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The Psalms in philanthropic movements Prison Reform and John Howard ; in missionary enterprises John Eliot, David Brainerd, William Carey, Henry Martyn, Alexander Duff, Alien Gardiner, David Livingstone, Bishop Hannington; in ordinary life Colonel Gardiner, Thomas Carlyle, Jane Welsh Carlyle; in secular history Brittany and La Vendee, the execution of Madame de Noailles, the evacuation of Moscow in 1812, the Revolution of 1848, Bourget in the Franco-German War of 1870-1, Captain Conolly at Bokhara and Havelock at Jellalabad, Duff, Edwards, and ( Quaker 'Wallace in the Indian Mutiny, the Boer War.
IN the preceding chapter, the influence of the Psalms during
the last two
centuries has been illustrated from the lives and writings of leaders of
religion, science, and literature. Within the same period, their power may be
traced, not only in philanthropic movements or missionary enterprises, but also
in ordinary life and secular history.
The religious reawakening which revolutionised England in the latter half of the eighteenth century, inspired numerous efforts towards social progress. The abolition of the Slave Trade, the foundation of the Bible Society, the educational work of Raikes and Lancaster, were the outcome of new and higher standards of life. Among efforts to improve social conditions, an honourable place belongs to the struggle for Prison Reform, which is inseparably associated with the name of John Howard (1726-90). In all the stages of its progress, the Psalms were at work.
In 1755, on Howard's voyage to Lisbon, the Hanover packet, in which he was sailing, was captured by a French privateer. Herded together in a filthy dungeon at Brest, he and his companions experienced the horrors of imprisonment. The memory of his own sufferings may well have lingered in his mind. But it was not till 177 3, nearly twenty years afterwards, that he began to devote himself to Prison Reform. While serving as High Sheriff for the County, Howard officially inspected the Bedfordshire jails. Horror-struck at the sufferings of the prisoners, whether criminals or debtors, he began his investigations in England, and gradually extended his visits to Scotland, Ireland, and the Continent. In the damp, unwholesome cells, ill-lighted and badly-ventilated, where prisoners were confined without exercise or employment, jail fever and smallpox raged. Howard's visits were paid in peril of his life. But " Hold Thou up my goings " (Ps. xvii., verse 5) was the text which encouraged him to persevere. The fever had no terrors for him. "Trusting," he says, "in Divine Providence, and believing myself in the way of my duty, I visit the most noxious cells, and while so doing ' I fear no evil'" (Ps. xxiii., verse 4). Yet he did not always escape. At Lille, in May 1783, he caught the fever. It is in the language of the Psalms that he expresses his gratitude for his recovery:
" For many days I have been in pain and sorrow, the sentence of death was, as it were, upon me, but I cried unto the Lord, and He heard me. Blessed, for ever blessed, be the name of the Lord." A deeply religious man, he jots down in his memorandum books his pious ejaculations and secret aspira- tions. Often his thoughts are couched in the words of the Psalmist. As an example, may be quoted two entries from his Diary, made when he was lying ill at the Hague in 1778 :
"May i^th. In pain and anguish all Night . . . help. Lord, for vain is the help of Man. In Thee do I put my trust, let me not be confounded. May i^th. This Night my Fever abaited, my Pains less . . . Righteous art Thou in all Thy ways, and holy in all Thy works . . . bring me out of the Furnace as Silver purified seven times."
From a Psalm (Ixxix., verse 12) is taken the motto on the title-page of his Account of Lazarettos, " 0 let the sorrowful sighing of the prisoners come before thee," and he chose it because he had himself observed the effect which the words produced on the minds of the prisoners in Lancaster Gaol. In 1789, he left England on the journey which ended with his death at Kherson. He had previously chosen the inscription for his monument, left directions for his funeral, and even selected the text for the sermon which his friend and pastor would preach on the event. The text was Psalm xvii., verse 16. "That text," he says, "is the most appropriate to my feelings of any I know; for I can indeed join with the Psalmist in saying, ' As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness;
and when I awake up after thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it.'"
