IN 1814 THE YOUNG Thomas Babington Macaulay tried his hand at the couplet to memorialize one of his Evangelical family’s heroes. Henry Martyn, chaplain to the British East India Company, had died in 1812 on his way home from duties in the east. With an adolescent’s enthusiasm for battle Macaulay engaged the tropes of spiritual quest and violent conquest that accompanied the evangelical spirit. To Martyn’s efforts he attributed, “Eternal trophies! Not with carnage red, / Not stained with tears by hapless captives shed, / But trophies of the Cross!” (281). Military violence gives way to conquest in a higher sphere, the world of the mission field. Nearly a half century later George Eliot evoked Martyn’s spiritual heroism at the outset of her career as a fiction writer. In Scenes of Clerical Life, Janet Dempster finds the inspiration to reform her life by reading the Memoir of Henry Martyn. Martyn’s example nerves her to engage in self-sacrifice and is the catalyst for her return to the scene of domestic violence; in an act of self-conquest Janet assumes the role of model wife and forgiving Christian.