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The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary

by George Smith · English · Gutenberg #2056 · 855,318 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary

Author: George Smith


        
Release date: February 1, 2000 [eBook #2056]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

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The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary


by

George Smith




PREFACE


On the death of William Carey In 1834 Dr. Joshua Marshman promised to
write the Life of his great colleague, with whom he had held almost
daily converse since the beginning of the century, but he survived too
short a time to begin the work.  In 1836 the Rev. Eustace Carey
anticipated him by issuing what is little better than a selection of
mutilated letters and journals made at the request of the Committee of
the Baptist Missionary Society.  It contains one passage of value,
however.  Dr. Carey once said to his nephew, whose design he seems to
have suspected, "Eustace, if after my removal any one should think it
worth his while to write my Life, I will give you a criterion by which
you may judge of its correctness.  If he give me credit for being a
plodder he will describe me justly. Anything beyond this will be too
much.  I can plod.  I can persevere in any definite pursuit.  To this I
owe everything."

In 1859 Mr. John Marshman, after his final return to England, published
The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward, a valuable history and
defence of the Serampore Mission, but rather a biography of his father
than of Carey.

When I first went to Serampore the great missionary had not been twenty
years dead.  During my long residence there as Editor of the Friend of
India, I came to know, in most of its details, the nature of the work
done by Carey for India and for Christendom in the first third of the
century.  I began to collect such materials for his Biography as were
to be found in the office, the press, and the college, and among the
Native Christians and Brahman pundits whom he had influenced.  In
addition to such materials and experience I have been favoured with the
use of many unpublished letters written by Carey or referring to him;
for which courtesy I here desire to thank Mrs. S. Carey, South Bank,
Red Hill; Frederick George Carey, Esq., LL.B., of Lincoln's Inn; and
the Rev. Jonathan P. Carey of Tiverton.

My Biographies of Carey of Serampore, Henry Martyn, Duff of Calcutta,
and Wilson of Bombay, cover a period of nearly a century and a quarter,
from 1761 to 1878.  They have been written as contributions to that
history of the Christian Church of India which one of its native sons
must some day attempt; and to the history of English-speaking peoples,
whom the Foreign Missions begun by Carey have made the rulers and
civilisers of the non-Christian world.


CONTENTS

    I. CAREY'S COLLEGE
   II. THE BIRTH OF ENGLAND'S FOREIGN MISSIONS
  III. INDIA AS CAREY FOUND IT
   IV. SIX YEARS IN NORTH BENGAL--MISSIONARY AND INDIGO PLANTER
    V. THE NEW CRUSADE--SERAMPORE AND THE BROTHERHOOD
   VI. THE FIRST NATIVE CONVERTS AND CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS
  VII. CALCUTTA AND THE MISSION CENTRES FROM DELHI TO AMBOYNA
 VIII. CAREY'S FAMILY AND FRIENDS
   IX. PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT, BENGALI, AND MARATHI
    X. THE WYCLIF OF THE EAST--BIBLE TRANSLATION
   XI. WHAT CAREY DID FOR LITERATURE AND FOR HUMANITY
  XII. WHAT CAREY DID FOR SCIENCE--FOUNDER OF THE AGRICULTURAL AND
       HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF INDIA
 XIII. CAREY'S IMMEDIATE INFLUENCE IN GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA
  XIV. CAREY AS AN EDUCATOR--THE FIRST CHRISTIAN COLLEGE IN THE EAST
   XV. CAREY'S CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY FOR THE PEOPLE OF INDIA
  XVI. CAREY'S LAST DAYS
       APPENDIX





LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY, D.D.


CHAPTER I

CAREY'S COLLEGE

1761-1785

The Heart of England--The Weaver Carey who became a Peer, and the
weaver who was father of William Carey--Early training in
Paulerspury--Impressions made by him on his sister--On his companions
and the villagers--His experience as son of the parish
clerk--Apprenticed to a shoemaker of Hackleton--Poverty--Famous
shoemakers from Annianus and Crispin to Hans Sachs and Whittier--From
Pharisaism to Christ--The last shall be first--The dissenting preacher
in the parish clerk's home--He studies Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Dutch
and French--The cobbler's shed is Carey's College.

William Carey, the first of her own children of the Reformation whom
England sent forth as a missionary to India, where he became the most
extensive translator of the Bible and civiliser, was the son of a
weaver, and was himself a village shoemaker till he was twenty-eight
years of age.  He was born on the 17th August 1761, in the very midland
of England, in the heart of the district which had produced Shakspere,
had fostered Wyclif and Hooker, had bred Fox and Bunyan, and had for a
time been the scene of the lesser lights of John Mason and Doddridge,
of John Newton and Thomas Scott.  William Cowper, the poet of missions,
made the land his chosen home, writing Hope and The Task in Olney,
while the shoemaker was studying theology under Sutcliff on the
opposite side of the market-place. Thomas Clarkson, born a year before
Carey, was beginning his assaults on the slave-trade by translating
into English his Latin essay on the day-star of African liberty when
the shoemaker, whom no university knew, was writing his Enquiry into
the Obligations of Christians to use means for the Conversion of the
Heathens.

William Carey bore a name which had slowly fallen into forgetfulness
after services to the Stewarts, with whose cause it had been
identified.  Professor Stephens, of Copenhagen, traces it to the
Scando-Anglian Car, CAER or CARE, which became a place-name as CAR-EY.
Among scores of neighbours called William, William of Car-ey would soon
sink into Carey, and this would again become the family name.  In
Denmark the name Caròe is common.  The oldest English instance is the
Cariet who coined money in London for Æthelred II. in 1016.  Certainly
the name, through its forms of Crew, Carew, Carey, and Cary, still
prevails on the Irish coast--from which depression of trade drove the
family first to Yorkshire, then to the Northamptonshire village of
Yelvertoft, and finally to Paulerspury, farther south--as well as over
the whole Danegelt from Lincolnshire to Devonshire.  If thus there was
Norse blood in William Carey it came out in his persistent missionary
daring, and it is pleasant even to speculate on the possibility of such
an origin in one who was all his Indian life indebted to Denmark for
the protection which alone made his career possible.

The Careys who became famous in English history sprang from Devon. For
two and a half centuries, from the second Richard to the second
Charles, they gave statesmen and soldiers, scholars and bishops, to the
service of their country.  Henry Carey, first cousin of Queen
Elizabeth, was the common ancestor of two ennobled houses long since
extinct--the Earls of Dover and the Earls of Monmouth.  A third peerage
won by the Careys has been made historic by the patriotic counsels and
self-sacrificing fate of Viscount Falkland, whose representative was
Governor of Bombay for a time.  Two of the heroic Falkland's
descendants, aged ladies, addressed a pathetic letter to Parliament
about the time that the great missionary died, praying that they might
not be doomed to starvation by being deprived of a crown pension of £80
a year.  The older branch of the Careys also had fallen on evil times,
and it became extinct while the future missionary was yet four years
old.  The seventh lord was a weaver when he succeeded to the title, and
he died childless.  The eighth was a Dutchman who had to be
naturalised, and he was the last.  The Careys fell lower still.  One of
them bore to the brilliant and reckless Marquis of Halifax, Henry
Carey, who wrote one of the few English ballads that live.  Another,
the poet's granddaughter, was the mother of Edmund Kean, and he at
first was known by her name on the stage.

At that time when the weaver became the lord the grandfather of the
missionary was parish clerk and first schoolmaster of the village of
Paulerspury, eleven miles south of Northampton, and near the ancient
posting town of Towcester, on the old Roman road from London to
Chester.  The free school was at the east or "church end" of the
village, which, after crossing the old Watling Street, straggles for a
mile over a sluggish burn to the "Pury end."  One son, Thomas, had
enlisted and was in Canada.  Edmund Carey, the second, set up the loom
on which he wove the woollen cloth known as "tammy," in a two-storied
cottage.  There his eldest child, WILLIAM, was born, and lived for six
years till his father was appointed schoolmaster, when the family
removed to the free schoolhouse.  The cottage was demolished in 1854 by
one Richard Linnell, who placed on the still meaner structure now
occupying the site the memorial slab that guides many visitors to the
spot.  The schoolhouse, in which William Carey spent the eight most
important years of his childhood till he was fourteen, and the school
made way for the present pretty buildings.

The village surroundings and the country scenery coloured the whole of
the boy's after life, and did much to make him the first agricultural
improver and naturalist of Bengal, which he became. The lordship of
Pirie, as it was called by Gitda, its Saxon owner, was given by the
Conqueror, with much else, to his natural son, William Peverel, as we
see from the Domesday survey.  His descendants passed it on to Robert
de Paveli, whence its present name, but in Carey's time it was held by
the second Earl Bathurst, who was Lord Chancellor.  Up to the very
schoolhouse came the royal forest of Whittlebury, its walks leading
north to the woods of Salcey, of Yardley Chase and Rockingham, from the
beeches which give Buckingham its name.  Carey must have often sat
under the Queen's Oak, still venerable in its riven form, where Edward
IV., when hunting, first saw Elizabeth, unhappy mother of the two
princes murdered in the Tower.  The silent robbery of the people's
rights called "inclosures" has done much, before and since Carey's
time, to sweep away or shut up the woodlands.  The country may be less
beautiful, while the population has grown so that Paulerspury has now
nearly double the eight hundred inhabitants of a century ago. But its
oolitic hills, gently swelling to above 700 feet, and the valleys of
the many rivers which flow from this central watershed, west and east,
are covered with fat vegetation almost equally divided between grass
and corn, with green crops.  The many large estates are rich in gardens
and orchards.  The farmers, chiefly on small holdings, are famous for
their shorthorns and Leicester sheep. Except for the rapidly-developing
production of iron from the Lias, begun by the Romans, there is but one
manufacture--that of shoes. It is now centred by modern machinery and
labour arrangements in Northampton itself, which has 24,000 shoemakers,
and in the other towns, but a century ago the craft was common to every
hamlet.  For botany and agriculture, however, Northamptonshire was the
finest county in England, and young Carey had trodden many a mile of
it, as boy and man, before he left home for ever for Bengal.

Two unfinished autobiographical sketches, written from India at the
request of Fuller and of Ryland, and letters of his youngest sister
Mary, his favourite "Polly" who survived him, have preserved for us in
still vivid characters the details of the early training of William
Carey.  He was the eldest of five children.  He was the special care of
their grandmother, a woman of a delicate nature and devout habits, who
closed her sad widowhood in the weaver-son's cottage.  Encompassed by
such a living influence the grandson spent his first six years.
Already the child unconsciously showed the eager thirst for knowledge,
and perseverance in attaining his object, which made him chiefly what
he became.  His mother would often be awoke in the night by the
pleasant lisping of a voice "casting accompts; so intent was he from
childhood in the pursuit of knowledge.  Whatever he began he finished;
difficulties never seemed to discourage his mind."  On removal to the
ancestral schoolhouse the boy had a room to himself.  His sister
describes it as full of insects stuck in every corner that he might
observe their progress. His many birds he entrusted to her care when he
was from home.  In this picture we see the exact foreshadowing of the
man. "Though I often used to kill his birds by kindness, yet when he
saw my grief for it he always indulged me with the pleasure of serving
them again; and often took me over the dirtiest roads to get at a plant
or an insect.  He never walked out, I think, when quite a boy, without
observation on the hedges as he passed; and when he took up a plant of
any kind he always observed it with care.  Though I was but a child I
well remember his pursuits.  He always seemed in earnest in his
recreations as well as in school.  He was generally one of the most
active in all the amusements and recreations that boys in general
pursue.  He was always beloved by the boys about his own age."  To
climb a certain tree was the object of their ambition; he fell often in
the attempt, but did not rest till he had succeeded.  His Uncle Peter
was a gardener in the same village, and gave him his first lessons in
botany and horticulture.  He soon became responsible for his father's
official garden, till it was the best kept in the neighbourhood.
Wherever after that he lived, as boy or man, poor or in comfort,
William Carey made and perfected his garden, and always for others,
until he created at Serampore the botanical park which for more than
half a century was unique in Southern Asia.

We have in a letter from the Manse, Paulerspury, a tradition of the
impression made on the dull rustics by the dawning genius of the youth
whom they but dimly comprehended.  He went amongst them under the
nickname of Columbus, and they would say, "Well, if you won't play,
preach us a sermon," which he would do.  Mounting on an old dwarf
witch-elm about seven feet high, where several could sit, he would hold
forth.  This seems to have been a resort of his for reading, his
favourite occupation.  The same authority tells how, when suffering
toothache, he allowed his companions to drag the tooth from his head
with a violent jerk, by tying around it a string attached to a wheel
used to grind malt, to which they gave a sharp turn.

The boy's own peculiar room was a little library as well as museum of
natural history.  He possessed a few books, which indeed were many for
those days, but he borrowed more from the whole country-side.
Recalling the eight years of his intellectual apprenticeship till he
was fourteen, from the serene height of his missionary standard, he
wrote long after:--"I chose to read books of science, history, voyages,
etc., more than any others.  Novels and plays always disgusted me, and
I avoided them as much as I did books of religion, and perhaps from the
same motive.  I was better pleased with romances, and this circumstance
made me read the Pilgrim's Progress with eagerness, though to no
purpose."  The new era, of which he was to be the aggressive spiritual
representative from Christendom, had not dawned.  Walter Scott was ten
years his junior. Captain Cook had not discovered the Sandwich Islands,
and was only returning from the second of his three voyages while Carey
was still at school.  The church services and the watchfulness of his
father supplied the directly moral training which his grandmother had
begun.

The Paulerspury living of St. James is a valuable rectory in the gift
of New College, Oxford.  Originally built in Early English, and rebuilt
in 1844, the church must have presented a still more venerable
appearance a century ago than it does now, with its noble tower in the
Perpendicular, and chancel in the Decorated style, dominating all the
county.  Then, as still, effigies of a Paveli and his wife, and of Sir
Arthur Throckmorton and his wife recumbent head to head, covered a
large altar-tomb in the chancel, and with the Bathurst and other
monuments called forth first the fear and then the pride of the parish
clerk's eldest son.  In those days the clerk had just below the pulpit
the desk from which his sonorous "Amen" sounded forth, while his family
occupied a low gallery rising from the same level up behind the pulpit.
There the boys of the free school also could be under the master's eye,
and with instruments of music like those of King David, but now
banished from even village churches, would accompany him in the
doggerel strains of Sternhold and Hopkins, immortalised by Cowper.  To
the far right the boys could see and long for the ropes under the
tower, in which the bell-ringers of his day, as of Bunyan's not long
before, delighted. The preaching of the time did nothing more for young
Carey than for the rest of England and Scotland, whom the parish church
had not driven into dissent or secession.  But he could not help
knowing the Prayer-Book, and especially its psalms and lessons, and he
was duly confirmed.  The family training, too, was exceptionally
scriptural, though not evangelical. "I had many stirrings of mind
occasioned by being often obliged to read books of a religious
character; and, having been accustomed from my infancy to read the
Scriptures, I had a considerable acquaintance therewith, especially
with the historical parts."  The first result was to make him despise
dissenters.  But, undoubtedly, this eldest son of the schoolmaster and
the clerk of the parish had at fourteen received an education from
parents, nature, and books which, with his habits of observation, love
of reading, and perseverance, made him better instructed than most boys
of fourteen far above the peasant class to which he belonged.

Buried in this obscure village in the dullest period of the dullest of
all centuries, the boy had no better prospect before him than that of a
weaver or labourer, or possibly a schoolmaster like one of his uncles
in the neighbouring town of Towcester.  When twelve years of age, with
his uncle there, he might have formed one of the crowd which listened
to John Wesley, who, in 1773 and then aged seventy, visited the
prosperous posting town.  Paulerspury could indeed boast of one son,
Edward Bernard, D.D., who, two centuries before, had made for himself a
name in Oxford, where he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy.  But
Carey was not a Scotsman, and therefore the university was not for such
as he.  Like his school-fellows, he seemed born to the English
labourer's fate of five shillings a week, and the poorhouse in sickness
and old age.  From this, in the first instance, he was saved by a
disease which affected his face and hands most painfully whenever he
was long exposed to the sun.  For seven years he had failed to find
relief.  His attempt at work in the field were for two years followed
by distressing agony at night. He was now sixteen, and his father
sought out a good man who would receive him as apprentice to the
shoemaking trade.  The man was not difficult to find, in the hamlet of
Hackleton, nine miles off, in the person of one Clarke Nichols.  The
lad afterwards described him as "a strict churchman and, what I
thought, a very moral man.  It is true he sometimes drank rather too
freely, and generally employed me in carrying out goods on the Lord's
Day morning; but he was an inveterate enemy to lying, a vice to which I
was awfully addicted." The senior apprentice was a dissenter, and the
master and his boys gave much of the talk over their work to disputes
upon religious subjects.  Carey "had always looked upon dissenters with
contempt. I had, moreover, a share of pride sufficient for a thousand
times my knowledge; I therefore always scorned to have the worst in an
argument, and the last word was assuredly mine.  I also made up in
positive assertion what was wanting in argument, and generally came off
with triumph.  But I was often convinced afterwards that although I had
the last word my antagonist had the better of the argument, and on that
account felt a growing uneasiness and stings of conscience gradually
increasing."  The dissenting apprentice was soon to be the first to
lead him to Christ.

William Carey was a shoemaker during the twelve years of his life from
sixteen to twenty-eight, till he went to Leicester.  Poverty, which the
grace of God used to make him a preacher also from his eighteenth year,
compelled him to work with his hands in leather all the week, and to
tramp many a weary mile to Northampton and Kettering carrying the
product of his labour.  At one time, when minister of Moulton, he kept
a school by day, made or cobbled shoes by night, and preached on
Sunday.  So Paul had made tents of his native Cilician goatskin in the
days when infant Christianity was chased from city to city, and the
cross was a reproach only less bitter, however, than evangelical
dissent in Christian England in the eighteenth century.  The providence
which made and kept young Carey so long a shoemaker, put him in the
very position in which he could most fruitfully receive and nurse the
sacred fire that made him the most learned scholar and Bible translator
of his day in the East. The same providence thus linked him to the
earliest Latin missionaries of Alexandria, of Asia Minor, and of Gaul,
who were shoemakers, and to a succession of scholars and divines, poets
and critics, reformers and philanthropists, who have used the
shoemaker's life to become illustrious.[1] St. Mark chose for his
successor, as first bishop of Alexandria, that Annianus whom he had
been the means of converting to Christ when he found him at the
cobbler's stall.  The Talmud commemorates the courage and the wisdom of
"Rabbi Jochanan, the shoemaker," whose learning soon after found a
parallel in Carey's.  Like Annianus, "a poor shoemaker named Alexander,
despised in the world but great in the sight of God, who did honour to
so exalted a station in the Church," became famous as Bishop of Comana
in Cappadocia, as saint, preacher, and missionary-martyr.  Soon after
there perished in the persecutions of Diocletian, at Soissons, the two
missionary brothers whose name of Crispin has ever since been gloried
in by the trade, which they chose at once as a means of livelihood and
of helping their poor converts.  The Hackleton apprentice was still a
child when the great Goethe was again adding to the then artificial
literature of his country his own true predecessor, Hans Sachs, the
shoemaker of Nürnberg, the friend of Luther, the meistersinger of the
Reformation.  And it was another German shoemaker, Boehme, whose
exalted theosophy as expounded by William Law became one link in the
chain that drew Carey to Christ, as it influenced Wesley and
Whitefield, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge.  George Fox was only nineteen
when, after eight years' service with a shoemaker in Drayton,
Leicestershire, not far from Carey's county, he heard the voice from
heaven which sent him forth in 1643 to preach righteousness,
temperance, and judgment to come, till Cromwell sought converse with
him, and the Friends became a power among men.

Carlyle has, in characteristic style, seized on the true meaning that
was in the man when he made to himself a suit of leather and became the
modern hero of Sartor Resartus.  The words fit William Carey's case
even better than that of George Fox:--"Sitting in his stall, working on
tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a
nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had nevertheless a Living Spirit
belonging to him; also an antique Inspired Volume, through which, as
through a window, it could look upwards and discern its celestial
Home." That "shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any
Vatican or Loretto-shrine...Stitch away, every prick of that little
instrument is pricking into the heart of slavery."  Thirty-six years
after Fox had begun to wear his leathern doublet he directed all
Friends everywhere that had Indians or blacks to preach the Gospel to
them.