Howard's work among prisoners was continued, on different lines, by women like Elizabeth Fry and Sarah Martin. But meanwhile missionary enterprise was taking wider and more daring flight. In June 1793, William Carey and his colleague sailed for India. So opposed to the policy of the East India Company was the idea of a Christian mission, that they were obliged to embark in a Danish East Indiaman, and to settle in Danish territory. Nearly a century later, in April 1874, David Livingstone was buried in Westminster Abbey;
" Open the Abbey doors and bear him in
To sleep with king and statesman, chief and sage, The missionary come of weaver kin,
But great by work that brooks no lower wage."
The contrast marks the revulsion of public opinion, and suggests the importance of a movement which is among the marvels of the nineteenth century.
For Protestant England, the history of missions to the heathen begins with John Eliot (1604-90), the son of a Hert- fordshire yeoman, an early settler in New England for con- science' sake, and one of the three authors of the metrical version of the Psalms, which was known as the Bay Psalm Book (1640). Few names in American history are more truly venerable than that of the man who gave the best years of his life to the task of preaching the Gospel to the Red Indians. Rising above the special faults which beset the religion of his contemporaries, he was neither sour, nor gloomy, nor fanatical a kindly-natured, tender-hearted man who always stored the deep pockets of his horseman's cloak with presents for the papooses. His metrical version of the Psalms in the Indian dialect of Massachusetts (1658) was the first part of the Bible which he published, and in the singing of the Psalms he found the readiest means of arresting the attention of his hearers, and the simplest expression for the religious feelings of the infants of humanity.
Eliot's communities of "Praying Indians" were dead or dying before his successor began his mission work among the Indians of Delaware and Pennsylvania. The Journal of David Brainerd (1718-47), as published in Jonathan Edwards' account of his life (1765), is a remarkable piece of spiritual autobiography. In words which are largely drawn from the Psalms, it traces the inner life of the thoughtful, somewhat melancholy youth, who, growing up in his father's home in Connecticut, or working on his own farm, resolved to devote his whole life, first as a minister, then as a missionary to the Indians of Delaware and Pennsylvania. Five years (1742-7) of toil, anxiety, ex- posure, and privation, did their work on a sickly, overwrought frame. At the age of thirty, Brainerd died of consumption, with the words of Psalm cii., sung at his bedside by his friends, still ringing in his ears.
The Journal is a forgotten book. It contains few illuminating thoughts; it breathes a theology which to many men is repel- lant; it speaks a technical language, which, from less saintly and simple lips, might nauseate the modern reader. Yet the picture it presents of utter self-surrender, and of concentrated single-minded effort, is singularly impressive. As a record of religious conflict and spiritual triumph, it may be contrasted with the autobiographies of Bunyan or Henry Martyn. It shows little of the dramatic force and picture-making imagina- tion of the Grace Abounding; it reveals scarcely a trace of the natural struggle with human ties and passions, which gives to Martyn's Journal so pathetic, and even romantic, an interest. But, bare, simple, detached though it is, it stands apart from similar diaries by reason of its absorption in the one object of Brainerd's life the strenuous, concentrated effort to attain nearness to God.
The early stages of his progress are common enough. His transient self-satisfaction in doing duty passed away, leaving him so despondent that, like Bunyan, he "begrutched the birds and beasts their happiness," and fancied that mountains obstructed his hopes of mercy. In alternate joy and despair he continued, till, in October 1740, his temper and habit of mind underwent a change. New and higher views of God and His relation to man seemed to take possession of his soul. There was no special call, no vision, no sudden application of some special passage of Scripture to his own particular case. The change came over him quietly, without violent personal impressions. But it was absolute and permanent. Hencefor- ward he had the "full assurance of hope," and retained it "unto the end." But this confidence only made him more humble-minded, more conscious of his own shortcomings. Externally, it impelled him to greater activity in his mission- ary work; in his inner life, it was the nourishment of his spiritual growth, the source of his love and longing for purity of heart, the spring of that passion for holiness, which banished all motives of fear and self-interest, inspired his eager pursuit on earth of things above, and created his ideal of the beauty of heaven.
