learning in the same manner as in the Universities of Great Britain, regulating such endowment according to their own will; and it shall be duty of the College Council to carry such benefactions into effect in strict consonance with the will of the donors as far as shall be consistent with the Statutes of the College.

16. It shall be lawful for the first Council of the College or their successors to make and rescind any bye-laws whatever, provided they be not contrary to these Statutes.

17. The Charter having declared that the number of the Professors and students in Serampore College remains unlimited, they shall be left thus unlimited, the number to be regulated only by the gracious providence of God and the generosity of the public in India, Europe and America.

III.--Article VI., Clause 2, Of The Treaty Of Purchase, Transferring Serampore To The British Government

"The rights and immunities granted to the Serampore College by Royal Charter of date, 23rd February, 1827, shall not be interfered with, but continue in force in the same manner as if they had been obtained by a Charter from the British Government, subject to the general law of British India."

IV.--CAREY’S BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

THIRTY-SIX BIBLE TRANSLATIONS,

MADE AND EDITED BY DR. CAREY AT SERAMPORE

First Published in:

1. 1801. BENGALI--New Testament; Old Testament in 1802-9.

2. 1811.   Ooriya       "              "       in 1819.

3. 1824.   Maghadi      " only.

4. 1815-19.   Assamese     "              "       in 1832.

5. 1824.   Khasi.

6. 1814-24.   Manipoori.

7. 1808. SANSKRIT       "              "       in 1811-18.

8. 1809-11. HINDI          "              "       in 1813-18.

9. 1822-32.   Bruj-bhasa   " only.

10. 1815-22.   Kanouji      "   "

11. 1820.   Khosali--Gospel of Matthew only.

12. 1822.   Oodeypoori--New Testament only.

13. 1815.   Jeypoori             "

14. 1821.   Bhugeli              "

15. 1821.   Marwari              "

16. 1822.   Haraoti              "

17. 1823.   Bikaneri             "

18. 1823.   Oojeini              "

19. 1824.   Bhatti               "

20. 1832.   Palpa                "

21. 1826.   Kumaoni              "

22. 1832.   Gurhwali             "

23. 1821.   Nepalese             "

24. 1811. MARATHI--              "   Old Testament in 1820.

25. 1820.   Goojarati            " only.

26. 1819.   Konkan               "   Pentateuch in 1821.

27. 1815. PANJABI                "       " and Historical Books in 1822.

28. 1819.   Mooltani--New Testament.

29. 1825.   Sindhi--Gospel of Matthew only.

30. 1820.   Kashmeeri--New Testament; and Old Testament to 2nd Book of Kings.

31. 1820-26.   Dogri--New Testament only.

32. 1819. PUSHTOO--New Test. and Old Test. Historical Books.

33. 1815. BALOOCHI     "         Three Gospels.

34. 1818. TELUGOO      "         and Pentateuch in 1820.

35. 1822. KANARESE     "         only.

36. MALDIVIAN--Four Gospels.

EDITED AND PRINTED ONLY BY CAREY

Persian.                         Singhalese.

Hindostani.                      Chinese (Dr. Marshman’s).

Malayalam.                       Javanese.

Burmese--Matthew’s Gospel.       Malay.

* * * * * * * * * *

If you have been blessed by this volume, you may also be interested in some of our other Christian Classics Treasury collections:

MISSIONS COLLECTIONS:

- Amy Carmichael 8-in-1

- The Hudson Taylor Collection (7-in-1)

- David Livingstone Collection (5-in-1)

- Samuel Zwemer 7-in-1(Missions in Arabia)

- Samuel Zwemer, 7-in-1, Vol 2

- Key to the Missionary Problem (Andrew Murray)

- Classic Missions Texts  (Murray, Allen, Carey, Zwemer)

CLASSIC COLLECTIONS:

- 7 Catholic Classics

- 7 Classics on PRAYER

- 7 Classics on HOLINESS

- 7 Classics on EVANGELISM and SOUL-WINNING

- 5 Classics on the HOLY SPIRIT

- 5 Classics on POWER

- EDERSHEIM COLLECTION  (Sketches of Jewish Social Life; The Temple; Jesus the Messiah)

- The Didache (Teaching of the 12 Apostles)

PREACHERS AND REVIVALISTS:

- Biography of John Wesley Collection: 4-in-1

- Biography of Andrew Murray

- Charles Spurgeon: 40 sermons on Prayer

- Charles Spurgeon: Lectures to My Students

- The George Muller Collection

- The Revival Writings of Jonathan Edwards (7-in-1)

- The Works of Catherine Booth (7-in-1)

- The Works of Charles Finney

- The Works of D. L. Moody

- The Works of R. A. Torrey

- The Works of William Booth

5.  HUDSON TAYLOR – A RETROSPECT (d. 1905)

A RETROSPECT

BY

J. HUDSON TAYLOR, M.R.C.S., F.R.G.S.

Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee.

THIRD EDITION

TORONTO

CHINA INLAND MISSION

507 CHURCH STREET

THE "LAMMERMUIR" PARTY.   (See chapter 19)

CHAPTER 1: THE POWER OF PRAYER

THE following account of some of the experiences which eventually led to the formation of the China Inland Mission, and to its taking the form in which it has been developed, first appeared in the pages of China's Millions. Many of those who read it there asked that it might appear in separate form. Miss Guinness incorporated it in the Story of the China Inland Mission, a record which contained the account of God's goodness to the beginning of 1894. But friends still asking for it in pamphlet form, for wider distribution, this edition is brought out.

Much of the material was taken from notes of addresses given in China during a conference of our missionaries; this will account for the direct and narrative form of the papers, which it has not been thought necessary to change.

It is always helpful to us to fix our attention on the God-ward aspect of Christian work; to realise that the work of God does not mean so much man's work for God, as God's own work through man. Furthermore, in our privileged position of fellow-workers with Him, while fully recognising all the benefits and blessings to be bestowed on a sin-stricken world through the proclamation of the Gospel and spread of the Truth, we should never lose sight of the higher aspect of our work—that of obedience to God, of bringing glory to His Name, of gladdening the heart of our God and Father by living and serving as His beloved children.

Many circumstances connected with my own early life and service presented this aspect of work vividly to me; and as I think of some of them, I am reminded of how much the cause of missions is indebted to many who are never themselves permitted to see the mission field—many, it may be, who are unable to give largely of their substance, and who will be not a little surprised in the Great Day to see how much the work has been advanced by their love, their sympathy, and their prayers.

For myself, and for the work that I have been permitted to do for God, I owe an unspeakable debt of gratitude to my beloved and honoured parents, who have passed away and entered into rest, but the influence of whose lives will never pass away.

Many years ago, probably about 1830, the heart of my dear father, then himself an earnest and successful evangelist at home, was deeply stirred as to the spiritual state of China by reading several books, and especially an account of the travels of Captain Basil Hall. His circumstances were such as to preclude the hope of his ever going to China for personal service, but he was led to pray that if God should give him a son, he might be called and privileged to labour in the vast needy empire which was then apparently so sealed against the truth. I was not aware of this desire or prayer myself until my return to England, more than seven years after I had sailed for China; but it was very interesting then to know how prayer offered before my birth had been answered in this matter.

All thought of my becoming a missionary was abandoned for many years by my dear parents on account of the feebleness of my health. When the time came, however, God gave increased health, and my life has been spared, and strength has been given for not a little toilsome service both in the mission field and at home, while many stronger men and women have succumbed.

I had many opportunities in early years of learning the value of prayer and of the Word of God; for it was the delight of my dear parents to point out that if there were any such Being as God, to trust Him, to obey Him, and to be fully given up to His service, must of necessity be the best and wisest course both for myself and others. But in spite of these helpful examples and precepts my heart was unchanged. Often I had tried to make myself a Christian; and failing of course in such efforts, I began at last to think that for some reason or other I could not be saved, and that the best I could do was to take my fill of this world, as there was no hope for me beyond the grave.

While in this state of mind I came in contact with persons holding sceptical and infidel views, and accepted their teaching, only too thankful for some hope of escape from the doom which, if my parents were right and the Bible true, awaited the impenitent. It may seem strange to say it, but I have often felt thankful for the experience of this time of scepticism. The inconsistencies of Christian people, who while professing to believe their Bibles were yet content to live just as they would if there were no such book, had been one of the strongest arguments of my sceptical companions; and I frequently felt at that time, and said, that if I pretended to believe the Bible I would at any rate attempt to live by it, putting it fairly to the test, and if it failed to prove true and reliable, would throw it overboard altogether. These views I retained when the Lord was pleased to bring me to Himself; and I think I may say that since then I have put God's Word to the test. Certainly it has never failed me. I have never had reason to regret the confidence I have placed in its promises, or to deplore following the guidance I have found in its directions.

Let me tell you how God answered the prayers of my dear mother and of my beloved sister, now Mrs. Broomhall, for my conversion. On a day which I shall never forget, when I was about fifteen years of age, my dear mother being absent from home, I had a holiday, and in the afternoon looked through my father's library to find some book with which to while away the unoccupied hours. Nothing attracting me, I turned over a little basket of pamphlets, and selected from amongst them a Gospel tract which looked interesting, saying to myself, "There will be a story at the commencement, and a sermon or moral at the close: I will take the former and leave the latter for those who like it."

I sat down to read the little book in an utterly unconcerned state of mind, believing indeed at the time that if there were any salvation it was not for me, and with a distinct intention to put away the tract as soon as it should seem prosy. I may say that it was not uncommon in those days to call conversion "becoming serious"; and judging by the faces of some of its professors, it appeared to be a very serious matter indeed. Would it not be well if the people of God had always tell-tale faces, evincing the blessings and gladness of salvation so clearly that unconverted people might have to call conversion "becoming joyful" instead of "becoming serious"?

Little did I know at the time what was going on in the heart of my dear mother, seventy or eighty miles away. She rose from the dinner-table that afternoon with an intense yearning for the conversion of her boy, and feeling that—absent from home, and having more leisure than she could otherwise secure—a special opportunity was afforded her of pleading with God on my behalf. She went to her room and turned the key in the door, resolved not to leave that spot until her prayers were answered. Hour after hour did that dear mother plead for me, until at length she could pray no longer, but was constrained to praise God for that which His Spirit taught her had already been accomplished—the conversion of her only son.

I in the meantime had been led in the way I have mentioned to take up this little tract, and while reading it was struck with the sentence, "The finished work of Christ." The thought passed through my mind, "Why does the author use this expression? why not say the atoning or propitiatory work of Christ?" Immediately the words "It is finished" suggested themselves to my mind. What was finished? And I at once replied, "A full and perfect atonement and satisfaction for sin: the debt was paid by the Substitute; Christ died for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." Then came the thought, "If the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid, what is there left for me to do?" And with this dawned the joyful conviction, as light was flashed into my soul by the Holy Spirit, that there was nothing in the world to be done but to fall down on one's knees, and accepting this Saviour and His salvation, to praise Him for evermore. Thus while my dear mother was praising God on her knees in her chamber, I was praising Him in the old warehouse to which I had gone alone to read at my leisure this little book.

Several days elapsed ere I ventured to make my beloved sister the confidante of my joy, and then only after she had promised not to tell any one of my soul secret. When our dear mother came home a fortnight later, I was the first to meet her at the door, and to tell her I had such glad news to give. I can almost feel that dear mother's arms around my neck, as she pressed me to her bosom and said, "I know, my boy; I have been rejoicing for a fortnight in the glad tidings you have to tell me." "Why," I asked in surprise, "has Amelia broken her promise? She said she would tell no one." My dear mother assured me that it was not from any human source that she had learned the tidings, and went on to tell the little incident mentioned above. You will agree with me that it would be strange indeed if I were not a believer in the power of prayer.

Nor was this all. Some little time after, I picked up a pocket-book exactly like one of my own, and thinking that it was mine, opened it. The lines that caught my eye were an entry in the little diary, which belonged to my sister, to the effect that she would give herself daily to prayer until God should answer in the conversion of her brother. Exactly one month later the Lord was pleased to turn me from darkness to light.

Brought up in such a circle and saved under such circumstances, it was perhaps natural that from the commencement of my Christian life I was led to feel that the promises were very real, and that prayer was in sober matter of fact transacting business with God, whether on one's own behalf or on behalf of those for whom one sought His blessing.

CHAPTER 2: THE CALL TO SERVICE

THE first joys of conversion passed away after a time, and were succeeded by a period of painful deadness of soul, with much conflict. But this also came to an end, leaving a deepened sense of personal weakness and dependence on the Lord as the only Keeper as well as Saviour of His people. How sweet to the soul, wearied and disappointed in its struggles with sin, is the calm repose of trust in the Shepherd of Israel.

Not many months after my conversion, having a leisure afternoon, I retired to my own chamber to spend it largely in communion with God. Well do I remember that occasion. How in the gladness of my heart I poured out my soul before God; and again and again confessing my grateful love to Him who had done everything for me—who had saved me when I had given up all hope and even desire for salvation—I besought Him to give me some work to do for Him, as an outlet for love and gratitude; some self-denying service, no matter what it might be, however trying or however trivial; something with which He would be pleased, and that I might do for Him who had done so much for me. Well do I remember, as in unreserved consecration I put myself, my life, my friends, my all, upon the altar, the deep solemnity that came over my soul with the assurance that my offering was accepted. The presence of God became unutterably real and blessed; and though but a child under sixteen, I remember stretching myself on the ground, and lying there silent before Him with unspeakable awe and unspeakable joy.

For what service I was accepted I knew not; but a deep consciousness that I was no longer my own took possession of me, which has never since been effaced. It has been a very practical consciousness. Two or three years later propositions of an unusually favourable nature were made to me with regard to medical study, on the condition of my becoming apprenticed to the medical man who was my friend and teacher. But I felt I dared not accept any binding engagement such as was suggested. I was not my own to give myself away; for I knew not when or how He whose alone I was, and for whose disposal I felt I must ever keep myself free, might call for service.

Within a few months of this time of consecration the impression was wrought into my soul that it was in China the Lord wanted me. It seemed to me highly probable that the work to which I was thus called might cost my life; for China was not then open as it is now. But few missionary societies had at that time workers in China, and but few books on the subject of China missions were accessible to me. I learned, however, that the Congregational minister of my native town possessed a copy of Medhurst's China, and I called upon him to ask a loan of the book. This he kindly granted, asking me why I wished to read it. I told him that God had called me to spend my life in missionary service in that land. "And how do you propose to go there?" he inquired. I answered that I did not at all know; that it seemed to me probable that I should need to do as the Twelve and the Seventy had done in Judæa—go without purse or scrip, relying on Him who had called me to supply all my need. Kindly placing his hand upon my shoulder, the minister replied, "Ah, my boy, as you grow older you will get wiser than that. Such an idea would do very well in the days when Christ Himself was on earth, but not now."

I have grown older since then, but not wiser. I am more than ever convinced that if we were to take the directions of our Master and the assurances He gave to His first disciples more fully as our guide, we should find them to be just as suited to our times as to those in which they were originally given.

Medhurst's book on China emphasised the value of medical missions there, and this directed my attention to medical studies as a valuable mode of preparation.

My beloved parents neither discouraged nor encouraged my desire to engage in missionary work. They advised me, with such convictions, to use all the means in my power to develop the resources of body, mind, heart, and soul, and to wait prayerfully upon God, quite willing, should He show me that I was mistaken, to follow His guidance, or to go forward if in due time He should open the way to missionary service. The importance of this advice I have often since had occasion to prove. I began to take more exercise in the open air to strengthen my physique. My feather bed I had taken away, and sought to dispense with as many other home comforts as I could, in order to prepare myself for rougher lines of life. I began also to do what Christian work was in my power, in the way of tract distribution, Sunday-school teaching, and visiting the poor and sick, as opportunity afforded.

After a time of preparatory study at home, I went to Hull for medical and surgical training. There I became assistant to a doctor who was connected with the Hull school of medicine, and was surgeon also to a number of factories, which brought many accident cases to our dispensary, and gave me the opportunity of seeing and practising the minor operations of surgery.

And here an event took place that I must not omit to mention. Before leaving home my attention was drawn to the subject of setting apart the firstfruits of all one's increase and a proportionate part of one's possessions to the Lord's service. I thought it well to study the question with my Bible in hand before I went away from home, and was placed in circumstances which might bias my conclusions by the pressure of surrounding wants and cares. I was thus led to the determination to set apart not less than one-tenth of whatever moneys I might earn or become possessed of for the Lord's service. The salary I received as medical assistant in Hull at the time now referred to would have allowed me with ease to do this. But owing to changes in the family of my kind friend and employer, it was necessary for me to reside out of doors. Comfortable quarters were secured with a relative, and in addition to the sum determined on as remuneration for my services I received the exact amount I had to pay for board and lodging.

Now arose in my mind the question, Ought not this sum also to be tithed? It was surely a part of my income, and I felt that if it had been a question of Government income tax it certainly would not have been excluded. On the other hand, to take a tithe from the whole would not leave me sufficient for other purposes; and for some little time I was much embarrassed to know what to do. After much thought and prayer I was led to leave the comfortable quarters and happy circle in which I was now residing, and to engage a little lodging in the suburbs—a sitting-room and bedroom in one—undertaking to board myself. In this way I was able without difficulty to tithe the whole of my income; and while I felt the change a good deal, it was attended with no small blessing.

More time was given in my solitude to the study of the Word of God, to visiting the poor, and to evangelistic work on summer evenings than would otherwise have been the case. Brought into contact in this way with many who were in distress, I soon saw the privilege of still further economising, and found it not difficult to give away much more than the proportion of my income I had at first intended.

About this time a friend drew my attention to the question of the personal and pre-millennial coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and gave me a list of passages bearing upon it, without note or comment, advising me to ponder the subject. For a while I gave much time to studying the Scriptures about it, with the result that I was led to see that this same Jesus who left our earth in His resurrection body was so to come again, that His feet were to stand on the Mount of Olives, and that He was to take possession of the temporal throne of His father David which was promised before His birth. I saw, further, that all through the New Testament the coming of the Lord was the great hope of His people, and was always appealed to as the strongest motive for consecration and service, and as the greatest comfort in trial and affliction. I learned, too, that the period of His return for His people was not revealed, and that it was their privilege, from day to day and from hour to hour, to live as men who wait for the Lord; that thus living it was immaterial, so to speak, whether He should or should not come at any particular hour, the important thing being to be so ready for Him as to be able, whenever He might appear, to give an account of one's stewardship with joy, and not with grief.

The effect of this blessed hope was a thoroughly practical one. It led me to look carefully through my little library to see if there were any books there that were not needed or likely to be of further service, and to examine my small wardrobe, to be quite sure that it contained nothing that I should be sorry to give an account of should the Master come at once. The result was that the library was considerably diminished, to the benefit of some poor neighbours, and to the far greater benefit of my own and that I found I had articles of clothing also which might be put to better advantage in other directions.

It has been very helpful to me from time to time through life, as occasion has served, to act again in a similar way; and I have never gone through my house, from basement to attic, with this object in view, without receiving a great accession of spiritual joy and blessing. I believe we are all in danger of accumulating—it may be from thoughtlessness, or from pressure of occupation—things which would be useful to others, while not needed by ourselves, and the retention of which entails loss of blessing. If the whole resources of the Church of God were well utilised, how much more might be accomplished! How many poor might be fed and naked clothed, and to how many of those as yet unreached the Gospel might be carried! Let me advise this line of things as a constant habit of mind, and a profitable course to be practically adopted whenever circumstances permit.

CHAPTER 3: PREPARATION FOR SERVICE

Salt junk on the Yang-tsi

HAVING now the twofold object in view of accustoming myself to endure hardness, and of economising in order to be able more largely to assist those amongst whom I spent a good deal of time labouring in the Gospel, I soon found that I could live upon very much less than I had previously thought possible. Butter, milk, and other such luxuries I soon ceased to use; and I found that by living mainly on oatmeal and rice, with occasional variations, a very small sum was sufficient for my needs. In this way I had more than two-thirds of my income available for other purposes; and my experience was that the less I spent on myself and the more I gave away, the fuller of happiness and blessing did my soul become. Unspeakable joy all the day long, and every day, was my happy experience. God, even my God, was a living, bright Reality; and all I had to do was joyful service.

It was to me a very grave matter, however, to contemplate going out to China, far away from all human aid, there to depend upon the living God alone for protection, supplies, and help of every kind. I felt that one's spiritual muscles required strengthening for such an undertaking. There was no doubt that if faith did not fail, God would not fail; but, then, what if one's faith should prove insufficient? I had not at that time learned that even "if we believe not, He abideth faithful, He cannot deny Himself"; and it was consequently a very serious question to my mind, not whether He was faithful, but whether I had strong enough faith to warrant my embarking in the enterprise set before me.

I thought to myself, "When I get out to China, I shall have no claim on any one for anything; my only claim will be on God. How important, therefore, to learn before leaving England to move man, through God, by prayer alone."

At Hull my kind employer, always busily occupied, wished me to remind him whenever my salary became due. This I determined not to do directly, but to ask that God would bring the fact to his recollection, and thus encourage me by answering prayer. At one time, as the day drew near for the payment of a quarter's salary, I was as usual much in prayer about it. The time arrived, but my kind friend made no allusion to the matter. I continued praying, and days passed on, but he did not remember, until at length, on settling up my weekly accounts one Saturday night, I found myself possessed of only a single coin—one half-crown piece. Still I had hitherto had no lack, and I continued in prayer.

That Sunday was a very happy one. As usual my heart was full and brimming over with blessing. After attending Divine service in the morning, my afternoons and evenings were filled with Gospel work, in the various lodging-houses I was accustomed to visit in the lowest part of the town. At such times it almost seemed to me as if heaven were begun below, and that all that could be looked for was an enlargement of one's capacity for joy, not a truer filling than I possessed. After concluding my last service about ten o'clock that night, a poor man asked me to go and pray with his wife, saying that she was dying. I readily agreed, and on the way to his house asked him why he had not sent for the priest, as his accent told me he was an Irishman. He had done so, he said, but the priest refused to come without a payment of eighteenpence, which the man did not possess, as the family was starving. Immediately it occurred to my mind that all the money I had in the world was the solitary half-crown, and that it was in one coin; moreover, that while the basin of water gruel I usually took for supper was awaiting me, and there was sufficient in the house for breakfast in the morning, I certainly had nothing for dinner on the coming day.

Somehow or other there was at once a stoppage in the flow of joy in my heart; but instead of reproving myself I began to reprove the poor man, telling him that it was very wrong to have allowed matters to get into such a state as he described, and that he ought to have applied to the relieving officer. His answer was that he had done so, and was told to come at eleven o'clock the next morning, but that he feared that his wife might not live through the night. "Ah," thought I, "if only I had two shillings and a sixpence instead of this half-crown, how gladly would I give these poor people one shilling of it!" But to part with the half-crown was far from my thoughts. I little dreamed that the real truth of the matter simply was that I could trust in God plus one-and-sixpence, but was not yet prepared to trust Him only, without any money at all in my pocket.

My conductor led me into a court, down which I followed him with some degree of nervousness. I had found myself there before, and at my last visit had been very roughly handled, while my tracts were torn to pieces, and I received such a warning not to come again that I felt more than a little concerned. Still, it was the path of duty, and I followed on. Up a miserable flight of stairs, into a wretched room, he led me; and oh what a sight there presented itself to our eyes! Four or five poor children stood about, their sunken cheeks and temples all telling unmistakably the story of slow starvation; and lying on a wretched pallet was a poor exhausted mother, with a tiny infant thirty-six hours old, moaning rather than crying at her side, for it too seemed spent and failing. "Ah!" thought I, "if I had two shillings and a sixpence instead of half-a-crown, how gladly should they have one-and-sixpence of it!" But still a wretched unbelief prevented me from obeying the impulse to relieve their distress at the cost of all I possessed.

It will scarcely seem strange that I was unable to say much to comfort these poor people. I needed comfort myself. I began to tell them, however, that they must not be cast down, that though their circumstances were very distressing, there was a kind and loving Father in heaven; but something within me said, "You hypocrite! telling these unconverted people about a kind and loving Father in heaven, and not prepared yourself to trust Him without half-a-crown!" I was nearly choked. How gladly would I have compromised with conscience if I had had a florin and a sixpence! I would have given the florin thankfully and kept the rest; but I was not yet prepared to trust in God alone, without the sixpence.

To talk was impossible under these circumstances; yet, strange to say, I thought I should have no difficulty in praying. Prayer was a delightful occupation to me in those days; time thus spent never seemed wearisome, and I knew nothing of lack of words. I seemed to think that all I should have to do would be to kneel down and engage in prayer, and that relief would come to them and to myself together. "You asked me to come and pray with your wife," I said to the man, "let us pray." And I knelt down. But scarcely had I opened my lips with "Our Father who art in heaven" than conscience said within, "Dare you mock God? Dare you kneel down and call Him Father with that half-crown in your pocket?" Such a time of conflict came upon me then as I have never experienced before or since. How I got through that form of prayer I know not, and whether the words uttered were connected or disconnected I cannot tell; but I arose from my knees in great distress of mind.

The poor father turned to me and said, "You see what a terrible state we are in, sir; if you can help us, for God's sake do!" Just then the word flashed into my mind, "Give to him that asketh of thee," and in the word of a King there is power. I put my hand into my pocket, and slowly drawing forth the half-crown, gave it to the man, telling him that it might seem a small matter for me to relieve them, seeing that I was comparatively well off, but that in parting with that coin I was giving him my all; what I had been trying to tell him was indeed true—God really was a Father, and might be trusted. The joy all came back in full flood-tide to my heart; I could say anything and feel it then, and the hindrance to blessing was gone—gone, I trust, for ever.

Not only was the poor woman's life saved, but I realised that my life was saved too! It might have been a wreck—would have been a wreck probably, as a Christian life—had not grace at that time conquered, and the striving of God's Spirit been obeyed. I well remember how that night, as I went home to my lodgings, my heart was as light as my pocket. The lonely, deserted streets resounded with a hymn of praise which I could not restrain. When I took my basin of gruel before retiring, I would not have exchanged it for a prince's feast. I reminded the Lord as I knelt at my bedside of His own Word, that he who giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord: I asked Him not to let my loan be a long one, or I should have no dinner next day; and with peace within and peace without, I spent a happy, restful night.

Next morning for breakfast my plate of porridge remained, and before it was consumed the postman's knock was heard at the door. I was not in the habit of receiving letters on Monday, as my parents and most of my friends refrained from posting on Saturday; so that I was somewhat surprised when the landlady came in holding a letter or packet in her wet hand covered by her apron. I looked at the letter, but could not make out the handwriting. It was either a strange hand or a feigned one, and the postmark was blurred. Where it came from I could not tell. On opening the envelope I found nothing written within; but inside a sheet of blank paper was folded a pair of kid gloves, from which, as I opened them in astonishment, half-a-sovereign fell to the ground. "Praise the Lord!" I exclaimed; "400 per cent for twelve hours investment; that is good interest. How glad the merchants of Hull would be if they could lend their money at such a rate!" I then and there determined that a bank which could not break should have my savings or earnings as the case might be—a determination I have not yet learned to regret.

I cannot tell you how often my mind has recurred to this incident, or all the help it has been to me in circumstances of difficulty in after-life. If we are faithful to God in little things, we shall gain experience and strength that will be helpful to us in the more serious trials of life.

CHAPTER 4: FURTHER ANSWERS TO PRAYER

THE remarkable and gracious deliverance I have spoken of, was a great joy to me, as well as a strong confirmation of faith; but of course ten shillings, however economically used, will not go very far, and it was none the less necessary to continue in prayer, asking that the larger supply which was still due might be remembered and paid. All my petitions, however, appeared to remain unanswered; and before a fortnight had elapsed I found myself pretty much in the same position that I had occupied on the Sunday night already made so memorable. Meanwhile, I continued pleading with God, more and more earnestly, that He would graciously remind my employer that my salary was overdue. Of course it was not the want of the money that distressed me—that could have been had at any time for the asking—but the question uppermost in my mind was this: "Can I go to China? or will my want of faith and power with God prove to be so serious an obstacle as to preclude my entering upon this much-prized service?"

As the week drew to a close I felt exceedingly embarrassed. There was not only myself to consider; on Saturday night a payment would be due to my Christian landlady which I knew she could not well dispense with. Ought I not, for her sake, to speak about the matter of the salary? Yet to do so would be, to myself at any rate, the admission that I was not fitted to undertake a missionary enterprise. I gave nearly the whole of Thursday and Friday—all the time not occupied in my necessary employment—to earnest wrestling with God in prayer. But still on Saturday morning I was in the same position as before. And now my earnest cry was for guidance as to whether it was my duty to break silence and speak to my employer, or whether I should still continue to wait the Father's time. As far as I could judge, I received the assurance that to wait His time was best; and that God in some way or other would interpose on my behalf. So I waited, my heart being now at rest and the burden gone.

About five o'clock that Saturday afternoon, when the doctor had finished writing his prescriptions, his last circuit for the day being taken, he threw himself back in his arm-chair, as he was wont, and began to speak of the things of God. He was a truly Christian man, and many seasons of very happy spiritual fellowship we had together. I was busily watching, at the time, a pan in which a decoction was boiling that required a good deal of attention. It was indeed fortunate for me that it was so, for without any obvious connection with what had been going on, all at once he said, "By-the-bye, Taylor, is not your salary due again?" My emotion may be imagined! I had to swallow two or three times before I could answer. With my eye fixed on the pan and my back to the doctor, I told him as quietly as I could that it was overdue some little time. How thankful I felt at that moment! God surely had heard my prayer, and caused him, in this time of my great need, to remember the salary without any word or suggestion from me. He replied, "Oh, I am so sorry you did not remind me! You know how busy I am; I wish I had thought of it a little sooner, for only this afternoon I sent all the money I had to the bank, otherwise I would pay you at once." It is impossible to describe the revulsion of feeling caused by this unexpected statement. I knew not what to do. Fortunately for me my pan boiled up, and I had a good reason for rushing with it from the room. Glad indeed I was to get away, and keep out of sight until after the doctor had returned to his house, and most thankful that he had not perceived my emotion.

As soon as he was gone I had to seek my little sanctum, and pour out my heart before the Lord for some time, before calmness—and more than calmness—thankfulness, and joy were restored to me. I felt that God had His own way, and was not going to fail me. I had sought to know His will early in the day, and as far as I could judge had received guidance to wait patiently; and now God was going to work for me in some other way.

That evening was spent, as my Saturday evenings usually were, in reading the Word and preparing the subjects on which I expected to speak in the various lodging-houses on the morrow. I waited, perhaps, a little longer than usual. At last, about ten o'clock, there being no interruption of any kind, I put on my overcoat, and was preparing to leave for home, rather thankful to know that by that time I should have to let myself in with the latch-key, as my landlady retired early to rest. There was certainly no help for that night; but perhaps God would interpose for me by Monday, and I might be able to pay my landlady early in the week the money I would have given her before, had it been possible.

Just as I was preparing to turn down the gas, I heard the doctor's step in the garden which lay between the dwelling-house and surgery. He was laughing to himself very heartily, as though greatly amused by something. Entering the surgery, he asked for the ledger, and told me that, strange to say, one of his richest patients had just come to pay his doctor's bill—was it not an odd thing to do? It never struck me that it might have any bearing on my own particular case, or I might have felt embarrassed; but looking at it simply from the position of an uninterested spectator, I also was highly amused that a man who was rolling in wealth should come after ten o'clock at night to pay a doctor's bill, which he could any day have met by a cheque with the greatest ease. It appeared that somehow or other he could not rest with this on his mind, and had been constrained to come at that unusual hour to discharge his liability.

The account was duly receipted in the ledger, and the doctor was about to leave, when suddenly he turned, and handing me some of the bank notes just received, said, to my surprise and thankfulness, "By the way, Taylor, you might as well take these notes; I have not any change, but can give you the balance next week." Again I was left—my feelings undiscovered—to go back to my own little closet and praise the Lord with a joyful heart that after all I might go to China.

To me this incident was not a trivial one; and to recall it sometimes, in circumstances of great difficulty, in China or elsewhere, has proved no small comfort and strength.

By-and-by the time drew near when it was thought desirable that I should leave Hull to attend the medical course of the London Hospital. A little while spent there, and then I had every reason to believe that my life-work in China would commence. But much as I had rejoiced at the willingness of God to hear and answer prayer and to help His half-trusting, half-timid child, I felt that I could not go to China without having still further developed and tested my power to rest upon His faithfulness; and a marked opportunity for doing so was providentially afforded me.

My dear father had offered to bear all the expense of my stay in London. I knew, however, that, owing to recent losses, it would mean a considerable sacrifice for him to undertake this just when it seemed necessary for me to go forward. I had recently become acquainted with the Committee of the Chinese Evangelisation Society, in connection with which I ultimately left for China, and especially with its secretary, my esteemed and much-loved friend Mr. George Pearse, then of the Stock Exchange, but now[xlix] and for many years himself a missionary. Not knowing of my father's proposition, the Committee also kindly offered to bear my expenses while in London. When these proposals were first made to me, I was not quite clear as to what I ought to do, and in writing to my father and the secretaries, told them that I would take a few days to pray about the matter before deciding any course of action. I mentioned to my father that I had had this offer from the Society, and told the secretaries also of his proffered aid.

Subsequently, while waiting upon God in prayer for guidance, it became clear to my mind that I could without difficulty decline both offers. The secretaries of the Society would not know that I had cast myself wholly on God for supplies, and my father would conclude that I had accepted the other offer. I therefore wrote declining both propositions, and felt that without any one having either care or anxiety on my account I was simply in the hands of God, and that He, who knew my heart, if He wished to encourage me to go to China, would bless my effort to depend upon Him alone at home.

CHAPTER 5: LIFE IN LONDON

I MUST not now attempt to detail the ways in which the Lord was pleased—often to my surprise, as well as to my delight—to help me from time to time. I soon found that it was not possible to live quite as economically in London as in Hull. To lessen expenses I shared a room with a cousin, four miles from the hospital, providing myself with board; and after various experiments I found that the most economical way was to live almost exclusively on brown bread and water. Thus I was able to make the means that God gave me last as long as possible. Some of my expenses I could not diminish, but my board was largely within my own control. A large two-penny loaf of brown bread, purchased daily on my long walk from the hospital, furnished me with supper and breakfast; and on that diet, with a few apples for lunch, I managed to walk eight or nine miles a day, besides being a good deal on foot while attending the practice of the hospital and the medical school.

One incident that occurred just about this time I must refer to. The husband of my former landlady in Hull was chief officer of a ship that sailed from London, and by receiving his half-pay monthly and remitting it to her I was able to save her the cost of a commission. This I had been doing for several months, when she wrote requesting that I would obtain the next payment as early as possible, as her rent was almost due, and she depended upon that sum to meet it. The request came at an inconvenient time. I was working hard for an examination in the hope of obtaining a scholarship which would be of service to me, and felt that I could ill afford the time to go during the busiest part of the day to the city and procure the money. I had, however, sufficient of my own in hand to enable me to send the required sum. I made the remittance therefore, purposing, as soon as the examination was over, to go and draw the regular allowance with which to refund myself.

Before the time of examination the medical school was closed for a day, on account of the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, and I had an opportunity of going at once to the office, which was situated in a street on Cheapside, and applying for the due amount. To my surprise and dismay the cleric told me that he could not pay it, as the officer in question had run away from his ship and gone to the gold diggings. "Well," I remarked, "that is very inconvenient for me, as I have already advanced the money, and I know his wife will have no means of repaying it." The clerk said he was sorry, but could of course only act according to orders; so there was no help for me in that direction. A little more time and thought, however, brought the comforting conclusion to my mind, that as I was depending on the Lord for everything, and His means were not limited, it was a small matter to be brought a little sooner or later into the position of needing fresh supplies from Him; and so the joy and the peace were not long interfered with.

Very soon after this, possibly the same evening, while sewing together some sheets of paper on which to take notes of the lectures, I accidentally pricked the first finger of my right hand, and in a few moments forgot all about it. The next day at the hospital I continued dissecting as before. The body was that of a person who had died of fever, and was more than usually disagreeable and dangerous. I need scarcely say that those of us who were at work upon it dissected with special care, knowing that the slightest scratch might cost us our lives. Before the morning was far advanced I began to feel very weary, and while going through the surgical wards at noon was obliged to run out, being suddenly very sick—a most unusual circumstance with me, as I took but little food and nothing that could disagree with me. After feeling faint for some time, a draught of cold water revived me, and I was able to rejoin the students. I became more and more unwell, however, and ere the afternoon lecture on surgery was over found it impossible to hold the pencil and continue taking notes. By the time the next lecture was through, my whole arm and right side were full of severe pain, and I was both looking and feeling very ill.

Finding that I could not resume work, I went into the dissecting-room to bind up the portion I was engaged upon and put away my apparatus, and said to the demonstrator, who was a very skilful surgeon, "I cannot think what has come over me," describing the symptoms. "Why," said he, "what has happened is clear enough: you must have cut yourself in dissecting, and you know that this is a case of malignant fever." I assured him that I had been most careful, and was quite certain that I had no cut or scratch. "Well," he replied, "you certainly must have had one;" and he very closely scrutinised my hand to find it, but in vain. All at once it occurred to me that I had pricked my finger the night before, and I asked him if it were possible that a prick from a needle, at that time, could have been still unclosed. His opinion was that this was probably the cause of the trouble, and he advised me to get a hansom, drive home as fast as I could, and arrange my affairs forthwith. "For," he said, "you are a dead man."

My first thought was one of sorrow that I could not go to China; but very soon came the feeling, "Unless I am greatly mistaken, I have work to do in China, and shall not die." I was glad, however, to take the opportunity of speaking to my medical friend, who was a confirmed sceptic as to things spiritual, of the joy that the prospect of perhaps soon being with my Master gave me; telling him at the same time that I did not think I should die, as, unless I were much mistaken, I had work to do in China; and if so, however severe the struggle, I must be brought through. "That is all very well," he answered, "but you get a hansom and drive home as fast as you can. You have no time to lose, for you will soon be incapable of winding up your affairs."

I smiled a little at the idea of my driving home in a hansom, for by this time my means were too exhausted to allow of such a proceeding, and I set out to walk the distance if possible. Before long, however, my strength gave way, and I felt it was no use to attempt to reach home by walking. Availing myself of an omnibus from Whitechapel Church to Farringdon Street, and another from Farringdon Street onwards, I reached, in great suffering, the neighbourhood of Soho Square, behind which I lived. On going into the house I got some hot water from the servant, and charging her very earnestly—literally as a dying man—to accept eternal life as the gift of God through Jesus Christ, I bathed my head and lanced the finger, hoping to let out some of the poisoned blood. The pain was very severe; I fainted away, and was for some time unconscious, so long that when I came to myself I found that I had been carried to bed.

An uncle of mine who lived near at hand had come in, and sent for his own medical man, an assistant surgeon at the Westminster Hospital. I assured my uncle that medical help would be of no service to me, and that I did not wish to go to the expense involved. He, however, quieted me on this score, saying that he had sent for his own doctor, and that the bill would be charged to himself. When the surgeon came and learned all the particulars, he said, "Well, if you have been living moderately, you may pull through; but if you have been going in for beer and that sort of thing, there is no manner of chance for you." I thought that if sober living was to do anything, few could have a better chance, as little but bread and water had been my diet for a good while past. I told him I had lived abstemiously, and found that it helped me in study. "But now," he said, "you must keep up your strength, for it will be a pretty hard struggle." And he ordered me a bottle of port wine every day, and as many chops as I could consume. Again I smiled inwardly, having no means for the purchase of such luxuries. This difficulty, however, was also met by my kind uncle, who sent me at once all that was needed.

I was much concerned, notwithstanding the agony I suffered, that my dear parents should not be made acquainted with my state. Thought and prayer had satisfied me that I was not going to die, but that there was indeed a work for me to do in China. If my dear parents should come up and find me in that condition, I must lose the opportunity of seeing how God was going to work for me, now that my money had almost come to an end. So, after prayer for guidance, I obtained a promise from my uncle and cousin not to write to my parents, but to leave me to communicate with them myself. I felt it was a very distinct answer to prayer when they gave me this promise, and I took care to defer all communication with them myself until the crisis was past and the worst of the attack over. At home they knew that I was working hard for an examination, and did not wonder at my silence.

Days and nights of suffering passed slowly by; but at length, after several weeks, I was sufficiently restored to leave my room; and then I learned that two men, though not from the London Hospital, who had had dissection wounds at the same time as myself, had both succumbed, while I was spared in answer to prayer to work for God in China.

Water gate and Custom house, Soo-chow

CHAPTER 6: STRENGTHENED BY FAITH

ONE day the doctor coming in found me on the sofa, and was surprised to learn that with assistance I had walked downstairs. "Now," he said, "the best thing you can go is to get off to the country as soon as you feel equal to the journey. You must rusticate until you have recovered a fair amount of health and strength, for if you begin your work too soon the consequences may still be serious." When he had left, as I lay very exhausted on the sofa, I just told the Lord all about it, and that I was refraining from making my circumstances known to those who would delight to meet my need, in order that my faith might be strengthened by receiving help from Himself in answer to prayer alone. What was I to do? And I waited for His answer.

It seemed to me as if He were directing my mind to the conclusion to go again to the shipping office, and inquire about the wages I had been unable to draw. I reminded the Lord that I could not afford to take a conveyance, and that it did not seem at all likely that I should succeed in getting the money, and asked whether this impulse was not a mere clutching at a straw, some mental process of my own, rather than His guidance and teaching. After prayer, however, and renewed waiting upon God, I was confirmed in my belief that He Himself was teaching me to go to the office.

The next question was, "How am I to go?" I had had to seek help in coming downstairs, and the place was at least two miles away. The assurance was brought vividly home to me that whatever I asked of God in the name of Christ would be done, that the Father might be glorified in the Son; that what I had to do was to seek strength for the long walk, to receive it by faith, and to set out upon it. Unhesitatingly I told the Lord that I was quite willing to take the walk if He would give me the strength. I asked in the name of Christ that the strength might be immediately given; and sending the servant up to my room for my hat and stick, I set out, not to attempt to walk, but to walk to Cheapside.

Although undoubtedly strengthened by faith, I never took so much interest in shop windows as I did upon that journey. At every second or third step I was glad to lean a little against the plate glass, and take time to examine the contents of the windows before passing on. It needed a special effort of faith when I got to the bottom of Farringdon Street to attempt the toilsome ascent of Snow Hill: there was no Holborn Viaduct in those days, and it had to be done. God did wonderfully help me, and in due time I reached Cheapside, turned into the by-street in which the office was found, and sat down much exhausted on the steps leading to the first floor, which was my destination. I felt my position to be a little peculiar—sitting there on the steps, so evidently spent—and the gentlemen who rushed up and downstairs looked at me with an inquiring gaze. After a little rest, however, and a further season of prayer, I succeeded in climbing the staircase, and to my comfort found in the office the clerk with whom I had hitherto dealt in the matter. Seeing me looking pale and exhausted, he kindly inquired as to my health, and I told him that I had had a serious illness, and was ordered to the country, but thought it well to call first, and make further inquiry, lest there should have been any mistake about the mate having run off to the gold diggings. "Oh," he said, "I am so glad you have come, for it turns out that it was an able seaman of the same name that ran away. The mate is still on board; the ship has just reached Gravesend, and will be up very soon. I shall be glad to give you the half-pay up to date, for doubtless it will reach his wife more safely through you. We all know what temptations beset the men when they arrive at home after a voyage."

Before, however, giving me the sum of money, he insisted upon my coming inside and sharing his lunch. I felt it was the Lord indeed who was providing for me, and accepted his offer with thankfulness. When I was refreshed and rested, he gave me a sheet of paper to write a few lines to the wife, telling her of the circumstances. On my way back I procured in Cheapside a money order for the balance due to her, and posted it; and returning home again, felt myself now quite justified in taking an omnibus as far as it would serve me.

Very much better the next morning, after seeing to some little matters that I had to settle, I made my way to the surgery of the doctor who had attended me, feeling that, although my uncle was prepared to pay the bill, it was right for me, now that I had some money in hand, to ask for the account myself. The kind surgeon refused to allow me, as a medical student, to pay anything for his attendance: but he had supplied me with quinine, which he allowed me to pay for to the extent of eight shillings. When that was settled, I saw that the sum left was just sufficient to take me home; and to my mind the whole thing seemed a wonderful interposition of God on my behalf.

I knew that the surgeon was sceptical, and told him that I should very much like to speak to him freely, if I might do so without offence; that I felt that under God I owed my life to his kind care, and wished very earnestly that he himself might become a partaker of the same precious faith that I possessed. So I told him my reason for being in London, and about my circumstances, and why I had declined the help of both my father and the officers of the Society in connection with which it was probable that I should go to China. I told him of the recent providential dealings of God with me, and how apparently hopeless my position had been the day before, when he had ordered me to go to the country, unless I would reveal my need, which I had determined not to do. I described to him the mental exercises I had gone through; but when I added that I had actually got up from the sofa and walked to Cheapside, he looked at me incredulously, and "Impossible! Why, I left you lying there more like a ghost than a man." And I had to assure him again and again that, strengthened by faith, the walk had really been taken. I told him also what money was left to me, and what payments there had been to make, and showed him that just sufficient remained to take me home to Yorkshire, providing for needful refreshment by the way and the omnibus journey at the end.

My kind friend was completely broken down, and said with tears in his eyes, "I would give all the world for a faith like yours." I, on the other hand, had the joy of telling him that it was to be obtained without money and without price. We never met again. When I came back to town, restored to health and strength, I found that he had had a stroke, and left for the country; and I subsequently learned that he never rallied. I was able to gain no information as to his state of mind when taken away; but I have always felt very thankful that I had the opportunity, and embraced it, of bearing that testimony for God. I cannot but entertain the hope that the Master Himself was speaking to him through His dealings with me, and that I shall meet him again in the Better Land. It would be no small joy to be welcomed by him, when my own service is over.

The next day found me in my dear parents' home. My joy in the Lord's help and deliverance was so great that I was unable to keep it to myself, and before my return to London my dear mother knew the secret of my life for some time past. I need scarcely say that when I went up again to town I was not allowed to live—as, indeed, I was not fit to live—on the same economical lines as before my illness. I needed more now, and the Lord did provide.

CHAPTER 7: MIGHTY TO SAVE

"Compassionate heart, benevolent methods"

RETURNING to London when sufficiently recovered to resume my studies, the busy life of hospital and lecture-hall was resumed; often relieved by happy Sundays of fellowship with Christian friends, especially in London or Tottenham. Opportunities for service are to be found in every sphere, and mine was no exception. I shall only mention one case now that gave me great encouragement in seeking conversion even when it seemed apparently hopeless.

God had given me the joy of winning souls before, but not in surroundings of such special difficulty. With God all things are possible, and no conversion ever takes place save by the almighty power of the Holy Ghost. The great need, therefore, of every Christian worker is to know God. Indeed, this is the purpose for which He has given us eternal life, as our Saviour Himself says, in the oft misquoted verse, John xvii. 3: "This is [the object of] life eternal, [not to know but] that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." I was now to prove the willingness of God to answer prayer for spiritual blessing under most unpromising circumstances, and thus to gain an increased acquaintance with the prayer-answering God as One "mighty to save."

A short time before leaving for China, it became my duty daily to dress the foot of a patient suffering from senile gangrene. The disease commenced, as usual, insidiously, and the patient had little idea that he was a doomed man, and probably had not long to live. I was not the first to attend to him, but when the case was transferred to me, I naturally became very anxious about his soul. The family with whom he lived were Christians, and from them I learned that he was an avowed atheist, and very antagonistic to anything religious. They had, without asking his consent, invited a Scripture reader to visit him, but in great passion he had ordered him from the room. The vicar of the district had also called, hoping to help him; but he had spit in his face, and refused to allow him to speak to him. His passionate temper was described to me as very violent, and altogether the case seemed to be as hopeless as could well be imagined.

Upon first commencing to attend him I prayed much about it; but for two or three days said nothing to him of a religious nature. By special care in dressing his diseased limb I was able considerably to lessen his sufferings, and he soon began to manifest grateful appreciation of my services. One day, with a trembling heart, I took advantage of his warm acknowledgments to tell him what was the spring of my action, and to speak of his own solemn position and need of God's mercy through Christ. It was evidently only by a powerful effort of self-restraint that he kept his lips closed. He turned over in bed with his back to me, and uttered no word.

I could not get the poor man out of my mind, and very often through each day I pleaded with God, by His Spirit, to save him ere He took him hence. After dressing the wound and relieving his pain, I never failed to say a few words to him, which I hoped the Lord would bless. He always turned his back to me, looking annoyed, but never spoke a word in reply.

After continuing this for some time, my heart sank. It seemed to me that I was not only doing no good, but perhaps really hardening him and increasing his guilt. One day, after dressing his limb and washing my hands, instead of returning to the bedside to speak to him, I went to the door, and stood hesitating for a few moments with the thought in my mind, "Ephraim is joined to his idols; let him alone." I looked at the man and saw his surprise, as it was the first time since speaking to him that I had attempted to leave without going up to his bedside to say a few words for my Master. I could bear it no longer. Bursting into tears, I crossed the room and said, "My friend, whether you will hear or whether you will forbear, I must deliver my soul," and went on to speak very earnestly to him, telling him with many tears how much I wished that he would let me pray with him. To my unspeakable joy he did not turn away, but replied, "If it will be a relief to you, do." I need scarcely say that I fell on my knees and poured out my whole soul to God on his behalf. I believe the Lord then and there wrought a change in his soul.

He was never afterwards unwilling to be spoken to and prayed with, and within a few days he definitely accepted Christ as his Saviour. Oh the joy it was to me to see that dear man rejoicing in hope of the glory of God! He told me that for forty years he had never darkened the door of church or chapel, and that then—forty years ago—he had only entered a place of worship to be married, and could not be persuaded to go inside when his wife was buried. Now, thank God, his sin-stained soul, I had every reason to believe, was washed, was sanctified, was justified, in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. Oftentimes, when in my early work in China circumstances rendered me almost hopeless of success, I have thought of this man's conversion, and have been encouraged to persevere in speaking the Word, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear.

The now happy sufferer lived for some time after this change, and was never tired of bearing testimony to the grace of God. Though his condition was most distressing, the alteration in his character and behaviour made the previously painful duty of attending him one of real pleasure. I have often thought since, in connection with this case and the work of God generally, of the words, "He that goeth forth weeping, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." Perhaps if there were more of that intense distress for souls that leads to tears, we should more frequently see the results we desire. Sometimes it may be that while we are complaining of the hardness of the hearts of those we are seeking to benefit, the hardness of our own hearts, and our own feeble apprehension of the solemn reality of eternal things, may be the true cause of our want of success.

CHAPTER 8: VOYAGE TO CHINA

The new girls school at Chefoo

SOON after this the time so long looked forward to arrived—the time that I was to leave England for China. After being set apart with many prayers for the ministry of God's Word among the heathen Chinese I left London for Liverpool; and on the 19th of September 1853 a little service was held in the stern cabin of the Dumfries, which had been secured for me by the Committee of the Chinese Evangelisation Society, under whose auspices I was going to China.

My beloved, now sainted, mother had come to see me off from Liverpool. Never shall I forget that day, nor how she went with me into the little cabin that was to be my home for nearly six long months. With a mother's loving hand she smoothed the little bed. She sat by my side, and joined me in the last hymn that we should sing together before the long parting. We knelt down, and she prayed—the last mother's prayer I was to hear before starting for China. Then notice was given that we must separate, and we had to say good-bye, never expecting to meet on earth again.

For my sake she restrained her feelings as much as possible. We parted; and she went on shore, giving me her blessing; I stood alone on deck, and she followed the ship as we moved towards the dock gates. As we passed through the gates, and the separation really commenced, I shall never forget the cry of anguish wrung from that mother's heart. It went through me like a knife. I never knew so fully, until then, what God so loved the world meant. And I am quite sure that my precious mother learned more of the love of God to the perishing in that hour than in all her life before.

Oh, how it must grieve the heart of God when He sees His children indifferent to the needs of that wide world for which His beloved, His only begotten Son died!

Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear;

Forget also thine own people, and thy father's house;

So shall the King desire thy beauty:

For He is thy Lord; and worship thou Him.

Praise God, the number is increasing who are finding out the exceeding joys, the wondrous revelations of His mercies, vouchsafed to those who follow Him, and emptying themselves, leave all in obedience to His great commission.

It was on 19th September 1853 that the Dumfries sailed for China; and not until 1st March, in the spring of the following year, did I arrive in Shanghai.

Our voyage had a rough beginning, but many had promised to remember us in constant prayer. No small comfort was this; for we had scarcely left the Mersey when a violent equinoctial gale caught us, and for twelve days we were beating backwards and forwards in the Irish Channel, unable to get out to sea. The gale steadily increased, and after almost a week we lay to for a time; but drifting on a lee coast, we were compelled again to make sail, and endeavoured to beat on to windward. The utmost efforts of the captain and crew, however, were unavailing; and Sunday night, 25th September, found us drifting into Carnarvon Bay, each tack becoming shorter, until at last we were within a stone's-throw of the rocks. About this time, as the ship, which had refused to stay, was put round in the other direction, the Christian captain said to me, "We cannot live half an hour now: what of your call to labour for the Lord in China?" I had previously passed through a time of much conflict, but that was over, and it was a great joy to feel and to tell him that I would not for any consideration be in any other position; that I strongly expected to reach China; but that, if otherwise, at any rate the Master would say it was well that I was found seeking to obey His command.

Within a few minutes after wearing ship the captain walked, up to the compass, and said to me, "The wind has freed two points; we shall be able to beat out of the bay." And so we did. The bowsprit was sprung and the vessel seriously strained; but in a few days we got out to sea, and the necessary repairs were so thoroughly effected on board that our journey to China was in due time satisfactorily accomplished.

One thing was a great trouble to me that night. I was a very young believer, and had not sufficient faith in God to see Him in and through the use of means. I had felt it a duty to comply with the earnest wish of my beloved and honoured mother, and for her sake to procure a swimming-belt. But in my own soul I felt as if I could not simply trust in God while I had this swimming-belt; and my heart had no rest until on that night, after all hope of being saved was gone, I had given it away. Then I had perfect peace; and, strange to say, put several light things together, likely to float at the time we struck, without any thought of inconsistency or scruple. Ever since, I have seen clearly the mistake I made—a mistake that is very common in these days, when erroneous teaching on faith-healing does much harm, misleading some as to the purposes of God, shaking the faith of others, and distressing the minds of many. The use of means ought not to lessen our faith in God; and our faith in God ought not to hinder our using whatever means He has given us for the accomplishment of His own purposes.

For years after this I always took a swimming-belt with me, and never had any trouble about it; for after the storm was over, the question was settled for me, through the prayerful study of the Scriptures. God gave me then to see my mistake, probably to deliver me from a great deal of trouble on similar questions now so constantly raised. When in medical or surgical charge of any case, I have never thought of neglecting to ask God's guidance and blessing in the use of appropriate means, nor yet of omitting to give Him thanks for answered prayer and restored health. But to me it would appear as presumptuous and wrong to neglect the use of those measures which He Himself has put within our reach, as to neglect to take daily food, and suppose that life and health might be maintained by prayer alone.

The voyage was a very tedious one. We lost a good deal of time on the equator from calms; and when we finally reached the Eastern Archipelago, were again detained from the same cause. Usually a breeze would spring up soon after sunset, and last until about dawn. The utmost use was made of it, but during the day we lay still with flapping sails, often drifting back and losing a good deal of the advantage we had gained during the night.

This happened notably on one occasion, when we were in dangerous proximity to the north of New Guinea. Saturday night had brought us to a point some thirty miles off the land; but during the Sunday morning service, which was held on deck, I could not fail to notice that the captain looked troubled, and frequently went over to the side of the ship. When the service was ended, I learnt from him the cause—a four-knot current was carrying us rapidly towards some sunken reefs, and we were already so near that it seemed improbable that we should get through the afternoon in safety. After dinner the long-boat was put out, and all hands endeavoured, without success, to turn the ship's head from the shore. As we drifted nearer we could plainly see the natives rushing about the sands and lighting fires every here and there. The captain's horn-book informed him that these people were cannibals, so that our position was not a little alarming.

After standing together on the deck for some time in silence, the captain said to me, "Well, we have done everything that can be done; we can only await the result." A thought occurred to me, and I replied, "No, there is one thing we have not done yet." "What is it?" he queried. "Four of us on board are Christians," I answered (the Swedish carpenter and our coloured steward, with the captain and myself); "let us each retire to his own cabin, and in agreed prayer ask the Lord to give us immediately a breeze. He can as easily send it now as at sunset."

The captain complied with this proposal. I went and spoke to the other two men, and after prayer with the carpenter we all four retired to wait upon God. I had a good but very brief season in prayer, and then felt so satisfied that our request was granted that I could not continue asking, and very soon went up again on deck. The first officer, a godless man, was in charge. I went over and asked him to let down the clews or corners of the mainsail, which had been drawn up in order to lessen the useless flapping of the sail against the rigging. He answered, "What would be the good of that?" I told him we had been asking a wind from God, that it was coming immediately, and we were so near the reef by this time that there was not a minute to lose. With a look of incredulity and contempt, he said with an oath that he would rather see a wind than hear of it! But while he was speaking I watched his eye, and followed it up to the royal (the topmost sail), and there, sure enough, the corner of the sail was beginning to tremble in the coming breeze. "Don't you see the wind is coming? Look at the royal!" I exclaimed. "No, it is only a cat's-paw," he rejoined (a mere puff of wind). "Cat's-paw or not," I cried, "pray let down the mainsail, and let us have the benefit!"

This he was not slow to do. In another minute the heavy tread of the men on the deck brought up the captain from his cabin to see what was the matter; and he saw that the breeze had indeed come. In a few minutes we were ploughing our way at six or seven knots an hour through the water, and the multitude of naked savages whom we had seen on the beach had no wreckage that night. We were soon out of danger; and though the wind was sometimes unsteady, we did not altogether lose it until after passing the Pelew Islands.

Thus God encouraged me, ere landing on China's shores, to bring every variety of need to Him in prayer, and to expect that He would honour the Name of the Lord Jesus, and give the help which each emergency required.

CHAPTER 9: EARLY MISSIONARY EXPERIENCES

ON landing in Shanghai on 1st March 1854, I found myself surrounded with difficulties that were wholly unexpected. A band of rebels, known as the "Red Turbans," had taken possession of the native city, against which was encamped an Imperial army of from forty to fifty thousand men, who were a much greater source of discomfort and danger to the little European community than were the rebels themselves. Upon landing, I was told that to live outside the Settlement was impossible, while within the foreign concession apartments were scarcely obtainable at any price. The dollar, now worth about three shillings, had risen to a value of eight-and-ninepence, and the prospect for one with only a small income of English money was dark indeed. However, I had three letters of introduction, and counted on counsel and help, especially from one of those to whom I had been commended, whose friends I well knew and highly valued. Of course I sought him out at once, but only to learn that he had been buried a month or two before, having died from fever during the time of my voyage.

Saddened by these tidings, I inquired for a missionary to whom another of my letters of introduction was addressed; but a further disappointment awaited me—he had left for America. The third letter remained; but as it had been given by a comparative stranger, I had expected less from it than from the other two. It proved, however, to be God's channel of help. The Rev. Dr. Medhurst, of the London Mission, to whom it was addressed, introduced me to Dr. Lockhart, who kindly allowed me to live with him for six months. Dr. Medhurst procured my first Chinese teacher; and he, Dr. Edkins, and the late Mr. Alexander Wylie gave me considerable help with the language.

Those were indeed troublous times, and times of danger. Coming out of the city one day with Mr. Wylie, he entered into conversation with two coolies, while we waited a little while at the East Gate for a companion who was behind us. Before our companion came up an attack upon the city from the batteries on the opposite side of the river commenced, which caused us to hurry away to a place of less danger, the whiz of the balls being unpleasantly near. The coolies, unfortunately, stayed too long, and were wounded. On reaching the Settlement we stopped a few minutes to make a purchase, and then proceeded at once to the London Mission compound, where, at the door of the hospital, we found the two poor coolies with whom Mr. Wylie had conversed, their four ankles terribly shattered by a cannon ball. The poor fellows declined amputation, and both died. We felt how narrow had been our escape.

At another time, early in the morning, I had joined one of the missionaries on his verandah to watch the battle proceeding, at a distance of perhaps three-quarters of a mile, when suddenly a spent ball passed between us and buried itself in the verandah wall. Another day my friend Mr. Wylie left a book on the table after luncheon, and returning for it about five minutes later, found the arm of the chair on which he had been sitting shot clean away. But in the midst of these and many other dangers God protected us.

After six months' stay with Dr. Lockhart, I rented a native house outside the Settlement, and commenced a little missionary work amongst my Chinese neighbours, which for a few months continued practicable. When the French joined the Imperialists in attacking the city, the position of my house became so dangerous that during the last few weeks, in consequence of nightly recurring skirmishes, I gave up attempting to sleep except in the daytime. One night a fire appeared very near, and I climbed up to a little observatory I had arranged on the roof of the house, to see whether it was necessary to attempt escape. While there a ball struck the ridge of the roof on the opposite side of the quadrangle, showering pieces of broken tile all around me, while the ball itself rolled down into the court below. It weighed four or five pounds; and had it come a few inches higher, would probably have spent its force on me instead of on the building. My dear mother kept the ball for many years. Shortly after this I had to abandon the house and return to the Foreign Settlement—a step that was taken none too soon, for before the last of my belongings were removed, the house was burnt to the ground.

Of the trials of this early period it is scarcely possible to convey any adequate idea. To one of a sensitive nature, the horrors, atrocities, and misery connected with war were a terrible ordeal. The embarrassment also of the times was considerable. With an income of only eighty pounds a year, I was compelled, upon moving into the Settlement, to give one hundred and twenty for rent, and sublet half the house; and though the Committee of the Chinese Evangelisation Society increased my income when, after the arrival of Dr. Parker, they learned more of our circumstances, many painful experiences had necessarily been passed through. Few can realise how distressing to so young and untried a worker these difficulties seemed, or the intense loneliness of the position of a pioneer who could not even hint at many of his circumstances, as to do so would have been a tacit appeal for help.

The great enemy is always ready with his oft-repeated suggestion, "All these things are against me." But oh, how false the word! The cold, and even the hunger, the watchings and sleeplessness of nights of danger, and the feeling at times of utter isolation and helplessness, were well and wisely chosen, and tenderly and lovingly meted out. What circumstances could have rendered the Word of God more sweet, the presence of God more real, the help of God more precious? They were times, indeed, of emptying and humbling, but were experiences that made not ashamed, and that strengthened purpose to go forward as God might direct, with His proved promise, "I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee." One can see, even now, that as for God, His way is perfect, and yet can rejoice that the missionary path of to-day is comparatively a smooth and an easy one.

Journeying inland was contrary to treaty arrangements, and attended with much difficulty, especially for some time after the battle of Muddy Flat, in which an Anglo-American contingent of about three hundred marines and seamen, with a volunteer corps of less than a hundred residents, attacked the Imperial camp, and drove away from thirty to fifty thousand Chinese soldiers, the range of our shot and shell making the native artillery useless. Still, in the autumn of 1854 a journey of perhaps a week's duration was safely accomplished with Dr. Edkins, who of course did the speaking and preaching, while I was able to help in the distribution of books.

CHAPTER 10: FIRST EVANGELISTIC EFFORTS

A JOURNEY taken in the spring of 1855 with the Rev. J. S. Burden of the Church Missionary Society (now the Bishop of Victoria, Hong-kong) was attended with some serious dangers.

In the great mouth of the river Yang-tse, distant some thirty miles to the north of Shanghai, lies the group of islands of which Ts'ung-ming and Hai-men are the largest and most important; and farther up the river, where the estuary narrows away from the sea, is situated the influential city of T'ung-chau, close to Lang-shan, or the Wolf Mountains, famous as a resort for pilgrim devotees. We spent some time in evangelising on those islands, and then proceeded to Lang-shan, where we preached and gave books to thousands of the devotees who were attending an idolatrous festival. From thence we went on to T'ung-chau, and of our painful experiences there the following journal will tell:—

Thursday, April 26th, 1855.

After breakfast we commended ourselves to the care of our Heavenly Father, and sought His Blessing before proceeding to this great city. The day was dull and wet. We felt persuaded that Satan would not allow us to assail his kingdom, as we were attempting to do, without raising serious opposition; but we were also fully assured that it was the will of God that we should preach Christ in this city, and distribute the Word of Truth among its people. We were sorry that we had but few books left for such an important place: the result, however, proved that this also was providential.

Our native teachers did their best to persuade us not to go into the city; but we determined that, by God's help, nothing should hinder us. We directed them, however, to remain in one of the boats; and if we did not return, to learn whatever they could respecting our fate, and make all possible haste to Shanghai with the information. We also arranged that the other boat should wait for us, even if we could not get back that night, so that we might not be detained for want of a boat in case of returning later. We then put our books into two bags, and with a servant who always accompanied us on these occasions, set off for the city, distant about seven miles. Walking was out of the question, from the state of the roads, so we availed ourselves of wheel-barrows, the only conveyance to be had in these parts. A wheel-barrow is cheaper than a sedan, only requiring one coolie; but is by no means an agreeable conveyance on rough, dirty roads.

We had not gone far before the servant requested permission to go back, as he was thoroughly frightened by reports concerning the native soldiery. Of course we at once consented, not wishing to involve another in trouble, and determined to carry the books ourselves, and look for physical as well as spiritual strength to Him who had promised to supply all our need.

At this point a respectable man came up, and earnestly warned us against proceeding, saying that if we did we should find to our sorrow what the T'ung-chau militia were like. We thanked him for his kindly counsel, but could not act upon it, as our hearts were fixed, whether it were to bonds, imprisonment, and death, or whether to distribute our Scriptures and tracts in safety, and return unhurt, we knew not; but we were determined, by the grace of God, not to leave T'ung-chau any longer without the Gospel, nor its teeming thousands to die in uncared-for ignorance of the Way of life.

After this my wheel-barrow man would proceed no farther, and I had to seek another, who was fortunately not difficult to find. As we went on, the ride in the mud and rain was anything but agreeable, and we could not help feeling the danger of our position, although wavering not for a moment. At intervals we encouraged one another with promises from the Scripture and verses of hymns. That verse—

"The perils of the sea, the perils of the land,

Should not dishearten thee: thy Lord is nigh at hand.

But should thy courage fail, when tried and sore oppressed,

His promise shall avail, and set thy soul at rest."

seemed particularly appropriate to our circumstances, and was very comforting to me.

On our way we passed through one small town of about a thousand inhabitants; and here, in the Mandarin dialect, I preached Jesus to a good number of people. Never was I so happy in speaking of the love of God and the atonement of Jesus Christ. My own soul was richly blessed, and filled with joy and peace; and I was able to speak with unusual freedom and ease. And how rejoiced I was when, afterwards, I heard one of our hearers repeating to the newcomers, in his own local dialect, the truths upon which I had been dwelling! Oh, how thankful I felt to hear a Chinaman, of his own accord, telling his fellow-countrymen that God loved them; that they were sinners, but that Jesus died instead of them, and paid the penalty of their guilt. That one moment repaid me for all the trials we had passed through; and I felt that if the Lord should grant His Holy Spirit to change the heart of that man, we had not come in vain.

We distributed a few Testaments and tracts, for the people were able to read, and we could not leave them without the Gospel. It was well that we did so, for when we reached T'ung-chau we found we had quite as many left as we had strength to carry.

Nearing the end of our journey, as we approached the western suburb of the city, the prayer of the early Christians, when persecution was commencing, came to my mind: "And now, Lord, behold their threatenings, and grant unto Thy servants that with all boldness they may speak Thy Word." In this petition we most heartily united. Before entering the suburb we laid our plans, so as to act in concert, and told our wheel-barrow men where to await us, that they might not be involved in any trouble on our account. Then looking up to our Heavenly Father, we committed ourselves to His keeping, took our books, and set on for the city.

For some distance we walked along the principal street of the suburb leading to the West Gate unmolested, and were amused at the unusual title of Heh-kwei-tsi (black devils) which was applied to us. We wondered about it at the time, but afterwards found that it was our clothes, and not our skin, that gave rise to it. As we passed several of the soldiers, I remarked to Mr. Burdon that these were the men we had heard so much about, and that they seemed willing to receive us quietly enough. Long before we reached the gate, however, a tall powerful man, made tenfold fiercer by partial intoxication, let us know that all the militia were not so peaceably inclined, by seizing Mr. Burdon by the shoulders. My companion endeavoured to shake him off. I turned to see what was the matter, and at once we were surrounded by a dozen or more brutal men, who hurried us on to the city at a fearful pace.

My bag now began to feel very heavy, and I could not change hands to relieve myself. I was soon in a profuse perspiration, and was scarcely able to keep pace with them. We demanded to be taken before the chief magistrate, but were told that they knew where to take us, and what to do with such persons as we were, with the most insulting epithets. The man who first seized Mr. Burdon soon afterwards left him for me, and became my principal tormentor; for I was neither so tall nor so strong as my friend, and was therefore less able to resist him. He all but knocked me down again and again, seized me by the hair, took hold of my collar so as to almost choke me, and grasped my arms and shoulders, making them black and blue. Had this treatment continued much longer, I must have fainted. All but exhausted, how refreshing was the remembrance of a verse quoted by my dear mother in one of my last home letters—

"We speak of the realms of the blest,

That country so bright and so fair,

And oft are its glories confessed;

But what must it be to be there!"

To be absent from the body! to be present with the Lord! to be free from sin! And this is the end of the worst that man's malice can ever bring upon us.

As we were walking along Mr. Burdon tried to give away a few books that he was carrying, not knowing whether we might have another opportunity of doing so; but the fearful rage of the soldier, and the way he insisted on manacles being brought, which fortunately were not at hand, convinced us that in our present position we could do no good in attempting book-distribution. There was nothing to be done but quietly to submit, and go along with our captors.

Once or twice a quarrel arose as to how we should be dealt with; the more mild of our conductors saying that we ought to be taken to the magistrate's office, but others wishing to kill us at once without appeal to any authority. Our minds were kept in perfect peace; and when thrown together on one of these occasions, we reminded each other that the Apostles rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer in the cause of Christ. Having succeeded in getting my hand into my pocket, I produced a Chinese card (if the large red paper, bearing one's name, may be so called), and after this was treated with more respect. I demanded it should be given to the chief official of the place, and that we should be led to his office. Before this we had been unable, say what we would, to persuade them that we were foreigners, although we were both in English attire.

Oh the long weary streets that we were dragged through! I thought they would never end; and seldom have I felt more thankful than when we stopped at a place where we were told a mandarin resided. Quite exhausted, bathed in perspiration, and with my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth, I leaned against the wall, and saw that Mr. Burdon was in much the same condition. I requested them to bring us chairs, but they told us to wait; and when I begged them to give us some tea, received only the same answer. Round the doorway a large crowd had gathered; and Mr. Burdon, collecting his remaining strength, preached Christ Jesus to them. Our cards and books had been taken in to the mandarin, but he proved to be one of low rank, and after keeping us waiting for some time he referred us to his superiors in office.

Upon hearing this, and finding that it was their purpose to turn us out again into the crowded streets, we positively refused to move a single step, and insisted on chairs being brought. After some demur this was done; we seated ourselves in them, and were carried on. On the road we felt so glad of the rest which the chairs afforded us, and so thankful at having been able to preach Jesus in spite of Satan's malice, that our joy was depicted on our countenances; and as we passed along we heard some say that we did not look like bad men, while others seemed to pity us. When we arrived at the magistrate's office, I wondered where we were being taken; for though we passed through some great gates that looked like those of the city wall, we were still evidently within the city. A second pair of gates suggested the idea that it was a prison into which we were being carried; but when we came in sight of a large tablet, with the inscription "Ming chï fu mu" (the father and mother of the people), we felt that we had been conveyed to the right place; this being the title assumed by the mandarins.

Our cards were again sent in, and after a short delay we were taken into the presence of Ch'en Ta Lao-ie (the Great Venerable Father Ch'en), who, as it proved, had formerly been Tao-tai of Shanghai, and consequently knew the importance of treating foreigners with courtesy. Coming before him, some of the people fell on their knees and bowed down to the ground, and my conductor motioned for me to do the same, but without success. This mandarin, who seemed to be the highest authority of T'ung-chau, and wore an opaque blue button on his cap, came out to meet us, and treated us with every possible token of respect. He took us to an inner apartment, a more private room, but was followed by a large number of writers, runners, and other semi-officials. I related the object of our visit, and begged permission to give him copies of our books and tracts, for which he thanked me. As I handed him a copy of the New Testament with part of the Old (from Genesis to Ruth) and some tracts, I tried to explain a little about them, and also to give him a brief summary of our teachings. . . . He listened very attentively, as of course did all the others present. He then ordered some refreshments to be brought in, which were very welcome, and himself partook of them with us.

After a long stay, we asked permission to see something of the city, and to distribute the books we had brought, before our return. To this he kindly consented. We then mentioned that we had been most disrespectfully treated as we came in, but that we did not attach much importance to the fact, being aware that the soldiers knew no better. Not desiring, however, to have such an experience repeated, we requested him to give orders that we were not to be further molested. This also he promised to do, and with every possible token of respect accompanied us to the door of his official residence, sending several runners to see that we were respectfully treated. We distributed our books well and quickly, and left the city quite in state. It was amusing to us to see the way in which the runners made use of their tails. When the street was blocked by the crowd, they turned them into whips, and laid them about the people's shoulders to right and left!

We had a little trouble in finding our wheel-barrows; but eventually succeeding, we paid off the chair coolies, mounted our humble vehicles, and returned to the river, accompanied for fully half the distance by an attendant from the magistrate's office. Early in the evening we got back to the boats in safety, sincerely thankful to our Heavenly Father for His gracious protection and aid.

CHAPTER 11: WITH THE REV. WILLIAM BURNS

Down the Yang-tsi on a cargo boat

AFTER the retaking of Shanghai by the Imperialists, in February 1855, I was enabled to rent a house within the walls of the native city, and gladly availed myself of this opportunity to reside amidst the crowded population left to inhabit the ruins that had survived the war. Here I made my headquarters, though often absent on more or less prolonged itinerations.

At the suggestion of the Rev. Dr. Medhurst, the veteran leader of the London Mission, I was led at about this period to adopt the native costume in preference to foreign dress, to facilitate travel and residence inland. The Chinese had permitted a foreign firm to build a silk factory some distance inland, with the proviso that the style of building must be purely Chinese, and that there should be nothing external to suggest that it was foreign. Much benefit was found to result from this change of costume; and I, and most of those associated with me, have continued to use native dress.

The T'ai-p'ing rebellion, commenced in 1851, had by this time reached the height of its ephemeral success. The great city of Nan-king had fallen before the invading host; and there, within two hundred miles of Shanghai, the rebels had established their headquarters, and proceeded to fortify themselves for further conquests. During the summer of 1855 various attempts were made to visit the leaders of the movement, in order to bring to bear some decidedly Christian influence upon them; but so little success was met with, that these efforts were abandoned.

I, amongst others, had sought to reach Nan-king; but finding it impossible to do so, turned my attention again to evangelistic work on the island of Ts'ung-ming. After some time I was enabled so far to overcome the prejudice and fears of the people as to rent a little house and settle down in their midst. This was a great joy and encouragement to me; but before many weeks were over complaints were made by the local authorities to the British Consul, who compelled me to retire; though the French Consul had himself secured to the Romish missionaries a property within three or four miles of the house I had to vacate. Sorely tried and disappointed by this unexpected hindrance, I reluctantly returned to Shanghai, little dreaming of the blessing that God had in store for me there.

A few months previously the Rev. William Burns, of the English Presbyterian Mission, had arrived in that port on his return journey from home; and before proceeding to his former sphere of service in the southern province of Fu-kien, he had endeavoured, like myself, without success, to visit the T'ai-p'ing rebels at Nan-king. Failing in this attempt, he made his headquarters in Shanghai for a season, devoting himself to the evangelisation of the surrounding populous regions. Thus in the autumn of the year I was providentially led into association with this beloved and honoured servant of God.

We journeyed together, evangelising cities and towns in southern Kiang-su and north Cheh-kiang, living in our boats, and following the course of the canals and rivers which here spread like a network over the whole face of the rich and fertile country. Mr. Burns at that time was wearing English dress; but saw that while I was the younger and in every way less experienced, I had the quiet hearers, while he was followed by the rude boys, and by the curious but careless; that I was invited to the homes of the people, while he received an apology that the crowd that would follow precluded his being invited. After some weeks of observation he also adopted the native dress, and enjoyed the increased facilities which it gave.

Those happy months were an unspeakable joy and privilege to me. His love for the Word was delightful, and his holy, reverential life and constant communings with God made fellowship with him satisfying to the deep cravings of my heart. His accounts of revival work and of persecutions in Canada, and Dublin, and in Southern China were most instructive, as well as interesting; for with true spiritual insight he often pointed out God's purposes in trial in a way that made all life assume quite a new aspect and value. His views especially about evangelism as the great work of the Church, and the order of lay evangelists as a lost order that Scripture required to be restored, were seed-thoughts which were to prove fruitful in the subsequent organisation of the China Inland Mission.

Externally, however, our path was not always a smooth one; but when permitted to stay for any length of time in town or city, the opportunity was well utilised. We were in the habit of leaving our boats, after prayer for blessing, at about nine o'clock in the morning, with a light bamboo stool in hand. Selecting a suitable station, one would mount the stool and speak for twenty minutes, while the other was pleading for blessing; and then changing places, the voice of the first speaker had a rest. After an hour or two thus occupied, we would move on to another point at some distance from the first, and speak again. Usually about midday we returned to our boats for dinner, fellowship, and prayer, and then resumed our out-door work until dusk. After tea and further rest, we would go with our native helpers to some tea-shop, where several hours might be spent in free conversation with the people. Not infrequently before leaving a town we had good reason to believe that much truth had been grasped; and we placed many Scriptures and books in the hands of those interested. The following letter was written by Mr. Burns to his mother at home in Scotland about this time:—

"Twenty-five miles from Shanghai,

January 26th, 1856.

"Taking advantage of a rainy day which confines me to my boat, I pen a few lines, in addition to a letter to Dundee, containing particulars which I need not repeat. It is now forty-one days since I left Shanghai on this last occasion. A young English missionary, Mr. Taylor, of the Chinese Evangelisation Society, has been my companion during these weeks—he in his boat, and I in mine—and we have experienced much mercy, and on some occasions considerable assistance in our work.

"I must once more tell the story I have had to tell already more than once—how four weeks ago, on December 29th, I put on the Chinese dress, which I am now wearing. Mr. Taylor had made this change a few months before, and I found that he was, in consequence, so much less incommoded in preaching, etc., by the crowd, that I concluded it was my duty to follow his example. We were at that time more than double the distance from Shanghai that we are now, and would still have been at as great a distance had we not met at one place with a band of lawless people, who demanded money and threatened to break our boats if their demands were refused. The boatmen were very much alarmed, and insisted on returning to some place nearer home. These people had previously broken in, violently, a part of Mr. Taylor's boat, because their unreasonable demand for books was not complied with.

"We have a large, very large, field of labour in this region, though it might be difficult in the meantime for one to establish himself in any particular place; the people listen with attention, but we need the Power from on High to convince and convert. Is there any spirit of prayer on our behalf among God's people in Kilsyth? or is there any effort to seek this spirit? How great the need is, and how great the arguments and motives for prayer in this case. The harvest here is indeed great, and the labourers are few, and imperfectly fitted without much grace for such a work. And yet grace can make the few and feeble instruments the means of accomplishing great things—things greater than we can even conceive."

The incident referred to in this letter, which led to our return to Shanghai more speedily than we had at first intended, took place on the northern border of Cheh-kiang. We had reached a busy market town known by the name of Wu-chen, or Black Town, the inhabitants of which, we had been told, were the wildest and most lawless people in that part of the country. Such indeed we found them to be: the town was a refuge for salt smugglers and other bad characters. The following extracts are taken from my journal, written at the time:—

January 8th, 1856.

Commenced our work in Wu-chen this morning by distributing a large number of tracts and some Testaments. The people seemed much surprised, and we could not learn that any foreigner had been here before. We preached twice—once in the temple of the God of War, and afterwards in an empty space left by a fire, which had completely destroyed many houses. In the afternoon we preached again to a large and attentive audience on the same site; and in the evening adjourned to a tea-shop, where we had a good opportunity of speaking until it got noised abroad that we were there, when, too many people coming in, we were obliged to leave. Our native assistants, Tsien and Kuei-hua, were able, however, to remain. Returning to our boats, we spoke to a number of people standing on a bridge, and felt we had abundant reason to be thankful and encouraged by the result of our first day's labour.

January 10th.

First sent Tsien and Kuei-hua to distribute some sheet tracts. After their return we went with them, and in a space cleared by fire we separated, and addressed two audiences. On our return to the boats for lunch, we found people waiting, as usual, and desiring books. Some were distributed to those who were able to read them; and then asking them kindly to excuse us while we took our midday meal, I went into my boat and shut the door.

Hardly was there time to pour out a cup of tea when a battering began, and the roof was at once broken in. I went out at the back, and found four or five men taking the large lumps of frozen earth turned up in a field close by—weighing, I should suppose, from seven to fourteen pounds each—and throwing them at the boat. Remonstrance was of no avail, and it was not long ere a considerable part of the upper structure of the boat was broken to pieces, and a quantity of earth covered the things inside. Finally, Tsien got a boat that was passing to land him at a short distance, and by a few tracts drew away the attention of the men, thus ending the assault.

We now learned that of those who had done the mischief only two were natives of the place, the others being salt smugglers, and that the cause was our not having satisfied their unreasonable demand for books. Most providentially no one was injured; and as soon as quiet was somewhat restored, we all met in Mr. Burns's boat and joined in thanksgiving that we had been preserved from personal harm, praying also for the perpetrators of the mischief, and that it might be over-ruled for good to us and to those with us. We then took our lunch and went on shore, and but a few steps from the boats addressed a large multitude that soon assembled. We were specially assisted; never were we heard with more attention, and not one voice was found to sympathise with the men who had molested us. In the evening, at the tea-shops, the same spirit was manifested, and some seemed to hear with joy the glad tidings of salvation through a crucified and risen Saviour.

As we came home we passed a barber's shop still open, and I went in, and while getting my head shaved had an opportunity of speaking to a few people, and afterwards pasted a couple of sheet tracts on the wall for the benefit of future customers.

January 11th.

A respectable shop-keeper of the name of Yao, who on the first or second day of our stay at Wu-chen had received portions of the New Testament and a tract, came yesterday, when our boat was broken, to beg for some more books. At that time we were all in confusion from the damage done, and from the earth thrown into the boat, and so invited him to come again in a day or two's time, when we would gladly supply him. This morning he appeared and handed in the following note:—

"On a former day I begged Burns and Taylor, the two 'Rabbis,' to give me good books. It happened at that time those of our town whose hearts were deceived by Satan, not knowing the Son of David, went so far as to dare to 'raca' and 'moreh' and injure your respected boat. I thank you for promising afterwards to give the books, and beg the following: Complete New Testament, 'Discourse of a Good Man when near his Death,' 'Important Christian Doctrines,' an Almanack, 'Principles of Christianity,' 'Way to make the World happy,'—of each one copy. Sung and Tsien, and all teachers I hope are well. Further compliments are unwritten."

This note is interesting, as showing that he had been reading the New Testament attentively, as the italicised words were all taken from it. His use of "raca" and "moreh" for reviling, shows their meaning was not lost upon him.

After supplying this man, we went out with Tsien and Kuei-hua to the east of the town, and spoke in the street for a short time. Upon returning to the boats, I was visited by two Chih-li men, who are in the magistrate's office here. I was greatly helped in speaking to them of a crucified Saviour in the Mandarin dialect; and though one of them did not pay much attention, the other did, and made inquiries that showed the interest he was feeling. When they had left, I went on shore and spoke to the people collected there, to whom Kuei-hua had been preaching. The setting sun afforded a parable, and reminded one of the words of Jesus, "The night cometh, when no man can work;" and as I spoke of the uncertain duration of this life, and of our ignorance as to the time of Christ's return, a degree of deep seriousness prevailed that I had never previously witnessed in China. I engaged in prayer, and the greatest decorum was observed. I then returned to my boat with a Buddhist priest who had been in the audience, and he admitted that Buddhism was a system of deceit that could give no hope in death.

January 12th.

In the afternoon we addressed the people on shore close to our boats, also in one of the streets of the city, and in a tea-shop, books being distributed on each occasion. In the evening we went as usual to speak in the tea-shops, but determined to go to the opposite end of the town, in order to afford those who lived there a better opportunity of meeting with us. It was a long straggling place, nearly two English miles in length. As Mr. Burns and I were accustomed to talk together in Chinese, this conclusion was known to those in the boats.

After we had proceeded a short distance we changed our minds, and went instead to the usual tea-shop, thinking that persons might have gone there expecting to meet us. But this was not the case; and we did not find such serious hearers as we had done on previous occasions. On this account Mr. Burns proposed leaving earlier than usual, and we did so, telling Tsien and Kuei-hua that they might remain a little longer. Returning to the boats, we gave away a few books; but, singularly enough, were left to go alone, no one accompanying us, as is so generally the case. Instead of being a clear night, as it was when we started, we found that it had become intensely dark. On our way we met the boatman, whose manner seemed very strange, and without giving us any explanation he blew out the candle of our lantern; we relighted the lantern, telling him not to put it out again, when to our surprise he deliberately removed the candle and threw it into the canal. He then walked down along a low wall jutting out to the river's edge, and gazed into the water.

Not knowing what was the matter with him, I ran forward to hold him, fearful lest he were going to drown himself; but to my great relief he came quietly back. In answer to our repeated questions he told us not to speak, for some bad men were seeking to destroy the boats, and they had moved away to avoid them. He then led us to the place where one of them was lying. Before long Tsien and Kuei-hua came and got safely on board, and soon after we were joined by the teacher Sung, and the boat moved away.

The cause of all this disturbance was then explained. A man professing to be the constable had come to the boats in our absence, with a written demand for ten dollars and a quantity of opium. He stated that there were more than fifty country people (salt smugglers) awaiting our reply in an adjoining tea-shop; and if we gave them what they wanted, and three hundred cash to pay for their tea, we might remain in peace; but that if not, they would come at once and destroy our boats. Sung told them that we could not comply with their demand; for, not being engaged in trade, but only in preaching and book-distribution, we had not an atom of opium, and that our money was nearly all expended. The man, however, told him plainly that he did not believe him, and Sung had no alternative but to seek us out, desiring the man to await our reply. Not knowing that we had changed our plans, he sought us in the wrong direction, and of course in vain.

In the meanwhile the boatmen had succeeded in moving off. They were very much alarmed; and having so recently had proof of what these men would do in open daylight, felt no desire to experience what they might attempt by night. Moving away, therefore, they had separated, so that if one boat should be injured the other might afford us a refuge. It was after this that we had providentially met the boatman, and had been safely led on board. As Sung repassed the place where we were previously moored, he saw between the trees a dozen or more men, and heard them inquiring where the boats had gone to; but no one could tell. Fortunately they sought in vain.

After a while the two boats joined, and rowed together for some time. It was already late, and to travel by night in that part of the country was not the way to avoid danger from evil men; so the question arose as to what should be done. This we left for the boatmen to decide; they had moved off of their own accord, and we felt that whatever we personally might desire we could not constrain others to remain in a position of danger on our account. We urged them, however, to do quickly whatever they intended to do, as the morrow was the Lord's Day, when we should not wish to travel. We also informed them that wherever we were we must fulfil our mission, and preach the Gospel; it therefore made but little difference where we might stay, for even if we passed the night unperceived, we were sure to be found out on the following morning. The men consequently concluded that we might as well return to the place from which we had started; to this we fully agreed, and they turned back accordingly. But—whether by accident or no we could not tell—they got into another stream, and rowed for some time they knew not whither. At last, as it was very dark, they moored for the night.

We then called all the boatmen together, with our native assistants, and read to them the ninety-first Psalm. It may be imagined how appropriate to our position and need and how sweetly consoling was this portion of God's Word:—

"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High

Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress:

My God; in Him will I trust.

"Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler,

And from the noisome pestilence.

He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust:

His truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night;

Nor for the arrow that flieth by day.

"Because he hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him.

I will set him on high, because he hath known My Name.

He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him;

I will be with him in trouble;—I will deliver him, and honour him.

With long life will I satisfy him,—and show him My salvation."

Committing ourselves in prayer to His care and keeping Who had covered us with thick darkness and permitted us to escape from the hand of the violent, we retired for the night; which—thanks to the kind protection of the Watchman of Israel, who neither slumbers nor forgets His people—we passed in peace and quietness, and were enabled, in some measure, to realise the truth of that precious word, "Thou art my Hiding-place, and my Shield."

Sunday, January 13th.

This morning I was awakened about 4 A.M. by violent pain in the knee-joint. I had bruised it the day before, and severe inflammation was the result. To my great surprise I heard the rain pouring down in torrents, the weather having previously been particularly fine. On looking out, we found ourselves so near our former stopping-place, that, had nothing happened to prevent it, we should not have felt justified in neglecting to go into the town to preach as usual; but the rain was so heavy all day that no one could leave the boats. Thus we enjoyed a delightful day of rest, such as we had not had for some time; and the weather prevented much inquiry being made for us. Had the day been fine we should most likely have been discovered, even if we had not left the boats. As it was, we were allowed to think in peace, with wonder and gratitude, of the gracious dealings of our God, who had thus led us apart into "a desert place" to rest awhile.

Monday, January 14th.

A cloudless morning. One of the native assistants went before daybreak to get some clothes which had been given out for washing. He came back with the tidings that, notwithstanding the drenching rain of yesterday, men had been seeking us in all directions. We had been kept, however, in peace and safety "under the shadow of the Almighty."

The boatmen were now so thoroughly alarmed that they would stay no longer, and moved off at dawn. I was confined to my quarters by lameness, and had no alternative but to go with them. In the afternoon we reached Ping-wang, on the way to Shanghai.

"Ill that God blesses is our good,

And unblest good is ill;

And all is right that seems most wrong,

If it be His sweet will."

East gate and sentry box, Bhamô, Burmah

CHAPTER 12: CALLED TO SWATOW

HAVING to leave the neighbourhood of Black Town thus unexpectedly was a real disappointment to us, as we had hoped to spend some time evangelising in that district. We were to prove, however, that no unforeseen mischance had happened, but that these circumstances which seemed so trying were necessary links in the chain of a divinely ordered providence, guiding to other and wider spheres.

God does not permit persecution to arise without sufficient reason. . . . He was leading us by a way that we knew not; but it was none the less His way.

"O Lord, how happy should we be

If we would cast our care on Thee,

If we from self would rest;

And feel at heart that One above,

In perfect wisdom, perfect love,

Is working for the best!"

When we reached Shanghai, thinking to return inland in a few days with fresh supplies of books and money, we met a Christian captain who had been trading at Swatow, and he put very strongly before us the need of that region, and the fact that there were British merchants living on Double Island, selling opium and engaged in the coolie trade (practically a slave traffic), while there was no British missionary to preach the Gospel. The Spirit of God impressed me with the feeling that this was His call, but for days I felt that I could not obey it. I had never had such a spiritual father as Mr. Burns; I had never known such holy, happy fellowship; and I said to myself that it could not be God's will that we should separate.

In great unrest of soul I went one evening, with Mr. Burns, to take tea at the house of the Rev. R. Lowrie, of the American Presbyterian Mission, at the South Gate of Shanghai. After tea Mrs. Lowrie played over to us "The Missionary Call."[l]  I had never heard it before, and it greatly affected me. My heart was almost broken before it was finished, and I said to the Lord, in the words that had been sung—

"And I will go!

I may no longer doubt to give up friends, and idol hopes,

And every tie that binds my heart. . . .

Henceforth, then, it matters not, if storm or sunshine be my earthly lot, bitter

or sweet my cup;

I only pray, God, make me holy,

And my spirit nerve for the stern hour of strife."

Upon leaving I asked Mr. Burns to come home with me to the little house that was still my headquarters in the native city, and there, with many tears, told him how the Lord had been leading me, and how rebellious I had been and unwilling to leave him for this new sphere of labour. He listened with a strange look of surprise, and of pleasure rather than pain; and answered that he had determined that very night to tell me that he had heard the Lord's call to Swatow, and that his one regret had been the prospect of the severance of our happy fellowship. We went together; and thus was recommenced missionary work in that part of China, which in later years has been so abundantly blessed.

Long before this time the Rev. R. Lechler, of the Basel Missionary Society, had widely itinerated in the neighbourhood of Swatow and the surrounding regions. Driven about from place to place, he had done work that was not forgotten, although ultimately he was obliged to retire to Hong-kong. For more than forty years this earnest-hearted servant of God has continued in "labours more abundant"; and quite recently he has left Hong-kong, with his devoted wife, to return again inland, and spend the strength of his remaining years amongst the people he has so long and truly loved.

Captain Bowers, the Christian friend who had been used of God in bringing the needs of Swatow before Mr. Burns and myself, was overjoyed when he heard of our decision to devote ourselves to the evangelisation of that busy, important, and populous mart. Being about to sail himself on his return journey, he gladly offered us free passages on board the Geelong, in which we left Shanghai early in the month of March 1856.

A favourable journey of six days brought us to Double Island, where we found ourselves landed in the midst of a small but very ungodly community of foreigners, engaged in the opium trade and other commercial enterprises. Unwilling to be in any way identified with these fellow-countrymen, we were most desirous of obtaining quarters at once within the native city, situated on a promontory of the mainland, five miles farther up, at the mouth of the Han river. Great difficulty was experienced in this attempt to obtain a footing amongst the people. Indeed, it seemed as though we should fail altogether, and we were helplessly cast upon the Lord in prayer. Our God soon undertook for us. Meeting one day with a Cantonese merchant, a relative of the highest official in the town, Mr. Burns addressed him in the Cantonese dialect; this gentleman was so pleased at being spoken to by a foreigner in his own tongue that he became our friend, and secured us a lodging. We had only one little room, however, and not easily shall I forget the long hot summer months in that oven-like place, where towards the eaves one could touch the heated tiles with one's hand. More room or better accommodation it was impossible to obtain.

We varied our stay by visits to the surrounding country; but the difficulties and dangers that encountered us here were so great and constant, that our former work in the North began to appear safe and easy in comparison. The hatred and contempt of the Cantonese was very painful, "foreign devil," "foreign dog," or "foreign pig" being the commonest appellations; but all this led us into deeper fellowship than I had ever known before with Him who was "despised and rejected of men."

In our visits to the country we were liable to be seized at any time and held to ransom; and the people commonly declared that the whole district was "without emperor, without ruler, and without law." Certainly, might was right in those days. On one occasion we were visiting a small town, and found that the inhabitants had captured a wealthy man of another clan. A large ransom was demanded for his release, and on his refusing to pay it they had smashed his ankle-bones, one by one, with a club, and thus extorted the promise they desired. There was nothing but God's protection to prevent our being treated in the same way. The towns were all walled, and one such place would contain ten or twenty thousand people of the same clan and surname, who were frequently at war with the people living in the next town. To be kindly received in one place was not uncommonly a source of danger in the next. In circumstances such as these the preserving care of our God was often manifested.

After a time the local mandarin became ill, and the native doctors were unable to relieve him. He had heard from some who had been under my treatment of the benefit derived, and was led to seek our help. God blessed the medicines given, and grateful for relief, he advised our renting a house for a hospital and dispensary. Having his permission, we were able to secure the entire premises, one room of which we had previously occupied. I had left my stock of medicine and surgical instruments under the care of my friend, the late Mr. Wylie, in Shanghai, and went back at once to fetch them.

Mr. Burns came down from a town called Am-po, that we had visited together several times, to see me off, and returned again when I had sailed, with two native evangelists sent up from Hong-kong by the Rev. J. Johnson, of the American Baptist Missionary Union. The people were willing to listen to their preaching, and to accept their books as a gift, but they would not buy them. One night robbers broke in and carried off everything they had, with the exception of their stock of literature, which was supposed to be valueless. Next morning, very early, they were knocked up by persons wishing to buy books, and the sales continued; so that by breakfast time they had not only cash enough to procure food, but to pay also for the passage of one of the men to Double Island, below Swatow, with a letter to Mr. Burns's agent to supply him with money. Purchasers continued coming during that day and the next, and our friends lacked nothing; but on the third day they could not sell a single book. Then, however, when the cash from their sales was just exhausted, the messenger returned with supplies.

It was early in July, after about four months' residence in Swatow, that I left for Shanghai, intending to return in the course of a few weeks, bringing with me my medical apparatus, for further work in association with the Rev. William Burns. A new and promising field seemed to be opening before us, and it was with much hopeful anticipation that we looked forward to the future of the work. Marked blessing was indeed in store for the city and neighbourhood of Swatow; but it was not the purpose of God that either of us should remain to reap the harvest. Mr. Burns while in the interior was taken up and imprisoned by the Chinese authorities soon after I left, and was sent to Canton. And though he returned to Swatow after the war had broken out, he was called away for other service, which prevented his subsequent return; while my journey to Shanghai proved to be the first step in a diverging pathway leading to other spheres.

2. Why live I here? the vows of God are | on me; | and I may not stop

to play with shadows or pluck earthly flowers, | till I my work

have done, and | rendered up ac | count.

3. And I will | go! | I may no longer doubt to give up friends, and idol |

hopes, | and every tie that binds my heart to | thee, my | country.

4. Henceforth, then, it matters not, if storm or sunshine be my | earthly

lot, | bitter or sweet my | cup; | I only pray: "God make me

holy, and my spirit nerve for the stern | hour of strife!"

5. And when one for whom Satan hath struggled as he hath for | me, | has

gained at last that blessed | shore, | Oh! how this heart will glow

with | gratitude and | love.

CHAPTER 13: MAN PROPOSES, GOD DISPOSES

IT is interesting to notice the various events which united, in the providence of God, in preventing my return to Swatow, and ultimately led to my settling in Ningpo, and making that the centre for the development of future labours.

Upon reaching Shanghai, great was my dismay to find that the premises in which my medicines and instruments had been stored were burnt down, and that all the medicines and many of the instruments were entirely destroyed. To me this appeared a great calamity, and I fear I was more disposed with faithless Jacob to say, "All these things are against me," than to recognise that "All things work together for good." I had not then learned to think of God as the One Great Circumstance "in Whom we live, and move, and have our being"; and of all lesser, external circumstances, as necessarily the kindest, wisest, best, because either ordered or permitted by Him. Hence my disappointment and trial were very great.

Medicines were expensive in Shanghai, and my means were limited. I therefore set out on an inland journey to Ningpo, hoping to obtain a supply from Dr. William Parker, a member of the same mission as myself. I took with me my few remaining possessions, the principal being my watch, a few surgical instruments, a concertina, books for the study of Chinese, which in those days were very expensive; but left behind in Shanghai a portion of my money.

The country through which I had to pass was suffering much from drought; it was the height of summer; and the water in the Grand Canal was very low, having been largely drawn upon for the neighbouring rice fields, as well as evaporated by the intense heat. I had determined to make the journey as much of a mission tour as possible, and set out well supplied with Christian tracts and books. After fourteen days spent in travelling slowly through the populous country, preaching and distributing books, etc., we reached a large town called Shih-mun-wan, and here, finding that my supply of literature was exhausted, I determined not to linger over the rest of the journey, but to reach Ningpo as speedily as possible, viâ the city of Hai-ning.

August 4th, 1856.

There was no water beyond Shih-mun-wan, so I paid off my boat, hired coolies to carry my things as far as to Chang-gan, and ere sunrise we were on the way. I walked on alone, leaving my servant to follow with the men, who made frequent stoppages to rest; and on reaching a city through which we had to pass, I waited for them in a tea-shop just outside the North Gate. The coolies came on very slowly, and seemed tired when they arrived. I soon found that they were both opium-smokers, so that, although they had only carried a load that one strong man would think nothing of taking three times the distance, they really seemed wearied.

After some rice and tea and an hour's rest—including, I doubt not, a smoke of the opium pipe—they were a little refreshed, and I proposed moving on, that we might get to Chang-gan before the sun became too powerful. My servant, however, had a friend in the city, and he desired to spend the day there, and to go on next morning. But to this I objected, wishing to reach Hai-ning that night if possible. . . . We therefore set off, entered the North Gate, and had passed through about a third of the city, when the coolies stopped to rest, and said they should be unable to carry the burden on to Chang-gan. Finally, they agreed to take it to the South Gate, where they were to be paid in proportion to the distance they had carried it; and the servant undertook to call other coolies and come along with them.

I walked on before as in the first instance, and the distance being only about four miles, soon reached Chang-gan, and waited their arrival, meanwhile engaging coolies for the rest of the journey to Hai-ning. Having waited a long time, I began to wonder at the delay; and at length it became too late to finish the journey to Hai-ning that night. I felt somewhat annoyed; and but that my feet were blistered, and the afternoon very hot, I should have gone back to meet them and urge them on. At last I concluded that my servant must have gone to his friend's, and would not appear until evening. But evening came, and still there was no sign of them.

Feeling very uneasy, I began diligently to inquire whether they had been seen. At last a man responded, "Are you a guest from Shih-mun-wan?" I answered in the affirmative. "Are you going to Hai-ning?" "That is my destination." "Then your things have gone on before you; for I was sitting in a tea-shop when a coolie came in, took a cup of tea, and set off for Hai-ning in a great hurry, saying that the bamboo box and bed he carried, which were just such as you describe yours to have been, were from Shih-mun-wan, and he had to take them to Hai-ning to-night, where he was to be paid at the rate of ten cash a pound." From this I concluded that my goods were on before me; but it was impossible to follow them at once, for I was too tired to walk, and it was already dark.

Under these circumstances all I could do was to seek a lodging for the night; and no easy task I found it. After raising my heart to God to ask His aid, I walked through to the farther end of the town, where I thought the tidings of a foreigner's being in the place might not have spread, and looked out for an inn. I soon came to one, and went in, hoping that I might pass unquestioned, as it was already dark. Asking the bill of fare, I was told that cold rice—which proved to be more than "rather burnt"—and snakes, fried in lamp-oil, were all that could be had. Not wishing any question to be raised as to my nationality, I was compelled to order some, and tried to make a meal, but with little success.

While thus engaged I said to the landlord, "I suppose I can arrange to spend the night here?"

To which he replied in the affirmative; but bringing out his book, he added—

"In these unsettled times we are required by the authorities to keep a record of our lodgers: may I ask your respected family name?"

"My unworthy family name is Tai," I responded.

"And your honourable second name?"

"My humble name is Ia-koh" (James).

"What an extraordinary name! I never heard it before. How do you write it?"

I told him, and added, "It is a common name in the district from which I come."

"And may I ask whence you come and whither you are going?"

"I am journeying from Shanghai to Ningpo, by way of Hang-chau."

"What may be your honourable profession?"

"I heal the sick."

"Oh! you are a physician," the landlord remarked; and to my intense relief closed the book. His wife, however, took up the conversation.

"You are a physician, are you?" said she; "I am glad of that, for I have a daughter afflicted with leprosy. If you will cure her, you shall have your supper and bed for nothing."

I was curious enough to inquire what my supper and bed were to cost, if paid for; and to my amusement found they were worth less than three-halfpence of our money!

Being unable to benefit the girl, I declined to prescribe for her, saying that leprosy was a very intractable disease, and that I had no medicines with me.

The mother, however, brought pen and paper, urging, "You can at least write a prescription, which will do no harm, if it does no good."

But this also I declined to do, and requested to be shown my bed. I was conducted to a very miserable room on the ground-floor, where, on some boards raised upon two stools, I passed the night, without bed or pillow, save my umbrella and shoe, and without any mosquito netting. Ten or eleven other lodgers were sleeping in the same room, so I could not take anything off, for fear of its being stolen; but I was, I found, by no means too warm as midnight came on.

August 5th.

As may be supposed, I arose but little rested or refreshed, and felt very far from well. I had to wait a long time ere breakfast was obtainable, and then there was another delay before I could get change for the only dollar I had with me, in consequence of its being chipped in one or two places. More than three hundred cash also were deducted from its price on this account, which was a serious loss to me in my trying position.

I then sought throughout the town for tidings of my servant and coolies, as I thought it possible that they might have arrived later, or have come on in the morning. The town is large, long, and straggling, being nearly two miles from one end to the other, so this occupied some time. I gained no information, however; and, footsore and weary, set out for Hai-ning in the full heat of the day. The journey—about eight miles—took me a long time; but a halfway village afforded a resting-place and a cup of tea, both of which I gladly availed myself of. When about to leave again, a heavy shower of rain came on, and the delay thus occasioned enabled me to speak a little to the people about the truths of the Gospel.

The afternoon was far spent before I approached the northern suburb of Hai-ning, where I commenced inquiries, but could hear no tidings of my servant or things. I was told that outside the East Gate I should be more likely to hear of them, as it was there the sea-junks called. I therefore proceeded thither, and sought for them outside the Little East Gate, but in vain. Very weary, I sat down in a tea-shop to rest; and while there a number of persons from one of the mandarin's offices came in, and made inquiries as to who I was, where I had come from, etc. On learning the object of my search, one of the men in the tea-shop said, "A bamboo box and a bed, such as you describe, were carried past here about half an hour ago. The bearer seemed to be going towards either the Great East Gate or the South Gate; you had better go to the hongs there and inquire." I asked him to accompany me in the search, and promised to reward him for his trouble, but he would not. Another man offered to go with me, so we set off together, and both inside and outside the two gates made diligent inquiries, but all in vain. I then engaged a man to make a thorough search, promising him a liberal reward if he should be successful. In the meantime I had some dinner, and addressed a large concourse of people who had gathered together.

When he returned, having met with no success, I said to him, "I am now quite exhausted: will you help me to find quarters for the night, and then I will pay you for your trouble?" He was willing to befriend me, and we set off in search of lodgings. At the first place or two the people would not receive me; for though on our first going in they seemed willing to do so, the presence of a man who followed us, and who, I found, was engaged in one of the Government offices, seemed to alarm them, and I was refused. We now went to a third place, and being no longer followed by the mandarin's messenger, we were promised quarters; some tea was brought, and I paid the man who had accompanied me for his trouble.

Soon after he was gone some official people came in; they soon went away, but the result of their visit was that I was told I could not be entertained there that night. A young man present blamed them for their heartless behaviour, and said, "Never mind, come with me; and if we cannot get better lodgings for you, you shall sleep at our house." I went with him, but we found the people of his house unwilling to receive me. Weary and footsore, so that I could scarcely stand, I had again to seek quarters, and at length got promise of them; but a little crowd collecting about the door, they desired me to go to a tea-shop and wait there till the people had retired, or they would be unable to accommodate me. There was no help for it, so I went, accompanied still by the young man, and waited till past midnight. Then we left for the promised resting-place; but my conductor would not find it, and he led me about to another part of the city; and finally, between one and two o'clock, he left me to pass the rest of the night as best I could.

I was opposite a temple, but it was closed; so I lay down on the stone steps in front of it, and putting my money under my head for a pillow, should soon have been asleep in spite of the cold had I not perceived a person coming stealthily towards me. As he approached I saw he was one of the beggars so common in China, and had no doubt his intention was to rob me of my money. I did not stir, but watched his movements, and looked to my Father not to leave me in this hour of trial. The man came up, looked at me for some time to assure himself that I was asleep (it was so dark that he could not see my eyes fixed on him), and then began to feel about me gently. I said to him in the quietest tone, but so as to convince him that I was not, nor had been, sleeping, "What do you want?" He made no answer, but went away.

I was very thankful to see him go, and when he was out of sight put as much of my cash as would not go into my pocket safely up my sleeve, and made my pillow of a stone projection of the wall. It was not long ere I began to doze, but I was aroused by the all but noiseless footsteps of two persons approaching; for my nervous system was rendered so sensitive by exhaustion that the slightest noise startled me. Again I sought protection from Him who alone was my stay, and lay still as before, till one of them came up and began to feel under my head for the cash. I spoke again, and they sat down at my feet. I asked them what they were doing; they replied that they, like me, were going to pass the night there. I then requested them to take the opposite side, as there was plenty of room, and leave this side to me; but they would not move from my feet, so I raised myself up and set my back against the wall.

They said, "You had better lie down and sleep; if you do not, you will be unable to walk to-morrow. Do not be afraid; we shall not leave you, and will see that no one hurts you."

"Listen to me," I replied. "I do not want your protection; I need it not; I am not a Chinese; I do not worship your senseless, helpless idols. I worship God; He is my Father; I trust in Him. I know well what you are, and what your intentions are, and shall keep my eye on you, and shall not sleep."

On this, one of them went away, but soon returned with a third companion. I felt very uneasy, but looked to God for help. Once or twice one of them got up to see if I was asleep. I only said, "Do not be mistaken; I am not sleeping." Occasionally my head dropped, and this was a signal for one of them to rise; but I at once roused myself and made some remark. As the night slowly passed on, I felt very weary; and to keep myself awake, as well as to cheer my mind, I sang several hymns, repeated aloud some portions of Scripture, and engaged in prayer in English, to the great annoyance of my companions, who seemed as if they would have given anything to get me to desist. After that they troubled me no more; and shortly before dawn of day they left me, and I got a little sleep.

August 6th.

I was awakened by the young man who had so misled me on the previous evening. He was very rude, and insisted on my getting up and paying him for his trouble, and even went so far as to try to accomplish by force what he wanted. This roused me; and in an unguarded moment, with very improper feeling, I seized his arm with such a grasp as he little expected I was capable of, and dared him to lay a finger upon me again or to annoy me further. This quite changed his manner; he let me quietly remain till the guns announced the opening of the gates of the city, and then he begged me to give him some money to buy opium with. It is needless to say this was refused. I gave him the price of two candles, that he said he had burnt while with me last night and no more. I learned he was connected with one of the mandarin's offices.

As soon as possible, I bought some rice gruel and tea for breakfast, and then once more made a personal search after my things. Some hours thus spent proving unavailing, I set out on the return journey, and after a long, weary, and painful walk reached Chang-gan about noon. Here also my inquiries failed to give me any trace of the missing goods; so I had a meal cooked in a tea-shop, got a thorough wash and bathed my inflamed feet, and after dinner rested and slept till four in the afternoon.

Much refreshed, I then set on to return to the city, at the South Gate of which I had parted with my servant and coolies two days before. On the way I was led to reflect on the goodness of God, and recollected that I had not made it a matter of prayer that I might be provided with lodgings last night. I felt condemned, too, that I should have been so anxious for my few things, while the many precious souls around me had caused so little emotion. I came as a sinner and pleaded the blood of Jesus, realising that I was accepted in Him—pardoned, cleansed, sanctified—and oh the love of Jesus, how great I felt it to be! I knew something more than I had ever previously known of what it was to be despised and rejected, and to have nowhere to lay one's head; and I felt more than ever I had done before the greatness of that love which induced Him to leave His home in glory and suffer thus for me; nay, to lay down His very life upon the Cross. I thought of Him as "despised and rejected of men, a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief"; I thought of Him at Jacob's well, weary, hungry, and thirsty, yet finding it His meat and drink to do His Father's will; and contrasted this with my littleness of love. I looked to Him for pardon for the past, and for grace and strength to do His will in the future, to tread more closely in His footsteps, and be more than ever wholly His. I prayed for myself, for friends in England, and for my brethren in the work. Sweet tears of mingled joy and sorrow flowed freely, the road was almost forgotten, and before I was aware of it I had reached my destination. Outside the South Gate I took a cup of tea, asked about my lost luggage, and spoke of the love of Jesus. Then I entered the city, and after many vain inquiries left it by the North Gate.

I felt so much refreshed both in mind and body by the communion I had on my walk to the city that I thought myself able to finish the remaining six miles back to Shih-mun-wan that evening. First I went into another tea-shop to buy some native cakes, and was making a meal of them when who should come in but one of the identical coolies who had carried my things the first stage. From him I learned that after I left them they had taken my luggage to the South Gate; there my servant went away, saying on his return that I had gone on, that he did not intend to start at once, but would spend the day with his friend, and then rejoin me; they carried the things to this friend's house, and left them there. I got him to go with me to the house, and there learned that the man had spent the day and night with them, and next morning had called other coolies, and set off for Hang-chau. This was all I could gather; so, unable to do anything but proceed on my return journey to Shanghai with all expedition, I left the city again. It was now too late to go on to Shih-mun-wan. I looked to my Father as able to supply all my need, and received another token of His ceaseless love and care, being invited to sleep on a hong-boat, now dry in the bed of the river. The night was again very cold and the mosquitoes troublesome. Still, I got a little rest, and at sunrise was up and continued my journey.

August 7th.

I felt very ill at first, and had a sore throat, but reflected on the wonderful goodness of God in enabling me to bear the heat by day and the cold by night so long. I felt also that quite a load was now taken off my mind. I had committed myself and my affairs to the Lord, and knew that if it was for my good and for His glory my things would be restored; if not, all would be for the best. I hoped that the most trying part of my journey was now drawing to a close, and this helped me, weary and footsore, on the way. When I got to Shih-mun-wan and had breakfasted, I found I had still eight hundred and ten cash in hand; and I knew that the hong-boat fare to Kia-hing Fu was one hundred and twenty cash, and thence to Shanghai three hundred and sixty, leaving me just three hundred and thirty cash—or twelve pence and a fraction—for three or four days provisions. I went at once to the boat office, but to my dismay found that from the dry state of the river goods had not come down, so that no boat would leave to-day and perhaps none to-morrow. I inquired if there were no letter-boats for Kia-hing Fu, and was told that they had already left. The only remaining resource was to ascertain if any private boats were going in which I could get a passage. My search, however, was in vain; and I could get no boat to undertake to go all the way to Shanghai, or my difficulty would have been at an end.

Just at this juncture I saw before me, at a turn in the canal, a letter-boat going in the direction of Kia-hing Fu This, I concluded, must be one of the Kia-hing boats that had been unexpectedly detained, and I set off after it as fast as hope and the necessities of the case would carry me. For the time being weariness and sore feet were alike forgotten. After a chase of about a mile I overtook it.

"Are you going to Kia-hing Fu?" I called out.

"No," was the only answer.

"Are you going in that direction?"

"No."

"Will you give me a passage as far as you do go that way?"

Still "No," and nothing more.

Completely dispirited and exhausted, I sank down on the grass and fainted away.

As consciousness returned some voices reached my ear, and I found they were talking about me. One said, "He speaks pure Shanghai dialect," and from their own speech I knew them to be Shanghai people. Raising myself, I saw that they were on a large hong-boat on the other side of the canal, and after a few words they sent their small boat to fetch me, and I went on board the junk. They were very kind, and gave me some tea; and when I was refreshed and able to partake of it, some food also. I then took my shoes and stockings off to ease my feet, and the boatman kindly provided me with hot water to bathe them. When they heard my story, and saw the blisters on my feet, they evidently pitied me, and hailed every boat that passed to see if it was going my way. Not finding one, by and by, after a few hours' sleep, I went ashore with the captain, intending to preach in the temple of Kwan-ti.

Before leaving the junk I told the captain and those on board that I was now unable to help myself; that I had not strength to walk to Kia-hing Fu, and having been disappointed in getting a passage to-day, I should no longer have sufficient means to take me there by letter-boat, which was an expensive mode of travelling; that I knew not how the God whom I served would help me, but that I had no doubt He would do so; and that my business now was to serve Him where I was. I also told them that the help which I knew would come ought to be an evidence to them of the truth of the religion which I and the other missionaries at Shanghai preached.

On our way to the town, while engaged in conversation with the captain, we saw a letter-boat coming up. The captain drew my attention to it; but I reminded him that I had no longer the means of paying my passage by it. He hailed it, nevertheless, and found that it was going to a place about nine English miles from Shanghai, whence one of the boatmen would carry the mails overland to the city. He then said, "This gentleman is a foreigner from Shanghai, who has been robbed, and has no longer the means of returning. If you will take him with you as far as you go, and then engage a sedan chair to carry him the rest of the way, he will pay you in Shanghai. You see my boat is lying aground yonder for want of water, and cannot get away. Now, I will stand surety; and if this gentleman does not pay when you get to Shanghai, I will do so on your return." This unsolicited kindness on the part of a Chinaman, a perfect stranger, will appear the more remarkable to any one acquainted with the character of the Chinese, who are generally most reluctant to risk their money. Those on the letter-boat agreeing to the terms, I was taken on board as a passenger. Oh, how thankful I felt for this providential interposition, and to be once more on my way to Shanghai!

Letter-boats such as the one on which I was now travelling are of a long narrow build, and very limited as to their inside accommodation. One has to lie down all the time they are in motion, as a slight movement would easily upset them. This was no irksome condition to me, however; on the contrary, I was only too glad to be quiet. They are the quickest boats I have seen in China. Each one is worked by two men, who relieve one another continuously night and day. They row with their feet, and paddle with their hands; or if the wind is quite favourable, row with their feet, and with one hand manage a small sail, while steering with the other.

After a pleasant and speedy journey, I reached Shanghai in safety on August 9th, through the help of Him who has said, "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee;" "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."

CHAPTER 14: PROVIDENTIAL GUIDANCE

IT now seemed very clear that the lost property—including everything I possessed in China, with the exception of a small sum of money providentially left in Shanghai—had been deliberately stolen by my servant, who had gone off with it to Hang-chau. The first question, of course, was how best to act for the good of the man who had been the cause of so much trouble. It would not have been difficult to take steps that would have led to his punishment; though the likelihood of any reparation being made for the loss sustained was very small. But the consideration which weighed most heavily was that the thief was a man for whose salvation I had laboured and prayed; and I felt that to prosecute him would not be to emphasise the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, in which we had read together, "Resist not evil," and other similar precepts. Finally, concluding that his soul was of more value than the £40 worth of things I had lost, I wrote and told him this, urging upon him his need of repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The course I took commended itself to my Christian friends in England, one of whom was afterwards led to send me a cheque for £40—the first of many subsequently received from the same kind helper.

Having obtained the little money left in Shanghai, I again set out for Ningpo, to seek assistance from Dr. Parker in replacing the medicines I had previously lost by fire. This being satisfactorily accomplished, I returned once more to Shanghai, en route for Swatow, hoping soon to rejoin my much-loved friend, Mr. Burns, in the work in that important centre. God had willed it otherwise, however; and the delay caused by the robbery was just sufficient to prevent me from starting for the South as I had intended.

Over the political horizon storm-clouds had long been gathering, precursors of coming war; and early in October of this year (1856) the affair of the Lorcha Arrow at Canton led to the definite commencement of hostilities. Very soon China was deeply involved in a second prolonged struggle with foreign powers; and missionary operations, in the South at any rate, had to be largely suspended. Tidings of these events, together with letters from Mr. Burns, arrived just in time to meet me in Shanghai as I was leaving for Swatow; and thus hindered, I could not but realise the hand of God in closing the door I had so much desired to enter.

While in Ningpo, I had made the acquaintance of Mr. John Jones, who, with Dr. Parker, represented the Chinese Evangelisation Society in that city. Hindered from returning to Swatow, I now decided to join these brethren in the Ningpo work, and set out at once upon the journey. On the afternoon of the second day, when already about thirty miles distant from Shanghai, Mr. Jones and I drew near the large and important city of Sung-kiang, and I spoke of going ashore to preach the Gospel to the thronging multitudes that lined the banks and crowded the approaches to the city gates.

Among the passengers on board the boat was one intelligent man, who in the course of his travels had been a good deal abroad, and had even visited England, where he went by the name of Peter. As might be expected, he had heard something of the Gospel, but had never experienced its saving power. On the previous evening I had drawn him into earnest converse about his soul's salvation. The man listened with attention, and was even moved to tears, but still no definite result was apparent. I was pleased, therefore, when he asked to be allowed to accompany me, and to hear me preach.

I went into the cabin of the boat to prepare tracts and books for distribution on landing with my Chinese friend, when suddenly I was startled by a splash and a cry from without. I sprang on deck, and took in the situation at a glance. Peter was gone! The other men were all there, on board, looking helplessly at the spot where he had disappeared, but making no effort to save him. A strong wind was carrying the junk rapidly forward in spite of a steady current in the opposite direction, and the low-lying, shrubless shore afforded no landmark to indicate how far we had left the drowning man behind.

I instantly let down the sail and leapt overboard in the hope of finding him. Unsuccessful, I looked around in agonising suspense, and saw close to me a fishing-boat with a peculiar drag-net furnished with hooks, which I knew would bring him up.

"Come!" I cried, as hope revived in my heart. "Come and drag over this spot directly; a man is drowning just here!"

"Veh bin" (It is not convenient), was the unfeeling answer.

"Don't talk of convenience!" cried I in an agony; "a man is drowning, I tell you!"

"We are busy fishing," they responded, "and cannot come."

"Never mind your fishing," I said, "I will give you more money than many a day's fishing will bring; only come—come at once!"

"How much money will you give us?"

"We cannot stay to discuss that now! Come, or it will be too late. I will give you five dollars" (then worth about thirty shillings in English money).

"We won't do it for that," replied the men. "Give us twenty dollars, and we will drag."

"I do not possess so much: do come quickly, and I will give you all I have!"

"How much may that be?"

“I don't know exactly, about fourteen dollars."

At last, but even then slowly enough, the boat was paddled over, and the net let down. Less than a minute sufficed to bring up the body of the missing man. The fishermen were clamorous and indignant because their exorbitant demand was delayed while efforts at resuscitation were being made. But all was in vain—life was extinct.

To myself this incident was profoundly sad and full of significance, suggesting a far more mournful reality. Were not those fishermen actually guilty of this poor Chinaman's death, in that they had the means of saving him at hand, if they would but have used them? Assuredly they were guilty. And yet, let us pause ere we pronounce judgment against them, lest a greater than Nathan answer, "Thou art the man." Is it so hard-hearted, so wicked a thing to neglect to save the body? Of how much sorer punishment, then, is he worthy who leaves the soul to perish, and Cain-like says, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The Lord Jesus commands, commands me, commands you, my brother, and you, my sister. "Go," says He, "go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." Shall we say to Him, "No, it is not convenient"? shall we tell Him that we are busy fishing and cannot go? that we have bought a piece of ground and cannot go? that we have purchased five yoke of oxen, or have married, or are engaged in other and more interesting pursuits, and cannot go? Ere long "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body." Let us remember, let us pray for, let us labour for the unevangelised Chinese; or we shall sin against our own souls. Let us consider Who it is that has said, "If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not He that pondereth the heart consider it? and He that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not He render to every man according to his works?"

Through midnight gloom from Macedon,

The cry of myriads as of one;

The voiceful silence of despair

Is eloquent in awful prayer:

The soul's exceeding bitter cry,

"Come o'er and help us, or we die."

How mournfully it echoes on,

For half the earth is Macedon;

These brethren to their brethren call,

And by the Love which loves them all,

And by the whole world's Life they cry,

"O ye that live, behold we die!"

By other sounds the world is won

Than that which wails from Macedon;

The roar of gain is round it rolled,

Or men unto themselves are sold,

And cannot list the alien cry,

"O hear and help us, lest we die!"

Yet with that cry from Macedon

The very car of Christ rolls on:

"I come; who would abide My day,

In yonder wilds prepare My way;

My voice is crying in their cry,

Help ye the dying, lest ye die."

Jesu, for men of Man the Son,

Yea, Thine the cry from Macedon;

Oh, by the kingdom and the power

And glory of Thine advent hour,

Wake heart and will to hear their cry:

Help us to help them, lest we die.

Group of Christians at Lan-k'i, Cheh-kiang

CHAPTER 15: SETTLEMENT IN NINGPO

THE autumn of 1856 was well advanced before I reached Ningpo, one of the most ancient and influential cities on the coast of China. Opened to the residence of foreigners in 1842 by the treaty of Nan-king, it had long been the scene of missionary labours. Within its thronging thoroughfares the busy tide of life runs high. Four hundred thousand human beings dwell within or around the five miles circuit of its ancient wall, every one a soul that Jesus loves, for whom He died.

As winter drew on I rented a native house in Wu-gyiao-deo, or Lake Head Street. It was not then a very comfortable residence. I have a very distinct remembrance of tracing my initials on the snow which during the night had collected upon my coverlet in the large barn-like upper room, now subdivided into four or five smaller ones, each of which is comfortably ceiled. The tiling of an unceiled Chinese house may keep off the rain—if it happens to be sound—but it does not afford so good a protection against snow, which will beat up through crannies and crevices, and find its way within. But however unfinished may have been its fittings, the little house was well adapted for work amongst the people; and there I thankfully settled down, finding ample scope for service,—morning, noon, and night.

During the latter part of this year my mind was greatly exercised about continued connection with my Society, it being frequently in debt. Personally I had always avoided debt, and kept within my salary, though at times only by very careful economy. Now there was no difficulty in doing this, for my income was larger, and the country being in a more peaceful state, things were not so dear. But the Society itself was in debt. The quarterly bills which I and others were instructed to draw were often met by borrowed money, and a correspondence commenced which terminated in the following year by my resigning from conscientious motives.

To me it seemed that the teaching of God's Word was unmistakably clear: "Owe no man any thing." To borrow money implied, to my mind, a contradiction of Scripture—a confession that God had withheld some good thing, and a determination to get for ourselves what He had not given. Could that which was wrong for one Christian to do be right for an association of Christians? Or could any amount of precedents make a wrong course justifiable? If the Word taught me anything, it taught me to have no connection with debt. I could not think that God was poor, that He was short of resources, or unwilling to supply any want of whatever work was really His. It seemed to me that if there were lack of funds to carry on work, then to that degree, in that special development, or at that time, it could not be the work of God. To satisfy my conscience I was therefore compelled to resign connection with the Society which had hitherto supplied my salary.

It was a great satisfaction to me that my friend and colleague, Mr. Jones, also of the Chinese Evangelisation Society, was led to take the same step; and we were both profoundly thankful that the separation took place without the least breach of friendly feeling on either side. Indeed, we had the joy of knowing that the step we took commended itself to several members of the Committee, although as a whole the Society could not come to our position. Depending upon God alone for supplies, we were enabled to continue a measure of connection with our former supporters, sending home journals, etc., for publication as before, so long as the Society continued to exist.

The step we had taken was not a little trying to faith. I was not at all sure what God would have me do, or whether He would so meet my need as to enable me to continue working as before. I had no friends whatever from whom I expected supplies. I did not know what means the Lord might use; but I was willing to give up all my time to the service of evangelisation among the heathen, if by any means He would supply the smallest amount on which I could live; and if He were not pleased to do this, I was prepared to undertake whatever work might be necessary to supply myself, giving all the time that could be spared from such a calling to more distinctly missionary efforts. But God blessed and prospered me; and how glad and thankful I felt when the separation was really effected! I could look right up into my Father's face with a satisfied heart, ready, by His grace, to do the next thing as He might teach me, and feeling very sure of His loving care.

And how blessedly He did lead me on and provide for me I can never, never tell. It was like a continuation of some of my earlier home experiences. My faith was not untried; it often, often failed, and I was so sorry and ashamed of the failure to trust such a Father. But oh! I was learning to know Him. I would not even then have missed the trial. He became so near, so real, so intimate. The occasional difficulty about funds never came from an insufficient supply for personal needs, but in consequence of ministering to the wants of scores of the hungry and dying ones around us. And trials far more searching in other ways quite eclipsed these difficulties; and being deeper, brought forth in consequence richer fruits. How glad one is now, not only to know, with dear Miss Havergal, that——

"They who trust Him wholly

Find Him wholly true,"

but also that when we fail to trust fully He still remains unchangingly faithful. He is wholly true whether we trust or not. "If we believe not, He abideth faithful; He cannot deny Himself." But oh, how we dishonour our Lord whenever we fail to trust Him, and what peace, blessing, and triumph we lose in thus sinning against the Faithful One! May we never again presume in anything to doubt Him!

The year 1857 was a troublous time, and closed with the notorious bombardment of Canton by the British, and the commencement of our second Chinese war. Rumours of trouble were everywhere rife, and in many places the missionaries passed through not a little danger. In Ningpo this was especially the case, and the preserving care of God in answer to prayer was consequently most marked. When the awful news of the bombardment of Canton reached the Cantonese in Ningpo their wrath and indignation knew no bounds, and they immediately set to work to plot the destruction of all the foreigners resident in the city and neighbourhood. It was well known that many of the foreigners were in the habit of meeting for worship every Sunday evening at one of the missionary houses, and the plan was to surround the place on a given occasion and make short work of all present, cutting off afterwards any who might not be present.

The sanction of the Tao-t'ai, or chief civil magistrate of the city, was easily obtained; and nothing remained to hinder the execution of the plot, of which the foreigners were of course entirely in ignorance. (A similar plot against the Portuguese a few months later was carried out, and between fifty and sixty were massacred in open daylight.) It so happened, however, that one of those acquainted with the conspiracy had a friend engaged in the service of the missionaries; and anxious for his safety, he was led to warn him of the coming danger, and urge his leaving foreign employ. The servant made the matter known to his master, and thus the little community became aware of their peril. Realising the gravity of the situation, they determined to meet together at the house of one of their number to seek the protection of the Most High, and to hide under the shadow of His wings. Nor did they thus meet in vain.

At the very time we were praying the Lord was working. He led an inferior mandarin, the Superintendent of Customs, to call upon the Tao-t'ai, and remonstrate with him upon the folly of permitting such an attempt, which he assured him would rouse the foreigners in other places to come with armed forces to avenge the death of their countrymen and raze the city to the ground. The Tao-t'ai replied that, when the foreigners came for that purpose, he should deny all knowledge of or complicity in the plot, and so direct their vengeance against the Cantonese, who would in their turn be destroyed; "and thus," said he, "we shall get rid of both Cantonese and foreigners by one stroke of policy." The Superintendent of Customs assured him that all such attempts at evasion would be useless; and, finally, the Tao-t'ai sent to the Cantonese, withdrawing his permission, and prohibiting the attack. This took place at the very time when we were asking protection of the Lord, though we did not become acquainted with the facts until some weeks later. Thus again we were led to prove that—

"Sufficient is His arm alone,

And our defence is sure."

I cannot attempt to give any historical record of the events of this period, but ere 1857 terminated Mr. Jones and I were cheered by tokens of blessing. It is interesting to recall the circumstances connected with the first profession of faith in Christ, which encouraged us.

On one occasion I was preaching the glad tidings of salvation through the finished work of Christ, when a middle-aged man stood up, and testified before his assembled countrymen to his faith in the power of the Gospel.

"I have long sought for the Truth," said he earnestly, "as my fathers did before me; but I have never found it. I have travelled far and near, but without obtaining it. I have found no rest in Confucianism, Buddhism, or Taoism; but I do find rest in what I have heard here to-night. Henceforth I am a believer in Jesus."

This man was one of the leading officers of a sect of reformed Buddhists in Ningpo. A short time after his confession of faith in the Saviour there was a meeting of the sect over which he had formerly presided. I accompanied him to that meeting, and there, to his former co-religionists, he testified of the peace he had obtained in believing. Soon after, one of his former companions was converted and baptized. Both now sleep in Jesus. The first of these two long continued to preach to his countrymen the glad tidings of great joy. A few nights after his conversion he asked how long this Gospel had been known in England. He was told that we had known it for some hundreds of years.

"What!" said he, amazed; "is it possible that for hundreds of years you have had the knowledge of these glad tidings in your possession, and yet have only now come to preach it to us? My father sought after the Truth for more than twenty years, and died without finding it. Oh, why did you not come sooner?"

A whole generation has passed away since that mournful inquiry was made; but how many, alas! might repeat the same question to-day? More than two hundred millions in the meanwhile have been swept into eternity, without an offer of salvation. How long shall this continue, and the Master's words, "To every creature," remain unheeded?

Students' quarters, Gan-k'ing Training Home

CHAPTER 16: TIMELY SUPPLIES

A Mandarin's sedan chair

NOT infrequently our God brings His people into difficulties on purpose that they may come to know Him as they could not otherwise do. Then He reveals Himself as "a very present help in trouble," and makes the heart glad indeed at each fresh revelation of a Father's faithfulness. We who only see so small a part of the sweet issues of trial often feel that we would not for anything have missed them; how much more shall we bless and magnify His Name when all the hidden things are brought to light!

In the autumn of 1857, just one year after I came to settle in Ningpo, a little incident occurred that did much to strengthen our faith in the loving-kindness and ever-watchful care of God.

A brother in the Lord, the Rev. John Quarterman, of the American Presbyterian Mission North, was taken with virulent small-pox, and it was my mournful privilege to nurse him through his suffering illness to its fatal close. When all was over, it became necessary to lay aside the garments worn while nursing, for fear of conveying the infection to others. Not having sufficient money in hand to purchase what was needful in order to make this change, prayer was the only resource. The Lord answered it by the unexpected arrival of a long-lost box of clothing from Swatow, that had remained in the care of the Rev. William Burns when I left him for Shanghai, in the early summer of the previous year. The arrival of the things just at this juncture was as appropriate as it was remarkable, and brought a sweet sense of the Father's own providing.

About two months later the following was penned:——

November 18th, 1857.

Many seem to think that I am very poor. This certainly is true enough in one sense, but I thank God it is "as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing all things." And my God shall supply all my need; to Him be all the glory. I would not, if I could, be otherwise than I am—entirely dependent myself upon the Lord, and used as a channel of help to others.

On Saturday, the 4th inst., our regular home mail arrived. That morning we supplied, as usual, a breakfast to the destitute poor, who came to the number of seventy. Sometimes they do not reach forty, at others again exceeding eighty. They come to us every day, Lord's Day excepted, for then we cannot manage to attend to them and get through all our other duties too. Well, on that Saturday morning we paid all expenses, and provided ourselves for the morrow, after which we had not a single dollar left between us. How the Lord was going to provide for Monday we knew not; but over our mantelpiece hung two scrolls in the Chinese character—Ebenezer, "Hitherto hath the Lord helped us"; and Jehovah-Jireh, "The Lord will provide"—and He kept us from doubting for a moment. That very day the mail came in, a week sooner than was expected, and Mr. Jones received a bill for two hundred and fourteen dollars. We thanked God and took courage. The bill was taken to a merchant, and although there is usually a delay of several days in getting the change, this time he said, "Send down on Monday." We sent, and though he had not been able to buy all the dollars, he let us have seventy on account; so all was well. Oh, it is sweet to live thus directly dependent upon the Lord, who never fails us!

On Monday the poor had their breakfast as usual, for we had not told them not to come, being assured that it was the Lord's work, and that the Lord would provide. We could not help our eyes filling with tears of gratitude when we saw not only our own needs supplied, but the widow and the orphan, the blind and the lame, the friendless and the destitute, together provided for by the bounty of Him who feeds the ravens. "O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His Name together. . . . Taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in Him. O fear the Lord, ye His saints: for there is no want to them that fear Him. The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing"—and if not good, why want it?

But even two hundred dollars cannot last for ever, and by New Year's Day supplies were again getting low. At last, on January 6th, 1858, only one solitary cash remained—the twentieth part of a penny—in the joint possession of Mr. Jones and myself; but though tried we looked to God once again to manifest His gracious care. Enough provision was found in the house to supply a meagre breakfast; after which, having neither food for the rest of the day, nor money to buy any, we could only betake ourselves to Him who was able to supply all our need with the petition, "Give us this day our daily bread."

After prayer and deliberation we thought that perhaps we ought to dispose of something we possessed in order to meet our immediate requirements. But on looking round we saw nothing that we could well spare, and little that the Chinese would purchase for ready money. Credit to any extent we might have had, could we conscientiously have availed ourselves of it, but this we felt to be unscriptural in itself, as well as inconsistent with the position we were in. We had, indeed, one article—an iron stove—which we knew the Chinese would readily purchase; but we much regretted the necessity of parting with it. At length, however, we set out to the founder's, and after a walk of some distance came to the river, which we had intended to cross by a floating bridge of boats; but here the Lord shut up our path. The bridge had been carried away during the preceding night, and the river was only passable by means of a ferry, the fare for which was two cash each person. As we only possessed one cash, our course clearly was to return and await God's own interposition on our behalf.

Upon reaching home, we found that Mrs. Jones had gone with the children to dine at a friend's house, in accordance with an invitation accepted some days previously. Mr. Jones, though himself included in the invitation, refused now to go and leave me to fast alone. So we set to work and carefully searched the cupboards; and though there was nothing to eat, we found a small packet of cocoa, which, with a little hot water, somewhat revived us. After this we again cried to the Lord in our trouble, and the Lord heard and saved us out of all our distresses. For while we were still upon our knees a letter arrived from England containing a remittance.

