8 UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF THE 



When Mackenzie was sketching the Man of Feeling, he could 

 ha^ve desired no better model than Henry Martyn, the young 

 and successful competitor for academical honours ; a man born 

 to love with ardour and to hate with vehemence : amorous, 



ascible, ambitious, and vain ; without one torpid nerve about 

 him : aiming at universal excellence in science, in literature, in 

 conversation, in horsemanship,, and even in dress; not without 

 some gay fancies, but more prone to austere and melancholy 

 thought ; patient of the most toilsome enquiries, though not 

 wooing philosophy for her own sake ; animated by the poetical 

 temperament, though unvisited by any poetical inspiration ; 

 eager for enterprise, though thinking meanly of the rewards to 

 which the adventurous aspire; uniting in himself, though as 

 yet unable to concentrate or to harmonise them, many keen 

 desires, many high powers, and much constitutional dejection — 

 the chaotic materials of a great character, destined to combine, 

 as the future events of life should determine, into no common 

 forms, whether of beauty and delight, or of deformity and 

 terror. 



Among those events, the most momentous was his connexion 

 with Charles Simeon, and with such of his disciples as sought 

 learning at Cambridge, and learned leisure at Clapham. A 

 mind so beset by sympathies of every other kind, could not but 

 be peculiarly susceptible to the contagion of opinion. From 

 that circle he adopted in all its unadorned simplicity, the 

 system called evangelical — that system of which (if Augustine, 

 Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the writers of the English Homilies 

 may be credited) Christ himself was the author, and Paul the 

 first and greatest interpreter. 



Through shallow heads and voluble tongues, such a creed (or 

 indeed any creed) filtrates so easily, that, of the multitude who 

 maintain it, comparatively few are aware of the conflict of their 

 faith with the natural and unaided reason of mankind. Indeed 

 he who makes such an avowal will hardly escape the charge of 

 affectation or of impiety. Yet if any truth be clearly revealed, 

 it is, that the apostolic doctrine was foolishness to the sages of 

 this world. If any unrevealed truth be indisputable, it is, that 

 such sages are at this day making, as they have ever made, 

 ill-disguised efforts to escape the inferences with which their 



