Apparently Lost Service

If there was ever a man who seemed to spend his life for nothing, it was Henry Martyn — a man of an exquisite nature, great power, and a sweet and loving disposition. Taking the highest honours at the university, and having the best prospects in the Church, he was led by the Spirit of God to consecrate himself to the cause of foreign missions. For that object he sacrificed that which was dearer to him than life—for she to whom he was affianced declined to go with him. He forsook father, and mother, and native land, and love itself, and went, an elegant accomplished scholar, among the Persians, the Orientals, and spent a few years almost without an apparent conversion. Still he laboured on, patient and faithful, until, seized with a fever, he staggered. And the last record that he made in his journal was, that he sat under the orchard trees and sighed for that land where there should be sickness and suffering no more. The record closed — he died, and a stranger marked his grave.

A worldly man would say, "Here was an instance of mistaken zeal and enthusiasm. Here was a man who might have produced a powerful effect on the Church and in his own country, and built up a happy home, and been respected and honoured; but, under the influence of a strange fanaticism, he went abroad, and sickened and died, and that was the last of him."

The last of him!

Henry Martyn's life was the seed-life of more noble souls, perhaps, than the life of any other man that ever lived. Scores and scores of ministers in England and America, who have brought into the Church hundreds and thousands of souls, and multitudes of men in heathen lands, all over the world, have derived inspiration and courage from the eminently fruitful, but apparently wasted and utterly thrown away, life of Henry Martyn. And are there not some of you who are desponding because you do not see the fruit of your labours, who will receive consolation from, and be revived by, such an instance as this?—Beecher