Customer Reviews

Life and Letters of Henry Martyn

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For those interested in the history of Christian missions and missionary biography, few works will compare to Sargent's biography of the 19th-century British missionary, Henry Martyn. Martyn was a missionary to both India and Persia at the beginning of the 19th-century and was responsible for highly valuable translations of the Bible into Hindi and the New Testament into Persian. But Martyn is most remembered for the legacy of his journal. Dying in his early 30's, he left behind a journal that plumbed the depths of his spiritual experiences and which, alongside Brainerd' journals, was one of the greatest inspirational forces to 19th-century missions.

Sargent was a friend of Martyn and liberally splices the journal into an ongoing account of Martyn's life. This book is a reprint of the original biography which went through numerous printings in the last century, but which has been out of print for many decades. While necessarily marked by somewhat antiquated religious vocabulary, the biography manages to breathe life into a figure only dimly remembered by 20th-century Christians.

The life of Henry Martyn has inspired Christian missions for centuries, and deservedly so. The actual text though, is a bit on the dry side. Much of the book goes into detailed accounts of his sea voyage from England to India, an overland trip from India to Peria and his last homeward trek from Persia to Istambul. But aside from these lenghtly travelogues, the book does give an honest glimpse into Martyn's soul, his passion for the conversion of the heathen, and his spiritual struggles.
Most interesting are the letters he exchanged with his love, Lydia, who eventually rejects his marriage proposal (very sad), and his encounter with Perisan Islamic Sufism. On the whole, the text is pretty laborous to read through. My own recommendation is to read David Brainerd's journal (a much more interesting read of a missionary to the North American native Indians), who partly inspires Martyn to be a missionary himself.