This timely supply not only met the immediate and urgent need of the day; for in the assured confidence that God, whose we were and whom we served, would not put to shame those whose whole and only trust was in Himself. My marriage had been previously arranged to take place just fourteen days after this date. And this expectation was not disappointed; for "the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed, but My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of My peace be removed." And although during subsequent years our faith was often exercised, and sometimes severely, He ever proved faithful to His promise, and never suffered us to lack any good thing.

Never, perhaps, was there a union that more fully realised the blessed truth, "Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord." My dear wife was not only a precious gift to me; God blessed her to many others during the twelve eventful years through which she was spared to those that loved her and to China.

Hers had been a life connection with missionary work in that great empire; for her father, the loved and devoted Samuel Dyer, was amongst the very earliest representatives of the London Mission in the East. He reached the Straits as early as 1827, and for sixteen years laboured assiduously amongst the Chinese in Penang and Singapore, completing at the same time a valuable fount of Chinese metallic type, the first of the kind that had then been attempted. Dying in 1843, it was never Mr. Dyers privilege to realise his hopes of ultimately being able to settle on Chinese soil; but his children lived to see the country opened to the Gospel, and to take their share in the great work that had been so dear to his heart. At the time of her marriage, my dear wife had been already living for several years in Ningpo with her friend, Miss Aldersey, in whose varied missionary operations she was well qualified to render valuable assistance.

CHAPTER 17: GOD A REFUGE FOR US

A SOMEWHAT different though not less manifest answer to prayer was vouchsafed early in the year 1859. My dear wife was brought very low by illness, and at last all hope of recovery seemed gone. Every remedy tried had proved unavailing; and Dr. Parker, who was in attendance, had nothing more to suggest. Life was ebbing fast away. The only ground of hope was that God might yet see fit to raise her up, in answer to believing but submissive prayer.

The afternoon for the usual prayer meeting among the missionaries had arrived, and I sent in a request for prayer, which was most warmly responded to. Just at this time a remedy that had not yet been tried was suggested to my mind, and I felt that I must hasten to consult Dr. Parker as to the propriety of using it. It was a moment of anguish. The hollow temples, sunken eyes, and pinched features denoted the near approach of death; and it seemed more than questionable as to whether life would hold out until my return. It was nearly two miles to Dr. Parker's house, and every moment appeared long. On my way thither, while wrestling mightily with God in prayer, the precious words were brought with power to my soul, "Call upon Me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shall glorify Me." I was at once enabled to plead them in faith, and the result was deep, deep, unspeakable peace and joy. All consciousness of distance was gone. Dr. Parker cordially approved of the use of the means suggested, but upon arriving at home I saw at a glance that the desired change had taken place in the absence of this or any other remedy. The pinched aspect of the countenance had given place to the calmness of tranquil slumber, and not one unfavourable symptom remained to retard recovery to health and strength.

Spared thus in answer to prayer the loss of my own loved one, it was with added sympathy and sorrow that I felt for Dr. Parker, when, in the autumn of the same year, his own wife was very suddenly removed. It being necessary for the doctor to return at once with his motherless children to Glasgow, temporary arrangements had to be made for the conduct of the Mission Hospital in Ningpo, for which he alone had been responsible. Under these circumstances he requested me to take up the work, at least so far as the dispensary was concerned. After a few days' waiting upon the Lord for guidance, I felt constrained to undertake not only the dispensary work, but also that of the hospital; relying solely upon the faithfulness of a prayer-hearing God to furnish the means required for its support.

The funds for the maintenance of the hospital had hitherto been supplied by the proceeds of the doctor's foreign medical practice; and with his departure these ceased. But had not God said that whatever we ask in the Name of the Lord Jesus shall be done? And are we not told to seek first the kingdom of God, not means to advance it, and that all these things shall be added to us? Such promises were surely sufficient. Eight days before entering upon this responsibility I had not the remotest idea of ever doing so; still less could friends at home have anticipated it. But the Lord had foreseen the need, and already funds were on the way to supply it.

At times there were not less than fifty in-patients in the hospital, besides a large number who daily attended the out-patient department. Thirty beds were ordinarily allotted to free patients and their attendants; and about as many to opium-smokers, who paid for their board while being cured of the habit. As all the wants of the sick in the wards were supplied gratuitously, in addition to the remedial appliances needed for the out-patient work, the daily expenses were considerable; besides which, a number of native attendants were required, involving their support.

When Dr. Parker handed the hospital over to me he was able to leave money that would meet the salaries and working expenses of the current month, and little more. Being unable to guarantee their support, his native staff retired; and then I mentioned the circumstances to the members of our little church, some of whom volunteered to help me, depending, like myself, upon the Lord; and they with me continued to wait upon God that in some way or other He would provide for His own work. Day by day the stores diminished, and they were all but exhausted when one day a remarkable letter reached me from a friend in England which contained a cheque for £50. The letter stated that the sender had recently lost his father, and had inherited his property; that not desiring to increase his personal expenditure, he wished to hold the money which had now been left to him to further the Lord's work. He enclosed the £50, saying that I might know of some special need for it; but leaving me free to use it for my own support, or in any way that the Lord might lead me; only asking to know how it was applied, and whether there was need for more.

After a little season of thanksgiving with my dear wife, I called my native helpers into our little chapel, and translated to them the letter. I need not say how rejoiced they were, and that we together praised God. They returned to their work in the hospital with overflowing hearts, and told out to the patients what a God was ours; appealing to them whether their idols had ever helped them so. Both helpers and patients were blessed spiritually through this remarkable provision, and from that time the Lord provided all that was necessary for carrying on the institution, in addition to what was needed for the maintenance of my own family, and for sustaining other branches of missionary work under my care. When, nine months later, I was obliged through failure of health to relinquish this charge, I was able to leave more funds in hand for the support of the hospital than were forthcoming at the time I undertook it.

But not only were pecuniary supplies vouchsafed in answer to prayer—many lives were spared; persons apparently in hopeless stages of disease were restored, and success was given in cases of serious and dangerous operations. In the case of one poor man, whose legs were amputated under very unfavourable circumstances, healthy action took place with such rapidity that both wounds were healed in less than two weeks. And more permanent benefits than these were conferred. Many were convinced of the truth of Christianity; not a few sought the Lord in faith and prayer, and experienced the power of the Great Physician to cure the sin-sick soul. During the nine months above alluded to sixteen patients from the hospital were baptized, and more than thirty others became candidates for admission into one or other of the Christian churches in the city.

Thus the year 1860 began with openings on all hands, but time and strength were sadly too limited to admit of their being used to the best advantage. For some time the help of additional workers had been a much-felt need; and in January very definite prayer was made to the Lord of the harvest that He would thrust forth more labourers into this special portion of the great world-field. Writing to relatives at home in England, under date of January 16th, 1860, I thus expressed the deep longing of our hearts:—

Do you know any earnest, devoted young men desirous of serving God in China, who—not wishing for more than their actual support—would be willing to come out and labour here? Oh, for four or five such helpers! They would probably begin to preach in Chinese in six months time; and in answer to prayer the necessary means for their support would be found.

But no one came to help us then; and under the incessant physical and mental strain involved, in the care of the hospital during Dr. Parker's absence, as well as the continued discharge of my other missionary duties, my own health began rapidly to fail, and it became a serious question as to whether it would not be needful to return to England for a time.

It was hard to face this possibility. The growing church and work seemed to need our presence, and it was no small trial to part from those whom we had learned so truly to love in the Lord. Thirty or forty native Christians had been gathered into the recently organised church; and the well-filled meetings, and the warm-hearted earnestness of the converts, all bespoke a future of much promise. At last, however, completely prostrated by repeated attacks of illness, the only hope of restoration seemed to lie in a voyage to England and a brief stay in its more bracing climate; and this necessity, painful though it seemed at the time, proved to be only another opportunity for the manifestation of the faithfulness and loving care of Him "who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will."

As heretofore, the Lord was present with His aid. The means for our journey were supplied, and that so liberally that we were able to bring with us a native Christian to assist in translation or other literary work, and to instruct in the language such helpers as the Lord might raise up for the extension of the Mission. That He would give us fellow-labourers we had no doubt; for we had been enabled to seek them from Him in earnest and believing prayer for many months previously.

The day before leaving China we wrote as follows to our friend W. T. Berger, Esq., whom we had known in England, and who had ever strengthened our hands in the Lord while in that distant land:—

"We are bringing with us a young Chinese brother to assist in literary work, and I hope also in teaching the dialect to those whom the Lord may induce to return with us."

And throughout the voyage our earnest cry to God was that He would overrule our stay at home for good to China, and make it instrumental in raising up at least five helpers to labour in the province of Cheh-kiang.

The way in which it pleased the Lord to answer these earnest and believing prayers, and the "exceeding abundantly" with which He crowned them, we shall now sketch in brief outline.

CHAPTER 18: A NEW AGENCY NEEDED

"My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”[li]  How true are these words! When the Lord is bringing in great blessing in the best possible way, how oftentimes our unbelieving hearts are feeling, if not saying, like Jacob of old, "All these things are against me." Or we are filled with fear, as were the disciples when the Lord, walking on the waters, drew near to quiet the troubled sea, and to bring them quickly to their desired haven. And yet mere common-sense ought to tell us that He, whose way is perfect, can make no mistakes; that He who has promised to "perfect that which concerneth" us, and whose minute care counts the very hairs of our heads, and forms for us our circumstances, must know better than we the way to forward our truest interests and to glorify His own Name.

"Blind unbelief is sure to err

And scan His work in vain;

God is His own Interpreter,

And He will make it plain."

To me it seemed a great calamity that failure of health compelled my relinquishing work for God in China, just when it was more fruitful than ever before; and to leave the little band of Christians in Ningpo, needing much care and teaching, was a great sorrow. Nor was the sorrow lessened when, on reaching England, medical testimony assured me that return to China, at least for years to come, was impossible. Little did I then realise that the long separation from China was a necessary step towards the formation of a work which God would bless as He has blessed the China Inland Mission. While in the field, the pressure of claims immediately around me was so great that I could not think much of the still greater needs of the regions farther inland; and, if they were thought of, could do nothing for them. But while detained for some years in England, daily viewing the whole country on the large map on the wall of my study, I was as near to the vast regions of Inland China as to the smaller districts in which I had laboured personally for God; and prayer was often the only resource by which the burdened heart could gain any relief.

As a long absence from China appeared inevitable, the next question was how best to serve China while in England, and this led to my engaging for several years, with the late Rev. F. F. Gough of the C. M. S., in the revision of a version of the New Testament in the colloquial of Ningpo for the British and Foreign Bible Society. In undertaking this work, in my short-sightedness I saw nothing beyond the use that the Book, and the marginal references, would be to the native Christians; but I have often seen since that, without those months of feeding and feasting on the Word of God, I should have been quite unprepared to form, on its present basis, a mission like the China Inland Mission.

In the study of that Divine Word I learned that, to obtain successful labourers, not elaborate appeals for help, but, first, earnest prayer to God to thrust forth labourers, and, second, the deepening of the spiritual life of the church, so that men should be unable to stay at home, were what was needed. I saw that the Apostolic plan was not to raise ways and means, but to go and do the work, trusting in His sure Word who has said, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."

In the meantime the prayer for workers for Cheh-kiang was being answered. The first, Mr. Meadows, sailed for China with his young wife in January 1862, through the kind co-operation and aid of our friend Mr. Berger. The second left England in 1864, having her passage provided by the Foreign Evangelisation Society. The third and fourth reached Ningpo on July 24th, 1865. A fifth soon followed them, reaching Ningpo in September 1865. Thus the prayer for the five workers was fully answered; and we were encouraged to look to God for still greater things.

Months of earnest prayer and not a few abortive efforts had resulted in a deep conviction that a special agency was essential for the evangelisation of Inland China. At this time I had not only the daily help of prayer and conference with my beloved friend and fellow-worker the late Rev. F. F. Gough, but also invaluable aid and counsel from Mr. and Mrs. Berger, with whom I and my dear wife (whose judgment and piety were of priceless value at this juncture) spent many days in prayerful deliberation. The grave difficulty of possibly interfering with existing missionary operations at home was foreseen; but it was concluded that, by simple trust in God, suitable agency might be raised up and sustained without interfering injuriously with any existing work. I had also a growing conviction that God would have me to seek from Him the needed workers, and to go forth with them. But for a long time unbelief hindered my taking the first step.

How inconsistent unbelief always is! I had no doubt that, if I prayed for workers, "in the Name" of the Lord Jesus Christ, they would be given me. I had no doubt that, in answer to such prayer, the means for our going forth would be provided, and that doors would be opened before us in unreached parts of the Empire. But I had not then learned to trust God for keeping power and grace for myself, so no wonder that I could not trust Him to keep others who might be prepared to go with me. I feared that in the midst of the dangers, difficulties, and trials which would necessarily be connected with such a work, some who were comparatively inexperienced Christians might break down, and bitterly reproach me for having encouraged them to undertake an enterprise for which they were unequal.

Yet, what was I to do? The feeling of blood-guiltiness became more and more intense. Simply because I refused to ask for them, the labourers did not come forward—did not go out to China—and every day tens of thousands were passing away to Christless graves! Perishing China so filled my heart and mind that there was no rest by day, and little sleep by night, till health broke down. At the invitation of my beloved and honoured friend, Mr. George Pearse (then of the Stock Exchange), I went to spend a few days with him in Brighton.

On Sunday, June 25th, 1865, unable to bear the sight of a congregation of a thousand or more Christian people rejoicing in their own security, while millions were perishing for lack of knowledge, I wandered out on the sands alone, in great spiritual agony; and there the Lord conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to God for this service. I told Him that all the responsibility as to issues and consequences must rest with Him; that as His servant, it was mine to obey and to follow Him—His, to direct, to care for, and to guide me and those who might labour with me. Need I say that peace at once flowed into my burdened heart? There and then I asked Him for twenty-four fellow-workers, two for each of eleven inland provinces which were without a missionary, and two for Mongolia; and writing the petition on the margin of the Bible I had with me, I returned home with a heart enjoying rest such as it had been a stranger to for months, and with an assurance that the Lord would bless His own work and that I should share in the blessing. I had previously prayed, and asked prayer, that workers might be raised up for the eleven then unoccupied provinces, and thrust forth and provided for, but had not surrendered myself to be their leader.

About this time, with the help of my dear wife, I wrote the little book, China's Spiritual Need and Claims. Every paragraph was steeped in prayer. With the help of Mr. Berger, who had given valued aid in the revision of the manuscript, and who bore the expense of printing an edition of 3000 copies, they were soon put in circulation. I spoke publicly of the proposed work as opportunity permitted, specially at the Perth and Mildmay Conferences of 1865, and continued in prayer for fellow-workers, who were soon raised up, and after due correspondence were invited to my home, then in the East of London. When one house became insufficient, the occupant of the adjoining house removed, and I was able to rent it; and when that in its turn became insufficient, further accommodation was provided close by. Soon there were a number of men and women under preparatory training, and engaging in evangelistic work which tested in some measure their qualifications as soul-winners.

CHAPTER 19: THE FORMATION OF THE C. I. M.

IT was thus that in the year 1865 the China Inland Mission was organised; and the workers already in the field were incorporated into it. W. T. Berger, Esq., then residing at Saint Hill, near East Grinstead, without whose help and encouragement I could not have gone forward, undertook the direction of the home department of the work during my anticipated absence in China; and I proposed, as soon as arrangements could be completed, to go out with the volunteers and take the direction of the work in the field. For the support of the workers already in China, our friends at home were sending in unsolicited contributions from time to time, and every need was met.

We had now, however, to look forward to the outgoing of a party of sixteen or seventeen, and estimated that from £1500 to £2000 might be required to cover outfits, passage-money, and initial expenses. I wrote a little pamphlet, calling it "Occasional Paper, No. I." (intending in successive numbers to give to donors and friends accounts of the work wrought through us in China), and in that paper stated the anticipated needs for floating the enterprise. I expected that God would incline the hearts of some of the readers to send contributions: I had determined never to use personal solicitation, or to make collections, or to issue collecting-books. Missionary-boxes were thought unobjectionable, and we had a few prepared for those who might ask for them, and have continued to use them ever since.

It was February 6th, 1866, when I sent my manuscript of "Occasional Paper, No. I.," with a design for the cover, to the printer. From delays in engraving and printing, it was March 12th when the bales of pamphlets were delivered at my house. Now on February 6th a daily prayer-meeting, from 12 to 1 o'clock, had been commenced, to ask for the needed funds. And that we had not asked in vain, the following extract from "Occasional Paper, No. II." will show:—

"The receipts for 1864 were £51:14s.; for 1865, from January to June, £221:12:6, besides two free passages; from June to December, £923:12:8. Hindrances having occurred, the MS. of the "Occasional Paper, No. I." was not completed till February 6th, 1866. Up to this time we had received (from December 30th) £170:8:3.

"We felt much encouraged by the receipt of so much money in little more than a month, as it was entirely unsolicited by us—save from God. But it was also evident that we must ask the Lord to do yet greater things for us, or it would be impossible for a party of from ten to sixteen to leave in the middle of May. Daily united prayer was therefore offered to God for the funds needful for the outfits and passages of as many as He would have to go out in May.

"Owing to the delays mentioned above in the printing of the 'Occasional Paper,' it was not ready for the publisher until March 12th. On this day I again examined my mission cash-book, and the comparison of the result of the two similar periods of one month and six days each, one before and one after special prayer for £1500 to £2000, was very striking:—

"Receipts from December 30th to February 6th,

£170

8

3

"    Feb. 6th to Mar. 12th

£1774

5

11

"Funds advised, since received

200

0

0

—————

£1974

5

11

"This, it will be noticed, was previous to the circulation of the 'Occasional Paper,' and, consequently, was not the result of it. It was the response of a faithful God to the united prayers of those whom He had called to serve Him in the Gospel of His dear Son.

"We can now compare with these two periods a third of the same extent. From March 12th to April 18th the receipts were £529, showing that when God had supplied the special need, the special supply also ceased. Truly there is a Living God, and He is the hearer and answerer of prayer."

But this gracious answer to prayer made it a little difficult to circulate "Occasional Paper, No. I.," for it stated as a need that which was already supplied. The difficulty was obviated by the issue with each copy of a coloured inset stating that the funds for outfit and passage were already in hand in answer to prayer. We were reminded of the difficulty of Moses—not a very common one in the present day—and of the proclamation he had to send through the camp to the people to prepare no more for the building of the Tabernacle, as the gifts in hand were already too much. We are convinced that if there were less solicitation for money and more dependence upon the power of the Holy Ghost and upon the deepening of spiritual life, the experience of Moses would be a common one in every branch of Christian work.

Preparations for sailing to China were at once proceeded with. About this time I was asked to give a lecture on China in a village not very far from London, and agreed to do so on condition that there should be no collection, and that this should be announced on the bills. The gentleman who invited me, and who kindly presided as chairman, said he had never had that condition imposed before. He accepted it, however, and the bills were issued accordingly for the 2nd or 3rd of May. With the aid of a large map, something of the extent and population and deep spiritual need of China was presented, and many were evidently impressed.

At the close of the meeting the chairman said that by my request it had been intimated on the bills that there would be no collection; but he felt that many present would be distressed and burdened if they had not the opportunity of contributing something towards the good work proposed. He trusted that as the proposition emanated entirely from himself, and expressed, he felt sure, the feelings of many in the audience, I should not object to it. I begged, however, that the condition agreed to might be carried out; pointing out among other reasons for making no collection, that the very reason adduced by our kind chairman was, to my mind, one of the strongest for not making it. My wish was, not that those present should be relieved by making such contribution as might there and then be convenient, under the influence of a present emotion; but that each one should go home burdened with the deep need of China, and ask of God what He would have them to do. If, after thought and prayer, they were satisfied that a pecuniary contribution was what He wanted of them, it could be given to any Missionary Society having agents in China; or it might be posted to our London office; but that perhaps in many cases what God wanted was not a money contribution, but personal consecration to His service abroad; or the giving up of son or daughter—more precious than silver or gold—to His service. I added that I thought the tendency of a collection was to leave the impression that the all-important thing was money, whereas no amount of money could convert a single soul; that what was needed was that men and women filled with the Holy Ghost should give themselves to the work: for the support of such there would never be a lack of funds. As my wish was evidently very strong, the chairman kindly yielded to it, and closed the meeting. He told me, however, at the supper-table, that he thought it was a mistake on my part, and that, notwithstanding all I had said, a few persons had put some little contributions into his hands.

Next morning at breakfast, my kind host came in a little late, and acknowledged to not having had a very good night. After breakfast he asked me to his study, and giving me the contributions handed to him the night before, said, "I thought last night, Mr. Taylor, that you were in the wrong about a collection; I am now convinced you were quite right. As I thought in the night of that stream of souls in China ever passing onward into the dark, I could only cry as you suggested, 'Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?' I think I have obtained the guidance I sought, and here it is." He handed me a cheque for £500, adding that if there had been a collection he would have given a few pounds to it, but now this cheque was the result of having spent no small part of the night in prayer.

I need scarcely say how surprised and thankful I was for this gift. I had received at the breakfast-table a letter from Messrs. Killick, Martin and Co., shipping agents, in which they stated that they could offer us the whole passenger accommodation of the ship Lammermuir. I went direct to the ship, found it in every way suitable, and paid the cheque on account. As above stated, the funds deemed needed had been already in hand for some time; but the coincidence of the simultaneous offer of the ship accommodation and this munificent gift—God's "exceeding abundantly"—greatly encouraged my heart.

On the 26th of May we sailed for China in the Lammermuir, a missionary party of 16 (besides my four children and their nurse, and Miss Bausum (afterwards Mrs. Barchet); in all 22 passengers. Mr. Berger took charge of the home department, and thus the C. I. M. was fully inaugurated.

CHAPTER 20: THE MISSION IN 1894

THE events sketched in the last two chapters have been more fully delineated by Miss Guinness in her interesting Story of the China Inland Mission, which continues its history to the present date. It is indeed a record of the goodness of God, every remembrance of which calls for gratitude and praise. We can only here briefly mention a few facts, referring our readers to Miss Guinness's work for all details.

After a voyage of many mercies the Lammermuir party safely reached China, and during the first ten years stations and out-stations were opened in many cities and towns in four provinces which hitherto had been unreached by the Gospel. At home Mr. and Mrs. Berger continued their devoted service until March 19th, 1872, I having returned to England the year before. Shortly after this the London Council was formed, which has now for several years been assisted by an auxiliary Council of ladies. A Scotch Council was also formed in Glasgow a few years ago.

A visit to America in 1888 issued in the formation of the Council for North America, and a similar Council for Australasia was commenced in Melbourne two years later. In the field a China Council was organised in 1886, composed of senior missionaries who meet quarterly in Shanghai.

Closely associated with the C. I. M. are seven Committees—in England, Norway, Sweden (two), Finland, Germany, and the United States—which send out and support their own missionaries, who in China have the assistance of the educational and other advantages of the C. I. M., and who work under its direction.

The staff of the Mission, in May 1893, consisted of 552 missionaries (including wives and associates). There were also 326 native helpers (95 of whom were unpaid), working as pastors, evangelists, teachers, colporteurs, Bible-women, etc., in 14 different provinces.

Duly qualified candidates for missionary labour are accepted without restriction as to denomination, provided they are sound in the faith in all fundamental truths: these go out in dependence upon God for temporal supplies, with the clear understanding that the officers of the Mission do not guarantee any income whatever; and knowing that as they will not go into debt, they can only minister to them as the funds sent in from time to time will allow. But we praise God that during the past twenty-eight years such ministry has always been possible; our God has supplied all our need, and has withheld no good thing.

All the expenses of the Mission at home and abroad are met by voluntary contributions, sent to the offices of the Mission without personal solicitation, by those who wish to aid in this effort to spread the knowledge of the Gospel throughout China. The income for the year 1892 was about £34,000 from all sources—Great Britain, the Continent of Europe, North America, Australasia, China, etc.

Some of the missionaries having private property have gone out at their own expense, and do not take anything from the Mission funds.

Stations have been opened in ten of the eleven provinces which were previously without Protestant missionaries; from one of these, however, we have had to retire. The eleventh province has been visited several times, and it is hoped that in it permanent work may soon be begun.

More than 200 stations and out-stations have been opened in fourteen of the eighteen provinces, in all of which stations either missionaries or native labourers are resident. Over 6000 converts have been baptized from the commencement, some 4000 of whom are now living and in fellowship.

THE MISSION IN 1902

The year 1894, in which the first edition of A Retrospect appeared, was marked by the erection of large and commodious premises for the work of the Mission, and early in the following year the houses in Pyrland Road, which had so long formed the home of the Mission in England, were vacated, and Newington Green, London, N., became the address of the Mission offices and home.

From that date until the Boxer outbreak of 1900 the Mission made steady progress, the development of the work in China being accompanied by corresponding developments in the home departments of the Mission in England, America, and Australasia.

In January 1900, before the Boxer outbreak, there were in connection with the Mission, 811 missionaries, including wives and associates; 171 stations; 223 out-stations; 387 chapels; 581 paid native helpers; 193 unpaid native helpers; 8557 communicants in fellowship, 12,964 having been baptized from the commencement. There were 266 organised churches; 788 boarding scholars; 1382 day scholars; 6 hospitals; 18 dispensaries; and 46 opium refuges.

During the terrible year of 1900, when no fewer than 135 missionaries and 53 missionaries' children and many thousands of Chinese Christians were cruelly murdered, the China Inland Mission lost 58 missionaries and 21 children. The records of these unparalleled times of suffering have been told in Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission and in Last Letters, both of which books will be found advertised at the end of this volume. Apart from loss of life, there was an immense amount of Mission property destroyed, and the missionaries were compelled to retire from their stations in most parts of China.

The doors closed by this outbreak have all been reopened in the goodness of God. In those districts which suffered most from the massacres the work has largely been one of reorganisation; but throughout China generally there has been a spirit of awakening and a time of enlarged opportunity; which is a loud call for more men and women to volunteer to step into the gaps and fill the places of those who have fallen.

Among recent developments we would specially mention the opening of a new home centre at Philadelphia, U.S.A. The total income of the Mission for 1901 was £53,633 = $257,712, and the total received in England alone, for 1902, was £51,446 = $246,912. The total membership of the Mission in June 1902 was 761.

Current information about the progress of the work in China may be obtained from China's Millions, the organ of the Mission. It is published monthly, and may be ordered through any bookseller from Messrs. Morgan and Scott, 12 Paternoster Buildings, E.C., for 1s. per year, or direct by post from the offices of the Mission, Newington Green, London, N., for 1s. 6d. per annum.

The Australasian edition of China's Millions may be ordered at the same price from M. L. Hutchinson, Little Collins Street, or from the Mission Offices, 267 Collins Street, Melbourne. The North American edition will be sent post free from the Mission Offices, 507 Church Street, Toronto, for 50 cents per annum.

Prayer meetings on behalf of the work in China are held at the principal home centres of the Mission, as follows: Every Saturday afternoon from 4 to 6 o'clock, at Newington Green, London. Every Friday evening at 8 o'clock, at 507 Church Street, Toronto. Every Saturday afternoon at 4 o'clock, in the Office, 267 Collins Street, Melbourne. A hearty invitation to attend any one of these meetings is given to any one residing in or visiting any of these cities.

Donations to the Mission, applications from candidates, orders for literature, requests for deputation speakers, and other correspondence should be forwarded to

The Secretary,

China Inland Mission,

Newington Green, London, N.

The Home Director,

China Inland Mission,

507 Church Street, Toronto, Canada.

or

702 Witherspoon Buildings, Philadelphia, U.S.A.

or to

The Secretary,

China Inland Mission,

267 Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia.

MAP OF CHINA, showing:

1. All Protestant Mission Stations in China up to June 1866, when the C.I.M. was founded (they numbered fifteen) These are underlined in black.

2. The Stations of the China Inland Mission which (with the exception of Ning-Po & Fung-hwa) have been opened since June 1866. These are printed in red.

For more on Hudson Taylor you may want to check:

·         MOVIE: Hudson Taylor Story

·         Men of Faith biography of Hudson Taylor

·         Spiritual Secret of Hudson Taylor

STATIONS OF THE CHINA INLAND MISSION, 1900

(BEFORE THE BOXER OUTBREAK)

The best guide to the stations of the Mission is the new China Inland Mission Map (size 44 × 38 in., mounted on linen, coloured, varnished, and hung on rollers), price 8s. net, carriage and packing extra. Mounted to fold, 8s. net, post free.

Provinces.

Stations.

Work

Begun.

Kan-suh, 1876

Liang-chau

1888

Si-ning

1885

LAN-CHAU

1885

Ts'in-chau

1878

Area, 125,450 square miles.

Fu K'iang

1899

Population, 9,285,377.

P'ing-liang

1895

King-chau

1895

Ts'ing-ning

1897

Chen-yuen

1897

Tong-chi

1899

Shen-si, 1876.

Lung-chau

1893

Feng-tsiang

1888

Mei-hien

1893

K'ien-chau

1894

Area, 67,400 square miles.

Chau-chih

1893

Population, 8,432,193.

Sang-kia-chuang

1894

Hing-p'ing

1893

SI-GAN

1893

Ying-kia-wei

1893

Chen-kia-hu

1897

Lan-t'ien

1895

K'ien-yang

1897

Ch'ang-wu

1897

San-shui

1897

T'ung-chau

1891

Han-ch'eng

1897

Han-chung

1879

Ch'eng-ku

1887

Si-hsiang

1896

Yang-hien

1896

Hing-an

1898

Shan-si, 1876

Ta-t'ung

1886

Hwen-yuen

1898

Soh-p'ing

1895

Tsö-yuin

1895

Ying-chau

1897

Hiao-i

1887

Kiai-hiu

1891

Sih-chau

1885

Ta-ning

1885

Kih-chau

1891

Ho-tsin

1893

Ping-yao

1888

Area, 56,268 square miles.

Hoh-chau

1886

Population, 12,211,453.

Hung-t'ung

1886

Yoh-yang

1896

P'ing-yang

1879

K'üh-wu

1885

I-shï

1891

Yüin-ch'eng

1888

Mei-ti-kiai

1895

Hiai-chau

1895

Lu-ch'eng

1889

Ü-wu

1896

Lu-gan

1889

Kiang-chau

1898

Chih-li, 1887

T'ien-tsin

1888

Area, 58,949 square miles.

PAO-T'ING

1891

Population, 17,937,000.

Hwuy-luh

1887

Shun-teh

1888

Shan-tung, 1879

Chefoo

1879

"    Sanatorium

1880

"    Boys' School

1880

Area, 53,762 square miles.

"    Girls'    "

1884

Population, 36,247,835.

"   Preparatory School

1895

T'ung-shin

1889

Ning-hai

1886

Ho-nan, 1875

Siang-ch'eng

1891

Chau-kia-k'eo

1884

Ho-nan

...

Ho-peh

...

Ho-si

...

Area, 66,913 square miles.

Ch'en-chau

1895

Population, 22,115,827.

T'ai-k'ang

1895

She-k'i-tien

1886

Kwang-chau

1899

Hin-an

1899

King-tsï-kuan

1896

W. Si-ch'uan, 1877

Kwan-hien

1889

CH'EN-TU

1881

Kia-ting

1888

Area of whole Province, 166,800 square miles.

Sui-fu

1888

Lu-chau

1890

Hiao-shï

1899

Ch'ung-k'ing

1877

Ta-chien-lu

1897

E. Si-ch'uan, 1886

Kwang-yuen

1889

Sin-tien-tsï

1892

Pao-ning

1886

Ying-shan

1898

Population of whole Province, 67,712,897.

Kü-hien

1898

Shun-k'ing

1896

Pa-chau

1887

Sui-ting

1899

Wan-hien

1888

Hu-peh, 1874

Lao-ho-k'eo

1887

Area, 70,450 square miles.

Han-kow

1889

Population, 34,244,685.

I-ch'ang

1895

Gan-hwuy, 1869

T'ai-ho

1892

Ving-chau

1897

Ch'eng-yang-kwan

1887

K'u-ch'eng

1887

Fuh-hing-tsih (Lai-gan)

1898

Luh-gan

1890

GAN-K'ING

1869

Area, 48,461 square miles.

Training Home

...

Population, 20,596,288.

Wu-hu

1893

Kien-p'ing

1894

Ning-kwoh

1874

Kwang-teh

1890

Ch'i-chau

1889

Kien-teh

1892

Hwuy-chau

1884

Kiang-su, 1854

Gan-tung

1891

Ts'ing-kiang-pu

1869

Kao-yiu

1888

Yang-chau

1868

Training Home

...

Chin-kiang

1888

Area, 44,500 square miles.

Shanghai

1854

Population, 20,905,171.

Financial Department

...

Business Department

...

Home

...

Hospital

...

Evangelistic Work

...

Literary Work

...

Yun-nan, 1877

Bhâmo (Upper Burmah)

1875

Area, 107,969 square miles.

Ta-li

1881

Population, 11,721,576.

YUN-NAN

1882

K'üh-ts'ing

1889

Kwei-chau, 1877

Kwei-yang

1877

Gan-shun

1888

Area, 64,554 square miles.

Tuh-shan

1893

Population, 7,669,181.

Hing-i

1891

(Work among Aborigines)

...

P'ang-hai

1897

Hu-nan, 1875

Ch'ang-teh

1898

Area, 74,320 square miles.

Shen-chau

1898

Population, 21,002,604.

Ch'a-ling

1898

Kiang-si, 1869

Kiu-kiang

1889

Ku-ling Sanatorium

1898

Ta-ku-t'ang

1873

Nan-k'ang

1887

Gan-ren

1889

Rao-chau

1898

Peh-kan

1893

Kwei-k'i

1878

Shang-ts'ing

1893

Hü-wan

1899

Ih-yang

1890

Area, 72,176 square miles.

Ho-k'eo

1878

Population, 24,534,118.

Yang-k'eo

1890

Kwang-feng

1889

Yuh-shan

1877

Chang-shu

1895

Kui-gan

1891

Feng-kang

1891

Kan-chau

1899

Sin-feng

1899

Lin-kiang

1898

NAN-CH'ANG

1898

Uen-chau (Itinerating)

...

Yung-sin

1899

Cheh-kiang, 1857

HANG-CHAU

1866

Shao-hing

1866

Sin-ch'ang

1870

Kiu-chau

1872

Ch'ang-shan

1878

Lan-k'i

1894

Area, 39,150 square miles.

Kin-hwa

1875

Population, 11,588,692.

Yung-k'ang

1882

Tseh-k'i

1897

Ch'u-chau

1875

Lung-ch'uen

1894

Uin-ho

1895

Song-yang

1896

Siao-mei

1896

Tsin-yun

1898

Ning-p'o

1857

Fung-hwa

1866

Ning-hai

1868

T'ien-t'ai

1898

T'ai-chau

1867

Ling-he District

...

Hwang-yen

1896

T'ai-p'ing

1898

Wun-chau

1867

Bing-yae

1874

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

* * * * * * * * * *

If you have been blessed by this volume, you may also be interested in some of our other Christian Classics Treasury collections:

MISSIONS COLLECTIONS:

- Amy Carmichael 8-in-1

- The Hudson Taylor Collection (7-in-1)

- David Livingstone Collection (5-in-1)

- Samuel Zwemer 7-in-1(Missions in Arabia)

- Samuel Zwemer, 7-in-1, Vol 2

- Key to the Missionary Problem (Andrew Murray)

- Classic Missions Texts  (Murray, Allen, Carey, Zwemer)

CLASSIC COLLECTIONS:

- 7 Catholic Classics

- 7 Classics on PRAYER

- 7 Classics on HOLINESS

- 7 Classics on EVANGELISM and SOUL-WINNING

- 5 Classics on the HOLY SPIRIT

- 5 Classics on POWER

- EDERSHEIM COLLECTION  (Sketches of Jewish Social Life; The Temple; Jesus the Messiah)

- The Didache (Teaching of the 12 Apostles)

PREACHERS AND REVIVALISTS:

- Biography of John Wesley Collection: 4-in-1

- Biography of Andrew Murray

- Charles Spurgeon: 40 sermons on Prayer

- Charles Spurgeon: Lectures to My Students

- The George Muller Collection

- The Revival Writings of Jonathan Edwards (7-in-1)

- The Works of Catherine Booth (7-in-1)

- The Works of Charles Finney

- The Works of D. L. Moody

- The Works of R. A. Torrey

- The Works of William Booth

6.  THE STORY OF JOHN G. PATON (d. 1907)

With over 2 dozen illustrations

THE STORY OF

JOHN G. PATON

Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals

By REV. JAMES PATON, B.A.

ILLUSTRATED

A. L. BURT COMPANY,

PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

PREFACE.

EVER since the story of my brother's life first appeared (January 1889) it has been constantly pressed upon me that a YOUNG FOLKS' EDITION would be highly prized. The Autobiography has therefore been re-cast and illustrated, in the hope and prayer that the Lord will use it to inspire the Boys and Girls of Christendom with a wholehearted enthusiasm for the Conversion of the Heathen World to Jesus Christ.

A few fresh incidents have been introduced; the whole contents have been rearranged to suit a new class of readers; and the service of a gifted Artist has been employed, to make the book every way attractive to the young. For full details as to the Missionary's work and life, the COMPLETE EDITION must still of course be referred to.

JAMES PATON.

GLASGOW, Sept, 1892.

CHAPTER 1: OUR COTTAGE HOME.

MY early days were all spent in the beautiful county of Dumfries, which Scotch folks call the Queen of the South. There, in a small cottage, on the farm of Braehead, in the parish of Kirkmahoe, I was born on the 24th May, 1824. My father, James Paton, was a stocking manufacturer in a small way; and he and his young wife, Janet Jardine Rogerson, lived on terms of warm personal friendship with the "gentleman farmer," so they gave me his son's name, John Gibson; and the curly-haired child of the cottage was soon able to toddle across to the mansion, and became a great pet of the lady there. On my visit to Scotland in 1884 I drove out to Braehead; but we found no cottage, nor trace of a cottage, and amused ourselves by supposing that we could discover by the rising of the grassy mound, the outline where the foundations once had been!

While yet a mere child, five years or so of age, my parents took me to a new home in the ancient village of Torthorwald, about four and a quarter miles from Dumfries, on the road to Lockerbie. At that time, say 1830, Torthorwald was a busy and thriving village, and comparatively populous, with its cottars and crofters, large farmers and small farmers, weavers and shoemakers, doggers and coopers, blacksmiths and tailors. Fifty-five years later, when I visited the scenes of my youth, the village proper was extinct, except for five thatched cottages where the lingering patriarchs were permitted to die slowly away,—soon they too would be swept into the large farms, and their garden plots plowed over, like sixty or seventy others that had been blotted out!

From the Bank Hill, close above our village, and accessible in a walk of fifteen minutes, a view opens to the eye which, despite several easily understood prejudices of mine that may discount any opinion that I offer, still appears to me well worth seeing amongst all the beauties of Scotland. At your feet lay a thriving village, every cottage sitting in its own plot of garden, and sending up its blue cloud of "peat reek," which never somehow seemed to pollute the blessed air; and after all has been said or sung, a beautifully situated village of healthy and happy homes for God's children is surely the finest feature in every landscape! Looking from the Bank Hill on a summer day, Dumfries with its spires shone so conspicuous that you could have believed it not more than two miles away; the splendid sweeping vale through which Nith rolls to Solway, lay all before the naked eye, beautiful with village spires, mansion houses, and white shining farms; the Galloway hills, gloomy and far-tumbling, bounded the forward view, while to the left rose Criffel, cloud-capped and majestic; then the white sands of Solway, with tides swifter than horsemen; and finally the eye rested joyfully upon the hills of Cumberland, and noticed with glee the blue curling smoke from its villages on the southern Solway shores.

There, amid this wholesome and breezy village life, our dear parents found their home for the long period of forty years. There too were born to them eight additional children, making in all a family of five sons and six daughters. Theirs was the first of the thatched cottages on the left, past the "miller's house," going up the "village gate," with a small garden in front of it, and a large garden across the road; and it is one of the few still lingering to show to a new generation what the homes of their fathers were. The architect who planned that cottage had no ideas of art, but a fine eye for durability! It consists at present of three, but originally of four, pairs of "oak couples" (Scottice kipples) planted like solid trees in the ground at equal intervals, and gently sloped inwards till they meet or are "coupled" at the ridge, this coupling being managed not by rusty iron, but by great solid pins of oak. A roof of oaken wattles was laid across these, till within eleven or twelve feet of the ground, and from the ground upwards a stone wall was raised, as perpendicular as was found practicable, towards these overhang-wattles, this wall being roughly "pointed" with sand and clay and lime. Now into and upon the roof was woven and intertwisted a covering of thatch, that defied all winds and weathers, and that made the cottage marvelously cozy,—being renewed year by year, and never allowed to remain in disrepair at any season. But the beauty of the construction was and is its durability, or rather the permanence of its oaken ribs! There they stand, after probably not less than four centuries, japanned with "peat reek" till they are literally shining, so hard that no ordinary nail can be driven into them, and perfectly capable of service for four centuries more on the same conditions. The walls are quite modern, having all been rebuilt in my father's time, except only the few great foundation boulders, piled around the oaken couples; and parts of the roofing also may plead guilty to having found its way thither only in recent days; but the architect's one idea survives, baffling time and change—the ribs and rafters of oak.

Our home consisted of a "but" and a "ben" and a "mid room," or chamber, called the "closet." The one end was my mother's domain, and served all the purposes of dining-room and kitchen and parlor, besides containing two large wooden erections, called by our Scotch peasantry "box beds"; not holes in the wall, as in cities, but grand, big, airy beds, adorned with many-colored counterpanes, and hung with natty curtains, showing the skill of the mistress of the house. The other end was my father's workshop, filled with five or six "stocking-frames," whirring with the constant action of five or six pairs of busy hands and feet, and producing right genuine hosiery for the merchants at Hawick and Dumfries. The "closet" was a very small apartment betwixt the other two, having room only for a bed, a little table and a chair, with a diminutive window shedding diminutive light on the scene. This was the Sanctuary of that cottage home. Thither daily, and oftentimes a day, generally after each meal, we saw our father retire, and "shut to the door"; and we children got to understand by a sort of spiritual instinct (for the thing was too sacred to be talked about) that prayers were being poured out there for us, as of old by the High Priest within the veil in the Most Holy Place. We occasionally heard the pathetic echoes of a trembling voice pleading as if for life, and we learned to slip out and in past that door on tiptoe, not to disturb the holy colloquy. The outside world might not know, but we knew, whence came that happy light as of a new-born smile that always was dawning on my father's face: it was a reflection from the Divine Presence, in the consciousness of which he lived. Never, in temple or cathedral, on mountain or in glen, can I hope to feel that the Lord God is more near, more visibly walking and talking with men, than under that humble cottage roof of thatch and oaken wattles. Though everything else in religion were by some unthinkable catastrophe to be swept out of memory, or blotted from my understanding, my soul would wander back to those early scenes, and shut itself up once again in that Sanctuary Closet, and, hearing still the echoes of those cries to God, would hurl back all doubt with the victorious appeal, "He walked with God, why may not I?"

CHAPTER 2: OUR FOREBEARS.

A FEW notes had better here be given as to our "Forebears," the kind of stock from which my father and mother sprang. My father's mother, Janet Murray, claimed to be descended from a Galloway family that fought and suffered for Christ's Crown and Covenant in Scotland's "killing time," and was herself a woman of a pronouncedly religious development. Her husband, our grandfather, William Paton, had passed through a roving and romantic career, before he settled down to be a douce deacon of the weavers of Dumfries, like his father before him.

Forced by a press-gang to serve on board a British man-of-war, he was taken prisoner by the French, and thereafter placed under Paul Jones, the pirate of the seas, and bore to his dying day the mark of a slash from the captain's sword across his shoulder for some slight disrespect or offense. Determining with two others to escape, the three were hotly pursued by Paul Jones's men. One, who could swim but little, was shot, and had to be cut adrift by the other two, who in the darkness swam into a cave and managed to evade for two nights and a day the rage of their pursuers. My grandfather, being young and gentle and yellow-haired, persuaded some kind heart to rig him out in female attire, and in this costume escaped the attentions of the press-gang more than once; till, after many hardships, he bargained with the captain of a coal sloop to stow him away amongst his black diamonds; and thus, in due time, he found his way home to Dumfries, where he tackled bravely and wisely the duties of husband, father, and citizen for the remainder of his days. The smack of the sea about the stories of his youth gave zest to the talks round their quiet fireside, and that, again, was seasoned by the warm Evangelical spirit of his Covenanting wife, her lips "dropping grace."

On the other side, my mother, Janet Rogerson, had for parents a father and mother of the Annandale stock. William Rogerson, her father, was one of many brothers, all men of uncommon strength and great force of character, quite worthy of the Border Rievers of an earlier day. Indeed, it was in some such way that he secured his wife, though the dear old lady in after days was chary about telling the story. She was a girl of good position, the ward of two unscrupulous uncles who had charge of her small estate, near Langholm; and while attending some boarding school she fell devotedly in love with the tall, fair-haired, gallant young blacksmith, William Rogerson. Her guardians, doubtless very properly, objected to the "connection"; but our young Lochinvar, with his six or seven stalwart brothers and other trusty "lads," all mounted, and with some ready tools in case of need, went boldly and claimed his bride, and she, willingly mounting at his side, was borne off in the light of open day, joyously married, and took possession of her "but and ben," as the mistress of the blacksmith's castle.

Janet Jardine bowed her neck to the self-chosen yoke, with the light of a supreme affection in her heart, and showed in her gentler ways, her love of books, her fine accomplishments with the needle, and her general air of ladyhood, that her lot had once been cast in easier, but not necessarily happier, ways. Her blacksmith lover proved not unworthy of his lady bride, and in old age found for her a quiet and modest home, the fruit of years of toil and hopeful thrift, their own little property, in which they rested and waited a happy end. Amongst those who at last wept by her grave stood, amidst many sons and daughters, her son the Rev. James J. Rogerson, clergyman of the Church of England, who, for many years thereafter, and till quite recently, was spared to occupy a distinguished position at ancient Shrewsbury and has left behind him there an honored and beloved name.

From such a home came our mother, Janet Jardine Rogerson, a bright-hearted, high-spirited, patient-toiling, and altogether heroic little woman; who, for about forty-three years, made and kept such a wholesome, independent, God-fearing, and self-reliant life for her family of five sons and six daughters, as constrains me, when I look back on it now, in the light of all I have since seen and known of others far differently situated, almost to worship her memory. She had gone with her high spirits and breezy disposition to gladden as their companion, the quiet abode of some grand or great-grand-uncle and aunt, familiarly named in all that Dalswinton neighborhood, "Old Adam and Eve." Their house was on the outskirts of the moor, and life for the young girl there had not probably too much excitement. But one thing had arrested her attention. She had noticed that a young stocking-maker from the "Brig End," James Paton, the son of William and Janet there, was in the habit of stealing alone into the quiet wood, book in hand, day after day, at certain hours, as if for private study and meditation. It was a very excusable curiosity that led the young bright heart of the girl to watch him devoutly reading and hear him reverently reciting (though she knew not then, it was Ralph Erskine's Gospel Sonnets, which he could say by heart sixty years afterwards, as he lay on his bed of death); and finally that curiosity awed itself into a holy respect, when she saw him lay aside his broad Scotch bonnet, kneel down under the sheltering wings of some tree, and pour out all his soul in daily prayers to God. As yet they had never spoken. What spirit moved her, let lovers tell—was it all devotion, or was it a touch of unconscious love kindling in her towards the yellow-haired and thoughtful youth? Or was there a stroke of mischief, of that teasing, which so often opens up the door to the most serious step in all our lives? Anyhow, one day she slipped in quietly, stole away his bonnet, and hung it on a branch near by, while his trance of devotion made him oblivious of all around; then, from a safe retreat, she watched and enjoyed his perplexity in seeking for and finding it! A second day this was repeated; but his manifest disturbance of mind, and his long pondering with the bonnet in hand, as if almost alarmed, seemed to touch another chord in her heart—that chord of pity which is so often the prelude of love, that finer pity that grieves to wound anything nobler or tenderer than ourselves. Next day, when he came to his accustomed place of prayer, a little card was pinned against the tree just where he knelt, and on it these words: "She who stole away your bonnet is ashamed of what she did; she has a great respect for you, and asks you to pray for her, that she may become as good a Christian as you."

Staring long at that writing, he forgot Ralph Erskine for one day! Taking down the card, and wondering who the writer could be, he was abusing himself for his stupidity in not suspecting that some one had discovered his retreat and removed his bonnet, instead of wondering whether angels had been there during his prayer,—when, suddenly raising his eyes, he saw in front of old Adam's cottage, though a lane amongst the trees, the passing of another kind of angel, swinging a milk-pail in her hand and merrily singing some snatch of old Scottish song. He knew, in that moment, by a Divine instinct, as infallible as any voice that ever came to seer of old, that she was the angel visitor that had stolen in upon his retreat—that bright-faced, clever-witted niece of old Adam and Eve, to whom he had never yet spoken, but whose praises he had often heard said and sung—"Wee Jen." I am afraid he did pray "for her," in more senses than one, that afternoon; at any rate, more than a Scotch bonnet was very effectually stolen; a good heart and true was there virtually bestowed, and the trust was never regretted on either side, and never betrayed.

Often and often, in the genial and beautiful hours of the autumntide of their long life, have I heard my dear father tease "Jen" about her maidenly intentions in the stealing of that bonnet; and often have heard her quick mother-wit in the happy retort, that had his motives for coming to that retreat been altogether and exclusively pious, he would probably have found his way to the other side of the wood, but that men who prowled about the Garden of Eden ran the risk of meeting some day with a daughter of Eve!

CHAPTER 3: CONSECRATED PARENTS.

SOMEWHERE in or about his seventeenth year, my father passed through a crisis of religious experience; and from that day he openly and very decidedly followed the Lord Jesus. His parents had belonged to one of the older branches of what is now called the United Presbyterian Church; but my father, having made an independent study of the Scotch Worthies, the Cloud of Witnesses, the Testimonies, and the Confession of Faith, resolved to cast in his lot with the oldest of all the Scotch Churches, the Reformed Presbyterian, as most nearly representing the Covenanters and the attainments of both the first and second Reformations in Scotland. This choice he deliberately made, and sincerely and intelligently adhered to; and was able at all times to give strong and clear reasons from Bible and from history for the principles he upheld.

Besides this, there was one other mark and fruit of his early religious decision, which looks even fairer through all these years. Family Worship had heretofore been held only on Sabbath Day in his father's house; but the young Christian, entering into conference with his sympathizing mother, managed to get the household persuaded that there ought to be daily morning and evening prayer and reading of the Bible and holy singing. This the more readily, as he himself agreed to take part regularly in the same, and so relieve the old warrior of what might have proved for him too arduous spiritual toils! And so began in his seventeenth year that blessed custom of Family Prayer, morning and evening, which my father practised probably without one single avoidable omission till he lay on his deathbed, seventy-seven years of age; when ever to the last day of his life, a portion of Scripture was read, and his voice was heard softly joining in the Psalm, and his lips breathed the morning and evening Prayer,—falling in sweet benediction on the heads of all his children, far away many of them over all the earth, but all meeting him there at the Throne of Grace.

Our place of worship was the Reformed Presbyterian Church at Dumfries, under the ministry, during most of these days, of Rev. John McDermid—a genuine, solemn, lovable Covenanter, who cherished towards my father a warm respect, that deepened into apostolic affection when the yellow hair turned snow-white and both of them grew patriarchal in their years. The Minister, indeed, was translated to a Glasgow charge; but that rather exalted than suspended their mutual love. Dumfries was four miles fully from our Torthorwald home; but the tradition is that during all these forty years my father was only thrice prevented from attending the worship of God—once by snow, so deep that he was baffled and had to return; once by ice on the road, so dangerous that he was forced to crawl back up the Roucan Brae on his hands and knees, after having descended it so far with many falls; and once by the terrible outbreak of cholera at Dumfries.

Each of us, from very early days, considered it no penalty, but a great joy, to go with our father to the church; the four miles were a treat to our young spirits, the company by the way was a fresh incitement, and occasionally some of the wonders of city-life rewarded our eager eyes. A few other pious men and women, of the best Evangelical type, went from the same parish to one or other favorite Minister at Dumfries; and when these God-fearing peasants "forgathered" in the way to or from the House of God, we youngsters had sometimes rare glimpses of what Christian talk may be and ought to be.

We had, too, special Bible Readings on the Lord's Day evening,—mother and children and visitors reading in turns, with fresh and interesting question, answer, and exposition, all tending to impress us with the infinite grace of a God of love and mercy in the great gift of His dear Son Jesus, our Saviour. The Shorter Catechism was gone through regularly, each answering the question asked, till the whole had been explained, and its foundation in Scripture shown by the proof-texts adduced. It has been an amazing thing to me, occasionally to meet with men who blamed this "catechizing" for giving them a distaste to religion; every one in all our circle thinks and feels exactly the opposite. It laid the solid rock-foundations of our religious life. After-years have given to these questions and their answers a deeper or a modified meaning, but none of us has ever once even dreamed of wishing that we had been otherwise trained. Of course, if the parents are not devout, sincere, and affectionate,—if the whole affair on both sides is taskwork, or worse, hypocritical and false,—results must be very different indeed!

Oh, I can remember those happy Sabbath evenings; no blinds down, and shutters up, to keep out the sun from us, as some scandalously affirm; but a holy, happy, entirely human day, for a Christian father, mother and children to spend. Others must write and say what they will, and as they feel; but so must I. There were eleven of us brought up in a home like that; and never one of the eleven, boy or girl, man or woman, has been heard, or ever will be heard, saying that Sabbath was dull and wearisome for us, or suggesting that we have heard of or seen any way more likely than that for making the Day of the Lord bright and blessed alike for parents and for children. But God help the homes where these things are done by force and not by love!

As I must, however, leave the story of my father's life—much more worthy, in many ways, of being written than my own—I may here mention that his long and upright life made him a great favorite in all religious circles far and near within the neighborhood, that at sick-beds and at funerals he was constantly sent for and much appreciated, and that this appreciation greatly increased, instead of diminishing, when years whitened his long, flowing locks, and gave him an apostolic beauty; till finally, for the last twelve years or so of his life, he became by appointment a sort of Rural Missionary for the four nearest parishes, and spent his autumn in literally sowing the good seed of the Kingdom as a Colporteur of the Tract and Book Society of Scotland. His success in this work, for a rural locality, was beyond all belief. Within a radius of five miles he was known in every home, welcomed by the children, respected by the servants, longed for eagerly by the sick and aged. He gloried in showing off the beautiful Bibles and other precious books, which he sold in amazing numbers. He sang sweet Psalms beside the sick, and prayed like the voice of God at their dying beds. He went cheerily from farm to farm, from cot to cot; and when he wearied on the moorland roads, he refreshed his soul by reciting aloud one of Ralph Erskine's "Sonnets," or crooning to the birds one of David's Psalms. His happy partner, our beloved mother, died in 1865, and he himself in 1868, having reached his seventy-seventh year, an altogether beautiful and noble episode of human existence having been enacted, amid the humblest surroundings of a Scottish peasant's home, through the influence of their united love by the grace of God; and in this world, or in any world, all their children will rise up at mention of their names and call them blessed!

CHAPTER 4: SCHOOL DAYS.

IN my boyhood, Torthorwald had one of the grand old typical Parish Schools of Scotland; where the rich and the poor met together in perfect equality; where Bible and Catechism were taught as zealously as grammar and geography; and where capable lads from the humblest of cottages were prepared in Latin and Mathematics and Greek to go straight from their Village class to the University bench. Besides, at that time, an accomplished pedagogue of the name of Smith, a learned man of more than local fame, had added a Boarding House to the ordinary School, and had attracted some of the better class gentlemen and farmers' sons from the surrounding country; so that Torthorwald, under his régime, reached the zenith of its educational fame. In this School I was initiated into the mystery of letters, and all my brothers and sisters after me, though some of them under other masters than mine. My teacher punished severely—rather, I should say, savagely—especially for lessons badly prepared. Yet, that he was in some respects kindly and tender-hearted, I had the best of reasons to know.

When still under twelve years of age, I started to learn my father's trade, in which I made surprising progress. We wrought from six in the morning till ten at night, with an hour at dinner-time and half an hour at breakfast and again at supper. These spare moments every day I devoutly spent on my books, chiefly in the rudiments of Latin and Greek; for I had given my soul to God, and was resolved to aim at being a Missionary of the Cross, or a Minister of the Gospel. Yet I gladly testify that what I learned of the stocking frame was not thrown away; the facility of using tools, and of watching and keeping the machinery in order, came to be of great value to me in the Foreign Mission field.

One incident of this time I must record here, because of the lasting impression made upon my religious life. Our family, like all others of peasant rank in the land, were plunged into deep distress, and felt the pinch severely, through the failure of the potato, the badness of other crops, and the ransom-price of food. Our father had gone off with work to Hawick, and would return next evening with money and supplies; but meantime the meal barrel ran low, and our dear mother, too proud and too sensitive to let any one know, or to ask aid from any quarter, coaxed us all to rest, assuring us that she had told God everything, and that He would send us plenty in the morning. Next day, with the carrier from Lockerbie came a present from her father, who, knowing nothing of her circumstances or of this special trial, had been moved of God to send at that particular nick of time a love-offering to his daughter, such as they still send to each other in those kindly Scottish shires—a bag of new potatoes, a stone of the first ground meal or flour, or the earliest homemade cheese of the season—which largely supplied all our need. My mother, seeing our surprise at such an answer to her prayers, took us around her knees, thanked God for His goodness, and said to us:

"O my children, love your Heavenly Father, tell Him in faith and prayer all your needs, and He will supply your wants so far as it shall be for your good and His glory."

Perhaps, amidst all their struggles in rearing a family of eleven, this was the hardest time they ever had, and the only time they ever felt the actual pinch of hunger; for the little that they had was marvelously blessed of God, and was not less marvelously utilized by that noble mother of ours, whose high spirit, side by side with her humble and gracious piety, made us, under God, what we are to-day.

I saved as much at my trade as enabled me to go for six weeks to Dumfries Academy; this awoke in me again the hunger for learning, and I resolved to give up that trade and turn to something that might be made helpful to the prosecution of my education. An engagement was secured with the Sappers and Miners, who were mapping and measuring the county of Dumfries in connection with the Ordnance Survey of Scotland. The office hours were from 9 A. M. till 4 P. M.; and though my walk from home was above four miles every morning, and the same by return in the evening, I found much spare time for private study, both on the way to and from my work and also after hours. Instead of spending the mid-day hour with the rest, at football and other games, I stole away to a quiet spot on the banks of the Nith, and there pored over my book, all alone. Our lieutenant, unknown to me, had observed this from his house on the other side of the stream, and after a time called me into his office and inquired what I was studying. I told him the whole truth as to my position and my desires. After conferring with some of the other officials there, he summoned me again, and in their presence promised me promotion in the service, and special training in Woolwich at the Government's expense, on condition that I would sign an engagement for seven years. Thanking him most gratefully for his kind offer, I agreed to bind myself for three years or four, but not for seven.

Excitedly he said, "Why? Will you refuse an offer that many gentlemen's sons would be proud of?"

I said, "My life is given to another Master, so I cannot engage for seven years." He asked sharply, "To whom?" I replied, "To the Lord Jesus; and I want to prepare as soon as possible for His service in the proclaiming of the Gospel."

In great anger he sprang across the room, called the paymaster and exclaimed, "Accept my offer, or you are dismissed on the spot!"

I answered, "I am extremely sorry if you do so, but to bind myself for seven years would probably frustrate the purpose of my life; and though I am greatly obliged to you, I cannot make such an engagement."

His anger made him unwilling or unable to comprehend my difficulty; the drawing instruments were delivered up, I received my pay, and departed, without further parley. Hearing how I had been treated, and why, Mr. Maxwell, the Rector of Dumfries Academy, offered to let me attend all classes there, free of charge so long as I cared to remain; but that, in lack of means of support, was for the time impossible, as I would not and could not be a burden on my dear father, but was determined rather to help him in educating the rest. I went therefore to what was known as the Lamb Fair at Lockerbie, and for the first time in my life took a "fee" for the harvest. On arriving at the field when shearing and mowing began, the farmer asked me to bind a sheaf; when I had done so, he seized it by the band, and it fell to pieces! Instead of disheartening me, however, he gave me a careful lesson how to bind; and the second that I bound did not collapse when shaken, and the third he pitched across the field, and on finding that it still remained firm, he cried to me cheerily:

"Right now, my lad; go ahead!"

It was hard work for me at first, and my hands got very sore; but, being willing and determined, I soon got into the way of it, and kept up with the best of them. The male harvesters were told off to sleep in a large hayloft, the beds being arranged all along the side, like barracks. Many of the fellows were rough and boisterous; and I suppose my look showed that I hesitated in mingling with them, for the quick eye and kind heart of the farmer's wife prompted her to suggest that I, being so much younger than the rest, might sleep with her son George in the house—an offer, oh, how gratefully accepted! A beautiful new steading had recently been built for them; and during certain days, or portions of days, while waiting for the grain to ripen or to dry, I planned and laid out an ornamental garden in front of it, which gave great satisfaction—a taste inherited from my mother, with her joy in flowers and garden plots. They gave me, on leaving, a handsome present, as well as my fee, for I had got on very pleasantly with them all. This experience, too, came to be valuable to me, when, in long-after days, and far other lands, Mission buildings had to be erected, and garden and field cropped and cultivated without the aid of a single European hand.

CHAPTER 5: LEAVING THE OLD HOME.

BEFORE going to my first harvesting, I had applied for a situation in Glasgow, apparently exactly suited for my case; but I had little or no hope of ever hearing of it further. An offer of £50 per annum was made by the West Campbell Street Reformed Presbyterian Congregation, then under the good and noble Dr. Bates, for a young man to act as district visitor and tract distributor, especially amongst the absentees from the Sabbath School; with the privilege of receiving one year's training at the Free Church Normal Seminary, that he might qualify himself for teaching, and thereby push forward to the Holy Ministry. The candidates, along with their application and certificates, were to send an essay on some subject, of their own composition, and in their own handwriting. I sent in two long poems on the Covenanters, which must have exceedingly amused them, as I had not learned to write even decent prose. But, much to my surprise, immediately on the close of the harvesting experience, a letter arrived, intimating that I, along with another young man, had been put upon the short leet, and that both were requested to appear in Glasgow on a given day and compete for the appointment.

Two days thereafter I started out from my quiet country home on the road to Glasgow. Literally "on the road," for from Torthorwald to Kilmarnock—about forty miles—had to be done on foot, and thence to Glasgow by rail. Railways in those days were as yet few, and coach-travelling was far beyond my purse. A small bundle contained my Bible and all my personal belongings. Thus was I launched upon the ocean of life. I thought on One who says, "I know thy poverty, but thou art rich."

My dear father walked with me the first six miles of the way. His counsels and tears and heavenly conversation on that parting journey are fresh in my heart as if it had been but yesterday; and tears are on my cheeks as freely now as then, whenever memory steals me away to the scene. For the last half mile or so we walked on together in almost unbroken silence,—my father, as was often his custom, carrying hat in hand, while his long, flowing yellow hair (then yellow, but in later years white as snow) streamed like a girl's down his shoulders. His lips kept moving in silent prayers for me; and his tears fell fast when our eyes met each other in looks of which all speech was vain! We halted on reaching the appointed parting-place; he grasped my hand firmly for a minute in silence, and then solemnly and affectionately said:

"God bless you, my son! Your father's God prosper you, and keep you from all evil!"

Unable to say more, his lips kept moving in silent prayer; in tears we embraced, and parted. I ran off as fast as I could; and, when about to turn a corner in the road where he would lose sight of me, I looked back and saw him still standing with head uncovered where I had left him—gazing after me. Waving my hat in adieu, I was round the corner and out of sight in an instant. But my heart was too full and sore to carry me farther, so I darted into the side of the road and wept for a time. Then, rising up cautiously, I climbed the dyke to see if he yet stood where I had left him; and just at that moment I caught a glimpse of him climbing the dyke and looking out for me! He did not see me, and after he had gazed eagerly in my direction for a while he got down, set his face towards home, and began to return—his head still uncovered, and his heart, I felt sure, still rising in prayers for me. I watched through blinding tears, till his form faded from my gaze; and then, hastening on my way, vowed deeply and oft, by the help of God, to live and act so as never to grieve or dishonor such a father and mother as He had given me. The appearance of my father, when we parted,—his advice, prayers, and tears—the road, the dyke, the climbing up on it and then walking away, head uncovered—have often, often, all through life, risen vividly before my mind, and do so now while I am writing, as if it had been but an hour ago. In my earlier years particularly, when exposed to many temptations, his parting form rose before me as that of a guardian angel.

CHAPTER 6: EARLY STRUGGLES.

I REACHED Glasgow on the third day, having slept one night at Thornhill, and another at New Cumnock; and having needed, owing to the kindness of acquaintances upon whom I called by the way, to spend only three halfpence of my modest funds. Safely arrived, but weary, I secured a humble room for my lodging, for which I had to pay one shilling and sixpence per week. Buoyant and full of hope and looking up to God for guidance, I appeared at the appointed hour before the examiners, as did also the other candidate; and they having carefully gone through their work, asked us to retire. When recalled, they informed us that they had great difficulty in choosing, and suggested that the one of us might withdraw in favor of the other, or that both might submit to a more testing examination. Neither seemed inclined to give it up, both were willing for a second examination; but the patrons made another suggestion. They had only £50 per annum to give; but if we would agree to divide it betwixt us, and go into one lodging, we might both be able to struggle through, they would pay our entrance fees at the Free Normal Seminary, and provide us with the books required; and perhaps they might be able to add a little to the sum promised to each of us. By dividing the mission work appointed, and each taking only the half, more time also might be secured for our studies. Though the two candidates had never seen each other before, we at once accepted this proposal, and got on famously together, never having had a dispute on anything of common interest throughout our whole career.

As our fellow-students at the Normal were all far advanced beyond us in their education, we found it killing work, and had to grind away incessantly, late and early. Both of us, before the year closed, broke down in health; partly by hard study, but principally, perhaps, for lack of nourishing diet. A severe cough seized upon me; I began spitting blood, and a doctor ordered me at once home to the country and forbade all attempts at study. My heart sank; it was a dreadful disappointment, and to me a bitter trial. Soon after, my companion, though apparently much stronger than I, was similarly seized. He, however, never entirely recovered, though for some years he taught in a humble school; and long ago he fell asleep in Jesus, a devoted and honored Christian man.

I, on the other hand, after a short rest, nourished by the hill air of Torthorwald and by the new milk of our family cow, was ere long at work again. Renting a house, I began to teach a small school at Girvan, and gradually but completely recovered my health.

Having saved £10 by my teaching, I returned to Glasgow, and was enrolled as a student at the College; but before the session was finished my money was exhausted—I had lent some to a poor student, who failed to repay me—and only nine shillings remained in my purse. There was no one from whom to borrow, had I been willing; I had been disappointed in attempting to secure private tuition; and no course seemed open for me, except to pay what little I owed, give up my College career, and seek for teaching or other work in the country. I wrote a letter to my father and mother, informing them of my circumstances; that I was leaving Glasgow in quest of work, and that they would, not hear from me again till I had found a suitable situation. I told them that if otherwise unsuccessful, I should fall back on my own trade, though I shrank from that as not tending to advance my education; but that they might rest assured I would do nothing to dishonor them or my own Christian profession. Having read that letter over again through many tears, I said,—I cannot send that, for it will grieve my darling parents; and therefore, leaving it on the table, I locked my room door and ran out to find a place where I might sell my precious books, and hold on a few weeks longer. But, as I stood on the opposite side and wondered whether these folks in a shop with the three golden balls would care to have a poor student's books, and as I hesitated, knowing how much I needed them for my studies, conscience smote me as if for doing a guilty thing; I imagined that the people were watching me like one about to commit a theft; and I made off from the scene at full speed, with a feeling of intense shame at having dreamed of such a thing! Passing through one short street into another, I marched on mechanically; but the Lord God of my father was guiding my steps, all unknown to me.

A certain notice in a window, into which I had probably never in my life looked before, here caught my eye, to this effect—"Teacher wanted, Maryhill Free Church school; apply at the Manse." A coach or bus was just passing, when I turned round; I leapt into it, saw the Minister, arranged to undertake the School, returned to Glasgow, paid my landlady's lodging score, tore up that letter to my parents and wrote another full of cheer and hope; and early next morning entered the School and began a tough and trying job. The Minister warned me that the School was a wreck, and had been broken up chiefly by coarse and bad characters from mills and coal-pits, who attended the evening classes. They had abused several masters in succession; and, laying a thick and heavy cane on the desk, he said:

"Use that freely, or you will never keep order here!"

I put it aside into the drawer of my desk, saying, "That will be my last resource."

There were very few scholars for the first week—about eighteen in the Day School and twenty in the Night School. The clerk of the mill, a good young fellow, came to the evening classes, avowedly to learn book-keeping, but privately he said he had come to save me from personal injury.

The following week, a young man and a young woman began to attend the Night School, who showed from the first moment that they were bent on mischief. On my repeated appeals for quiet and order, they became the more boisterous, and gave great merriment to a few of the scholars present. I finally urged the young man, a tall, powerful fellow, to be quiet or at once to leave, declaring that at all hazards I must and would have perfect order; but he only mocked at me, and assumed a fighting attitude. Quietly locking the door and putting the key in my pocket, I turned to my desk, armed myself with the cane, and dared any one at his peril to interfere betwixt us. It was a rough struggle—he smashing at me clumsily with his fists, I with quick movements evading and dealing him blow after blow with the heavy cane for several rounds—till at length he crouched down at his desk, exhausted and beaten, and I ordered him to turn to his book, which he did in sulky silence. Going to my desk, I addressed them and asked them to inform all who wished to come to the School,—That if they came for education, everything would be heartily done that it was in my power to do; but that any who wished for mischief had better stay away, as I was determined to conquer, not to be conquered, and to secure order and silence, whatever it might cost. Further, I assured them that that cane would not again be lifted by me, if kindness and forbearance on my part could possibly gain the day, as I wished to rule by love and not by terror. But this young man knew he was in the wrong, and it was that which had made him weak against me, though every way stronger far than I. Yet I would be his friend and helper, if he was willing to be friendly with me, the same as if this night had never been. At these words a dead silence fell on the School: every one buried face diligently in book; and the evening closed in uncommon quiet and order.

The attendance grew, till the School became crowded, both during the day and at night. During the mid-day hour even, I had a large class of young women who came to improve themselves in writing and arithmetic. By and by the cane became a forgotten implement; the sorrow and pain which I showed as to badly-done lessons, or anything blameworthy, proved the far more effectual penalty.

The School Committee had promised me at least ten shillings per week, and guaranteed to make up any deficit if the fees fell short of that sum; but if the income from fees exceeded that sum, all was to be mine. Affairs went on prosperously for a season; indeed, too much so for my selfish interest. The Committee took advantage of the large attendance and better repute of the School, to secure the services of a master of the highest grade. The parents of many of the children offered to take and seat a hall, if I would remain, but I knew too well that I had neither education nor experience to compete with an accomplished teacher. Their children, however, got up a testimonial and subscription, which was presented to me on the day before I left and this I valued chiefly because the presentation was made by the young fellows who at first behaved so badly, but were now my devoted friends.

Once more I committed my future to the Lord God of my father, assured that in my very heart I was willing and anxious to serve Him and to follow the blessed Saviour, yet feeling keenly that intense darkness had again enclosed my path.

CHAPTER 7: A CITY MISSIONARY.

BEFORE undertaking the Maryhill School, I had applied to be taken on as an agent in the Glasgow City Mission; and the night before I had to leave Maryhill, I received a letter from Rev. Thomas Caie, the superintendent of the said Mission, saying that the directors had kept their eyes on me ever since my application, and requesting, as they understood I was leaving the School, that I would appear before them the next morning, and have my qualifications for becoming a Missionary examined into. Praising God, I went off at once, passed the examination successfully, and was appointed to spend two hours that afternoon and the following Monday in visitation with two of the directors, calling at every house in a low district of the town, and conversing with all the characters encountered there as to their eternal welfare. I had also to preach a "trial" discourse in a Mission meeting, where a deputation of directors would be present, the following evening being Sunday; and on Wednesday evening they met again to hear their report and to accept or reject me.

All this had come upon me so unexpectedly, that I almost anticipated failure; but looking up for help I went through with it, and on the fifth day after leaving the School they called me before a meeting of directors, and informed me that I had passed my trials most successfully, and that the reports were so favorable that they had unanimously resolved to receive me at once as one of their City Missionaries. Deeply solemnized with the responsibilities of my new office, I left that meeting praising God for all His undeserved mercies, and seeing most clearly His gracious hand in all the way by which He had led me, and the trials by which He had prepared me for this sphere of service. Man proposes—God disposes.

I found the district a very degraded one. Many families said they had never been visited by any Minister; and many were lapsed professors of religion who had attended no church for ten, sixteen, or twenty years, and said they had never been called upon by any Christian visitor. In it were congregated many avowed infidels, Romanists, and drunkards,—living together, and associated for evil, but apparently without any effective counteracting influence. In many of its closes and courts sin and vice walked about openly—naked and not ashamed.

After nearly a year's hard work, I had only six or seven non-church-goers, who had been led to attend regularly there, besides about the same number who met on a week evening in the ground-floor of a house kindly granted for the purpose by a poor and industrious but ill-used Irishwoman. She supported her family by keeping a little shop, and selling coals. Her husband was a powerful man—a good worker, but a hard drinker; and, like too many others addicted to intemperance, he abused and beat her, and pawned and drank everything he could get hold of. She, amid many prayers and tears, bore everything patiently, and strove to bring up her only daughter in the fear of God. We exerted, by God's blessing, a good influence upon him through our meetings. He became a Total Abstainer, gave up his evil ways, and attended Church regularly with his wife. As his interest increased, he tried to bring others also to the meetings, and urged them to become Abstainers. His wife became a center of help and of good influence in all the district, as she kindly invited all and welcomed them to the meeting in her house, and my work grew every day more hopeful.

By and by Meetings and Classes were both too large for any house that was available for us in the whole of our district. We instituted a Bible Class, a Singing Class, a Communicants' Class, and a Total Abstinence Society; and, in addition to the usual meetings, we opened two prayer-meetings specially for the Calton division of the Glasgow Police—one at a suitable hour for the men on day duty, and another for those on night duty. The men got up a Mutual Improvement Society and Singing Class also amongst themselves, weekly, on another evening. My work now occupied every evening in the week; and I had two meetings every Sabbath. By God's blessing they all prospered, and gave evidence of such fruits as showed that the Lord was working there for good by our humble instrumentality.

The kind cowfeeder had to inform us—and he did it with much genuine sorrow—that at a given date he would require the hay-loft, which was our place of meeting; and as no other suitable house or hall could be got, the poor people and I feared the extinction of our work. At that very time however, a commodious block of buildings, that had been Church, Schools, Manse, etc., came into the market. My great-hearted friend, the late Thomas Binnie, persuaded Dr. Symingrton's congregation, Great Hamilton Street, in connection with which my Mission was carried on, to purchase the whole property. Its situation at the foot of Green Street gave it a control of the district where my work lay; and so the Church was given to me in which to conduct all my meetings, while the other Halls were adapted as Schools for poor girls and boys, where they were educated by a proper master, and were largely supplied with books, clothing, and sometimes even food, by the ladies of the congregation.

Availing myself of the increased facilities, my work was all reorganized. On Sabbath morning, at seven o'clock, I had one of the most deeply interesting and fruitful of all my Classes for the study of the Bible. It was attended by from seventy to a hundred of the very poorest young women and grown-up lads of the whole district. They had nothing to put on except their ordinary work-day clothes,—all without bonnets, some without shoes. Beautiful was it to mark how the poorest began to improve in personal appearance immediately after they came to our Class; how they gradually got shoes and one bit of clothing after another, to enable them to attend our other Meetings, and then to go to Church; and, above all, how eagerly they sought to bring others with them, taking a deep personal interest in all the work of the Mission. Long after they themselves could appear in excellent dress, many of them still continued to attend in their working clothes, and to bring other and poorer girls with them to that Morning Class, and thereby helped to improve and elevate their companions. My delight in that Bible Class was among the purest joys in all my life, and the results were amongst the most certain and precious of all my Ministry.

I had also a very large Bible Class—a sort of Bible-Reading—on Monday night, attended by all, of both sexes and of any age, who cared to come or had any interest in the Mission. Wednesday evening, again, was devoted to a prayer-meeting for all; and the attendance often more than half-filled the Church. There I usually took up some book of Holy Scripture and read and lectured right through, practically expounding and applying it. On Thursday I held a Communicants' Class, intended for the more careful instruction of all who wished to become full members of the Church. Our constant text-book was Paterson on the Shorter Catechism (Nelson and Sons), than which I have never seen a better compendium of the doctrines of Holy Scripture. Each being thus trained for a season, received from me, if found worthy, a letter to the Minister of any Protestant Church which he or she felt inclined to join. In this way great numbers became active and useful communicants in the surrounding congregations; and eight young lads of humble circumstances educated themselves for the Ministry of the Church—most of them getting their first lessons in Latin and Greek from my very poor stock of the same! Friday evening was occupied with a Singing Class, teaching Church music, and practising for our Sabbath meetings. On Saturday evening we held our Total Abstinence meeting, at which the members themselves took a principal part, in readings, addresses, recitations, singing hymns, etc.

Great good resulted from this Total Abstinence work. Many adults took and kept the pledge, thereby greatly increasing the comfort and happiness of their homes. Many were led to attend the Church on the Lord's Day, who had formerly spent it in rioting and drinking. But, above all, it trained the young to fear the very name of intoxicating drink, and to hate and keep far away from everything that led to intemperance.

I would add my testimony also against the use of tobacco, which injures and leads many astray, especially lads and young men, and which never can be required by any person in ordinary health. But I would not be understood to regard the evils that flow from it as deserving to be mentioned in comparison with the unutterable woes and miseries of intemperance.

To be protected, however, from suspicion and from evil, all the followers of our Lord Jesus should in self-denial (how small!) and in consecration to His service, be pledged Abstainers from both of these selfish indulgences, which are certainly injurious to many, which are no ornament to any character, and which can be no help in well-doing. Praise God for the many who are now so pledged!

CHAPTER 8: GLASGOW EXPERIENCES.

ON one occasion, it becoming known that we had arranged for a special Saturday afternoon Temperance demonstration, a deputation of Publicans complained beforehand to the Captain of the Police—that our meetings were interfering with their legitimate trade. The Captain, a pious Wesleyan, who was in full sympathy with us and our work, informed me of the complaints made, and intimated that his men would be present; but I was just to conduct the meeting as usual, and he would guarantee that strict justice would be done. The Publicans having announced amongst their sympathizers that the Police were to break up and prevent our meeting and take the conductors in charge, a very large crowd assembled, both friendly and unfriendly, for the Publicans and their hangers-on were there "to see the fun," and to help in "baiting" the Missionary. Punctually, I ascended the stone stair, accompanied by another Missionary who was also to deliver an address, and announced our opening hymn. As we sang, a company of Police appeared, and were quietly located here and there among the crowd, the sergeant himself taking his post close by the platform, whence the whole assembly could be scanned. Our enemies were jubilant, and signals were passed betwixt them and their friends, as if the time had come to provoke a row. Before the hymn was finished, Captain Baker himself, to the infinite surprise of friend and foe alike, joined us on the platform, devoutly listened to all that was said, and waited till the close. The Publicans could not for very shame leave, while he was there at their suggestion and request, though they had wit enough to perceive that his presence had frustrated all their sinister plans. They had to hear our addresses and prayers and hymns; they had to listen to the intimation of our future meetings. When all had quietly dispersed, the Captain warmly congratulated us on our large and well-conducted congregation, and hoped that great good would result from our efforts. This opposition also the Lord overruled to increase our influence, and to give point and publicity to our assaults upon the kingdom of Satan.

Though Intemperance was the main cause of poverty, suffering, misery, and vice in that district of Glasgow, I had also considerable opposition from Romanists and Infidels, many of whom met in clubs, where they drank together, and gloried in their wickedness and in leading other young men astray.

An Infidel, whose wife was a Roman Catholic, became unwell, and gradually sank under great suffering and agony. His blasphemies against God were known and shuddered at by all the neighbors. His wife pled with me to visit him. She refused, at my suggestion, to call her own priest, so I accompanied her at last. The man refused to hear one word about spiritual things, and foamed with rage. He even spat at me, I mentioned the name of Jesus. "The natural receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him!" There is a "wisdom" which is at best earthly, and at worst "sensual and devilish." I visited the poor man daily, but his enmity to God and his sufferings together seemed to drive him mad. Towards the end I pleaded with him even then to look to the Lord Jesus, and asked if I might pray with him? With all his remaining strength he shouted at me, "Pray for me to the devil!"

Reminding him how he had always denied that there was any devil, I suggested that he must surely believe in one now, else he would scarcely make such a request, even in mockery. In great rage he cried, "Tes, I believe there is a devil, and a God, and a just God too; but I have hated Him in life, and I hate Him in death!" With these awful words he wriggled into Eternity; but his shocking death produced a very serious impression for good, especially amongst young men, in the district where his character was known.

How different was the case of that Doctor who also had been an unbeliever as well as a drunkard! Highly educated, skilful, and gifted above most in his profession, he was taken into consultation for specially dangerous cases, whenever they could find him tolerably sober. After one of his excessive "bouts" he had a dreadful attack of delirium tremens. At one time wife and watchers had a fierce struggle to dash from his lips a draught of prussic acid; at another, they detected the silver-hafted lancet concealed in the band of his shirt, as he lay down, to bleed himself to death. His aunt came and pleaded with me to visit him. My heart bled for his poor young wife and two beautiful little children. Visiting him twice daily, and sometimes even more frequently, I found the way somehow into his heart, and he would do almost anything for me and longed for my visits. When again the fit of self-destruction seized him, they sent for me; he held out his hand eagerly, and grasping mine said, "Put all these people out of the room, remain you with me; I will be quiet, I will do everything you ask!"

I got them all to leave, but whispered to one in passing to "keep near the door."

Alone I sat beside him, my hand in his, and kept up a quiet conversation for several hours. After we had talked of everything that I could think of, and it was now far into the morning, I said, "If you had a Bible here, we might read a chapter, verse about."

He said dreamily, "There was once a Bible above yon press; if you can get up to it, you might find it there yet."

Getting it, dusting it, and laying it on a small table which I drew near to the sofa on which we sat, we read there and then a chapter together. After this I said; "Now, shall we pray?"

He replied heartily, "Yes."

I having removed the little table, we kneeled down together at the sofa; and after a solemn pause I whispered, "You pray first."

He replied, "I curse, I cannot pray; would you have me curse God to His face?"

I answered, "You promised to do all that I asked; you must pray, or try to pray, and let me hear that you cannot."

He said, "I cannot curse God on my knees; let me stand, and I will curse Him; I cannot pray."

I gently held him on his knees, saying, "Just try to pray, and let me hear you cannot."

Instantly he cried out, "O Lord, Thou knowest I cannot pray," and was going to say something dreadful as he strove to rise up. But I took up gently the words he had uttered as if they had been my own and continued the prayer, pleading for him and his dear ones as we knelt there together, till he showed that he was completely subdued and lying low at the feet of God. On rising from our knees he was manifestly greatly impressed, and I said, "Now, as I must be at College by daybreak and must return to my lodging for my books and an hour's rest, will do you one thing more for me before I go?"

"Yes," was his reply.

"Then," said I, "it is long since you had a refreshing sleep: now, will you lie down, and I will sit by you till you fall asleep?"

He lay down, and was soon fast asleep. After commending him to the care and blessing of the Lord, I quietly slipped out, and his wife returned to watch by his side. When I came back later in the day, after my Classes were over, he, on hearing my foot and voice, came to meet me, and clasping me in his arms, cried, "Thank God, I can pray now! I rose this morning refreshed from sleep, and prayed with my wife and children for the first time in my life; and now I shall do so every day, and serve God while I live, who hath dealt in so great mercy with me!"

After delightful conversation, he promised to go with me to Dr. Symington's church on Sabbath Day; there he took sittings beside me; at next half-yearly Communion he and his wife were received into membership, and their children were baptized; and from that day till his death he led a devoted and most useful Christian life. He now sleeps in Jesus; and I do believe I shall meet him in Glory as a trophy of redeeming grace and love!

In my Mission district I was the witness of many joyful departures to be with Jesus,—I do not like to name them "deaths" at all. They left us rejoicing in the bright assurance that nothing present or to come "could ever separate them or us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Many examples might be given; but I can find room for only one. John Sim, a dear little boy, was carried away by consumption. His child-heart seemed to be filled with joy about seeing Jesus. His simple prattle, mingled with deep questionings, arrested not only his young companions, but pierced the hearts of some careless sinners who heard him, and greatly refreshed the faith of God's dear people. It was the very pathos of song incarnated to hear the weak quaver of his dying voice sing out—

"I lay my sins on Jesus,

The spotless Lamb of God."

Shortly before his decease he said to his parents, "I am going soon to be with Jesus; but I sometimes fear that I may not see you there."

"Why so, my child?" said his weeping mother.

"Because," he answered, "if you were set upon going to Heaven and seeing Jesus there, you would pray about it, and sing about it; you would talk about Jesus to others, and tell them of that happy meeting with Him in Glory. All this my dear Sabbath School teacher taught me, and she will meet me there. Now why did not you, my father and mother, tell me all these things about Jesus, if you are going to meet Him too?" Their tears fell fast over their dying child; and he little knew, in his unthinking eighth year, what a message from God had pierced their souls through his innocent words.

One day an aunt from the country visited his mother, and their talk had run in channels for which the child no longer felt any interest. On my sitting down beside him, he said, "Sit you down and talk with me about Jesus; I am tired hearing so much talk about everything else but Jesus; I am going soon to be with Him. Oh, do tell me everything you know or have ever heard about Jesus, the spotless Lamb of God!"

At last the child literally longed to be away, not for rest, or freedom from pain—for of that he had very little—but, as he himself always put it, "to see Jesus." And, after all, that was the wisdom of the heart, however he learned it. Eternal life, here or hereafter, is just the vision of Jesus.

CHAPTER 9: A FOREIGN MISSIONARY.

HAPPY in my work as I felt through these ten years, and successful by the blessing of God, yet I continually heard, and chiefly during my last years in the Divinity Hall, the wail of the perishing Heathen in the South Seas; and I saw that few were caring for them, while I well knew that many would be ready to take up my work in Calton, and carry it forward perhaps with more efficiency than myself. Without revealing the state of my mind to any person, this was the supreme subject of my daily meditation and prayer; and this also led me to enter upon those medical studies, in which I purposed taking the full course; but at the close of my third year, an incident occurred, which led me at once to offer myself for the Foreign Mission field.

The Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland, in which I had been brought up, had been advertising for another Missionary to join the Rev. John Inglis in his grand work on the New Hebrides. Dr. Bates, the excellent convener of the Heathen Missions Committee, was deeply grieved, because for two years their appeal had failed. At length, the Synod, after much prayer and consultation, felt the claims of the Heathen so gently pressed upon them by the Lord's repeated calls, that they resolved to cast lots, to discover whether God would thus select any Minister to be relieved from his home-charge, and designated as a Missionary to the South Seas. Each member of Synod, as I was informed, agreed to hand in, after solemn appeal to God, the names of the three best qualified in his esteem for such a work, and he who had the clear majority was to be loosed from his congregation, and to proceed to the Mission field—or the first and second highest, if two could be secured. Hearing this debate, and feeling an intense interest in these most unusual proceedings, I remember yet the hushed solemnity of the prayer before the names were handed in. I remember the strained silence that held the Assembly while the scrutineers retired to examine the papers; and I remember how tears blinded my eyes when they returned to announce that the result was so indecisive, that it was clear that the Lord had not in that way provided a Missionary. The cause was once again solemnly laid before God in prayer, and a cloud of sadness appeared to fall over all the Synod.

The Lord kept saying within me, "Since none better qualified can be got, rise and offer yourself!" Almost overpowering was the impulse to answer aloud, "Here am I, send me." But I was dreadfully afraid of mistaking my mere human emotions for the will of God. So I resolved to make it a subject of close deliberation and prayer for a few days longer, and to look at the proposal from every possible aspect. Besides, I was keenly solicitous about the effect upon the hundreds of young people and others, now attached to all my Classes and Meetings; and yet I felt a growing assurance that this was the call of God to His servant, and that He who was willing to employ me in the work abroad, was both able and willing to provide for the on-carrying of my work at home. My medical studies, as well as my literary and divinity training, had specially qualified me in some ways for the Foreign field, and from every aspect at which I could look the whole facts in the face, the voice within me sounded like a voice from God.

It was under good Dr. Bates of West Campbell Street that I had begun my career in Glasgow—receiving £25 per annum for district visitation in connection with his Congregation, along with instruction under Mr. Hislop and his staff in the Free Church Normal Seminary—and oh, how Dr. Bates did rejoice, and even weep for joy, when I called on him, and offered myself for the New Hebrides Mission! I returned to my lodging with a lighter heart than I had for sometime enjoyed, feeling that nothing so clears the vision, and lifts up the life, as a decision to move forward in what you know to be entirely the will of the Lord. I said to my fellow-student, Joseph Copeland, who had chummed with me all through our course at college, "I have been away signing my banishment" (a rather trifling way of talk for such an occasion). "I have offered myself as a Missionary for the New Hebrides."

After a long and silent meditation, in which he seemed lost in far-wandering thoughts, his answer was, "If they will accept of me, I am also resolved to go!"

I said, "Will you write the Convener to that effect, or let me do so?"

He replied, "You may."

A few minutes later his letter of offer was in the post-office. Next morning Dr. Bates called upon us, early, and after a long conversation, commended us and our future work to the Lord God in fervent prayer. At a meeting of the Foreign Missions Committee, held immediately thereafter, both were, after due deliberation, formally accepted, on condition that we passed successfully the usual examinations required of candidates for the Ministry. And for the next twelve months we were placed under a special committee for advice as to medical experience, acquaintance with the rudiments of trades, and anything else which might be thought useful to us in the Foreign field.

When it became known that I was preparing to go abroad as Missionary, nearly all were dead against the proposal, except Dr. Bates and my fellows-student. My dear father and mother, however, when I consulted them, characteristically replied, "that they had long since given me away to the Lord, and in this matter also would leave me to God's disposal." From other quarters we were besieged with the strongest opposition on all sides. Even Dr. Symington, one of my professors in divinity, and the beloved Minister in connection with whose congregation I had wrought so long as a City Missionary, and in whose Kirk Session I had for years sat as an Elder, repeatedly urged me to remain at home.

To his arguments I replied, "that my mind was finally resolved; that, though I loved my work and my people, yet I felt that I could leave them to the care of Jesus, who would soon provide them a better pastor than I; and that, with regard to my life amongst the Cannibals, as I had only once to die, I was content to leave the time and place and means in the hand of God who had already marvelously preserved me when visiting cholera patients and the fever-stricken poor; on that score I had positively no further concern, having left it all absolutely to the Lord, whom I sought to serve and honor, whether in life or by death."

The house connected with my Green Street Church was now offered to me for a Manse, and any reasonable salary that I cared to ask (as against the promised £120 per annum for the far-off and dangerous New Hebrides), on condition that I would remain at home. I cannot honestly say that such offers or opposing influences proved a heavy trial to me; they rather tended to confirm my determination that the path of duty was to go abroad.

Amongst many who sought to deter me, was one dear old Christian gentleman, whose crowning argument always was, "The cannibals! you will be eaten by cannibals!" At last I replied, "Mr. Dickson, you are advanced in years now, and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms, I confess to you, that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by cannibals or by worms; and in the Great Day my resurrection body will arise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer."

The old gentleman, raising his hands in a deprecating attitude, left the room exclaiming, "After that I have nothing more to say!"

My dear Green Street people grieved excessively at the thought of my leaving them, and daily pleaded with me to remain. Indeed, the opposition was so strong from nearly all, and many of them warm Christian friends, that I was sorely tempted to question whether I was carrying out the Divine will, or only some headstrong wish of my own. But conscience said louder and clearer every day, "Leave all these results with Jesus your Lord, who said, 'Go ye into all the world, preach the Gospel to every creature, and lo! I am with you alway.'" These words kept ringing in my ears; these were our marching orders.

Some retorted upon me, "There are Heathen at home; let us seek and save, first of all, the lost ones perishing at our doors." This I felt to be most true, and an appalling fact; but I unfailingly observed that those who made this retort neglected these Home Heathen themselves; and so the objection, as from them, lost all its power.

On meeting, however, with so many obstructing influences, I again laid the whole matter before my dear parents, and their reply was to this effect:—"Heretofore we feared to bias you, but now we must tell you why we praise God for the decision to which you have been led. Your father's heart was set upon being a Minister, but other claims forced him to give it up! When you were given to them, your father and mother laid you upon the altar, their first-born, to be consecrated, if God saw fit, as a Missionary of the Cross; and it has been their constant prayer that you might be prepared, qualified, and led to this very decision; and we pray with all our heart that the Lord may accept your offering, long spare you, and give you many souls from the Heathen World for your hire." From that moment, every doubt as to my path of duty forever vanished. I saw the hand of God very visibly, not only preparing me for, but now leading me to, the Foreign Mission field.

Well did I know that the sympathy and prayers of my dear parents were warmly with me in all my studies and in all my Mission work; but for my education they could of course, give me no money help. All through, on the contrary, it was my pride and joy to help them, being the eldest in a family of eleven; though I here most gladly and gratefully record that all my brothers and sisters, as they grew up and began to earn a living, took their full share in this same blessed privilege. For we stuck to each other and to the old folks like burs, and had all things "in common," as a family in Christ—and I knew that never again, howsoever long they might be spared through the peaceful autumn of life, would the dear old father and mother lack any joy or comfort that the willing hands and loving hearts of all their children could singly or unitedly provide. For all this I did praise the Lord! It consoled me beyond description, in parting from them, probably forever, in this world at least.

CHAPTER 10: TO THE NEW HEBRIDES.

ON the first of December 1857—being then in my thirty-third year—the other Missionary-designate and I were "licensed" as preachers of the Gospel. Thereafter we spent four months in visiting and addressing nearly every Congregation and Sabbath School in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland, that the people might see us and know us, and thereby take a personal interest in our work. On the 23d March 1858, in Dr. Symington's church, Glasgow, in presence of a mighty crowd, and after a magnificent sermon on "Come over and help us," we were solemnly ordained as Ministers of the Gospel, and set apart as Missionaries to the New Hebrides. On the 16th April of the same year, we left the Tail of the Bank at Greenock, and set sail in the Clutha for the Foreign Mission field.

Our voyage to Melbourne was rather tedious, but ended prosperously, under Captain Broadfoot, a kindly, brave-hearted Scot, who did everything that was possible for our comfort. He himself led the singing on board at Worship, which was always charming to me, and was always regularly conducted—on deck when the weather was fair, below when it was rough. I was also permitted to conduct Bible Classes amongst both the crew and the passengers, at times and places approved of by the Captain—in which there was great joy.

Arriving at Melbourne, we were welcomed by Rev. Mr. Moor, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Wilson, and Mr. Wright, all Reformed Presbyterians from Geelong. Mr. Wilson's two children, Jessie and Donald, had been under our care during the voyage; and my young wife and I went with them for a few days on a visit to Geelong, while Mr. Copeland remained on board the Clutha to look after our boxes and to watch for any opportunity of reaching our destination on the Islands. He heard that an American ship, the Frances P. Sage, was sailing from Melbourne to Penang; and the Captain agreed to land us on Aneityum, New Hebrides, with our two boats and fifty boxes, for £100. We got on board on the 12th August, but such a gale blew that we did not sail till the 17th. On the Clutha all was quiet, and good order prevailed; in the F. P. Sage all was noise and profanity. The Captain said he kept his second mate for the purpose of swearing at the men and knocking them about. The voyage was most disagreeable to all of us, but fortunately it lasted only twelve days. On the 29th we were close up to Aneityum; but the Captain refused to land us, even in his boats; some of us suspecting that his men were so badly used that had they got on shore they would never have returned to him! In any case he had beforehand secured his £100.

He lay off the island till a trader's boat pulled across to see what we wanted, and by it we sent a note to Dr. Geddie, one of the Missionaries there. Early next horning, Monday, he arrived in his boat, accompanied by Mr. Mathieson, a newly arrived Missionary from Nova Scotia; bringing also Captain Andersen in the small Mission schooner, the John Knox, and a large Mission boat called the Columbia, well manned with crews of able and willing Natives. Our fifty boxes were soon on board the John Knox, the Columbia, and our own boats—all being heavily loaded and built up, except those that had to be used in pulling the others ashore. Dr. Geddie, Mr. Mathieson, Mrs. Paton, and I were perched among the boxes on the John Knox, and had to hold on as best we could. On sheering off from the F. P. Sage, one of her davits caught and broke the mainmast of the little John Knox by the deck; and I saved my wife from being crushed to death by its fall, through managing to swing her instantaneously aside in an apparently impossible manner. It did graze Mr. Mathieson, but he was not hurt. The John Knox, already overloaded, was thus quite disabled; we were about ten miles at sea, and in imminent danger; but the captain of the F. P. Sage heartlessly sailed away, and left us to struggle with our fate.

We drifted steadily in the direction of Tanna, an island of cannibals, where our goods would have been plundered and all of us cooked and eaten. Dr. Geddie's boat, and mine had the John Knox in tow; and Mr. Copeland, with a crew of Natives, was struggling hard with his boat to pull the Columbia and her load towards Aneityum. As God mercifully ordered it, though we had a stiff trade wind to pull against, we had a comparatively calm sea; yet we drifted still to leeward, till Dr. Inglis going round to the harbor in his boat, as he had heard of our arrival, saw us far at sea, and hastened to our rescue. All the boats now, with their willing Native crews, got fastened to our schooner, and to our great joy she began to move ahead. After pulling for hours and hours, under the scorching rays of a tropical sun, we were all safely landed on shore at Aneityum, about six o'clock in the evening of 30th August, just four months and fourteen days since we sailed from Greenock. We got a hearty welcome from the Missionaries' wives, Mrs. Geddie, Mrs. Inglis, and Mrs. Mathieson, and from all our new friends the Christian Natives of Aneityum; and the great danger in which both life and property had been placed at the close of our voyage, made us praise God all the more that He had brought us to this quiet resting-place, around which lay the Islands of the New Hebrides, to which our eager hearts had looked forward, and into which we entered now in the name of the Lord.

Mr. Copeland, Mrs. Paton, and I went round the island to Dr. Inglis's Station, where we were most cordially received and entertained by his dear lady, and by the Christian Natives there. As he was making several additions to his house at that time, we received for the next few weeks our first practical and valuable training in Mission house-building, as well as in higher matters. Soon after, a meeting was called to consult about our settlement, and, by the advice and with the concurrence of all, Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson from Nova Scotia were located on the south side of Tanna, at Umairarekar, and Mrs. Paton and I at Port Resolution, on the same island. At first it was agreed that Mr. Copeland should be placed along with us; but owing to the weakly state of Mrs. Mathieson's health, it was afterwards resolved that, for a time at least, Mr. Copeland should live at either Station as seem most suitable or most requisite.

Dr. Inglis and a number of his most energetic Natives accompanied us to Umairarekar Tanna. There we purchased a site for Mission House and Church, and laid a stone foundation, and advanced as far as practicable the erection of a dwelling for Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson. Thence we proceeded to Port Resolution, Tanna, and similarly purchased a site, and advanced, to a forward stage, the house which Mrs. Paton and I were to occupy on our settlement there. Lime for plastering had to be burned in kilns from the coral rocks; and thatch, for roofing with sugar-cane leaf, had to be prepared by the Natives at both Stations before our return; for which, as for all else, a price was duly agreed upon, and was scrupulously paid. Unfortunately we learned, when too late, that both houses were too near the shore, exposed to unwholesome miasma, and productive of the dreaded fever and ague,—the most virulent and insidious enemy to all Europeans in those Southern Seas.

CHAPTER 11: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF HEATHENDOM.

MY first impressions drove me, I must confess, to the verge of utter dismay. On beholding these Natives in their paint and nakedness and misery, my heart was as full of horror as of pity. Had I given up my much-beloved work and my dear people in Glasgow, with so many delightful associations, to consecrate my life to these degraded creatures? Was it possible to teach them right and wrong, to Christianize, or even to civilize them? But that was only a passing feeling; I soon got as deeply interested in them, and in all that tended to advance them, and to lead them to the knowledge and love of Jesus, as ever I had been in my work at Glasgow. We were surprised and delighted at the remarkable change produced on the Natives of Aneityum through the instrumentality of Drs. Geddie and Inglis in so short a time; and we hoped, by prayerful perseverance in the use of similar means, to see the same work of God repeated on Tanna. Besides, the wonderful and blessed work done by Mrs. Inglis and Mrs. Geddie, at their Stations, filled our wives with the buoyant hope of being instruments in the hand of God to produce an equally beneficent change amongst the savage women of Tanna. Mrs. Paton had been left with Mrs. Inglis to learn all she could from her of Mission work on the Islands, till I returned with Dr. Inglis from the house-building operations on Tanna; during which period Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson were also being instructed by Dr. and Mrs. Geddie.

To the Tannese, Dr. Inglis and I were objects of curiosity and fear; they came crowding to gaze on our wooden and lime-plastered house; they chattered incessantly with each other, and left the scene day after day with undisguised and increasing wonderment. Possibly they thought us rather mad than wise!

Party after party of armed men going and coming in a state of great excitement, we were informed that war was on foot; but our Aneityumese Teachers were told to assure us that the Harbor people would only act on the defensive, and that no one would molest us at our work. One day two hostile tribes met near our Station; high words arose, and old feuds were revived. The Inland people withdrew; but the Harbor people, false to their promises, flew to arms and rushed past us in pursuit of their enemies. The discharge of muskets in the adjoining bush, and the horrid yells of the savages, soon informed us that they were engaged in deadly fights. Excitement and terror were on every countenance; armed men rushed about in every direction, with feathers in their twisted hair,—with faces painted red, black, and white, and some, one cheek black, the other red, others, the brow white, the chin blue—in fact, any color and on any part,—the more grotesque and savage-looking, the higher the art! Some of the women ran with their children to places of safety; but even then we saw other girls and women, on the shore close by, chewing sugar-cane and chaffering and laughing, as if their fathers and brothers had been engaged in a country dance, instead of a bloody conflict.

In the afternoon, as the sounds of the muskets and the yelling of the warriors came unpleasantly near to us, Dr. Inglis, leaning against a post for a little while in silent prayer, looked on us and said, "The walls of Jerusalem were built in troublous times, and why not the Mission House on Tanna? But let us rest for this day, and pray for these poor Heathen."

We retired to a Native house that had been temporarily granted to us for rest, and there pled before God for them all. The noise and the discharge of muskets gradually receded, as if the Inland people were retiring; and towards evening the people around us returned to their villages. We were afterwards informed that five or six men had been shot dead; that their bodies had been carried by the conquerors from the field of battle, and cooked and eaten that very night at a boiling spring near the head of the bay, less than a mile from the spot where my house was being built. We had also a more graphic illustration of the surroundings into which we had come, through Dr. Inglis's Aneityum boy, who accompanied us as cook. When our tea was wanted next morning, the boy could not be found. After a while of great anxiety on our part, he returned, saying, "Missi, this is a dark land. The people of this land do dark works. At the boiling spring they have cooked and feasted upon the slain. They have washed the blood into the water; they have bathed there, polluting everything. I cannot get pure water to make your tea. What shall I do?"

Dr. Inglis told him that he must try for water elsewhere, till the rains came and cleansed away the pollution; and that meanwhile, instead of tea, we would drink from the cocoa-nut, as they had often done before. The lad was quite relieved. It not a little astonished us, however, to see that his mind regarded their killing and eating each other as a thing scarcely to be noticed, but that it was horrible that they should spoil the water! How much are even our deepest instincts the creatures of mere circumstances! I, if trained like him, would probably have felt like him.

Next evening, as we sat talking about the people, and the dark scenes around us, the quiet of the night was broken by a wild wailing cry from the villages around, long-continued and unearthly. We were informed that one of the wounded men, carried home from the battle, had just died; and that they had strangled his widow to death, that her spirit might accompany him to the other world, and be his servant there, as she had been here. Now their dead bodies were laid side by side, ready to be buried in the sea. Our hearts sank to think of all this happening within ear-shot, and that we knew it not! Every new scene, every fresh incident, set more clearly before us the benighted condition and shocking cruelties of these Heathen people, and we longed to be able to speak to them of Jesus and the love of God. We eagerly tried to pick up every word of their language, that we might, in their own tongue, unfold to them the knowledge of the true God and of salvation from all these sins through Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER 12: BREAKING GROUND ON TANNA.

OUR small Missionary schooner, the John Knox, having no accommodation for lady passengers, and little for anybody else except the discomfort of lying on deck, we took advantage of a trader to convey us from Aneityum to Tanna. The Captain kindly offered to take us and about thirty casks and boxes to Port Resolution for £5, which we gladly accepted. After a few hours' sailing we were all safely landed on Tanna on the 5th November, 1858. Dr. Geddie went for a fortnight to Umairarekar, now known as Kwamera, on the south side of Tanna, to assist in the settlement of Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson, and to help in making their house habitable and comfortable. Mr. Copeland, Mrs. Paton, and I were left at Port Resolution, to finish the building of our house there, and work our way into the good will of the Natives as best we could.

On landing, we found the people to be literally naked and painted Savages; they were at least as destitute of clothing as Adam and Eve after the fall, when they sewed fig-leaves for a girdle, and even more so, for the women wore only a tiny apron of grass, in some cases shaped like a skirt or girdle, the men an indescribable affair like a pouch or bag, and the children absolutely nothing whatever.

At first they came in crowds to look at us, and at everything we did or had. We knew nothing of their language; we could not speak a single word to them, nor they to us. We looked at them, they at us; we smiled and nodded, and made signs to each other; this was our first meeting and parting. One day I observed two men, the one lifting up one of our articles to the other, and saying, "Nungsi nari enu?"

I concluded that he was asking, "What is this?" Instantly, lifting a piece of wood, I said, "Nungsi nari enu?"

They smiled and spoke to each other. I understood them to be saying, "He has got hold of our language now." Then they told me their name for the thing which I had pointed to. I found that they understood my question, What is this? or, What is that? and that I could now get from them the name of every visible or tangible thing around us! We carefully noted down every name they gave us, spelling all phonetically, and also every strange sound we heard from them; thereafter, by painstaking comparison of different circumstances, we tried to ascertain their meanings, testing our own guess by again cross-questioning the Natives. One day I saw two men approaching, when one, who was a stranger, pointed to me with his finger, and said, "Se nangin?"

Concluding that he was asking my name, I pointed! to one of them with my finger, and looking at the other, inquired, "Se nangin?"

They smiled, and gave me their names. We were now able to get the names of persons and things, and so our ears got familiarized with the distinctive sounds of their language; and being always keenly on the alert, we made extraordinary progress in attempting bits of conversation and in reducing their speech for the first time to a written form—for the New Hebrideans had no literature, and not even the rudiments of an alphabet. I used to hire some of the more intelligent lads and men to sit and talk with us, and answer our questions about names and sounds; but they so often deceived us, and we, doubtless, misunderstood them so often, that this course was not satisfactory, till after we had gained some knowledge of their language and its construction, and they themselves had become interested in helping us. Amongst our most interesting helpers, and most trustworthy, were two aged chiefs—Nowa and Nouka—in many respects two of Nature's noblest gentlemen, kind at heart to all, and distinguished by a certain native dignity of bearing. But they were both under the leadership of the war-chief Miaki, a kind of devil-king over many villages and tribes.

The Tannese had hosts of stone idols, charms, and sacred objects, which they abjectly feared, and in which they devoutly believed. They were given up to countless superstitions, and firmly glued to their dark heathen practices. Their worship was entirely a service of fear, its aim being to propitiate this or that Evil Spirit, to prevent calamity or to secure revenge. They deified their chiefs, like the Romans of old, so that almost every village or tribe had its own Sacred Man, and some of them had many. They exercised an extraordinary influence for evil, these village or tribal priests, and were believed to have the disposal of life and death through their sacred ceremonies, not only in their own tribe, but over all the Islands. Sacred men and women, wizards and witches, received presents regularly to influence the gods, and to remove sickness, or to cause it by the Nahak, i. e. incantation over remains of food, or the skin of fruit, such as banana, which the person has eaten on whom they wish to operate. They also worshiped the spirits of departed ancestors and heroes, through their material idols of wood and stone, but chiefly of stone. They feared these spirits and sought their aid; especially seeking to propitiate those who presided over war and peace, famine and plenty, health and sickness, destruction and prosperity, life and death. Their whole worship was one of slavish fear; and, so far as ever I could learn, they had no idea of a God of mercy or grace.

But these very facts—that they did worship something, that they believed in spirits of ancestors and heroes, and that they cherished many legends regarding those whom they had never seen, and handed these down to their children—and the fact that they had ideas about the invisible world and its inhabitants, made it not so hard as some might suppose to convey to their minds, once their language and modes of thought were understood, some clear ideal of Jehovah God as the great uncreated Spirit Father, who Himself created and sustains all that is. It could not, however, be done offhand, or by a few airy lessons. The whole heart and soul and life had to be put into the enterprise. But it could be done—that we believed because they were men, not beasts; it had been done—that we saw in the converts on Aneityum; and our hearts rose to the task with quenchless hope!

CHAPTER 13: PIONEERS IN THE NEW HEBRIDES.

A GLANCE backwards over the story of the Gospel in the New Hebrides may help to bring my readers into touch with the events that are to follow. The ever-famous names of Williams and Harris are associated with the earliest efforts to introduce Christianity amongst this group of islands in the South Pacific Seas. John Williams and his young Missionary companion Harris, under the auspices of the London Missionary Society, landed on Erromanga on the 30th of November 1839. Alas, within a few minutes of their touching land, both were clubbed to death; and the savages proceeded to cook and feast upon their bodies. Thus were the New Hebrides baptized with the blood of Martyrs; and Christ thereby told the whole Christian world that He claimed these Islands as His own. His cross must yet be lifted up, where the blood of His saints has been poured forth in His name! The poor Heathen knew not that they had slain their best friends; but tears and prayers ascended for them from all Christian souls, wherever the story of the martyrdom on Erromanga was read or heard.

Again, therefore, in 1842, the London Missionary Society sent out Messrs. Turner and Nisbet to pierce this kingdom of Satan. They placed their standard on our chosen island of Tanna, the nearest to Erromanga. In less than seven months, however, their persecution by the savages became so dreadful, that we see them in a boat trying to escape by night with bare life. Out on that dangerous sea they would certainly have been lost, but the Ever-Merciful drove them back to land, and sent next morning a whaling vessel, which, contrary to custom, called there, and just in the nick of time. They, with all goods that could be rescued, were got safely on board, and sailed for Samoa. Say not their plans and prayers were baffled; for God heard and abundantly blessed them there, beyond all their dreams.

After these things, the London Missionary Society again and again placed Samoan Native Teachers on one or other island of the New Hebrides; but their unhealthiness, compared with the more wholesome Samoa or Rarotonga, so afflicted them with the dreaded ague and fever, besides what they endured from the inhospitable savages themselves, that no effective Mission work had been accomplished there till at last the Presbyterian Missionaries were led to enter upon the scene. Christianity had no foothold anywhere on the New Hebrides, unless it were in the memory and the blood of the Martyrs of Erromanga.

The Rev. John Geddie and his wife, from Nova Scotia, were landed on Aneityum, the most southerly island of the New Hebrides, in 1848; and the Rev. John Inglis and his wife, from Scotland, were landed on the other side of the same island, in 1852. An agent for the London Missionary Society, the Rev. T. Powell, accompanied Dr. Geddie for about a year, to advise as to his settlement and to assist in opening up the work. Marvelous as it may seem, the Natives on Aneityum, showed interest in the Missionaries from the very first, and listened to their teachings; so that in a few years Dr. Inglis and Dr. Geddie saw about 3500 savages throwing away their idols, renouncing their Heathen customs, and avowing themselves to be worshipers of the true Jehovah God. Slowly, yet progressively, they unlearned their Heathenism; surely and hopefully they learned Christianity and civilization. When these Missionaries "came to this Island, there were no Christians there; when they left it, there were no Heathens."

Further, these poor Aneityumese, having glimpses of the Word of God, determined to have a Holy Bible in their own mother tongue, wherein before no book or page ever had been written in the history of their race. The consecrated brain and hand of their Missionaries kept toiling day and night in translating the book of God; and the willing hands and feet of the Natives kept toiling through fifteen long but unwearying years, planting and preparing arrowroot to pay the £1200 required to be laid out in the printing and publishing of the book. Year after year the arrowroot, too sacred to be used for their daily food, was set apart as the Lord's portion; the Missionaries sent it to Australia and Scotland, where it was sold by private friends, and the whole proceeds consecrated to this purpose. On the completion of the great undertaking by the Bible Society, it was found that the Natives had earned as much as to pay every penny of the outlay; and their first Bibles went out to them, purchased with the consecrated toils of fifteen years!

Let those who lightly esteem their Bibles think on those things. Eight shillings for every leaf, or the labor and proceeds of fifteen years for the Bible entire, did not appear to these poor converted savages too much to pay for that Word of God, which had sent to them the Missionaries, which had revealed to them the grace of God in Christ, and which had opened their eyes to the wonders and glories of redeeming love!

CHAPTER 14: THE GREAT BEREAVEMENT.

MY first house on Tanna was on the old site occupied by Turner and Nisbet, near the shore, for obvious reasons, and only a few feet above tide-mark. So was that of Mr. Mathieson, handy for materials as goods being landed, and, as we imagined, close to the healthy breezes of the sea. Alas! we had to learn by sad experience, like our brethren in all untried Mission fields. The sites proved to be hot-beds for Fever and Ague, mine especially; and much of this might have been escaped by building on the higher ground, and in the sweep of the refreshing trade-winds. For all this, however, no one was to blame; everything was done for the best, according to the knowledge then possessed. Our house was sheltered behind by an abrupt hill about two hundred feet high, which gave the site a feeling of coziness. It was surrounded and much shaded, by beautiful breadfruit trees, and very large cocoa-nut trees; too largely beautiful, indeed, for they shut out many a healthy breeze that we sorely needed! There was a long swamp at the head of the bay, and, the ground at the other end on which our house stood being scarcely raised perceptibly higher, the malaria almost constantly enveloped us. Once, after a smart attack of the fever, an intelligent Chief said to me, "Missi, if you stay here, you will soon die! No Tanna man sleeps so low down as you do, in this damp weather, or he too would die. We sleep on the high ground, and the trade-wind keeps us well. You must go and sleep on the hill, and then you will have better health."

I at once resolved to remove my house to higher ground, at the earliest practicable moment; heavy though the undertaking would necessarily be, it seemed our only hope of being able to live on the island. Alas, for one of us, it was already too late!

My dear young wife, Mary Ann Robson, landed with me on Tanna on the 5th November 1858, in excellent health and full of all tender and holy hopes. On the 12th February 1859 God sent to us our first-born son; for two days or so both mother and child seemed to prosper, and our island-exile thrilled with joy! But the greatest of sorrows was treading hard upon the heels of that joy! My darling's strength showed no signs of rallying. She had an attack of ague and fever a few days before; on the third day or so thereafter, it returned, and attacked her every second day with increasing severity for a fortnight. Diarrhea ensued, and symptoms of pneumonia, with slight delirium at intervals; and then in a moment, altogether unexpectedly, she died on the 3d March. To crown my sorrows, and complete my loneliness, the dear baby-boy, whom we had named after her father, Peter Robert Robson, was taken from me after one week's sickness, on the 20th March. Let those who have ever passed through any similar darkness as of midnight feel for me; as for all others, it would be more than vain to try to paint my sorrows!

I knew then, when too late, that our work had been entered on too near the beginning of the rainy season. We were both, however, healthy and hearty; and I daily pushed on with the house, making things hourly more comfortable, in the hope that long lives were before us both, to be spent for Jesus in seeking the salvation of the perishing Heathen. In our mutual inexperience, and with our hearts aglow for the work of our lives, we incurred this risk which should never have been incurred; and I only refer to the matter thus, in the hope that others may take warning.

Stunned by that dreadful loss, in entering upon this field of labor to which the Lord had Himself so evidently led me, my reason seemed for a time almost to give way. Ague and fever, too, laid a depressing and weakening hand upon me, continuously recurring, and reaching oftentimes the very height of its worst burning stages. But I was never altogether forsaken. The ever-merciful Lord sustained me, to lay the precious dust of my beloved Ones in the same quiet grave, dug for them close by at the end of the house; in all of which last offices my own hands, despite breaking heart, had to take the principal share! I built the grave round and round with coral blocks, and covered the top with beautiful white coral, broken small as gravel; and that spot became my sacred and much-frequented shrine, during all the following months and years when I labored on for the salvation of these savage Islanders amidst difficulties, dangers, and deaths. Whensoever Tanna turns to the Lord, and is won for Christ, men in after-days will find the memory of that spot still green,—where with ceaseless prayers and tears I claimed that land for God in which I had "buried my dead" with faith and hope. But for Jesus, and the fellowship He vouchsafed me there, I must have gone mad and died beside that lonely grave!

Dr. Inglis, my brother Missionary on Aneityum, wrote to the Reformed Presbyterian Magazine:—"I trust all those who shed tears of sorrow on account of her early death will be enabled in the exercise of faith and resignation to say, 'The Will of the Lord be done; the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the Name of the Lord!' I need not say how deeply we sympathize with her bereaved parents, as well as with her sorrowing husband. By her death the Mission has sustained a heavy loss. We were greatly pleased with Mrs. Paton during the period of our short intercourse with her. Her mind, naturally vigorous, had been cultivated by a superior education. She was full of Missionary spirit, and took a deep interest in the Native women. This was seen further, when she went to Tanna, where, in less than three months, she had collected a class of eight females, who came regularly to her to receive instruction. There was about her a maturity of thought, a solidity of character, a loftiness of aim and purpose, rarely found in one so young. Trained up in the fear of the Lord from childhood, like another Mary she had evidently chosen that good part, which is never taken away from those possessed of it. When she left this island, she had to all human appearance a long career of usefulness and happiness on Earth before her, but the Lord has appointed otherwise. She has gone, as we trust, to her rest and her reward. The Lord has said to her as He said to David, 'Thou didst well in that it was in thine heart to build a House for My Name.' Let us watch and pray, for our Lord cometh as a thief in the night."

Soon after her death, the good Bishop Selwyn called at Port Resolution, Tanna, in his Mission Ship. He came on shore to visit me, accompanied by the Rev. J. O. Patteson. They had met Mrs. Paton on Aneityum in the previous year soon after our arrival, and, as she was then the picture of perfect health, they also felt her loss very keenly. Standing with me beside the grave of mother and child, I weeping aloud on his one hand, and Patteson—afterward the Martyr Bishop of Kakupu—sobbing silently on the other, the godly Bishop Selwyn poured out his heart to God amidst sobs and tears, during which he laid his hands on my head, and invoked Heaven's richest consolations and blessings on me and my trying labors.

Sorrow and love constrain me to linger over her last words. She cried, "Oh, that my dear mother were here! She is a good woman, my mother, a jewel of a woman."

Then, observing Mr. Copeland near by, she said, "Oh, Mr. Copeland, I did not know you were there! You must not think that I regret coming here, and leaving my mother. If I had the same thing to do over again, I would do it with far more pleasure, yes, with all my heart. Oh no! I do not regret leaving home and friends, though at the time I felt it keenly."

Soon after this, looking up and putting her hand in mine, she said—

"J. C. wrote to our Janet saying, that young Christians under their first impressions thought they could do anything or make any sacrifice for Jesus, and he asked if she believed it, for he did not think they could, when tested; but Janet wrote back that she believed they could, and (added she with great emphasis) I believe it is true!"

In a moment, altogether unexpectedly, she fell asleep in Jesus, with these words on her lips. "Not lost, only gone before to be forever with the Lord"—my heart keeps saying or singing to itself from that hour till now.

It was very difficult to be resigned, left alone, and in sorrowful circumstance; but feeling immovably assured that my God and Father was too wise and loving to err in anything that He does or permits, I looked up to the Lord for help, and struggled on in His work. I do not pretend to see through the mystery of such visitations,—wherein God calls away the young, the promising, and those sorely needed for His service here; but this I do know and feel, that, in the light of such dispensations, it becomes us all to love and serve our blessed Lord Jesus so that we may be ready at His call for death and Eternity.

CHAPTER 15: AT HOME WITH CANNIBALS.

IN the first letter, sent jointly by Mr. Copeland and myself from Tanna to the Church at home, the following statements occur:—

"We found the Tannese to be painted Savages, enveloped in all the superstition and wickedness of Heathenism. All the men and children go in a state of nudity. The older women wear grass skirts, and the young women and girls, grass or leaf aprons like Eve in Eden. They are exceedingly ignorant, vicious, and bigoted, and almost void of natural affection. Instead of the inhabitants of Port Resolution being improved by coming in contact with white men they are rendered much worse; for they have learned all their vices but none of their virtues,—if such are possessed by the pioneer traders among such races! The Sandal-wood Traders are as a class the most godless of men, whose cruelty and wickedness make us ashamed to own them as our countrymen. By them the poor defenseless Natives are oppressed and robbed on every hand; and if they offer the slightest resistance, they are ruthlessly silenced by the musket or revolver. Few months here pass without some of them being so shot, and, instead of their murderers feeling ashamed, they boast of how they despatch them. Such treatment keeps the Natives always burning under a desire for revenge, so that it is a wonder any white man is allowed to come among them. Indeed, all Traders here are able to maintain their position only by revolvers and rifles; but we hope a better state of affairs is at hand for Tanna."

The novelty of our being among them soon passed away, and they began to show their avarice and deceitfulness in every possible way. The Chiefs united and refused to give us the half of the small piece of land which had been purchased, on which to build our Mission House, and when we attempted to fence in the part they had left to us, they "tabooed" it, i. e. threatened our Teachers and us with death if we proceeded further with the work. This they did by placing certain reeds stuck into the ground here and there around our house, which our Aneityumese servants at once knew the meaning of, and warned us of our danger; so we left off making the fence, that we might if possible evade all offense. They then divided the few breadfruit and cocoa-nut trees on the ground amongst themselves, or demanded such payment for these trees as we did not possess, and threatened revenge on us if the trees were injured by any person. They now became so unreasonable and offensive, and our dangers so increased, as to make our residence amongst them extremely trying. At this time a vessel called; I bought from the Captain the things for payment which they demanded; on receiving it, they lifted the Taboo, and for a little season appeared to be friendly again. This was the third payment they had got for that site, and to yield was teaching them a cruel lesson; all this we felt and clearly saw, but they had by some means to be conciliated, if possible, and our lives had to be saved, if that could be done without dishonor to the Christian name.

After these events, a few weeks of dry weather began to tell against the growth of their yams and bananas. The drought was instantly ascribed to us and our God. The Natives far and near were summoned to consider the matter in public assembly. Next day, Nouka, the high chief, and Miaki, the war-chief, his nephew, came to inform us that two powerful Chiefs had openly declared in that assembly that if the Harbor people did not at once kill us or compel us to leave the island they would, unless the rain came plentifully in the meantime, summon all the Inland people and murder both our Chiefs and us. The friendly Chiefs said, "Pray to your Jehovah God for rain, and do not go far beyond your door for a time; we are all in greatest danger, and if war breaks out we fear we cannot protect you."

But this friendliness was all pretense; they themselves, being Sacred Men, professed to have the power of sending or withholding rain, and tried to fix the blame of their discomfiture on us. The rage of the poor ignorant Heathen was thereby fed against us. The Ever-Merciful, however, again interposed on our behalf. On the following Sabbath, just when we were assembling for worship, rain began to fall, and in great abundance. The whole inhabitants believed, apparently, that it was sent to save us in answer to our prayers; so they met again, and resolved to allow us to remain on Tanna. Alas! on the other hand, the continuous and heavy rains brought much sickness and fever in their train, and again their Sacred Men pointed to us as the cause. Hurricane winds also blew and injured their fruits and fruit-trees,—another opportunity for our enemies to lay the blame of everything upon the Missionaries and their Jehovah God! The trial and the danger daily grew, of living among a people so dreadfully benighted by superstition, and so easily swayed by prejudice and passion.

The Natives of Tanna were well-nigh constantly at war amongst themselves, every man doing that which was right in his own eyes, and almost every quarrel ending in an appeal to arms. Besides many battles far inland, one was fought beside our houses and several around the Harbor. In these conflicts many men were bruised with clubs and wounded with arrows, but few lives were lost, considering the savage uproar and frenzy of the scene. In one case, of which we obtained certain information, seven men were killed in an engagement; and, according to Tannese custom, the warriors and their friends feasted on them at the close of the fray, the widows of the slain being also strangled to death, and similarly disposed of. Besides those who fell in war, the Natives living in our quarter had killed and feasted on eight persons, usually, in sacrificial rites.

It is said that the habitual Cannibal's desire for human flesh becomes so horrible that he has been known to disinter and feast upon those recently buried. Two cases of this revolting barbarism were reported as having occurred amongst the villagers living near us. On another occasion the great chief Nouka took seriously unwell, and his people sacrificed three women for his recovery! All such cruel and horrifying practises, however, they tried to conceal from us; and many must have perished in this way of whom we, though living at their doors, were never permitted to hear.

Amongst the Heathen, in the New Hebrides, and especially on Tanna, woman is the down-trodden slave of man. She is kept working hard, and bears all the heavier burdens, while he walks by her side with musket, club, or spear. If she offends him, he beats or abuses her at pleasure. A savage gave his poor wife a severe beating in front of our house and just before our eyes, while in vain we strove to prevent it. Such scenes were so common that no one thought of interfering. Even if the woman died in his hands, or immediately thereafter, neighbors, took little notice, if any at all. And their children were so little cared for, that my constant wonder was how any of them survived at all! As soon as they are able to knock about, they are left practically to care for themselves; hence the very small affection they show towards their parents, which results in the aged who are unable to work being neglected, starved to death, and sometimes even more directly and violently destroyed.

A Heathen boy's education consists in being taught to aim skilfully with the bow, throw the spear faultlessly at a mark, to wield powerfully the club and tomahawk, and to shoot well with musket and revolver when these can be obtained. He accompanies his father and brothers in all the wars and preparations for war, and is diligently initiated into all their cruelties and lusts, as the very prerequisite of his being regarded and acknowledged to be a man and a warrior. The girls have, with their mother and sisters, to toil and slave in the village plantations, to prepare all the materials for fencing these around, to bear every burden, and to be knocked about at will by the men and boys.

Oh, how sad and degraded is the position of Woman where the teaching of Christ is unknown, or disregarded though known! It is the Christ of the Bible, it is His Spirit entering into humanity, that has lifted Woman, and made her the helpmate and the friend of Man, not his toy or his slave.

CHAPTER 16: SUPERSTITIONS AND CRUELTIES.

ABOUT the time of my dear wife's death, our brother Missionary, Mr. Mathieson, also became exceedingly unwell. His delicate frame fast gave way, and brought with it weakness of the mind as well; and he was removed to Aneityum apparently in a dying condition. These sad visitations had a bad effect on the natives, owing to their wild superstitions about the cause of death and sickness. We had reason to fear that they would even interfere with the precious grave, over which we kept careful watch for a season; but God mercifully restrained them. Unfortunately, however, one of my Aneityumese Teachers who had gone round to Mr. Mathieson's Station took ill and died there, and this rekindled all their prejudices. He, poor fellow, before death said, "I shall not again return to Port Resolution, or see my dear Missi; but tell him that I die happy, for I love Jesus much, and I am going to Jesus!"

Hearing these things, the natives insolently demanded me to tell them the cause of his death, and of Mr. Mathieson's trouble, and of the other deaths. Other reasoning or explanation being to them useless, I turned the tables, and demanded them to tell me why all this trouble and death had overtaken us in their land, and whether they themselves were not the cause of it all? Strange to say, this simple question turned the whole current of their speculations. They held meeting after meeting to discuss it for several days, and returned the message, "We do not blame you, and you must not blame us, for causing these troubles and deaths; but we believe that a Bushman must have got hold of a portion of something we had eaten, and must have thrown it to the great Evil Spirit in the volcano, thereby bringing all these troubles and curses."

Another Chief vindicated himself and others thus:—"Karapanamun, the Aurumanu or great Evil Spirit of Tanna, whom we all fear and worship, is causing these troubles; for he knows that if we become worshipers of your Jehovah God, we cannot continue to fear him, or present him with the best of everything, as our forefathers have always done; he is angry at you and at us all."

The fear of the deaths and troubles being ascribed to them silenced their talk against us for a season; but very little made them either friends or foes, as the next event will too painfully show.

Nowhat, an old Chief of the highest rank from Aneityum, who spoke Tannese and was much respected by the natives all round the south side of Tanna, came on a visit to our island. After returning home, he became very ill and died in a few days. The deluded Tannese, hearing of his death, ascribed it to me and the Worship, and resolved to burn our house and property, and either murder the whole Mission party, or compel us to leave the island. Nowhat's brother was sent from Aneityum to talk to the Tannese and conciliate them, but unfortunately he could not speak the language well; and the Aneityumese Teachers felt their lives to be at this time in such danger that they durst not accompany him as interpreters, while I, on the other hand, did not understand his language, nor he, mine. Within two days after landing, he had a severe attack of ague and fever; and, though the vessel he came in remained eight days, he was prostrated all the time, so that his well-intentioned visit did us much harm. The Tannese became furious. This was proof positive that we were the cause of all their sickness and death! Inland and all along the weather side of the island, when far enough away from us, they said that the natives were enjoying excellent health. Meeting after meeting was held; exciting speeches were delivered; and feasts were given, for which it was said that several women were sacrificed, cooked and eaten,—such being the bonds by which they entered into covenant with each other for life or death.

The inhabitants for miles around united in seeking our destruction, but God put it into even savage hearts to save us. Old Nowar, the Chief under whom we lived, and the Chief next under him, Arkurat, set themselves to rescue us. Along with Manuman and Sirawia they opposed every plan in the public assembly for taking our lives. Some of their people also remained friendly to us, and by the help of our Aneityumese Teachers, warned us of danger and protected our lives. Determined not to be baffled, a meeting of all our enemies on the island was summoned, and it was publicly resolved that a band of men be selected and enjoined to kill the whole of those friendly to the Mission, old Nowar among the rest, and not only to murder the Mission party, but also a trader who had lately landed to live there, that no one might be left to give information to the white men or bring punishment on the Islanders. Frenzy of excitement prevailed, and the blood-fiend seemed to override the whole assembly; when, under an impulse that surely came from the Lord of Pity, one great warrior Chief who had hitherto kept silent, rose, swung aloft a mighty club, and smashing it earthwards, cried aloud, "The man that kills Missi must first kill me,—the men that kill the Mission Teachers must first kill me and my people,—for we shall stand by them and defend them till death."

Instantaneously, another Chief thundered in with the same declaration; and the great assembly broke up in dismay. All the more remarkable was this deliverance, as these two Chiefs lived nearly four miles inland, and, as reputed disease makers and Sacred Men, were regarded as amongst our bitterest enemies. It had happened that, a brother of the former Chief having been wounded in battle, I had dressed his wounds and he recovered, for which perhaps he now favored us. But I do not put very much value on that consideration; for too clearly did our dear Lord Jesus interpose directly on our behalf that day. I and my defenseless company had spent it in anxious prayers and tears; and our hearts overflowed with gratitude to the Saviour who rescued us from the lions' jaws.

Leaving all consequences to the disposal of my Lord, I determined to make an unflinching stand against wife-beating and widow-strangling, feeling confident that even their natural conscience would be on my side, I accordingly pled with all who were in power to unite and put down these shocking and disgraceful customs. At length ten Chiefs entered into an agreement not to allow any more beating of wives or strangling of widows, and to forbid all common labor on the Lord's day; but alas, except for purposes of war or other wickedness, the influence of the Chiefs on Tanna was comparatively small. One Chief boldly declared, "If we did not beat our women, they would never work; they would not fear and obey us; but when we have beaten, and killed, and feasted on two or three, the rest are all very quiet and good for a long time to come!"

I tried to show him how cruel it was, besides that it made them unable for work, and that kindness would have a much better effect; but he promptly assured me that Tannese women "could not understand kindness." For the sake of teaching by example, my Aneityumese Teachers and I used to go a mile or two inland on the principal pathway, along with the Teachers' wives, and there cutting and carrying home a heavy load of firewood for myself and each of the men, while we gave only a small burden to each of the women. Meeting many Tanna-men by the way, I used to explain to them that this was how Christians helped and treated their wives and sisters, and then they loved their husbands and were strong to work at home; and that as men were made stronger, they were intended to bear the heavier burdens, and especially in all labors out of doors. Our habits and practises had thus as much to do as, perhaps more than, all our appeals, in leading them to glimpses of the life to which the Lord Jesus was calling them.

CHAPTER 17: STREAKS OF DAWN AMIDST DEEDS OF DARKNESS.

ANOTHER war-burst, that caused immense consternation, passed over with only two or three deaths; and I succeeded in obtaining the consent of twenty Chiefs to fight no more except on the defensive,—a covenant to which, for a considerable time, they strictly adhered, in the midst of fierce provocations. But to gain any such end, the masses of the people must be educated to the point of desiring it. The few cannot, in such circumstances, act up to it, without laying themselves open to be downtrodden and swept away by the savages around.

About this time, several men, afraid or ashamed by day, came to me regularly by night for conversation and instruction. Having seen the doors of the Mission House made fast and the windows blinded so that they could not be observed, they continued with me for many hours, asking all strange questions about the new Religion and its laws. I remember one Chief particularly, who came often, saying to me, "I would be an Awfuaki man (i. e. a Christian) were it not that all the rest would laugh at me; that I could not stand!"

"Almost persuaded"—before you blame him, remember how many in Christian lands and amid greater privileges live and die without ever passing beyond that stage.

The wife of one of those Chiefs died, and he resolved to imitate a Christian burial. Having purchased white calico from a Trader, he came to me for some tape which the Trader could not supply, and told me that he was going to dress the body as he had seen my dear wife's dressed, and lay her also in a similar grave. He declined my offer to attend the funeral and to pray with them, as in that case many of the villagers would not attend. He wanted all the people to be present, to see and to hear, as it was the first funeral of the kind ever celebrated among the Tannese; and my friend Nowar the Chief had promised to conduct a Service and offer prayer to Jehovah before all the Heathen. It moved me to many strange emotions, this Christian burial, conducted by a Heathen and in the presence of Heathens, with an appeal to the true and living God by a man as yet darkly groping among idols and superstitions. Many were the wondering questions from time to time addressed to me. The idea of a resurrection from the dead was that which most keenly interested these Natives, and called forth all their powers of inquiry and argument. Thus the waves of hope and fear swept alternately across our lives; but we embraced every possible opportunity of telling them the story of the life and death of Jesus, in the strong hope that God would spare us yet to bring the benighted Heathen to the knowledge of the true salvation, and to love and serve the only Saviour.

Confessedly, however, it was uphill, weary, and trying work. For one thing, these Tannese were terribly dishonest; and when there was any special sickness, or excitement from any cause, their bad feeling towards the Worship was displayed by the more insolent way in which they carried off whatever they could seize. When I opposed them, the club or tomahawk, the musket or kawas (i. e. killing-stone), being instantly raised, intimated that my life would be taken, if I resisted. Their skill in stealing on the sly was phenomenal! If an article fell, or was seen on the floor, a Tanna-man would neatly cover it with his foot, while looking you frankly in the face, and, having fixed it by his toes or by bending in his great toe like a thumb to hold it, would walk off with it, assuming the most innocent look in the world. In this way, a knife, a pair of scissors or any smaller article, would at once disappear. Another fellow would deftly stick something out of sight amongst the whipcord plaits of his hair, another would conceal it underneath his naked arm, while yet another would shamelessly lift what he coveted and openly carry it away.

With most of them, however, the shame was not in the theft, but in doing it so clumsily that they were discovered! Once, after continuous rain and a hot damp atmosphere, when the sun shone out I put my bedclothes on a rope to dry. I stood at hand watching, as also the wives of two Teachers, for things were mysteriously disappearing almost under our very eyes. Suddenly, Miaki, who with his war-companions had been watching us unobserved, came rushing to me breathless and alone, crying, "Missi, come in, quick, quick! I want to tell you something and to get your advice!"