The Journal is permeated with the power of the Psalms. So much have they become part of his habitual thoughts, that his hopes, fears, and aspirations flow naturally into language which recalls, even when it does not reproduce, the actual words. On the Psalms are based the " five distinguishing marks of a true Christian," which Brainerd gives from what he had himself "felt and experienced," and the fifth may be taken as some illustration of his character and life:
"The laws of God are his delight, Psalm cxix., verse 97 (' Lord, what love have I unto Thy law; all the day long is my study in it'). These he observes, not out of constraint, from a servile fear of hell; but they are his choice. Psalm cxix., verse 30 (' I have chosen the way of truth; and Thy judgments have I laid before me'). The strict observance of them is not his bondage, but his greatest liberty. Psalm cxix., verse 45 ('And I will walk at liberty; for I seek Thy commandments')." It is on the same foundation that in the Journal Brainerd builds his own assurance of hope. " That holy confidence," he writes, "can only arise from the testimony of a good conscience. (Then,' says the holy psalmist, ' shall I not be ashamed when I have respect unto all Thy commandments'" (Ps. cxix., verse 6).
Brainerd's Journal is, as has been said, a forgotten book. .Yet it would be difficult to measure the magnitude of the results which it indirectly produced. It fired the imagination of William Carey; it stirred the zeal of Henry Martyn; it inspired the decision of David Livingstone to become a missionary. In his Diary for igth April 1794, Carey makes this entry: "I was much humbled to-day by reading Brainerd. 0 what a disparity betwixt me and him! He always constant, I as inconstant as the wind." Martyn, who repeatedly refers to the same book, made the life of Brainerd his human ideal. Such references as the following might be multiplied; "7th November 1803. I thought of David Brainerd, and ardently desired his devotedness to God and holy breathings of soul." " 23rd September 1803. Read David Brainerd to-day, and yes- terday, and find, as usual, my spirit greatly benefited by it. I long to be like him: let me forget the world, and be swallowed in a desire to glorify God."
From Eliot and Brainerd, William Carey (1761-1834) traced his spiritual lineage. The son of the parish clerk and school- master of Paulerspury, in Northamptonshire, he became a Baptist in October 1783. Like Hans Sachs, the poet of the German Reformation, or George Fox, the Quaker, or Jacob Bohme, the mystic, he was by trade a shoemaker. Working at his business, preaching, teaching, a married man and a father, burdened with a debt which he had undertaken for his wife's first husband, he found time to teach himself French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. In his daily prayers for slaves and heathen, he conceived the thought, which gradually shaped itself in practical form, that he would convert the heathen world by giving them the Bible in their native tongues. He brought the subject before the assembled ministers of his persuasion, only to be silenced as a fanatic. But his enthusiasm and per- tinacity were at length rewarded. At Kettering, in October 1792, in the low-roofed back parlour of Widow Wallis, twelve Baptist ministers formed the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen. A few weeks later it was decided that Carey should be sent out to Bengal with Thomas, a surgeon who had already worked as a mission- ary in India. A verse from the Psalms, "0 come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker " (Ps. xcv., verse 6), was already inscribed by Christian Friedrich . Schwartz (1726-97) over the portal of his Mission Church of Bethlehem at Tranquebar. It was a psalm (xvi., verse 4), " They that run after another God shall have great trouble," which supplied the text of the sermon preached at the service held to dedicate Carey to his work. Thus was launched, to quote Sydney Smith's sneer, by a few " consecrated cobblers," the first English mission to the heathen in India.
Carey left England, determined never to return. The resolu- tion cost him something. Among the seeds which, years later, he sowed in his garden at Serampore were those of the daisy. " I know not," he wrote, " that I ever enjoyed since leaving Europe, a simple pleasure so exquisite as the sight which this English daisy afforded me; not having seen one for thirty years, and never expecting to see one again." During his long, laborious career, thirty-four translations of the Bible were made or edited by him. He himself completed the Ben- gali, Hindi, Maratti, and Sanskrit versions. His paper factories created a new industry. Not only was he one of the first of Oriental scholars, but he was a scientific botanist, an enthusi- astic farmer, an ardent student of natural history. Yet, with him, science was always subordinated to religion. It is a text from the Psalms, " All thy works praise thee, 0 Lord " (Ps. cxlv., verse 10), that he prefixed to his edition of Roxburgh's Flora Indica (1820). It was with the words of a psalm in his mind that he desired to end his life. In December 1823, he lay, as he thought, dying. "I had no joys," he writes ; "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 5ist Psalm, which I desired might be the text of my funeral sermon,(Have mercy upon me, 0 God, after Thy great goodness: according to the multitude of Thy mercies do away mine offences. Wash me throughly from my wickedness, and cleanse me from my sin."
