WILLIAM CAREY, D.D.

THE SHOEMAKER WHO TRANSLATED THE BIBLE INTO BENGALI AND HINDOSTANI.

“No, sir! only a cobbler.”—Dr. William Carey.

“I am indeed poor, and shall always be so until the Bible is published in Bengali and Hindostani, and the people want no further instruction.”—Dr. William Carey, Letter from India, 1794.

WILLIAM CAREY.

Between the years 1786 and 1789, when William Gifford, just liberated by the generous interference of a friend from the yoke of apprenticeship to a cruel master, was receiving instruction from the Rev. Thomas Smerdon, when Robert Bloomfield, a journeyman shoemaker in London, was preparing in his mind the materials for the “Farmer’s Boy,” and when Samuel Drew, the young shoemaker of St. Austell, was reading “Locke on the Understanding,” and learning to think and reason as a metaphysician, there lived at Moulton in Northamptonshire a poor shoemaker, school-teacher, and village pastor, who was cherishing in his great heart the project of forming a society for the purpose of sending out Christian missionaries to the heathen world. This poor young man, in spite of his obscure position, his meagre social influence, his limited resources, and his lack of early educational advantages, became the originator of the great foreign missionary enterprises which constitute so remarkable a feature in the religious history of this country at the close of the last and the beginning of the present century. He was the first missionary chosen to be sent out by the committee of the society he had been the means of establishing. His field of labor was India, where for more than forty years, “without a visit to England or even a voyage to sea to recruit his strength,” and without losing a vestige of his early enthusiasm for his Christian enterprise, he toiled on at the work of preaching the gospel and translating the Sacred Scriptures. From 1801 to 1830, he was Professor of Oriental Languages in a college founded at Fort William by the Marquis of Wellesley, Governor-General of India. As an Oriental linguist he had few equals in his day, and few have ever exceeded him in the extent and exactitude of his acquaintance with the languages of India. He compiled grammars and dictionaries in Mahratta, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telugu, Bengali, and Bhotana. But his chief work was the translation of the Scriptures into Bengali and other languages. No less than twenty-four different translations of the Bible were made and edited by him, and passed through the press at Serampore under his supervision. One account speaks of “two hundred thousand Bibles, or portions thereof, in about forty Oriental languages or dialects, besides a great number of tracts and other religious works in various languages;“ and adds that ”a great proportion of the actual literary labor involved in these undertakings was performed” by this prodigious worker. A truly noble life-work was this for any man. It may be questioned if more work of a solid and useful character was ever pressed into one human life. What monarch or ruler of a vast empire, what statesman or judge, what scientific or literary worker, what man of genius in business or the professions, has ever thrown more energy into his life-work or achieved more worthy results for all his toil than this humble shoemaker and village pastor from Northamptonshire, who first gave to the various races of Northern India the Bible in their own language?

No one who is at all familiar with the work of the Christian Church in the present century, will need to be told that we are speaking of the famous pioneer missionary to Bengal, Dr. William Carey. And surely no list of illustrious shoemakers would be complete that did not include the name of this good man. His experience of the “gentle craft” was somewhat extensive. He was bound apprentice to the trade, and afterward worked as,a journeyman for more than twelve years. When he became known to the world, he was often spoken of as “the learned shoemaker.” Indeed, he was not always honored with so respectful a title as this. More often than not he was alluded to as “the cobbler,” and his own strict honesty and modesty of spirit led him to prefer the latter epithet. His humble origin and occupation were sometimes the occasion of an empty sneer on the part of men whose class feeling and religious prejudice prevented their appreciation of his splendid mental gifts and high purpose in life, and who consequently endeavored, but in vain, to bring his grand and Christ-like undertaking into contempt. That famous wit, the Rev. Sydney Smith, sometime prebendary of Bristol and canon of St. Paul’s, tried to set the world laughing at the “consecrated cobbler.” It was a sorry joke, and quite unworthy of a Christian minister, and must have been sorely repented of in after-years. One would have thought that Sydney Smith’s undoubted piety, and natural kindliness of heart, let along his strong bias in favor of all that was liberal in religion and politics, would have saved him from such a cruel and flippant sneer. But wit is a brilliant and dangerous weapon, and few men know how to use it as much as Sydney Smith did without injury to their own reputation or the feelings of other people.