He ran into my house, and I followed; but before he had got into his story, we heard the two women crying out, "Missi, Missi, come quick! Miaki's men are Stealing your sheets and blankets!"

I ran at once, but all were gone into the bush, and them my sheets and blankets. Miaki for a moment looked abashed, as I charged him with deceiving me just to give his men their opportunity. But he soon rose to the occasion. He wrought himself into a towering rage at them, flourished his huge club and smashed the bushes all around, shouting to me, "Thus will I smash these fellows, and compel them to return your clothes."

One dark night, I heard them amongst my fowls. These I had purchased from them for knives and calico; and they now stole them all away, dead or alive. Had I interfered, they would have gloried in the chance to club or shoot me in the dark, when no one could exactly say who had done the deed. Several of the few goats, which I had for milk, were also killed or driven away; indeed, all the injury that was possible was done to me, short of taking away my life, and that was now frequently attempted. Having no fires or fireplaces in my Mission House, such being not required there,—though sometimes a fire would have been invaluable for drying our bedclothes in the rainy season,—we had a house near by in which all our food was cooked, and there, under lock and key, we secured all our cooking utensils, pots, dishes, etc. One night that too was broken into, and everything was stolen. In consternation, I appealed to the Chief, telling him what had been done. He also flew into a great rage, and vowed vengeance on the thieves, saying that he would compel them to return everything. But, of course, nothing was returned; the thief could not be found! I, unable to live without something in which to boil water, at length offered a blanket to any one that would bring back my kettle. Miaki himself, after much professed difficulty, returned it minus the lid,—that, he said, probably fishing for a higher bribe, could not be got at any price, being at the other side of the island in a tribe over which he had no control! In the circumstances, I was glad to get kettle minus lid—realizing how life itself may depend on so small a luxury!

CHAPTER 18: THE VISIT OF H. M. S. "CORDELIA."

ONE morning, the Tannese, rushing towards me in great excitement, cried, "Missi, Missi, there is a God, or a ship on fire, or something of fear, coming over the sea! We see no flames, but it smokes like a volcano. Is it a Spirit, a God, or a ship on fire? What is it? what is it?"

One party after another followed in quick succession, shouting the same questions in great alarm, to which I replied, "I cannot go at once; I must dress first in my best clothes; it will likely be one of Queen Victoria's Men-of-war, coming to ask of me if your conduct is good or bad, if you are stealing my property, or threatening my life, or how you are using me?"

They pled with me to go and see it; but I made much fuss about dressing, and getting ready to meet the great Chief on the vessel, and would not go with them. The two principal Chiefs now came running and asked, "Missi, will it be a ship of war?"

I called to them, "I think it will; but I have no time to speak to you now, I must get on my best clothes!"

They said, "Missi, only tell us, will he ask you if we have been stealing your things?"

I answered, "I expect he will."

They asked, "And will you tell him?"

I said, "I must tell him the truth; if he asks, I will tell him."

They then cried out, "Oh, Missi, tell him not! Everything shall be brought back to you at once, and no one will be allowed again to steal from you."

Then said I, "Be quick! Everything must be returned before he comes. Away, away! and let me get ready to meet the great Chief on the Man-of-war."

Hitherto, no thief could ever be found, and no Chief had power to cause anything to be restored to me; but now, in an incredibly brief space of time, one came running to the Mission House with a pot, another with a pan, another with a blanket, others with knives, forks, plates, and all sorts of stolen property. The Chiefs called me to receive these things, but I replied, "Lay them all down at the door, bring everything together quickly; I have no time to speak with you!"

I delayed my toilet, enjoying mischievously the magical effect of an approaching vessel that might bring penalty to thieves. At last the Chiefs, running in breathless haste, called out to me, "Missi, Missi, do tell us, is the stolen property all here?"

Of course I could not tell, but, running out, I looked on the promiscuous heap of my belongings, and said, "I don't see the lid of the kettle there yet!"

One Chief said, "No, Missi, for it is on the other side of the island; but tell him not, I have sent for it, and it will be here to-morrow."

I answered, "I am glad you have brought back so much; and now, if you three Chiefs, Nauka, Miaki, and Nowar, do not run away when he comes, he will not likely punish you; but, if you and your people run away, he will ask me why you are afraid, and I will be forced to tell him! Keep near me and you are all safe; only there must be no more stealing from me."

They said, "We are in black fear, but we will keep near you, and our bad conduct to you is done."

The charm and joy of that morning are fresh to me still, when H. M. S. Cordelia, Captain Vernon, steamed into our lovely Harbor. The Commander, having heard rumor of my dangers on Tanna, kindly came on shore as soon as the ship cast anchor, with two boats, and a number of his officers and men, so far armed. He was dressed in splendid uniform, being a tall and handsome man, and he and his attendants made a grand and imposing show. On seeing Captain Vernon's boat nearing the shore, and the men glittering in gold lace and arms, Miaki the Chief left my side on the beach and rushed towards his village. I concluded that he had run for it through terror, but he had other and more civilized intentions in his Heathen head! Having obtained, from some trader or visitor in previous days, a soldier's old red coat, he had resolved to rise to the occasion and appear in his best before the Captain and his men. As I was shaking hands with them and welcoming them to Tanna, Miaki returned with the short red coat on, buttoned tightly round his otherwise naked body; and, surmounted by his ugly painted face and long whipcords of twisted hair, it completely spoiled any appearance that he might otherwise have had of savage freedom, and made him look a dirty and insignificant creature.

The Captain was talking to me, his men stood in order nearby—to my eyes, oh how charming a glimpse of Home life!—when Miaki marched up and took his place most consequentially at my side. He felt himself the most important personage in the scene, and with an attempt at haughty dignity he began to survey the visitors. All eyes were fixed on the impudent little man, and the Captain asked, "What sort of a character is this?"

I replied, "This is Miaki, our great war Chief"; and whispered to the Captain to be on his guard, as this man knew a little English, and might understand or misunderstand just enough to make it afterwards dangerous to me.

The Captain only muttered, "The contemptible creature!" But such words were far enough beyond Miaki's vocabulary, so he looked on and grinned complacently.

At last he said, "Missi, this great Chief whom Queen Victoria has sent to visit you in her Man-of-war, cannot go over the whole of this island so as to be seen by all our people; and I wish you to ask him if he will stand by a tree, and allow me to put a spear on the ground at his heel, and we will make a nick in it at the top of his head, and the spear will be sent round the island to let all the people see how tall this great man is!" They were delighted at the good Captain agreeing to their simple request; and that spear was exhibited to thousands, as the vessel, her Commander, officers, and men, were afterwards talked of round and round the island.

Captain Vernon was extremely kind, and offered to do anything in his power for me, thus left alone on the island amongst such savages; but, as my main difficulties were connected with my spiritual work amongst them, rousing up their cruel prejudices, I did not see his kindness could effectually interpose. At his suggestion, however, I sent a general invitation to all the Chiefs within reach, to meet the Captain next morning at my house. True to their instincts of suspicion and fear, they despatched all their women and and children to the beach on the opposite side of the island, beyond reach of danger, and next morning my house was crowded with armed men, manifestly much afraid. Punctually at the hour appointed, 10 A.M., the Captain came on shore; and soon thereafter twenty Chiefs were seated with him in my house. He very kindly spent about an hour, giving them wise counsels and warning them against outrages on strangers, all calculated to secure our safety and advance the interests of our Mission work. He then invited all the Chiefs to go on board and see his vessel. They were taken to see the Armory, and the sight of the big guns running so easily on rails vastly astonished them. He then placed them round us on deck and showed them two shells discharged towards the ocean, at which, as they burst and fell far off, splash—splashing into the water, the terror of the Natives visibly increased. But, when he sent a large ball crashing through a cocoanut grove, breaking the trees like straws and cutting its way clear and swift, they were quite dumfounded and pled to be again set safely on shore. After receiving each some small gift, however, they were reconciled to the situation, and returned immensely interested in all that they had seen. Doubtless many a wild romance was spun by these savage heads, in trying to describe and hand down to others the wonders of the fire-god of the sea, and the Captain of the great white Queen. How easily it all lends itself to the service of poetry and myth!

CHAPTER 19: "NOBLE OLD ABRAHAM."

FEVER and ague had now attacked me fourteen times severely, with slighter recurring attacks almost continuously after my first three months on the island, and I now felt the necessity of taking the hint of the Tannese Chief before referred to—"Sleep on the higher ground." Having also received medical counsel to the same effect, though indeed experience was painfully sufficient testimony, I resolved to remove my house, and began to look about for a suitable site. There rose behind my present site, a hill about two hundred feet high, surrounded on all sides by a valley, and swept by the breezes of the trade-winds, being only separated from the ocean by a narrow neck of land. On this I had set my heart; there was room for a Mission House and a Church, for which indeed Nature seemed to have adapted it. I proceeded to buy up every claim by the Natives to any portion of the hill, paying each publicly and in turn, so that there might be no trouble afterwards. I then purchased from a Trader the deck planks of a shipwrecked vessel, with which to construct a house of two apartments, a bedroom and a small store-room adjoining it, to which I purposed to transfer and add the old house as soon as I was able.

Just at this juncture, the fever smote me again more severely than ever; my weakness after this attack was so great, that I felt as if I never could rally again. With the help of my faithful Aneityumese Teacher, Abraham, and his wife, however, I made what appeared my last effort to creep—I could not climb—up the hill to get a breath of wholesome air. When about two-thirds up the hill, I became so faint that I concluded I was dying. Lying down on the ground, sloped against the root of a tree to keep me from rolling to the bottom, I took farewell of old Abraham, of my Mission work, and of everything around! In this weak state I lay, watched over by my faithful companion, and fell into a quiet sleep. When consciousness returned, I felt a little stronger, and a faint gleam of hope and life came back to my soul.

Abraham and his devoted wife Nafatu lifted me and carried me to the top of the hill. There they laid me on cocoanut leaves on the ground, and erected over me a shade or screen of the same; and there the two faithful souls, inspired surely by something diviner even than mere human pity, gave me the cocoanut juice to drink and fed me with native food and kept me living—I know not for how long. Consciousness did, however, fully return. The trade-wind refreshed me day by day. The Tannese seemed to have given me up for dead; and providentially none of them looked near us for many days. Amazingly my strength returned, and I began planning about my new house on the hill. Afraid again to sleep at the old site, I slept under the tree, and sheltered by the cocoanut leaf screen, while preparing my new bedroom.

Here again, but for these faithful souls, the Aneityumese Teacher and his wife, I must have been baffled, and would have died in the effort. The planks of the wreck, and all other articles required, they fetched and carried; and it taxed my utmost strength to get them in some way planted together. But life depended on it. It was at length accomplished; and after that time I suffered comparatively little from anything like continuous attacks of fever and ague. That noble old soul, Abraham, stood by me as an angel of God in sickness and in danger; he went at my side wherever I had to go; he helped me willingly to the last inch of strength in all that I had to do; and it was perfectly manifest that he was doing all this not from mere human love, but for the sake of Jesus. That man had been a Cannibal in his Heathen days, but by the grace of God there he stood verily a new creature in Christ Jesus. Any trust, however sacred or valuable, could be absolutely reposed in him; and in trial or danger I was often refreshed by that old Teacher's prayers, as I used to be by the prayers of my saintly father in my childhood's home. No white man could have been more valuable helper to me in my perilous circumstances; and no person, white or black, could have shown more fearless and chivalrous devotion.

When I have read or heard the shallow objections of irreligious scribblers and talkers, hinting that there was no reality in conversions, and that Mission effort was but waste, oh, how my heart has yearned to plant them just one week on Tanna, with the "natural" man all around in the person of Cannibal and Heathen, and only the one "spiritual" man in the person of the converted Abraham, nursing them, feeding them, saving them "for the love of Jesus"—that I might just learn how many hours it took to convince them that Christ in man was a reality after all! All the skepticism of Europe would hide its head in foolish shame; and all its doubts would dissolve under one glance of the new light that Jesus, and Jesus alone, pours from the converted Cannibal's eye.

CHAPTER 20: A TYPICAL SOUTH SEA TRADER.

THE prejudices and persecutions of Heathens were a sore enough trial, but sorer and more hopeless was the wicked and contaminating influence of, alas, my fellow-countrymen. One, for instance, a Captain Winchester, living with a native woman at the head of the bay as a Trader, a dissipated wretch, though a well-educated man, was angry forsooth at this state of peace! Apparently there was not the usual demand for barter for the fowls, pigs, etc., in which he traded. He developed at once a wonderful interest in their affairs, presented all the Chiefs around with powder, caps, and balls, and lent among them a number of flash-muskets. He urged them not to be afraid of war, as he would supply any amount of ammunition. I remonstrated, but he flatly told me that peace did not suit his purposes. Incited and encouraged thus, these poor Heathen people were goaded into a most unjust war on neighboring tribes. The Trader immediately demanded a high price for the weapons he had lent; the price of powder, caps, and balls rose exorbitantly with every fresh demand; his yards were crowded with poultry and pigs, which he readily disposed of to passing vessels; and he might have amassed great sums of money but for his vile dissipations. Captain Winchester, now glorying in the war, charged a large hog for a wine-glass full of powder, or three or four balls, or ten gun-caps; he was boastful of his "good luck" in getting rid of all his old muskets and filling his yards with pigs and fowls. Such is the infernal depth to which we can sink, when the misery and the ruin of many are thought to be more than atoned for by the wealth and prosperity of a few who trade in their doom!

Miaki the war Chief had a young brother, Rarip by name, about eighteen years of age. When this war began he came to live with me at the Mission House. After it had raged some time, Miaki forced him to join the fighting men; but he escaped through the bush, and returned to me, saying, "Missi, I hate this fighting; it is not good to kill men; I will live with you!"

Again the war Chief came, and forced my dear young Rarip to join the hosts. Of course, I could only plead; I could not prevent him. This time, he placed him at his own side in the midst of his warriors. On coming in sight of the enemy, and hearing their first yells as they rushed from the bush, a bullet pierced young Rarip's breast, and he fell dead into the arms of Miaki. The body was carried home to his brother's village, with much wailing, and a messenger ran to tell me that Rarip was dead. On hasting thither, I found him quite dead, and the center of a tragic ceremonial. Around him, some sitting, others lying on the ground, were assembled all the women and girls, tearing their hair, wounding themselves with split bamboos and broken bottles, dashing themselves headlong to the earth, painting all black their faces, breasts, and arms, and wailing with loud lamentations! Men were also there, knocking their heads against the trees, gashing their bodies with knives till they ran with streaks of blood, and indulging in every kind of savage symbol of grief and anguish. My heart broke to see them, and to think that they knew not to look to our dear Lord Jesus for consolation.

I returned to the Mission House, and brought a white sheet and some tape, in which the body of dear young Rarip was wrapped and prepared for the grave. The Natives appeared to be gratified at this mark of respect; and all agreed that Rarip should have, under my direction, a Christian burial. The men prepared the grave in a spot selected near to his own house; I read the Word of God, and offered prayer to Jehovah, with a psalm of praise, amidst a scene of weeping and lamentation never to be forgotten; and the thought burned through my very soul—oh, when, when will the Tannese realize what I am now thinking and praying about, the life and immortality brought to light through Jesus?

As the war still raged on, and many more were killed, vengeance threatened the miserable Trader. Miaki attacked him thus, "You led us into this war. You deceived us, and we began it. Rarip is dead, and many others. Your life shall yet go for his."

Captain Winchester, heartless as a dog so long as pigs and fowls came to the yard at whatever cost to others' lives, now trembled like a coward for himself. He implored me to let him and his Mare wife sleep at my house for safety; but I refused to allow my Mission to be in any way identified with his crimes. The Natives from other islands, whom he kept and wrought like slaves, he now armed with muskets for his defence; but, having no faith in their protecting or even warning him, he implored me to send one of my Teachers, to assist his wife in watching till he snatched a few hours of sleep every day, and, if awake, he would sell his life as dearly as he could by aid of musket and revolver. The Teachers were both afraid and disinclined to go; and I could not honestly ask them to do so. His peril and terror became so real that by night he slept in his boat anchored out in the center of the bay, with his arms beside him, and a crew ready to start off at the approach of danger and lose everything; while by day he kept watch on shore, armed, and also ready to fly. Thus his miserable existence dragged on, keeping watch alternatively with his wife, till a trading vessel called and carried him off with all that he had rescued—for which deliverance we were unfeignedly thankful! The war, which he had wickedly instigated, lingered on for three months; and then, by a present given secretly to two leading Chiefs, I managed to bring it to a close. But feelings of revenge for the slain burned fiercely in many breasts; and young men had old feuds handed on to them by the recital of their fathers' deeds of blood.

CHAPTER 21: UNDER AX AND MUSKET.

ABOUT this time, our Sabbath audiences at the Mission numbered forty or so. Nowar and three or four more, and only they, seemed to love and serve Jesus. They were, however, changeable and doubtful, though they exerted a good influence on their villages, and were generally friendly to us and to the Worship.

One morning at daybreak I found my house surrounded by armed men, and a Chief intimated that they had assembled to take my life. Seeing that I was entirely in their hands, I knelt down and gave myself away body and soul to the Lord Jesus, for what seemed the last time on earth. Rising, I went out to them, and began calmly talking about their unkind treatment of me and contrasting it with all my conduct towards them. I also plainly showed them what would be the sad consequences, if they carried out their cruel purpose. At last some of the chiefs, who had attended the Worship, rose and said, "Our conduct has been bad; but now we will fight for you, and kill all those who hate you."

Grasping hold of their leader, I held him fast till he promised never to kill any one on my account, for Jesus taught us to love our enemies and always to return good for evil! During this scene, many of the armed slunk away into the bush, and those who remained entered into a bond to be friendly and to protect us. But again their Public Assembly resolved that we should be killed, because, as they said, they hated Jehovah and the Worship; for it made them afraid to do as they had always done. If I would give up visiting the villages, and praying and talking with them about Jehovah, they intimated that they would like me to stay and trade with them, as they liked the Traders but hated the Missionaries! I told them that the hope of being able to teach them the Worship of Jehovah alone kept me living amongst them; that I was there, not for gain or pleasure, but because I loved them, and pitied their estate, and sought their good continually by leading them to know and serve the only true God.

But my enemies seldom slackened their hateful designs against my life, however calmed or baffled for the moment. Within a few days of the above events, when Natives in large numbers were assembled at my house, a man furiously rushed on me with his ax; but a Kaserumini Chief snatched a spade with which I had been working, and dexterously defended me from instant death. Life in such circumstances led me to cling very near to the Lord Jesus; I knew not, for one brief hour, when or how attack might be made; and yet, with my trembling hand clasped in the Hand once nailed on Calvary, and now swaying the scepter of the Universe, calmness and peace and resignation abode in my soul.

Next day, a wild Chief followed me about for four hours with his loaded musket, and, though often directed towards me, God restrained his hand. I spoke kindly to him, and attended to my work as if he had not been there, fully persuaded that my God had placed me there, and would protect me till my allotted task was finished. Looking up in unceasing prayer to our dear Lord Jesus, I left all in His hands, and felt immortal till my work was done. Trials and hairbreadth escapes strengthened my faith, and seemed only to nerve me for more to follow; and they did tread swiftly upon each other's heels. Without that abiding consciousness of the presence and power of my dear Lord and Saviour, nothing else in all the world could have preserved me from losing my reason and perishing miserably. His words, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world," became to me so real that it would not have startled me to behold Him, as Stephen did, gazing down upon the scene. I felt His supporting power, as did St. Paul, when he cried, "I can do all things through Christ which strengthened me." It is the sober truth, and it comes back to me sweetly after twenty years, that I had my nearest and dearest glimpses of the face and smile of my blessed Lord in those dread moments when musket, club, or spear was being leveled at my life. Oh the bliss of living and enduring, as seeing "Him who is invisible!" One evening, I awoke three times to hear a Chief and his men trying to force the door of my house. Though armed with muskets, they had some sense of doing wrong, and were wholesomely afraid of a little retriever dog which had often stood betwixt me and death. God restrained them again; and next morning the report went all round the Harbor that those who tried to shoot me were "smitten weak with fear," and that shooting would not do. A plan was therefore deliberately set on foot to fire the premises, and club us if we attempted to escape. But our Aneityumese Teacher heard of it, and God helped us to frustrate their designs. When they knew their plots were revealed to us, they seemed to lose faith in themselves, and cast about to circumvent us in some more secret way, Their evil was overruled for good.

CHAPTER 22: A NATIVE SAINT AND MARTYR.

NAMUEI, one of my Aneityumese Teachers, was placed at our nearest village. There he had built a house for himself and his wife, and there he led amongst the Heathen a pure and humble Christian life. Almost every morning he came and reported on the state of affairs to me. Without books or a school, he yet instructed the Natives in Divine things, conducted the worship, and taught them much by his good example. His influence was increasing, when one morning a Sacred Man threw at him the kawas or killing-stone, a deadly weapon like a scythe stone in shape and thickness, usually round but sometimes angular, and from eighteen to twenty inches long. They throw it from a great distance and with fatal precision. The Teacher, with great agility, warded his head and received the deep cut from it in his left hand, reserving his right hand to guard against the club that was certain to follow swiftly. The Priest sprang upon him with his club and with savage yells. He evaded, yet also received, many blows; and, rushing out of their hands, actually reached the Mission House, bleeding, fainting, and pursued by howling murderers. I had been anxiously expecting him, and hearing the noise I ran out with all possible speed.

On seeing me, he sank down by a tree, and cried, "Missi, Missi, quick! and escape for your life! They are coming to kill you; they say they must kill us all to-day, and they have begun with me; for they hate Jehovah and the Worship!"

I hastened to the good Teacher where he lay; I bound up, washed, and dressed his wounds; and God, by the mystery of His own working, kept the infuriated Tannese watching at bay. Gradually they began to disappear into the bush, and we conveyed the dear Teacher to the Mission House. In three or four weeks, he so far recovered by careful nursing that he was able to walk about again. Some petitioned for him to return to the village; but I insisted, as a preliminary, that the Harbor Chiefs should unitedly punish him who had abused the Teacher; and this to test them, for he had only carried out their own wishes,—Nowar excepted, and perhaps one or two others. They made a pretense of atoning by presenting the Teacher with a pig and some yams as a peace-offering; but I said, "No! Such bad conduct must be punished, or we would leave their island by the first opportunity."

Now that Sacred Man, a Chief too, had gone on fighting with other tribes, till his followers had all died or been slain; and, after three weeks' palaver, the other Chiefs seized him, tied him with a rope, and sent me word to come and see him punished, as they did not want us after all to leave the island. I had to go, for fear of more bloody work, and after talk with them, followed by many fair promises, he was loosed.

All appearing friendly for some time, and willing to listen and learn, the Teacher earnestly desired to return to his post. I pled with him to remain at the Mission House till we felt more assured, but he replied, "Missi, when I see them thirsting for my blood, I just see myself when the Missionary first came to my island. I desired to murder him, as they now desire to kill me. Had he stayed away for such danger, I would have remained Heathen; but he came, and continued coming to teach us, till, by the grace of God, I was changed to what I am. Now the same God that changed me to this can change these poor Tannese to love and serve Him. I cannot stay away from them; but I will sleep at the Mission House, and do all I can by day to bring them to Jesus."

It was not in me to keep such a man, under such motives, from what he felt to be his post of duty. He returned to his village work, and for several weeks things appeared most encouraging. The inhabitants showed growing interest in us and our work, and less fear of the pretensions of their Heathen Priest, which, alas! fed his jealousy and anger. One morning during worship, when the good Teacher knelt in prayer, the same savage Priest sprang upon him with his great club and left him for dead, wounded and bleeding and unconscious. The people fled and left him in his blood, afraid of being mixed up with the murder. The Teacher, recovering a little, crawled to the Mission House, and reached it about midday in a dying condition. On seeing him, I ran to meet him, but he fell near the Teacher's house, saying, "Missi, I am dying! They will kill you also. Escape for your life."

Trying to console him, I sat down beside him, dressing his wounds and nursing him. He was quite resigned; he was looking up to Jesus, and rejoicing that he would soon be with Him in Glory. His pain and suffering were great but he bore all very quietly, as he said and kept saying, "For the sake of Jesus! For Jesu's sake!" He was constantly praying for his persecutors, "O Lord Jesus, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing. Oh, take not away all Thy servants from Tanna! Take not away Thy Worship from this dark island! O God, bring all the Tannese to love and follow Jesus!"

To him, Jesus was all and in all; and there were no bands in his death. He passed from us, in the assured hope of entering into the Glory of his Lord. Humble though he may appear in the world's esteem, I knew that a great man had fallen there in the service of Christ, and that he would take rank in the glorious Army of the Martyrs. I made for him a coffin, and dug his grave near the Mission House. With prayers, and many tears, we consigned his remains to the dust in the certainty of a happy resurrection. Even one such convert was surely a triumphant reward for the Missionaries, whom God had honored in bringing him to Jesus. May they have many like Namuri for their crown of joy and rejoicing in the great day!

CHAPTER 23: BUILDING AND PRINTING FOR GOD.

FOR fully three months, all our available time, with all the native help which I could hire, was spent in erecting a building to serve for Church and School. It was fifty feet long, by twenty-one feet six inches broad. The studs were three feet apart, and all fixed by tenon and mortise into upper and lower wall plates. The beautiful roof of iron-wood and sugar-cane leaf was supported by three massive pillars of wood, sunk deeply into the ground. The roof extended about three feet over the wall plates, both to form a verandah and to carry the raindrops free beyond the walls. It was made of sugar-cane leaf and cocoanut leaves all around. The floor was laid with white coral, broken small, and covered with cocoanut leaf mats, such as those on which the Natives sat. Indeed, it was as comfortable a House of Prayer as any man need wish for in the tropics, though having only open spaces for doors and windows! I bought the heavy wood for it on Aneityum—price, fifty pairs of trousers for Natives; and these again were the gift of my Bible Class in Glasgow, all cut and sewed by their own hands. I gave also one hundred and thirty yards of cloth, along with other things, for other needful wood.

As we were preparing a foundation for the Church, a huge and singular-looking round stone was dug up, at sight of which the Tannese stood aghast. The eldest Chief said, "Missi, that stone was either brought there by Karapanamun (the Evil Spirit), or hid there by our great Chief who is dead. That is the Stone God to which our forefathers offered human sacrifices; these holes held the blood of the victim till drunk up by the Spirit. The Spirit of that stone eats up men and women and drinks their blood, as our fathers taught us. We are in greatest fear!"

A Sacred Man claimed possession, and was exceedingly desirous to carry it off; but I managed to keep it, and did everything in my power to show them the absurdity of these foolish notions. Idolatry had not indeed yet fallen throughout Tanna; but one cruel idol, at least, had to give way for the erection of God's House on that benighted land.

An ever-memorable event was the printing of my first book in Tannese. Thomas Binnie, Jun., Glasgow, gave me a printing-press and a font of type. Printing was one of the things I had never tried, but having now prepared a booklet in Tannese, I got my printing press into order, and began fingering the type. But book-printing turned out to be for me a much more difficult affair than house-building had been. Yet by dogged perseverance I succeeded at last. My biggest difficulty was how to arrange the pages properly! After many failures, I folded a piece of paper into the number of leaves wanted, cut the corners, folding them back, and numbering as they would be when correctly placed in the book; then folding all back without cutting up the sheet, I found now by these numbers how to arrange the pages in the frame or case for printing, as indicated on each side. And do you think me foolish, when I confess that I shouted in an ecstasy of joy when the first sheet came from the press all correct? It was about one o'clock in the morning. I was the only white man then on the island, and all the Natives had been fast asleep for hours! Yet I literally pitched my hat into the air, and danced like a schoolboy round and round that printing-press; till I began to think, Am I losing my reason? Would it not be like a Missionary to be upon my knees, adoring God for this first portion of His blessed Word ever printed in this new language? Friend, bear with me, and believe me—that was as true worship as ever was David's dancing before the Ark of his God! Nor think that I did not, over that first sheet of God's Word ever printed in the Tannese tongue, go upon my knees too, and then, and every day since, plead with the mighty Lord to carry the light and joy of His own Holy Bible into every dark heart and benighted home on Tanna!

Yet dangers darkened round me. One day, while toiling away at my house, the war Chief and his brother, and a large party of armed men, surrounded the plot where I was working. They all had muskets, besides their own native weapons. They watched me for some time in silence, and then every man leveled a musket straight at my head. Escape was impossible. Speech would only have increased my danger. My eyesight came and went for a few moments. I prayed to my Lord Jesus, either Himself to protect me or to take me home to His Glory. I tried to keep working on at my task, as if no one was near me. In that moment, as never before, the words came to me—"Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, I will do it;" and I knew that I was safe. Retiring a little from their first position, no word having been spoken, they took up the same attitude somewhat farther off, and seemed to be urging one another to fire the first shot. But my dear Lord restrained them once again, and they withdrew, leaving me with a new reason for trusting Him with all that concerned me for Time and Eternity.

CHAPTER 24: HEATHEN DANCE AND SHAM FIGHT.

THE Chief, Nowar Noukamara, usually known as Nowar, was my best and most-to-be-trusted friend. He influenced the Harbor Chiefs and their people for eight or ten miles around to get up a great feast in favor of the Worship of Jehovah. All were personally and specially invited, and it was the largest Assembly of any kind that I ever witnessed on the Islands.

When all was ready, Nowar sent a party of Chiefs to escort me and my Aneityumese Teachers to the feast. Fourteen Chiefs, in turn, made speeches to the assembled multitude; the drift of all being, that war and fighting be given up on Tanna,—that no more people be killed by Nahak, for witchcraft and sorcery were lies,—that Sacred Men no longer profess to make wind and rain, famine and plenty, disease and death,—that the dark Heathen talk of Tanna should cease,—that all here present should adopt the Worship of Jehovah as taught to them by the Missionary and the Aneityumese,—and that all the banished Tribes should be invited to their own lands to live in peace! These strange speeches did not draw forth a single opposing voice. The Tannese are born talkers, and can and will speechify on all occasions; but most of it means nothing, bears no fruit.

After these speeches, a scene followed which gradually assumed shape as an idolatrous ceremonial and greatly horrified me. It was in connection with the immense quantity of food that had been prepared for the feast, especially pigs and fowls. A great heap had been piled up for each Tribe represented, and a handsome portion also set apart for the Missionary and his Teachers. The ceremony was this, as nearly as I could follow it. One hundred or so of the leading men marched into the large clear space in the center of the assembled multitudes, and stood there facing each other in equal lines, with a man at either end closing up the passage between. At the middle they stood eight or ten feet apart, gradually nearing till they almost met at either end. Amid tremendous silence for a few moments, all stood hushed; then every man kneeled on his right knee, extended his right hand, and bent forward till his face nearly touched the ground. Thereon the man at the one end began muttering something, his voice rising ever louder as he rose to his feet, when it ended in a fearful yell as he stood erect. Next the two long lines of men, all in a body, went through the same ceremonial, rising gradually to their feet, with mutterings deepening into a howl, and heightening into a yell stood erect. Finally, the man at the other end went through the same hideous forms. All this was thrice deliberately repeated, each time with growing frenzy. And then, all standing on their feet, they united as with one voice in what sounded like music running mad up and down the scale—closing with a long, deep-toned, hollow howl as of souls in pain. With smiles of joy, the men then all shook hands with each other. Nowar and another Chief briefly spoke; and the food was then divided and exchanged, a principal man of each Tribe standing by to receive and watch his portion.

At this stage, Nowar and Nerwangi, as leaders, addressed the Teachers and the Missionary to this effect; "This feast is held to move all the Chiefs and People here to give up fighting, to become friends, and to worship your Jehovah God. We wish you to remain, and to teach us all good conduct. As an evidence of our sincerity, and of our love, we have prepared this pile of food for you."

In reply, I addressed the whole multitude, saying how pleased I was with their speeches and with the resolutions and promises which they all had made. I further urged them to stick fast by these, and that grand fruits would arise to their island, to themselves, and to their children.

Having finished a brief address, I then walked forward to the very middle of the circle, and laid down before them a bundle of stripes of red calico and pieces of white calico, a number of fish-hooks, knives, etc., etc., requesting the two Chiefs to divide my offering of goodwill among the Tribes assembled, and also the pile of food presented to us, as a token of my love and friendship to them all.

Not without some doubt, and under considerable trial, did I take this apparently unfriendly attitude of refusing to take their food. But I feared to seem even to approve of any act of devil-worship, or to confirm them in it, being there to discourage all such scenes, and to lead them to acknowledge only the true God. Yet all the time I felt this qualm,—that it might have been better to eat food with men who acknowledged some God and asked his blessing, than with those white Heathens at home, who asked the blessing of no God, nor thanked Him—in this worse than the dog which licks the hand that feeds it! Nowar and Nerwangi explained in great orations what I meant, and how I wished all to be divided amongst the assembled Tribes to show my love. With this, all seemed highly satisfied.

Heathen dances were now entered upon, their paint and feathers and ornaments adding to the wildness of the scene. The men seemed to dance in an inside ring, and the women in an outside ring, at a considerable distance from each other. Music was supplied by singing and clapping of hands. The order was perfect, and the figures highly intricate. But I have never been able to associate dancing with things lovely and of good report! After the dancing, all retired to the bush; and a kind of sham fight then followed on the public cleared ground. A host of painted savages rushed in and took possession with songs and shoutings. From the bush, on the opposite side, the chanting of women was heard in the distance, louder and louder as they approached. Snatching from a burning fire flaming sticks, they rushed on the men with these, beating them and throwing burning pieces of wood among them, till with deafening yells amongst themselves and amidst shouts of laughter from the crowd, they drove them from the space, and danced thereon and sang a song of victory. The dancing and fighting, the naked painted figures, and the constant yells and shoutings gave one a weird sensation, and suggested strange ideas of Hell broken loose.

The final scene approached, when the men assisted their women to fill all the allotted food into baskets to be carried home and eaten there; for the different Tribes do not sit down together and eat together as we would do; their coming together is for the purpose of exchanging and dividing the food presented. And now they broke into friendly confusion, and freely walked about mingling with each other; and a kind of savage rehearsal of Jonathan and David took place. They stripped themselves of their fantastic dresses, their handsomely woven and twisted grass skirts, leaf skirts, grass and leaf aprons; they gave away or exchanged all these, and their ornaments and bows and arrows, besides their less romantic calico and print dresses more recently acquired. The effusion and ceremonial of the gifts and exchanges seem to betoken a loving people; and so they were for the feast—but that laid not aside a single deadly feud, and streams of blood and cries of hate would soon efface all traces of this day.

CHAPTER 25: CANNIBALS AT WORK.

EARLY one morning, the savage yells of warring Tribes woke me from sleep. They had broken into a quarrel about a woman, and were fiercely engaged with their clubs. According to my custom, I rushed in amongst them, and, not without much difficulty, was blessed in separating them before deadly wounds had been given or received. On this occasion, the Chiefs of both Tribes, being very friendly to me, drove their people back from each other at my earnest appeals. Sitting down at length within earshot, they had it out in a wild scolding match, a contest of lung and tongue. Meanwhile I rested on a canoe midway betwixt them, in the hope of averting a renewal of hostilities. By and by an old Sacred Man, a Chief, called Sapa, with some touch of savage comedy in his breast, volunteered an episode which restored good humor to the scene. Leaping up, he came dancing and singing towards me, and there, to the amusement of all, reenacted the quarrel, and mimicked rather cleverly my attempt at separating the combatants. Smashing at the canoe with his club, he yelled and knocked down imaginary enemies; then, rushing first at one party and then at the other, he represented me as appealing and gesticulating and pushing them afar from each other, till he became quite exhausted. Thereon he came and planted himself in great glee beside me, and looked around as if to say, "You must laugh, for I have played." At this very juncture, a loud cry of "Sail O" broke upon our ears, and all parties leapt to their feet, and prepared for a new sensation; for in those climes, everything—war itself—is a smaller interest than a vessel from the Great Unknown Beyond sailing into your Harbor.

Not many days thereafter, a very horrible transaction occurred. Before daybreak, I heard shot after shot quickly discharged in the Harbor. One of my Teachers came running, and cried, "Missi, six or seven men have been shot dead this morning for a great feast. It is to reconcile Tribes that have been at war, and to allow a banished Tribe to return in peace."

I learned that the leading men had in council agreed upon this sacrifice, but the name of each victim was kept a secret till the last moment. The torture of suspense and uncertainty seemed to be borne by all as part of their appointed lot; nor did they prepare as if suspecting any dread assault. Before daylight, the Sacred Men allocated a murderer to the door of each house where a victim slept. A signal shot was fired; all rushed to their doors, and the doomed ones were shot and clubbed to death, as they attempted to escape. Their bodies were then borne to a sacred tree, and hung up there by the hands for a time as an offering to the gods. Being taken down, they were carried ceremoniously and laid out on the shore near my house, placed under a special guard.

Information had reached me that my Teachers and I were also destined victims for this same feast; and sure enough we espied a band of armed men, the killers, despatched towards our premises. Instantaneously I had the Teachers and their wives and myself securely locked into the Mission House; and, cut off from all human hope, we set ourselves to pray to our dear Lord Jesus, either Himself to protect us or to take us to His glory. All through that morning and forenoon we heard them tramp-tramping round our house, whispering to each other, and hovering near window and door. They knew that there were a double-barreled fowling-piece and a revolver on the premises, though they never had seen me use them, and that may, under God, have held them back in dread. But the thought of using them did not enter our souls even in that awful time. I had gone to save, and not to destroy. It would be easier for me at any time to die, than to kill one of them. Our safety lay in our appeal to that blessed Lord who had placed us there, and to whom all power had been given in Heaven and on Earth. He that was with us was more than all that could be against us. This is strength;—this is peace:—to feel, in entering on every day, that all its duties and trials have been committed to the Lord Jesus,—that, come what may, He will use us for His glory and our own real good!

All through that dreadful morning, and far into the afternoon, we thus abode together, feeling conscious that we were united to this dear Lord Jesus; and we had sweet communion with Him, meditating on the wonders of His person and the hopes and glories of His kingdom. Oh, that all my readers may learn something of this in their own experience of the Lord! I can wish them nothing more precious. Towards sundown, constrained by the Invisible One, they withdrew from our Mission House, and left us once more in peace. They bore away the slain to be cooked, and distributed amongst the Tribes, and eaten in their feast of reconciliation; a covenant sealed in blood, and soon, alas, to be buried in blood again! For many days thereafter we had to take unusual care, and not unduly expose ourselves to danger; for dark characters were seen prowling about in the bush near at hand, and we knew that our life was the prize. We took what care we could, and God the Lord did the rest; or rather He did all—for His wisdom guided us, and His power baffled them.

CHAPTER 26: THE DEFYING OF NAHAK.

SHORTLY thereafter war was again declared, by the Inland people attacking our Harbor people. It was an old quarrel; and the war was renewed and continued, long after the cause thereof had passed away. Going amongst them every day, I did my utmost to stop hostilities, setting the evils of war before them, and pleading with the leading men to renounce it. Thereon arose a characteristic incident of Island and Heathen life. One day I held a Service in the village where morning after morning their Tribes assembled, and declared that if they would believe in and follow the Jehovah God, He would deliver them from all their enemies and lead them into a happy life. There were present three Sacred Men, Chiefs, of whom the whole population lived in terror—brothers or cousins, heroes of traditional feats, professors of sorcery, and claiming the power of life and death, health and sickness, rain and drought, according to their will. On hearing me, these three stood up and declared they did not believe in Jehovah, nor did they need His help; for they had the power to kill my life by Nahak (i.e. sorcery or witchcraft), if only they could get possession of any piece of the fruit or food that I had eaten. This was an essential condition of their black art; hence the peel of a banana or an orange, and every broken scrap of food, is gathered up by the Natives, lest it should fall into the hands of the Sacred Men, and be used for Nahak. This superstition was the cause of most of the bloodshed and terror upon Tanna; and being thus challenged, I asked God's help, and determined to strike a blow against it.

A woman was standing near with a bunch of native fruit in her hand, like our plums, called quonquore. I asked her to be pleased to give me some; and she, holding out a bunch, said, "Take freely what you will!"

Calling the attention of all the Assembly to what I was doing, I took three fruits from the bunch, and taking a bite out of each, I gave them one after another to the three Sacred Men, and deliberately said in the hearing of all, "You have seen me eat of this fruit, you have seen me give the remainder to your Sacred Men; they have said they can kill me by Nahak, but I challenge them to do it if they can, without arrow or spear, club or musket; for I deny that they have any power against me, or against any one, by their Sorcery."

The challenge was accepted; the Natives looked terror-struck at the position in which I was placed! The ceremony of Nahak was usually performed in secret,—the Tannese fleeing in dread, as Europeans would from the touch of the plague; but I lingered and eagerly watched their ritual. As the three Chiefs arose, and drew near to one of the Sacred Trees, to begin their ceremonial, the Natives fled in terror, crying, "Missi, Iawé? Alas, Missi!"

But I held on at my post of observation. Amidst wavings and incantations, they rolled up the pieces of the fruit from which I had eaten, in certain leaves of this Sacred Tree, into a shape like a waxen candle; then they kindled a sacred fire near the root, and continued their mutterings, gradually burning a little more and a little more of the candle-shaped things, wheeling them round their heads, blowing upon them with their breaths, waving them in the air, and glancing wildly at me as if expecting my sudden destruction. Wondering whether after all they did not believe their own lie, for they seemed to be in dead earnest, I, more eager than ever to break the chains of such vile superstition, urged them again and again, crying, "Be quick! Stir up your gods to help you! I am not killed yet; I am perfectly well!"

At last they stood up and said, "We must delay till we have called all our Sacred Men. We will kill Missi before his next Sabbath comes round. Let all watch, for he will soon die and that without fail."

I replied, "Very good! I challenge all your Priests to unite and kill me by Sorcery or Nahak. If on Sabbath next I come again to your village in health, you will all admit that your gods have no power over me, and that I am protected by the true and living Jehovah God!"

Every day throughout the remainder of that week the Conchs were sounded; and over that side of the island all their Sacred Men were at work trying to kill me by their arts. Now and again messengers arrived from every quarter of the island, inquiring anxiously after my health, and wondering if I was not feeling sick, and great excitement prevailed amongst the poor deluded idolaters.

Sabbath dawned upon me peacefully, and I went to that village in more than my usual health and strength. Large numbers assembled, and when I appeared they looked at each other in terror, as if it could not really be I myself still spared and well. Entering into the public ground, I saluted them to this effect, "My love to you all, my friends! I have come again to talk to you about the Jehovah God and His Worship."

The three Sacred Men, on being asked, admitted that they had tried to kill me by Nahak, but had failed; and on being questioned, why they had failed; they gave the acute and subtle reply, that I also was myself a Sacred Man, and that my God being the stronger had protected me from their gods. Addressing the multitude, I answered thus, "Yea, truly; my Jehovah God is stronger than your gods. He protected me, and helped me; for He is the only living and true God, the only God that can hear or answer any prayer from the children of men. Your gods cannot hear prayer, but my God can and will hear and answer you, if you will give heart and life to Him, and love and serve Him only. This is my God, and He is also your friend if you will hear and follow His voice."

Having said this, I sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and addressed them, "Come and sit down all around me, and I will talk to you about the love and mercy of my God, and teach you how to worship and please Him."

Two of the Sacred Men then sat down, and all the people gathered round and seated themselves very quietly. I tried to present to them ideas of sin, and of salvation through Jesus Christ, as revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures.

The third Sacred Man, the highest in rank, a man of great stature and uncommon strength, had meantime gone off for his warrior's spear, and returned brandishing it in the air and poising it at me. I said to the people, "Of course he can kill me with his spear, but he undertook to kill me by Nahak or Sorcery, and promised not to use against me any weapons of war; and if you let him kill me now, you will kill your friend, one who lives among you and only tries to do you good, as you all know so well. I know that if you kill me thus, my God will be angry and will punish you."

Thereon I seated myself calmly in the midst of the crowd, while he leaped about in rage, scolding his brothers and all who were present for listening to me. The other Sacred Men, however, took my side, and, as many of the people also were friendly to me and stood closely packed around me, he did not throw his spear. To allay the tumult and obviate further bloodshed, I offered to leave with my Teachers at once, and, in doing so, I ardently pled with them to live at peace. Though we got safely home, that old Sacred Man seemed still to hunger after my blood. For weeks thereafter, go where I would, he would suddenly appear on the path behind me, poising in his right hand that same Goliath spear. God only kept it from being thrown, and I, using every lawful precaution, had all the same to attend to my work, as if no enemy were there, leaving all other results in the hands of Jesus. This whole incident did, doubtless, shake the prejudices of many as to Sorcery; but few even of converted Natives ever get entirely clear of the dread of Nahak.

CHAPTER 27: A PERILOUS PILGRIMAGE.

THE other Mission Station, on the southwest side of Tanna, had to be visited by me from time to time. Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson, there, were both in a weak state of health, having a tendency to consumption. On this account they visited Aneityum several times. They were earnestly devoted to their work, and were successful as far as health and the time allowed to them permitted. At this juncture, a message reached me that they were without European food, and a request to send them a little flour if possible. The war made the journey overland impossible. A strong wind and a high sea round the coast rendered it impracticable for my boat to go. The danger to life from the enemy was so great that I could not hire a crew. I pled therefore with Nowar and Manuman, and a few leading men, to take one of their best canoes, and themselves to accompany me. I had a large flat-bottomed pot with a close fitting lid, and that I pressed full of flour; and, tying the lid firmly down, I fastened it right in the center of the canoe, and as far above water-mark as possible. All else that was required we tied around our own persons. Sea and land being as they were, it was a perilous undertaking, which only dire necessity could have justified. They were all swimmers, but as I could not swim, the strongest man was placed behind me, to seize me and swim ashore, if a crash came.

Creeping round near the shore all the way, we had to keep just outside the great breakers on the coral reef, and were all drenched through and through with the foam of an angry surf. We arrived, however, in safety within two miles of our destination, where lived the friends of my canoe's company, but where a very dangerous sea was breaking on the reef. Here they all gave in, and protested that no further could they go; and truly their toil all the way with the paddles had been severe. I appealed to them, that the canoe would for certain be smashed if they tried to get on shore, that the provisions would be lost, and some of us probably drowned. But they turned to the shore, and remained for some time thus, watching the sea. At last their Captain cried, "Missi, hold on! There's a smaller wave coming; we'll ride in now."

My heart rose to the Lord in trembling prayer! The wave came rolling on; every paddle with all their united strength struck into the sea; and next moment our canoe was flying like a sea-gull on the crest of the wave towards the shore. Another instant, and the wave had broken on the reef with a mighty roar, and rushed passed us hissing in clouds of foam. My company were next seen swimming wildly about in the sea, Manuman the one-eyed Sacred Man alone holding on by the canoe, nearly full of water, with me still clinging to the seat of it, and the very next wave likely to devour us. In desperation, I sprang for the reef, and ran for a man half-wading, half-swimming to reach us; and God so ordered it, that just as the next wave broke against the silvery rock of coral, the man caught me and partly swam with me through its surf, partly carried me till I was set safely ashore. Praising God, I looked up and saw all the others as safe as myself, except Manuman, my friend, who was still holding on by the canoe in the face of wind and sea, and bringing it with him. Others ran and swam to his help. The paddles were picked up amid the surf. A powerful fellow came towards me with the pot of flour on his head, uninjured by water! The Chief who held on by the canoe got severely cut about the feet, and had been badly bruised and knocked about; but all the rest escaped without further harm, and everything that we had was saved. Amongst friends at last, they resolved to await a favorable wind and tide to return to their own homes. Singing in my heart unto God, I hired a man to carry the pot of flour, and soon arrived at the Mission Station.

Supplying the wants of our dear friends, Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson, whom we found as well as could be expected, we had to prepare, after a few hours of rest, to return to our own Station by walking overland through the night. I durst not remain longer away, lest my own house should be plundered and broken into. Though weak in health, my fellow-Missionaries were both full of hope, and zealous in their work, and this somewhat strange visit was a pleasant blink amidst our darkness. Before I had gone far on my return journey, the sun went down, and no Native could be hired to accompany me. They all told me that I would for certain be killed by the way. But I knew that it would be quite dark before I reached the hostile districts, and that the Heathen are great cowards in the dark and never leave their villages at night in the darkness, except in companies for fishing and suchlike tasks. I skirted along the sea-shore as fast as I could, walking and running alternately; and, when I got within hearing of voices, I slunk back into the bush till they had safely passed, and then groped my way back near the shore, that being my only guide to find a path.

Having made half the journey, I came to a dangerous path, almost perpendicular, up a great rock round the base of which the sea roared deep. With my heart lifted up to Jesus, I succeeded in climbing it, cautiously grasping roots, and resting by bushes, till I safely reached the top. There, to avoid a village, I had to keep crawling slowly along the brush near the sea, on the top of that great ledge of rock—a feat I could never have accomplished even in daylight without the excitement; but I felt that I was supported and guided in all that life-or-death journey by my dear Lord Jesus. I had to leave the shore, and follow up the bank of a very deep ravine to a place shallow enough for one to cross, and then through the bush away for the shore again. By holding too much to the right, I missed the point where I had intended to reach it. Small fires were now visible through the bush; I heard the voices of the people talking in one of our most Heathen villages.

Quietly drawing back, I now knew where I was, and easily found my way towards the shore; but on reaching the Great Rock, I could not in the darkness find the path down again. I groped about till I was tired. I feared that I might stumble over and be killed; or, if I delayed till daylight, that the savages would kill me. I knew that one part of the rock was steep-sloping, with little growth or none thereon, and I searched about to find it, resolved to commend myself to Jesus and slide down thereby, that I might again reach the shore and escape for my life. Thinking I had found this spot, I hurled down several stones and listened for their splash that I might judge whether it would be safe. But the distance was too far for me to hear or judge. At high tide the sea there was deep; but at low tide I could wade out of it and be safe. The darkness made it impossible for me to see anything. I let go my umbrella, shoving it down with considerable force, but neither did it send me back any news.

Feeling sure, however, that this was the place I sought, and knowing that to await the daylight would be certain death, I prayed to my Lord Jesus for help and protection, and resolved to let myself go. First, I fastened all my clothes as tightly as I could, so as not to catch on anything; then I lay down at the top on my back, feet foremost, holding my head downwards on my breast to keep it from striking on the rock; then, after one cry to my Saviour, having let myself down as far as possible by a branch, I at last let go, throwing my arms forward and trying to keep my feet well up. A giddy swirl, as if flying through the air, took possession of me; a few moments seemed an age; I rushed quickly down, and felt no obstruction till my feet struck into the sea below. Adoring and praising my dear Lord Jesus, who had ordered it so, I regained my feet; it was low tide, I had received no injury, I recovered my umbrella, and, wading through, I found the shore path easier and lighter than the bush had been. The vary darkness was my safety, preventing the Natives from rambling about. I saw no person to speak to, till I reached a village quite near to my own house, fifteen or twenty miles from where I had started; I here left the sea path and promised some young men a gift of fish-hooks to guide me the nearest way through the bush to my Mission Station, which they gladly and heartily did. I ran a narrow risk in approaching them; they thought me an enemy, and I arrested their muskets only by a loud cry—

"I am Missi! Don't shoot; my love to you, my friends!"

Praising God for His preserving care, I reached home, and had a long refreshing sleep. The natives, on hearing next day how I had come all the way in the dark exclaimed—

"Surely any of us would have been killed! Your Jehovah God alone thus protects you and brings you safely home."

With all my heart, I said, "Yes! and He will be your protector and helper too, if only you will obey and trust in Him."

Certainly that night put my faith to the test. Had it not been the assurance that I was engaged in His service, and that in every path of duty He would carry me through or dispose of me therein for His glory I could never have undertaken either journey. St. Paul's words are true to-day and forever—"I can do all things through Christ which strengthened me."

CHAPTER 28: THE PLAGUE OF MEASLES.

ABOUT this time I had a never-to-be-forgotten illustration of the infernal spirit that possessed some of the Traders towards these poor Natives. One morning, three or four vessels entered our Harbor and cast anchor in Port Resolution. The captains called on me, and one of them, with manifest delight, exclaimed, "We know how to bring down your proud Tannese now! We'll humble them before you!"

I answered, "Surely you don't mean to attack and destroy these poor people?"

He replied, not abashed but rejoicing, "We have sent the measles to humble them! That kills them by the score! Four young men have been landed at different ports, ill with measles, and these will soon thin their ranks."

Shocked above measure, I protested solemnly and denounced their conduct and spirit; but my remonstrances only called forth the shameless declaration, "Our watchword is,—Sweep these creatures away and let white men occupy the soil!"

Their malice was further illustrated thus: they induced Kapuku, a young Chief, to go off to one of their vessels, promising him a present. He was the friend and chief supporter of Mr. Mathieson and of his work. Having got him on board, they confined him in the hold amongst natives lying ill with measles. They gave him no food for about four-and-twenty hours; and then, without the promised present, they put him ashore far from his own home. Though weak and excited, he scrambled back to his tribe in great exhaustion and terror. He informed the Missionary that they had put him down amongst sick people, red and hot with fever, and that he feared their sickness was upon him. I am ashamed to say that these Sandal-wood and other Traders were our own degraded countrymen; and that they deliberately gloried in thus destroying the poor Heathen. A more fiendish spirit could scarcely be imagined; but most of them were horrible drunkards, and their traffic of every kind amongst these islands was, generally speaking, steeped in human blood.

The measles, thus introduced, became amongst our islanders the most deadly plague. It spread fearfully, and was accompanied by sore throat and diarrhea. In some villages, man, woman, and child were stricken, and none could give food or water to the rest. The misery, suffering, and terror were unexampled, the living being afraid sometimes even to bury the dead. Thirteen of my own Mission party died of this disease; and, so terror-stricken were the few who survived, that when the little Mission schooner John Knox returned to Tanna, they all packed up and left for their own Aneityum, except my own dear old Abraham.

At first, thinking that all were on the wing, he also had packed his chattels, and was standing beside the others ready to leave with them. I drew near to him, and said, "Abraham, they are all going; are you also going to leave me here alone on Tanna, to fight the battles of the Lord?"

He asked, "Missi, will you remain?"

I replied, "Yes; but Abraham, the danger to life is now so great that I dare not plead with you to remain, for we may both be slain. Still, I cannot leave the Lord's work now."

The noble old Chief looked at the box and his bundles, and, musingly, said, "Missi, our danger is very great now."

I answered, "Yes; I once thought you would not leave me alone to it; but, as the vessel is going to your own land, I cannot ask you to remain and face it with me!"

He again said, "Missi, would you like me to remain alone with you, seeing my wife is dead and in her grave here?"

I replied, "Yes, I would like you to remain; but, considering the circumstances in which we will be left alone, I cannot plead with you to do so."

He answered, "Then, Missi, I remain with you of my own free choice, and with all my heart. We will live and die together in the work of the Lord. I will never leave you while you are spared on Tanna."

So saying, and with a light that gave the fore-gleam of a Martyr's glory to his dark face, he shouldered his box and bundles back to his own house; and thereafter, Abraham was my dear companion and constant friend, and my fellow-sufferer in all that remains still to be related of our Mission life on Tanna.

Before this plague of measles was brought amongst us I had sailed round in the John Knox to Black Beach on the opposite side of Tanna, and prepared the way for settling Teachers. And they were placed soon after by Mr. Copeland and myself with encouraging hopes of success, and with the prospect of erecting there a Station for Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, the newly arrived Missionaries from Nova Scotia. But this dreadful imported epidemic blasted all our dreams. They devoted themselves from the very first, and assisted me in every way to alleviate the dread sufferings of the Natives. We carried medicine, food, and even water, to the surrounding villages every day, few of themselves being able to render us much assistance. Nearly all who took our medicine and followed instructions as to food, etc., recovered; but vast numbers of them would listen to no counsels, and rushed into experiments which made the attack fatal all around. When the trouble was at its height, for instance, they would plunge into the sea, and seek relief; they found it an almost instant death. Others would dig a hole into the earth, the length of the body and about two feet deep; therein they laid themselves down, the cold earth feeling agreeable to their fevered skins; and when the earth around them grew heated, they got friends to dig a few inches deeper, again and again, seeking a cooler and cooler couch. In this ghastly effort many of them died, literally in their own graves, and were buried where they lay! It need not be surprising, though we did everything in our power to relieve and save them, that the natives associated us with the white men who had so dreadfully afflicted them, and that their blind thirst for revenge did not draw fine distinctions between the Traders and the Missionaries. Both were whites—that was enough.

Before leaving this terrible plague of measles, I may record my belief that it swept away, with accompanying sore throat and diarrhea, a third of the entire population of Tanna; nay? in certain localities more than a third perished. The living declared themselves unable to bury the dead, and great want and suffering ensued. The Teacher and his wife and child, placed by us at Black Beach, were also taken away; and his companion, the other Teacher there, embraced the first opportunity to leave along with his wife for his own island, else his life would have been taken in revenge. Yet, from all accounts afterwards received, I do not think the measles were more fatal on Tanna than on the other Islands of the group. They appear to have carried off even a larger proportion on Aniwa—the future scene of many sorrows but of greater triumphs.

CHAPTER 29: ATTACKED WITH CLUBS.

THE 1st January 1861 was a New Year's Day ever to be remembered. Mr. and Mrs. Johnston, Abraham, and I, had spent nearly the whole time in a kind of solemn yet happy festival. Anew in a holy covenant before God, we unitedly consecrated our lives and our all to the Lord Jesus, giving ourselves away to His blessed service for the conversion of the Heathen on the New Hebrides. After evening Family Worship, Mr. and Mrs. Johnston left my room to go to their own house, only some ten feet distant; but he returned to inform me that there were two men at the window, armed with huge clubs, and having black painted faces. Going out to them and asking them, what they wanted, they replied, "Medicine for a sick boy."

With difficulty I persuaded them to come in and get it. At once, it flashed upon me, from their agitation and their disguise of paint, that they had come to murder us. Mr. Johnston had also accompanied us into the house. Keeping my eye constantly fixed on them, I prepared the medicine and offered it. They refused to receive it, and each man grasped his killing-stone. I faced them firmly and said, "You see that Mr. Johnston is now leaving, and you too must leave this room for to-night. To-morrow, you can bring the boy or come for the medicine."

Seizing their clubs, as if for action, they showed unwillingness to withdraw, but I walked deliberately forward and made as if to push them out, when both turned and began to leave.

Mr. Johnston had gone in front of them and was safely out. But he bent down to lift a little kitten that had escaped at the open door; and at that moment one of the savages, jerking in behind, aimed a blow with his huge club, in avoiding which Mr. Johnston fell with a scream to the ground. Both men sprang towards him, but our two faithful dogs ferociously leapt in their faces and saved his life. Rushing out, but not fully aware of what had occurred, I saw Mr. Johnston trying to raise himself, and heard him cry, "Take care these men have tried to kill me, and they will kill you!"

Facing them sternly I demanded, "What is it that you want? He does not understand your language. What do you want? Speak with me."

Both men, thereon, raised their great clubs and made to strike me; but quick as lightning these two dogs sprang at their faces and baffled their blows. One dog was badly bruised, and the ground received the other blow that would have launched me into Eternity. The best dog was a little cross-bred retriever with terrier blood in him, splendid for warning us of approaching dangers, and which had already been the means of saving my life several times. Seeing how matters stood, I now hounded both dogs furiously upon them, and the two savages fled. I shouted after them, "Remember, Jehovah God sees you and will punish you for trying to murder His servants!"

In their flight, a large body of men, who had come eight or ten miles to assist in the murder and plunder, came slipping here and there from the bush and joined them, fleeing too. Verily, "the wicked flee, when no man pursueth." David's experience and assurance came home to us, that evening, as very real:—"God is our refuge and our strength...therefore we will not fear."

I, now accustomed to such scenes on Tanna, retired to rest and slept soundly; but my dear fellow-laborer, as I afterwards learned, could not sleep for one moment. His pallor and excitement continued next day, indeed for several days; and after that, though he was naturally lively and cheerful, I never saw him smile again.

For that morning, 1st January 1861, the following entry was found in his Journal: "To-day, with a heavy heart and a feeling of dread, I know not why, I set out on my accustomed wanderings amongst the sick. I hastened back to get the Teacher and carry Mr. Paton to the scene of distress. I carried a bucket of water in one hand and medicine in the other; and so we spent a portion of this day endeavoring to alleviate their sufferings, and our work had a happy effect also on the minds of others." In another entry, on 22d December, he wrote: "Measles are making fearful havoc amongst the poor Tannese. As we pass through the villages, mournful scenes meet the eye; young and old prostrated on the ground, showing all these painful symptoms which accompany loathsome and malignant diseases. In some villages few are left able to prepare food, or to carry drink to the suffering and dying. How pitiful to see the sufferers destitute of every comfort, attention, and remedy that would ameliorate their suffering or remove their disease! As I think of the tender manner in which we are nursed in sickness, the many remedies employed to give relief, with the comforts and attention bestowed upon us, my heart sickens, and I say, Oh my ingratitude and the ingratitude of Christian people!"

Having, as above recorded, consecrated our lives anew to God on the first day of January, I was, up till the 16th of the month, accompanied by Mr. Johnston and sometimes also by Mrs. Johnston on my rounds in the villages amongst the sick, and they greatly helped me. But by an unhappy accident I was laid aside when most sorely needed. When adzing a tree for housebuilding I observed that Mahanan, the war Chief's brother, had been keeping too near me, and that he carried a tomahawk in his hand; and, in trying both to do my work and to keep an eye on him, I struck my ankle severely with the adze. He moved off quickly, saying, "I did not do that," but doubtless rejoicing at what had happened. The bone was badly hurt, and several of the blood-vessels cut. Dressing it as well as I could, and keeping it constantly soaked in cold water, I had to exercise the greatest care. In this condition, amidst great sufferings, I was sometimes carried to the villages to administer medicine to the sick, and to plead and pray with the dying.

On such occasions, in this mode of transit even, the conversations that I had with dear Mr. Johnston were most solemn and greatly refreshing. He had, however, scarcely ever slept since the 1st of January, and during the night of the 16th he sent for my bottle of laudanum. Being severely attacked with ague and fever, I could not go to him, but sent the bottle, specifying the proper quantity for a dose, but that he quite understood already. He took a dose for himself, and gave one also to his wife, as she too suffered from sleeplessness. This he repeated three nights in succession, and both of them obtained a long, sound and refreshing sleep. He came to my bedside, where I lay in the ague-fever, and said with great animation, amongst other things, "I have had such a blessed sleep, and feel so refreshed! What kindness in God to provide such remedies for suffering man!"

At midday his dear wife came to me crying, "Mr. Johnston has fallen asleep, so deep that I cannot awake him."

My fever had reached the worst stage, but I struggled to my feet got to his bedside, and found him in a state of coma, with his teeth fixed in tetanus. With great difficulty we succeeded in slightly rousing him; with a knife, spoon, and pieces of wood, we forced his teeth open, so as to administer an emetic with good effects, and also other needful medicines. For twelve hours, we had to keep him awake by repeated cold dashes in the face, by ammonia, and by vigorously moving him about. He then began to speak freely; and next day he rose and walked about a little. For the two following days, he was sometimes better and sometimes worse; but we managed to keep him up till the morning of the 21st, when he again fell into a state of coma, from which we failed to rouse him. At two o'clock in the afternoon he fell asleep—another Martyr for the testimony of Jesus in those dark and trying Isles, leaving his young wife in indescribable sorrow, which she strove to bear with Christian resignation. Having made his coffin and dug his grave, we two alone at sunset laid him to rest beside my own dear wife and child, close by the Mission House.

CHAPTER 30: KOWIA.

ANOTHER tragedy followed, with, however, much of the light of Heaven amid its blackness, in the story of Kowia, a Tannese Chief of the highest rank. Going to Aneityum in youth, he had there become a true Christian. He married an Aneityumese Christian woman, with whom he lived very happily and had two beautiful children. Some time before the measles reached our island he returned to live with me as a Teacher and to help forward our work on Tanna. He proved himself to be a decided Christian; he was a real Chief amongst them, dignified in his whole conduct, and every way a valuable helper to me. Everything was tried by his own people to induce him to leave me and to renounce the Worship, offering him every honor and bribe in their power. Failing these, they threatened to take away all his lands, and to deprive him of Chieftainship, but he answered "Take all! I shall still stand by Missi and the Worship of Jehovah."

From threats they passed to galling insults, all which he bore patiently for Jesu's sake. But one day a party of his people came and sold some fowls, and an impudent fellow lifted them after they had been bought and offered to sell them again to me. Kowia shouted, "Don't purchase these, Missi; I have just bought them for you, and paid for them!"

Thereon the fellow began to mock at him. Kowia, gazing round on all present, and then on me, rose like a lion awaking out of sleep, and with flashing eyes exclaimed, "Missi, they think that because I am now a Christian I have become a coward! a woman! to bear every abuse and insult they can heap upon me. But I will show them for once that I am no coward, that I am still their Chief, and that Christianity does not take away but gives us courage and nerve."

Springing at one man, he wrenched in a moment the mighty club from his hands, and swinging it in air above his head like a toy, he cried, "Come any of you, come all against your Chief! My Jehovah God makes my heart and arms strong. He will help me in this battle as He helps me in other things, for He inspires me to show you that Christians are no cowards, though they are men of peace. Come on, and you will yet know that I am Kowia your Chief."

All fled as he approached them; and he cried, "Where are the cowards now?" and handed back to the warrior his club. After this they left him at peace.

He lived at the Mission House, with his wife and children, and was a great help and comfort to Abraham and myself. He was allowed to go more freely and fearlessly amongst the people than any of the rest of our Mission staff. The ague and fever on me at Mr. Johnston's death so increased and reduced me to such weakness that I had become insensible, while Abraham and Kowia alone attended to me. On returning to consciousness I heard as in a dream Kowia lamenting over me, and pleading that I might recover, so as to hear and speak with him before he died. Opening my eyes and looking at him, I heard him say, "Missi, all our Aneityumese are sick. Missi Johnson is dead. You are very sick, and I am weak and dying. Alas, when I too am dead, who will climb the trees and get you a cocoanut to drink? And who will bathe your lips and brow?"

Here he broke down into deep and long weeping, and then resumed, "Missi, the Tanna-men hate us all on account of the Worship of Jehovah; and I now fear He is going to take away all His servants from this land, and leave my people to the Evil One and his service!"

I was too weak to speak, so he went on, bursting into a soliloquy of prayer: "O Lord Jesus, Missi Johnston is dead; Thou hast taken him away from this land. Missi Johnston the woman and Missi Paton are very ill; I am sick, and Thy servants the Aneityumese are all sick and dying. O Lord, our Father in Heaven, art Thou going to take away all Thy servants, and Thy Worship from this dark land? What meanest Thou to do, O Lord? The Tannese hate Thee and Thy Worship and Thy servants; but surely, O Lord, Thou canst not forsake Tanna and leave our people to die in the darkness! Oh, make the hearts of this people soft to Thy Word and sweet to Thy Worship; teach them to fear and love Jesus; and oh, restore and spare Missi, dear Missi Paton, that Tanna may be saved!"

Touched to the very fountains of my life by such prayers, from a man once a Cannibal, I began under the breath of God's blessing to revive.

A few days thereafter, Kowia came again to me, and rousing me out of sleep, cried, "Missi, I am very weak; I am dying. I come to bid you farewell, and go away to die. I am nearing death now, and I will soon see Jesus."

I spoke what words of consolation and cheer I could muster, but he answered, "Missi, since you became ill my dear wife and children are dead and buried. Most of our Aneityumese are dead, and I am dying. If I remain on the hill, and die here at the Mission House, there are none left to help Abraham to carry me down to the grave where my wife and children are laid. I wish to lie beside them, that we may rise together in the Great Day when Jesus comes. I am happy, looking unto Jesus! One thing only deeply grieves me now; I fear God is taking us all away from Tanna, and will leave my poor people dark and benighted as before, for they hate Jesus and the Worship of Jehovah. O Missi, pray for them, and pray for me once more before I go!"

He knelt down at my side, and we prayed for each other and for Tanna. I then urged him to remain at the Mission House, but he replied, "O Missi, you do not know how near to death I am! I am just going, and will soon be with Jesus, and see my wife and children now. While a little strength is left, I will lean on Abraham's arm, and go down to the graves of my dear ones and fall asleep there, and Abraham will dig a quiet bed and lay me beside them. Farewell, Missi, I am very near death now; we will meet again in Jesus and with Jesus!"

With many tears he dragged himself away; and my heart-strings seemed all tied round that noble simple soul, and felt like breaking one by one as he left me there on my bed of fever all alone. Abraham sustained him, tottering to the place of graves; there he lay down, and immediately gave up the ghost and slept in Jesus; and there the faithful Abraham buried him beside his wife and children. Thus died a man who had been a cannibal Chief, but by the grace of God and the love of Jesus, changed, transfigured into a character of light and beauty. I lost, in losing him, one of my best friends and most courageous helpers; but I knew that day, and I know now, that there is one soul at least from Tanna to sing the glories of Jesus in Heaven—and, oh, the rapture when I meet him there!

CHAPTER 31: MARTYRDOM OF THE GORDONS.

MAY 1861 brought with it a sorrowful and tragic event, which fell as the very shadow of doom across our path; I mean the martyrdom of the Gordons on Erromanga. Rev. G. N. Gordon was a native of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and was born in 1822. He was educated at the Free Church College, Halifax, and placed as Missionary on Erromanga in June 1857. Much troubled and opposed by the Sandal-wooders, he had yet acquired the language and was making progress by inroads on Heathenism. A considerable number of young men and women embraced the Christian Faith, lived at the Mission House, and devotedly helped him and his excellent wife in all their work. But the hurricanes and the measles, already referred to, caused great mortality in Erromanga also; and the degraded Traders, who had introduced the plague, in order to save themselves from revenge, stimulated the superstitions of the Heathen, and charged the Missionaries there too with causing sickness and all other calamities. The Sandal-wooders hated him for fearlessly denouncing and exposing their hideous atrocities.

When Mr. Copeland and I placed the Native Teachers at Black Beach, Tanna, we ran across to Erromanga in the John Knox, taking a harmonium to Mrs. Gordon, just come by their order from Sydney. When it was opened out at the Mission House, and Mrs. Gordon began playing on it and singing sweet hymns, the native women were in ecstasies. They at once proposed to go off to the bush and cut each a burden of long grass, to thatch the printing-office which Mr. Gordon was building in order to print the Scriptures in their own tongue, if only Mrs. Gordon would play to them at night and teach them to sing God's praises. They joyfully did so, and then spent a happy evening singing those hymns. Next day being Sabbath, we had a delightful season there, about thirty attending Church and listening eagerly. The young men and women living at the Mission House were being trained to become Teachers; they were reading a small book in their own language, telling them the story of Joseph; and the work every way seemed most hopeful. The Mission House had been removed a mile or so up a hill, partly for Mrs. Gordon's health, and partly to escape the annoying and contaminating influence of the Sandal-wooders on the Christian Natives.

On the 20th May 1861 he was still working at the roofing of the printing-office, and had sent his lads to bring each a load of the long grass to finish the thatching. Meantime a party of Erromangans from a district called Bunk-Hill, under a Chief named Lovu, had been watching him. They had been to the Mission House inquiring and they had seen him send away his Christian lads. They then hid in the bush and sent two of their men to the Missionary to ask for calico. On a piece of wood he wrote a note to Mrs. Gordon to give them two yards each. They asked him to go with them to the Mission House, as they needed medicine for a sick boy, and Lovu their Chief wanted to see him. He tied up in a napkin a meal of food, which had been brought to him but not eaten, and started to go with them. He requested the native Narubulet to go on before with his companion, but they insisted upon his going in front. In crossing a streamlet, which I visited shortly afterwards, his foot slipped. A blow was aimed at him with a tomahawk, which he caught; the other man struck, but his weapon was also caught. One of the tomahawks was then wrenched out of his grasp. Next moment a blow on the spine laid the dear Missionary low, and a second on the neck almost severed the head from the body. The other Natives then rushed from their ambush, and began dancing round him with frantic shoutings. Mrs. Gordon hearing the noise, came out and stood in front of the Mission House, looking in the direction of her husband's working place, and wondering what had happened. Ouben, one of the party, who had run towards the Station the moment that Mr. Gordon fell, now approached her. A merciful clump of trees had hid from her eyes all that had occurred, and she said to Ouben, "What's the cause of that noise?"

He replied, "Oh, nothing! only the boys amusing themselves!"

Saying, "Where are the boys?" she turned round. Ouben slipped stealthily behind her, sank his tomahawk into her back, and with another blow almost severed her head!

Such was the fate of those two devoted servants of the Lord; loving in their lives, and in their deaths not divided—their spirits, wearing the crown of martyrdom, entered Glory together to be welcomed by Williams and Harris, whose blood was shed near the same now hallowed spot for the name and cause of Jesus. They had labored four years on Erromanga, amidst trials and dangers manifold, and had not been without tokens of blessing in the Lord's work. Never more earnest or devoted Missionaries lived and died in the Heathen field.

CHAPTER 32: SHADOWS DEEPENING ON TANNA.

IMMEDIATELY thereafter, a Sandal-wood Trader brought in his boat a party of Erromangans by night to Tanna. They assembled our Harbor Chiefs and people, and urged them to kill us and Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson and the Teachers, or allow them to do so, as they had killed Mr. and Mrs. Gordon. Then they proposed to go to Aneityum and kill the Missionaries there, as the Aneityumese Natives had burned their Church, and thus they would sweep away the Worship and the servants of Jehovah from all the New Hebrides. Our Chiefs, however, refused, restrained by the Merciful One, and the Erromangans returned to their own island in a sulky mood.

Notwithstanding this refusal, as if they wished to reserve the murder and plunder for themselves, our Mission House was next day thronged with armed men, some from Inland, others from Mr. Mathieson's Station. They loudly praised the Erromangans! The leader said again and again in my hearing, "The men of Erromanga killed Missi Williams long ago. We killed the Rarotongan and Samoan Teachers. We fought Missi Turner and Missi Nisbet, and drove them from our island. We killed the Aneityumese Teachers on Aniwa, and one of Missi Paton's Teachers too. We killed several white men, and no Man-of-war punished us. Let us talk over this, about killing Missi Paton and the Aneityumese, till we see if any Man-of-war comes to punish the Erromangans. If not, let us unite, let us kill these Missionaries, let us drive the Worship of Jehovah from our land!"

An Inland Chief said or rather shouted in my hearing, "My love to the Erromangans! They are strong and brave men, the Erromangans. They have killed their Missi and his wife, while we only talk about it. They have destroyed the Worship and driven away Jehovah!"

I stood amongst them and protested, "God will yet punish the Erromangans for such wicked deeds. God has heard all your bad talk, and will punish it in His own time and way."

But they shouted me down, amidst great excitement, with the cry, "Our love to the Erromangans! Our love to the Erromangans!"

After I left them, Abraham heard them say, "Miaki is lazy. Let us meet in every village, and talk with each other. Let us all agree to kill Missi and the Aneityumese for the first of our Chiefs that dies."

The night after the visit of the Erromangan boat, and the sad news of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon's death, the Tannese met on their village dancing-grounds and held high festival in praise of the Erromangans. Our best friend, old Nowar the Chief, who had worn shirt and kilt for some time and had come regularly to the Worship, relapsed once more; he painted his face, threw off his clothing, resumed his bow and arrows and his tomahawk, of which he boasted that it had killed very many men and at least one woman! On my shaming him for professing to worship Jehovah and yet uniting with the Heathen in rejoicing over the murder of His servants on Erromanga, he replied to this effect, "Truly, Missi, they have done well. If the people of Erromanga are severely punished for this by the Man-of-war, we will all hear of it; and our people will then fear to kill you and the other Missionaries, so as to destroy the Worship of Jehovah. Now, they say, the Erromangans killed Missi Williams and the Samoan, Rarotongan, and Aneityumese Teachers, besides other white men, and no Man-of-war has punished either them or us. If they are not punished for what has been done on Erromanga, nothing else can keep them here from killing you and me and all who worship at the Mission House!"

I answered, "Nowar, let us all be strong to love and serve Jehovah Jesus. If it be for our good and His glory, He will protect us; if not, He will take us to be with Himself. We will not be killed by their bad talk. Besides, what avails it to us, when dead and gone, if even a Man-of-war should come and punish our murderers?"

He shrugged his shoulders, answering, "Missi, by and by you will see. Mind, I tell you the truth. I know our Tannese people. How is it that Jehovah did not protect the Gordons and the Erromangan worshipers? If the Erromangans are not punished, neither will our Tannese be punished, though they murder all Jehovah's people!"

I felt for Nowar's struggling faith, just trembling on the verge of Cannibalism yet, and knowing so little of the true Jehovah.

Groups of Natives assembled suspiciously near us and sat whispering together. They urged old Abraham to return to Aneityum by the very first opportunity, as our lives were certain to be taken, but he replied, "I will not leave Missi."

Abraham and I were thrown much into each other's company, and he stood by me in every danger. We conducted Family Prayers alternately; and that evening he said during the prayer in Tannese, in which language alone we understood each other:—

"O Lord, our Heavenly Father, they have murdered Thy servants on Erromanga. They have banished the Aneityumese from dark Tanna. And now they want to kill Missi Paton and me! Our great King, protect us, and make their hearts soft and sweet to Thy Worship. Or, if they are permitted to kill us, do not Thou hate us, but wash us in the blood of Thy dear Son Jesus Christ. He came down to Earth and shed His blood for sinners; through Him forgive us our sins and take us to Heaven—that good place where Missi Gordon the man and Missi Gordon the woman and all thy dear servants now are singing Thy praise and seeing Thy face. Our Lord, our hearts are pained just now, and we weep over the death of Thy dear servants; but make our hearts good and strong for Thy cause, and take thou away all our fears. Make us two and all Thy servants strong for Thee and for Thy Worship; and if they kill us two, let us die together in Thy good work, like Thy servants Missi Gordon the man and Missi Gordon the woman."

In this manner his great simple soul poured itself out to God; and my heart melted within me as it had never done under any prayer poured from the lips of cultured Christian men!

Under the strain of these events, Miaki came to our house, and attacked me in hearing of his men to this effect, "You and the Worship are the cause of all the sickness and death now taking place on Tanna! The Erromanga men killed Missi Gordon the man and also the woman, and they are all well long ago. The Worship is killing us all; and the Inland people will kill us for keeping you and the Worship here; for we love the conduct of Tanna, but we hate the Worship. We must kill you and it, and we shall all be well again."

I tried to reason firmly and kindly with them, showing them that their own conduct was destroying them, and that our presence and the Worship could only be a blessing to them in every way, if only they would accept of it and give up their evil ways. I referred to a poor girl, whom Miaka and his men had stolen and abused—that they knew such conduct to be bad, and that God would certainly punish them for it.

He replied, "Such is the conduct of Tanna. Our fathers loved and followed it, we love and follow it, and if the Worship condemns it, we will kill you and destroy the Worship."

I said, "The Word of the Holy God condemns all bad conduct, and I must obey my God in trying to lead you to give it up, and to love and serve His Son Jesus our Saviour. If I refuse to obey my God, He will punish me."

He declared that his heart was good, that his conduct was good, but that he hated the teaching of the Worship. He had a party of men staying with him from the other side of the island, and he sent back a present of four large fat hogs to their Chiefs, with a message as to the killing of the Mathiesons. If that were done, his hands would be strengthened in dealing with us.

To know what was best to be done, in such trying circumstances, was an abiding perplexity. To have left altogether, when so surrounded by perils and enemies, at first seemed the wisest course, and was the repeated advice of many friends. But again, I had acquired the language, and had gained a considerable Influence amongst the Natives, and there were a number warmly attached both to himself and to the Worship. To have left would have been to lose all, which to me was heartrending; therefore, risking all with Jesus, I held on while the hope of being spared longer had not absolutely and entirely vanished.

The following quotation from a letter of the late A. Clark, Esq., J. P., Auckland, New Zealand, will show what Bishop Selwyn thought of my standing fast on Tanna at the post of duty, and he knew what he was writing about. These are the words:—"'Talk of bravery! talk of heroism! The man who leads a forlorn hope is a coward in comparison with him, who, on Tanna, thus alone, without a sustaining look or cheering word from one of his own race, regards it as his duty to hold on in the face of such dangers. We read of the soldier, found after the lapse of ages among the ruins of Herculaneum, who stood firm at his post amid the fiery rain destroying all around him, thus manifesting the rigidity of the discipline among those armies of Ancient Rome which conquered the World. Mr. Paton was subjected to no such iron law. He might with honor, when offered to him, have sought a temporary asylum in Auckland, where he would have been heartily received. But he was moved by higher considerations. He chose to remain, and God knows whether at this moment he is in the land of the living!' When the Bishop told us that he declined leaving Tanna by H. M. S. Pelorus, he added, 'And I like him all the better for so doing!'"

For my part I feel quite confident that, in like circumstances, that noble Bishop of God would have done the same. I, born in the bosom of the Scottish Covenant descended from those who suffered persecution for Christ's honor, would have been unworthy of them and of my Lord had I deserted my post for danger only. Yet not to me, but to the Lord who sustained me, be all the praise and the glory.

CHAPTER 33: THE VISIT OF THE COMMODORE.

AT that time, though my life was daily attempted, a dear lad, named Katasian, was coming six miles regularly to the Worship and to receive frequent instruction. One day, when engaged in teaching him, I caught a man stealing the blind from my window. On trying to prevent him, he aimed his great club at me, but I seized the heavy end of it with both my hands as it swung past my head, and held on with all my might. What a prayer went up from me to God at that dread moment! The man, astonished and abashed at my kind words and appeal, slunk away and left me in peace. God never took away from me the consciousness that it was still right for me to be kind and forgiving, and to hope that I might lead them to love and imitate Jesus.

For some time, Nouka and his wife and daughter—a handsome girl, his only child—and Miaki's principal wife and her two sons, and nine Chiefs attended Worship regularly at the Mission House, on Sabbaths and on the afternoon of every Wednesday. In ail, about sixty persons somewhat regularly waited on our ministrations at this time; and amidst all perils I was encouraged, and my heart was full of hope. Yet one evening when feeling more consoled and hopeful than ever before, a musket was discharged at my very door, and I was constrained to realize that we were in the midst of death. Father, our times are in Thy hand!

In my Mission School, I offered as a prize a red shirt for the first Chief who knew the whole Alphabet without a mistake. It was won by an Inikahi Chief, who was once a terror to the whole community. Afterwards, when trying to teach the A B C to others, he proceeded in something like this graphic style: "A is a man's legs with the body cut off; B is like two eyes; C is a three-quarters moon; D is like one eye; E is a man with one club under his feet and another over his head; F is a man with a large club and a smaller one," etc., etc.; L was like a man's foot; Q was the talk of the dove, etc. Then he would say, "Remember these things; you will soon get hold of the letters and be able to read. I have taught my little child, who can scarcely walk, the names of them all. They are not hard to hold, but soft and easy. You will soon learn to read the book, if you try it with all your heart!"

But Miaki was still our evil genius, and every incident seemed to be used by him for one settled purpose of hate. A Kaserumini Chief, for instance, and seven men took away a young girl in a canoe to Aniwa, to be sold to friends there for tobacco leaf, which the Aniwans cultivated extensively. They also prepared to take revenge there for a child's death, killed in their belief by the sorcery of an Aniwan. When within sight of the shore, the canoes were upset and all were said to have been devoured by sharks, excepting only one canoe out of six. This one returned to Tanna and reported that there were two white Traders living on Aniwa, that they had plenty of ammunition and tobacco, but that they would not come to Tanna as long as a Missionary lived there. Under this fresh incitement, a party of Miaki's men came to my house, praising the Erromangans for the murder of their Missionaries and threatening me.

Even the friendly Nowar said, "Miaki will make a great wind and sink any Man-of-war that comes here. We will take the Man-of-war and kill all that are on board. If you and Abraham do not leave us we will kill you both, for we must have the Traders and the powder."

Just as they were assuming a threatening attitude, other Natives came running with the cry, "Missi, the John Knox is coming into the Harbor, and two great ships of fire, Men-of war, behind her, coming very fast!"

I retorted upon Nowar and the hostile company, "Now is your time! Make all possible haste! Let Miaki raise his great wind now; get all your men ready; I will tell them that you mean to fight, and you will find them always ready!"

Miaki's men fled away in unconcealed terror; but Nowar came to me and said "Missi, I know that my talk is all lies, but if I speak the truth, they will kill me!"

I answered, "Trust in Jehovah, the same God who sent these vessels now, to protect us from being murdered." But Nowar always wavered.

And now from all parts of the island those who were most friendly flocked to us. They were clamorous to have Miaki and some others of our enemies punished by the Man-of-war in presence of the Natives; and then they would be strong to speak in our defense and to lead the Tannese to worship Jehovah.

Commodore Seymour, Captain Hume, and Dr. Geddie came on shore. After inquiring into everything, the Commodore urged me to leave at once, and very kindly offered to remove me to Aneityum, or Auckland, or any place of safety that I preferred. Again, however, I hesitated to leave my dear benighted Tannese, knowing that both Stations would be instantly broken up, that all the influence gained would be thrown away, that the Church would lose all that had been expended, and above all, that those friendly to us would be left to persecution and destruction. For a long time I had seldom taken off my clothes at night, needing to be constantly on the alert to start at a moment's notice; yet, while hope burned within my soul I could not withdraw, so I resolved to risk all with my dear Lord Jesus, and remained at my post. At my request, however, they met and talked with all the leaders who could be assembled at the Mission House. The Natives declared frankly that they liked me, but did not like the Worship. The Commodore reminded them that they had invited me to land among them, and had pledged their word more than once to protect me; he argued with them that as they had no fault to find with me, but only with the Worship, which could do them only good, they must bind themselves to protect my life. Miaki and others promised, and gave him their hand to do so. Lathella, an Aneityumese Chief, who was with Dr. Geddie, interpreted for him and them, Dr. Geddie explaining fully to Lathella in Aneityumese what the Commodore said in English, and Lathella explaining all to the Tannese in their own tongue.

At last old Mouka spoke out for all and said, "Captain Paddan and all the Traders tell us that the Worship causes all our sickness and death. They will not trade with us, nor sell us tobacco, pipes, powder, balls, caps, and muskets, till we kill our Missi like the Erromangans, but after that they will send a Trader to live among us and give us plenty of all these things. We love Missi. But when the Traders tell us that the Worship makes us sick, and when they bribe us with tobacco and powder to kill him or drive him away, some believe them and our hearts do bad conduct to Missi. Let Missi remain here, and we will try to do good conduct to Missi; but you must tell Queen 'Toria of her people's bad treatment of us, and that she must prevent her Traders from killing us with their measles, and from telling us lies to make us do bad conduct to Missi! If they come to us and talk as before, our hearts are very dark and may again lead us to bad conduct to Missi."

After this little parley, the Commodore invited us all on board, along with the Chiefs. They saw about three hundred brave marines ranked up on deck, and heard a great cannon discharged. For all such efforts to impress them and open their eyes, I felt profoundly grateful; but too clearly I knew and saw that only the grace of God could lastingly change them! They were soon back to their old arguments, and were heard saying to one another, "If no punishment is inflicted on the Erromangans for murdering the Missi there, we fear the bad conduct of the Tannese will continue."

No punishment was inflicted at Erromanga, and the Tannese were soon as bold and wicked as ever. For instance, while the Man-of-war lay in the Harbor, Nowar kept himself closely concealed; but no sooner had she sailed than the cowardly fellow came out, laughing at the others, and protesting that he was under no promise and was free to act as he pleased! Yet in the hour of danger he generally proved to be our friend; such was his vacillating character. Nor was Miaki very seriously impressed. Mr. Mathieson shortly thereafter sent his boat round to me, being again short of European food. On his crew leaving her to deliver their message to me, some of Miaki's men at once jumped into the boat and started off round the island in search of kava. I went to Miaki, to ask that the boat might be brought back soon, but on seeing me he ran for his club and aimed to strike me. I managed to seize it, and to hold on, pleading with God and talking with Miaki, till by interference of some friendly Natives his wrath was assuaged a little. Returning home, I sent food overland to keep the Mathiesons going till the boat returned, which she did in about eight days. Thus light and shadow pursued each other, the light brightening for a moment, but upon the whole the shadows deepening.

CHAPTER 34: THE WAR CHIEFS IN COUNCIL.

A TIME of great excitement amongst the Natives now prevailed. War, war, nothing but war was spoken of! Preparations for war were being made in all the villages far and near. Fear sat on every face, and armed bands kept watching each other, as if uncertain where the war was to begin or by whom. All work was suspended, and that war spirit was let loose which rouses the worst passions of human nature. Again we found ourselves the center of conflict, one party set for killing us or driving us away; the other wishing to retain us, while all old bitter grievances were also dragged into their speeches.

Miaki and Nouka said, "If you will keep Missi and his Worship, take him with you to your own land, for we will not have him to live at the Harbor."

Ian, the great Inland Chief, rose in wrath and said, "On whose lands does the Missi live, yours or ours? Who fight against the Worship and all good, who are the thieves and murderers, who tell the lies, you or we? We wish peace, but you will have war. We like Missi and the Worship, but you hate them and say, 'Take him to your own land!' It is our land on which he now lives; it is his own land which he bought from you, but which our fathers sold Missi Turner long ago. The land was not yours to sell; it was really ours. Your fathers stole it from us long ago by war; but we would not have asked it back, had you not asked us to take Missi away. Now we will defend him on it, and he will teach us and our people in our own land!" So meeting after meeting broke into fiery speech, and separated with many threats.

To the next great meeting I was invited, but did not go, contenting myself with a message pleading that they should live at peace and on no account go to war with each other. But Ian himself came for me. I said, "Ian, I have told you my whole heart. Go not to that meeting. I will rather leave the island or die, than see you going to war about me!"

He answered, "Missi, come with me, come now!"

I replied, "Ian, you are surely not taking me away to kill me? If you are, my God will punish it."

His only reply was, "Follow me, follow me quickly."

I felt constrained to go. He strode on before me till we reached the great village of his ancestors. His followers, armed largely with muskets as well as native weapons, filled one half the Village Square or dancing-ground. Miaki, Nouka, and their whole party sat in manifest terror upon the other half. Marching into the center, he stood with me by his side, and proudly looking round, exclaimed, "Missi, these are my men and your friends! We are met to defend you and the Worship." Then pointing across to the other side, he cried aloud, "These are your enemies and ours! The enemies of the Worship, the disturbers of the peace on Tanna! Missi, say the word, and the muskets of my men will sweep all opposition away, and the Worship will spread and we will all be strong for it on Tanna. We will not shoot without your leave; but if you refuse they will kill you and persecute us and our children, and banish Jehovah's Worship from our land."

I said, "I love all of you alike. I am here to teach you how to turn away from all wickedness, to worship and serve Jehovah, and to live in peace. How can I approve of any person being killed for me or for the Worship? My God would be angry at me and punish me, if I did!"

He replied, "Then, Missi, you will be murdered and the Worship destroyed."

I then stood forth in the middle before them all and cried, "You may shoot or murder me, but I am your best friend. I am not afraid to die. You will only send me the sooner to my Jehovah God, whom I love and serve, and to my dear Saviour Jesus Christ, who died for me and for you, and who sent me here to tell you all His love. If you will only love and serve Him and give up your bad conduct, you will be happy. But if you kill me, His messenger, rest assured that He will in His own time and way punish you. This is my word to you all; my love to you all!"

So saying, I turned to leave; and Ian strode suddenly away and stood at the head of his men, crying, "Missi, they will kill you! they will kill us, and you will be to blame!"

Miaki and Nouka, full of deceit, now cried out, "Missi's word is good! Let us all obey it. Let us all worship."

An old man, Sirawia, one of Ian's under-chiefs, then said, "Miaki and Nouka say that the land on which Missi lives was theirs; though they sold it to him and he has paid them for it, they all know that it was ours, and is yet ours by right; but if they let Missi live on it in peace, we will all live at peace, and worship Jehovah. And if not, we will surely claim it again."

Miaki and his party hereon went off to their plantations, and brought a large present of food to Ian and his men as a peace-offering. This they accepted; and the next day Ian and his men brought Miaki a return present and said, "You know that Missi lives on our land? Take our present, be friends, and let him live quietly and teach us all. Yesterday you said his word was good; obey it now, else we will punish you and defend the Missi."

Miaki accepted the token, and gave good promises for the future. Ian then came to the hill-top near our house, by which passed the public path, and cried aloud in the hearing of all, "Abraham, tell Missi that you and he now live on our land. This path is the march betwixt Miaki and us. We have this day bought back the land of our fathers by a great price to prevent war. Take of our breadfruits and also of our cocoanuts what you require, for you are our friends and living on our land, and we will protect you and the Worship!"

CHAPTER 35: UNDER KNIFE AND TOMAHAWK.

CHAFED at the upsetting of all their plans and full of revenge, Nouka and Miaki and their allies declared publicly that they were now going to kill Ian by sorcery, i. e. by Nahak, more feared by the poor Tannese than the field of battle. Strange to say. Ian became sick shortly after the Sacred Men had made the declaration about their Nahak-sorcery. I attended him, and for a time he recovered, and appeared very grateful. But he soon fell sick again. I sent him and the Chief next under him a blanket each; I also gave shirts and calico to a number of his leading men. They wore them and seemed grateful and pleased. Ian, however, gradually sank and got worse. He had every symptom of being poisoned, a thing easily accomplished, as they know and use many deadly poisons. His sufferings were very great, which prevented me from ascribing his collapse to mere superstitious terror. I did all that could be done; but all thought him dying, and of course by sorcery. His people were angry at me for not consenting before to their shooting of Miaki; and Miaki's people were now rejoicing that Ian was being killed by Nahak.

One night, his brother and a party came for me to go and see Ian, but I declined to go till the morning for fear of the fever and ague. On reaching his village, I saw many people about, and feared that I had been led into a snare; but I at once entered into his house to talk and pray with him, as he appeared to be dying. After prayer, I discovered that I was left alone with him, and that all the people had retired from the village; and I knew that, according to their custom, this meant mischief. Ian said, "Come near me, and sit by my bedside to talk with me, Missi."

I did so, and while speaking to him he lay as if lost in a swoon of silent meditation. Suddenly he drew from the sugar-cane leaf thatch close to his bed a large butcher-like knife, and instantly feeling the edge of it with his other hand, he pointed it to within a few inches of my heart and held it quivering there, all atremble with excitement. I durst neither move nor speak, except that my heart kept praying to the Lord to spare me, or if my time was come to take me home to Glory with Himself. There passed a few moments of awful suspense. My sight went and came. Not a word had been spoken, except to Jesus; and then Ian wheeled the knife around, thrust it into the sugar-cane leaf, and cried to me, "Go, go quickly!"

Next moment I was on the road. Not a living soul was to be seen about the village. I understood then that it had been agreed that Ian was to kill me, and that they had all withdrawn so as not to witness it, that when the Man-of-war came to inquire about me, Ian would be dead, and no punishment could overtake the murderer. I walked quietly till quite free of the village, lest some hid in their houses might observe me. Thereafter, fearing that they, finding I had escaped, might overtake and murder me, I ran for my life a weary four miles till I reached the Mission House, faint yet praising God for such a deliverance. Poor Ian died soon after, and his people strangled one of his wives and hanged another, and took out the three bodies together in a canoe and sank them in the sea.

Miaki was jubilant over having killed his enemy by Nahak; but the Inland people now assembled in thousands to help Sirawia and his brother to avenge that death on Miaki, Nouka, and Karewick. These, on the other hand, boasted that they would kill all their enemies by Nahak-sorcery, and would call up a hurricane to destroy their houses, fruit-trees, and plantations. Immediately after Miaki's threat about bringing a storm, one of their great hurricanes actually smote that side of the island and laid everything waste. His enemies were greatly enraged, and many of the injured people united with them in demanding revenge on Miaki. Hitherto I had done everything in my power to prevent war, but now it seemed inevitable, and both parties sent word that if Abraham and I kept to the Mission House no one would harm us. We had little faith in any of their promises, but there was no alternative for us.

On the following Saturday, 18th January 1862, the war began. Musket after musket was discharged quite near us, and the bush all around rang with the yell of their war-cry, which if once heard will never be forgotten. It came nearer and nearer, for Miaki fled, and his people took shelter behind and around our house. We were placed in the heart of danger, and the balls flew thick all around us. In the afternoon Ian's brother and his party retired, and Miaki quickly sent messengers and presents to the Inikahimini and Kaserumini districts, to assemble all their people and help him "to fight Missi and the Tannese who were friends of the Worship." He said, "Let us cook his body and Abraham's, and distribute them to every village on this side of the island!"

Yet all the while Miaki assured me that he had sent a friendly message. The war went on, and poor Nowar the Chief protected us, till he had a spear broken into his right knee. The enemy would have carried him off to feast on his body; but his young men, shouting wildly his name and battle-cry, rushed in with great impetuosity and carried their wounded Chief home in triumph. The Inland people now discharged muskets at my house and beat against the walls with their clubs. They smashed in the door and window of our storeroom, broke open boxes and casks, tore my books to pieces and scattered them about, and carried off everything for which they cared, including my boat, mast, oars, and sails. They broke into Abraham's house and plundered it; after which they made a rush at the bedroom, into which we were locked, firing muskets, yelling, and trying to break it in. A Chief, professing to be sorry for us, called me to the window, but on seeing me he sent a tomahawk through it crying, "Come on, let us kill him now!"

I replied, "My Jehovah God will punish you; a Man-of-war will come and punish you, if you kill Abraham, his wife, or me."

He retorted, "It's all lies about a Man-of-war! They did not punish the Erromangans. They are afraid of us. Come on, let us kill them!"

He raised his tomahawk and aimed to strike my forehead, many muskets were uplifted as if to shoot, so I raised a revolver in my right hand and pointed it at them. The Rev. Joseph Copeland had left it with me on a former visit. I did not wish it, but he insisted upon leaving it, saying that the very knowledge that I had such a weapon might save my life. Truly, on this occasion it did so. Though it was harmless they fell back quickly. My immediate assailant dropped to the ground, crying, "Missi has got a short musket! He will shoot you all!"

After lying flat on the ground for a little, they all got up and ran to the nearest bush, where they continued yelling about and showing their muskets. Towards nightfall they left, loaded with the plunder of the store and of Abraham's house. So God once more graciously protected us from falling into their cruel hands.

In the evening, after they left, I went to Miaki and Nouka. Miaki, with a sneer, said, "Missi, where was Jehovah to-day? There was no Jehovah to-day to protect you. It's all lies about Jehovah. They will come and kill you, and Abraham, and his wife, and cut your bodies into pieces to be cooked and eaten in every village upon Tanna."

I said, "Surely, when you had planned all this, and brought them to kill us and steal all our property, Jehovah did protect us, or we would not have been here!"

He replied, "There was no Jehovah to-day! We have no fear of any Man-of-war. They dare not punish us. They durst not punish the Erromangans for murdering the Gordons. They will talk to us and say we must not do so again, and give us a present. That is all. We fear nothing. The talk of all Tanna is that we will kill you and seize all your property tomorrow."

I warned him that the punishment of a Man-of-war can only reach the body and the land, but that Jehovah's punishment reached both body and soul in Time and in Eternity.

He replied, "Who fears Jehovah? He was not here to protect you to-day!"

"Yes," I said, "my Jehovah God is here now. He hears all we say, sees all we do, and will punish the wicked and protect His own people."

After this, a number of the people sat down around me, and I prayed with them. But I left with a very heavy heart, feeling that Miaki was evidently bent on our destruction.

CHAPTER 36: THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

I SENT Abraham to consult Nowar, who had defended us till disabled by a spear in the right knee. He sent a canoe by Abraham, advising me to take some of my goods in it to his house by night, and he would try to protect them and us. The risk was so great we could only take a very little. Enemies were on every hand to cut off our flight, and Miaki, the worst of all, whose village had to be passed in going to Nowar's. In the darkness of the Mission House, we durst not light a candle for fear of some one seeing and shooting us. Not one of Nowar's men durst come to help us. But in the end it made no difference, for Nowar and his men kept what was taken there, as their portion of the plunder. Abraham, his wife, and I waited anxiously for the morning light. Miaki, the false and cruel, came to assure us that the Heathen would not return that day. Yet, as daylight came in, Miaki himself stood and blew a great conch not far from our house. I ran out to see why this trumpet-shell had been blown, and found it was the signal for a great company of howling armed savages to rush down the hill on the other side of the bay and make straight for the Mission House. We had not a moment to lose. To have remained would have been certain death to us all, and also to Matthew, a Teacher just arrived from Mr. Mathieson's Station. Though I am by conviction a strong Calvinist, I am no Fatalist. I held on while one gleam of hope remained. Escape for life was now the only path of duty. I called the Teachers, locked the door, and made quickly for Nowar's village. There was not a moment left to carry anything with us. In the issue, Abraham and his wife and I lost all our earthly goods, and all our clothing except what we had on. My Bible, the few translations which I had made into Tannese, and a light pair of blankets I carried with me.

We durst not choose the usual path along the beach, for there our enemies would have quickly overtaken us. We entered the bush in the hope of getting away unobserved. But a cousin of Miaki, evidently secreted to watch us, sprang from behind a breadfruit tree, and swinging his tomahawk, aimed it at my brow with a fiendish look. Avoiding it I turned upon him and said in a firm bold voice, "If you dare to strike me, my Jehovah God will punish you. He is here to defend me now!"

The man, trembling, looked all round as if to see the God who was my defender, and the tomahawk gradually lowered at his side. With my eye fixed upon him, I gradually moved backwards in the track of the Teachers, and God mercifully restrained him from following me.

On reaching Nowar's village unobserved, we found the people terror-stricken, crying, rushing about in despair at such a host of armed savages approaching. I urged them to ply their axes, cut down trees, and blockade the path. For a little they wrought vigorously at this; but when, so far as eye could reach, they saw the shore covered with armed men rushing on towards their village, they were overwhelmed with fear, they threw away their axes and weapons of war, they cast themselves headlong on the ground, and they knocked themselves against the trees as if to court death before it came. They cried, "Missi, it's of no use! We will all be killed and eaten to-day! See what a host are coming against us."

Mothers snatched up little children and ran to hide in the bush. Others waded as far as they could into the sea with them, holding their heads above the water. The whole village collapsed in a condition of indescribable terror. Nowar, lame with his wounded knee, got a canoe turned upside-down and sat upon it where he could see the whole approaching multitude. He said, "Missi, sit down beside me, and pray to our Jehovah God, for if He does not send deliverance now, we are all dead men. They will kill us all on your account, and that quickly. Pray, and I will watch!"

They had gone to the Mission House and broken in the door, and finding that we had escaped, they rushed on to Nowar's village. For, as they began to plunder the bedroom, Nouka said, "Leave everything. Missi will come back for his valuable things at night, and then we will get them and him also!"

So he nailed up the door, and they all marched for Nowar's. We prayed as one can only pray when in the jaws of death and on the brink of Eternity. We felt that God was near, and omnipotent to do what seemed best in His sight. When the savages were about three hundred yards off, at the foot of a hill leading up to the village, Nowar touched my knee, saying. "Missi, Jehovah is hearing! They are all standing still."

Had they come on they would have met with no opposition, for the people were scattered in terror. On gazing shorewards, and round the Harbor, as far as we could see, was a dense host of warriors, but all were standing still, and apparently absolute silence prevailed. We saw a messenger or herald running along the approaching multitude, delivering some tidings as he passed, and then disappearing in the bush. To our amazement, the host began to turn, and slowly marched back in great silence, and entered the remote bush at the head of the Harbor. Nowar and his people were in ecstasies, crying out, "Jehovah has heard Missi's prayer! Jehovah has protected us and turned them away back."

About midday, Nouka and Miaki sent their cousin Jonas, who had always been friendly to me, to say that I might return to my house in safety, as they were now carrying the war inland. Jonas had spent some years on Samoa, and been much with Traders in Sydney, and spoke English well; but we felt they were deceiving us. Next night, Abraham ventured to creep near the Mission House, to test whether we might return, and save some valuable things, and get a change of clothing. The house appeared to stand as when they nailed up the door. But a large party of Miaki's allies at once enclosed Abraham, and, after asking many questions about me, they let him go since I was not there. Had I gone there they would certainly that night have killed me. Again, at midnight Abraham and his wife and Matthew went to the Mission House, and found Nouka, Miaki, and Karewick near by, concealed in the bush among the reeds. Once more they enclosed them, thinking I was there too, but Nouka, finding that I was not, cried out, "Don't kill them just now! Wait till Missi comes."

Hearing this, Matthew slipped into the bush and escaped. Abraham's wife waded into the sea, and they allowed her to get away. Abraham was allowed to go to the Mission House, but he too crept into the bush, and after an anxious waiting they all came back to me in safety. We now gave up all hope of recovering anything from the house.

Towards morning, when Miaki and his men saw that I was not coming back to deliver myself into their hands, they broke up my house and stole all they could carry away. They tore my books, and scattered them about. They took away the type of my printing-press, to be made into bullets for their muskets. For similar uses they melted down the zinc lining of my boxes, and everything else that could be melted. What they could not take away, they destroyed.

As the night advanced, Nowar declared that I must leave his village before morning, else he and his people would be killed for protecting me. He advised me, as the sea was good, to try for Mr. Mathieson's Station; but he objected to my taking away any of my property—he would soon follow with it himself! But how to sail? Miaki had stolen my boat, mast, sails, and oars, as also an excellent canoe made for me and paid for by me on Aneityum; and he had threatened to shoot any person that assisted me to launch either the one or the other. The danger still increasing, Nowar said, "You cannot remain longer in my house! My son will guide you to the large chestnut tree in my plantation in the bush. Climb up into it, and remain there till the moon rises."

Being entirely at the mercy of such doubtful and vacillating friends, I, though perplexed, felt it best to obey. I climbed into the tree, and was left there alone in the bush. The hours I spent there live all before me as if it were but of yesterday. I heard the frequent discharging of muskets, and the yells of the savages. Yet I sat there among the branches, as safe in the arms of Jesus. Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the moonlight flickered among these chestnut leaves, and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Saviour's spiritual presence, to enjoy His consoling fellowship. If thus thrown back upon your own soul, alone, all, all alone, in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will not fail you then?

CHAPTER 37: FIVE HOURS IN A CANOE.

GLADLY would I have lingered there for one night of comparative peace! But Nowar sent his son to call me down from the tree, and to guide me to the shore where he himself was, as it was now time to take to sea in the canoe. Pleading for my Lord's continuing presence, I had to obey. My life and the lives of my Aneityumese now hung upon a very slender thread; the risk was almost equally great from our friends so-called, or from our enemies. Had I been a stranger to Jesus and to prayer, my reason would verily have given way, but my comfort and joy sprang out of these words, "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee; lo, I am with you alway!" Pleading these promises, I followed my guide. We reached the beach, just inside the Harbor, at a beautiful white sandy bay on Nowar's ground, from which our canoe was to start. A good number of the Natives had assembled there to see us off. Arkurat, having got a large roll of calico for the loan of his canoe, hid it away, and then refused the canoe, saying that if he had to escape with his family he would require it. He demanded an ax, a sail for his canoe, and a pair of blankets. As Koris had the ax and another had the quilt, I gave the quilt to him for a sail, and the ax and blankets for the canoe, in fact, these few relics of our earthly all at Nowar's were coveted by the savages and endangered our lives, and it was as well to get rid of them altogether. He cruelly proposed a small canoe for two; but I had hired the canoe for five, and insisted upon getting it, as he had been well paid for it. As he only laughed and mocked us, I prepared to start and travel overland to Mr. Mathieson's Station. He then said, "My wrath is over! You may take it and go."

We launched it, but now he refused to let us go till daylight. He had always been one of my best friends, but now appeared bent on a quarrel, so I had to exercise much patience with him and them. Having launched it, he said I had hired the canoe but not the paddles. I protested, "Surely you know we hired the paddles too. What could we do without paddles?"

But Arkurat lay down and pretended to have fallen asleep, snoring on the sand, and could not be awaked. I appealed to Nowar, who only said, "That is his conduct, Missi, our conduct!"

I replied, "As he has got the blankets which I saved to keep me from ague and fever, and I have nothing left now but the clothes I have on, surely you will give me paddles."

Nowar gave me one. Returning to the village, friends gave me one each till I got other three. Now Arkurat started up, and refused to let us go. A Chief and one of his men, who lived on the other side of the island near to where we were going, and who was hired by me to go with us and help in paddling the canoe, drew back also and refused to go. Again I offered to leave the canoe, and walk overland if possible, when Faimungo, the Chief who had refused to go with us, came forward and said, "Missi, they are all deceiving you! The sea is so rough, you cannot go by it; and if you should get round the weather point, Miaki has men appointed to shoot you as you pass the Black Rocks, while by land all the paths are guarded by armed men. I tell you the truth, having heard all their talk. Miaki and Karewick say they hate the Worship, and will kill you. They killed your goats, and stole all your property yesterday. Farewell!"

The Teachers, the boy, and I now resolved to enter the canoe and attempt it, as the only gleam of hope left to us. My party of five embarked in our frail canoe; Abraham first, I next, Matthew after me, the boy at the steering paddle, and Abraham's wife sitting in the bottom, where she might hold on while it continued to float. For a mile or more we got away nicely under the lee of the island, but when we turned to go south for Mr. Mathieson's Station, we met the full force of wind and sea, every wave breaking over and almost swamping our canoe. The Native lad at the helm paddle stood up crying, "Missi, this is the conduct of the sea! It swallows up all who seek its help."

I answered, "We do not seek help from it, but from Jehovah Jesus."

Our danger became very great, as the sea broke over and lashed around us. My faithful Aneityumese, overcome with terror, threw down their paddles, and Abraham said, "Missi, we are all drowned now! We are food for the sharks. We might as well be eaten by the Tannese as by fishes; but God will give us life with Jesus in heaven!"

I seized the paddle nearest me; I ordered Abraham to seize another within his reach; I enjoined Matthew to bail the canoe for life, and the lad to keep firm in his seat, and I cried, "Stand to your post, and let us return! Abraham, where is now your faith in Jesus? Remember, He is Ruler on sea as on land. Abraham, pray and ply your paddle! Keep up stroke for stroke with me, as our lives depend on it. Our God can protect us. Matthew, bail with all your might. Don't look round on the sea and fear. Let us pray to God and ply our paddles, and He will save us yet!"

Dear old Abraham said, "Thank you for that, Missi. I will be strong. I pray to God and ply my paddle. God will save us!"

With much labor, and amid deadly perils, we got the canoe turned; and after four hours of a terrible struggle, we succeeded, towards daylight as the tide turned, in again reaching smooth water. With God's blessing we at last reached the shore, exactly where we had left it five hours ago!

Now drenched and weary, with the skin of our hands sticking to the paddles, we left the canoe on the reef and waded ashore. Many Natives were there, and looked sullen and disappointed at our return. Katasian, the lad who had been with us, instantly fled for his own land; and the Natives reported that he was murdered soon after. Utterly exhausted, I lay down on the sand and immediately fell into a deep sleep. By and by I felt someone pulling from under my head the native bag in which I carried my Bible and the Tannese translations—the all that had been saved by me from the wreck! Grasping the bag, I sprang to my feet, and the man ran away. My Teachers had also a hedging knife, a useless revolver, and a fowling-piece, the sight of which, though they had been under the salt water for hours, God used to restrain the savages. Calling my Aneityumese near, we now, in united prayer and kneeling on the sands, committed each other unto the Lord God, being prepared for the last and worst.

CHAPTER 38: A RACE FOR LIFE.

As I sat meditating on the issues, Faimungo, the friendly Inland Chief, again appeared to warn us of our danger, now very greatly increased by our being driven back from the sea. All Nowar's men had fled, and were hid in the bush and in rocks along the shore; while Miaki was holding a meeting not half a mile away, and preparing to fall upon us. Faimungo said, "Farewell, Missi, I am going home. I don't wish to see the work and the murders of this morning."

He was Nowar's son-in-law. He had always been truthful and kindly with me. His home was about half-way across the island, on the road that we wanted to go, and under sudden impulse I said, "Faimungo, will you let us follow you? Will you show us the path? When the Mission Ship arrives, I will give you three good axes, blankets, knives, fish-hooks, and many things you prize."

The late hurricanes had so destroyed and altered the paths, that only Natives who knew them well could follow them. He trembled much and said, "Missi, you will be killed. Miaki and Karewick will shoot you. I dare not let you follow. I have only about twenty men, and your following might endanger us all."

I urged him to leave at once, and we would follow of our own accord. I would not ask him to protect us; but if he betrayed us and helped the enemy to kill us, I assured him that our God would punish him. If he spared us, he would be rewarded well; and if we were killed against his wishes, God would not be angry at him. He said, "Seven men are with me now, and thirteen are to follow. I will not now send for them. They are with Miaki and Nouka. I will go; but if you follow, you will be killed on the way. You may follow me as far as you can."

Off he started to Nowar's, and got a large load of my stolen property, blankets, sheets, etc., which had fallen to his lot. He called his seven men, who had also shared in the plunder, and, to avoid Miaki's men, they ran away under a large cocoanut grove skirting the shore, calling, "Be quick! Follow and keep as near to us as you can."

Though Nowar had got a box of my rice and appropriated many things from the plunder of the Mission House besides the goods entrusted to his care, and got two of my goats killed and cooked for himself and his people, yet now he would not give a particle of food to my starving Aneityumese or myself, but hurried us off, saying, "I will eat all your rice and keep all that has been left with me, in payment for my lame knee and for my people fighting for you!"

My three Aneityumese and I started after Faimungo and his men. We could place no confidence in any of them; but, feeling that we were in the Lord's hands, it appeared to be our only hope of escaping instant death. We got away unobserved by the enemies. We met several small parties of friends in the Harbor, apparently glad to see us trying to get away. But about four miles on our way, we met a large party of Miaki's men, all armed, and watching as outposts. Some were for shooting us, but others hesitated. Every musket was, however, raised and leveled at me. Faimungo poised his great spear and said, "No, you shall not kill Missi to-day. He is with me." Having made this flourish, he strode off after his own men, and my Aneityumese followed, leaving me face to face with a ring of leveled muskets.

Sirawia, who was in command of this party, and who once, like Nowar, had been my friend, said to me, Judas like, "My love to you, Missi." But he also shouted after Faimungo, "Your conduct is bad in taking the Missi away; leave him to us to be killed!" I then turned upon him, saying, "Sirawia, I love you all. You must know that I sought only your good. I gave you medicine and food when you and your people were sick and dying under measles; I gave you the very clothing you wear. Am I not your friend? Have we not often drunk tea and eaten together in my house? Can you stand there and see your friend shot? If you do, my God will punish you severely."

He then whispered something to his company which I did not hear; and, though their muskets were still raised, I saw in their eyes that he had restrained them. I therefore began gradually to move backwards, still keeping my eyes fixed on them, till the bush hid them from my view, whereon I turned and ran after my party, and God kept the enemy from following. We trusted in Jehovah Jesus, and pressed on in flight.

A second hostile party encountered us, and with great difficulty we also got away from them. Soon thereafter a friendly company crossed our path. We learned from them that the enemies had slaughtered other two of Manuman's men, and burned several villages with fire. Another party of the enemy encountered us, and were eager for our lives. But this time Faimungo withstood them firmly, his men encircled us, and he said, "I am not afraid now, Missi; I am feeling stronger near my own land!"

CHAPTER 39: FAINT YET PURSUING.

HURRYING still onwards, we came to that village on their high ground called Aneai, i. e. Heaven. The sun was oppressively hot, the path almost unshaded, and our whole party very exhausted, especially Faimungo, carrying his load of stolen goods. So here he sat down on the village dancing-ground for a smoke, saying, "Missi, I am near my own land now. We can rest with safety."

In a few minutes, however, he started up, he and his men, in wild excitement. Over a mountain, behind the village and above it, there came the shoutings, and anon the tramp, tramp of a multitude making rapidly towards us. Faimungo got up and planted his back against a tree. I stood beside him, and the Aneityumese woman and the two men stood near me, while his men seemed prepared to flee. At full speed a large body of the tallest and most powerful men that I had seen on Tanna came rushing on and filled the dancing-ground. They were all armed, and flushed with their success in war. A messenger had informed them of our escape, probably from Miaki, and they had crossed the country to intercept us.

Faimungo was much afraid, and said, "Missi, go on in that path, you and your Aneityumese; and I will follow when I have had a smoke and a talk with these men."

I replied, "No, I will stand by your side till you go; and if I am killed, it will be by your side, I will not leave you."

He implored us to go on, but that I knew would be certain death. They began urging one another to kill us, but I looked round them as calmly as possible, saying, "My Jehovah God will punish you here and hereafter, if you kill me or any of His servants."

A killing-stone, thrown by one of the savages, grazed poor old Abraham's cheek, and the dear soul gave such a look at me, and then upwards, as if to say, "Missi, I was nearly away to Jesus." A club was also raised to follow the blow of the killing-stone, but God baffled the aim. They encircled us in a deadly ring, and one kept urging another to strike the first blow, or fire the first shot. My heart rose up to the Lord Jesus; I saw Him watching all the scene. In that awful hour I beheld His own words, as if carved in letters of fire upon the clouds of Heaven: "Seek, and ye shall find. Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son." I could understand how Stephen and John saw the glorified Saviour as they gazed up through suffering and persecution to the Heavenly Throne!

Yet I never could say that on such occasions I was entirely without fear. Nay, I have felt my reason reeling, my sight coming and going, and my knees smiting together when thus brought close to a violent death, but mostly under the solemn thought of being ushered into Eternity and appearing before God. Still, I was never left without hearing that promise in all its consoling and supporting power coming up through the darkness and the anguish, "Lo, I am with you alway;" And with Paul I could say, even in this dread moment and crisis of being, "I am persuaded that neither death nor life,.. nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Faimungo and others now urged us to go on in the path. I said, "Faimungo, why are we to leave you? My God heard your promise not to betray me. He knows now what is in your heart and in mine. I will not leave you; and if I am to die, I will die by your side."

He replied, "Now, I go on before; Missi, keep close to me."

His men had gone, and I persuaded my Aneityumese to follow them. At last, with a bound, Faimungo started after them. I followed, keeping as near him as I could, pleading with Jesus to protect me or to take me home to Glory. The host of armed men also ran along on each side with their weapons ready; but leaving everything to Jesus, I ran on as if they were my escort, or as if I saw them not. If any reader wonders how they were restrained, much more would I, unless I believed that the same Hand that restrained the lions from touching Daniel held back these Savages from hurting me! We came to a stream crossing our path. With a bound all my party cleared it, ran up the bank opposite, and disappeared in the bush. "Faint yet pursuing," I also tried the leap, but I struck the bank and slid back on my hands and knees towards the stream. At this moment I heard a crash above my head amongst the branches of an overhanging tree, and I knew that a Kawas had been thrown, and that that branch had saved me. Praising my God, I scrambled up on the other side, and followed the track of my party into the bush. The savages gazed after me for a little in silence, but no one crossed the stream; and I saw them separate into two, one portion returning to the village and another pressing inland. With what gratitude did I recognize the Invisible One who brought their counsels to confusion.

I found my party resting in the bush, and amazed to see me escaped alive from men who were thirsting for my blood. Faimungo and his men received me with demonstrations of joy, perhaps feeling a little ashamed of their own cowardice. He now ascended the mountain and kept away from the common path to avoid other Native bands. At every village enemies to the Worship were ready to shoot us. But I kept close to our guide, knowing that the fear of shooting him would prevent their shooting at me, as he was the most influential Chief in all that section of the island.

One party said, "Miaki and Karewick said that Missi made the sickness and the hurricanes, and we ought to kill him."

Faimungo replied, "They lie about Missi! It is our own bad conduct that makes us sick."

They answered, "We don't know who makes the sickness, but our fathers have taught us to kill all Foreign men."

Faimungo, clutching club and spear, exclaimed, standing betwixt them and us, "You won't kill Missi to-day!"

Faimungo now sent his own men home by a near path, and guided us himself till we were close upon the shore. There sitting down, he said, "Missi, I have now fulfilled my promise. I am so tired, I am so afraid, I dare not go farther. My love to you all. Now go on quickly! Three of my men will go with you to the next rocks. Go quickly! Farewell."

These men went on a little, and then said, "Missi, we dare not go! Faimungo is at war with the people of the next land. You must keep straight along this path." So they turned and ran back to their own village.

To us this district was especially perilous. Many years ago the Aneityumese had joined in a war against the Tannese of this tribe, and the thirst for revenge yet existed in their hearts, handed down from sire to son. Most providentially the men were absent on a war expedition, and we saw only three lads and a great number of women and children, who ran off to the bush in terror. In the evening the enraged savages of another district assaulted the people of the shore villages for allowing us to pass, and, though sparing their lives, broke in pieces their weapons of war—a very grievous penalty.

In the next district, as we hasted along the shore, two young men came running after us, poising their quivering spears. I took the useless revolver out of my little native basket, and raising it cried, "Beware! Lay down your spears at once on the sand, and carry my basket to the next landing at the Black Rocks."

They threw their spears on the sand, lifted the bag, and ran on before us to the rocks which formed the march betwixt them and their enemies. Laying it down, they said appealingly, "Missi, let us return to our home!" And how they did run, fearing the pursuit of their foes.

In the next land we saw none. After that we saw crowds all along, some friendly, others unfriendly, but they let us pass on, and with the blessing of Almighty God we drew dear to Mr. Mathieson's Station in safety. Here a man gave me a cocoanut for each of our party, which we greatly required, having tasted nothing all that day, and very little for several days before. We were so weak that only the struggle for life enabled us to keep our feet; yet my poor Aneityumese never complained and never halted, not even the woman. The danger and excitement kept us up in the race for life; and by the blessing of God we were now approaching the Mission House, praising God for His wonderful deliverances.

Hearing of our coming, Mr. Mathieson came running to meet me. They had heard of our leaving my own Station, and they thought I was dead! They were themselves both very weak; their only child had just been laid in the grave, and they were in great grief and in greater peril. We praised the Lord for permitting us to meet; we prayed for support, guidance, and protection; and resolved now, in all events, to stand by each other till the last.

CHAPTER 40: WAITING AT KWAMERA.

BEFORE I left the Harbor I wrote and left with Nowar letters to be given to the Captains of any vessels which called, for the first, and the next, and the next, telling them of our great danger, that Mr. Mathieson was almost without food, and that I would reward them handsomely if they would call at the Station and remove any of us who might be spared thence to Aneityum. Two or three vessels called, and, as I afterwards learned, got my letters; but, while buying my stolen property from the Natives for tobacco, powder, and balls, they took no further notice of my appeals, and sailed past Mr. Mathieson's, straight on to Aneityum. "The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel!"

Let me now cull the leading events from my Journal, that intervened betwixt this date and the break-up of the Mission on Tanna—at least for a season—though, blessed be God! I have lived to see the light rekindled by my dear friends Mr. and Mrs. Watt, and shining more brightly and hopefully than ever. The candle was quenched, but the candlestick was not removed!

On the 23d January, 1862, Mr. Mathieson sent for Taura, Kati, and Kapuku, his three principal Chiefs, to induce them to promise protection till a vessel called to take us away. They appeared friendly, and promised to do their best. Alas! the promises of the Tannese Chiefs had too often proved to be vain.

On Friday, 24th January, report reached our Station that Miaki and his party, hearing that a friendly Chief had concealed two of Manuman's young men, compelled him to produce them and club them to death before their eyes. Also, that they surrounded Manuman's party on a mountain, and hemmed them in there, dying of starvation, and trying to survive on the carcasses of the dead and on bark and roots. Also, that Miaki had united all the Chiefs, friends and foes alike, in a bond of blood, to kill every one pertaining to the whole Mission on Tanna. Jesus reigns!

On Sunday, the 26th January, thirty persons came to worship at the Mission House. Thereafter, at great risk, we had Worship at three of the nearest and most friendly villages. Amidst all our perils and trials we preached the Gospel to about one hundred and sixteen persons. It was verily a sowing time of tears; but, despite all that followed, who shall say that it was vain! Twenty years have passed, and now when I am writing this, there is a Church of God singing the praises of Jesus in that very district of Tanna. On leaving the second village, a young lad affectionately took my hand to lead me to the next village; but a sulky, down-browed savage, carrying a ponderous club, also insisted upon accompanying us. I led the way, guided by the lad. Mr. Mathieson got the man to go before him, while he himself followed, constantly watching. Coming to a place where another path branched off from ours, I asked which path we took, and, on turning to the left as instructed by the lad, the savage, getting close behind me, swung his huge club over his shoulder to strike me on the head. Mr. Mathieson, springing forward, caught the club from behind with a great cry to me; and I, wheeling instantly, had hold of the club also, and betwixt us we wrested it out of his hands. The poor creature, craven at heart however bloodthirsty, implored us not to kill him. I raised the club threateningly, and caused him to march in front of us till we reached the next village fence. In terror lest these villagers should kill him, he gladly received back his club, as well as the boy his bow and arrows, and they were lost in the bush in a moment.

At the village from which this man and boy had come, one savage brought his musket while we were conducting Worship, and sat sullen and scowling at us all the time. Mocking questions were also shouted at us, such as, "Who made the rains, winds, and hurricanes? Who caused all the disease? Who killed Missi Mathieson's child?" They sneered and scoffed at our answers, and in this Taura the Chief joined the rest.

On the 27th, at daylight, a vessel was seen in the offing, as if to tantalize us. The Captain had been at the Harbor, and had received my letter from Nowar. I hoisted a flag to induce him to send or come on shore, but he sailed off for Aneityum, bearing the plunder of my poor Mission House, purchased for ammunition and tobacco for the Natives. He left the news at Aneityum that I had been driven from my Station some time ago, and was believed to have been murdered.

On the 29th of January, the young Chief Kapuku came and handed to Mr. Mathieson his own and his father's war-gods and household idols. They consisted chiefly of a basket of small and peculiar stones, much worn and shining with use. He said, "While many are trying to kill you and drive the Worship of Jehovah from this island, I give up my gods, and will send away all Heathen idols from my land."

On the 31st, we learned that a party of Miaki's men were going about Mr. Mathieson's district inciting the people to kill us. Faimungo also came to inform us that Maiki was exerting all his artifice to get us and the Worship destroyed. Manuman even sent, from inland, Raki, his adopted son, to tell me of the fearful sufferings that he and his people were now passing through, and that some were killed almost every day. Raki's wife was a Chief's daughter, who, when the war began, returned to her father's care. The savages of Miaki went to her own father's house and compelled him to give her up as an enemy. She was clubbed and feasted on.

On Sabbath, 2d February, thirty-two people attended the Morning Service. I addressed them on the Deluge, its causes and lessons. I showed them a doll, explaining that such carved and painted images could not hear our prayers or help us in our need, that the living Jehovah God only could hear and help. They were much interested, and after Worship carefully examined the doll. Mr. Mathieson and I, committing ourselves to Jesus, went inland and conducted Worship at seven villages, listened to by about one hundred people in all. Nearly all appeared friendly. The people of one village had been incited to kill us on our return; but God guided us to return by another way, and so we escaped.

During the day, on 3d February, a company of Miaki's men came to the Mission House, and forced Mrs. Mathieson to show them through the premises. Providentially, I had bolted myself that morning into a closet room, and was engrossed with writing. They went through every room in the house and did not see me, concluding I had gone inland. They discharged a musket into our Teacher's house, but afterwards left quietly, greatly disappointed at not finding me. My heart still rose in praise to God for another such deliverance, neither by man nor of man's planning!

CHAPTER 41: THE LAST AWFUL NIGHT.

WORN out with long watching and many fatigues, I lay down that night early, and fell into a deep sleep. About ten o'clock the savages again surrounded the Mission House. My faithful dog Clutha, clinging still to me amid the wreck of all else on earth, sprang quietly upon me, pulled at my clothes, and awoke me, showing danger in her eye glancing at me through the shadows. I silently awoke Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson, who had also fallen asleep. We committed ourselves in hushed prayer to God and watched them, knowing that they could not see us. Immediately a glare of light fell into the room! Men passed with flaming torches; and first they set fire to the Church all round, and then to a reed fence connecting the Church and the dwelling-house. In a few minutes the house, too, would be in flames, and armed savages waiting to kill us on attempting an escape!

Taking my harmless revolver in the left hand and a little American tomahawk in the right, I pleaded with Mr. Mathieson to let me out and instantly to again lock the door on himself and wife. He very reluctantly did so, holding me back and saying, "Stop here and let us die together! You will never return!"

I said, "Be quick! Leave that to God. In a few minutes our house will be in flames, and then nothing can save us."

He did let me out, and locked the door again quickly from the inside; and, while his wife and he prayed and watched for me from within, I ran to the burning reed fence, cut it from top to bottom, and tore it up and threw it back into the flames, so that the fire could not by it be carried to our dwelling-house. I saw on the ground shadows, as if something were falling around me, and started back. Seven or eight savages had surrounded me, and raised their great clubs in air. I heard a shout—"Kill him! Kill him!" One savage tried to seize hold of me, but, leaping from his clutch, I drew the revolver from my pocket and leveled it as for use, my heart going up in prayer to my God. I said, "Dare to strike me, and my Jehovah God will punish you. He protects us, and will punish you for burning His Church, for hatred to His Worship and people, and for all your bad conduct. We love you all; and for doing you good only, you want to kill us. But our God is here now to protect us and to punish you."

They yelled in rage, and urged each other to strike the first blow, but the Invisible One restrained them. I stood invulnerable beneath His invisible shield, and succeeded in rolling back the tide of flame from our dwelling-house.

At this dread moment occurred an incident, which my readers may explain as they like, but which I trace directly to the interposition of my God. A rushing and roaring sound came from the South, like the noise of a mighty engine or of muttering thunder. Every head was instinctively turned in that direction, and they knew, from previous hard experience, that it was one of their awful tornadoes of wind and rain. Now, mark, the wind bore the flames away from our dwelling-house; had it come in the opposite direction, no power on earth could have saved us from being all consumed! It made the work of destroying the Church only that of a few minutes; but it brought with it a heavy and murky cloud, which poured out a perfect torrent of tropical rain. Now, mark again, the flames of the burning Church were thereby cut off from extending to and seizing upon the reeds and the bush; and, besides, it had become almost impossible now to set fire to our dwelling-house. The stars in their courses were fighting against Sisera!

The mighty roaring of the wind, the black cloud pouring down unceasing torrents, and the whole surroundings, awed those savages into silence. Some began to withdraw from the scene, all lowered their weapons of war, and several, terror-struck, exclaimed, "That is Jehovah's rain! Truly their Jehovah God is fighting for them and helping them. Let us away!" A panic seized upon them; they threw away their remaining torches; in a few moments they had all disappeared in the bush; and I was left alone, praising God for His marvelous works. "O taste and see that God is good! Blessed is the man that trusteth in Him!"

Returning to the door of the Mission House, I cried, "Open and let me in. I am now all alone."

Mr. Mathieson let me in, and exclaimed, "If ever, in time of need, God sent help and protection to His servants in answer to prayer, He has done so to-night! Blessed be His holy Name!"

In fear and in joy we united our praises. Truly our Jesus has all power, not less in the elements of Nature than in the savage hearts of the Tannese. Precious Jesus! Often since have I wept over His love and mercy in that deliverance, and prayed that every moment of my remaining life may be consecrated to the service of my precious Friend and Saviour!

CHAPTER 42: "SAIL O! SAIL O!"

ALL through the remainder of that night I lay wide awake keeping watch, my noble little dog lying near me with ears alert. Early in the morning friends came weeping around us. Our enemies were loudly rejoicing. It had been finally resolved to kill us at once, to plunder our house and then to burn it. The noise of the shouting was distinctly heard as they neared the Mission premises, and our weeping, friendly Natives looked terror-struck, and seemed anxious to flee for the bush. But just when the excitement rose to the highest pitch, we heard, or dreamed that we heard, a cry higher still, "Sail O!"

We were by this time beginning to distrust almost our very senses; but again and again that cry came rolling up from the shore, and was repeated from crowd to crowd all along the beach, "Sail O! Sail O!"

The shouts of those approaching us gradually ceased, and the whole multitude seemed to have melted away from our view. I feared some cruel deception, and at first peered out very cautiously to spy the land. But yonder in very truth a vessel came sailing into view. It was the Blue Bell Captain Hastings. I set fire to the reeds on the side of the hill to attract his attention. I put a black shawl as a flag on one end of the Mission House and a white sheet on the other.

This was one of the vessels that had been to Port Resolution, and had sailed past to Aneityum some time ago. I afterwards saw the mate and some of the men wearing my shirts, which they had bought from the Tannese on their former visit. At the earnest request of Messrs. Geddie and Copeland, Mr. Underwood, the owner, had sent Captain Hastings to Tanna to rescue us if yet alive. For this purpose he had brought twenty armed men from Aneityum, who came on shore in two boats in charge of the mate, the notorious Ross Lewin. He returned to the ship with a boat-load of Mr. Mathieson's things, leaving ten of the Natives to help us to pack more and carry them down to the beach, especially what the Missionary thought most valuable.

The two boats were now loaded and ready to start. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon, when a strange and painful trial befell us. Poor dear Mr. Mathieson, apparently unhinged, locked himself all alone into what had been his study, telling Mrs. Mathieson and me to go, for he had resolved to remain and die on Tanna. We tried to show him the inconsistency of praying to God to protect us or grant us means of escape, and then refuse to accept a rescue sent to us in our last extremity. We argued that it was surely better to live and work for Jesus than to die as a self-made martyr, who, in God's sight, was guilty of self-murder. His wife wept aloud and pleaded with him, but all in vain! He refused to leave or to unlock his door. I then said, "It is now getting dark. Your wife must go with the vessel, but I will not leave you alone. I shall send a note explaining why I am forced to remain; and as it is certain that we shall be murdered whenever the vessel leaves, I tell you God will charge you with the guilt of our murder." At this he relented, unlocked the door, and accompanied us to the boats, in which we all immediately left.

Meantime, having lost several hours, the vessel had drifted leeward; darkness suddenly settled upon us, and when we were out at sea we lost sight of her and she of us. After tumbling about for some hours in a heavy sea, and unable to find her, those in charge of the boats came near for consultation, and, if possible, to save the lives of all. We advised that they should steer for Port Resolution by the flame of the volcano—a never failing lighthouse, seen fifty miles away—and there await the vessel. The boats were to keep within hearing of each other by constant calling; but this was soon lost to the ear, though on arriving in the bay we found they had got to anchor before us. There we sat in the boats and waited for the coming day.

As the light appeared, we anchored as far out as possible, beyond the reach of musket shots; and there without water or food we sat under a tropical sun till midday came, and still there was no sign of the vessel. The mate at last put all the passengers and the poorest seamen into one boat and left her to swing at anchor, while, with a strong crew in the other, he started off in search of the vessel.

In the afternoon, Nowar and Miaki came off in a canoe to visit us. Nowar had on a shirt, but Miaki was naked and frowning. He urged me to go and see the Mission House, but as we had seen a body of men near it I refused to go. Miaki declared that everything remained as I had left it, but we knew that he lied. Old Abraham and a party had slipped on shore in a canoe, and had found the windows smashed and everything gone except my books, which were scattered about and torn in pieces. They learned that Miaki had sold everything that he could sell to the Traders. The mate and men of the Blue Bell had on my very clothes. They boasted that they had bought them for a few figs of tobacco and for powder, caps, and balls. But they would not return a single shirt to me, though I was without a change. We had all been without food since the morning before, so Nowar brought us off a cocoanut each, and two very small roasted yams for the ladies. Those, however, only seemed to make our thirst the more severe, and we spent a trying day in that boat under a burning sun.

Nowar informed me that only a few nights before this, Miaki and his followers went inland to a village where last year they had killed ten men. Having secretly placed a savage at the door of every house, at a given signal they yelled, and when the terrified inmates tried to escape, they killed almost every man, woman, and child. Some fled into the bush, others rushed to the shore. A number of men got into a canoe to escape, but hearing women and children crying after them they returned, and taking those they could with them, they killed the rest, lest they should fall alive into Miaki's hands. These are surely "they who through fear of death are all their lifetime subject to bondage." The Chief and nearly his whole village were cut off in one night! The dark places of the Earth are "full of the habitations of horrid cruelty." To have actually lived amongst the Heathen and seen their life gives a man a new appreciation of the power and blessings of the Gospel, even where its influence is only very imperfectly allowed to guide and restrain the passions of men. Oh, what it will be when all men in all nations love and serve the glorious Redeemer!

CHAPTER 43: FAREWELL TO TANNA.