But it would be too long to tell the list of workers in what has been
called the gentle craft, whom the cobbler's stall, with its peculiar
opportunities for rhythmic meditation, hard thinking, and oft harder
debating, has prepared for the honours of literature and scholarship,
of philanthropy and reform.  To mention only Carey's contemporaries,
the career of these men ran parallel at home with his abroad--Thomas
Shillitoe, who stood before magistrates, bishops, and such sovereigns
as George III. and IV. and the Czar Alexander I. in the interests of
social reform; and John Pounds, the picture of whom as the founder of
ragged schools led Thomas Guthrie, when he stumbled on it in an inn in
Anstruther, to do the same Christlike work in Scotland.  Coleridge, who
when at Christ's Hospital was ambitious to be a shoemaker's apprentice,
was right when he declared that shoemakers had given to the world a
larger number of eminent men than any other handicraft.  Whittier's own
early experience in Massachusetts fitted him to be the poet-laureate of
the craft which for some years he adorned.  His Songs of Labour,
published in 1850, contain the best English lines on shoemakers since
Shakspere put into the mouth of King Henry V. the address on the eve of
Agincourt, which begins: "This day is called the feast of Crispin."
But Whittier, Quaker, philanthropist, and countryman of Judson though
he was, might have found a place for Carey when he sang so well of
others:--

  "Thy songs, Hans Sachs, are living yet,
    In strong and hearty German;
  And Bloomfield's lay and Gifford's wit
    And patriot fame of Sherman;

  "Still from his book, a mystic seer,
    The soul of Behmen teaches,
  And England's priestcraft shakes to hear
    Of Fox's leathern breeches."

The confessions of Carey, made in the spiritual humility and
self-examination of his later life, form a parallel to the Grace
Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, the little classic of John Bunyan
second only to his Pilgrim's Progress.  The young Pharisee, who entered
Hackleton with such hate in his heart to dissenters that he would have
destroyed their meeting-place, who practised "lying, swearing, and
other sins," gradually yielded so far to his brother apprentice's
importunity as to leave these off, to try to pray sometimes when alone,
to attend church three times a day, and to visit the dissenting
prayer-meeting.  Like the zealot who thought to do God service by
keeping the whole law, Carey lived thus for a time, "not doubting but
this would produce ease of mind and make me acceptable to God." What
revealed him to himself was an incident which he tells in language
recalling at once Augustine and one of the subtlest sketches of George
Eliot, in which the latter uses her half-knowledge of evangelical faith
to stab the very truth that delivered Paul and Augustine, Bunyan and
Carey, from the antinomianism of the Pharisee:--

"A circumstance which I always reflect on with a mixture of horror and
gratitude occurred about this time, which, though greatly to my
dishonour, I must relate.  It being customary in that part of the
country for apprentices to collect Christmas boxes [donations] from the
tradesmen with whom their masters have dealings, I was permitted to
collect these little sums.  When I applied to an ironmonger, he gave me
the choice of a shilling or a sixpence; I of course chose the shilling,
and putting it in my pocket, went away.  When I had got a few shillings
my next care was to purchase some little articles for myself, I have
forgotten what.  But then, to my sorrow, I found that my shilling was a
brass one.  I paid for the things which I bought by using a shilling of
my master's.  I now found that I had exceeded my stock by a few pence.
I expected severe reproaches from my master, and therefore came to the
resolution to declare strenuously that the bad money was his.  I well
remember the struggles of mind which I had on this occasion, and that I
made this deliberate sin a matter of prayer to God as I passed over the
fields towards home!  I there promised that, if God would but get me
clearly over this, or, in other words, help me through with the theft,
I would certainly for the future leave off all evil practices; but this
theft and consequent lying appeared to me so necessary, that they could
not be dispensed with.

"A gracious God did not get me safe through.  My master sent the other
apprentice to investigate the matter.  The ironmonger acknowledged the
giving me the shilling, and I was therefore exposed to shame, reproach,
and inward remorse, which preyed upon my mind for a considerable time.
I at this time sought the Lord, perhaps much more earnestly than ever,
but with shame and fear.  I was quite ashamed to go out, and never,
till I was assured that my conduct was not spread over the town, did I
attend a place of worship.

"I trust that, under these circumstances, I was led to see much more of
myself than I had ever done before, and to seek for mercy with greater
earnestness.  I attended prayer-meetings only, however, till February
10, 1779, which being appointed a day of fasting and prayer, I attended
worship on that day.  Mr. Chater [congregationalist] of Olney preached,
but from what text I have forgotten.  He insisted much on following
Christ entirely, and enforced his exhortation with that passage, 'Let
us therefore go out unto him without the camp, bearing his
reproach.'--Heb. xiii. 13.  I think I had a desire to follow Christ;
but one idea occurred to my mind on hearing those words which broke me
off from the Church of England.  The idea was certainly very crude, but
useful in bringing me from attending a lifeless, carnal ministry to one
more evangelical.  I concluded that the Church of England, as
established by law, was the camp in which all were protected from the
scandal of the cross, and that I ought to bear the reproach of Christ
among the dissenters; and accordingly I always afterwards attended
divine worship among them."

At eighteen Carey was thus emptied of self and there was room for
Christ.  In a neighbouring village he consorted much for a time with
some followers of William Law, who had not long before passed away in a
village in the neighbourhood, and select passages from whose writings
the Moravian minister, Francis Okely, of Northampton, had versified.
These completed the negative process. "I felt ruined and helpless."
Then to his spiritual eyes, purged of self, there appeared the
Crucified One; and to his spiritual intelligence there was given the
Word of God. The change was that wrought on Paul by a Living Person.
It converted the hypocritical Pharisee into the evangelical preacher;
it turned the vicious peasant into the most self-denying saint; it sent
the village shoemaker far off to the Hindoos.

But the process was slow; it had been so even in Paul's case.  Carey
found encouragement in intercourse with some old Christians in
Hackleton, and he united with a few of them, including his
fellow-apprentice, in forming a congregational church.  The state of
the parish may be imagined from its recent history.  Hackleton is part
of Piddington, and the squire had long appropriated the living of £300
a year, the parsonage, the glebe, and all tithes, sending his house
minister "at times" to do duty.  A Certificate from Northamptonshire,
against the pluralities and other such scandals, published in 1641,
declared that not a child or servant in Hackleton or Piddington could
say the Lord's Prayer.  Carey sought the preaching of Doddridge's
successor at Northampton, of a Baptist minister at Road, and of Scott
the commentator, then at Ravenstone. He had found peace, but was
theologically "inquisitive and unsatisfied."  Fortunately, like Luther,
he "was obliged to draw all from the Bible alone."

When, at twenty years of age, Carey was slowly piecing together "the
doctrines in the Word of God" into something like a system which would
at once satisfy his own spiritual and intellectual needs, and help him
to preach to others, a little volume was published, of which he
wrote:--"I do not remember ever to have read any book with such
raptures."  It was Help to Zion's Travellers; being an attempt to
remove various Stumbling-Blocks out of the Way, relating to Doctrinal,
Experimental, and Practical Religion, by Robert Hall. The writer was
the father of the greater Robert Hall, a venerable man, who, in his
village church of Arnsby, near Leicester, had already taught Carey how
to preach.  The book is described as an "attempt to relieve discouraged
Christians" in a day of gloominess and perplexity, that they might
devote themselves to Christ through life as well as be found in Him in
death.  Carey made a careful synopsis of it in an exquisitely neat hand
on the margin of each page.  The worm-eaten copy, which he treasured
even in India, is now deposited in Bristol College.

A Calvinist of the broad missionary type of Paul, Carey somewhat
suddenly, according to his own account, became a Baptist. "I do not
recollect having read anything on the subject till I applied to Mr.
Ryland, senior, to baptise me.  He lent me a pamphlet, and turned me
over to his son," who thus told the story when the Baptist Missionary
Society held its first public meeting in London:--"October 5th, 1783: I
baptised in the river Nen, a little beyond Dr. Doddridge's
meeting-house at Northampton, a poor journeyman shoemaker, little
thinking that before nine years had elapsed, he would prove the first
instrument of forming a society for sending missionaries from England
to preach the gospel to the heathen.  Such, however, as the event has
proved, was the purpose of the Most High, who selected for this work
not the son of one of our most learned ministers, nor of one of the
most opulent of our dissenting gentlemen, but the son of a parish
clerk."

The spot may still be visited at the foot of the hill, where the Nen
fed the moat of the old castle, in which many a Parliament sat from the
days of King John. The text of that morning's sermon happened to be the
Lord's saying, "Many first shall be last, and the last first," which
asserts His absolute sovereignty in choosing and in rewarding His
missionaries, and introduces the parable of the labourers in the
vineyard.  As Carey wrote in the fulness of his fame, that the
evangelical doctrines continued to be the choice of his heart, so he
never wavered in his preference for the Baptist division of the
Christian host.  But from the first he enjoyed the friendship of Scott
and Newton, and of his neighbour Mr. Robinson of St. Mary's, Leicester,
and we shall see him in India the centre of the Episcopal and
Presbyterian chaplains and missionaries from Martyn Wilson to Lacroix
and Duff. His controversial spirit died with the youthful conceit and
self-righteousness of which it is so often the birth.  When at eighteen
he learned to know himself, he became for ever humble.  A zeal like
that of his new-found Master took its place, and all the energy of his
nature, every moment of his time, was directed to setting Him forth.

In his monthly visits to the father-house at Paulerspury the new man in
him could not be hid.  His sister gives us a vivid sketch of the lad,
whose going over to the dissenters was resented by the formal and stern
clerk, and whose evangelicalism was a reproach to the others.

"At this time he was increasingly thoughtful, and very was jealous for
the Lord of Hosts.  Like Gideon, he seemed for throwing down all the
altars of Baal in one night.  When he came home we used to wonder at
the change.  We knew that before he was rather inclined to persecute
the faith he now seemed to wish to propagate.  At first, perhaps, his
zeal exceeded the bounds of prudence; but he felt the importance of
things we were strangers to, and his natural disposition was to pursue
earnestly what he undertook, so that it was not to be wondered at,
though we wondered at the change.  He stood alone in his father's house
for some years.  After a time he asked permission to have family prayer
when he came home to see us, a favour which he very readily had
granted.  Often have I felt my pride rise while he was engaged in
prayer, at the mention of those words in Isaiah, 'that all our
righteousness was like filthy rags.' I did not think he thought his so,
but looked on me and the family as filthy, not himself and his party.
Oh, what pride is in the human heart!  Nothing but my love to my
brother would have kept me from showing my resentment."

"A few of the friends of religion wished our brother to exercise his
gifts by speaking to a few friends in a house licensed at Pury; which
he did with great acceptance.  The next morning a neighbour of ours, a
very pious woman, came in to congratulate my mother on the occasion,
and to speak of the Lord's goodness in calling her son, and my brother,
two such near neighbours, to the same noble calling. My mother replied,
'What, do you think he will be a preacher?' 'Yes,' she replied, 'and a
great one, I think, if spared.'  From that time till he was settled at
Moulton he regularly preached once a month at Pury with much
acceptance.  He was at that time in his twentieth year, and married.
Our parents were always friendly to religion; yet, on some accounts, we
should rather have wished him to go from home than come home to preach.
I do not think I ever heard him, though my younger brother and my
sister, I think, generally did.  Our father much wished to hear his
son, if he could do it unseen by him or any one.  It was not long
before an opportunity offered, and he embraced it.  Though he was a man
that never discovered any partiality for the abilities of his children,
but rather sometimes went too far on the other hand, that often tended
a little to discourage them, yet we were convinced that he approved of
what he heard, and was highly gratified by it."

In Hackleton itself his expositions of Scripture were so valued that
the people, he writes, "being ignorant, sometimes applauded to my great
injury."  When in poverty, so deep that he fasted all that day because
he had not a penny to buy a dinner, he attended a meeting of the
Association of Baptist Churches at Olney, not far off.  There he first
met with his lifelong colleague, the future secretary of the mission,
Andrew Fuller, the young minister of Soham, who preached on being men
in understanding, and there it was arranged that he should preach
regularly to a small congregation at Earls Barton, six miles from
Hackleton.  His new-born humility made him unable to refuse the duty,
which he discharged for more than three years while filling his
cobbler's stall at Hackleton all the week, and frequently preaching
elsewhere also.  The secret of his power which drew the
Northamptonshire peasants and craftsmen to the feet of their fellow was
this, that he studied the portion of Scripture, which he read every
morning at his private devotions, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

This was Carey's "college."  On the death of his first master, when he
was eighteen, he had transferred his apprenticeship to a Mr. T. Old.
Hackleton stands on the high road from Bedford and Olney to
Northampton, and Thomas Scott was in the habit of resting at Mr. Old's
on his not infrequent walks from Olney, where he had succeeded John
Newton.  There he had no more attentive listener or intelligent talker
than the new journeyman, who had been more influenced by his preaching
at Ravenstone than by that of any other man.  Forty years after, just
before Scott's death, Dr. Ryland gave him this message from Carey:--"If
there be anything of the work of God in my soul, I owe much of it to
his preaching when I first set out in the ways of the Lord;" to which
this reply was sent: "I am surprised as well as gratified at your
message from Dr. Carey.  He heard me preach only a few times, and that
as far as I know in my rather irregular excursions; though I often
conversed and prayed in his presence, and endeavoured to answer his
sensible and pertinent inquiries when at Hackleton.  But to have
suggested even a single useful hint to such a mind as his must be
considered as a high privilege and matter of gratitude."  Scott had
previously written this more detailed account of his intercourse with
the preaching shoemaker, whom he first saw when he called on Mr. Old to
tell him of the welfare of his mother:

"When I went into the cottage I was soon recognised, and Mr. Old came
in, with a sensible-looking lad in his working-dress.  I at first
rather wondered to see him enter, as he seemed young, being, I believe,
little of his age.  We, however, entered into very interesting
conversation, especially respecting my parishioner, their relative, and
the excellent state of her mind, and the wonder of divine grace in the
conversion of one who had been so very many years considered as a
self-righteous Pharisee.  I believe I endeavoured to show that the term
was often improperly applied to conscientious but ignorant inquirers,
who are far from self-satisfied, and who, when the Gospel is set before
them, find the thing which they had long been groping after.  However
that may be, I observed the lad who entered with Mr. Old riveted in
attention with every mark and symptom of intelligence and feeling;
saying little, but modestly asking now and then an appropriate
question.  I took occasion, before I went forward, to inquire after
him, and found that, young as he was, he was a member of the church at
Hackleton, and looked upon as a very consistent and promising
character.  I lived at Olney till the end of 1785; and in the course of
that time I called perhaps two or three times each year at Mr. Old's,
and was each time more and more struck with the youth's conduct, though
I said little; but, before I left Olney, Mr. Carey was out of his
engagement with Mr. Old. I found also that he was sent out as a
probationary preacher, and preached at Moulton; and I said to all to
whom I had access, that he would, if I could judge, prove no ordinary
man.  Yet, though I often met both old Mr. Ryland, the present Dr.
Ryland, Mr. Hall, Mr. Fuller, and knew almost every step taken in
forming your Missionary Society, and though I sometimes preached very
near Moulton, it so happened that I do not recollect having met with
him any more, till he came to my house in London with Mr. Thomas, to
desire me to use what little influence I had with Charles Grant, Esq.,
to procure them licence to go in the Company's ships as missionaries to
the British settlements in India, perhaps in 1792.  My little influence
was of no avail.  What I said of Mr. Carey so far satisfied Mr. Grant
that he said, if Mr. Carey was going alone, or with one equally to be
depended on along with him, he would not oppose him; but his strong
disapprobation of Mr. T., on what ground I knew not, induced his
negative.  I believe Mr. Old died soon after I left Olney, if not just
before; and his shop, which was a little building apart from the house,
was suffered to go to decay.  While in this state I several times
passed it, and said to my sons and others with me, that is Mr. Carey's
college."

This cobbler's shed which was Carey's college has been since restored,
but two of the original walls still stand, forming the corner in which
he sat, opposite the window that looks out into the garden he carefully
kept.  Here, when his second master died, Carey succeeded to the
business, charging himself with the care of the widow, and marrying the
widow's sister, Dorothy or Dolly Placket. He was only twenty when he
took upon himself such burdens, in the neighbouring church of
Piddington, a village to which he afterwards moved his shop.  Never had
minister, missionary, or scholar a less sympathetic mate, due largely
to that latent mental disease which in India carried her off; but for
more than twenty years the husband showed her loving reverence.  As we
stand in the Hackleton shed, over which Carey placed the rude signboard
prepared by his own hands, and now in the library of Regent's Park
College, "Second Hand Shoes Bought and--,"[2] we can realise the low
estate to which Carey fell, even below his father's loom and
schoolhouse, and from which he was called to become the apostle of
North India as Schwartz was of the South.

How was this shed his college?  We have seen that he brought with him
from his native village an amount of information, habits of
observation, and a knowledge of books unusual in rustics of that day,
and even of the present time.  At twelve he made his first acquaintance
with a language other than his own, when he mastered the short grammar
in Dyche's Latine Vocabulary, and committed nearly the whole book to
memory.  When urging him to take the preaching at Barton, Mr. Sutcliff
of Olney gave him Ruddiman's Latin Grammar. The one alleviation of his
lot under the coarse but upright Nichols was found in his master's
small library.  There he began to study Greek.  In a New Testament
commentary he found Greek words, which he carefully transcribed and
kept until he should next visit home, where a youth whom dissipation
had reduced from college to weaving explained both the words and their
terminations to him.  All that he wanted was such beginnings.  Hebrew
he seems to have learned by the aid of the neighbouring ministers;
borrowing books from them, and questioning them "pertinently," as he
did Scott.[3] At the end of Hopkins's Three Sermons on the Effects of
Sin on the Universe, preached in 1759, he had made this entry on 9th
August 1787--"Gulielm. Careius perlegit."  He starved himself to
purchase a few books at the sale which attended Dr. Ryland's removal
from Northampton to Bristol.  In an old woman's cottage he found a
Dutch quarto, and from that he so taught himself the language that in
1789 he translated for Ryland a discourse on the Gospel Offer sent to
him by the evangelical Dr. Erskine of Edinburgh.  The manuscript is in
an extremely small character, unlike what might have been expected from
one who had wrought with his hands for eight years.  French he
acquired, sufficiently for literary purposes, in three weeks from the
French version of Ditton on the Resurrection, which he purchased for a
few coppers.  He had the linguistic gift which soon after made the
young carpenter Mezzofanti of Bologna famous and a cardinal. But the
gift would have been buried in the grave of his penury and his
circumstances had his trade been almost any other, and had he not been
impelled by the most powerful of all motives.  He never sat on his
stall without his book before him, nor did he painfully toil with his
wallet of new-made shoes to the neighbouring towns or return with
leather without conning over his lately-acquired knowledge, and making
it for ever, in orderly array, his own.  He so taught his evening
school and his Sunday congregations that the teaching to him, like
writing to others, stereotyped or lighted up the truths.  Indeed, the
school and the cobbling often went on together--a fact commemorated in
the addition to the Hackleton signboard of the Piddington nail on which
he used to fix his thread while teaching the children.

But that which sanctified and directed the whole throughout a working
life of more than half a century, was the missionary idea and the
missionary consecration.  With a caution not often shown at that time
by bishops in laying hands on those whom they had passed for deacon's
orders, the little church at Olney thus dealt with the Father of Modern
Missions before they would recognise his call and send him out "to
preach the gospel wherever God in His providence might call him:"

"June 17, 1785.--A request from William Carey of Moulton, in
Northamptonshire, was taken into consideration.  He has been and still
is in connection with a society of people at Hackleton.  He is
occasionally engaged with acceptance in various places in speaking the
Word. He bears a very good moral character.  He is desirous of being
sent out from some reputable church of Christ into the work of the
ministry.  The principal Question was--'In what manner shall we receive
him? by a letter from the people of Hackleton, or on a profession of
faith, etc.?'  The final resolution of it was left to another church
Meeting.