Carey, as we have said, did not object to being called a “cobbler,” although the term did not accurately describe his degree of proficiency in the trade. It was reported in Northamptonshire that he was a poor workman, the neighbors declaring that though he made boots, he “could never make a pair.”[35] In a letter to Dr. Ryland he contradicts this report and says: “The childish story of my shortening a shoe to make it longer is entitled to no credit. I was accounted a very good workman, and recollect Mr. Old keeping a pair of shoes which I had made in his shop as a model of good workmanship.“ He cautiously adds, ”But the best workmen sometimes, from various causes, put bad work out of their hands, and I have no doubt but I did so too.”[36] This is more than likely, for he was subject to long fits of mental abstraction as he sat at the stall:

He pined for the field of missions and chafed against the cruel “bars of circumstance” that kept him in his native land. While engaged in shoemaking, he was so intent on learning Latin, Greek, and Hebrew that he often forgot to fit the shoes to the last. No wonder if shoes were not “a pair,” and were sometimes returned; no wonder that while he became one of the first linguists in the world in his day he was spoken of by his neighbors as nothing more than “a cobbler!” With reference to his poor abilities in the craft a good story is told of the way in which he silenced an officious person whose “false pride in place and blood” had betrayed him into some disparaging remarks about Carey as a shoemaker. His biographer[37] says: “Some thirty years after this period, dining one day with the Governor-General, Lord Hastings, at Barrakpore, a general officer made an impertinent inquiry of one of the aides-de-camp whether Dr. Carey had not once been a shoemaker. He happened to overhear the conversation, and immediately stepped forward and said, “No, sir; only a cobbler!”

In the brief story we have to tell of the life of this remarkable man, we shall, as seems most appropriate to our purpose, confine our remarks almost entirely to the work he accomplished before he ceased to be a shoemaker. His father and grandfather held the position of parish clerk and schoolmaster at Pury, or Paulersbury, in Northamptonshire, where William Carey was born, 17th August, 1761. His only education was received in the village school, and this was very slight and rudimentary; yet it was sufficient to give him a start in the work of educating himself. As a boy he was always fond of reading, and chose such books as referred to natural history. Botany and entomology were favorite subjects. His bedroom was turned into a sort of museum, chiefly remarkable for butterflies and beetles. Of books of travel and accounts of voyages he never seems to have wearied; the history and geography of any country also afforded him special delight. He was a bright, active, good-looking, intelligent boy, by no means a recluse and bookworm, caring nothing for out-door exercise and sports. He was as fond of games as any boy in the village, and as clever at them, and so became a general favorite. His quickness of intellect and perseverance with any hobby he took up often led the neighbors to predict success for him in future life. The perseverance and courage, which were such marked features of his character as a man, were shown in his boyhood by a curious incident. Attempting to climb a tree one day, he fell and broke his leg, and was an invalid for six weeks. As soon as he could crawl to the bottom of the garden, he made his way to the very tree from which he had fallen, climbed to the top of it, and brought down one of the highest branches, which he carried into the house, exclaiming, “There, I knew I would do it!”

At the age of twelve he showed the first signs of a taste and capacity for the acquisition of languages. A copy of Dyche’s Latin Grammar and Vocabulary had come into his hands, and he at once set to work, of his own free will and choice, to study the introductory portion, and to commit all the Latin words, with their meanings, to memory. Such an incident as this was quite enough to show that he was a boy of no common mind, and that he would well repay any outlay that might be made in giving him a classical training. But that was out of the question; the village school could not afford such a training, and anything better, in the shape of grammar-school or college, was not to be had, for his friends were poor and had no patrons to assist them. What he might have done in an university it is idle to suppose. Undoubtedly, he would have distinguished himself, but it may be reasonably doubted whether he would have been led into the path of Christian philanthropy and usefulness which the stress of circumstances at Moulton led him to think and adopt. It must have been painful for his parents, with their sense of the boy’s merits and ambition as a scholar, to see him languishing at home, unable to find sufficient food for his hungry and capacious young mind, while they also were unable to satisfy his passion for books, or send him to a school adequate to his requirements. And doubly painful must it have been for him as for them, when they felt that the time had come for him to learn a trade, and the thought of further schooling must be given up.

