Kitabı oku: «Pioneers and Founders», sayfa 8
As soon as he mended a little, he enjoyed talking over his Hebrew and Greek studies and his ethnological researches with his clever and eager hostess, who must have greatly refreshed his spirit. He delighted in music: his voice and ear were both excellent, and he taught her many hymns and their tunes. He also took much pleasure in a little orphan girl whom she was bringing up. At this time she herself was almost a childless mother, all her Indian-born infants having been victims to the climate; but a few months later Mr. Martyn christened her little daughter Lucy, a child of such gentle, gracious temper that he was wont to call her Serena. Mrs. Sherwood gives a pretty picture of this little creature, when about eighteen months old, creeping up to Mr. Martyn as he lay on a sofa with all his books about him, and perching herself on his Hebrew Lexicon, which he needed every moment, but would not touch so as to disturb her. The pale, white-clad pastor, and the child with silky hair, bare white feet and arms, and little muslin frock, looked equally innocent and pure.
Mr. Martyn’s house at Cawnpore was at the end of an avenue of palms and aloes: there were two bungalows connected by a long passage, in one of which he himself lived, the other was given up to Sabat and his wife. The garden was prettily laid out with shrubs and tall trees, with a raised platform in the centre; and on one side was a whole colony, consisting not only of the usual number of servants allowed to a military chaplain, but of a host of pundits, moonshees, schoolmasters, and poor nominal Christians, who hung about him because there was no one else to give them a handful of rice for their daily maintenance.
Here Mrs. Sherwood describes a motley entertainment, at which she was the only lady. Her husband, in his scarlet and gold uniform, and Mr. Martyn, in his clerical black silk coat, were the only other English. The other European present was Padre Giulio Cesare, an Italian Franciscan, whom Mr. Martyn was obliged to receive when he came to minister to the numerous Irish Roman Catholics in the regiment. He wore a purple satin cassock, a cord of twisted silk, a rosary of costly stones, and a little skull-cap, and his languages were French with the Sherwoods, and Italian and Latin with Mr. Martyn. Sabat was there in his Arab dress; there was a thin, copper-coloured, half-caste gentleman in white nankeen, speaking only Bengalee; and a Hindoo in full costume, speaking only his native tongue: so that no two of the party were in similar costume, seven languages were employed, and moreover the three Orientals viewed it as good breeding to shout at the very top of their voices.
Unluckily, too, Mr. Martyn in his politeness suddenly recollected that Mrs. Sherwood had expressed a liking for certain mutton patties, and ordered them to be brought, in a bachelor’s entire oblivion whether any mutton was procurable otherwise than by killing a sheep: and the delay forced the guests to continue to sit on the platform in the dark, with the voices and languages making too great a Babel for the night-enjoyment sometimes so valued, when Mr. Martyn would show Mrs. Sherwood our own Pole Star just above the horizon, or watch the new moon “looking like a ball of ebony in a silver cup.” At last the patties were ready, and Mr. Martyn handed Mrs. Sherwood to a seat by him at the top of the table, while Sabat perched himself cross-legged upon a chair at the bottom.
The good chaplain’s simplicity seems to have been a great amusement to the Sherwoods. Late one evening he quietly observed, “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 run off and taken my treasure with him.” Thereupon it turned out that, not having drawn his pay for some time, he had sent a note to the collector at Cawnpore, asking that the amount should be forwarded by the bearer, a common coolie. It was all paid in silver, tied up in cotton bags, and no one expected that he would ever see it; however, the coolie arrived safely with it a little later. Another time, when each household had ordered a pineapple cheese, it was observed that the fissures in the two were marvellously similar; and at last it was discovered that the servants, though paid for two cheeses, made one do duty for both, appearing in turn at the two tables, which was the easier as Mr. Martyn supped on limes and other fruits, and only produced his cheese when the Sherwoods came to supper. He heeded little but his immediate thoughts, and, when he drove out in his gig, went on with his disquisitions on language and pronunciation, utterly unheeding what his horse was about.
