REV. HENRY MARTYW^, B.D. 9 



own admissions teem. Divine philosophy divorced from human 

 science — celestial things stripped of the mitigating veils woven 

 by man's wit and fancy to relieve them — forms an abyss as 

 impassable at Oxford now, as at Athens eighteen centuries ago. 

 To Henry Martyn the gulf was visible, the self-renunication 

 painful, the victory complete. His understanding embraced, 

 and his heart reposed in the two comprehensive and ever 

 germinating tenets of the school, in which he studied. Regarding 

 his own heart as corrupt, and his own reason as delusive, he 

 exercised an unlimited affiance in the holiness and wisdom of 

 Him, in whose person the divine nature had been allied to the 

 human, that, in the persons of his followers, the human might 

 be allied to the divine. 



Such was his religious theory — a theory which doctors may 

 combat, or admit, or qualify, but in which the readers of Henry 

 Martyn's biography, letters, and journals, cannot but acknow- 

 ledge that he found the resting-place of all the impetuous 

 appetencies of his mind, the spring of all his strange powers 

 of activity and endurance. Prostrating his soul before the 

 real, though the hidden Presence he adored, his doubts 

 were silenced, his anxieties soothed, and every meaner passion 

 hushed into repose. He pursued divine truth, (as all who 

 would succeed in that pursuit must pursue it) by the will rather 

 than the understanding ; by sincerely and earnestly searching 

 out the light which had come into the world, by still going after 

 it when perceived, by following its slightest intimations with 

 faith, with resignation, and with constancy, though the path it 

 disclosed led him from the friends and the home of his youth, 

 across wide oceans and burning deserts, amidst contumely and 

 contention, with a wasted frame and an over-burdened spirit. 

 He rose to the sublime in character, neither by the powers of his 

 intellect, nor by the compass of his learning, nor by the subtlety, 

 the range, or the beauty of his conceptions (for in all these he 

 was surpassed by many), but by the copiousness and the force 

 of the living fountains by which his spiritual life was nourished. 

 Estranged from a world once too fondly loved, his well-tutored 

 heart learned to look back with a calm though affectionate 

 melancholy on its most bitter privations. Insatiable in the thirst 

 for freedom, holiness and peace, he maintained an ardour of 

 devotion which might pass for an erotic delirium, when contrasted 