ABOUT five o'clock in the evening the vessel hove in sight. Before dark we were all on board, and were sailing for Aneityum. Though both Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson had become very weak, they stood the voyage wonderfully. Next day we were safely landed. We had offered Captain Hastings £20 to take us to Aneityum, but he declined any fare. However, we divided it amongst the mate and crew, for they had every one shown great kindness to us on the voyage.

After arriving on Aneityum, Mrs. Mathieson gradually sank under consumption, and fell asleep in Jesus on 11th March, 1862, and was interred there in the full assurance of a glorious resurrection. Mr. Mathieson, becoming more and more depressed after her death, went over to Mr. Creagh's Station, on Mare, and there died on 14th June, 1862, still trusting in Jesus, and assured that he would soon be with Him in Glory.

After their death I was the only one left alive, in all the New Hebrides Mission north of Aneityum, to tell the story of those pioneer years, during which were sown the seeds of what is now fast becoming a glorious harvest. Twenty-five years ago, all these dear brethren and sisters who were associated with me in the work of the Mission were called home to Glory, to cast their crowns at the feet of Jesus and enjoy the bliss of the redeemed; while I am privileged still to toil and pray for the salvation of the poor Islanders, and plead the cause of the Mission both in the Colonies and at home, in which work the Lord has graciously given me undreamt-of success. My constant desire and prayer are that I may be spared to see at least one Missionary on every island of the group, or trained Native Teachers under the superintendence of a Missionary, to unfold the riches of redeeming love and to lead the poor Islanders to Jesus for salvation.

What could be taken in three boats was saved out of the wreck of Mr. Mathieson's property; but my earthly all perished, except the Bible and the translations into Tannese. Along with the goods pertaining to the Mission, the property which I had to leave behind would be under-estimated at £600, besides the value of the Mission House, etc. Often since have I thought that the Lord stripped me thus bare of all these interests that I might with undistracted mind devote my entire energy to the special work soon to be carved out for me, and of which at this moment neither I nor any one had ever dreamed. At any rate, the loss of my little Earthly All, though doubtless costing me several pangs, was not an abiding sorrow like that which sprang from the thought that the Lord's work was now broken up at both Stations, and that the Gospel was for the time driven from Tanna.

In the darkest moment I never doubted that ultimately the victory there, as elsewhere, would be on the side of Jesus, believing that the whole Earth would yet be filled with the glory of the Lord. But I sometimes sorely feared that I might never live to see or hear of that happy day! By the goodness of the Ever-merciful One I have lived to see and hear of a Gospel Church on Tanna, and to read about my dear fellow-Missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Watt, celebrating the Holy Supper to a Native Congregation of Tannese, amid the very scenes and people where the seeds of faith and hope were planted not only in tears, but tears of blood,—"in deaths oft."

My own intention was to remain on Aneityum, go on with my work of translating the Gospels, and watch the earliest opportunity, as God opened up my way, to return to Tanna, I had, however, got very weak and thin; my health was undoubtedly much shaken by the continued trials and dangers through which we had passed; and therefore, as Dr. and Mrs. Inglis were at home carrying the New Testament through the press in the language of Aneityum, and as Tanna was closed for a season—Dr. Geddie, the Rev. Joseph Copeland, and Mr. Mathieson all urged me to go to Australia by a vessel then in the Harbor and leaving in a few days. My commission was to awaken an interest among the Presbyterian Churches of our Colonies in this New Hebrides Mission which lay at their doors, up till this time sustained by Scotland and Nova Scotia alone. And further, and very specially, to raise money there, if possible, to purchase a new Mission Ship for the work of God in the New Hebrides,—a clamant necessity which would save all future Missionaries some of the more terrible of the privations and risks of which a few examples have in these pages already been recorded.

With regrets, and yet with unquenchable hope for these Islands, I embarked for Australia. But I had only spoken to one man in Sydney; all the doors to influence had therefore to be unlocked; and I had no helper, no leader, but the Spirit of my Lord.

Oftentimes, while passing through the perils and defeats of my first four years in the Mission field on Tanna, I wondered, and perhaps the reader hereof has wondered, why God permitted such things. But on looking back now, I already clearly perceive, and the reader of my future pages will, I think, perceive, that the Lord was thereby preparing me for doing, and providing me materials wherewith to accomplish, the best work of all my life, namely, the kindling of the heart of Australian Presbyterianism with a living affection for these Islanders of their own Southern Seas—the binding of all their children into a happy league of shareholders, first in one Mission Ship, and finally in a larger and more commodious Steam-Auxiliary; and, last of all, in being the instrument under God of sending out Missionary after Missionary to the New Hebrides, to claim another island and still another for Jesus. That work, and all that may spring from it in Time and Eternity, never could have been accomplished by me, but for first the sufferings and then the story of my Tanna days!

Never for one moment have I had occasion to regret the step then taken. The Lord has so used me, during the five-and-twenty years that have passed over me since my farewell to Tanna, as to stamp the event with His own most gracious approval. Oh, to see a Missionary, and Christian Teachers, planted on every island of the New Hebrides! For this I labor, and wait, and pray. To help on the fulfillment thereof is the sacred work of my life, under God. When I see that accomplished, or in a fair way of being so, through the organization that will provide the money and call forth the men, I can lay down my head as peacefully and gratefully as ever warrior did, with the shout of victory in his ears—"Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace!"

(For "Good News from Tanna," see Supplementary Chapter by the Editor, p.393.)

CHAPTER 44: THE FLOATING OF THE "DAYSPRING."

RESCUED from Tanna by the Blue Bell in the Spring of 1869, I was landed on Aneityum, leaving behind me all that I owned on Earth, save the clothes upon my back, my precious Bible, and a few translations that I had made from it into the Tannese language. The Missionaries on Aneitymn united in urging me to go to Australia in the interests of our Mission. A Mission Ship was sorely needed—was absolutely required—to prevent the needless sacrifice of devoted lives. More Missionaries were called for, and must somehow be brought into the field, unless the hope of claiming these fair Islands for Jesus was to be forever abandoned.

With unaffected reluctance, I at last felt constrained to undertake this unwelcome but apparently inevitable task. It meant the leaving of my dear Islanders for a season; but it embraced within it the hope of returning to them again, with perhaps every power of blessing amongst them tenfold increased.

A Sandal-wooder, then lying at Aneityum, was to sail in a few days direct for Sydney. My passage was secured for £10. And, as if to make me realize how bare the Lord had stripped me in my late trials, the first thing that occupied me on board was the making with my own hands, from a piece of cloth obtained on Aneityum, another shirt for the voyage, to change with that which I wore—the only one that had been left to me.

The Captain proved to be a profane and brutal fellow. And how my heart bled for some poor Islanders whom he had on board! They knew not a word of English, and no one in the vessel knew a sound of their language. They were made to work, and to understand what was expected of them, only by hard knocks and blows, being pushed and pulled hither and thither. They were kept quite naked on the voyage up; but, when nearing Sydney, each received two yards of calico to be twisted as a kilt around his loins. A most pathetic spectacle it was to watch these poor Natives,—when they had leisure to sit on deck,—gazing, gazing, intently and imploringly, upon the face of the Sun! This they did every day, and at all hours, and I wept much to look on them, and not be able to tell them of the Son of God, the Light of the world, for I knew no word of their language. Perhaps they were worshipers of the Sun; and perhaps, amid all their misery, oh, perhaps, some ray of truth from the great Father of Lights may have streamed into those darkened souls!

When we arrived at Sydney the Inspecting Officer of the Government, coming on board, asked how these Islanders came to be there. The Captain impudently replied that they were "passengers." No further question was put. No other evidence was sought. Yet all who knew anything of our South-Sea Island Traders were perfectly aware that the moral certainty was that these Natives were there practically as Slaves. They would be privately disposed of by the Captain to the-highest bidder; and that, forsooth, is to be called the Labor Traffic,—Free Labor! I will, to my dying breath, denounce and curse this Kanaka traffic as the worst of Slavery.

As we came to anchorage, about midnight, in Sydney Harbor, I anxiously paced the deck, gazing towards the gas-lighted city, and pleading with God to open up my way, and give success in the work before me, on which the salvation of thousands of the Heathen might depend. Still I saw them perishing, still heard their wailing cry on the Islands behind me. At the same time, I knew not a soul in that great city; though I had a note of introduction to one person, which, as experience proved, I would have been better without.

That friend, however, did his best. He kindly called with me on a number of Ministers and others. They heard my story, sympathized with me, shook hands, and wished me success; but, strangely enough, something "very special" prevented every one of them from giving me access to his pulpit or Sabbath School. At length I felt so disappointed, so miserable, that I wished I had been in my grave with my dear departed, and my brethren on the Islands, who had fallen around me, in order that the work on which so much now appeared to depend might have been entrusted to some one better fitted to accomplish it. The heart seemed to keep repeating, "All these things are against thee."

Finding out at last the Rev. A. Buzacott, then retired, but formerly the successful and honored representative of the London Missionary Society on Rarotonga, considerable light was let in upon the mystery of my last week's experiences. He informed me that the highly-esteemed friend, who had kindly been introducing me all round, was at that moment immersed in a keen Newspaper war with Presbyterians and Independents. This made it painfully manifest that, in order to succeed, I must strike out a new course for myself, and one clear from all local entanglement.

Paying a fortnight in advance, I withdrew even from the lodging I had taken, and turned to the Lord more absolutely for guidance. He brought me into contact with good and generous-souled servants of His, the open-hearted Mr. and Mrs. Foss. Though entire strangers, they kindly invited me to be their guest while in Sydney, assuring me that I would meet with many Ministers and other Christians at their house who could help me in my work. God had opened the door; I entered with a grateful heart; they will not miss their recompense.

A letter and appeal had been already printed on behalf of our Mission. I now re-cast and reprinted it, adding a postscript, and appending my own name and address. This was widely circulated among Ministers and others engaged in Christian work; and by this means, and by letters in the newspapers, I did everything in my power to make our Mission known. But one week had passed, and no response came. One Lord's Day had gone by, and no pulpit had been opened to me. I was perplexed beyond measure how to get access to Congregations and Sabbath Schools; though a something deep in my soul assured me, that if once my lips were opened, the Word of the Lord would not return void.

On my second Sabbath in Sydney I wandered out with a great yearning at heart to get telling my message to any soul that would listen. It was the afternoon; and children were flocking into a Church that I passed. I followed them—that yearning growing stronger every moment. My God so ordered it that I was guided thus to the Chalmers Presbyterian Church. The Minister, the Rev. Mr. M'Skimming, addressed the children. At the close I went up and pleaded with him to allow me ten minutes to speak to them. After a little hesitation, and having consulted together, they gave me fifteen minutes. Becoming deeply interested, the good man invited me to preach to his Congregation in the evening. This was duly intimated in the Sabbath School; and thus my little boat was at last launched—surely by the hand of the dear Lord, with the help of His little children.

CHAPTER 45: A SHIPPING COMPANY FOR JESUS.

THE kindly minister of Chalmers church, now very deeply interested, offered to spend the next day in introducing me to his clerical brethren. For his sake, I was most cordially received by them all, but especially by Dr. Dunmore Lang, who greatly helped me; and now access was granted me to almost every church and Sabbath School, both Presbyterian and Independent. In Sabbath Schools, I got a collection in connection with my address, and distributed, with the sanction of superintendents, collecting cards amongst the children, to be returned through the Teachers within a specified date. In congregations, I received for the Mission the surplus over and above the ordinary collection when I preached on Sabbaths, and the full collection at all week-night meetings for which I could arrange.

I now appealed to a few of the most friendly ministers to form themselves into an honorary committee of advice; and, at my earnest request, they got J. Goodlet, Esq., an excellent elder, to become honorary treasurer, and to take charge of all funds raised for the Mission ship. For the public knew nothing of me; but all knew my good treasurer and these faithful ministers, and had confidence in the work. They knew that every penny went direct to the Mission; and they saw that my one object was to promote God's glory in the conversion of the heathen. Our dear Lord Jesus thus opened up my way; and now I had invitations from more schools and congregations than I knew how to overtake—the response in money being also gratifying beyond almost all expectation.

It was now that I began a little plan of interesting the children, that attracted them from the first, and has since had an amazing development. I made them shareholders in the new Mission Ship—each child receiving a printed form, in acknowledgment of the number of shares, at sixpence each, of which he was the owner. Thousands of these shares were taken out, were shown about amongst families, and were greatly prized. The Ship was to be their very own! They were to be a great Shipping Company for Jesus. In hundreds of homes these receipt-forms have been preserved; and their owners, now in middle years, are training their children of to-day to give their pennies to support the white-winged Angel of the Seas, that bears the Gospel and the Missionary to the Heathen Isles.

Let no one think me ungrateful to my good Treasurer and his wife, to Dr. and Mrs. Moon, and to other dear friends who generously helped me, when I trace step by step how the Lord Himself opened up my way. The Angel of His Presence went before me, and wonderfully moved His people to contribute in answer to my poor appeals. I had indeed to make all my own arrangements and correspond regarding all engagements and details,—to me, always a slow and laborious writer, a very burdensome task. But it was all necessary in order to the fulfillment of the Lord's purposes; and, to one who realizes that he is a fellow-laborer with Jesus, every yoke that He lays on becomes easy and every burden light.

Having done all that could at that time be accomplished in New South Wales, and as rapidly as possible—my Committee gave me a Letter of Commendation to Victoria. But there I had no difficulty. The Ministers had heard of our work in Sydney. They received me most cordially, and at my request formed themselves into a Committee of Advice. Our dear friend, James M'Bain, Esq., now Sir James, became Honorary Treasurer. All moneys from this Colony, raised by my pleading for the Ship, were entrusted to him; and, ultimately, the acknowledging of every individual sum cost much time and labor. Dr. Cairns, and many others now gone to their rest, along with two or three honored Ministers yet living, formed my Committee. The Lord richly reward them all in that Day!

As in New South Wales, I made, chiefly by correspondence, all my own engagements, and arranged for Churches and Sabbath Schools as best I could. Few in the other Denominations of Victoria gave any help, but the Presbyterians rose to our appeal as with one heart. God moved them by one impulse; and Ministers, Superintendents, Teachers, and Children, heartily embraced the scheme as their own. I addressed three or four meetings every Sabbath, and one or more every week-day; and thus traveled over the length and breadth of Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia. Wheresoever a few of the Lord's people could be gathered together, thither I gladly went, and told the story of our Mission, setting forth its needs and claims.

The contributions and collections were nearly all in very small sums, I recall only one exception,—a gift of £250 from the late Hon. G. F. Angus, South Australia, whose heart the Lord had touched. Yet gently and steadily the required money began to come pouring in; and my personal outlays were reduced to a minimum by the hospitality of Christian friends and their kindly conveying of me from place to place. For all this I felt deeply grateful; it saved money for the Lord's work.

The work was unceasingly prosecuted. Meetings were urged upon me now from every quarter. Money flowed in so freely that, at the close of my tour, the fund had risen to £5000, including special Donations of £300 for the support of Native Teachers. Many Sabbath Schools, and many ladies and gentlemen, had individually promised the sum of £5 yearly to keep a Native Teacher on one or other of the New Hebrides Islands. This happy custom prevails still, and is largely developed; the sum required being now £6 per annum at least—for which you may have your own personal representative toiling among the Heathen and telling them of Jesus.

Returning to Melbourne, the whole matter was laid before my Committee. I reported how God had blessed the undertaking, and what sums were now in the hands of the several Treasurers, indicating also larger hopes and plans which had been put into my soul. Dear Dr. Cairns rose and said, "Sir, it is of the Lord. This whole enterprise is of God, and not of us. Go home, and He will give you more Missionaries for the Islands."

Of the money which I had raised, £3000 were sent to Nova Scotia, to pay for the building of our new Mission Ship, the Dayspring. The Church which began the Mission on the New Hebrides was granted the honor of building our new Mission Ship. The remainder was set apart to pay for the outfit and passage of additional Missionaries for the field, and I was commissioned to return home to Scotland in quest of them. Dr. Inglis wrote, in vindication of this enterprise, to the friends whom he had just left, "From first to last, Mr. Paton's mission here has been a great success; and it has been followed up with such energy and promptitude in Nova Scotia, both in regard to the Ship and the Missionaries, that Mr. Paton's pledge to the Australian Churches has been fully redeemed. The hand of the Lord has been very visible in the whole movement from beginning to end, and we trust He has yet great blessing in store for the long and deeply-degraded Islanders."

CHAPTER 46: AUSTRALIAN INCIDENTS.

HERE let me turn aside from the current of Missionary toils, and record a few wayside incidents that marked some of my wanderings to and fro in connection with the Floating of the Dayspring. Traveling in the Colonies in 1862-68 was vastly less developed than it is to-day; and a few of my experiences then will, for many reasons, be not unwelcome to most readers of this book. Besides, these incidents, one and all, will be felt to have a vital connection with the main purpose of writing this Autobiography, namely, to show that the Finger of God is as visible still, to those who have eyes to see, as when the fire-cloud Pillar led His People through the wilderness.

Twenty-six years ago, the roads of Australia, except those in and around the principal towns, were mere tracks over unfenced plains and hills, and on many of them packhorses only could be used in slushy weather. During long journeys through the bush the traveler could find his road only by following the deep notches, gashed by friendly precursors into the larger trees, and all pointing in one direction. If he lost his way, he had to struggle back to the last indented tree, and try to interpret more correctly its pilgrim notch. Experienced bush-travelers seldom miss the path; yet many others, losing the track, have wandered round and round till they sank and died. For then it was easy to walk thirty to forty miles, and see neither a person nor a house. The more intelligent do sometimes guide their steps by sun, moon, and stars, or by glimpses of mountain peaks or natural features on the far and high horizon, or by the needle of the compass; but the perils are not illusory, and occasionally the most experienced have miscalculated and perished.

An intelligent gentleman, a sheep farmer, who knew the country well, once kindly volunteered to lift me in an out-of-the-way place, and drive me to a meeting at his Station. Having a long spell before us, we started at midday in a buggy drawn by a pair of splendid horses, in the hope of reaching our destination before dusk. He turned into the usual bush-track through the forests, saying, "I know this road well; and we must drive steadily, as we have not a moment to lose."

Our conversation became absorbingly interesting. After we had driven about three hours, he remarked, "We must soon emerge into the open plain."

I doubtfully replied, "Surely we cannot have turned back! These trees and bushes are wonderfully like those we passed at starting."

He laughed, and made me feel rather vexed that I had spoken, when he said, "I am too old a hand in the bush for that. I have gone this road many a time before."

But my courage immediately revived, for I got what appeared to me a glint of the roof of the Inn beyond the bush, from which we had started at noon, and I repeated, "I am certain we have wheeled, and are back at the beginning of our journey; but there comes a Chinaman—let us wait and inquire."

My dear friend learned, to his utter amazement, that he had erred. The bush-track was entered upon once more, and followed with painful care, as he murmured, half to himself, "Well, this beats all reckoning! I could have staked my life that this was impossible."

Turning to me, he said, with manifest grief, "Our meeting is done for! It will be midnight before we can arrive."

The sun was beginning to set as we reached the thinly-timbered ground. Ere dusk fell, he took his bearing with the greatest possible care. Beyond the wood, a vast plain stretched before us, where neither fence nor house was visible, far as the eye could reach. He drove steadily towards a far-distant point, which was in the direction of his home. At last we struck upon the wire fence that bounded his property. The horses were now getting badly fagged; and, in order to save them a long round-about drive, he lifted and laid low a portion of the fence, led his horses cautiously over it, and, leaving it to be re-erected by a servant next day, he started direct for the Station. That seemed a long journey too; but it was for him familiar ground; and though amongst great patriarchal trees here and there, and safely past dangerous water-holes, we swung steadily on, reached his home in safety, and had a joyous welcome. The household had by this time got into great excitement over our non-appearance. The expected meeting had, of course, been abandoned hours ago: and the people were all gone, wondering in their hearts "whereto this would grow!"

At that time, in the depth of winter, the roads were often wrought into rivers of mire, and at many points almost impassable even for well-appointed conveyances. In connection therewith, I had one very perilous experience. I had to go from Clunes to a farm in the Learmouth district. The dear old Minister there, Mr. Downes, went with me to every place where a horse could be hired; but the owners positively refused—they would sell, but they would not hire, for the conveyance would be broken, and the horse would never return alive! Now, I was advertised to preach at Learmouth, and must somehow get over the nine miles that lay between. This would have been comparatively practicable, were it not that I carried with me an indispensable bag of "curios," and a heavy bundle of clubs, arrows, dresses, etc., from the Islands, wherewith to illustrate my lectures and enforce my appeals. No one could be hired to carry my luggage, nor could I get it sent after me by coach on that particular way. Therefore, seeing no alternative opening up my path, I committed myself once more to the Lord, as in harder trials before, shouldered my bundle of clubs, lifted my heavy bag, and started off on foot. They urged me fervently to desist; but I heard a voice repeating, "As thy days, so shall thy strength be." There came back to me also the old adage that had in youthful difficulties, spurred me on, "Where there's a will, there's a way." And I thought that with these two in his heart, a Scotchman and a Christian would not be easily beaten.

When I found the road wrought into mire, and dangerous, or impassable, I climbed the fence, and waded along in the plowed fields—though they were nearly as bad. My bundle was changed from shoulder to shoulder, and my bag from hand to hand, till I became thoroughly tired of both. Pressing on, however, I arrived at a wayside Public-house, where several roads met, and there I inquired the way to Learmouth, and how far it was. The innkeeper, pointing, answered—

"This is the road. If you are on horseback, it might be three to four miles just now, as your horse is able to take it. If you are in a conveyance, with a good horse, it might be six miles. And if you are walking, it might be eight or ten miles, or even more."

I said, "I am walking. How many English miles is it to Mr. Baird's farm?"

He laughingly replied, "You will find it a long way indeed this dark night, considering the state of the road, fenced in on both sides so that you cannot get off."

I passed on, leaving my Job's comforter; but a surly watchdog got upon my track, and I had much difficulty in keeping it from biting me. Its attacks, renewed upon me again and again, had one good effect,—they stirred up my spirits and made me hasten on.

Having persevered along the Learmouth road, I next met a company of men hastening on with a bundle of ropes. They were on their way to relieve a poor bullock, which by this time had almost disappeared, sinking in the mire on the public highway! They kindly pointed me to a light, visible through the dusk. That was the farm at which I was to stay, and they advised me to clear the fence, and make straight for that light, as the way was good.

With thankful heart, I did so. The light was soon lost to me, but I walked steadily on in the direction thereof, to the best of my judgment. Immediately I began to feel the ground all floating under me. Then at every step I took, or tried to take, I sank deeper and deeper, till at last I durst not move either backward or forward. I was floundering in a deadly swamp. I called out again and again, and "coo-ee-d" with all my strength, but there came no reply. It grew extremely dark, while I kept praying to God for deliverance. About midnight, I heard two men conversing, apparently at no very great distance. I began "coo-ee-ing" again, but my strength was failing. Fortunately, the night was perfectly calm. The conversation ceased for a while, but I kept on crying for help. At length I heard one voice remark to the other, "Some one is in the swamp." And then the question came, "Who's there?"

I answered, "A stranger. Oh, do help me!" Again a voice came through the darkness, "How did you get in there?"

And I feebly replied, "I have lost my way." I heard the one say to the other, "I will go and get him out, whoever he may be. We must not leave him there; he'll be dead before the morning. As you pass by our door, tell my wife that I'm helping some poor creature out of the swamp, and will be home immediately."

He kept calling to me, and I answering his call through the darkness, till, not without peril, he managed to reach and aid me. Once I was safely dragged out, he got my bag in his hand and slung my clubs on his shoulder, and in a very short time landed me at the farm, dripping and dirty and cold. Had God not sent that man to save me, I must have perished there, as many others have similarly perished before. The farmer's wife heartily welcomed me and kindly ministered to all my needs. Though not yet gone to rest, they had given up all hope of seeing me. I heard the kind servant say to his mistress, "I don't know where he came from, or how far he has carried his bundles; but I got him stuck fast in the swamp, and my shoulder is already sore from carrying his clubs!"

A cup of warm tea restored me. The Lord gave me a sound and blessed sleep. I rose next morning wonderfully refreshed, though arms and shoulders were rather sore with the burdens of yesterday. I conducted three Services, and told the story of my Mission, not without comfort and blessing; and with gratifying results in money. The people gave liberally to the work.

Thereafter, a Schoolmaster drove me a long distance across the country to Violet Town, where for the night we had to stay at an Inn. We had a taste of what Australian life really was, when the land was being broken in. A company of wild and reckless men were carousing there at the time, and our arrival was the signal for an outbreak of malicious mischief. A powerful fellow, who turned out to be a young Medical, rushed upon me as I left the conveyance, seized me by the throat, and shook me roughly, shouting, "A parson! a parson! I will do for the parson!"

Others with great difficulty relieved me from his grip, and dragged him away, cursing as if at his mortal enemy.

After tea, we got into the only bedroom in the house, available for two. The Teacher and I locked ourselves in and barricaded the door, hearing in the next room a large party of drunken men gambling and roaring over their cards. By and by they quarreled and fought; they smashed in and out of their room, and seemed to be murdering each other; every moment we expected our door to come crashing in, as they were thrown or lurched against it. Their very language made us tremble. One man in particular seemed to be badly abused; he shouted that they were robbing him of his money; and he groaned and cried for protection, all in vain. We spent a sleepless and most miserable night. At four in the morning I arose, and was glad to get away by the early coach. My friend also left in his own conveyance, and reached his home in safety. At that period, it was not only painful but dangerous for any decent traveler to stay at many of these wayside Inns in the new and rough country. Every man lived and acted just as he pleased, doing that which was right to his own eyes; and Might was Right.

CHAPTER 47: AMONGST SQUATTERS AND DIGGERS.

AFTER this, I made a Mission tour, in a somewhat mixed and original fashion, right across the Colony of Victoria, from Albury in New South Wales to Mount Gambier in South Australia. I conducted Mission Services almost every day, and three or more every Sabbath, besides visiting all Sunday Schools that could be touched on the way. When I reached a gold-digging or township, where I had been unable to get any one to announce a meeting, the first thing I did on arriving was to secure some Church or Hall, and, failing that, to fix on some suitable spot in the open air. Then, I was always able to hire some one to go round with the bell, and announce the meeting. Few will believe how large were the audiences in this way gathered together, and how very substantial was the help that thereby came to the Mission fund.

Wheresover railway, steamboat, and coach were available, I always used them; but failing these, I hired, or was obliged to friends of Missions for driving me from place to place. On this tour, having reached a certain place, from which my way lay for many miles across the country, where there was no public conveyance, I walked to the nearest squatter's Station and frankly informed the owner how I was situated; that I could not hire, and that I would like to stay at his house all night, if he would kindly send me on in the morning by any sort of trap to the next Station on my list. He happened to be a good Christian and a Presbyterian, and gave me a right cordial welcome. A meeting of his servants was called, which I had the pleasure of addressing. Next morning, he gave me £20, and sent me forward with his own conveyance, telling me to retain it all day, if necessary.

On reaching the next squatter's Station, I found the master also at home, and said, "I am a Missionary from the South Sea Islands. I am crossing Victoria to plead the cause of the Mission. I would like to rest here for an hour or two. Could you kindly send me on to the next Station by your conveyance? If not, I am to keep the last squatter's buggy, until I reach it."

Looking with a queer smile at me, he replied, "You propose a rather novel condition on which to rest at my house! My horses are so employed to-day, I fear that I may have difficulty in sending you on. But come in; both you and your horses need rest; and my wife will be glad to see you."

I immediately discovered that the good lady came from Glasgow, from a street in which I had lodged when a student at the Free Normal College. I even knew some of her friends. All the places of her youthful associations were equally familiar to me. We launched out into deeply-interesting conversation, which finally led up, of course, to the story of our Mission.

The gentleman, by this time, had so far been won that he slipped out and sent my conveyance and horses back to their owner, and ordered his own to be ready to take me to the next Station, or, if need be, to the next again. At parting, the lady said to her husband, "The Missionary has asked no money, though he sees we have been deeply interested; yet clearly that is the object of his tour. He is the first Missionary from the Heathen that ever visited us here; and you must contribute something to his Mission fund."

I thanked her, explaining, "I never ask money directly from any person for the Lord's work. My part is done when I have told my story and shown the needs of the Heathen and the claims of Christ; but I gratefully receive all that the Lord moves His people to give for the Mission."

Her husband replied, rather sharply, "You know I don't keep money here." To which she retorted with ready tact and with a resistless smile, "But you keep a check-book; and your check is as good as gold! This is the first donation we ever gave to such a cause, and let it be a good one." He made it indeed handsome, and I went on my way, thanking them very sincerely, and thanking God.

At the next Station, the owner turned out to be a gruff Irishman, forbidding and insolent. Stating my case to him as to the others, he shouted at me, "Go on! I don't want to be troubled with the loikes o' you here."

I answered, "I am sorry if my coming troubles you; but I wish you every blessing in Christ Jesus. Good-by!"

As we drove off, he kept growling after us. On leaving his door, I heard a lady calling to him from the window, "Don't let that Missionary go away! Make haste and call him back. I want the children to see the idols and the South Sea curios."

At first he drowned her appeal in his own shoutings. But she must have persisted effectually; for shortly we heard him "coo-ee-ing," and stopped. When he came up to us, he explained, "That lady in my house heard you speaking in Melbourne. The ladies and children are very anxious to see your idols, dresses, and weapons. Will you please come back?"

We did so. I spent fifteen minutes or so, giving them information about the Natives and our Mission. As I left, our boisterous friend handed me a check for £5, and wished me great success.

The next Station at which we arrived was one of the largest of all. It happened to be a sort of payday, and men were assembled from all parts of the "run," and were to remain there over night. The squatter and his family were from home; but Mr. Todd, the overseer, being a good Christian and a Scotchman, was glad to receive us, arranged to hold a meeting that evening in the men's hut, and promised to set me forward on my journey next day. The meeting was very enthusiastic; and they subscribed £20 to the Mission—every man being determined to have so many shares in the new Mission Ship. With earnest personal dealing, I urged the claims of the Lord Jesus upon all who were present, seeking the salvation of every hearer. I ever found even the rough digger, and the lowest of the hands about far-away Stations, most attentive and perfectly respectful.

A lively and memorable extemporized meeting on this tour is associated in memory with one of my dearest friends. The district was very remote. He, the squatter, and his beloved wife were sterling Christians, and have been ever since warmly devoted to me. On my arrival, he invited the people from all the surrounding Stations, as well as his own numerous servants, to hear the story of our Mission. Next day he volunteered to drive me a long distance over the plains of St. Arnaud, his dear wife accompanying us. At that time there were few fences in such districts in Australia. The drive was long, but the day had been lovely, and the fellowship was so sweet that it still shines a sunny spot in the fields of memory.

Having reached our destination about seven o'clock, he ordered tea at the Inn for the whole party; and we sallied out meantime and took the only Hall in the place, for an extemporized meeting to be held that evening at eight o'clock. I then hired a man to go through the township with a bell, announcing the same; while I myself went up one side of the main street, and my friend up the other, inviting all who would listen to us to attend the Mission meeting where South Sea Islands idols, weapons, and dresses would be exhibited, and stories of the Natives told.

Running back for a hurried cup of tea, I then hasted to the Hall, and found it crowded to excess with rough and boisterous diggers. The hour struck as I was getting my articles arranged and spread out upon the table, and they began shouting, "Where's the Missionary?"—"Another hoax!"—indicating that they were not unwilling for a row. I learned that, only a few nights ago, a so-called Professor had advertised a lecture, lifted entrance money till the Hall was crowded, and then quietly slipped off the scene. In our case, though there was no charge, they seemed disposed to gratify themselves by some sort of promiscuous revenge.

Amidst the noisy chaff and rising uproar, I stepped up on the table, and said, "Gentlemen, I am the Missionary. If you will now be silent, the lecture will proceed. According to my usual custom, let us open the meeting with prayer."

The hush that fell was such a contrast to the preceding hubbub, that I heard my heart throbbing aloud! Then they listened to me for an hour, in perfect silence and with ever-increasing interest. At the close I intimated that I asked no collection; but if, after what they had heard, they would take a Collecting Card for the new Mission Ship, and send any contributions to the Treasurer at Melbourne, I would praise God for sending me amongst them. Many were heartily taken, and doubtless some souls felt the "constraining love," who had till then been living without God.

CHAPTER 48: JOHN GILPIN IN THE BUSH.

THE crowning adventure of my tour in Australia came about in the following manner. I was advertised to conduct Services at Narracoort on Sabbath, and at a Station on the way on Saturday evening. But how to get from Penola was a terrible perplexity. On Saturday morning, however, a young lady offered me, out of gratitude for blessings received, the use of her riding horse for the journey. "Garibaldi" was his name; and, though bred for a race-horse, I was assured that if I kept him firmly in hand, he would easily carry me over the two-and-twenty miles. He was to be left at the journey's end, and the lady herself would fetch him back. I shrank from the undertaking, knowing little of horses, and having vague recollections of being dreadfully punished for more than a week after my last and almost only ride. But every one in that country is quite at ease on the back of a horse. They saw no risk; and, as there appeared no other way of getting there to fulfil my engagements, I, for my part, began to think that God had unexpectedly provided the means, and that He would carry me safely through.

I accepted the lady's kind offer, and started on my pilgrimage. A friend showed me the road, and gave me ample directions. In the bush, I was to keep my eye on the notches in the trees, and follow them. He agreed kindly to bring my luggage to the Station, and leave it there for me by and by. After I had walked very quietly for some distance, three gentlemen on horseback overtook me. We entered into conversation. They inquired how far I was going, and advised me to sit a little "freer" in the saddle, as it would be so much easier for me. They seemed greatly amused at my awkward riding! Dark clouds were now gathering ahead, and the atmosphere prophesied a severe storm; therefore they urged that I should ride a little faster, as they, for a considerable distance, could guide me on the right way. I explained to them my plight through inexperience, said that I could only creep on slowly with safety, and bade them Good-by. As the sky was getting darker every minute, they consented, wishing me a safe journey, and started off at a smart pace.

I struggled to hold in my horse; but seizing the bit with his teeth, laying back his ears, and stretching out his eager neck, he manifestly felt that his honor was at stake; and in less time than I take to write it, the three friends cleared a way for us, and he tore past them all at an appalling speed. They tried for a time to keep within reach of us, but that sound only put fire into his blood; and in an incredibly short time I heard them not; nor, from the moment that he bore me swinging past them, durst I turn my head by one inch to look for them again. In vain I tried to hold him in; he tore on, with what appeared to me the speed of the wind. Then the thunderstorm broke around us, with flash of lightning and flood of rain, and at every fresh peal my "Garibaldi" dashed more wildly onward.

To me, it was a vast surprise to discover that I could sit more easily on this wild flying thing than when at a canter or a trot. At every turn I expected that he would dash himself and me against the great forest trees; but instinct rather than my hand guided him miraculously. Sometimes I had a glimpse of the road, but as for the "notches," I never saw one of them; we passed them with lightning speed. Indeed, I durst not lift my eyes for one moment from watching the horse's head and the trees on our track. My high-crowned hat was now drenched, and battered out of shape; for whenever we came to a rather clear space, I seized the chance and gave it another knock down over my head. I was spattered and covered with mud and mire.

Crash, crash, went the thunder, and on, on, went "Garibaldi" through the gloom of the forest, emerging at length upon a clearer ground with a more visible pathway. Reaching the top of the slope, a large house stood out far in front of us to the left; and the horse had apparently determined to make straight for that, as if it were his home. He skirted along the hill, and took the track as his own familiar ground, all my effort to hold him in or guide him having no more effect than that of a child. By this time, I suspect, I really had lost all power. "Garibaldi" had been at that house, probably frequently before; he knew those stables; and my fate seemed to be instant death against door or wall.

Some members of the family, on the outlook for the Missionary, saw us come tearing along as if mad or drunk; and now all rushed to the veranda, expecting some dread catastrophe. A tall and stout young groom, amazed at our wild career, throwing wide open the gate, seized the bridle at great risk to himself, and ran full speed, yet holding back with all his might, and shouting to me to do the same. We succeeded—"Garibaldi" having probably attained his purpose—in bringing him to a halt within a few paces of the door. Staring at me with open mouth, the man exclaimed, "I have saved your life. What madness to ride like that!" Thanking him, though I could scarcely by this time articulate a word, I told him that the horse had run away, and that I had lost all control.

Truly I was in a sorry plight, drenched, covered with mud, and my hat battered down over my eyes; little wonder they thought me drunk or mad! Finally, as if to confirm every suspicion, and amuse them all,—for master, mistress, governess, and children now looked on from the veranda,—when I was helped off the horse, I could not stand on my feet! My head still went rushing on in the race; I staggered, and down I tumbled into the mud, feeling chagrin and mortification; yet there I had to sit for some time, before I recovered myself, so as either to rise or to speak a word. When I did get to my feet, I had to stand holding by the veranda for some time, my head still rushing on in the race. At length the master said, "Will you not come in?"

I knew that he was treating me for a drunken man; and the giddiness was so dreadful still, that my attempts at speech seemed more drunken than even my gait.

As soon as I could stand, I went into the house, and drew near to an excellent fire in my dripping clothes. The squatter sat opposite me in silence, reading the newspapers, and taking a look at me now and again over his spectacles. By and by he remarked, "Wouldn't it be worth while to change your clothes?"

Speech was now returning to me. I replied, "Yes, but my bag is coming on in the cart, and may not be here to-night."

He began to relent. He took me into a room, and laid out for me a suit of his own. I being then very slender, and he a big-framed farmer, my new dress, though greatly adding to my comfort, enhanced the singularity of my appearance!

Returning to him, washed and dressed, I inquired if he had arranged for a meeting? My tongue, I fear, was still unsteady, for the squatter looked at me rather reproachfully, and said, "Do you really consider yourself fit to appear before a meeting to-night?"

I assured him he was quite wrong in his suspicions, that I was a life-long Abstainer, and that my nerves had been so unhinged by the terrible ride and runaway horse. He smiled rather suggestively, and said we would see how I felt after tea.

We went to the table. All that had occurred was now consummated by my appearing in the lusty farmer's clothes; and the lady and other friends had infinite difficulty in keeping their amusement within decent bounds. I again took speech in hand, but I suspect my words had still the thickness of the tippler's utterance, for they seemed not to carry much conviction, "Dear friends, I quite understand your feelings; appearances are so strangely against me. But I am not drunken, as ye suppose. I have tasted no intoxicating drink, I am a life-long Total Abstainer!"

This fairly broke down their reserve. They laughed aloud, looking at each other and at me, as if to say, "Man, you're drunk at this very moment."

Before tea was over they appeared, however, to begin to entertain the idea that I might address the meeting; and so I was informed of the arrangements that had been made. At the meeting, my incredulous friends became very deeply interested. Manifestly their better thoughts were gaining the ascendency. And they heaped thereafter every kindness upon me, as if to make amends for harder suspicions.

Next morning the master drove me about ten miles farther on to the Church. A groom rode the racehorse, who took no scathe from his thundering gallop of the day before. It left deeper traces upon me. I got through the Services, however, and with good returns for the Mission. Twice since, on my Mission tours, I have found myself at that same memorable house; and on each occasion, a large company of friends were regaled by the good lady there with very comical descriptions of my first arrival at her door.

CHAPTER 49: THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA.

DETAINED for nearly a week at Balmoral by the breakdown of the coach on these dreadful roads, I telegraphed to Hamilton for a conveyance; and the Superintendent of the Sunday School, dear Mr. Laidlaw, volunteered, in order to reduce expenses, to spend one day of his precious time coming for me, and another driving me down. While awaiting him, I came into painful and memorable contact with the Aborigines of Australia. The Publicans had organized a day of sports, horse-racing, and circus exhibitions. Immense crowds assembled, and, amongst the rest, tribe after tribe of the Aborigines from all the surrounding country. Despite the law prohibiting the giving of strong drinks to these poor creatures, foolish and unprincipled dealers supplied them with the same, and the very blankets which the Government had given them were freely exchanged for the fire-water which kindled them to madness.

Next day was the Sabbath. The morning was hideous with the yells of the fighting savages. They tore about on the Common in front of the Church, leading gentlemen having tried in vain to quiet them, and their wild voices without jarred upon the Morning Service. About two o'clock, I tried to get into conversation with them. I appealed to them whether they were not all tired and hungry? They replied that they had had no food all that day; they had fought since the morning! I said, "I love you, black fellows. I go Missionary black fellows far away. I love you, want you rest, get food. Come all of you, rest, sit round me, and we will talk, till the Jins (=women) get ready tea. They boil water, and I take tea with you, and then you will be strong!"

By broken English and by many symbols, I won their ear. They produced tea and damper, i. e. a rather forbidding-looking bread, without yeast, baked on the coals. Their wives hasted to boil water. I kept incessantly talking, to interest them, and told them how Jesus, God's dear Son, came and died to make them happy, and how He grieved to see them beating and fighting and killing each other.

When the tea was ready we squatted on the green grass, their tins were filled, the damper was broken into lumps, and I asked the blessing of God on the meal. To me it was unpleasant eating! Many of them looked strong and healthy; but not a few were weak and dying creatures. The strong, devouring all they could get, urged me to be done, and let them finish their fighting, eager for the fray. But having gained their confidence, I prayed with them, and thereafter said, "Now, before I leave, I will ask of you to do one thing for my sake, which you can all easily do." With one voice they replied, "Yes, we all do whatever you say."

I got their leaders to promise to me one by one. I then said, "Now you have got your tea; and I ask every man and boy among you to lie down in the bush and take a sleep, and your wives will sit by and watch over your safety!"

In glum silence, their war weapons still grasped in their hands, they stood looking intently at me, doubting whether I could be in earnest. I urged then, "You all promised to do what I asked. If you break your promise, these white men will laugh at me, and say that black fellows only lie and deceive. Let them see that you can be trusted. I wait here till I see you all asleep."

One said that his head was cut, and he must have revenge before he could lie down. Others filed past showing their wounds, and declaring that it was too bad to request them to go to sleep. I praised them as far as I could, but urged them for once to be men and to keep their word. Finally, they all agreed to lie down, I waiting till the last man had disappeared; and being doubly exhausted with the debauch and the fighting, they were soon all fast asleep. I prayed that the blessed Sleep might lull their savage passions.

Before daylight next morning, the Minister and I were hastening to the scene to prevent further fighting; but as the sun was rising we saw the last tribe of the distant Natives disappearing over the brow of a hill. A small party belonging to the district alone remained. They shouted to us, "Black fellows all gone! No more fight. You too much like black fellow!"

For three days afterwards I had still to linger there; and if their dogs ran or barked at me, the women chased them with sticks and stones, and protected me. One little touch of kindness and sympathy had unlocked their darkened hearts.

Who wonders that the dark races melt away before the whites? The pioneers of Civilization will carry with them this demon of strong drink, the fruitful parent of every other vice. The black people drink, and become unmanageable; and through the white man's own poison-gift, an excuse is found for sweeping the poor creatures off the face of the earth. Marsden's writings show how our Australian blacks are destroyed. But I have myself been on the track of such butcheries again and again. A Victorian lady told me the following incident. She heard a child's pitiful cry in the bush. On tracing it, she found a little girl weeping over her younger brother. She said, "The white men poisoned our father and mother. They threaten to shoot me, so that I dare not go near them, I am here, weeping over my brother till we die!"

The compassionate lady promised to be a mother to the little sufferers, and to protect them. They instantly clung to her, and have proved themselves to be loving and dutiful ever since.

CHAPTER 50: NORA.

WHILE I was pondering over Kingsley's words,—about the blacks of Australia being "poor brutes in human shape," and too low to take in the Gospel,—the story of Nora, an Aboriginal Christian woman, whom I myself actually visited and corresponded with, was brought under my notice, as if to shatter to pieces everything that the famous preacher had proclaimed. A dear friend told me how he had seen Nora encamped with the blacks near Hexham in Victoria. Her husband had lost, through drink, their once comfortable home at a Station where he was employed. The change back to life in camp had broken her health, and she lay sick on the ground within a miserable hut. The visitors found her reading a Bible, and explaining to a number of her own poor people the wonders of redeeming love. My friend, Roderick Urquhart, Esq., overcome by the sight, said, "Nora, I am grieved to see you here, and deprived of every comfort in your sickness."

She answered, not without tears, "The change has indeed made me unwell; but I am beginning to think that this too is far the best; it has at last brought my poor husband to his senses, and I will grudge nothing if God thereby brings him to the Saviour's feet!"

She further explained that she had found wonderful joy in telling her own people about the true God and His Son Jesus, and was quite assured that the Lord in His own way would send her relief. The visitors who accompanied Mr. Urquhart showed themselves to be greatly affected by the true and pure Christian spirit of this poor Aboriginal, and on parting she said, "Do not think that I like this miserable hut, or the food, or the company: but I am and have been happy in trying to do good amongst my people."

For my part, let that dear Christlike soul look out on me from her Aboriginal hut, and I will trample under foot all teachings or theorizings that dare to say that she or her kind are but poor brutes, as mere blasphemies against Human Nature! "I thank thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."

It is easy to understand how even experienced travelers may be deluded to believe that the Aborigines have no idols and no religion. One must have lived amongst them or their kindred ere he can authoritatively decide these questions. Before I left Melbourne, for instance, I had met Nathaniel Pepper, a converted Aboriginal from Wimmera. I asked him if his people had any "Doctors," i. e. Sacred Men or priests. He said they had. I inquired if they had any objects of Worship, or any belief in God? He said, "No! None whatever."

But on taking from my pocket some four small stone idols, his expression showed at once that he recognized them as objects of Worship. He had seen the Sacred Men use them; but he refused to answer any more questions. I resolved now, if possible, to secure some of their idols, and set this whole problem once for all at rest.

At Newstead, on another occasion, I persuaded a whole camp of the Aborigines to come to my meeting. After the address, they waited to examine the idols and stone gods which I had shown. Some of the young men admitted that their "doctors" had things like these, which they and the old people prayed to; but they added jauntily, "We young fellows don't worship; we know too much for that!" No "doctors" were, however, in that camp; so I could not meet with them; but I already felt that the testimony of nearly all white people that the "blacks" had "no idols and no worship" was quickly crumbling away.

On returning to Horsham, from a visit to a great camp of the blacks at Wonwondah, and having purchased, in the presence of witnesses, specimens of their idols from the Doctor or Sacred Man of these tribes, I informed my dear friends, Rev. P. Simpson and his excellent lady, of my exploits and possessions. He replied, "There is a black 'doctor' gone round our house just now to see one of his people who is washing here to-day. Let us go and test them, whether they know these objects."

Carrying them in his hand, we went to them. The woman instantly on perceiving them dropped what she was washing, and turned away in instinctive terror. Mr. Simpson asked, "Have you ever before seen stones like these?"

The wily "doctor" replied, "Plenty on the plains, where I kick them out of my way."

Taking others out of my pocket, I said, "These make people sick and well, don't they?"

His rage overcame his duplicity, and he exclaimed, "What black fellow give you these? If I know him I do for him!"

The woman, looking the picture of terror, and pointing to one of the objects, cried, "That fellow no good! he kill men. No good, no good! Me too much afraid."

Then, looking at me, she said, pointing with her finger, "That fellow savvy (knows) too much! No white man see them. He no good."

There was more in this scene and in all its surroundings, than in many arguments; and Mr. Simpson thoroughly believed that these were objects of idolatrous worship.

And now let me relate the story of my visit to Nora, the converted Aboriginal referred to above. Accompanied by Robert Hood, Esq., J. P., Victoria, I found my way to the encampment near Hexham. She did not know of our coming, nor see us till we stood at the door of her hut. She was clean and tidily dressed, as were also her dear little children, and appeared glad to see us. She had just been reading the Presbyterian Messenger, and the Bible was lying at her elbow. I said, "Do you read the Messenger?"

She replied, "Yes; I like to know what is going on in the Church."

We found her to be a sensible and humble Christian woman, conversing intelligently about religion and serving God devotedly. Next Sabbath she brought her husband, her children, and six blacks to church, all decently dressed, and they all listened most attentively.

At our first meeting I said, "Nora, they tell me you are a Christian. I want to ask you a few questions about the blacks; and I hope that as a Christian you will speak the truth." Rather hurt at my language, she raised her right hand, and replied, "I am a Christian. I fear and serve the true God. I always speak the truth."

Taking from my pocket the stone idols from the Islands, I inquired if her people had or worshipped things like these. She replied, "The 'doctors' have them."

"Have you a 'doctor' in your camp?" I asked. She said, "Yes, my uncle is the Sacred Man; but he is now far away from this."

"Has he the idols with him now?" I inquired. She answered, "No; they are left in my care."

I then said, "Could you let us see them?"

She consulted certain representatives of the tribe who were at hand. They rose, and removed to a distance. They had consented. Mr. Hood assured me that no fault would be found with her, as she was the real, or at least virtual head of the tribe. Out of a larger bag she then drew two smaller bags, and opened them. They were filled with the very objects which I had brought from the Islands. I asked her to consult the men of her tribe whether they would agree to sell four or five of them to me, that I might by them convince the white people that they had gods of their own, and are, therefore, above the brutes of the field; the money to be given to their Sacred Man on his return. This, also, after a time was agreed to. I selected three of the objects, and paid the stipulated price. And I have the recorded testimony of "Robert Hood, J. P., Hexham, Victoria, 28th February, 1863," certifying on his honor all that I am here affirming.

Mr. Hood asked Nora how he had never heard of or seen these things before, living so long amongst them, and blacks constantly coming and going about his house. She replied, "Long ago white men laughed at black fellows praying to their idols. Black fellows said, white men never see them again! Suppose this white man not know all about them, he would not now see them. No white men live now have seen what you have seen."

Thus it has been demonstrated on the spot, and in presence of the most reliable witnesses, that the Aborigines, before they saw the white invaders, were not "brutes" incapable of knowing God, but human beings, yearning after a God of some kind. Nor do I believe that any tribe of men will ever be found, who, when their language and customs are rightly interpreted, will not display their consciousness of the need of a God, and that Divine capacity of holding fellowship with the Unseen Powers, of which the brutes are without one faintest trace.

Poor, dear, Christian-hearted Nora! The Christ-spirit shines forth unmistakably through thee,—praying for and seeking to save husband and children, enduring trials and miseries by the aid of communion with thy Lord, weeping over the degradation of thy people, and seeking to lift them up by telling them of the true God and of His love to Mankind through Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER 51: BACK TO SCOTLAND.

EACH of my Australian Committees strongly urged my return to Scotland, chiefly to secure, if possible, more Missionaries for the New Hebrides. Dr. Inglis, just arrived from Britain, where he had the Aneityumese New Testament carried through the press, also zealously enforced this appeal.

Constrained by what appeared to me the Voice of God, I sailed for London in the Kosciusko, an Aberdeen clipper, on the 17th May, 1863. Captain Stuart made the voyage most enjoyable to all. The Rev. Mr. Stafford, friend of the good Bishop Selwyn and tutor to his son, conducted along with myself, alternately, an Anglican and a Presbyterian Service. We passed through a memorable thunder-burst in rounding the Cape. Our good ship was perilously struck by lightning. The men on deck were thrown violently down. The copper in the bulwarks was twisted and melted—a specimen of which the Captain gave me and I still retain. When the ball of fire struck the ship, those of us sitting on chairs, screwed to the floor around the cabin table, felt as if she were plunging to the bottom. When she sprang aloft again, a military man and a medical officer were thrown heavily into the back passage between the cabins, the screws that held their seats having snapped asunder. I, in grasping the table, got my leg severely bruised, being jammed betwixt the seat and the table, and had to be carried to my berth. All the men were attended to, and quickly recovered consciousness; and immediately the good Captain, an elder of the Church, came to me, and said, "Lead us in prayer, and let us thank the Lord for this most merciful deliverance; the ship is not on fire, and no one is seriously injured!"

Poor fellow! whether hastened on by this event I know not, but he struggled for three weeks thereafter in a fever, and it took our united care and love to pull him through. The Lord, however, restored him; and we cast anchor safely in the East India Docks, at London, on 26th August, 1863, having been three months and ten days at sea from port to port.

It was 5.30 P. M. when we cast anchor, and the gates closed at 6 o'clock. My little box was ready on deck. The Custom House officers kindly passed me, and I was immediately on my way to Euston Square. Never before had I been within the Great City, and doubtless I could have enjoyed its palaces and memorials. But the King's business entrusted to me, "required haste," and I felt constrained to press forward, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left.

At nine o'clock that evening, I left for Scotland by train. Next morning, about the same hour, I reported myself at the manse of the Rev. John Kay, Castle Douglas, the Convener of the Foreign Mission Committee of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, to which I then belonged. We arranged for a meeting of said Committee, at earliest practicable date, that my scheme and plans might at once be laid before them.

By the next train I was on my way to Dumfries, and thence by conveyance to my dear old home at Torthorwald. There I had a Heavenly Welcome from my saintly parents, yet not unmixed with many fast-falling tears. Five brief years only had elapsed, since I went forth from their Sanctuary, with my young bride; and now, alas! alas! that grave on Tanna held mother and son locked in each other's embrace till the Resurrection Day.

Not less glowing, but more terribly agonizing, was my reception, a few days thereafter, at Coldstream, when I first gazed on the bereaved father and mother of my beloved; who, though godly people, were conscious of a heart-break under that stroke, from which through their remaining years they never fully rallied. They murmured not against the Lord; but all the same, heart and flesh began to faint and fail, even as our Divine Exemplar Himself fainted under the Cross, which yet He so uncomplainingly bore.

The Foreign Mission Committee of the Reformed Presbyterian Church met in Edinburgh, and welcomed me kindly, nay, warmly. A full report of all my doings for the past, and of all my plans and hopes, was laid before them. They at once agreed to my visiting and addressing every Congregation and Sabbath School in the Church. They opened to me their Divinity Hall, that I might appeal to the Students. My Address there was published and largely circulated, under the motto—"Come over and help us." It was used of God to deepen vastly the interest in our Mission.

The Committee generously and enthusiastically did everything in their power to help me. By their influence, the Church in 1864 conferred on me the undesired and undeserved honor, the highest which they could confer—the honor of being the Moderator of their Supreme Court. No one can understand how much I shrank from all this; but, in hope of the Lord's using it and me to promote His work amongst the Heathen, I accepted the Chair, though, I fear, only to occupy it most unworthily, for Tanna gave me little training for work like that!

I have ever regarded it as a privilege and honor that I was born and trained within the old covenanting Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland. As a separate Communion, that Church was small amongst the thousands of Israel; but the principles of Civil and Religious Liberty for which her founders suffered and died are, at this moment, the heart and soul of all that is best and divinest in the Constitution of our British Empire. I am more proud that the blood of Martyrs is in my veins, and their truths in my heart, than other men can be of noble pedigree or royal names.

CHAPTER 52: TOUR THROUGH THE OLD COUNTRY.

My tour through Scotland brought me into contact with every Minister, Congregation, and Sabbath School in the Church of my fathers. They were never at any time a rich people, but they were always liberal. At this time they contributed beyond all previous experience, both in money and in boxes of useful articles for the Islanders.

Unfortunately, my visit to the far North, to our Congregations at Wick and Stromness, had been arranged for the month of January; and thereby a sore trial befell me in my pilgrimages. The roads were covered with snow and ice. I reached Aberdeen and Wick by steamer from Edinburgh, and had to find my way thence to Thurso. The inside seats on the mail coach being all occupied, I had to take my place outside. The cold was intense, and one of my feet got bitten by the frost. The storm detained me nearly a week at Thurso, but feeling did not return to the foot.

We started, in a lull, by steamer for Stromness; but the storm burst again, all were ordered below, and hatches and doors made fast. The passengers were mostly very rough, the place was foul with whisky and tobacco. I appealed to the Captain to let me crouch somewhere on deck and hold on as best I could. He shouted, "I dare not! You'll be washed overboard."

On seeing my appealing look, he relented, directed his men to fasten a tarpaulin over me, and lash it and me to the mast, and there I lay till we reached Stromness. The sea broke heavily and dangerously over the vessel. But the Captain, finding shelter for several hours under the lee of a headland, saved both the ship and the passengers. When at last we landed, my foot was so benumbed and painful that I could move a step only with greatest agony. Two meetings, however, were in some kind of way conducted; but the projected visit to Dingwall and other places had to be renounced, the snow lying too deep for any conveyance to carry me, and my foot crying aloud for treatment and skill.

On returning Southwards I was confined for about two months, and placed under the best medical advice. All feeling seemed gradually to have departed from my foot; and amputation was seriously proposed both in Edinburgh and in Glasgow. Having somehow managed to reach Liverpool, my dear friend, the Rev. Dr. Graham, took me there to a Doctor who had wrought many wonderful recoveries by galvanism. Time after time he applied the battery, but I felt nothing. He declared that the power used would "have killed six ordinary men," and that he had never seen any part of the human body so dead to feeling on a live and healthy person. Finally, he covered it all over with a dark plaster, and told me to return in three days. But next day, the throbbing feeling of insufferable coldness in the foot compelled me to return at once. After my persistent appeals, he removed the plaster; and, to his great astonishment, the whole of the frosted part adhered to it! Again, dressing the remaining parts, he covered it with plaster as before, and assured me that with care and rest it would now completely recover. By the blessing of the Lord it did, though it was a bitter trial to me amidst all these growing plans to be thus crippled by the way; and to this day I am sometimes warned in over-walking that the part is capable of many a painful twinge. And humbly I feel myself crooning over the graphic words of the Greatest Missionary, "I bear about in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus."

On that tour, the Sabbath Schools joyfully adopted my scheme, and became "Shareholders" in the Mission Ship. It was thereafter ably developed by an elder of the Church. A Dayspring collecting box found its way into almost every family; and the returns from Scotland have yielded ever since about £250 per annum, as their proportion for the expenses of the Children's Mission Ship to the New Hebrides. The Church in Nova Scotia heartily accepted the same idea, and their Sabbath School children have regularly contributed their £250 per annum too. The Colonial children have contributed the rest, throughout all these years, with unfailing interest. And whensoever the true and full history of the South Sea Islands Mission is written for the edification of the Universal Church, let it not be forgotten that the children of Australasia, and Nova Scotia, and Scotland, did by their united pennies keep the Dayspring floating in the New Hebrides; that the Missionaries and their families were thereby supplied with the necessaries of life, and that the Islanders were thus taught to clothe themselves and to sit at the feet of Jesus. This was the Children's Holy League, erewhile referred to; and one knows that on such a Union the Divine Master smiles well pleased.

The Lord also crowned this tour with another precious fruit of blessing, though not all by any means due to my influence. Four new Missionaries volunteered from Scotland, and three from Nova Scotia. By their aid we not only re-claimed for Jesus the posts that had been abandoned, but we took possession of other Islands in His most blessed Name. But I did not wait and take them out with me. They had matters to look into and to learn about, that would be infinitely helpful to them in the Mission field. Especially, and far above everything else in addition to their regular Clerical course, some Medical instruction was an absolute prerequisite. Every Missionary was urged to obtain all insight that was practicable at the Medical Mission Dispensary, and otherwise, especially on lines known to be most requisite for these Islands. For this, and similar objects, all that I raised over and above what was required for the Dayspring was entrusted to the Foreign Mission Committee, that the new Missionaries might be fully equipped, and their outfit and traveling expenses be provided for without burdening the Church at home. Her responsibilities were already large enough for her resources. But she could give men, God's own greatest gift, and His people elsewhere gave the money,—the Colonies and the Home Country thus binding themselves to each other in this Holy Mission of the Cross.

CHAPTER 53: MARRIAGE AND FAREWELL.

BUT I did not return alone. The dear Lord had brought to me one prepared, all unknown to either of us, by special culture, by godly training, by many gifts and accomplishments, and even by family associations, to share my lot on the New Hebrides. Her brother had been an honored Missionary in the Foreign field, and had fallen asleep while the dew of youth was yet upon him; her sister was the wife of a devoted Minister of our Church in Adelaide, both she and her husband being zealous promoters of our work; and her father had left behind him a fragrant memory through his many Christian works at Edinburgh, Kenneth, and Alloa, besides being not unknown to fame as the author of those still popular books, Whitecross's Anecdotes, illustrative of the Shorter Catechism and of the Holy Scriptures. Ere I left Scotland in 1864, I was married to Margaret Whitecross, and God spares us to each other still (1892); and the family which He has been pleased in His love to grant unto us we have dedicated to His service, with the prayer and hope that He may use every one of them in spreading the Gospel throughout the Heathen World.

Our marriage was celebrated at her sister's house in Edinburgh; and I may be pardoned for recalling a little event which characterized the occasion. My youngest brother, then tutor to a gentleman studying at the University, stepped forth at the close of the ceremony and recited an Epithalamium composed for the day. For many a month and year the refrain, a play upon the Bride's name, kept singing itself through my memory:—

"Long may the Whitecross banner wave,

By the battle blasts unriven;

Long may our Brother and Sister brave

Rejoice in the light of Heaven."

He describes the Bride as hearing a "Voice from the far Pacific Seas"; and turning to us both, he sang of an Angel "beckoning us to the Tanna-land," to gather a harvest of souls:—

"The warfare is brief, the crown is bright,

The pledge is the souls of men;

Go, may the Lord defend the Right,

And restore you safe again!"

But the verse which my dear wife thought most beautiful for a bridal day, and which her memory cherishes still, was this:—

"May the ruddy Joys, and the Graces fair,

Wait fondly around you now;

Sweet angel Hopes and young Loves repair

To your home and bless your vow!"

My last scene in Scotland was kneeling at the family altar in the old Sanctuary Cottage at Torthorwald, while my venerable father, with his high-priestly locks of snow-white hair streaming over his shoulders, commenced us once again to "the care and keeping of the Lord God of the families of Israel." It was the last time that ever on this Earth those accents of intercession, loaded with a pathos of deathless love, would fall upon my ears. I knew to a certainty that when we rose from our knees and said farewell, our eyes would never meet again till they were flooded with the lights of the Resurrection Day. But he and my darling mother gave us away once again with a free heart, not unpierced with the sword of human anguish, to the service of our common Lord and to the Salvation of the Heathen. And we went forth, praying that a double portion of their spirit, along with their precious blessing, might rest upon us in all the way that we had to go.

Our beloved mother, always more self-restrained, and less demonstrative in the presence of others, held back her heart till we were fairly gone from the door; and then, as my dear brother afterward informed me, she fell back into his arms with a great cry, as if all the heart-strings had broken, and lay for long in a deathlike swoon. Oh, all ye that read this page, think most tenderly of the cries of Nature, even where Grace and Faith are in perfect triumph. Read, through scenes like these, a fuller meaning into the words addressed to that blessed Mother, whose Son was given for us all, "Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also."

CHAPTER 54: FIRST PEEP AT THE "DAYSPRING."

WE embarked at Liverpool for Australia in The Crest o' the Wave, Captain Ellis; and, after what was then considered a fast passage of ninety-five days, we landed at Sydney on 17th January, 1865. Within an hour we had to grapple with a new and amazing perplexity. The Captain of our Dayspring came to inform me that his ship had arrived three days ago and now lay in the stream,—that she had been to the Islands, and had settled the Gordons, M'Cullaghs, and Morrisons on their several stations,—that she had left Halifax in Nova Scotia fourteen months ago, and that now, on arriving at Sydney, he could not get one penny of money, and that the crew were clamoring for their pay, etc. etc. He continued, "Where shall I get money for current expenses? No one will lend unless we mortgage the Dayspring. I fear there is nothing before us but to sell her!" I gave him £50 of my own to meet clamant demands, and besought him to secure me a day or two of delay that something might be done.

Having landed, and been heartily welcomed by dear Dr. and Mrs. Moon and other friends, I went with a kind of trembling joy to have my first look at the Dayspring, like a sailor getting a first peep at the child born to him whilst far away on the sea. Some of the irritated ship's company stopped us by the way, and threatened prosecution and all sorts of annoyance. I could only urge again for a few days' patience. I found her to be a beautiful two-masted Brigantine, with a deck-house (added when she first arrived at Melbourne), and every way suitable for our necessities,—a thing of beauty, a white-winged Angel set a-floating by the pennies of the children to bear the Gospel to these sin-darkened but sun-lit Southern Isles. To me she became a sort of living thing, the impersonation of a living and throbbing love in the heart of thousands of "shareholders"; and I said, with a deep, indestructible faith,—"The Lord has provided—the Lord will provide."

Since she sailed, £1400 had been expended; for present liabilities at least £700 more were instantly required: and, at any rate, as large a sum to pay her way and meet expenses of next trip to the Islands. Having laid our perplexing circumstances before our dear Lord Jesus, having "spread out" all the details in His sympathetic presence, pleading that the Ship itself and the new Missionaries were all His own, not mine, I told Him that this money was needed to do His own blessed work.

On Friday morning, I consulted friends of the Mission, but no help was visible. I tried to borrow, but found that the lender demanded 20 per cent for interest, besides the title-deeds of the ship for security. I applied for a loan from the agent of the London Missionary Society (then agent for us too) on the credit of the Reformed Presbyterian Church's Foreign Committee, but he could not give it without a written order from Scotland. There were some who seemed rather to enjoy our perplexity!

Driven thus to the wall, I advertised for a meeting of Ministers and other friends, next morning at eleven o'clock, to receive my report and to consult re the Dayspring. I related my journeyings since leaving them and the results, and then asked for advice about the ship.

"Sell her," said some, "and have done with it."—"What," said others, "have the Sabbath Schools given you the Dayspring and can you not support her yourselves?"

I pointed out to them that the salary of each Missionary was then only £120 per annum, that they gave their lives for the Heathen, and that surely the Colonial Christians would undertake the up-keep of the ship, which was necessary to the very existence of the Mission. I appealed to them that, as my own Church in Scotland had now one Missionary abroad for every six Ministers at home, and the small Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia had actually three Missionaries now on our Islands, it would be a blessed privilege for the Australian Churches and Sabbath Schools to keep the Dayspring afloat, without whose services the Missionaries could not live nor the Islanders be evangelized.

Being Saturday, the morning Services for Sabbath were all arranged for, or advertised; but Dr. M'Gibbon offered me a meeting for the evening, and Dr. Steel an afternoon Service at three o'clock, combined with his Sabbath School. Rev. Mr. Patterson of Piermont, offered me a Morning Service; but, as his was only a Mission Church, he could not give me a collection. These openings I accepted, as from the Lord, however much they fell short of what I desired.

At the Morning Service I informed the congregation how we were situated, and expressed the hope that under God and their devoted pastor they would greatly prosper, and would yet be able to help in supporting our Mission to their South Sea neighbors. Returning to the vestry, a lady and gentleman waited to be introduced to me. They were from Launceston, Tasmania.

"I am," said he, "Captain and owner of that vessel lying at anchor opposite the Dayspring. My wife and I, being too late to get on shore to attend any Church in the city, heard this little Chapel bell ringing, and followed, when we saw you going up the hill. We have so enjoyed the Service. We do heartily sympathize with you. This check for £50 will be a beginning to help you out of your difficulties."

The reader knows how warmly I would thank them; and how in my own heart I knew Who it was that made them arrive too late for their plans, but not for His, and led them up that hill, and opened their hearts. Jehovah-Jireh?

At three o'clock, Dr. Steel's Church was filled with children and others. I told them in my appeal what had happened in the Mission Chapel, and how God had led Captain Frith and his wife, entire strangers, to sound the first note of our deliverance. One man stood up and said, "I will give £10." Another, "I will give £5." A third, "I shall send you £20 to-morrow morning." Several others followed their example, and the general collection was greatly encouraging.

In the evening I had a very large as well as sympathetic congregation. I fully explained the difficulty about the Dayspring, and told them what God had already done for us, announcing an address to which contributions might be sent. Almost every mail brought me the free-will offerings of God's people; and on Wednesday, when the adjourned meeting was held, the sum had reached in all £456. Believing that the Lord thus intervened at a vital crisis in our Mission, I dwell on it to the praise of His blessed Name. Trust in Him, obey Him, and He will not suffer you to be put to shame.

Clearing out from her sister ships, then in harbor, the John Williams and the John Wesley, our little Dayspring sailed for Tasmania. At Hobart we were visited by thousands of children and parents, and afterwards at Launceston, who were proud to see their own Ship, in which they were "shareholders" for Jesus. Daily, all over the Colony, I preached in churches, and addressed public meetings, and got collections, and gave out Collection Cards to be returned within two weeks.

We received many tokens of interest and sympathy. The steam tug was granted to us free, and the harbor dues were remitted. Many presents were also sent on board the Dayspring. Still, after meeting all necessary outlays, the trip to Tasmania gave us only £227: 8: 11 clear for the Mission fund.

Sailing now for South Australia, we arrived at Adelaide. Many friends there showed the deepest interest in our plans. Thousands of children and parents came to visit their own Mission Ship by several special trips. Daily and nightly I addressed meetings, and God's people were moved greatly in the cause. After meeting ail expenses while in port, there remained a sum of £634: 9: 2 for the up-keep of the vessel. The Honorable George Fife Angus gave me £241—a dear friend belonging to the Baptist Church. But there was still a deficit of £400 before the Dayspring could sail free of debt, and my heart was sore as I cried for it to the Lord.

Leaving the ship to sail direct for Sydney, I took steamer to Melbourne; but, on arriving there, sickness and anxiety laid me aside for three days. Under great weakness, I crept along to my dear friends at the Scotch College, Dr. and Mrs. Morrison, and Miss Fraser, and threw myself on their advice.

"Come along," said the Doctor cheerily, "and I'll introduce you to Mr. Butchart and one or two friends in East Melbourne, and we'll see what what can be done!"

I gave all information, being led on in conversation by the Doctor, and tried to interest them in our work, but no subscriptions were asked or received. Ere I sailed for Sydney however, the whole deficiency was sent to me. I received in all, on this tour, the sum of £1726: 9: 10. Our Dayspring once more sailed free, and our hearts overflowed with gratitude to the Lord and to His stewards!

CHAPTER 55: THE FRENCH IN THE PACIFIC.

We went down to the Islands with the Dayspring in 1865. The full story of the years that had passed was laid before my Missionary brethren at their Annual Synod. They resolved that permanent arrangements must now be made for the vessel's support, and that I must return to the Colonies and see these matured, to prevent any such crisis as that through which we had recently passed. This, meantime, appeared to all of them, the most clamant of all Missionary duties,—their very lives, and the existence of the Mission itself, depending thereon. The Lord seemed to leave me no alternative: and, with great reluctance, my back was again turned away from the Islands.

The Dayspring, doing duty among the Loyalty Islands, left me, along with my dear wife, on Mare, there to await an opportunity of getting to New Caledonia, and thence to Sydney. Detained there for some time, we saw the noble work done by Messrs. Jones and Creagh, of the London Missionary Society, all being cruelly undone by the tyranny and Popery of the French. One day, in an inland walk, Mrs. Paton and I came on a large Conventicle in the bush. They were teaching each other, and reading the Scriptures which the Missionaries had translated into their own language, and which the French had forbidden them to use. They cried to God for deliverance from their oppressors! Missionaries were prohibited from teaching the Gospel to the Natives without the permission of France; their books were suppressed, and they themselves placed under military guard on the Island of Lifu. Even when, by Britain's protest, the Missionaries were allowed to resume their work, the French language was alone to be used by them; and some, like Rev. J. Jones (as far down as 1888), were marched on board a Man-of-war, at half an hour's notice, and, without crime laid to their charge, forbidden ever to return to the Islands. While, on the other hand, the French Popish Missionaries were everywhere fostered and protected, presenting to the Natives as many objects of idolatry as their own, and following, as is the custom of the Romish Church in those Seas, in the wake of every Protestant Mission, to pollute and to destroy.

Being delayed also for two weeks on Noumea, we saw the state of affairs under military rule. English Protestant residents, few in number, appealed to me to conduct worship, but liberty could not be obtained from the authorities, who hated everything English. Again a number of Protestant parents, some French, others English and German, applied to me to baptize their children at their own houses. To have asked permission would have been to court refusal, and to falsify my position. I laid the matter before the Lord, and baptized them all. Within two days the Private Secretary of the Governor arrived with an interpreter, and began to inquire of me, "Is it true that you have been baptizing here?"

I replied quite frankly, "It is."

"We are sent to demand on whose authority?"

"On the authority of my Great Master."

"When did you get that authority?"

"When I was licensed and ordained to preach the Gospel, I got that authority from my Great Master."

Here a spirited conversation followed betwixt the two in French, and they politely bowed, and left me.

Very shortly they returned, saying, "The Governor sends his compliments, and he wishes the honor of a visit from you at Government House at three o'clock, if convenient for you."

I returned my greeting, and said that I would have pleasure in waiting upon his Excellency at the appointed hour. I thought to myself that I was in for it now, and I earnestly cried for Divine guidance.

He saluted me graciously as "de great Missionary of de New Hebrides." He conversed in a very friendly manner about the work there, and seemed anxious to find any indication as to the English designs. I had to deal very cautiously. He spoke chiefly through the interpreter; but, sometimes dismissing him, he talked to me as good, if not better English himself. He was eager to get my opinions as to how Britain got and retained her power over the Natives. After a very prolonged interview, we parted without a single reference to the baptisms or to religious services!

That evening the Secretary and interpreter waited upon us at our Inn, saying, "The Governor will have pleasure in placing his yacht and crew at your disposal to-morrow. Mrs. Paton and you can sail all around, and visit the Convict Island, and the Government Gardens, where lunch will be prepared for you."

It was a great treat to us indeed. The crew were in prison garments, but all so kind to us. By Convict labor all the public works seemed to be carried on, and the Gardens were most beautiful. The carved work in bone, ivory, cocoanuts, shells, etc., was indeed very wonderful. We bought a few specimens, but the prices were beyond our purse. It was a strange spectacle—these things of beauty and joy, and beside them the chained gangs of fierce and savage Convicts, kept down only by bullet and sword!

Thanking the Governor for his exceeding kindness, I referred to their Man-of-war about to go to Sydney, and offered to pay full passage money if they would take me, instead of leaving me to wait for a "trader." He at once granted my request, and arranged that we should be charged only at the daily cost for the sailors. At his suggestion, however, I took a number of things on board with me, and presented them to be used at the cabin table. We were most generously treated—the Captain giving up his own room to my wife and myself, as they had no special accommodation for passengers.

Noumea appeared to me at that time to be wholly given over to drunkenness and vice, supported as a great Convict Settlement by the Government of France, and showing every extreme of reckless, worldly pleasure, and of cruel, slavish toil. When I saw it again, three-and-twenty years thereafter, it showed no signs of progress for the better. It there be a God of justice and of love, His blight cannot but rest on a nation whose pathway is stained with corruption and steeped in blood, as is undeniably the case with France in the Pacific Isles.

CHAPTER 56: THE GOSPEL AND GUNPOWDER.

Arriving at Sydney, I was at once plunged into a whirlpool of horrors. H. M. S. Curaçoa had just returned from her official trip to the Islands, in which the Commodore, Sir William Wisenian, had thought it his duty to inflict punishment on the Natives for murder and robbery of Traders and others. On these Islands, as in all similar cases, the Missionaries had acted as interpreters, and of course always used their influence on the side of mercy, and in the interests of peace. But Sydney, and indeed Australia and the Christian World, were thrown into a ferment just a few days before our arrival, by certain articles in a leading publication there, and by the pictorial illustrations of the same. They were professedly from an officer on board Her Majesty's ship, and the sensation was increased by their apparent truthfulness and reality. Tanna was the scene of the first event, and a series was to follow in succeeding numbers. The Curaçoa was pictured lying at anchor off the shore having the Dayspring astern. The Tannese warriors were being blown to pieces by shot and shell, and lay in heaps on the bloody coast. And the Missionaries were represented as safe in the lee of the Man-of-war, directing the onslaught, and gloating over the carnage.

Without a question being asked or a doubt suggested, without a voice being raised in fierce denial that such men as these Missionaries were known to be could be guilty of such conduct,—men who had jeoparded their lives for years on end rather than hurt one hair on a Native's head,—a cry of execration, loud and deep, and even savage, arose from the Press, and was apparently joined in by the Church itself. The common witticism about the "Gospel and Gunpowder" headed hundreds of bitter and scoffing articles in the journals; and, as we afterwards learned, the shocking news had been telegraphed to Britain and America, losing nothing in force by the way, and, while filling friends of Missions with dismay, was dished up day after day with every imaginable enhancement of horror for the readers of the secular and infidel Press. As I stepped ashore at Sydney I found myself probably the best-abused man in all Australia, and the very name of the New Hebrides Mission stinking in the nostrils of the people.

The gage of battle had been thrown and fell at my feet. Without one moment's delay I lifted it in the name of my Lord and of my maligned brethren. That evening my reply was in the hands of the editor, denying that such battles ever took place, retailing the actual facts of which I had been myself an eyewitness, and intimating legal prosecution unless the most ample and unequivocal withdrawal and apology were at once published. The Newspaper printed my rejoinder, and made satisfactory amends for having been imposed upon and deceived. I waited upon the Commodore and appealed for his help in redressing this terrible injury to our Mission. He informed me that he had already called his officers to account, but that all denied any connection with the articles or the picture. He had little doubt, all the same, that some one on board was the prompter, who gloried in the evil that was being done to the cause of Christ. He offered every possible assistance, by testimony or otherwise, to place all the facts before the Christian public and to vindicate our Missionaries.

The outstanding facts are best presented in the following extract from the official report of the Mission Synod:—

"When the New Hebrides Missionaries were assembled at their annual meeting on Aneityum, H. M. S. Curaçoa, Sir Win. Wiseman, Bart., C. B., arrived in the harbor to investigate many grievances of white men and trading vessels among the Islands. A petition having been previously presented to the Governor in Sydney, as drawn out by the Revs. Messrs. Geddie and Copeland, after the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon on Erromanga, requesting an investigation into the sad event, and the removal of a Sandal-wood Trader, a British subject, who had incited the Natives to it,—the Missionaries gave the Commodore a memorandum on the loss of life and property that had been sustained by the Mission on Tanna, Erromanga, and Efate. He requested the Missionaries to supply him with interpreters, and requested the Dayspring to accompany him with them. The request was at once acceded to. Mr. Paton was appointed to act as interpreter for Tanna, Mr. Gordon (brother of the martyr) for Erromanga, and Mr. Morrison for Efate.

"At each of these Islands, the Commodore summoned the principal Chiefs near the harbors to appear before him, and explained to them that his visit was to inquire into the complaints British subjects had made against them, and to see if they had any against British subjects; and when he had found out the truth he would punish those who had done the wrong and protect those who had suffered wrong. The Queen did not send him to compel them to become Christians, or to punish them for not becoming Christians. She left them to do as they liked in this matter; but she was very angry at them because they had encouraged her subjects to live amongst them, sold them land, and promised to protect them, and afterwards murdered some of them and attempted to murder others, and stolen and destroyed their property; that the inhabitants of these islands were talked of over the whole world for their treachery, cruelty, and murders; and that the Queen would no longer allow them to murder or injure her subjects, who were living peaceably among them either as Missionaries or Traders. She would send a Ship of War every year to inquire into their conduct, and if any white man injured any Native they were to tell the Captain of the Man-of-war, and the white man would be punished as fast as the black man."

After spending much time, and using peaceably every means in his power in trying to get the guilty parties on Tanna, and not succeeding, he shelled two villages,—having the day before informed the Natives that he would do so, and advising to have all women, children, and sick removed, which in fact they did. Indeed nearly the whole of the inhabitants, young and old, went to Nowar's land, where they were instructed they would be safe, while they witnessed what a Man-of-war could do in punishing murderers. But before the hour approached, a foolish host of Tannese warriors had assembled on the beach, painted and armed and determined to fight the Man-of-war! And the Chief of a village on the other side of the bay was at that moment assembled with his men on the high ground within our view, and dancing to a war song in defiance.

The Commodore caused a shell to strike the hill and explode with terrific fury just underneath the dancers. The earth and the bush were torn and thrown into the air above and around them; and next moment the whole host were seen disappearing over the brow of the hill. Two shots were sent over the heads of the warriors on the shore, with terrific noise and uproar: in an instant, every man was making haste for Nowar's land, the place of refuge. The Commodore then shelled the villages, and destroyed their property. Beyond what I have here recorded, absolutely nothing was done.

We returned then for a moment to Sydney. The public excitement made it impossible for me to open my lips in the promotion of our Mission. The Rev. Drs. Dunmore, Lang and Steel, along with Professor Smith of the University, waited on the Commodore, and got an independent version of the facts. They then called a meeting on the affair by public advertisement. Without being made acquainted with the results of their investigations, I was called upon to give my own account of the Curaçoa's visit and of the connection of the Missionaries therewith. They then submitted the Commodore's statement, given by him in writing. He exonerated the Missionaries from every shadow of blame and from all responsibility. In the interests of mercy as well as justice, and to save life, they had acted as his interpreters; and there all that they had to do with the Curaçoa began and ended. All this was published in the newspapers next day, along with the speeches of the three deputies. The excitement began to subside. But the poison had been lodged in many hearts, and the ejectment of it was a slow and difficult process.

Feeling absolutely conscious that I had only done my Christian duty, I left all results in the hands of my Lord Jesus, and pressed forward in His blessed work. But more than one dear personal friend had to be sacrificed over this painful affair. A presbyterian Minister, and a godly elder and his wife, all most excellent and well-beloved, at whose houses I had been received as a brother, intimated to me that owing to this case of the Curaçoa their friendship and mine must entirely cease in this world. And it did cease; but my esteem never changed. I had learned not to think unkindly of friends, even when they manifestly misunderstood my actions. Nor would these things merit being recorded here, were it not that they may be at once a beacon and a guide. God's people are still belied. And the mob is still as ready as ever to cry, "Crucify! Crucify!"

CHAPTER 57: A PLEA FOR TANNA.

EVERYTHING having been at length arranged for in the Colonies, in connection with the Mission and Dayspring, as far as could possibly be,—and I having been adopted by the Victorian Assembly of 1866, as the first Missionary from the Presbyterian Church of Australia to the New Hebrides,—we sailed for the Islands on the 8th August of that year. Besides my wife and child, the following accompanied us to the field: Revs. Copeland, Cosh, and M'Nair, along with their respective wives. On 20th August we reached Aneityum; and, having landed some of our friends, we sailed Northwards, as far as Efate, to let the new Missionaries see all the Islands open for occupation, and to bring all our Missionaries back to the annual meeting, where the permanent settlements would be finally agreed upon.

While staying at Aneityum, I learned with as deep emotion as man ever felt for man, that noble old Abraham, the sharer of my Tannese trials, had during the interval peacefully fallen asleep in Jesus. He left for me his silver watch—one which I had myself sent to the dear soul from Sydney, and which he greatly prized. In his dying hour he said, "Give it to Missi, my own Missi Paton; and tell him that I go to Jesus, where Time is dead."

I learned also, and truly human-hearted readers will need no apology for introducing this news in so grave a story—that my faithful dog Clutha, entrusted to the care of a kindly Native to be kept for my return, had, despite all coaxing, grown weary of heart amongst all these dark faces, and fallen asleep too, truly not unworthy of a grateful tear!

At our annual Synod, after much prayerful deliberation and the careful weighing of every vital circumstance, I was constrained by the united voice of my brethren not to return to Tanna, but to settle on the adjoining island of Aniwa (=A-neé-wa). It was even hoped that thereby Tanna might eventually be the more surely reached and evangelized.

By the new Missionaries all the other old Stations were reoccupied and some fresh Islands were entered upon in the name of Jesus. As we moved about with our Dayspring, and planted the Missionaries here and there, nothing could repress the wonder of Natives.

"How is this?" they cried. "We slew or drove them all away! We plundered their houses and robbed them. Had we been so treated, nothing would have made us return. But they come back with a beautiful new ship, and with more and more Missionaries. And is it to trade and to get money, like the other white men? No! no! But to tell us of their Jehovah God and of His Son Jesus. If their God makes them do all that, we may well worship Him too."

In this way, island after island was opened up to receive the Missionary, and their Chiefs bound themselves to protect and cherish him, before they knew anything whatever of the Gospel, beyond what they saw in the disposition and character of its Preachers or heard rumored regarding its fruits on other Islands. Imagine Cannibals found thus prepared to welcome the Missionary, and to make not only his property but his life comparatively safe. The Isles "wait" for Christ.

On our way to Aniwa, the Dayspring had to call at Tanna. By stress of weather we lay several days in Port Resolution. And there many memories were again revived—wounds that after five-and-twenty years, when I now write, still bleed afresh! Nowar, the old Chief, unstable but friendly, was determined to keep us there by force or by fraud. The Captain told him that the council of the Missionaries had forbidden him to land our boxes at Tanna.

"Don't land them," said the wily Chief, "just throw them over; my men and I will catch everything before it reaches the water, and carry them all safely ashore!"

The Captain said he durst not. "Then," persisted Nowar, "just point them out to us; you will have no further trouble; we will manage everything for Missi."

They were in distress when he refused; and poor old Nowar tried another tack. Suspecting that my clear wife was afraid of them, he got us on shore to see his extensive plantations. Turning eagerly to her, he said, leaving me to interpret, "Plenty of food! While I have a yam or a banana, you shall not want."

She answered, "I fear not any lack of food."

Pointing to his warriors, he cried, "We are many! We are strong! We can always protect you."

"I am not afraid," she calmly replied.

He then led us to that chestnut tree, in the branches of which I had sat during a lonely and memorable night, when all hope had perished of any earthly deliverance, and said to her with a manifest touch of genuine emotion, "The God who protected Missi there will always protect you."

She told him that she had no fear of that kind, but explained to him that we must for the present go to Aniwa, but would return to Tanna, if the Lord opened up our way. Nowar, Arkurat, and the rest, seemed to be genuinely grieved, and it touched my soul to the quick.

A beautiful incident was the outcome, as we learned only in long after years. There was at that time an Aniwan Chief on Tanna, visiting friends. He was one of their great Sacred Men. He and his people had been promised a passage home in the Dayspring, with their canoes in tow. When old Nowar saw that he could not keep us with himself, he went to this Aniwan Chief, and took the white shells, the insignia of Chieftainship, from his own arm, and bound them on the Sacred Man, saying, "By these you promise to protect my Missi and his wife and child on Aniwa. Let no evil befall them; or, by this pledge, I and my people will revenge it."

In a future crisis, this probably saved our lives, as shall be afterwards related. After all, a bit of the Christ-Spirit had found its way into that old cannibal's soul! And the same Christ-Spirit in me yearned more strongly still, and made it a positive pain to pass on to another Island, and leave him in that dim-groping twilight of the soul.

CHAPTER 58: OUR NEW HOME ON ANIWA.

ANIWA became my Mission Home in November, 1866; and for the next fifteen years it was the heart and center of my personal labors in the Heathen World. Since 1881, alas! my too frequent deputation pilgrimages among Churches in Great Britain and in the Colonies have rendered my visits to Aniwa but few and far between. God never guided me back to Tanna; but others, my dear friends, have seen His Kingdom planted and beginning to grow amongst that slowly relenting race. Aniwa was to be the land wherein my past years of toil and patience and faith were to see their fruits ripening at length. I claimed Aniwa for Jesus, and by the grace of God Aniwa now worships at the Saviour's feet.

The Island of Aniwa is one of the smaller isles of the New Hebrides. It measures scarcely seven miles by two, and is everywhere girt round with a belt of coral reef. The sea breaks thereon heavily, with thundering roar, and the white surf rolls in furious and far. But there are days of calm, when all the sea is glass, and the spray on the reef is only a fringe of silver.

Aniwa, having no hills to attract and condense the clouds, suffers badly for lack of genial rains; and the heavy rains of hurricane and tempest seem to disappear as if by magic through the light soil and porous rock. The moist atmosphere and the heavy dews, however keep the Island covered with green, while large and fruitful trees draw wondrous nourishment from their rocky beds.

Aniwa has no harbor, or safe anchorage of any kind for ships; though, in certain winds, they have been seen at anchor on the outer edge of the reef, always a perilous haven! There is one rock in the coral belt, through which a boat can safely run to shore; but the little wharf, built there of the largest coral blocks that could be rolled together, has been once and again swept clean off by the hurricane, leaving "not a wrack behind."

When we landed, the Natives received us kindly. They and the Aneityumese Teachers led us to a temporary home, prepared for our abode. It was a large Native Hut. Walls and roof consisted of sugar-cane leaf and reeds, intertwisted on a strong wooden frame. It had neither doors nor windows, but open spaces instead of these. The earthen floor alone looked beautiful, covered thick with white coral broken small. It had only one apartment; and that, meantime, had to serve also for Church and School and Public Hall. We screened off a little portion, and behind that screen planted our bed, and stored our valuables. All the natives within reach assembled to watch us taking our food! A box at first served for a chair, the lid of another box was our table, our cooking was all done in the open air under a large tree, and we got along with amazing comfort. But the house was under the shelter of a coral rock, and we saw at a glance that at certain seasons it would prove a very hotbed of fever and ague. We were, however, only too thankful to enter it, till a better could be built, and on a breezier site.

The Aniwans were not so violently dishonorable as the Tannese. But they had the knack of asking in a rather menacing manner whatever they coveted; and the tomahawk was sometimes swung to enforce an appeal. We strove to get along quietly and kindly, in the hope that when we knew their language, and could teach them the principles of Jesus, they would be saved, and life and property would be secure. But the rumor of the Curaçoa's visit and her punishment of murder and robbery did more, by God's blessing, to protect us during those Heathen days than all other influences combined. The savage cannibal was heard to whisper to his bloodthirsty mates, "not to murder or to steal, for the Man-of-war that punished Tanna would blow up their little island!"

Sorrowful experience on Tanna had taught us to seek the site of our Aniwan house on the highest ground, and away from the malarial influences near the shore. There was one charming mound, covered with trees, whose roots ran down into the crevices of coral, and from which Tanna and Erromanga are clearly seen. But there the Natives for some superstitious reason forbade us to build, and we were constrained to take another rising ground somewhat nearer the shore. In the end, this turned out to be the very best site on the island for us, central and suitable every way. But we afterwards learned that perhaps superstition also led them to sell us this site, in the malicious hope that it would prove our ruin. The mounds on the top, which had to be cleared away, contained the bones and refuse of their Cannibal feasts for ages. None but their Sacred Men durst touch them; and the Natives watched us hewing and digging, certain that their gods would strike us dead! That failing, their thoughts may probably have been turned to reflect that after all the Jehovah God was stronger than they.

In leveling the site, and gently sloping the sides of the ground for good drainage purposes, I had gathered together two large baskets of human bones. I said to a Chief in Tannese, "How do these bones come to be here?"

And he replied, with a shrug worthy of a cynical Frenchman, "Ah, we are not Tanna-men! We don't eat the bones!"

CHAPTER 59: HOUSE-BUILDING FOR GOD.

THE site being now cleared, we questioned whether to build only a temporary home, hoping to return to dear old Tanna as soon as possible, or, though the labor would be vastly greater, a substantial house—for the comfort of our successors, if not of ourselves. We decided that, as this was work for God, we would make it the very best we could. We planned two central rooms, sixteen feet by sixteen, with a five feet wide lobby between, so that other rooms could be added when required. About a quarter of a mile from the sea, and thirty-five feet above its level, I laid the foundations of the house. Coral blocks raised the wall about three feet high all round. Air passages carried sweeping currents underneath each room, and greatly lessened the risk of fever and ague. A wide trench was dug all round, and filled up as a drain with broken coral. At back and front, the verandah stretched five feet wide; and pantry, bath-room, and tool-house were partitioned off under the verandah behind. The windows sent to me had hinges; I added two feet to each, with wood from Mission-boxes, and made them French door-windows, opening from each room to the verandah. And so we had, by God's blessing, a healthy spot to live in, if not exactly a thing of beauty!

The Mission House, as ultimately finished, had six rooms, three on each side of the lobby, and measured ninety feet in length, surrounded by a verandah, one hundred feet by five, which kept everything shaded and cool. Underneath two rooms a cellar was dug eight feet deep, and shelved all round for a store. In more than one terrific hurricane that cellar saved our lives,—all crushing into it when trees and houses were being tossed like feathers on the wings of the wind. Altogether, the house at Aniwa has proved one of the healthiest and most commodious of any that have been planted by Christian hands on the New Hebrides. In selecting site and in building "the good hand of our God was upon us for good."

I built also two small Orphanages, almost as inevitably necessary as the Missionary's own house. They stood on a line with the front of my own dwelling, one for girls, the other for boys, and we had them constantly under our own eyes. The orphans were practically boarded at the Mission premises, and adopted by the Missionaries. Their clothing was a heavy drain upon our resources; and every odd and curious article that came in any of the boxes or parcels was utilized. We trained these young people for Jesus. And at this day many of the best of our Native Teachers, and most devoted Christian helpers, are amongst those who would probably have perished but for these Orphanages.

Every day after dinner we set the bell a-ringing—intimating, from, our first arrival on Aniwa, readiness to give advice or medicine to all who were sick. We spoke to them, so soon as we had learned, a few words about Jesus. The weak received a cup of tea and a piece of bread. The demand was sometimes great, especially when epidemics befell them. But some rather fled from us as the cause of their sickness, and sought refuge from our presence in remotest corners, or rushed off at our approach and concealed themselves in the bush. They were but children, and full of superstition; and we had to win them by kindly patience, never losing faith in them and hope for them, any more than the Lord did with us!

Our learning the language on Aniwa was marked by similar incidents to those of Tanna related in a preceding chapter; though a few of them could understand my Tannese, and that greatly helped me. One day a man, after carefully examining some article, turned to his neighbor and said, "Taha tinei?"

I inferred that he was asking, "What is this?" Pointing to another article, I repeated their words; they smiled at each other, and gave me its name.

On another occasion, a man said to his companion, looking toward me, "Taha neigo?" Concluding that he was asking my name, I pointed towards him, and repeated the words, and they at once gave me their names.

Readers would be surprised to discover how much you can readily learn of any language, with these two short questions constantly on your lips, and with people ready at every turn to answer—"What's this?" "What's your name?" Every word was at once written down, spelled phonetically and arranged in alphabetic order, and a note appended as to the circumstances in which it was used. By frequent comparison of these notes, and by careful daily and even hourly imitation of all their sounds, we were able in a measure to understand each other before we had gone far in the house-building operations, during which some of them were constantly beside me.

One incident of that time was very memorable, and God turned it to good account for higher ends. I often tell it as "the miracle of the speaking bit of wood"; and it has happened to other Missionaries exactly as to myself. While working at the house, I required some nails and tools. Lifting a piece of planed wood, I penciled a few words on it, and requested our old Chief to carry it to Mrs. Paton, and she would send what I wanted. In blank wonder, he innocently stared at me, and said, "But what do you want?"

I replied, "The wood will tell her." He looked rather angry, thinking that I befooled him, and retorted, "Who ever heard of wood speaking?"

By hard pleading I succeeded in persuading him to go. He was amazed to see her looking at the wood and then fetching the needed articles. He brought back the bit of wood, and eagerly made signs for an explanation. Chiefly in broken Tannese I read to him the words, and informed him that in the same way God spoke to us through His Book. The will of God was written there, and by and by, when he learned to read, he would hear God speaking to him from its page, as Mrs. Paton heard me from the bit of wood.

A great desire was thus awakened in the poor man's soul to see the very Word of God printed in his own language. He helped me to learn words and master ideas with growing enthusiasm. And when my work of translating portions of Holy Scripture began, his delight was unbounded and his help invaluable. The miracle of a speaking page was not less wonderful than that of speaking wood!

One day, while building the house, an old Inland Chief and his three sons came to see us. Everything was to them full of wonder. After returning home one of the sons fell sick, and the father at once blamed us and the Worship, declaring that if the lad died we all should be murdered in revenge. By God's blessing, and by our careful nursing and suitable medicine, he recovered and was spared. The old Chief superstitiously wheeled round almost to another extreme. He became not only friendly, but devoted to us. He attended the Sabbath Services, and listened to the Aneityumese Teachers, and to my first attempts, partly in Tannese, translated by the orator Taia or the Chief Namakei, and explained in our hearing to the people in their mother tongue.

But on the heels of this, another calamity overtook us. So soon as two rooms of the Mission House were roofed in, I hired the stoutest of the young men to carry our boxes thither. Two of them started off with a heavy box suspended on a pole from shoulder to shoulder, their usual custom. They were shortly after attacked with vomiting of blood; and one of them, an Erromangan, actually died. The father of the other swore that, if his son did not get better, every soul at the Mission House should be slain in revenge. But God mercifully restored him.

As the boat-landing was nearly three-quarters of a mile distant, and such a calamity recurring would be not only sorrowful in itself but perilous in the extreme for us all, I steeped my wits, and with such crude materials as were at hand, I manufactured not only a hand-barrow, but a wheel-barrow, for the pressing emergencies of the time. In due course, I procured a more orthodox hand-cart from the Colonies, and coaxed and bribed the Natives to assist me in making a road for it. Perhaps the ghost of Macadam would shudder at the appearance of that road, but it has proved immensely useful ever since.

CHAPTER 60: A CITY OF GOD.

When, in the course of years, everything had been completed to our taste, we lived practically in the midst of a beautiful village,—the Church, the School, the Orphanage, the Smithy and Joiner's Shop, the Printing Office, the Banana and Yam House, the Cook House, etc.; all very humble indeed, but all standing sturdily up there among the orange-trees, and preaching the Gospel of a higher civilization and of a better life for Aniwa. The little road leading to each door was laid with the white coral broken small. The fence around all shone fresh and clean with new paint. Order and taste were seen to be laws in the white man's New Life; and several of the Natives began diligently to follow our example.

Many and strange were the arts which I had to try to practise, such as handling the adze, the mysteries of tenon and mortise, and other feats of skill. If a Native wanted a fish-hook, or a piece of red calico to bind his long whip-cord hair, he would carry me a block of coral or fetch me a beam; but continuous daily toil seemed to him a mean existence. The women were tempted, by calico and beads for pay, to assist in preparing the sugar-cane leaf for thatch, gathering it in the plantations, and tying it over reeds four or six feet long with strips of bark of pandanus leaf, leaving a long fringe hanging over on one side. How differently they acted when the Gospel began to touch their hearts! They built their Church and their Schools then, by their own free toil, rejoicing to labor without money or price; and they have ever since kept them in good repair, for the service of the Lord, by their voluntary offerings of wood and sugar-cane leaf and coral-lime.

The roof was firmly tied on and nailed; thereon were laid the reeds, fringed with sugar-cane leaf, row after row tied firmly to the wood; the ridge was bound down by cocoanut leaves, dexterously plaited from side to side and skewered to the ridge-pole with hard wooden pins; and over all, a fresh storm-roof was laid on yearly for the hurricane months, composed of folded cocoanut leaves, held down with planks of wood, and bound to the frame-work below—which, however, had to be removed again in April to save the sugar-cane leaf from rotting beneath it. There you were snugly covered in, and your thatching good to last from eight years to ten; that is, provided you were not caught in the sweep of the hurricane, before which trees went flying like straws, huts disappeared like autumn leaves, and your Mission House, if left standing at all, was probably swept bare alike of roof and thatch at a single stroke! Well for you at such times if you have a good barometer indicating the approach of the storm; and better still, a large cellar like ours, four-and-twenty feet by sixteen, built round with solid coral blocks,—where goods may be stored, and whereinto also all your household may creep for safety, while the tornado tosses your dwelling about, and sets huge trees dancing around you! We had also to invent a lime-kiln, and this proved one of the hardest nuts of all that had to be cracked. The kind of coral required could be obtained only at one spot, about three miles distant. Lying at anchor in my boat, the Natives dived into the sea, broke off with hammer and crowbar piece after piece, and brought it up to me, till I had my load. We then carried it ashore, and spread it out in the sun to be blistered there for two weeks or so. Having thus secured twenty or thirty boat-loads, and had it duly conveyed round to the Mission Station, a huge pit was dug in the ground, dry wood piled in below, and green wood above to the height of several feet, and on the top of all the coral blocks were orderly laid. When this pile had burned for seven or ten days, the coral had been reduced to excellent lime, and the plasterwork made therefrom shone like marble.

On one of these trips the Natives performed an extraordinary feat. The boat with full load was struck heavily by a wave, and the reef drove a hole in her side. Quick as thought the crew were all in the sea, and, to my amazement, bearing up the boat with their shoulder and one hand, while swimming and guiding us ashore with the other! There on the land we were hauled up, and four weary days were spent fetching and carrying from the Mission Station every plank, tool, and nail, necessary for her repair. Every boat for these seas ought to be built of cedar wood and copper-fastened, which is by far the most economical in the end. And all houses should be built of wood which is as full as possible of gum or resin, since the large white ants devour not only other soft woods, but even Colonial blue gum-trees, the hard cocoanut, and window sashes, chairs, and tables!

Glancing back on all these toils, I rejoice that such exhausting demands are no longer made on our newly-arrived Missionaries. Houses, all ready for being set up, are now brought down from the Colonies. Zinc roofs and other improvements have been introduced. The Synod appoints a deputation to accompany the young Missionary, and plant the house along with himself at the Station committed to his care. Precious strength is thus saved for higher uses; and not only property but life itself is oftentimes preserved.

I will close this chapter with an incident which, though it came to our knowledge only years afterwards, closely bears upon our Settlement on Aniwa. At first we had no idea why they so determinedly refused us one site, and fixed us to another of their own choice. But after the old Chief Namakei became a Christian, he one day addressed the Aniwan people in our hearing to this effect:—

"When Missi came we saw his boxes. We knew he had blankets and calico, axes and knives, fish-hooks and all such things. We said, 'Don't drive him off, else we will lose all these things. We will let him land. But we will force him to live on the Sacred Plot. Our gods will kill him, and we will divide all that he has amongst the men of Aniwa.' But Missi built his house on our most sacred spot. He and his people lived there, and the gods did not strike. He planted bananas there, and we said, 'Now when they eat of these they will all drop down dead, as our fathers assured us, if any one ate fruit from that ground, except only our Sacred Men themselves.' These bananas ripened. They did eat them. We kept watching for days and days, but no one died! Therefore what we say, and what our fathers have said, is not true. Our gods cannot kill them. Their Jehovah God is stronger than the gods of Aniwa."

I enforced old Namakei's appeal, telling them that, though they knew it not, it was the living and true and only God who had sent them every blessing which they possessed, and had at last sent us to teach them how to serve and love and please Him. In wonder and silence they listened, while I tried to explain to them that Jesus, the Son of this God, had lived and died and gone to the Father to save them, and that He was now willing to take them by the hand and lead them through this life to glory and immortality together with Himself.

The old Chief led them in prayer—a strange, dark, groping prayer, with streaks of Heathenism coloring every thought and sentence; but still a heart-breaking prayer, as the cry of a soul once Cannibal, but now being thrilled through and through with the first conscious pulsations of the Christ-Spirit, throbbing into the words—"Father, Father; our Father."

When these poor creatures began to wear a bit of calico or a kilt, it was an outward sign of a change, though yet far from civilization. And when they began to look up and pray to One whom they called "Father, our Father," though they might be far, very far, from the type of Christian that dubs itself "respectable," my heart broke over them in tears of joy; and nothing will ever persuade me that there was not a Divine Heart in the Heavens rejoicing too.

CHAPTER 61: THE RELIGION OF REVENGE.

ON landing in November, 1866, we found the Natives of Aniwa, some very shy and distrustful, and others forward and imperious. No clothing was worn; but the wives and elder women had grass aprons or girdles like our first parents in Eden. The old Chief interested himself in us and our work; but the greater number showed a far deeper interest in the axes, knives, fishhooks, strips of red calico, and blankets, received in payment for work or for bananas. Even for payment they would scarcely work at first, and they were most unreasonable, easily offended, and started off in a moment at any imaginable slight.

For instance, a Chief once came for medicine. I was so engaged that I could not attend to him for a few minutes. So off he went, in a great rage, threatening revenge, and muttering, "I must be attended to! I won't wait on him." Such were the exactions of a naked savage!

Shortly before our arrival, an Aneityumese Teacher was sacrificed on Aniwa. The circumstances are illustrative of what may be almost called their worship of revenge. Many long years ago, a party of Aniwans had gone to Aneityum on a friendly visit; but the Aneityumese, then all savages, murdered and ate every man of them save one, who escaped into the bush. Living on cocoanuts, he awaited a favorable wind, and, launching his canoe by night, he arrived in safety. The bereaved Aniwans, hearing his terrible story, were furious for revenge; but the forty-five miles of sea between proving too hard an obstacle, they made a deep cut in the earth and vowed to renew that cut from year to year till the day of revenge came round. Thus the memory of the event was kept alive for nearly eighty years.

At length the people of Aneityum came to the knowledge of Jesus Christ. They strongly yearned to spread their saving Gospel to the Heathen Islands all around. Amid prayers and strong cryings to God they, like the Church at Antioch, designated two of their leading men to go as Native Teachers and evangelize Aniwa, viz. Navalak and Nemeyan; whilst others went forth to Fotuna, Tanna, and Erromanga, as opportunity arose. Namakei, the principal Chief of Aniwa, had promised to protect and be kind to them. But as time went on, it was discovered that the Teachers belonged to the Tribe on Aneityum, and one of them to the very land, where long ago the Aniwans had been murdered. The Teachers had from the first known their danger, but were eager to make known the Gospel to Aniwa. It was resolved that they should die. But the Aniwans, having promised to protect them, shrank from doing it themselves; so they hired two Tanna-men and an Aniwan Chief, one of whose parents had belonged to Tanna, to waylay and shoot the Teachers as they returned from their tour of Evangelism among the villages on Sabbath afternoon. Their muskets did not go off, but the murderers rushed upon them with clubs and left them for dead.

Nemeyan was dead, and entered that day amongst the noble army of the Martyrs. Poor Navalak was still breathing, and the Chief Namakei carried him to his village and kindly nursed him. He pleaded with the people that the claims of revenge had been satisfied, and that Navalak should be cherished and sent home,—the Christ-Spirit beginning to work in that darkened soul! Navalak was restored to his people and is yet living (1888)—a high class Chief on Aneityum, and an honor to the Church of God, bearing on his body "the marks of the Lord Jesus." And often since has he visited Aniwa, in later years, and praised the Lord amongst the very people who once thirsted for his blood and left him by the wayside as good as dead!

For a time, Aniwa was left without any witness for Jesus,—the London Missionary Society Teachers, having suffered dreadfully for lack of food and from fever and ague, being also removed. But on a visit of a Mission vessel, Namakei sent his orator Taia to Aneityum, to tell them that now revenge was satisfied, the cut in the earth filled up, and a cocoanut tree planted and flourishing where the blood of the Teachers had been shed, and that no person from Aneityum would ever be injured by Aniwans. Further, he was to plead for more Teachers, and to pledge his Chiefs word that they would be kindly received and protected. They knew not the Gospel, and had no desire for it; but they wanted friendly intercourse with Aneityum, where trading vessels called, and whence they might obtain mats, baskets, blankets, and iron tools. At length two Aneityumese again volunteered to go, Kangaru and Nelmai, one from each side of the Island, and were located by the Missionaries, along with their families, on Aniwa, one with Namakei, and the other at the south end, to lift up the Standard of a Christlike life among their Heathen neighbors.

Taia, who went on the Mission to Aneityum, was a great speaker and also a very cunning man. He was the old Chief's appointed "Orator" on all state occasions, being tall and stately in appearance, of great bodily strength, and possessed of a winning manner. On the voyage to Aneityum he was constantly smoking and making things disagreeable to all around him. Being advised not to smoke while on board, he pleaded with the Missionary just to let him take a whiff now and again till he finished the tobacco he had in his pipe, and then he would lay it aside. But, like the widow's meal, it lasted all the way to Aneityum, and never appeared to get less—at which the innocent Taia expressed much astonishment!

CHAPTER 62: FIRST FRUITS ON ANIWA.

THE two Teachers and their wives on Aniwa were little better than slaves when we landed there, toiling in the service of their masters and living in constant fear of being murdered. Doubtless, however, the mighty contrast presented by the life, character, and disposition of these godly Teachers was the sowing of the seed that bore fruit in other days,—though as yet no single Aniwan had begun to wear clothing out of respect to Civilization, much less been brought to know and love the Saviour.

So soon as I could speak a little to them in their own language, we began to visit regularly at their villages and to talk to them about Jesus and His love. We tried also to get them to come to our Church under the shade of the banyan tree. Nasi and some of the worst characters would sit scowling not far off, or follow us with loaded muskets. Using every precaution, we still held on doing our work; sometimes giving fish-hooks or beads to the boys and girls, showing them that our objects were kind and not selfish. And however our hearts sometimes trembled in the presence of imminent death and sank within us, we stood fearless in their presence, and left all results in the hands of Jesus. Often have I had to run into the arms of some savage, when his club was swung or his musket leveled at my head, and, praying to Jesus, so clung round him that he could neither strike nor shoot me till his wrath cooled down, and I managed to slip away. Often have I seized the pointed barrel and directed it upwards, or, pleading with my assailant, uncapped his musket in the struggle. At other times, nothing could be said, nothing done, but stand still in silent prayer, asking God to protect us or to prepare us for going home to His Glory. He fulfilled His own promise—"I will not fail thee nor forsake thee."

The first Aniwan that ever came to the knowledge and love of Jesus was the old Chief Namakei. We came to live on his land, as it was near our diminutive harbor; and, upon the whole, he and his people were the most friendly, though his only brother, the Sacred Man of the tribe, on two occasions tried to shoot me. Namakei came a good deal about us at the Mission House, and helped us to acquire the language. He discovered that we took tea evening and morning. When we gave him a cup and a piece of bread, he liked it well, and gave a sip to all around him. At first he came for the tea, perhaps, and disappeared suspiciously soon thereafter; but his interest manifestly grew, till he showed great delight in helping us in every possible way. Along with him and as his associates came also the Chief Naswai and his wife Katua. These three grew into the knowledge of the Saviour together. From being savage Cannibals they rose before our eyes, under the influence of the Gospel, into noble and beloved characters, and they and we loved each other exceedingly.

Namakei brought his little daughter, his only child, the Queen of her race, called Litsi Soré (=Litsi the Great), and said, "I want to leave my Litsi with you, I want you to train her for Jesus."

She was a very intelligent child, learned things like any white girl, and soon became quite a help to Mrs. Paton. On seeing his niece dressed, and so smart-looking, the old Chief's only brother, the Sacred Man that had attempted to shoot me, also brought his child, Litsi Sisi (=the Little) to be trained like her cousin. The mothers of both were dead. The children reported all they saw, and all we taught them, and so their fathers became more deeply interested in our work, and the news of the Gospel spread far and wide. Soon we had all the Orphans committed to us, whose guardians were willing to part with them, and our Home become literally the School of Christ—the boys growing up to help all my plans, and the girls to help my wife and to be civilized and trained by her, and many of them developing into devoted Teachers and Evangelists.

Our earlier Sabbath Services were sad affairs. Every man came armed—indeed, every man slept with his weapons of war at his side—and bow and arrow, spear and tomahawk, club and musket, were always ready for action. On fair days we assembled under the banyan tree, on rainy days in a Native hut partly built for the purpose. One or two seemed to listen, but the most lay about on their backs or sides, smoking, talking, sleeping! When we stopped the feast at the close, which the Aneityumese Teacher had been forced to prepare before our coming, and for which they were always ready, the audiences at first went down to two or three; but these actually came to learn, and a better tone began immediately to pervade the Service. We informed them that it was for their good that we taught them, and that they would get no "pay" for attending Church or School, and the greater number departed in high dudgeon as very ill-used persons! Others of a more commercial turn came offering to sell their "idols," and when we would not purchase them, but urged them to give up and cast them away for love to Jesus, they carried them off, saying they would have nothing to do with this new Worship.

Amidst our frequent trials and dangers in those earlier times on Aniwa, our little Orphans often warned us privately and and saved our lives from cruel plots. When, in baffled rage, our enemies demanded who had revealed things to us, I always said, "It was a little bird from the bush." So the dear children grew to have perfect confidence in us. They knew we would not betray them; and they considered themselves the guardians of our lives.

CHAPTER 63: TRADITIONS AND CUSTOMS.

WHAT a suggestive tradition of the Fall came to me in one of those early days on Aniwa! Upon our leaving the hut and removing to our new house, it was seized upon by Tupa for his sleeping-place, though still continuing to be used by the Natives as club-house, court of law, etc. One morning at daylight this Tupa came running to us in great excitement, wielding his club furiously, and crying, "Missi, I have killed the Tebil. I have killed Teapolo. He came to catch me last night. I raised all the people, and we fought him round the house with our clubs. At daybreak he came out and I killed him dead. We will have no more bad conduct or trouble now. Teapolo is dead!"

I said, "What nonsense; Teapolo is a spirit, and cannot be seen."

But in mad excitement he persisted that he had killed him. And at Mrs. Paton's advice, I went with the man, and he led me to a great Sacred Rock of coral near our old hut, over which hung the dead body of a huge and beautiful sea-serpent, and exclaimed, "There he lies! Truly I killed him."

I protested, "That is not the Devil; it is only the body of a serpent."

The man quickly answered, "Well? but it is all the game! He is Teapolo. He makes us bad, and causes all our troubles."

Following up this hint by many inquiries, then and afterwards, I found that they clearly associated man's troubles and sufferings somehow with the serpent. They worshiped the Serpent, as a spirit of evil, under the name of Matshiktshiki; that is to say, they lived in abject terror of his influence, and all their worship was directed towards propitiating his rage against man.

Their story of Creation, at least of the origin of their own Aniwa and the adjacent Islands, is much more an outcome of the unaided Native mind. They say that Matshiktshiki fished up these lands out of the sea. And they show the deep print of his foot on the coral rocks, opposite each island, whereon he stood as he strained and lifted them up above the waters. He then threw his great fishing-line round Fotuna, thirty-six miles distant, to draw it close to Aniwa and make them one land; but, as he pulled, the line broke and he fell, where his mark may still be seen upon the rock—so the Islands remain separated unto this day.

Matshiktshiki placed men and women on Aniwa. On the southern end of the Island there was a beautiful spring and a freshwater river, with rich land all around, for plantations. But the people would not do what Matshiktshiki wanted them; so he got angry, and split off the richer part of Aniwa, with the spring and river, and sailed with them across to Aneityum, leaving them where Dr. Inglis has since built his beautiful Mission Station. To this day, the river there is called "the water of Aniwa" by the inhabitants of both islands; and it is the ambition of all Aniwans to visit Aneityum and drink of that spring and river, as they sigh to each other, "Alas, for the waters of Aniwa!"

Their picture of the Flood is equally grotesque. Far back, when the volcano now on Tanna was part of Aniwa, the rain fell and fell from day to day, and the sea rose till it threatened to cover everything. All were drowned except the few who climbed up on the volcano mountain. The sea had already put out the volcano at the southern end of Aniwa; and Matshiktshiki, who dwelt in the greater volcano, becoming afraid of the extinction of his big fire too, split it off from Aniwa with all the land on the southeastern side, and sailed it across to Tanna on the top of the flood. There, by his mighty strength, he heaved the volcano to the top of a high mountain in Tanna, where it remains to this day. For, on the subsiding of the sea, he was unable to transfer his big fire to Aniwa; and so it was reduced to a very small island, without a volcano, and without a river, for the sins of the people long ago.

Even where there are no snakes they apply the superstitions about the serpent to a large, black, poisonous lizard called Kekvau. They call it Teapolo, and women or children scream wildly at the sight of one.

One of the darkest and most hideous blots on Heathenism is the practice of Infanticide. Only three cases came to our knowledge on Aniwa; but we publicly denounced them at all hazards, and awoke not only natural feeling, but the selfish interests of the community for the protection of the children. These three were the last that died there by parents' hands. A young husband, who had been jealous of his wife, buried their male child alive as soon as born. An old Tanna woman, who had no children living, having at last a fine healthy boy born to her, threw him into the sea before any one could interfere to save. And a savage, in anger with his wife, snatched her baby from her arms, hid himself in the bush till night, and returned without the child, refusing to give any explanation, except that he was dead and buried. Praise be to God, these three murderers of their own children were by and by touched with the story of Jesus, became members of the Church, and each adopted little orphan children, towards whom they continued to show the most tender affection and care.

Wife-murder was also considered quite legitimate. In one of our inland villages dwelt a young couple, happy in every respect except that they had no children. The man, being a Heathen, resolved to take home another wife, a widow with two children. This was naturally opposed by his young wife. And, without the slightest warning, while she sat plaiting a basket, he discharged a ball into her from his loaded musket. It crashed through her arm and lodged in her side. Everything was done that was in my power to save her life; but on the tenth day tetanus came on, and she soon after passed away. The man appeared very attentive to her all the time; but, being a Heathen, he insisted that she had no right to oppose his wishes! He was not in any way punished or disrespected by the people of his village, but went out and in amongst them as usual, and took home the other woman as his wife a few weeks thereafter. His second wife began to attend Church and School regularly with her children; and at last he also came along with them, changing very manifestly from his sullen and savage former self. They have a large family; they are avowedly trying to train them all for the Lord Jesus, and they take their places meekly at the Lord's Table.

It would give a wonderful shock, I suppose, to many namby-pamby Christians to whom the title "Mighty to Save" conveys no ideas of reality, to be told that nine or ten converted murderers were partaking with them the Holy Communion of Jesus! But the Lord who reads the heart, and weighs every motive and circumstance, has perhaps much more reason to be shocked by the presence of some of themselves. Penitence opens all the heart of God—"To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."

CHAPTER 64: NELWANG'S ELOPEMENT.

SOME most absurd and preposterous experiences were forced upon us by the habits and notions of the people. Amongst these I recall very vividly the story of Nelwang's elopement with his bride. I had begun, in spare hours, to lay the foundation of two additional rooms for our house, and felt rather uneasy to see a well-known savage hanging around every day with his tomahawk, and eagerly watching me at work. He had killed a man, before our arrival on Aniwa; and had also startled my wife by suddenly appearing from amongst the boxes, and causing her to run for life. On seeing him hovering so alarmingly near, tomahawk in hand, I saluted him, "Nelwang, do you want to speak to me?"

"Yes, Missi," he replied; "if you will help me now, I will be your friend forever."

I answered, "I am your friend. That brought me here and keeps me here."

"Yes," said he very earnestly, "but I want you to be strong as my friend, and I will be strong for you!"

I replied, "Well, how can I help you?"

He quickly answered, "I want to get married, and I need your help."

I protested,—"Nelwang, you know that marriages here are all made in infancy, by children being bought and betrothed to their future husbands. How can I interfere? You don't want to bring evil on me and my wife and child? It might cost us our lives."

"No! no! Missi," earnestly retorted Nelwang. "No one hears of this, or can hear. Only help me now. You tell me, if you were my circumstances, how would you act?"

"That's surely very simple," I answered. "Every man knows how to go about that business, if he wants to be honest! Look out for your intended, find out if she loves you and the rest will follow naturally,—you will marry her."

"Yes," argued Nelwang, "but just there my trouble comes in!"

"Do you know the woman you would like to get?" I asked, wishing to bring him to some closer issue.

"Yes," replied he very frankly, "I want to marry Yakin, the Chiefs' widow up at the inland village, and that will break no infant betrothals."

"But," I persevered, "do you know if she loves you or would take you?"

"Yes," replied Nelwang; "one day I met her on the path and told her I would like to have her for my wife. She took out her ear-rings and gave them to me, and I know thereby that she loves me. I was one of her late husband's men; and if she had loved any of them more than she loved me, she would have given them to another. With the ear-rings she gave me her heart."

"Then why," I insisted, "don't you go and marry her?"

"There," said Nelwang gravely, "begins my difficulty. In her village there are thirty young men for whom there are no wives. Each of them wants her, but no one has the courage to take her, for the other nine-and-twenty will shoot him!"

"And if you take her," I suggested, "the disappointed thirty will shoot you!"

"That's exactly what I see, Missi," continued Nelwang; "but I want you just to think you are in my place, and tell me how you would carry her off. You white men can always succeed. Missi, hear my plans, and advise me."

With as serious a face as I could command, I had to listen to Nelwang, to enter into his love affair, and to make suggestions, with a view to avoiding bloodshed and other miseries. The result of the deliberations was that Nelwang was to secure the confidence of two friends, his brother and the orator Taia, to place one at each end of the coral rocks above the village as watchmen, to cut down with his American tomahawk a passage through the fence at the back, and to carry off his bride at dead of night into the seclusion and safety of the bush! Nelwang's eyes flashed as he flourished his tomahawk about and cried, "I see it now, Missi! I shall win her from them all. Yakin and I will be strong for you all our days."

Next morning Yakin's house was found deserted. They sent to all the villages around, but no one had seen her. The hole in the fence behind was then discovered, and the thirty whispered to each other that Yakin had been wooed and won by some daring lover. Messengers were despatched to all the villages, and Nelwang was found to have disappeared on the same night as the widow, and neither could anywhere be found.

The usual revenge was taken. The houses of the offenders burned, their fences broken down, and all their property either destroyed or distributed. Work was suspended, and the disappointed thirty solaced themselves by feasting at Yakin's expense.

Three weeks passed. The runaways were nowhere to be found. It was generally believed that they had gone in a canoe to Tanna or Erromanga. But one morning, as I began my work at my house alone, the brave Nelwang appeared at my side!

"Hillo!" I said, "where have you come from? and where is Yakin?"

"I must not," he replied, "tell you yet. We are hid. We have lived on cocoanuts gathered at night. Yakin is well and happy. I come now to fulfil my promise: I will help you, and Yakin will help Missi Paton the woman, and we shall be your friends. I have ground to be built upon and fenced, whenever we dare; but we will come and live with you, till peace is secured. Will you let us come to-morrow morning?"

"All right!" I said. "Come to-morrow!" And, trembling with delight, he disappeared into the bush.

Thus strangely God provided us with wonderful assistance. Yakin soon learnt to wash and dress and clean everything, and Nelwang served me like a faithful disciple. They clung by us like our very shadow, partly through fear of attack, partly from affection; but as each of them could handle freely both musket and tomahawk, which, though laid aside, were never far away, it was not every enemy that cared to try issues with Nelwang and his bride. After a few weeks had thus passed by, and as both of them were really showing an interest in things pertaining to Jesus and His Gospel, I urged them strongly to appear publicly at the Church on Sabbath, to show that they were determined to stand their ground together as true husband and wife, and that the others must accept the position and become reconciled. Delay now could gain no purpose, and I wished the strife and uncertainty to be put to an end.

Nelwang knew our customs. Every worshiper has to be seated, when our Church bell ceases ringing. Aniwans would be ashamed to enter after the Service had actually begun. As the bell ceased, Nelwang, knowing that he would have a clear course, marched in, dressed in shirt and kilt, but grasping very determinedly his tomahawk! He sat down as near to me as he could conveniently get, trying hard to conceal his manifest agitation. Silently smiling towards me, he then turned and looked eagerly at the other door through which the women entered and left the Church, as if to say, "Yakin is coming!" But his tomahawk was poised ominously on his shoulder, and his courage gave him a defiant and almost impudent air. He was evidently quite ready to sell his life at a high price, if any one was prepared to risk the consequences.

In a few seconds Yakin entered; and if Nelwang's bearing and appearance were rather inconsistent with the feeling of worship,—what on earth was I to do when the figure and costume of Yakin began to reveal itself marching in? The first visible difference betwixt a Heathen and a Christian is,—that the Christian wears some clothing, the Heathen wears none. Yakin had determined to show the extent of her Christianity by the amount of clothing she could carry upon her person. Being a Chief's widow before she became Nelwang's bride, she had some idea of state occasions, and appeared dressed in every article of European apparel, mostly portions of male attire, that she could beg or borrow from about the premises! Her bridal gown was a man's drab-colored great-coat, put on above her Native grass skirts, and sweeping down to her heels, buttoned tight. Over this she had hung on a vest, and above that again, most amazing of all, she had superinduced a pair of men's trousers, planting the body of them on her neck and shoulders, and leaving her head and face looking out from between the legs—a leg from either side streaming over her bosom arid dangling down absurdly in front! Fastened to the one shoulder also there was a red shirt, and to the other a striped shirt, waving about her like wings as she sailed along. Around her head a red shirt had been twisted like a turban, and her notions of art demanded that a sleeve thereof should hang aloft over each of her ears! She seemed to be a moving monster loaded with a mass of rags. The day was excessively hot, and the perspiration poured over her face in streams. She, too, sat as near to me as she could get on the women's side of the Church. Nelwang looked at me and then at her, smiling quietly, as if to say, "You never saw, in all your white world, a bride so grandly dressed!"

I little thought what I was bringing on myself when I urged them to come to Church. The sight of that poor creature sweltering before me constrained me for once to make the service very short—perhaps the shortest I ever conducted in all my life! The day ended in peace. The two souls were extremely happy; and I praised God that what might have been a scene of bloodshed had closed thus, even though it were in a kind of wild grotesquerie!

CHAPTER 65: THE CHRIST-SPIRIT AT WORK.

THE progress of God's work was most conspicuous in, relation to wars and revenges among the Natives. The two high Chiefs, Namakei and Naswai, frequently declared, "We are the men of Christ now. We must not fight. We must put down murders and crimes among our people."

Two young fools, returning from Tanna with muskets, attempted twice to shoot a man in sheer wantonness and display of malice. The Islanders met, and informed them that if man or woman was injured by them, the other men would load their muskets and shoot them dead in general council. This was a mighty step towards public order, and I greatly rejoiced before the Lord. His Spirit, like leaven, was at work!

My constant custom was, in order to prevent war, to run right in between the contending parties. My faith enabled me to grasp and realize the promise, "Lo, I am with you always." In Jesus I felt invulnerable and immortal, so long as I was doing His work. And I can truly say that these were the moments when I felt my Saviour to be most truly and sensibly present, inspiring and empowering me.

Another scheme had an excellent educative and religious influence. I tried to interest all the villages, and to treat all the Chiefs equally. In our early days, after getting into my two-roomed house, I engaged the Chief, or representative man of each district, to put up one or other at the many outhouses required at the Station. One, along with his people, built the cookhouse; another, the store; another, the banana and yam-house; another, the washing-house; another, the boys and girls' house; the houses for servants and teachers, the Schoolhouse, and the large shed, a kind of shelter where Natives sat and talked when not at work about the premises. Of course these all were at first only Native huts, of larger or smaller dimensions. But they were all built by contract for articles which they highly valued, such as axes, knives, yards of prints and calico, strings of beads, blankets, etc. They served our purpose for the time, and when another party, by contract also, had fenced around our premises, the Mission Station was really a beautiful, little, lively, and orderly village, and in itself no bad emblem of Christian and civilized life. The payments, made to all irrespectively, but only for work duly done and according to reasonable bargain, distributed property and gifts amongst them on wholesome principles, and encouraged a well-conditioned rivalry which had many happy effects.

Heathenism made many desperate and some strange efforts to stamp out our Cause on Aniwa, but the Lord held the helm. One old Chief, formerly friendly, turned against us. He ostentatiously set himself to make a canoe, working at it very openly and defiantly on Sabbaths. He, becoming sick and dying, his brother started, on a Sabbath morning and in contempt of the Worship, with an armed company to provoke our people to war. They refused to fight; and one man, whom he struck with his club, said, "I will leave my revenge to Jehovah."

A few days thereafter, this brother also fell sick and suddenly died. The Heathen party made much of these incidents, and some clamored for our death in revenge, but most feared to murder us; so they withdrew and lived apart from our friends, as far away as they could get. By and by, however, they set fire to a large district belonging to our supporters burning cocoanut and breadfruit trees and plantations. Still our people refused to fight, and kept near to protect us. Then all the leading men assembled to talk it over. Most were for peace, but some insisted upon burning our house and driving us away or killing us, that they might be left to live as they had hitherto done. At last a Sacred Man, a Chief who had been on Tanna when the Curaçoa punished the murderers and robbers, but protected the villages of the friendly Natives there, stood up and spoke in our defense, and warned them what might happen; and other three, who had been under my instruction on Tanna, declared themselves to be the friends of Jehovah and of His Missionary. Finally, the Sacred Man rose again, and showed them rows of beautiful white shells strung round his left arm, saying—

"Nowar, the great Chief at Port Resolution on Tanna, when he saw that Missi and his wife could not be kept there, took me to his heart, and pledged me by these, the shells of his office as Chief, taken from his own arm and bound on mine, to protect them from all harm. He told me to declare to the men of Aniwa that if the Missi be injured or slain, he and his warriors will come from Tanna and take the full revenge in blood." This turned the scale. The meeting closed in our favor.

Close on the heels of this, another and a rather perplexing incident befell us. A party of Heathens assembled and made a great display of fishing on the Lord's Day, in contempt of the practice of the men on Jehovah's side, threatening also to waylay the Teachers and myself in our village circuits. A meeting was held by the Christian party, at the close of the Sabbath Services. All who wished to serve Jehovah were to come to my house next morning, unarmed, and accompany me on a visit to our enemies, that we might talk and reason together with them. By daybreak, the Chiefs and nearly eighty men assembled at the Mission House, declaring that they were on Jehovah's side, and wished to go with me. But, alas! they refused to lay down their arms, or leave them behind; nor would they either refrain from going or suffer me to go alone. Pledging them to peace, I was reluctantly placed at their head, and we marched off to the village of the unfriendly party.

The villagers were greatly alarmed. The Chief's two sons came forth with every available man to meet us. That whole day was consumed in talking and speechifying, sometimes chanting their replies—the Natives are all inveterate talkers! To me the day was utterly wearisome; but it had one redeeming feature,—their rage found vent in hours of palaver, instead of blows and blood. It ended in peace. The Heathen were amazed at the number of Jehovah's friends; and they pledged themselves henceforth to leave the Worship alone, and that every one who pleased might come to it unmolested. For this, worn out and weary, we returned, praising the Lord.

CHAPTER 66: THE SINKING OF THE WELL.

BUT I must here record the story of the Sinking of the Well, which broke the back of Heathenism on Aniwa. Being a flat coral island, with no hills to attract the clouds, rain is scarce there as compared with the adjoining mountainous islands; and even when it does fall heavily, with tropical profusion, it disappears, as said before, through the light soil and porous rock, and drains itself directly into the sea. The rainy season is from December to April, and then the disease most characteristic of all these regions is apt to prevail, viz., fever and ague.

At certain seasons, the Natives drink very unwholesome water; and, indeed, the best water they had at any time for drinking purposes was from the precious cocoanut, a kind of Apple of Paradise for all these Southern Isles! They also cultivate the sugar-cane very extensively, and in great variety; and they chew it, when we would fly to water for thirst; so it is to them both food and drink. The black fellow carries with him to the field, when he goes off for a day's work, four or five sticks of sugar-cane, and puts in his time comfortably enough on these. Besides, the sea being their universal bathing-place, in which they swattle like fish, and little water, almost none, being required for cooking purposes, and none whatever for washing clothes, the lack of fresh-springing water was not the dreadful trial to them that it would be to us. Yet they appreciate and rejoice in it immensely too; though the water of the green cocoanut is refreshing, and in appearance, taste, and color not unlike lemonade—one nut filling a tumbler; and though when mothers die they feed the babies on it and on the soft white pith, and they flourish on the same, yet the Natives themselves show their delight in preferring, when they can get it, the water from the well.

Aniwa, having therefore no permanent supply of fresh water, in spring or stream or lake, and my own household also suffering sadly for lack of the same, I resolved by the help of God to sink a well near the Mission Premises, hoping that a wisdom higher than my own would guide me to the source of some blessed spring. Of the scientific conditions of such an experiment I was comparatively ignorant; but I counted on having to dig through earth and coral above thirty feet, and my constant fear was, that owing to our environment, the water, if water I found, could only be salt water after all my toils! Still I resolved to sink that shaft in hope, and in faith that the Son of God would be glorified thereby.

One morning I said to the old Chief and his fellow-Chief, both now earnestly inquiring about the religion of Jehovah and of Jesus, "I am going to sink a deep well down into the earth, to see if our God will send us fresh water up from below."

They looked at me with astonishment, and said in a tone of sympathy approaching to pity, "O Missi! Wait till the rain comes down, and we will save all we possibly can for you."

I replied, "We may all die for lack of water. If no fresh water can be got, we may be forced to leave you."

The old Chief looked imploringly, and said "O Missi! you must not leave us for that. Rain comes only from above. How could you expect our Island to send up showers of rain from below?"

I told him, "Fresh water does come up springing from the earth in my Land at home, and I hope to see it here also."

The old Chief grew more tender in his tones, and cried, "O Missi, your head is going wrong; you are losing something, or you would not talk wild like that! Don't let our people hear you talking about going down into the earth for rain, or they will never listen to your word or believe you again."

But I started upon my hazardous job, selecting a spot near the Mission Station and close to the public path, that my prospective well might be useful to all. I began to dig, with pick and spade and bucket at hand, an American axe for a hammer and crowbar, and a ladder for service by and bye. The good old Chief now told off his men in relays to watch me, lest I should attempt to take my own life, or do anything outrageous, saying, "Poor Missi! That's the way with all who go mad. There's no driving of a notion out of their heads. We must just watch him now. He will find it harder to work with pick and spade than with his pen, and when he's tired we'll persuade him to give it up."

I did get exhausted sooner than I expected, toiling under that tropical sun; but we never own before the Natives that we are beaten; so I went into the house and filled my vest pocket with large, beautiful English-made fish-hooks. These are very tempting to the young men as compared with their own,—skilfully made though they be out of shell, and serving their purposes wonderfully. Holding up a large hook, I cried, "One of these to every man who fills and turns over three buckets out of this hole!"

A rush was made to get the first turn, and back again for another and another. I kept those on one side who had got a turn, till all the rest in order had a chance, and bucket after bucket was filled and emptied rapidly. Still the shaft seemed to lower very slowly, while my fish-hooks were disappearing very quickly. I was constantly there, and took the heavy share of everything, and was thankful one evening to find that we had cleared more than twelve feet deep,—when lo! next morning, one side had rushed in, and our work was all undone.

The old Chief and his best men now came around me more earnestly than ever. He remonstrated with me very gravely. He assured me for the fiftieth time that rain would never be seen coming up through the earth on Aniwa!

"Now," said he, "had you been in that hole last night, you would have been buried, and a Man-of-war would have come from Queen 'Toria to ask for the Missi that lived here. We would have to say, 'He is down in that hole.' The Captain would ask, 'Who killed him and put him down there?' We would have to say, 'He went down there himself!' The Captain would answer, 'Nonsense! Who ever heard of a white man going down into the earth to bury himself? You killed him, you put him there; don't hide your bad conduct with lies!' Then he would bring out his big guns and shoot us, and destroy our Island in revenge. You are making your own grave, Missi, and you will make ours too. Give up this mad freak, for no rain will be found by going downwards on Aniwa. Besides, all your fish-hooks cannot tempt my men again to enter that hole; they don't want to be buried with you. Will you not give it up now?"

I said all that I could to quiet his fears, explained to them that this falling in had happened by my neglect of precautions, and finally made known that by the help of my God, even without all other help, I meant to persevere.

Steeping my poor brains over the problem, I became an extemporized engineer. Two trees were searched for, with branches on opposite sides, capable of sustaining a cross tree betwixt them. I sank them on each side firmly into the ground, passed the beam across them over the center of the shaft, fastened thereon a rude home-made pulley and block, passed a rope over the wheel, and swung my largest bucket to the end of it. Thus equipped, I began once more sinking away at the well, but at so great an angle that the sides might not again fall in. Not a Native, however, would enter that hole, and I had to pick and dig away till I was utterly exhausted. But a Native Teacher, in whom I had confidence, took charge above, managing to hire them with axes, knives, etc., to seize the end of the rope and walk along the ground, pulling it till the bucket rose to the surface, and then he himself swung it aside, emptied it, and lowered it down again. I rang a little bell which I had with me, when the bucket was loaded, and that was the signal for my brave helpers to pull their rope. And thus I toiled on from day to day, my heart almost sinking sometimes with the sinking of the well, till we reached a depth of about thirty feet. And the phrase, "living water," "living water," kept chiming through my soul like music from God, as I dug and hammered away!

CHAPTER 67: RAIN FROM BELOW.

AT this depth the earth and coral began to be soaked with damp. I felt that we were nearing water. My soul had a faith that God would open a spring for us; but side by side with this faith was a strange terror that the water would be salt. So perplexing and mixed are even the highest experiences of the soul; the rose-flower of a perfect faith, set round and round with prickly thorns. One evening I said to the old Chief, "I think that Jehovah God will give us water to-morrow from that hole!"

The Chief said, "No, Missi; you will never see rain coming up from the earth on this Island. We wonder what is to be the end of this mad work of yours. We expect daily, if you reach water, to see you drop through into the sea and the sharks will eat you! That will be the end of it; death to you, and danger to us all."

