INDIA AS CAREY FOUND IT
1793
Tahiti v. Bengal--Carey and Thomas appointed missionaries to
Bengal--The farewell at Leicester--John Thomas, first medical
missionary--Carey's letter to his father--The Company's "abominable
monopoly"--The voyage--Carey's aspirations for world-wide
missions--Lands at Calcutta--His description of Bengal in
1793--Contrast presented by Carey to Clive, Hastings, and
Cornwallis--The spiritual founder of an Indian Empire of Christian
Britain--Bengal and the famine of 1769-70--The Decennial Settlement
declared permanent--Effects on the landed classes--Obstacles to Carey's
work--East India Company at its worst--Hindooism and the Bengalees in
1793--Position of Hindoo women--Missionary attempts before
Carey's--Ziegenbalg and Schwartz--Kiernander and the
chaplains--Hindooised state of Anglo-Indian society and its reaction on
England--Guneshan Dass, the first caste Hindoo to visit
England--William Carey had no predecessor.
Carey had desired to go first to Tahiti or Western Africa. The natives
of North America and the negroes of the West Indies and Sierra Leone
were being cared for by Moravian and Wesleyan evangelists. The
narrative of Captain Cook's two first voyages to the Pacific and
discovery of Tahiti had appeared in the same year in which the
Northampton churches began their seven years' concert of prayer, just
after his own second baptism. From the map, and a leather globe which
also he is said to have made, he had been teaching the children of
Piddington, Moulton, and Leicester the great outlines and thrilling
details of expeditions round the world which roused both the scientific
and the simple of England as much as the discoveries of Columbus had
excited Europe. When the childlike ignorance and natural grace of the
Hawaiians, which had at first fired him with the longing to tell them
the good news of God, were seen turned into the wild justice of
revenge, which made Cook its first victim, Carey became all the more
eager to anticipate the disasters of later days. That was work for
which others were to be found. It was not amid the scattered and
decimated savages of the Pacific or of America that the citadel of
heathenism was found, nor by them that the world, old and new, was to
be made the kingdom of Christ. With the cautious wisdom that marked
all Fuller's action, though perhaps with the ignorance that was due to
Carey's absence, the third meeting of the new society recorded this
among other articles "to be examined and discussed in the most diligent
and impartial manner--In what part of the heathen world do there seem
to be the most promising openings?"
The answer, big with consequence for the future of the East, was in
their hands, in the form of a letter from Carey, who stated that "Mr.
Thomas, the Bengal missionary," was trying to raise a fund for that
province, and asked "whether it would not be worthy of the Society to
try to make that and ours unite with one fund for the purpose of
sending the gospel to the heathen indefinitely." Tahiti was not to be
neglected, nor Africa, nor Bengal, in "our larger plan," which included
above four hundred millions of our fellowmen, among whom it was an
object "worthy of the most ardent and persevering pursuit to
disseminate the humane and saving principles of the Christian
Religion." If this Mr. Thomas were worthy, his experience made it
desirable to begin with Bengal. Thomas answered for himself at the
next meeting, when Carey fell upon his neck and wept, having previously
preached from the words--"Behold I come quickly, and My reward is with
Me." "We saw," said Fuller afterwards, "there was a gold mine in India,
but it was as deep as the centre of the earth. Who will venture to
explore it? 'I will venture to go down,' said Carey, 'but remember that
you (addressing Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland) must hold the ropes.' We
solemnly engaged to him to do so, nor while we live shall we desert
him."
Carey and Thomas, an ordained minister and a medical evangelist, were
at this meeting in Kettering, on 10th January 1793, appointed
missionaries to "the East Indies for preaching the gospel to the
heathen," on "£100 or £150 a year between them all,"--that is, for two
missionaries, their wives, and four children,--until they should be
able to support themselves like the Moravians. As a matter of fact
they received just £200 in all for the first three years when
self-support and mission extension fairly began. The whole sum at
credit of the Society for outfit, passage, and salaries was £130, so
that Fuller's prudence was not without justification when supported by
Thomas's assurances that the amount was enough, and Carey's modest
self-sacrifice. "We advised Mr. Carey," wrote Fuller to Ryland, "to
give up his school this quarter, for we must make up the loss to him."
The more serious cost of the passage was raised by Fuller and by the
preaching tours of the two missionaries. During one of these, at Hull,
Carey met the printer and newspaper editor, William Ward, and cast his
mantle over him thus--"If the Lord bless us, we shall want a person of
your business to enable us to print the Scriptures; I hope you will
come after us." Ward did so in five years.
The 20th March 1793 was a high day in the Leicester chapel, Harvey
Lane, when the missionaries were set apart like Barnabas and Paul--a
forenoon of prayer; an afternoon of preaching by Thomas from Psalm xvi.
