Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812

Henry Martyn was twenty-three years old when he abandoned a brilliant Cambridge career to become a missionary in a world that had no use for Englishmen with holy ambitions. This is the story of that choice and its consequences. Sarah J. Rhea chronicles Martyn's journey from the cloistered colleges of Cambridge to the heat-blasted plains of India, where he mastered Hindustani and Persian, and finally to the dangerous courts of Persia, where he translating the New Testament into languages that had never received it. Martyn died at thirty-one, exhausted, estranged from his wife, and far from home. Yet his translations endured. Rhea writes with the reverence of a biographer who believes her subject was touched by grace, and her portrait captures something the modern reader may find almost incomprehensible: a man who genuinely believed the eternal mattered more than the temporal, and who staked his brief life on that conviction. This is not a hagiography exactly, but it is not far from one. For readers drawn to the inner lives of missionaries, to the history of British India, or to the strange romantic tragedy of brilliant young men who burn too brightly, Martyn's life remains quietly unforgettable.