The hope of having Lydia with him to brighten his life and aid his labours had by this time passed away. She had some entanglement which prevented her from coming out to India, and his disappointment was most acute. His letters urging her to come out to him are so strong, and full of such anguish, that it is hard to understand that the person who could withstand them could have been the admirable woman Miss Grenfell is described to have been in after-life—unless, indeed, Martyn did not appreciate the claims at home to which she yielded. “Why do things go so well with them and so hardly with me?” was a thought that would come into his mind at the weddings where he officiated as priest. Meantime he had established native schools, choosing a master, usually a Mussulman, and giving him an anna a head for each boy whom he obtained as a scholar in reading and writing. Mr. Martyn supplied books, and these were translations of Scripture history, of the Parables, and the like, through which he hoped to lay a foundation for distinctive teaching. Here is Mrs. Sherwood’s description of the Cawnpore school, then in a long shed by the side of the cavalry lines:—
“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 their 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 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 cocoa-nut 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. Who that has ever heard it, can forget the sounds of the various notes with which these little people intonated their ‘Aleph, Zubbin ah, Zair a, Paiche oh,’ as they moved backwards and forwards in their recitations? Who can forget the self-importance of the schoolmaster, who was generally a grey-bearded, dry, old man, who had no other means of proving his superiority to the scholars than by making more noise than even they could?”
In the winter of 1809, Mr. Martyn made his first endeavour at native preaching. The Yogis and Fakers, devotees and vagrants, haunted the station, and every Sunday evening he opened the gates of his garden, admitted all who were collected by the assurance of the distribution of a pice a head; and standing on his platform, read to them some simple verse of Scripture, and then endeavoured to make them believe there is a pure Almighty Universal Father. A frightful crowd: they were often five hundred in number. “No dreams,” says Mrs. Sherwood, “in the delirium of a raging fever, could surpass the realities” of their appearance; “clothed with abominable rags, or nearly without clothes, or plastered with mud and cow-dung, or with long matted locks streaming down to their heels; every countenance foul and frightful with evil passions; the lips black with tobacco, or crimson with henna. One man, who came in a cart drawn by a bullock, was so bloated as to look like an enormous frog; another had kept an arm above his head with his hand clenched till the nail had come out at the back of his hand; and one very tall man had all his bones marked on his dark skin with white chalk, like the figure of grim Death himself.” The assemblage, in contrast with the pure, innocent, pale face and white dress of the preacher who addressed them, must have been like some of Gustave Doré’s illustrations.
These addresses were jealously watched by the British authorities, and were often interrupted by the howls and threatenings of his loathsome congregation; while, moreover, pulmonary complaint, the enemy of his family, began to manifest itself, so that the physicians insisted on his trying the effect of cessation from work, a sea-voyage, and a visit to England. On this plan he had at first fixed. He enters in his journal a happy dream of a walk with Lydia, and, waking, the recollection of the 16,000 miles between them; but in the meantime he heard from the critics at Calcutta, that his translation of the Gospels into Persian, done with the assistance of Sabat, was too full of Arabic idioms, and in language not simple enough for its purpose; and he therefore made up his mind to spend his leave of absence in making his way through Persia and part of Arabia, so as to improve himself in the languages, and submit his translation to more trustworthy scholars. Mr. Brown, on hearing of his plan, consented in these remarkable terms: “Can I then bring myself to cut the string and let you go? I confess I could not if your bodily frame were strong, and promised to last for half a century. But as you burn with the intenseness and rapid blaze of phosphorus, why should we not make the most of you? Your flame may last as long, and perhaps longer, in Arabia than in India. Where should the phœnix build her odoriferous nest but in the land prophetically called the ‘blessed’? And where shall we ever expect but from that country the true Comforter to come to the nations of the East?”