"July 14--Ch. Meeting.  W. Carey appeared before the Church, and having
given a satisfactory account of the work of God upon his soul, he was
admitted a member.  He had been formerly baptised by the Rev. Mr.
Ryland, jun., of Northampton.  He was invited by the Church to preach
in public once next Lord's Day.

"July 17.--Ch. Meeting, Lord's Day Evening.  W. Carey, in consequence
of a request from the Church, preached this Evening. After which it was
resolved that he should be allowed to go on preaching at those places
where he has been for some time employed, and that he should engage
again on suitable occasions for some time before us, in order that
farther trial may be made of ministerial gifts.

"June 16, 1786.--C.M. The case of Bror. Carey was considered, and an
unanimous satisfaction with his ministerial abilities being expressed,
a vote was passed to call him to the Ministry at a proper time.

"August 10.--Ch. Meeting.  This evening our Brother William Carey was
called to the work of the Ministry, and sent out by the Church to
preach the Gospel, wherever God in His providence might call him.

"April 29, 1787.--Ch. M. After the Orde. our Brother William Carey was
dismissed to the Church of Christ at Moulton in Northamptonshire with a
view to his Ordination there."

These were the last years at Olney of William Cowper before he removed
to the Throckmortons' house at Weston village, two miles distant.
Carey must often have seen the poet during the twenty years which he
spent in the corner house of the market-square, and in the walks
around.  He must have read the poems of 1782, which for the first time
do justice to missionary enterprise.  He must have hailed what Mrs.
Browning calls "the deathless singing" which in 1785, in The Task,
opened a new era in English literature.  He may have been fired with
the desire to imitate Whitefield, in the description of whom, though
reluctant to name him, Cowper really anticipated Carey himself:--

  "He followed Paul; his zeal a kindred flame,
  His apostolic charity the same;
  Like him crossed cheerfully tempestuous seas,
  Forsaking country, kindred, friends and ease;
  Like him he laboured and, like him, content
  To bear it, suffered shame where'er he went."




CHAPTER II

THE BIRTH OF ENGLAND'S FOREIGN MISSIONS

1785-1792

Moulton the Mission's birthplace--Carey's fever and poverty--His
Moulton school--Fired with the missionary idea--His very large
missionary map--Fuller's confession of the aged and respectable
ministers' opposition--Old Mr. Ryland's rebuke--Driven to publish his
Enquiry--Its literary character--Carey's survey of the world in
1788--His motives, difficulties, and plans--Projects the first
Missionary Society--Contrasted with his predecessors from
Erasmus--Prayer concert begun in Scotland in 1742--Jonathan
Edwards--The Northamptonshire Baptist movement in 1784--Andrew
Fuller--The Baptists, Particular and General--Antinomian and Socinian
extremes opposed to Missions--Met by Fuller's writings and Clipstone
sermon--Carey's agony at continued delay--His work in Leicester--His
sermon at Nottingham--Foundation of Baptist Missionary Society at
last--Kettering and Jerusalem.

The north road, which runs for twelve miles from Northampton to
Kettering, passes through a country known last century for the doings
of the Pytchley Hunt. Stories, by no means exaggerated, of the deep
drinking and deeper play of the club, whose gatehouse now stands at the
entrance of Overstone Park, were rife, when on Lady Day 1785 William
Carey became Baptist preacher of Moulton village, on the other side of
the road.  Moulton was to become the birthplace of the modern
missionary idea; Kettering, of evangelical missionary action.

No man in England had apparently a more wretched lot or more miserable
prospects than he.  He had started in life as a journeyman shoemaker at
eighteen, burdened with a payment to his first master's widow which his
own kind heart had led him to offer, and with the price of his second
master's stock and business.  Trade was good for the moment, and he had
married, before he was twenty, one who brought him the most terrible
sorrow a man can bear.  He had no sooner completed a large order for
which his predecessor had contracted than it was returned on his hands.
From place to place he wearily trudged, trying to sell the shoes.
Fever carried off his first child and brought himself so near to the
grave that he sent for his mother to help in the nursing.  At
Piddington he worked early and late at his garden, but ague, caused by
a neighbouring marsh, returned and left him so bald that he wore a wig
thereafter until his voyage to India.  During his preaching for more
than three years at Barton, which involved a walk of sixteen miles, he
did not receive from the poor folks enough to pay for the clothes he
wore out in their service.  His younger brother delicately came to his
help, and he received the gift with a pathetic tenderness.  But a
calling which at once starved him, in spite of all his method and
perseverance, and cramped the ardour of his soul for service to the
Master who had revealed Himself in him, became distasteful.  He gladly
accepted an invitation from the somewhat disorganised church at Moulton
to preach to them.  They could offer him only about £10 a year,
supplemented by £5 from a London fund.  But the schoolmaster had just
left, and Carey saw in that fact a new hope.  For a time he and his
family managed to live on an income which is estimated as never
exceeding £36 a year.  We find this passage in a printed appeal made by
the "very poor congregation" for funds to repair and enlarge the chapel
to which the new pastor's preaching had attracted a crowd:--"The
peculiar situation of our minister, Mr. Carey, renders it impossible
for us to send him far abroad to collect the Contributions of the
Charitable; as we are able to raise him but about Ten Pounds per Annum,
so that he is obliged to keep a School for his Support: And as there
are other two Schools in the Town, if he was to leave Home to collect
for the Building, he must probably quit his Station on his Return, for
Want of a Maintenance."

His genial loving-kindness and his fast increasing learning little
fitted him to drill peasant children in the alphabet. "When I kept
school the boys kept me," he used to confess with a merry twinkle. In
all that our Lord meant by it William Carey was a child from first to
last.  The former teacher returned, and the poor preacher again took to
shoemaking for the village clowns and the shops in Kettering and
Northampton.  His house still stands, one of a row of six cottages of
the dear old English type, with the indispensable garden behind, and
the glad sunshine pouring in through the open window embowered in roses
and honeysuckle.

There, and chiefly in the school-hours as he tried to teach the
children geography and the Bible and was all the while teaching
himself, the missionary idea arose in his mind, and his soul became
fired with the self-consecration, unknown to Wyclif and Hus, Luther and
Calvin, Knox and even Bunyan, for theirs was other work.  All his past
knowledge of nature and of books, all his favourite reading of voyages
and of travels which had led his school-fellows to dub him Columbus,
all his painful study of the Word, his experience of the love of Christ
and expoundings of the meaning of His message to men for six years,
were gathered up, were intensified, and were directed with a
concentrated power to the thought that Christ died, as for him, so for
these millions of dark savages whom Cook was revealing to Christendom,
and who had never heard the glad tidings of great joy.

Carey had ceased to keep school when the Moulton Baptists, who could
subscribe no more than twopence a month each for their own poor,
formally called the preacher to become their ordained pastor, and
Ryland, Sutcliff, and Fuller were asked to ordain him on the 10th
August 1786.  Fuller had discovered the value of a man who had passed
through spiritual experience, and possessed a native common sense like
his own, when Carey had been suddenly called to preach in Northampton
to supply the place of another.  Since that day he had often visited
Moulton, and he thus tells us what he had seen:--

"The congregation being few and poor, he followed his business in order
to assist in supporting his family.  His mind, however, was much
occupied in acquiring the learned languages, and almost every other
branch of useful knowledge.  I remember, on going into the room where
he employed himself at his business, I saw hanging up against the wall
a very large map, consisting of several sheets of paper pasted together
by himself, on which he had drawn, with a pen, a place for every nation
in the known world, and entered into it whatever he met with in
reading, relative to its population, religion, etc.  The substance of
this was afterwards published in his Enquiry.  These researches, on
which his mind was naturally bent, hindered him, of course, from doing
much of his business; and the people, as was said, being few and poor,
he was at this time exposed to great hardships.  I have been assured
that he and his family have lived for a great while together without
tasting animal food, and with but a scanty pittance of other provision."

"He would also be frequently conversing with his brethren in the
ministry on the practicability and importance of a mission to the
heathen, and of his willingness to engage in it.  At several ministers'
meetings, between the year 1787 and 1790, this was the topic of his
conversation.  Some of our most aged and respectable ministers thought,
I believe, at that time, that it was a wild and impracticable scheme
that he had got in his mind, and therefore gave him no encouragement.
Yet he would not give it up; but would converse with us, one by one,
till he had made some impression upon us."

The picture is completed by his sister:--

"He was always, from his first being thoughtful, remarkably impressed
about heathen lands and the slave-trade.  I never remember his engaging
in prayer, in his family or in public, without praying for those poor
creatures.  The first time I ever recollect my feeling for the heathen
world, was from a discourse I heard my brother preach at Moulton, the
first summer after I was thoughtful. It was from these words:--'For
Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake will I
give him no rest.'  It was a day to be remembered by me; a day set
apart for prayer and fasting by the church.  What hath God wrought
since that time!"

Old Mr. Ryland always failed to recall the story, but we have it on the
testimony of Carey's personal friend, Morris of Clipstone, who was
present at the meeting of ministers held in 1786 at Northampton, at
which the incident occurred.  Ryland invited the younger brethren to
propose a subject for discussion.  There was no reply, till at last the
Moulton preacher suggested, doubtless with an ill-restrained
excitement, "whether the command given to the Apostles, to teach all
nations, was not obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of
the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent."
Neither Fuller nor Carey himself had yet delivered the Particular
Baptists from the yoke of hyper-calvinism which had to that hour shut
the heathen out of a dead Christendom, and the aged chairman shouted
out the rebuke--"You are a miserable enthusiast for asking such a
question.  Certainly nothing can be done before another Pentecost, when
an effusion of miraculous gifts, including the gift of tongues, will
give effect to the commission of Christ as at first."  Carey had never
before mentioned the subject openly, and he was for the moment greatly
mortified.  But, says Morris, he still pondered these things in his
heart.  That incident marks the wide gulf which Carey had to bridge.
Silenced by his brethren, he had recourse to the press.  It was then
that he wrote his own contribution to the discussion he would have
raised on a duty which was more than seventeen centuries old, and had
been for fourteen of these neglected: An Enquiry into the Obligations
of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, in which
the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success
of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings,
are considered by WILLIAM CAREY.  Then follows the great conclusion of
Paul in his letter to the Romans (x. 12-15): "For there is no
difference between the Jew and the Greek...How shall they preach except
they be sent?"  He happened to be in Birmingham in 1786 collecting
subscriptions for the rebuilding of the chapel in Moulton, when Mr.
Thomas Potts, who had made a fortune in trade with America, discovering
that he had prepared the manuscript, gave him £10 to publish it.  And
it appeared at Leicester in 1792, "price one shilling and sixpence,"
the profits to go to the proposed mission.  The pamphlet form doubtless
accounts for its disappearance now; only four copies of the original
edition[4] are known to be in existence.

This Enquiry has a literary interest of its own, as a contribution to
the statistics and geography of the world, written in a cultured and
almost finished style, such as few, if any, University men of that day
could have produced, for none were impelled by such a motive as Carey
had.  In an obscure village, toiling save when he slept, and finding
rest on Sunday only by a change of toil, far from libraries and the
society of men with more advantages than his own, this shoemaker, still
under thirty, surveys the whole world, continent by continent, island
by island, race by race, faith by faith, kingdom by kingdom, tabulating
his results with an accuracy, and following them up with a logical
power of generalisation which would extort the admiration of the
learned even of the present day.

Having proved that the commission given by our Lord to His disciples is
still binding on us, having reviewed former undertakings for the
conversion of the heathen from the Ascension to the Moravians and "the
late Mr. Wesley" in the West Indies, and having thus surveyed in detail
the state of the world in 1786, he removes the five impediments in the
way of carrying the Gospel among the heathen, which his contemporaries
advanced--their distance from us, their barbarism, the danger of being
killed by them, the difficulty of procuring the necessaries of life,
the unintelligibleness of their languages.  These his loving heart and
Bible knowledge enable him skilfully to turn in favour of the cause he
pleads.  The whole section is essential to an appreciation of Carey's
motives, difficulties, and plans:--

"FIRST, As to their distance from us, whatever objections might have
been made on that account before the invention of the mariner's
compass, nothing can be alleged for it with any colour of plausibility
in the present age.  Men can now sail with as much certainty through
the Great South Sea as they can through the Mediterranean or any lesser
sea.  Yea, and providence seems in a manner to invite us to the trial,
as there are to our knowledge trading companies, whose commerce lies in
many of the places where these barbarians dwell.  At one time or other
ships are sent to visit places of more recent discovery, and to explore
parts the most unknown; and every fresh account of their ignorance or
cruelty should call forth our pity, and excite us to concur with
providence in seeking their eternal good.  Scripture likewise seems to
point out this method, 'Surely the Isles shall wait for me; the ships
of Tarshish first, to bring my sons from far, their silver and their
gold with them, unto the name of the Lord, thy God.'--Isai. lx. 9. This
seems to imply that in the time of the glorious increase of the church,
in the latter days (of which the whole chapter is undoubtedly a
prophecy), commerce shall subserve the spread of the gospel.  The ships
of Tarshish were trading vessels, which made voyages for traffic to
various parts; thus much therefore must be meant by it, that
navigation, especially that which is commercial, shall be one great
mean of carrying on the work of God; and perhaps it may imply that
there shall be a very considerable appropriation of wealth to that
purpose.

"SECONDLY, As to their uncivilised and barbarous way of living, this
can be no objection to any, except those whose love of ease renders
them unwilling to expose themselves to inconveniences for the good of
others.  It was no objection to the apostles and their successors, who
went among the barbarous Germans and Gauls, and still more barbarous
Britons!  They did not wait for the ancient inhabitants of these
countries to be civilised before they could be christianised, but went
simply with the doctrine of the cross; and Tertullian could boast that
'those parts of Britain which were proof against the Roman armies, were
conquered by the gospel of Christ.' It was no objection to an Eliot or
a Brainerd, in later times. They went forth, and encountered every
difficulty of the kind, and found that a cordial reception of the
gospel produced those happy effects which the longest intercourse with
Europeans without it could never accomplish.  It is no objection to
commercial men.  It only requires that we should have as much love to
the souls of our fellow-creatures, and fellow-sinners, as they have for
the profits arising from a few otter-skins, and all these difficulties
would be easily surmounted.

"After all, the uncivilised state of the heathen, instead of affording
an objection against preaching the gospel to them, ought to furnish an
argument for it.  Can we as men, or as Christians, hear that a great
part of our fellow-creatures, whose souls are as immortal as ours, and
who are as capable as ourselves of adorning the gospel and contributing
by their preachings, writings, or practices to the glory of our
Redeemer's name and the good of his church, are enveloped in ignorance
and barbarism?  Can we hear that they are without the gospel, without
government, without laws, and without arts, and sciences; and not exert
ourselves to introduce among them the sentiments of men, and of
Christians?  Would not the spread of the gospel be the most effectual
mean of their civilisation?  Would not that make them useful members of
society? We know that such effects did in a measure follow the
afore-mentioned efforts of Eliot, Brainerd, and others amongst the
American Indians; and if similar attempts were made in other parts of
the world, and succeeded with a divine blessing (which we have every
reason to think they would), might we not expect to see able divines,
or read well-conducted treatises in defence of the truth, even amongst
those who at present seem to be scarcely human?

"THIRDLY, In respect to the danger of being killed by them, it is true
that whoever does go must put his life in his hand, and not consult
with flesh and blood; but do not the goodness of the cause, the duties
incumbent on us as the creatures of God and Christians, and the
perishing state of our fellow-men, loudly call upon us to venture all,
and use every warrantable exertion for their benefit? Paul and
Barnabas, who hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, were not blamed as being rash, but commended for so doing;
while John Mark, who through timidity of mind deserted them in their
perilous undertaking, was branded with censure.  After all, as has been
already observed, I greatly question whether most of the barbarities
practised by the savages upon those who have visited them, have not
originated in some real or supposed affront, and were therefore, more
properly, acts of self-defence, than proofs of ferocious dispositions.
No wonder if the imprudence of sailors should prompt them to offend the
simple savage, and the offence be resented; but Eliot, Brainerd, and
the Moravian missionaries have been very seldom molested.  Nay, in
general the heathen have showed a willingness to hear the word; and
have principally expressed their hatred of Christianity on account of
the vices of nominal Christians.

"FOURTHLY, As to the difficulty of procuring the necessaries of life,
this would not be so great as may appear at first sight; for, though we
could not procure European food, yet we might procure such as the
natives of those countries which we visit, subsist upon themselves.
And this would only be passing through what we have virtually engaged
in by entering on the ministerial office.  A Christian minister is a
person who in a peculiar sense is not his own; he is the servant of
God, and therefore ought to be wholly devoted to him.  By entering on
that sacred office he solemnly undertakes to be always engaged, as much
as possible, in the Lord's work, and not to choose his own pleasure, or
employment, or pursue the ministry as a something that is to subserve
his own ends, or interests, or as a kind of bye-work.  He engages to go
where God pleases, and to do or endure what he sees fit to command, or
call him to, in the exercise of his function.  He virtually bids
farewell to friends, pleasures, and comforts, and stands in readiness
to endure the greatest sufferings in the work of his Lord, and Master.
It is inconsistent for ministers to please themselves with thoughts of
a numerous auditory, cordial friends, a civilised country, legal
protection, affluence, splendour, or even a competency.  The slights,
and hatred of men, and even pretended friends, gloomy prisons, and
tortures, the society of barbarians of uncouth speech, miserable
accommodations in wretched wildernesses, hunger, and thirst, nakedness,
weariness, and painfulness, hard work, and but little worldly
encouragement, should rather be the objects of their expectation.  Thus
the apostles acted, in the primitive times, and endured hardness, as
good soldiers of Jesus Christ; and though we, living in a civilised
country where Christianity is protected by law, are not called to
suffer these things while we continue here, yet I question whether all
are justified in staying here, while so many are perishing without
means of grace in other lands.  Sure I am that it is entirely contrary
to the spirit of the gospel for its ministers to enter upon it from
interested motives, or with great worldly expectations.  On the
contrary, the commission is a sufficient call to them to venture all,
and, like the primitive Christians, go everywhere preaching the gospel.

"It might be necessary, however, for two, at least, to go together, and
in general I should think it best that they should be married men, and
to prevent their time from being employed in procuring necessaries,
two, or more, other persons, with their wives and families, might also
accompany them, who should be wholly employed in providing for them.
In most countries it would be necessary for them to cultivate a little
spot of ground just for their support, which would be a resource to
them, whenever their supplies failed. Not to mention the advantages
they would reap from each other's company, it would take off the
enormous expense which has always attended undertakings of this kind,
the first expense being the whole; for though a large colony needs
support for a considerable time, yet so small a number would, upon
receiving the first crop, maintain themselves.  They would have the
advantage of choosing their situation, their wants would be few; the
women, and even the children, would be necessary for domestic purposes:
and a few articles of stock, as a cow or two, and a bull, and a few
other cattle of both sexes, a very few utensils of husbandry, and some
corn to sow their land, would be sufficient.  Those who attend the
missionaries should understand husbandry, fishing, fowling, etc., and
be provided with the necessary implements for these purposes. Indeed, a
variety of methods may be thought of, and when once the work is
undertaken, many things will suggest themselves to us, of which we at
present can form no idea.

"FIFTHLY, As to learning their languages, the same means would be found
necessary here as in trade between different nations.  In some cases
interpreters might be obtained, who might be employed for a time; and
where these were not to be found, the missionaries must have patience,
and mingle with the people, till they have learned so much of their
language as to be able to communicate their ideas to them in it.  It is
well known to require no very extraordinary talents to learn, in the
space of a year, or two at most, the language of any people upon earth,
so much of it at least as to be able to convey any sentiments we wish
to their understandings.

"The Missionaries must be men of great piety, prudence, courage, and
forbearance; of undoubted orthodoxy in their sentiments, and must enter
with all their hearts into the spirit of their mission; they must be
willing to leave all the comforts of life behind them, and to encounter
all the hardships of a torrid or a frigid climate, an uncomfortable
manner of living, and every other inconvenience that can attend this
undertaking.  Clothing, a few knives, powder and shot, fishing-tackle,
and the articles of husbandry above mentioned, must be provided for
them; and when arrived at the place of their destination, their first
business must be to gain some acquaintance with the language of the
natives (for which purpose two would be better than one), and by all
lawful means to endeavour to cultivate a friendship with them, and as
soon as possible let them know the errand for which they were sent.
They must endeavour to convince them that it was their good alone which
induced them to forsake their friends, and all the comforts of their
native country.  They must be very careful not to resent injuries which
may be offered to them, nor to think highly of themselves, so as to
despise the poor heathens, and by those means lay a foundation for
their resentment or rejection of the gospel.  They must take every
opportunity of doing them good, and labouring and travelling night and
day, they must instruct, exhort, and rebuke, with all long suffering
and anxious desire for them, and, above all, must be instant in prayer
for the effusion of the Holy Spirit upon the people of their charge.
Let but missionaries of the above description engage in the work, and
we shall see that it is not impracticable.