I still answered, "Come to-morrow. I hope and believe that Jehovah God will send you the rain water up through the earth."

At the moment I knew I was risking much, and probably incurring sorrowful consequences, had no water been given; but I had faith that the Lord was leading me on, and I knew that I sought His glory, not my own.

Next morning, I went down again at daybreak and sank a narrow hole in the center about two feet deep. The perspiration broke over me with uncontrollable excitement, and I trembled through every limb, when the water rushed up and began to fill the hole. Muddy though it was, I eagerly tasted it, lapping it with my trembling hand, and then I almost fell upon my knees in that muddy bottom as my heart burst up in praise to the Lord. It was water! It was fresh water. It was living water from Jehovah's well! True, it was a little brackish, but nothing to speak of; and no spring in the desert, cooling the parched lips of a fevered pilgrim, ever appeared more worthy of being called a Well of God than did that water to me!

The Chiefs had assembled with their men near by. They waited on in eager expectancy. It was a rehearsal, in a small way, of the Israelites coming round, while Moses struck the rock and called for water. By and by, when I had praised the Lord, and my excitement was a little calmed, the mud being also greatly settled, I filled a jug, which I had taken down empty in the sight of them all, and ascending to the top called for them to come and see the rain which Jehovah God had given us through the well. They closed around me in haste, and gazed on it in superstitious fear. The old Chief shook it to see if it would spill, and then touched it to see if it felt like water. At last he tasted it, and rolling it in his mouth with joy for a moment, he swallowed it, and shouted, "Rain! Rain! Yes, it is Rain! But how did you get it?"

I repeated, "Jehovah my God gave it out of His own Earth in answer to our labors and prayers. Go and see it springing up for yourselves!"

Now, though every man there could climb the highest tree as swiftly and as fearlessly as a squirrel or an opossum, not one of them had courage to walk to the side and gaze down into that well. To them this was miraculous! But they were not without a resource that met the emergency. They agreed to take firm hold of each other by the hand, to place themselves in a long line, the foremost man to lean cautiously forward, gaze into the well, and then pass to the rear, and so on till all had seen "Jehovah's rain" far below. It was somewhat comical, yet far more pathetic, to stand by and watch their faces, as man after man peered down into the mystery, and then looked up at me in blank bewilderment! When all had seen it with their own very eyes, and were "weak with wonder," the old Chief exclaimed—

"Missi, wonderful, wonderful is the work of your Jehovah God! No god of Aniwa ever helped us in this way. The world is turned upside down since Jehovah came to Aniwa! But, Missi," continued he, after a pause that looked liked silent worship, "will it always rain up through the earth? or will it come and go like the rain from the clouds?"

I told them that I believed it would always continue there for our use, as a good gift from Jehovah.

"Well, but, Missi," replied the Chief some glimmering of self-interest beginning to strike his brain, "will you or your family drink it all, or shall we also have some?"

"You and all your people," I answered, "and all the people of the Island, may come and drink and carry away as much of it as you wish. I believe there will always be plenty for us all, and the more of it we can use the fresher it will be. That is the way with many of our Jehovah's best gifts to men, and for it and for all we praise His Name!"

"Then, Missi," said the Chief, "it will be our water, and we may all use it as our very own."

"Yes," I answered, "whenever you wish it, and as much as you need, both here and at your own houses, as far as it can possibly be made to go."

The Chief looked at me eagerly, fully convinced at length that the well contained a treasure, and exclaimed, "Missi, what can we do to help you now?"

I was thankful, indeed, to accept of the Chief's assistance, now sorely needed, and I said, "You have seen it fall in once already. If it falls again, it will conceal the rain from below which our God has given us. In order to preserve it for us and for our children in all time, we must build it round and round with great coral blocks from the bottom to the very top. I will now clear it out, and prepare the foundation for this wall of coral. Let every man and woman carry from the shore the largest block they can bring. It is well worth all the toil thus to preserve our great Jehovah's gift!"

Scarcely were my words uttered, when they rushed to the shore, with shoutings and songs of gladness; and soon every one was seen struggling under the biggest block of coral with which he dared to tackle. They lay like limestone rocks, broken up by the hurricanes, and rolled ashore in the arms of mighty billows; and in an incredibly short time scores of them were tumbled down for my use at the mouth of the well. Having prepared a foundation, I made ready a sort of bag-basket, into which every block was firmly tied and then let down to me by the pulley—a Native Teacher, a faithful fellow, cautiously guiding it. I received and placed each stone in its position, doing my poor best to wedge them one against the other, building circularly, and cutting them to the needed shape with my American ax. The wall is about three feet thick, and the masonry may be guaranteed to stand till the coral itself decays. I wrought incessantly, for fear of any further collapse, till I had it raised about twenty feet; and now, feeling secure, and my hands being dreadfully cut up, I intimated that I would rest a week or two, and finish the building then. But the Chief advanced and said—

"Missi, you have been strong to work. Your strength has fled. But rest here beside us; and just point out where each block is to be laid. We will lay them there, we will build them solidly behind like you. And no man will sleep till it is done."

With all their will and heart they started on the job; some carrying, some cutting and squaring the blocks, till the wall rose like magic, and a row of the hugest rocks laid round the top, bound all together, and formed the mouth of the well. Women, boys, and all wished to have a hand in building it, and it remains to this day, a solid wall of masonry, the circle being thirty-four feet deep, eight feet wide at the top, and six at the bottom. I floored it over with wood above all, and fixed the windlass and bucket, and there it stands as one of the greatest material blessings which the Lord has given to Aniwa. It rises and falls with the tide, though a third of a mile distant from the sea; and when, after using it, we tasted the pure fresh water on board the Dayspring, the latter seemed so insipid that I had to slip a little salt into my tea along with the sugar before I could enjoy it! All visitors are taken to see the well, as one of the wonders of Aniwa; and an Elder of the Native Church said to me, on a recent visit, "But for that water, during the last two years of drought, we would have all been dead!"

Very strangely, though the Natives themselves have since tried to sink six or seven wells in the most likely places near their different villages, they have either come to coral rock which they could not pierce, or found only water that was salt. And they say amongst themselves, "Missi not only used pick and spade, but he prayed and cried to his God. We have learned to dig, but not how to pray, and therefore Jehovah will not give us the rain, from below!"

CHAPTER 68: THE OLD CHIEF'S SERMON.

THE well was now finished. The place was neatly fenced in. And the old Chief said, "Missi, I think I could help you next Sabbath. Will you let me preach a sermon on the well?"

"Yes," I at once replied, "if you will try to bring all the people to hear you."

"Missi, I will try," he eagerly promised. The news spread like wildfire that the Chief Namakei was to be Missionary on the next day for the Worship, and the people, under great expectancy, urged each other to come and hear what he had to say.

Sabbath came round. Aniwa assembled in what was for that island a great crowd. Namakei appeared dressed in shirt and kilt. He was so excited, and flourished his tomahawk about at such a rate, that it was rather lively work to be near him. I conducted short opening devotions, and then called upon Namakei. He rose at once, with eye flashing wildly, and his limbs twitching with emotion. He spoke to the following effect, swinging his tomahawk to enforce every eloquent gesticulation:—

"Friends of Namakei, men and women and children of Aniwa, listen to my words! Since Missi came here he has talked many strange things we could not understand—things things all too wonderful; and we said regarding many of them that they must be lies. White people might believe such nonsense, but we said that the black fellow knew better than to receive it. But of all his wonderful stories, we thought the strangest was about sinking down through the earth to get rain! Then we said to each other, The man's head is turned; he's gone mad. But the Missi prayed on and wrought on, telling us that Jehovah God heard and saw, and that his God would give him rain. Was he mad? Has he not got the rain deep down in the earth? We mocked at him; but the water was there all the same. We have laughed at other things which the Missi told us, because we could not see them. But from this day I believe that all he tells us about his Jehovah God is true. Some day our eyes will see it. For to-day we have seen the rain from the earth."

Then rising to a climax, first the one foot and then the other making the broken coral on the floor fly behind like a war-horse pawing the ground, he cried with great eloquence:—

"My people, the people of Aniwa, the world is turned upside down since the word of Jehovah came to this land! Who ever expected to see rain coming up through the earth? It has always come from the clouds! Wonderful is the work of this Jehovah God. No god of Aniwa ever answered prayers as the Missi's God has done. Friends of Namakei, all the powers of the world could not have forced us to believe that rain could be given from the depths of the earth, if we had not seen it with our eyes, felt it and tasted it as we here do. Now, by the help of Jehovah God the Missi brought that invisible rain to view, which we never before heard of or saw, and"—(beating his hand on his breast, he exclaimed):—

"Something here in my heart tells me that the Jehovah God does exist, the Invisible One, whom we never heard of nor saw till the Missi brought Him to our knowledge. The coral has been removed, the land has been cleared away, and lo! the water rises. Invisible till this day, yet all the same it was there, though our eyes were too weak. So I, your Chief, do now firmly believe that when I die, when the bits of coral and the heaps of dust are removed which now blind my old eyes, I shall then see the Invisible Jehovah God with my soul, as Missi tells me, not less surely than I have seen the rain from the earth below. From this day, my people, I must worship the God who has opened for us the well, and who fills us with rain from below. The gods of Aniwa cannot hear, cannot help us, like the God of Missi. Henceforth I am a follower of Jehovah God. Let every man that thinks with me go now and fetch the idols of Aniwa, the gods which our fathers feared, and cast them down at Missi's feet. Let us burn and bury and destroy these things of wood and stone, and let us be taught by the Missi how to serve God who can hear, the Jehovah who gave us the well, and who will give us every other blessing, for He sent His Son Jesus to die for us and bring us to Heaven. This is what the Missi has been telling us every day since he landed on Aniwa. We laughed at him, but now we believe him. The Jehovah God has sent us rain from the earth. Why should He not also send us His Son from Heaven? Namakei stands up for Jehovah!"

This address, and the Sinking of the Well, broke the back of Heathenism on Aniwa. That very afternoon, the old Chief and several of his people brought their idols and cast them down at my feet beside the door of our house. Oh, the intense excitement of the weeks that followed! Company after company came to the spot, loaded with their gods of wood and stone, and piled them up in heaps, amid the tears and sobs of some, and the shoutings of others, in which was heard the oft-repeated word, "Jehovah! Jehovah!" What could be burned, we cast into the flames; others we buried in pits twelve or fifteen feet deep; and some few, more likely than the rest to feed or awaken superstition, we sank far out into the deep sea. Let no Heathen eyes ever gaze on them again!

One of the very first steps in Christian discipline to which they readily and almost unanimously took was the asking of God's blessing on every meal and praising the great Jehovah for their daily bread. Whosoever did not do so was regarded as a Heathen. (Query: how many white Heathens are there?) The next step, and it was taken in a manner as if by some common consent that was not less surprising than joyful, was a form of Family Worship every morning and evening. Doubtless the prayers were often very queer, and mixed up with many remaining superstitions; but they were prayers to the great Jehovah, the compassionate Father, the Invisible One—no longer to gods of stone!

Necessarily these were the conspicuous features of our life as Christians in their midst—morning and evening Family Prayer, and Grace at Meat; and hence, most naturally, their instinctive adoption and imitation of the same as the first outward tokens of Christian discipline. Every house in which there was not Prayer to God in the family was known thereby to be Heathen. This was a direct and practical evidence of the New Religion; and, so far as it goes (and that is very far indeed, where there is any sincerity beneath it), the test was one about which there could be no mistake on either side.

A third conspicuous feature stood out distinctly and at once,—the change as to the Lord's Day. Village after village followed in this also the example of the Mission House. All ordinary occupation ceased. Sabbath was spoken of as the Day for Jehovah. Saturday came to be called "Cooking Day," referring to the extra preparations for the coming day of rest and worship. They believed that it was Jehovah's will to keep the first day holy. The reverse was a distinctive mark of Heathenism.

The first traces of a new Social Order began to rise visibly on the delighted eye. The whole inhabitants, young and old, now attended School,—three generations sometimes at the one copy or A B C book! Thefts, quarrels, crimes, etc., were settled now, not by club law, but by fine or bonds or lash, as agreed upon by the Chiefs and their people. Everything was rapidly and surely becoming "New" under the influence of the leaven of Jesus. Industry increased. Huts and plantations were safe. Formerly every man, in traveling, carried with him all his valuables; now they were secure, left at home.

Even a brood of fowls or a litter of pigs would be carried in bags on their person in Heathen days. Hence at Church we had sometimes lively episodes, the chirruping of chicks, the squealing of piggies, and the barking of puppies, one gaily responding to the other, as we sang, or prayed, or preached the Gospel! Being glad to see the Natives there, even with all their belongings, we carefully refrained from finding fault; but the thread of devotion was sometimes apt to slip through one's fingers, especially when the conflict of the owner to silence a baby pig inspired the little wretch to drown everything in a long-sustained and high-pitched scream.

The natives, finding this state of matters troublesome to themselves and disagreeable all round, called a General Assembly, unanimously condemned dishonesty, agreed upon severe fines and punishments for every act of theft, and covenanted to stand by each other in putting it down. The chiefs, however found this a long and difficult task, but they held at it under the inspiration of the gospel and prevailed. Even the trials and difficulties with which they met were overruled by God, in assisting them to form by the light of their own experience a simple code of Social Laws, fitted to repress the crimes there prevailing, and to encourage the virtues specially needing to be cultivated there. Heathen Worship was gradually extinguished; and, though no one was compelled to come to Church, every person on Aniwa, without exception, became ere many years an avowed worshipper of Jehovah God. Again,

"O Galilean, Thou hast conquered!"

CHAPTER 69: THE FIRST BOOK AND THE NEW EYES.

THE printing of my first Aniwan book was a great event, not so much for the toil and worry which it cost me, though that was enough to have broken the heart of many a compositor, as rather for the joy it gave to the old Chief Namakei.

The break-up at Tanna had robbed me of my own neat little printing-press. I had since obtained at Aneityum the remains of one from Erromanga, that had belonged to the murdered Gordon. But the supply of letters, in some cases, was so deficient that I could print only four pages at a time; and, besides, bits of the press were wanting, and I had first to manufacture substitutes from scraps of iron and wood. I managed, however, to make it go, and by and by it did good service. By it I printed our Aniwan Hymn-Book, a portion of Genesis in Aniwan, a small book in Erromangan for the second Gordon, and some other little things.

The old Chief had eagerly helped me in translating and preparing this first book. He had a great desire "to hear it speak," as he graphically expressed it. It was made up chiefly of short passages from the Scriptures that might help me to introduce them to the treasures of Divine truth and love. Namakei came to me, morning after morning, saying, "Missi, is it done? Can it speak?"

At last I was able to answer, "Yes!"

The old Chief eagerly responded, "Does it speak my words?"

I said, "It does."

With rising interest, Namakei exclaimed, "Make it speak to me, Missi! Let me hear it speak."

I read to him a part of the book, and the old man fairly shouted in an ecstasy of joy, "It does speak! It speaks my own language, too! Oh, give it to me!"

He grasped it hurriedly, turned it all round every way, pressed it to his bosom, and then, closing it with a look of great disappointment, handed it back to me, saying, "Missi, I cannot make it speak! It will never speak to me."

"No," said I; "you don't know how to read it yet, how to make it speak to you; but I will teach you to read, and then it will speak to you as it does to me."

"O Missi, dear Missi, show me how to make it speak!" persisted the bewildered Chief. He was straining his eyes so, that I suspected they were dim with age, and could not see the letters. I looked out for him a pair of spectacles, and managed to fit him well. He was much afraid of putting them on at first, manifestly in dread of some sort of sorcery. At last, when they were properly placed, he saw the letters and everything so clearly that he exclaimed in great excitement and joy—

"I see it all now! This is what you told us about Jesus. He opened the eyes of a blind man. The word of Jesus has just come to Aniwa. He has sent me these glass eyes. I have gotten back again the sight that I had when a boy. O Missi, make the book speak to me now!"

I walked out with him to the public Village Ground. There I drew A B C in large characters upon the dust, showed him the same letters in the book, and left him to compare them, and find out how many occurred on the first page. Fixing these in his mind, he came running to me, and said, "I have lifted up A B C. They are here in my head and I will hold them fast. Give me other three."

This was repeated time after time. He mastered the whole Alphabet, and soon began to spell out the smaller words. Indeed, he came so often, getting me to read it over and over, that before he himself could read it freely, he had it word for word committed to memory. When strangers passed him, or young people came around, he would get out the little book, and say, "Come, and I will let you hear how the book speaks our own Aniwan words. You say, it is hard to learn to read and make it speak. But be strong to try! If an old man like me has done it, it ought to be much easier for you."

One day I heard him read to a company with wonderful fluency. Taking the book, I asked him to show me how he had learned to read so quickly. Immediately I perceived that he could recite the whole from memory! He became our right-hand helper in the Conversion of Aniwa.

Next after God's own Word, perhaps the power of Music was most amazingly blessed in opening up our way. Amongst many other illustrations, I may mention how Namakei's wife was won. The old lady positively shuddered at coming near the Mission House, and dreaded being taught anything. One day she was induced to draw near the door, and fixing a hand on either post, and gazing inwards, she exclaimed, "Awái, Missi! Kái, Missi!"—the Native cry for unspeakable wonder. Mrs. Paton began to play on the harmonium, and sang a simple hymn in the old woman's language. Manifestly charmed, she drew nearer and nearer, and drank in the music, as it were, at every pore of her being. At last she ran off, and we thought it was with fright, but it was to call together all the women and girls from her village "to hear the bokis sing!" (Having no x, the word box is pronounced thus.) She returned with them all at her heels. They listened with dancing eyes. And ever after the sound of a hymn, and the song of the bokis, made them flock freely to class or meeting.

Being myself as nearly as possible destitute of the power of singing, all my work would have been impaired and sadly hindered, and the joyous side of the Worship and Service of Jehovah could not have been presented to the Natives, but for the gift bestowed by the Lord on my dear wife. She led our songs of praise, both in the Family and in the Church, and that was the first avenue by which the New Religion winged its way into the heart of Cannibal and Savage.

The old Chief was particularly eager that this same aged lady, his wife Yauwaki, should be taught to read. But her sight was far gone. So, one day, he brought her to me, saying, "Missi, can you give my wife also a pair of new glass eyes like mine? She tries to learn, but she cannot see the letters. She tries to sew, but she pricks her finger, and throws away the needle, saying, 'The ways of the white people are not good!' If she could get a pair of glass eyes, she would be in a new world like Namakei." In my bundle I found a pair that suited her. She was in positive terror about putting them on her face, but at last she cried with delight, "Oh, my new eyes! my new eyes! I have the sight of a little girl. Oh, my new eyes!"

CHAPTER 70: A ROOF-TREE FOR JESUS.

AT first we moved about amongst the Natives from village to village, acquired their language, and taught them everywhere,—by the roadside, under the shade of a tree, or on the public Tillage Ground. Our old Native Hut, when we removed to the Mission House formerly referred to, was also used for all sorts of public meetings. Feeling by and by, however, that the time had come to interest them in building a new Church, and that it would be every way helpful, I laid the proposal before them, carefully explaining that for this work no one would be paid, that the Church was for all the Islanders and for the Worship alone, and that every one must build purely for the love of Jesus.

I told them that God would be pleased with such materials as they had to give, that they must not begin till they had divided the work and counted the cost, and that for my part I would do all that I could to direct and help, and would supply the sinnet (= cocoanut fiber rope) which I had brought from Aneityum, and the nails from Sydney.

They held meeting after meeting throughout the Island. Chiefs made long speeches; orators chanted their palavers; and warriors acted their part by waving of club and tomahawk. An unprecedented friendliness sprang up amongst them. They agreed to sink every quarrel, and unite in building the first Church on Aniwa,—one Chief only holding back. Women and children began to gather and prepare the sugar-cane leaf for thatch. Men searched for and cut down suitable trees.

The Church measured sixty-two feet by twenty-four. The wall was twelve feet high. The studs were of hard ironwood, and were each by tenon and mortise fastened into six ironwood trees forming the upper wall plates. All were not only nailed, but strongly tied together by sinnet-rope, so as to resist the hurricanes. The roof was supported by four huge ironwood trees, and a fifth of equally hard wood, sunk about eight feet into the ground, surrounded by building at the base, and forming massive pillars. There were two doorways and eight window spaces; the floor was laid with white coral, broken small, and covered with cocoanut tree leaf-mats, on which the people sat. I had a small platform, floored and surrounded with reeds; and Mrs. Paton had a seat enclosing the harmonium, also made of reeds and in keeping. Great harmony prevailed all the time, and no mishap marred the work. One hearty fellow fell from the roof-tree to the ground, and was badly stunned. But, jumping up, he shook himself, and saying—"I was working for Jehovah! He has saved me from being hurt!"—he mounted the roof again and went on cheerily with his work.

But our pride in this New Church soon met with a dreadful blow. That very season a terrific hurricane leveled it with the ground. After much wailing, the principal Chief, in a public Assembly, said, "Let us not weep, like boys over their broken bows and arrows! Let us be strong, and build a yet stronger Church for Jehovah."

By our counsel, ten days were spent first in repairing houses and fences, and saving food from the plantations, many of which had been swept into utter ruin. Then they assembled on the appointed day. A hymn was sung. God's blessing was invoked, and all the work was dedicated afresh to Him. Days were spent in taking the iron wood roof to pieces, and saving everything that could be saved. The work was allocated equally amongst the villages, and a wholesome emulation was created. One Chief still held back. After a while, I visited him and personally invited his help,—telling him that it was God's House, and for all the people of Aniwa; and that if he and his people did not do their part, the others would cast it in their teeth that they had no share in the House of God. He yielded to my appeal, and entered vigorously upon the work.

One large tree was still needed to complete the couples, and could nowhere be found. The work was at a standstill; for, though the size was now reduced to fifty feet by twenty-two, the roof lowered by four feet, and there was still plenty of smaller wood on Aniwa, the larger trees were apparently exhausted. One morning, however, we were awakened at early daybreak by the shouting and singing of a company of men, carrying a great black tree to the Church, with this same Chief dancing before them, leading the singing, and beating time with the flourish of his tomahawk. Determined not to be beaten, though late in the field, he had lifted the roof-tree out of his own house, as black as soot could make it, and was carrying it to complete the couplings. The rest of the builders shouted against this. All the other wood of the Church was white and clean, and they would not have this black tree, conspicuous in the very center of all. But I praised the old Chief for what he had done, and hoped he and his people would come and worship Jehovah under his own roof-tree. At this all were delighted! and the work went on apace, with many songs and shoutings.

Whenever the Church was roofed in, we met in it for Public Worship. Coral was being got and burned, and preparations made for plastering the walls. The Natives were sharp enough to notice that I was not putting up the bell; and suspicions arose that I kept it back in order to take it with me when I returned to Tanna. It was a beautiful Church bell, cast and sent out by our dear friend, James Taylor, Esq., Birkenhead. The Aniwans, therefore, gave me no rest till I agreed to have it hung on their new Church. They found a large ironwood tree near the shore, cut a road for half a mile through the bush, tied poles across it every few feet, and with shouts lifted it bodily on their shoulders—six men or so at each pole—and never set it down again till they reached the Church; for as one party got exhausted, others were ready to rush in and relieve them at every stage of the journey. The two old Chiefs, flourishing their tomahawks, went capering in front of all the rest, and led the song to which they marched, joyfully bearing their load. They dug a deep hole, into which to sink it; I squared the top and screwed on the bell; then we raised the tree by ropes, letting it sink into the hole, and built it round eight feet deep with coral blocks and lime; and there from its top swings and rings ever since the Church bell of Aniwa.

CHAPTER 71: "KNOCK THE TEVIL OUT!"

ONE of the last attempts ever made on my life resulted, by God's blessing, in great good to us all and to the work of the Lord. It was when Nourai, one of Nasi's men, struck at me again and again with the barrel of his musket; but I evaded the blows, till rescued by the women—the men looking on stupefied. After he escaped into the bush I assembled our people, and said, "If you do not now try to stop this bad conduct, I shall leave Aniwa, and go to some island where my life will be protected."

Next morning at daybreak, about one hundred men arrived at my house, and in answer to my query why they came armed they replied, "We are now going to that village where the men of wicked conduct are gathered together. We will find out why they sought your life, and we will rebuke their Sacred Man for pretending to cause hurricanes and diseases. We cannot go unarmed. We will not suffer you to go alone. We are your friends and the friends of the Worship. And we are resolved to stand by you, and you must go at our head to-day!"

In great perplexity, yet believing that my presence might prevent bloodshed, I allowed myself to be placed at their head. The old Chief followed next, then a number of fiery young men; then all the rest, single file, along the narrow path. At a sudden turn, as we neared their village, Nourai, who had attacked me the Sabbath day before, and his brother were seen lurking with their muskets; but our young men made a rush in front, and they disappeared into the bush.

We took possession of the Village Public Ground; and the Chief, the Sacred Man, and others soon assembled. A most characteristic Native Palaver followed. Speeches, endless speeches, were fired by them at each other. My friends declared, in every conceivable form of language and of graphic illustration, that they were resolved at any cost to defend me and the Worship of Jehovah, and that they would as one man punish every attempt to injure me or take my life. The orator, Taia, exclaimed, "You think that Missi is here alone, and that you can do with him as you please! No! We are now all Missi's men. We will fight for him and his rather than see him injured. Every one that attacks him attacks us. That is finished to-day!"

In the general scolding, the Sacred Man had special attention for pretending to cause hurricanes. One pointed out that he had himself a stiff knee, and argued, "If he can make a hurricane, why can't he restore the joint of his own knee? It is surely easier to do the one than the other!"

The Natives laughed heartily, and taunted him. Meantime he sat looking down to the earth in sullen silence; and a ludicrous episode ensued. His wife, a big, strong woman, scolded him roundly for the trouble he had brought them all into; and then, getting indignant as well as angry, she seized a huge cocoanut leaf out of the bush, and with the butt end thereof began thrashing his shoulders vigorously as she poured out the vials of her wrath in torrents of words, always winding up with the cry, "I'll knock the Tevil out of him! He'll not try hurricanes again!"

The woman was a Malay, as all the Aniwans were. Had a Papuan woman on Tanna or Erromanga dared such a thing, she would have been killed on the spot. But even on Aniwa, the unwonted spectacle of a wife beating her husband created uproarious amusement. At length I remonstrated, saying, "You had better stop now! You don't want to kill him, do you? You seem to have knocked 'the Tevil' pretty well out of him now! You see how he receives it all in silence, and repents of all his bad talk and bad conduct."

They exacted from him a solemn promise as to the making of no more diseases or hurricanes, and that he would live at peace with his neighbors. The offending villagers at length presented a large quantity of sugar-cane and food to us as a peace-offering; and we returned, praising God that the whole day's scolding had ended in talk, not blood. The result was every way most helpful. Our friends knew their strength and took courage. Our enemies were disheartened and afraid. We saw the balance growing heavier every day on the side of Jesus; and our souls blessed the Lord.

CHAPTER 72: THE CONVERSION OF YOUWILI.

THESE events suggest to me another incident of those days, full at once of trial and of joy. It pertains to the story of our young Chief Youwili. From the first, and for long, he was most audacious and troublesome. Observing that for several days no Natives had come near the Mission House, I asked the old Chief if he knew why, and he answered, "Youwili has tabooed the paths, and threatens death to any one who breaks through it."

I at once replied, "Then I conclude that you all agree with him, and wish me to leave. We are here only to teach you and your people. If he has power to prevent that we shall leave with the Dayspring."

The old Chief called the people together, and they came to me, saying, "Our anger is strong against Youwili. Go with us and break down the taboo. We will assist and protect you."

I went at their head and removed it. It consisted simply of reeds stuck into the ground, with twigs and leaves and fiber tied to each in a peculiar way, in a circle round the Mission House. The Natives had an extraordinary dread of violating the taboo, and believed that it meant death to the offender or to some one of his family. All present entered into a bond to punish on the spot any man who attempted to replace the taboo or to revenge its removal. Thus a mortal blow was publicly struck at this most miserable superstition, which had caused bloodshed and misery untold.

One day, thereafter, I was engaged in clearing away the bush around the Mission House, having purchased and paid for the land for the very purpose of opening it up, when suddenly Youwili appeared and menacingly forbade me to proceed. For the sake of peace I for the time desisted. But he went straight to my fence, and with his tomahawk cut down the portion in front of our house, also some bananas planted there—the usual declaration of war, intimating that he only awaited his opportunity similarly to cut down me and mine. We saw the old Chief and his men planting themselves here and there to guard us, and the Natives prowling about armed and excited. On calling them, they explained the meaning of what Youwili had done, and that they were determined to protect us. I said. "This must not continue. Are you to permit one young fool to defy us all, and break up the Lord's work on Aniwa? If you cannot righteously punish him, I will shut myself up in my house and withdraw from all attempts to teach or help you, till the vessel comes, and then I can leave the island."

Now that they had begun really to love us, and to be anxious to learn more, this was always my most powerful argument. We retired into the Mission House. The people surrounded our doors and windows and pleaded with us. After long silence, we replied, "You know our resolution. It is for you now to decide. Either you must control that foolish young man, or we must go!"

Much speech-making, as usual, followed. The people resolved to seize and punish Youwili; but he fled, and had hid himself in the bush. Coming to me, the Chief said, "It is left to you to say what shall be Youwili's punishment. Shall we kill him?"

I replied firmly, "Certainly not! Only for murder can life be lawfully taken away."

"What then?" they continued. "Shall we burn his houses and destroy his plantations?"

I answered, "No."

"Shall we bind him and beat him?"

"No."

"Shall we place him in a canoe, thrust him out to sea, and let him drown or escape as he may?"

"No! by no means."

"Then, Missi," said they, "these are our ways of punishing. What other punishment remains that Youwili cares for?"

I replied, "Make him with his own hands, and alone, put up a new fence, and restore all that he has destroyed; and make him promise publicly that he will cease all evil conduct towards us. That will satisfy me."

This idea of punishment seemed to tickle them greatly. The Chiefs reported our words to the Assembly; and the Natives laughed and cheered, as if it were a capital joke! They cried aloud, "It is good! Obey the word of the Missi."

After considerable hunting, the young Chief was found. They brought him to the Assembly and scolded him severely and told him their sentence. He was surprised by the nature of the punishment, and cowed by the determination of the people.

"To-morrow," said he, "I will fully repair the fence. Never again will I oppose the Missi. His word is good."

By daybreak next morning Youwili was diligently repairing what he had broken down, and before evening he had everything made right better than it was before. While he toiled away, some fellows of his own rank twitted him, saying, "Youwili, you found it easier to cut down Missi's fence than to repair it again. You will not repeat that in a hurry!"

But he heard all in silence. Others passed with averted heads, and he knew they were laughing at him. He made everything tight and then left without uttering a single word. My heart yearned after the poor fellow, but I thought it better to let his own mind work away, on its new ideas as to punishment and revenge, for a little longer by itself alone. I instinctively felt that Youwili was beginning to turn, that the Christ-Spirit had touched his darkly-groping soul. My doors were now thrown open, and every good work went on as before. We resolved to leave Youwili entirely to Jesus, setting apart a portion of our prayer every day for the enlightenment and conversion of the young Chief, on whom all other means had been exhausted apparently in vain.

A considerable time elapsed. No sign came, and our prayers seemed to fail. But one day, I was toiling between the shafts of a hand-cart, assisted by two boys, drawing it along from the shore loaded with coral blocks. Youwili came rushing from his house, three hundred yards or so off the path, and said, "Missi, that is too hard for you. Let me be your helper!"

Without waiting for a reply, he ordered the two boys to seize one rope, while he grasped the other, threw it over his shoulder and started off, pulling with the strength of a horse. My heart rose in gratitude, and I wept with joy as I followed him. I knew that that yoke was but a symbol of the yoke of Christ, which Youwili with his change of heart was beginning to carry! Truly there is only one way of regeneration, being born again by the power of the Spirit of God, the new heart; but there are many ways of conversation, of outwardly turning to the Lord, of taking the actual first step that shows on whose side we are.

Like those of old praying for the deliverance of Peter, and who could not believe their ears and eyes when Peter knocked and walked in amongst them, so we could scarcely believe our eyes and ears when Youwili became a disciple of Jesus, though we had been praying for his conversion every day. His once sullen countenance became literally bright with inner light. His wife came immediately for a book and a dress saying, "Youwili sent me. His opposition to the Worship is over now. I am to attend Church and School. He is coming too. He wants to learn how to be strong, like you, for Jehovah and for Jesus."

Oh, Jesus! to Thee alone be all the glory. Thou hast the key to unlock every heart that Thou hast created.

CHAPTER 73: FIRST COMMUNION ON ANIWA.

AND this leads me to relate the story of our First Communion on Aniwa. It was Sabbath, 24th October 1869; and surely the Angels of God and the Church of the Redeemed in Glory were amongst the "great cloud of witnesses" who eagerly "peered" down upon the scene,—when we sat around the Lord's Table and partook the memorials of His body and blood with those few souls rescued out of the Heathen World. My Communicants' Class had occupied me now a considerable time. The conditions of attendance at this early stage were explicit, and had to be made very severe, and only twenty were admitted to the roll. At the final examination only twelve gave evidence of understanding what they were doing, and of having given their hearts to the service of the Lord Jesus. At their own urgent desire, and after every care in examining and instructing, they were solemnly dedicated in prayer to be baptized and admitted to the Holy Table. On that Lord's Day, after the usual opening Service, I gave a short and careful exposition of the Ten Commandments and of the Way of Salvation according to the Gospel. The twelve Candidates then stood up before all the inhabitants there assembled; and, after a brief exhortation to them as Converts, I put to them the two questions that follow, and each gave an affirmative reply, "Do you, in accordance with your profession of the Christian Faith, and your promises before God and the people, wish me now to baptize you?"

And—"Will you live henceforth for Jesus only, hating all sin and trying to love and serve your Saviour?"

Then, beginning with the old Chief, the twelve came forward, and I baptized them one by one according to the Presbyterian usage. Two of them had also little children, and they were at the same time baptized, and received as the lambs of the flock. Solemn prayer was then offered, and in the name of the Holy Trinity the Church of Christ on Aniwa was formally constituted. I addressed them on the words of the Holy Institution—1 Corinthians xi. 23—and then, after the prayer of Thanksgiving and Consecration, administered the Lord's Supper, the first time since the Island of Aniwa was heaved out of its coral depths! Mrs. M'nair, my wife, and myself, along with six Aneityumese Teachers, communicated with the newly baptized twelve. And I think, if ever in all my Earthly experience, on that day I might truly add the blessed words—"Jesus in the midst."

The whole Service occupied nearly three hours. The Islanders looked on with a wonder whose unwonted silence was almost painful to bear. Many were led to inquire carefully about everything they saw, so new and strange. For the first time the Dorcas Street Sabbath School Teachers' gift from South Melbourne Presbyterian Church was put to use—a new Communion Service of silver. They gave it in faith that we would require it, and in such we received it. And now the day had come and gone! For three years we had toiled and prayed and taught for this. At the moment when I put the bread and wine into those dark hands, once stained with the blood of Cannibalism, but now stretched out to receive and partake the emblems and seals of the Redeemer's love, I had a foretaste of the joy of Glory that well-nigh broke my heart to pieces. I shall never taste a deeper bliss till I gaze on the glorified face of Jesus Himself.

On the afternoon of that Communion Day an open-air Prayer Meeting was held under the shade of the great banyan tree in front of our Church. Seven of the new Church members there led the people in prayer to Jesus, a hymn being sung after each. My heart was so full of joy that I could do little else but weep. Oh, I wonder, I wonder, when I see so many good Ministers at home, crowding each other and treading on each other's heels, whether they would not part with all their home privileges, and go out to the Heathen World and reap a joy like this—"the joy of the Lord."

CHAPTER 74: THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER.

THE new Social Order, referred to already in its dim beginnings, rose around us like a sweet-scented flower. I never interfered directly, unless expressly called upon or appealed to. The two principal Chiefs were impressed with the idea that there was but one law—the Will of God; and one rule for them and their people as Christians—to please the Lord Jesus. In every difficulty they consulted me. I explained to them and read in their hearing the very words of Holy Scripture, showing what appeared to me to be the will of God and what would please the Saviour; and then sent them away to talk it over with their people, and to apply these principles of the Word of God as wisely as they could according to their circumstances. Our own part of the work went on very joyfully, notwithstanding occasional trying and painful incidents. Individual cases of greed and selfishness and vice brought us many a bitter pang. But the Lord never lost patience with us, and we durst not therefore lose patience with them! We trained the Teachers, we translated and printed and expounded the Scriptures, we ministered to the sick and dying; we dispensed medicines every day, we taught them the use of tools, we advised them as to laws and penalties; and the New Society grew and developed, and bore amidst all its imperfections some traces of the fair Kingdom of God amongst men.

Our life and work will reveal itself to the reader if I briefly outline a Sabbath Day on Aniwa. Breakfast is partaken of immediately after daylight. The Church bell then rings, and ere it stops every worshiper is seated. The Natives are guided in starting by the sunrise, and are forward from farthest corners at this early hour. The first Service is over in about an hour; there is an interval of twenty minutes; the bell is again rung, and the second Service begins. We follow the ordinary Presbyterian ritual; but in every Service I call upon an Elder or a Church Member to lead in one of the prayers, which they do with great alacrity and with much benefit to all concerned.

As the last worshiper leaves, at close of second Service, the bell is sounded twice very deliberately, and that is the signal for the opening of my Communicants' Class. I carefully expound the Church's Shorter Catechism, and show how its teachings are built upon Holy Scripture, applying each truth to the conscience and the life. This class is conducted all the year round; and from it, step by step, our Church Members are drawn as the Lord opens up their way, the most of them attending two full years at least before being admitted to the Lord's Table. This discipline accounts for the fact that so very few of our baptized converts have ever fallen away—as few in proportion, I verily believe, as in Churches at home. Meantime, many of the Church members have been holding a prayer-meeting amongst themselves in the adjoining School,—a thing started of their own free accord,—in which they invoke God's blessing on all the work and worship of the day.

Having snatched a brief meal of tea, or a cold dinner cooked on Saturday, the bell rings within an hour, and our Sabbath School assembles,—in which the whole inhabitants, young and old, take part, myself superintending and giving the address, as well as questioning on the lesson, Mrs. Paton teaching a large class of adult women, and the Elders and best readers instructing the ordinary classes for about half-an-hour or so.

About one o'clock the School is closed, and we then start off on our village tours. An experienced Elder, with several Teachers, takes one side of the Island this Sabbath, I with another company taking the other side, and next Sabbath we reverse the order. A short Service is conducted in the open air, or in Schoolrooms, at every village that can be reached and on their return they report to me cases of sickness, or any signs of progress in the work of the Lord. The whole Island is thus steadily and methodically evangelized.

As the sun is setting I am creeping home from my village tour; and when darkness begins to approach, the canoe drum is beat at every village, and the people assemble under the banyan tree for evening village prayers. The Elder or Teacher presides. Five or six hymns are joyously sung, and five or six short prayers offered between, and thus the evening hour passes happily in the fellowship of God. On a calm evening, after Christianity had fairly taken hold of the people, and they loved to sing over and over again their favorite hymns, these village prayer-meetings formed a most blessed close to every day, and set the far-distant bush echoing with the praises of God.

Nor is our week-day life less crowded or busy, though in different ways. At gray dawn on Monday, and every morning, the Tavaka (= the canoe drum) is struck in every village on Aniwa. The whole inhabitants turn in to the early School, which lasts about an hour and a half, and then the Natives are off to their plantations. Having partaken of breakfast, I then spend my forenoon in translating or printing, or visiting the sick, or whatever else is most urgent. About two o'clock the Natives return from their work, bathe in the sea, and dine off cocoanut, breadfruit, or anything else that comes handily in the way. At three o'clock the bell rings, and the afternoon School for the Teachers and the more advanced learners then occupy my wife and myself for about an hour and a half. After this, the Natives spend their time in fishing or lounging or preparing supper,—which is amongst them always the meal of the day. Towards sundown the Tavaka sounds again, and the day closes amid the echoes of village prayers from under their several banyan trees.

Thus day after day and week after week passed over us on Aniwa; and much the same on all the Islands where the Missionary has found a home. In many respects it is a simple and happy and beautiful life; and the man whose heart is full of things that are dear to Jesus, feels no desire to exchange it for the poor frivolities of what calls itself "Society," which seems to find its life in pleasures that Christ cannot be asked to share, and in which, therefore, Christians should have neither lot nor part.

CHAPTER 75: THE ORPHANS AND THEIR BISCUITS.

THE habits of morning and evening Family Prayer and of Grace at Meat took a very wonderful hold upon the people; and became, as I have shown elsewhere, a distinctive badge of Christian versus Heathen. This was strikingly manifested during a time of bitter scarcity that befell us. I heard a father, for instance, at his hut door, with his family around him, reverently blessing God for the food provided for them, and for all His mercies in Christ Jesus. Drawing near and conversing with them, I found that their meals consisted of fig leaves which they had gathered and cooked—a poor enough dish, but hunger makes a healthy appetite, and contentment is a grateful relish.

During the same period of privation, my Orphans suffered badly also. Once they came to me, saying, "Missi, we are very hungry."

I replied, "So am I, dear children, and we have no more white food till the Dayspring comes."

They continued, "Missi, you have two beautiful fig-trees. Will you let us take one feast of the young and tender leaves? We will not injure branch or fruit."

I answered, "Gladly, my children, take your fill!"

In a twinkling each child was perched upon a branch; and they feasted there happy as squirrels. Every night we prayed for the vessel, and in the morning our Orphan boys rushed to the coral rocks and eagerly scanned the sea for an answer. Day after day they returned with sad faces, saying, "Missi, Tavaka jimra!" (= No vessel yet).

But at gray dawn of a certain day we were awoke by the boys shouting from the shore and running for the Mission House with the cry,—"Tavaka oa! Tavaka oa!"(= The vessel, hurrah!)

We arose at once, and the boy exclaimed, "Missi, she is not our own vessel, but we think she carries her flag. She has three masts, and our Dayspring only two!"

I looked through my glass, and saw that they were discharging goods into the vessel's boats; and the children, when I told them that boxes and bags and casks were being sent on shore, shouted and danced with delight. As the first boat-load was discharged, the Orphans surrounded me, saying, "Missi, here is a cask that rattles like biscuits? Will you let us take it to the Mission House?"

I told them to do so if they could; and in a moment it was turned into the path, and the boys had it flying before them, some tumbling and hurting their knees, but up and at it again, and never pausing till it rolled up at the door of our Storehouse. On returning I found them all around it, and they said, "Missi, have you forgotten what you promised us?"

I said, "What did I promise you?"

They looked very disappointed and whispered to each other, "Missi has forgot!"

"Forgot what?" inquired I.

"Missi," they answered, "you promised that when the vessel came you would give each of us a biscuit."

"Oh," I replied, "I did not forget; I only wanted to see if you remembered it?"

They laughed, saying, "No fear of that, Missi! Will you soon open the cask? We are dying for biscuits."

At once I got hammer and tools, knocked off the hoops, took out the end, and then gave girls and boys a biscuit each. To my surprise, they all stood round, biscuit in hand, but not one beginning to eat.

"What," I exclaimed, "you are dying for biscuits! Why don't you eat? Are you expecting another?"

One of the eldest said, "We will first thank God for sending us food, and ask Him to bless it to us all."

And this was done in their own simple and beautiful childlike way; and then they did eat, and enjoyed their food as a gift from the Heavenly Father's hand. (Is there any child reading this, or hearing it read, who never thanks God or asks Him to bless daily bread? Then is that child not a white Heathen?) We ourselves at the Mission House could very heartily rejoice with the dear Orphans. For some weeks past our European food had been all exhausted, except a little tea, and the cocoanut had been our chief support. It was beginning to tell against us. Our souls rose in gratitude to the Lord, who had sent us these fresh provisions that we might love Him better and serve Him more.

The children's sharp eyes had read correctly. It was not the Dayspring. Our brave little ship, as I afterwards learned, had gone to wreck on 6th January 1873; and this vessel was the Paragon, chartered to bring down our supplies. Alas! the wreck had gone by auction sale to a French slaving company, who cut a passage through the coral reef, and had the vessel again floating in the Bay,—elated at the prospect of employing our Mission Ship in the blood-stained Tanaka-traffic (= a mere euphemism for South Sea slavery)! Our souls sank in horror and concern. Many Natives would unwittingly trust themselves to the Dayspring and revenge would be taken on us, as was done on noble Bishop Patteson, when the deception was found out. What could be done? Nothing but cry to God, which all the friends of our Mission did day and night, not without tears, as we thought of the possible degradation of our noble little ship. Listen! The French Slavers, anchoring their prize in the Bay, and greatly rejoicing, went ashore to celebrate the event. They drank and feasted and reveled. But that night a mighty storm arose, the old Dayspring dragged her anchor, and at daybreak she was seen again on the reef, but this time with her back broken in two and for ever unfit for service, either fair or foul. Oh, white winged Virgin, daughter of the waves, better for thee, as for thy human sisters, to die and pass away than to suffer pollution and live on in disgrace!

CHAPTER 76: THE FINGER-POSTS OF GOD.

I HAD often said that I would not again leave my beloved work on the Islands unless compelled to do so either by the breakdown of health, or by the loss of our Mission Ship and my services being required to assist in providing another. Very strange, that in this one season both of these events befell us! During the hurricanes, from January to April 1873, when the Dayspring was wrecked, we lost a darling child by death, my dear wife had a protracted illness, and I was brought very low with severe rheumatic fever. I was reduced so far that I could not speak, and was reported as dying. The Captain of a vessel, having seen me, called at Tanna, and spoke of me as in all probability dead by that time. Our unfailing and ever-beloved friends and fellow-Missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Watt, at once started from Kwamera, in their open boat, and rowed and sailed thirty miles to visit us. But a few days before they arrived I had fallen into a long and sound sleep, out of which, when I awoke, consciousness had again returned to me. I had got the turn; there was no further relapse; but when I did regain a little strength, my weakness was so great that I had to travel about on crutches for many a day.

In the circumstances of our baby Lena's death, every form of heartrending tenderness seemed to meet. On Friday, 28th March, at 3 A.M. she came from God, and seemed to both of us the Angel-child of all our flock. Alas, on Saturday I was seized with sciatica, so dreadful and agonizing, that I had to be borne to my bed, and could not stir a limb any more than if my back had been broken. My dear wife struggled to attend to the baby, with such help as Native girls could give; and I directed the Teachers about the Services in Church next Sunday, the first time as yet that I had been unable to appear and lead them. From the beds where we lay, my wife and I could hear each other's voices, and tried to console one another in our sorrowful and helpless state. On Tuesday, 1st April, the child was bright and vigorous; but the mother's strength had been overtaxed, and she fell back, fainting in her bed, when helping to dress the baby. Next morning, to our dismay, there were symptoms of wheezing and feverishness in the little darling. All due measures were at once taken to check these; and Williag, an experienced Native, now having charge, kept everything warm and cozy. Before tea, when receiving a little food, Lena opened her dark blue eyes, and gazed up peacefully and gladly in her mother's face. But, immediately after tea, within less than an hour, when the nurse brought her and placed her in the mother's arms, the Angel-Soul fled away. Poor Williag, seeing the mother's pathetic look, and as if she herself had been guilty, fell on her knees and cried,—"I knew it, Missi, I knew it! She gave two big sighs, and went! Awai, Missi, Awai!" When the mother called to me something about the child having "fainted," I was talking with Koris, but my heart guessed the worst. Alas, all means were seen to be vain! I could not rise, could not move, nor could the mother, but we prayed, in each other's hearing, and in the hearing of our blessed Lord, and He did not leave us without consolation. In such cases, the Heathen usually fly away in terror, but our Teachers were faithful and obedient; and our little boys, Bob and Fred, six and four respectively, followed all our tearful directions. One of their small toy-boxes was readily given up to make the baby's coffin. Yawaci brought calico, and dressed the precious body at the mother's instructions. I then offered a prayer to the clear Lord, whilst the mother clasped the coffin in her arms. The little grave, dug by the Teachers in the Mission plot, was within earshot of where we lay, and there Bob and Fred, kneeling in their snow-white dresses, sang "There is a Happy Land," as their sister's dust was laid in the Earth and in the arms of Jesus who is the Resurrection and the Life. God only can ever know how our hearts were torn by the pathos of that event, as we lay helpless, almost dying, and listened to our children's trembling voices! Johna, the Teacher, then prayed; while the Heathen, in groups of wonder, but holding far aloof, had many strange ideas wakened in their puzzled brains. The mother and I gave ourselves once more away to God, and to the Service of our dear Lord Jesus, as we parted with our darling Lena; and when, by and by, we were raised up again, and able to move about, often, often, did we find ourselves meeting together at that precious grave.

Being ordered to seek health by change and by higher medical aid, and if possible in the cooler air of New Zealand, we took the first opportunity and arrived at Sydney, anxious to start the new movement to secure the Paragon there, and then to go on to the sister Colony. Being scarcely able to walk without the crutches, we called privately a preliminary meeting of friends for consultation and advice. The conditions were laid before them and discussed. The Insurance Company had paid £2000 on the first Dayspring. Of that sum £1000 had been spent on chartering and maintaining the Paragon; so that we required an additional £2000 to purchase her, according to Dr. Steel's bargain with the owners, besides a large sum for alterations and equipment for the Mission. The late Mr. Learmouth looked across to Mr. Goodlet, and said, "If you'll join me, we will at once secure this vessel for the Missionaries, that God's work may not suffer from the wreck of the Dayspring."

Those two servants of God, excellent Elders of the Presbyterian Church, consulted together, and the vessel was purchased next day. How I did praise God, and pray Him to bless them and theirs! The late Dr. Fullarton, our dear friend, said to them, "But what guarantee do you ask from the Missionaries for your money?"

Mr. Learmouth's noble reply was, and the other heartily re-echoed it—"God's work is our guarantee! From them we will ask none. What guarantee have they to give us, except their faith in God? That guarantee is ours already."

I answered, "You take God and His work for your guarantee. Rest assured that He will soon repay you, and you will lose nothing by this noble service."

Having secured St. Andrew's Church for a public meeting, I advertised it in all the papers. Ministers, Sabbath School Teachers, and other friends came in great numbers. The scheme was fairly launched, and Collecting Cards largely distributed. Committees carried everything out into detail, and all worked for the fund with great goodwill.

I then sailed from Sydney to Victoria, and addressed the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in session at Melbourne. The work was easily set agoing there, and willing workers fully and rapidly organized it through Congregations and Sabbath Schools. Under medical advice, I next sailed for New Zealand in the S. S. Hero, Captain Logan. Reaching Auckland, I was in time to address the General Assembly of the Church there also. They gave me cordial welcome, and every Congregation and Sabbath School might be visited as far as I possibly could. The Ministers promoted the movement with hearty zeal. The Sabbath Scholars took Collecting Cards for "shares" in the New Mission Ship. A meeting was held every day, and three every Sabbath. Auckland, Nelson, Wellington, Dunedin, and all towns and churches within reach of these were rapidly visited; and I never had greater joy or heartiness in any of my tours than in this happy intercourse with the Ministers and people of the Presbyterian Church in New Zealand.

I arrived in Sydney about the end of March. My health was wonderfully restored, and New Zealand had given me about £1700 for the new ship. With the £1000 of insurance money, and about £700 from New South Wales, and £400 from Victoria, besides the £500 for her support also from. Victoria, we were able to pay back the £3000 of purchase money, and about £800 for alterations and repairs, as well as equip and provision her to sail for her next year's work amongst the Islands free of debt. I said to our two good friends at Sydney:

"You took God and His work for your guarantee. He has soon relieved you from all responsibility. You have suffered no loss, and you have had the honor and privilege of serving your Lord. I envy you the joy you must feel in so using your wealth, and I pray God's double blessing on all your store."

Our agent. Dr. Steel, had applied to the Home authorities for power to change the vessel's name from Paragon to Dayspring, so that the old associations might not be broken. This was cordially granted. And so our second Dayspring, owing no man anything, sailed on her annual trip to the New Hebrides, and we returned with her, praising the Lord and reinvigorated alike in spirit and in body.

CHAPTER 77: THE GOSPEL IN LIVING CAPITALS.

IN Heathendom every true convert becomes at once a Missionary. The changed life, shining out amid the surrounding darkness, is a Gospel in largest Capitals which all can read. Our Islanders, especially, having little to engage or otherwise distract attention, become intense and devoted workers for the Lord Jesus, if once the Divine Passion for souls stirs within them.

A Heathen has been all his days groping after peace of soul in dark superstition and degrading rites. You pour into his soul the light of Revelation. He learns that God is love, that God sent His Son to die for him, and that he is the heir of Life Eternal in and through Jesus Christ. By the blessed enlightenment of the Spirit of the Lord he believes all this. He passes into a third heaven of joy, and he burns to tell every one of this Glad Tidings. Others see the change in his disposition in his character in his whole life and actions; and amid such surroundings, every Convert is a burning and a shining light. Even whole populations are thus brought into the Outer Court of the Temple; and Islands, still Heathen and Cannibal, are positively eager for the Missionary to live amongst them, and would guard his life and property now in complete security, where a very few years ago everything would have been instantly sacrificed on touching their shores! They are not Christianized, neither are they Civilized, but the light has been kindled all round them, and though still only shining afar, they cannot but rejoice in its beams.

But even where the path is not so smooth, nor any welcome awaiting them, Native Converts show amazing zeal. For instance, one of our Chiefs, full of the Christ-kindled desire to seek and to save, sent a message to an inland Chief, that he and four attendants would come on Sabbath and tell them the Gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came back sternly forbidding their Visit, and threatening with death any Christian that approached their village. Our Chief sent in response a loving message, telling them that Jehovah had taught the Christians to return good for evil, and that they would come unarmed to tell them the story of how the Son of God came into the world and died in order to bless and save His enemies. The Heathen Chief sent back a stern and prompt reply once more, "If you come, you will be killed."

On Sabbath morning, the Christian Chief and his four companions were met outside the village by the Heathen Chief, who implored and threatened them once more. But the former said, "We come to you without weapons of war! We come only to tell you about Jesus. We believe that He will protect us to-day."

As they steadily pressed forward towards the village, spears began to be thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except one most dexterous warriors; and others they literally received with their bare hands, striking them and turning them aside in an incredible manner. The Heathen, apparently thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them without weapons of war, and not even flinging back their own spears which they had turned aside, desisted from mere surprise, after having thrown what the old Chief called "a shower of spears." Our Christian Chief called out, as he and his companions drew up in the midst of them on the village Public Ground:

"Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we come not to fight, but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our dark hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other weapons of war, and to hear what we can tell you about the love of God, our great Father, the only living God."

The Heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked upon these Christians as protected by some Invisible One! They listened for the first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We lived to see that Chief and all his tribe sitting in the School of Christ. And there is perhaps not an Island in these Southern Seas, amongst all those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on the part of Converts cannot be recited by every Missionary to the honor of our poor Natives and to the glory of their Saviour.

Larger and harder tests were sometimes laid upon their new faith. Once the war on Tanna drove about one hundred of them to seek refuge on Aniwa. Not so many years before, their lives would never have been thus intrusted to the inhabitants of another Cannibal Island. But the Christ-Spirit was abroad upon Aniwa. The refugees were kindly cared for, and in process of time were restored to their own lands, by our Missionary ship the Dayspring. The Chiefs, however, and the Elders of the Church laid the new laws before them very clearly and decidedly. They would be helped and sheltered, but Aniwa was now under law to Christ, and if any of the Tannese broke the public rules as to moral conduct, or in any way disturbed the Worship of Jehovah, they would at once be expelled from the Island and sent back to Tanna. In all this, the Chief of the Tanna party, my old friend Nowar, strongly supported our Christian Chiefs. The Tannese behaved well, and many of them wore clothing and began to attend Church; and the heavy drain upon the poor resources of Aniwa was borne with a noble and Christian spirit, which greatly impressed the Tannese and commended the Gospel of Christ.

CHAPTER 78: THE DEATH OF NAMAKEI.

IN claiming Aniwa for Christ, and winning it as a small jewel for His crown, we had the experience which has ever marked God's path through history,—He raised up around us and wonderfully endowed men to carry forward His own blessed work. Among these must be specially commemorated Namakei, the old Chief of Aniwa. Slowly, but very steadily, the light broke in upon his soul, and he was ever very eager to communicate to his people all that he learned. In Heathen days he was a Cannibal and a great warrior; but from the first, as shown in the preceding chapter he took a warm interest in us and our work,—a little selfish, no doubt, at the beginning, but soon becoming purified, as his eyes and heart were opened to the Gospel of Jesus.

On the birth of a son to us on the Island, the old Chief was in ecstasies. He claimed the child as his heir, his own son being dead, and brought nearly the whole inhabitants in relays to see the white Chief of Aniwa! He would have him called Namakei the Younger, an honor which I fear we did not too highly appreciate. As the child grew, he took his hand and walked about with him freely amongst the people, learning to speak their language like a Native, and not only greatly interesting them in himself, but even in us and in the work of the Lord. This, too, was one of the bonds, however purely human, that drew them all nearer and nearer to Jesus.

It was this same child, who, in the moment of our greatest peril, when the Mission House was once surrounded by savages who had resolved to murder us, managed in some incredible way to escape, and appeared, to our horror and amazement, dancing with glee amongst the armed warriors. He threw his arms around the neck of one after another, and kissed them, to their great surprise,—at last, he settled down like a bird upon the ringleader's knee, and therefrom prattled to them all, while we from within gazed on in speechless and helpless terror! He roundly scolded them for being "Naughty! Naughty!" The frowning faces began to relax into broad grins, another spirit came over them, and, one after another, they rapidly slipt away. The Council of Death was broken up; and we had a new illustration of the Lord's precious work,—"A little Child shall lead them."

The death of Namakei had in it many streaks of Christian romance. He had heard about the Missionaries annually meeting on one or other of the Islands, and consulting about the work of Jehovah. What ideas he had formed of a Mission Synod one cannot easily imagine; but in his old age, and when very frail, he formed an impassioned desire to attend our next meeting on Aneityum, and see and hear all the Missionaries of Jesus gathered together from the New Hebrides. Terrified that he would die away from home, and that that might bring great reverses to the good work on Aniwa, where he was truly beloved, I opposed his going with all my might. But he and his relations and his people were all set upon it, and I had at length to give way. His few booklets were then gathered together, his meager wardrobe was made up, and a small Native basket carried all his belongings. He assembled his people and took an affectionate farewell, pleading with them to be "strong for Jesus," whether they ever saw him again or not, and to be loyal and kind to Missi. The people wailed aloud, and many wept bitterly. Those on board the Dayspring were amazed to see how his people loved him. The old Chief stood the voyage well. He went in and out to our meeting of Synod, and was vastly pleased with the respect paid to him on Aneityum. When he heard of the prosperity of the Lord's work, and how Island after Island was learning to sing the praises of Jesus, his heart glowed, and he said, "Missi, I am lifting up my head like a tree. I am growing tall with joy!"

On the fourth or fifth day, however, he sent for me out of the Synod, and when I came to him, he said, eagerly, "Missi, I am near to die! I have asked you to come and say farewell. Tell my daughter, my brother, and my people to go on pleasing Jesus, and I will meet them again in the fair World."

I tried to encourage him, saying that God might raise him up again and restore him to his people; but he faintly whispered, "O Missi, death is already touching me! I feel my feet going away from under me. Help me to lie down under the shade of that banyan tree."

So saying, he seized my arm, we staggered near to the tree, and he lay down under its cool shade. He whispered again, "I am going! O Missi, let me hear your words raising up in prayer, and then my Soul will be strong to go."

Amidst many choking sobs, I tried to pray. At last he took my hand, pressed it to his heart, and said in a stronger and clearer tone, "O my Missi, my dear Missi, I go before you, but I will meet you again in the Home of Jesus. Farewell!"

That was the last effort of dissolving strength; he immediately became unconscious, and fell asleep. My heart felt like to break over him. He was my first Aniwan Convert—the first who ever on that Island, of love and tears opened his heart to Jesus; and as he lay there on the leaves and grass, my soul soared upward after his, and all the harps of God seemed to thrill with song as Jesus presented to the Father this trophy of redeeming love. He had been our true and devoted friend and fellow-helper in the Gospel; and next morning all the members of our Synod followed his remains to the grave. There we stood, the white Missionaries of the Cross from far distant lands, mingling our tears with Christian Natives of Aneityum, and letting them fall over one who only a few years before was a blood-stained Cannibal, and whom now we mourned as a brother, a saint, an Apostle amongst his people. Ye ask an explanation? The Christ entered into his heart, and Namakei became a new Creature. "Behold, I make all things new."

CHAPTER 79: CHRISTIANITY AND COCOANUTS.

NASWAI, the friend and companion of Namakei, was an inland Chief. He had, as his followers, by far the largest number of men in any village on Aniwa. He had certainly a dignified bearing, and his wife Katua was quite a lady in look and manner as compared with all around her. She was the first woman on the Island that adopted the clothes of civilization, and she showed considerable instinctive taste in the way she dressed herself in these. Her example was a kind of Gospel in its good influence on all the women; she was a real companion to her husband, and went with him almost everywhere.

Naswai was younger and more intelligent than Namakei, and in everything, except in translating the Scriptures, he was much more of a fellow-helper in the work of the Lord. For many years it was Naswai's special delight to carry my pulpit Bible from the Mission House to the Church every Sabbath morning, and to see that everything was in perfect order before the Service began. He was also the Teacher in his own village School, as well as an Elder in the Church. His addresses were wonderfully happy in graphic illustrations, and his prayers were fervid and uplifting. Yet his people were the worst to manage on all the Island, and the very last to embrace the Gospel.

He died when we were in the Colonies on furlough in 1875; and his wife Katua very shortly pre-deceased him. His last counsels to his people made a great impression on them. They told us how he pleaded with them to love and serve the Lord Jesus, and how he assured them with his dying breath that he had been "a new creature" since he gave his heart to Christ, and that he was perfectly happy in going to be with his Saviour.

I must here recall one memorable example of Naswai's power and skill as a preacher. On one occasion the Dayspring brought a large deputation from Fotuna to see for themselves the change which the Gospel had produced on Aniwa. On Sabbath, after the Missionaries had conducted the usual Public Worship, some of the leading Aniwans addressed the Fotunese; and amongst others, Naswai spoke to the following effect: "Men of Fotuna, you come to see what the Gospel has done for Aniwa. It is Jehovah the living God that has made all this change. As Heathens, we quarreled, killed, and ate each other. We had no peace and no joy in heart or house, in villages or in lands; but we now live as brethren and have happiness in all these things. When you go back to Fotuna, they will ask you, 'What is Christianity?' And you will have to reply, 'It is that which has changed the people of Aniwa.' But they will still say, 'What is it?' And you will answer, 'It is that which has given them clothing and blankets, knives and axes, fish-hooks and many other useful things; it is that which has led them to give up fighting, and to live together as friends.' But they will ask you, 'What is it like?' And you will have to tell them, alas, that you cannot explain it that you have only seen its workings, not itself, and that no one can tell what Christianity is but the man that loves Jesus, the Invisible Master, and walks with Him and tries to please Him. Now, you people of Fotuna, you think that if you don't dance and sing and pray to your gods, you will have no crops. We once did so too, sacrificing and doing much abomination to our gods for weeks before our planting season every year. But we saw our Missi only praying to the Invisible Jehovah, and planting his yams, and they grew fairer than ours. You are weak every year before your hard work begins in the fields, with your wild and bad conduct to please your gods. But we are strong for our work, for we pray to Jehovah, and He gives quiet rest instead of wild dancing, and makes us happy in our toils. Since we followed Missi's example, Jehovah has given us large and beautiful crops, and we now know that He gives us all our blessings."

Turning to me, he exclaimed, "Missi, have you the large yam we presented to you? Would you not think it well to send it back with these men of Fotuna, to let their people see the yams which Jehovah grows for us in answer to prayer? Jehovah is the only God who can grow yams like that!"

Then, after a pause, he proceeded, "When you go back to Fotuna, and they ask you, 'What is Christianity?' you will be like an inland Chief of Erromanga, who once came down and saw a great feast on the shore. When he saw so much food and so many different kinds of it, he asked, 'What is this made of?' and was answered, 'Cocoanuts and yams.' 'And this?' 'Cocoanuts and bananas.' 'And this?' 'Cocoanuts and taro.' 'And this?' 'Cocoanuts and chestnuts,' etc. etc. The Chief was immensely astonished at the host of dishes that could be prepared from the cocoanuts. On returning, he carried home a great load of them to his people, that they might see and taste the excellent food of the shore-people. One day, all being assembled, he told them the wonders of that feast; and, having roasted the cocoanuts, he took out the kernels, all charred and spoiled, and distributed them, amongst his people. They tasted the cocoanut, they began to chew it, and then spat it out, crying, 'Our own food is better than that!' The Chief was confused, and only got laughed at for all his trouble. Was the fault in the cocoanuts? No; but they were spoiled in the cooking! So your attempts to explain Christianity will only spoil it. Tell them that a man must live as a Christian, before he can show others what Christianity is."

On their return to Fotuna they exhibited Jehovah's yam, given in answer to prayer and labor; they told what Christianity had done for Aniwa; but did not fail to qualify all their accounts with the story of the Erromangan Chief and the cocoanuts.

CHAPTER 80: NERWA'S BEAUTIFUL FAREWELL.

THE Chief of next importance on Aniwa was Nerwa, a keen debater, all whose thoughts ran in the channels of logic. When I could speak a little of their language I visited and preached at his village; but the moment he discovered that the teaching about Jehovah was opposed to their Heathen customs, he sternly forbade us. One day, during my address, he blossomed out into a full-fledged and pronounced Agnostic (with as much reason at his back as the European type!), and angrily interrupted me:

"It's all lies you come here to teach us, and you call it worship! You say your Jehovah God dwells in Heaven. Who ever went up there to hear Him or see Him? You talk of Jehovah as if you had visited His Heaven. Why, you cannot climb even to the top of one of our cocoanut trees, though we can and that with ease! In going up to the roof of your own Mission House you require the help of a ladder to carry you. And even if you could make your ladder higher than our highest cocoanut tree, on what would you lean its top? And when you get to its top, you can only climb down the other side and end where you began! The thing is impossible. You never saw that God; you never heard Him speak; don't come here with any of your white lies, or I'll send my spear through you."

He drove us from his village, and furiously threatened murder, if we ever dared to return. But very shortly thereafter the Lord sent us a little orphan girl from Nerwa's village. She was very clever, and could soon both read and write, and told over all that we taught her. Her visits home, or at least amongst the villagers where her home had been, her changed appearance and her childish talk, produced a very deep interest in us and in our work.

An orphan boy next was sent from that village to be kept and trained at the Mission House, and he too took back his little stories of how kind and good to him were Missi the man and Missi the woman. By this time Chief and people alike were taking a lively interest in all that was transpiring. One day the Chief's wife, a quiet and gentle woman, came to the Worship and said, "Nerwa's opposition dies fast. The story of the Orphans did it! He has allowed me to attend the Church, and to get the Christian's book."

We gave her a book and a bit of clothing. She went home and told everything. Woman after woman followed her from that same village, and some of the men began to accompany them. The only thing in which they showed a real interest was the children singing the little hymns which I had translated into their own Aniwan tongue, and which my wife had taught them to sing very sweetly and joyfully. Nerwa at last got so interested that he came himself, and sat within earshot, and drank in the joyful sound. In a short time he drew so near that he could hear the preaching, and then began openly and regularly to attend the Church. His keen reasoning faculty was constantly at work. He weighed and compared everything he heard, and soon out-distanced nearly all of them in his grasp of the ideas of the Gospel. He put on clothing, joined our School, and professed himself a follower of the Lord Jesus. He eagerly set himself, with all his power, to bring in a neighboring Chief and his people, and constituted himself at once an energetic and very pronounced helper to the Missionary.

On the death of Naswai, Nerwa at once took his place in carrying my Bible to the Church, and seeing that all the people were seated before the stopping of the bell. I have seen him clasping the Bible like a living thing to his breast, as if he would cry, "Oh, to have this treasure in my own words of Aniwa!"

When the Gospels of Matthew and Mark were at last printed in Aniwan, he studied them incessantly, and soon could read them freely. He became the Teacher in his own village School, and delighted in instructing others. He was assisted by Ruwawa, whom he himself had drawn into the circle of Gospel influence; and at our next election these two friends were appointed Elders of the Church, and greatly sustained our hands in every good work on Aniwa.

After years of happy useful service, the time came for Nerwa to die. He was then so greatly beloved that most of the inhabitants visited him during his long illness. He read a bit of the Gospels in his own Aniwan, and prayed with and for every visitor. He sang beautifully, and scarcely allowed any one to leave his bedside without having a verse of one or other of his favorite hymns, "Happy Land," and "Nearer, my God, to Thee."

On my last visit to Nerwa, his strength had gone very low, but he drew me near his face, and whispered, "Missi, my Missi, I am glad to see you. You see that group of young men? They came to sympathize with me; but they have never once spoken the name of Jesus, though they have spoken about everything else! They could not have weakened me so, if they had spoken about Jesus! Read me the story of Jesus; pray for me to Jesus. No! stop, let us call them, and let me speak with them before I go."

I called them all around him, and he strained his dying strength, and said, "After I am gone, let there be no bad talk, no Heathen ways. Sing Jehovah's songs, and pray to Jesus, and bury me as a Christian. Take good care of my Missi, and help him all you can. I am dying happy and going to be with Jesus, and it was Missi that showed me this way. And who among you will take my place in the village School and in the Church? Who amongst you all will stand up for Jesus?"

Many were shedding tears, but there was no reply; after which the dying Chief proceeded, "Now let my last work on Earth be this—We will read a chapter of the Book, verse about, and then I will pray for you all, and the Missi will pray for me, and God will let me go while the song is still sounding in my heart!"

At the close of this most touching exercise, we gathered the Christians who were near by close around, and sang very softly in Aniwan, "There is a Happy Land." As they sang, the old man grasped my hand, and tried hard to speak, but in vain. His head fell to one side, "the silver cord was loosed, and the golden bowl was broken."

CHAPTER 81: RUWAWA.

His great friend, Ruwawa the Chief, had waited by Nerwa like a brother till within a few days of the latter's death, when he also was smitten down apparently by the same disease. He was thought to be dying, and he resigned himself calmly into the hands of Christ, One Sabbath afternoon, sorely distressed for lack of air, he instructed his people to carry him from the village to a rising ground on one of his plantations. It was fallow; the fresh air would reach him; and all his friends could sit around him. They extemporized a rest—two posts stuck into the ground, slanting, sticks tied across them, then dried banana leaves spread on these and also as a cushion on the ground—and there sat Ruwawa, leaning back and breathing heavily. After the Church Services, I visited him, and found half the people of that side of the Island sitting round him, in silence, in the open air. Ruwawa beckoned me, and I sat down before him. Though suffering sorely, his eye and face had the look of ecstasy.

"Missi," he said, "I could not breathe in my village; so I got them to carry me here, where there is room for all. They are silent and they weep, because they think I am dying. If it were God's will, I would like to live and to help you in His work. I am in the hands of our dear Lord, If he takes me, it is good; if He spares me, it is good! Pray, and tell our Saviour all about it."

I explained to the people that we would tell our Heavenly Father how anxious we all were to see Ruwawa given back to us strong and well to work for Jesus, and then leave all to His wise and holy disposal. I prayed, and the place became a very Bochim. When I left him, Ruwawa exclaimed, "Farewell, Missi; if I go first, I will welcome you to Glory; if I am spared, I will work with you for Jesus; so all is well!"

One of the young Christians followed me and said, "Missi, our hearts are very sore! If Ruwawa dies, we have no Chief to take his place in the Church, and it will be a heavy blow against Jehovah's Worship on Aniwa."

I answered, "Let us each tell our God and Father all that we feel and all that we fear; and leave Ruwawa and our work in His holy hands."

We did so with earnest and unceasing cry. And when all hope had died out of every heart, the Lord began to answer us; the disease began to relax its hold, and the beloved Chief was restored to health. As soon as he was able, though still needing help, he found his way back to the Church, and we all offered special thanksgiving to God. He indicated a desire to say a few words; and although still very weak, spoke with great pathos thus:

"Dear Friends, God has given me back to you all. I rejoice thus to come here and praise the great Father, who made us all, and who knows how to make and keep us well. I want you all to work hard for Jesus, and to lose no opportunity of trying to do good and so to please Him. In my deep journey away near to the grave, it was the memory of what I had done in love to Jesus that made my heart sing. I am not afraid of pain,—my dear Lord Jesus suffered far more for me, and teaches me how to bear it. I am not afraid of war or famine or death, or of the present or of the future; my dear Lord Jesus died for me, and in dying I shall live with him in Glory. I fear and love my dear Lord Jesus, because He loved me and gave Himself for me."

Then he raised his right hand, and cried in a soft, full-hearted voice: "My own, my dear Lord Jesus!" and stood for a moment looking joyfully upward, as if gazing into his Saviour's face. When he sat down, there was a long hush, broken here and there by a smothered sob, and Ruwawa's words produced an impression that is remembered to this day.

In 1888, when I visited the Islands, Ruwawa was still devoting himself heart and soul to the work of the Lord on Aniwa. Assisted by Koris, a Teacher from Aneityum, and visited annually by our ever dear and faithful friends, Mr. and Mrs. Watt, from Tanna, the good Ruwawa carried forward all the work of God on Aniwa, along with others, in our absence as in our presence. The meetings, the Communicants' Class, the Schools, and the Church Services are all regularly conducted and faithfully attended. "Bless the Lord, O my soul!"

CHAPTER 82: LITSI SORE AND MUNGAW.

LITSI, the only daughter of Namakei, had both in her own career and in her connection with poor dear Mungaw, an almost unparalleled experience. She was entrusted to us when very young, and became a bright, clever, and attractive Christian girl. Many sought her hand, but she disdainfully replied, "I am Queen of my own Island, and when I like I will ask a husband in marriage, as your great Queen Victoria did!"

Her first husband, however won, was undoubtedly the tallest and most handsome man on Aniwa; but he was a giddy fool, and, on his early death, she again returned to live with us at the Mission House. Her second marriage had everything to commend it, but it resulted in indescribable disaster. Mungaw, heir to a Chief, had been trained with us, and gave every evidence of decided Christianity. They were married in the Church, and lived in the greatest happiness. He was able and eloquent, and was first chosen as a deacon, then as an Elder of the Church, and finally as High Chief of one half of the Island. He showed the finest Christian spirit under many trying circumstances. Once, when working at the lime for the building of our Church, two bad men, armed with muskets, sought his life for blowing the conch to assemble the workers. Hearing of the quarrel, I rushed to the scene, and heard him saying, "Don't call me coward, or think me afraid to die. If I died now, I would go to be with Jesus. But I am no longer a Heathen; I am a Christian, and wish to treat you as a Christian should."

Two loaded muskets were leveled at him. I seized one in each of my hands, and held their muzzles aloft in air, so that, if discharged, the balls might pass over his head and mine; and thus I stood for some minutes pleading with them.

Others soon coming to the rescue, the men were disarmed; and, after much talk, they professed themselves ashamed, and promised better conduct for the future. Next day they sent a large present as a peace-offering to me, but I refused to receive it till they should first of all make peace with the young Chief. They sent a larger present to him, praying him to receive it, and to forgive them. Mungaw brought a still larger present in exchange, laid it down at their feet in the Public Ground, shook hands with them graciously, and forgave them in presence of all the people. His constant saying was, "I am a Christian, and I must do the conduct of a Christian."

In one of my furloughs to Australia I took the young Chief with me, in the hope of interesting the Sabbath Schools and Congregations by his eloquent addresses and noble personality. The late Dr. Cameron of Melbourne, having heard him, as translated by me, publicly declared that Mungaw's appearance and speech in his Church did more to show him the grand results of the Gospel amongst the Heathen than all the Missionary addresses he ever listened to or read.

Our lodging was in St. Kilda. My dear wife was suddenly seized with a dangerous illness on a visit to Taradale, and I was telegraphed for. Finding that I must remain with her, I got Mungaw booked for Melbourne, on the road for St. Kilda, in charge of a railway guard. Some white wretches, in the guise of gentlemen, offered to see him to the St. Kilda Station, assuring the guard that they were friends of mine, and interested in our Mission. They took him, instead, to some den of infamy in Melbourne. On refusing to drink with them, he said they threw him down on a sofa, and poured drink or drugs into him till he was nearly dead. Having taken all his money (he had only two or three pounds, made up of little presents from various friends), they thrust him out to the street, with only one penny in his pocket.

On becoming conscious, he applied to a policeman, who either did not understand or would not interfere. Hearing an engine whistle, he followed the sound, and found his way to Spencer Street Station, where he proffered his penny for a ticket, all in vain. At last a sailor took pity on him, got him some food, and led him to the St. Kilda Station. There he stood for a whole day, offering his penny for a ticket by every train, only to meet with refusal after refusal, till he broke down, and cried aloud in such English as desperation gave him:

"If me savvy road, me go. Me no savvy road, and stop here me die. My Missi Paton live at Kilda. Me want go Kilda. Me no money. Bad fellow took all! Send me Kilda."

Some gentle Samaritan gave him a ticket, and he reached our house at St. Kilda at last. There for above three weeks the poor creature lay in a sort of stupid doze. Food he could scarcely be induced to taste, and he only rose now and again for a drink of water. When my wife was able to be removed thither also, we found dear Mungaw dreadfully changed in appearance and in conduct. Twice thereafter I took him with me on Mission work; but, on medical advice, preparations were made for his immediate return to the Islands. I intrusted him to the kind care of Captain Logan, who undertook to see him safely on board the Dayspring, then lying at Auckland. Mungaw was delighted, and we hoped everything from his return to his own land and people. After some little trouble, he was landed safely home on Aniwa. But his malady developed dangerous and violent symptoms, characterized by long periods of quiet and sleep, and then sudden paroxysms, in which he destroyed property, burned houses, and was a terror to all.

On our return he was greatly delighted; but he complained bitterly that the white men "had spoiled his head," and that when it "burned hot" he did all these bad things for which he was extremely sorry. He deliberately attempted my life, and most cruelly abused his dear and gentle wife; and then, when the frenzy was over, he wept and lamented over it. Many a time he marched round and round our house with loaded musket and spear and tomahawk, while we had to keep doors and windows locked and barricaded; then the paroxysm passed off, and he slept, long and deep, like a child. When he came to himself, he wept and said, "The white men spoiled my head! I know not what I do. My head burns hot, and I am driven."

One day, in the Church, he leaped up during Worship with a loud yelling war-cry, rushed off through the Imrai to his own house, set fire to it, and danced around till everything he possessed was burned to ashes. Nasi, a bad Tannese Chief living on Aniwa, had a quarrel with Mungaw about a cask found at the shore, and threatened to shoot him. Others encouraged him to do so, as Mungaw was growing every day more and more destructive and violent. When any person became outrageous or insane on Aniwa, as they had neither asylum nor prison, they first of all held him fast and discharged a musket close to his ear; and then, if the shock did not bring him back to his senses, they tied him up for two days or so; and finally, if that did not restore him, they shot him dead. Thus the plan of Nasi was favored by their own customs. One night, after Family Worship—for amidst all his madness, when clear moments came, he poured out his soul in faith and love to the Lord—he said, "Litsi, I am melting! My head burns. Let us go out and get cooled in the open air."

She warned him not to go, as she heard voices whispering under the verandah. He answered a little wildly, "I am not afraid to die. Life is a curse and burden. The white men spoiled my head. If there is a hope of dying, let me go quickly and die!"

As he crossed the door, a ball crashed through him, and he fell dead. We got the mother and her children away to the Mission House; and next morning they buried the remains of poor Mungaw under the floor of his own hut, and enclosed the whole place with a fence. It was a sorrowful close to so noble a career. I shed many a tear that I ever took him to Australia. What will God have to say to those white fiends who poisoned and maddened poor dear Mungaw?

After a while the good Queen Litsi was happily married again. She became possessed with a great desire to go as a Missionary to the people and tribe of Nasi, the very man who had murdered her husband. She used to say, "Is there no Missionary to go and teach Nasi's people? I weep and pray for them, that they too may come to know and love Jesus."

I answered, "Litsi, if I had only wept and prayed for you, but stayed at home in Scotland, would that have brought you to know and love Jesus as you do?"

"Certainly not," she replied.

"Now then," I proceeded, "would it not please Jesus, and be a grand and holy revenge, if you, the Christians of Aniwa, could carry the Gospel to the very people whose Chief murdered Mungaw?"

The idea took possession of her soul. She was never wearied talking and praying over it. When at length a Missionary was got for Nasi's people, Litsi and her new husband offered themselves as the head of a band of six or eight Aniwan Christians and were engaged there to open up the way and assist, as Teachers and Helpers, the Missionary and his wife. There she and they have labored ever since. They are "strong" for the Worship. Her son is being trained up by his cousin, an Elder of the Church, to be "the good Chief of Aniwa"; so she calls him in her prayers, as she cries on God to bless and watch over him, while she is serving the Lord in at once serving the Mission family and ministering to the Natives in that foreign field.

Many years have now passed; and when lately I visited that part of Tanna, Litsi ran to me, clasped my hand, kissed it with many sobs, and cried, "O my father! God has blessed me to see you again. Is my mother, your dear wife, well? And your children, my brothers and sisters? My love to them all! Oh my heart clings to you!"

We had sweet conversation, and then she said more calmly, "My days here are hard. I might be happy and independent as Queen of my own Aniwa. But the Heathen here are beginning to listen. The Missi sees them coming nearer to Jesus. And oh, what a reward when we shall hear them sing and pray to our dear Saviour! The hope of that makes me strong for anything."

CHAPTER 83: THE CONVERSION OF NASI.

NASI, the Tanna-man, was a bad and dangerous character, though some readers may condone his putting an end to Mungaw in the terrible circumstances of our case. During a great illness that befell him, I ministered to him regularly, but no kindness seemed to move him. When about to leave Aniwa, I went specially to visit him. On parting I said, "Nasi, are you happy? Have you ever been happy?"

He answered gloomily, "No! Never."

I said, "Would you like this dear little boy of yours to grow up like yourself, and lead the life you have lived?"

"No!" he replied warmly! "I certainly would not."

"Then," I continued, "you must become a Christian, and give up all your Heathen conduct, or he will just grow up to quarrel and fight and murder as you have done; and, O Nasi, he will curse you through all Eternity for leading him to such a life and to such a doom!"

He was very much impressed, but made no response. After we had sailed, a band of our young Native Christians held a consultation over the case of Nasi. They said, "We know the burden and terror that Nasi has been to our dear Missi. We know that he has murdered several persons with his own hands, and has taken part in the murder of others. Let us unite in daily prayer that the Lord would open his heart and change his conduct, and teach him to love and follow what is good, and let us set ourselves to win Nasi for Christ, just as Missi tried to win us."

So they began to show him every possible kindness, and one after another helped him in his daily tasks, embracing every opportunity of pleading with him to yield to Jesus and take the new path of life. At first he repelled them, and sullenly held aloof. But their prayers never ceased, and their patient affection continued to grow. At last, after long waiting, Nasi broke down, and cried to one of the Teachers, "I can oppose your Jesus no longer. If He can make you treat me like that, I yield myself to Him and to you. I want Him to change me too. I want a heart like that of Jesus."

He rubbed off the ugly thick-daubed paint from his face; he cut off his long heathen hair; he went to the sea and bathed, washing himself clean; and then he came to the Christians and dressed himself in a shirt and a kilt. The next step was to get a book,—his was the translation of the Gospel according to St. John. He eagerly listened to every one that would read bits of it aloud to him, and his soul seemed to drink in the new ideas at every pore. He attended the Church and the School most regularly, and could in a very short time read the Gospel for himself. The Elders of the Church took special pains in instructing him, and after due preparation he was admitted to the Lord's Table—my brother Missionary from Tanna baptizing and receiving him. Imagine my joy on learning all this regarding one who had sullenly resisted my appeals for many years, and how my soul praised the Lord who is "Mighty to save!"

During a recent visit to Aniwa, in 1886, God's almighty compassion was further revealed to me, when I found that Nasi the murderer was now a Scripture Reader, and able to comment in a wonderful and interesting manner on what he read to the people! On arriving at the Island, after my tour in Great Britain (1884-85), all the inhabitants of Aniwa seemed to be assembled at the boat-landing to welcome me, except Nasi. He was away fishing at a distance, and had been sent for, but had not yet arrived. On the way to the Mission House, he came rushing to meet me. He grasped my hand, and kissed it, and burst into tears. I said, "Nasi, do I now at last meet you as a Christian?"

He warmly answered, "Yes, Missi; I now worship and serve the only Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Bless God, I am a Christian at last!"

My soul went out with a silent cry, "Oh, that the men at home who discuss and doubt about conversion, and the new heart, and the power of Jesus to change and save, could but look on Nasi, and spell out the simple lesson,—He that created us at first by His power can create us anew by His love!"

CHAPTER 84: THE APPEAL OF LAMU.

MY first Sabbath on Aniwa, after this tour in Great Britain and the Colonies, gave me a blessed surprise. Before daybreak I lay awake thinking of all my experiences on that Island, and wondering whether the Church had fallen off in my four years' absence, when suddenly the voice of song broke on my ears! It was scarcely full dawn, yet I jumped up and called to a man that was passing, "Have I slept in? Is it already Church-time? Or why are the people met so early?"

He was one of their leaders, and gravely replied, "Missi, since you left, we have found it very hard to live near to God! So the Chief and the Teachers and a few others meet when daylight comes in every Sabbath morning, and spend the first hour of every Lord's Day in prayer and praise. They are met to pray for you now, that God may help you in your preaching, and that all hearts may bear fruit to the glory of Jesus this day."

I returned to my room, and felt wonderfully "prepared" myself. It would be an easy and a blessed thing to lead such a Congregation into the presence of the Lord! They were there already.

On that day every person on Aniwa seemed to be at Church, except the bedridden and the sick. At the close of the Services, the Elders informed me that they had kept up all the Meetings during my absence, and had also conducted the Communicants' Class, and they presented to me a considerable number of Candidates for membership. After careful examination, I set apart nine boys and girls, about twelve or thirteen years of age and advised them to wait for at least another year or so, that their knowledge and habits might be matured. They had answered every question, indeed, and were eager to be baptized and admitted; but I feared for their youth, lest they should fall away and bring disgrace on the Church. One of them with very, earnest eyes, looked at me and said, "We have been taught that whosoever believeth is to be baptized. We do most heartily believe in Jesus, and try to please Jesus."

I answered, "Hold on for another year, and then our way will be clear."

But he persisted, "Some of us may not be living then; and you may not be here. We long to be baptized by you, our own Missi, and to take our place among the servants of Jesus."

After much conversation I agreed to baptize them, and they agreed to refrain from going to the Lord's Table for a year, that all the Church might by that time have knowledge and proof of their consistent Christian life, though so young in years. This discipline, I thought, would be good for them; and the Lord might use it as a precedent for guidance in future days.

Of other ten adults at this time admitted, one was specially noteworthy. She was about twenty-five, and the Elders objected because her marriage had not been according to the Christian usage on Aniwa. She left us weeping deeply. I was writing late at night in the cool evening air, as was my wont in that oppressive tropical clime, and a knock was heard at my door. I called out, "Akai era?" (= Who is there?)

A voice softly answered, "Missi, it is Lamu. Oh, do speak with me!"

This was the rejected candidate, and I at once opened the door.

"Oh, Missi," she began, "I cannot sleep, I cannot eat; my soul is in pain. Am I to be shut out from Jesus? Some of those at the Lord's Table committed murder. They repented, and have been saved. My heart is very bad; yet I never did any of those crimes of Heathenism; and I know that it is my joy to try and please my Saviour Jesus. How is it that I only am to be shut out from Jesus?"

I tried all I could to guide and console her, and she listened to all very eagerly. Then she looked up at me and said, "Missi, you and the Elders may think it right to keep me back from showing my love to Jesus at the Lord's Table; but I know here in my heart that Jesus has received me; and if I were dying now, I know that Jesus would take me to Glory and present me to the Father."

Her look and manner thrilled me. I promised to see the Elders and submit her appeal. But Lamu appeared and pled her own cause before them with convincing effect. She was baptized and admitted along with other nine. And that Communion Day will be long remembered by many souls on Aniwa.

It has often struck me, when relating these events, to press this question on the many young people, the highly privileged white brothers and sisters of Lamu, Did you ever lose one hour of sleep or a single meal in thinking of your Soul, your God, the claims of Jesus, and your Eternal Destiny?

And when I saw the diligence and fidelity of these poor Aniwan Elders, teaching and ministering during all those years, my soul has cried aloud to God, Oh, what could not the Church accomplish if the educated and gifted Elders and others in Christian lands would set themselves thus to work for Jesus, to teach the ignorant, to protect the tempted, and to rescue the fallen!

CHAPTER 85: WANTED! A STEAM AUXILIARY.

IN December 1883 I brought a pressing and vital matter before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria. It pertained to the New Hebrides Mission, to the vastly increased requirements of the Missionaries and their families there, and to the fact that the Dayspring was no longer capable of meeting the necessities of the case,—thereby incurring loss of time, loss of property, and risk and even loss of precious lives. The Missionaries on the spot had long felt this, and had loudly and earnestly pled for a new and larger Vessel, or a Vessel with Steam Auxiliary power, or some arrangement whereby the work of God on these Islands might be overtaken, without unnecessary exposure of life, and without the dreaded perils that accrue to a small sailing Vessel such as the Dayspring alike from deadly calms and from treacherous gales.

The Victorian General Assembly, heartily at one with the Missionaries, commissioned me to go home to Britain in 1884, making me at the same time their Missionary delegate to the Pan-Presbyterian Council at Belfast, and also their representative to the General Assemblies of the several Presbyterian Churches in Great Britain and Ireland. And they empowered and authorized me to lay our proposals about a new Steam Auxiliary Mission Ship before all these Churches, and to ask and receive from God's people whatever contributions they felt disposed to give towards the sum of £6000, without which this great undertaking could not be faced.

A few days after my arrival I was called upon to appear before the Supreme Court of the English Presbyterian Church, then assembled at Liverpool. While a hymn was being sung, I took my seat in the pulpit under great depression. But light broke around, when my dear friend and fellow-student, Dr. Oswald Dykes, came up from the body of the Church, shook me warmly by the hand, whispered a few encouraging words in my ear, and, returned to his seat. God helped me to tell my story, and the audience were manifestly interested.

Next, by kind invitation, I visited and addressed the United Presbyterian Synod of Scotland, assembled in Edinburgh. My reception there was not only cordial,—it was enthusiastic. Though as a Church they had no denominational interest in our Mission, the Moderator, amidst the cheers of all the Ministers and Elders, recommended that I should have free access to every Congregation and Sabbath School which I found it possible to visit, and hoped that their generous-hearted people would contribute freely to so needful and noble a cause. My soul rose in praise; and I may here say, in passing, that every Minister of that Church whom I wrote to or visited treated me in the same spirit throughout all my tour.

Having been invited by Mr. Dickson, an Elder of the Free Church, to address a midday meeting of children in the Free Assembly Hall, I was able by all appearances, greatly to interest and impress them. At the close, my dear and noble friend, Principal Cairns, warmly welcomed and cheered me, and that counted for much amid all anxieties; for I had learned that very day, at headquarters, that the Free Church authorities were resolved, in view of a difference of opinion betwixt the Dayspring Board at Sydney and the Victorian Assembly as to the new Steam Auxiliary, to hold themselves absolutely neutral.

Having letters from Andrew Scott, Esq., Carrugal, my very dear friend and helper in Australia, to Dr. J. Hood Wilson, Barclay Free Church, Edinburgh, I resolved to deliver them that evening; and I prayed the Lord to open up all my path, as I was thus thrown solely on Him for guidance and bereft of the aid of man. Dr. Wilson and his lady, neither of whom I had ever seen before, received me as kindly as if I had been an old friend. He read my letters of introduction, conversed with me as to plans and wishes (chiefly through Mrs. Wilson, for he was suffering from sore throat) and then he said with great warmth and kindliness:

"God has surely sent you here to-night! I feel myself unable to preach to-morrow. Occupy my pulpit in the forenoon and address my Sabbath School, and you shall have a collection for your Ship."

Thereafter, I was with equal kindness received by Mr. Balfour, having a letter of introduction from his brother, and he offered me his pulpit for the evening of that day. I lay down blessing and praising Him, the Angel of whose Presence was thus going before me and opening up my way. That Lord's Day I had great blessing and joy; there was an extraordinary response financially to my appeals and my proposal was thus fairly launched in the Metropolis of our Scottish Church life. I remembered an old saying, Difficulties are made only to be vanquished. And I thought in my deeper soul,—Thus our God throws us back upon Himself; and if these £6000 ever come to me, to the Lord God alone, and not to man, shall be all the glory!

On the Monday following, after a long conversation and every possible explanation, Colonel Young, of the Free Church Foreign Missions Committee, said, "We must have you to address the Assembly on the evening devoted to Missions." Thus I had the pleasure and honor of addressing that great Assembly; and though no notice was taken of my proposals in any "finding" of the Court, yet many were thereby interested deeply in our work, and requests now poured in upon me from every quarter to occupy pulpits and receive collections for the new Ship.

At the meeting in the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, which along with others, I was cordially invited to address, the good and noble Lord Polwarth occupied the chair. That was the beginning of a friendship in Christ which will last and deepen as long as we live. From that night he took the warmest personal interest, not only by generously contributing to my fund, but by organizing meetings at his own Mansion House, and introducing me to a wide circle of influential friends.

Nor, whilst the pen leads on my mind to recall these Border memories, must I fail to record how John Scott Dudgeon, Esq., Longnewton, a greatly esteemed Elder of the Church went from town to town in all that region, and from Minister to Minister, arranging for me a series of happy meetings. I shared also the hospitality of his beautiful home, and added himself and his much-beloved wife to the precious roll of those who are dear for the Gospel's sake and for their own. Her Majesty's Commissioner to the General Assembly for the year was that distinguished Christian as well as nobleman, the Earl of Aberdeen. He graciously invited me to meet the Countess and himself at ancient Holyrood. After dinner he withdrew himself for a lengthened time from the general company, and entered into a close and interested conversation about our Mission, and especially about the threatened annexation of the New Hebrides by the French.

There also I had the memorable pleasure of meeting, and for a long while conversing with that truly noble and large-hearted lady, his mother, the much-beloved Dowager-Countess well known for her life-long devotion to so many schemes of Christian philanthropy. At her own home, Alva House, she afterwards arranged meetings for me, as well as in Halls and Churches in the immediately surrounding district; and her letters of interest in the work, of sympathy, and of helpfulness, from time to time received, were amongst the sustaining forces of my spiritual life.

When one sees men and women of noble rank thus consecrating themselves in humble and faithful service to Jesus, there dawns upon the mind a glimpse of what the prophet means, and of what the world will be like, when it can be said regarding the Church of God on Earth,—"Kings have become thy nursing fathers, and their Queens thy nursing mothers."

CHAPTER 86: MY CAMPAIGN IN IRELAND.

MY steps were next directed towards Ireland, immediately after the Church meetings at Edinburgh; first to 'Derry, where the Presbyterian Assembly was met in annual conclave, and thereafter to Belfast, where the Pan-Presbyterian Council was shortly to sit. The eloquent fervor of the Brethren at 'Derry was like a refreshing breeze to my spirit; I never met Ministers anywhere, in all my travels, who seemed more wholehearted in their devotion to the work which the Lord had given them to do.

I addressed the Assembly at 'Derry and also the Council at Belfast. The memory of seeing all those great and learned and famous men—for many of the leaders were eminently such—so deeply interested in the work of God, and particularly in the Evangelizing of the Heathen World and bringing thereto the knowledge of Jesus, was to me, so long exiled from all such influences, one of the great inspirations of my life. I listened with humble thankfulness, and blessed the Lord who had brought me to sit at their feet.

On the rising of the Council, I entered upon a tour of six weeks among the Presbyterian Congregations and Sabbath Schools of Ireland. It had often been said to me, after my addresses in the Assemblies and elsewhere, "How do you ever expect to raise £6000? It can never be accomplished, unless you call upon the rich individually, and get their larger subscriptions. Our ordinary Church people have more than enough to do with themselves. Trade is dull," etc.

I explained to them, and also announced publicly, that in all similar efforts I had never called on or solicited any one privately, and that I would not do so now. I would make my appeal, but leave everything else to be settled betwixt the individual conscience and the Saviour—I gladly receiving whatsoever was given or sent, acknowledging it by letter, and duly forwarding it to my own Church in Victoria. Again and again did generous souls offer to go with me, introduce me, and give me opportunity of soliciting subscriptions; but I steadily refused—going, indeed, wherever an occasion was afforded me of telling my story and setting forth the claims of the Missions, but asking no one personally for anything, having fixed my soul in the conviction that one part of the work was laid upon me, but that the other lay betwixt the Master and His servants exclusively.

"On what then do you really rely, looking at it from a business point of view?" they would somewhat appealingly ask me.

I answered, "I will tell my story; I will set forth the claims of the Lord Jesus on the people; I will expect the surplus collection, or a retiring collection, on Sabbath; I will ask the whole collection, less expenses, at week-night meetings; I will issue Collecting Cards for Sabbath Scholars; I will make known my Home-Address, to which everything may be forwarded, either from Congregations or from private donors; and I will go on, to my utmost strength, in the faith that the Lord will send me the £6000 required. If He does not so send it, then I shall expect He will send me grace to be reconciled to the disappointment, and I shall go back to my work without the Ship."

This, in substance, I had to repeat hundreds of times; and as often had I to witness the half-pitying or incredulous smile with which it was received, or to hear the blunt and emphatic retort, "You'll never succeed! Money cannot be got in that unbusiness-like way."

I generally added nothing further to such conversation; but a Voice, deep, sweet, and clear, kept sounding through my soul—"The silver and the gold are Mine."

During the year 1884, as is well known, Ireland was the scene of many commotions and of great distress. Yet at the end of my little tour amongst the Presbyterian people of the North principally, though not exclusively, a sum of more than £600 had been contributed to our Mission Fund. And there was not, so far as my knowledge went, one single large subscription; there were, of course, many bits of gold from those well-to-do, but the ordinary collection was made up of the shillings and pence of the masses of the people. Nor had I ever in all my travels a warmer response, nor ever mingled with any Ministers more earnestly devoted to their Congregations or more generally and deservedly beloved.

CHAPTER 87: SCOTLAND'S FREE-WILL OFFERINGS.

RETURNING to Scotland, I settled down at my headquarters, the house of my brother James in Glasgow; and thence began to open up the main line of my operations, as the Lord day by day guided me. Having the aid of no Committee, I cast myself on Minister after Minister and Church after Church, calling here, writing there, and arranging for three meetings every Sabbath, and one, if possible, every week-day, and drawing-room meetings, wherever practicable, in the afternoons. My correspondence grew to oppressive proportions, and kept me toiling at it every spare moment from early morn till bedtime. Indeed, I never could have overtaken it, had not my brother devoted many days and hours of precious time, answering letters regarding arrangements issuing the "Share" receipts for all moneys the moment they arrived, managing all my transactions through the bank, and generally tackling and reducing the heap of communications, and preventing me falling into hopeless arrears.

I printed, and circulated by post and otherwise, ten thousand copies of a booklet, "Statement and Appeal,"—containing, besides my Victorian Commission and my Glasgow address, a condensed epitome of the results of the New Hebrides Mission and of the reasons for asking a new Steam Auxiliary Ship. To this chiefly is due the fact, as well as to my refusing to call for subscriptions, that the far greater portion of all the money came to me by letter. On one day, though no doubt a little exceptional, as many as seventy communications reached me by post; and every one of these contained something for our fund-ranging from "a few stamps," and "the widow's mite," through every variety of figure up to the wealthy man's fifty or hundred pounds. I was particularly struck with the number of times that I received £1, with such a note as, "From a servant-girl that loves the Lord Jesus;" or "From a servant-girl that prays for the conversion of the Heathen." Again and again I received sums of five and ten shillings, with notes such as—"From a working-man who loves his Bible;" or "From a working-man who prays for God's blessing on you and work like yours every day in Family Worship." I sometimes regret that the graphic, varied, and intensely interesting notes and letters were not preserved; for by the close of my tour they would have formed a wonderful volume of leaves from the human heart.

I also addressed every Religious Convention to which I was invited, or to which I could secure access. The Perth Conference was made memorable to me by my receiving the first large subscription for our Ship, and by my making the acquaintance of a beautiful type of Christian merchant. At the close of the meeting, at which I had the privilege of speaking, an American gentleman introduced himself to me. We at once entered into each other's confidence, as brothers in the Lord's service. I afterwards learned that he had made a competency for himself and his family, though only in the prime of life; and he still carried on a large and flourishing business—but why? to devote the whole profits, year after year, to the direct service of God and His cause among men? He gave me a cheque for the largest single contribution with which the Lord had yet cheered me. God, who knows me, sees that I have never coveted money for myself or my family; but I did envy that Christian merchant the joy that he had in having money, and having the heart to use it as a steward of the Lord Jesus!

Thereafter I was invited to the annual Christian Conference at Dundee. A most peculiar experience befell me there. Being asked to close the forenoon meeting with prayer and the benediction, I offered prayer, and then began, "May the love of God the Father—" but not another word would come in English; everything was blank except the words in Aniwan, for I had long begun to think in the Native tongue, and after a dead pause, and a painful silence, I had to wind up with a simple "Amen!" I sat down wet with perspiration. It might have been wiser, as the Chairman afterwards suggested, to have given them the blessing in Aniwan, but I feared to set them alaughing by so strange a manifestation of the "tongues." Worst of all, it had been announced that I was to address them in the afternoon; but who would come to hear a Missionary that stuck in the benediction? The event had its semi-comical aspect, but it sent me to my knees during the interval in a very fever of prayerful anxiety. A vast audience assembled, and if the Lord ever manifestly used me in interesting His people in Missions, it was certainly then and there. As I sat down, a devoted Free Church Elder from Glasgow handed me his card, with "I. O. U. £100." This was my first donation of a hundred pounds, and my heart was greatly cheered. I praised the Lord, and warmly thanked His servant. A Something kept sounding these words in my ears, "My thoughts are not as your thoughts;" and also, "Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He will sustain thee."

During my address at that meeting three colored girls, not unlike our Island girls, sat near the platform, and eagerly listened to me. At the close, the youngest, apparently about twelve years of age, rose, salaamed to me in Indian fashion, took four silver bangles from her arm, and presented them to me, saying, "Padre, I want to take shares in your Mission Ship by these bangles, for I have no money, and may the Lord ever bless you!"

I replied, "Thank you, my dear child; I will not take your bangles, but Jesus will accept your offering, and bless and reward you all the same."

As she still held them up to me, saying, "Padre, do receive them from me, and may God ever bless you!" a lady, who had been seated beside her, came up to me, and said, "Please, do take them, or the dear girl will break her heart. She has offered them up to Jesus for your Mission Ship."

I afterwards learned that the girls were orphans, whose parents died in the famine; that the lady and her sister, daughters of a Missionary, had adopted them to be trained as Zenana Missionaries, and that they intended to return with them, and live and die to aid them in that blessed work amongst the daughters of India. Oh, what a reward and joy might many a lady who reads this page easily reap for herself in Time and Eternity by a similar simple yet far-reaching service! Take action when and where God points the way; wait for no one's guidance.

The most amazing variety characterize the gifts and the givers. One donor sent me an anonymous note to this effect, "I have been curtailing my expenses. The first £5 saved I enclose that you may invest it for me in the Bank of Jesus. I am sure He gives the best interest, and the most certain returns."

In Glasgow a lady called at my brother's house, saying, "Is the Missionary at home? Can I see him alone? If not, I will call again." Being asked into my room, she declined to be seated, but said, "I heard you tell the story of your Mission in the City Hall, and I have been praying for you ever since. I have called to give you my mite, but not my name. God bless you. We shall meet in Heaven!" She handed me an envelope, and was off almost before I could thank her. It was £49 in bank-notes.

Another dear Christian friend carne to see me, and at the close of a delightful conversation, said: "I have been thinking much about you since I heard you in the Clark Hall, Paisley. I have come to give a little bit of dirty paper for your Ship. God sent it to me, and I return it to God through you with great pleasure." I thanked her warmly, thinking it a pound, or five at the most; on opening it, after she was gone, it turned out to be £100. I felt bowed down in humble thankfulness, and pressed forward in the service of the Lord.

CHAPTER 88: ENGLAND'S OPEN BOOK.

THE time now arrived for my attempting something amongst the Presbyterians of England. But my heart sank within me; I was a stranger to all except Dr. Dykes, and the New Hebrides Mission had no special claims on them. Casting myself upon the Lord, I wrote to all the Presbyterian Ministers in and around London, enclosing my "Statement and Appeal," and asking a Service, with a retiring collection, or the surplus above the usual collection, on behalf of our Mission Ship. All declined, except two. I learned afterwards that the London Presbytery had resolved that no claim beyond their own Church was to be admitted into any of its pulpits for a period of months, under some special financial emergency. My dear friend, Dr. J. Hood Wilson, kindly wrote also to a number of them, on my behalf, but with a similar result; though at last other two Services were arranged for with a collection, and one without. Being required at London, in any case, in connection with the threatened Annexation of the New Hebrides by the French, I resolved to take these five Services by the way, and immediately return to Scotland, where engagements and opportunities were now pressed upon me, far more than I could overtake. But the Lord Himself opened before me a larger door, and more effectual, than any that I had tried in vain to open up for myself.

The Churches to which I had access did nobly indeed, and the Ministers treated me as a very brother. Dr. Dykes most affectionately supported my Appeal, and made himself recipient of donations that might be sent for our Mission Ship. Dr. Donald Fraser, and Messrs. Taylor and Mathieson, with their Congregations, generously contributed to the Fund. And so did the Mission Church in Drury Lane—the excellent and consecrated Rev. W. B. Alexander, the pastor thereof, and his wife, becoming my devoted personal friends and continuing to remember in their work-parties ever since the needs of the Natives on the New Hebrides. Others also, whom I cannot wait to specify, showed a warm interest in us and in our department of the Lord's work. But my heart had been foolishly set upon adding a large sum to the fund for the Mission Ship, and when only about £150 came from all the Churches in London to which I could get access, no doubt I was sensible of cherishing a little guilty disappointment. That was very unworthy in me, considering all my previous experiences; and God deserved to be trusted by me far differently, as the sequel will immediately show.

That widely-known and deeply-beloved servant of God, Mr. J. E. Mathieson, of the Mildmay Conference Hall, had invited me to address one of their annual meetings on behalf of Foreign Missions, and also to be his guest while the Conference lasted. Thereby I met and heard many godly and noble disciples of the Lord, whom I could not otherwise have reached though every Church I had asked in London had been freely opened to me. These devout and faithful and generous people, belonging to every branch of the Church of Christ, and drawn from every rank and class in society, from the humblest to the highest, were certainly amongst the most open-hearted and the most responsive of all whom I ever had the privilege to address. One felt there, in a higher degree than almost anywhere else, that every soul was on fire with love to Jesus and with genuine devotion to His Cause in every corner of the Earth. There it was a privilege and a gladness to speak; and though no collection was asked, or could be expected, my heart was uplifted and strengthened by these happy meetings, and by all that Heavenly intercourse.

But see how the Lord leads us by a way we know not! Next morning after my address, a gentleman who had heard me, the Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer, handed me a cheque from his father-in-law for £300, by far the largest single donation at that time towards our Mission Ship; and immediately thereafter I received from one of the Mildmay lady Missionaries £50, from a venerable friend of the founder £20, from "Friends at Mildmay" £30; and through my dear friend and brother, Mr. Mathieson, many other donations were in due course forwarded to me.

My introduction, however, to the Conference at Mildmay did far more for me than even this; it opened up a series of drawing-room meetings in and around London, where I told the story of our Mission and preached, the Gospel to many in the higher walks of life, and received most liberal support for the Mission Ship. It also brought me invitations from many quarters of England, to Churches, to Halls, and to County Houses and Mansions.

Lord Radstock got up a special meeting, inviting by private card a large number of his most influential friends; and there I met for the first time one whom I have since learned to regard as a very precious personal friend. Rev. Sholto D. C. Douglas, clergyman, of the Church of England, who then, and afterwards at Douglas-Support in Scotland, not only most liberally supported our fund, but took me by the hand as a brother, and promoted my work by every means in his power.

The Earl and Countess of Tankerville also invited me to Chillingham Castle, and gave me an opportunity of addressing a great assembly there, then gathered together from all parts of the County. The British and Foreign Bible Society received me in a special meeting of the Directors; and I was able to tell them how all we, the Missionaries of these Islands whose language had never before been reduced to writing, looked to them, and leant upon them, and prayed for them and their work—without whom our Native Bibles never could have been published. After the meeting the Chairman gave me £5, and one of the Directors a check for £25 for our Mission Ship.

I was also invited to Leicester, and made the acquaintanceship of a godly and gifted servant of the Lord Jesus, the Rev. F. B. Meyer, B. A. (now of London), whose books and booklets on the higher aspects of the Christian Life are read by tens of thousands, and have been fruitful of blessing. There I addressed great meetings of devoted workers in the Lord's vineyard; and the dear friend who was my host on that occasion, a Christian merchant, has since contributed £10 per annum for the support of a Native Teacher on the New Hebrides.

It was my privilege also to visit and address the Müller Orphanages at Bristol, and to see that saintly man of faith and prayer moving about as a wise and loving father amongst the hundreds, even thousands, that look to him for their daily bread and for the bread of Life Eternal. At the close of my address, the venerable founder thanked me warmly and said, "Here are £50, which God has sent to me for your Mission." I replied saying, "Dear friend, how can I take it? I would rather give you £500 for your Orphans if I could, for I am sure you need it all!"

He replied, with sweetness and great dignity, "God provides for His own Orphans. This money cannot be used for them. I must send it after you by letter. It is the Lord's gift."

Often, as I have looked at the doings of men and Churches, and tried to bring all to the test as if in Christ's very presence, it has appeared to me that such work as Müller's and Barnardo's, and that of my own fellow-countryman, William Quarrier, must be peculiarly dear to the heart of our blessed Lord. And were He to visit this world again, and seek a place where His very Spirit had most fully wrought itself out into deeds, I fear that many of our so-called Churches would deserve to be passed by, and that His holy, tender, helpful, divinely-human love would find its most perfect reflex in these Orphan Homes. Still and forever, amidst all changes of creed and of climate, this, this is "pure and undefiled Religion" before God and the Father!

But in this connection I must not omit to mention that the noble and world-famous servant of God, the Minister of the Tabernacle, invited me to a garden-party at his home, and asked me to address his students and other Christian workers. When I arrived I found a goodly company assembled under the shade of lovely trees, and felt the touch of that genial humor, so mighty a gift when sanctified, which has so often given wings to C. H. Spurgeon's words, when he saluted me as "The King of the Cannibals!" On my leaving, Mrs. Spurgeon presented me with her husband's Treasury of David, and also "£5 from the Lord's cows"—which I afterwards learned was part of the profits from certain cows kept by the good lady, and that everything produced thereby was dedicated to the work of the Lord. I praised God that He had privileged me to meet this extraordinarily endowed man, to whom the whole Christian World had been so specially indebted, and who had consecrated all his gifts and opportunities to the proclamation of the pure and precious Gospel.

Of all my London associations, however, the deepest and the most imperishable is that which weaves itself around the Honorable Ion Keith-Falconer, who has already passed to what may truly be called a Martyr's crown. At that time I met him at his father-in-law's house at Trent; and on another occasion spent a whole day with him at the house of his noble mother, the Countess-Dowager of Kintore. His soul was then full of his projected Mission to the Arabs, being himself one of the most distinguished Orientalists of the day; and as we talked together, and exchanged experiences, I felt that never before had I visibly marked the fire of God, the holy passion to seek and to save the lost, burning more steadily or brightly on the altar of any human heart. The heroic founding of the Mission at Aden is already one of the precious annals of the Church of Christ. His young and devoted wife survives, to mourn indeed, but also to cherish his noble memory; and, with the aid of others, and the banner of the Free Church of Scotland, to see the "Keith-Falconer Mission" rising up amidst the darkness of blood-stained Africa, as at once a harbor of refuge for the slave, and a beacon-light to those who are without God and without hope The servant does his day's work, and passes on through the gates of sleep to the Happy Dawn; but the Divine Master lives and works and reigns, and by our death, as surely as by our life, His holy purposes shall be fulfilled.

CHAPTER 89: FAREWELL SCENES.

ON returning to Scotland, every day was crowded with engagements for the weeks that remained, and almost every mail brought me contributions from all conceivable corners of the land. My heart was set upon taking out two or three Missionaries with me to claim more and still more of the Islands for Christ; and with that view I had addressed Divinity Students at Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Again and again, by conversation and correspondence, consecrated young men were just on the point of volunteering; but again and again the larger and better known fields of labor turned the scale, and they finally decided for China or Africa or India. Deeply disappointed at this, and thinking that God directed us to look to our own Australia alone for Missionaries for the New Hebrides, I resolved to return, and took steps towards securing a passage by the Orient Line to Melbourne. But just then two able and devoted students, Messrs. Morton and Leggatt, offered themselves as Missionaries for our Islands; and shortly thereafter a third, Mr. Landells, also an excellent man; and all, being on the eve of their License as preachers, were approved of, accepted, and set to special preparations for the Mission field, particularly in acquiring practical medical knowledge.

On this turn of affairs I managed to have my passage delayed for six weeks, and resolved to cast myself on the Lord that He might enable me in that time to raise at least £500, in order to furnish the necessary outfit and equipment for three new Mission Stations, and to pay the passage money of the Missionaries and their wives, that there might be no difficulty on this score amongst the Foreign Mission Committees on the other side. And then the idea came forcibly, and for a little unmanned me, that it was wrong in me to speak of these limits as to time and money in my prayers to God. But I reflected, again, how it was for the Lord's own glory alone in the salvation of the Heathen, and for no personal aims of mine; and so I fell back on His promise, "Whatsoever ye shall ask in My Name," and believingly asked it in His Name, and for His praise and service alone. I think it due to my Lord, and for the encouragement of all His servants, that I should briefly outline what occurred in answer to these prayers.

Having gone to the center of one of the great shipbuilding districts of Scotland, and held a series of meetings, and raised a sum of about £55 only after nine services and many Sabbath School collecting cards, my heart was beginning to sink, as I did not think my health would stand another six weeks of incessant strain; when, at the close of my last meeting in a Free Church, an Elder and his wife entered the vestry and said, "We are deeply interested in you and in all your work and plans. You say that you have asked £500 more. We gave you the first £100 at the Dundee Conference; and it is a joy to us to give you this £100 too, towards the making up of your final sum. We pray that you may speedily realize your wish, and that God's richest blessing may ever rest upon your head."

Another week passed by, and at the close of it a lady called upon me, and, after delightful conversation about the Mission, said, "How near are you to the sum required?" I explained to her what is recorded above, and she continued, "I gave you one little piece of paper at the beginning of your efforts. I have prayed for you every day since. God has prospered me, and this is one of the happiest moments of my life, when I am now able to give you another little bit of paper."

So saying, she put into my hand £100. I protested, "You are surely too generous. Can you afford a second £100?"

She replied to this effect, and very joyfully, as one who had genuine gladness in the deed, "My Lord has been very kind to me, in my business. My wants are simple, and are safe in His hands. I wait not till death forces me, but give back whatever I am able to the Lord now, and hope to live to see much blessing thereby through you in the conversion of the Heathen."

My last week had come, and I was in the midst of preparations for departure, when amongst the letters delivered to me was one to this effect:

"Restitution money which never now can be returned to its owner. Since my Conversion I have labored hard to save it. I now make my only possible amends by returning it to God through you. Pray for me and mine, and may God bless you in your work!" I rather startled my brother and his wife at our breakfast table by shouting out in unwontedly excited tones,—"Hallelujah! The Lord has done it! Hallelujah!" But my tones softened down into intense reverence, and my words broke at last into tears, when I found that this, the second largest subscription ever received by me (£1000, by one friend, have since been given to the "John G. Paton Mission Fund"), came from a converted tradesman who had consecrated his all to the Lord Jesus, and whose whole leisure was now centered upon seeking to bless and save those of his own rank and class, amongst whom he had spent his early and unconverted days. Jesus said unto him, "Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee."

Bidding farewell to dear old Glasgow, so closely intertwined with all my earlier and later experiences, I started for London, accompanied by my brother James. We were sitting at breakfast at Mrs. Mathieson's table, Mildmay, when a telegram was put into my hands announcing a "thank-offering" from Lord and Lady Polwarth, received since our departure from Glasgow. The Lord had now literally exceeded my prayers. With other gifts, repeated again by friends at Mildmay, the special fund for outfit and traveling expenses for new Missionaries had risen above the £500, and now approached £650.

In a Farewell Meeting at Mildmay the Lord's servants, being assembled in great numbers from all quarters of London, dedicated me and my work very solemnly to God, amid songs of praise and many prayers and touching "last words." And when at length Mr. Mathieson, intimating that I must go, as another company of Christian workers were elsewhere waiting also to say Good-by, suggested that the whole audience should stand up, and, instead of hand-shaking, quietly breathe their benedictory Farewell as I passed from the platform down through their great Hall, a perfect flood of emotion overwhelmed me. I never felt a humbler man, nor more anxious to hide my head in the dust, than when all these noble, gifted, and beloved followers of Jesus Christ, and consecrated workers in His service, stood up and with one heart said, "God speed" and "God bless you," as I passed on through the Hall. To one who had striven and suffered less, or who less appreciated how little we can do for others compared with what Jesus had done for us, this scene might have ministered to spiritual pride; but long ere I reached the door of that Hall, my soul was already prostrated at the feet of my Lord in sorrow and in shame that I had done so little for Him, and I bowed my head and could have gladly bowed my knees to cry, "Not unto us; Lord, not unto us!"

CHAPTER 90: WELCOME TO VICTORIA AND ANIWA.

ON the 28th October, 1885, I sailed for Melbourne, and in due course safely arrived there by the goodness of God. The Church and people of my own beloved Victoria gave me a right joyful welcome, and in public assembly presented me with a testimonial, which I shrank from receiving, but which all the same was the highly-prized expression of their confidence and esteem.

During my absence at the Islands, to which I immediately proceeded, they unanimously elected me Moderator of their Supreme Court, and called me back to fill that highest Chair of honor in the Presbyterian Church. God is my witness how very little any or all of these things in themselves ever have been coveted by me; but how, when they have come in my way, I have embraced them with a single desire thereby to promote the Church's interest in that Cause to which my whole life and all my opportunities are consecrated—the Conversion of the Heathen World.

My Mission to Britain was to raise £6000, in order to enable the Australian Churches to provide a Steam Auxiliary Mission Ship, for the enlarged and constantly enlarging requirements of the New Hebrides. I spent exactly eighteen months at home; and when I returned, I was enabled to hand over to the Church that had commissioned and authorized me no less a sum than £9000. And all this had been forwarded to me, as the freewill offerings of the Lord's stewards, in the manner illustrated by the preceding pages. "Behold! What God hath wrought!"

Of this sum £6000 are set apart to build or acquire the new Mission Ship. The remainder is added to what we call our Number II. Fund, for the maintenance and equipment of additional Missionaries. It has been the dream of my life to see one Missionary at least, with trained Native Teachers, planted on every Island of the New Hebrides, and then I could lie down and whisper gladly, "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace!"

As to the new Mission Ship, unexpected delay has arisen. There are differences of opinion about the best way of carrying out the proposal. There must be an understanding betwixt New South Wales and Victoria and the other Colonies, as to the additional annual expenditure. And the perplexity as to the wisest course has deepened, since the Colonial Government began to run Mail Ships regularly from Australia to Fiji, willing on certain terms of subsidy, to call at one or other harbor in the New Hebrides. Meantime, let all friends who are interested in us and our work understand—that the money so generously intrusted to me has been safely handed over to my own Victorian Church, and is deposited at good interest in the bank, to be spent at their discretion in due time, when all details are settled, and, as nearly as possible in the altered circumstances, exclusively for the purposes for which it was asked and bestowed.

To me personally, this delay is confessedly a keen and deep disappointment. But the special work laid upon me has, however, been accomplished. The Colonial Churches have now all the responsibility of the further steps. In this, as in many a harder trouble of my checkered life, I calmly roll all my burden upon the Lord. I await with quietness and confidence His wise disposal of events. His hand is on the helm; and whither He steers us, all shall be well.

But let me not close this chapter, till I have struck another and a Diviner note. I have been to the Islands again, since my return from Britain. The whole inhabitants of Aniwa were there to welcome me, and my procession to the old Mission House was more like the triumphal march of a Conqueror than that of a humble Missionary. Everything was kept in beautiful and perfect order. Every Service of the Church, as previously described in this book, was fully sustained by the Native Teachers, the Elders, and the occasional visit, once or twice a year, of an ordained Missionary from one of the other Islands. Aniwa, like Aneityum, is a Christian land. Jesus has taken possession, never again to quit those shores. GLORY, GLORY TO HIS BLESSED NAME!

My Home has since been at Melbourne. My life-work now (1892), and probably during the remainder of my active days, will be to visit and address the Congregations and Sabbath Schools of the Presbyterian Churches of Australasia, telling them, as in this book, the story of my experiences, and inspiring the Christian people of these Colonies to support the New Hebrides Mission, and to claim all these Islands for the Lord Jesus Christ.

Reader, in your life, as in mine, one last Chapter still awaits us. By His grace, who has sustained me from childhood till now, I would work out that Chapter, and live through these closing scenes. With this book still open before you, I implore you to go alone before your blessed Saviour, and pledge yourself so to live, and so to die, in the service and fellowship of the Lord Jesus, that you and I, who have companied with each other through these pages, may meet again and renew our happy intercourse in our FATHER'S HOUSE.

CHAPTER 91: GOOD NEWS FROM TANNA, 1891.

(By the Editor.)

WHILST this page of manuscript passes through my hands, there is laid before me a brilliant letter from Mrs. Watt of Tanna, which, I am sure, she will pardon me for utilizing thus. It is written from Port Resolution, in the closing days of 1891. Its main theme is the building of the SCOTCH CHURCH, in the very heart of the district where my brother's years of anguish and toil were endured. Friends in Scotland gave Mr. and Mrs. Watt the money wherewith to purchase materials, and St. Paul's Parish Church, Glasgow, provided the Bell. But let us hear how she paints the scene, and unveils to us the Island life,—alike Pagan and Christian.

When they returned from Scotland and found their way to Kwamera, after galling delays among the Islands, one of their first duties was the making of "the annual contribution of arrow-root," the proceeds "to go to line the roof of the Kwamera Church,—the Church itself having been built in the same way," that is, by the sacred arrow-root! Then they went round to Port Resolution for the erection of the SCOTCH CHURCH,—"A Memorial of Workers and Work on Tanna." She tells how they "improvized a derrick by lashing together the masts of the two boats, and, with the aid of these and blocks and tackle, got the principals into their proper position. And though carpenters or builders may laugh at it," she adds, "we heaved a sigh of relief when the last one was secured." Listen to this: "Mr. Gray (neighbor Missionary) and Mr. Watt were the only skilled workmen. The others were all inexperienced, being Natives. We had them all divided into two relays, and they came turn about, each alternate day; and I can assure you there are no Natives in the Group, or indeed in any land, who would have come more faithfully, or worked more heartily, than these much-abused Tannese! The work went on every day, Sabbaths excepted, from 6 A.M. till 6 P.M., for forty days. On ten of these days Mr. Gray gave very valuable assistance; in truth, I do not see how we could have done without him. Day by day the women prepared food; the boys pulled drinking cocoanuts; and every one worked willingly, while crowds came and gazed on in wonder as the edifice arose." And if there be any shallow arm-chair critic of Missions ready to sneer at such toils, let him first digest what this devoted lady Missionary says: "Church Building may not be considered by some as Mission work; yet we believe this Church erection has been the means of much good to this people. We have had better attendances, both on week-days and on Sabbaths, than ever before. And we managed to keep up the daily morning and evening meetings during all the building time,—as, after the devotional part was over, the builders went out, but the rest remained for lessons." What more blessed than thus to work and pray! To teach their hands to work, and their hearts to sing praises to the Lord!

Now let us pass on, and look in upon them at the opening and dedication of this SCOTCH CHURCH ON TANKA to the Lord God. "On a fixed day, Wednesday 28th October, exactly twelvemonths to a day from our leaving Liverpool, Natives from far and near assembled for the occasion. Mr. and Mrs. Gray, with their two children, a Mr. Voullaire, a German who has come to Tanna as a Trader, and our neighbor Mr. Bramwell, joined us. So that, when we all met for the Opening Services, we were a somewhat mixed company, speaking a medley of languages,—English, Scotch, German, Fijian, Aneityumese, Aniwan, and at least two of the Tannese languages! The building was well filled; but the bigger crowd was gathered outside; for our Heathen onlookers were afraid to enter the sacred edifice. The Service was beautiful. All seemed very happy. After it, there was an exchange of gifts, we giving fifty fathoms of prints and calicoes, some handkerchiefs, two pots full of cooked rice, a pile of raw yams and taro, and two pieces of salt beef. Our neighbor gave some print, some tins of luncheon beef, and some uncooked rice. The Natives gave two cooked pigs, and native puddings ad libitum. These things being divided to the satisfaction of all, we had speeches, when doubtless some good impressions were made. On the Sabbath following we had a good attendance, Mr. Gray addressing the people. On the Sabbath following that we made our first money collection on Tanna." I again ask to my readers to listen, and to lay to heart what the lady Missionary tells us of these once cruel and cannibal souls. "We asked the people to give it as a thank-offering for the remarkable exemption from accident during the building of the Church though at times the work was rather dangerous. The collection was £3: 5s. We were much pleased with the hearty way the people responded to this, the first call to give a free gift to the Lord. One man, whose whole purse was 17s., gave 1s. himself, and gave 1s. to each of his three sons, so that they too might have something to give. Knowing how meanly the Tannese treated the Spirits whom they worshiped in Heathenism,—giving them the scraggiest fish, the poorest bananas, and the smallest yams,—we rejoiced in this Christian liberality!!"

Referring to exaggerated Newspaper rumors she says: "Tanna bulks largely in some minds, though it is only a small Island, a little larger than Arran! We had noticed that our Civil War was telegraphed not only to the Australian papers, but to San Francisco, and even to the London Standard. We have been receiving letters of condolence from friends, who think our lives in danger!" Now, mark what the presence of the Gospel and the Missionary has brought about, as compared with former days: "Personally, the said Civil War has not affected us in the slightest. The Grays, who were in the center of the scene of action, and who more than once had the bullets whizzing over and around their house, were so assured of their complete safety that Mrs. Gray stayed there bravely alone with their children, while Mr. Gray came up here to assist at our Church building!"

But she does not pretend that all is Christlike: "The list of killed and wounded has been unusually large for Tanna, while the atrocities committed have been worse than we ever heard of before. Indignities were offered to the dead of both sexes. And, in one case at least, a mutilated woman was left unburied to be eaten by dogs,—and would have been completely devoured, had not one of our Teachers come on the scene next day, and, unaided, dug a grave and buried her." And then the writer lets in the lurid light of the Nether Pit in this closing picture: "One instance of the disgusting depravity of the people shocked me much. A man, who even attends Service in the district where the above dreadful affair took place, on seeing the poor mutilated form of the woman, addressed it thus—'If only the Gospel had not reached my Village, how I would have enjoyed a feast off you!' I cannot tell you how much this has preyed upon my mind; or how glad I feel at realizing that Jesus is an Almighty Saviour, and can save to the uttermost, else I would despair of these People!"

This may be commended to the attention of those who still affect to believe that the Cannibalism of my brother's book is overdrawn. That half-civilized Tanna man, smacking his lips at the thought of what might have been his but for the Gospel, outweighs all cavils, and is tenfold stronger than arguments. Also let us ask all readers to ponder the dear lady's parting shot at unsympathetic and disparaging critics: "Some have said that the backwardness of the Gospel on Tanna is due to the want of faith on the part of her Missionaries; but I agree with our fellow-laborer, Mr. Gray, who declares that it is only gigantic Faith that could have toiled so many years amongst such a People!" Dear sister in the Lord, courageous, much-enduring, free of all mock-modesty, conscious of thy Cross, I thank thee for that word--it is the right one--"Gigantic faith!"

* * * * * * * * * *

If you have been blessed by this volume, you may also be interested in some of our other Christian Classics Treasury collections:

MISSIONS COLLECTIONS:

- Amy Carmichael 8-in-1

- The Hudson Taylor Collection (7-in-1)

- David Livingstone Collection (5-in-1)

- Samuel Zwemer 7-in-1(Missions in Arabia)

- Samuel Zwemer, 7-in-1, Vol 2

- Key to the Missionary Problem (Andrew Murray)

- Classic Missions Texts  (Murray, Allen, Carey, Zwemer)

CLASSIC COLLECTIONS:

- 7 Catholic Classics

- 7 Classics on PRAYER

- 7 Classics on HOLINESS

- 7 Classics on EVANGELISM and SOUL-WINNING

- 5 Classics on the HOLY SPIRIT

- 5 Classics on POWER

- EDERSHEIM COLLECTION  (Sketches of Jewish Social Life; The Temple; Jesus the Messiah)

- The Didache (Teaching of the 12 Apostles)

PREACHERS AND REVIVALISTS:

- Biography of John Wesley Collection: 4-in-1

- Biography of Andrew Murray

- Charles Spurgeon: 40 sermons on Prayer

- Charles Spurgeon: Lectures to My Students

- The George Muller Collection

- The Revival Writings of Jonathan Edwards (7-in-1)

- The Works of Catherine Booth (7-in-1)

- The Works of Charles Finney

- The Works of D. L. Moody

- The Works of R. A. Torrey

- The Works of William Booth

7.  THINGS AS THEY ARE: Mission Work in Southern India – Amy Carmichael (d. 1951)

(with over 30 Illustrations)

Old India. "You think you know us; you know nothing at all about us!" and the old eyes peer intently into yours, and the old head shakes and he smiles to himself as he moves off. Every bit of this picture is suggestive: the closed door behind,—only a Brahman may open that door; the mythological carving,—only a Brahman has the right to understand it; the three-skein cord,—only a Brahman may touch it. Even the ragged old cloth is suggestive. In old India nothing but Caste counts for anything, and a reigning Prince lately gave his weight in gold to the Brahmans, as part payment for ceremonies which enabled him to eat with men of this old man's social position. Look at the marks on the baby's forehead; they are suggestive too.

Things as They Are

MISSION WORK

IN SOUTHERN INDIA

BY

AMY WILSON-CARMICHAEL

Keswick Missionary C.E.Z.M.S.

AUTHOR OF "FROM SUNRISE LAND," ETC.

WITH PREFACE BY

EUGENE STOCK

VICTORY TO JESUS' NAME!

LONDON: MORGAN AND SCOTT

(Office of "The Christian")

12, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, E.C.

And may be ordered of any bookseller

1905

To the Memory of My Dear Friend,

ELEANOR CARR,

Whose last message to the Band, before her

translation on June 16, 1901, was:

"YOU WILL BE IN THE THICK OF THE FIGHT

BY THE TIME THIS REACHES YOU,

THE BATTLE IS THE LORD'S!"

Note

WITHIN a few weeks of the publication of Things as They Are, letters were received from missionaries working in different parts of India, confirming its truth. But some in England doubt it. And so it was proposed that if a fourth edition were called for, a few confirmatory notes, written by experienced South Indian missionaries, other than those of the district described, would be helpful. Several such notes are appended. The Indian view of one of the chief facts set forth in the book is expressed in the note written by one who, better than any missionary, and surely better even than any onlooker at home, has the right to be heard in this matter—and the right to be believed.

And now at His feet, who can use the least, we lay this book again; for "to the Mighty One," as the Tamil proverb says, "even the blade of grass is a weapon." May it be used for His Name's sake, to win more prayer for India—and all dark lands—the prayer that prevails.

Amy Wilson-Carmichael,

Dohnavur, Tinnevelly District,

S. India.

Confirmatory Notes

From Rev. D. Downie, D.D., American Baptist Mission, Nizam's Dominions, S. India.

I have felt for many years that we missionaries were far too prone to dwell on what is called the "bright side of mission work." That it has a bright side no one can question. That it has a "dark" side some do question; but I for one, after thirty years of experience, know it to be just as true as the bright side is true. I have heard Miss Carmichael's book denounced as "pessimistic." Just what is meant by that I am not quite sure; but if it means that what she has written is untrue, then I am prepared to say that it is NOT pessimistic, for there is not a line of it that cannot be duplicated in this Telugu Mission. That she has painted a dark picture of Hindu life cannot be denied, but, since it is every word true, I rejoice that she had the courage to do what was so much needed, and yet what so many of us shrank from doing, "lest it should injure the cause."

From Rev. T. Stewart, M.A., Secretary, United Free Church Mission, Madras.

This book, Things as They Are, meets a real need—it depicts a phase of mission work of which, as a rule, very little is heard. Every missionary can tell of cases where people have been won for Christ, and mention incidents of more than passing interest. Miss Carmichael is no exception, and could tell of not a few trophies of grace. The danger is, lest in describing such incidents the impression should be given that they represent the normal state of things, the reverse being the case. The people of India are not thirsting for the Gospel, nor "calling us to deliver their land from error's chain." The night is still one in which the "spiritual hosts of wickedness" have to be overcome before the captive can be set free. The writer has laid all interested in the extension of the Kingdom of God under a deep debt of obligation by such a graphic and accurate picture of the difficulties that have to be faced and the obstacles to be overcome. Counterparts of the incidents recorded can be found in other parts of South India, and there are probably few missionaries engaged in vernacular work who could not illustrate some of them from their own experience.

From Dr. A. W. Rudisill, Methodist Episcopal Press, Madras.

In Things as They Are are pictured, by camera and pen, some things in Southern India. The pen, as faithfully as the camera, has told the truth, and nothing but the truth.

The early chapters bring out with vivid, striking, almost startling reality the wayside hearers in India. One can almost see the devil plucking away the words as fast as they fall, and hear the opposers of the Gospel crying out against it.

Paul did not hesitate to write things as they were of the idolaters to whom he preached, even though the picture was very dark. It is all the more needful now, when so many are deceived and being deceived as to the true nature of idolatry, that people at home who give and pray should be told plainly that what Paul wrote of idolaters in Rome and Corinth is still true of idolaters in India.

Miss Carmichael has given only glances and glimpses, not full insights. Let those who think the picture she has drawn is too dark know that, if the whole truth were told, an evil spirit only could produce the pictures, and hell itself would be the only fit place in which to publish them, because in Christian lands eyes have not seen and ears have not heard of such things.

From Rev. C. W. Clarke, M.A., Principal, Noble College, Masulipatam.

I have worked as Principal of a College for over seventeen years amongst the caste people of South India, and I entirely endorse Miss Carmichael's views as to the actual risks run by students and others desirous of breaking caste and being baptized. While the teaching of the Bible and English education generally have removed a great deal of prejudice, and greatly raised the ethical standard amongst a number of those who come under such influences, Hinduism as held and practised by the vast majority of caste people remains essentially unchanged. To break caste is held to be the greatest evil a person can inflict upon himself and his community, therefore practically any means may be resorted to to prevent such a calamity. It is a commonplace amongst missionaries, that when a caste man or woman shows any serious intention of being baptized,—in any case, where caste feeling is not modified by special circumstances,—the most stringent precautions must be taken to protect the inquirer from the schemes of his caste brethren.

From Krishna Ran, Esq., B.A., Editor, Christian Patriot, Madras (himself a convert).

The question is often asked whether a high caste Hindu convert can live with his own people after his baptism. It is only those who know nothing of the conditions of life in India, and of the power of caste as it exists in this country, who raise the question.

The convert has to be prepared for the loss of parents and their tender affection; of brothers and sisters, relatives and friends; of wife and children, if he has any; of his birthright, social position, means of livelihood, reputation, and all the power which hides behind the magic word "caste"; of all that he is taught from his childhood to hold as sacred.

From Miss Reade, South Arcot, South India.

I am not surprised that anyone unacquainted with mission work in India should be staggered at the facts narrated in Things as They Are. But as one who has worked for nearly thirty years in the heart of heathenism, away from the haunts of civilisation, I can bear testimony that the reality of things far exceeds anything that it would be possible to put into print. One's tongue falters to tell of what is custom in this country. I know a case where a young girl of ten was placed in such a position that her choice lay between two sinful courses of life, no right way being open to her. I think one of the most distressing things we have to meet in caste work in this country is the fact that often as soon as a soul begins to show interest in Christ he or she disappears, and one either hears next that he is dead, or can get no reliable information at all.

