Life & Letters of Henry Martyn

For those interested in the history of Christian missions and missionary biography, few works will compare to Sargent's biography of the 19th-century British missionary, Henry Martyn. Martyn was a missionary to both India and Persia at the beginning of the 19th-century and was responsible for highly valuable translations of the Bible into Hindi and the New Testament into Persian. But Martyn is most remembered for the legacy of his journal. Dying in his early 30's, he left behind a journal that plumbed the depths of his spiritual experiences and which, alongside Brainerd' journals, was one of the greatest inspirational forces to 19th-century missions. Sargent was a friend of Martyn and liberally splices the journal into an ongoing account of Martyn's life. This book is a reprint of the original biography which went through numerous printings in the last century, but which has been out of print for many decades. While necessarily marked by somewhat antiquated religious vocabulary, the biography manages to breathe life into a figure only dimly remembered by 20th-century Christians.