This disciplining of nature, honest, erring human nature, which could, if permitted, make out a fair case for itself, is not an essential element of the evangelist’s code.  In the hands of men less great than Wesley, it has been known to nullify the work of a lifetime.  The Lincolnshire farmer who, after listening to a sermon on Hell, said to his wife, “Noa, Sally, it woant do.  Noa constitootion could stand it,” expressed in his own fashion the healthy limit of endurance.  Our spiritual constitutions break under a pitiless strain.  When we read in the diary of Henry Alline, quoted by Dr. William James in his “Varieties of Religious Experience,” “On Wednesday the twelfth I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding carnal mirth,” we are not merely sorry for the wedding guests, but beset by doubts as to their moral gain.

Why should Henry Martyn, that fervent young missionary who gave his life for his cause with the straight-forward simplicity of a soldier, have regretted so bitterly an occasional lapse into good spirits?  He was inhumanly serious, and he prayed by night and day to be saved from his “besetting sin” of levity.  He was consumed by the flame of religious zeal, and he bewailed at grievous length, in his diary, his “light, worldly spirit.”  He toiled unrestingly, taking no heed of his own physical weakness, and he asked himself (when he had a minute to spare) what would become of his soul, should he be struck dead in a “careless mood.”  We have Mr. Birrell’s word for it that once, in an old book about India, he came across an after-dinner jest of Henry Martyn’s; but the idea was so incongruous that the startled essayist was disposed to doubt the evidence of his senses.  “There must have been a mistake somewhere.”

To such a man the world is not, and never can be, a tragi-comedy, and laughter seems forever out of place.  When a Madeira negress, a good Christian after her benighted fashion, asked Martyn if the English were ever baptized, he did not think the innocent question funny, he thought it horrible.  He found Saint Basil’s writings unsatisfactory, as lacking “evangelical truth”; and, could he have heard this great doctor of the Church fling back a witticism in the court of an angry magistrate, he would probably have felt more doubtful than ever concerning the status of the early Fathers.  It is a relief to turn from the letters of Martyn, with their aloofness from the cheerful currents of earth, to the letters of Bishop Heber, who, albeit a missionary and a keen one, had always a laugh for the absurdities which beset his wandering life.  He could even tell with relish the story of the drunken pedlar whom he met in Wales, and who confided to him that, having sold all his wares, he was trying to drink up the proceeds before he got home, lest his wife should take the money away from him.  Heber, using the argument which he felt would be of most avail, tried to frighten the man into soberness by picturing his wife’s