"It might likewise be of importance, if God should bless their labours,
for them to encourage any appearances of gifts amongst the people of
their charge; if such should be raised up many advantages would be
derived from their knowledge of the language and customs of their
countrymen; and their change of conduct would give great weight to
their ministrations."

This first and still greatest missionary treatise in the English
language closes with the practical suggestion of these means--fervent
and united prayer, the formation of a catholic or, failing that, a
Particular Baptist Society of "persons whose hearts are in the work,
men of serious religion and possessing a spirit of perseverance," with
an executive committee, and subscriptions from rich and poor of a tenth
of their income for both village preaching and foreign missions, or, at
least, an average of one penny or more per week from all members of
congregations.  He thus concludes:--"It is true all the reward is of
mere grace, but it is nevertheless encouraging; what a treasure, what
an harvest must await such characters as Paul, and Eliot, and Brainerd,
and others, who have given themselves wholly to the work of the Lord.
What a heaven will it be to see the many myriads of poor heathens, of
Britons amongst the rest, who by their labours have been brought to the
knowledge of God. Surely a crown of rejoicing like this is worth
aspiring to. Surely it is worth while to lay ourselves out with all our
might, in promoting the cause and kingdom of Christ."

So Carey projected the first organisation which England had seen for
missions to all the human race outside of Christendom; and his project,
while necessarily requiring a Society to carry it out, as coming from
an "independent" Church, provided that every member of every
congregation should take a part to the extent of fervent and united
prayer, and of an average subscription of a penny a week.  He came as
near to the New Testament ideal of all Christians acting in an
aggressive missionary church as was possible in an age when the
Established Churches of England, Scotland, and Germany scouted foreign
missions, and the Free Churches were chiefly congregational in their
ecclesiastical action.  While asserting the other ideal of the
voluntary tenth or tithe as both a Scriptural principle and Puritan
practice, his common sense was satisfied to suggest an average penny a
week, all over, for every Christian.  At this hour, more than a century
since Carey wrote, and after a remarkable missionary revival in
consequence of what he wrote and did, all Christendom, Evangelical,
Greek, and Latin, does not give more than five millions sterling a year
to Christianise the majority of the race still outside its pale.  It is
not too much to say that were Carey's penny a week from every Christian
a fact, and the prayer which would sooner or later accompany it, the
five millions would be fifty, and Christendom would become a term
nearly synonymous with humanity.  The Churches, whether by themselves
or by societies, have yet to pray and organise up to the level of
Carey's penny a week.

The absolute originality as well as grandeur of the unconscious action
of the peasant shoemaker who, from 1779, prayed daily for all the
heathen and slaves, and organised his society accordingly, will be seen
in the dim light or darkness visible of all who had preceded him.  They
were before the set time; he was ready in the fulness of the missionary
preparation.  They belonged not only to periods, but to nations, to
churches, to communities which were failing in the struggle for
fruitfulness and expansion in new worlds and fresh lands; he was a son
of England, which had come or was about to come out of the struggle a
victor, charged with the terrible responsibility of the special servant
of the Lord, as no people had ever before been charged in all history,
sacred or secular.  William Carey, indeed, reaped the little that the
few brave toilers of the wintry time had sown; with a humility that is
pathetic he acknowledges their toll, while ever ignorant to the last of
his own merit.  But he reaped only as each generation garners such
fruits of its predecessor as may have been worthy to survive.  He was
the first of the true Anastatosantes of the modern world, as only an
English-speaking man could be--of the most thorough, permanent, and
everlasting of all Reformers, the men who turn the world upside down,
because they make it rise up and depart from deadly beliefs and
practices, from the fear and the fate of death, into the life and light
of Christ and the Father.

Who were his predecessors, reckoning from the Renascence of Europe, the
discovery of America, and the opening up of India and Africa? Erasmus
comes first, the bright scholar of compromise who in 1516 gave the New
Testament again to Europe, as three centuries after Carey gave it to
all Southern Asia, and whose missionary treatise, Ecclesiasties, in
1535 anticipated, theoretically at least, Carey's Enquiry by two
centuries and a half.  The missionary dream of this escaped monk of
Rotterdam and Basel, who taught women and weavers and cobblers to read
the Scriptures, and prayed that the Book might be translated into all
languages, was realised in the scandalous iniquities and frauds of
Portuguese and Spanish and Jesuit missions in West and East. Luther had
enough to do with his papal antichrist and his German translation of
the Greek of the Testament of Erasmus. The Lutheran church drove
missions into the hands of the Pietists and Moravians--Wiclif's
offspring--who nobly but ineffectually strove to do a work meant for
the whole Christian community.  The Church of England thrust forth the
Puritans first to Holland and then to New England, where Eliot, the
Brainerds, and the Mayhews sought to evangelise tribes which did not
long survive themselves.

It was from Courteenhall, a Northamptonshire village near Paulerspury,
that in 1644 there went forth the appeal for the propagation of the
Gospel which comes nearest to Carey's cry from the same midland region.
Cromwell was in power, and had himself planned a Protestant Propaganda,
so to the Long Parliament William Castell, "parson of Courteenhall,"
sent a petition which, with the "Eliot Tracts," resulted in an
ordinance creating the Corporation for the Promoting and Propagating
the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England.  Seventy English ministers
had backed the petition, and six of the Church of Scotland, first of
whom was Alexander Henderson. The corporation, which, in a restored
form, Robert Boyle governed for thirty years, familiarised the nation
with the duty of caring for the dark races then coming more and more
under our sway alike in America and in India.  It still exists, as well
as Boyle's Society for advancing the Faith in the West Indies.  The
Friends also, and then the Moravians, taught the Wesleys and Whitefield
to care for the negroes.  The English and Scottish Propagation
Societies sought also to provide spiritual aids for the colonists and
the highlanders.

The two great thinkers of the eighteenth century, who flourished as
philosopher and moralist when Carey was a youth, taught the principles
which he of all others was to apply on their spiritual and most
effective side.  Adam Smith put his finger on the crime which had
darkened and continued till 1834 to shadow the brightness of
geographical enterprise in both hemispheres--the treatment of the
natives by Europeans whose superiority of force enabled them to commit
every sort of injustice in the new lands.  He sought a remedy in
establishing an equality of force by the mutual communication of
knowledge and of all sorts of improvements by an extensive commerce.[5]
Samuel Johnson rose to a higher level alike of wisdom and
righteousness, when he expressed the indignation of a Christian mind
that the propagation of truth had never been seriously pursued by any
European nation, and the hope "that the light of the Gospel will at
last illuminate the sands of Africa and the deserts of America, though
its progress cannot but be slow when it is so much obstructed by the
lives of Christians."

The early movement which is connected most directly with Carey's and
the Northamptonshire Baptists' began in Scotland.  Its Kirk,
emasculated by the Revolution settlement and statute of Queen Anne, had
put down the evangelical teaching of Boston and the "marrow" men, and
had cast out the fathers of the Secession in 1733.  In 1742 the
quickening spread over the west country.  In October 1744 several
ministers in Scotland united, for the two years next following, in what
they called, and what has since become familiar in America as, a
"Concert to promote more abundant application to a duty that is
perpetually binding--prayer that our God's kingdom may come, joined
with praises;" to be offered weekly on Saturday evening and Sunday
morning, and more solemnly on the first Tuesday of every quarter.  Such
was the result, and so did the prayer concert spread in the United
Kingdom that in August 1746 a memorial was sent to Boston inviting all
Christians in North America to enter into it for the next seven years.
It was on this that Jonathan Edwards wrote his Humble Attempt to
promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God's People in
Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of
Christ's Kingdom on Earth.

This work of Edwards, republished at Olney, came into the hands of
Carey, and powerfully influenced the Northamptonshire Association of
Baptist ministers and messengers.  At their meeting in Nottingham in
1784 Sutcliff of Olney suggested and Ryland of Northampton drafted an
invitation to the people to join them, for one hour on the first Monday
of every month, in prayer for the effusion of the Holy Spirit of God.
"Let the whole interest of the Redeemer be affectionately remembered,"
wrote these catholic men, and to give emphasis to their [oe]cumenical
missionary desires they added in italics--"Let the spread of the Gospel
to the most distant parts of the habitable globe be the object of your
most fervent requests.  We shall rejoice if any other Christian
societies of our own or other denominations will join with us, and we
do now invite them most cordially to join heart and hand in the
attempt."  To this Carey prominently referred in his Enquiry, tracing
to even the unimportunate and feeble prayers of these eight years the
increase of the churches, the clearing of controversies, the opening of
lands to missions, the spread of civil and religious liberty, the noble
effort made to abolish the inhuman slave-trade, and the establishment
of the free settlement of Sierra Leone.  And then he hits the other
blots in the movement, besides the want of importunity and
earnestness--"We must not be contented with praying without exerting
ourselves in the use of means...Were the children of light but as wise
in their generation as the children of this world, they would stretch
every nerve to gain so glorious a prize, nor ever imagine that it was
to be obtained in any other way."  A trading company obtain a charter
and go to its utmost limits.  The charter, the encouragements of
Christians are exceeding great, and the returns promised infinitely
superior. "Suppose a company of serious Christians, ministers and
private persons, were to form themselves into a society."

The man was ready who had been specially fitted, by character and
training, to form the home organisation of the society, while Carey
created its foreign mission.  For the next quarter of a century William
Carey and Andrew Fuller worked lovingly, fruitfully together, with the
breadth of half the world between them.  The one showed how, by Bible
and church and school, by physical and spiritual truth, India and all
Asia could be brought to Christ; the other taught England, Scotland,
and America to begin at last to play their part in an enterprise as old
as Abraham; as divine in its warrant, its charge, its promise, as
Christ Himself.  Seven years older than Carey, his friend was born a
farmer's son and labourer in the fen country of Cromwell whom he
resembled, was self-educated under conditions precisely similar, and
passed through spiritual experiences almost exactly the same.  The two,
unknown to each other, found themselves when called to preach at
eighteen unable to reconcile the grim dead theology of their church
with the new life and liberty which had come to them direct from the
Spirit of Christ and from His Word. Carey had left his ancestral church
at a time when the biographer of Romaine could declare with truth that
that preacher was the only evangelical in the established churches of
all London, and that of twenty thousand clergymen in England, the
number who preached the truth as it is in Jesus had risen from not
twenty in 1749 to three hundred in 1789.  The methodism of the Wesleys
was beginning to tell, but the Baptists were as lifeless as the
Established Church.  In both the Church and Dissent there were
individuals only, like Newton and Scott, the elder Robert Hall and
Ryland, whose spiritual fervour made them marked men.

The Baptists, who had stood alone as the advocates of toleration,
religious and civil, in an age of intolerance which made them the
victims, had subsided like Puritan and Covenanter when the Revolution
of 1688 brought persecution to an end.  The section who held the
doctrine of "general" redemption, and are now honourably known as
General Baptists, preached ordinary Arminianism, and even Socinianism.
The more earnest and educated among them clung to Calvinism, but, by
adopting the unhappy term of "particular" Baptists, gradually fell
under a fatalistic and antinomian spell. This false Calvinism, which
the French theologian of Geneva would have been the first to denounce,
proved all the more hostile to the preaching of the Gospel of salvation
to the heathen abroad, as well as the sinner at home, that it professed
to be an orthodox evangel while either emasculating the Gospel or
turning the grace of God into licentiousness.  From such "particular"
preachers as young Fuller and Carey listened to, at first with
bewilderment, then impatience, and then denunciation, missions of no
kind could come. Fuller exposed and pursued the delusion with a native
shrewdness, a masculine sagacity, and a fine English style, which have
won for him the apt name of the Franklin of Theology.  For more than
twenty years Fullerism, as it was called, raised a controversy like
that of the Marrow of Divinity in Scotland, and cleared the ground
sufficiently at least to allow of the foundation of foreign missions in
both countries.  It now seems incredible that the only class who a
century ago represented evangelicalism should have opposed missions to
the heathen on the ground that the Gospel is meant only for the elect,
whether at home or abroad; that nothing spiritually good is the duty of
the unregenerate, therefore "nothing must be addressed to them in a way
of exhortation excepting what relates to external obedience."

The same year, 1784, in which the Baptist concert for prayer was begun,
saw the publication of Fuller's Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation.
Seven years later he preached at Clipstone a famous sermon, in which he
applied the dealing of the Lord of Hosts (in Haggai) to the Jewish
apathy--"The time is not come that the Lord's house should be
built"--with a power and directness which nevertheless failed
practically to convince himself.  The men who listened to him had been
praying for seven years, yet had opposed Carey's pleas for a foreign
mission, had treated him as a visionary or a madman.  When Fuller had
published his treatise, Carey had drawn the practical deduction--"If it
be the duty of all men, when the Gospel comes, to believe unto
salvation, then it is the duty of those who are entrusted with the
Gospel to endeavour to make it known among all nations for the
obedience of faith."  Now, after seven more years of waiting, and
remembering the manuscript Enquiry, Carey thought action cannot be
longer delayed.  Hardly was the usual discussion that followed the
meeting over when, as the story is told by the son of Ryland who had
silenced him in a former ministers' meeting, Carey appealed to his
brethren to put their preaching into practice and begin a missionary
society that very day.  Fuller's sermon bore the title of The Evil
Nature and the Dangerous Tendency of Delay in the Concerns of Religion,
and it had been preceded by one on being very jealous for the Lord God
of Hosts, in which Sutcliff cried for the divine passion, the celestial
fire that burned in the bosom and blazed in the life of Elijah.  The
Elijah of their own church and day was among them, burning and blazing
for years, and all that he could induce them to promise was vaguely
that, "something should be done," and to throw to his importunity the
easy request that he would publish his manuscript and preach next
year's sermon.

Meanwhile, in 1789, Carey had left Moulton[6] for Leicester, whither he
was summoned to build up a congregation, ruined by antinomianism, in
the mean brick chapel of the obscure quarter of Harvey Lane. This
chapel his genius and Robert Hall's eloquence made so famous in time
that the Baptists sent off a vigorous hive to the fine new church. In
an equally humble house opposite the chapel the poverty of the pastor
compelled him to keep a school from nine in the morning till four in
winter and five in summer.  Between this and the hours for sleep and
food he had little leisure; but that he spent, as he had done all his
life before and did all his life after, with a method and zeal which
doubled his working days. "I have seen him at work," writes Gardiner in
his Music and Friends, "his books beside him, and his beautiful flowers
in the windows."  In a letter to his father we have this division of
his leisure--Monday, "the learned languages;" Tuesday, "the study of
science, history, composition, etc;" Wednesday, "I preach a lecture,
and have been for more than twelve months on the Book of Revelation;"
Thursday, "I visit my friends;" Friday and Saturday, "preparing for the
Lord's Day." He preached three times every Sunday in his own chapel or
the surrounding villages, with such results that in one case he added
hundreds to its Wesleyan congregation.  He was secretary to the local
committee of dissenters. "Add to this occasional journeys, ministers'
meetings, etc., and you will rather wonder that I have any time, than
that I have so little.  I am not my own, nor would I choose for myself.
Let God employ me where he thinks fit, and give me patience and
discretion to fill up my station to his honour and glory."

"After I had been probationer in this place a year and ten months, on
the 24th of May 1791 I was solemnly set apart to the office of pastor.
About twenty ministers of different denominations were witnesses to the
transactions of the day.  After prayer Brother Hopper of Nottingham
addressed the congregation upon the nature of an ordination, after
which he proposed the usual questions to the church, and required my
Confession of Faith; which being delivered, Brother Ryland prayed the
ordination prayer, with laying on of hands.  Brother Sutcliff delivered
a very solemn charge from Acts vi. 4--'But we will give ourselves
continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word.'  And Brother
Fuller delivered an excellent address to the people from Eph. v.
2--'Walk in love.'  In the evening Brother Pearce of Birmingham
preached from Gal. vi. 14--'God forbid that I should glory, save in the
cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me
and I unto the world.'  The day was a day of pleasure, and I hope of
profit to the greatest part of the Assembly."

Carey became the friend of his neighbour, Thomas Robinson, evangelical
rector of St. Mary's, to whom he said on one occasion when indirectly
charged in humorous fashion with "sheep-stealing:" "Mr. Robinson, I am
a dissenter, and you are a churchman; we must each endeavour to do good
according to our light.  At the same time, you may be assured that I
had rather be the instrument of converting a scavenger that sweeps the
streets than of merely proselyting the richest and best characters in
your congregation."  Dr. Arnold and Mr. R. Brewin, a botanist, opened
to him their libraries, and all good men in Leicester soon learned to
be proud of the new Baptist minister.  In the two chapels, as in that
of Moulton, enlarged since his time, memorial tablets tell succeeding
generations of the virtues and the deeds of "the illustrious W. Carey,
D.D."

The ministers' meeting of 1792 came round, and on 31st May Carey seized
his opportunity.  The place was Nottingham, from which the 1784
invitation to prayer had gone forth.  Was the answer to come just there
after nine years' waiting?  His Enquiry had been published; had it
prepared the brethren?  Ryland had been always loyal to the journeyman
shoemaker he had baptised in the river, and he gives us this
record:--"If all the people had lifted up their voices and wept, as the
children of Israel did at Bochim, I should not have wondered at the
effect.  It would only have seemed proportionate to the cause, so
clearly did he prove the criminality of our supineness in the cause of
God." The text was Isaiah's (liv. 2, 3) vision of the widowed church's
tent stretching forth till her children inherited the nations and
peopled the desolate cities, and the application to the reluctant
brethren was couched in these two great maxims written ever since on
the banners of the missionary host of the kingdom--

   EXPECT GREAT THINGS FROM GOD.
   ATTEMPT GREAT THINGS FOR GOD.

The service was over; even Fuller was afraid, even Ryland made no sign,
and the ministers were leaving the meeting.  Seizing Fuller's arm with
an imploring look, the preacher, whom despair emboldened to act alone
for his Master, exclaimed: "And are you, after all, going again to do
nothing?"  What Fuller describes as the "much fear and trembling" of
these inexperienced, poor, and ignorant village preachers gave way to
the appeal of one who had gained both knowledge and courage, and who,
as to funds and men, was ready to give himself.  They entered on their
minutes this much:--"That a plan be prepared against the next
ministers' meeting at Kettering for forming a Baptist Society for
propagating the Gospel among the Heathen."  There was more delay, but
only for four months.  The first purely English Missionary Society,
which sent forth its own English founder, was thus constituted as
described in the minutes of the Northampton ministers' meeting.

"At the ministers' meeting at Kettering, October 2, 1792, after the
public services of the day were ended, the ministers retired to consult
further on the matter, and to lay a foundation at least for a society,
when the following resolutions were proposed, and unanimously agreed
to:--

"1. Desirous of making an effort for the propagation of the gospel
among the heathen, agreeably to what is recommended in brother Carey's
late publication on that subject, we, whose names appear to the
subsequent subscription, do solemnly agree to act in society together
for that purpose.

"2. As in the present divided state of Christendom, it seems that each
denomination, by exerting itself separately, is most likely to
accomplish the great ends of a mission, it is agreed that this society
be called The Particular [Calvinistic] Baptist Society for Propagating
the Gospel among the Heathen.

"3. As such an undertaking must needs be attended with expense, we
agree immediately to open a subscription for the above purpose, and to
recommend it to others.

"4. Every person who shall subscribe ten pounds at once, or ten
shillings and sixpence annually, shall be considered a member of the
society.

"5. That the Rev. John Ryland, Reynold Hogg, William Carey, John
Sutcliff, and Andrew Fuller, be appointed a committee, three of whom
shall be empowered to act in carrying into effect the purposes of this
society.

"6. That the Rev. Reynold Hogg be appointed treasurer, and the Rev.
Andrew Fuller secretary.