4; "Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another God;"
an evening of preaching by the treasurer from Acts xxi. 14, "And when
he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, the will of the Lord be
done;" and the parting charge by Fuller the secretary, from the risen
Lord's own benediction and forthsending of His disciples, "Peace be
unto you, as My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you." Often in
after days of solitude and reproach did Carey quicken his faith by
reading the brave and loving words of Fuller on "the objects you must
keep in view, the directions you must observe, the difficulties you
must encounter, the reward you may expect."
Under date four days after we find this entry in the Church Book--"Mr.
Carey, our minister, left Leicester to go on a mission to the East
Indies, to take and propagate the Gospel among those idolatrous and
superstitious heathens. This is inserted to show his love to his poor
miserable fellow-creatures. In this we concurred with him, though it
is at the expense of losing one whom we love as our own souls." When
Carey's preaching had so filled the church that it became necessary to
build a front gallery at a cost of £98, and they had applied to several
other churches for assistance in vain, he thus taught them to help
themselves. The minister and many of the members agreed to pay off the
debt "among ourselves" by weekly subscriptions,--a process, however,
which covered five years, so poor were they. Carey left this as a
parting lesson to home congregations, while his people found it the
easier to pay the debt that they had sacrificed their best, their own
minister, to the work of missions for which he had taught them to pray.
John Thomas, four years older than Carey, was a surgeon, who had made
two voyages to Calcutta in the Oxford Indiaman, had been of spiritual
service to Charles Grant, Mr. George Udny, and the Bengal civilian
circle at Malda, and had been supported by Mr. Grant as a missionary
for a time until his eccentricities and debts outraged his friends and
drove him home at the time of the Kettering meetings. Full justice has
been done to a character and a career somewhat resembling those of John
Newton, by his patient and able biographer the Rev. C. B. Lewis. John
Thomas has the merit of being the first medical missionary, at a time
when no other Englishman cared for either the bodies or souls of our
recently acquired subjects in North India, outside of Charles Grant's
circle. He has more; he was used by God to direct Carey to the dense
Hindoo population of Bengal--to the people and to the centre, that is,
where Brahmanism had its seat, and whence Buddhism had been carried by
thousands of missionaries all over Southern, Eastern, and Central Asia.
But there our ascription of merit to Thomas must stop. However well he
might speak the uncultured Bengali, he never could write the language
or translate the Bible into a literary style so that it could be
understood by the people or influence their leaders. His temper kept
Charles Grant back from helping the infant mission, though anxious to
see Mr. Carey and to aid him and any other companion. The debts of
Thomas caused him and Carey to be excluded from the Oxford, in which
his friend the commander had agreed to take them and their party
without a licence; clouded the early years of the enterprise with their
shadow, and formed the heaviest of the many burdens Carey had to bear
at starting. If, afterwards, the old association of Thomas with Mr.
Udny at Malda gave Carey a home during his Indian apprenticeship, this
was a small atonement for the loss of the direct help of Mr. Grant. If
Carey proved to be the John among the men who began to make Serampore
illustrious, Thomas was the Peter, so far as we know Peter in the
Gospels only.
Just before being ejected from the Oxford, as he had been deprived of
the effectual help of Charles Grant through his unhappy companion, when
with only his eldest son Felix beside him, how did Carey view his
God-given mission? The very different nature of his wife, who had
announced to him the birth of a child, clung anew to the hope that this
might cause him to turn back. Writing from Ryde on the 6th May he thus
replied with sweet delicacy of human affection, but with true loyalty
to his Master's call:--
"Received yours, giving me an account of your safe delivery. This is
pleasant news indeed to me; surely goodness and mercy follow me all my
days. My stay here was very painful and unpleasant, but now I see the
goodness of God in it. It was that I might hear the most pleasing
accounts that I possibly could hear respecting earthly things. You
wish to know in what state my mind is. I answer, it is much as when I
left you. If I had all the world, I would freely give it all to have
you and my dear children with me; but the sense of duty is so strong as
to overpower all other considerations; I could not turn back without
guilt on my soul. I find a longing desire to enjoy more of God; but,
now I am among the people of the world, I think I see more beauties in
godliness than ever, and, I hope, enjoy more of God in retirement than
I have done for some time past...You want to know what Mrs. Thomas
thinks, and how she likes the voyage...She would rather stay in England
than go to India; but thinks it right to go with her husband...Tell my
dear children I love them dearly, and pray for them constantly. Felix
sends his love. I look upon this mercy as an answer to prayer indeed.
Trust in God. Love to Kitty, brothers, sisters, etc. Be assured I love
you most affectionately. Let me know my dear little child's name.--I
am, for ever, your faithful and affectionate husband,
"WILLIAM CAREY.
