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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use of many unpublished letters written by Carey or referring to him;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."