"7. That the subscriptions be paid in at the Northampton ministers'
meeting, October 31, 1792, at which time the subject shall be
considered more particularly by the committee, and other subscribers
who may be present.

"Signed, John Ryland, Reynold Hogg, John Sutcliff, Andrew Fuller,
Abraham Greenwood, Edward Sherman, Joshua Burton, Samuel Pearce, Thomas
Blundel, William Heighton, John Eayres, Joseph Timms; whose
subscriptions in all amounted to £13:2:6."

The procedure suggested in "brother Carey's late publication" was
strictly followed--a society of subscribers, 2d. a week, or 10s. 6d. a
year as a compromise between the tithes and the penny a week of the
Enquiry.  The secretary was the courageous Fuller, who once said to
Ryland and Sutcliff: "You excel me in wisdom, especially in foreseeing
difficulties.  I therefore want to advise with you both, but to execute
without you."  The frequent chairman was Ryland, who was soon to train
missionaries for the work at Bristol College.  The treasurer was the
only rich man of the twelve, who soon resigned his office into a
layman's hands, as was right.  Of the others we need now point only to
Samuel Pearce, the seraphic preacher of Birmingham, who went home and
sent £70 to the collection, and who, since he desired to give himself
like Carey, became to him dearer than even Fuller was.  The place was a
low-roofed parlour in the house of Widow Wallis, looking on to a back
garden, which many a pilgrim still visits, and around which there
gathered thousands in 1842 to hold the first jubilee of modern
missions, when commemorative medals were struck.  There in 1892 the
centenary witnessed a still vaster assemblage.

Can any good come out of Kettering? was the conclusion of the Baptist
ministers of London with the one exception of Booth, when they met
formally to decide whether, like those of Birmingham and other places,
they should join the primary society.  Benjamin Beddome, a venerable
scholar whom Robert Hall declared to be chief among his brethren,
replied to Fuller in language which is far from unusual even at the
present day, but showing the position which the Leicester minister had
won for himself even then:--

"I think your scheme, considering the paucity of well-qualified
ministers, hath a very unfavourable aspect with respect to destitute
churches at home, where charity ought to begin.  I had the pleasure
once to see and hear Mr. Carey; it struck me he was the most suitable
person in the kingdom, at least whom I knew, to supply my place, and
make up my great deficiencies when either disabled or removed.  A
different plan is formed and pursued, and I fear that the great and
good man, though influenced by the most excellent motives, will meet
with a disappointment.  However, God hath his ends, and whoever is
disappointed He cannot be so.  My unbelieving heart is ready to suggest
that the time is not come, the time that the Lord's house should be
built."

The other Congregationalists made no sign.  The Presbyterians, with a
few noble exceptions like Dr. Erskine, whose Dutch volume Carey had
translated, denounced such movements as revolutionary in a General
Assembly of Socinianised "moderates."  The Church of England kept
haughtily or timidly aloof, though king and archbishop were pressed to
send a mission. "Those who in that day sneered that England had sent a
cobbler to convert the world were the direct lineal descendants of
those who sneered in Palestine 2000 years ago, 'Is not this the
carpenter?'" said Archdeacon Farrar in Westminster Abbey on 6th March
1887.  Hence Fuller's reference to this time:--"When we began in 1792
there was little or no respectability among us, not so much as a squire
to sit in the chair or an orator to address him with speeches.  Hence
good Dr. Stennett advised the London ministers to stand aloof and not
commit themselves."

One man in India had striven to rouse the Church to its duty as Carey
had done at home.  Charles Grant had in 1787 written from Malda to
Charles Simeon and Wilberforce for eight missionaries, but not one
Church of England clergyman could be found to go.  Thirty years after,
when chairman of the Court of Directors and father of Lord Glenelg and
Sir Robert Grant, he wrote:--"I had formed the design of a mission to
Bengal: Providence reserved that honour for the Baptists."  After all,
the twelve village pastors in the back parlour of Kettering were the
more really the successors of the twelve apostles in the upper room of
Jerusalem.




CHAPTER III

INDIA AS CAREY FOUND IT

1793

Tahiti v. Bengal--Carey and Thomas appointed missionaries to
Bengal--The farewell at Leicester--John Thomas, first medical
missionary--Carey's letter to his father--The Company's "abominable
monopoly"--The voyage--Carey's aspirations for world-wide
missions--Lands at Calcutta--His description of Bengal in
1793--Contrast presented by Carey to Clive, Hastings, and
Cornwallis--The spiritual founder of an Indian Empire of Christian
Britain--Bengal and the famine of 1769-70--The Decennial Settlement
declared permanent--Effects on the landed classes--Obstacles to Carey's
work--East India Company at its worst--Hindooism and the Bengalees in
1793--Position of Hindoo women--Missionary attempts before
Carey's--Ziegenbalg and Schwartz--Kiernander and the
chaplains--Hindooised state of Anglo-Indian society and its reaction on
England--Guneshan Dass, the first caste Hindoo to visit
England--William Carey had no predecessor.

Carey had desired to go first to Tahiti or Western Africa.  The natives
of North America and the negroes of the West Indies and Sierra Leone
were being cared for by Moravian and Wesleyan evangelists.  The
narrative of Captain Cook's two first voyages to the Pacific and
discovery of Tahiti had appeared in the same year in which the
Northampton churches began their seven years' concert of prayer, just
after his own second baptism.  From the map, and a leather globe which
also he is said to have made, he had been teaching the children of
Piddington, Moulton, and Leicester the great outlines and thrilling
details of expeditions round the world which roused both the scientific
and the simple of England as much as the discoveries of Columbus had
excited Europe.  When the childlike ignorance and natural grace of the
Hawaiians, which had at first fired him with the longing to tell them
the good news of God, were seen turned into the wild justice of
revenge, which made Cook its first victim, Carey became all the more
eager to anticipate the disasters of later days.  That was work for
which others were to be found.  It was not amid the scattered and
decimated savages of the Pacific or of America that the citadel of
heathenism was found, nor by them that the world, old and new, was to
be made the kingdom of Christ.  With the cautious wisdom that marked
all Fuller's action, though perhaps with the ignorance that was due to
Carey's absence, the third meeting of the new society recorded this
among other articles "to be examined and discussed in the most diligent
and impartial manner--In what part of the heathen world do there seem
to be the most promising openings?"

The answer, big with consequence for the future of the East, was in
their hands, in the form of a letter from Carey, who stated that "Mr.
Thomas, the Bengal missionary," was trying to raise a fund for that
province, and asked "whether it would not be worthy of the Society to
try to make that and ours unite with one fund for the purpose of
sending the gospel to the heathen indefinitely."  Tahiti was not to be
neglected, nor Africa, nor Bengal, in "our larger plan," which included
above four hundred millions of our fellowmen, among whom it was an
object "worthy of the most ardent and persevering pursuit to
disseminate the humane and saving principles of the Christian
Religion."  If this Mr. Thomas were worthy, his experience made it
desirable to begin with Bengal.  Thomas answered for himself at the
next meeting, when Carey fell upon his neck and wept, having previously
preached from the words--"Behold I come quickly, and My reward is with
Me." "We saw," said Fuller afterwards, "there was a gold mine in India,
but it was as deep as the centre of the earth.  Who will venture to
explore it? 'I will venture to go down,' said Carey, 'but remember that
you (addressing Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland) must hold the ropes.'  We
solemnly engaged to him to do so, nor while we live shall we desert
him."

Carey and Thomas, an ordained minister and a medical evangelist, were
at this meeting in Kettering, on 10th January 1793, appointed
missionaries to "the East Indies for preaching the gospel to the
heathen," on "£100 or £150 a year between them all,"--that is, for two
missionaries, their wives, and four children,--until they should be
able to support themselves like the Moravians.  As a matter of fact
they received just £200 in all for the first three years when
self-support and mission extension fairly began.  The whole sum at
credit of the Society for outfit, passage, and salaries was £130, so
that Fuller's prudence was not without justification when supported by
Thomas's assurances that the amount was enough, and Carey's modest
self-sacrifice. "We advised Mr. Carey," wrote Fuller to Ryland, "to
give up his school this quarter, for we must make up the loss to him."
The more serious cost of the passage was raised by Fuller and by the
preaching tours of the two missionaries.  During one of these, at Hull,
Carey met the printer and newspaper editor, William Ward, and cast his
mantle over him thus--"If the Lord bless us, we shall want a person of
your business to enable us to print the Scriptures; I hope you will
come after us."  Ward did so in five years.

The 20th March 1793 was a high day in the Leicester chapel, Harvey
Lane, when the missionaries were set apart like Barnabas and Paul--a
forenoon of prayer; an afternoon of preaching by Thomas from Psalm xvi.
4; "Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another God;"
an evening of preaching by the treasurer from Acts xxi. 14, "And when
he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, the will of the Lord be
done;" and the parting charge by Fuller the secretary, from the risen
Lord's own benediction and forthsending of His disciples, "Peace be
unto you, as My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you."  Often in
after days of solitude and reproach did Carey quicken his faith by
reading the brave and loving words of Fuller on "the objects you must
keep in view, the directions you must observe, the difficulties you
must encounter, the reward you may expect."

Under date four days after we find this entry in the Church Book--"Mr.
Carey, our minister, left Leicester to go on a mission to the East
Indies, to take and propagate the Gospel among those idolatrous and
superstitious heathens.  This is inserted to show his love to his poor
miserable fellow-creatures.  In this we concurred with him, though it
is at the expense of losing one whom we love as our own souls."  When
Carey's preaching had so filled the church that it became necessary to
build a front gallery at a cost of £98, and they had applied to several
other churches for assistance in vain, he thus taught them to help
themselves.  The minister and many of the members agreed to pay off the
debt "among ourselves" by weekly subscriptions,--a process, however,
which covered five years, so poor were they.  Carey left this as a
parting lesson to home congregations, while his people found it the
easier to pay the debt that they had sacrificed their best, their own
minister, to the work of missions for which he had taught them to pray.

John Thomas, four years older than Carey, was a surgeon, who had made
two voyages to Calcutta in the Oxford Indiaman, had been of spiritual
service to Charles Grant, Mr. George Udny, and the Bengal civilian
circle at Malda, and had been supported by Mr. Grant as a missionary
for a time until his eccentricities and debts outraged his friends and
drove him home at the time of the Kettering meetings.  Full justice has
been done to a character and a career somewhat resembling those of John
Newton, by his patient and able biographer the Rev. C. B. Lewis.  John
Thomas has the merit of being the first medical missionary, at a time
when no other Englishman cared for either the bodies or souls of our
recently acquired subjects in North India, outside of Charles Grant's
circle.  He has more; he was used by God to direct Carey to the dense
Hindoo population of Bengal--to the people and to the centre, that is,
where Brahmanism had its seat, and whence Buddhism had been carried by
thousands of missionaries all over Southern, Eastern, and Central Asia.
But there our ascription of merit to Thomas must stop. However well he
might speak the uncultured Bengali, he never could write the language
or translate the Bible into a literary style so that it could be
understood by the people or influence their leaders.  His temper kept
Charles Grant back from helping the infant mission, though anxious to
see Mr. Carey and to aid him and any other companion.  The debts of
Thomas caused him and Carey to be excluded from the Oxford, in which
his friend the commander had agreed to take them and their party
without a licence; clouded the early years of the enterprise with their
shadow, and formed the heaviest of the many burdens Carey had to bear
at starting.  If, afterwards, the old association of Thomas with Mr.
Udny at Malda gave Carey a home during his Indian apprenticeship, this
was a small atonement for the loss of the direct help of Mr. Grant.  If
Carey proved to be the John among the men who began to make Serampore
illustrious, Thomas was the Peter, so far as we know Peter in the
Gospels only.

Just before being ejected from the Oxford, as he had been deprived of
the effectual help of Charles Grant through his unhappy companion, when
with only his eldest son Felix beside him, how did Carey view his
God-given mission?  The very different nature of his wife, who had
announced to him the birth of a child, clung anew to the hope that this
might cause him to turn back.  Writing from Ryde on the 6th May he thus
replied with sweet delicacy of human affection, but with true loyalty
to his Master's call:--

"Received yours, giving me an account of your safe delivery.  This is
pleasant news indeed to me; surely goodness and mercy follow me all my
days.  My stay here was very painful and unpleasant, but now I see the
goodness of God in it.  It was that I might hear the most pleasing
accounts that I possibly could hear respecting earthly things.  You
wish to know in what state my mind is.  I answer, it is much as when I
left you.  If I had all the world, I would freely give it all to have
you and my dear children with me; but the sense of duty is so strong as
to overpower all other considerations; I could not turn back without
guilt on my soul.  I find a longing desire to enjoy more of God; but,
now I am among the people of the world, I think I see more beauties in
godliness than ever, and, I hope, enjoy more of God in retirement than
I have done for some time past...You want to know what Mrs. Thomas
thinks, and how she likes the voyage...She would rather stay in England
than go to India; but thinks it right to go with her husband...Tell my
dear children I love them dearly, and pray for them constantly.  Felix
sends his love.  I look upon this mercy as an answer to prayer indeed.
Trust in God. Love to Kitty, brothers, sisters, etc.  Be assured I love
you most affectionately.  Let me know my dear little child's name.--I
am, for ever, your faithful and affectionate husband,

"WILLIAM CAREY.

"My health never was so well.  I believe the sea makes Felix and me
both as hungry as hunters.  I can eat a monstrous meat supper, and
drink a couple of glasses of wine after it, without hurting me at all.
Farewell."

She was woman and wife enough, in the end, to do as Mrs. Thomas had
done, but she stipulated that her sister should accompany her.

By a series of specially providential events, as it seemed, such as
marked the whole early history of this first missionary enterprise of
modern England, Carey and Thomas secured a passage on board the Danish
Indiaman Kron Princessa Maria, bound from Copenhagen to Serampore.  At
Dover, where they had been waiting for days, the eight were roused from
sleep by the news that the ship was off the harbour.  Sunrise on the
13th June saw them on board.  Carey had had other troubles besides his
colleague and his wife.  His father, then fifty-eight years old, had
not given him up without a struggle. "Is William mad?" he had said when
he received the letter in which his son thus offered himself up on the
missionary altar.  His mother had died six years before:--

"LEICESTER, Jan. 17th, 1793.

"DEAR AND HONOURED FATHER,--The importance of spending our time for God
alone, is the principal theme of the gospel.  I beseech you, brethren,
says Paul, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is your reasonable service.  To
be devoted like a sacrifice to holy uses, is the great business of a
christian, pursuant to these requisitions. I consider myself as devoted
to the service of God alone, and now I am to realise my professions.  I
am appointed to go to Bengal, in the East Indies, a missionary to the
Hindoos.  I shall have a colleague who has been there five or six years
already, and who understands their language.  They are the most mild
and inoffensive people in all the world, but are enveloped in the
greatest superstition, and in the grossest ignorance...I hope, dear
father, you may be enabled to surrender me up to the Lord for the most
arduous, honourable, and important work that ever any of the sons of
men were called to engage in.  I have many sacrifices to make.  I must
part with a beloved family, and a number of most affectionate friends.
Never did I see such sorrow manifested as reigned through our place of
worship last Lord's-day.  But I have set my hand to the plough.--I
remain, your dutiful son,

"WILLIAM CAREY."

When in London Carey had asked John Newton, "What if the Company should
send us home on our arrival in Bengal?" "Then conclude," was the reply,
"that your Lord has nothing there for you to accomplish. But if He
have, no power on earth can hinder you."  By Act of Parliament not ten
years old, every subject of the King going to or found in the East
Indies without a licence from the Company, was guilty of a high crime
and misdemeanour, and liable to fine and imprisonment.  Only four years
previously a regulation had compelled every commander to deliver to the
Hoogli pilot a return of the passengers on board that the Act might be
enforced.  The Danish nationality of the ship and crew saved the
missionary party.  So grievously do unjust laws demoralise contemporary
opinion, that Fuller was constrained to meet the objections of many to
the "illegality" of the missionaries' action by reasoning, unanswerable
indeed, but not now required: "The apostles and primitive ministers
were commanded to go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every
creature; nor were they to stop for the permission of any power upon
earth, but to go, and take the consequences.  If a man of God,
conscious of having nothing in his heart unfriendly to any civil
government whatever, but determined in all civil matters to obey and
teach obedience to the powers that are, put his life in his hand,
saying, I will go, and if I am persecuted in one city I will flee to
another'...whatever the wisdom of this world may decide upon his
conduct, he will assuredly be acquitted, and more than acquitted, at a
higher tribunal."

Carey's journal of the voyage begins with an allusion to "the
abominable East Indian monopoly," which he was to do more than any
other man to break down by weapons not of man's warfare.  The second
week found him at Bengali, and for his companion the poems of Cowper.
Of the four fellow-passengers one was a French deist, with whom he had
many a debate.

"Aug. 2.--I feel myself to be much declined, upon the whole, in the
more spiritual exercises of religion; yet have had some pleasant
exercises of soul, and feel my heart set upon the great work upon which
I am going.  Sometimes I am quite dejected when I see the
impenetrability of the hearts of those with us.  They hear us preach on
the Lord's-day, but we are forced to witness their disregard to God all
the week.  O may God give us greater success among the heathen.  I am
very desirous that my children may pursue the same work; and now intend
to bring up one in the study of Sanskrit, and another of Persian.  O
may God give them grace to fit them for the work!  I have been much
concerned for fear the power of the Company should oppose us...

"Aug. 20.--I have reason to lament over a barrenness of soul, and am
sometimes much discouraged; for if I am so dead and stupid, how can I
expect to be of any use among the heathen?  Yet I have of late felt
some very lively desires after the success of our undertaking. If there
is anything that engages my heart in prayer to God, it is that the
heathen may be converted, and that the society which has so generously
exerted itself may be encouraged, and excited to go on with greater
vigour in the important undertaking...

"Nov. 9.--I think that I have had more liberty in prayer, and more
converse with God, than for some time before; but have,
notwithstanding, been a very unfruitful creature, and so remain. For
near a month we have been within two hundred miles of Bengal, but the
violence of the currents set us back when we have been at the very
door.  I hope I have learned the necessity of bearing up in the things
of God against wind and tide, when there is occasion, as we have done
in our voyage."

To the Society he writes for a Polyglot Bible, the Gospels in Malay,
Curtis's Botanical Magazine, and Sowerby's English Botany, at his own
cost, and thus plans the conquest of the world:--"I hope the Society
will go on and increase, and that the multitudes of heathen in the
world may hear the glorious words of truth.  Africa is but a little way
from England; Madagascar but a little way farther; South America, and
all the numerous and large islands in the Indian and Chinese seas, I
hope will not be passed over.  A large field opens on every side, and
millions of perishing heathens, tormented in this life by idolatry,
superstition, and ignorance, and exposed to eternal miseries in the
world to come, are pleading; yea, all their miseries plead as soon as
they are known, with every heart that loves God, and with all the
churches of the living God. Oh, that many labourers may be thrust out
into the vineyard of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the gentiles may
come to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Him!"

On the 7th November, as the ship lay in the roads of Balasore, he and
Thomas landed and "began our labours."  For three hours the people of
the bazaar listened with great attention to Thomas, and one prepared
for them a native dinner with plantain leaf for dish, and fingers for
knives and forks.  Balasore--name of Krishna--was one of the first
settlements of the English in North India in 1642, and there the
American Baptist successors of Carey have since carried on his work.
On the 11th November, after a five months' voyage, they landed at
Calcutta unmolested.  The first fortnight's experience of the city,
whose native population he estimated at 200,000, and of the surrounding
country, he thus condenses:--"I feel something of what Paul felt when
he beheld Athens, and 'his spirit was stirred within him.'  I see one
of the finest countries in the world, full of industrious inhabitants;
yet three-fifths of it are an uncultivated jungle, abandoned to wild
beasts and serpents.  If the gospel flourishes here, 'the wilderness
will in every respect become a fruitful field.'"

