Nowhere, in British India as it was in 1807, could Henry Martyn have found a better training field, at once as chaplain to the troops and missionary to the Mohammedans, than the Patna centre of the great province of Bihar. For fourteen miles, Patna, the Mohammedan city, Bankipore, the British civil station, and Dinapore, the British military station, line the right bank of the Ganges, which is there two miles broad. Patna itself--'the city,' as the word means--was the Buddhist capital to which the Greek ambassador Megasthenes came from Seleukos Nikator, 300 B.C., and the Chinese pilgrim, Hwen T'sang, 637 years A.D. But under the Mogul emperors and down to the present day, Patna has been the focus of the most fanatical sect of Islam. There Meer Kasim murdered sixty Englishmen in 1763; and so little did a century's civilisation affect the place, which Christian missionaries, except Martyn, neglected till recently, that in 1857 it was a centre of the Mutiny, and in 1872 it was the nucleus of Wahabi rebellion. The second city in Bengal next to Calcutta, and the fifth city in all India in inhabitants, Patna with Bankipore and Dinapore commanded an accessible native population of half a million. Such was Henry Martyn's first 'parish' in the East. For the mass of these he opened schools and translated the Word of God; with their learned men he 'disputed' continually, in the spirit of Paul seeking to commend to them the very Christ. Besides the Company's civil servants in Bankipore whom he never ceased to influence, he was specially charged with the spiritual care of two European regiments, consisting at one time of 1,700 men and 80 officers in various positions. Then and up till 1860, when what was known as 'the White Mutiny' led the Queen's Government to disband the troops, the East India Company had a European force of its own, specially recruited and paid more highly than the royal regiments. The men were generally better educated than the ordinary private of those days, were, indeed, often runaway sons of good families and disreputable adventurers from many countries. As a fighting force they were splendid veterans; in all other respects their history and character as well as his own experience of them on board ship, justified Martyn's language in a letter to Mr. Brown. 'My disdainful and abandoned countrymen among the military; they are impudent children and stiff-hearted, and will receive, I fear, my ministrations, as all the others have done, with scorn. Yet Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Henceforward let me live with Christ alone.' How loving and faithful, if not always tender, his ministry was among them and their native women, and how it gained their respect till it formed a little Church in the army, we shall see.