One can imagine his feelings when told that he must be apprenticed to a shoemaker. Not that such an occupation was necessarily a bugbear to a boy in his position, for thousands of village lads would not have regarded it in that light; but it was so to him. His heart had been set on a very different kind of occupation. He was eager for study, and felt within him the movement of an impulse to do something great in the world, and this apprenticeship was a bitter disappointment, saddening his young heart, and quenching for a time all his bright hopes. But only for a time did he lose heart. He was one of those who are no friends to despair, who do not understand defeat, and whose spirit and determination rise in the face of difficulties. It was not to be expected in his circumstances that life could offer him any position of greater honor or advantage than a cobbler’s stool. He would not, therefore, murmur at his necessary lot. He would rather take to it with as good a grace as possible, and make the best of it. He would use every means and chance of self-improvement, and if he could not have his heart’s desire in the way he had intended, he would have it in some other way; anyhow he would have it. A broken purpose should no more stand in the way of his climbing the “tree of knowledge” than a broken leg had prevented his climbing to the top of the tree in his father’s garden.

So he settled to his work with Charles Nickolls of Hackleton at the age of fourteen, with no prospect but that of being bound to wield the awl and bend over the last until he had come to be twenty-one years of age. Soon after entering the shoemaker’s room he found a copy of the New Testament, in the notes to which occurred a number of Greek words. This opened up another field of study, and he determined to enter upon it. Copying out the words, he took them for explanation to a young man who was a weaver in the village where his father lived. This weaver came from Kidderminster, had seen better days, and had received a good education. He assisted young Carey, then fifteen years of age, in mastering the rudiments of Greek. With such a start he did not rest until he had procured and could read the Greek New Testament. In the second year of his apprenticeship his indentures were cancelled on account of the death of his master, and Carey became a journeyman, of course at very low wages, under Mr. Old. At this time there lived in the neighborhood a clergyman who was one of the lights of a dark period in the religious history of this country—the Rev. Thomas Scott, the popular evangelical preacher, writer, and Bible commentator. His own career was very remarkable. From the position of a laboring man he had risen to occupy good rank as a clergyman, and with very meagre advantages in early life he had become, or was rapidly becoming, one of the best sacred classics in the country. The man who had laid aside the shepherd’s smock for the clergyman’s surplice, and who on one occasion doffed his clerical attire, donned the shepherd’s clothes again, and sheared eleven large sheep on an afternoon, was not likely to neglect or overlook a youth of more than ordinary intelligence and application to study because the youth happened to spend his days at the shoemaker’s stall. Mr. Scott on his visiting rounds now and then turned in at Mr. Old’s, and was struck with the boy’s bright look and rapt attention to any remarks that the visitor might make. Occasionally young Carey would venture to ask a question. So appropriate and far-seeing were his inquiries that Mr. Scott discerned his young friend’s uncommon powers, and often declared that he would prove to be “no ordinary character.” In later years, when William Carey was known throughout England as a pioneer in mission work, as a great Oriental linguist, and the first translator of the New Testament into Bengali, Mr. Scott, as he passed by the old room where the thoughtful and studious young shoemaker had once sat at work, would point to it and say, “That was Mr. Carey’s college.”

But with all this mental activity and zest for knowledge there was no moral purpose in his life, and as he grew older he became more and more loose and careless in his habits, and, as he himself would have it, even vicious, until he came to be about eighteen years of age. But there is no proof of any evil conduct to justify the use of such a term as “vicious” in describing his life at this time. He spoke of himself, no doubt, after the religious fashion of the age, and judged his early conduct by the severe moral standard adopted by his co-religionists. His complete mental awakening, like that of Samuel Drew, seems to have come as a result of the moral change wrought in him at the time of his religious conversion. A variety of causes, as is the rule, led to this crucial event in his life, “that vital change of heart which laid the foundation of his Christian character.” First of all he was indebted to the good example of a fellow-workman, then to the earnest preaching of the Rev. Thomas Scott. Mr. Marshman says, “It was chiefly to the ministrations of Mr. Scott that Carey was indebted for the progress he made in his religious career, and he never omitted through life to acknowledge the deep obligation under which he had been laid by his instructions.” Brought up as a strict Churchman, he was confirmed at a suitable age, and regularly attended the services at the parish church. But at the time we are speaking of, when personal religion became the chief subject of his thoughts, he sought light and help by every available means. The little Baptist community, among whom he had many friends, showed him much sympathy: he began to attend their meetings for prayer, and eventually cast in his lot among them. They encouraged him to become a preacher, and his first sermon, delivered at Hackleton when he was nineteen years of age, was delivered in one of their assemblies. For three and a half years he was on the preachers’ plan, and regularly “supplied the pulpits” in this village and Earl’s Barton as a kind of pastor. “It was during these ministerial engagements,” says his biographer, “that his views on the subject of baptism were altered, and he embraced the opinion that baptism by immersion, after a confession of faith, was in accordance with the injunctions of Divine Writ and the practice of the apostolic age. He was accordingly baptized by Dr. John Ryland, his future associate in the cause of missions, who subsequently stated at a public meeting that, on the 7th of October, 1783, he baptized a poor journeyman shoemaker in the river Nene, a little beyond Dr. Doddridge’s chapel in Northampton.”[38]