In September, therefore, Henry Martyn made ready to set forth, and to take leave of his congregation of beggars. He had baptized one poor old Hindoo woman, and she seemed to him to be the only fruit of his toils; but though the exhortation, at the end of all his labours of the Sunday, cost him severe pain and exhaustion, he had constantly persisted, often beginning in a low feeble tone, but gradually rising in fervour to the full power of his musical voice; then himself going among the disgusting throng to distribute their petty bribe for attendance, and often falling afterwards, faint and speechless, on a sofa.
He knew not that one seed, cast on these turbid waters, had found good soil, and was springing up. Sheik Salah was the son of a pundit at Delhi, and was well-learned in Persian and Arabic. When a youth he had become moonshee to two English gentlemen then living at Lucknow, and while in their service converted a Hindoo fellow-servant from his idolatry to Islam. Elated with his success, he gave himself such airs that his English masters reproved him; and he left them in displeasure, vowing never to serve a Feringhee again. However, being in the pay of a Mahratta chief, he was sent in company with a Mahometan envoy who had undertaken to murder a rival of his master, and having lulled his victim into security by an oath on the Koran that no treachery was intended, decoyed him into his tent, and there stabbed him.
Sheik Salah was a deeply conscientious man, and not only did he leave the Mahratta service, lest some such horrible act should be required of him, but he conceived a certain distrust of his own faith, which, though it condemns such deeds, had not hindered them. While in search of employment, he came to Cawnpore, and there, one fine evening, he sat with some other young Mussulmans, in a summer-house on the garden wall that bounded Mr. Martyn’s garden, enjoying their hookahs and sherbet, and amusing themselves with what they called the “foolishness” of the Feringhee Padre, who was discoursing to the throng of hateful looking beggars below. By and by, anxious to hear more, they came down, entered the garden, and stood in a row before the front of the bungalow; their arms folded, their turbans placed jauntily on one side, and their countenances expressive of the utmost contempt.
But the words that Sheik Salah caught were sinking deep. They were of the intense purity and holiness of God and of His laws, and of the need of His power to attain to the keeping of them, as well as of His Sacrifice to atone for man’s sinfulness. Sheik Salah could not rest without hearing more, and becoming determined to obtain employment at Cawnpore, he undertook to copy Persian manuscripts for Sabat, and was lodged by him in one of the numerous huts in Mr. Martyn’s compound. He was a well-educated, graceful man, exceedingly handsome, looking like a hero of the Old Testament; and probably Sabat was afraid of a rival, for he never mentioned to Mr. Martyn the stranger who, Sunday after Sunday, listened to his preaching, and no doubt would have as thankfully profited by his individual teaching as he would have joyfully given it.
Sabat was at this time a great trial to Mr. Martyn, who in the flush of enthusiasm had let him be put too forward at first, and found the wild man of the desert far too strong for him. Sometimes, when they differed about a word in the translation, Sabat would contend so violently for a whole morning that poor Mr. Martyn, when unable to bear it any longer, would order his palanquin and be carried over to the Sherwoods to escape from the intolerable brawling shout. What Sabat could be was plain from the story of his wife Amina; his seventh, as he told his friends. When he was trying to convert her, she asked his views upon the future lot of those who remained Mahometans, and, when he consigned them to the state of condemnation, she quietly replied that she greatly preferred hell without Sabat’s company to heaven with him. The poor man was no doubt in great measure sincere, but his probation had been insufficient, and his wild Ishmaelitish nature, so far from being overcome, gained in pride and violence through the enthusiasm that was felt for him as a convert. Once, in a fit of indignation, he wrote a Persian letter, full of abuse of Mr. Martyn, to a friend in the service of the English resident at Lucknow. By him it was carried to his master, who, wishing to show Mr. Martyn the real character of his favourite convert, sent him the letter. Instead of looking into it, Mr. Martyn summoned Sabat, and bade him read it aloud to him. For once the Arab was overpowered; he cowered before his calm master and entreated his pardon, and when Mr. Martyn put the letter into his hands, assuring him that he had not read it, he was really touched, and showed sorrow for his violence.