"My health never was so well. I believe the sea makes Felix and me
both as hungry as hunters. I can eat a monstrous meat supper, and
drink a couple of glasses of wine after it, without hurting me at all.
Farewell."
She was woman and wife enough, in the end, to do as Mrs. Thomas had
done, but she stipulated that her sister should accompany her.
By a series of specially providential events, as it seemed, such as
marked the whole early history of this first missionary enterprise of
modern England, Carey and Thomas secured a passage on board the Danish
Indiaman Kron Princessa Maria, bound from Copenhagen to Serampore. At
Dover, where they had been waiting for days, the eight were roused from
sleep by the news that the ship was off the harbour. Sunrise on the
13th June saw them on board. Carey had had other troubles besides his
colleague and his wife. His father, then fifty-eight years old, had
not given him up without a struggle. "Is William mad?" he had said when
he received the letter in which his son thus offered himself up on the
missionary altar. His mother had died six years before:--
"LEICESTER, Jan. 17th, 1793.
"DEAR AND HONOURED FATHER,--The importance of spending our time for God
alone, is the principal theme of the gospel. I beseech you, brethren,
says Paul, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is your reasonable service. To
be devoted like a sacrifice to holy uses, is the great business of a
christian, pursuant to these requisitions. I consider myself as devoted
to the service of God alone, and now I am to realise my professions. I
am appointed to go to Bengal, in the East Indies, a missionary to the
Hindoos. I shall have a colleague who has been there five or six years
already, and who understands their language. They are the most mild
and inoffensive people in all the world, but are enveloped in the
greatest superstition, and in the grossest ignorance...I hope, dear
father, you may be enabled to surrender me up to the Lord for the most
arduous, honourable, and important work that ever any of the sons of
men were called to engage in. I have many sacrifices to make. I must
part with a beloved family, and a number of most affectionate friends.
Never did I see such sorrow manifested as reigned through our place of
worship last Lord's-day. But I have set my hand to the plough.--I
remain, your dutiful son,
"WILLIAM CAREY."
When in London Carey had asked John Newton, "What if the Company should
send us home on our arrival in Bengal?" "Then conclude," was the reply,
"that your Lord has nothing there for you to accomplish. But if He
have, no power on earth can hinder you." By Act of Parliament not ten
years old, every subject of the King going to or found in the East
Indies without a licence from the Company, was guilty of a high crime
and misdemeanour, and liable to fine and imprisonment. Only four years
previously a regulation had compelled every commander to deliver to the
Hoogli pilot a return of the passengers on board that the Act might be
enforced. The Danish nationality of the ship and crew saved the
missionary party. So grievously do unjust laws demoralise contemporary
opinion, that Fuller was constrained to meet the objections of many to
the "illegality" of the missionaries' action by reasoning, unanswerable
indeed, but not now required: "The apostles and primitive ministers
were commanded to go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every
creature; nor were they to stop for the permission of any power upon
earth, but to go, and take the consequences. If a man of God,
conscious of having nothing in his heart unfriendly to any civil
government whatever, but determined in all civil matters to obey and
teach obedience to the powers that are, put his life in his hand,
saying, I will go, and if I am persecuted in one city I will flee to
another'...whatever the wisdom of this world may decide upon his
conduct, he will assuredly be acquitted, and more than acquitted, at a
higher tribunal."
Carey's journal of the voyage begins with an allusion to "the
abominable East Indian monopoly," which he was to do more than any
other man to break down by weapons not of man's warfare. The second
week found him at Bengali, and for his companion the poems of Cowper.
Of the four fellow-passengers one was a French deist, with whom he had
many a debate.
"Aug. 2.--I feel myself to be much declined, upon the whole, in the
more spiritual exercises of religion; yet have had some pleasant
exercises of soul, and feel my heart set upon the great work upon which
I am going. Sometimes I am quite dejected when I see the
impenetrability of the hearts of those with us. They hear us preach on
the Lord's-day, but we are forced to witness their disregard to God all
the week. O may God give us greater success among the heathen. I am
very desirous that my children may pursue the same work; and now intend
to bring up one in the study of Sanskrit, and another of Persian. O
may God give them grace to fit them for the work! I have been much
concerned for fear the power of the Company should oppose us...
"Aug. 20.--I have reason to lament over a barrenness of soul, and am
sometimes much discouraged; for if I am so dead and stupid, how can I
expect to be of any use among the heathen? Yet I have of late felt
some very lively desires after the success of our undertaking. If there
is anything that engages my heart in prayer to God, it is that the
heathen may be converted, and that the society which has so generously
exerted itself may be encouraged, and excited to go on with greater
vigour in the important undertaking...