During these years he was diligently prosecuting his studies, and read the Scriptures in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Like many another poor student, he was fain to borrow what he could not buy in the way of books, and “laid the libraries of all the friends around him under contribution.” Notwithstanding his extraordinary abilities and diligence, he does not seem to have displayed any marked qualities as a preacher. It was with difficulty he got through his trial sermons before the church of which he was now a member. The very decided “personal influence” of the pastor, the Rev. John Suttcliffe, was required to enable the modest young shoemaker to obtain the church’s sanction to his receiving “a call to the ministry.” The church to which he ministered at Earl’s Barton was poor, and scarcely able to keep its pastor in clothing, much less provide for his entire maintenance. For this he was dependent on his trade, and as the times were now very bad he was obliged to travel from village to village to dispose of his work and obtain fresh orders. Nothing but the assistance of his relatives saved him at this time from destitution.

And here we are bound to pause and notice the greatest mistake Carey made in all his life. We refer to his marriage at the age of twenty to the sister of his former employer. “This imprudent union,” it is said, “proved a severe clog on his exertions for more than twenty-five years.” The match was about as unfortunate and unsuitable as a match could be. Mrs. Carey was much older than her husband, ill-educated in mind and temper, and quite incapable of sympathizing with her husband’s studies and projects. How he came to contract such a miserable union passes comprehension, for he was remarkably sensible and business-like in common affairs. But there are those who can cultivate another man’s vineyard while they neglect their own, wise for others and simple for themselves; and in regard to this particular business, as Froude the historian has well said, some men are apparently “destined to be unfortunate in their relations with women.” The judicious Hooker was judicious in everything else but the choice of a wife, for he married a jade who was wont to give him the baby to nurse and stand and scold him into the bargain, as he sat writing the works that were destined to make his name illustrious for all time. MoliÈre, who exposed in the most masterly manner in his plays the follies and foibles of the women of Parisian society in his day, married, to his bitter regret, as weak and vain a woman as any that figures in his own works. Milton’s second wife went home again within three months of their wedding-day; and John Wesley’s wife left him a short while after their marriage. But if these good men made a mistake in their choice, they one and all acted with good sense and feeling in their treatment of their ill-matched partners. Nothing could be better than the common-sense of stern John Wesley in his reply to a friend who asked him if he would not send for his truant wife home again. He answered in Latin, but this is what his words mean, “I did not send her away, and I will not fetch her back again.” Carey acted with much kindness and discretion toward his miserable partner; but he found it harder to transform her into a sensible woman than to transform his own Baptist Conference into a missionary society.[39]

In 1786, he took the pastorate of a small church at Moulton; yet, even here, he was obliged to eke out his poor living by shoemaking, and even to add to his other labors the task of teaching a school. For this task he was utterly unfit. However well he might teach himself, he could never teach boys. He knew this, and was accustomed to say, “When I kept school, it was the boys who kept me.” His circumstances at this time ought to be fully stated in order that the reader may form some idea of the hardship Carey had to endure and the absorbing personal duties and cares in the midst of which he began to cherish his great purpose “to convey the gospel of Jesus Christ to some portion of the heathen world.” His ministerial stipend from all sources and the proceeds of his school would not together put him in the position of Goldsmith’s ideal village pastor, who was “passing rich on forty pounds a year.” So that he was obliged, even at Moulton, to have recourse to shoemaking. A friend of his at the time remarks, “Once a fortnight Carey might be seen walking eight or ten miles to Northampton, with his wallet full of shoes on his shoulder, and then returning home with a fresh supply of leather.”