Extract from a letter to Miss Carmichael on Things as They Are. (The writer is a veteran American missionary.)

I could duplicate nearly every incident in the book; so I know it is a true picture, not alone because I believe your word, but because my experience has been so similar to yours. Many times, while reading it, the memory of the old heart-break has been so vivid that I have had to lay the book down and look round the familiar room in order to convince myself that it was you, and not I, who was agonising over one of the King's own children who was being crowded back into darkness and hurled down to destruction, because Satan's wrath is great as he realises that his time is short.

I wish the book might be read by all the Christians in the homeland.

From Pandita Ramabai.

While I was reading Things as They Are, I fancied I was living my old life among Hindus over again. I can honestly corroborate everything said in regard to the religious and social life of the Hindus. I came from that part of the country, and I am very glad that the book has succeeded in bringing the truth to light.

From Miss L. Trotter.

There is hardly a phase of all the heart-suffering retold that we have not known: page after page might have been written out here, word for word.

Preface

THE writer of these thrilling chapters is a Keswick missionary, well known to many friends as the adopted daughter of Mr. Robert Wilson, the much-respected chairman of the Keswick Convention. She worked for a time with the Rev. Barclay Buxton in Japan; and for the last few years she has been with the Rev. T. Walker (also a C.M.S. Missionary) in Tinnevelly, and is on the staff of the Church of England Zenana Society.

I do not think the realities of Hindu life have ever been portrayed with greater vividness than in this book; and I know that the authoress's accuracy can be fully relied upon. The picture is drawn without prejudice, with all sympathy, with full recognition of what is good, and yet with an unswerving determination to tell the truth and let the facts be known,—that is, so far as she dares to tell them. What she says is the truth, and nothing but the truth; but it is not the whole truth—that she could not tell. If she wrote it, it could not be printed. If it were printed, it could not be read. But if we read between the lines, we do just catch glimpses of what she calls "the Actual."

It is evident that the authoress deeply felt the responsibility of writing such a book; and I too feel the responsibility of recommending it. I do so with the prayer of my heart that God will use it to move many. It is not a book to be read with a lazy kind of sentimental "interest." It is a book to send the reader to his knees—still more to her knees.

Most of the chapters are concerned with the lives of Heathen men and women and children surrounded by the tremendous bars and gates of the Caste system. But one chapter, and not the least important one, tells of native Christians. It has long been one of my own objects to correct the curious general impression among people at home that native Christians, as a body, are—not indeed perfect,—no one thinks that, but—earnest and consistent followers of Christ. Narratives, true narratives, of true converts are read, and these are supposed to be specimens of the whole body. But (1) where there have been "mass movements" towards Christianity, where whole villages have put themselves under Christian instruction, mixed motives are certain; (2) where there have been two or three generations of Christians it is unreasonable to expect the descendants of men who may have been themselves most true converts to be necessarily like them. Hereditary Christianity in India is much like hereditary Christianity at home. The Church in Tinnevelly, of which this book incidentally tells a little, is marked by both these features. Whole families or even villages have "come over" at times; and the large majority of the Christians were (so to speak) born Christians, and were baptized in infancy. This is not in itself a result to be despised. "Christian England," unchristian as a great part of its population really is, is better than Heathen India; and in the chapter now referred to, Miss Carmichael herself notices the difference between a Hindu and a Christian village. But the more widely Christianity spreads, the more will there assuredly be of mere nominal profession.

Is the incorrect impression I allude to caused by missionaries dwelling mostly on the brighter side of their work? Here and there in the book there is just a suggestion that they are wrong in doing so. But how can they help it? What does a clergyman or an evangelist in England tell of? Does he tell of his many daily disappointments, or of his occasional encouraging cases? The latter are the events of his life, and he naturally tells of them. The former he comprises in some general statement. How can he do otherwise? And what can the modern missionary do in the short reports he is able to write? Fifty years ago missionary journals of immense length came home, and were duly published; and then the details of Hindu idolatry and cruelty and impurity, and the tremendous obstacles to the Gospel, were better known by the few regular readers. Much that Miss Carmichael tells was then told over and over again, though not perhaps with a skilful pen like hers. But the work has so greatly developed in each mission, and the missions are so far more numerous and extended, that neither can missionaries now write as their predecessors did, nor, if they did, could all the missionary periodicals together find space for their journals.

The fault of incorrect impressions lies mainly in the want of knowledge and want of thought of home speakers and preachers. I remember, thirty years ago, an eloquent Bishop in Exeter Hall triumphantly flinging in the face of critics of missions the question, "Is Tinnevelly a fiction?"—as if Tinnevelly had become a Christian country, which apparently some people still suppose it to be, notwithstanding the warning words to the contrary which the C.M.S. publications have again and again uttered. Even now, there are in Tinnevelly about twenty heathen to every one Christian; and of what sort the twenty are this book tells. Tinnevelly is indeed "no fiction," but in a very different sense from that of the good Bishop's speech. Again, a few months ago, I heard a preacher, not very favourable to the C.M.S., say that the C.M.S., despite its shortcomings, deserved well of the Church because it had "converted a nation" in Uganda!—as if the nation comprised only 30,000 souls. Some day the "Actual" of Uganda will be better understood, and the inevitable shortcomings of even its Christian population realised, and then we shall be told that we deceived the public—although we have warned them over and over again.

But the larger part of this book is a revelation—so far as is possible—of the "Actual" of Hinduism and Caste. God grant that its terrible facts and its burning words may sink into the hearts of its readers! Perhaps, when they have read it, they will at last agree that we have used no sensational and exaggerated language when we have said that the Church is only playing at missions! Service, and self-denial, and prayer, must be on a different scale indeed if we are ever—I do not say to convert the world—but even to evangelise it.

EUGENE STOCK.

Glossary

Agni

God of Fire.

Aiyo

Alas! "Ai" runs together almost like "eye." The word is repeated rapidly, Eye-eye Yō Eye-eye Yō!

Ammā

Mother! (vocative case). "A" is pronounced like "u" in "up." The word is also used by all women in speaking to each other, and by girls in speaking to women.

Ammāl

Lady or woman. "A" is pronounced like "u" in "up."

Anna

One penny.

Areca Nut

Nut "eaten" by the Indians with betel leaf or lime.

Betel

Leaf of a creeper.

Bandy

A bullock cart.

Brahma

The first person in the Hindu Triad, regarded as the Creator.

Brahman

The highest of the Hindu Castes.

Bramo Samâj

A sect of Hindu reformers who honour Christ as a man, but reject Him as a Saviour.

Chee!

Exclamation of derision, disgust, or remonstrance.

Compound

A piece of ground surrounding a house.

Coolie

A paid labourer. "Coolie" is the Tamil word for pay.

Curry

A preparation of meat or vegetables made by grinding various condiments and mixing them together.

Fakeer

Religious beggar.

Guru

A religious teacher.

Iyer

Title given to Brahmans and Gurus.

Paddy

Rice in the husk. Paddy fields = rice fields.

Pariah

A depressed class.

Pūjah

Worship. "ū" is pronounced like "oo."

Rupee

Value 1s. 4d.

Saivite

A worshipper of Siva.

Salaam

A salutation meaning "peace," used in greeting and farewell, and often in the sense of "thank you." The right hand is raised to the forehead as one says salaam.

Seeley

Tamil woman's dress of silk, muslin, or cotton.

Shanar

A Caste of Palmyra-palm climbers.

Siva

The third person in the Hindu Triad. The Destroyer.

Tom-Tom

An Indian drum.

Vaishnavite

A worshipper of Vishnu.

Vellalar

A Caste of landowners and cultivators.

Vishnu

The second person in the Hindu Triad. The Preserver.

CHAPTER 1: About the Book

"We can do nothing against the Truth, but for the Truth."

St. Paul, Asia and Europe.

"There is too little desire to know what is the actual state of mission work in India, and a regard to the showy and attractive rather than to the solid and practical. I will try, however, to avoid being carried away by the tide, and to set myself the task of giving as plain and unvarnished a statement as possible of what is actually being done or not done in the great field of our foreign labour."

Bishop French, India and Arabia.

THREE friends sat Native fashion on the floor of an Indian verandah. Two of the three had come out to India for a few months to see the fight as it is. And they saw it. They now proposed that the third should gather some letters written from the hot heart of things, and make them into a book, to the intent that others should see exactly what they had seen. The third was not sure. The world has many books. Does it want another, and especially another of the kind this one would be? Brain and time are needed for all that writing a book means. The third has not much of either. But the two undertook to do all the most burdensome part of the business. "Give us the letters, we will make the book," and they urged reasons which ended in—this.

This, the book, has tried to tell the Truth. That is all it has to say about itself. The quotations which head the chapters, and which are meant to be read, not skipped, are more worthful than anything else in it. They are chosen from the writings of missionaries, who saw the Truth and who told it.

The story covers about two years. We had come from the eastern side of this South Indian district, to work for awhile in the south of the South, the farthest southern outpost of the C.M.S. in India. Chapter II. plunges into the middle of the beginning. The Band Sisters are the members of a small Women's Itinerating Band; the girls mentioned by translated names are the young convert-girls who are with us; the Iyer is Rev. T. Walker; the Ammal is Mrs. Walker; the Missie Ammal explains itself.

The Picture-catching Missie Ammal is the friend who proposed the book's making. This is her Tamil name, given because it describes her as she struck the Tamil mind. The pictures she caught were not easy to catch. Reserved and conservative India considered the camera intrusive, and we were often foiled in getting what we most desired. Even where we were allowed to catch our object peaceably, it was a case of working under difficulties which would have daunted a less ardent picture-catcher. Wherever the camera was set up, there swarms of children sprang into being, burrowed in and out like rabbits, and scuttled about over everything, to the confusion of the poor artist, who had to fix focus and look after the safety of her camera legs at the same time, while the second Missie Ammal held an umbrella over her head, and the third exhorted the picture, which speedily got restive, to sit still. So much for the mere mechanical.

Finally, I should explain the book's character. "Tell about things as they actually are"; so said the Two with emphasis. I tried, but the Actual eluded me. It was as if one painted smoke, and then, pointing to the feeble blur, said, "Look at the battle! 'the smoking hell of battle!' There is the smoke!" The Poet's thought was not this, I know, when she coined that suggestive phrase, "The Dust of the Actual," but it has been the predominating thought in my mind, for it holds that which defines the scope and expresses the purpose of the book, and I use it as the title of one of the chapters. It does not show the Actual. Principalities, Powers, Rulers of the Darkness, Potentialities unknown and unimagined, gathered up into one stupendous Force—we have never seen it. How can we describe it? What we have seen and tried to describe is only an indication of Something undescribed, and is as nothing in comparison with it—as Dust in comparison with the Actual. The book's scope, then, is bounded by this: it only touches the Dust; but its purpose goes deeper, stretches wider, has to do with the Actual and our relation to it.

But in touching the Dust we touch the outworkings of an Energy so awful in operation that descriptive chapters are awful too. And such chapters are best read alone in some quiet place with God. For the book is a battle-book, written from a battle-field where the fighting is not pretty play but stern reality; and almost every page looks straight from the place where Charles Kingsley stood when he wrote—

"God! fight we not within a cursèd world,

Whose very air teems thick with leaguèd fiends—

Each word we speak has infinite effects—

Each soul we pass must go to heaven or hell—

And this our one chance through eternity

To drop and die, like dead leaves in the brake!

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad if thou wilt:

Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven,

And that thy last deed ere the judgment day."

This is our bullock-bandy. The water was up to the top of the bank when we crossed last. The palms are cocoanuts.

CHAPTER 2: Three Afternoons off the Track

"They are led captive by Satan at his will in the most quiescent manner."

David Brainerd, North America.

"Oh that the Lord would pour out upon them a spirit of deep concern for their souls!"

Henry Martyn, India.

"I ask you earnestly to pray that the Gospel may take saving and working effect."

James Gilmour, Mongolia.

THE Western Ghauts sweep down to the sea in curves. Dohnavur is in one of the last of these curves. There are no proper roads running under the mountains, only rough country ruts crossing the plain. We were rolling along one of these at the rate of two miles an hour.

Crash and tumble went the bandy, a springless construction with a mat roof; bang over stones and slabs of rock, down on one side, up on the other; then both wheels were sharp aslant. But this is usual. On that particular First Afternoon the water was out, which is the South Indian way of saying that the tanks, great lake-like reservoirs, have overflowed and flooded the land. Once we went smoothly down a bank and into a shallow swollen pool, and the water swished in at the lower end and floated our books out quietly. So we had to stop, and fish them up; and then, huddled close at the upper end we sat, somewhat damp, but happy.

At last we got to our destination, reached through a lane which then was a stream with quite a swift little current of its own. Cupid's Lake the place is called. We thought the name appropriate. Cupid's Lake is peopled by Castes of various persuasions; we made for the Robber quarter first. The Robber Caste is honourable here; it furnishes our watchmen and the coolies who carry our money. There is good stuff in the Robber Caste people: a valiant people are they, and though they were not prepared for the thing that was coming towards them, they met it with fortitude. A little girl saw it first. One glance at my hat through the end of the cart, and she flew to spread the news—

"Oh! everyone come running and see! A great white man is here! Oh what an appalling spectacle! A great white man!"

Then there was a general rush; children seemed to spring from the ground, all eyes and tongues and astonishment. "She isn't a man!" "He is!" "She isn't!" "He has got a man's turban!" "But look at her seeley!" (Tamil dress.) A woman, and white—it staggered them till the assurances of the Band Sisters prevailed; and they let me into a neighbouring house, out of the sun which made that hat a necessity. Once it was off they lost all fear, and crowded round in the friendliest fashion; but later, one of the Band was amused by hearing me described in full: "Not a man, though great and white, and wearing a white man's turban, too! Was it not an appalling spectacle?" And the old body who was addressed held up both her hands amazed, and hastened off to investigate.

An English magazine told us lately exactly what these poor women think when they see, for the first time in their lives, the lady missionary. They greatly admire her, the article said, and consider her fairer and more divine than anything ever imagined before—which is very nice indeed to read; but here what they say is this: "Was it not an appalling spectacle? A great white man!"

And now that the spectacle was safe in the house, the instincts of hospitality urged clean mats and betel. Betel (pronounced beetle) is the leaf of a climbing plant, into which they roll a morsel of areca nut and lime. The whole is made up into a parcel and munched, but not swallowed. This does not sound elegant; neither is the thing. It is one of the minor trials of life to have to sit through the process.

We took a leaf or two, but explained that it was not our custom to eat it; and then we answered questions straight off for ten minutes. "What is your Caste?" "Chee!" in a tone of remonstrance, "don't you see she is white? Married or widow? Why no jewels? What relations? Where are they all? Why have you left them and come here? Whatever can be your business here? What does the Government give you for coming here?" These last questions gave us the chance we were watching for, and we began to explain.

Now what do these people do when, for the first time, they hear the Good Tidings? They simply stare.

In that house that day there was an old woman who seemed to understand a little what it was all about. She had probably heard before. But nobody else understood in the least; they did not understand enough to make remarks. They sat round us on the floor and ate betel, as everybody does here in all leisure moments, and they stared.

The one old woman who seemed to understand followed us out of the house, and remarked that it was a good religion but a mistaken one, as it advocated, or resulted in, the destruction of Caste.

In the next house we found several girls, and tried to persuade the mothers to let them learn to read. If a girl is learning regularly it gives one a sort of right of entrance to the house. One's going there is not so much observed and one gets good chances, but to all our persuasions they only said it was not their custom to allow their girls to learn. Had they to do Government work? Learning was for men who wanted to do Government work. We explained a little, and mentioned the many villages where girls are learning to read. They thought it a wholly ridiculous idea. Then we told them as much as we could in an hour about the great love of Jesus Christ.

I was in the middle of it, and thinking only of it and their souls, when an old lady with fluffy white hair leaned forward and gazed at me with a beautiful, earnest gaze. She did not speak; she just listened and gazed, "drinking it all in." And then she raised a skeleton claw, and grabbed her hair, and pointed to mine. "Are you a widow too," she asked, "that you have no oil on yours?" After a few such experiences that beautiful gaze loses its charm. It really means nothing more nor less than the sweet expression sometimes observed in the eyes of a sorrowful animal.

But her question had set the ball rolling again. "Oil! no oil! Can't you even afford a halfpenny a month to buy good oil? It isn't your custom? Why not? Don't any white Ammals ever use oil? What sort of oil do the girls use? Do you never use castor oil for the hair? Oh, castor oil is excellent!" And they went into many details. The first thing they do when a baby is born is to swing it head downwards, holding its feet, and advise it not to sin; and the second thing is to feed it with castor oil, and put castor oil in its eyes. "Do we do none of these things?" We sang to them. They always like that, and sometimes it touches them: but the Tamils are not easily touched, and could never be described as unduly emotional.

All through there were constant and various interruptions. Two bulls sauntered in through the open door, and established themselves in their accustomed places; then a cow followed, and somebody went off to tie the animals up. Children came in and wanted attention, babies made their usual noises. We rarely had five consecutive quiet minutes.

When they seemed to be getting tired of us, we said the time was passing, to which they agreed, and, with a word about hoping to come again, to which they answered cordially, "Oh yes! Come to-morrow!" we went out into the street, and finished up in the open air. There is a tree at one end of the village; we stood under it and sang a chorus and taught the children who had followed us from house to house to sing it, and this attracted some passing grown-ups, who listened while we witnessed unto Jesus, Who had saved us and given us His joy. Nothing tells more than just this simple witness. To hear one of their own people saying, with evident sincerity, "One thing I know, that whereas I was blind now I see," makes them look at each other and nod their heads sympathetically. This is something that appeals, something they can appreciate; many a time it arrests attention when nothing else would.

We were not able to get the photo of that special girl in the blue seeley, but this girl is so like her that I put her here. She is a Vellalar. The jewels worn by a girl of this class run into thousands of rupees. They are part of the ordinary dress. This girl did not know we were coming, she was "caught" just as she was. She had a ball of pink oleander flowers in her hands and white flowers in her hair.

We were thoroughly tired by this time, and could neither talk nor sing any more. The crowd melted—all but the children, who never melt—one by one going their respective ways, having heard, some of them, for the first time. What difference will it make in their lives? Did they understand it? None of them seemed specially interested, none of them said anything interesting. The last question I heard was about soap—"What sort of soap do you use to make your skin white?" Most of them would far prefer to be told that secret than how to get a white heart.

Afternoon Number Two found us in the Village of the Temple, a tumble-down little place, but a very citadel of pride and the arrogance of ignorance. We did not know that at first, of course, but we very soon found it out. There was the usual skirmish at the sight of a live white woman; no one there had seen such a curiosity. But even curiosity could not draw the Brahmans. They live in a single straggling street, and would not let us in. "Go!" said a fat old Brahman disdainfully; "no white man has ever trodden our street, and no white woman shall. As for that low-caste child with you"—Victory looked up in her gentle way, and he varied it to—"that child who eats with those low-caste people—she shall not speak to one of our women. Go by the way you have come!"

This was not encouraging. We salaamed and departed, and went to our bandy left outside ("low-caste bandies" are not allowed to drive down Brahman streets), and asked our Master to open another door. While we were waiting, a tall, fine-looking Hindu came and said, "Will you come to my house? I will show you the way." So we went.

He led us to the Vellala quarter next to the Brahmans, and we found his house was the great house of the place. The outer door opened into a large square inner courtyard. A wide verandah, supported by pillars quaintly carved, ran round it. The women's rooms, low and windowless, opened on either side; these are the rooms we rejoice to get into, and now we were led right in.

But first I had to talk to the men. They were regular Caste Hindus; courteous—for they have had no cause to fear the power of the Gospel—yet keen and argumentative. One of them had evidently read a good deal. He quoted from their classics; knew all about Mrs. Besant and the latest pervert to her views; and was up in the bewildering tangle of thought known as Hindu Philosophy. "Fog-wreaths of doubt, in blinding eddies drifted"—that is what it really is, but it is very difficult to prove it so.

One truth struck him especially—Christianity is the only religion which provides a way by which there is deliverance from sin now. There is a certain system of philosophy which professes to provide deliverance in the future, when the soul, having passed through the first three stages of bliss, loses its identity and becomes absorbed in God; but there is no way by which deliverance can be obtained here and now. "Sin shall not have dominion over you"—there is no such line as this in all the million stanzas of the Hindu classics. He admitted this freely, admitted that this one tenet marked out Christianity as a unique religion; but he did not go on further; he showed no desire to prove the truth of it.

After this they let us go to the women, who had all this time been watching us, and discussing us with interest.

Once safely into their inner room, we sat down on the floor in the midst of them, and began to make friends. There was a grandmother who had heard that white people were not white all over, but piebald, so to speak; might she examine me? There were several matronly women who wanted to know what arrangements English parents made concerning their daughters' marriages. There were the usual widows of a large Indian household—one always looks at them with a special longing; and there was a dear young girl, in a soft blue seeley (Tamil dress), her ears clustered about with pearls, and her neck laden with five or six necklets worth some hundreds of rupees. She was going to be married; and beyond the usual gentle courtesy of a well-brought-up Tamil girl, showed no interest in us. Almost all the women had questions to ask. On the track it is different; they have already satisfied their lawful curiosity concerning Missie Ammals; but here they have not had the chance; and if we ignore their desires, we defeat our own. They may seem to listen, but they are really occupied in wondering about us. We got them to listen finally, and left them, cheered by warm invitations to return.

Then we thought of the poor proud Brahmans, and hoping that, perhaps, in the interval they had inquired about us, and would let us in, we went to them again. We could see the fair faces and slender forms of the younger Brahman women standing in the shadow behind their verandah pillars, and some of them looked as if they would like to let us in, but the street had not relented; and a Brahman street is like a house—you cannot go in unless you are allowed.

There was one kind-faced, courtly old man, and he seemed to sympathise with us, for he left the mocking group of men, and came to see us off; and then, as if to divert us from the greater topic, he pointed to one of the mountains, a spur of the God King's mountain, famous in all South India, and volunteered to tell me its story. We were glad to make friends with him even over so small a thing as a mountain; but he would speak of nothing else, and when he left us we felt baffled and sorry, and tired with the tiredness that comes when you cannot give your message; and we sat down on a rock outside the Brahman street, to wait till the Band Sisters gathered for the homeward walk.

It was sunset time, and the sky was overcast by dull grey clouds; but just over the Brahman quarter there was a rift in the grey, and the pent-up gold shone through. It seemed as if God were pouring out His beauty upon those Brahmans, trying to make them look up, and they would not. One by one we saw them go to their different courtyards, where the golden glow could not reach them, and we heard them shut their great heavy doors, as if they were shutting Him out.

In there it was dark; out here, out with God, it was light. The after-glow, that loveliest glow of the East, was shining through the rent of the clouds, and the red-tiled roofs and the scarlet flowers of the Flame of the Forest, and every tint and colour which would respond in any way, were aglow with the beauty of it. The Brahman quarter was set in the deep green of shadowy trees; just behind it the mountains rose outlined in mist, and out of the mist a waterfall gleamed white against blue.

We spent Afternoon Number Three in the Village of the Warrior, a lonely little place, left all by itself on a great rough moorland—if you can call a patch of bare land "moor" which is destitute of heather, and grows palms and scrub in clumps instead. It took us rather a long time to get to it, over very broken ground on a very hot day; but when we did get there we found such a good opening that we forgot about our feelings, and entered in rejoicing. There were some little children playing at the entrance to the village, and they led us straight to their own house, making friends in the most charming way as they trotted along beside us. They told us their family history, and we told them as much of ours as was necessary, and they introduced us to their mothers as old acquaintances. The mothers were indulgent, and let us have a room all to ourselves in the inner courtyard, where a dozen or more children gathered and listened with refreshing zest. They understood, dear little things, though so often their elders did not.

Then the mothers got interested, and sat about the door. The girls were with me. (We usually divide into two parties; the elder and more experienced Sisters go off in one direction, and the young convert-girls come with me.) And before long, Jewel of Victory was telling out of a full heart all about the great things God had done for her. She has a very sweet way with the women, and they listened fascinated. Then the others spoke, and still those women listened. They were more intelligent than our audience of yesterday; and though they did not follow nearly all, they listened splendidly to the story-part of our message. In the meaning, as is often the case, their interest was simply nil.

But we were sorry, and I think so were they, when a commotion outside disturbed us, and we were sorrier when we knew the cause. The village postman, who only visits these out-of-the-way places once a week, had appeared with a letter for the head of the house. One of the men folk had read it. It told of the death of the son in foreign parts—Madras, I think—and the poor old mother's one desire was to see us out of the room. She had not liked to turn us out; but, as the news spread, more women gathered clamouring round the door; and the moment we left the room empty, in they rushed, with the mother and the women who had listened to us, and flinging themselves on the floor, cried the Tamil cry of sorrow, full of a pathos of its own: "Ai-yō! Ai-yō! Ai-Ai-yō!"

It was sad to leave them crying so, but at that moment we were certainly better away. The children came with us to the well outside the village, and we sat on its wall and went on with our talk. They would hardly let us go, and begged us to come back and "teach them every day," not the Gospel—do not imagine their little hearts craved for that—but reading and writing and sums! As we drove off some of the villagers smiled and salaamed, and the little children's last words followed us as far as we could hear them: "Come back soon!"

Sometimes, as now, when we come to a new place, we dream a dream, dream that perhaps at last it may be possible to win souls peacefully. Perhaps these courteous, kindly people will welcome the message we bring them when they understand it better. Perhaps homes need not be broken up, perhaps whole families will believe, or individual members believing may still live in their own homes and witness there. Perhaps—perhaps—! And snatches of verse float through our dream—

"Oh, might some sweet song Thy lips have taught us,

Some glad song, and sweet,

Guide amidst the mist, and through the darkness,

Lost ones to Thy feet!"

It sounds so beautiful, so easy, singing souls to Jesus. And we dream our dream.

Till suddenly and with violence we are awakened. Someone—a mere girl, or a lad, or even a little child—has believed, has confessed, wants to be a Christian. And the whole Caste is roused, and the whole countryside joins with the Caste; and the people we almost thought loved us, hate us. And till we go to the next new place we never dream that dream again.

CHAPTER 3: Humdrum

"A missionary's life is more ordinary than is supposed. Plod rather than cleverness is often the best missionary equipment."

Rev. J. Heywood Horsburgh, China.

"Truly to understand the facts of work for Christ in any land, we must strip it of all romance, and of everything which is unreal."

Miss S. S. Hewlett, India.

THERE have been times of late when I have had to hold on to one text with all my might: "It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful." Praise God, it does not say "successful."

One evening things came to a climax. We all spent a whole afternoon without getting one good listener. We separated as usual, going two and two to the different quarters of a big sleepy straggly village. Life and I went to the potters. Life spoke most earnestly and well to an uninterested group of women. After she had finished one of them pointed to my hat (the only foreign thing about me which was visible—oh that I could dispense with it!). "What is that?" she said. Not one bit did they care to hear. One by one they went back to their work, and we were left alone.

We went to another quarter. It was just the same. At a rest-house by the way I noticed a Brahman, and went to see if he would listen. He would if I would talk "about politics or education, but not if it was about religion." However, I did get a chance of pleading with him to consider the question of his soul's salvation, and he took a book and said he would read it at his leisure. And then he asked me how many persons I had succeeded in joining to my Way since I began to try. It was exactly the question, only asked in another form, which the devil had been pressing on me all the afternoon. After this he told me politely that we were knocking our heads against a rock; we might smash our heads, but we never would affect the rock.

"Rock! Rock! when wilt thou open?" It is an old cry; I cried it afresh. But the Brahman only smiled, and then with a gesture expressing at once his sense of his own condescension in speaking with me, and his utter contempt for the faith I held, motioned to me to go.

Outside in the road a number of Hindus were standing; some of them were his retainers and friends. I heard them say, as I passed through their midst, "Who will fall into the pit of the Christian Way!" And they laughed, and the Brahman laughed. "As the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things, unto this day."

We walked along the road bordered with beautiful banyan trees. We sat down under their shade, and waited for what would come. Some little children followed us, but before we could get a single idea clearly into their heads a man came and chased them away. "It is getting dark," he said. "They are only little green things; they must not be out late." It was broad daylight then, and would be for another hour. Some coolies passing that way stopped to look at us; but before they had time to get interested they too remarked that darkness was coming, and they must be off, and off they went.

We were left alone after that. Within five minutes' walk were at least five hundred souls, redeemed, but they don't know it; redeemed, but they don't want to know it. Sometimes they seem to want to know, but however tenderly you tell it, the keen Hindu mind soon perceives the drift of it all—Redemption must mean loss of Caste. One day last week I was visiting in the Village of the Red Lake. Standing in one of its courtyards you see the Western Ghauts rising straight up behind. The Red Lake lies at the mountain foot; we call it Derwentwater, but there are palms and bamboos, and there is no Friar's Crag.

That afternoon I was bound for a house in the centre of the village, when an old lady called me to come to her house, and I followed her gladly. There were six or eight women all more or less willing to listen; among them were two who were very old. Old people in India are usually too attached to their own faith, or too utterly stupid and dull, to care to hear about another; but this old lady had been stirred to something almost like active thought by the recent death of a relative, and she felt that she needed something more than she had to make her ready for death. She was apparently devout. Ashes were marked on her brow and arms, and she wore a very large rosary. It is worn to accumulate merit. I did not refer to it as I talked, but in some dim way she seemed to feel it did not fit with what I was saying, for, with trembling hands, she took it off and threw it to a child. I hoped this meant something definite, and tried to lead her to Jesus. But as soon as she understood Who He was, she drew back. "I cannot be a disciple of your Guru, here," she said; "would my relations bear such defilement?" Being a Christian really meant sooner or later leaving her home and all her people for ever. Can you wonder an old lady of perhaps seventy-five stopped at that?

The little children in the Village of the Warrior are not allowed to learn. The men of the place have consulted and come to the decision. The chill of it has struck the little ones, and they do not care to run the chance of the scolding they would receive if they showed too much interest in us. The mothers are as friendly as ever, but indifferent. "We hear this is a religion which spoils our Caste," they say, and that is the end of it. In the great house of the Temple Village they listened well for some weeks. Then, as it gradually opened to them that there is no Caste whatever in Christianity, their interest died.

How much one would like to tell a different story! But a made-up story is one thing and a story of facts is another. So far we have only found two genuine earnest souls here. But if those two go on—! Praise God for the joy on before!

We went again to the potters' village and sat on the narrow verandah and talked to a girl as she patted the pots into shape underneath where the wheel had left an open place. She listened for awhile; then she said, "If I come to your Way will you give me a new seeley and good curry every day?" And back again we went to the very beginning of things, while the old grandfather spinning his wheel chuckled at us for our folly in wasting our time over potters. "As if we would ever turn to your religion!" he said. "Have you ever heard of a potter who changed his Caste?"

Caste and religion! They are so mixed up that we do not know how to unmix them. His Caste to the potter meant his trade, the trade of his clan for generations; it meant all the observances bound up with it; it meant, in short, his life. It would never strike him that he could be a Christian and a potter at the same time, and very probably he could not; the feeling of the Caste would be against it. Then what else could he be? He does not argue all this out; he does not care enough about the matter to take the trouble to think at all. He has only one concern in life—he lives to make pots and sell them, and make more and sell them, and so eat and sleep in peace.

But the girl had the look of more possibility; she asked questions and seemed interested, and finally suggested we should wait till she had finished her batch of pots, and then she would "tell us all her mind." So we waited and watched the deft brown hands as they worked round the gaping hole till it grew together and closed; and at last she had finished. Then she drew us away from the group of curious children, and told us if we would come in three days she would be prepared to join our Way and come with us, for she had to work very hard at home, and her food was poor and her seeley old, and she thought it would be worth risking the wrath of her people to get all she knew we should give her if she came; and this was all her mind.

She had touched a great perplexity. How are we to live in India without raising desires of this sort? It is true the Brahmans look down upon us, and the higher Castes certainly do not look up, but to the greater number of the people we seem rich and grand and desirable to cultivate. The Ulterior-Object-Society is a fact in South India. We may banish expensive-looking things from our tables, and all pictures and ornaments from our walls, and confine ourselves to texts. This certainly helps; there is less to distract the attention of the people when they come to see us, and we have so many the fewer things to take care of—a very great advantage—but it does not go far towards disillusioning them as to what they imagine is our true position. We are still up above to them; not on a level, not one of themselves.

The houses we live in are airy and large, and they do not understand the need of protection from the sun. The food we eat is abundant and good, and to them it looks luxurious, for they live on rice and vegetable curry, at a cost of twopence a day. Our walls may be bare, but they are clean, and the texts aforesaid are not torn at the corners; so, whatever we say, we are rich.

Identification with the people whom we have come to win is the aim of many a missionary, but the difficulty always is the same—climate and customs are dead against it; how can we do it? George Bowen struck at English life and became a true Indian, so far as he could, but even he could not go all the way. No matter how far you may go, there is always a distance you cannot cover—yards or inches it may be, but always that fatal hiatus. We seem so undeniably up, far up above them in everything, and we want to get to the lowest step down, low enough down to lift lost souls up.

"I went down to the potter's house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels." The vessel the potters are making here is worth about a halfpenny, but it is perfect of its kind. The moulder never lifts his hand from it from the moment he puts a lump of shapeless clay on the wheel till the moment he takes it off finished, so far as the wheel can finish it. If it is "marred," it is "marred in the hand of the potter," and instantly he makes it again another vessel as it seems good to him. He never wastes the clay.

On and on, if they will let us, time after time, by text and hymn and story, we have to explain what things really mean before they are able to understand even a fraction of the truth. The fact that this girl had thought enough to get her ideas into shape was encouraging, and with such slender cause for hope we still hoped. But when after some weeks' visiting she began to see that the question was not one of curries and seeleys but of inward invisible gifts, her interest died, and she was "out" when we went, or too busy patting her pots to have time to listen to us.

Humdrum we have called the work, and humdrum it is. There is nothing romantic about potters except in poetry, nor is there much of romance about missions except on platforms and in books. Yet "though it's dull at whiles," there is joy in the doing of it, there is joy in just obeying. He said "Go, tell," and we have come and are telling, and we meet Him as we "go and tell."

But, dear friends, do not, we entreat you, expect to hear of us doing great things, as an everyday matter of course. Our aim is great—it is India for Christ! and before the gods in possession here, we sing songs unto Him. But what we say to you is this: Do not expect every true story to dovetail into some other true story and end with some marvellous coincidence or miraculous conversion. Most days in real life end exactly as they began, so far as visible results are concerned. We do not find, as a rule, when we go to the houses—the literal little mud houses, I mean, of literal heathendom—that anyone inside has been praying we might come. I read a missionary story "founded on fact" the other day, and the things that happened in that story on these lines were most remarkable. They do not happen here. Practical missionary life is an unexciting thing. It is not sparkling all over with incident. It is very prosaic at times.

CHAPTER 4: Correspondences

"It is very pleasant when you are in England, and you see souls being saved, and you see the conviction of sin, and you see the power of the Gospel to bring new life and new joy and purity to hearts. But it is still more glorious amongst the heathen to see the same things, to see the Lord there working His own work of salvation, and to see the souls convicted and the hearts broken, and to see there the new life and the new joy coming out in the faces of those who have found the Lord Jesus."

Rev. Barclay F. Buxton, Japan.

BEFORE putting this chapter together, I have looked long at the photograph which fronts it. The longer one looks the more pitiful it seems. Perhaps one reads into it all that one knows of her, all one has done for her, how one has failed—and this makes it sadder than it may be to other eyes. And yet can it fail to be sad? Hood's lines reversed describe her—

"All that is left of her

Now is not womanly."

The day we took her photo she was returning from her morning worship at the shrine. She had poured her libation over the idol, walked round and round it, prostrated herself before it, gone through the prayers she had learned off by heart, and now was on her way home.

A Saivite ascetic. Siva represents the severer side of Hinduism, the Powers of Nature which destroy. But as all disintegrated things are reintegrated in some other form, the two Powers, Destruction and Reconstruction, were united in the thought of the old Hindus, and Siva represents the double Power. The Saivite form of Hinduism is older than the Vaishnavite, and more widely spread over India. There are said to be 30,000,000 symbols of the god Siva scattered about the land. Saivites are instantly recognised by the mark of white ashes on their foreheads, and sometimes on the breast and arms, and often a necklet of berries is worn.

We had gone to her village to take photographs, and had just got the street scene in the morning light. The crowd followed us, eager to see more of the doings of the picture-catching box; and she, fearing the defiling touch of the mixed Castes represented there, had climbed up on a granite slab by the side of the road, and stood waiting till we passed.

There we saw her, and there we took her,—for, to our surprise, she did not object,—and now here she is, to show with all the force of truth how far from ideal the real may be. We looked at her as I look at her now, stripped of all God meant her to have when He made her, deep in the mire of the lowest form of idolatry, a devotee of Siva. She had been to Benares and bathed in the sacred Ganges, and therefore she is holy beyond the reach of doubt. She has no room for any sense of the need of Christ. She pities our ignorance when we talk to her. Is she not a devotee? Has she not been to Benares?

Often and often we meet her in the high-caste houses of the place, where she is always an honoured guest because of her wonderful sanctity. She watches keenly then lest any of the younger members of the household should incline to listen to us.

One of her relatives is an English-educated lawyer, a bitter though covert foe, who not long ago stirred up such opposition that we were warned not to go near the place. Men had been hired "to fall upon us and beat us." This because a girl, a connection of his, read her Bible openly, instead of in secret as she had done before. He connected this action on her part with a visit we had paid to the house, and so induced certain of the baser sort to do this thing. We went, however, just the same, as we had work we had promised to do, and saw the old gentleman sitting on the verandah reading his English newspaper in the most pacific fashion. He seemed surprised to see us as we passed with a salaam; we saw nothing of the beaters, and returned with whole bones, to the relief of the community at large. Only I remember one of our Band was woefully disappointed: "I thought, perhaps, we were going to be martyrs," she said.

Street in the Red Lake Village. An ordinary typical village scene, except that just then there were more people than usual before the picture-catching box. The only way to keep them from crowding round it was to show them something else: this explains the group on the stones at the side.

And so we realise, as so often in India, the power of both extremes; the one with all the force of his education, and the other with all the force of her superstition, each uniting with the other in repelling the coming of the Saviour both equally need.

As one looks at the photograph, does it not help in the effort to realise the utter hopelessness, from every human point of view, of trying to win such a one, for example, to even care to think of Christ? There is, over and above the natural apathy common to all, an immense barrier of accumulated merit gained by pilgrimages, austerities, and religious observances, and the soul is perfectly satisfied, and has no desire whatever after God. It is just this self-satisfaction which makes it so hopeless to try to do anything with it.

And yet nothing is hopeless to God; "Set no borders to His strength," a Japanese missionary said. We say it over and over again to ourselves, in the face of some great hopelessness, like that photograph before us; and sometimes, as if to assure us it is so, God lifts some such soul into light. Just now we are rejoicing in a letter from the eastern side of the district, telling us of the growth in the new life of one who only a little while ago was a temple devotee.

One has often longed to see Him work as He worked of old, healing the sick by the word of His power, raising the dead. But when we see Him gathering one—and such a one!—from among the heathen to give thanks unto His holy Name and to triumph in His praise, one feels that indeed it is a miracle of miracles, and that greater than a miracle wrought on the body is a miracle wrought on the soul. But nothing I can write can show you the miracle it was. In that particular case it was like seeing a soul drawn out of the hand of the Ruler of Darkness. All salvation is that in reality, but sometimes, as in her case, when the whole environment of the soul has been strongly for evil in its most dangerous phase, then it is more evidently so.

Perhaps we should explain. We know that in its widest sense environment simply means "all that is." We know that "all that is" includes the existence of certain beings, described as "Powers" in Ephesians vi. 12. Some of us are more or less unconscious of this part of our environment. We have no conscious correspondence with it, but it is there. Others, again, seek and find such correspondence, to their certain and awful loss.

Such a subject can hardly bear handling in language. Thank God we know so little about it that we do not know how to speak of it accurately. Neither, indeed, do we wish to intrude into those things which we have not seen by any attempt at close definition; but we know there is this unhallowed correspondence between men and demons, which in old days drew down, as a lightning conductor, the flash of the wrath of God.

Here in India it exists; we often almost touch it, but not quite. We would not go where we knew we should see it, even if we might; so, unless we happen upon it, which is rare, we never see it at all. A year ago I saw it, and that one look made me realise, as no amount of explanations ever could, how absolutely out of reach of all human influence such souls are. Nothing can reach them, nothing but the might of the Holy Ghost.

So I close with this one look. Will you pray for those to whom in the moonless night, at the altar by the temple, there is the sudden coming of that which they have sought—the "possession," the "afflatus," which for ever after marks them out as those whose correspondences reach beyond mortal ken. All devotees have not received this awful baptism, but in this part of India many have.

We were visiting in a high-caste house. The walls were decorated with mythological devices, and even the old wood-carvings were full of idolatrous symbols. The women were listening well, asking questions and arguing, until one, an old lady, came in. Then they were silent. She sat down and discussed us. We thought we would change the subject, and we began to sing. She listened, as they always do, interrupting only to say, "That's true! that's true!" Till suddenly—I cannot describe what—something seemed to come over her, and she burst into a frenzy, exclaiming, "Let me sing! let me sing!" And then she sang as I never heard anyone sing before—the wildest, weirdest wail of a song all about idolatry, its uselessness and folly, its sorrow and sin.

So far I followed her, for I knew the poem well, but she soon turned off into regions of language and thought unreached as yet by me. Here she got madly excited, and, swaying herself to and fro, seemed lashing herself into fury. Nearer and nearer she drew to us (we were on the floor beside her); then she stretched out her arm with its clenched fist, and swung it straight for my eye. Within a hair's-breadth she drew back, and struck out for Victory's; but God helped her not to flinch.

Then I cannot tell what happened, only her form dilated, and she seemed as if she would spring upon us, but as if she were somehow held back. We dare not move for fear of exciting her more. There we sat for I know not how long, with this awful old woman's clenched fist circling round our heads, or all but striking into our eyes, while without intermission she crooned her song in that hollow hum that works upon the listener till the nerve of the soul is drawn out, as it were, to its very farthest stretch. It was quite dark by this time; only the yellow flicker of the wind-blown flame of the lamp made uncertain lights and shadows round the place where we were sitting, and an eerie influence fell on us all, almost mesmeric in effect. I did not need the awestruck whispers round me to tell me what it was. But oh! I felt, as I never felt before, the reality of the presence of unseen powers, and I knew that the Actual itself was in the room with me.

At last she fell back exhausted, trembling in every limb. Her old head hit the wall as she fell, but I knew we must not help her; it would be pollution to her if we touched her. The people all round were too frightened to move. So she fell and lay there quivering, her glittering eyes still fixed on us; and she tried to speak, but could not.

Softly we stole away, and we felt we had been very near where Satan's seat is.

Think of someone you love—as I did then—of someone whose hair is white like hers; but the face you think of has peace in it, and God's light lightens it. Then think of her as we saw her last—the old face torn with the fury of hell, and for light the darkness thereof.

Oh, friends, do you care enough? Do we care enough out here? God give us hearts that can care!

CHAPTER 5: The Prey of the Terrible

"I believe we are in the midst of a great battle. We are not ourselves fighting, we are simply accepting everything that comes; but the Powers of Light are fighting against the Powers of Darkness, and they will certainly prevail. The Holy Spirit is working, but the people do not as yet know it is the Spirit."

Hester Needham, Sumatra.

THE devil's favourite device just now is to move interested people to far-away places. We have had several who seemed very near to the Kingdom. Then suddenly they have disappeared.

There was Wreath, of the Village of the Temple. She used to listen in the shadow of the door while we sat on the outside verandah. Then she got bolder, and openly asked to see Golden, and talk with her. One day, unexpectedly, Golden was led to the Red Lake Village, and to her surprise found Wreath there. She had been sent away from the Village of the Temple, and was now with some other relations, under even stricter guard. But God led Golden, all unknowingly, to go straight to the very house where she was. So she heard again.

Next time Golden went she could not see her alone, but somehow Wreath got her to understand that if she went to a certain tree near the women's bathing-place, at a certain time next week, she would try to meet her there. Golden went, and they met. Wreath told her she believed it all, but she could not then face breaking Caste and destroying her family's name. They had been good to her, how could she disgrace them? Still, she eagerly wanted to go on hearing, and we felt that if she did, the love of God would win. So we were full of hope.

Next time Golden went she could find no trace of her. She has never seen her since. There is a rumour that she has been carried off over the mountains, hundreds of miles away.

In another village a bright, keen boy of seventeen listened one day when we taught the women, and, becoming greatly interested, openly took the Gospel's part when the village elders attacked it. After some weeks he gathered courage to come and see the Iyer. He was a very intelligent boy, well known all over the countryside, because he had studied the Tamil classics, and also because of his connection with one of the chief temples of the district.

A fortnight after his visit here, our Band went to his village. They heard that he was married and gone, where, no one would say. The relations must have heard of his coming to us (of course he was urged to tell them), and they rushed him through a marriage, and sent him off post haste. So now there is another key turned, locking him into Hinduism.

In the Village of the Wind a young girl became known as an inquirer. Her Caste passed the word along from village to village wherever its members were found, and all these relations and connections were speedily leagued in a compact to keep her from hearing more. When we went to see her, we found she had been posted off somewhere else. When we went to the somewhere else (always freely mentioned to us, with invitations to go), we found she had been there, but had been forwarded elsewhere. For weeks she was tossed about like this; then we traced her, and found her. But she was thoroughly cowed, and dared not show the least interest in us. It is often like that. Just at the point where the soul-poise is so delicate that the lightest touch affects it, something, someone, pushes it roughly, and it trembles a moment, then falls—on the wrong side.

The reason for all this alertness of opposition is, that scattered about the five thousand square miles we call our field, here and there seeds are beginning to grow. Some of the sowers are in England now, and some are in heaven—sowers and reapers, English and Tamil, rejoice together! This is known everywhere, for the news spreads from town to town, and then out to the villages, and the result is opposition. Sometimes the little patch of ground which looked so hopeful is trampled, and the young seedlings killed; sometimes they seem to be rooted up. When we go to our Master and tell Him, He explains it: "An Enemy hath done this." But as the measure of the Enemy's activity is in direct proportion to the measure of God's working, we take it as a sign of encouragement, however hindering it may be. Satan would not trouble to fight if he saw nothing worth attacking; he does not seem to mind the spread of a head knowledge of the Doctrine, or even a cordial appreciation of it. Often we hear the people say how excellent it is, and how they never worship idols now, but only the true God; and even a heathen mother will make her child repeat its texts to you, and a father will tell you how it tells him Bible stories; and if you are quite new to the work you put it in the Magazine, and at home it sounds like conversion. All this goes on most peacefully; there is not the slightest stir, till something happens to show the people that the Doctrine is not just a Creed, but contains a living Power. And then, and not till then, there is opposition.

This opposition is sufficiently strong in the case of a boy or young man (older Caste men and women rarely "change their religion" in this part of South India), but if a girl is in question, the Caste is touched at its most sensitive point, and the feeling is simply intense. Men and demons seem to conspire to hold such a one in the clutch of the Terrible.

There is a young girl in Cupid's Lake Village whose heart the Lord opened some weeks ago. She is a gentle, timid girl, and devoted to her mother. "Can it be right to break my mother's heart?" she used to ask us pitifully. We urged her to try to win her mother, but the mother was just furious. The moment she understood that her daughter wanted to follow Jesus, or "join the Way," as she would express it, she gathered the girl's books and burnt them, and forbade her ever to mention the subject; and she went all round the villages trying to stop our work.

At last things came to a crisis. The girl was told to do what she felt would be sin against God. She refused. They tried force, sheer brute force. She nerved herself for the leap in the dark, and tried to escape to us. But in the dark night she lost the way, and had to run back to her home. Next morning the village priest spread a story to the effect that his god had appeared to him, told him of her attempt to escape, and that she would try twice again, "but each time I will stand in the way and turn her back," he said.

This naturally startled the girl. "Is his god stronger than Jesus?" she asked in real perplexity. We told her we thought the tale was concocted to frighten her; the priest had seen her, and made up the rest. But twice since then, driven by dire danger, that girl has tried to get to us, and each time she has been turned back. And now she is kept in rigorous guard, as her determination to be a Christian is well known to all in the place.

Do you say, "Tell her to stay at home and bear it patiently"? We do tell her so, when we can see her, but we add, "till God makes a way of escape"; and if you knew all there is to be known about a Hindu home, and what may happen in it, you would not tell her otherwise.

But supposing there is nothing more than negative difficulty to be feared, have you ever tried in thought to change places with such a girl? Have you ever considered how impossible it is for such a one to grow? The simple grace of continuance is in danger of withering when all help of every sort is absolutely cut off, and the soul is, to begin with, not deeply rooted in God. Plants, even when they have life, need water and sunshine and air. Babes need milk.

You find it hard enough to grow, if one may judge from the constant wails about "leanness," and yet you are surrounded by every possible help to growth. You have a whole Bible, not just a scrap of it; and you can read it all, and understand at least most of it. You have endless good books, hymn-books, and spiritual papers; you have sermons every week, numerous meetings for edification, and perhaps an annual Convention. Now strip yourself of all this. Shut your Bible, and forget as completely as if you had never known it all you ever read or heard, except the main facts of the Gospel. Forget all those strengthening verses, all those beautiful hymns, all those inspiring addresses. Likewise, of course, entirely forget all the loving dealings of God with yourself and with others—a Hindu has no such memories to help her. Then go and live in a devil's den and develop saintliness. The truth is, even you would find it difficult; but this Hindu girl's case is worse than that, a million times worse. Think of the life, and then, if you can, tell her she must be quite satisfied with it, that it is the will of God. You could not say that it is His will! It is the will of the Terrible, who holds on to his prey, and would rather rend it limb from limb than ever let it go.

We are often asked to tell converts' stories; and certainly they would thrill, for the way of escape God opens sometimes is, like Peter's from prison, miraculous; and truth is stranger than fiction, and far more interesting. But we who work in the Terrible's lair, and know how he fights to get back his prey, even after it has escaped from him, are afraid to tell these stories too much, and feel that silence is safest, and, strange as it may seem to some, for the present most glorifies God.

For a certain connection has been observed between publicity and peril. And we have learned by experience to fear any attempt to photograph spiritual fruit. The old Greek artist turned away the face that held too much for him to paint; and that turned-away face had power in it, they say, to touch men's hearts. We turn these faces away from you; may the very fact that we do it teach some at home to realise how much more lies in each of them than we can say, how great a need there is to pray that each may be kept safe. The names of one and another occur, because they came in the letters so often that I could not cross them all out without altering the character of the whole; they are part of one's very life.

But as even a passing mention may mean danger, unless a counteracting influence of real prayer protects them, we ask you to pray that the tender protection of God may be folded round each one of them; and then when we meet where no sin can creep into the telling, and no harm can follow it, they will tell you their stories themselves, and God will give you your share in the joy, comrades by prayer at home! But let us press it on you now—pray, oh, pray for the converts! Pray that they may grow in Christ. Pray that He may see of the travail of His soul, and be satisfied with each of them. And pray that we may enter into that travail of soul with Him. Nothing less is any good. Spiritual children mean travail of soul—spiritual agony. I wonder who among those who read this will realise what I mean. Some will, I think; so I write it. It is a solemn thing to find oneself drawn out in prayer which knows no relief till the soul it is burdened with is born. It is no less solemn afterwards, until Christ is formed in them. Converts are a responsible joy.

And now we have told you a little of what is going on. There are days when nothing seems to be done, and then again there are days when the Terrible seems almost visible, as he gathers up his strength, and tears and mauls his prey. And so it is true we have to fight a separate fight for each soul. But another view of the case is a strength to us many a time. "We are not ourselves fighting, but the Powers of Light are fighting against the Powers of Darkness," and the coming of the victory is only a question of time. "Shall the prey be taken from the Mighty or the captives of the Terrible be delivered? But thus saith the Lord, Even the captives of the Mighty shall be taken away and the prey of the Terrible shall be delivered."

CHAPTER 6: Missed Ends

"If you could only know what one feels on finding oneself . . . where the least ray of the Gospel has not penetrated! If those friends who blame . . . could see from afar what we see, and feel what we feel, they would be the first to wonder that those redeemed by Christ should be so backward in devotion and know so little of the spirit of self-sacrifice. They would be ashamed of the hesitations that hinder us. . . . We must remember that it was not by interceding for the world in glory that Jesus saved it. He gave Himself. Our prayers for the evangelisation of the world are but a bitter irony so long as we only give of our superfluity, and draw back before the sacrifice of ourselves."

M. François Coillard, Africa.

"Someone must go, and if no one else will go, he who hears the call must go; I hear the call, for indeed God has brought it before me on every side, and go I must."

Rev. Henry Watson Fox, India.

THE tom-toms thumped straight on all night, and the darkness shuddered round me like a living, feeling thing. I could not go to sleep, so I lay awake and looked; and I saw, as it seemed, this:

That I stood on a grassy sward, and at my feet a precipice broke sheer down into infinite space. I looked, but saw no bottom; only cloud shapes, black and furiously coiled, and great shadow-shrouded hollows, and unfathomable depths. Back I drew, dizzy at the depth.

Then I saw forms of people moving single file along the grass. They were making for the edge. There was a woman with a baby in her arms and another little child holding on to her dress. She was on the very verge. Then I saw that she was blind. She lifted her foot for the next step . . . it trod air. She was over, and the children over with her. Oh, the cry as they went over!

Then I saw more streams of people flowing from all quarters. All were blind, stone blind; all made straight for the precipice edge. There were shrieks as they suddenly knew themselves falling, and a tossing up of helpless arms, catching, clutching at empty air. But some went over quietly, and fell without a sound.

Then I wondered, with a wonder that was simply agony, why no one stopped them at the edge. I could not. I was glued to the ground, and I could not call; though I strained and tried, only a whisper would come.

Then I saw that along the edge there were sentries set at intervals. But the intervals were far too great; there were wide, unguarded gaps between. And over these gaps the people fell in their blindness, quite unwarned; and the green grass seemed blood-red to me, and the gulf yawned like the mouth of hell.

Then I saw, like a little picture of peace, a group of people under some trees, with their backs turned towards the gulf. They were making daisy chains. Sometimes when a piercing shriek cut the quiet air and reached them it disturbed them, and they thought it a rather vulgar noise. And if one of their number started up and wanted to go and do something to help, then all the others would pull that one down. "Why should you get so excited about it? You must wait for a definite call to go! You haven't finished your daisy chains yet. It would be really selfish," they said, "to leave us to finish the work alone."

There was another group. It was made up of people whose great desire was to get more sentries out; but they found that very few wanted to go, and sometimes there were no sentries set for miles and miles of the edge.

Once a girl stood alone in her place, waving the people back; but her mother and other relations called, and reminded her that her furlough was due; she must not break the rules. And being tired and needing a change, she had to go and rest for awhile; but no one was sent to guard her gap, and over and over the people fell, like a waterfall of souls.

Once a child caught at a tuft of grass that grew at the very brink of the gulf; it clung convulsively, and it called—but nobody seemed to hear. Then the roots of the grass gave way, and with a cry the child went over, its two little hands still holding tight to the torn-off bunch of grass. And the girl who longed to be back in her gap thought she heard the little one cry, and she sprang up and wanted to go; at which they reproved her, reminding her that no one is necessary anywhere; the gap would be well taken care of, they knew. And then they sang a hymn.

Then through the hymn came another sound like the pain of a million broken hearts wrung out in one full drop, one sob. And a horror of great darkness was upon me, for I knew what it was—the Cry of the Blood.

Then thundered a Voice, the Voice of the Lord: "And He said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brothers' blood crieth unto Me from the ground."

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

The tom-toms still beat heavily, the darkness still shuddered and shivered about me; I heard the yells of the devil-dancers and the weird wild shriek of the devil-possessed just outside the gate.

What does it matter, after all? It has gone on for years; it will go on for years. Why make such a fuss about it?

God forgive us! God arouse us! Shame us out of our callousness! Shame us out of our sin!

One afternoon, a few weeks after that night at the precipice edge, Victory and I were visiting in the Red Lake Village, when we heard the death-beat of the tom-tom and the shriek of the conch shell, and we knew that another had gone beyond our reach. One can never get accustomed to this. We stopped for a moment and listened.

The women we were teaching broke in with eager explanations. "Oh, he was such a great one! He had received the Initiation. There will be a grand ceremonial, grander than ever you have!" Then they told us how this great one had been initiated into the Hindu mysteries by his family priest, and that the mystical benefits accruing from this initiation were to be caused to revert to the priest. This Reverting of the Initiation was to be one of the ceremonies. We watched the procession pass down the street. They were going for water from a sacred stream for the bathing of purification. When they return, said the women, the ceremonies will begin.

A little later we passed the house, and stood looking in through the doorway. There was the usual large square courtyard, with the verandah running round three sides. The verandah was full of women. We longed to go in, but did not think they would let us. The courtyard was rather confused; men were rushing about, putting up arches and decorating them; servants were sweeping, and cooking, and shouting to one another; the women were talking and laughing. And all the time from within the house came the sound of the dirge for the dead, and the laugh and the wail struck against each other, and jarred. No one noticed us for awhile, but at last a woman saw us, and beckoned us to come. "We are all defiled to-day; you may sit with us," they said; and yielding to the instincts of their kindly Tamil nature, they crushed closer together to make room for us beside them. How I did enjoy being squeezed up there among them. But to appreciate that in the least you would have to work in a caste-bound part of old India; you can have no idea, until you try, how hard it is to refrain from touching those whom you love.

The house door opened upon the verandah, and we could hear the moan of the dirge. "There is sorrow on the sea; it cannot be quiet." There was no quietness, only the ceaseless moan, that kept rising into a wail; there were tears in the sound of the wail, and I felt like a sort of living harp with all its strings drawn tight.

But the women outside cared nothing at all. It was strange to see how callous they were. It was not their own who had died, so they chatted and laughed and watched the proceedings—the tying of the garlands round the arches, the arrangement of offerings for the Brahmans. It was all full of interest to them. We tried to turn their thoughts to the Powers of the World to Come. But no. They did not care.

Presently there was a stir. "The men are coming!" they said. "Run! there is a shady corner under those palms on the far verandah! Run and hide! They are here!" And, even as they spoke, in streamed the men, each with his brass water-vessel poised on his head, and they saw us standing there. We thought they would turn us out, and were quite prepared to go at a sign from the head of the clan. But he was a friend of ours, and he smiled as we salaamed, and pointed to a quiet corner, out of the way, where we could see it all without being too much seen.

To understand this, which to me was a surprise, one must remember that by nature the Indian is most courteous, and if it were not for Caste rules we should be allowed to come much closer to them than is possible now. To-day they were all ceremonially unclean, so our presence was not considered polluting. Also the Indian loves a function; sad or glad, it matters little. Life is a bubble on the water; enjoy it while you may. And they sympathised with what they thought was our desire to see the show. This was human; they could understand it. So they let us stay; and we stayed, hoping for a chance later on.

Then the ceremonies began. They carried the dead man out and laid him in the courtyard under the arch of palms. He was old and worn and thin. One could see the fine old face, with the marks of the Hindu trident painted down the forehead. He had been a most earnest Hindu; all the rites were duly performed, and morning and night for many years he had marked those marks on his brow. Had he ever once listened to the Truth? I do not know. He must have heard about it, but he had not received it. He died, they told us, "not knowing what lay on the other side."

The water-bearers laid their vessels on the ground. Each had a leaf across its mouth. The priest was crowned with a chaplet of flowers. Then came the bathing. They threw up a shelter, and carried him there. It was reverently done. There was a touch of refinement in the thought which banished the women and children before the bathing began. Tamils bathe in the open air, and always clothed, but always apart. And as the women's verandah overlooked the screened enclosure, they were all ordered off. They went and waited, silent now, awed by the presence of the men. While the bathing was going on the priests chanted and muttered incantations, and now and again a bell was rung, and incense waved, and tapers lighted. Now they were causing that mysterious Something which still hovered round the lifeless form to leave it and return to them, and when the bathing was over they signified that all was done; the Influence had departed, descended; the funeral ceremonies might proceed.

And all this time, without a break, the dirge was being sung by the mourners in the house. It was a sort of undernote to all the sounds outside. Then the old man, robed in white and crowned and wreathed with flowers, was carried round to the other side; and oh, the pitifulness of it all! St. Paul must have been thinking of some such scene when he wrote to the converts, "That ye sorrow not even as others which have no hope." And I thought how strangely callous we were, how superficial our sympathy. The Lord's command does not stir us, the sorrow of those we neglect does not touch us; we think so much more of ourselves and our own selfish pleasure than we think of the purpose for which we were saved—and at such a tremendous cost! Oh for a baptism of reality and obedience to sweep over us! Oh to be true to the hymns we sing and the vows we make! God make us true.

Forgive all this. It was burnt into me afresh that day as I sat there watching the things they did and listening to what they said. We had come too late for that old dead man, too late for most of the living ones too. Can you wonder if at such solemn times one yields oneself afresh and for ever to obey?

Rice was prepared for the dead man's use, and balls of rice were ready to be offered to his spirit after his cremation; for the Hindus think that an intermediate body must be formed and nourished, which on the thirteenth day after death is conducted to either heaven or hell, according to the deeds done on earth. The ceremonies were all characterised by a belief in some future state. The spirit was somewhere—in the dark—so they tried to light the way for him. This reminds me of one ceremony especially suggestive. All the little grandchildren were brought, and lighted tapers given to them; then they processioned round the bier, round and round many times, holding the tapers steadily, and looking serious and impressed.

Then the widow came out with a woman on either side supporting her. And she walked round and round her husband, with the tears rolling down her face, and she wailed the widow's wail, with her very heart in it. Why had he gone away and left her desolate? His was the spirit of fragrance like the scented sandal-wood; his was the arm of strength like the lock that barred the door. Gone was the scent of the sandal, broken and open the door; why had the bird flown and left but the empty cage? Gone! was he gone? Was he really gone? Was it certain he was dead? He who had tossed and turned on the softest bed they could make, must he lie on the bed of his funeral pyre? Must he burn upon logs of wood? Say, was there no way to reach him, no way to help him now? "I have searched for thee, but I find thee not." And so the dirge moaned on.

I could not hear all this then; Victory told it to me, and much more, afterwards. "Last time I heard it," she said, "I was inside, wailing too."

As the poor widow went round and round she stopped each time she got to the feet, and embraced them fervently. Sometimes she broke through all restraint, and clasped him in her arms.

A photo rarely possible. The dead woman lies in her bier; the white on her eyes and brow is the mark of Siva's ashes. Some of the mourners are so marked, as they are all Saivites. The fire is lighted from the pot of fire to the right. Just before it is lighted, the chief mourner takes a vessel of water, pierces a hole in it, walks round the dead, letting the water trickle out, pierces another hole and repeats the walk. After the third piercing and walk, he throws the pot backwards over his shoulder, and as it smashes the water all splashes out. This is to refresh the spirit if it should be thirsty while its body is being burned.

After many ceremonies had been performed, the men all went away, and the women were left to bid farewell to the form soon to be carried out. Then the men came back and bore him across the courtyard, and paused under the arch outside, while the women all rushed out, tearing their hair and beating themselves and wailing wildly. As they were lifting the bier to depart the cry was, "Stop! stop! Will he not speak?" And this, chanted again and again, would have made the coldest care. Then when all was over, and the long procession, headed by the tom-toms and conch shells, had passed out of sight, the women pressed in again, and each first let down her hair, and seized her nearest neighbour, and they all flung themselves on the ground and knocked their heads against it, and then, rising to a sitting posture, they held on to one another, swaying backwards and forwards and chanting in time to the swaying, in chorus and antiphone. All this, even to the hair-tearing and head-knocking, was copied by the children who were present with terrible fidelity.

We sat down among them. They took our hands and rocked us in the orthodox way. But we did not wail and we did not undo our hair. We tried to speak comforting words to those who were really in grief, but we found it was not the time. A fortnight later we went again, and found the house door open because we had been with them that day.

But we could not help them then, so we rose and were going away, when, held by the power of that dirge of theirs, I turned to look again. The last rays of the afternoon sun were lighting up the courtyard, and shining on the masses of black hair and grey. As I looked they got up one by one, and put their disordered dress to rights, and shook out the dust from their glossy hair, and did it up again. And one by one, without farewell of any sort, they went away. An hour later we met groups of them coming home from bathing. They would not touch us then. Afterwards the chief mourners came out and bathed, and went all round the village wailing. And the last thing I saw, as the sun set over the hills and the place grew chill and dark, was the old widow, worn out now, returning home in her wet things, wailing still.

I write this under a sense of the solemnity of being "a servant . . . separated unto the Gospel." I would not write one word lightly. But oh! may I ask you to face it? Are we honest towards God? If we were, would these people be left to die as they are being left to die?

We feel for them. But feelings will not save souls; it cost God Calvary to win us.

It will cost us as much as we may know of the fellowship of His sufferings, if those for whom He died that day are ever to be won.

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

I am writing in the midst of the sights and the sounds of life. There is life in the group of women at the well; life in the voices, in the splash of the water, in the cry of a child, in the call of the mother; life in the flight of the parrots as they flock from tree to tree; life in their chatter as they quarrel and scream; life, everywhere life. How can I think out of all this, back into death again?

But I want to, for you may live for many a year in India without being allowed to see once what we have seen twice within two months, and it cannot be for nothing that we saw it. We must be meant to show it to you.

This needs to be looked into. Gradually the middle clears. The women are holding each other's hands preparatory to swaying backwards and forwards as they chant the dirge for the dead. The lamp (you see its top near the vessel on the right) was lighted as soon as the old woman died, and placed at her head on the floor. So blindly they show their sense of the darkness of death. The brass water vessel, with the leaves laid across its mouth, was filled with the water of purification. This was poured in a circle on the floor round the body. The bits of grass are the sacred Kusa grass used in many religious ceremonies.

The Picture-catching Missie and I were in the Village of the Tamarind Tree, when for the second time I saw it. They are very friendly there, and just as in the Red Lake Village they let us look behind the curtain, so here again they pushed it back, and let us in, and went on with their business, not minding us. We crouched up close together on the only scrap of empty space, and watched.

Everything was less intense; the dead was only a poor and very old widow who had lived her life out, and was not wanted. There were no near kindred, only relations by marriage; it was evident everyone went through the form without emotion of any sort.

The woman lay on a rough bier on the floor, and round her crowded a dozen old women. At her head there was a brass vessel of water, a lamp-stand, some uncooked rice, and some broken cocoanuts. Just before we came in they had filled a little brass vessel from the larger one. Now one of the old hags walked round the dead three times, pouring the water out as she walked. Then another fed her—fed that poor dead mouth, stuffed it in so roughly it made us sick and faint. There were other things done hurriedly, carelessly; we could not follow them. The last was the rubbing on of ashes—she had been a worshipper of Siva—also they covered the closed eyes with ashes and patted them down flat. And all the time the gabble of the women mocked at the silence of death. There was no reverence, no sense of solemnity; the ceremonial so full of symbol to its makers, the thinkers of Védic times, was to them simply a custom, a set of customs, to be followed and got through as quickly as might be by heedless hands. And yet they faithfully carried out every detail they knew, and they finished their heartless work and called to the men to come. The men were waiting outside. They came in and carried her out.

It seemed impossible to think of a photograph then; it was most unlikely they would let us take one, and we hardly felt in the spirit of picture-catching. Yet we thought of you, and of how you certainly could never see it unless we could show it to you; and we wanted to show it to you, so we asked them if we might. Of course if there had been real grief, as in the other I had seen, we could not have asked it, it would have been intrusion; but here there was none—that was the pathos of it. And they were very friendly, so they put their burden on the ground, and waited.

There it is. To the right the barber stands with his fire-bowl hanging from a chain; this is to light the funeral pyre. The smoke interfered with the photo, but then it is true to life. To the left stands the man with the shell ready to blow. At the back, with the sacred ashes rubbed on forehead and breast and arms, stand the two nearest relatives, who to-morrow will gather the ashes and throw them into the stream.

The picture was caught. The man with the shell blew it, the man with the fire came in front, the bearers lifted the bier; they went away with their dead.

These are three of the mourners, but they were only mourning ceremonially; and so, released for the moment from their duty, they quite enjoyed themselves.

Then the old women, who had been pressing through the open door, rushed back in the usual way and began the usual rock and dirge. These Comparison Songs are always full of soul. They have sprung into being in times of deepest feeling, taken shape when hearts were as finely wrought moulds which left their impress upon them. And to hear them chanted without any soul is somehow a pitiful thing, a sort of profanation, like the singing of sacred words for pay.

The photograph was not easy to take, the space was so confined, the movement so continuous, the commotion so confusing. How it was taken I know not; the women massed on the floor were not still for more than a moment. In that moment it was done. Then we persuaded three of them to risk the peril of being caught alone. They would not move farther than the wall of the house, and as it was in a narrow street, again there were difficulties. But the crowning perplexity was at the water-side. It was windy, and our calls were blown away, so they did not hear what we wanted them to do, and they splashed too vigorously. Their only idea just then was to get themselves and their garments ceremonially clean, defiled as they were by contact with the dead.

But let those six whom you can partly see stand for the thousands upon thousands whom you cannot see at all. Those thousands are standing in water to-day from the North to the uttermost South, as the last act in the drama which they have played in the presence of the dead.

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

The women have gone from the well. The parrots have flown to other trees. The Tamils say the body is the sheath of the soul. I think of that empty sheath I saw, and wonder where the soul has flown. It has gone—but where? Has it gone home, like the women from the well? Has it flown far, like the birds among the trees? It has gone, it has gone, that is all we know. It has gone.

Then I read these words from Conybeare and Howson's translation: "If the tent which is my earthly house be destroyed I have a mansion built by God . . . eternal in the heavens. And herein I groan with earnest longings, desiring to cover my earthly raiment with the robes of my heavenly mansion. . . . And He who has prepared me for this very end is God."

The dead man missed his End. That old dead woman missed it too. And the millions around us still alive are missing their End to-day. "This very End"—think of it—Mortality swallowed up in Life—Death only an absence, Life for ever a presence—Present with the Lord who has prepared us "for this very End."

Can we enjoy it all by ourselves? Will there be no sense of incompleteness if the many are outside, missing it all because they missed their End? Will the glory make us glad if they are somewhere far away from it and God? Will not heaven be almost an empty place to one who has never tried to fill it? Yet there is room, oh so much room, for those we are meant to bring in with us!

And there is room, oh so much room, along the edge of the precipice. There are gaps left all unguarded. Can it be that you are meant to guard one of those gaps? If so, it will always remain as it is, a falling-point for those rivers of souls, unless you come.

Are these things truth or are they imagination? If they are imagination—then let the paper on which they are written be burnt, burnt till it curls up and the words fall into dust. But if they are true—then what are we going to do? Not what are we going to say or sing, or even feel or pray—but what are we going to do?

CHAPTER 7: "The Dust of the Actual"

"This may be counted as our richest gain, to have learned afresh one's utter impotency so completely that the past axiom of service, 'I can no more convert a soul than create a star,' comes to be an awful revelation, so that God alone may be exalted in that day."

Rev. Walter Searle, Africa.

WE have just come back from a Pariah village. Now see it all with me. Such a curious little collection of huts, thrown down anywhere; such half-frightened, half-friendly faces; such a scurrying in of some and out of others; and we wonder which house we had better make for. We stop before one a shade cleaner than most, and larger and more open.

"May we come in?" Chorus, "Come in! oh, come in!" and in we go. It is a tiny, narrow slip of a room. At one end there is a fire burning on the ground; the smoke finds its way out through the roof, and a pot of rice set on three stones is bubbling cheerfully. No fear of defilement here. They would not like us to touch their rice or to see them eating it, but they do not mind our being in the room where it is being cooked.

At the other end of the narrow slip there is a goat-pen, not very clean; and down one side there is a raised mud place where the family apparently sleep. This side and the two ends are roofed by palmyra palm. It is dry and crackles at a touch, and you touch it every time you stand up, so bits of it are constantly falling and helping to litter the open space below.

An ancient Pariah, but the baby in her arms is a son of the Caste of Palmyra Climbers. Both faces—the old crone's and the baby boy's—are very typical. The baby is a "Christian," I should explain, and his parents are true Christians, otherwise the Pariah woman would not have been allowed to touch him.

Five babies at different stages of refractoriness are sprawling about on this strip of floor; they make noises all the time. Half a dozen imbecile-looking old women crowd in through the low door, and stare and exchange observations. Three young men with nothing particular to do lounge at the far end of the platform near the goats. A bright girl, with more jewellery on than is usual among Pariahs, is tending the fire at the end near the door; she throws a stick or two on as we enter, and hurries forward to get a mat. We sit down on the mat, and she sits beside us; and the usual questions are asked and answered by way of introduction. There is a not very clean old woman diligently devouring betel; another with an enormous mouth, which she always holds wide open; another with a very loud voice and a shock of unspeakable hair. But they listen fairly well till a goat creates a diversion by making a remark, and a baby—a jolly little scrap in its nice brown skin and a bangle—yells, and everyone's attention concentrates upon it.

The goat subsides, the baby is now in its mother's arms; so we go on where we left off, and I watch the bright young girl, and notice that she listens as one who understands. She looks rather superior; her rose-coloured seeley is clean, and two large gold jewels are in each ear; she has a little gold necklet round her throat, and silver bangles and toe rings. All the others are hopelessly grubby and very unenlightened, but they listen just as most people listen in church, with a sort of patient expression. It is the proper thing to do.

I am talking to them now, and till I am half-way through nobody says anything, when suddenly the girl remarks, "We have ten fingers, not just one!" which is so astonishing that I stop and wonder what she can be thinking of. I was talking about the one sheep lost out of one hundred. What has that got to do with one finger and ten? She goes on to explain, "I have heard all this before. I have a sister who is a Christian, and once I stayed with her, and I heard all about your religion, and I felt in my heart it was good. But then I was married" ("tied," she said), "and of course I forgot about it; but now I remember, and I say if ten of our people will join and go over to your Way, that will be well, but what would be the use of one going? What is the use of one finger moving by itself? It takes ten to do the day's work."

"If ten of you had cholera, and I brought you cholera medicine, would you say, 'I won't take it unless nine others take it too'?" I replied. She laughs and the others laugh, but a little uneasily. They hardly like this reference to the dreaded cholera; death of the body is so much more tremendous in prospect than death of the soul. "You would take it, and then the others, seeing it do you good, would perhaps take it too"; and we try to press home the point of the illustration. But a point pricks, and pricking is uncomfortable.

The three men begin to shuffle their feet and talk about other things; the old mother-in-law proposes betel all round, and hands us some grimy-looking leaves with a pressing invitation to partake. The various onlookers make remarks, and the girl devotes herself to her baby. But she is thinking; one can see old memories are stirred. At last with a sigh she gets up, looks round the little indifferent group, goes over to the fireplace, and blows up the fire. This means we had better say salaam; so we say it and they say it, adding the usual "Go and come."

It will be easier to help these people out of their low levels than it will be to help their masters of the higher walks of life. But to do anything genuine or radical among either set of people is never really easy.

"It takes the Ideal to blow a hair's-breadth off the Dust of the Actual."

It takes more. It takes God. It takes God to do anything anywhere. Yesterday we were visiting in one of the Caste villages, and one old lady, who really seems to care for us, said she would greatly like to take my hand in hers; "but," she explained, "this morning one of the children of the place leaned over the edge of the tank to drink, and he fell in and was drowned; so I have been to condole with his people, and I have now returned from bathing, and do not feel equal to bathing again." If she touched me she would have to bathe to get rid of the defilement. Of course I assured her I quite understood, but as she sat there within two inches of me, yet so carefully preserving inviolate those two inches of clear space, I felt what a small thing this caste-created distance was, the merest "Dust of the Actual" on the surface of the system of her life; and yet, "to blow a hair's-breadth of it off, nothing less is needed than the breath of the power of God." "Come, O Breath, and breathe!" we cry. Nothing else will do.

Something in our talk led to a question about the character of Jesus, and, as we tried to describe a little of the loveliness of our dear Lord to her, her dark eyes kindled. "How beautiful it is!" she said; "how beautiful He must be!" She seemed "almost persuaded," but we knew it was only almost, not quite; for she does not yet know her need of a Saviour, she has no sense of sin. Sometimes, it is true, that comes later; but we find that if the soul is to resist the tremendous opposing forces which will instantly be brought to bear upon it if it turns in the least towards Christ, there must be a conviction wrought within it; nothing so superficial as a feeling, be it ever so appreciative or hopeful or loving, will stand that strain.

So, though the eyes of this dear woman fill with tears as she hears of the price of pain He paid, and though she gladly listens as we read and talk with her and pray, yet we know the work has not gone deep, and we make our "petitions deep" for her, and go on.

In India men must work among men, and women among women, but sometimes, in new places, as I have told before, we have to stop and talk with the men before they will let us pass. For example, one afternoon I was waylaid on my way to the women by the head of the household I was visiting, a fine old man of the usual type, courteous but opposed. He asked to look at my books. I had a Bible, a lyric book, and a book of stanzas bearing upon the Truth, copied from the old Tamil classics. He pounced upon this. Then he began to chant the stanzas in their inimitable way, and at the sound several other old men drew round the verandah, till soon a dozen or more were listening with that appreciative expression they seem to reserve for their own beloved poetry.

After the reader had chanted through a dozen or more stanzas, he stopped abruptly and asked me if I really cared for it. Of course I said I did immensely, and only wished I knew more, for the Tamil classics are a study in themselves, and these beautiful ancient verses I had copied out were only gleanings from two large volumes, full of the wisdom of the East.

They were all thoroughly friendly now, and we got into conversation. One of the group held that there are three co-eternal substances—God, the Soul, and Sin. Sin is eternally bound up in the soul, as verdigris is inherent in copper. It can be removed eventually by intense meditation upon God, and by the performance of arduous works of merit. But these exercises they all admitted were incompatible with the ordinary life of most people, and generally impracticable. And so the fact is, the verdigris of sin remains.

I remember the delight with which I discovered that Isaiah i. 25 uses this very illustration; for the word translated "dross" in English is the colloquial word for verdigris in Tamil; so the verse reads, "I will turn My hand to thee, and thoroughly purify thee, so as to remove thy verdigris."

Most of the others held a diametrically opposite view. So far from Soul and Sin being co-eternal with God they are not really existent at all. Both are illusory. There is only one existent entity. It is the Divine Spirit, and it has neither personality nor any personal qualities. All apparent separate existences are delusive. Meditation, of the same absorbing type held necessary by the other, is the only way to reach the stage of enlightenment which leads to reabsorption into the Divine essence, in which we finally merge, and lose what appeared to be our separate identity. We are lost in God, as a drop is lost in the ocean.

Some of the men advocated a phase of truth which reminds one of Calvinism gone mad, and others exactly opposite are extravagantly Arminian. The Calvinists illustrate their belief by a single illuminating word, Cat-hold, and the Arminians by another, Monkey-hold. Could you find better illustrations? The cat takes up the kitten and carries it in its mouth; the kitten is passive, the cat does everything. But the little monkey holds on to its mother, and clings with might and main. Those who have watched the "cat-hold" in the house, and the "monkey-hold" out in the jungle, can appreciate the accuracy of these two illustrations.

But running through every form of Hinduism, however contradictory each to the other may be, there is the underlying thought of pure and simple Pantheism. And this explains many of the aforesaid contradictions, and many of the incongruities which are constantly cropping up and bewildering one who is trying to understand the Hindu trend of thought. So, though those men all affirmed that there is only one God, they admitted that they each worshipped several. They saw nothing inconsistent in this. Just as the air is in everything, so God is in everything, therefore in the various symbols. And as our King has divers representative Viceroys and Governors to rule over his dominions in his name, so the Supreme has these sub-deities, less in power and only existing by force of Himself, and He, being all-pervasive, can be worshipped under their forms.

This argument they all unitedly pressed upon me that afternoon, and though capital answers probably present themselves to your mind, you might not find they satisfied the Hindu who argues along lines of logic peculiar to the East, and subtle enough to mystify the practical Western brain; and then—for we are conceited as well as practical—we are apt to pity the poor Hindu for being so unlike ourselves; and if we are wholly unsympathetic, we growl that there is nothing in the argument, whereas there is a good deal in it, only we do not see it, because we have never thought out the difficulty in question. Quite opposite, sometimes we have to meet a type of mind like that of MacDonald's student of Shakespeare, who "missed a plain point from his eyes being so sharp that they looked through it without seeing it, having focussed themselves beyond it." Assuredly there is much to learn before one can hope to understand the winding of the thread of thought which must be traced if one would follow the working of the Hindu mind. Let no one with a facility for untying mental knots think that his gift would be wasted in India!

The word that struck those men that afternoon was 1 John v. 11 and 12: "God hath given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." I was longing to get to the women, but when they began to read those verses and ask about the meaning, I could not go without trying to tell them. Oh, how one needed at that moment Christ to become to us Wisdom, for it is just here one may so easily make mistakes. Put the truth of God's relation to the soul subjectively—"He that hath the Son hath life"—before thoughtful Hindus such as these men were, and they will be perfectly enchanted; for the Incarnation presents no difficulty to them, as it would to a Mohammedan; and perhaps, to your sudden surprise and joy, they will say, that is exactly what they are prepared to believe. "Christ in me"—this is comprehensible. "The indwelling of the Spirit of God"—this is analogous to their own phrase: "The indwelling of the Deity in the lotus of the heart." But probably by trading on words and expressions which are already part of the Hindu terminology, and which suggest to them materialistic ideas, we may seriously mislead and be misled. We need to understand not only what the Hindu says, but also what his words mean to himself, a very different thing.

That talk ended in a promise from the men that they would arrange a meeting of Hindus for the Iyer, if he would come and take it, which of course he did. I should like to finish up by saying, "and several were converted," but as yet that would not be true. These deep-rooted ancient and strong philosophies are formidable enough, when rightly understood, to make us feel how little we can do to overturn them; but they are just as "Dust" in comparison with the force of the "Actual" entrenched behind them. Only superficial Dust; and yet, as in every other case, nothing but the Breath of God can blow this Dust away.

Another widow. She was never a wife; and, moved by some sort of pity, they let her keep one jewel in each ear. She is a Vellalar; her people are wealthy landowners. She was ashamed of having yielded to the weakness of letting us take her photo; and when we went to show it to her, she would not look at it. She has no desire whatever to hear; and she and the young girl on the step at her feet are resolute in opposing the teaching.

We left the old men to their books and endless disquisitions, and went on to the women's quarter. There we saw a young child-widow, very fair and sweet and gentle, but quieter than a child should be; for she is a widow accursed. Her mind is keen—she wants to learn; but why should a widow learn, they say, why should her mind break bounds? She lives in a tiny mud-built house, in a tiny mud-walled yard; she may not go out beyond those walls, then why should she think beyond? But she is better off than most, for she lives with her mother, who loves her, and her father makes a pet of her, and so she is sheltered more or less from the cruel scourge of the tongue.

There is another in the next courtyard; she is not sheltered so. She lives with her mother-in-law, and the world has lashed her heart for years; it is simply callous now. There she sits with her chin in her hand, just hard. Years ago they married her, an innocent, playful little child, to a man who died when she was nine years old. Then they tore her jewels from her, all but two little ear-rings, which they left in pity to her; and this poor little scrap of jewellery was her one little bit of joy. She could not understand it at first, and when her pretty coloured seeleys were taken away, and she had to wear the coarse white cloth she hated so, she cried with impotent childish wrath; and then she was punished, and called bitter names,—the very word widow means bitterness,—and gradually she understood that there was something the matter with her. She was not like other little girls. She had brought ill-fortune to the home. She was accursed.

It is true that some are more gently dealt with, and many belong to Castes where the yoke of Custom lies lighter; for these the point of the curse is blunted, there is only a dull sense of wrong. But in all the upper Castes the pressure is heavy, and there are those who feel intensely, feel to the centre of their soul, the sting of the shame of the curse.

"It is fate," says the troubled mother; "who can escape his fate?" "It is sin," says the mother-in-law; and the rest of the world agrees. "'Where the bull goes, there goes its rope.' 'Deeds done in a former birth, in this birth burn.'"

Much of the working of the curse is hidden behind shut doors. I saw a young widow last week whose mind is becoming deranged in consequence of the severity of the penance she is compelled to perform. When, as they put it, "the god of ill-fortune seizes her," that is, when she becomes violent, she is quietly "removed to another place." No one sees what is done to her there, but I know that part of the treatment consists in scratching her head with thorns, and then rubbing raw lime juice in—lime juice is like lemon juice, only more acid. When the paroxysm passes she reappears, and does penance till the next fit comes. This has been repeated three times within the last few months.

I was visiting in a Hindu house for two years before I found out that all that time a girl of seventeen was kept alone in an upper room. "Let her weep," they said, quoting a proverb; "'though she weeps, will a widow's sorrow pass?'" Once a day, after dark, she was brought downstairs for a few minutes, and once a day, at noon, some coarse food was taken up to her. She is allowed downstairs now, but only in the back part of the house; she never thinks of resisting this decree—it, and all it stands for, is her fate. Sometimes the glad girl-life reasserts itself, and she plays and laughs with her sister-in-law's pretty baby boy; but if she hears a man's voice she disappears upstairs. There are proverbs in the language which tell why.

I sat on the verandah of a well-to-do Hindu house one day, and talked to the bright-looking women in their jewels and silks. And all the time, though little I knew it, a widow was tied up in a sack in one of the inner rooms. This wrong is a hidden wrong.

I do not think that anyone would call the Hindus distinctively cruel; in comparison with most other Asiatics their instincts are kind. A custom so merciless as this custom, which punishes the innocent with so grievous a punishment, does not seem to us to be natural to them. It seems like a parasite custom, which has struck its roots deep into the tree of Hindu social life, but is not part of it. Think of the power which must have been exerted somewhere by someone before the disposition of a nation could be changed.

This custom as it stands is formidable enough. Many a man, Indian and foreign, has fought it and failed. It is a huge and most rigorous system of tyrannical oppression, a very pyramid to look at, old, immovable. But there is Something greater behind it. It is only the effect of a Cause—the Dust of the Actual.

What can alter the custom? Strong writing or speaking, agitations, Acts of Parliament? All these surely have their part. They raise the question, stir the Dust—but blow it off? Oh no! nothing can touch the conscience of the people, and utterly reverse their view of things, and radically alter them, but God.

Yes, it is true, we may make the most of what has been done by Government, by missionaries and reformers, but there are times in the heart histories of all who look far enough down to see what goes on under the surface of things, when the sorrow takes shape in the Prophet's cry, "We have not wrought any deliverance in the earth!"

It is true. We have not. We cannot even estimate the real weight of the lightest speck of the Dust that has settled on the life of this people. But we believe that our God, Who comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, comprehends to the uttermost the Dust of the Actual, and we believe to see Him work, with Whom is strength and effectual working.

We believe to see, and believing even now we see; and when we see anything, be it ever so little, when the Breath breathes, and even "a hair's-breadth" of that Dust is blown away, then, with an intensity I cannot describe, we feel the presence of the Lord our God among us, and look up in the silence of joy and expectation for the coming of the Day when all rule, and all authority and power, yea, the power of the very Actual itself, shall be put down, that God may be all in all.

So again and yet again we ask you to pray not less for the Reform movement, and the Educational movement, and the Civilising movement of India, but far more for the Movement of the Breath of God, and far more for us His workers here, that we may abide in Him without Whom we can do nothing.

CHAPTER 8: Roots

"It is not an easy thing in England to lead an old man or woman to Christ, even though the only 'root' which holds them from Him is love of the world. As the Tamil proverb says, 'That which did not bend at five will not be bent at fifty,' still less at sixty or seventy. When a soul in India is held down, not by one root only, but by a myriad roots, who is sufficient to deliver it? Only He who overturneth the mountains by the roots. 'This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.'"

An Indian Missionary.

"AMMA, you are getting old."

"Yes (grunt), yes."

"When we are old then death is near."

"Yes (grunt), yes."

"Then we must leave our bodies and go somewhere else."

Three more grunts.

"Amma, do you know where you are going?"

Then the old woman wakes up a little, grunts a little more, "Who knows where she is going?" she mumbles, and relapses into grunts.

"I know where I am going," the girl answers. "Amma, don't you want to know?"

"Don't I want to know what?"

"Where you are going."

"Why do I want to know what?"

The girl goes over it again. The old woman turns to her daughter-in-law. "Is the rice ready?" she says. The girl tries again. The old woman agrees we all must die. Death is near to the ancient; she is ancient, therefore death is near to her, she must go somewhere after death. It would be well to know where she is going. She does not know where she is going. Then she gazes and grunts.

Enlargement of one of the old dames seen in chapter vi. A capital typical face. We have a number of these keen, interesting old people, but very rarely find they have any desire to "change their religion." They are "rooted."

The girl tries on different lines. Whom is the old woman looking to, to help her when death comes?

"God."

"What God?"

"The great God." And rousing herself to express herself she declares that He is her constant meditation, therefore all is well. "Is the rice ready?"

"No."

"Then give me some betel leaf," and she settles down to roll small pieces of lime into little balls, and these balls she rolls up in a betel leaf, with a bit of areca nut for taste, and this betel leaf she puts into her mouth—all this very slowly, and with many inarticulate sounds, which I have translated "grunts." And this is all she does. She does not want to listen or talk, she only wants to scrunch betel, and grunt.

This is not a touching tale. It is only true. It happened this evening exactly as I have told it, and the girl, a distant connection of the old woman, who had come with me so delightedly, eager to tell the Good Tidings, had to give it up. She had begun by speaking about the love of Jesus, but that had fallen perfectly flat; so she had tried the more startling form of address, with this result—grunts.

I spent an afternoon not long ago with a more intelligent specimen. Here she is, a fine sturdy old character, one of the three you saw before. She was immensely interested with her photo, which I showed her, and she could not understand at all how, in the one moment when she stood against a wall, her face "had been caught on a piece of white paper." A little explanation opened the way for the greater thing I had come about. We were sitting on a mud verandah, opening on to a square courtyard; two women pounding rice, two more grinding it, another sweeping, a cow, some fowls, a great many children, and several babies, made it exceedingly difficult to concentrate one's attention on anything, and still more difficult to get the wandering brains of an old woman to concentrate on a subject in which she had no interest. She had been interested in the photograph, but that was different.

The conversation ended by her remarking that it was getting dark, ought I not to be going home? It was not getting dark yet, but it meant that she had had enough, so I salaamed and went, hoping for a better chance again. Next time we visited the Village of the Tamarind she was nowhere to be seen; she had gone to her own village, she had only come here for the funeral. Would she return, we asked? Not probable, they said, "she had come and gone." "Come and gone." As they said it, one felt how true it was. Come, for that one short afternoon within our reach; gone, out of it now for ever.

In that same village there is one who more than any other drew one's heart out in affection and longing, but so far all in vain.

I first saw her in the evening as we were returning home. She was sitting on her verandah, giving orders to the servants as they stood in the courtyard below. Then she turned and saw us. We were standing in the street, looking through the open door. The old lady, in her white garments, with her white hair, sat among a group of women in vivid shades of red, behind her the dark wood of the pillar and door, and above the carved verandah roof.

The men were fresh from the fields, and stood with their rough-looking husbandry implements slung across their shoulders; the oxen, great meek-eyed beasts, were munching their straw and swishing their tails as they stood in their places in the courtyard, where some little children played.

The paddy-birds, which are small white storks, were flying about from frond to frond of the cocoanut palms that hung over the wall, and the sunset light, striking slanting up, caught the underside of their wings, and made them shine with a clear pale gold, gold birds in a darkness of green. A broken mud wall ran round one end, and the sunset colour painted it too till all the red in it glowed; and then it came softly through the palms, and touched the white head with a sort of sheen, and lit up the brow of the fine old face as, bending forward, she beckoned to us. "Come in! come in!" she said.

We soon made friends with her. She was a Saivite and we heard afterwards had received the Initiation; the golden symbol of her god had been branded upon her shoulder, and she was sworn to lifelong devotion to Siva; but she had found that he was vain, and she never worshipped him, she worshipped God alone, "and at night, when the household is sleeping, I go up alone to an upper room, and stretch out my hands to the God of all, and cry with a long, loud cry." Then she suddenly turned and faced me full. "Tell me, is that enough?" she said. "Is it all I must do for salvation? Say!"

I did not feel she was ready for a plunge into the deep sea of full knowledge yet, and I tried to persuade her to leave that question, telling her that if she believed what we told her of Jesus our Lord, she would soon know Him well enough to ask Him direct what she wanted to know, and He Himself would explain to her all that it meant to follow Him. But she was determined to hear it then, and, as she insisted, I read her a little of what He says about it Himself. She knew quite enough to understand and take in the force of the forceful words. She would not consent to be led gently on. "No, I must know it now," she said; and as verse by verse we read to her, her face settled sorrowfully. "So far must I follow, so far?" she said. "I cannot follow so far."

It was too late for much talk then, but she promised to listen if we would come and read to her. She could not read, but she seemed to know a great deal about the Bible.

For some weeks one of us went once a week; sometimes the men of the house were in, and then we could not read to her, as they seemed to object; but oftener no one was about, and she had her way, and we read.

She told us her story one afternoon. She was the head of a famous old house; her husband had died many years ago; she had brought up her children successfully, and now they were settled in life. She had a Christian relation, but she had never seen him; she thought he had a son studying in a large school in England—Cambridge, I knew, when I heard the name; the father is one of our true friends.

All her sons are greatly opposed, but one of her little girls learnt for a time, and so the mother heard the Truth, and, being convinced that it was true, greatly desired to hear more.

But the child was married, and went away, and she feared to ask the Missie Ammal to come again, lest people should notice it and talk. So the years passed emptily, "and oh, my heart was an empty place, a void as empty as air!" And she stretched out her arms, and clasping her hands she looked at the empty space between, and then at me with inquiring eyes, to see if I understood.

How well one understood!

"I am an emptiness for Thee to fill,

My soul a cavern for Thy sea, . . .

I have done nought for Thee, am but a Want."

She had never heard it, but she had said it. We do not often hear it said, and when we do our whole heart goes out to meet the heart of the one who says it; everything that is in us yearns with a yearning that cannot be told, to bring her to Him Who said "Come."

We were full of hope about her, and we wrote to her Christian relative, and he wrote back with joy. It seemed so likely then that she would decide for Christ.

But one day, for the first time, she did not care to read. I remember that day so well; it was the time of our monsoon, and the country was one great marsh. We had promised to go that morning, but the night before the rivers filled, and the pool between her and us was a lake. We called the bandyman and explained the situation. He debated a little, but at last—"Well, the bulls can swim," he said, and they swam.

We need not have gone, she was "out." "Out," or "not at home to-day," is a phrase not confined to Society circles where courtesy counts for more than truth. "I am in, but I do not want to see you," would have been true, but rude.

This was the first chill, but she was in next time, and continued to be in, until after a long talk we had, when again the question rose and had to be faced, "Can I be a Christian here?"

It was a quiet afternoon; we were alone, only the little grandchildren were with her—innocent, fearless, merry little creatures, running to her with their wants, and pulling at her hands and dress as babies do at home. Their grandmother took no notice of them beyond an occasional pat or two, but the childish things, with their bright brown eyes and little fat, soft, clinging hands went into the photo one's memory took, and helped one the better to understand and sympathise in the humanness of the pretty home scene, that humanness which is so natural, and which God meant to be. I think there is nothing in all our work which so rends and tears at the heart-strings within us, as seeing the spiritual clash with the natural, and to know that while Caste and bigotry reign it always must be so.

We had a good long talk. "I want to be a Christian," she said, and for a moment I hoped great things, for she as the mistress of the house was almost free to do as she chose. I thought of her influence over her sons and their wives, and the little grandchildren; and I think my face showed the hope I had, for she said, looking very direct at me, "By a Christian I mean one who worships your God, and ceases to worship all other gods; for He alone is the Living God, the Pervader of all and Provider. This I fully believe and affirm, but I cannot break my Caste."

"Would you continue to keep it in all ways?"

"How could I possibly break my Caste?"

"And continue to smear Siva's sign on your forehead?"

"That is indeed part of my Caste."

More especially part of it, I knew, since she had received the Initiation.

Then the disappointment got into my voice, and she felt it, and said, "Oh, do not be grieved! These things are external. How can mere ashes affect the internal, the real essential, the soul?"

It was such a plausible argument, and we hear it over and over again; for history repeats itself, there is nothing new under the sun.

I reminded her that ashes were sacred to Siva.

"I would not serve Siva," she answered me, "but the smearing of ashes on one's brow is the custom of my Caste, and I cannot break my Caste."

Then she looked at me very earnestly with her searching, beautiful, keen old eyes, and she went over ground she knew I knew. She reminded me what the requirements of her Caste had always been, that they must be fulfilled by all who live in the house, and she told me in measured words and slow that I knew she could not live at home if she broke the laws of her Caste. But why make so much of trifling things? For matter and spirit are distinct, and when the hands are raised in prayer, when the lamp is lighted and wreathed with flowers, the outward observer may mistake and think the action is pujah to Agni, but God who reads the heart understands, and judges the thought and not the act. "Yes, my hand may smear on Siva's ashes, while at the same moment my soul may commune with God the Eternal, Who only is God."

I turned to verse after verse to show her this sort of thing could never be, how it would mock at the love of Christ and nullify His sacrifice. I urged upon her that if she were true, and the central thought of her life were towards God, all the outworkings would correspond, creed fitting deed, and deed fitting creed without the least shade of diversity. But faith and practice are not to be confused, each is separate from the other; the two may unite or the one may be divorced from the other without the integrity of either being affected: this is the unwritten Hindu code which she and hers had ever held; and now, after years of belief in it, to face round suddenly to its opposite—this was more than she could do. She held, as it were, the Truth in her hand, and turned it round and round and round, but she always ended where she began; she would not, could not, see it as Truth, or perhaps more truly, would not accept it. It meant too much.

There she sat, queen of her home. The sons were expected, and she had been making preparations for their coming. Her little grandchildren played about her, each one of them dear as the jewel of her eye. How could she leave it all, how could she leave them all—home, all that it stands for; children, all that they mean?

Then she looked at me again, and I shall never forget the look. It seemed as if she were looking me through and through, and forcing the answer to come. She spoke in little short sentences, instinct with intensity. "I cannot live here and break my Caste. If I break it I must go. I cannot live here without keeping my customs. If I break them I must go. You know all this. I ask you, then, tell me yes or no. Can I live here and keep my Caste, and at the same time follow your God? Tell me yes or no!"

I did not tell her—how could I? But she read the answer in my eyes, and she said, as she had said before, "I cannot follow so far—so far, I cannot follow so far!"

"Reverence for opinions and practice held sacred by his ancestors is ingrained in every fibre of a Hindu's character, and is, so to speak, bred in the very bone of his physical and moral constitution." So writes Sir Monier Williams. It is absolutely true.

Oh, friends, is it easy work? My heart is sore as I write, with the soreness that filled it that day. I would have given anything to be able truthfully to say "yes" to her question. But "across the will of nature leads on the path of God" for them; and they have to follow so very far, so very, very far!

All trees have roots. To tear up a full-grown tree by the roots, and transplant it bodily, is never a simple process. But in India we have a tree with a double system of roots. The banyan tree drops roots from its boughs. These bough roots in time run as deep underground as the original root. And the tap root and its runners, and the branch roots and theirs, get knotted and knit into each other, till the whole forms one solid mass of roots, thousands of yards of a tangle of roots, sinuous and strong. Conceive the uprooting of such a tree, like the famous one of North India, for instance, which sheltered an army of seven thousand men. You cannot conceive it; it could not be done, the earthward hold is so strong.

The old in India are like these trees; they are doubly, inextricably rooted. There is the usual great tap root common to all human trees in all lands—faith in the creed of the race; there are the usual running roots too—devotion to family and home. All these hold the soul down.

But in India we have more—we have the branch-rooted system of Caste; Caste so intricate, so precise, that no Western lives who has traced it through its ramifications back to the bough from which it dropped in the olden days.

This Caste, then, these holding laws, which most would rather die than break, are like the branch roots of the banyan tree with their infinite strength of grip. But the strangest thing to us is this: the people love to have it so; they do not regard themselves as held, these roots are their pride and joy. Take a child of four or five, ask it a question concerning its Caste, and you will see how that baby tree has begun to drop branch rootlets down. Sixty years afterwards look again, and every rootlet has grown a tree, each again sending rootlets down; and so the system spreads.

But we look up from the banyan tree. God! what are these roots to Thee? These Caste-root systems are nothing to Thee! India is not too hard for Thee! O God, come!

CHAPTER 9: The Classes and the Masses

"We speak of work done against the force of gravitation. If the magnitude of a force can be estimated in any sense by the resistance which it has to overcome, then verily there is no land under the sun more calculated than India to display the Grand Forces of God's Omnipotent Grace. For here it has to face and overcome the combined resistances of the Caste system, entrenched heathenism, and deeply subtle philosophies. Praise God! it can and will be done. Thou, who alone doest wondrous things, work on. 'So will we sing and praise Thy power.'"

Rev. T. Walker, India.

PERHAPS it would help towards the better understanding of these letters if we stopped and explained things a little. Some may have been wondering, as they read, how it is that while the South Indian fields are constantly quoted as among the most fruitful in the world, we seem to be dealing with a class where fruit is very rare, and so subject to blighting influences after it has appeared, that we hardly like to speak of it till it is ripe and reaped and safe in the heavenly garner. I think it will be easier to understand all this if we view Hindu Tamil South India (with which alone this book deals) from the outside, and let it fall into two divisions the Classes and the Masses. There is, of course, the border line between, crossed over on either side by some who belong to the Classes but are almost of the Masses, and by some who belong to the Masses but are almost of the Classes. Broadly speaking, however, there is a distinct difference between the two. As to their attitude towards the Gospel, the Classes and the Masses unite; they are wholly indifferent to it.

In a paper read at the Student Volunteers' Conference in 1900, a South Indian missionary summed up the matter in a comprehensive sentence: "Shut in for millenniums by the gigantic wall of the Himalayas on the North, and by the impassable ocean on the South, they have lived in seclusion from the rest of the world, and have developed social institutions and conceptions of the universe, and of right and wrong, quite their own. Their own religion and traditionary customs are accepted as sufficiently meeting their needs, and they are not conscious of needing any teaching from foreigners. They will always listen courteously to what we say, and this constitutes an open door for the Gospel, but of conscious need and hungering for the Gospel there is little or none. So long as it is only a matter of preaching, there are in the world no more patient listeners than the Hindus. But as soon as a case arises of one of their number abandoning the Caste customs and traditionary worship, all their hostility is aroused, and the whole community feels it a duty of patriotism to do its utmost to deprive that individual of liberty of action, and to defend the vested rights of Hinduism."

For the true Hindu is fervently Hindu. His religion "may be described as bound up in the bundle of his everyday existence." His intense belief in it, and in his Caste, which is part of it, gives edge to the blade with which he fights the entrance of a new religion to his home. This new religion he conceives of as something inherently antagonistic to his Caste, and as Caste is at every point connected with Hinduism, a thing interwoven with it, as if Hinduism were the warp and Caste the woof of the fabric of Indian life, we cannot say he is mistaken in regarding Christianity as a foe to be fought if he would continue a Caste Hindu. So far, in South Indian religious history, we have no example on a large scale of anything approaching the Bramo Samâj of the North. In the more conservative South there is almost no compromise with, and little assimilation of, the doctrine which makes all men one in Christ.

To return to the division—Classes and Masses—the Classes comprise members of what are known as the higher Castes, and in speaking of towns and villages where these dwell, and of converts from among them, the prefix "Caste" is sometimes used. Among the Classes we find women of much tenderness of feeling and a culture of their own, but their minds are narrowed by the petty lives they live, lives in many instances bounded by no wider horizon than thoughts concerning their husbands and children and jewels and curries, and always their next-door neighbour's squabbles and the gossip of the place. Much of this gossip deals with matters which are not of an elevating character. It takes us years to understand it, because most of the conversation is carried on in allusion or innuendo. But it is understood by the children. One of our converts told me that she often prays for power to forget the words she heard, and the things she saw, and the games she played, when she was a little child in her mother's room.

This old man is the Hindu village schoolmaster. The boys write on a strip of palm leaf with an iron style. These little lads come to us every Sunday afternoon. Will some one remember them?

The young girls belonging to the higher Castes are kept in strict seclusion. During these formative years they are shut up within the courtyard walls to the dwarfing life within, and as a result they get dwarfed, and lose in resourcefulness and independence of mind, and above all in courage; and this tells terribly in our work, making it so difficult to persuade such a one to think for herself or dare to decide to believe. Such seclusion is not felt as imprisonment; a girl is trained to regard it as the proper thing, and we never find any desire among those so secluded to break bounds and rush out into the free, open air. They do not feel it cramped as we should; it is their custom.

It is this custom which makes work among girls exceedingly slow and unresultful. They have to be reached one by one, and it takes many months of teaching before the mind opens enough to understand that it may be free. The reaction of the physical upon the mental is never more clearly illustrated than in such cases. Sometimes it seems as if the mind could not go out beyond the cramping walls; but when it has, by God's illumination, received light enough to see into the darkness of the soul, and the glory that waits to shine in on it, conceive of the tremendous upheaval, the shock of finding solid ground sink, as gradually or suddenly the conviction comes upon such a one that if she acts upon this new knowledge there is no place for her at home. She must give everything up—everything!

Do you wonder that few are found willing to "follow so far"? Do you wonder that our hearts nearly break sometimes, as we realize the cost for them? Do you wonder that, knowing how each is set as a target for the archer who shoots at souls, we fear to say much about them, lest we should set the targets clearer in his sight?

The men and boys of the Classes live a more liberal life, and here you find all varying shades of refinement. There is education, too, and a great respect for learning, and reverence for their classic literature and language, a language so ancient that we find certain Tamil words in the Hebrew Scriptures, and so rich, that while "nearly all the vernaculars of India have been greatly enriched from the Sanscrit, Sanscrit has borrowed from Tamil." Almost every Caste village has its own little school, and every town has many, where the boys are taught reading, writing, poetry, and mental arithmetic.

There is not much education among the Masses. Here and there a man stands out who has fought his way through the ignorance of centuries, up into the light of the knowledge of books. Such a man is greatly respected by the whole community. The women have the same kindly nature as the women of the Classes, and there is surprising responsiveness sometimes, where one would least expect it. We have known a Tamil woman, distinctly of the Masses, never secluded in her girlhood, but left to bloom as a wild flower in the field, as sensitive in spirit as any lady born. The people are rough and rustic in their ways, but there are certain laws observed which show a spirit of refinement latent among them; there are customs which compare favourably with the customs of the masses at home. As a whole, they are like the masses of other lands, with good points and bad points in strong relief, and just the same souls to be saved.

Converts from among the Masses, as a general rule, are able to live at home. There is persecution, but they are not turned out of village, street, or house. Often they come in groups, two or three families together perhaps, or a whole village led by its headman comes over. There is less of the single one-by-one conversion and confession, though there is an increasing number of such, and they are the best we have.

It is easy to understand how much more rapidly Christianity spreads under such conditions than among those prevailing among the Classes; we see it illustrated over and over again. For example, in a certain high-caste Hindu town some miles distant from our station on the Eastern side, a young man heard the Gospel preached at an open-air meeting; he believed, and confessed in baptism, thus breaking Caste and becoming an alien to his own people. He has never been able to live at home since, and so there has been no witness borne, no chance to let the life show out the love of God. The men of that household doubtless know something of the truth; they know enough, at least, to make them responsible for refusing it; but what can the women know? Only that the son of the house has disgraced his house and name; only that he has destroyed his Caste and broken his mother's heart. "Shame upon him," they cry with one voice, "and curses on the cause of the shame, the 'Way' of Jesus Christ!" It is useless to say they are merely women, and do not count; they do count. Their influence counts for a very great deal. Theoretically, women in India are nothing where religion is concerned; practically, they are the heart of the Hindu religion, as the men are its sinew and brain. There has never been a convert in that town since that young man was banished from it, out-casted by his Caste.

But in a village only a few miles from that town a heathen lad believed, and was baptised, and returned home, not so welcome as before, but not considered too defiled to be reckoned a son of the household still. His father is dead, his mother is a bitter opponent, but his brother has come since, and within a stone's-throw another; and so it goes on: the life has a chance to tell. Almost every time we have gone to that village we have found some ready for baptism, and though none of the mothers have been won, they witness to the change in the life of their sons. "My boy's heart is as white as milk now," said one, who had stood by and seen that boy tied up and flogged for Christ's sake. They rarely "change their religion," these staunch old souls; "let me go where my husband is; he would have none of it!" said one, and nothing seems to move them; but they let their boys live at home, and perhaps, even yet, the love will break down their resistance. They are giving it a chance.

I think this one illustration explains more than many words would the difference between work among the Classes and the Masses, and why it is that one form of work is so much more fruitful than the other.

A village woman of the Shanar Caste. The photo shows the baby's ears being prepared for the jewels her mother hopes will fill them by and by. Holes are made first and filled with cotton wool, graduated leaden weights are added till the lobes are long enough.

The Masses must not be understood as a vast casteless Mass, out-casted by the Classes, for the Caste system runs down to the very lowest stratum, but their Caste rules allow of freer intercourse with others. We may visit in their houses more freely, enter more freely into their thoughts, share more freely in the interests of their lives. We are less outside, as it were. But the main difference between the one set of people and the other lies deeper; it is a difference underground. It works out, however, into something all can see. Among the Masses, "mass movements" are of common occurrence; among the Classes, with rare exceptions, each one must come out alone.

This is often forgotten by observers of the Indian Field from the home side. There are parts of that field where the labourers seem to be always binding up sheaves and singing harvest songs; and from other parts come fewer songs, for the sheaves are fewer there, or it may be there are none at all, only a few poor ears of corn, and they had to be gathered one by one, and they do not show in the field.

CHAPTER 10: The Creed Chasm

"I have had to deal in the same afternoon's work, on the one hand with men of keen powers of intellect, whose subtle reasoning made one look to the foundations of one's own faith; and on the other hand with ignorant crowds, whose conception of sin was that of a cubit measure, and to whom the terms 'faith' and 'love' were as absolutely unknown as though they had been born and bred in some undeveloped race of Anthropoids."

Rev. T. Walker, India.

IN writing about the Classes and the Masses of South India, one great difference which does not exist at home should be explained. In England a prince and a peasant may be divided by outward things—social position, style of life, and the duty of life—but in all inward things they may be one—one in faith, one in purpose, one in hope. The difference which divides them is only accidental, external; and the peasant, perhaps being in advance of the prince in these verities of existence, may be regarded by the prince as nobler than himself: there is no spiritual chasm between them. It is the same in the realm of scholarship. All true Christians, however learned or however unlearned, hold one and the same faith. But in India it is not so. The scholar would smile at the faith of the simple villagers, he would even teach them to believe that which he did not believe himself, holding that it was more suitable for them, and he would marvel at your ignorance if you confounded his creed with theirs; and yet in name both he and they are Hindus.

Sir Monier Williams explains the existence of this difference by describing the receptivity and all-comprehensiveness of Hinduism. "It has something to offer which is suited to all minds, its very strength lies in its infinite adaptability to the infinite diversity of human characters and human tendencies. It has its highly spiritual and abstract side, suited to the metaphysical philosopher; its practical and concrete side, suited to the man of affairs and the man of the world; its æsthetic and ceremonial side, suited to the man of poetic feeling and imagination; its quiescent and contemplative side, suited to the man of peace and lover of seclusion. Nay, it holds out the right hand of brotherhood to nature worshippers, demon worshippers, animal worshippers, tree worshippers, fetich worshippers. It does not scruple to permit the most grotesque forms of idolatry and the most degrading varieties of superstition, and it is to this latter fact that yet another remarkable peculiarity of Hinduism is mainly due—namely, that in no other System of the world is the chasm more vast which separates the religion of the higher, cultured, and thoughtful Classes, from that of the lower, uncultured, and unthinking Masses."

Naturally, therefore, work among them is different; one almost needs a different vocabulary for each, and certainly one needs a different set of ideas. I remember how, in one afternoon's work, we saw the two types most perfectly. In thinking of it, it is as if one saw again the quiet face of the old scholar against a background of confusion, the clear calm features carved as in ivory, and set with a light upon it; chaotic darkness behind. We were visiting his wife, when he came out from the inner room, and asked if he might talk with us. Usually to such a question I say no; we have come to the women, who are far the more needy, the men can easily hear if they will. But he was such an old man, I felt I could not refuse; so he began to tell me what he held as truth, which was, in brief, that there are two sets of attachment, one outer, one inner; that deliverance from these, and from Self, the Ego, which regards itself as the doer, constitutes Holiness; that is, that one must be completely disentangled and completely self-less. This attained, the next is Bliss, which is progressive. First comes existence in the same place as God. Second, nearness to God. Third, likeness to God. Fourth, identity with God. Then he quoted from a classic beloved by all the old Tamil school, stanza after stanza, to prove the truth of the above, ending with one which Dr. Pope has thus translated—

"Cling thou to that which He to Whom nought clings hath bid thee cling,

Cling to that bond, to get thee free from every clinging thing."

He knew Sanscrit, and read me strange-sounding passages from a huge ancient book, and then, in return for a booklet, he gave me one of Mrs. Besant's translations from the Bhagavad Gita.

The talk ended in my quoting what he could not deny was the true heart-cry of one of his greatest poets. "I know nothing! nothing! I am in darkness! Lord, is there no light for me?" And another, from the poem he had quoted, which asks the question, "What is the use of knowledge, mere knowledge, if one does not draw near to the All-knowing, All-pure One?" And this led into what he would not listen to at first, a little reading from the Book of books, before whose light even these wonderful books pale as tapers in clear sunshine. The marvel of our Bible never shows more marvellous than at such times, when you see it in deed and in truth the Sword of the Spirit, and it cuts.

The old man asked me to come again, and I did, as the Iyer was away. He often got out of my depth, and I longed to know more; but I always found the Bible had the very word he needed, if he would only take it. So far as I know, he did not, and I left him—to quote his own words, though not spoken of himself, alas!—"bewildered by numerous thoughts, meshed in the web of delusion."

As we left our old scholar, we came upon a thing wholly foolish and brainless, animalism in force. It was the difference between the Classes and the Masses once for all painted in glare. A huge procession was tearing along the streets and roads, with all the usual uproar. They stopped when they got to a big thorn bush, and then danced round it, carrying their idols raised on platforms, and borne by two or three dozen to each. We passed, singing as hard as ever we could "Victory to Jesus' Name! Victory!" and when we got rather out of the stream, stopped, and sang most vigorously, till quite a little crowd gathered, and we had a chance to witness.

It was dark, and the flaming torches lit up the wildest, most barbaric bit of heathenism I have seen for a long time. The great black moving mass seemed like some hellish sea which had burst its bounds, and the hundreds of red-fire torches moving up and down upon it like lights in infernal fishermen's boats, luring lost souls to their doom.

As we waited and spoke to those who would hear, a sudden rush from the centre of things warned us to go; but before we could get out of the way, a rough lad with a thorn-branch torch stuck it right into the bandy, and all but set fire to us. He ran on with a laugh, and another followed with an idol, a hideous creature, red and white, which he also pushed in upon us. Our bullocks trotted as fast as they could, and we soon got out of it all, and looking back saw the great square of the devil temple blazing with torches and firebrands, and heard the drummings and clangings and yells which announced the arrival of the procession.

All that night the riotous drumming continued, and, as one lay awake and listened, one pictured the old scholar sitting in the cool night air on his verandah, reading his ancient palm-leaf books by the light of the little lamp in the niche of his cottage wall.

CHAPTER 11: Caste viewed as a Doer

"It is matter for especial notice that in every department of applied science we have to deal with the unseen. All forces, whether in physics, mechanics, or electricity, are invisible."

Alexander Mackay, Africa.

THE division of the Tamil people, over fifteen million strong, into Classes and Masses, though convenient and simple, is far too simple to be of value in giving an accurate idea of the matter as it is understood from within. As we said, it is only an outside view of things. A study of Caste from an Indian point of view is a study from which you rise bewildered.

What is Caste? What is electricity? Lord Kelvin said, on the occasion of his jubilee, that he knew no more of electric and magnetic force . . . than he knew and tried to teach his students of natural philosophy fifty years ago in his first session as Professor. We know that electricity exists, we are conscious of its presence in the phenomena of light, heat, sound; but we do not know what it is.

Nothing could more perfectly illustrate Caste. You cannot live long in a conservative part of India, in close contact with its people, without being conscious of its presence; if you come into conflict with it, it manifests itself in a flash of opposition, hot rage of persecution, the roar of the tumult of the crowd. But try to define it, and you find you cannot do it. It is not merely birth, class, a code of rules, though it includes all these. It is a force, an energy; there is spirit in it, essence, hidden as the invisible essence which we call electricity.

Look at what it does. A few months ago a boy of twelve resolved to be a Christian. His clan, eight thousand strong, were enraged. There was a riot in the streets; in one house the poison cup was ready. Better death than loss of Caste.

In another town a boy took his stand, and was baptised, thus crossing the line that divides secret belief from open confession. His Caste men got hold of him afterwards; next time he was seen he was a raving lunatic. The Caste was avenged.

It may be someone will wonder if these things are confined to one part of the field, so I quote from another, working in a neighbouring field, Tamil, but not "ours."

She tells of a poor low-caste woman who learned in her home, and believed. Her husband also believed, and both thought of becoming Christians. The village soothsayer warned them that their father's god would be angry; they did not heed him, but went on, and suddenly their baby died. This was too much for their faith then, and they both went back to idolatry.

A few years afterwards their eldest child began to learn to read, and the mother's faith revived. The soothsayer and her husband reminded her of the infant's fate, but she was brave, and let her child learn. Then her cow suddenly died. "Did we not tell you so?" they said, and for the moment she was staggered; but she rallied, and only became more earnest in faith. So the soothsayer threatened worse.

Cooking in a house of the Shanar Caste, always the most accessible of all Castes here, but this is a specially friendly house, or we should not have been allowed to take the photo. The small girl who is grinding curry stuff on the stone is the "Imp" of chapter 20.

Then a Caste meeting was called to determine what could be done with this woman. The husband attended the meeting, and was treated to some rice and curry; before he reached home he was taken violently ill, and in three days he died. The relatives denounced the woman as the cause of her husband's death, took her only son from her, and entreated her to return to her father's gods before they should all be annihilated. They gave her "two weeks to fast and mourn for her husband, then finding her mind as firmly fixed on Christ as before, they sent her to Burmah."

This happened recently. It is told without any effort to appeal to the sympathies of anyone, simply as a fact; a witness, every line of it, to the power of Caste as a Doer. But there is something in the tale, told so terribly quietly, that makes one's heart burn with indignation at the unrelenting cruelty which would hound a poor woman down, and send her, bereft of all she loved, into exile, such as a foreign land would be to one who knew only her own little village. And when you remember the Caste was "low," which they took such infinite pains to guard, you can judge, perhaps, what the hate would be, the concentration of scorn and hate, if the Caste were higher or high.

But look at Caste in another way, in its power in the commonplace phases of life. For example, take a kitchen and cooking, and see how Caste rules there. For cooking is not vulgar work, or infra dig. in any sense, in India; all Caste women in good orthodox Hindu families either do their own or superintend the doing of it by younger members of the same family or servants of the same Caste. "We Europeans cannot understand the extent to which culinary operations may be associated with religion. The kitchen in every Indian household is a kind of sanctuary or holy ground. . . . The mere glance of a man of inferior Caste makes the greatest delicacies uneatable, and if such a glance happens to fall on the family supplies during the cooking operations, when the ceremonial purity of the water used is a matter of almost life and death to every member of the household, the whole repast has to be thrown away as if poisoned. The family is for that day dinnerless. Food thus contaminated would, if eaten, communicate a taint to the souls as well as bodies of the eaters, a taint which could only be removed by long and painful expiation." Thus far Sir Monier Williams (quoted as a greater authority than any mere missionary!). Think of the defilement which would be contracted if a member of the household who had broken Caste in baptism took any part in the cooking. It would never be allowed. Such a woman could take no share in the family life. Her presence, her shadow, above all her touch, would be simply pollution. Therefore, and for many other reasons, her life at home is impossible, and the Hindu, without arguing about it, regards it as impossible. It does not enter into the scheme of life as laid down by the rules of his Caste. He never, if he is orthodox, contemplates it for a moment as a thing to be even desired.

Cooking and kitchen work may seem small (though it would not be easy for even the greatest to live without reference to it), so let us look out on the world of trade, and see Caste again as a Doer there. If a merchant becomes a Christian, no one will buy his goods; if he is a weaver, no one will buy his cloth; if he is a dyer, no one will buy his thread; if he is a jeweller, no one will employ him. If it is remembered that every particular occupation in life represents a particular Caste, it will be easily understood how matters are complicated where converts from the great Trades Unions are concerned. Hence the need of Industrial Missions, and the fact that they exist.

A man wants to become a Christian, say, from the blacksmith or carpenter Caste. As a Christian he loses his trade, and he has been trained to no other. His forefathers worked in iron or wood, and he cannot attempt to learn other work. Let the Christians employ him, you say. Some do; but the question involves other questions far too involved for discussion here. And even if we discussed it, we should probably end where we began—facing a practical problem which no one can hope to solve while Caste is what it is.

Just now this system is in full operation in the case of a lad of the brassworker Caste. He is a thoughtful boy, and he has come to the conclusion that Christianity is the true religion; he would like to be a Christian; if the conditions were a little easier he would be enrolled as an inquirer to-morrow. But here is the difficulty. His father is not strong, his mother and little sisters and brothers are his care; if he were a Christian he could not support them; no one would sell him brass, no one would buy the vessels he makes. He knows only his inherited trade. He can make fine water-pots, lamps, vases, and vessels of all sorts, nothing else. He is too old to learn any other trade; but supposing such an arrangement could be made, who would support the family in the meantime? Perhaps we might do it; we certainly could not let them starve; but it would not do to tell him so, or to hold out hopes of earthly help, till we know beyond a doubt that he is true. This is what is holding him back. He reads over and over again, "He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me," and then he looks at his father and mother and the little children; and he reads the verse again, and he looks at them again. It is too hard.

It is easy enough to tell him that God would take care of them if he obeys. We do tell him so, but can we wonder at the boy for hesitating to take a step which will, so far as he can see, take house and food and all they need from his mother and those little children?

These are some of the things which make work in India what is simply called difficult. We do not want to exaggerate. We know all lands have their difficulties, but when being a Christian means all this, over and above what it means elsewhere, then the bonds which bind souls are visibly strengthened, and the work can never be described as other than very difficult.

Or take the power of Caste in another direction—its callous cruelty. I give one illustration from last year's life.

I was visiting in the house where the old lady lives upon whom the afflatus fell. The first time we went there we saw a little lad of three or four, who seemed to be suffering with his eyes. He lay in a swinging bag hung from the roof, and cried piteously all the time we were there. Now, two months afterwards, there he lay crying still, only his cries were so weary he had hardly strength to cry.

They lifted him out. I should not have known the child—the pretty face drawn and full of pain, the little hands pressed over the burning eyes. Only one who has had it knows the agony of ophthalmia. They told me he had not slept, "not even the measure of a rape-seed," for three months. Night and day he cried and cried; "but he does not make much noise now," they added. He couldn't, poor little lad!

I begged them to take him to the hospital, twenty-five miles away, but they said to go to a hospital was against their Caste. The child lay moaning so pitifully it wrung my heart, and I pleaded and pleaded with them to let me take him if they would not. Even if his sight could not be saved, something could be done to ease the pain, I knew. But no, he might die away from home, and that would disgrace their Caste.

"Then he is to suffer till he is blind or dead?" and I felt half wild with the cold cruelty of it.

"What can we do?" they asked; "can we destroy our Caste?"

Oh, I did blaze out for a moment! I really could not help it. And then I knelt down among them all, just broken with the pity of it, and prayed with all my heart and soul that the Good Shepherd would come and gather the lamb in His arms!

I wonder if you can bear to read it? I can hardly bear to write it. But you have not seen the little wasted hands pressed over the eyes, and then falling helplessly, too tired to hold up any longer; and you have not heard those weak little wails—and to think it need not have been!

But we could do nothing. We were leaving the place next day, and even if we could have helped him, they would not have let us. They had their own doctor, they said; the case was in his hands. As we came away they explained that one of the boy's distant relatives had died two years ago, and that this was what prevented any of them leaving the house, as some obscure Caste rule would be broken if they did; otherwise, perhaps they might have been able to take him somewhere for change of treatment. So there that child must lie in his pain, one more little living sacrifice on the altar of Caste.

"I determined not to laugh!" That was what she said when she saw it, and she was fairly satisfied with the result of her efforts. The jewels are gold, the seeley a rich red. A woman of this type makes a fine picture,—the strong intelligent face, the perfect arms and hands, the glistening gold on the clear brown, and the graceful dress harmonising so perfectly with the colour of eyes and hair. The one deformity is the ear, cut so as to hold the jewels, which are so heavy that one wonders the stretched lobes do not break.

The last thing I heard them say as we left the house was, "Cry softly, or we'll put more medicine in!" And the last thing I saw was the tightening of the little hands over the poor shut eyes, as he tried to stifle his sobs and "cry softly." This told one what the "medicine" meant to him. One of the things they had put in was raw pepper mixed with alum.

Is not Caste a cruel thing? Those women were not heartless, but they would rather see that baby die in torture by inches, than dim with one breath the lustre of their brazen escutcheon of Caste!

This is one glimpse of one phase of a power which is only a name at home. It is its weakest phase; for the hold of Caste upon the body is as nothing to the hold it has upon the mind and soul. It yields to the touch of pain sometimes, as our medical missionaries know; but it tightens again too often when the need for relief is past. It is unspeakably strong, unmercifully cruel, and yet it would seem as though the very blood of the people ran red with it. It is in them, part of their very being.

This, then, is Caste viewed as a Doer. It does strange things, hard things, things most cruel. It is, all who fight it are agreed, the strongest foe to the Gospel of Christ on the Hindu fields of South India.

CHAPTER 12: Petra

"This work in India . . . is one of the most crucial tests the Church of Christ has ever been put to. The people you think to measure your forces against are such as the giant races of Canaan are nothing to."

Bishop French, India and Arabia.

IT was very hot, and we were tired, and the friendly voice calling "Come in! come in! Oh, come and rest!" was a welcome sound, and we went in.

She was a dear old friend of mine, the only real friend I have in that ancient Hindu town. Her house is always open to us, the upper room always empty—or said to be so—when we are needing a rest. But she is a Hindu of the Hindus, and though so enlightened that for love's sake she touches us freely, taking our hands in hers, and even kissing us, after we go there is a general purification; every scrap of clothing worn while we were in the house is carefully washed before sunset.

She insisted now upon feeding us, called for plantains and sugar, broke up the plantains, dabbed the pulp in the sugar, and commanded us to eat. Then she sat down satisfied, and was photographed.

This town, a little ancient Hindu town, is two hours journey from Dohnavur. There are thirty-eight stone temples and shrines in and around it, and five hundred altars. No one has counted the number of idols; there are two hundred under a single tree near one of the smaller shrines. Each of the larger temples has its attendant temple-women; there are two hundred recognised Servants of the gods, and two hundred annual festivals.

Wonderful sums are being worked just now concerning the progress of Christianity in India. A favourite sum is stated thus: the number of Christians has increased during the last decade at a certain ratio. Given the continuance of this uniform rate of increase, it will follow that within a computable period India will be a Christian land. One flaw in this method of calculation is that it takes for granted that Brahmans, high-caste Hindus, and Mohammedans will be Christianised at the same rate of progress as prevails at present among the depressed classes.

There are sums less frequently stated. Here in the heart of this Hindu town they come with force; one such sum worked out carefully shows that, according to the present rate of advance, it will be more than twenty thousand years before the Hindu towns of this district are even nominally Christian. Another still more startling gives us this result: according to the laws which govern statistics, thirteen hundred thousand years must pass before the Brahmans in this one South Indian district are Christianised. And if the sum is worked so as to cover all India, the result is quite as staggering to faith based on statistics.

Praise God, this is not His arithmetic! It is a purely human invention. We believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; we believe in God, even God Who calleth the things that are not as though they were: therefore these sums prove nothing. But if such sums are worked at all, they ought to be worked on both sides, and not only on the side which yields the most encouraging results.

Two of us spent a morning in the Brahman street. In these old Hindu towns the Brahman street is built round the temple, and in large towns this street is a thoroughfare, and we are allowed in. The women stood in the shadow of the cool little dark verandahs, and we stood out in the sun and tried to make friends with them. Then some Mission College boys saw us and felt ashamed that we should stand in that blazing heat, and they offered us a verandah; but the women instantly cleared off, and the men came, and the boys besought us under their breath to say nothing about our religion.

We spoke for a few minutes, throwing our whole soul into the chance. We felt that our words were as feathers floating against rocks; but we witnessed, and they listened till, as one of them remarked, it was time to go for their noontide bathe, and we knew they wished us to go. We went then, and found a wall at the head of the Brahman street, and we stood in its shadow and tried again. Crowds of men and lads gathered about us, but our College boys stood by our side and helped to quiet them. "Now you see," they said to us, as they walked with us down the outer street, "how quite impossible for us is Christianity."

It is good sometimes to take time to take in the might of the foe we fight. That evening two of us had a quiet few minutes under the temple walls. Those great walls, reaching so high above us, stretching so far beyond us, seemed a type of the wall Satan has built round these souls.

We could touch this visible wall, press against it, feel its solid strength. Run hard against it, and you would be hurt, you might fall back bleeding; it would not have yielded one inch.

And the other invisible wall? Oh, we can touch it too! Spirit-touch is a real thing. And so is spirit-pain. But the wall, it still stands strong.

It was moonlight. We had walked all round the great temple square, down the silent Brahman streets, and we had stood in the pillared hall, and looked across to the open door, and seen the light on the shrine.

Now we were out in God's clean light, looking up at the mass of the tower, as it rose pitch-black against the sky. And we felt how small we were.

Then the influences of the place began to take hold of us. It was not only masonry; it was mystery. "The Sovereigns of this present Darkness" were there.

How futile all of earth seemed then, against those tremendous forces and powers. What toy-swords seemed all weapons of the flesh. Praise God for the Holy Ghost!

While we were sitting there a Brahman came to see what we were doing, and we told him some of our thoughts. He asked us then if we would care to hear his. We told him, gladly. He pointed up to the temple tower. "That is my first step to God." We listened, and he unfolded, thought by thought, that strange old Védic philosophy, which holds that God, being omnipresent, reveals Himself in various ways, in visible forms in incarnations, or in spirit. The visible-form method of revelation is the lowest; it is only, as it were, the first of a series of steps which lead up to the highest, intelligent adoration of and absorption into the One Supreme Spirit. "We are only little children yet. We take this small first step, it crumbles beneath us as we rise to the next, and so step by step we rise from the visible to the invisible, from matter to spirit—to God. But," he added courteously, "as my faith is good for me, so, doubtless, you find yours for you."

Next morning we went down to the river and had talks with the people who passed on their way to the town. It was all so pretty in the early morning light. Men were washing their bullocks, and children were scampering in and out of the water. Farther downstream the women were bathing their babies and polishing their brass water-vessels. Trees met overhead, but the light broke through in places and made yellow patches on the water. Out in one of those reaches of yellow a girl stood bending to fill her vessel; she wore the common crimson of the South, but the light struck it, and struck the shining brass as she swung it up under her arm, and made her into a picture as she stood in her clinging wet red things against the brown and green of water and wood. Everywhere we looked there was something beautiful to look at, and all about us was the sound of voices and laughter, and the musical splashing of water; then, as we enjoyed it all, we saw this:

Under an ancient tree fifteen men were walking slowly round and round, following the course of the sun. Under the tree there were numbers of idols, and piles of oleander and jessamin wreaths, brought fresh that morning. The men were elderly, fine-looking men; they were wholly engrossed in what they were doing. It was no foolish farce to them; it was reality.

There is something in the sight of this ordinary, evident dethronement of our God which stirs one to one's inmost soul. We could not look at it.

Again and again we have gone to that town, but to-day those men go round that tree, and to-day that town is a fort unwon.

Petra, I have called it; the word stands for many a town walled in as that one is. In Keith's Evidence of Prophecy there is a map of Petra, the old strong city of Edom, and in studying it a light fell upon David's question concerning it, and his own triumphant answer, "Who will lead me into the strong city? Who will bring me into Edom? Wilt not Thou, O God?" for the map shows the mountains all round except at the East, where they break into a single narrow passage, the one way in. There was only one way in, but there was that one way in!

Here is a town walled up to heaven by walls of Caste and bigotry, but there must be one way in. Here is a soul walled all round by utter indifference and pride, but there must be one way in.

"Who will lead me into the strong city? Who will bring me into Edom? Wilt not Thou, O God?"

CHAPTER 13: Death by Disuse

"There is a strong tendency to look upon the Atonement of Christ as possessing some quality by virtue of which God can excuse and overlook sin in the Christian, a readiness to look upon sinning as the inevitable accompaniment of human nature 'until death do us part,' and to look upon Christianity as a substitute for rather than a cause of personal holiness of life."

Rev. I. W. Charlton, India.

"From many things I have heard I fancy many at home think of the mission as a sort of little heaven upon earth, but when one looks under the surface there is much to sadden one. . . . Oh, friends, much prayer is needed! Many of the agents know apparently nothing about conversion.

"You may not like my writing so plainly, but sometimes it seems as if only the bright side were given, and one feels that if God's praying people at home understood things more as they really are . . . more prayer for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on our agents and converts would ascend to God. . . . We do long to see all our pastors and agents really converted men, men of prayer and faith, who, knowing that they themselves are saved, long with a great longing to see the heathen round them brought out of darkness into His light, and the Christians who form their congregations, earnest converted men and women."

A. J. Carr, India.

"Fifty added to the Church sounds fine at home, but if only five of them are genuine what will it profit in the Great Day?"

David Livingstone, Africa.

"Oh for the Fire to set the whole alight, and melt us all into one mighty Holy-Ghost Church!"

Minnie Apperson, China.

THE lamps were being lighted, the drums beaten, the cymbals struck, and the horns blown for evening pujah in all the larger temples and shrines of the "Strong City," when we turned out of it, and, crossing the stream that divides the two places, went to the Christian hamlet, which by contrast at that moment seemed like a little corner of the garden of the Lord. Behind was the heathenish clash and clang of every possible discord, and here the steady ringing of the bell for evening service; behind was all that ever was meant by the "mystery of iniquity," and here the purity and peace of Christianity. This is how it struck me at first; and even now, after a spell of work in the heart of heathendom, Christendom, or the bit of it lying alongside, is beautiful by contrast. There you have naked death, death unadorned, the corpse exhibited; here, if there is a corpse, at least it is decently dressed. And yet that evening it was forced upon me that death is death wherever found and however carefully covered.

The first of the Christians to welcome us was a bright-looking widow—this is her photograph. We soon made friends. She told us she had been "born in the Way"; her grandfather joined it, and none of the family had gone back, so she was sure that all was right. We were not so sure, and we tried to find out if she knew the difference between joining the Way and coming to Christ. This was only a poor little country hamlet, but everywhere we have travelled, among educated and uneducated alike, we have found much confusion of thought upon this subject.

"God knows my heart," she said, "God hears my prayers. If I see a bad dream in the night, I pray to God, and putting a Bible under my head, I sleep in perfect peace." Could anything be more conclusive?

There were numbers of other proofs forthcoming: If your grandfather gave six lamps to the church, value three and a half rupees each (the lamps are hanging to-day, and bear witness to the fact); if your father never failed to pay his yearly dues, besides regular Sunday collections (his name is in the church report, and how much he gave is printed); if you freely help the poor, and give them paddy on Christmas Day (quite a sackful of it); if you never offer to demons (no, not when your children are sick, and the other faithless Christians advise you); if you never tie on the cylinder (a charm frequently though covertly worn by purely nominal Christians); and finally, if you have been baptised and confirmed, and "without a break join the Night-supper," surely no one can reasonably doubt that you are a Christian of a very proper sort? As to questions about change of heart, and chronic indulgence in sins, such as lying—who in this wicked world lives without lying? And when it pleases God to do it He will change your heart.

