e found there. Years afterwards he writes
with emotion of the distressing discovery that he then made. 'I do not
remember a time,' he says, 'in which the wickedness of my heart rose to
a greater height than it did then. The consummate selfishness and
exquisite instability of my mind were displayed in rage, malice and
envy; in pride, vain-glory and contempt for all about me; and in the
harsh language which I used to my sister and even to my father. Oh, what
an example of patience and mildness was he! I love to think of his
excellent qualities; and it is the anguish of my heart that I could ever
have been base enough and wicked enough to have pained him. O my God,
why is not my heart doubly-agonized at the remembrance of all my great
transgressions?' So poor John Martyn, lying silent in his grave, entered
into that felicity which, in one of her short poems, Miss Susan Best has
so touchingly depicted. 'When I was laid in my coffin,' she makes a dead
man say,

When I was laid in my coffin,
Quite done with Time and its fears,
My son came and stood beside me--
He hadn't been home for years;
And right on my face came dripping
The scald of his salty tears;
And I was glad to know his breast
Had turned at last to the old home nest,
That I said to myself in an underbreath:
'This is the recompense of death.'

_The Sister bore her Corner._ In his letters to her he opens all his
heart. He is sometimes angry with her because, when he expected her to
show delight in his academic triumphs, she only exhibits an earnest
solicitude for his spiritual well-being. But, in his better moments, he
forgave her. 'What a blessing it is for me,' he writes to her in his
twentieth year, 'what a blessing it is for me that I have such a sister
as you, who have been so instrumental in keeping me in the right way.'
And, later on, he delights her by telling her that he 'has begun to
attend more diligently to the words of the Saviour and to devour them
with delight.'

_The Author bore his Corner._ It was just about a hundred years after
the birth of Philip Doddridge, and just about fifty years after his
death, that his book, _The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul_,
fell into the hands of Henry Martyn. Twenty years earlier it had opened
the eyes of William Wilberforce and led him to repentance. Doddridge's
powerful sentences fell upon the proud soul of Henry Martyn like the
lashes of a scourge. He resented them; he wr