On the last Sunday of September 1810, Mr. Martyn took leave of Cawnpore. It was also the Sunday of the installation as chaplain of his dearest friend, the Reverend Daniel Corrie, and of the opening of a church which his exertions had prevailed to raise, whereas all former services had been in his own long verandah. The first sound of the bell most deeply affected those who had scarcely heard one since they had left their native country. That church has given place to the beautiful building which commemorates the horrors of 1857; but the name of Henry Martyn ought never to be forgotten at Cawnpore, if only as the priest to whom it was granted first to give thanks that, in his own words, “a temple of God was erected and a door opened for the service of the Almighty in a place where, from the foundation of the world, the tabernacle of the true God had never stood.”
After returning from church he sank, nearly fainting, on a sofa in the hall; but, as soon as he revived, begged his friends to sing to him. The hymn was—
“O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope in years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.”
After the early dinner and afternoon rest, on a sickly, hazy, burning evening, he preached for the last time to his beggars; came away fainting, and as he lay on his sofa told his friends that he did not believe that he had ever made the slightest impression on one of his audience there.
He knew not that Sheik Salah’s heart had been touched, and so deeply that he sought further instruction. As to Sabat, his later career was piteous. He fell back into Mahometanism, and, after some years of a wandering life, took service with the Mussulman chief of Acheen in Sumatra, where, having given some offence, he was barbarously hacked to pieces and thrown into the sea. Such bitter disappointments occur in missionary life; and how should we wonder, since the like befel even St. Paul and St. John?
On the 1st of October, 1810, Mr. Martyn embarked on the Ganges, and on the last day of the month arrived at Mr. Brown’s house at Aldeen. He was then much the stronger for the long rest to his voice and chest, but his friends thought him greatly changed and enfeebled, and he could not even hold a conversation without bringing on painful symptoms. Nevertheless, he preached every Sunday but one at Calcutta until the 7th of January, 1811, when he took his last leave of his Anglo-Indian friends, and set forth on his journey to lands almost entirely strange even to his countrymen, in the hope of rendering the Scriptures available for the study of the numerous Hindoos and Mahometans who understood Persian better than any other literary language. He went forth, in broken health, and not only without a companion, but without even an attendant, and for his further history we have only his own journals and letters to depend upon. He went by sea to Bombay with a captain who had been a pupil of Swartz, and whose narratives delighted him much, and afterwards obtained a passage in an English ship which was to cruise in the Persian Gulf against Arab pirates. Here he was allowed to have public prayers every evening, and on the 22nd of May was landed at Bushire, where he was lodged in the house of an English merchant with an Armenian wife.
The time for a journey to Persia was so far favourable that the Shah, Fath’ Ali, who had succeeded to the throne in 1794, owed England much gratitude for having interfered to check the progress of Russian conquest upon his northern frontier. After Persia had long been closed from foreign intercourse by the jealous and cruel Shah, Aga Mohammed, Fath’ Ali, a comparatively enlightened prince in the prime of life, willingly entertained envoys and travellers from European courts, and Sir Gore Ouseley was resident at Shiraz as British Ambassador. Yet it was not considered safe for a Frank to travel through Persia without an Oriental dress, and, accordingly, Martyn had to provide himself with the tall conical cap of black Tartar lambskin, baggy blue trousers, red boots, and a chintz coat, allowing his beard and moustache to grow, and eating rice by handfuls from the general dish. Meantime he was hospitably entertained, the Armenian ladies came in a body to kiss his hand, and the priest placed him beside the altar in church, and incensed him four times over, for which he was not grateful on being told “it was for the honour of our order.”