The time spent at Moulton was, in spite of its many cares and hardships, a time of great progress in study. It was during these years he adopted the plan of allotting his time, a plan to which he rigidly adhered all through his life, and by means of which he was able in after-years to accomplish tasks which seemed to onlookers sufficient for the energies of two or three ordinary men. Now began also the acquaintance with men whose friendship was of the greatest service to a man like Carey, and largely influenced and helped him in his life-work—Mr. Hall (the father of the eminent pulpit orator Robert Hall), Dr. Ryland, John Suttcliffe, and Andrew Fuller. All these lived within a few miles of each other, and belonged to the same association of Baptist churches, called the Northamptonshire Association. It was at one of the meetings of this association that Fuller first met with Carey and heard him preach. So delighted was Fuller with the devout thoughtfulness and Christian catholicity of Carey’s discourse, that he met the preacher as he came down from the pulpit and thanked him in the warmest manner. In this cordial meeting commenced a friendship and fellowship in Christian work which lasted for twenty years until Fuller’s death, and which proved a source of untold blessings to the heathen world.

Carey’s first thought of missions came into his mind when reading Captain Cook’s account of his voyage round the world. He was in the habit of blending study with his task as a shoemaker, or while sitting among his boys at school. This book impressed his imagination, and stirred his compassion to the utmost, as he contemplated the vast extent of the world and the large proportion of its inhabitants who were living in ignorance of the true God, and of the Saviour of mankind. In order to realize the facts more vividly, he constructed a large map of the world, and marked it in such a manner as to indicate the numerical relation of the heathen to the Christian nations. This map was fixed on the wall in front of his work-stool, so that he might raise his head occasionally and look upon it as he sat at his daily toil. While he mused on the map and the facts it represented, “the fire burned.” It was the means of inspiring in him the purpose never to tire nor rest until he and others had gone out to convey the good news of the Gospel to his suffering fellow-men in distant lands. It was to this circumstance that William Wilberforce alluded, in a speech made in the House of Commons twenty years after, when, urging Parliament to grant missionaries free access to India, he said: “A sublimer thought cannot be conceived than when a poor cobbler formed the resolution to give to the millions of Hindoos the Bible in their own language.”

With this purpose in mind, Carey went to the meetings of his brethren, longing for an opportunity of expressing his thoughts and calling forth their sympathies. But he had to endure a terrible trial at the outset—a trial which only Christian faith and love could endure. The older men, who ruled in an almost supreme manner in these councils, sternly rebuked his presumption, as they deemed it, and called him an “enthusiast”—a term employed very recently by a noble duke in the House of Lords in the same connection. No term could have described Carey more correctly. It was a term of honor, though meant in reproach and condemnation. The word means one inspired by God, and surely Carey’s Christlike thought and zeal for his fellow-men was an inspiration. He was an enthusiast of the type of Robert Raikes of Gloucester, who only six or seven years before[40] had begun the work of Sabbath-schools in that city; or John Howard, whose great work, published within a year or two of this time,[41] on the condition of the prisons in Europe, and especially in England and Ireland, created a merciful revolution in the treatment of our criminal class; or Thomas Charles of Bala, whose pity for the Welsh girl who had no Bible of her own, and had been unable to walk six or seven miles to a place where she could have access to one, led him to take steps which resulted in the formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society. The founder of the Baptist Missionary Society was a man of this type, and such men are the greatest benefactors of their race, no matter whether they be clergymen like Charles, or country gentlemen like Howard, or cobblers and Nonconformist village pastors like Carey.

At the first meeting in which Carey ventured to submit the subject of Christian missions, the senior minister present spoke in the following oracular manner: “Brother Carey ought certainly to have known that nothing could be done before another Pentecost, when an effusion of miraculous gifts, including the gift of tongues, would give effect to the commission of Christ, as at the first; and that he (Mr. Carey) was a miserable enthusiast for asking such a question.” And then, as if to settle the whole question once for all, and shut the mouth of Mr. Carey forever, the stern old man turned to the humble young pastor and said, “What, sir! can you preach in Arabic, in Persic, in Hindostani, in Bengali, that you think it your duty to preach the gospel to the heathen?” Little did the speaker imagine that he was addressing the very man who would subsequently hold the office of Professor of Oriental Languages, at Fort William for twenty years, become one of the greatest proficients the world has known in two of the very languages he had named, and not only preach in them but translate the Scriptures into them, as a boon and legacy of love to the people of Hindostan. When on another occasion Carey, nothing daunted by his first repulse, and willing to forgive and forget his rebuff for the sake of the cause he cherished, asked his brethren once more to consider the question of missions, the same stern voice exclaimed, “Young man, sit down; when God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine.”