Clive, Hastings (Macpherson during an interregnum of twenty-two
months), and Cornwallis, were the men who had founded and administered
the empire of British India up to this time.  Carey passed the last
Governor-General in the Bay of Bengal as he retired with the honours of
a seven years' successful generalship and government to atone for the
not unhappy surrender of York Town, which had resulted in the
independence of the United States.  Sir John Shore, afterwards Lord
Teignmouth, who had been selected by Pitt to carry out the reforms
which he had elaborated along with his predecessor, had entered on his
high office just a fortnight before. What a contrast was presented, as
man judges, by the shy shoemaker, schoolmaster, and Baptist preacher,
who found not a place in which to lay his head save a hovel lent to him
by a Hindoo, to Clive, whose suicide he might have heard of when a
child; to Hastings, who for seventeen years had stood before his
country impeached.  They were men described by Macaulay as of ancient,
even illustrious lineage, and they had brought into existence an empire
more extensive than that of Rome. He was a peasant craftsman, who had
taught himself with a skill which Lord Wellesley, their successor
almost as great as themselves, delighted publicly to acknowledge--a man
of the people, of the class who had used the Roman Empire to build out
of it a universal Christendom, who were even then turning France upside
down, creating the Republic of America, and giving new life to Great
Britain itself.  The little Englishman was about to do in Calcutta and
from Serampore what the little Jew, Paul, had done in Antioch and
Ephesus, from Corinth and Rome. England might send its nobly born to
erect the material and the secular fabric of empire, but it was only,
in the providence of God, that they might prepare for the poor village
preacher to convert the empire into a spiritual force which should in
time do for Asia what Rome had done for Western Christendom.  But till
the last, as from the first, Carey was as unconscious of the part which
he had been called to play as he was unresting in the work which it
involved.  It is no fanatical criticism, but the true philosophy of
history, which places Carey over against Clive, the spiritual and
secular founders, and Duff beside Hastings, the spiritual and secular
consolidators of our Indian Empire.

Carey's work for India underlay the first period of forty years of
transition from Cornwallis to Bentinck, as Duff's covered the second of
thirty years to the close of Lord Canning's administration, which
introduced the new era of full toleration and partial but increasing
self-government directed by the Viceroy and Parliament.

Carey had been sent not only to the one people outside of Christendom
whose conversion would tell most powerfully on all Asia, Africa, and
their islands--the Hindoos; but to the one province which was almost
entirely British, and could be used as it had been employed to
assimilate the rest of India--Bengal.  Territorially the East India
Company possessed, when he landed, nothing outside of the Ganges valley
of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares, save a few spots on the Madras and
Malabar coasts and the portion just before taken in the Mysore war.
The rest was desolated by the Marathas, the Nizam, Tipoo, and other
Mohammedan adventurers.  On the Gangetic delta and right up to
Allahabad, but not beyond, the Company ruled and raised revenue,
leaving the other functions of the state to Mohammedans of the type of
Turkish pashas under the titular superiority of the effete Emperor of
Delhi.  The Bengali and Hindi-speaking millions of the Ganges and the
simpler aborigines of the hills had been devastated by the famine of
1769-70, which the Company's officials, who were powerless where they
did not intensify it by interference with trade, confessed to have cut
off from ten to twelve millions of human beings.  Over three-fifths of
the area the soil was left without a cultivator.  The whole young of
that generation perished, so that, even twenty years after, Lord
Cornwallis officially described one-third of Bengal as a jungle
inhabited only by wild beasts.  A quarter of a century after Carey's
language was, as we have seen, "three-fifths of it are an uncultivated
jungle abandoned to wild beasts and serpents."

But the British peace, in Bengal at least, had allowed abundant crops
to work their natural result on the population.  The local experience
of Shore, who had witnessed the horrors he could do so little to
relieve, had united with the statesmanship of Cornwallis to initiate a
series of administrative reforms that worked some evil, but more good,
all through Carey's time.  First of all, as affecting the very
existence and the social development of the people, or their capacity
for being educated, Christianised, civilised in the highest sense,
there was the relation of the Government to the ryots ("protected
ones") and the zameendars ("landholders").  In India, as nearly all
over the world except in feudalised Britain, the state is the common
landlord in the interests of all classes who hold the soil subject to
the payment of customary rents, directly or through middlemen, to the
Government. For thirty years after Plassey the Government of India had
been learning its business, and in the process had injured both itself
and the landed classes, as much as has been done in Ireland.  From a
mere trader it had been, more or less consciously, becoming a ruler. In
1786 the Court of Directors, in a famous letter, tried to arrest the
ruin which the famine had only hastened by ordering that a settlement
of the land-tax or revenue or rent be made, not with mere farmers like
the pashas of Turkey, but with the old zameendars, and that the rate be
fixed for ten years.  Cornwallis and Shore took three years to make the
detailed investigations, and in 1789 the state rent-roll of Bengal
proper was fixed at £2,858,772 a year. The English peer, who was
Governor-General, at once jumped to the conclusion that this rate
should be fixed not only for ten years, but for ever.  The experienced
Bengal civilian protested that to do that would be madness when a third
of the rich province was out of cultivation, and as to the rest its
value was but little known, and its estates were without reliable
survey or boundaries.

We can now see that, as usual, both were right in what they asserted
and wrong in what they denied.  The principle of fixity of tenure and
tax cannot be over-estimated in its economic, social, and political
value, but it should have been applied to the village communities and
cultivating peasants without the intervention of middlemen other than
the large ancestral landholders with hereditary rights, and that on the
standard of corn rents.  Cornwallis had it in his power thus to do what
some years afterwards Stein did in Prussia, with the result seen in the
present German people and empire.  The dispute as to a permanent or a
decennial settlement was referred home, and Pitt, aided by Dundas and
Charles Grant, took a week to consider it.  His verdict was given in
favour of feudalism. Eight months before Carey landed at Calcutta the
settlement had been declared perpetual; in 1795 it was extended to
Benares also.

During the next twenty years mismanagement and debt revolutionised the
landed interest, as in France at the same time, but in a very different
direction.  The customary rights of the peasant proprietors had been
legislatively secured by reserving to the Governor-General the power
"to enact such regulations as he may think necessary for the protection
and welfare of the dependent talookdars, ryots, and other cultivators
of the soil."  The peasants continued long to be so few that there was
competition for them; the process of extortion with the aid of the
courts had hardly begun when they were many, and the zameendars were
burdened with charges for the police.  But in 1799 and again in 1812
the state, trembling for its rent, gave the zameendars further
authority.  The principle of permanence of assessment so far
co-operated with the splendid fertility of the Ganges valley and the
peaceful multiplication of the people and spread of cultivation, that
all through the wars and annexations, up to the close of the Mutiny, it
was Bengal which enabled England to extend the empire up to its natural
limits from the two seas to the Himalaya.  But in 1859 the first
attempt was made by the famous Act X. to check the rack-renting power
of the zameendars.  And now, more than a century since the first step
was taken to arrest the ruin of the peasantry, the legislature of India
has again tried to solve for the whole country these four difficulties
which all past landed regulations have intensified--to give the state
tenants a guarantee against uncertain enhancements of rent, and against
taxation of improvements; to minimise the evil of taking rent in cash
instead of in kind by arranging the dates on which rent is paid; and to
mitigate if not prevent famine by allowing relief for failure of crops.
As pioneering, the work of Carey and his colleagues all through was
distinctly hindered by the treatment of the land question, which at
once ground down the mass of the people and created a class of
oppressive landlords destitute for the most part of public spirit and
the higher culture.  Both were disinclined by their circumstances to
lend an ear to the Gospel, but these circumstances made it the more
imperative on the missionaries to tell them, to teach their children,
to print for all the glad tidings.  Carey, himself of peasant
extraction, cared for the millions of the people above all; but his
work in the classical as well as the vernacular languages was equally
addressed to their twenty thousand landlords.  The time of his
work--before Bentinck; and the centre of it--outside the metropolis,
left the use of the English weapon against Brahmanism largely for Duff.

When Cornwallis, following Warren Hastings, completed the substitution
of the British for the Mohammedan civil administration by a system of
courts and police and a code of regulations, he was guilty of one
omission and one mistake that it took years of discussion and action to
rectify.  He did not abolish from the courts the use of Persian, the
language of the old Mussulman invaders, now foreign to all parties; and
he excluded from all offices above £30 a year the natives of the
country, contrary to their fair and politic practice.  Bengal and its
millions, in truth, were nominally governed in detail by three hundred
white and upright civilians, with the inevitable result in abuses which
they could not prevent, and oppression of native by native which they
would not check, and the delay or development of reforms which the few
missionaries long called for in vain.  In a word, after making the most
generous allowance for the good intentions of Cornwallis, and
conscientiousness of Shore, his successor, we must admit that Carey was
called to become the reformer of a state of society which the worst
evils of Asiatic and English rule combined to prevent him and other
self-sacrificing or disinterested philanthropists from purifying.  The
East India Company, at home and in India, had reached that depth of
opposition to light and freedom in any form which justifies Burke's
extremest passages--the period between its triumph on the exclusion of
"the pious clauses" from the Charter of 1793 and its defeat in the
Charter of 1813.  We shall reproduce some outlines of the picture which
Ward drew:--[7]

"On landing in Bengal, in the year 1793, our brethren found themselves
surrounded with a population of heathens (not including the Mahometans)
amounting to at least one hundred millions of souls.

"On the subject of the divine nature, with the verbal admission of the
doctrine of the divine unity, they heard these idolaters speak of
330,000,000 of gods.  Amidst innumerable idol temples they found none
erected for the worship of the one living and true God. Services
without end they saw performed in honour of the elements and deified
heroes, but heard not one voice tuned to the praise or employed in the
service of the one God. Unacquainted with the moral perfections of
Jehovah, they saw this immense population prostrate before dead matter,
before the monkey, the serpent, before idols the very personifications
of sin; and they found this animal, this reptile, and the lecher
Krishnu {u-caron} and his concubine Radha, among the favourite
deities of the Hindoos...

"Respecting the real nature of the present state, the missionaries
perceived that the Hindoos laboured under the most fatal
misapprehensions; that they believed the good or evil actions of this
birth were not produced as the volitions of their own wills, but arose
from, and were the unavoidable results of, the actions of the past
birth; that their present actions would inevitably give rise to the
whole complexion of their characters and conduct in the following
birth; and that thus they were doomed to interminable transmigrations,
to float as some light substance upon the bosom of an irresistible
torrent...

"Amongst these idolaters no Bibles were found; no sabbaths; no
congregating for religious instruction in any form; no house for God;
no God but a log of wood, or a monkey; no Saviour but the Ganges; no
worship but that paid to abominable idols, and that connected with
dances, songs, and unutterable impurities; so that what should have
been divine worship, purifying, elevating, and carrying the heart to
heaven, was a corrupt but rapid torrent, poisoning the soul and
carrying it down to perdition; no morality, for how should a people be
moral whose gods are monsters of vice; whose priests are their
ringleaders in crime; whose scriptures encourage pride, impurity,
falsehood, revenge, and murder; whose worship is connected with
indescribable abominations, and whose heaven is a brothel?  As might be
expected, they found that men died here without indulging the smallest
vestige of hope, except what can arise from transmigration, the hope,
instead of plunging into some place of misery, of passing into the body
of some reptile.  To carry to such a people the divine word, to call
them together for sacred instruction, to introduce amongst them a pure
and heavenly worship, and to lead them to the observance of a Sabbath
on earth, as the preparative and prelude to a state of endless
perfection, was surely a work worthy for a Saviour to command, and
becoming a christian people to attempt."

The condition of women, who were then estimated at "seventy-five
millions of minds," and whom the census shows to be now above
144,000,000, is thus described after an account of female infanticide:--

"To the Hindoo female all education is denied by the positive
injunction of the shastru {u-caron}, and by the general voice
of the population.  Not a single school for girls, therefore,
all over the country!  With knitting, sewing, embroidery, painting,
music, and drawing, they have no more to do than with letters;
the washing is done by men of a particular tribe.  The Hindoo
girl, therefore, spends the ten first years of her life in sheer
idleness, immured in the house of her father.

"Before she has attained to this age, however, she is sought after by
the ghutuks, men employed by parents to seek wives for their sons.  She
is betrothed without her consent; a legal agreement, which binds her
for life, being made by the parents on both sides while she is yet a
child.  At a time most convenient to the parents, this boy and girl are
brought together for the first time, and the marriage ceremony is
performed; after which she returns to the house of her father.

"Before the marriage is consummated, in many instances, the boy dies,
and this girl becomes a widow; and as the law prohibits the marriage of
widows, she is doomed to remain in this state as long as she lives.
The greater number of these unfortunate beings become a prey to the
seducer, and a disgrace to their families.  Not long since a bride, on
the day the marriage ceremony was to have been performed, was burnt on
the funeral pile with the dead body of the bridegroom, at
Chandernagore, a few miles north of Calcutta. Concubinage, to a most
awful extent, is the fruit of these marriages without choice.  What a
sum of misery is attached to the lot of woman in India before she has
attained even her fifteenth year!

"In some cases as many as fifty females, the daughters of so many
Hindoos, are given in marriage to one bramhun {u-caron}, in order to
make these families something more respectable, and that the parents
may be able to say, we are allied by marriage to the kooleens...

"But the awful state of female society in this miserable country
appears in nothing so much as in dooming the female, the widow, to be
burnt alive with the putrid carcase of her husband.  The Hindoo
legislators have sanctioned this immolation, showing herein a studied
determination to insult and degrade woman.  She is, therefore, in the
first instance, deluded into this act by the writings of these bramhuns
{u-caron}; in which also she is promised, that if she will offer
herself, for the benefit of her husband, on the funeral pile,
she shall, by the extraordinary merit of this action, rescue her
husband from misery, and take him and fourteen generations of his and
her family with her to heaven, where she shall enjoy with them
celestial happiness until fourteen kings of the gods shall have
succeeded to the throne of heaven (that is, millions of years!) Thus
ensnared, she embraces this dreadful death.  I have seen three widows,
at different times, burnt alive; and had repeated opportunities of
being present at similar immolations, but my courage failed me...

"The burying alive of widows manifests, if that were possible, a still
more abominable state of feeling towards women than the burning them
alive.  The weavers bury their dead.  When, therefore, a widow of this
tribe is deluded into the determination not to survive her husband, she
is buried alive with the dead body.  In this kind of immolation the
children and relations dig the grave. After certain ceremonies have
been attended to, the poor widow arrives, and is let down into the pit.
She sits in the centre, taking the dead body on her lap and encircling
it with her arms. These relations now begin to throw in the soil; and
after a short space, two of them descend into the grave, and tread the
earth firmly round the body of the widow.  She sits a calm and
unremonstrating spectator of the horrid process.  She sees the earth
rising higher and higher around her, without upbraiding her murderers,
or making the least effort to arise and make her escape. At length the
earth reaches her lips--covers her head.  The rest of the earth is then
hastily thrown in, and these children and relations mount the grave,
and tread down the earth upon the head of the suffocating widow--the
mother!"

Before Carey, what had been done to turn the millions of North India
from such darkness as that?  Nothing, beyond the brief and impulsive
efforts of Thomas.  There does not seem to have been there one genuine
convert from any of the Asiatic faiths; there had never been even the
nucleus of a native church.

In South India, for the greater part of the century, the Coast Mission,
as it was called, had been carried on from Tranquebar as a centre by
the Lutherans whom, from Ziegenbalg to Schwartz, Francke had trained at
Halle and Friedrich IV. of Denmark had sent forth to its East India
Company's settlement.  From the baptism of the first convert in 1707
and translation of the New Testament into Tamil, to the death in 1798
of Schwartz, with whom Carey sought to begin a correspondence then
taken up by Guericke, the foundations were laid around Madras, in
Tanjore, and in Tinnevelli of a native church which now includes nearly
a million.  But, when Carey landed, rationalism in Germany and Denmark,
and the Carnatic wars between the English and French, had reduced the
Coast Mission to a state of inanition.  Nor was Southern India the true
or ultimate battlefield against Brahmanism; the triumphs of
Christianity there were rather among the demon-worshipping tribes of
Dravidian origin than among the Aryan races till Dr. W. Miller
developed the Christian College. But the way for the harvest now being
reaped by the Evangelicals and Anglicans of the Church of England, by
the Independents of the London Missionary Society, the Wesleyans, and
the Presbyterians of Scotland and America, was prepared by the German
Ziegenbalg and Schwartz under Danish protection.  The English
Propagation and Christian Knowledge Societies sent them occasional aid,
the first two Georges under the influence of their German chaplains
wrote to them encouraging letters, and the East India Company even gave
them a free passage in its ships, and employed the sculptor Bacon to
prepare the noble group of marble which, in St. Mary's Church, Madras,
expresses its gratitude to Schwartz for his political services.

It was Clive himself who brought to Calcutta the first missionary,
Kiernander the Swede, but he was rather a chaplain, or a missionary to
the Portuguese, who were nominal Christians of the lowest Romanist
type.  The French had closed the Danish mission at Cuddalore, and in
1758 Calcutta was without a Protestant clergyman to bury the dead or
baptise or marry the living.  Two years before one of the two chaplains
had perished in the tragedy of the Black Hole, where he was found lying
hand in hand with his son, a young lieutenant.  The other had escaped
down the river only to die of fever along with many more.  The victory
of Plassey and the large compensation paid for the destruction of Old
Calcutta and its church induced thousands of natives to flock to the
new capital, while the number of the European troops and officials was
about 2000.  When chaplains were sent out, the Governor-General
officially wrote of them to the Court of Directors so late as
1795:--"Our clergy in Bengal, with some exceptions, are not respectable
characters."  From the general relaxation of morals, he added, "a black
coat is no security."  They were so badly paid--from £50 to £230 a
year, increased by £120 to meet the cost of living in Calcutta after
1764--that they traded.  Preaching was the least of the chaplains'
duties; burying was the most onerous.  Anglo-Indian society, cut off
from London, itself not much better, by a six months' voyage, was
corrupt.  Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, his hostile colleague in
Council, lived in open adultery.  The majority of the officials had
native women, and the increase of their children, who lived in a state
worse than that of the heathen, became so alarming that the
compensation paid by the Mohammedan Government of Moorshedabad for the
destruction of the church was applied to the foundation of the useful
charity still known as the Free School.  The fathers not infrequently
adopted the Hindoo pantheon along with the zanana.  The pollution,
springing from England originally, was rolled back into it in an
increasing volume, when the survivors retired as nabobs with fortunes,
to corrupt social and political life, till Pitt cried out; and it
became possible for Burke almost to succeed in his eighteen years'
impeachment of Hastings.  The literature of the close of the eighteenth
century is full of alarm lest the English character should be
corrupted, and lest the balance of the constitution should be upset.

Kiernander is said to have been the means of converting 209 heathens
and 380 Romanists, of whom three were priests, during the twenty-eight
years of his Calcutta career.  Claudius Buchanan declares that
Christian tracts had been translated into Bengali--one written by the
Bishop of Sodor and Man--and that in the time of Warren Hastings Hindoo
Christians had preached to their countrymen in the city.  The "heathen"
were probably Portuguese descendants, in whose language Kiernander
preached as the lingua franca of the time. He could not even converse
in Bengali or Hindostani, and when Charles Grant went to him for
information as to the way of a sinner's salvation this happened--"My
anxious inquiries as to what I should do to be saved appeared to
embarrass and confuse him exceedingly.  He could not answer my
questions, but he gave me some good instructive books."  On
Kiernander's bankruptcy, caused by his son when the father was blind,
the "Mission Church" was bought by Grant, who wrote that its labours
"have been confined to the descendants of Europeans, and have hardly
ever embraced a single heathen, so that a mission to the Hindoos and
Mohammedans would be a new thing."  The Rev. David Brown, who had been
sent out the year after as master and chaplain of the Military Orphan
Society, for the education of the children of officers and soldiers,
and was to become one of the Serampore circle of friends, preached to
Europeans only in the Mission Church.  Carey could find no trace of
Kiernander's work among the natives six years after his death.[8] The
only converted Hindoo known of in Northern India up to that time was
Guneshan Dass, of Delhi, who when a boy joined Clive's army, who was
the first man of caste to visit England, and who, on his return with
the Calcutta Supreme Court Judges in 1774 as Persian interpreter and
translator, was baptised by Kiernander, Mr. justice Chambers being
sponsor.