An English officer joined company with him, and a muleteer undertook their transport to Shiraz. It was a terrible journey up the parching mountain paths of Persia, where Alexander’s army had suffered so much, with the sun glaring down upon them, never, in that rainless belt around the Persian Gulf, tempered by a cloud. They travelled only by night, and encamped by day, sometimes without a tree to spread their tents under. The only mode of existing was to wrap the head in a wet cloth, and the body in all the heavy clothing to be had, to prevent the waste of moisture; but even thus Martyn says his state was “a fire within my head, my skin like a cinder, the pulse violent.” The thermometer rose to 126° in the middle of the day, and came down to about 100° in the evening. When exhausted with fever and sleeplessness, but unable to touch food, it was needful to mount, and, in a half-dead state of sleepiness, be carried by the sure-footed mountain pony up steep ascents, and along the verge of giddy precipices, with a general dreamy sense that it was magnificent scenery for any one who was in a bodily condition to admire it.
Swift clear streams and emerald valleys began to refresh the travellers as they rose into the higher land above the arid region; and, after one twenty-four hours’ halt in a sort of summer-house, where Henry Martyn was too ill to move till he had had a few hours of sleep, they safely arrived at the mountain-city of Shiraz, where he was kindly received by Jaffier Ali Khan, a Persian gentleman to whom he had brought letters of introduction.
Persia, as is well known, has a peculiar intellectual character of its own. Descended from the Indo-European stock, and preserved from total enervation by their mountain air, the inhabitants have, even under Islam, retained much of the vivacity, fire, and poetry inherent in the Aryan nature. Their taste for beauty, especially in form and colour, has always been exquisite; their delight in gardens, in music, and poetry has had a certain refinement, and with many terrible faults—in especial falsehood and cruelty, the absence of the Turkish stolidity, the Arab wildness, and the Hindoo pride and indolence—has always made them an attractive people. Their Mahommedanism, too, is of a different form from that of the Arab and Turk. Theirs is the schismatical sect of Ali, which is less rigid, and affords more scope for the intellect and fancy, and it has thrown off a curious body called the Soofees, a sort of philosophers in relation to Islam. The name may be either really taken from the Greek Sophos, wise, or else comes from the Persian Soof, purity. The Soofees profess to be continually in search of truth, and seem, for the most part, to rest upon a general belief in an all-pervading Creator, with a spirit diffused through all His works. Like their (apparent) namesakes of old, they revel in argument, and delight to tell or to hear some new thing.
Thus, Jaffier Ali Khan, who belonged to this sect, made the English padre welcome; and his brother, Seid Ali, whose title of Mirza shows him to have been a Scribe, undertook to assist in the translation, while Moollahs and students delighted to come and hold discussions with him; and very vain and unprofitable logomachies he found them, whether with Soofee, Mahometan, or Jew. But the life, on the whole, was interesting, since he was fulfilling his most important object of providing a trustworthy and classical version of the Scriptures, such as might adequately express their meaning, and convey a sense of their beauty of language and force of expression to the scholarly and fastidious Oriental.
He made friends in the suite of the Ambassador, Sir Gore Ouseley, whose house he ministered on Sunday, and he was presented by him to the heir to the throne, Prince Abbas Mirza. He had, by way of Court dress, to wear a pair of red cloth stockings and high-heeled shoes, and was marched up through the great court of the palace, where a hundred fountains began to play the moment the Ambassador entered. The Prince sat on the ground in his hall of audience, and all his visitors sat in a line with their hats on, but he conversed with no one but the Ambassador, looking so gentle and amiable that Mr. Martyn could hardly believe that the tyrannical acts reported of him could be true.
In the summer heat, Jaffier Ali pitched a tent for him in a garden outside the walls of Shiraz, where he worked with much enjoyment, “living among clusters of grapes, by the side of a clear stream,” and sitting under the shade of an orange-tree. From thence he made an expedition to see the ruins of Persepolis, greatly to the perplexity of his escort, who, after repeatedly telling him that the place was uninhabited, concluded that he had come thither to drink brandy in secret!