Carey survived his illness for nearly eleven years. He lived to see the tone of Anglo-Indian society transformed, and the worst cruelties of the Hindoo religion suppressed. He lived also to see two of his greatest successors among Indian missionaries. In the prime of his manhood, he welcomed Henry Martyn to India; at the close of his own career he blessed Alexander Duff, tottering with outstretched hands to meet the ruddy Highlander " a little yellow old man in a white jacket."
Both Eliot and Carey had left the Anglican Church before they began their missionary labours; the work of Bunyan, Baxter, Howard, and Wesley was done outside her organisa- tion. But Henry Martyn (1781-1812) lived, laboured, and died a faithful member of her communion. It is this contrast which marks the special importance of Martyn's life and death, as the first Anglican missionary to the heathen, the precursor of a long line of heroes, the spiritual ancestor of men of the type of Bishop Patteson and Bishop Hannington.
Senior wrangler at Cambridge in 1801, a brilliant classic as well as a mathematician, a fellow of St John's College (1802), Martyn was ordained in October 1803. He had already resolved to devote his life and abilities to missionary work. To this resolution he was drawn, partly by the example of Carey, partly, as has been shown, by the career of David Brainerd. Appointed at the close of 1804 to an East Indian Company's chaplaincy, he sailed for Calcutta in July 1805. The sacrifice was costly. On the one side, were the consciousness of talents, achieved success, a growing reputation, congenial pursuits, material comfort, affection for his home, kindred, friends, and, above all, his love for Lydia Grenfell. On the other side, were exile, solitude, obscure employment among ignorant aliens, possibility of failure, surrender of the comforts and refine- ments of a scholarly, literary life, separation from kindred and acquaintances, abandonment of his prospects of marriage with the being who was dearest to him on earth. It is this human struggle, chronicled with abundant wealth of detail, which gives to his final victory its pathos, its romance, and, for ordinary men, its vital interest. The Diary depicts, with all the fluctuations of success and defeat, the hard-won conquest of self by a creature of flesh and blood, not the easy triumph achieved over the weak passions of earth by some disembodied spirit.
In his Diary for July agth, 1804, Martyn speaks for the first time of his love for Lydia Grenfell: " 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." Or again, a month later (27th August):
"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. ... I continued con- versing 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. Walked to St Hilary, deter- mining, in great tumult and inward pain, to be the servant of God." Martyn tore himself away from the living woman to perfect his union with his exalted ideal of conduct. On the last day of the same year (December 3ist), when he was waiting for news of his definite appointment to the Indian chaplaincy, he makes the following entry, clothing his self-surrender in the familiar words of Psalm xxxi., verse 6: "So closes the easy part of my life; enriched by every earthly comfort, and caressed by friends, I may scarcely be said to have experienced trouble;
but now, farewell ease, if I might presume to conjecture. * 0 Lord, into Thy hands I commit my spirit! Thou hast redeemed me. Thou God of truth!' may I be saved by Thy grace, and be sanctified to do Thy will, and to all eternity; through Jesus Christ."
The struggle was not over. It was renewed again and again.
In a sense it ceased only with his life. Few passages in the Journal are more pathetic than those which record Martyn's feelings during the detention of his ship at Falmouth and at Mounts Bay. At Miss Grenfell's house at Marazion, on August loth, 1805, came the final parting. On board ship, throughout his labours among English soldiers and natives at Dinapore and Cawnpore, in the midst of his toil in translating the New Testament into Hindustani and Persian, in his journey through Persia, in his religious disputes at Shiraz, he never swerved from his purpose, never relaxed his efforts to conquer himself and never forgot his love.