But the old man was not a prophet. God did not choose to work without the aid of William Carey, though the time was not yet. The undaunted moral hero had other battles to fight before he stood on the field of missions.

In 1789 Carey became the pastor of a church in Leicester. For four years he labored zealously at his ministerial duties, studied with great diligence, availing himself of new and valuable friendships for this purpose, and never failing to bring up his favorite theme for discussion at the meetings of the Baptist ministers. Before he left Moulton, as we have seen, he began to raise the question in the public assemblies. On one occasion the debate ran on the question he had introduced, “Whether it were not practicable, and our bounden duty, to attempt somewhat toward spreading the gospel in the heathen world?” Not satisfied with the result of such discussions, the village shoemaker and pastor sat down to write a pamphlet on this subject, entitled “Thoughts on Christian Missions.” When he showed this pamphlet to his friends Fuller, Suttcliffe, and Ryland, they were amazed at the amount of knowledge it displayed, and deeply moved by Carey’s zeal and persistence in the good cause; but all they could do in the matter was to put him off for a time by counselling him to revise his production. It appears that at the time this brochure was penned the poor shoemaker with his family were “in a state bordering on starvation, and passed many weeks without animal food, and with but a scanty supply of bread.”

In the year 1791, at a meeting held at Clipstone in Northamptonshire, Carey again read his pamphlet, and was requested to publish it. This was a decided step in advance, and prepared the way for the events of the following year, when the desire of his heart was accomplished in the formation of a missionary society. In May, 1792, he preached the famous sermon which is said to have done more than anything else to consummate this missionary enterprise.[42] The two main propositions of this discourse have passed into something like a proverb on the lips of missionary advocates: “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” Although the discourse made a deep impression, Carey was distressed beyond all self-control when he found his friends were about to separate without a distinct resolution to form a society. He seized Andrew Fuller’s hand “in an agony of distress,” and tearfully pleaded that some steps should at once be taken. Overcome at last by his entreaties, they solemnly resolved on the holy enterprise.

After this the history of the Society is a record of meetings, committees, travels, and labors, of deputations to the churches, difficulties and embarrassments, in the midst of which no one was more devoted and useful in bringing the plans of the young Society into working order than Carey’s valuable friend, Andrew Fuller. The first subscription list was made up at another meeting of the Association, held at Kettering, in Carey’s own county, in the autumn of the same year. Its promises amounted to £13 2s. 6d. This little fund was the precursor of the tens of thousands which have since flowed into the treasuries of our modern Christian Missionary Societies. In twenty-nine days after the fund was started at Kettering, Birmingham followed with the noble gift of £70.

The Society was now fairly started, with the resolution formally recorded on its minute-books “to convey the message of salvation to some portion of the heathen world.” On the 9th of January, 1793, Carey and a colleague were appointed by the Committee to proceed at once to India. Carey’s colleague was a man of extraordinary missionary zeal, who had “lately returned from Bengal, and was endeavoring to establish a fund in London for a mission to that country.”[43] He was a Baptist, and on hearing of the schemes of his brethren in England, he readily fell in with their proposal that he should accompany Carey to India. But the question of finding a berth on an English vessel was not easily settled. No English captain dare take them out without a government license, and to obtain a license as missionaries was not to be thought of. Having at one time gone on board a vessel with all their baggage, they were obliged by the captain, who felt that he was risking his commission in taking them on board, to land again and return to London. They were compelled at length to have recourse to a Danish vessel, the Cron Princessa Maria, whose captain, an Englishman by birth, though naturalized as a Dane, looked favorably on their enterprise. On the 13th of June, 1793, Carey and his companion set sail from the shores of England, their expedition as ambassadors for Christ as little heeded by the world at large as that of the Cilician tentmaker and his little band of preachers who set sail seventeen centuries before from the port of Alexandria Troas for the shores of Europe.