"Nov. 9.--I think that I have had more liberty in prayer, and more
converse with God, than for some time before; but have,
notwithstanding, been a very unfruitful creature, and so remain. For
near a month we have been within two hundred miles of Bengal, but the
violence of the currents set us back when we have been at the very
door. I hope I have learned the necessity of bearing up in the things
of God against wind and tide, when there is occasion, as we have done
in our voyage."
To the Society he writes for a Polyglot Bible, the Gospels in Malay,
Curtis's Botanical Magazine, and Sowerby's English Botany, at his own
cost, and thus plans the conquest of the world:--"I hope the Society
will go on and increase, and that the multitudes of heathen in the
world may hear the glorious words of truth. Africa is but a little way
from England; Madagascar but a little way farther; South America, and
all the numerous and large islands in the Indian and Chinese seas, I
hope will not be passed over. A large field opens on every side, and
millions of perishing heathens, tormented in this life by idolatry,
superstition, and ignorance, and exposed to eternal miseries in the
world to come, are pleading; yea, all their miseries plead as soon as
they are known, with every heart that loves God, and with all the
churches of the living God. Oh, that many labourers may be thrust out
into the vineyard of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the gentiles may
come to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Him!"
On the 7th November, as the ship lay in the roads of Balasore, he and
Thomas landed and "began our labours." For three hours the people of
the bazaar listened with great attention to Thomas, and one prepared
for them a native dinner with plantain leaf for dish, and fingers for
knives and forks. Balasore--name of Krishna--was one of the first
settlements of the English in North India in 1642, and there the
American Baptist successors of Carey have since carried on his work.
On the 11th November, after a five months' voyage, they landed at
Calcutta unmolested. The first fortnight's experience of the city,
whose native population he estimated at 200,000, and of the surrounding
country, he thus condenses:--"I feel something of what Paul felt when
he beheld Athens, and 'his spirit was stirred within him.' I see one
of the finest countries in the world, full of industrious inhabitants;
yet three-fifths of it are an uncultivated jungle, abandoned to wild
beasts and serpents. If the gospel flourishes here, 'the wilderness
will in every respect become a fruitful field.'"
Clive, Hastings (Macpherson during an interregnum of twenty-two
months), and Cornwallis, were the men who had founded and administered
the empire of British India up to this time. Carey passed the last
Governor-General in the Bay of Bengal as he retired with the honours of
a seven years' successful generalship and government to atone for the
not unhappy surrender of York Town, which had resulted in the
independence of the United States. Sir John Shore, afterwards Lord
Teignmouth, who had been selected by Pitt to carry out the reforms
which he had elaborated along with his predecessor, had entered on his
high office just a fortnight before. What a contrast was presented, as
man judges, by the shy shoemaker, schoolmaster, and Baptist preacher,
who found not a place in which to lay his head save a hovel lent to him
by a Hindoo, to Clive, whose suicide he might have heard of when a
child; to Hastings, who for seventeen years had stood before his
country impeached. They were men described by Macaulay as of ancient,
even illustrious lineage, and they had brought into existence an empire
more extensive than that of Rome. He was a peasant craftsman, who had
taught himself with a skill which Lord Wellesley, their successor
almost as great as themselves, delighted publicly to acknowledge--a man
of the people, of the class who had used the Roman Empire to build out
of it a universal Christendom, who were even then turning France upside
down, creating the Republic of America, and giving new life to Great
Britain itself. The little Englishman was about to do in Calcutta and
from Serampore what the little Jew, Paul, had done in Antioch and
Ephesus, from Corinth and Rome. England might send its nobly born to
erect the material and the secular fabric of empire, but it was only,
in the providence of God, that they might prepare for the poor village
preacher to convert the empire into a spiritual force which should in
time do for Asia what Rome had done for Western Christendom. But till
the last, as from the first, Carey was as unconscious of the part which
he had been called to play as he was unresting in the work which it
involved. It is no fanatical criticism, but the true philosophy of
history, which places Carey over against Clive, the spiritual and
secular founders, and Duff beside Hastings, the spiritual and secular
consolidators of our Indian Empire.
Carey's work for India underlay the first period of forty years of
transition from Cornwallis to Bentinck, as Duff's covered the second of
thirty years to the close of Lord Canning's administration, which
introduced the new era of full toleration and partial but increasing
self-government directed by the Viceroy and Parliament.
Carey had been sent not only to the one people outside of Christendom
whose conversion would tell most powerfully on all Asia, Africa, and
their islands--the Hindoos; but to the one province which was almost
entirely British, and could be used as it had been employed to
assimilate the rest of India--Bengal. Territorially the East India
Company possessed, when he landed, nothing outside of the Ganges valley
of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares, save a few spots on the Madras and
Malabar coasts and the portion just before taken in the Mysore war.