William Carey had no predecessor in India as the first ordained
Englishman who was sent to it as a missionary; he had no predecessor in
Bengal and Hindostan proper as the first missionary from any land to
the people.  Even the Moravians, who in 1777 had sent two brethren to
Serampore, Calcutta, and Patna, had soon withdrawn them, and one of
them became the Company's botanist in Madras--Dr. Heyne. Carey
practically stood alone at the first, while he unconsciously set in
motion the double revolution, which was to convert the Anglo-Indian
influence on England from corrupting heathenism to aggressive
missionary zeal, and to change the Bengal of Cornwallis into the India
of Bentinck, with all the possibilities that have made it grow, thus
far, into the India of the Lawrences.




CHAPTER IV

SIX YEARS IN NORTH BENGAL--MISSIONARY AND INDIGO PLANTER

1794-1799

Carey's two missionary principles--Destitute in Calcutta--Bandel and
Nuddea--Applies in vain to be under-superintendent of the Botanic
Garden--Housed by a native usurer--Translation and preaching work in
Calcutta--Secures a grant of waste land at Hasnabad--Estimate of the
Bengali language, and appeal to the Society to work in Asia and Africa
rather than in America--The Udny family--Carey's summary of his first
year's experience--Superintends the indigo factory of Mudnabati--Indigo
and the East India Company's monopolies--Carey's first nearly fatal
sickness--Death of his child and chronic madness of his wife--Formation
of first Baptist church in India--Early progress of Bible
translation--Sanskrit studies; the Mahabarata--The wooden
printing-press set up at Mudnabati--His educational ideal;
school-work--The medical mission--Lord Wellesley--Carey seeks a mission
centre among the Bhooteas--Describes his first sight of a
Sati--Projects a mission settlement at Kidderpore.

Carey was in his thirty-third year when he landed in Bengal.  Two
principles regulated the conception, the foundation, and the whole
course of the mission which he now began.  He had been led to these by
the very genius of Christianity itself, by the example and teaching of
Christ and of Paul, and by the experience of the Moravian brethren.  He
had laid them down in his Enquiry, and every month's residence during
forty years in India confirmed him in his adhesion to them.  These
principles are that (1) a missionary must be one of the companions and
equals of the people to whom he is sent; and (2) a missionary must as
soon as possible become indigenous, self-supporting, self-propagating,
alike by the labours of the mission and of the converts.  Himself a man
of the people yet a scholar, a shoemaker and a schoolmaster yet a
preacher and pastor to whom the great Robert Hall gloried in being a
successor, Carey had led the two lives as Paul had done.  Now that he
was fairly in Calcutta he resumed the divine toil, and ceased it not
till he entered on the eternal rest.  He prepared to go up country to
Malda to till the ground among the natives of the rich district around
the ruined capital of Gour. He engaged as his pundit and interpreter
Ram Basu, one of the professing inquirers whom Thomas had attracted in
former days.  Experience soon taught him that, however correct his
principle, Malda is not a land where the white man can be a farmer. So
he became, in the different stages of his career, a captain of labour
as an indigo planter, a teacher of Bengali, and professor of Sanskrit
and Marathi, and the Government translator of Bengali.  Nor did he or
his associates ever make the mistake--or commit the fraud--of the
Jesuit missionaries, whose idea of equality with the people was not
that of brotherhood in Christ, but that of dragging down Christian
doctrine, worship and civilisation, to the level of idolatrous
heathenism, and deluding the ignorant into accepting the blasphemous
compromise.

Alas! Carey could not manage to get out of Calcutta and its
neighbourhood for five months.  As he thought to live by farming,
Thomas was to practise his profession; and their first year's income of
£150 had, in those days when the foreign exchanges were unknown, to be
realised by the sale of the goods in which it had been invested.  As
usual, Thomas had again blundered, so that even his gentle colleague
himself half-condemned, half-apologised for him by the shrewd
reflection that he was only fit to live at sea, where his daily
business would be before him, and daily provision would be made for
him.  Carey found himself penniless.  Even had he received the whole of
his £75, as he really did in one way or other, what was that for such a
family as his at the beginning of their undertaking? The expense of
living at all in Calcutta drove the whole party thirty miles up the
river to Bandel, an old Portuguese suburb of the Hoogli factory.  There
they rented a small house from the German hotel-keeper, beside the
Augustinian priory and oldest church in North India, which dates from
1599 and is still in good order. There they met Kiernander, then at the
great age of eighty-four. Daily they preached or talked to the people.
They purchased a boat for regular visitation of the hamlets, markets,
and towns which line both banks of the river.  With sure instinct Carey
soon fixed on Nuddea, as the centre of Brahmanical superstition and
Sanskrit learning, where "to build me a hut and live like the natives,"
language recalled to us by the words of the dying Livingstone in the
swamps of Central Africa.  There, in the capital of the last of the
Hindoo kings, beside the leafy tols or colleges of a river port which
rivals Benares, Poona, and Conjeeveram in sanctity, where Chaitanya the
Vaishnaiva reformer was born, Carey might have attacked Brahmanism in
its stronghold.  A passage in his journal shows how he realised the
position.  Thomas, the pundit, and he "sought the Lord by prayer for
direction," and this much was the result--"Several of the most learned
Pundits and Brahmans wished us to settle there; and, as that is the
great place for Eastern learning, we seemed inclined, especially as it
is the bulwark of heathenism, which, if once carried, all the rest of
the country must be laid open to us."  But there was no available land
there for an Englishman's cultivation.  From Bandel he wrote home these
impressions of Anglo-Indian life and missionary duty:--

"26th Dec. 1793.--A missionary must be one of the companions and equals
of the people to whom he is sent, and many dangers and temptations will
be in his way.  One or two pieces of advice I may venture to give.  The
first is to be exceedingly cautious lest the voyage prove a great
snare.  All the discourse is about high life, and every circumstance
will contribute to unfit the mind for the work and prejudice the soul
against the people to whom he goes; and in a country like this, settled
by Europeans, the grandeur, the customs, and prejudices of the
Europeans are exceeding dangerous. They are very kind and hospitable,
but even to visit them, if a man keeps no table of his own, would more
than ten times exceed the allowance of a mission; and all their
discourse is about the vices of the natives, so that a missionary must
see thousands of people treating him with the greatest kindness, but
whom he must be entirely different from in his life, his appearance in
everything, or it is impossible for him to stand their profuse way of
living, being so contrary to his character and so much above his
ability. This is a snare to dear Mr. Thomas, which will be felt by us
both in some measure.  It will be very important to missionaries to be
men of calmness and evenness of temper, and rather inclined to suffer
hardships than to court the favour of men, and such who will be
indefatigably employed in the work set before them, an inconstancy of
mind being quite injurious to it."

He had need of such faith and patience.  Hearing of waste land in
Calcutta, he returned there only to be disappointed.  The Danish
captain, knowing that he had written a botanical work, advised him to
take it to the doctor in charge of the Company's Botanic Garden, and
offer himself for a vacant appointment to superintend part of it.  The
doctor, who and whose successors were soon to be proud of his
assistance on equal terms, had to tell him that the office had been
filled up, but invited the weary man to dine with him. Houseless, with
his maddened wife, and her sister and two of his four children down
with dysentery, due to the bad food and exposure of six weeks in the
interior, Carey found a friend, appropriately enough, in a Bengali
money-lender.[9] Nelu Dutt, a banker who had lent money to Thomas,
offered the destitute family his garden house in the north-eastern
quarter of Manicktolla until they could do better. The place was mean
enough, but Carey never forgot the deed, and he had it in his power
long after to help Nelu Dutt when in poverty. Such, on the other hand,
was the dislike of the Rev. David Brown to Thomas, that when Carey had
walked five miles in the heat of the sun to visit the comparatively
prosperous evangelical preacher, "I left him without his having so much
as asked me to take any refreshment."

Carey would not have been allowed to live in Calcutta as a missionary.
Forty years were to pass before that could be possible without a
Company's passport.  But no one was aware of the existence of the
obscure vagrant, as he seemed, although he was hard at work. All around
him was a Mohammedan community whom he addressed with the greatest
freedom, and with whom he discussed the relative merits of the Koran
and the Bible in a kindly spirit, "to recommend the Gospel and the way
of life by Christ."  He had helped Thomas with a translation of the
book of Genesis during the voyage, and now we find this in his journal
two months and a half after he had landed:--

"Through the delays of my companion I have spent another month, and
done scarcely anything, except that I have added to my knowledge of the
language, and had opportunity of seeing much more of the genius and
disposition of the natives than I otherwise could have known. This day
finished the correction of the first chapter of Genesis, which moonshi
says is rendered into very good Bengali.  Just as we had finished it, a
pundit and another man from Nuddea came to see me.  I showed it to
them; and the pundit seemed much pleased with the account of the
creation; only they have an imaginary place somewhere beneath the
earth, and he thought that should have been mentioned likewise...

"Was very weary, having walked in the sun about fifteen or sixteen
miles, yet had the satisfaction of discoursing with some money-changers
at Calcutta, who could speak English, about the importance and absolute
necessity of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. One of them was a very
crafty man, and tried much to entangle me with hard questions; but at
last, finding himself entangled, he desisted, and went to his old
occupation of money-changing again. If once God would by his Spirit
convince them of sin, a Saviour would be a blessing indeed to them: but
human nature is the same all the world over, and all conviction fails
except it is produced by the effectual working of the Holy Spirit."

Ram Basu was himself in debt, was indeed all along a self-interested
inquirer.  But the next gleam of hope came from him, that the Carey
family should move to the waste jungles of the Soondarbans, the
tiger-haunted swamps south-east of Calcutta, and there cultivate a
grant of land.  With a sum of £16 borrowed from a native at twelve per
cent. by Mr. Thomas, a boat was hired, and on the fourth day, when only
one more meal remained, the miserable family and their stout-hearted
father saw an English-built house.  As they walked up to it the owner
met them, and with Anglo-Indian hospitality invited them all to become
his guests.  He proved to be Mr. Charles Short, in charge of the
Company's salt manufacture there.  As a deist he had no sympathy with
Carey's enterprise, but he helped the missionary none the less, and the
reward came to him in due time in the opening of his heart to the love
of Christ.  He afterwards married Mrs. Carey's sister, and in England
the two survived the great missionary, to tell this and much more
regarding him.  Here, at the place appropriately named Hasnabad, or the
"smiling spot," Carey took a few acres on the Jamoona arm of the united
Ganges and Brahmapootra, and built him a bamboo house, forty miles east
of Calcutta.  Knowing that the sahib's gun would keep off the tigers,
natives squatted around to the number of three or four thousand. Such
was the faith, the industry, and the modesty of the brave little man
that, after just three months, he wrote thus:--"When I know the
language well enough to preach in it, I have no doubt of having a
stated congregation, and I much hope to send you pleasing accounts.  I
can so far converse in the language as to be understood in most things
belonging to eating and drinking, buying and selling, etc.  My ear is
somewhat familiarised to the Bengali sounds.  It is a language of a
very singular construction, having no plural except for pronouns, and
not a single preposition in it: but the cases of nouns and pronouns are
almost endless, all the words answering to our prepositions being put
after the word, and forming a new case. Except these singularities, I
find it an easy language.  I feel myself happy in my present
undertaking; for, though I never felt the loss of social religion so
much as now, yet a consciousness of having given up all for God is a
support; and the work, with all its attendant inconveniences, is to me
a rich reward.  I think the Society would do well to keep their eye
towards Africa or Asia, countries which are not like the wilds of
America, where long labour will scarcely collect sixty people to hear
the Word: for here it is almost impossible to get out of the way of
hundreds, and preachers are wanted a thousand times more than people to
preach to.  Within India are the Maratha country and the northern parts
to Cashmere, in which, as far as I can learn, there is not one soul
that thinks of God aright...My health was never better.  The climate,
though hot, is tolerable; but, attended as I am with difficulties, I
would not renounce my undertaking for all the world."

It was at this time that he drew his strength often from the experience
of the first missionary, described by Isaiah, in all his
solitude:--"Look unto Abraham your father, for I called him alone and
blessed him and increased him.  For the Lord shall comfort Zion; He
will comfort all her waste places."  The sun of His comfort shone forth
at last.

Carey's original intention to begin his mission near Malda was now to
be carried out.  In the opening week of 1794 the small English
community in Bengal were saddened by the news that, when crossing the
Hoogli at Calcutta, a boat containing three of its principal merchants
and the wife of one of them, had been upset, and all had been drowned.
It turned out that two of the men recovered, but Mr. R. Udny and his
young wife perished.  His aged mother had been one of the godly circle
in the Residency at Malda to whom Thomas had ministered; and Mr. G.
Udny, her other son, was still the Company's commercial Resident there.
A letter of sympathy which Thomas sent to them restored the old
relations, and resulted in Mr. G. Udny inviting first the writer and
then Carey to become his assistants in charge of new indigo factories
which he was building on his own account.  Each received a salary
equivalent to £250 a year, with the prospect of a commission on the
out-turn, and even a proprietary share.  Carey's remark in his journal
on the day he received the offer was:--"This appearing to be a
remarkable opening in divine providence for our comfortable support, I
accepted it...I shall likewise be joined with my colleague again, and
we shall unitedly engage in our work."  Again:--"The conversion of the
heathen is the object which above all others I wish to pursue.  If my
situation at Malda should be tolerable, I most certainly will publish
the Bible in numbers."  On receiving the rejoinder to his acceptance of
the offer he set this down:--"I am resolved to write to the Society
that my circumstances are such that I do not need future help from
them, and to devote a sum monthly for the printing of the Bengali
Bible." This he did, adding that it would be his glory and joy to stand
in the same relation to the Society as if he needed support from them.
He hoped they would be the sooner able to send another mission
somewhere--to Sumatra or some of the Indian Islands.  From the first he
lived with such simplicity that he gave from one-fourth to one-third of
his little income to his own mission at Mudnabati.

Carey thus sums up his first year's experience before leaving his
jungle home on a three weeks' voyage up the Ganges, and records his
first deliberate and regular attempt to preach in Bengali on the way.

"8th April 1794.--All my hope is in, and all my comfort arises from,
God; without His power no European could possibly be converted, and His
power can convert any Indian; and when I reflect that He has stirred me
up to the work, and wrought wonders to prepare the way, I can hope in
His promises, and am encouraged and strengthened...

"19th April.--O how glorious are the ways of God! 'My soul longeth and
fainteth for God, for the living God, to see His glory and beauty as I
have seen them in the sanctuary.'  When I first left England, my hope
of the conversion of the heathen was very strong; but, among so many
obstacles, it would entirely die away unless upheld by God. Nothing to
exercise it, but plenty to obstruct it, for now a year and nineteen
days, which is the space since I left my dear charge at Leicester.
Since that I have had hurrying up and down; a five months' imprisonment
with carnal men on board the ship; five more learning the language; my
moonshi not understanding English sufficiently to interpret my
preaching; my colleague separated from me; long delays and few
opportunities for social worship; no woods to retire to, like Brainerd,
for fear of tigers (no less than twenty men in the department of
Deharta, where I am, have been carried away by them this season from
the salt-works); no earthly thing to depend upon, or earthly comfort,
except food and raiment.  Well, I have God, and His Word is sure; and
though the superstitions of the heathen were a million times worse than
they are, if I were deserted by all, and persecuted by all, yet my
hope, fixed on that sure Word, will rise superior to all obstructions,
and triumph over all trials.  God's cause will triumph, and I shall
come out of all trials as gold purified by fire.  I was much humbled
to-day by reading Brainerd.  O what a disparity betwixt me and him, he
always constant, I as inconstant as the wind!

"22nd April.--Bless God for a continuance of the happy frame of
yesterday.  I think the hope of soon acquiring the language puts fresh
life into my soul; for a long time my mouth has been shut, and my days
have been beclouded with heaviness; but now I begin to be something
like a traveller who has been almost beaten out in a violent storm, and
who, with all his clothes about him dripping wet, sees the sky begin to
clear: so I, with only the prospect of a more pleasant season at hand,
scarcely feel the sorrows of the present.

"23rd.--With all the cares of life, and all its sorrows, yet I find
that a life of communion with God is sufficient to yield consolation in
the midst of all, and even to produce a holy joy in the soul, which
shall make it to triumph over all affliction.  I have never yet
repented of any sacrifice that I have made for the Gospel, but find
that consolation of mind which can come from God alone.

"26th May.--This day kept Sabbath at Chandureea; had a pleasant day. In
the morning and afternoon addressed my family, and in the evening began
my work of publishing the Word of God to the heathen. Though imperfect
in the knowledge of the language, yet, with the help of moonshi, I
conversed with two Brahmans in the presence of about two hundred
people, about the things of God. I had been to see a temple, in which
were the images of Dukkinroy, the god of the woods, riding on a tiger;
Sheetulla, goddess of the smallpox, without a head, riding on a horse
without a head; Punchanon, with large ears; and Colloroy, riding on a
horse.  In another apartment was Seeb, which was only a smooth post of
wood, with two or three mouldings in it, like the base of a Tuscan
pillar.  I therefore discoursed with them upon the vanity of idols, the
folly and wickedness of idolatry, the nature and attributes of God, and
the way of salvation by Christ.  One Brahman was quite confounded, and
a number of people were all at once crying out to him, 'Why do you not
answer him?  Why do you not answer him?'  He replied, 'I have no
words.'  Just at this time a very learned Brahman came up, who was
desired to talk with me, which he did, and so acceded to what I said,
that he at last said images had been used of late years, but not from
the beginning.  I inquired what I must do to be saved; he said I must
repeat the name of God a great many times.  I replied, would you, if
your son had offended you, be so pleased with him as to forgive him if
he were to repeat the word 'father' a thousand times?  This might
please children or fools, but God is wise.  He told me that I must get
faith; I asked what faith was, to which he gave me no intelligible
reply, but said I must obey God. I answered, what are His commands?
what is His will?  They said God was a great light, and as no one could
see him, he became incarnate, under the threefold character of Brhumma,
Bishno, and Seeb, and that either of them must be worshipped in order
to life.  I told them of the sure Word of the Gospel, and the way of
life by Christ; and, night coming on, left them.  I cannot tell what
effect it may have, as I may never see them again."

At the beginning of the great rains in the middle of June Carey joined
Mr. Udny and his mother at the chief factory.  On each of the next two
Sabbaths he preached twice in the hall of the Residency of the Company,
which excluded all Christian missionaries by Act of Parliament.  As an
indigo planter he received the Company's licence to reside for at least
five years.  So on 26th June he began his secular duties by completing
for the season of indigo manufacture the buildings at Mudnabati, and
making the acquaintance of the ninety natives under his charge.  Both
Mr. Udny and he knew well that he was above all things a Christian
missionary. "These will furnish a congregation immediately, and, added
to the extensive engagements which I must necessarily have with the
natives, will open a very wide door for activity.  God grant that it
may not only be large but effectual."

These were the days, which continued till the next charter, when the
East India Company was still not only a body of merchants but of
manufacturers.  Of all the old monopolies only the most evil one is
left, that of the growth, manufacture, and sale of opium.  The civil
servants, who were termed Residents, had not political duties with
tributary sovereigns as now, but from great factory-like palaces, and
on large salaries, made advances of money to contractors, native and
European, who induced the ryots to weave cloth, to breed and feed the
silkworm, and to grow and make the blue dye to which India had long
given the name of "indigo."  Mr. Carey was already familiar with the
system of advances for salt, and the opium monopoly was then in its
infancy.  The European contractors were "interlopers," who introduced
the most valuable cultivation and processes into India, and yet with
whom the "covenanted" Residents were often at war.  The Residents had
themselves liberty of private trade, and unscrupulous men abused it.
Clive had been hurried out thirty years before to check the abuse,
which was ruining not only the Company's investments but the people.
It had so spread on his departure that even judges and chaplains shared
in the spoils till Cornwallis interfered.  In the case of Mr. G. Udny
and purely commercial agents the evil was reduced to a minimum, and the
practice had been deliberately sanctioned by Sir John Shore on the
ground that it was desirable to make the interests of the Company and
of individuals go hand in hand.