The story of Carey’s life and work in India cannot be followed in detail. We have come to the close of that portion of his history which properly belongs to these brief sketches of illustrious shoemakers. A few sentences must suffice to give a picture of his labors as a missionary and the result of those labors. For six or seven years Carey and his friends had to endure much hardship, and their proceedings were hampered by difficulties of various kinds. To begin with, they had no legal standing in the country, and were forced at length to take up their quarters under the Danish flag at Serampore. “Here they bought a house, and organized themselves into a family society, resolving that whatever was done by any member should be for the benefit of the mission. They opened a school, in which the children of those natives who chose to send them were instructed gratuitously.”[44] The funds supplied from home were but scanty, and they were compelled to resort to trade for their livelihood and the means of carrying on their work. “Thomas, who was a surgeon, intended to support himself by his profession. Carey’s plan was to take land and cultivate it for his maintenance.“[45] At one time, when funds were exhausted, Mr. Carey ”was indebted for an asylum to an opulent native;” at another time, driven to distraction by want of money, by the apparent failure of his plans, and the upbraidings of his unsympathetic partner, he removed with his family to the Soonderbunds, and took a small grant of land, which he proposed to cultivate for his own maintenance; and, later on, he thankfully accepted, as a way out of his difficulties and a means of furthering his missionary projects, the post of superintendent of an indigo factory at Mudnabatty. This post he held for five or six years. No sooner had he got into this position of comparative independence than he wrote home and proposed that “the sum which might be considered his salary should be devoted to the printing of the Bengali translation of the New Testament.” This generous proposal is a fair illustration of his self-sacrificing spirit from the beginning to the end of his missionary life. To the work of translating and circulating the Scriptures in the languages of India he devoted not only all his time and his vast mental powers, but whatever private funds might be at his command. As the work proceeded, and he became known and employed by the government in various professorships, these funds were often very considerable. In 1807, when Carey held the Professorship of Oriental Languages at the Fort William College, at a salary of £1200 a year, Mr. Ward, one of his colleagues, wrote, in reply to some unfriendly remarks made in an English publication, that Dr. Carey and Mr. Marshman “were contributing £2400 a year,“ and receiving from the mission fund ”only their food and a trifle of pocket-money for apparel.”

In 1800 the missionary establishment, now strengthened by the two worthy colleagues just named, was removed to Serampore, a Danish settlement about fifteen miles from Calcutta. A printing press and type were purchased, and the work of printing the Scriptures commenced. Carey had been quietly but most diligently going on with the translation of the Scriptures into Bengali during the previous years of anxiety and varied missionary labor. Whatever cares weighed on brain and heart, the true work of his life, to which he had devoted himself, was never relinquished.

On the 18th of March, 1800, the first sheets of the Bengali New Testament were struck off, and on the 7th of February in the following year, “Mr. Carey enjoyed the supreme gratification of receiving the last sheet of the Bengali New Testament from the press, the fruition of the ‘sublime thought’ which he had conceived fifteen years before.” It is not surprising that we should read the following record of the manner in which these humble missionaries expressed their devout gratitude to God on the consummation of this part of their Christian labors: “As soon as the first copy was bound, it was placed on the communion table in the chapel, and a meeting was held of the whole of the mission family, and of the converts recently baptized, to offer a tribute of gratitude to God for this great blessing.” In 1806 the New Testament was ready for the press in Sanskrit, the sacred language of India, the language of its most ancient and venerated writings, and the parent of nearly all the languages of modern India. Simultaneously with this were being issued proof-sheets of the New Testament in Mahratta, Orissa, Persian, and Hindostani, besides dictionaries and grammars, and other publications for the use of students. It is well-nigh impossible to form a correct idea of the amount of religious zeal, mental energy, and physical endurance involved in labors like those of Dr. Carey, extending over forty years in the climate of Bengal. He is said to have regularly tired out three pundits, or native interpreters, who came one after the other each day to assist him in the correction and revision of his translations. A letter written in 1807, when the degree of D.D. was conferred on Mr. Carey by the Brown University, United States, gives a graphic sketch of the ordinary day’s work performed by him at this period: “He rises a little before six, reads a chapter in the Hebrew Bible, and spends the time till seven in private devotion. He then has family prayer with the servants in Bengali, after which he reads Persian with a moonshee who is in attendance. As soon as breakfast is over he sits down to the translation of the Ramayun with his pundit till ten, when he proceeds to the college and attends to its duties till two. Returning home, he examines a proof-sheet of the Bengali translation, and dines with his friend Mr. Rolt. After dinner he translates a chapter of the Bible with the aid of the chief pundit of the college. At six he sits down with the Telugu pundit to the study of that language, and then preaches a sermon in English to a congregation of about fifty. The service ended, he sits down to the translation of Ezekiel into Bengali, having thrown aside his former version. At eleven the duties of the day are closed, and after reading a chapter in the Greek Testament and commending himself to God he retires to rest.”[46]