The rest was desolated by the Marathas, the Nizam, Tipoo, and other
Mohammedan adventurers. On the Gangetic delta and right up to
Allahabad, but not beyond, the Company ruled and raised revenue,
leaving the other functions of the state to Mohammedans of the type of
Turkish pashas under the titular superiority of the effete Emperor of
Delhi. The Bengali and Hindi-speaking millions of the Ganges and the
simpler aborigines of the hills had been devastated by the famine of
1769-70, which the Company's officials, who were powerless where they
did not intensify it by interference with trade, confessed to have cut
off from ten to twelve millions of human beings. Over three-fifths of
the area the soil was left without a cultivator. The whole young of
that generation perished, so that, even twenty years after, Lord
Cornwallis officially described one-third of Bengal as a jungle
inhabited only by wild beasts. A quarter of a century after Carey's
language was, as we have seen, "three-fifths of it are an uncultivated
jungle abandoned to wild beasts and serpents."
But the British peace, in Bengal at least, had allowed abundant crops
to work their natural result on the population. The local experience
of Shore, who had witnessed the horrors he could do so little to
relieve, had united with the statesmanship of Cornwallis to initiate a
series of administrative reforms that worked some evil, but more good,
all through Carey's time. First of all, as affecting the very
existence and the social development of the people, or their capacity
for being educated, Christianised, civilised in the highest sense,
there was the relation of the Government to the ryots ("protected
ones") and the zameendars ("landholders"). In India, as nearly all
over the world except in feudalised Britain, the state is the common
landlord in the interests of all classes who hold the soil subject to
the payment of customary rents, directly or through middlemen, to the
Government. For thirty years after Plassey the Government of India had
been learning its business, and in the process had injured both itself
and the landed classes, as much as has been done in Ireland. From a
mere trader it had been, more or less consciously, becoming a ruler. In
1786 the Court of Directors, in a famous letter, tried to arrest the
ruin which the famine had only hastened by ordering that a settlement
of the land-tax or revenue or rent be made, not with mere farmers like
the pashas of Turkey, but with the old zameendars, and that the rate be
fixed for ten years. Cornwallis and Shore took three years to make the
detailed investigations, and in 1789 the state rent-roll of Bengal
proper was fixed at £2,858,772 a year. The English peer, who was
Governor-General, at once jumped to the conclusion that this rate
should be fixed not only for ten years, but for ever. The experienced
Bengal civilian protested that to do that would be madness when a third
of the rich province was out of cultivation, and as to the rest its
value was but little known, and its estates were without reliable
survey or boundaries.
We can now see that, as usual, both were right in what they asserted
and wrong in what they denied. The principle of fixity of tenure and
tax cannot be over-estimated in its economic, social, and political
value, but it should have been applied to the village communities and
cultivating peasants without the intervention of middlemen other than
the large ancestral landholders with hereditary rights, and that on the
standard of corn rents. Cornwallis had it in his power thus to do what
some years afterwards Stein did in Prussia, with the result seen in the
present German people and empire. The dispute as to a permanent or a
decennial settlement was referred home, and Pitt, aided by Dundas and
Charles Grant, took a week to consider it. His verdict was given in
favour of feudalism. Eight months before Carey landed at Calcutta the
settlement had been declared perpetual; in 1795 it was extended to
Benares also.
During the next twenty years mismanagement and debt revolutionised the
landed interest, as in France at the same time, but in a very different
direction. The customary rights of the peasant proprietors had been
legislatively secured by reserving to the Governor-General the power
"to enact such regulations as he may think necessary for the protection
and welfare of the dependent talookdars, ryots, and other cultivators
of the soil." The peasants continued long to be so few that there was
competition for them; the process of extortion with the aid of the
courts had hardly begun when they were many, and the zameendars were
burdened with charges for the police. But in 1799 and again in 1812
the state, trembling for its rent, gave the zameendars further
authority. The principle of permanence of assessment so far
co-operated with the splendid fertility of the Ganges valley and the
peaceful multiplication of the people and spread of cultivation, that
all through the wars and annexations, up to the close of the Mutiny, it
was Bengal which enabled England to extend the empire up to its natural
limits from the two seas to the Himalaya. But in 1859 the first
attempt was made by the famous Act X. to check the rack-renting power
of the zameendars. And now, more than a century since the first step
was taken to arrest the ruin of the peasantry, the legislature of India
has again tried to solve for the whole country these four difficulties
which all past landed regulations have intensified--to give the state
tenants a guarantee against uncertain enhancements of rent, and against
taxation of improvements; to minimise the evil of taking rent in cash
instead of in kind by arranging the dates on which rent is paid; and to
mitigate if not prevent famine by allowing relief for failure of crops.
