ithed under their
condemnation; but they revealed to him the desperate need of his heart,
and he could not shake from him the alarm which they excited.

_The Minister bore his Corner._ No preacher in England was better fitted
to appeal to the mind of Martyn, at this critical stage of his career,
than was the Rev. Charles Simeon, the Vicar of Trinity Church,
Cambridge. In his concern, the young collegian found himself strangely
attracted to the services at Trinity; and he gradually acquired, as he
confessed to his sister, more knowledge in divine things. He made the
acquaintance, and won the friendship, of Mr. Simeon, and confided in him
without reserve. 'I now experienced,' he says, 'a real pleasure in
religion, being more deeply convinced of sin than before, more earnest
in fleeing to Jesus for refuge, and more desirous for the renewal of my
nature.' The profit was mutual. For, many years after Henry Martyn's
departure and death, Mr. Simeon kept in his study a portrait of the
young student, and he used to say that he could never look into that
face but it seemed to say to him, 'Be earnest! Be earnest!'

And so, to repeat the language of the Gospel, '_there came unto Jesus
one that was borne of four_,' and his name was Henry Martyn.

III

I cannot discover that, up to this point, any one text had played a
conspicuous part in precipitating the crisis which transfigured his
life. But, after this, I find one sentence repeatedly on his lips.
During a journey a man is often too engrossed with the perplexities of
the immediate present to be able to review the path as a whole. But,
when he looks back, he surveys the entire landscape in grateful
retrospect, and is astonished at the multiplicity and variety of the
perils that he has escaped. Henry Martyn had some such feeling. When, at
the age of twenty-two, he entered the ministry, he was amazed at the
greatness of the grace that had made such hallowed privileges and sacred
duties possible to him. Even in his first sermon, we are told, he
preached with a fervor of spirit and an earnestness of manner that
deeply impressed the congregation.

He preached as one who ne'er should preach again,
And as a dying man to dying men.

'For,' he wrote, '_I am but a brand plucked from the burning_.'

Again, when the needs of the world pressed like an intolerable burden
upon his spirit, the same thought decided his course. On the _one_ hand,
he saw a world lying in darkness and c