Strangely enough, about this time a controversy was going on in certain English journals as to the value of the work that Carey and his coadjutors were doing in India. We have no wish to speak bitterly of the satire and severity of the articles written by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review. They were not simply sallies of wit, but serious essays, written in a spirit of deliberate hostility to this missionary enterprise. What else can be thought of an article commencing with words like these: “In rooting out a nest of consecrated cobblers, and in bringing to light such a perilous heap of trash as we are obliged to work through in our articles on Methodists and missionaries, we are generally considered to have rendered a useful service to the cause of rational religion.” Such articles condemned themselves; and it is fair to add that their author himself lived to regard them as a mistake, and to express to Lord Macaulay his regret that he had ever written them.[47]

But even in that day Carey and his heroic band of Christian fellow-laborers had plenty of sympathizers and supporters both in the Church of England and the Nonconformist denominations. Robert Southey the poet came forward with generous enthusiasm in their defence, and in a carefully-written article in the Quarterly Review[48] vindicated their character and labors. Among other remarkable statements in their behalf, he was able to say: “These ‘low-born and low-bred mechanics’ have translated the whole Bible into Bengali, and have by this time printed it. They are printing the New Testament in the Sanskrit, the Orissa, the Mahratta, the Hindostani, the Guzerat, and translating it into Persic, Teligna, Carnata, Chinese, the language of the Sieks and the Burmans, and in four of these languages they are going on with the Bible. Extraordinary as this is, it will appear still more so when it is remembered that of these men one was originally a shoemaker, another a printer at Hull, and the third the master of a charity-school at Bristol. Only fourteen years have elapsed since Thomas and Carey set foot in India, and in that time these missionaries have acquired the gift of tongues. In fourteen years these ‘low-born, low-bred mechanics’ have done more to spread the knowledge of the Scriptures among the heathen than has been accomplished or even attempted by all the world beside. A plain statement of fact will be the best proof of their diligence and success. The first convert was baptized in December, 1800,[49] and in seven years after that time the number has amounted to 109, of whom nine were afterward excluded or suspended, or had been lost sight of. Carey and his son have been in Bengal fourteen years, the other brethren only nine. They had all a difficult language to acquire before they could speak to a native, and to preach and argue in it required a thorough and familiar knowledge. Under these circumstances the wonder is, not that they have done so little, but that they have done so much; for it will be found that, even without this difficulty to retard them, no religious opinions have spread more rapidly in the same time, unless there was some remarkable folly or extravagance to recommend them, or some powerful worldly inducement.” This liberal Tory an evangelical High Churchman goes on to say: “Other missionaries from other societies have now entered India, and will soon become efficient laborers in their station. From Government all that is asked is toleration for themselves and protection for their converts. The plan which they have laid for their own proceedings is perfectly prudent and unexceptionable, and there is as little fear of their provoking martyrdom as there would be of their shrinking from it if the cause of God and man require the sacrifice.”

Having lived to see his desire accomplished in the establishment of many other missionary societies besides his own; having been the means of translating the Sacred Scriptures in the languages spoken probably by two hundred millions of people; this good man, working up to the close of his life, died at Calcutta on the 9th of June, 1834. As he lay ill, Lady Bentinck, the wife of the Governor-General, paid him frequent visits, and good “Bishop Wilson came and besought his blessing.” He instructed his executors to place no memorial over his tomb but the following simple inscription:

Mr. Marshman, who had the best means of knowing Carey and his work,[50] says: “The basis of all his excellences was deep and unaffected piety. So great was his love of integrity that he never gave his confidence where he was not certain of the existence of moral worth. He was conspicuous for constancy, both in the pursuits of life and the associations of friendship. With great simplicity he united the strongest decision of character. He never took credit for anything but plodding, but it was the plodding of genius.” In all his work, however successful, however honored by his fellow-men, William Carey was modest and simple-hearted as a child. His unparalleled labors as a translator of the Scriptures were performed under the prompting of sublime faith in Divine truth, warm unwavering love to souls, and an assured confidence in the ultimate triumph of the kingdom of God. The shoemaker of Northamptonshire will be remembered till the end of the world as the Christian Apostle of Northern India.