As pioneering, the work of Carey and his colleagues all through was
distinctly hindered by the treatment of the land question, which at
once ground down the mass of the people and created a class of
oppressive landlords destitute for the most part of public spirit and
the higher culture. Both were disinclined by their circumstances to
lend an ear to the Gospel, but these circumstances made it the more
imperative on the missionaries to tell them, to teach their children,
to print for all the glad tidings. Carey, himself of peasant
extraction, cared for the millions of the people above all; but his
work in the classical as well as the vernacular languages was equally
addressed to their twenty thousand landlords. The time of his
work--before Bentinck; and the centre of it--outside the metropolis,
left the use of the English weapon against Brahmanism largely for Duff.
When Cornwallis, following Warren Hastings, completed the substitution
of the British for the Mohammedan civil administration by a system of
courts and police and a code of regulations, he was guilty of one
omission and one mistake that it took years of discussion and action to
rectify. He did not abolish from the courts the use of Persian, the
language of the old Mussulman invaders, now foreign to all parties; and
he excluded from all offices above £30 a year the natives of the
country, contrary to their fair and politic practice. Bengal and its
millions, in truth, were nominally governed in detail by three hundred
white and upright civilians, with the inevitable result in abuses which
they could not prevent, and oppression of native by native which they
would not check, and the delay or development of reforms which the few
missionaries long called for in vain. In a word, after making the most
generous allowance for the good intentions of Cornwallis, and
conscientiousness of Shore, his successor, we must admit that Carey was
called to become the reformer of a state of society which the worst
evils of Asiatic and English rule combined to prevent him and other
self-sacrificing or disinterested philanthropists from purifying. The
East India Company, at home and in India, had reached that depth of
opposition to light and freedom in any form which justifies Burke's
extremest passages--the period between its triumph on the exclusion of
"the pious clauses" from the Charter of 1793 and its defeat in the
Charter of 1813. We shall reproduce some outlines of the picture which
Ward drew:--[7]
"On landing in Bengal, in the year 1793, our brethren found themselves
surrounded with a population of heathens (not including the Mahometans)
amounting to at least one hundred millions of souls.
"On the subject of the divine nature, with the verbal admission of the
doctrine of the divine unity, they heard these idolaters speak of
330,000,000 of gods. Amidst innumerable idol temples they found none
erected for the worship of the one living and true God. Services
without end they saw performed in honour of the elements and deified
heroes, but heard not one voice tuned to the praise or employed in the
service of the one God. Unacquainted with the moral perfections of
Jehovah, they saw this immense population prostrate before dead matter,
before the monkey, the serpent, before idols the very personifications
of sin; and they found this animal, this reptile, and the lecher
Krishnu {u-caron} and his concubine Radha, among the favourite
deities of the Hindoos...
"Respecting the real nature of the present state, the missionaries
perceived that the Hindoos laboured under the most fatal
misapprehensions; that they believed the good or evil actions of this
birth were not produced as the volitions of their own wills, but arose
from, and were the unavoidable results of, the actions of the past
birth; that their present actions would inevitably give rise to the
whole complexion of their characters and conduct in the following
birth; and that thus they were doomed to interminable transmigrations,
to float as some light substance upon the bosom of an irresistible
torrent...
"Amongst these idolaters no Bibles were found; no sabbaths; no
congregating for religious instruction in any form; no house for God;
no God but a log of wood, or a monkey; no Saviour but the Ganges; no
worship but that paid to abominable idols, and that connected with
dances, songs, and unutterable impurities; so that what should have
been divine worship, purifying, elevating, and carrying the heart to
heaven, was a corrupt but rapid torrent, poisoning the soul and
carrying it down to perdition; no morality, for how should a people be
moral whose gods are monsters of vice; whose priests are their
ringleaders in crime; whose scriptures encourage pride, impurity,
falsehood, revenge, and murder; whose worship is connected with
indescribable abominations, and whose heaven is a brothel? As might be
expected, they found that men died here without indulging the smallest
vestige of hope, except what can arise from transmigration, the hope,
instead of plunging into some place of misery, of passing into the body
of some reptile. To carry to such a people the divine word, to call
them together for sacred instruction, to introduce amongst them a pure
and heavenly worship, and to lead them to the observance of a Sabbath
on earth, as the preparative and prelude to a state of endless
perfection, was surely a work worthy for a Saviour to command, and
becoming a christian people to attempt."
The condition of women, who were then estimated at "seventy-five
millions of minds," and whom the census shows to be now above
144,000,000, is thus described after an account of female infanticide:--
"To the Hindoo female all education is denied by the positive
injunction of the shastru {u-caron}, and by the general voice
of the population. Not a single school for girls, therefore,
all over the country! With knitting, sewing, embroidery, painting,
music, and drawing, they have no more to do than with letters;
the washing is done by men of a particular tribe. The Hindoo
girl, therefore, spends the ten first years of her life in sheer
idleness, immured in the house of her father.