On the eve of his departure from Cawnpore, when the fatal signs of consumption had declared themselves, and a sea voyage seemed the only chance of life, he makes this entry:
" 23rd September 1811. Was walking with Lydia; both much affected; and speaking on things dearest to us both. I awoke, and behold it was a dream! My mind remained very solemn and pensive; I shed tears. The clock struck three, and the moon was riding near her highest noon; all was silence and solemnity, and I thought with pain of the sixteen thousand miles between us. But good is the will of the Lord! even if I see her no more." Side by side with this entry, there are scattered throughout the pages of the Journal almost innumer- able references to the Psalms, and illustrations of their power to soothe and encourage. In the stress of his struggle in 1804, he found that, by learning portions of the Psalms by heart, he quickened his devotional feelings, and in this way committed to memory Psalm cxix. It was a psalm (x.) that he was reading to Lydia Grenfell when he was hastily summoned to rejoin his ship, and they parted for ever on earth. During his long and tedious voyage, surrounded by uncongenial com- panions, it was to the Psalms that he turned for comfort. Day after day the entries in his Journal of the daily events of his life began with a verse from the Psalms, followed by a short comment. From the Psalms he drew encouragement in his missionary enterprise. Thus (December loth, 1805) he quotes Psalm xxii., verse 27; " All the ends of the earth shall remember, and be turned to the Lord "; and thus continues, " Sooner or later, they shall remember what is- preached to them, and though missionaries may not live to see the fruits of their labours, yet the memory of their words shall remain, and in due time shall be the means of turning them unto the Lord." In failing health, and sleepless nights, assailed by temptation, yet straining after purity of heart, his " hope and trust" is in the words, " Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow" (Ps. li., verse 7). At Shiraz, in the midst of daily disputes with Maho- metan doctors, and the laborious revision of his Persian translation of the New Testament, he found " a sweet employment" in translating the Psalms into Persian. The work "caused six weary moons, that waxed and waned since its commencement, to pass unnoticed." It was the Psalms that soothed the fatigue of his headlong ride from Tabriz to Tokat on his homeward journey: " 4th September 1813. I beguiled the hours of the night by thinking of the i4th Psalm." " loth September. All day at the village, writing down notes on the i5th and i6th Psalms."
The closing weeks of his life bring into touching juxtaposition his earthly and his heavenly love. He had resolved to aban- don his scheme of translating the Bible into Arabic, and to return home from Tabriz by Constantinople. In one of his last letters, written three months before his death, he tells Miss Grenfell of his plan. " Perhaps," he continues, " you may be gratified by the intelligence; but oh, my dear Lydia, I must faithfully tell you, that the probability of my reaching England alive is but small." The last entry in the Journal (October 6th), begins with words which sound like reminiscences of the Psalmist, who remembered the past, and meditated on the works of God. " I sat in the orchard, and thought with sweet comfort and peace of my God; in solitude my company, my friend, and comforter." Ten days later, i6th October 1812, alone among strangers, Henry Martyn passed to his rest.
His epitaph was written by Macaulay:
" 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."
But, in missionary enterprises, there has never been any lack ot true spiritual heroes to fill the gaps caused by death. Man after man has come forward, obeying what, in his simple sin- cerity, he believes to be a call. In doing that work, their own characters have ripened in beauty and nobility. Many have been inspired by the largest views of their country's oppor- tunities and responsibilities; but every genuine missionary has done his best, without self-seeking, in some community, however small, and from each a handful of human beings, at the least, have learned the highest and purest impulses of their lives.
High in the roll of missionaries stands the name of Alexander Duff, the eloquent speaker, the educational statesman, and the first missionary sent out to India by the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. An incident on his voyage confirmed, if it did not shape, his career. On October i4th, 1829, he and his wife sailed from Ryde, on board the Lady Holland. Four months later, in rough, boisterous weather, the ship approached the Cape of Good Hope, and made for Table Bay. At midnight, February i3th, 1830, she ran aground. Her back broke; her masts were cut away; waves dashed over the wreck: the position seemed desperate. It was not even known whether the ship had struck on a reef, the mainland, or an island. All around were boiling surf and foam. With great difficulty, one of the boats was launched, manned, and despatched to find a landing-place. Three hours passed. Hope was almost gone, when the boat returned, reporting a small sandy bay. At this haven, which proved to be on Dessen Island, the passengers and crew were safely landed, but all that they possessed was lost.