On the New Year’s Day of 1812 Martyn wrote in his journal: “The present year will probably be a perilous one, but my life is of little consequence, whether I live to finish the Persian New Testament, or do not. I look back with pity and shame on my former self, and on the importance I then attached to my life and labours. The more I see of my own works, the more I am ashamed of them. Coarseness and clumsiness mar all the works of men. I am sick when I look at man, and his wisdom, and his doings, and am relieved only by reflecting that we have a city whose builder and maker is God. The least of His works is refreshing to look at. A dried leaf or a straw makes me feel myself in good company. Complacency and admiration take the place of disgust.”
On the 24th of February he finished his Persian New Testament, and in six weeks more his translation of the Psalms. His residence in Persia had lasted just a year, and, though direct missionary work had not been possible to him there, he had certainly inspired his coadjutor, Mirza Seid Ali, with a much higher morality and with something very like faith. On one of the last days before his leaving Shiraz, Seid Ali said seriously, “Though a man had no other religious society, I suppose he might, with the aid of the Bible, live alone with God.” It was to this solitude that Martyn left him, not attempting apparently to induce him to give up anything for the sake of embracing Christianity. Death would probably have been the consequence of joining the Armenian Church in Persia, but why did Martyn’s teaching stop at inward faith instead of insisting on outward confession, the test fixed by the Saviour Himself?
On the 24th of May, Mr. Martyn and another English clergyman set out to lay his translation before the Shah, who was in his camp at Tebriz. There they were admitted to the presence of the Vizier, before whom two Moollahs, the most ignorant and discourteous whom he had met in Persia, were set to argue with the English priest. The Vizier mingled in the discussion, which ended thus: “You had better say God is God, and Mahomet is His prophet.” “God is God,” repeated Henry Martyn, “and Jesus is the Son of God.”
“He is neither born nor begets,” cried the Moollahs; and one said, “What will you say when your tongue is burnt out for blasphemy?”
He had offended against the Mohammedan doctrine most strictly held; and, knowing this well, he had kept back the confession of the core of the true faith till to withhold it longer would have been a denial of his Lord. After all, he was not allowed to see the Shah without the Ambassador to present him, and descended again to Sultania—a painful journey, from which he brought a severe ague and fever, through which he was nursed by Sir Gore and Lady Ouseley.
As soon as he had recovered, he decided on making his way to Constantinople, and thence to England, where he hoped to recruit his health and, it might be, induce Lydia to accompany him back to India. His last letter to her was written from Tebriz on the 28th of August, dreading illness on the journey, but still full of hope. In that letter, too, he alludes to Sabat as the greatest tormentor he had known, but warns her against mentioning to others that this “star of the East,” as Claudius Buchanan had called him, had been a disappointment. His diary is carried on as far as Tocat. The last entry is on the 6th of October. It closes thus: “Oh! when shall time give place to eternity? When shall appear that new heaven and earth wherein dwelleth righteousness? There, there shall in nowise enter in anything that defileth; none of that wickedness which has made men worse than wild beasts, none of those corruptions which add still more to the miseries of mortality, shall be seen or heard of any more.”
No more is known of Henry Martyn save that he died at Tocat on the 16th of that same October of 1812, without a European near. It is not even known whether his death were caused by fever, or by the plague, which was raging at the place. He died a pilgrim’s solitary death, and lies in an unknown grave in a heathen land.
What fruit has his mission zeal left? It has left one of the soul-stirring examples that have raised up other labourers. It has left the Persian Bible for the blessing of all to whom that language is familiar. It left, for the time, a strong interest in Christianity in Shiraz. It left in India many English quickened to a sense of religion; and it assuredly left Sheik Salah a true convert. Baptized afterwards by the name of Abdul Messeh, or Servant of the Messiah, he became the teacher of no less than thirty-nine Hindoos whom he brought to Holy Baptism. Such were the reapings in Paradise that Henry Martyn has won from his thirty-one years’ life and his seeming failure.
