At Cutwa, one of Carey's mission stations, he had fellowship with
Chamberlain, receiving that 'refreshment of spirit which comes from
the blessing of God on Christian communion.' 'Tell Marshman,' he
wrote, 'with my affectionate remembrance, that I have seriously begun
the Sanskrit Grammar.' To Ward he sends a list of errata which he
found in a tract in the Persian character. He had his Serampore
moonshi with him. At Berhampore, soon to be occupied by Mr. Parson as
chaplain, and by the London Missionary Society, he spent some time,
for it was the great military station of the old Nawab Nazim's
capital, Moorshidabad, which Clive described as wealthier than London,
and quite as populous. Henry Martyn at once walked into the hospital,
where the surgeon immediately recognised him as an old schoolfellow
and townsman. But even with such help he could not induce the men to
rise and assemble for Divine service. 'I left three books with them
and went away amidst the sneers and titters of the common soldiers.
Certainly it is one of the greatest crosses I am called to bear, to
take pains to make people hear me. It is such a struggle between a
sense of propriety and modesty on the one hand, and a sense of duty on
the other, that I find nothing equal to it.' At Rajmahal, like Carey
six years before, he met some of the hill tribes--'wrote down from
their mouth some of the names of things.'
At Maldah he was in the heart of the little Christian community which,
under Charles Grant twenty years before, had proved the salt of
Anglo-Indian society, and had made the first attempt with Carey's
assistance to open vernacular Christian schools. With Mr. Ellerton,
whose wife had witnessed the duel between Warren Hastings and Philip
Francis, and who as a widow indeed lived to the Mutiny of 1857 as the
friend of Bishop Daniel Wilson, he went to Gomalty, and visited one of
the schools. 'The cheerful faces of the little boys, sitting
cross-legged on their mats round the floor, much delighted me. While
they displayed their power of reading, their fathers, mothers, etc.,
crowded in numbers round the door and windows.' Here we see the now
vast educational system of Bengal in the birth. Not less striking is
the contrast, due to the progress of that system on its missionary
side, when we find Martyn, in 1806, recording his surprise at the
extraordinary fear and unwillingness of the people to take tracts and
books. One postmaster, when he found what the booklet was about,
returned it with the remark that a person who had his legs in two
boats went on his way uncomfortably. Passing Colgong and Monghyr, he
'reached Patna. Walked about the scene of my future ministry with a
spirit almost overwhelmed at the sight of the immense multitudes.' On
November 26 he arrived at Dinapore--'the multitudes at the water-side
prodigious.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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