We took the evening meeting for the villagers, who meanwhile had gathered and were listening with approval. Privacy, as we understand it, is a thing unknown in India. "That is right," they remarked cheerfully; "give her plenty of good advice!" And we all trooped into the prayer-room.

Once in there, everyone put on a sort of church expression, and each one took his or her accustomed seat in decorous silence. The little school-children sat in rows in front on the mats with arms demurely folded, and sparkling eyes fixed solemnly; the grown-up people sat on their mats on either side behind, and we sat on ours facing them. We began with a chorus, which the children picked up quickly and shouted lustily, the grown-ups joining in with more reserve; and then we got to work.

Blessing spoke. She had once been a nominal Christian, and she knew exactly where these people were, and how they looked at things. Her heart was greatly moved as she spoke, and the tears were in her eyes, for she knew none of these friends had the joy of conscious salvation, and she told me afterwards she had thirst and hunger for them. But they listened unimpressed. Then we had prayer and a quiet time; sometimes the Spirit works most in quiet, and we rose expectantly; but there was no sign of life.

After the meeting was over they gathered round us again. They are always so loving and friendly in these little villages; but they could not understand what it was that troubled us. Were they not all Christians?

Shortly afterwards they came, as their kindly custom is, to bring us fruit and wreaths of flowers on New Year's Day. I missed my first friend of that evening, and asked for her. "That widow you talked to?" said the old catechist, "three days ago fever seized her, and"—He broke off and looked up. Then I longed to hear how she had died, but no one could tell me anything. Oh, the curtain of silence that covers the passing of souls!

We went soon afterwards to the village, sure that at last the people would be stirred; for she had been a leader among the women, and her call, even in this land of sudden calls, had been very sudden. But we did not find it had affected anyone. They all referred to her in the chastened tone adopted upon such occasions, and, sighing, reminded each other that God was merciful, and she had always been, up to the measure of her ability, a very good woman.

We felt as if we were standing with each one of those people separately, in the one little standing space we were sure of, before that curtain, and we spoke with them as you speak with those whom you know you may never see again on this side of it. But they looked at us, and wondered what was the matter with us. Were they not Christians? Did they not believe in God? Did they not pray regularly night and morning for forgiveness, protection, and blessing? So they could not understand.

Was it that the power to understand had been withered up within them? Was the soul God gave them dead—"sentenced to death by disuse"? Dead they are in apathy and ignorance and putrefying customs, and the false security that comes from adherence to the Christian creed without vital connection with Christ. These poor Christians are dead.

"Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead?" Lord, it is not a thing incredible. Thou hast done it before. Oh, do it again. Do it soon!

I have told you how much we need your help for the work among the heathen; but often we feel we need it almost as much for the work among the Christians. Over and over again it is told, but still it is hardly understood, that the Christians need to be converted; that the vast majority are not converted; that statistics may mislead, and do not stand for Eternity work; that many a pastor, catechist, teacher, has a name to live, but is dead; that the Church is very dead as a whole—thank God for every exception. We do not say this thoughtlessly; the words are a grief to write. We humble ourselves that it is so, and take to ourselves the blame. It is true that the corpse of the dead Church is dressed, just as it is at home, only here it is even more dressed; and because the spirit of the land is intensely religious, its grave-clothes are vestments. But dressed death is still death.

This will come as a shock to those who have read stories of this or that native Christian, and generalising from these stories, picture the Church as a company of saints. God has His saints in India, men and women hidden away in quiet places out of sight, and some few out in the front; but the cry of our hearts is for more. So we tell you the truth about things as they are, though we know it will not be acceptable, for the best is the thing that is best liked at home; so the best is most frequently written.

This may seem to cross out what was said before, about the darker side of the truth being often told. It does not cross it out: read through the magazines and reports, and you will find truth-revealing sentences, which show facts to those who have eyes to see; but though this is so, all will admit that the sanguine view, as it is called, is by far the most in evidence, for the sanguine man is by far the most popular writer, and so is more pressed to write. "People will read what is buoyant and bright; the more of that sort we have the better," wrote a Mission secretary out in the field not long ago, to a missionary who did not feel free to write in quite that way. Those who, to quote another secretary, "are afraid of writing at all, for fear of telling lies"—excuse the energetic language; I am quoting, not inventing—naturally write much less, and so the best gets known.

This is nobody's fault exactly. The home authorities print for the most part what is sent to them. They even call attention sometimes to the less cheerful view of things; and if, yielding occasionally to the pressure which is brought to bear upon them by a public which loves to hear what it likes, they take the sting out of some strong paragraph by adding an editorial "Nevertheless," is it very astonishing?

Do you think we are writing like this because we are discouraged? No, we are not discouraged, except when sometimes we fear lest you should grow weary in prayer before the answer comes. This India is God's India. This work is His. Oh, join with us then, as we join with all our dear Indian brothers and sisters who are alive in the Lord, in waiting upon Him in that intensest form of waiting which waits on till the answer comes; join with us as we pray to the mighty God of revivals, "O Lord, revive Thy work! Revive Thy work in the midst of the years! In the midst of the years make known!"

CHAPTER 14: What Happened

"Some years ago England was stirred through and through by revelations which were made as to the 'Bitter Cry' of wronged womanhood. In India the bitter cry is far more bitter, but it is stifled and smothered by the cruel gag of Caste. Orthodox Hindus would rather see their girls betrayed, tortured, murdered, than suffer them to break through the trammels of Caste."

Rev. T. Walker, India.

THERE is another ancient town near Dohnavur, and in that town another temple, and round the temple the usual Brahman square. In one of the streets of this square we saw the girl whose face looks out at you. It struck us as a typical face, not beautiful as many are, but characteristic in the latent power of eyes and brow, a face full of possibilities.

Here is one who might be a queen. What she may be is very different. She is a Brahman girl; all her people are Hindus. She has never even felt a desire, or seen any one in her town who felt a desire, to "fall into the pit of Christianity."

We were rarely able to get anything we specially wanted, but we got this. I look at it now, and wonder how it will develop as the soul behind it shapes and grows. That child is enfolded in influences which ward off the touch of the grace of life.

We saw numbers of women that day, but only at the distance of a street breadth; they would not come nearer, for the town is still a Petra to us, we are waiting to be led in.

But if we were able to get in enough to take a photograph, surely we were "in" enough to preach the Gospel? Why not stop and there speak of more important matters? What was to hinder then?

Only this: in that town they have heard of converts coming out, and breaking Caste in baptism, and they have made a law that we (with whom they know some of these converts are) shall never be allowed to speak to any of their women. That hindered us there. But even supposing we had been free to speak, as we trust we shall be soon, and supposing she had wanted to hear, the barriers which lie between such a child and confession of Christ are so many and so great that when, as now, one wants to tell you about them, one hardly knows how to do it. Words seem like little feeble shadows of some grim rock, like little feeble shadows of the grasses growing on it, rather than of it, in its solidity; or, to revert to the old thought, all one can say is just pointing to the Dust as evidence of the Actual.

"What is to hinder high-caste women from being baptised, and living as Christians in their own homes?" The question was asked by an Englishman, a winter visitor, who, being interested in Missions, was gathering impressions. We told him no high-caste woman would be allowed to live as an open Christian in her own home; and we told him of some who, only because they were suspected of inclining towards Christianity, had been caused to disappear. "What do you suppose happened to them?" he asked, and we told him.

We were talking in the pleasant drawing-room of an Indian Hotel. Our friend smiled, and assured us we must be mistaken. We were under the English Government; such things could not be possible. We looked round the quiet room, with its air of English comfort and English safety; we looked at the quiet faces, faces that had never looked at fear, and we hardly wondered that they could not understand.

Then in a moment, even as they talked, we were far away in another room, looking at other faces, faces unquiet, very full of fear. We knew that all round us, for streets and streets, there were only the foes of our Lord; we knew that a cry that was raised for help would be drowned long before it could escape through those many streets to the great English house outside. There were policemen, you say. But policemen in India are not as at home. Policemen can be bribed.

And now we are looking in again. There is a very dark inner room, no window, one small door; the walls are solid, so is the door. If you cried in there, who would hear?

And now we are listening—someone is speaking: "Once there was one; she cared for your God. She was buried into the wall in there, and that was the end of her." . . .

But we are back in the drawing-room, hearing them tell us these things could never be. . . . Three years passed, and a girl came for refuge to us. She loved her people well; she would never have come to us had they let her live as a Christian at home. But no, "Rather than that she shall burn," they said. We were doubtful about her age, and we feared we should have to give her up if the case came on in the courts. And if we had to give her up? We looked at the gentle, trustful face, and we could not bear the thought; and yet, according to our friends, the Government made all safe.

About that time a paper came to the house; names, dates, means of identification, all were given. This was the story in brief. A young Brahman girl in another South Indian town wanted to be a Christian, and confessed Christ at home. She earnestly wished to be baptised, but she was too young then, and waited, learning steadily and continuing faithful, though everything was done that could be done to turn her from her purpose. She was betrothed against her will to her cousin, and forbidden to have anything to do with the Christians. "She was never allowed to go out alone, and was practically a prisoner."

For three years that child held on, witnessing steadfastly at home, and letting it be clearly known that she was and would be a Christian. A Hindu ceremony of importance in the family was held in her grandfather's house, and she refused to go. This brought things to a crisis. Her people appointed a council of five to investigate the matter. "She maintained a glorious witness before them all," says the missionary; "declared boldly that she was a Christian, and intended to join us; and when challenged about the Bible, she held it out, and read it to the assembled people."

For a time it seemed as if she had won the day, but fresh attempts were made upon her constancy by certain religious bigots of the town. They offered her jewels—that failed; tried to get her to turn Mussulman, that being less disgraceful than to be a Christian; and last and worst, tried to stain that white soul black—but, thank God! still they failed.

At last the waiting time was over; she was of age to be baptised, and she wrote to tell her missionary friend about it. He sent her books to read, and promised to let her know within two days what he could arrange to do. "Her letter was dated from her grandfather's house," the missionary writes, "to which she said she had been sent, and put in a room alone. On the following day, hearing a rumour of her death, I went to N.'s house, and there found her body, outside the door. I caused it to be seized by the police, and the post-mortem has revealed the fact that the poor child was poisoned by arsenic. Bribes have been freely used and atrocious lies have been told, and the net result of all the police inquiries, so far, is that no charge can be brought against anyone."

Last year we met one of the missionaries from this Mission, on the hills, and we asked him if anyone had been convicted. He said no one had been convicted, "the Caste had seen to that."

Here, then, is a statement of facts, divested of all emotion or sensationalism. A child is shut up in a room alone, and poisoned; when she is dead, her body is thrown outside the door. It was found. There have been bodies which have not been found; but we are under the British Government—nothing can have happened to them!

The British Government does much, but it cannot do everything. It is notorious in India that false witnesses can be bought at so much a head, according to the nature of witness required. Bribery and corruption are not mere names here, but facts, most difficult for any straightforward official to trace and track and deal with. We know, and everyone knows, that the White Man's Government, though strong enough to win and rule this million-peopled Empire, is weak as a white child when it stands outside the door of an Indian house, and wants to know what has gone on inside, or proposes to regulate what shall go on. It cannot do it. The thought is vain.

"Why not have her put under surveillance?" asked a friend, a military man, about a certain girl who wanted to be a Christian; as if such surveillance were practicable, or ever could be, under such conditions as obtain in high-caste Hindu and Mohammedan circles, except in places directly under the eye of Government. We know there are houses where, at an hour's notice, any kind and any strength of poison can be prepared and administered: quick poison to kill within a few minutes; slow poisons that undermine the constitution, and do their work so safely that no one can find it out; brain poisons, worse than either, and perhaps more commonly used, as they are as effective and much less dangerous. But we could not prove what we know, and knowledge without proof is, legally speaking, valueless.

And yet we know these things, we have heard "a cry of tears," we have heard "a cry of blood"—

"Tears and blood have a cry that pierces heaven

Through all its hallelujah swells of mirth;

God hears their cry, and though He tarry, yet

He doth not forget."

CHAPTER 15: "Simply Murdered"

"'Agonia'—that word so often on St. Paul's lips, what did it mean? Did it not just mean the thousand wearinesses . . . and deeper, the strivings, the travailings, the bitter disappointments, the 'deaths oft' of a missionary's life?"

Rev. Robert Stewart, China.

THERE are worse things than martyrdom. There are some who are "simply murdered." There is one who belongs to a Caste which more than any other is considered tolerant and safe. Men converts from this Caste can live at home, and if a husband and wife believe, they may continue living in their own house, among the heathen. And yet this is what happened to a girl because it was known that she wanted to be a Christian.

First persecution. Treasure, as her name may be translated, had learnt as a child in the little mission school, and when we went to her village she responded, and took her stand. She refused to take part in a Hindu ceremony. She was beaten, at first slightly, then severely. This failed, so they sent her out of our reach to a heathen village miles away. This also failed, and she was brought home, and for some months went steadily on, reading and learning when she could, and all the time brightly witnessing. She was a joy to us.

She was very anxious to come out and be baptised, but her age was the difficulty. When a convert comes, the first thing to be done is to let the police authorities know. They send a constable, who takes down the convert's deposition, which is then forwarded to headquarters. One of the first questions concerns age. In some cases a medical certificate is demanded, and the girl's fate turns on that; if we can get one for over sixteen we are safe from prosecution in the Criminal Courts, but eighteen is the safest age, as the Civil Courts, if the case were to proceed, would force us to give her up if she were under eighteen. The difficulty of proving the age, unless the girl is evidently well over it, is very serious. The medical certificate usually takes off a year from what we have every reason to believe is the true age.

One other proof remains—the horoscope. This is a Hindu document written on a palm leaf at the birth of the child; but it is always carefully kept by the head of the family, and so, as a rule, unobtainable. When a case comes on in Court a false horoscope may be produced by the relatives; this was done in a recent case tried in our Courts, so we cannot count upon that. In this girl's case we got the Government registers searched for birth-records of her village, but all such registers we found had been destroyed; none were kept of births sixteen years back. So, though she believed herself to be, and we believed her to be, and the Christians who had known her all her life were sure she was, "about sixteen," we knew it could not be proved. She was a very slight girl, delicate and small for her age. This was against her, and there were other reasons against her coming just then. She had to wait.

I shall never forget the day I had to tell her so. She could not understand it. She knew that all the higher Castes had threatened to combine, and back up her father in a lawsuit, if she became a Christian; but she thought it would be quite enough if she stood up before the judge, and said she knew she was of age, and she wanted to come to us. "I will not be afraid of the people," she pleaded, "I will stand up straight before them all, and speak without any fear!"

I remember how the tears filled her eyes as I explained things; it was so hard for her to understand that we had no power whatever to protect her. It would be worse for her if she came and had to be given up. She was fully sensible of this, but "Would God let them take me away? Would He not take care of me?" she asked.

I suppose it is right to obey the laws. They are, on whole, righteous laws, made in the defence of these very girls. It would never do if anyone could decoy away a mere child from her parents or natural guardians. But the unrighteous thing, as it seems to us, is that the whole burden of proof lies upon us, and that in these country villages no facilities such as Government registers of birth are to be had, by which we could hope legally to prove a point about which we are morally sure. We feel that as the burden of proof rests upon us, surely facilities should be obtainable by which we could find out a girl's age before she comes, so that we might know whether or not we might legally protect her. Still more strongly we feel it is strange justice which decrees that though a child of twelve may be legally held competent to undertake the responsibilities of wifehood, six years more must pass before she may be legally held free to obey her conscience. Free! She is never legally free! A widow may be legally free; a wife in India, never! Hardly a single Caste wife in all this Empire would be found in the little band of open Christians to-day, if the missionary concerned had not risked more than can be told here, and put God's law before man's. But oh, the number who have been turned back!

One stops, forces the words down—they come too hot and fast. There are reasons. As I write, a young wife dear to us is lying bruised and unconscious on the floor of the inner room of a Hindu house. Her husband, encouraged by her own mother, set himself to make her conform to a certain Caste custom. It was idolatrous. She refused. He beat her then, blow upon blow, till she fell senseless. They brought her round and began again. There is no satisfactory redress. She is his wife. She is not free to be a Christian. He knows it. Her relations know it. She knows it, poor child.

O God, forgive us if we are too hot, too sore at heart, for easy pleasantness! And, God, raise up in India Christian statesmen who will inquire into this matter, and refuse to be blindfolded and deceived. His laws and ours clash somewhere; the question is, where?

To return to Treasure, we left her waiting to come. A Christian teacher lived next door, and Treasure used to slip in sometimes, as the two courtyards adjoined. We had put up a text on the wall for her: "Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art Mine." This was her special text, and she looked at it now; and then she grew braver, and promised to be patient and try to win her mother, who was bitterly opposed.

But oh, how I remember the wistfulness of her face as I went out; and one's very heart can feel again the stab of pain, like a knife cutting deep, as I left her—to her fate.

You have seen a tree standing stark and bare, a bleak black thing, on a sunny day against a sky of blue. You have looked at it, fascinated by the silent horror of it, a distorted cinder, not a tree, and someone tells you it was struck in the last great thunderstorm.

Next time we saw Treasure she was like that. What happened between, so far as it is known, was this. They tried to persuade her, they tried to coerce her; she witnessed to Jesus, and never faltered, though once they dragged her out of the house by her hair, and holding her down against the wall, struck her hard with a leather strap. One of the Christians saw it, and heard the poor tortured child cry out, "I do not fear! I do not fear! It will only send me to Jesus!"

Then they tried threats. "We will take you out to the lake at night, and cut you in little pieces, and throw you into it." She fully believed them, but even so, we hear she did not flinch.

Then they did their worst to her.

It was a Sunday morning. The Saturday evening before she had managed to see the teacher. She told her hurriedly how one had come, "a bridegroom" she called him, a student from a Mission College; he was telling her all sorts of things—that Christianity was an exploded religion; and how a great and learned woman (Mrs. Besant) had exposed the missionaries and their ways, so that no thinking people had any excuse for being deceived by them.

Then she added earnestly, "It is the devil. Do pray for me. They want me to marry him secretly! Oh, I must go to the Missie Ammal!" And if we had only known, we would have risked anything, any breach of the law of the land, to save her from a breach of the law of heaven! For all this talk, between an Indian girl of good repute and her prospective husband, is utterly foreign to what is considered right in Old India. It in itself meant danger. But we knew nothing, and next day, all that Sunday, she was shut up, and no one knows what happened to her. On Monday she was seen again; but changed, so utterly changed!

We heard nothing of this till the following Wednesday. The Christians were honestly concerned, but the Tamil is ever casual, and they saw no reason for distressing us with bad news sooner than could be helped.

As soon as we heard, I sent two of the Sisters who knew her best, to try and see her if possible. They managed to see her for two or three minutes, but found her hopelessly hard. Every bit of care was gone. She laughed in a queer, strained way, they said. It was no use my trying to see her. But I determined to see her. I cannot go over it all again, it is like tearing the skin off a wound; so the letter written at the time may tell the rest of it.

"On Saturday I went. I went straight to the teacher's house, and sent off the bandy at once, and by God's special arrangement got in unnoticed. For hours we sat in the little inner room, waiting; we could hear her voice in the courtyard outside—a hard, changed voice. The teacher tried to get her in, but no, she would not come. Oh, how we held on to God! I could not bear to go till I had seen her.

"At last we had to go. The cart came back for us, thus proclaiming where we were, and the last human chance was gone. And then, just then, like one walking in a dream, Treasure wandered in and stood, startled.

"She did not know we were there. We were kneeling with our backs to the door. I turned and saw her.

"I cannot write about the next five minutes; I thought I realised something of what Satan could do in this land, but I knew nothing about it. Oh, when will Jesus come and end it all?

"Just once it seemed as if the spell were broken. My arms were round her, though she had shrunk away at first, and tried to push me from her; she was quiet now, and seemed to understand a little how one cared. She knelt down with me, and covered her eyes as if in prayer, while I poured out my soul for her, and then we were all very still, and the Lord seemed very near. But she rose, unmoved, and looked at us. We were all quite broken down, and she smiled in a strange, hard, foolish way—that was all.

"The cause no one knows. There are only two possible explanations. One is poison. There is some sort of mind-bewildering medicine which it is known is given in such cases. This is the view held by the Christians on the spot. One of them says her cousin was dealt with in this way. He was keen to be a Christian, and was shut up for a day, and came out—dead. Dead, she means, to all which before had been life to him.

"The other, and worse, is sin. Has she been forced into some sin which to one so enlightened as she is must mean an awful darkness, the hiding of God's face?

"I cannot tell you how bright this dear child was. Up till that Saturday evening her faith never wavered; she was a living sign to all the town that the Lord is God. The heathen are triumphant now."

I have told you plainly what has happened. God's Truth needs no painting. I leave it with you. Do you believe it is perfectly true? Then what are you going to do?

CHAPTER 16: Wanted, Volunteers

"We have a great and imposing War Office, but a very small army. . . . While vast continents are shrouded in almost utter darkness, and hundreds of millions suffer the horrors of heathenism or of Islam, the burden of proof lies upon you to show that the circumstances in which God has placed you were meant by Him to keep you out of the foreign mission field."

Ion Keith Falconer, Arabia.

IN one of the addresses delivered at the International Student Missionary Conference, London, in January 1900, a South Indian missionary spoke of the Brahman race as "the brain of India." "Their numbers are comparatively small—between ten and fifteen millions—but though numerically few—only five per cent. of the Hindu population—they hold all that population in the hollow of their hand. They occupy every position of influence in the land. They are the statesmen and politicians, the judges, magistrates, Government officials, and clerks of every grade. If there is any position conferring influence over their fellow-men, it will be held by a Brahman. Moreover, they are a sacred Caste, admitted by the people to be gods upon earth—a rank supposed to have been attained by worth maintained through many transmigrations."

Among the Petras of this district is a little old-fashioned country town, held in strength by the Brahmans. No convert has ever come from that town, and the town boasts that none ever shall. None of the houses are open yet to teaching, or even visiting, but we are making friends, and hope for an entrance soon. We spent a morning out in the street; they had no objection to that, and as the free young Brahmans gathered round us, or stood for a moment against a wall to be "caught," it was difficult, even for us who knew it, to realise how bound they were. "Bound, who should conquer; slaves, who should be kings." Bound, body and soul, in a bondage perfectly incomprehensible to the English mind.

Afterwards, when we saw the photographs, we recalled one and another who, while they were young students like these, dared to desire to escape from their bondage; but back they were dragged, and the chains were riveted faster than ever, and every link was tested again, and hammered down hard.

We wanted to be sure of our facts about each of them, that these facts may further answer that smile which assures us things are not as we imagine; so the Iyer wrote to a brother missionary who had known these lads well, and asked him to tell what happened to each of them. This morning the answer to that letter came, and was handed to me with "I hardly like to give it to you, but it tells the truth about what goes on." These boys were students in our C.M.S. College.

The first one mentioned in the letter is a young Brahman who confessed Christ in baptism, and bravely withstood the tremendous opposition raised by his friends, who came in crowds for many weeks, and tried by every argument to persuade him to return to Hinduism; but he preached Christ to them. They brought his young wife, and she tore her hair and wailed, and besought him not to condemn her to the shame of a widow's life. This was the hardest of all to withstand; he turned to the missionary and said, "Oh my father, take her away! She is tearing out my heart!"

A typical Brahman student. The marks on the forehead are made of bright red, yellow, and white paste, and represents the footprint of the god Vishnu. These Brahmans are Vaishnavites.

Then came the baptism day of another Brahman student, his friend, who previous to this had been seized by his relatives, shut up and starved, and then fed with poisoned food; but the poison was not strong enough to kill, and he had escaped, and was now safe and ready for baptism.

It was remembered afterwards how the friend of the newly baptised stood and rejoiced, and praised God. Then, the baptism over, fearing no danger in open day, he went to the tank to bathe. He was never seen again.

What happened exactly no one knows. It is thought that men hired to watch him seized their opportunity, and carried him off. What they did then has never been told. Contradictory reports about the boy have reached the missionaries. One, that he is still holding on, another that he is now a priest in one of the great Saivite temples of South India. Which is true, God knows.

But we are under the English Government. Could nothing be done? One of his near relatives is the present Judge of the High Court of one of our Indian cities. And among the crowd of Brahmans who came during those weeks, there were influential men, graduates of colleges, members of the legal profession—a favourite profession in India. And yet this thing was done.

There was another; the means used to get hold of him cannot be written here. That is the difficulty which fronts us when we try to tell the truth as it really is. It simply cannot be told. The Dust may be shown—or a little of it; the whole of the Actual, never.

There were others near the Kingdom, but it is the same story over again. They were all spirited away from the college; the missionary writes, "it makes one's heart sick to think of them, and the hellish means invented to turn them from Christ." These are not the words of sentimental imagination. They are the words of a man who gives evidence as a witness. But even a witness may feel.

He tells us of one, a bright, happy fellow, he says he was, whose friends made no objection to his returning home after his baptism, and he returned, thinking he would be able to live as a Christian with his wife. They drugged his food, then what they did has to be covered with silence again. . . . They did their worst. . . . When he awoke from that nightmare of sin, he sought out his missionary friend. Some of the Hindus even, "ashamed of the vile means used" to entice him and destroy him, would have wished him to be received again as a Christian, but his spirit was broken. He said he could not disgrace the cause of Christ by coming back; he would go away where he would not be known. He left his wife, and went. He has never been heard of since.

Our comrade tells of another, and again, in telling it, we have to leave it half untold. This one was eager to confess Christ in baptism; he was a student at college then, and very keen. His father knew of his son's desire, and he did what few Hindu fathers would do, he turned his home into a hell, in order to ruin his boy. The infernal plot succeeded. God only knows how far the soul is responsible when the mind is dazed and then inflamed by those fearful drugs. But we do know that the soul He meant should rise and shine, sinks, weighted down by the unspeakable shame of some awful memory darkened, as by some dark dye that has stained it through and through.

I think of others as I write: one was a boy we knew well, a splendid, earnest lad, keen to witness for Christ. He told us one evening how he had been delivered from those who were plotting his destruction. For several months after his decision to be a Christian, he lived at home and tried to win his people; but they were incensed against him for even thinking of breaking Caste, and would not listen to him. Still he waited, and witnessed to them, not fearing anything. Then one day, suddenly some men rushed into the room where he was sitting, seized and bound and gagged him. They forced something into his mouth as he lay on the floor at their mercy; he feared it was a drug, but it was only some disgusting stuff which, to a Hindu, meant unutterable defilement. Then they left him bound alone, and at night he managed to escape. A few months after he told us this, we heard he had been seized again, and this time "drugged and done for."

In South India baptism does not prevent the Caste from using every possible means to get the convert back; once back, certain ceremonies are performed, after which he is regarded as purified, and reinstated in his Caste. The policy of the whole Caste confederation is this: get him back unbaptised if you can, but anyhow get him back. Two Brahman lads belonging to different parts of this district decided for Christ, went through all that is involved in open confession, and were baptised. One of the two was sent North for safety; his people traced him, followed him, turned up unexpectedly at a wayside station in Central India, and forced him back to his home in the South. Once there, they took their own measures to keep him. The other lad was sent to Madras. The Brahmans found out where he was, broke into the house at night, overpowered the boy's protectors, and carried him off. They too did what seemed good to them there, and they too succeeded. No one outside could interfere. The Caste guards its own concerns.

"O Lord Jesus Christ!" wrote one, a Hindu still, "who knowest us to be placed in such danger that it is as if we were within some magical circle drawn round us, and Satan standing with his wand without, keeping us in terror, break the spell of Satan, and set us free to serve Thee!"

All this may be easy reading to those who are far away from the place where it happened. Distance has a way of softening too distinct an outline; but it is not easy to write, it comes so close to us. Why write it, then? We write it because it seems to us it should be more fully known, so that men and women who know our God, and the secret of how to lay hold upon Him, should lay hold, and hold on for the winning of the Castes for Christ.

Another Brahman, much duller than the last. This and the two preceding photographs are perfect as a study of three types of Brahmanhood as we have it in Southern India—keen, thoughtful, dull.

Surely the very hardness of an enterprise, the very fact that it is what a soldier would call a forlorn hope, is in itself a call and a claim stronger than any put forth by something easier. The soldier does not give in because the hope is "forlorn." It is a hope, be it ever so desperate. He volunteers for it, and win or not, he fights.

There is that in this enterprise which may mark it out as "forlorn." For ages the race has broken one of nature's laws with blind persistency, and the result is a certain lack of moral fibre, grit, "tone." No separate individual is responsible for this, harsh judgments are entirely out of place; but the fact remains that it is so, and it must be taken into account in dealing with the Brahmans and several of the upper Castes of India. Side by side with this element of weakness there is, in apparent contradiction, that stubborn element of strength known as the Caste spirit. This spirit is seen in all I have shown you of what happens when a convert comes. It is as if all the million wills of the million Caste men and women were condensed into one single Will, a concentration of essence of Will not comparable with anything known at home.

Look at this face—it is a photographed fact. Does it not show you an absence of that "something" which nerves to endurance, stimulates to dare? Then listen to this:—A Christian man lies dead. The way to the cemetery lies through the Brahman street, in the chief town of this District; there is no other way. The Brahman street is a thoroughfare, it cannot be closed to traffic, but the Brahmans refuse point blank to allow that dead man to be carried through. The Bishop expostulates. No; he was a Christian, he shall not be carried through. Time is passing. In the Tropics the dead must be buried quickly. The Bishop appeals to the Collector (Representative of Government here). The Collector gives an order. The Brahmans refuse to obey. He orders out a company of soldiers. The Brahmans mass on the housetops and stone the soldiers. The order is given to fire. Then, and not till then, the Christians may carry out their dead; and later on the Brahmans carry out theirs. This happened some years ago, and outwardly times have changed since then in that particular town. But the spirit that it shows is in possession to this day, and as small things show great, so this street scene shows the presence of that "something" which intensifies the difficulty of winning the Castes for Christ. Each unit is weak in itself, but in combination, strong.

"A forlorn hope" we have called the attempt to do what we are told to do. The word is a misnomer; with our Captain as our Leader no hope is ever "forlorn"! But our Leader calls for men, men like the brave of old who jeopardised their lives unto the death in the high places of the field, in the day that they came to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty. A jeopardised life may be lost.

Christ our Captain is calling for volunteers; here are the terms: "Whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospel's the same shall find it." The teachers' life may seem "lost" who lives for his college boys; the student's life may seem "lost" who spends hour after hour through the long hot days in quiet talks in the house. Be it so, for it may mean that. But the life lost for His Name's sake, the same shall be found again.

CHAPTER 17: If it is so very important. . . ?

"Let us for a moment imagine what would have happened on the Galilean hillside, when our Lord fed the five thousand, if the Apostles had acted as some act now. The twelve would be going backwards, helping the first rank over and over again, and leaving the back rows unsupplied. Let us suppose one of them, say Andrew, venturing to say to his brother Simon Peter, 'Ought we all to be feeding the front row? Ought we not to divide, and some of us go to the back rows?' Then suppose Peter replying, 'Oh no; don't you see these front people are so hungry? They have not had half enough yet; besides, they are nearest to us, so we are more responsible for them.' Then, if Andrew resumes his appeal, suppose Peter going on to say, 'Very well; you are quite right. You go and feed all those back rows; but I can't spare anyone else. I and the other ten of us have more than we can do here.'

"Once more, suppose Andrew persuades Philip to go with him; then, perhaps, Matthew will cry out and say, 'Why, they're all going to those farther rows! Is no one to be left to these needy people in front?'

"Let me ask the members of Congress, Do you recognise these sentences at all?"

Eugene Stock, at Shrewsbury Church Congress.

IT was only a common thing. A girl, very ill, and in terrible pain, who turned to us for help. We could do nothing for her. Her people resorted to heathen rites. They prepared her to meet the fierce god they thought was waiting to snatch her away.

We went again and again, but she suffered so that one could not say much, it did not seem any use. The last time we went, the crisis had passed; she would live, they told us with joy. They were eager to listen to us now. "Tell us all about your Way!" clamoured the women, speaking together, and very loud. "Tell us the news from beginning to end!" But, alas! they could take in very little. One whole new Truth was too much for them. "Never mind," they consoled us, "come every day, and then what you say will take hold of our hearts." And I had to tell them we were leaving that evening, and could not come "every day."

Is not the contrast good? The old woman so intelligent, the baby so inane. She made a picture sitting there, in her crimson edged seeley, with her dark old face showing up against the darker wall. She is one of the many we have missed by coming so slowly and so late. "How can I change now?" she says.

The girl turned her patient face towards us. She had smiled at the Name of Jesus, and it seemed as if down in the depths of her weakness she had listened when we spoke before, and tried to understand. Now she looked puzzled and troubled, and the women all asked, "Why?"

There, in that crowded, hot little room, a sense of the unequal distribution of the Bread of Life came over us. The front rows of the Five Thousand are getting the loaves and the fishes over and over again, till it seems as though they have to be bribed and besought to accept them, while the back rows are almost forgotten. Is it that we are so busy with the front rows, which we can see, that we have no time for the back rows out of sight? But is it fair? Is it what Jesus our Master intended? Can it be really called fair?

The women looked very reproachful. Then one of them said, looking up at me, "You say this is very important. If it is so very important, why did you not come before? You say you will come back again if you can, but how can we be sure that nothing will happen to stop you? We are, some of us, very old; we may die before you come back. This going away is not good." And again and again she repeated, "If it is so very important, why did you not come before?"

Don't think that the question meant more than it did. It was only a human expression of wonder; it was not a real desire after God. But the force of the question was stronger far than the poor old questioner knew; it appealed to our very hearts.

The people saw we were greatly moved, and they pressed closer round us to comfort us, and one dear old grandmother put her arms round me, and stroked my face with her wrinkled old hand, and said, "Don't be troubled; we will worship your God. We will worship Him just as we worship our own. Now, will you go away glad?"

A Brahman widow, the only Brahman woman who would let us take her photo. Brahman women wear their seeleys fastened in a peculiar way, and never cut their ears. Brahman widows are always shaven, and wear no jewels. This one is a muscular character, strong and resolute, an ordinary looking woman, but there must be an under-the-surface life which does not show. A widow's fate is described in one word here, "accursed."

The dear old woman was really in earnest, she wanted so much to comfort us. But her voice seemed to mingle with voices from the homeland; and another—we heard another—the Voice I had heard on the precipice-edge—the voice of our brothers', our sisters' blood calling unto God from the ground.

Friends, are these women real to you? Look at this photo of one of them. Surely it was not just a happy chance which brought out the detail so perfectly. Look at the thoughtful, fine old face. Can you look at it and say, "Yes, I am on my way to the Light, and you are on your way to the Dark. At least, this is what I profess to believe. And I am sorry for you, but this is all I can do for you; I can be very sorry for you. I know that this will not show you the way from the Dark, where you are, to the Light, where I am. To show you the way I must go to you, or, perhaps, send you one whom I want for myself, or do without something I wish to have; and this, of course, is impossible. It might be done if I loved God enough—but I love myself better than God or you."

You would not say such a thing, I know, but "Whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?"

CHAPTER 18: The Call Intensified

"Sometimes the men and boys will not go away and let us talk to the women; in such cases I find silent prayer the best refuge. In other places the people welcome you, but will listen to anything but the Doctrine of Jesus Christ; and this is harder to bear than anything else I know."

Anna Gordon, China.

"Let the people that are at home not care only to hear about successes; we must train them that they take an interest in the struggle."

Rev. A. Schreiber, Sumatra and India.

"It is a fight making its demands upon physical, mental, and spiritual powers, and there are many adversaries. The dead weight of heathenism, the little appreciation of one's object and purpose, and the actual, vigorous opposition of the powers of darkness, make it a real fight, and only men of grit, of courage, devotion, and infinite patience and perseverance, will win.

"Have I painted a discouraging picture? Am I frightening good men who might have volunteered and done well? I think not. I think the right sort of men, those who ought to volunteer, will be attracted rather than repelled by the difficulties."

Rev. J. Lampard, India.

WE got this photograph that day in December which we spent in the friendly Brahman street. "There is not another woman in the town who would stand for you like that!" said the men, as she came forward, and, without a thought of posing, stood against the wall for a moment, and looked at the camera straight. Most of the women were afraid even to glance at it, but she was not afraid. She would not stay to talk to us, however, but marched off with the same resolute air. For Brahman widows as a whole are by no means an approachable race. Sometimes we find one who will open out to us, and let us tell her of the Comfort wherewith we are comforted; but oftener we find them hard, or hardening rapidly.

It is too soon to write about any of those who have listened during the past few months, but we put this photo in to remind you to remember those who are freer than most women in India to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, if only they would let His love have a chance of drawing them. We have been to the various towns in this and the upper curve of the mountains, but we have not reached the lower curve towns, or half of the many villages scattered close under the mountains, and, except when we went out in camp, we have not of course touched those farther afield.

There are only five working afternoons in a week, for Saturday is given up to other things, and Sunday belongs to the Christians; and when any interest is shown, we return again to the same village, which delays us, but is certainly worth while. Then there are interruptions—sometimes on the Hindu side; festivals, for instance, when no woman has time to hear; and on ours, and on the weather's, so to speak, when great heat or great rain make outdoor work impossible. Theoretically, itinerating is delightfully rapid; but practically, as every itinerating missionary knows, it is quite slow. There are other things to be done; those already brought in have to be taught and trained and mothered, and much time has to be spent in waiting upon God for more; so that, looking back, we seem to have done very little for the thousands about us, and now we must return to the eastern side of the district, for some of the boy converts are there at school, and there may be fruit to gather in after last year's sowing.

But I look up from my writing and see a stretch of mountain range thirty miles long, and this range stretches unbroken for a thousand miles to the North. I know how little is being done on the plains below, and I wonder when God's people will awake, and understand that there is yet very much land to be possessed, and arise and possess it. Look down this mountain strip with me; there are towns where work is being done, but it needs supervision, and the missionaries are too few to do it thoroughly. There are towns and numbers of villages where nothing is even attempted, except that once in two years, if possible, the Men's Itinerant Band comes round; but that does not reach the women well, and even if it did, how much would you know of Jesus if you only heard a parable or a miracle or a few facts from His life or a few points of His doctrine once in two years? I do not want to write touching appeals, or to draw one worker from anywhere else,—it would be a joy to know that God used these letters to help to send someone to China, or anywhere where He has need of His workers,—but I cannot help wondering, as I look round this bit of the field, how it is that the workers are still so few.

We have found the people in the towns and villages willing to let us do what we call "verandah work" when they will not let us into their houses. Verandah work, like open-air preaching, is unsatisfactory as regards the women, but it is better than nothing.

We spent an afternoon in the street this photo shows. It is a thoroughfare, and so we were not forbidden; but even so, we always ask permission before we walk down it. Such an ordinary, commonplace street it looks to you; there is no architectural grandeur to awe the beholder, and impress him with the majesty of Brahmanhood; and yet that street, and every street like it, is a very Petra to us, for it is walled round by walls higher and stronger than the temple walls round which it is built; walls built, as it seems, of some crystal rock, imperceptible till you come up to it, and even then not visible, only recognisable as something you cannot get through.

Our first day there was encouraging. We began at the far end of the street, and after some persuasion the men agreed to move to one side, and let us have the other for any women who would come. Nothing particular happened, but we count a day good if we get a single good chance to speak in quietness to the women.

Next time we went it was not so good. They had heard in the meantime all about us, and that we had girls from the higher Castes with us, and this was terrible in their eyes. For the Brahman, from his lofty position of absolute supremacy, holds in very small account the souls of those he calls low-caste; but if any from the middle distance (he would not describe them as near himself, only dangerously nearer than the others) "fall into the pit of the Christian religion," he thinks it is time to begin to take care that the Power which took such effect on them should not have a chance to perform upon him, and, above all, upon his womankind. So that day we were politely informed that no one had time to listen, and, when some women wanted to come, a muscular widow chased them off. We looked longingly back at those dear Brahman women, but appeal was useless, so we went.

In one of the other Castes, the Caste represented by this row of men, we found more friendliness; they let us sit on one end of the narrow verandah fronts, and quite a number of women clustered about on the other. They were greatly afraid of defilement there, and would not come too close. And they had the strangest ideas about us. They were sure we had a powder which, if they inhaled it, would compel them to be Christians. They had heard that we went round "calling children," that is, beckoning them, and drawing them to follow after us, and that we were paid so much a head for converts. It takes a whole afternoon sometimes simply to disabuse their minds of such misconceptions.

I heard this commercial aspect of things explained by one who apparently knew. A kindly old Brahman woman had allowed us to sit on her doorstep out of the sun, and bit by bit we had worked our way to the end of the verandah, which was a little more shaded, where a girl was sitting alone who seemed to want to hear. The old woman sat down behind us, and then an old man came up, and the two began to talk. Said the old woman to the old man, "She is trying to make us join her Way." (I had carefully abstained from any such expression.) The old man agreed that such was my probable object. "What will she get if we join? Do you know?" "Oh yes; do I not know! For one of us a thousand rupees, and for a Vellalar five hundred. She even gets something for a low-caste child, but she gets a whole thousand for one of us!"

A Shepherd-Caste house of the better sort. We would give a great deal to get into this house, but so far it is closed. You can see straight through to the back courtyard where the women are, where we may not go. The old man is typical of his class, a thoughtful man of refinement of mind, but wholly indifferent to the teaching.

They were both very interested in this conversation, and so indeed was I, and I thought I would further enlighten them, when the old woman got up in a hurry and hobbled into the house. After that, whenever we passed, she used to shake her head at us, and say, "Chee, chee!" No persuasions could ever induce her to let us sit on her doorstep again. We were clearly after that thousand rupees, and she would have none of us.

In the same village there was a little Brahman child who often tried to speak to us, but never was allowed. One day she risked capture and its consequences, and ran across the narrow stream which divides the Brahman street from the village, and spoke to one of our Band in a hurried little whisper. "Oh, I do want to hear about Jesus!" And she told how she had learnt at school in her own town, and then she had been sent to her mother-in-law's house in this jungle village, "that one," pointing to a house where they never had smiles for us; but her mother-in-law objected to the preaching, and had threatened to throw her down the well if she listened to us. Just then a hard voice called her, and she flew. Next time we went to that village she was shut up somewhere inside.

Often as one passes one sees shy faces looking out from behind the little pillars which support the verandahs, and one longs to get nearer. But it does not do to make any advance unless one is sure of one's ground. It only results in a sudden startled scurrying into the house, and you cannot follow them there. To try to do so would be more than rude—it would be considered pollution.

Only yesterday we were trying to get to the women who live in the great house of the village behind the bungalow. This photo shows you the door we stood facing for ten minutes or more, first waiting, and then pleading with the old mother-in-law to let us in to the little dark room in which you may see a woman's form hiding behind the door.

But we could not go to them, and they could not come to us. There were only two narrow rooms between, but the second of the two had brass water-vessels in it. If we had gone in, those vessels and the water in them would have been defiled. The women were not allowed to come out, the mother-in-law saw well to that; never was one more vigilant. She stood like a great fat hen at the door, with her white widow's skirts outspread like wings, and guarded her chickens effectually. "Go! go by the way you have come!" was all she had to say to us.

The friendly old man of the house was out. A friendly young man came in with some rice, and began to measure it. He invited us to sit down, which we did, and he measured the rice in little iron tumblers, counting aloud as he did so in a sing-song chant. He was pleased that we should watch him, and it was interesting to watch, for he did it exactly as the verse describes, pressing the rice down, shaking the iron measure, heaping up the rice till it was running over, and yet counting this abundant tumblerful only as one; then he handed the basketful of rice to a child who stood waiting, and asked what he could do for us. We told him how much we wanted to see the women of the house, but he did not relish the idea of tackling the vigorous old mother-in-law, so we gave up the attempt, and went out. As we passed the wall at the back which encloses the women's quarters, we saw a girl look over the wall as if she wanted to speak to us, but she was instantly pulled back by that tyrannical dame, and a dog came jumping over, barking most furiously, which set a dozen more yelping all about us, and so escorted we retired.

This house is in the Village of the Merchant, not five minutes from our gate, but the women in it are far enough from any chance of hearing. The men let us in that day to take the photograph, and we hoped thereby to make friends; but though there are six families living there (for the house is large; the photograph only shows one end of the verandah which runs down its whole length), we have never been once allowed to speak to one of the women; the mother-in-law of all the six takes care we never get the chance. One of the children, a dear little girl, follows us outside sometimes, but she is only seven, and not very courageous; so, though she evidently picks up some of the choruses we sing, she is afraid of being seen listening, and never gets much at a time.

These are some of the practical difficulties in the way of reaching the women. There are others. Suppose you do get in, or, what is more probable in pioneer work, suppose you get a verandah, even then it is not plain sailing by any means. For, first of all, it is dangerously hot. The sun beats down on the street or courtyard to within a foot or two of the stone ledge you are sitting upon, and strikes up. Reflected glare means fever, so you try to edge a little farther out of it without disturbing anyone's feelings, explaining minutely why you are doing it, lest they should think your design is to covertly touch them; and then, their confidence won so far, you begin perhaps with the wordless book, or a lyric set to an Indian tune, or a picture of some parable—never of our Lord—or, oftener still, we find the best way is to open our Bibles, for they all respect a Sacred Book, and read something from it which we know they will understand. We generally find one or two women about the verandahs, and two or three more come within a few minutes, and seeing this, two or three more. But getting them and keeping them are two different things. It is not easy to hold people to hear what they have no special desire to hear. But we are helped; we are not alone. It is always a strength to remember that.

Once fairly launched, interruptions begin. You are in the middle of a miracle, perhaps, and by this time a dozen women have gathered, and rejoice your heart by listening well, when a man from the opposite side of the street saunters over and asks may he put a question, or asks it forthwith. He has heard that our Book says, that if you have faith you can lift a mountain into the sea. Now, there is a mountain, and he points to the pillar out on the plain, standing straight up for five thousand feet, a column of solid rock. There is sea on the other side, he says; cast it in, and we will believe! And the women laugh. But one more intelligent turns to you, "Does your Book really say that?" she asks, "then why can't you do it, and let us see?" And the man strikes in with another remark, and a woman at the edge moves off, and you wish the man would go.

Perhaps he does, or perhaps you are able to detach him from the visible, and get him and those women too to listen to some bit of witnessing to the Power that moves the invisible, and you are in its very heart when another objection is started: "You say there is only one true God, but we have heard that you worship three!" or, "Can your God keep you from sin?" And you try, God helping you, to answer so as to avoid discussion, and perhaps to your joy succeed, and some are listening intently again, when a woman interrupts with a question about your relations which you answered before, but she came late, and wants to hear it all over again. You satisfy her as far as you can, and then, feeling how fast the precious minutes are passing, you try, oh so earnestly, to buy them up and fill them with eternity work, when suddenly the whole community concentrates itself upon your Tamil sister. Who is she? You had waived the question at the outset, knowing what would sequel it, but they renew the charge. If she is a "born Christian," they exclaim, and draw away for fear of defilement—"Low-caste, low-caste!" and the word runs round contemptuously. If she is a convert, they ask questions about her relations (they have probably been guessing among themselves about her Caste for the last ten minutes); if she does not answer them, they let their imagination run riot; if she does, they break out in indignation, "Left your own mother! Broken your Caste!" and they call her by names not sweet to the ear, and perhaps rise up in a body, and refuse to have anything more to do with such a disgraceful person.

Or perhaps you are trying to persuade some of them to learn to read, knowing that, if you can succeed, there will be so much more chance of teaching them, but they assure you it is not the custom for women in that village to read, which unhappily is true; or it may be you are telling them, as you tell those you may never see again, of the Love that is loving them, and in the middle of the telling a baby howls, and all the attention goes off upon it; or somebody wants to go into the house, and a way has to be made for her, with much gathering together and confusion; or a dog comes yelping round the corner, with a stone at its heels, and a pack of small boys in full chase after it; or the men call out it is time to be going; or the women suggest it is time to be cooking; or someone says or does something upsetting, and the group breaks up in a moment, and each unit makes for its separate hole, and stands in it, looking out; and you look up at those dark little doorways, and feel you would give anything they could ask, if only they would let you in, and let you sit down beside them in one of those rooms, and tell them the end of the story they interrupted; but they will not do that. Oh, it makes one sorrowful to be so near to anyone, and yet so very far, as one sometimes is from these women. You look at them, as they stand in their doorways, within reach, but out of reach, as out of reach as if they were thousands of miles away. . . .

Just as I wrote those words a Brahman woman came to the door and looked in. Then she walked in and sat down, but did not speak. Can you think how one's heart bounds even at such a little thing as that? Brahman women do not come to see us every day. She pulled out a book of palm-leaf slips, and we read it. It told how she was one of a family of seven, all born deaf and dumb; how hand in hand they had set off to walk to Benares to drown themselves in the Ganges; how a Sepoy had stopped them and taken them to an English Collector; how he had provided for the seven for a year, then let them go; how they had scattered and wandered about, visiting various holy places, supported by the virtuous wherever they went; and how the bearer would be glad to receive whatever we would give her. . . . She has gone, a poor deaf and dumb and wholly heathen woman; we could not persuade her to stay and rest. She is married, she told us by signs; her husband is deaf and dumb, and she has one blind child. She sat on the floor beside us for a few minutes and asked questions—the usual ones, about me, all by signs; but nothing we could sign could in any way make her understand anything about our God. And yet she seems to know something at least about her own. She pointed to her mouth, and then up, and then down and round, to show the winding of a river, and signed clearly enough how she went from holy river to holy river, and worshipped by each, and she pointed up and clasped her hands. There we were, just as I had been writing, so near to her, yet so far from her.

But the greatest difficulty of all in reaching the women is that they have no desire to be reached. Sometimes, as on that afternoon when the child came and wanted to hear, we find one who has desire, but the greater number have none; and except in the more advanced towns and villages, where they are allowed to learn with a Bible-woman, they have hardly a chance to hear enough to make them want to hear more.

Then, as if to make the case doubly hard (and this law applies to every woman, of whatever Caste), she is, in the eyes of the law, the property of her husband; and though a Christian cannot by law compel his Hindu wife to live with him, a Hindu husband can compel his Christian wife to live with him; so that no married woman is ever legally free to be a Christian, for if the husband demanded her back, she could not be protected, but would have to be given up to a life which no English woman could bear to contemplate. She may say she is a Christian; he cares nought for what she says. God help the woman thus forced back!

But, believing a higher Power will step in than the power of this most unjust law, we would risk any penalty and receive such a wife should she come. Only, in dealing with the difficulties and barriers which lie between an Indian woman and life as a free Christian, it is useless to shut one's eyes to this last and least comprehensible of all difficulties, "an English law, imported into India, and enforced with imprisonment," an obsolete English law!

We have no Brahman women converts in our Tamil Mission. We hear of a few in Travancore; we know of more in the North, where the Brahmans are more numerous and less exclusive; but there is not a single bonâ fide Brahman convert woman or child in the whole of this District. There was one, a very old woman; but she died two years ago. We may comfort ourselves with the thought that surely some of those who have heard have become secret believers. But will a true believer remain secret always? We may trust that many a dear little child died young, loving Jesus, and went to Him. But what about those who have not died young? I know that a brighter view may be taken, and if the sadder has been emphasised in these letters, it is only because we feel you know less about it.

For more has been written about the successes than about the failures, and it seems to us that it is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war. We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them. We are not winning them as we should, because the fact of the reverses is so little realised, and the needed reinforcements are not forthcoming, as they would be if the position were thoroughly understood. Reinforcements of men and women are needed, but, far above all, reinforcements of prayer. And so we have tried to tell you the truth—the uninteresting, unromantic truth—about the heathen as we find them, the work as it is. More workers are needed. No words can tell how much they are needed, how much they are wanted here. But we will never try to allure anyone to think of coming by painting coloured pictures, when the facts are in black and white. What if black and white will never attract like colours? We care not for it; our business is to tell the truth. The work is not a pretty thing, to be looked at and admired. It is a fight. And battlefields are not beautiful.

But if one is truly called of God, all the difficulties and discouragements only intensify the Call. If things were easier there would be less need. The greater the need, the clearer the Call rings through one, the deeper the conviction grows: it was God's Call. And as one obeys it, there is the joy of obedience, quite apart from the joy of success. There is joy in being with Jesus in a place where His friends are few; and sometimes, when one would least expect it, coming home tired out and disheartened after a day in an opposing or indifferent town, suddenly—how, you can hardly tell—such a wave of the joy of Jesus flows over you and through you, that you are stilled with the sense of utter joy. Then, when you see Him winning souls, or hear of your comrades' victories, oh! all that is within you sings, "I have more than an overweight of joy!"

CHAPTER 19: "Attracted by the Influence"

"It seems to have been a mistake to imagine that the Divine Majesty on high was too exalted to take any notice of our mean affairs. The great minds among us are remarkable for the attention they bestow upon minutiæ . . . 'a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without your Father.'"

David Livingstone, Africa.

WE have now left Dohnavur, on the West, and returned to our old battlefield on the East. The evening after our arrival one of those special things happened, though only a little thing some will say—a little child was brought.

This is not Pearl-eyes. Pearl-eyes is tinier, and has more sparkle; but the Caste is the same, and as we have not got Pearl-eyes, we put this small girl here.

There is a temple in the Hindu village near us. We have often tried to reach the temple women, poor slaves of the Brahmans. We have often seen the little girls, some of them bought as infants from their mothers, and trained to the terrible life. In one of the Mission day schools there is a child who was sold by her "Christian" mother to these Servants of the gods; but though this is known it cannot be proved, and the child has no wish to leave the life, and she cannot be taken by force.

Sometimes we see the little girls playing in the courtyards of the houses near the temple, gracious little maidens, winsome in their ways, almost always more refined in manner than ordinary children, and often beautiful. One longs to help the little things, but no hand of ours can stretch over the wall and lift even one child out.

Among the little temple girls in the Great Lake Village was a tiny girl called Pearl-eyes, of whom we knew nothing; but God must have some purpose for her, for He sent His Angel to the house one afternoon, and the Angel found little Pearl-eyes, and he took her by the hand and led her out, across the stream, and through the wood, to a Christian woman's house in our village. Next morning she brought her to us. This is what really happened, I think; there is no other way to account for it. No one remembers such a thing happening here before.

I was sitting reading in the verandah when I saw them come. The woman was looking surprised. She did not know about the Angel, I expect, and she could not understand it at all. The little child was chattering away, lifting up a bright little face as she talked. When she saw me she ran straight up to me, and climbed on my knee without the least fear, and told me all about herself at once. I took her to the Iyer, and he sent for the Pastor, who sent a messenger to the Village of the Lake, to say the child was here, and to inquire into the truth of her story.

"My name is Pearl-eyes," the child began, "and I want to stay here always. I have come to stay." And she told us how her mother had sold her when she was a baby to the Servants of the gods. She was not happy with them. They did not love her. Nobody loved her. She wanted to live with us.

But why had she run away now? She hardly seemed to know, and looked puzzled at our questions. The only thing she was sure about was that she had "run and come," and that she "wanted to stay." Then the Ammal came in, and she went through exactly the same story with her.

We felt, if this proved to be fact, that we could surely keep her; the Government would be on our side in such a matter. Only the great difficulty might be to prove it.

Meanwhile we gave her a doll, and her little heart was at rest. She did not seem to have a fear. With the prettiest, most confiding little gesture, she sat down at our feet and began to play with it.

We watched her wonderingly. She was perfectly at home with us. She ran out, gathered leaves and flowers, and came back with them. These were carefully arranged in rows on the floor. Then another expedition, and in again with three pebbles for hearthstones, a shell for a cooking pot, bits of straw for firewood, a stick for a match, and sand for rice.

She went through all the minutiæ of Tamil cookery with the greatest seriousness. Then we, together with her doll, were invited to partake. The little thing walked straight into our hearts, and we felt we would risk anything to keep her.

Our messenger returned. The story was true. The women from whose house she had come were certainly temple women. But would they admit it to us, and, above all, would they admit they had obtained her illegally?—a fact easy to deny. Almost upon this they came; and to the Iyer's question, "Who are you?" one said, "We are Servants of the gods!" I heard an instructive aside, "Why did you tell them?" "Oh, never mind," said the one who had answered, "they don't understand!" But we had understood, and we were thankful for the first point gained.

They stood and stared and called the child, but she would not go, and we would not force her. Then they went away, and we were left for an hour in that curious quiet which comes before a storm. Our poor little girl was frightened. "Oh, if they come again, hide me!" she begged. One saw it was almost too much for her, high-spirited child though she is.

The next was worse. A great crowd gathered on the verandah, and an evil-faced woman, who seemed to have some sort of power over Pearl-eyes, fiercely demanded her back. When we refused to make her go, the evil-faced woman, whose very glance sent a tremble through the little one, declared that Pearl-eyes must say out loud that she would not go with her, "Out loud so that all should hear." But the poor little thing was dumb with fear. She just stood and looked, and shivered. We could not persuade her to say a word.

Star was hovering near. She had been through it all herself before, and her face was anxious, and our hearts were, I know. It is impossible to describe such a half-hour's life to you; it has to be lived through to be understood. The clamour and excitement, and the feeling of how much hangs on the word of a child who does not properly understand what she is accepting or refusing. The tension is terrible.

I dared not go near her lest they should think I was bewitching her. Any movement on my part towards her would have been the signal for a rush on theirs; but I signed to Star to take her away for a moment. The bewilderment on the poor little face was frightening me. One more look up at that woman, one more pull at the strained cord, and to their question, "Will you come?" she might as likely say yes as no.

Star carried her off. Once out of reach of those eyes, the words came fast enough. Star told me she clung to her and sobbed, "Oh, if I say no, she will catch me and punish me dreadfully afterwards! She will! I know she will!" And she showed cuts in the soft brown skin where she had been punished before; but Star soothed her and brought her back, and she stood—such a little girl—before them all. "I won't! I won't!" she cried, and she turned and ran back with Star. And the crowd went off, and I was glad to see the last of that fearful face, with its evil, cruel eyes.

But they said they would write to the mother, who had given her to them. We noted this—the second point we should have to prove if they lodged a suit against us—and any day the mother may come and complicate matters by working on the child's affections. Also, we have heard of a plot to decoy her away, should we be for a moment off guard; so we are very much on the watch, and we never let her out of our sight.

By this time—it is five days since she came—it seems impossible to think of having ever been without her. Apart from her story, which would touch anyone, there is her little personality, which is very interesting. She plays all day long with her precious dolls, talking to them, telling them everything we tell her. Yesterday it was a Bible story, to-day a new chorus. She insisted on her best-beloved infant coming to church with her, and it had to have its collection too. Everything is most realistic.

Tamil children usually hang their dolls up by their limbs to a nail in the wall, or stow them away on a shelf, but this mite has imagination and much sympathy.

In thinking over it, as, bit by bit, her little story came to light, we have been struck by the touches that tell how God cares. The time of her coming told of care. Some months earlier, the temple woman who kept her had burnt her little fingers across, as a punishment for some childish fault, and Pearl-eyes ran away. She knew what she wanted—her mother; she knew that her mother lived in a town twenty miles to the East. It was a long way for a little girl to walk, "but some kind people found me on the road, and they were going to the same town, and they let me go with them, so I was not afraid, only I was very tired when we got there. It took three days to walk. I did not know where my mother lived in the town, and it was a very big town, but I described my mother to the people in the streets, and at last I found my mother." For just a little while there was something of the mother-love, "my mother cried." But the temple woman had traced her and followed her, and the mother gave her up.

Then comes a blank in the story; she only remembers she was lonely, and she "felt a mother-want about the world," and wandered wearily—

"As restless as a nest-deserted bird

Grown chill through something being away, though what

It knows not."

Then comes a bit of life distinct in every detail, and told with terribly unchildish horror. She heard them whisper together about her; they did not know that she understood. She was to be "married to the god," "tied to a stone." Terrified, she flew to the temple, slipped past the Brahmans, crossed the court, stood before the god in the dim half-darkness of the shrine, clasped her hands,—she showed us how,—prayed to it, pleaded, "Let me die! Oh, let me die!" Barely seven years old, and she prayed, "Oh, let me die!"

She tried to run away again; if she had come to our village then, she could not have been saved. We were in Dohnavur, and there was no one here who could have protected her against the temple people. So God kept her from coming then.

About that time, one afternoon one of our Tamil Sisters, whom we had left behind to hold the fort, passed through the Great Lake Village, and the temple women called the child, and said, "See! It is she! The child-stealing Ammal! Run!" It was only said to frighten her, but it did a different work. One day, the day after we returned, the thought suddenly came to her, "I will go and look for that child-stealing Ammal"; and she wandered away in the twilight and came to our village, and stood alone in front of the church, and no one knew.

There one of our Christian women, Servant of Jesus by name, found her some time afterwards, a very small and desolate mite, with tumbled hair and troubled eyes, for she could not find the one she sought, that child-stealing Ammal she wanted so much, and she was frightened, all alone in the gathering dark by this big, big church; and very big it must have looked to so tiny a thing as she.

Servant of Jesus thought at first of taking the little one back to her home, but mercifully it was late (another touch of the hand of God), and so instead she took her straight to her own little house, which satisfied Pearl-eyes perfectly. But she would not touch the curry and rice the kind woman offered her. She drew herself up to her full small height and said, with the greatest dignity, "Am I not a Vellala child? May you ask me to break my Caste?"

So Servant of Jesus gave her some sugar, that being ceremonially safe, and Pearl-eyes ate it hungrily, and then went off to sleep.

Next morning, again the woman's first thought was to take her to her own people. But the child was so insistent that she wanted the child-catching Ammal, that Servant of Jesus, thinking I was the Ammal she meant (for this is one of my various names), brought her to me, as I have said, and oh, I am glad she did!

Nothing escapes those clear brown eyes. That morning, in the midst of the confusion, one of the temple women called out that the child was a wicked thief. This is an ordinary charge. They think it will compel submission. "We will make out a case, and send the police to drag you off to gaol!" they yell; and sometimes there is risk of serious trouble, for a case can be made out cheaply in India. But this did not promise to be serious, so we inquired the stolen sum. It came to fourpence halfpenny, which we paid for the sake of peace, though she told them where the money was, and we found out later that she had told the truth.

I never thought she would remember it—the excitements of the day crowded it out of my mind—but weeks afterwards, when I was teaching her the text, "Not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold," and explaining how much Jesus had paid for us, she interrupted me with the remark, "Oh yes, I understand! I know how much you paid for me—fourpence halfpenny!"

And now to turn from small-seeming things to large. Ragland, Tamil missionary, is writing to a friend in 1847. He is trying to express astronomically the value of a soul. He asks, "How does the astronomer correct the knowledge of the stars which simple vision brings him? First, having discovered that the little dot of light is thousands of miles distant, and having discerned by the telescope that it subtends at the eye a sensible angle, and having measured that angle, a simple calculation shows him the size of the object to be greater perhaps than that of the huge ball which he calls his earth." Then, "Take the soul of one of the poorest, lowest Pariahs of India, and form it by imagination into, or suppose it represented by, a sphere. Place this at the extremity of a line which is to represent time. Extend this line and move off your sphere, farther and farther ad infinitum, and what has become of your sphere? Why, there it is, just as before. . . . It is still what it was, and this even after thousands of years. In short, the disc appears undiminished, though viewed from an almost infinite distance. Oh, what an angle of the mind ought that poor soul to subtend!"

The letter goes on to suggest another parallel between things astronomical and things spiritual. He supposes an objector admits the size as proved, but demurs as to the importance of these heavenly bodies. "They are, perhaps, only unsubstantial froth, mere puffs of air, vapoury nothings." But the astronomer knows their mass and weight, as well as their size: "Long observation has taught him that planets in the neighbourhood of one given heavenly body have been turned out of their course, how, and by what, he is at first quite at a loss to tell but he has guessed and reasoned, has found cause for suspecting the planet. He watches, observes, and compares; and after a long sifting of evidence, he brings it in guilty of the disturbance. If it be so, it must have a power to disturb, a power to attract; and if so, it is not a mere shell, much less a mere vapour. It has mass and it has weight, and he calculates and determines from the disturbances what that weight is. Just so with the Pariah's soul. Oh, what a disturbance has it created! What a celestial body has it drawn out from its celestial sphere! Not a star, not the whole visible heavens, not the heaven of heavens itself, but Him Who fills heaven and earth, by Whom all things were created. Him did that Pariah's soul attract from heaven even to earth to save it. Oh that we would thence learn, and learning, lay to heart the weight and the value of that one soul."

And just as the majesty of the glory of the Lord is shown forth nowhere more majestically than in the chapter which tells us how He feeds His flock like a shepherd, and gathers the lambs with His arm, and carries them in His bosom, so nowhere, I think, do we see the glory of our God more than in chapters of life which show Him bending down from the circle of the earth, yea rather, coming down all the way to help it, "attracted by the influence" of the need of a little child.

CHAPTER 20: The Elf

"You remember what I said once, that you could not, perhaps, put a whole crown on the head of Jesus—that is, bring a whole country to be His—but you might put one little jewel in His crown."

Bishop French, India and Arabia.

PEARL-EYES, otherwise the Elf, because it exactly describes her, was very good for the first few weeks, after which we began to know her. She is not a convert in any sense of the term. She is just a very wilful, truthful, exasperating, fascinating little Oriental.

When she is, as she expresses it, "moved to sin," nobody of her own colour can manage her. "You are only me grown up," is her attitude towards them all. She is always ready to repent, but, as Pearl sorrowfully says, "before her tears are dry, she goes and sins again," and then, quite unabashed, she will trot up to you as if nothing had happened and expect to be lavishly petted.

I never saw anyone except the Elf look interesting when naughty. She does look interesting. She is a rather light brown, and any emotion makes the brown lighter; her long lashes droop over her eyes in the most pathetic manner, and when she looks up appealingly she might be an innocent martyr about to die for her faith.

We have two other small girls with us; the Imp—but her name is a libel, she reformed some months ago—and Tangles, who ties herself into knots whenever she makes a remark. These three have many an argument (for Indian children delight in discussion), and sometimes the things that are brought to me would shock the orthodox. This is the last, brought yesterday:

"Obedience is not so important as love. Orpah was very obedient. Her mother-in-law said, 'Go, return,' and she did as she was told. But Ruth was not obedient at all. Four times her mother-in-law said, 'Go,' and yet she would not go. But God blessed Ruth much more than Orpah, because she loved her mother-in-law. So obedience is not so important as love." Only the day before I had been labouring to explain the absolute necessity for the cultivation of the grace of obedience; but now it was proved a secondary matter, for Ruth was certainly disobedient, but good and greatly blessed.

The Elf's chief delinquencies at present, however, spring from a rooted aversion to her share in the family housework (ten minutes' rubbing up of brass water-vessels); an appetite for slate pencils—she would nibble them by the inch if we would let her—"they are so nice to eat," she says; and, most fruitful of all in sad consequences, a love of being first.

As regards sin No. 1, I hope it will soon be a thing of the past, for she has just made a valuable discovery: "Satan doesn't come very close to me if I sing all the time I'm rubbing the brasses. He runs away when he hears me sing, so I sing very loud, and that keeps him away. Satan doesn't like hymns." And I quite agree, and strongly advise her to persevere.

Sin No. 2 is likely to pass, as she hates the nasty medicine we give her to correct her depraved proclivities; but No. 3 is more serious. It opens the door, or, as she once expressed it, it "calls so many other sins to come,"—quarrelling, pride, and several varieties of temper, come at the "call" of this sin No. 3.

She is a born leader in her very small way, and she has not learned yet, that before we can lead we must be willing to be led. "I will choose the game," she remarks "and all of you must do as I tell you." Sometimes they do, for her directions, though decisive, are given with a certain grace that wins obedience; but sometimes they do not, and then the Elf is offended, and walks off.

But she is the life of the game, and they chase her and propitiate her; and she generally condescends to return, for solitary dignity is dull. If any of the seniors happen to see it, it is checked as much as possible, but oftener we hear of it in that very informing prayer, which is to her quite the event of the evening; for she takes to the outward forms of religion with great avidity, and the evening prayer especially is a deep delight to her. She counts up all her numerous shortcomings carefully and perfectly truthfully, as they appear to her, and with equal accuracy her blessings large and small. She sometimes includes her good deeds in the list, lest, I suppose, they should be forgotten in the record of the day. All the self-righteousness latent in human nature comes out, or used to, in her earlier days, in the evening revelations. Here is a specimen, taken at random from the first month's sheaf. She and the Imp had come to my room for their devotions, preternaturally pious, both of them, though quite unregenerate. It was the Elf's turn to begin. She settled herself circumspectly, sighed deeply, and then began.

First came the day's sins, counted on the fingers of the right hand, beginning with the fourth finger. "Once," and down went the little finger on the palm, "I was cross with L." (L. being the Imp, nine and a half to the Elf's seven and a half, but most submissive as a rule.) "I was cross because she did not do as I told her. That was wrong of me; but it was wrong of her too, so it was only half a sin. Twice," and the third finger was folded down, "when I did not do my work well. That was quite all my fault. Three times," and down went the middle finger, "when I caught a quarrel with those naughty little children; they were stupid little children, and they would not play my game, so I spoiled unity. But they came running after me, and they said, 'Please forgive us,' so I forgave them. That was very good of me, and I also forgave L.; so that is three bad things and two good things to-day."

I stopped her, and expatiated on the sin of pride, but her mind was full of the business in hand.

"Then there were four blessings—no, five; but I can't remember the fifth. The Ammal gave me a box for my doll, and you gave me some sweets; and I found some nice rags in your waste-paper basket"—grubbing in rag-bags and waste-paper baskets is one of the joys of life; rags are so useful when you have a large family of dolls who are always wearing out their clothes—"and I have some cakes in my own box now. There are four blessings. But I forget the fifth."

I advised her to leave it, and begin, for the Imp was patiently waiting her turn. She, good child, suggested the missing fifth must be the soap—the Ammal had given each of them a piece the size of a walnut. Yes, that was it apparently, for the Elf, contented, began—

"O loving Lord Jesus! I have done three wrong things to-day" (then followed the details and prayer for forgiveness). "Lord, give L. grace to do what I want her to do; and when she does not do it, Lord, give me grace to be patient with her. I thank Thee for causing me to forgive those little children who would not play the game I liked. Oh make them good, and make me also good; and next time we play together give me grace to play patiently with them. And oh, forgive all the bad things I have done to-day; and I thank Thee very much for all the good things I have done, for I did them by Thy grace." Praise for mercies followed in order: the cardboard box, the lump of sugar-candy, the spoils from the waste-paper basket, those sticky honey-cakes—which, to my disquietude, I then understood were secreted in her seeley box—and that precious bit of soap. Then—and this is never omitted—a fervently expressed desire for safe preservation for herself and her friends from "the bites of snakes and scorpions, and all other noxious creatures, through the darkness of the night, and when I wake may I find myself at Thy holy feet. Amen."

No matter how sleepy she is, these last phrases, which are quite of her own devising, are always included in the tail-end of her prayer. She would not feel at all safe on her mat, spread on the ground out of doors in hot weather, unless she had so fortified herself from all attacks of the reptile world. And when, one day, we discovered a nest of some few dozen scorpions within six yards of her mat, not one of which had ever disturbed her or any of her "friends," we really did feel that funny little prayer had power in it after all.

You cannot interrupt in the middle of those rather confusing confessions, she is far too much engaged to be disturbed, but when the communication is fairly over, and she cuddles on your knee for the kissing and caressing she so much appreciates, you have a chance of explaining things a little.

She listened seriously that evening, I remember, then, slipping down off my knee, she added as a sort of postscript, very reverently, "O Lord Jesus, I prayed it wrong. I was naughtier than L., much naughtier. But indeed Thou wilt remember that she was naughty first. . . . Oh, that's not it! It was not L., it was me! And I was impatient with those little children. But . . . but they caused impatience within me." Then getting hopelessly mixed up between self-condemnation and self-justification, she gave it up, adding, however, "Next time we play together, give them more grace to play patiently with me," which was so far satisfactory, as at first she had scouted the idea that there could be any need of patience on the other side.

Sometimes she brings me perplexities not new to most of us. "This morning I prayed with great desire, 'Lord, keep me to-day from being naughty at all,' and I was naughty an hour afterwards; I looked at the clock and saw. How was it I was naughty when I wanted to be good? The naughtiness jumped up inside me, so"—(illustrating its supposed action within), "and it came running out. So what is the use of praying?"

Once the difficulty was rather opposite.

"Can you be good without God's grace?"

I told her I certainly could not.

"Well, I can!" she answered delightedly. "I want to pray now."

"Now? It is eight o'clock now. Haven't you had prayer long ago?" (We all get up at six o'clock.)

"No. That's just what I meant. I skipped my prayer this morning, and so of course I got no grace; but I have been helping the elder Sisters. Wasn't that right?"

"Yes, quite right."

"And yet I hadn't got any grace! But I suppose," she added reflectively, "it was the grace over from yesterday that did it."

As a rule she is not distinguished for very deep penitence, but at one time she had what she called "a true sense of sin" which fluctuated rather, but was always hailed, when it appeared in force, as a sign of better things. After a day of mixed goodness and badness the Elf prayed most devoutly, "I thank Thee for giving me a sense of sin to-day. O God, keep me from being at all naughty to-morrow. But if I am naughty, Lord, give me a true sense of sin!"

We value this photo exceedingly, it was so hard to get. We were in a big heathen village when we saw this Ugly Duckling, in fact she was one of the most tiresome of the "rabbits" mentioned in Chapter I. She saw us, and darted off and climbed a wall and made faces at us in a truly delightful manner. We thought we would take her, and tried. As well try to pick up quicksilver; she would not be caught. The deed was finally done when she had not the least idea of it, and the camera gave a triumphant click as it snapped her unawares. "What do they want her for?" inquired a grown-up bystander, who had observed our little game. "Look at her hair," said another, "they never saw hair like that in England, that's what they want her for!"

Professor Drummond speaks of our whole life as a long-drawn breath of mystery, between the two great wonders—the first awakening and the last sleep. I often think of that as I listen to the little children talking to each other and to us. They are always wondering about something. One day it was, "Do fishes love Jesus?" followed by "What is a soul?" The conclusion was, "It's the thing we love Jesus with." When they first come to us they invariably think that mountains grow like trees: "Stones are young mountains, aren't they? and hills are middle-aged mountains." Later on, every printed thing on a wall is a text. We were in a railway station, on our way to the hills: "Look! oh, what numbers and numbers of texts! But what queer pictures to have on texts!" One was specially perplexing; it was a well-known advertisement, and the picture showed a monkey smoking a cigar. What could that depraved animal have to do with a text? When we got to the hills the first amazement was the sight of the fashionable ladies wearing veils. "Don't they like to look at God's beautiful world? Do they like it better spotty?"

Tangles has another name; it is the "Ugly Duckling," and it is extremely descriptive; but Ugly Duckling or not, she is of an inquiring turn of mind, and one Saturday afternoon, after standing under a tree for fully five minutes lost in thought, she came to me with a question: "What are the birds saying to each other?" I looked at the Ugly Duckling, and she twisted herself into a note of interrogation, in the ridiculous way she has, but her face was full of anxiety for enlightenment about the language of the sparrows. "There," she said, pointing vigorously to the astonished birds, which instantly flew away, "that little sparrow and this one are making quite different noises. What are they saying? I do want to know so much!"

As I imagined the birds in question had just been having supper, I told her what I thought they were probably saying. Next day, in the sermon, there was something about the praise all creation offers to God, and I saw Tangles knotting her hands together and going into the queerest contortions in appreciation of the one bit of the sermon she could understand.

The Imp's questions were various. "What is that?"—pointing to a busy-bee clock—"is it an English kind of insect? Don't its legs get tired going round? Oh! is it dead now?" (when it stopped). "Who made Satan?" was an early one. "Why doesn't God kill him immediately, and stamp on him?" One day I was trying to find and touch her heart by telling her how very sorry Jesus is when we are naughty. She seemed subdued, then—"Amma, where was the Queen's spirit after she died and before they buried her, and what did they give it to eat?"

"Did you see Lot's wife?" was a question which tickled the Bishop when, on his last visitation, he gave himself up to an hour's catechising upon his tour in the Holy Land. They were disappointed that he had to confess he had not. "Oh, I suppose the salt has melted," was the Elf's comment upon this.

Tangles is distinctly inclined to peace. The Elf, I grieve to say, is not. Yesterday she announced a quarrel: "I feel cross!" Tangles objected to quarrel. "I do feel cross!" and the Elf apparently showed corroborative symptoms. Then Tangles looked at her straight: "I'm not going to quarrel. The devil has arrived in the middle of the afternoon to interrupt our unity, and I won't let him!" which so touched the Elf that she embraced her on the spot; and then, in detailing it all in her prayer in the evening, this incorrigible little sinner added, with real emotion, "Lord, I am not good. I spoiled unity with L." (the Imp), "and Thou didst feel obliged to remove her to a boarding-school. Now do help me not to spoil unity with P." (who is Tangles), "lest Thou shouldst feel obliged to remove her also to a boarding-school,"—a view of the Imp's promotion which had not struck me before.

Tangles and she belong to the same Caste, and Tangles has the character of that Caste as fully developed as the Elf, and can hold her own effectually. Also she is a little older and taller, and being the Elf's "elder sister," is, therefore, entitled to a certain measure of respect. All those small things tend to the discipline of the Elf, who is very small for her age, and who would have preferred a junior, of a meek and mild disposition, and whose constant prayer is this: "O Lord, bring another little girl out of the lion's mouth, but, O Lord, please let her be a very little girl!" Shortly after this prayer began, a very little girl was brought; but she was a vulgar infant, and greatly tried the Elf, and she was, for various reasons, promptly returned to her parents. After this episode the prayer varied somewhat: "Lord, let her be a suitable child, and give me grace to love her from my heart when she comes."

The conversation of these young creatures is often very illuminating, and always most miscellaneous. The Elf's mind especially is a sort of small curiosity shop, and displays many assortments. The Elf, Tangles, and little Delight (Delight is a youthful Christian) are curled up on the warm red sand with their three little heads close together. The Elf is telling a story. I listen, and hear a marvellous muddle of the Uganda Boys and Cyril of North Africa. "He was only six years old, and he stood up and said, 'What you are going to do, do quickly! I am not afraid. I am going to the Golden City!' And they showed him the sword and the fire, and he said, 'Do it quickly!' and they chopped off his arm, and said, 'Will you deny Jesus?' and he said, 'No!' and they chopped off his other arm,"—and so on through all the various limbs in most vivid detail,—"and then they threw him on the fire, and burnt him till he was ashes; and he sang praises to Jesus!"

The Elf leans to the tragic. Tangles' mother had a difference of opinion with a friend. The friend snatched at her opponent's ear jewels, and tore the ear. Life with a torn ear was intolerable, so Tangles' mother walked three times round the well, repeated three times, "My blood be on your head!" and sprang in. She rose three times, each time said the same words, and then sank. All this Tangles confided to the Elf, who concocted a game based upon the incident—which, however, we ruthlessly squashed. They are tossing pebbles now, according to rules of their own, and talking vigorously. "The Ammal told me all the people in England are white, and I asked her what they did without servants, and she said they had white servants, white servants!!" and the note of exclamation is intense. The others are equally astonished. White people as servants! The two ideas clash. They have never seen a white servant. In all their extensive acquaintance with white people they have only seen missionaries (who are truly their servants, though they hardly realise it yet), and occasionally Government officials, whose mastership is very much in evidence. So they are puzzled. They get out of the difficulty, however. "At the beginning of the beginning of England, black people must have gone to be the white people's servants, and they gradually grew white." Yes, that's it apparently; they faded.

The conversation springs higher. "Do you know what lightning is? I'll tell you. I watched it one whole evening, and I think it's just a little bit of heaven's light coming through and going back again." This sounds probable, and great interest is aroused. They are discussing the sheet lightning which plays about the sky in the evening before rain. "Of course it isn't much of heaven's light, only a little tiny bit getting out and running down here to show us what it is like inside. One night I shut my eyes, and it ran in and out, in and out, oh so fast! Even if I shut my eyes I saw it running inside my eyes."

"Did you get caned in school to-day?"

"No, not exactly caned," and an explanation follows. "I was standing beside a very naughty little girl, and the teacher meant to cane her, but the cane fell on me by mistake. I wanted to cry, because it hurt, but I thought it would be silly to cry when it hurt me quite by mistake. So I didn't cry one tear!"

The Elf hit upon a capital expedient for escaping castigation (which is never very severe). "I found this cane myself. It was lying on the ground in the compound, and I am going to take it to the teacher." Chorus of "Why?" "Because," and the Elf looked elfish, "if I give it to him with my own hands, how will he cane my hands with it? His heart will not be hard enough to cane me with the cane I gave him!" and the little scamp looks round for applause. Chorus of admiring "Oh!"

Then they begin again, the Elf as usual chief informant. "I know something!" Chorus, "What?" "A beautiful doll is waiting for me in a box, and I'm going to have it at Ki-rismas!" "What sort of a doll?" is the eager inquiry. "I don't know exactly, but God sent it, of course, so I think it must be something like an angel." Chorus, delightedly, "Ah!" "Yes, if it came from God, then of course it came from heaven, and heaven is the place all the angels come from, and they are white and shining, so I think it will be white and shining like an angel." The doll in question is a negress with a woolly head and a scarlet-striped pinafore. It had not struck me as angelic. It is an experiment in dolls. Will it "take"? Ki-rismas came at last, and the heavenly doll with it, but it did not "take." Grievous were the tears and sobs, and the bitterest wail of all was, "I thought God would have sent me a nicer doll!" We changed it for a "nicer doll," for the poor Elf was not wicked, only broken-hearted, and Star, who is supposed to be much too old for dolls, begged for the despised black beauty; because, as the Elf maliciously remarked as she hugged her white dolly contentedly, "That black thing has a curly head, just like Star's!"

The habit of praying about everything is characteristic of the Elf, and more than once her uninstructed little soul has grieved over the strange way our prayers are sometimes answered. One day she came rushing in full of excitement. "Oh, may I go and be examined? The Government Missie Ammal is going to examine our school! Please let me go!" The Government Missie Ammal, a great celebrity who only comes round once a year, was staying with us, and I asked her if the child might have the joy of being examined even though she had not had nearly her year at school. She agreed, for the sake of the little one's delight—for an Indian child likes nothing better than a fuss of any kind—to let her come into the examination room, and take her examination informally. We knew she was sure of a pass. An hour or two afterwards a scout came flying over to tell us the awful news. The Elf had failed, utterly failed, and she was so ashamed she wouldn't come back, "wouldn't come back any more." I went for her, and found her a little heap of sobs and tears, outside the schoolroom. I gathered her up in my arms and carried her home, and tried to comfort her, but she was crushed. "I asked God so earnestly to let me pass, and I didn't pass! And I thought He had listened, but now I know He didn't listen at all!"

I was puzzled too, though for a different reason. I knew she should easily have passed, and I could only conclude her wild excitement had made her nervous, for with many tears she told me, "I did not know one answer! not even one!" And again she came back to the first and sorest, "Oh, I did think God was listening, and He wasn't listening at all!"

At last I got her quieted, and explained, by means of a rupee and an anna, how sometimes God gives us something better than we ask for; we ask for an anna, and He gives us a rupee. A rupee holds sixteen annas. She grew interested: "Then my passing that examination was the anna. But what is the rupee?" Now the Elf, as you may have observed, is not weighted with over much humility, so I told her I thought the rupee must be humility. She considered a while, then sliding off my knee, she knelt down and said, with the utmost gravity and purpose, "O God! I did not want that kind of answer, but I do want it now. Give me the rupee of humility!" Then springing up with eyes dancing with mischief, "Next time I fall into pride you will say, 'Oh, where is that rupee?'"

When the school examinations were over, and the Missie Ammal came back to rest, I asked her about the Elf. "She really did very badly, seemed to know nothing of her subjects; should not have gone in, poor mite!" It suddenly struck me to ask what class she had gone into. "The first," said the Missie Ammal. "But she is in the infants'!" Then we understood. The Elf had only been at school for a few months, and had just finished the infant standard book, and had been moved into the first a day or two before, as the teacher felt she was well able to clear the first course in the next six months and take her examination in the following year, two years' work in one. But it was not intended she should go in for the Government examination, which requires a certain time to be spent in preparation; so when, in the confusion of the arrangement of the classes, she stood with her little class-fellows of two days only, the mistake was not noticed. No wonder the poor Elf failed! We never told her the reason, not desiring to raise fresh questions upon the mysterious ways of Providence in her busy little brain; and to this day, when she is betrayed into pride, she shakes her head solemnly at herself, and remembers the rupee.

She has lately been staying with the Missie Ammals, "my very particular friends," as she calls them, at the C.E.Z. House, in Palamcottah. She returned to us full of matter, and charged with a new idea. "I am no more going to spend my pocket money upon vanities. I am going to save it all up, and buy a Gee-lit Bible." This gilt-edged treasure is a fruitful source of conversation. It will take about six years at the rate of one farthing a week to save enough to buy exactly the kind she desires. "I don't want a common Bible. It must be gee-lit, with shining gee-lit all down the leaves on the outside, and the name on the back all gee-lit too. That's the kind of Bible I want!" Just as I wrote that, she trotted in and poured three half-annas in small change upon the table. "That's all I've got, and it's six weeks' savings. Six years is a long, long time!" She confided to me that she found "the flesh wanted to persuade" her to spend these three half-annas on cakes. "It is the flesh, isn't it, that feeling you get inside, that says 'sweets and cakes! sweets and cakes!' in a very loud voice? I listened to it for a little, and then I wanted those sweets and cakes! So I said to myself, If I buy them they will all be gone in an hour, but if I buy that Gee-lit Bible it will last for years and years. So I would not listen any more to my flesh." Then a sudden thought struck her, and she added impressively, "But when you give me sweets and cakes, that is different; the feeling that likes them is not 'flesh' then. It is only 'flesh' when I'm tempted to spend my Gee-lit Bible money on them." This was a point I was intended thoroughly to understand. Sweets and cakes were not to be confused with "flesh" except where a Gee-lit Bible was concerned. She seemed relieved when I agreed with her that such things might perhaps sometimes be innocently enjoyed, and with a sudden and rather startling change of subject inquired, "Do they never have holidays in hell?"

CHAPTER 21: Deified Devilry

"Next to the sacrificers, they (the temple women) are the most important persons about the temple. That a temple intended as a place of worship, and attended by hundreds of simple-hearted men and women, should be so polluted, and that in the name of religion, is almost beyond belief; and that Indian boys should grow up to manhood, accustomed to see immorality shielded in these temples with a divine cloak, makes our hearts grow sick and faint."

Mrs. Fuller, India.

EXCUSE the title of this chapter. I can write no other. Sometimes the broad smooth levels of life are crossed by a black-edged jagged crack, rent, as it seems, by an outburst of the fiery force below. We find ourselves suddenly close upon it; it opens right at our very feet.

Two girls came to see us to-day; sisters, but tuned to different keys. One was ordinary enough, a bright girl with plenty of jewels and a merry, contented face. The other was finer grained; you looked at her as you would look at the covers of a book, wondering what was inside. Both were married; neither had children. This was the only sorrow the younger had ever had, and it did not seem to weigh heavily.

The elder looked as if she had forgotten how to smile. Sometimes, when the other laughed, her eyes would light for a moment, but the shadow in them deepened almost before the light had come; great soft brown eyes, full of the dumb look that animals have when they are suffering.

I knew her story, and understood. She was betrothed as a baby of four to a lad considerably older; a lovable boy, they say he was, generous and frank. The two of course belonged to the same Caste, the Vellalar, and were thoroughly well brought up.

In South India no ceremony of importance is considered complete without the presence of "the Servants of the gods." These are girls and women belonging to the temple (that is, belonging to the priests of the temple), who, as they are never married, "except to the god who never dies," can never become widows. Hence the auspiciousness of their presence at betrothals, marriages, feasts of all sorts, and even funerals.

But this set of Vellalars had as a clan risen above the popular superstition, and the demoralising presence of these women was not allowed to profane either the betrothal or marriage of any child of the family. So the boy and girl grew up as unsullied as Hindus ever are. They knew of what happened in other homes, but their clan was a large one, and they found their society in it, and did not come across others much.

Shortly before his marriage the boy went to worship in the great temple near the sea. He had heard of its sanctity all his life, and as a little lad had often gone with his parents on pilgrimage there, but now he went to worship. He took his offering and went. He went again and again. All that he saw there was religion, all that he did was religious. Could there be harm in it?

He was married; his little bride went with him trustfully. She knew more of him than most Indian brides know of their husbands. She had heard he was loving, and she thought he would be kind to her.

A year or two passed, and the child's face had a look in it which even the careless saw, but she never spoke about anything to give them the clue to it. She went to stay in her father's house for a few weeks, and they saw the change, but she would not speak even to them.

Then things got worse. The girl grew thin, and the neighbours talked, and the father heard and understood; and, to save a scandal, he took them away from the town where they lived, and made every effort to give them another start in a place where they were not known. But the coils of that snake of deified sin had twisted round the boy, body and soul; he could not escape from it.

They moved again to another town; it followed him there, for a temple was there, and a temple means that.

Then the devil of cruelty seized upon him; he would drink, a disgraceful thing in his Caste, and then hold his little wife down on the floor, and stuff a bit of cloth into her mouth, and beat her, and kick her, and trample upon her, and tear the jewels out of her ears. The neighbours saw it, and told.

Then he refused to bring money to her, and she slowly starved, quite silent still, till at last hunger broke down her resolute will, and she begged the neighbours for rice. And he did more, but it cannot be told. How often one stops in writing home-letters. The whole truth can never be told.

She is only a girl yet, in years at least; in suffering, oh, how old she is! Not half is known, for she never speaks; loyal and true to him through it all. We only know what the neighbours know, and what her silent dark eyes tell, and the little thin face and hands.

She was very weary and ill to-day, but she would not own it, brave little soul! I could see that neuralgia was racking her head, and every limb trembled when she stood up; but what made it so pathetic to me was the silence with which she bore it all. I have only seen her once before, and now she is going far away with her husband to another town, and I may not see her again. She was too tired to listen much, and she knows so little, not nearly enough to rest her soul upon. She cannot read, so it is useless to write to her. She is going away quite out of our reach; thank God, not out of His.

We watched them drive off in the bullock cart, a servant walking behind. The little pale face of the elder girl looked out at the open end of the cart; she salaamed as they drove away. Such a sweet face in its silent strength, so wondrously gentle, yet so strong, strong to endure.

Do you wonder I call this sort of thing a look deep down into hell? Do you wonder we burn as we think of such things going on in the Name of God? For they think of their god as God. In His Name the temples are built and endowed, and provided with "Servants" to do devil's work. Yes, sin is deified here.

And the shame of shames is that some Englishmen patronise and in measure support the iniquity. They attend entertainments at which these girls are present to sing and dance, and see nothing disgraceful in so doing. As lately as 1893, when the Indian Social Reformers of this Presidency petitioned two notable Englishmen to discountenance "this pernicious practice" (the institution of Slaves of the gods) "by declining to attend any entertainment at which they are invited to be present," these two distinguished men, representatives of our Queen, refused to take action in the matter. Surely this is a strange misuse of our position as rulers of India.

There are so many needs everywhere that I hardly like to speak of our own, but we do need someone to work among these temple women and girls. There is practically nothing being done for them; because it is impossible for any of us to work among them and others at the same time. The nearest Home to which we could send such a one is four hundred miles away. Someone is needed, old enough to have had experience of this kind of work, and yet young enough to learn the language.

Many of these Slaves of the gods were bought, or in some other way obtained, when they were little innocent girls, and they cannot be held responsible for the terrible life to which they are doomed by the law of the Hindu religion. Many of them have hardened past any desire to be other than they are; but sometimes we see the face of a girl who looks as if she might have desire, if only she had a chance to know there is something better for her.

Can it be that, out of the many at home, God has one, or better, two, who can come with Him to this South Indian District to do what must always be awful work, along the course of that crack? If she comes, or if they come, let them come in the power of the Holy Ghost, baptised with the love that endures!

This, then, is one look into Hinduism, this ghastly whitened sepulchre, within which are dead men's bones.

CHAPTER 22: Behind the Door

"When any person is known to be considering the new Religion, all his relations and acquaintances rise en masse; so that to get a new convert is like pulling out the eye-tooth of a live tiger."

Adoniram Judson, Burmah.

EVERY missionary who has despaired of hitting upon an illustration vivid enough to show you what the work is really like among Mohammedans and Caste Hindus will appreciate this simile. After our return from Dohnavur we found that the long-closed villages of this eastern countryside had opened again, and the people were willing to allow us to teach the girls and women. For two months this lasted, and then three boys, belonging to three different Castes, became known as inquirers. Instantly the news spread through all the villages. It was in vain we told them we (women-workers) had never once even seen the boys, had in no way influenced them; the people held to it that, personally responsible or not, the book we taught to the girls was the same those boys had read (an undeniable fact); that its poison entered through the eyes, ascended to the brain, descended to the heart, and then drew the reader out of his Caste and his religion; and that therefore we could not be tolerated in the streets or in the houses any more, and so we were turned out.

"It took me such a long time to learn to draw nicely," said Victory when she saw this photo; "I used to go to the Brahman street every morning and practise it there." A design is drawn with a piece of chalk on the ground in front of every house each morning during part of December and January, in memory of a goddess who used to amuse herself by drawing these patterns and planting flowers in them. All sorts of geometrical designs are drawn by the women and children, and the regular morning drawing is part of the day's work.

In one village where many of the relations of one of these three lads live, the tiger growled considerably. One furious old dame called us "Child-snatchers and Powder-mongers," and white snakes of the cobra species, and a particular genus of lizard, which when stamped upon merely wriggles, and cannot be persuaded to die (this applied to our persistence in evil), and a great many other things. The women stood out in the street in defiant groups and would not let us near enough to explain. The men sat on the verandah fronts and smiled, blandly superior to the childish nonsense the women talked, but they did not interfere.

Villages like this—and Old India is made up of such villages—are far removed from the influence of the few enlightened centres which exist. Madras is only a name to them, distant four hundred miles or so, a place where Caste notions are very lax and people are mixed up and jumbled together in a most unbecoming way.

Education, or "Learning," as they call it, they consider an excellent thing for boys who want to come to the front and earn money and grow rich. But for girls, what possible use is it? Can they pass examinations and get into Government employ? If you answered this question you would only disgust them. Then there is a latent feeling common enough in these old Caste families, that it is rather infra dig. for their women to know too much. It may be all very well for those who have no pretensions to greatness, they may need a ladder by which to climb up the social scale, but we who are already at the top, what do we want with it? "Have not our daughters got their Caste?" This feeling is passing away in the towns, but the villages hold out longer.

In that particular village we had some dear little girls who were getting very keen, and it was so hard to move out, and leave the field to the devil as undisputed victor thereon, and I sent one of our workers to try again. She is a plucky little soul, but even she had to beat a retreat. They will have none of us.

We went on that day to a village where they had listened splendidly only a week before. They had no time, it was the busy season. Then to a town, farther on, but it was quite impracticable. So we went to our friend the dear old Evangelist there, the blind old man. He and his wife are lights in that dark town. It is so refreshing to spend half an hour with two genuine good old Christians after a tug of war with the heathen; they have no idea they are helping you, but they are, and you return home ever so much the happier for the sight of them.

As we came home we were almost mobbed. In the old days mobs there were of common occurrence. It is a rough market town, and the people, after the first converts came, used to hoot us through the streets, and throw handfuls of sand at us, and shower ashes on our hair. In theory I like this very much, but in practice not at all. The yellings of the crowd, men chiefly, are not polite; the yelpings of the dogs, set on by sympathetic spectators; the sickening blaze of the sun and the reflected glare from the houses; the blinding dust in your eyes, and the queer feel of ashes down your neck; above all, the sense that this sort of thing does no manner of good—for it is not persecution (nothing so heroic), and it will not end in martyrdom (no such honours come our way)—all this row, and all these feelings, one on the top of the other, combine to make mobbing less interesting than might be expected. You hold on, and look up for patience and good nature and such like common graces, and you pray that you may not be down with fever to-morrow—for fever has a way of stopping work—and you get out of it all, as quickly as you can, without showing undue hurry. And then, though little they know it, you go and get a fresh baptism of love for them all.

But how delighted one would be to go through such unromantic trifles every hour of every day, if only at the end one could get into the hearts and the homes of the people. As it is, just now, our grief is that we cannot. We know of several who want us, and we are shut out from them.

One is a young wife, who saw us one day by the waterside, and asked us to come and teach her. For doing this she was publicly beaten that evening in the open street, by a man, before men; so, for fear of what they would do to her, we dare not go near the house. Another is a widow who has spent all her fortune in building a rest-house for the Brahmans, and who has not found Rest. She listened once, too earnestly; she has not been allowed to listen again. Oh, how that tiger bites!

Next door to her is a child we have prayed for for three years. She was a loving, clinging child when I knew her then, little Gold, with the earnest eyes. That last day I saw her, she put her hands into mine, caring nothing for defilement; "Are we not one Caste?" she said. I did not know it was the last time I should see her; that the next time when I spoke to her I should only see her shadow in the dark; and one wishes now one had known—how much one would have said! But the house was open then, and all the houses were. Then the first girl convert, after bravely witnessing at home, took her stand as a Christian. Her Caste people burned down the little Mission school—a boys' school—and chalked up their sentiments on the charred walls. They burned down the Bible-woman's house and a school sixteen miles away; and the countryside closed, every town and village in it, as if the whole were a single door, with the devil on the other side of it.

But some of the girls behind the door managed to send us messages. Gold was one of these. She wanted so much to see us again, she begged us to come and try. We tried; we met the mother outside, and asked her to let us come. She is a hard old woman, with eyes like bits of black ice, set deep in her head. She froze us, and refused.

Afterwards we heard what the child's punishment was. They took her down to the water, and led her in. She stood trembling, waist deep, not knowing what they meant to do. Then they held her head under the water till she made some sign to show she would give in. They released her then, rubbed ashes on her brow, sign of recantation, and they led her back sobbing—poor little girl. She is not made of martyr stuff; she was only miserable. For some months we saw nothing of her. We used to go to the next house and persuade the people to let us sing to them. We sang for Gold; but we never knew if she heard.

One evening, as two of us came home late from work, a woman passed us and said hurriedly to me, "Come, come quickly, and alone. It is Gold who calls you! Come!" I followed her to the house. "I am Gold's married sister," she explained. "Sit down outside in the verandah near the door and wait till the child comes out." Then she went in, and I sat still and waited.

Those minutes were like heart-beats. What was happening inside? But apparently the mother was away, for soon the door opened softly, and a shadow flitted out, and I knew it must be Gold. She dropped on her knees on the little narrow verandah on the other side of the door and crept along to its farther end, and then I could only distinguish a dark shape in the dark. For perhaps five minutes no one came except the sister, who stood at the door and watched. And for those five minutes one was free to speak as freely as one could speak to a shape which one could barely see, and which showed no sign, and spoke no word. Five whole minutes! How one valued every moment of them! Then a man came and sat down on the verandah. He must have been a relative, for he did not mean to go. I wished he would. It was impossible to talk past him to her, without letting him know she was there; so one had to talk to him, but for her, and even this could not last long. Dusk here soon is dark; we had to go. As we went, we looked back and saw him still keeping his unconscious guard over the child in her hiding-place.

There are no secrets in India. It was known that we had been there, and that stern old mother punished her child; but how, we never knew.

If any blame us for going at all, let it be remembered that one of Christ's little ones was thirsty, and she held out her hand for a cup of cold water. We could not have left that hand empty, I think.

After that we heard nothing for a year; then an old man whom we had helped, and who hoped we intended to help him more, came one evening to tell us he meant to set Gold free. It was all to be secretly done, and it was to be done that night. We told him we could have nothing to do with his plan, and we explained to him why. "But," he objected, "what folly is this? I thought you Christians helped poor girls, and this one certainly wants to come. She is of age. This is the time. If you wait you will never get her at all." We knew this was more than probable; to refuse his help was like turning the key and locking her body and soul into prison—an awful thought to me, as I remembered Treasure. But there was nothing else to be done; and afterwards, when we heard who he was, and what his real intentions were, we were thankful we had done it. He looked at us curiously as he went, as if our view of things struck him as strange; and he begged us never to breathe a word of what he had said. We never did, but it somehow oozed out, and soon after that he sickened and very suddenly died. His body was burnt within two hours. Post-mortems are rare in India.

Another year passed in silence as to Gold. How often we went down the street and looked across at her home, with its door almost always shut, and that icy-eyed mother on guard. We used to see her going about, never far from the house. When we saw her we salaamed; then she would glare at us grimly, and turn her back on us. Once the whole family went to a festival; but the girl of course was bundled in and out of a covered cart, and seen by no one, not even the next-door neighbours. There was talk of a marriage for her. Most girls of her Caste are married much younger; but to our relief this fell through, and once one of us saw her for a moment, and she still seemed to care to hear, though she was far too cowed by this time to show it.

Then we heard a rumour that a girl from the Lake Village had been seen by some of our Christians in a wood near a village five miles distant. These Christians are very out-and-out and keen about converts, and they managed to discover that the girl in the wood had some thought of being a Christian, and that her being there had some connection with this, so they told us at once. The description fitted Gold. But we could not account for a girl of her Caste being seen in a wood; she was always kept in seclusion. At last we found out the truth. She had shown some sign of a lingering love for Christ, and her mother had taken her to a famous Brahman ascetic who lived in that wood; and there together, mother and daughter stayed in a hut near the hermit's hut, and for three days he had devoted himself to confuse and confound her, and finally he succeeded, and reported her convinced.

This is the tangible brass-bossed door outside of which we so often stand on the stone step and knock, and hear voices from within call, "Everyone is out." The hand-marks are the hand-prints of the Power that keeps the door shut. Once a year, every door and the lintel of every window, and sometimes the walls, are marked like this. That evening, just before dark, the god comes round, they say, and looks for his mark on the door, and, seeing it, blesses all in the house. If there is no mark he leaves a curse. This is the devil's South Indian parody on the Passover.

We heard all this, and sorrowed, and wondered how it was done. We never heard all, but we heard one delusion they practised upon her, appealing as they so often do to the Oriental imagination, which finds such solid satisfaction in the supernatural. Nothing is so convincing as a vision or a dream; so a vision appeared before her, an incarnation, they told her, of Siva, in the form of Christ. Siva and Christ, then, were one, as they had so often assured her, one identity under two names. Hinduism is crammed with incarnations; this presented no difficulty. Like the old monk, the bewildered child looked for the print of the nails and the spear. Yes, they were there, marked in hands and foot and side. It must be hard to distrust one's own mother. Gold still trusted hers. "Listen!" said the mother, and the vision spoke. "If the speech of the Christians is true, I will return within twenty-four days; if the speech of the Hindus is true, I will not return." Then hour by hour for those twenty-four days they wove their webs about her, webs of wonderful sophistry which have entangled keener brains than hers. She was entangled. The twenty-four days did their work. She yielded her will on the twenty-fifth. So the mother and the Brahman won.

These letters are written, as you know, with a definite purpose. We try to show you what goes on behind the door, the very door of the photograph, type of all the doors, that seeing behind you may understand how fiercely the tiger bites.

CHAPTER 23: "Pan, Pan is Dead"

"If there is one thing that refreshes my soul above all others, it is that I shall behold the Redeemer gloriously triumphant at the winding up of all things."

Henry Martyn, N. India.

"PARTLY founded upon a well-known tradition, mentioned by Plutarch, according to which, at the hour of the Saviour's Agony, a cry of, 'Great Pan is dead,' swept across the waves in the hearing of certain mariners, and the oracles ceased." So reads the head-note to one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems. We look up a classical dictionary, and find the legend there. "This was readily believed by the Emperor, and the astrologers were consulted, but they were unable to explain the meaning of so supernatural a voice."

Pan, and with him all the false gods of the old world, die in the day of the death of our Saviour,—this according to the poem—

"Gods, we vainly do adjure you,—

Ye return nor voice nor sign!

Not a votary could secure you

Even a grave for your Divine;

Not a grave, to show thereby,

Here these grey old gods do lie.

Pan, Pan is dead."

And yet—is he dead? quite dead?

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

Night, moonless and hot. Our camp is pitched on the west bank of the river; we are asleep. Suddenly there is what sounds like an explosion just outside. Then another and another,—such a bursting bang,—then a s-s-swish, and I am out of bed, standing out on the sand; and for a moment I am sure the kitchen tent is on fire. Then it dawns on me, in the slow way things dawn in the middle of the night: it is only fireworks being let off by the festival people—only fireworks!

But I stand and look, and in the darkness everything seems much bigger than it is and much more awful. There is the gleaming of water, lit by the fires of the crowd on the eastern bank of the river. There are torches waving uncertainly in and out of the vast black mass—black even in the black of night—where the people are. There is the sudden burst and s-s-swish of the rockets as they rush up into the night, and fall in showers of colours on the black mass and the water; and there is the hoarse roar of many voices, mingled with the bleat of many goats. I stand and look, and know what is going on. They are killing those goats—thirty thousand of them—killing them now.

Is Pan dead? . . .

Morning, blazing sun, relentless sun, showing up all that is going on. We are crossing the river-bed in our cart. "Don't look!" says my comrade, and I look the other way. Then we separate. She goes among the crowds in the river bed, where the sun is hottest and the air most polluted and the scenes on every side most sickening, and I go up the bank among the people. We have each a Tamil Sister with us, and farther down the stream another little group of three is at work. In all seven, to tens of thousands. But we hope more will come later on.

We have arranged to meet at the cart at about ten o'clock. The bandy-man is directed to work his way up to a big banyan tree near the temple. He struggles up through a tangle of carts, and finds a slanting standing-ground on the edge of the shade of the tree.

All the way up the bank they are killing and skinning their goats. You look to the right, and put your hands over your eyes. You look to the left, and do it again. You look straight in front, and see an extended skinned victim hung from the branch of a tree. Every hanging rootlet of the great banyan tree is hung with horrors—all dead, most mercifully, but horrible still.

We had thought the killing over, or we should hardly have ventured to come; but these who are busy are late arrivals. One tells oneself over and over again that a headless creature cannot possibly feel, but it looks as if it felt . . . it goes on moving. We look away, and we go on, trying to get out of it,—but thirty thousand goats! It takes a long time to get out of it.

We see groups of little children watching the process delightedly. There is no intentional cruelty, for the god will not accept the sacrifice unless the head is severed by a single stroke—a great relief to me. But it is most disgusting and demoralising. And to think that these children are being taught to connect it with religion!

With me is one who used to enjoy it all. She tells me how she twisted the fowls' heads off with her own hands. I look at the fine little brown hands, such loving little hands, and I can hardly believe it. "You—you do such a thing!" I say. And she says, "Yes; when the day came round to sacrifice to our family divinity, my little brother held the goat's head while my father struck it off, and I twisted the chickens' heads. It was my pleasure!"

We go up along the bank; still those crowds, and those goats killed or being killed. We cannot get away from them.

At last we reach a tree partly unoccupied, but it is leafless, alas! On one side of it a family party is cheerfully feeding behind a shelter of mats. A little lower down some Pariahs are haggling over less polite portions of the goat's economy. They wrap up the stringy things in leaves and tuck them into a fold of their seeleys. At our feet a small boy plays with the head. We sit down in the band of shade cast by the trunk of the tree, and, grateful for so much shelter, invite the passers-by to listen while we sing. Some listen. An old hag who is chaperoning a bright young wife draws the girl towards us, and sits down. She has never heard a word of our Doctrine before, and neither has the girl. Then some boys come, full of mischief and fun, and threaten an upset. So we pick out the rowdiest of them and suggest he should keep order, which he does with great alacrity, swinging a switch most vigorously at anyone likely to interfere with the welfare of the meeting.

My little companion speaks to them, as only one who was once where they are ever can. I listen to her, and long for the flow at her command. "Do you not do this and this?" she says, naming the very things they do; "and don't you say so and so?" They stare, and then, "Oh, she was once one of us! What is her Caste? When did she come? Where are her father and mother? What is her village? Is she not married? Why is she not? And where are her jewels?" Above all, everyone asks it at once, "What is her Caste?" And they guess it, and probably guess right.

You can have no idea, unless you have worked among them, how difficult it is to get a heathen woman to listen with full attention for ten consecutive minutes. They are easily distracted, and to-day there are so many things to distract them, they don't listen very well. They are tired, too, they say; the wild, rough night has done its work. Yesterday it was different; we got good listeners.

Being women, and alone in such a crowd of idolaters, we do not attempt an open-air meeting, but just sit quietly where we can, and talk to any we can persuade to sit down beside us. Hindus are safer far than Mohammedans; they are very seldom rude; but to-day we know enough of what is going on to make us keep clear of all men, if we can. They would not say anything much to us, but they might say a good deal to each other which is better left unsaid.

By the time we have gathered, and held, and then had to let go, three or four of such little groups, it is breakfast time, and we want our breakfast badly. So we press through the crowd, diving under mat sheds and among unspeakable messes, heaps of skins on either side, and one hardly knows what under every foot of innocent-looking sand; for the people bury the débris lightly, throwing a handful of sand on the worst, and the sun does the rest of the sanitation. It is rather horrible.

At last we reach the cart, tilted sideways on the bank, and get through our breakfast somehow, and rest for a few blissful minutes, in most uncomfortable positions, before plunging again into that sea of sun and sand and animals, human and otherwise; and then we part, arranging to meet when we cannot go on any more.

Is Pan dead? . . .

Noon, and hotter, far hotter, than ever. Oh, how the people throng and push, and kill and eat, and bury remains! How can they enjoy it so? What can be the pleasure in it?

We find our way back to that ribbon of shade. It is a narrower ribbon now, because the sun, riding overhead, throws the shadow of a single bough, instead of the broader trunk. But such as it is, we are glad of it, and again we gather little groups, and talk to them, and sing.

Some beautiful girls pass us close, the only girls to be seen anywhere. Only little children and wives come here; no good unmarried girls. One of the group is dressed in white, but most are in vivid purples and crimsons. The girl in white has a weary look, the work of the night again. But most of the sisterhood are indoors; in the evening we shall see more of them, scattered among the people, doing their terrible master's work. These pass us without speaking, and mingle in the crowd.

After an hour in the band of shade, we slowly climb the bank again, and find ourselves among the potters, hundreds and hundreds of them. Every family buys a pot, and perhaps two or three of different sizes; so the potters drive a brisk trade to-day, and have no leisure to listen to us.

It is getting very much hotter now, for the burning sand and the thousands of fires radiate heat-waves up through the air, heated already stiflingly. We think of our comrades down in the river bed, reeking with odours of killing and cooking, a combination of abominations unimagined by me before.

We look down upon a collection of cart tops. The palm-woven mat covers are massed in brown patches all over the sand, and the moving crowds are between. We do not see the others. Have they found it as difficult as we find it, we wonder, to get any disengaged enough to want to listen? At last we reach the long stone aisle leading to the temple. On either side there are lines of booths, open to the air but shaded from the sun, and we persuade a friendly stall-keeper to let us creep into her shelter. She is cooking cakes on the ground. She lets us into an empty corner, facing the passing crowds, and one or two, and then two or three, and so on till we have quite a group, stop as they pass, and squat down in the shade and listen for a little. Then an old lady, with a keen old face, buys a Gospel portion at half price, and folds it carefully in a corner of her seeley. Two or three others buy Gospels, and all of them want tracts. The shop-woman gets a bit restive at this rivalry of wares. We spend our farthings, proceeds of our sales, on her cakes, and she is mollified. But some new attraction in the gallery leading to the temple disperses our little audience, to collect it round itself. The old woman explains that the Gospel she has bought is for her grandson, a scholar, she tells us, aged five, and moves off to see the new show, and we move off with her.

There, in the first stall, between the double row of pillars, a man is standing on a form, whirling a sort of crackling rattle high above his head. In the next, another is yelling to call attention to his clocks. There they are, ranged tier upon tier, regular "English" busy-bee clocks, ticking away, as a small child remarks, as if they were alive. Then come sweet-stalls, clothes-stalls, lamp-stalls, fruit-stalls, book-stalls, stalls of pottery, and brass vessels, and jewellery, and basket work, and cutlery, and bangles in wheelbarrow loads, and medicines, and mats, and money boxes, and anything and everything of every description obtainable here. In each stall is a stall-keeper. Occasionally one, like the clock-stall man, exerts himself to sell his goods; more often he lazes in true Oriental fashion, and sells or not as fortune decides for him, equally satisfied with either decree. How Indian shopkeepers live at all is always a puzzle to me. They hardly ever seem to do anything but moon.

On and on, in disorderly but perfectly good-natured streams, the people are passing up to the temple, or coming down from worship there. All who come down have their foreheads smeared with white ashes. Even here there are goats; they are being pulled, poor reluctant beasts, right to the steps of the shrine, there to be dedicated to the god within. Then they will be dragged, still reluctant, round the temple walls outside, then decapitated.

I watch a baby tug a goat by a rope tied round its neck. The goat has horns, and I expect every moment to see the baby gored. But it never seems to enter into the goat's head to do anything so aggressive. It tugs, however, and the baby tugs, till a grown-up comes to the baby's assistance, and all three struggle up to the shrine.

We are standing now in an empty stall, just a little out of the crush. Next door is an assortment of small Tamil booklets in marvellous colours, orange and green predominating. There is an empty barrel rolled into the corner, and we sit down on it, and begin to read from our Book. This causes a diversion in the flow of the stream, and we get another chance.

But it grows hotter and hotter, and we get so thirsty, and long for a drink of cocoanut water. It is always safe to drink that. No cocoanuts are available, though, and we have no money. Then a man selling native butter-milk comes working his way in and out of the press, and we become conscious that of all things in the world the thing we yearn for most is a drink of butter-milk. The man stops in front of our stall, pours out a cupful of that precious liquid, and seeing the thirst in our eyes, I suppose, beseeches us to drink. We explain our penniless plight. "Buy our books, and we'll buy your butter-milk," but he does not want our books. Then we wish we had not squandered our farthings on those impossible cakes. The butter-milk man proposes he should trust us for the money; he is sure to come across us again. He is a kind-hearted man; but debt is a sin; it is not likely we shall see him again. The butter-milk man considers. He is poor, but we are thirsty. To give drink to the thirsty is an act of merit. Acts of merit come in useful, both in this world and the next. He pours out a cupful of butter-milk (he had poured the first one back when we showed our empty hands). We hesitate; he is poor, but we are so very thirsty. The next stall-keeper reads our hearts, throws a halfpenny to the butter-milk man. "There!" he says, "drink to the limit of your capacity!" and we drink. It is a comical feeling, to be beholden to a seller of small Tamil literature of questionable description; but we really are past drawing nice distinctions. Never was butter-milk so good; we get through three brass tumbler-fuls between us, and feel life worth living again. We give the good bookseller plenty of books to cover his halfpenny, and to gratify us he accepts them; but as he does not really require them, doubtless the merit he has acquired is counted as undiminished, and we part most excellent friends.

And now the crowd streaming up to the temple gets denser every moment. Every conceivable phase of devotion is represented here, every conceivable type of worshipper too. Some are reverent, some are rampant, some are earnest, some are careless, awestruck, excited, but more usually perfectly frivolous; on and on they stream.

I leave my Tamil Sister safely with two others at the cart. But the comrade whom I am to meet again at that same cart some time to-day has not turned up. So I go off alone for another try, drawn by the sight of that stream, and I let myself drift along with it, and am caught in it and carried up—up, till I am within the temple wall, one of a stream of men and women streaming up to the shrine. We reach it at last. It is dark; I can just see an iron grating set in darkness, with a light somewhere behind, and there, standing on the very steps of Satan's seat, there is a single minute's chance to witness for Christ. The people are all on their faces in the dust and the crush, and for that single minute they listen, amazed at hearing any such voice in here; but it would not do to stay, and, before they have time to make up their minds what to make of it, I am caught in another stream flowing round to the right, and find myself in a quieter place, a sort of eddy on the outer edge of the whirlpool, where the worship is less intense, and very many women are sitting gossiping.

There, sitting on the ground beside one of the smaller shrines which cluster round the greater, I have such a chance as I never expected to get; for the women and children are so astonished to see a white face in here that they throw all restraint to the winds, and crowd round me, asking questions about how I got in. For Indian temples are sacred to Indians; no alien may pass within the walls to the centre of the shrine; moreover, we never go to the temples to see the parts that are open to view, because we know the stumbling-block such sight-seeing is to the Hindus. All this the women know, for everything a missionary does or does not do is observed by these observant people, and commented on in private. Now, as they gather round me, I tell them why I have come (how I got in I cannot explain, unless it was, as the women declared, that, being in a seeley, one was not conspicuous), and they take me into confidence, and tell me the truth about themselves, which is the last thing they usually tell, and strikes me as strange; and they listen splendidly, and would listen as long as I would stay. But it is not wise to stay too long, and I get into the stream again, which all this time has been pouring round the inner block of the temple, and am carried round with it as it pours back and out.

And as I pass out, still in that stream, I notice that the temple area is crowded with all kinds of merchandise, stalls of all sorts, just as outside. Vendors of everything, from mud pots up to jewels, are roaming over the place crying their wares, as if they had been in a market; and right in the middle of them the worship goes on at the different shrines and before the different idols. There it is, market and temple, as in the days of our Lord; neither seems to interfere with the other. No one seems to see anything incongruous in the sight of a man prostrated before a stone set at the back of a heap of glass bangles. And when someone drops suddenly, and sometimes reverently, in front of a stall of coils of oily cakes, no one sees anything extraordinary in it; they know there is a god somewhere on the other side of the cakes.

On and out, through the aisle with its hundred pillars, all stone—stone paving, pillars, roof; on and out, into the glare and the sight of the goats again. But one hardly sees them now, for between them and one's eyes seem to come the things one saw inside—those men and women, hundreds of them, worshipping that which is not God.

Is Pan dead? . . .

Pan is dead! Oh, Pan is dead! For, clearer than the sight of that idolatrous crowd, I saw this—I had seen it inside those temple walls:—a pile of old, dead gods. They were bundled away in a corner, behind the central shrine—stone gods, mere headless stumps; wooden gods with limbs lopped off; clay gods, mere lumps of mud; mutilated and neglected, worn-out old gods. Oh, the worship once offered to those broken, battered things! No one worships them now! For full five minutes I had sat and looked at them—

"Gods bereavëd, gods belated,

With your purples rent asunder!

Gods discrowned and desecrated,

Disinherited of thunder!"

There were withered wreaths lying at the feet of some of the idols near; there were fresh wreaths round the necks of others. There were no wreaths in this corner of dead gods. I looked, and looked, and looked again. Oh, there was prophecy in it!

And as I came out among the living people, the sight of that graveyard of dead gods was ever with me, and the triumph-song God's prophetess sang, sang itself through and through me—Pan is dead! Quite dead!

"'Twas the hour when One in Sion

Hung for love's sake on a cross;

When His brow was chill with dying,

And His soul was faint with loss;

When His priestly blood dropped downward,

And His kingly eyes looked throneward—

Then, Pan was dead.

"By the love He stood alone in,

His sole Godhead rose complete,

And the false gods fell down moaning,

Each from off his golden seat;

All the false gods with a cry

Rendered up their deity—

Pan, Pan was dead."

CHAPTER 24: "Married to the God"

"One thing one notices very much as a 'freshman'—that is, the unconscious influence which Christianity has over a nation. Go to the most depraved wretch you can find in England, and he has probably got a conscience, if only one can get at it. But here the result of heathenism seems to be to destroy men's consciences. They never feel sin as such."

Rev. E. S. Carr, India.

"I have heard people say they enjoyed hearing about missions. I often wonder if they would enjoy watching a shipwreck."

Mrs. Robert Stewart, China.

LEAVE this chapter if you want "something interesting to read"; hold your finger in the flame of a candle if you want to know what it is like to write it. If you do this, then you will know something of the burning at heart every missionary goes through who has to see the sort of thing I have to write about. Such things do not make interesting reading. Fire is an uncompromising thing, its characteristic is that it burns; and one writes with a hot heart sometimes. There are things like flames of fire. But perhaps one cares too much; it is only about a little girl.

I was coming home from work a few evenings ago when I met two men and a child. They were Caste men in flowing white scarves—dignified, educated men. But the child? She glanced up at me, smiled, and salaamed. Then I remembered her; I had seen her before in her own home. These men belonged to her village. What were they doing with her?

Then a sudden fear shot through me, and I looked at the men, and they laughed. "We are taking her to the temple there," and they pointed across through the trees, "to marry her to the god."

It all passed in a moment. One of them caught her hand, and they went on. I stood looking after them—just looking. The child turned once and waved her little hand to me. Then the trees came between.

The men's faces haunted me all night. I slept, and saw them in my dreams; I woke, and saw them in the dark. And that little girl—oh, poor little girl!—always I saw her, one hand in theirs, and the other waving to me!

And now it is over, the diabolical farce is over, and she is "tied," as their idiom has it, "tied to the stone." Oh, she is tied indeed, tied with ropes Satan twisted in his cruellest hour in hell!

We had to drive through the village a night or two later, and it was all ablaze. There was a crowd, and it broke to let our bullock carts pass, then it closed round two palanquins.

There were many men there, and girls. In the palanquins were two idols, god and goddess, out on view. It was their wedding night. We saw it all as we passed: the gorgeous decorations, gaudy tinsels, flowers fading in the heat and glare; saw, long after we had passed, the gleaming of the coloured lights, as they moved among the trees; heard for a mile and more along the road the sound of that heathen revelry; and every thud of the tom-tom was a thud upon one's heart. Our little girl was there, as one "married" to that god.

I had seen her only once before. She belonged to an interesting high-caste village, one of those so lately closed; and because there they have a story about the magic powder which, say what we will, they imagine I dust upon children's faces, I had not gone often lest it should shut the doors. But that last time I went, this child came up to me, and, with all the confidingness of a child, asked me to take her home with me. "Do let me come!" she said.

There were eyes upon me in a moment and heads shaken knowingly, and there were whispers at once among the women. The magic dust had been at work! I had "drawn" the little girl's heart to myself. Who could doubt it now? And one mother gathered her child in her arms and disappeared into the house. So I had to answer carefully, so that everyone could hear. Of course I knew they would not give her to me, and I thought no more of it.

I was talking to her grandmother then, a very remarkable old lady. She could repeat page after page from their beloved classics, and rather than let me sing Christian stanzas to her and explain them, she preferred to sing Hindu stanzas to me and explain them. "Consider the age of our great Religion, consider its literature—millions of stanzas! What can you have to compare with it? These ignorant people about us do not appreciate things. They know nothing of the classics; as for the language, the depths of Tamil are beyond them—is it not a shoreless sea?" And so she held the conversation.

This is vile enough to look at, but nothing to the reality. If the outer form is this, what must the soul within it be? Yet this is a "holy Brahman;" and if we sat down on that stone verandah he would shuffle past the pillar lest we should defile him. Look at the shadowy shapes behind; they might be spirits of darkness. It is he, and such as he, who have power over little temple flowers.

It was just at this point the child reappeared, and, standing by the verandah upon which we were sitting, her little head on a level with our feet, she joined in the stanza her grandmother was chanting, and, to my astonishment, continued through the next and the next, while I listened wondering. Then jumping up and down, first on one foot, then on the other, with her little face full of delight at my evident surprise, she told me she was learning much poetry now; and then, with the merriest little laugh, she ran off again to play.

And this was the child. All that brightness, all that intelligence, "married to a god."

Now I understood the question she had asked me. She was an orphan, as we afterwards heard, living in charge of an old aunt, who had some connection with the temple. She must have heard her future being discussed, and not understanding it, and being frightened, had wondered if she might come to us. But they had taken their own way of reconciling her to it; a few sweets, a cake or two, and a promise of more, a vision of the gay time the magic word marriage conjures up, and the child was content to go with them, to be led to the temple—and left there.

But her people were so thoroughly refined and nice, so educated too,—could it be, can it be, possibly true? Yes, it is true; this is Hinduism—not in theory of course, but in practice. Think of it; it is done to-day.

A moment ago I looked up from my writing and saw the little Elf running towards me, charmed to find me all alone, and quite at leisure for her. And now I watch her as she runs, dancing gleefully down the path, turning again—for she knows I am watching—to throw kisses to me. And I think of her and her childish ways, naughty ways so often, too, but in their very naughtiness only childish and small, and I shiver as I think of her, and a thousand thousand as small as she, being trained to be devil's toys. They brought one here a few days ago to act as decoy to get the Elf back. She was a beautiful child of five. Think of the shame of it!

We are told to modify things, not to write too vividly, never to harrow sensitive hearts. Friends, we cannot modify truth, we cannot write half vividly enough; and as for harrowing hearts, oh that we could do it! That we could tear them up, that they might pour out like water! that we could see hands lifted up towards God for the life of these young children! Oh, to care, and oh for power to make others care, not less but far, far more! care till our eyes do fail with tears for the destruction of the daughters of our people!

This photo is from death in life; a carcass, moving, breathing, sinning—such a one sits by that child to-day.

I saw him once. There is a monastery near the temple. He is "the holiest man in it"; the people worship him. The day I saw him they had wreathed him with fresh-cut flowers; white flowers crowned that hideous head, hung round his neck and down his breast; a servant in front carried flowers. Was there ever such desecration? That vileness crowned with flowers!

I knew something about the man. His life is simply unthinkable. Talk of beasts in human shape! It is slandering the good animals to compare bad men to beasts. Safer far a tiger's den than that man's monastery.

But he is a temple saint, wise in the wisdom of his creed; earthly, sensual, devilish. Look at him till you feel as if you had seen him. Let the photo do its work. It is loathsome—yes, but true.

Now, put a flower in his hand—a human flower this time. Now put beside him, if you can, a little girl—your own little girl—and leave her there—yes, leave her there in his hand.

CHAPTER 25: Skirting the Abyss

"The first thing for us all is to see and feel the great need, and to create a sentiment among Christian people on this subject. One of the characteristics of this great system is its secrecy—its subtlety. So few know of the evils of child-marriage, it is so hidden away in the secluded lives and prison homes of the people. And those of us who enter beyond these veils, and go down into these homes, are so apt to feel that it is a case of the inevitable, and nothing can be done."

Mrs. Lee, India.

I  HAVE been to the Great Lake Village to-day trying again to find out something about our little girl. I went to the Hindu school near the temple. The schoolmaster is a friend of ours, one of the honourable men of the village from which they took that flower. He was drilling the little Brahman boys as they stood in a row chanting the poem they were learning off by heart; but he made them stop when he saw us coming, and called us in.

I asked him about the child. It was true. She was in the temple, "married to the stone." Yes, it was true they had taken her there that day.

I asked if the family were poor; but he said, "Do not for a moment think that poverty was the cause. Certainly not. Our village is not poor!" And he looked quite offended at the thought. I knew the village was rich enough, but had thought perhaps that particular family might be poor, and so tempted to sell the little one; but he exclaimed with great warmth, Certainly not. The child was a relative of his own; there was no question of poverty!

We had left the school, and were talking out in the street facing the temple house. I looked at it, he looked at it. "From hence a passage broad, smooth, easy, inoffensive, down to hell"; he knew it well. "Yes, she is a relative of my own," he continued, and explained minutely the degree of relationship. "Her grandmother, whom you doubtless remember, is not like the ignorant women of these parts. She has learning." And again he repeated, as if desirous of thoroughly convincing me as to the satisfactory nature of the transaction, "Certainly she was not sold. She is a relative of my own."

A relative of his own! And he could teach his school outside those walls, and know what was going on inside, and never raise a finger to stop it, educated Hindu though he is. I could not understand it.

He seemed quite concerned at my concern, but explained that for generations one of that particular household had always been devoted to the gods. The practice could not be defended; it was the custom. That was all. "Our custom."

A stone's-throw from his door is another child who is living a strangely unnatural life, which strikes no one as unnatural because it is "our custom." She is quite a little girl, and as playful as a kitten. Her soft round arms and little dimpled hands looked fit for no harder work than play, but she was pounding rice when I saw her, and looked tired, and as if she wanted her mother.

While I was with her a very old man hobbled in. He was crippled, and leaned full weight with both hands on his stick. He seemed asthmatic too, and coughed and panted woefully. A withered, decrepit old ghoul. The child stood up when he came in and touched her neck where the marriage symbol lay. Then I knew he was her husband.

"What,

No blush at the avowal—you dared to buy

A girl of age beseems your grand-daughter, like ox or ass?

Are flesh and blood ware? are heart and soul a chattel?"

Yes! like chattels they are sold to the highest bidder. In that auction Caste comes first, then wealth and position. And the chattel is bought, the bit of breathing flesh and blood is converted into property; and the living, throbbing heart of the child may be trampled and stamped down under foot in the mire and the mud of that market-place, for all anyone cares.

It is not long since a young wife came for refuge to our house. Three times she had tried to kill herself; at last she fled to us. Her husband came. "Get up, slave," he said, as she crouched on the floor. She would not stir or speak. Then he got her own people to come, and then it was as if a pent-up torrent was bursting out of an over full heart. "You gave me to him. You gave me to him." The words came over and over again; she reminded them in a passion of reproach how, knowing what his character was, they had handed her over to him. But we could hardly follow her, the words poured forth with such fierce emotion, as with streaming eyes, and hands that showed everything in gestures, she besought them not to force her back. They promised, and believing them, she returned with them. The other day when I passed the house someone said, "Beautiful is there. He keeps her locked up in the back room now." So they had broken their word to her, and given her back, body and soul, to the power of a man whose cruelty is so well known that even the heathen call him a "demon." What must he be to his wife?

And if that poor wife, nerved by the misery of her life, dared all, and appealed to the Government, the law would do as her people did—force her back again to him, to fulfil a contract she never made. Is it not a shame? Oh, when will the day come when this merchandise in children's souls shall cease? We know that many husbands are kind, and many wives perfectly content, but sometimes we see those who are not, and there is no redress.

Another of our children sold by auction in the Village of the Lake is one who used to be such a pretty little thing, with a tangle of curls, and mischievous, merry brown eyes. But that was five years ago. Then a fiend in a man's shape saw her, and offered inducements to her parents which ended in his marrying her. She was nine years old.

One year afterwards she was sent to her husband's home. His motives in marrying her were wholly evil, but the child knew something of right and wrong, and she resisted him. Then he dragged her into an inner room, and he held her down, and smothered her shrieks, and pressed a plantain into her mouth. It was poisoned. She knew it, and did not swallow it all. But what she was forced to take made her ill, and she lay for days so dizzy and sick that when her husband kicked her as she lay she did not care. At last she escaped, and ran to her mother's house. But the law was on her owner's side; what could she prove of all this, poor child? And she had to go back to him. After that he succeeded in his devil's work, and to-day that child is dead to all sense of sin.

Oh, there are worse things far than seeing a little child die! It is worse to see it change. To see the innocence pass from the eyes, and the childishness grow into wickedness, and to know, without being able to stop it, just what is going on.

I am thinking of one such now. She was four years old when I first began to visit in her grandmother's house. She is six now—only six—but her demoralisation is almost complete. It is as if you saw a hand pull a rosebud on its stem, crumple and crush it, rub the pink loveliness into pulp, drop it then—and you pick it up. But it is not a rosebud now. Oh, these things, the knowledge of them, is as a fire shut up in one's bones! shut up, for one cannot let it all out—it must stay in and burn.

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

Those who know nothing of the facts will be sure to criticise. "It is not an unknown thing for persons to act as critics, even though supremely ignorant of the subject criticised." But those who know the truth of these things well know that we have understated it, carefully toned it down perforce, because it cannot be written in full. It could neither be published nor read.

It cannot be written or published or read, but oh, it has to be lived! And what you may not even hear, must be endured by little girls. There are child-wives in India to-day, of twelve, ten, nine, and even eight years old. "Oh, you mean betrothed! Another instance of missionary exaggeration!" We mean married.

"But of course the law interferes!" Perhaps you have heard of the law which makes wifehood illegal under twelve. With reference to this law the Hon. Manomoham Ghose of the High Court of Calcutta writes:—"If the Government thinks that the country is not yet prepared for such legislation" (by which he means drastic legislation) "as I suggest, I can only express my regret that by introducing the present Bill it has indefinitely postponed the introduction of a substantial measure of reform, which is urgently called for."

There are men and women in India to whom many a day is a nightmare, and this fair land an Inferno, because of what they know of the wrong that is going on. For that is the dreadful part of it. It is not like the burning alive of the widows, it is not a horror passed. It is going on steadily day and night. Sunlight, moonlight, and darkness pass, the one changing into the other; but all the time they are passing, this Wrong holds the hours with firm and strong hands, and uses them for its purpose—the murder of little girls. Meanwhile, what can be done by you and by me to hasten the day of its ending? Those who know can tell what they know, or so much as will bear the telling; and those who do not know can believe it is true, and if they have influence anywhere, use it; and all can care and pray! Praying alone is not enough, but oh for more real praying! We are playing at praying, and caring, and coming; playing at doing—if doing costs—playing at everything but play. We are earnest enough about that. God open our eyes and convict us of our insincerity! burn out the superficial in us, make us intensely in earnest! And may God quicken our sympathy, and touch our heart, and nerve our arm for what will prove a desperate fight against "leaguèd fiends" in bad men's shapes, who do the devil's work to-day, branding on little innocent souls the very brand of hell.

I have told of one—that little child who is now as evil-minded as a little child can be; she is only one of so many. Let a medical missionary speak.

"A few days ago we had a little child-wife here as a patient. She was ten or eleven, I think, just a scrap of a creature, playing with a doll, and yet degraded unmentionably in mind. . . . But oh, to think of the hundreds of little girls! . . . It makes me feel literally sick. We do what we can. . . . But what can we do? What a drop in the ocean it is!"

Where the dotted lines come, there was written what cannot be printed. But it had to be lived through, every bit of it, by a "scrap of a creature of ten or eleven."

Another—these are from a friend who, even in writing a private letter, cannot say one-tenth of the thing she really means.

"A few days ago the little mother (a child of thirteen) was crying bitterly in the ward. 'Why are you crying?' 'Because he says I am too old for him now; he will get another wife, he says.' 'He' was her husband, 'quite a lad,' who had come to the hospital to see her."

The end of that story which cannot be told is being lived through this very day by that little wife of thirteen. And remember that thirteen in India means barely eleven at home.

"She was fourteen years old," they said, "but such a tiny thing, she looked about nine years old in size and development. . . . The little mother was so hurt, she can never be well again all her life. The husband then married again . . . as the child was ruined in health. . . ." And, as before, the dots must cover all the long-drawn-out misery of that little child who "looked about nine."

"There is an old, old man living near here, with a little wife of ten or eleven. . . . Our present cook's little girl, nine years old, has lately been married to a man who already has had two wives." In each of these cases, as in each I have mentioned, marriage means marriage, not just betrothal, as so many fondly imagine. Only to-day I heard of one who died in what the nurse who attended her described as "simple agony." She had been married a week before. She was barely twelve years old.

We do not say this is universal. There are many exceptions; but we do say the workings of this custom should be exposed and not suppressed. Question our facts; we can prove them. To-day as I write it, to-day as you read it, hundreds and thousands of little wives are going through what we have described. But "described" is not the word to use—indicated, I should say, with the faintest wash of sepia where the thing meant is pitch black.

Think of it, then—do not try to escape from the thought—English women know too little, care too little—too little by far. Think of it. Stop and think of it. If it is "trying" to think of it, and you would prefer to turn the page over, and get to something nicer to read, what must it be to live through it? What must it be to those little girls, so little, so pitifully little, and unequal to it all? What must it be to these childish things to live on through it day by day, with, in some cases, nothing to hope for till kindly death comes and opens the door, the one dread door of escape they know, and the tortured little body dies? And someone says, "The girl is dead, take the corpse out to the burning-ground." Then they take it up, gently perhaps. But oh, the relief of remembering it! It does not matter now. Nothing matters any more. Little dead wives cannot feel.

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

I wonder whether it touches you? I know I cannot tell it well. But oh, one lives through it all with them!—I have stopped writing again and again, and felt I could not go on.

Mother, happy mother! When you tuck up your little girl in her cot, and feel her arms cling round your neck and her kisses on your cheek, will you think of these other little girls? Will you try to conceive what you would feel if your little girl were here?

Oh, you clasp her tight, so tight in your arms! The thought is a scorpion's sting in your soul. You would kill her, smother her dead in your arms, before you would give her to—that.

Turn the light down, and come away. Thank God she is safe in her little cot, she will wake up to-morrow safe. Now think for a moment steadily of those who are somebody's little girls, just as dear to them and sweet, needing as much the tenderest care as this your own little girl.

