Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/615

Rh M A II M A R 587 afterwards lie read the life of the devoted David Brainerd, the enthusiastic apostle of the Indians of North America, and, &quot; filled with a holy emulation,&quot; resolved to devote his energies to the work of a Christian missionary. On October 22, 1803, he was ordained deacon at Ely, and afterwards priest, and served as Simeon s curate at the church of Holy Trinity, taking charge of the neighbouring parish of Lolworth. Still full of the thought of work ing in heathen lands, he designed to volunteer for the Church Missionary Society, but a sudden disaster in Cornwall deprived him and his unmarried sister of all the provision their father had made for them, and rendered it necessary that he should obtain a salary that would support her as well as himself. He accordingly applied for, and obtained, a chaplaincy under the East India Company. He left for India on July 5, 1805. For some months he was chiefly located at Aldeen, near Serampore ; in October 1806 he proceeded to Dinapore, where he laboured for a time amongst the Europeans, and soon found himself able to conduct divine worship among the natives in their own vernacular language, and to establish schools for their instruction. At the end of April 1809 he was ordered up to Cawnpore, where he made his first attempt to preach to the heathen in his own compound, and had to endure frequent interruptions &quot; amidst groans, hissings, curses, blasphemies, and threatenings &quot; ; neverthe less he pursued his work among the hundreds who crowded round him, consoling himself that, if he should never see a native convert, God &quot; might design by his patience and continuance in the work to encourage other missionaries.&quot; Meanwhile the great business of his life was being diligently carried on. Day after day he occupied himself with learning new languages, and had already, during his residence at Dinapore, been engaged in revising the sheets of his Hindustani version of the New Testament. He now translated the whole of the New Testament into Hindi also, and into Persian twice over. He translated the Psalms into Persian, the Gospels into Judseo-Persic, and the prayer book into Hindustani, in spite of the constant interruptions caused by excessive weakness of body, and &quot; the pride, pedantry, and fury of his chief moonshee Sabat.&quot; Ordered by the doctors to take a sea voyage for his health, he got leave to go to Persia and correct his Persian New Testament, whence he made up his mind to go on to Arabia, and there compose an Arabic version. Accordingly, on October 1, 1810, having seen his work at Cawnpore crowned, on the previous day, by the opening of a church, he left for Calcutta, whence he departed on January 7, 1811, for Bombay, which he reached on his thirtieth birthday. From Bombay he set out for Bushire, bearing letters from Malcolm to men of position there, as also at Shiraz and Ispahan. After a killing journey from the coast he reached Shiraz, and was soon plunged into discussion with the disputants of all classes, &quot; Sufi, Moham medan, Jew, and Jewish-Mohammedan, even Armenian, all anxious to test their powers of argument with the first English priest who had visited them.&quot; Having made an unsuccessful journey to Tebriz to present the shah with his translation of the New Testament, he was seized with a fever, which so thoroughly prostrated his energies that, after a temporary recovery, he found it necessary to seek a change of climate. On September 12, 1812, he started with two Armenian servants, crossed the Araxes, rode from Tebriz to Erivan, from Erivan to Ears, from Kars to Erzeroum, from Erzeroum to Chiflik, urged on from place to place by his cruel Tartar guide, and, though the plague was raging at Tokat, he was compelled to stop there from utter prostration caused by fever. On the 6th of October he died, either from the plague or from the weakness of the disorders which harassed him from day to day. By his valuable labours as a translator Martyn had placed por tions of the Scriptures within the reach of all who could read over one-fourth of the habitable globe, and during his brief life he earned for himself a foremost place among modern missionaries. Macaulay s lines, written in 1818, testify to the impression made by his enthusiastic career of self-devotion. See Sargent, Memoir of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D., 1819; Wilberlbrce, Journals and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn, 1837; Kaye, Christianity in India, 1859 ; Yonge, Pioneers and Founders, 1874 ; and The Church Quarterly for October 1881. MARTYROLOGY, a catalogue or list of martyrs, arranged according to the succession of their anniversaries, and sometimes including an account of their lives and sufferings. The corresponding word in the Greek Church is Menologion or Analogion ; from the Menologia the Synaxaria are compiled. The custom of paying honour to the memory of those who had &quot; witnessed the good con* fession &quot; in perilous times established itself very early in tho Christian church, and one particular manner of commemora tion was formally recognized by at least one ecclesiastical synod before the end of the 4th century ; in the 47th canon of the third synod of Carthage (397 A.D.) it is decreed &quot; liceat legi Passiones Martyrum quum anniversarii eorum dies celebrantur.&quot; Apart from the still extant Depositio Martyrum contained in the work of the chrono- grapher of 354, edited in 1850 by Mommsen, the oldest &quot; martyrologies &quot; of which anything is known are the apXaiwv jjLo.pTvpi.wv crwaywyrj, or collection of records of past persecutions, to which Eusebius more than once alludes as having been made by himself, and the treatise On the Martyrs of Palestine, by the same author, the full text of which has been preserved in an ancient Syriac version edited by Cureton. Next to the general martyrology of Eusebius, in chronological order, it has been usual to place the calendar of saints days referred to in a letter, attributed to Jerome, which purports to be written in answer to bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, who had asked him to search the archives of Eusebius with the view of enabling them to observe the saints days with more regularity. This epistle is now admitted to be spurious ; ultimately, however, a so-called Martyrologium Hieronymianum came into existence, but it is not so much a single martyrology as a rude patchwork derived from many ancient church calendars. In its present form it is a meagre list of names and places, but may be said to lie at the foundation of all subsequent Western calendars. Almost contemporary with its last recension is what is known as the Parvum Martyrologium Romanian, found by Ado of Vienne about 850 ; in it many of the dates are changed, and for the first time days are assigned to the chief characters of Scripture. To nearly the same date must be assigned the independent compilation of Bede, which has reached us, however, only as enlarged by subsequent editors. The 9th century was very fertile in martyrologies, among which may be mentioned that of Floras, subdeacon of Lyons (c. 830), who was the first editor of Bede, that of Hrabanus Maurus, an attempted further improvement on Bede and Floras, that of Ado, an enlargement of Florus, but based on the Parvum Martyrologium Romanum, that of Usuard of Paris, the epitomizer of Ado, and that of Notker of St Gall, based on Ado and Hrabanus. The Martyrologium Romanum was published by Baronius at the command of Pope Gregory XIII. in 1586 ; the enlarged edition by Rosweyd appeared at Antwerp in 1613. The Cistercian Martyrology appeared at Rome in 1733 and 1748. The best-known Greek Menologion is that prepared in the 9th century by command of the emperor Basilius Macedo ; it was edited in 1727 by Cardinal Hannibal Urbini. An ancient Syriac martyrology, entitled &quot; the names of our lords the martyrs and victors, with their days on which they won crowns,&quot; written in 412, has been edited, with an English transla tion, by Professor W. Wright, in the Journal of Sacred