The days when Europe got its cotton cloth from India, calling it
"calico," from Calicut, and its rich yellow silks, have long since
passed, although the latter are still supplied in an inferior form, and
the former is once more raising its head, from the combination of
machinery and cheap labour.  For the old abuses of the Company the
Government by Parliament has to some extent atoned by fostering the new
cultures of tea, coffee, and cinchona, jute and wheat.  The system of
inducing the ryots to cultivate by advances, protected by a stringent
contract law, still exists in the case of opium.  The indigo culture
system of Carey's time broke down in 1860 in the lower districts,
where, following the Company itself, the planter made cash advances to
the peasant, who was required to sow indigo on land which he held as a
tenant but often as a proprietor, to deliver it at a fixed rate, and to
bear the risk of the crop as well as the exactions of the factory
servants.  It still exists in the upper districts of Bihar, especially
in Tirhoot, on a system comparatively free from economic objections.

The plant known as "Indigofera Tinctoria" is sown in March in soil
carefully prepared, grows to about 5 feet, is cut down early in July,
is fermented in vats, and the liquor is beaten till it precipitates the
precious blue dye, which is boiled, drained, cut in small cakes, and
dried.  From first to last the growth and the manufacture are even more
precarious than most tropical crops.  An even rainfall, rigorous
weeding, the most careful superintendence of the chemical processes,
and conscientious packing, are necessary. One good crop in three years
will pay where the factory is not burdened by severe interest on
capital; one every other year will pay very well.  Personally Carey had
more than the usual qualifications of a successful planter, scientific
knowledge, scrupulous conscientiousness and industry, and familiarity
with the native character, so soon as he acquired the special
experience necessary for superintending the manufacture.  That
experience he spared no effort to gain at once.

"1st, 2nd, and 3rd July.--Much engaged in the necessary business of
preparing our works for the approaching season of indigo-making, which
will commence in about a fortnight.  I had on the evening of each of
these days very precious seasons of fervent prayer to God. I have been
on these evenings much drawn out in prayer for my dear friends at
Leicester, and for the Society that it may be prosperous; likewise for
the ministers of my acquaintance, not only of the Baptist but other
denominations.  I was engaged for the churches in America and Holland,
as well as England, and much concerned for the success of the Gospel
among the Hindoos.  At present I know not of any success since I have
been here.  Many say that the Gospel is the word of truth; but they
abound so much in flattery and encomiums, which are mere words of
course, that little can be said respecting their sincerity.  The very
common sins of lying and avarice are so universal also, that no
European who has not witnessed it can form any idea of their various
appearances: they will stoop to anything whatsoever to get a few
cowries, and lie on every occasion.  O how desirable is the spread of
the Gospel!

"4th July.--Rather more flat, perhaps owing to the excessive heat; for
in the rainy season, if there be a fine day, it is very hot indeed.
Such has been this day, and I was necessitated to be out in it from
morning till evening, giving necessary directions.  I felt very much
fatigued indeed, and had no spirits left in the evening, and in prayer
was very barren...

"9th July to 4th Aug.--Employed in visiting several factories to learn
the process of indigo-making.  Had some very pleasant seasons at Malda,
where I preached several times, and the people seemed much affected
with the Word. One day, as Mr. Thomas and I were riding out, we saw a
basket hung in a tree, in which an infant had been exposed; the skull
remained, the rest having been devoured by ants."

Success in the indigo culture was indeed never possible in Mudnabati.
The factory stood on the river Tangan, within what is now the district
of Dinajpoor, thirty miles north of Malda.  To this day the revenue
surveyors of Government describe it as low and marshy, subject to
inundation during the rains, and considered very unhealthy.  Carey had
not been there a fortnight when he had to make this record:--

"5th, 6th, 7th July.--Much employed in settling the affairs of the
buildings, etc., having been absent so long, and several of our
managing and principal people being sick.  It is indeed an awful time
here with us now, scarcely a day but some are seized with fevers.  It
is, I believe, owing to the abundance of water, there being rice-fields
all around us, in which they dam up the water, so that all the country
hereabouts is about a foot deep in water; and as we have rain, though
moderate to what I expected the rainy season to be, yet the continual
moisture occasions fevers in such situations where rice is
cultivated...Felt at home and thankful these days.  O that I may be
very useful!  I must soon learn the language tolerably well, for I am
obliged to converse with the natives every day, having no other persons
here except my family."

Soon in September, the worst of all the months in Bengal, he himself
was brought near to the grave by a fever, one of the paroxysms
continuing for twenty-six hours without intermission, "when
providentially Mr. Udny came to visit us, not knowing that I was ill,
and brought a bottle of bark with him."  He slowly recovered, but the
second youngest child, Peter, a boy of five, was removed by dysentery,
and caste made it long difficult to find any native to dig his grave.
But of this time the faithful sufferer could write:--

"Sometimes I enjoyed sweet seasons of self-examination and prayer, as I
lay upon my bed.  Many hours together I sweetly spent in contemplating
subjects for preaching, and in musing over discourses in Bengali; and
when my animal spirits were somewhat raised by the fever, I found
myself able to reason and discourse in Bengali for some hours together,
and words and phrases occurred much more readily than when I was in
health.  When my dear child was ill I was enabled to attend upon him
night and day, though very dangerously ill myself, without much
fatigue; and now, I bless God that I feel a sweet resignation to his
will."

A still harder fate befell him.  The monomania of his wife became
chronic.  A letter which she wrote and sent by special messenger called
forth from Thomas this loving sympathy:--"You must endeavour to
consider it a disease.  The eyes and ears of many are upon you, to whom
your conduct is unimpeachable with respect to all her charges; but if
you show resentment, they have ears, and others have tongues set on
fire.  Were I in your case, I should be violent; but blessed be God,
who suits our burdens to our backs.  Sometimes I pray earnestly for
you, and I always feel for you.  Think of Job, Think of Jesus.  Think
of those who were 'destitute, afflicted, tormented.'"

A voyage up the Tangan in Mr. Udny's pinnace as far as the north
frontier, at a spot now passed by the railway to Darjeeling, restored
the invalid. "I am no hunter," he wrote, while Thomas was shooting wild
buffaloes, but he was ever adding to his store of observations of the
people, the customs and language.  Meanwhile he was longing for letters
from Fuller and Pearce and Ryland.  At the end of January 1795 the
missionary exile thus talks of himself in his journal:--"Much engaged
in writing, having begun to write letters to Europe; but having
received none, I feel that hope deferred makes the heart sick.
However, I am so fully satisfied of the firmness of their friendship
that I feel a sweet pleasure in writing to them, though rather of a
forlorn kind; and having nothing but myself to write about, feel the
awkwardness of being an egotist. I feel a social spirit though barred
from society...I sometimes walk in my garden, and try to pray to God;
and if I pray at all it is in the solitude of a walk.  I thought my
soul a little drawn out to-day, but soon gross darkness returned.
Spoke a word or two to a Mohammedan upon the things of God, but I feel
to be as bad as they...9th May.  I have added nothing to these memoirs
since the 19th of April.  Now I observe that for the last three
sabbaths my soul has been much comforted in seeing so large a
congregation, and more especially as many who are not our own workmen
come from the parts adjacent, whose attendance must be wholly
disinterested.  I therefore now rejoice in seeing a regular
congregation of from two to six hundred people of all
descriptions--Mussulmans, Brahmans and other classes of Hindus, which I
look upon as a favourable token from God...Blessed be God, I have at
last received letters and other articles from our friends in
England...from dear brethren Fuller, Morris, Pearce, and Rippon, but
why not from others?...14th June.  I have had very sore trials in my
own family, from a quarter which I forbear to mention.  Have greater
need for faith and patience than ever I had, and I bless God that I
have not been altogether without supplies of these graces...Mr. Thomas
and his family spent one Lord's day with us, May 23rd...We spent
Wednesday, 26th, in prayer, and for a convenient place assembled in a
temple of Seeb, which was near to our house...I was from that day
seized with a dysentery, which continued nearly a week with fearful
violence; but then I recovered, through abundant mercy.  That day of
prayer was a good day to our souls.  We concerted measures for forming
a Baptist church."

To his sister he wrote, on the 11th March, of the church, which was
duly formed of Europeans and Eurasians.  No native convert was made in
this Dinapoor mission till 1806, after Carey had removed to Serampore.
"We have in the neighbourhood about fifteen or sixteen serious persons,
or those I have good hopes of, all Europeans.  With the natives I have
very large concerns; almost all the farmers for nearly twenty miles
round cultivate indigo for us, and the labouring people working here to
the number of about five hundred, so that I have considerable
opportunity of publishing the Gospel to them.  I have so much knowledge
of the language as to be able to preach to them for about half an hour,
so as to be understood, but am not able to vary my subjects much.  I
tell them of the evil and universality of sin, the sins of a natural
state, the justice of God, the incarnation of Christ and his sufferings
in our stead, and of the necessity of conversion, holiness, and faith,
in order to salvation. They hear with attention in general, and some
come to me for instruction in the things of God."

"It was always my opinion that missionaries may and must support
themselves after having been sent out and received a little support at
first, and in consequence I pursue a very little worldly employment
which requires three months' closish attendance in the year; but this
is in the rains--the most unfavourable season for exertion.  I have a
district of about twenty miles square, where I am continually going
from village to village to publish the Gospel; and in this space are
about two hundred villages, whose inhabitants from time to time hear
the Word. My manner of travelling is with two small boats; one serves
me to live in, and the other for cooking my food.  I carry all my
furniture and food with me from place to place--viz. a chair, a table,
a bed, and a lamp.  I walk from village to village, but repair to my
boat for lodging and eating. There are several rivers in this extent of
country, which is very convenient for travelling."

Carey's first convert seems to have been Ignatius Fernandez, a
Portuguese descendant who had prospered as a trader in Dinapoor
station.  The first Protestant place of worship in Bengal, outside of
Calcutta, was built by him, in 1797, next to his own house. There he
conducted service both in English and Bengali, whenever Carey and
Thomas, and Fountain afterwards, were unable to go out to the station,
and in his house Thomas and Fountain died.  He remained there as a
missionary till his own death, four years before Carey's, when he left
all his property to the mission.  The mission-house, as it is now, is a
typical example of the bungalow of one story, which afterwards formed
the first chapel in Serampore, and is still common as officers'
quarters in Barrackpore and other military stations.

Side by side with his daily public preaching and more private
conversations with inquirers in Bengali, Carey carried on the work of
Bible translation.  As each new portion was prepared it was tested by
being read to hundreds of natives.  The difficulty was that he had at
once to give a literary form to the rich materials of the language, and
to find in these or adapt from them terms sufficiently pure and
accurate to express the divine ideas and facts revealed through the
Hebrew and the Greek of the original.  He gives us this unconscious
glimpse of himself at work on this loftiest and most fruitful of tasks,
which Jerome had first accomplished for Latin Christendom, Ulfila for
our Scandinavian forefathers, Wiclif for the English, and Luther for
the Germans of the time.

"Now I must mention some of the difficulties under which we labour,
particularly myself.  The language spoken by the natives of this part,
though Bengali, is yet so different from the language itself, that,
though I can preach an hour with tolerable freedom so as that all who
speak the language well, or can write or read, perfectly understand me,
yet the poor labouring people can understand but little; and though the
language is rich, beautiful, and expressive, yet the poor people, whose
whole concern has been to get a little rice to satisfy their wants, or
to cheat their oppressive merchants and zameendars, have scarcely a
word in use about religion.  They have no word for love, for repent,
and a thousand other things; and every idea is expressed either by
quaint phrases or tedious circumlocutions.  A native who speaks the
language well finds it a year's work to obtain their idiom.  This
sometimes discourages me much; but blessed be God I feel a growing
desire to be always abounding in the work of the Lord, and I know that
my labour shall not be in vain in the Lord. I am much encouraged by our
Lord's expression, 'He who reapeth' (in the harvest) 'receiveth wages,
and gathereth fruit unto eternal life.'  If I, like David, only am an
instrument of gathering materials, and another build the house, I trust
my joy will not be the less."  This was written to the well-beloved
Pearce, whom he would fain have had beside him at Mudnabati.  To guide
the two missionaries whom the Society were about to send to Africa on
the salaries which he and Thomas had set free for this extension, Carey
adds:--"They will do well to associate as much as possible with the
natives, and to write down every word they can catch, with its meaning.
But if they have children with them, it is by far the readiest way of
learning to listen to them, for they will catch up every idiom in a
little time. My children can speak nearly as well as the natives, and
know many things in Bengali which they do not know in English.  I
should also recommend to your consideration a very large country,
perhaps unthought of: I mean Bhootan or Tibet.  Were two missionaries
sent to that country, we should have it in our power to afford them
much help...The day I received your letter I set about composing a
grammar and dictionary of the Bengal language to send to you.  The best
account of Hindu mythology extant, and which is pretty exact, is
Sonnerat's Voyage, undertaken by order of the king of France."

Without Sanskrit Carey found that he could neither master its Bengali
offshoot nor enrich that vernacular with the words and combinations
necessary for his translations of Scripture. Accordingly, with his
usual rapidity and industry, we find that he had by April 1796 so
worked his way through the intricate difficulties of the mother
language of the Aryans that he could thus write to Ryland, with more
than a mere scholar's enthusiasm, of one of the two great Vedic
epics:--"I have read a considerable part of the Mahabarata, an epic
poem written in most beautiful language, and much upon a par with
Homer; and it was, like his Iliad, only considered as a great effort of
human genius, I should think it one of the first productions in the
world; but alas! it is the ground of faith to millions of the simple
sons of men, and as such must be held in the utmost abhorrence."  At
the beginning of 1798 he wrote to Sutcliff:--"I am learning the
Sanskrit language, which, with only the helps to be procured here, is
perhaps the hardest language in the world.  To accomplish this, I have
nearly translated the Sanskrit grammar and dictionary into English, and
have made considerable progress in compiling a dictionary, Sanskrit,
including Bengali and English."

By this year he had completed his first translation of the Bible except
the historical books from Joshua to Job, and had gone to Calcutta to
obtain estimates for printing the New Testament, of which he had
reported to Mr. Fuller:--"It has undergone one correction, but must
undergo several more.  I employ a pundit merely for this purpose, with
whom I go through the whole in as exact a manner as I can.  He judges
of the style and syntax, and I of the faithfulness of the translation.
I have, however, translated several chapters together, which have not
required any alteration in the syntax whatever: yet I always submit
this article entirely to his judgment.  I can also, by hearing him
read, judge whether he understands his subject by his accenting his
reading properly and laying the emphasis on the right words.  If he
fails in this, I immediately suspect the translation; though it is not
an easy matter for an ordinary reader to lay the emphasis properly in
reading Bengali, in which there is no pointing at all.  The mode of
printing, i.e. whether a printing-press, etc., shall be sent from
England, or whether it shall be printed here, or whether it shall be
printed at all, now rests with the Society."

Fuller was willing, but the ardent scholar anticipated him.  Seeing a
wooden printing-press advertised in Calcutta for £40, Carey at once
ordered it.  On its arrival in 1798, "after worship" he "retired and
thanked God for furnishing us with a press."  When set up in the
Mudnabati house its working was explained to the natives, on whom the
delighted missionary's enthusiasm produced only the impression that it
must be the idol of the English.

But Carey's missionary organisation would not have been complete
without schools, and in planning these from the very first he gives us
the germs which blossomed into the Serampore College of 1818 on the one
hand, and the primary school circles under native Christian inspectors
on the other, a system carried out since the Mutiny of 1857 by the
Christian Literature Society, and adopted by the state departments of
public instruction.

"MUDNABATI, 27th January 1795.--Mr. Thomas and I (between whom the
utmost harmony prevails) have formed a plan for erecting two colleges
(Chowparis, Bengali), one here and the other at his residence, where we
intend to educate twelve lads, viz. six Mussulmans and six Hindoos at
each place.  A pundit is to have the charge of them, and they are to be
taught Sanskrit, Bengali, and Persian; the Bible is to be introduced,
and perhaps a little philosophy and geography.  The time of their
education is to be seven years, and we find them meat, clothing,
lodging, etc.  We are now inquiring for children proper for the
purpose.  We have also determined to require that the Society will
advance money for types to print the Bengali Bible, and make us their
debtors for the sum, which we hope to be able to pay off in one year:
and it will also be requisite to send a printing-press from England.
We will, if our lives are spared, repay the whole, and print the Bible
at our own expense, and I hope the Society will become our creditors by
paying for them when delivered.  Mr. Thomas is now preparing letters
for specimens, which I hope will be sent by this conveyance.

"We are under great obligation to Mr. G. Udny for putting us in these
stations.  He is a very friendly man and a true Christian.  I have no
spirit for politics here; for whatever the East India Company may be in
England, their servants and officers here are very different; we have a
few laws, and nothing to do but to obey."  Of his own school he wrote
in 1799 that it consisted of forty boys. "The school would have been
much larger, had we been able to have borne the expense; but, as among
the scholars there are several orphans whom we wholly maintain, we
could not prudently venture on any further expense...The boys have
hitherto learned to read and write, especially parts of the Scriptures,
and to keep accounts.  We may now be able to introduce some other
useful branches of knowledge among them...I trust these schools may
tend to promote curiosity and inquisitiveness among the rising
generation; qualities which are seldom found in the natives of Bengal."

The Medical Mission completed the equipment. "I submit it to the
consideration of the Society whether we should not be furnished with
medicines gratis.  No medicines will be sold by us, yet the cost of
them enters very deeply into our allowance.  The whole supply sent in
the Earl Howe, amounting to £35, besides charges amounting to thirty
per cent., falls on me; but the whole will either be administered to
sick poor, or given to any neighbour who is in want, or used in our own
families.  Neighbouring gentlemen have often supplied us.  Indeed,
considering the distance we are from medical assistance, the great
expensiveness of it far beyond our ability, and the number of wretched,
afflicted objects whom we continually see and who continually apply for
help, we ought never to sell a pennyworth.  Brother Thomas has been the
instrument of saving numbers of lives.  His house is constantly
surrounded with the afflicted; and the cures wrought by him would have
gained any physician or surgeon in Europe the most extensive
reputation.  We ought to be furnished yearly with at least half a
hundredweight of Jesuit's bark."

Around and as the fruit of the completely organised mission, thus
conducted by the ordained preacher, teacher, scholar, scientist,
printer, and licensed indigo planter in one station, and by his medical
colleague sixteen miles to the north of him at Mahipal, there gathered
many native inquirers.  Besides the planters, civil officials, and
military officers, to whom he ministered in Malda and Dinapoor
stations, there was added the most able and consistent convert, Mr.
Cunninghame of Lainshaw, the assistant judge, who afterwards in England
fought the battle of missions, and from his Ayrshire estate, where he
built a church, became famous as an expounder of prophecy.  Carey
looked upon this as "the greatest event that has occurred since our
coming to this country."  The appointment of Lord Mornington, soon to
be known as the Marquis Wellesley, "the glorious little man," as
Metcalfe called him, and hardly second to his younger brother
Wellington, having led Fuller to recommend that Carey should wait upon
his Excellency at Calcutta, this reply was received:--"I would not,
however, have you suppose that we are obliged to conceal ourselves, or
our work: no such thing.  We preach before magistrates and judges; and
were I to be in the company with Lord Mornington, I should not hesitate
to declare myself a missionary to the heathen, though I would not on
any account return myself as such to the Governor-General in Council."

Two years before this, in 1797, Carey had written:--"This mission
should be strengthened as much as possible, as its situation is such as
may put it in our power, eventually, to spread the Gospel through the
greatest part of Asia, and almost all the necessary languages may be
learned here."  He had just returned from his first long missionary
tour among the Bhooteas, who from Tibet had overrun the eastern
Himalaya from Darjeeling to Assam.  Carey and Thomas were received as
Christian Lamas by the Soobah or lieutenant-governor of the country
below the hills, which in 1865 we were compelled to annex and now
administer as Jalpaigori District.  They seemed to have been the first
Englishmen who had entered the territory since the political and
commercial missions of Bogle and Buchanan-Hamilton sent by Warren
Hastings.

"The genuine politeness and gentleman-like behaviour of the Soobah
exceeded everything that can be imagined, and his generosity was
astonishing.  He insisted on supplying all our people with everything
they wanted; and if we did but cast our eyes to any object in the room,
he immediately presented us with one of the same sort.  Indeed he
seemed to interpret our looks before we were aware; and in this manner
he presented each of us that night with a sword, shield, helmet, and
cup, made of a very light beautiful wood, and used by all the Bhooteas
for drinking in.  We admiring the wood, he gave us a large log of it;
which appears to be like fir, with

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