Think of them. Try to think of them as if they were your very own. They are just like your own, in so many ways—only their future is different.

Oh, dear mothers, do you care? Do you care very much, I ask?

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

We passed the temple on our way home from the Village of the Lake. The great gate was open, and the Brahmans and their friends were lounging in and out, or sitting in the porch talking and laughing together. They were talking about us as we passed. They were quite aware of our object in coming, and were pleased that we had failed.

Government officials, English-speaking graduates, educated Hindus like our old friend the schoolmaster, all would admit in private that to take a child to the temple and "marry her" there was wrong. But very few have much desire to right the shameful wrong.

There are thousands of recognised Slaves of the gods in this Presidency. Under other names they exist all over India. There are thousands of little child-wives; fewer here than elsewhere, we know, but many everywhere. I do not for a moment suggest that all child-wives are cruelly handled, any more than I would have it thought that all little girls are available for the service of the gods. Nor would I have it supposed that we see down this hell-crack every day. We may live for years in the country and know very little about it. The medical workers—God help them!—are those who are most frequently forced to look down, and I, not being a medical, know infinitely less of its depths than they. But this I do know, and do mean, and I mean it with an intensity I know not how to express, that this custom of infant marriage and child marriage, whether to gods or men, is an infamous custom; that it holds possibilities of wrong, such unutterable wrong, that descriptive words concerning it can only "skirt the abyss," and that in the name of all that is just and all that is merciful it should be swept out of the land without a day's delay.

We look to our Indian brothers. India is so immense that a voice crying in the North is hardly heard in the South. Thank God for the one or two voices crying in the wilderness. But many voices are needed, not only one or two. Let the many voices cry! Every man with a heart and a voice to cry, should cry. Then all the cries crying over the land will force the deaf ears to hear, and force the dull brains to think and the hands of the law to act, and something at last will be done.

But "crying" is not nearly enough. We look to you, brothers of India, to do. Get convictions upon this subject which will compel you to do. Many can talk and many can write, and more will do both, as the years pass, but the crux is contained in the doing.

God alone can strengthen you for it. He who set His face as a flint, can make you steadfast and brave enough to set your faces as flints, till the bands of wickedness are loosed, and the heavy burdens are undone, and every yoke is broken, and the oppressed go free.

It will cost. It is bound to cost. Every battle of the warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood. It is only sham battles that cost something less than blood. Everything worth anything costs blood. "Reproach hath broken My heart." A broken heart bleeds. Is it the reproach of the battle you fear? This fear will conquer you until you hear the voice of your God saying, "Fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be afraid of their revilings. . . . Who art thou that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and the son of man that shall be made as grass, and forgettest the Lord thy Maker?"

This book is meant for our comrades at home, but it may come back to India, and so we have spoken straight from our hearts to our Indian brothers here. Oh, brothers, rise, and in God's Name fight; in His power fight till you win, for these, your own land's little girls, who never can fight for themselves!

And now we look to you at home. Will all who pity the little wives pray for the men of India? Pray for those who are honestly striving to rid the land of this shameful curse. Pray that they may be nerved for the fight by the power of God's right arm. Pray for all the irresolute. "A sound of battle is in the land, . . . the Lord hath opened His armoury." "Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood." Pray for resolution and the courage of conviction. It is needed.

And to this end pray that the Spirit of Life may come upon our Mission Colleges, and mightily energise the Missionary Educational Movement, that Hindu students may be won to out-and-out allegiance to Christ while they are students, before they become entangled in the social mesh of Hinduism. And pray, we earnestly plead with you, that the Christian students may meet God at college, and come out strong to fight this fiend which trades in "slaves and souls of men"—and in the souls of little girls.

CHAPTER 26: From a Hindu Point of View

"The Lord preserve us from innovations foreign to the true principles of the Protestant Church, and foreign to the principles of the C.M.S. Pictures, crosses, and banners, with processions, would do great harm. The Mohammedan natives would say, 'Wah! you worship idols as the Hindus do, and have taziyas (processions) as well as the Mohammedans!' And our Christians would mourn over such things."

Rev. C. B. Leupolt, India.

I  AM sitting in the north-west corner of the verandah of a little mission bungalow, on the outskirts of a town sixteen miles south of our Eastern headquarters. This is the town where they set fire to the schoolroom when Victory came. So far does Caste feeling fly. As you sit in the corner of this verandah you see a little temple fitted between two whitewashed pillars, roughly built and rudely decorated, but in this early morning light it looks like a picture set in a frame. It is just outside the compound, so near that you see it in all its detail of colour; the sun striking across it touches the colours and makes them beautiful.

There is the usual striped wall, red and white; the red is a fine terra-cotta, the colour of the sand. The central block, the shrine itself, has inlays of green, red, and blue; there is more terra-cotta in the roof, some yellow too, and white. Beyond on either side there are houses, and beyond the houses, trees and sky.

It is all very pretty and peaceful. Smoke is curling up in the still air from some early lighted fire out of doors; there are voices of people going and coming, softened by distance. There is the musical jingle of bullock bells here in the compound and out on the road, and there is the twitter of birds.

In front of that temple there are three altars, and in front of the altars a pillar. I can see it from where I am sitting now, rough grey stone. Upon it, there is what I thought at first was a sun-dial, and I wondered what it was doing there. Then I saw it had not a dial plate; only a strong cross-bar of wood, and the index finger, so to speak, was longer than one would expect, a sharp wooden spike. As I was wondering what it was a passer-by explained it. It is not a sun-dial, it is an impaling instrument. On that spike they used to impale alive goats and kids and fowls as offerings to the god Siva and his two wives, the deities to whose honour the three altars stand before the little shrine. The pillar on which stands this infernal spike has three circles scored into it, sign of the three divinities.

"The impaling has stopped," say the people, greatly amused at one's horror and distress, for at first I thought perhaps they still did it. "Now we do not impale alive; the Government has stopped it." Thank God for that! But oh, let all lovers of God's creatures pray for and hasten the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ! Government may step in and stop the public clubbing to death of buffaloes, and the impaling of goats and fowls in sacrifice, but it cannot stop the private cruelty, and the still wider-spread indifference on the part of those who are not themselves cruel; only the coming of Christ the Compassionate can do that.

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

There was the sound of voices just then, as I wrote, many voices, coming nearer, shrill women's voices, cutting through one's thoughts, and I went out to see what was going on.

On the other side of the road, opposite our gate, there is a huge old double tree, the sacred fig tree of India, intertwined with another—a religious symbol to this symbol-loving people. Underneath is a stone platform, and on it the hideous elephant-god. On the same side is a little house. A group of women were gathered under the shade near the house, evidently waiting for something or someone. They were delighted to talk.

We spent half an hour under the tree, and they listened; but we were interrupted by some well-dressed Government officials with their coats, sashes, and badges, and one not strictly Governmental got up in a marvellous fashion, and they joined the group and monopolised the conversation. I waited, hoping they would soon go away, and I listened to what they were saying.

"Yes! she actually appeared! She was a goddess." ("A goddess! Oh!" from the women.) "She came forward, moving without walking, and she stood as a tree stands, and she stretched out her arms and blessed the people, and vanished."

A woman pointed to me. "Like her? Was she like her?"

"Like her!" and the Government official was a little contemptuous. "Did I not say she was a goddess? Is this Missie Ammal a goddess? Is she not a mere woman like yourselves, only white?"

"She also came from the bungalow," objected the woman rather feebly, feeling public opinion against her.

"You oyster!" said the official politely, "because a Missie Ammal comes from the bungalow, does it prove that the goddess was a Missie Ammal?" The other women agreed with him, and snubbed the ignoramus, who retired from the controversy.

The story was repeated with variations, such a mixture of the probable with the improbable, not to say impossible, that one got tangled up in it before he had got half through.

Just then an ancient Christian appeared on the scene and quavered in, in the middle of the marvel, with words to the effect that our God was the true God, and they ought to have faith in Him. It was not exactly à propos of anything they were discussing, but he seemed to think it the right thing to say, and they accepted it as a customary remark, and went on with their conversation. I asked the old worthy if he knew anything about the story, and at first he denied it indignantly as savouring too much of idolatry to be connected with the bungalow, but finally admitted that once in the dim past he had heard that an Ammal in the bungalow, who was ill and disturbed by the tom-toms at night, got up and went out and tried to speak to the people. And the men, listening now to the old man, threw in a word which illumined the whole, "It was a great festival." I remembered that impaling stake, and understood it all. And in a flash I saw it—the poor live beast—and heard its cries. They would wring her heart as she heard them in the pauses of the tom-tom. She was ill, but she got up and struggled out, and tried to stop it, I am sure—tried, and failed.

Seven thousand miles away these things may seem trivial. Here, with that grey stone pillar full in view, they are real.

I came back to the present. The women were still there, and more people were gathering. Something was going to happen. Then a sudden burst of tom-toms, and a banging and clanging of all manner of noise-producers, and then a bullock coach drove up, a great gilded thing. It stopped in front of the little house; someone got out; the people shouted, "Guru! Great Guru! Lord Guru!" with wild enthusiasm.

The Guru was not poor. He had two carts laden with luggage—one item, a green parrot in a cage. Close to the cage a small boy was thundering away on a tom-tom, but it did not disturb the parrot. The people seemed to think this display of wealth demanded an apology. "It is not his, it belongs to his followers; he, being what he is, requires none of these things," they said.

I had to go then, and we started soon afterwards on our day's round, and I do not know what happened next; but I had never had the chance of a talk with a celebrity of this description, and in the evening, on my homeward way, I stopped before the little house and asked if I might see him, the famous Guru of one of the greatest of South Indian Castes.

The Government officials of the morning were there, but the officialism was gone. No coats and sashes and badges now, only the simple national dress, a scarf of white muslin. The one who in the morning had been an illustration of the possible effect of the mixture of East and West, stood in a dignity he had not then, a fine manly form.

The door was open, and they were sentry, for their Guru was resting, they said. "Then he is very human, just like yourselves?" But the strong, sensible faces looked almost frightened at the words. "Hush," they answered all in a breath, "no such thoughts may be even thought here. He is not just like us." And as if to divert us from the expression of such sentiments, they moved a little from the door, and said, "You may look, if you do not speak," and knowing such looks are not often allowed, I looked with interest, and saw all there was to see.

The Guru was in the far corner resting; a rich purple silk, with gold interwoven in borders and bands, was flung over his ascetic's dress. At the far end, too, was a sort of altar, covered with red cloth, and on it were numerous brass candlesticks and vessels, and on a little shelf above, a row of little divinities, some brass ornaments, and flowers.

To the left of this altar there was a high-backed chair covered by a deer skin; there were pictures of gods and goddesses round the room, especially near the altar, and there were the usual censers, rosaries, and musical instruments, and there was the parrot.

The Government official pointed in, and said, with an air of pride in the whole, and a certainty of sympathy too, "There, you see how closely it resembles your churches; there is not so much difference between you and us after all!"

Not so much difference! There is a very great difference, I told him; and I asked him where he had seen a Christian church like this. He mentioned two. One was a Roman Catholic chapel, the other an English church.

What could I say? They bear our name; how could he understand the divisions that rend us asunder?—Romanists, Ritualists, and Protestants—are we not all called Christians?

I looked again, and I could not help being struck with the resemblance. The altar with its brasses and flowers and candlesticks, and the little shelf above; the pictures on the walls; the chair, so like a Bishop's chair of state; the whole air of the place heavy with incense, was redolent of Rome.

He went on to explain, while I stood there ashamed. "Look, have you not got that?" and he pointed to the altar-like erection, with the red cloth and the flowers.

"We have nothing of the sort in our church. Come and see; we have only a table," I said; but he laughed and declared he had seen it in other churches, and it was just like ours, "only yours has a cross above it, and ours has images; but you bow to your cross, so it must represent a divinity," and, without waiting for any reply, he pointed next to the pictures.

"They are very like yours, I think," he said, only yours show your God on a cross, stretched out and dying—so"—And he stretched out his arms, and dropped his head, and said something which cannot be translated; and I could not look or listen, but broke in earnestly:

"Indeed, we have no such pictures—at least we here have not; but even if some show such a picture, do they ever call it a picture of God? They only say it is a picture of"—But he interrupted impatiently:

"Do not I know what they say?" And then, with a touch of scorn at what he thought was an empty excuse on my part, he added, "We also say the same" (which is true; no intelligent Hindu admits that he worships idols or pictures; he worships what these things represent). "Your people show your symbols," he continued, in the tone of one who is sure of his ground, "exactly as we show ours. I have seen your God on a great sheet at night; it was shown by means of a magic lamp; and sometimes you make it of wood or brass, as we make ours of stone. The name may change and the manner of making, but the thing's essence is the same."

"The Mohammedans do not show their God's symbol; but we do, and so do the Christians. Therefore between us and the Christians there is more in common than between the Mohammedans and us." This was another Hindu's contribution to the argument.

The chair now served as a text. "When your Bishop comes round your churches, does he not sit in a chair like that, himself apart from the people? And in like manner our Guru sits. There is much similarity. Also do not your Christians stand"—and he imitated the peculiarly deferential attitude adopted on such occasions by some—"just in the fashion that we stand? And do not your people feel themselves blessed by the presence of the Great? Oh, there is much similarity!"

I explained that all this, though foolish, was not intended for more than respect, and our Bishops did not desire it; at which he smiled. Then he went on to expatiate upon what he had seen in some of our churches (probably while on duty as Government servant): the display, as it seemed to him, so like this; the pomp, as he thought it, so fine, like this; the bowing and prostrating, and even on the part of those who did not do these things, the evident participation in the whole grand show. And the other men, who apparently had looked in through the open windows and doors, agreed with him.

He is not the first who has been stumbled in the same way; and I remembered, as he talked, what a Mohammedan woman said to a friend of mine about one of our English churches, seen through her husband's eyes. "You have idols in your church," she said, "to which you bow in worship." She referred to the things on or above the Communion table. My friend explained the things were not idols. "Then why do your people bow to them?" Was there nothing in the question?

Often we wonder whether the rapid but insidious increase of ritual in India is understood at home. In England it is bad enough, but in a heathen and Mohammedan land it is, if possible, worse; and the worst is, the spirit of it, or the spirit of tolerance toward it, which is on the increase even in missionary circles. Some of our Tamil people attend the English service in these "advanced" churches after their own service is over, and thus become familiarised with and gradually acclimatised to an ecclesiastical atmosphere foreign to them as members of a Protestant Society.

I remember spending a Sunday afternoon with a worthy pastor and his wife, stationed in the place where the church is in which the "idols are worshipped" according to the Mohammedans. When the bell rang for evening service he began to shuffle rather as if he wanted me to go. But he was too polite to say so, and the reason never struck me till his son came in with an English Bible and Prayer-Book. The old man put up his hand to his mouth in the apologetic manner of the Tamils. "We do not notice the foolish parts of the service. We like to hear the English. For the sake of the English we go."

"He did not turn to the East, but he did not keep quite straight; he just half turned." This from a pastor's wife, about one whom she had been observing during an ordination ceremony in the English cathedral. "He just half turned." It describes the nebulous attitude of mind of many a one to-day. India has not our historical background. It has no Foxe's Book of Martyrs yet. Perhaps that is why its people are so indifferent upon points which seem of importance to us. They have not had to fight for their freedom, in the sense at least our forefathers fought; there is no Puritan blood in their veins; and so they are willing to follow the lead of almost anyone, provided that lead is given steadily and persistently; which surely should make those in authority careful as to those in whose hands that lead is placed.

But the natural instinct of the converted idolater is dead against complexity in worship, and for simplicity. He does not want something as like his own old religion as possible, but as different as possible from it; and so we have good building material ready to hand, and a foundation ready laid. "But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon."

I hope this does not sound unkind. We give those who hold different views full credit for sincerity, and a right to their own opinions; but convictions are convictions, and, without judging others who differ, these are ours, and we want those at home who are with us in these things to unite to help to stem the tide that has already risen in India far higher than perhaps they know. Brave men are needed, men with a fuller development of spiritual vertebræ than is common in these easy-going days, and we need such men in our Native Church. God create them; they are not the product of theological colleges. And may God save His Missions in India from wasting His time, and money, and men, on the cultivation of what may evolve into something of no more use to creation than a new genus of jelly-fish.

The Government official and his friends were still talking among themselves: "Do we not know what the Christians do? Have we not ears? Have we not eyes? They do it in their way, we do it in ours. The thing itself is really the same. Yes, their religion is just like ours."

They could not see the vital difference between even the most vitiated forms of Christianity and their own Hinduism; there were so many resemblances, and these filled their mental vision at the moment. One could hardly wonder they could not.

They turned to me again, and with all the vigour of language at my command I told them that neither we nor those with us ever went to any church where we had reason to think there would be an exhibition of ecclesiastical paraphernalia. We did not believe it was in accordance with the simplicity of the Gospel; and I told them how simple the Truth really was, but they would not believe me. Those sights they had seen had struck them much as they struck the convert who described the Confirmation service thus: "We went up and knelt down before a stick" (the Bishop's pastoral staff). They had observed the immense attention paid to all these sacred trifles, and naturally they appeared to them as essential to the whole; part of it, nearly all of it, in fact; and even where the service was in the vernacular, their attention had been entirely diverted from the thing heard by the things seen.

Then I thought of the description of a primitive Christianity service as given in 1 Corinthians. There the idea evidently was that if an outsider came in, or looked in, as Hindus and Mohammedans so often look in here, he should understand what was going on; and being convicted of his sin and need, should be "convinced"; "and so, falling down on his face, he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth." Compare the effect produced upon the minds of these Hindu men by what they saw of our services, with the effect intended to be produced by the Holy Ghost. Can we say we have improved upon His pattern?

Oh for a return to the simplicity and power of the Gospel of Christ! Then we should not roll stumbling-blocks like these in our Indian brother's way. Oh for a return to the days of the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, to obscurity, and poverty, and suffering, and shame, and the utter absence of all earthly glory, and the winning of souls of a different make to the type thought sufficiently spiritual now! Oh for more of the signs of Apostleship—scars, and the cross—the real cross—the reproach of Christ the Crucified,—no mitre here, but there the crown!

CHAPTER 27: Though ye know Him not

"I have known cases of young ministers dissuaded from facing the missionary call by those who posed as friends of Foreign Missions, and yet presumed to argue: 'Your spiritual power and intellectual attainments are needed by the Church at home; they would be wasted in the Foreign Field.' 'Spiritual power wasted' in a land like India! Where is it so sorely needed as in a continent where Satan has constructed his strongest fortresses and displayed the choicest masterpieces of his skill? 'Intellectual ability wasted' among a people whose scholars smile inwardly at the ignorance of the average Western! Brothers, if God is calling you, be not deterred by flimsy subterfuges such as these. You will need the power of God the Holy Ghost to make you an efficient missionary. You will find your reputation for scholarship put to the severest test in India. Here is ample scope alike for men of approved spiritual power and for intellectual giants. And so I repeat, if God is calling you, buckle on your sword, come to the fight, and win your spurs among the cultured sons of India."

Rev. T. Walker, India.

THE sensation you experience is curious when you rise from the study of Sir Monier William's Brahmanism and Hinduism and go out to your work, and meet in that work someone who seems to be quoting that same book, not in paragraphs only, but in pages. He is talking Tamil, and the book is written in English; that is all the difference. He was standing by the wayside when I saw him: we got into conversation.

At first he reminded me of a sea anemone, with all its tentacles drawn inside, but gradually one by one they came out, and I saw what he really was; and I think the great Christian scholar, who laboured so hard to understand and translate into words the intricacies and mysteries of Indian thought, would have felt a little repaid had he known how his work would help in the practical business of a missionary's life. Part of our business is to meet the mind with which we are dealing half-way with quick comprehension. It is in this Sir Monier Williams helps.

When once this man felt himself understood, his whole attitude changed. At first, expecting, I suppose, that he was being mistaken for "an ignorant heathen" and worshipper of stocks and stones, he hardly took the trouble to do more than answer, as he thought, a fool according to his folly. The tentacles were all in then.

But that passed soon, and he pointed to the shed behind him, where two or three life-size idol horses stood and said how childish he knew it was, foolish and vain. But then, what else could be done? Idols are not objects of worship, and never were intended so to be; their only use is to help the uninitiated to worship Something. If nothing were shown them, they would worship nothing; and a non-worshipping human being is an animal, not a man.

He went on to answer the objections to this means of quickening intelligent worship by explaining how, in higher and purer ways, the thinkers of Hinduism had tried to make the unthinking think. "Look at our temples," he said. "There is a central shrine, with only one light in it. The darkness of the shrine symbolises the darkness of the world, of life and death and being. For life is a darkness, a whirlpool of dark waters. We stand on its edge, but we do not understand it. It is dark, but light there must be; one great light. So we show this certainty by the symbol of the one light in the shrine, in the very heart of our temples."

This led on to quotations from his own books, questioning the validity of such lights, which he finished the moment one began them, and this again led to our Lord's words,—how strong they sounded, and how direct—"I am the Light of the World." But he could not accept them in their simplicity, and here it was that the book I had been reading came in so helpfully. He spoke rapidly and eagerly, and such a mixture of Sanscrit and Tamil that if I had not had the clue I am not sure I could have followed him, and to have misunderstood him then might have driven all the tentacles in, and made it harder for the next one whom the Spirit may send to win his confidence.

He told me that, after much study of many religions, he held the eternal existence of one, Brahma. The human spirit, he said, is not really distinct from the Divine Spirit, but identical with it; the apparent distinction arises from our illusory view of things: there is absolutely no distinction in spirit. Mind is distinct, he admitted, and body is distinct, but spirit is identical; so that, "in a definitely defined sense, I am God, God is I. The so-called two are one, in all essentials of being." And he touched himself and said, "I am Brahma. I myself, my real I, am God."

It sounds terribly irreverent, but he did not for a moment mean it so. Go back to Gen. ii. 7, and try to define the meaning of the words, "the breath of life," and you will, if you think enough, find yourself in a position to understand how the Hindu, without revelation, ends as he does in delusion.

But, intertwined with this central fibre of his faith, there were strands of a strange philosophy; he held strongly the doctrine of Illusion, by which the one impersonal Spirit, "in the illusion which overspreads it, is to the external world what yarn is to cloth, what milk is to curds, what clay is to a jar, but only in that illusion," that is, "he is not the actual material cause of the world, as clay of a jar, but the illusory material cause, as a rope might be of a snake"; and the spirit of man "is that Spirit, personalised and limited by the power of illusion; and the life of every living spirit is nothing but an infinitesimal arc of the one endless circle of infinite existence."

Of course there are answers to this sort of reasoning which are perfectly convincing to the Western, but they fail to appeal to the Eastern mind. You suggest a practical test as to the reality or otherwise of this "Illusion"—touch something, run a pin into yourself, do anything to prove to yourself your own actuality, and he has his answer ready. Though theoretically he holds that there is one, and only one, Spirit, he "virtually believes in three conditions of being—the real, the practical, and the illusory; for while he affirms that the one Spirit, Brahma, alone has a real existence, he allows a practical separate existence to human spirits, to the world, and to the personal God or gods, as well as an illusory existence. Hence every object is to be dealt with practically, as if it were really what it appears to be."

This is only the end of a long and very confusing argument, which I expect I did not half understand, and he concluded it by quoting a stanza, thus translated by Dr. Pope, from an ancient Tamil classic—

"O Being hard to reach,

O Splendour infinite, unknown, in sooth

I know not what to do!"

"He is far away from me," he said, "a distant God to reach," and when I quoted from St. Augustine, "To Him who is everywhere, men come not by travelling, but by loving," and showed him the words, which in Tamil are splendidly negative, "He is NOT far from every one of us," he eluded the comfort and went back to the old question, "What is Truth? How can one prove what is Truth?"

There is an Indian story of a queen who "proved the truth by tasting the food." The story tells how her husband, who dearly loved her, and whom she dearly loved, lost his kingdom, wandered away with his queen into the forest, left her there as she slept, hoping she would fare better without him, and followed her long afterwards to her father's court, deformed, disguised, a servant among servants, a cook. Then her maidens came to her, told her of the wonderful cooking, magical in manner, marvellous in flavour and in fragrance. They are sure it is the long-lost king come back to her, and they bid her believe and rejoice. But the queen fears it may not be true. She must prove it, she must taste the food. They bring her some. She tastes, and knows. And the story ends in joy. "Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good." "If any man will do His Will, he shall know."

We got closer in thought after this. For the Oriental, a story is an illuminating thing. "I have sought for the way of truth," he said, "and sought for the way of light and life. Behind me, as I look, there is darkness. Before me there is only the Unknown." And then, with an earnestness I cannot describe, he said, "I worship Him I know not, the Unknown God." "Whom, therefore, ye worship, though ye know Him not, Him declare I unto you." One could only press home God's own answer to his words.

One other verse held him in its power before I went: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." With those two verses I left him.

It was evening, and he stood in the shadow, looking into it. There was a tangle of undergrowth, and a heavy grove of palms. It was all dark as you looked in. Behind was the shrine of the demon steeds, the god and his wife who ride out at night to chase evil spirits away. Near by was an old tree, also in shade, with an idol under it. It was all in shadow, and full of shadowy nothings, all dark.

But just outside, when I went, there was light; the soft light of the after-glow, which comes soon after the sun has set, as a sign that there is a sun somewhere, and shining. And I thought of his very last words to me, but I cannot describe the earnestness of them, "I worship the Unknown God."

Friends, who worship a God whom you know, whose joy in life is to know Him, will you remember and pray for that one, who to-day is seeking, I think in truth, to find the Unknown God?

CHAPTER 28: How Long?

"I shivered as if standing in the neighbourhood of hell."

Henry Martyn, India.

I  HAVE come home from vainly trying to help another child. She had heard of the children's Saviour, and I think she would have come to Him, but they suffered her not. She was, when I first saw her, sweet and innocent, with eyes full of light, great glancing, dancing eyes, which grew wistful for a moment sometimes, and then filled with a laugh again. She told me her mother lived very near, and asked me to come and see her; so I went.

The mother startled me. Such a face, or such a want of a face. One was looking at what had once been a face, but was now a strange spoiled thing, with strange hard eyes, so unlike the child's. There was no other feature fully shaped; it was one dreadful blank. She listened that day, with almost eagerness. She understood so quickly, too, one felt she must have heard before. But she told us nothing about herself, and we only knew that there was something very wrong. Her surroundings told us that.

Before we went again we heard who she was; a relative of one of our most honoured pastors, himself a convert years ago. Then a great longing possessed us to try to save her from a life for which she had not been trained, and especially we longed to save her little girl, and we went to try. This time the mother welcomed us, and told us how our words had brought back things she had heard when she was young. "But now it is all different, for I am different," and she told us her story. . . . "So I took poison, but it acted not as I intended. It only destroyed my face," and she touched the poor remnant with her hand, and went on with her terrible tale. There were people listening outside, and she spoke in a hoarse whisper. We could hardly believe she meant what she said, as she told of the fate proposed for her child. And oh, how we besought her then and there to give up the life, and let us help her, and that dear little one. She seemed moved. Something awoke within her and strove. Tears filled those hard eyes and rolled down her cheeks as we pleaded with her, in the name of all that was motherly, not to doom her little innocent girl, not to push her with her own hands down to hell. At last she yielded, promised that if in one week's time we would come again she would give her up to us, and as for herself, she would think of it, and perhaps she also would give up the life; she hated it, she said.

There was another girl there, a fair, quiet girl of fifteen. She was ill and very suffering, and we tried for her too; but there seemed no hope. "Take the little one; you are not too late for her," the mother said, and we went with the promise, "One more week and she is yours."

The week passed, and every day we prayed for that little one. Then when the time came, we went. Hope and fear alternated within us. One felt sick with dread lest anything had happened to break the mother's word, and yet one hoped. The house door was open. The people in the street smiled as we stopped our bandy, got out, and went in. I remembered their smiles afterwards, and understood. The mother was there: in a corner, crouching in pain, was the girl; on the floor asleep, drugged, lay the child with her little arms stretched out. The mother's eyes were hard.

It was no use. Outside in the street the people sat on their verandahs and laughed. "Offer twenty thousand rupees, and see if her mother will give her to you!" shouted one. Inside we sat beside that mother, not knowing what to say.

The child stirred in her sleep, and turned. "Will you go?" said the mother very roughly in her ear. She opened listless, senseless eyes. She had no wish to go. "She wanted to come last week," we said. The mother hardened, and pushed the child, and rolled her over with her foot. "She will not go now," she said.

Oh, it did seem pitiful! One of those pitiful, pitiful things which never grow less pitiful because they are common everywhere. That little girl, and this!

We took the mother's hands in ours, and pleaded once again. And then words failed us. They sometimes do. There are things that stifle words.

At last they asked us to go. The girl in the corner would not speak—could not, perhaps she only moaned; we passed her and went out. The mother followed us, half sorry for us,—there is something of the woman left in her,—half sullen, with a lowering sullenness. "You will never see her again," she said, and she named the town, one of the Sodoms of this Province, to which the child was soon to be sent; and then, just a little ashamed of her broken promise, she added, "I would have let her go, but he would not, no, never; and she does not belong to me now, so what could I do?" We did not ask her who "he" was. We knew. Nor did we ask the price he had paid. We knew; fifty rupees, about three pounds, was the price paid down for a younger child bought for the same purpose not long ago. This one's price might be a little higher. That is all.

We stood by the bullock cart ready to get in. The people were watching. The mother had gone back into the house. Then a great wave of longing for that child swept over us again. We turned and looked at the little form as it lay on the floor, dead, as it seemed, to all outward things. Oh that it had been dead! And we pleaded once more with all our heart, and once more failed.

We drove away. We could see them crowding to look after us, and we shut our eyes to shut out the sight of their smiles. The bullock bells jingled too gladly, it seemed, and we shut our ears to shut out the sound. And then we shut ourselves in with God, who knew all about it, and cared. How long, O God, how long?

And now we have heard that she has gone, and we know, from watching what happened before, just what will happen now. How day by day they will sear that child's soul with red-hot irons, till it does not feel or care any more. And a child's seared soul is an awful thing.

Forgive us for words which may hurt and shock; we are telling the day's life-story. Hurt or not, shocked or not, should you not know the truth? How can you pray as you ought if you only know fragments of truth? Truth is a loaf; you may cut it up nicely, like thin bread and butter, with all the crusts carefully trimmed. No one objects to it then. Or you can cut it as it comes, crust and all.

Think of that child to-night as you gather your children about you, and look in their innocent faces and their clear, frank eyes. Our very last news of her was that she had been in some way influenced to spread a lie about the place, first sign of the searing begun. I think of her as I saw her that first day, bright as a bird; and then of her as I saw her last, drugged on the floor; I think of her as she must be now, bright again, but with a different brightness—not the little girl I knew—never to be quite that little girl again.

Oh, comrades, do you wonder that we care? Do you wonder that we plead with you to care? Do you wonder that we have no words sometimes, and fall back into silence, or break out into words wrung from one more gifted with expression, who knew what it was to feel!

With such words, then, we close; looking back once more at that child on the floor, with the hands stretched out and the heavy eyes shut—and we know what it was they saw when they opened from that sleep—

"My God! can such things be?

Hast Thou not said that whatsoe'er is done

Unto Thy weakest and Thy humblest one,

Is even done to Thee?

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

Hoarse, horrible; and strong,

Rises to heaven that agonising cry,

Filling the arches of the hollow sky,

How long, O God, how long?"

CHAPTER 29: What do we count them worth?

"If we are simply to pray to the extent of a simple and pleasant and enjoyable exercise, and know nothing of watching in prayer, and of weariness in prayer, we shall not draw down the blessing that we may. We shall not sustain our missionaries who are overwhelmed with the appalling darkness of heathenism. . . . We must serve God even to the point of suffering, and each one ask himself, In what degree, in what point am I extending, by personal suffering, by personal self-denial, to the point of pain, the kingdom of Christ? . . . It is ever true that what costs little is worth little."

Rev. J. Hudson Taylor, China.

SHE picked up her water-vessel, and stood surveying us somewhat curiously. The ways of Picture-catching Missie Ammals were beyond her. Afterwards she sat down comfortably and talked. That was a year ago.

Then in the evening she and all her neighbours gathered in the market square for the open-air meeting. Shining of Life spoke for the first time. "I was a Hindu a year ago. I worshipped the gods you worship. Did they hear me when I prayed? No! They are dead gods. God is the living God! Come to the living God!"

One after the other the boys all witnessed that evening. Their clear boyish voices rang out round the ring. And some listened, and some laughed.

Behind us there was a little demon temple. It had a verandah barred down with heavy bars. Within these bars you could see the form of an idol. Beside us there was a shrine. Someone had put our lanterns on the top of this pyramid shrine. Before us there was the mass of dark faces. Behind us, then, black walls, black bars, a black shape; before us the black meeting, black losing itself in black. Around us light, light shining into the black. That was as it was a year ago. Now we are back at Dohnavur, and almost the first place we went to was this village, where we had taken the light and set it up in the heart of the dark. An earnest young schoolmaster had been sent to keep that light burning there, and we went expectantly. Had the light spread? We went straight to our old friend's house. She was as friendly as ever in her queer, rough, country way, but her heart had not been set alight. "Tell me what is the good of your Way? Will it fill the cavity within me?" and she struck herself a resounding smack in the region where food is supposed to go. "Will it stock my paddy-pots, or nourish my bulls, or cause my palms to bear good juice? If it will not do all these good things, what is the use of it?"

"If it is so important, why did you not come before?" The dear old woman who asked that lived here, and we searched through the labyrinthic courtyards to find her, but failed. The girl who listened in her pain is well now, but she says the desire she had has cooled. We found two or three who seem lighting up; may God's wind blow the flame to a blaze! But we came back feeling that we must learn more of the power of prayer ourselves if these cold souls are to catch fire. We remembered how, when we were children, we caught the sunlight, and focussed it, and set bits of paper on fire; and we longed that our prayers might be a lens to focus the Love-light of our God, and set their souls on fire.

Just one little bit of encouragement may be told by way of cheer. Blessing went off one day to see if the Village of the Warrior were more friendlily inclined, and Golden went to the Petra where they vowed they would never let us in. Before Blessing entered the village she knelt down under a banyan tree, and, remembering Abraham's servant, prayed for a sign to strengthen her faith that God would work in the place. While she prayed a child came and looked at her; then seeing her pray, she said, "Has that Missie Ammal sent you who came here more than a year ago?" Blessing said "Yes." Then the child repeated the chorus we had taught the children that first day. "None of us forget," she said; and told Blessing how the parents had agreed to allow us to teach if ever we should return. The village had been opened. He goeth before.

Golden's experience was equally strengthening to our faith. In the very street where they held a public demonstration to cleanse the road defiled by our "low-caste" presence, twenty houses have opened, where she is a welcome visitor. But all this is only for Love's sake, they say. They do not yet want Christ; so let us focus the light!

Then there is need for the fire of God to burn the cords that hold souls down. There is one with whom the Spirit strove last year when we were here. But a cord of sin was twined round her soul. She has a wicked brother-in-law, and a still more wicked sister, and together they plotted so evil a plot that, heathen though she is, she recoiled, and indignantly refused. So they quietly drugged her food, and did as they chose with her. And now the knot she did not tie, and which she wholly detested at first, seems doubly knotted by her own will. Oh, to know better how to use the burning-glass of prayer!

There may be a certain amount of sentiment, theoretically at least, in breaking up new ground. The unknown holds possibilities, and it allures one on. But in retracing the track there is nothing whatever of this. The broad daylight of bare truth shows you everything just as it is. Will you look once more at things just as they are, though it is not an interesting look.

A courtyard where the women have often heard. May we come in? Oh yes, come in! But with us in comes an old fakeer of a specially villainous type. His body is plastered all over with mud; he has nothing on but mud. His hair is matted and powdered with ashes, his face is daubed with vermilion and yellow, his wicked old eyes squint viciously, and he shows all his teeth, crimson with betel, and snarls his various wants. The women say "Chee!" Then he rolls in the dust, and squirms, and wriggles, and howls; and he pours out such unclean vials of wrath that the women, coerced, give him all he demands, and he rolls off elsewhere.

Now may we read to the women? No! Many salaams, but they have no time. Last night there was a royal row between two friends in adjoining courtyards, and family histories were laid bare, and pedigrees discovered. They are discussing these things to-day, and having heard it all before, they have no time to read.

Another courtyard, more refined; here the fakeer's opposite, a dignified ascetic, sits in silent meditation. "We know it all! You told us before!" But the women are friendly, and we go in; and after a long and earnest talk the white-haired grandmother touches her rosary. "This is my ladder to heaven." The berries are fine and set in chased gold, but they are only solidified tears, tears shed in wrath by their god, they say, which resolved themselves into these berries. How can tears make ladders to heaven? She does not know. She does not care. And a laugh runs round, but one's heart does not laugh. Such ladders are dangerous.

Another house; here the men are kind, and freely let us in and out. The Way, they say, is very good; they have heard the Iyer preach. But one day there is a stir in the house. One of the sons is very ill. He has been suffering for some time; now he is suddenly getting worse, and suspicions are aroused. Then the women whisper the truth: the father and he are at daggers drawn, and the father is slowly poisoning him—small doses of strychnine are doing the work. The stir is not very violent, but quite sufficient to make an excuse for not wanting to listen well. This sort of thing throws us back upon God. Lord, teach us to pray! Teach us the real secret of fiery fervency in prayer. We know so little of it. Lord, teach us to pray!

"Oh, Amma! Amma! do not pray! Your prayers are troubling me!"

We all looked up in astonishment. We had just had our Band Prayer Meeting, when a woman came rushing into the room, and began to exclaim like this. She was the mother of one of our girls, of whom I told you once before. She is still in the Terrible's den. Now the mother was all excitement, and poured out a curious story.

"When you went away last year I prayed. I prayed and prayed, and prayed again to my god to dispel your work. My daughter's heart was impressed with your words. I cried to my god to wash the words out. Has he washed them out? Oh no! And I prayed for a bridegroom, and one came; and the cart was ready to take her away, and a hindrance occurred; the marriage fell through. And I wept till my eyes well-nigh dissolved. And again another bridegroom came, and again an obstacle occurred. And yet again did a bridegroom come, and yet again an obstacle; and I cannot get my daughter 'tied,' and the neighbours mock, and my Caste is disgraced"—and the poor old mother cried, just sobbed in her shame and confusion of face. "Then I went to my god again, and said, 'What more can I offer you? Have I not given you all I have? And you reject my prayer!' Then in a dream my god appeared, and he said, 'Tell the Christians not to pray. I can do nothing against their prayers. Their prayers are hindering me!' And so, I beseech you, stop your prayers for fourteen days—only fourteen days—till I get my daughter tied!"

"And after she is tied?" we asked. "Oh, then she may freely follow your God! I will hinder her no more!"

Poor old mother! All lies are allowed where such things are concerned. We knew the proposed bridegroom came from a place three hundred miles distant, and the idea was to carry the poor girl off by force, as soon as she was "tied." We have been praying night and day to God to hinder this. And He is hindering! But there is need to go on. That mother is a devotee. She has received the afflatus. Sometimes at night it falls upon her, and she dances the wild, wicked dance, and tries to seize the girl, who shrinks into the farthest corner of the little house; and she dances round her, and chants the chant which even in daylight has power in it, but which at night appeals unspeakably. Once the girl almost gave way, and then in her desperation, hardly knowing the sin of it, ran to the place where poison was kept, drank enough to kill two, straight off, then lay down on the floor to die. Better die than do what they wanted her to do, she thought. But they found out what she had done, and drastic means were immediately used, and the poison only made her ill, and caused her days of violent pain. So there is need for the hindering prayer. Lord, teach us how to pray!

Is India crammed with the horrible? "Picturesque," they call it, who have "done it" in a month or two, and written a book to describe it. And the most picturesque part, they agree, is connected with the temples.

India ends off in a pointed rock; you can stand at the very point of the rock, with only ocean before you, and almost all Asia behind. A temple is set at the end of the point, as if claiming the land for its own. We took our convert boys and girls to the Cape for the Christmas holidays, and one morning some of us spent an hour under an old wall near the temple, which wall, being full of hermit crabs, is very interesting. We were watching the entertaining ways of these degenerate creatures when, through the soft sea sounds, we heard the sound of a Brahman's voice, and looking up, saw this:

A little group of five, sitting between the rocks and the sea, giving a touch of life to the scene, and making the picture perfect. There were two men, a woman, a child, and the priest. They were all marked with the V-shaped Vishnu mark. The priest twined the sacred Kusa grass round the fingers of his right hand, and gave each a handful of grass, and they did as he had done. Then they strewed the grass on the sand, to purify it from taint of earth, and then they began. The priest chanted names of God, then stopped, and drew signs on the sand. They followed him exactly. Then they bathed, bowing to the East between each dip, and worshipping; then returned and repeated it all. But before repeating it, they carefully painted the marks on their foreheads, using white and red pigment, and consulting a small English hand mirror—the one incongruous bit of West in this East, but symbolical of the times. The child followed it all, as a child will, in its pretty way. She was a dainty little thing in a crimson seeley and many gold jewels. The elder woman was dressed in dark green; the colouring was a joy to the eye, crimson and green, and the brown of the rock, against the blue of the sea.

It was one of those exquisite mornings we often have in the Tropics, when everything everywhere shows you God; shines the word out like a word illumined; sings it out in the Universe Song; and here in this South niche of Nature's cathedral, under the sky's transparency, these five, in the only way they knew, acknowledged the Presence of one great God, and worshipped Him. There was nothing revolting here, no hint of repulsive idolatry. They worshipped the Unseen. Very stately the Sanscrit sounded in which they chanted their adoration. "King of Immensity! King of Eternity! Boundless, Endless, Infinite One!" It might have been the echo of some ancient Christian hymn. It might have been, but it was not.

They are not worshipping God the Lord. They might be, but they are not. Whose is the responsibility? Is it partly yours and mine? The beauty of the scene has passed from us; the blue of the blue sky is blotted out—

"Only like souls I see the folk thereunder,

Bound who should conquer, slaves who should be kings;

Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder,

Sadly contented with a show of things.

Then with a rush the intolerable craving

Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call:

Oh to save these! To perish for their saving,

Die for their life, be offered for them all!"

The picture is made of souls—souls to be saved. "Oh to save these! To perish for their saving!" That is what the picture says. Picture! There is no picture. In the place where it was, there is simply a pain—God's world, and God dishonoured in it! Oh to see these people as souls! Refined or vulgar, beautiful or horrible, or just dull, oh to see them "only as souls," and to yearn over them, and pray for them as souls who must live eternally somewhere, and for whom each of us, in our measure, is responsible to God. Do you say we are not responsible for those particular souls? Who said that sort of thing first? "Where we disavow being keeper to our brother we're his Cain." If we are not responsible, why do we take the responsibility of appealing to them in impassioned poetry?

"Let every kindred, every tribe,

On this terrestrial ball,

To Him all majesty ascribe,

And crown Him Lord of all!"

What is the point of telling people to do a certain thing if we have no concern in whether they do it or not? The angels and the martyrs and the saints, to whom we appealed before, have crowned Him long ago. Our singing to them on the subject will make no difference either way; but when we turn to every kindred and tribe, the case alters. How can they crown Him Lord of all when they do not know about Him? Why do they not know about Him? Because we have not told them. It is true that many whom we have told heard "their one hope with an empty wonder"; but, on the other hand, it is true that the everlasting song rises fuller to-day because of those who, out in this dark heathendom, heard, and responded, and crowned Him King.

But singing hymns from a distance will never save souls. By God's grace, coming and giving and praying will. Are we prepared for this? Or would we rather sing? Searcher of hearts, turn Thy search-light upon us! Are we coming, giving, praying till it hurts? Are we praying, yea agonising in prayer? or is prayer but "a pleasant exercise"—a holy relief for our feelings?

We have sat together under the wall by the Southern sea. We have looked at the five as they worshipped Another, and not our God. Now let this little South window be like a little clear pane of glass, through which you may look up far to the North, over the border countries and the mountains to Tibet, over Tibet and away through the vastness of Central Asia, on to China, Mongolia, Manchuria; and even then you have only seen a few of the great dark Northern lands, which wait and wait—for you.

And this is only Asia, only a part of Asia. God looks down on all the world; and for every one of the millions who have never crowned Him King, Christ wore the crown of thorns. What do we count these millions worth? Do we count them worth the rearrangement of our day, that we may have more time to pray? Do we count them worth the laying down of a single ambition, the loosening of our hold on a single child or friend? Do we count them worth the yielding up of anything we care for very much? Let us be still for a moment and think. Christ counted souls worth Calvary. What do we count them worth?

CHAPTER 30: Two Safe

"God has given me the hunger and thirst for souls; will He leave me unsatisfied? No verily."

James Gilmour, Mongolia.

"That one soul has been brought to Christ in the midst of such hostile influences is so entirely and marvellously the Holy Spirit's work, that I am sometimes overjoyed to have been in any degree instrumental in effecting the emancipation of one."

Robert Noble, India.

TWO of our boys are safe. They left us very suddenly. We can hardly realise they are gone. The younger one was our special boy, the first of the boys to come, a very dear lad. I think of him as I saw him the last evening we all spent together, standing out on a wave-washed rock, the wind in his hair and his face wet with spray, rejoicing in it all. Not another boy dare go and stand in the midst of that seething foam, but the spice of danger drew him. He was such a thorough boy!

The call to leave his home for Christ came to him in an open-air meeting held in his village two years ago. Then there was bitterest shame to endure. His father and mother, aghast and distressed, did all they could to prevent the disgrace incurred by his open confession of Christ. He was an only son, heir to considerable property, so the matter was most serious. The father loved him dearly; but he nerved himself to flog the boy, and twice he was tied up and flogged. But they say he never wavered; only his mother's tears he found hardest to withstand.

Weeks passed of steadfast confession, and then it came to the place of choice between Christ and home. He chose Christ, and early one morning left all to follow Him. Do you think it was easy? He was a loving boy. Could it have been easy to stab his mother's heart?

When the household woke that morning he was on his way to us. The father gathered his clansmen, and they came in a crowd to the bungalow.

They sat on the floor in a circle, with the boy in their midst, and they pleaded. I remember the throb of that moment now. A single pulse seemed to beat in the room, so tense was the tension, until he spoke out bravely. "I will not go back," he said.

They promised everything—a house, lands, his inheritance to be given at once, a wife "with a rich dowry of jewels"—all a Tamil boy most desires they offered him. And they promised him freedom to worship God; "only come back and save your Caste, and do not break your mother's heart and disgrace your family."

Day after day they came, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups, but the mother never came. They described her in heart-moving language. She neither ate nor slept, they said, but sat with her hair undone, and wept and wailed the death-wail for her son.

At last they gave up coming, and we were relieved, for the long-continued strain was severe; and though he never wavered, we knew the boy felt it. We used to hear him praying for his people, pouring out his heart when he thought no one was near, sobbing sometimes as he named their names. The entreaty in the tone would make our eyes wet. If only he could have lived at home and been a Christian there! But we knew what had happened to others, and we dare not send him back.

Then a year or so afterward we all went to the water together, and he and three others were baptised. The first to go down into the water was the elder boy, Shining of Victory. Shining of Life was second. A few weeks of bright life—those happy days by the sea—and then in the same order, and called by the same messenger—the swift Indian messenger, cholera—they both went down into the other water, and crossed over to the other side.

Shining of Life was well in the morning, dead in the evening. When first the pain seized him he was startled. Then, understanding, he lay down in peace. The heathen crowded in. They could not be kept out. They taunted him as he lay. "This is your reward for breaking your Caste!" they said. The agony of cholera was on him. He could not say much, but he pointed up, "Do not trouble me; this is the way by which I am going to Jesus," and he tried to sing a line from one of our choruses, "My Strength and my Redeemer, my Refuge—Jesus!"

His parents had been sent for as soon as it was known that he was ill. They hurried over, the poor despairing mother crying aloud imploringly to the gods who did not hear. He pointed up again; he was almost past speech then, but he tried to say "Jesus" and "Come."

Then, while the heathen stood and mocked, and the mother beat her breast and wailed, and the father, silent in his grief, just stood and looked at his son, the boy passed quietly away. They hardly believed him dead.

Oh, we miss him so much! And our hearts ache for his people, for they mourn as those who have no hope. But God knows why He took him; we know it is all right.

Every memory of him is good. When the first sharp strain was over we found what a thorough boy he was, and in that week by the sea all the life and fun in him came out, and he revelled in the bathing and boating, and threw his whole heart into the holiday. We had many hopes for him; he was so full of promise and the energy of life.

And now it is all over for both. Was it worth the pain it cost? Such a short time to witness, was it worth while?

It is true it was very short. Most of the little space between their coming and their going was filled with preparation for a future of service here. And yet in that little time each of the two found one other boy who, perhaps, would never have been found if the cost had been counted too great. And I think, if you could ask them now, they would tell you Jesus' welcome made it far more than worth while.

CHAPTER 31: Three Objections

"May I have grace to live above every human motive; simply with God and to God, and not swayed, especially in missionary work, by the opinions of people not acquainted with the state of things, whose judgment may be contrary to my own."

Henry Martyn, India.

THESE letters have been put together to help our comrades at home to realise something of the nature of the forces ranged against us, that they may bring the Superhuman to bear upon the superhuman, and pray with an intelligence and intensity impossible to uninformed faith. We have long enough under-estimated the might of the Actual. We need more of Abraham's type of faith, which, without being weakened, considered the facts, and then, looking unto the promise, wavered not, but waxed strong. Ignorant faith does not help us much. Some years ago, when the first girl-convert came, friends wrote rejoicing that now the wall of Caste must give way; they expected soon to hear it had. As if a grain of dust falling from one of the bricks in that wall would in anywise shake the wall itself! Such faith is kind, but there it ends. It talks of what it knows not.

Then, as to the people themselves, there are certain fallacies which die hard. We read, the other day, in a home paper, that it was a well-known fact that "Indian women never smile." We were surprised to hear it. We had not noticed it. Perhaps, if they were one and all so abnormally depressed, we should find them less unwilling to welcome the Glad Tidings. Again, we read that you can distinguish between heathen and Christian by the wonderful light on the Christians' faces, as compared with "the sad expression on the faces of the poor benighted heathen." It is true that some Christians are really illuminated, but, as a whole, the heathen are so remarkably cheerful that the difference is not so defined as one might think. Then, again, we read in descriptive articles on India that the weary, hopeless longing of the people is most touching. But we find that our chief difficulty is to get them to believe that there is anything to long for. Rather we would describe them as those who think they have need of nothing, knowing not that they have need of everything. And again and again we read thrilling descriptions of India's women standing with their hands stretched out towards God. They may do this in visions; in reality they do not. And it is the utter absence of all this sort of thing which makes your help a necessity to us.

But none of you can pray in the way we want you to pray, unless the mind is convinced that the thing concerning which such prayer is asked is wholly just and right; and it seems to us that many of those who have followed the Story of this War may have doubts about the right of it—the right, for example, of converts leaving their homes for Christ's sake and His Gospel's. All will be in sympathy with us when we try to save little children, but perhaps some are out of sympathy when we do what results in sorrow and misunderstanding—"not peace, but a sword." So we purpose now to gather up into three, some of the many objections which are often urged upon those engaged in this sort of work, because we feel that they ought to be faced and answered if possible, lest we lose someone's prevailing prayer.

The first set of objections may be condensed into a question as to the right or otherwise of our "forcing our religion" upon those who do not want it. We are reminded that the work is most discouraging, conversions are rare, and when they occur they seem to create the greatest confusion. It is evident enough that neither we nor our Gospel are desired; and no wonder, when the conditions of discipleship involve so much. "We should not like strangers to come and interfere with our religion," write the friends who object, "and draw our children away from us; we should greatly resent it. No wonder the Hindus do!" And one reader of the letters wrote that she wondered how the girls who came out ever could be happy for a moment after having done such a wrong and heartless thing as to disobey their parents. "They richly deserve all they suffer," she wrote. "It is a perfect shame and disgrace for a girl to desert her own people!"

One turns from the reading of the letter, and looks at the faces of those who have done it; and knowing how they need every bit of prayer-help one can win for them, one feels it will be worth while trying to show those who blame them why they do it, and how it is they cannot do otherwise if they would be true to Christ.

This objection as to the right or wrong of the work as a whole, leads to another relating to baptism. It is a serious thing to think of families divided upon questions of religion; surely it would be better that a convert should live a consistent Christian life at home, even without baptism, than that she should break up the peace of the household by leaving her home altogether? Or, having been baptised, should she not return home and live there as a Christian?

Lastly—and this comes in letters from those who, more than any, are in sympathy with us—why not devote our energies to work of a more fruitful character? We are reminded of the mass-movement type of work, in which "nations are born in a day"; and often, too, of the nominal Christians who sorely need more enlightenment. Why not work along the line of least resistance, where conversion to God does not of necessity mean fire and sword, and where in a week we could win more souls than in years of this unresultful work?

We frankly admit that these objections and proposals are naturally reasonable, and that what they state is perfectly true. It is true that work among high-caste Hindus all over India (as among Moslems all over the world) is very difficult. It is true that open confession of Christ creates disastrous division in families. It is true there is other work to be done.

Especially we feel the force of the second objection raised. We fully recognise that the right thing is for the convert to live among her own people, and let her light shine in her own home; and we deplore the terrible wrench involved in what is known as "coming out." To a people so tenacious of custom as the Indians are, to a nature so affectionate as the Indian nature is, this cutting across of all home ties is a very cruel thing.

And now, only that we may not miss your prayer, we set ourselves to try to answer you. And, first of all, let us grasp this fact: it is not fair, nor is it wise, to compare work, and success in work, between one set of people and another, because the conditions under which that work is carried on are different, and the unseen forces brought to bear against it differ in character and in power. There is sometimes more "result" written down in a single column of a religious weekly than is to be found in the 646 pages of one of the noblest missionary books of modern days, On the Threshold of Central Africa. Or take two typical opposite lives, Moody's and Gilmour's. Moody saw more soul-winning in a day than Gilmour in his twenty-one years. It was not that the men differed. Both knew the Baptism of Power, both lived in Christ and loved. But these are extremes in comparison; take two, both missionaries, twin brothers in spirit, Brainerd of North America and Henry Martyn of India. Brainerd saw many coming to Jesus; Martyn hardly one. Each was a pioneer missionary, each was a flame of fire. "Now let me burn out for God," wrote Henry Martyn, and he did it. But the conditions under which each worked varied as widely spiritually as they varied climatically. Can we compare their work, or measure it by its visible results? Did God? Let us leave off comparing this with that—we do not know enough to compare. Let us leave off weighing eternal things and balancing souls in earthly scales. Only God's scales are sufficiently sensitive for such delicate work as that.

We take up the objections one by one. First, "Why do you go where you are not wanted?"

We go because we believe our Master told us to go. He said, "all the world," and "every creature." Our marching orders are very familiar. "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." "All the world" means everywhere in it, "every creature" means everyone in it. These orders are so explicit that there is no room to question what they mean.

All missionaries in all ages have so understood these words "all" and "every." Nearly seven hundred years ago the first missionary to the Moslems found no welcome, only a prison; but he never doubted he was sent to them. "God wills it," he said, and went again. They stoned him then, and he died—died, but never doubted he was sent.

Our Master Himself went not only to the common people, who heard Him gladly, but to the priestly and political classes, who had no desire for the truth. "Ye will not come to Me that ye might have life," He said, and yet He gave them the chance to come by going to them. The words, "If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink," were spoken to an audience which was not thirsting for the Gospel.

St. Paul would willingly have spent his strength preaching the Word in Asia, especially in Galatia, where the people loved him well; but he was under orders, and he went to Europe, to Philippi, where he was put in prison; to Thessalonica, where the opposition was so strong that he had to flee away by night; to Athens, where he was the butt of the philosophers. But God gave souls in each of these places; only a few in comparison to the great indifferent crowd, but he would tell you those few were worth going for. You would not have had him miss a Lydia, a Damaris? Above all, you would not have had him disobey his Lord's command?

So whether our message is welcomed or not, the fact remains we must go to all; and the worse they are and the harder they are, the more evident is it that, wanted or not, it is needed by them.

M. Coillard was robbed by the people he had travelled far to find. "You see we made no mistake," he writes, "in bringing the Gospel to the Zambesi."

The second objection is, "Why break up families by insisting on baptism as a sine quâ non of discipleship?"

And again we answer, Because we believe our Master tells us to. He said, "Baptising them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." What right have we, His servants, to stop short of full obedience? Did He not know the conditions of high-caste Hindu life in India when He gave this command? Was He ignorant of the breaking up of families which obedience to it would involve? "Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you nay, but rather division." And then come words which we have seen lived out literally in the case of every high-caste convert who has come. "For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." These are truly awful verses; no one knows better than the missionary how awful they are. There are times when we can hardly bear the pain caused by the sight of this division. But are we more tender than the Tender One? Is our sympathy truer than His? Can we look up into His eyes and say, "It costs them too much, Lord; it costs us too much, to fully obey Thee in this"?

But granted the command holds, why should not the baptised convert return home and live there? Because he is not wanted there, as a Christian. Exceptions to this rule are rare (we are speaking of Caste Hindus), and can usually be explained by some extenuating circumstance.

The high-caste woman who said to us, "I cannot live here and break my Caste; if I break it I must go," spoke the truth. Keeping Caste includes within itself the observance of certain customs which by their very nature are idolatrous. Breaking Caste means breaking through these customs; and one who habitually disregarded and disobeyed rules, considered binding and authoritative by all the rest of the household, would not be tolerated in an orthodox Hindu home. It is not a question of persecution or death, or of wanting or not wanting to be there; it is a question of not being wanted there, unless, indeed, she will compromise. Compromise is the one open door back into the old home, and God only knows what it costs when the choice is made and that one door is shut.

This ever-recurring reiteration of the power and the bondage of Caste may seem almost wearisome, but the word, and what lies behind it, is the one great answer to a thousand questions, and so it comes again and again. In Southern India especially, and still more so in this little fraction of it, and in the adjoining kingdoms of Travancore and Cochin, Caste feeling is so strong that sometimes it is said that Caste is the religion of South India. But everywhere all over India it is, to every orthodox Hindu, part of his very self. Get his Caste out of him? Can you? You would have to drain him of his life-blood first.

It is the strength of this Caste spirit which in South India causes it to take the form of a determination to get the convert back. Promises are given that they may live as Christians at home. "We will send you in a bandy to church every Sunday!"—promises given to be broken. If the convert is a boy, he may possibly reappear. If a girl—I was going to say never; but I remember hearing of one who did reappear, after seventeen years imprisonment—a wreck. Send them back, do you say? Think of the dotted lines in some chapters you have read; ponder the things they cover; then send them back if you can.

The third objection divides into two halves. The first half is, "Why do you not go to the Christians?" To which we answer, we do, and for exactly the same reason as that which we have given twice before, because our Master told us to do so. Our marching orders are threefold, one order concerning each form of service touched by the three objections. The third order touches this, "Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." So we go, and try to teach them the "all things"; and some of them learn them, and go to teach others, and so the message of a full Gospel spreads, and the Bride gets ready for the Bridegroom.

The second half of this last objection is, "Why not do easier work? There are so many who are more accessible, why not go to them?" And there does seem to be point in the suggestion that if there are open doors, it might be better to enter into them, rather than keep on knocking at closed ones.

We do seek to enter the so-called open doors, but we never find they are so very wide open when it is known that we bring nothing tangible with us. Spiritual things are not considered anything by most. Still, work among such is infinitely easier, and many, comparatively speaking, are doing it.

The larger number here are working among the Christians, the next larger number among the Masses, and the fewest always, everywhere, among the Classes, where conversion involves such terrible conflicts with the Evil One, that all that is human in one faints and fails as it confronts the cost of every victory.

But real conversion anywhere costs. By conversion we mean something more than reformation; that raises fewer storms. The kind of work, however, which more than any other seems to fascinate friends at home is what is known as the "mass movement," and though we have touched upon it before, perhaps we had better explain more fully what it really is. This movement, or rather the visible result thereof, is often dilated upon most rapturously. I quote from a Winter Visitor: "Christian churches counted by the thousand, their members by the million; whole districts are Christian, entire communities are transformed." And we look at one another, and ask each other, "Where?"

But to that question certain would answer joyously, "Here!" There are missions in India where the avowed policy is to baptise people "at the outset, not on evidence of what is popularly called conversion. . . . We baptise them 'unto' the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and not because we have reason to believe that they have received the Spirit's baptism,"—we quote a leader in the movement, and he goes on to say, if it is insisted "that we should wait until this change (conversion) is effected before baptising them, we reply that in most cases we would have to wait for a long time, and often see the poor creatures die without the change."

Of course every effort is made by revival services and camp meetings to bring these baptised Christians to a true knowledge of Christ, and it is considered that this policy yields more fruit than the other, which puts conversion first and baptism second. It is certainly richer in "results," for among the depressed classes and certain of the middle Castes, among whom alone the scheme can be carried out, there is no doubt that many are found ready to embrace Christianity, as the phrase goes, sometimes genuinely feeling it is the true religion, and desiring to understand it, sometimes for what they can get.

It must be admitted—for we want to state the case fairly—that a mass movement gives one a splendid chance to preach Christ, and teach His Gospel day by day. And the power in it does lay hold of some; we have earnest men and women working and winning others to-day, fruit of the mass movement of many years ago.

But on the whole, we fear it, and do not encourage it here. The dead weight of heathenism is heavy enough, but when you pile on the top of that the incubus of a dead Christianity—for a nominal thing is dead—then you are terribly weighted down and handicapped, as you try to go forward to break up new ground.

So, though we sympathise with everything that tends towards life and light in India, and rejoice with our brothers who bind sheaves, believing that though all is not genuine corn, some is, yet we feel compelled to give ourselves mainly to work of a character which, by its very nature, can never be popular, and possibly never successful from a statistical point of view, never, till the King comes, Whose Coming is our hope.

CHAPTER 32: "Show me Thy Glory!"

"Yesterday I was called to see a patient, a young woman who had been suffering terribly for three days. It was the saddest case I ever saw in my life. . . . I had to leave her to die. . . . The experience was such a terrible one that, old and accustomed surgeon as I am, I have been quite upset by it ever since. As long as I live the memory of that scene will cling to me."

A Chinese Missionary.

"If we refuse to be corns of wheat falling into the ground and dying; if we will neither sacrifice prospects nor risk character and property and health, nor, when we are called, relinquish home and break family ties, for Christ's sake and His Gospel, then we shall abide alone."

Thomas Gajetan Ragland, India.

"Not mere pity for dead souls, but a passion for the Glory of God, is what we need to hold us on to Victory."

Miss Lilias Trotter, Africa.

WE are all familiar with the facts and figures which stand for so much more than we realise. We can repeat glibly enough that there are nearly one thousand, five hundred million people in the world, and that of these nearly one thousand million are heathen or Mohammedan. Perhaps we can divide this unthinkable mass into comprehensible figures. We can tell everyone who is interested in hearing it, that of this one thousand million, two hundred million are Mohammedans; two hundred million more are Hindus; four hundred and thirty million are Buddhists and Confucianists; and more than one hundred and fifty million are Pagans.

But have we ever stopped and let the awfulness of these statements bear down upon us? Do we take in, that we are talking about immortal souls?

We quote someone's computation that every day ninety-six thousand people die without Christ. Have we ever for one hour sat and thought about it? Have we thought of it for half an hour, for a quarter of an hour, for five unbroken minutes? I go further, and I ask you, have you ever sat still for one whole minute and counted by the ticking of your watch, while soul after soul passes out alone into eternity?

. . . I have done it. It is awful. At the lowest computation, sixty-six for whom Christ died have died since I wrote "eternity."

"Oh my God! my God! Men are perishing, and I take no heed!" . . .

Sixty-six more have gone. Oh, how can one keep so calm? Death seems racing with the minute hand of my watch. I feel like stopping that terrible run of the minute hand. Round and round it goes, and every time it goes round, sixty-six people die.

I have just heard of the dying of one of the sixty-six. We knew her well. She was a widow; she had no protectors, and an unprotected widow in India stands in a dangerous place. We knew it, and tried to persuade her to take refuge in Jesus. She listened, almost decided, then drew back; afterwards we found out why. You have seen the picture of a man sucked under sea by an octopus; it was like that. You have imagined the death-struggle; it was like that. But it all went on under the surface of the water, there was nothing seen above, till perhaps a bubble rose slowly and broke; it was like that. One day, in the broad noontide, a woman suddenly fell in the street. Someone carried her into a house, but she was dead, and those who saw that body saw the marks of the struggle upon it. The village life flowed on as before; only a few who knew her knew she had murdered her body to cover the murder of her soul. We had come too late for her.

Last week I stood in a house where another of those sixty-six had passed. Crouching on the floor, with her knees drawn up and her head on her knees, a woman began to tell me about it. "She was my younger sister. My mother gave us to two brothers"—and she stopped. I knew who the brothers were. I had seen them yesterday—two handsome high-caste Hindus. We had visited their wives, little knowing. The woman said no more; she could not. She just shuddered and hid her face in her hands. A neighbour finished the story. Something went wrong with the girl. They called in the barber's wife—the only woman's doctor known in these parts. She did her business ignorantly. The girl died in fearful pain. Hindu women are inured to sickening sights, but this girl's death was so terrible that the elder sister has never recovered from the shock of seeing it. There she sits, they tell me, all day long, crouching on the floor, mute.

All do not pass like that; some pass very quietly, there are no bands in their death; and some are innocent children—thank God for the comfort of that! But it must never be forgotten that the heathen sin against the light they have; their lives witness against them. They know they sin, and they fear death. An Indian Christian doctor, practising in one of our Hindu towns, told me that he could not speak of what he had seen and heard at the deathbeds of some of his patients.

A girl came in a moment ago, and I told her what I was doing. Then I showed her the diagram of the Wedge; the great black disc for heathendom, and the narrow white slit for the converts won. She looked at it amazed. Then she slowly traced her finger round the disc, and she pointed to the narrow slit, and her tears came dropping down on it. "Oh, what must Jesus feel!" she said. "Oh, what must Jesus feel!" She is only a common village girl, she has been a Christian only a year; but it touched her to the quick to see that great black blot.

I know there are those who care at home, but do all who care, care deeply enough? Do they feel as Jesus feels? And if they do, are they giving their own? They are helping to send out others, perhaps; but are they giving their own?

Oh, are they truly giving themselves? There must be more giving of ourselves if that wedge is to be widened in the disc. Some who care are young, and life is all before them, and the question that presses now is this: Where is that life to be spent? Some are too old to come, but they have those whom they might send, if only they would strip themselves for Jesus' sake.

Mothers and fathers, have you sympathy with Jesus? Are you willing to be lonely for a few brief years, that all through eternal ages He may have more over whom to rejoice, and you with Him? He may be coming very soon, and the little interval that remains, holds our last chance certainly to suffer for His sake, and possibly our last to win jewels for His crown. Oh, the unworked jewel-mines of heathendom! Oh, the joy His own are missing if they lose this one last chance!

Sometimes we think that if the need were more clearly seen, something more would be done. Means would be devised; two or three like-minded would live together, so as to save expenses, and set a child free who must otherwise stay for the sake of one of the three. Workers abroad can live together, sinking self and its likes and dislikes for the sake of the Cause that stands first. But if such an innovation is impossible at home, something else will be planned, by which more will be spared, when those who love our God love Him well enough to put His interests first. "Worthy is the Lamb to receive!" Oh, we say it, and we pray it! Do we act as if we meant it? Fathers and mothers, is He not worthy? Givers, who have given your All, have you not found Him worthy?

"Bare figures overwhelmed me," said one, as he told how he had been led to come out; "I was fairly staggered as I read that twenty-eight thousand a day in India alone, go to their death without Christ. And I questioned, Do we believe it? Do we really believe it? What narcotic has Satan injected into our systems that this awful, woeful, tremendous fact does not startle us out of our lethargy, our frightful neglect of human souls?"

There is a river flowing through this District. It rises in the Western Ghauts, and flows for the greater part of the year a placid, shallow stream. But when the monsoon rains overflow the watersheds, it fills with a sudden, magnificent rush; you can hear it a mile away.

Out in the sandy river bed a number of high stone platforms are built, which are used by travellers as resting-places when the river is low. Some years ago a party of labourers, being belated, decided to sleep on one of these platforms; for though the rainy season was due, the river was very low. But in the night the river rose. It swept them on their hold on the stone. It whirled them down in the dark to the sea.

Suppose that, knowing, as they did not, that the rain had begun to fall on the hills, and the river was sure to fill, you had chanced to pass when those labourers were settling down for the night, would you, could you, have passed on content without an effort to tell them so? Would you, could you have gone to bed and slept in perfect tranquillity while those men and women whom you had seen were out in the river bed?

If you had, the thunder of the river would have wakened you, and for ever your very heart would have been cold with a chill chiller than river water, cold at the thought of those you dared to leave to drown!

You cannot see them, you say. You can. God has given eyes to the mind. Think, and you will see. Then listen. It is God Who speaks. "If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, 'Behold we knew it not,' doth not He that pondereth the heart consider it, and He that keepeth thy soul, doth not He know it? and shall not He render to every man according to his works?"

Oh, by the thought of the many who are drawn unto death, and the many that are ready to be slain, by the thought of the sorrow of Jesus Who loves them, consider these things!

But all are not called to come! We know it. We do not forget it. But is it a fact so forgotten at home that a missionary need press it? What is forgotten surely is that the field is the world.

You would not denude England! Would England be denuded? Would a single seat on the Bishop's bench, or a single parish or mission hall, be left permanently empty, if the man who fills it now moved out to the place which no one fills—that gap on the precipice edge?

But suppose it were left empty, would it be so dreadful after all? Would there not be one true Christian left to point the way to Christ? And if the worst came to the worst, would there not still be the Bible, and ability to read? Need anyone die unsaved, unless set upon self-destruction? If only Christians in England knew how to draw supplies direct from God, if only those who cannot come would take up the responsibility of the unconverted around them, why should not a parish here and there be left empty for awhile? Surely we should not deliberately leave so very many to starve to death, because those who have the Bread of Life have a strong desire for sweets. Oh, the spiritual confectionery consumed every year in England! God open our eyes to see if we are doing what He meant, and what He means should continue! But some men are too valuable to be thrown away on the mission field; they are such successful workers, pastors, evangelists, leaders of thought. They could not possibly be spared. Think of the waste of burying brain in unproductive sand! Apparently it is so, but is it really so? Does God view it like that? Where should we have been to-day if He had thought Jesus too valuable to be thrown away upon us? Was not each hour of those thirty-three years worth more than a lifetime of ours?

What is God's definition of that golden word "success"? He looks at Roman Catholic Europe, and Roman and heathen South America, and Mohammedan and heathen Africa and Asia, and many a forgotten place in many a great land. And then He looks at us, and I wonder what He thinks. Ragland, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, after years of brain-burying waste, wrote that He was teaching him that "of all plans for securing success the most certain is Christ's own, becoming a corn of wheat, falling into the ground and dying." If coming abroad means that for anyone, is it too much to ask? It was what our dear Lord did.

This brings us to another plea. I find it in the verse that carves out with two strokes the whole result of two lives. "If any man's work abide. . . . If any man's work shall be burned." The net result of one man's work is gold, silver, precious stones; the net result of another man's work is wood, hay, stubble. Which is worth the spending of a life?

An earnest worker in her special line of work is looking back at it from the place where things show truest, and she says, "God help us all! What is the good done by any such work as mine? 'If any man build upon this foundation . . . wood, hay, stubble. . . . If any man's work shall be burned he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire!' An infinitude of pains and labour, and all to disappear like the stubble and the hay."

Success—what is it worth?

"I was flushed with praise,

But pausing just a moment to draw breath,

I could not choose but murmur to myself,

'Is this all? All that's done? and all that's gained?

If this, then, be success, 'tis dismaller

Than any failure.'"

So transparent a thing is the glamour of success to clear-seeing poet-eyes, and should it dazzle the Christian to whom nothing is of any worth but the thing that endures? Should arguments based upon comparisons between the apparent success of work at home as distinguished from work abroad influence us in any way? Is it not very solemn, this calm, clear setting forth of a truth which touches each of us? "Every man's work shall be made manifest, for the Day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." And as we realise the perishableness of all work, however apparently successful, except the one work done in the one way God means, oh, does it not stir us up to seek with an intensity of purpose which will not be denied, to find out what that one work is? The same thought comes out in the verse which tells us that the very things we are to do are prepared before, and we are "created in Christ Jesus" to do them. If this is so, then will the doing of anything else seem worth while, when we look back and see life as God sees it?

It may be that the things prepared are lying close at our hand at home, but it may be they are abroad. If they are at home there will be settled peace in the doing of them there; but if they are abroad, and we will not come and do them?—Oh, then our very prayers will fall as fall the withered leaves, when the wind that stirred them falls, yea more so, for the withered leaves have a work to do, but the prayers which are stirred up by some passing breeze of emotion do nothing, nothing for eternity. God will not hear our prayers for the heathen if He means us to be out among them instead of at home praying for them, or if He means us to give up some son or daughter, and we prefer to pray.

Lord save us from hypocrisy and sham! "Shrivel the falsehood" from us if we say we love Thee but obey Thee not! Are we staying at home, and praying for missions when Thou hast said to us "Go"? Are we holding back something of which Thou hast said, "Loose it, and let it go"? Lord, are we utterly through and through true? Lord God of truthfulness, save us from sham! Make us perfectly true!

I turn to you, brothers and sisters at home! Do you know that if God is calling you, and you refuse to obey you will hardly know how to bear what will happen afterwards? Sooner or later you will know, yea burn through every part of your being, with the knowledge that you disobeyed, and lost your chance, lost it for ever. For that is the awful part. It is rarely given to one to go back and pick up the chance he knowingly dropped. The express of one's life has shot past the points, and one cannot go back; the lines diverge.

"Some of us almost shudder now to think how nearly we stayed at home," a missionary writes. "Do not, I beseech you, let this great matter drift. Do not walk in uncertainty. Do not be turned aside. You will be eternally the poorer if you do."

It may be you are not clear as to what is God's will for you. You are in doubt, you are honest, but a thousand questions perplex you. Will you go to God about it, and get the answer direct?

If you are puzzled about things which a straightforward missionary can explain, will you buy a copy of Do Not Say, and read it alone with God? Let me emphasise that word "alone." "Arise, go forth into the plain, and I will there talk with thee." "There was a Voice . . . when they stood and had let down their wings."

Oh, by the thought of the Day that is coming, when the fire shall try all we are doing, and only the true shall stand, I plead for an honest facing of the question before it is too late!

But this is not our strongest plea. We could pile them up, plea upon plea, and not exhaust the number which press and urge one to write. We pass them all, and go to the place where the strongest waits: God's Glory is being given to another. This is the most solemn plea, the supreme imperative call. "Not mere pity for dead souls, but a passion for the Glory of God, is what we need to hold us through to victory."

"I am the Lord, that is My Name, and My Glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images." But the men He made to glorify Him take His Glory from Him, give it to another; that, the sin of it, the shame, calls with a low, deep under-call through all the other calls. God's Glory is being given to another. Do we love Him enough to care? Or do we measure our private cost, if these distant souls are to be won, and, finding it considerable, cease to think or care? "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see"—"They took Jesus and led Him away. And He, bearing His cross, went forth into a place called the place of a skull . . . where they crucified Him." . . . "Herein is love." . . . "God so loved the world." . . . Have we petrified past feeling? Can we stand and measure now? "I know that only the Spirit, Who counted every drop that fell from the torn brow of Christ as dearer than all the jewelled gates of Paradise, can lift the Church out of her appreciation of the world, the world as it appeals to her own selfish lusts, into an appreciation of the world as it appeals to the heart of God." O Spirit, come and lift us into this love, inspire us by this love. Let us look at the vision of the Glory of our God with eyes that have looked at His love!

We would not base a single plea on anything weaker than solid fact. Sentiment will not stand the strain of the real tug of war; but is it fact, or is it not, that Jesus counted you and me, and the other people in the world, actually worth dying for? If it is true, then do we love Him well enough to care with the whole strength of our being, that to-day, almost all over the world, His Glory is being given to another? If this does not move us, is it because we do not love Him very much, or is it that we have never prayed with honest desire, as Moses prayed, "I beseech Thee, show me Thy Glory"? He only saw a little of it. "Behold there is a place by Me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: and it shall come to pass, while My Glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with My hand while I pass by." And the Glory of the Lord passed, and Moses was aware of something of it as it passed, but "My face shall not be seen," And yet that little was enough to mark him out as one who lived for one purpose, shone in the light of it, burned with the fire of it—he was jealous for the Glory of his God.

And we—"We beheld His Glory, the Glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth"; and we—we have seen "the light of the knowledge of the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

"While My Glory passeth by I will . . . cover thee . . . My face shall not be seen." "But we all with open face, reflecting, as in a mirror, the Glory of the Lord, are changed"—Are we? Do we? Do we know anything at all about it? Have we ever apprehended this for which we are apprehended of Christ Jesus? Have we seen the Heavenly Vision that breaks us down, and humbles us to hear the Voice of the Lord ask, "Who will go for Us?" and strengthens us to answer, "Here am I, send me," and holds us on to obey if we hear Him saying "Go"?

"I beseech Thee, show me Thy Glory!" Shall we pray it, meaning it now, to the very uttermost? The uttermost may hold hard things, but, easy or hard, there is no other way to reach the place where our lives can receive an impetus which will make them tell for eternity. The motive power is the love of Christ. Not our love for Him only, but His very love itself. It was the mighty, resistless flow of that glorious love that made the first missionary pour himself forth on the sacrifice and service. And the joy of it rings through triumphantly, "Yea, and if I be poured forth . . . I joy and rejoice with you all!"

Yes, God's Glory is our plea, highest, strongest, most impelling and enduring of all pleas. But oh, by the thought of the myriads who are passing, by the thought of the Coming of the Lord, by the infinite realities of life and death, heaven and hell, by our Saviour's cross and Passion, we plead with all those who love Him, but who have not considered these things yet, consider them now!

Let Him show us the vision of the Glory, and bring us to the very end of self, let Him touch our lips with the live coal, and set us on fire to burn for Him, yea, burn with consuming love for Him, and a purpose none can turn us from, and a passion like a pure white flame, "a passion for the Glory of God!"

Oh, may this passion consume us! burn the self out of us, burn the love into us—for God's Glory we ask it, Amen.

"Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing . . . Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power be unto Him."

APPENDIX: Some Indian Saints

THERE was one—he has joined the company of Indian saints in glory now—the poet of the Mission, and our friend,—one so true in all his ways that a Hindu lad observing him with critical schoolboy eyes, saw in him, as in a mirror, something of the holiness of God, and, won by that look, became a Christian and a winner of souls. Some of the noblest converts of our Mission are the direct result of that Tamil poet's life. There is another; he is old, and all through his many years he has been known as the one-word man, the man of changeless truth. He is a village pastor, whom all the people love. Go into his cottage any time, any day, and you will find one and another with him, and you will see the old man, with his loving face and almost quite blind eyes, bending patiently to catch every word of the story they are telling, and then you will hear him advising and comforting, as a father would his child. For miles round that countryside the people know him, and he is honoured by Hindus and by Christians as India honours saints.

I remember once seeing the poet and the pastor together. They belonged to widely different castes, but that was forgotten now. The two old white heads were bent over the same letter—a letter telling of the defection of a young convert each had loved as a son, and they were weeping over him. It was the ancient East living its life before us: "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom my son, my son!" But what made it a thing to remember in this land of Caste divisions, even among Christians, was the overflowing of the love that made those two men one.

There are others. Money, the place it holds in a man's affections, is supposed to be a fair test of character. We could tell of a lawyer who is losing money to-day rather than touch unrighteous gains; of a doctor who gives to his church till he feels, and travels any distance to help the poor who cannot pay; of a peasant who risks a certain amount of injury to his palms rather than climb them on Sunday; and in many an old-world town and village, dotted about on the wide red plain, we have simple, humble, holy people, of whom the world knows nothing—pastors in lonely out-stations, teachers, and workers, and just ordinary Christians—who do the day's work, and shine as they do it. We think of such men and women when we hear the critic's cry, and we wish he could know them as they are.

It is these men and women who ask us to tell it out clearly how sorely our Indian Church needs your prayers. They have no desire to hide things. They speak straighter than we do, and far more strongly, and they believe, as we do, that if you know more you will pray more.

THE END.

========

For more on Amy Carmichael you may want to check:

·         A chance to die – the biography by Elisabeth Elliot

·         If (paperback) – the well-known and though provoking meditation on the Cross.

·         I come quietly – a devotional using some of Carmichael’s writings.

·         MOVIE: The Amy Carmichael Story

* * * * * * * * * *

If you have been blessed by this volume, you may also be interested in some of our other Christian Classics Treasury collections:

MISSIONS COLLECTIONS:

- Amy Carmichael 8-in-1

- The Hudson Taylor Collection (7-in-1)

- David Livingstone Collection (5-in-1)

- Samuel Zwemer 7-in-1(Missions in Arabia)

- Samuel Zwemer, 7-in-1, Vol 2

- Key to the Missionary Problem (Andrew Murray)

- Classic Missions Texts  (Murray, Allen, Carey, Zwemer)

CLASSIC COLLECTIONS:

- 7 Catholic Classics

- 7 Classics on PRAYER

- 7 Classics on HOLINESS

- 7 Classics on EVANGELISM and SOUL-WINNING

- 5 Classics on the HOLY SPIRIT

- 5 Classics on POWER

- EDERSHEIM COLLECTION  (Sketches of Jewish Social Life; The Temple; Jesus the Messiah)

- The Didache (Teaching of the 12 Apostles)

PREACHERS AND REVIVALISTS:

- Biography of John Wesley Collection: 4-in-1

- Biography of Andrew Murray

- Charles Spurgeon: 40 sermons on Prayer

- Charles Spurgeon: Lectures to My Students

- The George Muller Collection

- The Revival Writings of Jonathan Edwards (7-in-1)

- The Works of Catherine Booth (7-in-1)

- The Works of Charles Finney

- The Works of D. L. Moody

- The Works of R. A. Torrey

- The Works of William Booth

[1] See the Statistical Society’s Journal, September, 1888, for invaluable notes on the ‘System of Work and Wages in the Cornish Mines,’ by L.L. Price, M.A., of Oriel College, Oxford.

[2] The late Henry Martyn Jeffery, M.A., F.R.S., in 1883.

[3] Rev. Henry Bailey, D.D., Canon of Canterbury, supplies us with this story from the lips of the late Rev. T.H. Shepherd, who was the last surviving Canon of the Collegiate Church in Southwell:—

‘Henry Martyn had just entered the College as a Freshman under the Rev. Mr. Catton. I was the year above him, i.e. second year man; and Mr. Catton sent for me to his rooms, telling me of Martyn, as a quiet youth, with some knowledge of classics, but utterly unable as it seemed to make anything of even the First Proposition of Euclid, and desiring me to have him into my rooms, and see what I could do for him in this matter. Accordingly, we spent some time together, but all my efforts appeared to be in vain; and Martyn, in sheer despair, was about to make his way to the coach office, and take his place the following day back to Truro, his native town. I urged him not to be so precipitate, but to come to me the next day, and have another trial with Euclid. After some time light seemed suddenly to flash upon his mind, with clear comprehension of the hitherto dark problem, and he threw up his cap for joy at his Eureka. The Second Proposition was soon taken, and with perfect success; but in truth his progress was such and so rapid, that he distanced every one in his year, and, as everyone knows, became Senior Wrangler.’

[4] Early Years and Late Reflections, vol. iii. p. 5.

[5] Introduction to Journals and Letters of Henry Martyn, 1837.

[6] See the delightful Charles Simeon, by H.C.G. Moule, M.A. (1892), published since this was written.

[7] Rev. Mr. Curgenven, curate of Kenwyn and Kea.

[8] William Carey’s most intimate friend. See p. 46 of Life of William Carey, D.D., 2nd ed. (John Murray).

[9] Rev. A. Caldecott, M.A., Fellow and Dean of St. John’s College.

[10] Deposited by Henry Martyn Jeffery, Esq., in the Truro Museum of the Royal Institution, where the MS. may be consulted.

[11] Hitherto unpublished. We owe the copy of this significant letter to the courtesy of H.M. Jeffery, Esq., F.R.S., for whom Canon Moor, of St. Clement’s, near Truro, procured it from the friend to whom Mrs. T.M. Hitchins had given it.

[12] Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography.

[13] The Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, written in 1792.

[14] The parallel between Henry Martyn and David Brainerd, so close as to spiritual experience and missionary service, hereditary consumption and early death, is even more remarkable in their hopeless but purifying love. Brainerd was engaged to Jerusha, younger daughter of the great Jonathan Edwards. ‘Dear Jerusha, are you willing to part with me?’ said the dying missionary on October 4, 1747.... ‘If I thought I should not see you and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part with you. But we shall spend a happy eternity together!’ See J.M. Sherwood’s edition (1885) of the Memoirs of Rev. David Brainerd, prefaced by Jonathan Edwards, D.D., p. 340.

[15] This letter never reached its destination, but was captured in the Bell Packet.

[16] Twenty Sermons, by the late Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D. Fourth edition (from first edition printed at Calcutta), London, 1822.

[17] Five Sermons (never before published), by the late Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D., with a prefatory letter on missionary enterprise, by the Rev. G.T. Fox, M.A., London, 1862.

[18] George M. Theal’s South African History, Lovedale Institution Press, 1873.

[19] An Abstract of the Annual Reports and Correspondence of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge from 1709 to 1814. London, 1814, pp. 4-24.

[20] See a remarkable letter from Mr. Burke to Yuseph Emin, an Armenian of Calcutta, in Simeon’s Memorial Sketches of David Brown, p. 334.

[21] Simeon thus introduced him to Dr. Kerr, in a private letter quoted by a later Madras chaplain, Rev. James Hough, in his valuable five volumes on The History of Christianity in India: ‘Our excellent friend, Mr. Martyn, lived five months with me, and a more heavenly-minded young man I never saw.’ In the same year, the Rev. Marmaduke Thompson, an evangelical chaplain, arrived in Madras viâ Calcutta.

[22]The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward, London, 1859. The Life of William Carey (John Murray), 2nd edition, 1887.

[23] First published (1892) by Rev. H.C.G. Moule from the autograph collection made by Canon Carus, the successor and biographer of Charles Simeon.

[24] A line has been erased by a subsequent writer.

[25] ‘Her letter was to bid me a last farewell.’—Martyn’s Journal. This was received November 23.

[26] Even in 1889 we find a Patna missionary writing of his work from Bankipore as a centre: ‘The people in every village, except those on the Dinapore road, said that no Sahib had ever been in their village before. Sometimes my approach was the cause of considerable alarm.’

[27] Memoir of the Rev. Thomas Thomason, M.A., by Rev. J. Sargent, M.A., 2nd edition, 1834, London.

[28] Rev. Dr. Milner.

[29] The names of Capt. Dare and Mrs. Dare occur in the Journals and Letters between February 17 and March 24, 1808, wherein Martyn’s relations with them are described just as in this set of letters.

[30] Mrs. Laura Curgenven: born January 1779, died in the year 1807.

[31] See Moule’s Charles Simeon, p. 201.

[32] The Life of Mrs. Sherwood (chiefly autobiographical), edited by her Daughter. London, 1854.

[33] ‘He was at that time married to his seventh wife; that is, according to his own account. Ameena was a pretty young woman, though particularly dark for a purdah-walla, or one, according to the Eastern custom, who is supposed always to sit behind a purdah, or curtain. She occupied the smaller bungalow, which adjoined the larger by a long, covered passage. Our children often went to see her whilst they were at Mr. Martyn’s, and I paid her one formal visit. I found her seated on the ground, encircled by cushions within gauze mosquito-curtains, stretched by ropes from the four corners of the hall. In the daytime these curtains were twisted and knotted over her head, and towards the night they were let down around her, and thus she slept where she had sat all day. She had one or two women in constant attendance upon her, though her husband was a mere subordinate. These Eastern women have little idea of using the needle, and very few are taught any other feminine accomplishment. Music and literature, dancing and singing, are known only to the Nautch or dancing-girls by profession. Hence, nothing on earth can be imagined to be more monotonous than the lives of women in the East; such, I mean, as are not compelled to servile labour. They sit on their cushions behind their curtains from day to day, from month to month, with no other occupation than that of having their hair dressed, and their nails and eyelids stained, and no other amusement than hearing the gup, or gossip of the place where they may happen to be; nor is any gossip too low or too frivolous to be unacceptable. The visits of our children and nurses were very acceptable to Ameena, and she took much and tender notice of the baby. She lived on miserable terms with her husband, and hated him most cordially. She was a Mussulman, and he was very anxious to make her a Christian, to which she constantly showed strong opposition. At length, however, she terminated the controversy in the following extraordinary manner: “Pray, will you have the goodness to inform me where Christians go after death?” “To heaven and to their Saviour,” replied Sabat. “And where do Mahometans go?” she asked. “To hell and the devil,” answered the fierce Arab. “You,” said the meek wife, “will go to heaven, of course, as being a Christian.” “Certainly,” replied Sabat. “Well, then,” she said, “I will continue to be a Mussulman, because I should prefer hell and the devil without you, to heaven itself in your presence.” This anecdote was told to Mr. Martyn by Sabat himself, as a proof of the hardened spirit of his wife.

‘Ameena was, by the Arab’s own account, his seventh wife. He had some wonderful story to tell of each of his former marriages; but that which he related of his sixth wife exceeded all the rest in the marvellous and the romantic. He told this tale at Mr. Martyn’s table one evening, whilst we were at supper, during the week we lived in the house. He spoke in Persian, and Mr. Martyn interpreted what he said, and it was this he narrated: It was on some occasion, he said, in which Fortune had played him one of her worst tricks, and reduced him to a state of the most abject poverty, that he happened to arrive one night at a certain city, which was the capital of some rajah, or petty king—Sabat called this person a king. It seemed he arrived at a crisis in which the king’s only daughter had given her father some terrible offence, and in order to be revenged upon her, the father issued his commands that she should be compelled to take for her husband the first stranger who arrived in the town after sunset. This man happened to be our Arab; he was accordingly seized and subjected to the processes of bathing and anointing with precious oil. He was then magnificently dressed, introduced into the royal hall, and duly married to the princess, who proved not only to be fair as the houris, but to be quite prepared to love the husband whom Fortune had sent her. He lived with her, he pretended, I know not how many years, and they were perfectly happy until the princess died, and he lost the favour of his majesty. I think that Sabat laid the scene of this adventure in or near Agra. But this could hardly be. That such things have been in the East—that is, that royal parents have taken such means of avenging themselves on offending daughters—is quite certain; but I cannot venture to assert that Sabat was telling the truth when he made himself the hero of the tale.’

[34] Corrie and Brown.

[35] By letters written March 30 and April 19, 1810, from Cawnpore.

[36] By letter written August 14, 1810.

[37] On leaving the station Henry Martyn presented his French New Testament to Dr. Govan, a little morocco-bound volume which his son prizes as an heirloom.

[38] We have these reminiscences of Henry Martyn’s Cawnpore from Bishop Corrie, when, as Archdeacon of Calcutta, he again visited it. In 1824 he writes: ‘I arrived at this station on the day fourteen years after sainted Martyn had dedicated the church. The house he occupied stands close by. The view of the place and the remembrance of what had passed greatly affected me.... I had to assist in administering the sacrament, and well it was, on the whole, that none present could enter into my feelings, or I should have been overcome.’ Again: ‘How would it have rejoiced the heart of Martyn could he have had the chief authorities associated, by order of Government, to assist him in the work of education; and how gladly would he have made himself their servant in the work for Jesus’ sake! One poor blind man who lives in an outhouse of Martyn’s, and received a small monthly sum from him, often comes to our house, and affords a mournful pleasure in reminding me of some little occurrence of those times. A wealthy native too, who lived next door to us, sent his nephew to express to me the pleasure he derived from his acquaintance with Martyn. These are all the traces I have found of that “excellent one of the earth” at the station.’

In 1833 Corrie was again at Cawnpore, which had two chaplains then, and thus wrote: ‘October 6.—I attended Divine service at the church bungalow, and stood up once more in Martyn’s pulpit. The place is a little enlarged. The remembrance of Martyn and the Sherwoods, and Mary (his sister), with the occupations of that period, came powerfully to my recollection, and I could not prevent the tears from flowing. A sense of the forgiving love of God, with the prospect of all joining in thankful adoration in the realms of bliss, greatly preponderates.’

[39] In two volumes (John Murray), 1884, see p. 231, vol. i.

[40] Memoirs, edited by his son, second edition, London (Moxon), 1836. See vol. ii. pp. 86, 268.

[41] The Life of John Wilson, D.D., F.R.S. (John Murray), 2nd edit., p. 137.

[42] Life and Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 65 (Smith, Elder & Co.), 1856.

[43] Bap•re = ‘O Father!’ the exclamation of Hindus when in surprise or grief; hence a noise or row; hence a Bobbery-pack or hunt is the Anglo-Indian for a pack of hounds of different breeds, or no breed, wherewith young officers hunt jackals or the like. See the late Colonel Sir Henry Yule’s Hobson-Jobson, or Anglo-Indian Glossary (John Murray), 1886.

[44] C.R. Low’s History of the Indian Navy, chapter x. vol. i. (Richard Bentley), 1877.

[45] By letter written April 22 or June 23, 1811.

[46] The Three Brothers, or the Travels and Adventures of Sir Anthony, Sir Robert, and Sir Thomas Sherley in Persia, Russia, Turkey, Spain, &c., London, 1825.

[47] Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia, &c., by Sir Robert Ker Porter, 2 vols., London, 1821.

[48] Mr. J.C. Marshman, C.S.I., who lived through the history of India, from Wellesley to Lord Lawrence, and personally knew almost all its distinguished men, writes in his invaluable History: ‘The good sense of Sir Harford and Colonel Malcolm gradually smoothed down all asperities, and it was not long before they agreed to unite their efforts to battle the intrigues and the cupidity of the court. Colonel Malcolm was received with open arms by the king, who considered him the first of Englishmen. “What induced you,” said he at the first interview, “to hasten away from Shiraz without seeing my son?” “How could I,” replied the Colonel with his ever ready tact, “after having been warmed by the sunshine of your Majesty’s favour, be satisfied with the mere reflection of that refulgence in the person of your son?” “Mashalla!” exclaimed the monarch, “Malcolm Sahib is himself again.” ... Sir Gore Ouseley had acquired the confidence of Lord Wellesley by the great talents he exhibited when in a private station at the court of Lucknow, and upon his recommendation was appointed to Teheran as the representative of the King of England.’ The two embassies cost the East India Company 380,000l.

[49] Sir C.U. Aitchison’s Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, 2nd edition, vol. vi. Calcutta, 1876.

[50] A Tour to Sheeraz by the route of Karroon and Feerozabad, London, 1807.

[51] In two splendid volumes, printed by native hands under the sanction of the Government at Calcutta, in 1891, Lieutenant-Colonel H. Wilberforce Clarke published an English prose translation of The Divan, written in the Fourteenth Century, by Khwaja Shamshu-d-Din Muhammad-i-Hafiz. The work is described in the Quarterly Review of January 1892, by a writer who thus begins: ‘About two miles north-west of Shiraz, in the garden called Mosella which is, being interpreted, “the place of prayer,” lies, beneath the shadow of cypress-trees, one of which he is said to have planted with his own hand, Shems-Edden Mohammed, surnamed Hafiz, or “the steadfast in Scripture,” poet, recluse, and mystic.... No other Persian has equalled him in fame—not Sadi, whose monument, now in ruins, may be visited near his own; nor Firdusi, nor Jami. Near the garden tomb is laid open the book of well nigh seven hundred poems which he wrote. According to Sir Gore Ouseley, who turned over its pages in 1811, it is a volume abounding in bright and delicate colour, with illuminated miniatures, and the lovely tints of the Persian caligraphy.’

[52] Persia and the Persian Question, 2 vols. (Longmans), 1892.

[53] Travels, vol. i. pp. 687-8.

[54] See article in the Spectator for August 17, 1889, by a writer who had recently returned from Persia.

[55] See article on the poet in the Calcutta Review for March 1858 (by Professor E.B. Cowell, L.L.D., Cambridge).

[56] London, 1818, pp. 223-4.

[57] Literally, ‘one who strives’ to attain the highest degree of Mussulman learning.

[58] Persian form of maulvi, the Arabic for a learned man. The word is said to mean ‘filled’ with knowledge, from mala, to fill.

[59] The Rev. S. Lee, D.D., Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge for many years, in his Controversial Tracts on Christianity and Mohammedanism by the late Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D., and some of the most eminent writers of Persia (1824).

[60] The Calcutta Review, No. VIII. vol. iv. Art. VI. ‘The Mahommedan Controversy,’ pp. 418-76, Calcutta, 1845.

[61] As translated from the Persian by Professor Lee.

[62] Sir Henry, then Major, H.C. Rawlinson, C.B., visited Persepolis in 1835. The Journals of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1846-9 publish his copies of the inscription of Behistun and Persepolis and his translations.

[63] See the Play as collected from oral tradition by the late Sir Lewis Pelly, in two volumes, 1879.

[64] Second edition published by the Church Missionary Society in 1858.

[65] ‘Some of our most eminent Native Christians are converts from Mohammedanism. We may particularly mention the Rev. Jani Ali, B.A.; the Rev. Imad-ud-din, D.D.; the Rev. Imam Shah; the Rev. Mian Sadiq; the Rev. Yakub Ali; Maulavi Safdar Ali, a high Government official; Abdullah Athim, also a high official, now retired, and an honorary lay evangelist.’—Church Missionary Society’s Intelligencer in 1888.

[66] ‘That list, in which Martyn holds a conspicuous place, has grown long of late years, till we are half tempted to forget that the share our age has taken and is taking in the work of translating and distributing the Scriptures, links on to that of those who could remember men who had seen the Lord.’ Canon Edmonds’ Sermon, preached in the Cathedral Church of Truro, October 16, 1890 (Exeter).

[67] The Churchman for September 1889, p. 635.

[68] See p. 314.

[69] Evidently taken in detail from Adam’s Religious World Displayed.

[70] Fourth edition, London, 1822.

[71] Fortieth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society, p. 97.

[72] The Bible of Every Land (Bagster), 1848.

[73] See Contributions Towards a History of Biblical Translations in India. Calcutta and London (Dalton), 1854.

[74] Monograph on Hindustani Versions of the Old and New Testaments, by the Rev. R.C. Mather, LL.D. (without date).

[75] The Life of Rev. T.T. Thomason, M.A., by the late Rev. J. Sargent, M.A., second edition, Seeley’s, 1834.

[76] Dr. Milner, Dr. Rumsden, Dr. Jowett, Mr. Farish (Charles Simeon’s writing).

[77] Christian Researches in Asia, with Notices of the Translation of the Scriptures into the Oriental Languages, by the Rev. Claudius Buchanan, D.D., 10th edition, London, 1814.

[78] See The Miracle Play of Hasan and Husain, collected from Oral Tradition, by Sir Lewis Pelly, two vols. 1879.

[79] Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, &c., by Mrs. Bishop (Isabella C. Bird), two vols., John Murray, 1891.

[80] The fanatical shrine of Fatima. See Mrs. Bishop’s first volume and Mr. Curzon’s second.

[81] A Second Journey through Persia, &c., between the years 1810 and 1816, p. 223.

[82] ‘Were I,’ writes Mr. Baillie Fraser, ‘to select a spot the best calculated for the recovery of health, and for its preservation, I know not that I could hit upon any more suited to the purpose than Tabreez, at any season. A brighter sky and purer air can scarcely be found. To me it seems as if there was truly health in the breeze that blows around me.’

[83] See the Eleventh Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1815, Appendix, No. 51.

[84] I beg leave to remark that the word ‘Tilawat,’ which the translator has rendered ‘read,’ is an honourable signification of that act, almost exclusively applied to the perusing or reciting the Koran. The making use, therefore, of this term or expression shows the degree of respect and estimation in which the Shah holds the New Testament.—Note by Sir Gore Ouseley.

[85] The Historical Geography of Asia Minor, vol. iv. of the Royal Geographical Society’s Supplementary Papers, John Murray, 1890.

[86] In his valuable book Transcaucasia and Ararat (1877), Mr. James Bryce, M.P., gives the meaning as ‘The Only-Begotten descended.’

[87] A few years after, when Sir R. Ker Porter was on the same route, he wrote: ‘This was the spot where our apostolic countryman, Henry Martyn, faint with fever and fatigue, alighted to bathe on his way to Tokat.’ There, too, Sir Robert was of opinion, Xenophon and the Ten Thousand Greeks crossed the Araxes 2,300 years ago.

[88] We must not forget the boyish ‘Epitaph on Henry Martyn,’ written by Thomas Babington Macaulay in his thirteenth year (Life, by his nephew, vol. i. p. 38):

‘Here Martyn lies. In manhood’s early bloom

The Christian hero finds a Pagan tomb.

Religion sorrowing o’er her favourite son

Points to the glorious trophies that he won,

Eternal trophies! not with carnage red;

Not stained with tears by hapless captives shed,

But trophies of the Cross. For that dear Name,

Through every form of danger, death, and shame,

Onward he journeyed to a happier shore,

Where danger, death, and shame assault no more.’

These lines reflect the impression made on Charles Grant and the other Clapham friends by Henry Martyn’s death at a time when they used his career as an argument for Great Britain doing its duty to India during the discussions in Parliament on the East India Company’s Charter of 1813.

[89] Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, and an Account of a Visit to Sherauz and Persepolis, by the late Claudius James Rich, Esq., edited (with memoir) by his widow, two vols., London, 1836.

[90] See later for the inscription.

[91] Missionary Researches in Armenia, London, 1834.

[92] It is a custom in the East to accompany travellers out of the city to bid them God speed, with the ‘khoda hafiz shuma,’ ‘may God take you into His holy keeping.’ If an Armenian, he is accompanied by the priest, who prays over him and for him with much fervour.

[93] The Nestorians and their Rituals in 1842-1844, 2 vols. London: Joseph Masters, 1852.

[94] New York, 1870, 2 vols. 12mo. Also published by John Murray, London, 1870.

[95] Mr. Rich, British Resident at Baghdad, who had laid this monumental slab, was evidently ignorant of Martyn’s Christian name.

[96] Professor W.M. Ramsay’s Historical Geography of Asia Minor, 1890.

[97] ‘Paucioribus lacrymis compositus es.’—Tac. quoted on this occasion by Sargent, Memoir of Martyn, p. 493.

[98] Her niece writes of her when she received the news of Henry Martyn’s death: ‘The circumstances of his affecting death, and my aunt’s intense sorrow, produced an ineffaceable remembrance on my own mind. I can never forget the “upper chamber” in which she took refuge from daily cares and interruptions—its view of lovely Mount’s Bay across fruit-trees and whispering white cœlibes—its perfect neatness, though with few ornaments. On the principal wall hung a large print of the Crucifixion of our Lord, usually shaded by a curtain, and at its foot (where he would have chosen to be) a portrait of Henry Martyn.’—The Church Quarterly Review for October 1881.

[99] An authoress, and member of the Gurney family, who died in April, 1816.

[100] Her Title of Honour, by Holme Lee, in which an attempt is made to tell the story of Lydia Grenfell’s life under a fictitious name, is unworthy of the subject and of the writer.

[101] In 1816 Charles Simeon thus wrote from King’s College to Thomason, of the Journal: ‘Truly it has humbled us all in the dust. Since the Apostolic age I think that nothing has ever exceeded the wisdom and piety of our departed brother; and I conceive that no book, except the Bible, will be found to excel this.... David Brainerd is great, but the degree of his melancholy and the extreme impropriety of his exertions, so much beyond his strength, put him on a different footing from our beloved Martyn.’

[102] Bishop Wilson’s Journal Letters, addressed to his family during the first nine years of his Indian Episcopate, edited by his son Daniel Wilson, M.A., Vicar of Islington, London, 1864.

[103] See Journal, passim, especially in February, 1806.

[104] Journal of Mr. Anthony N. Groves, Missionary to and at Baghdad, London, 1831.

[105] The Life of John Wilson, D.D., F.R.S., London, 1878.

[106] Memorials of the Hon. Keith-Falconer, M.A., late Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge, and Missionary to the Muhammadans of South Arabia, by Rev. Robert Sinker, D.D., p. 146 of 1st edition, 1888.

[107] George Maxwell Gordon, M.A., F.R.G.S., a History of his Life and Work, 1839-1880, by the Rev. Arthur Lewis, M.A., London, 1889.

[108] Archdeacon Moule in the Church Missionary Intelligencer.

[109] Even of the Soofis the ablest authority writes: ‘The remarkable development, in our own century, which has been given to the story of the death of Hosein should encourage us to hope that the Divine pathos of the New Testament will one day soften these hearts still more, and teach them the secret of which their poets have sung in such ardent strains. A Sufi has already learnt that Islam cannot satisfy the longing soul. He is, by profession, tolerant or even sympathetic in the presence of the Cross. And he believes, like all Moslim, that Isa, the Messiah of Israel, has the breath of life, and can raise the dead from the tomb.... To the reflecting mind, however, the lyric effusions of Hafiz prove that Eastern philosophy is either childlike or retrograde, and its principles at the mercy of those seas of passion upon which it has so long been drifting.’ Quarterly Review, January 1892.

[i] A. Symoands "The Renaissance," Encyc. Brit., xx., 383.

[ii] George Smith; "A Short History of Missions."

[iii] Some authorities give the date 1234, and one 1236. bit most agree on the year 1235. See Baring-Gould: "Lives of the Saints," vol. vi., p. 489.

[iv] From Latin Sene + scalcus, or Gothic sineigs + skalk.

[v] "Liber Contemplationis in Deo," ix,257, Ed. 1740.

[vi] For a list of these works see Heltfferich, p.74, note.

[vii] S. Baring-Gould "Lives of the Saints." vol. vi., p.489 Maclear: "History of Christian Missions in the Middle Ages," pp 355, 356.

[viii] "Terto et quarto successivo diebus intetpositis aliquibus, Salvator, in forma semper qua primitus, apparet." - "Acta Sanctorum, "p. 669.

[ix] See article by Rev. Edwin Wallace, of Oxford University, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, where Mount Roda is wrongly spelled Randa.

[x] "Vita Prima," p.662. "Dominum Jesum Christum devote, fleus largiter exoravit, quatenus haec praedicta tua quae ipse misericorditer inspiraverat cordi suo, ad effectum sibi placitum perducere dignaretur." Several authorities put a period of short backsliding between his conversion and the account of his sermon by the friar that follows in our text.

[xi] "Liber contemplanonis in Deo," xci., 27.

[xii] See Noble; "The Redemption of Africa," vol. 1,p. 110.

[xiii] Arnold: "Preaching of Islam," synchronological table p. 389, 1896.

[xiv]  Muir: "The Mameluke Dynasty of Egypt," p. 31, London, 1896.

[xv] "Marco Polo's Travels," Colonel Yule's edition, vol. i., p. 69.

[xvi] "Hell," canto xxviii., 20-39, in Dante's "Vision," Cary's edition.

[xvii] A. Keller's "Geisteskampf des Christentums gegen den Islam bis zur Zeit der Kreuzzüge," pp. 41, 43, Leipsic, 1896.

[xviii] Maclear : "History of Missions," p. 358, where authorities are cited.

[xix]  "Vita Prima," in "Acta Sanctorum," 663.

[xx] "Encyclopædia Britannica," vol. xv., p. 64.

[xxi] "Liber Contemplationis in Deo," cx. 28 Tom. ix., 246.

[xxii]  Milman : "History of Latin Christianity," vi. 175.

[xxiii]  Not as wrongly stated in some articles about Lull, a proposal to use force of arms. Cf Noble, p. 116 and Maclear p.366. with footnote in latter from Liber Contemplationis

[xxiv]  See the bibliography and consult Renan's "Averrhoes et l'Averrhoisme" for particulars of his method and success. The Averroists from the thirteenth century onward opposed reason to faith. Lull's great task was to show that they were not irreconcilable, but mutually related and in harmony, It was in fact, the battle of faith against agnosticism.

[xxv] "Vita Prima" in "Acta sanctorum," p. 633

[xxvi] "Vita Prima" in "Acta sanctorum," p. 634

[xxvii]  "Vita Prima," in "Acta Sanctorum," p. 664. Neander's "Memorials," p. 527, and Maclear, p. 361.

[xxviii] Al Muktataf. February number, 1901, p. 79.

[xxix] See them in full in "Vita Prima," p. 665, and "Liber Contemplationis in Deo." liv., 25-28, etc. Maclear gives the summary as quoted above, pp. 362, 363.

[xxx] See instances given in Muir's Mameluke Dynasty," pp. 41, 48, 75 etc.

[xxxi] Neander: "Church History," iv., p. 426.

[xxxii] See Helfferich, p.86. note, and No.225 in Bibliography A.

[xxxiii] Maclear, p 381 et seq.

[xxxiv] Kurtz "Church History." vol. ii., p.23.

[xxxv] Of these works the following are extant :"Liber contra Judaeos," "Liber de Reformatione Hebraica," and "Liber de Adventu Messiae."

[xxxvi] See Maclear. p.367 note, who quotes authorities for the legend.

[xxxvii] Sir William Muir "The Mameluke Dynasty," pp.67-87.

[xxxviii] Keller: "Geistkampf u.z.w. pp.59,6O. Maclear. p.365.

[xxxix] "Promittebant ei uxores, honores, domum, ei pecuniam copiosam." - "Vita Prima," chap iv.

[xl] See "Liber de Miraculis Coeli et Mundi," part vi., on Iman. Calamita.

As the needle naturally turns to the north when it is touched by the magnet so it is fitting," etc. - "Liber Contemplationis in Deo"

In his treatise "Fenix des les Maravillas del Orbes." pub lished in 1286, he again alludes to the use of the mariner's compass. See Humboldt: "Cosmos," ii., 630 n.

[xli] According to Moslem teaching, Allah has one hundred beautiful names. The Moslem's rosary has one hundred heads, and to count these names is a devotional exercise.

[xlii] "Der Protestantismus in Spanien zur Zeit der Reformation." Prot. Monatsblätter v. H. Gelzer. 1856, S. 133-168. Also his Raymund Lull. u.z.w. pp, l53-154

[xliii] Helfferich, pp. 111-122. He holds that the allegory was first written in Arabic and then put into Catalan. Several manuscripts of it are extant in the archives of Palma. It was first printed in 1521.

[xliv] "Liber Contempiationis," cxxix., 19; "Vita Sceunda." cap. iv., and "Liber Contemplationis," cxxx., 27. Cf. Maclear p. 367.

[xlv] Luke xii. 50: Mark x. 39 Matt x 39, Matt V.10-12. Compare the teaching of Roman Catholic commentaries on these passages.

[xlvi] Smith, "Short History or Christian Missions," pp, 107-108.

[xlvii] Copied from an old woodcut of the scutum fedei in the south transept of Thame Church, Oxfordshire.

[xlviii] Dr. Hubert Jansen's “Verbreitung des Islams," Berlin. 1897 a marvel of research and accuracy.

[xlix] Since the above was written Mr. George Pearse has died.

[l] For words and music see the end of this chapter.

[li] Isaiah lv. 8, 9.

Table of Contents

From the Editor

1.  RAYMOND LULL - FIRST MISSIONARY TO THE MUSLIMS (d. 1315)

INTRODUCTION

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1: EUROPE AND THE SARACENS IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER 2: RAYMUND LULL'S BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY LIFE

CHAPTER 3: THE VISION AND CALL TO SERVICE

CHAPTER 4: PREPARATION FOR THE CONFLICT

CHAPTER 5: AT MONTPELLIER, PARIS, AND ROME

CHAPTER 6: HIS FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY TO TUNIS

CHAPTER 7: OTHER MISSIONARY JOURNEYS

CHAPTER 8: RAYMUND LULL AS PHILOSOPHER AND AUTHOR

CHAPTER 9: HIS LAST MISSIONARY JOURNEY AND HIS MARTYRDOM

CHAPTER 10: "WHO BEING DEAD YET SPRAKETH"

2.  THE LIFE AND DIARY OF DAVID BRAINERD WITH NOTES AND REFLECTIONS (d. 1747)

Illustrations

Preface

Part 1: From His Birth, To The Time When He Began To Study For The Ministry.

Part 2: Study Of Divinity Until Licensed To Preach

Part 3: From Being Licensed To Preach Till Appointment As Missionary

Part 4: First Missionary Work

Part 5: From His Beginning To Instruct The Indians, To His Ordination.

Part 6: From His Ordination Till He First Began To Preach At Crossweeksung

Part 7: From His Beginning To Preach At Crossweeksung Till He Returned Ill With The Consumption

Part 8: After His Return From His Last Journey To Susquehannah, Until His Death.

3.  HENRY MARTYN: Saint and Scholar (d. 1812)

PREFACE

CHAPTER I: CORNWALL AND CAMBRIDGE, 1781-1803

CHAPTER II: LYDIA GRENFELL

CHAPTER III: THE NINE MONTHS’ VOYAGE—SOUTH AMERICA—SOUTH AFRICA, 1805-1806

CHAPTER IV: INDIA AND THE EAST IN THE YEAR 1806

CHAPTER V: CALCUTTA AND SERAMPORE, 1806

CHAPTER VI: DINAPORE AND PATNA, 1807-1809

CHAPTER VII: CAWNPORE, 1809-1810

CHAPTER VIII: FROM CALCUTTA TO CEYLON, BOMBAY, AND ARABIA

CHAPTER IX: IN PERSIA—BUSHIRE AND SHIRAZ, 1811

CHAPTER X: IN PERSIA—CONTROVERSIES WITH MOHAMMEDANS, SOOFIS, AND JEWS

CHAPTER XI: IN PERSIA—TRANSLATING THE SCRIPTURES

CHAPTER XII: SHIRAZ TO TABREEZ—THE PERSIAN NEW TESTAMENT

CHAPTER XIII: IN PERSIA AND TURKEY—TABREEZ TO TOKAT AND THE TOMB

CHAPTER XIV: THE TWO RESTING-PLACES—TOKAT AND BREAGE

CHAPTER XV: BAPTIZED FOR THE DEAD

4.  THE LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY (d. 1834)

Preface

Illustrations:

Chapter 1: Carey’s College

Chapter 2: The Birth Of England’s Foreign Missions

Chapter 3: India As Carey Found It

Chapter 4: Six Years In North Bengal--Missionary And Indigo Planter

Chapter 5: The New Crusade--Serampore And The Brotherhood

Chapter 6: The First Native Converts And Christian Schools

Chapter 7:  Calcutta And The Mission Centres From Delhi To Amboyna

Chapter 8: Carey’s Family And Friends

Chapter 9: Professor Of Sanskrit, Bengali, And Marathi

Chapter 10: The Wyclif Of The East--Bible Translation

Chapter 11: What Carey Did For Literature And For Humanity

Chapter 12: What Carey Did For Science--Founder Of The Agricultural And Horticultural Society Of India

Chapter 13: Carey’s Immediate Influence In Great Britain And America

Chapter 14: Carey As An Educator--The First Christian College In The East

Chapter 15: Carey’s Last Days

APPENDIX

I.--Charter Of Incorporation Of Serampore College

II.--Statutes And Regulations Of Serampore College

III.--Article VI., Clause 2, Of The Treaty Of Purchase, Transferring Serampore To The British Government

IV.--CAREY’S BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

5.  HUDSON TAYLOR – A RETROSPECT (d. 1905)

CHAPTER 1: THE POWER OF PRAYER

CHAPTER 2: THE CALL TO SERVICE

CHAPTER 3: PREPARATION FOR SERVICE

CHAPTER 4: FURTHER ANSWERS TO PRAYER

CHAPTER 5: LIFE IN LONDON

CHAPTER 6: STRENGTHENED BY FAITH

CHAPTER 7: MIGHTY TO SAVE

CHAPTER 8: VOYAGE TO CHINA

CHAPTER 9: EARLY MISSIONARY EXPERIENCES

CHAPTER 10: FIRST EVANGELISTIC EFFORTS

CHAPTER 11: WITH THE REV. WILLIAM BURNS

CHAPTER 12: CALLED TO SWATOW

CHAPTER 13: MAN PROPOSES, GOD DISPOSES

CHAPTER 14: PROVIDENTIAL GUIDANCE

CHAPTER 15: SETTLEMENT IN NINGPO

CHAPTER 16: TIMELY SUPPLIES

CHAPTER 17: GOD A REFUGE FOR US

CHAPTER 18: A NEW AGENCY NEEDED

CHAPTER 19: THE FORMATION OF THE C. I. M.

CHAPTER 20: THE MISSION IN 1894

THE MISSION IN 1902

STATIONS OF THE CHINA INLAND MISSION, 1900

6.  THE STORY OF JOHN G. PATON (d. 1907)

PREFACE.

CHAPTER 1: OUR COTTAGE HOME.

CHAPTER 2: OUR FOREBEARS.

CHAPTER 3: CONSECRATED PARENTS.

CHAPTER 5: LEAVING THE OLD HOME.

CHAPTER 7: A CITY MISSIONARY.

CHAPTER 8: GLASGOW EXPERIENCES.

CHAPTER 9: A FOREIGN MISSIONARY.

CHAPTER 10: TO THE NEW HEBRIDES.

CHAPTER 11: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF HEATHENDOM.

CHAPTER 12: BREAKING GROUND ON TANNA.

CHAPTER 13: PIONEERS IN THE NEW HEBRIDES.

CHAPTER 14: THE GREAT BEREAVEMENT.

CHAPTER 15: AT HOME WITH CANNIBALS.

CHAPTER 16: SUPERSTITIONS AND CRUELTIES.

CHAPTER 17: STREAKS OF DAWN AMIDST DEEDS OF DARKNESS.

CHAPTER 18: THE VISIT OF H. M. S. "CORDELIA."

CHAPTER 19: "NOBLE OLD ABRAHAM."

CHAPTER 21: UNDER AX AND MUSKET.

CHAPTER 22: A NATIVE SAINT AND MARTYR.

CHAPTER 23: BUILDING AND PRINTING FOR GOD.

CHAPTER 24: HEATHEN DANCE AND SHAM FIGHT.

CHAPTER 25: CANNIBALS AT WORK.

CHAPTER 26: THE DEFYING OF NAHAK.

CHAPTER 27: A PERILOUS PILGRIMAGE.

CHAPTER 28: THE PLAGUE OF MEASLES.

CHAPTER 29: ATTACKED WITH CLUBS.

CHAPTER 30: KOWIA.

CHAPTER 31: MARTYRDOM OF THE GORDONS.

CHAPTER 32: SHADOWS DEEPENING ON TANNA.

CHAPTER 33: THE VISIT OF THE COMMODORE.

CHAPTER 34: THE WAR CHIEFS IN COUNCIL.

CHAPTER 35: UNDER KNIFE AND TOMAHAWK.

CHAPTER 36: THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

CHAPTER 37: FIVE HOURS IN A CANOE.

CHAPTER 38: A RACE FOR LIFE.

CHAPTER 39: FAINT YET PURSUING.

CHAPTER 40: WAITING AT KWAMERA.

CHAPTER 41: THE LAST AWFUL NIGHT.

CHAPTER 42: "SAIL O! SAIL O!"

CHAPTER 43: FAREWELL TO TANNA.

CHAPTER 44: THE FLOATING OF THE "DAYSPRING."

CHAPTER 45: A SHIPPING COMPANY FOR JESUS.

CHAPTER 46: AUSTRALIAN INCIDENTS.

CHAPTER 47: AMONGST SQUATTERS AND DIGGERS.

CHAPTER 48: JOHN GILPIN IN THE BUSH.

CHAPTER 49: THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA.

CHAPTER 50: NORA.

CHAPTER 51: BACK TO SCOTLAND.

CHAPTER 52: TOUR THROUGH THE OLD COUNTRY.

CHAPTER 53: MARRIAGE AND FAREWELL.

CHAPTER 54: FIRST PEEP AT THE "DAYSPRING."

CHAPTER 55: THE FRENCH IN THE PACIFIC.

CHAPTER 56: THE GOSPEL AND GUNPOWDER.

CHAPTER 57: A PLEA FOR TANNA.

CHAPTER 58: OUR NEW HOME ON ANIWA.

CHAPTER 59: HOUSE-BUILDING FOR GOD.

CHAPTER 60: A CITY OF GOD.

CHAPTER 61: THE RELIGION OF REVENGE.

CHAPTER 62: FIRST FRUITS ON ANIWA.

CHAPTER 63: TRADITIONS AND CUSTOMS.

CHAPTER 64: NELWANG'S ELOPEMENT.

CHAPTER 65: THE CHRIST-SPIRIT AT WORK.

CHAPTER 66: THE SINKING OF THE WELL.

CHAPTER 67: RAIN FROM BELOW.

CHAPTER 68: THE OLD CHIEF'S SERMON.

CHAPTER 69: THE FIRST BOOK AND THE NEW EYES.

CHAPTER 70: A ROOF-TREE FOR JESUS.

CHAPTER 71: "KNOCK THE TEVIL OUT!"

CHAPTER 72: THE CONVERSION OF YOUWILI.

CHAPTER 73: FIRST COMMUNION ON ANIWA.

CHAPTER 74: THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER.

CHAPTER 75: THE ORPHANS AND THEIR BISCUITS.

CHAPTER 76: THE FINGER-POSTS OF GOD.

CHAPTER 77: THE GOSPEL IN LIVING CAPITALS.

CHAPTER 78: THE DEATH OF NAMAKEI.

CHAPTER 79: CHRISTIANITY AND COCOANUTS.

CHAPTER 80: NERWA'S BEAUTIFUL FAREWELL.

CHAPTER 81: RUWAWA.

CHAPTER 82: LITSI SORE AND MUNGAW.

CHAPTER 83: THE CONVERSION OF NASI.

CHAPTER 84: THE APPEAL OF LAMU.

CHAPTER 85: WANTED! A STEAM AUXILIARY.

CHAPTER 86: MY CAMPAIGN IN IRELAND.

CHAPTER 87: SCOTLAND'S FREE-WILL OFFERINGS.

CHAPTER 88: ENGLAND'S OPEN BOOK.

CHAPTER 89: FAREWELL SCENES.

CHAPTER 90: WELCOME TO VICTORIA AND ANIWA.

CHAPTER 91: GOOD NEWS FROM TANNA, 1891.

7.  THINGS AS THEY ARE: Mission Work in Southern India – Amy Carmichael (d. 1951)

Note

Confirmatory Notes

Preface

Glossary

CHAPTER 1: About the Book

CHAPTER 2: Three Afternoons off the Track

CHAPTER 3: Humdrum

CHAPTER 4: Correspondences

CHAPTER 5: The Prey of the Terrible

CHAPTER 6: Missed Ends

CHAPTER 7: "The Dust of the Actual"

CHAPTER 8: Roots

CHAPTER 9: The Classes and the Masses

CHAPTER 10: The Creed Chasm

CHAPTER 11: Caste viewed as a Doer

CHAPTER 12: Petra

CHAPTER 13: Death by Disuse

CHAPTER 14: What Happened

CHAPTER 15: "Simply Murdered"

CHAPTER 16: Wanted, Volunteers

CHAPTER 17: If it is so very important. . . ?

CHAPTER 18: The Call Intensified

CHAPTER 19: "Attracted by the Influence"

CHAPTER 20: The Elf

CHAPTER 21: Deified Devilry

CHAPTER 22: Behind the Door

CHAPTER 23: "Pan, Pan is Dead"

CHAPTER 24: "Married to the God"

CHAPTER 25: Skirting the Abyss

CHAPTER 26: From a Hindu Point of View

CHAPTER 27: Though ye know Him not

CHAPTER 28: How Long?

CHAPTER 29: What do we count them worth?

CHAPTER 30: Two Safe

CHAPTER 31: Three Objections

CHAPTER 32: "Show me Thy Glory!"

APPENDIX: Some Indian Saints

Table of Contents

From the Editor

1.  RAYMOND LULL - FIRST MISSIONARY TO THE MUSLIMS (d. 1315)

INTRODUCTION

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1: EUROPE AND THE SARACENS IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER 2: RAYMUND LULL'S BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY LIFE

CHAPTER 3: THE VISION AND CALL TO SERVICE

CHAPTER 4: PREPARATION FOR THE CONFLICT

CHAPTER 5: AT MONTPELLIER, PARIS, AND ROME

CHAPTER 6: HIS FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY TO TUNIS

CHAPTER 7: OTHER MISSIONARY JOURNEYS

CHAPTER 8: RAYMUND LULL AS PHILOSOPHER AND AUTHOR

CHAPTER 9: HIS LAST MISSIONARY JOURNEY AND HIS MARTYRDOM

CHAPTER 10: "WHO BEING DEAD YET SPRAKETH"

2.  THE LIFE AND DIARY OF DAVID BRAINERD WITH NOTES AND REFLECTIONS (d. 1747)

Illustrations

Preface

Part 1: From His Birth, To The Time When He Began To Study For The Ministry.

Part 2: Study Of Divinity Until Licensed To Preach

Part 3: From Being Licensed To Preach Till Appointment As Missionary

Part 4: First Missionary Work

Part 5: From His Beginning To Instruct The Indians, To His Ordination.

Part 6: From His Ordination Till He First Began To Preach At Crossweeksung

Part 7: From His Beginning To Preach At Crossweeksung Till He Returned Ill With The Consumption

Part 8: After His Return From His Last Journey To Susquehannah, Until His Death.

3.  HENRY MARTYN: Saint and Scholar (d. 1812)

PREFACE

CHAPTER I: CORNWALL AND CAMBRIDGE, 1781-1803

CHAPTER II: LYDIA GRENFELL

CHAPTER III: THE NINE MONTHS’ VOYAGE—SOUTH AMERICA—SOUTH AFRICA, 1805-1806

CHAPTER IV: INDIA AND THE EAST IN THE YEAR 1806

CHAPTER V: CALCUTTA AND SERAMPORE, 1806

CHAPTER VI: DINAPORE AND PATNA, 1807-1809

CHAPTER VII: CAWNPORE, 1809-1810

CHAPTER VIII: FROM CALCUTTA TO CEYLON, BOMBAY, AND ARABIA

CHAPTER IX: IN PERSIA—BUSHIRE AND SHIRAZ, 1811

CHAPTER X: IN PERSIA—CONTROVERSIES WITH MOHAMMEDANS, SOOFIS, AND JEWS

CHAPTER XI: IN PERSIA—TRANSLATING THE SCRIPTURES

CHAPTER XII: SHIRAZ TO TABREEZ—THE PERSIAN NEW TESTAMENT

CHAPTER XIII: IN PERSIA AND TURKEY—TABREEZ TO TOKAT AND THE TOMB

CHAPTER XIV: THE TWO RESTING-PLACES—TOKAT AND BREAGE

CHAPTER XV: BAPTIZED FOR THE DEAD

4.  THE LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY (d. 1834)

Preface

Illustrations:

Chapter 1: Carey’s College

Chapter 2: The Birth Of England’s Foreign Missions

Chapter 3: India As Carey Found It

Chapter 4: Six Years In North Bengal--Missionary And Indigo Planter

Chapter 5: The New Crusade--Serampore And The Brotherhood

Chapter 6: The First Native Converts And Christian Schools

Chapter 7:  Calcutta And The Mission Centres From Delhi To Amboyna

Chapter 8: Carey’s Family And Friends

Chapter 9: Professor Of Sanskrit, Bengali, And Marathi

Chapter 10: The Wyclif Of The East--Bible Translation

Chapter 11: What Carey Did For Literature And For Humanity

Chapter 12: What Carey Did For Science--Founder Of The Agricultural And Horticultural Society Of India

Chapter 13: Carey’s Immediate Influence In Great Britain And America

Chapter 14: Carey As An Educator--The First Christian College In The East

Chapter 15: Carey’s Last Days

APPENDIX

I.--Charter Of Incorporation Of Serampore College

II.--Statutes And Regulations Of Serampore College

III.--Article VI., Clause 2, Of The Treaty Of Purchase, Transferring Serampore To The British Government

IV.--CAREY’S BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

5.  HUDSON TAYLOR – A RETROSPECT (d. 1905)

CHAPTER 1: THE POWER OF PRAYER

CHAPTER 2: THE CALL TO SERVICE

CHAPTER 3: PREPARATION FOR SERVICE

CHAPTER 4: FURTHER ANSWERS TO PRAYER

CHAPTER 5: LIFE IN LONDON

CHAPTER 6: STRENGTHENED BY FAITH

CHAPTER 7: MIGHTY TO SAVE

CHAPTER 8: VOYAGE TO CHINA

CHAPTER 9: EARLY MISSIONARY EXPERIENCES

CHAPTER 10: FIRST EVANGELISTIC EFFORTS

CHAPTER 11: WITH THE REV. WILLIAM BURNS

CHAPTER 12: CALLED TO SWATOW

CHAPTER 13: MAN PROPOSES, GOD DISPOSES

CHAPTER 14: PROVIDENTIAL GUIDANCE

CHAPTER 15: SETTLEMENT IN NINGPO

CHAPTER 16: TIMELY SUPPLIES

CHAPTER 17: GOD A REFUGE FOR US

CHAPTER 18: A NEW AGENCY NEEDED

CHAPTER 19: THE FORMATION OF THE C. I. M.

CHAPTER 20: THE MISSION IN 1894

THE MISSION IN 1902

STATIONS OF THE CHINA INLAND MISSION, 1900

6.  THE STORY OF JOHN G. PATON (d. 1907)

PREFACE.

CHAPTER 1: OUR COTTAGE HOME.

CHAPTER 2: OUR FOREBEARS.

CHAPTER 3: CONSECRATED PARENTS.

CHAPTER 5: LEAVING THE OLD HOME.

CHAPTER 7: A CITY MISSIONARY.

CHAPTER 8: GLASGOW EXPERIENCES.

CHAPTER 9: A FOREIGN MISSIONARY.

CHAPTER 10: TO THE NEW HEBRIDES.

CHAPTER 11: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF HEATHENDOM.

CHAPTER 12: BREAKING GROUND ON TANNA.

CHAPTER 13: PIONEERS IN THE NEW HEBRIDES.

CHAPTER 14: THE GREAT BEREAVEMENT.

CHAPTER 15: AT HOME WITH CANNIBALS.

CHAPTER 16: SUPERSTITIONS AND CRUELTIES.

CHAPTER 17: STREAKS OF DAWN AMIDST DEEDS OF DARKNESS.

CHAPTER 18: THE VISIT OF H. M. S. "CORDELIA."

CHAPTER 19: "NOBLE OLD ABRAHAM."

CHAPTER 21: UNDER AX AND MUSKET.

CHAPTER 22: A NATIVE SAINT AND MARTYR.

CHAPTER 23: BUILDING AND PRINTING FOR GOD.

CHAPTER 24: HEATHEN DANCE AND SHAM FIGHT.

CHAPTER 25: CANNIBALS AT WORK.

CHAPTER 26: THE DEFYING OF NAHAK.

CHAPTER 27: A PERILOUS PILGRIMAGE.

CHAPTER 28: THE PLAGUE OF MEASLES.

CHAPTER 29: ATTACKED WITH CLUBS.

CHAPTER 30: KOWIA.

CHAPTER 31: MARTYRDOM OF THE GORDONS.

CHAPTER 32: SHADOWS DEEPENING ON TANNA.

CHAPTER 33: THE VISIT OF THE COMMODORE.

CHAPTER 34: THE WAR CHIEFS IN COUNCIL.

CHAPTER 35: UNDER KNIFE AND TOMAHAWK.

CHAPTER 36: THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

CHAPTER 37: FIVE HOURS IN A CANOE.

CHAPTER 38: A RACE FOR LIFE.

CHAPTER 39: FAINT YET PURSUING.

CHAPTER 40: WAITING AT KWAMERA.

CHAPTER 41: THE LAST AWFUL NIGHT.

CHAPTER 42: "SAIL O! SAIL O!"

CHAPTER 43: FAREWELL TO TANNA.

CHAPTER 44: THE FLOATING OF THE "DAYSPRING."

CHAPTER 45: A SHIPPING COMPANY FOR JESUS.

CHAPTER 46: AUSTRALIAN INCIDENTS.

CHAPTER 47: AMONGST SQUATTERS AND DIGGERS.

CHAPTER 48: JOHN GILPIN IN THE BUSH.

CHAPTER 49: THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA.

CHAPTER 50: NORA.

CHAPTER 51: BACK TO SCOTLAND.

CHAPTER 52: TOUR THROUGH THE OLD COUNTRY.

CHAPTER 53: MARRIAGE AND FAREWELL.

CHAPTER 54: FIRST PEEP AT THE "DAYSPRING."

CHAPTER 55: THE FRENCH IN THE PACIFIC.

CHAPTER 56: THE GOSPEL AND GUNPOWDER.

CHAPTER 57: A PLEA FOR TANNA.

CHAPTER 58: OUR NEW HOME ON ANIWA.

CHAPTER 59: HOUSE-BUILDING FOR GOD.

CHAPTER 60: A CITY OF GOD.

CHAPTER 61: THE RELIGION OF REVENGE.

CHAPTER 62: FIRST FRUITS ON ANIWA.

CHAPTER 63: TRADITIONS AND CUSTOMS.

CHAPTER 64: NELWANG'S ELOPEMENT.

CHAPTER 65: THE CHRIST-SPIRIT AT WORK.

CHAPTER 66: THE SINKING OF THE WELL.

CHAPTER 67: RAIN FROM BELOW.

CHAPTER 68: THE OLD CHIEF'S SERMON.

CHAPTER 69: THE FIRST BOOK AND THE NEW EYES.

CHAPTER 70: A ROOF-TREE FOR JESUS.

CHAPTER 71: "KNOCK THE TEVIL OUT!"

CHAPTER 72: THE CONVERSION OF YOUWILI.

CHAPTER 73: FIRST COMMUNION ON ANIWA.

CHAPTER 74: THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER.

CHAPTER 75: THE ORPHANS AND THEIR BISCUITS.

CHAPTER 76: THE FINGER-POSTS OF GOD.

CHAPTER 77: THE GOSPEL IN LIVING CAPITALS.

CHAPTER 78: THE DEATH OF NAMAKEI.

CHAPTER 79: CHRISTIANITY AND COCOANUTS.

CHAPTER 80: NERWA'S BEAUTIFUL FAREWELL.

CHAPTER 81: RUWAWA.

CHAPTER 82: LITSI SORE AND MUNGAW.

CHAPTER 83: THE CONVERSION OF NASI.

CHAPTER 84: THE APPEAL OF LAMU.

CHAPTER 85: WANTED! A STEAM AUXILIARY.

CHAPTER 86: MY CAMPAIGN IN IRELAND.

CHAPTER 87: SCOTLAND'S FREE-WILL OFFERINGS.

CHAPTER 88: ENGLAND'S OPEN BOOK.

CHAPTER 89: FAREWELL SCENES.

CHAPTER 90: WELCOME TO VICTORIA AND ANIWA.

CHAPTER 91: GOOD NEWS FROM TANNA, 1891.

7.  THINGS AS THEY ARE: Mission Work in Southern India – Amy Carmichael (d. 1951)

Note

Confirmatory Notes

Preface

Glossary

CHAPTER 1: About the Book

CHAPTER 2: Three Afternoons off the Track

CHAPTER 3: Humdrum

CHAPTER 4: Correspondences

CHAPTER 5: The Prey of the Terrible

CHAPTER 6: Missed Ends

CHAPTER 7: "The Dust of the Actual"

CHAPTER 8: Roots

CHAPTER 9: The Classes and the Masses

CHAPTER 10: The Creed Chasm

CHAPTER 11: Caste viewed as a Doer

CHAPTER 12: Petra

CHAPTER 13: Death by Disuse

CHAPTER 14: What Happened

CHAPTER 15: "Simply Murdered"

CHAPTER 16: Wanted, Volunteers

CHAPTER 17: If it is so very important. . . ?

CHAPTER 18: The Call Intensified

CHAPTER 19: "Attracted by the Influence"

CHAPTER 20: The Elf

CHAPTER 21: Deified Devilry

CHAPTER 22: Behind the Door

CHAPTER 23: "Pan, Pan is Dead"

CHAPTER 24: "Married to the God"

CHAPTER 25: Skirting the Abyss

CHAPTER 26: From a Hindu Point of View

CHAPTER 27: Though ye know Him not

CHAPTER 28: How Long?

CHAPTER 29: What do we count them worth?

CHAPTER 30: Two Safe

CHAPTER 31: Three Objections

CHAPTER 32: "Show me Thy Glory!"

APPENDIX: Some Indian Saints