othing could rob him of a dry and bitter humour ("They
won't let me go to Bedlam," he wrote, "because they say I make the
inmates mad, nor into Newgate, because I make them wicked"); but
there was little in his creed or in the scenes of his labours to
promote cheerfulness of spirit.

This disciplining of nature, honest, erring human nature, which
could, if permitted, make out a fair case for itself, is not an
essential element of the evangelist's code. In the hands of men less
great than Wesley, it has been known to nullify the work of a lifetime.
The Lincolnshire farmer who, after listening to a sermon on Hell,
said to his wife, "Noa, Sally, it woant do. Noa constitootion could
stand it," expressed in his own fashion the healthy limit of
endurance. Our spiritual constitutions break under a pitiless strain.
When we read in the diary of Henry Alline, quoted by Dr. William James
in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," "On Wednesday the
twelfth I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to
be the means of excluding carnal mirth," we are not merely sorry for
the wedding guests, but beset by doubts as to their moral gain.

Why should Henry Martyn, that fervent young missionary who gave his
life for his cause with the straight-forward simplicity of a soldier,
have regretted so bitterly an occasional lapse into good spirits?
He was inhumanly serious, and he prayed by night and day to be saved
from his "besetting sin" of levity. He was consumed by the flame of
religious zeal, and he bewailed at grievous length, in his diary,
his "light, worldly spirit." He toiled unrestingly, taking no heed
of his own physical weakness, and he asked himself (when he had a
minute to spare) what would become of his soul, should he be struck
dead in a "careless mood." We have Mr. Birrell's word for it that
once, in an old book about India, he came across an after-dinner jest
of Henry Martyn's; but the idea was so incongruous that the startled
essayist was disposed to doubt the evidence of his senses. "There
must have been a mistake somewhere."

To such a man the world is not, and never can be, a tragi-comedy,
and laughter seems forever out of place. When a Madeira negress, a
good Christian after her benighted fashion, asked Martyn if the
English were ever baptized, he did not think the innocent question
funny, he thought it horrible. He found Saint Basil's writings
unsatisfactory, as lacking "evangelical truth"; and, could he ha