"Before she has attained to this age, however, she is sought after by
the ghutuks, men employed by parents to seek wives for their sons. She
is betrothed without her consent; a legal agreement, which binds her
for life, being made by the parents on both sides while she is yet a
child. At a time most convenient to the parents, this boy and girl are
brought together for the first time, and the marriage ceremony is
performed; after which she returns to the house of her father.
"Before the marriage is consummated, in many instances, the boy dies,
and this girl becomes a widow; and as the law prohibits the marriage of
widows, she is doomed to remain in this state as long as she lives.
The greater number of these unfortunate beings become a prey to the
seducer, and a disgrace to their families. Not long since a bride, on
the day the marriage ceremony was to have been performed, was burnt on
the funeral pile with the dead body of the bridegroom, at
Chandernagore, a few miles north of Calcutta. Concubinage, to a most
awful extent, is the fruit of these marriages without choice. What a
sum of misery is attached to the lot of woman in India before she has
attained even her fifteenth year!
"In some cases as many as fifty females, the daughters of so many
Hindoos, are given in marriage to one bramhun {u-caron}, in order to
make these families something more respectable, and that the parents
may be able to say, we are allied by marriage to the kooleens...
"But the awful state of female society in this miserable country
appears in nothing so much as in dooming the female, the widow, to be
burnt alive with the putrid carcase of her husband. The Hindoo
legislators have sanctioned this immolation, showing herein a studied
determination to insult and degrade woman. She is, therefore, in the
first instance, deluded into this act by the writings of these bramhuns
{u-caron}; in which also she is promised, that if she will offer
herself, for the benefit of her husband, on the funeral pile,
she shall, by the extraordinary merit of this action, rescue her
husband from misery, and take him and fourteen generations of his and
her family with her to heaven, where she shall enjoy with them
celestial happiness until fourteen kings of the gods shall have
succeeded to the throne of heaven (that is, millions of years!) Thus
ensnared, she embraces this dreadful death. I have seen three widows,
at different times, burnt alive; and had repeated opportunities of
being present at similar immolations, but my courage failed me...
"The burying alive of widows manifests, if that were possible, a still
more abominable state of feeling towards women than the burning them
alive. The weavers bury their dead. When, therefore, a widow of this
tribe is deluded into the determination not to survive her husband, she
is buried alive with the dead body. In this kind of immolation the
children and relations dig the grave. After certain ceremonies have
been attended to, the poor widow arrives, and is let down into the pit.
She sits in the centre, taking the dead body on her lap and encircling
it with her arms. These relations now begin to throw in the soil; and
after a short space, two of them descend into the grave, and tread the
earth firmly round the body of the widow. She sits a calm and
unremonstrating spectator of the horrid process. She sees the earth
rising higher and higher around her, without upbraiding her murderers,
or making the least effort to arise and make her escape. At length the
earth reaches her lips--covers her head. The rest of the earth is then
hastily thrown in, and these children and relations mount the grave,
and tread down the earth upon the head of the suffocating widow--the
mother!"
Before Carey, what had been done to turn the millions of North India
from such darkness as that? Nothing, beyond the brief and impulsive
efforts of Thomas. There does not seem to have been there one genuine
convert from any of the Asiatic faiths; there had never been even the
nucleus of a native church.
In South India, for the greater part of the century, the Coast Mission,
as it was called, had been carried on from Tranquebar as a centre by
the Lutherans whom, from Ziegenbalg to Schwartz, Francke had trained at
Halle and Friedrich IV. of Denmark had sent forth to its East India
Company's settlement. From the baptism of the first convert in 1707
and translation of the New Testament into Tamil, to the death in 1798
of Schwartz, with whom Carey sought to begin a correspondence then
taken up by Guericke, the foundations were laid around Madras, in
Tanjore, and in Tinnevelli of a native church which now includes nearly
a million. But, when Carey landed, rationalism in Germany and Denmark,
and the Carnatic wars between the English and French, had reduced the
Coast Mission to a state of inanition. Nor was Southern India the true
or ultimate battlefield against Brahmanism; the triumphs of
Christianity there were rather among the demon-worshipping tribes of
Dravidian origin than among the Aryan races till Dr. W. Miller
developed the Christian College. But the way for the harvest now being
reaped by the Evangelicals and Anglicans of the Church of England, by
the Independents of the London Missionary Society, the Wesleyans, and
the Presbyterians of Scotland and America, was prepared by the German
Ziegenbalg and Schwartz under Danish protection. The English
Propagation and Christian Knowledge Societies sent them occasional aid,
the first two Georges under the influence of their German chaplains
wrote to them encouraging letters, and the East India Company even gave
them a free passage in its ships, and employed the sculptor Bacon to
prepare the noble group of marble which, in St. Mary's Church, Madras,
expresses its gratitude to Schwartz for his political services.
