Very slight in build, not tall, clean-shaven, with a high forehead
and sensitive lips, young Henry Martyn seemed a stripling beside the
flaming Arab. Yet Sabat, with all his sound and fury, was no match for
the swift-witted, clear-brained young Englishman. Henry Martyn was a
chaplain in the army of the East India Company, which then ruled in
India.
He was the only one of those who were listening to Sabat who could
understand what he was saying. When Sabat had finished his story,
Martyn turned, and, in his clear, musical voice translated it from
the Persian into Latin mixed with Italian for Padre Julius Caesar,
into Hindustani for the Indian scholar, into Bengali for the Bengal
gentleman, and into English for the British officer and his wife.
Martyn could also talk to Sabat himself both in Arabic and in Persian.
As Martyn listened to the rolling sentences of Sabat, the Christian
Arab, he seemed to see the lands beyond India, away across the Khyber
Pass, where Sabat had travelled--Mesopotamia, Arabia, Persia.
Henry Martyn knew that in all those lands the people were Mohammedans.
He wanted one thing above everything else in the world: that was
to give them all the chance of doing what Sabat and Abdallah had
done--the chance of reading in their own languages the one book in the
world that could tell them that God was a Father--the book of letters
and of biographies that we call the New Testament.
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