It was Clive himself who brought to Calcutta the first missionary,
Kiernander the Swede, but he was rather a chaplain, or a missionary to
the Portuguese, who were nominal Christians of the lowest Romanist
type. The French had closed the Danish mission at Cuddalore, and in
1758 Calcutta was without a Protestant clergyman to bury the dead or
baptise or marry the living. Two years before one of the two chaplains
had perished in the tragedy of the Black Hole, where he was found lying
hand in hand with his son, a young lieutenant. The other had escaped
down the river only to die of fever along with many more. The victory
of Plassey and the large compensation paid for the destruction of Old
Calcutta and its church induced thousands of natives to flock to the
new capital, while the number of the European troops and officials was
about 2000. When chaplains were sent out, the Governor-General
officially wrote of them to the Court of Directors so late as
1795:--"Our clergy in Bengal, with some exceptions, are not respectable
characters." From the general relaxation of morals, he added, "a black
coat is no security." They were so badly paid--from £50 to £230 a
year, increased by £120 to meet the cost of living in Calcutta after
1764--that they traded. Preaching was the least of the chaplains'
duties; burying was the most onerous. Anglo-Indian society, cut off
from London, itself not much better, by a six months' voyage, was
corrupt. Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, his hostile colleague in
Council, lived in open adultery. The majority of the officials had
native women, and the increase of their children, who lived in a state
worse than that of the heathen, became so alarming that the
compensation paid by the Mohammedan Government of Moorshedabad for the
destruction of the church was applied to the foundation of the useful
charity still known as the Free School. The fathers not infrequently
adopted the Hindoo pantheon along with the zanana. The pollution,
springing from England originally, was rolled back into it in an
increasing volume, when the survivors retired as nabobs with fortunes,
to corrupt social and political life, till Pitt cried out; and it
became possible for Burke almost to succeed in his eighteen years'
impeachment of Hastings. The literature of the close of the eighteenth
century is full of alarm lest the English character should be
corrupted, and lest the balance of the constitution should be upset.
Kiernander is said to have been the means of converting 209 heathens
and 380 Romanists, of whom three were priests, during the twenty-eight
years of his Calcutta career. Claudius Buchanan declares that
Christian tracts had been translated into Bengali--one written by the
Bishop of Sodor and Man--and that in the time of Warren Hastings Hindoo
Christians had preached to their countrymen in the city. The "heathen"
were probably Portuguese descendants, in whose language Kiernander
preached as the lingua franca of the time. He could not even converse
in Bengali or Hindostani, and when Charles Grant went to him for
information as to the way of a sinner's salvation this happened--"My
anxious inquiries as to what I should do to be saved appeared to
embarrass and confuse him exceedingly. He could not answer my
questions, but he gave me some good instructive books." On
Kiernander's bankruptcy, caused by his son when the father was blind,
the "Mission Church" was bought by Grant, who wrote that its labours
"have been confined to the descendants of Europeans, and have hardly
ever embraced a single heathen, so that a mission to the Hindoos and
Mohammedans would be a new thing." The Rev. David Brown, who had been
sent out the year after as master and chaplain of the Military Orphan
Society, for the education of the children of officers and soldiers,
and was to become one of the Serampore circle of friends, preached to
Europeans only in the Mission Church. Carey could find no trace of
Kiernander's work among the natives six years after his death.[8] The
only converted Hindoo known of in Northern India up to that time was
Guneshan Dass, of Delhi, who when a boy joined Clive's army, who was
the first man of caste to visit England, and who, on his return with
the Calcutta Supreme Court Judges in 1774 as Persian interpreter and
translator, was baptised by Kiernander, Mr. justice Chambers being
sponsor.
William Carey had no predecessor in India as the first ordained
Englishman who was sent to it as a missionary; he had no predecessor in
Bengal and Hindostan proper as the first missionary from any land to
the people. Even the Moravians, who in 1777 had sent two brethren to
Serampore, Calcutta, and Patna, had soon withdrawn them, and one of
them became the Company's botanist in Madras--Dr. Heyne. Carey
practically stood alone at the first, while he unconsciously set in
motion the double revolution, which was to convert the Anglo-Indian
influence on England from corrupting heathenism to aggressive
missionary zeal, and to change the Bengal of Cornwallis into the India
of Bentinck, with all the possibilities that have made it grow, thus
far, into the India of the Lawrences.