THE NEW CRUSADE--SERAMPORE AND THE BROTHERHOOD
1800
Effects of the news in England on the Baptists--On the home
churches--In the foundation of the London and other Missionary
Societies--In Scotland--In Holland and America--The missionary
home--Joshua Marshman, William Ward, and two others sent out--Landing
at the Iona of Southern Asia--Meeting of Ward and Carey--First attempt
to evangelise the non-Aryan hill tribes--Carey driven by providences to
Serampore--Dense population of Hoogli district--Adapts his communistic
plan to the new conditions--Purchase of the property--Constitution of
the Brotherhood--His relations to Marshman and Ward--Hannah Marshman,
the first woman missionary--Daily life of the Brethren--Form of
Agreement--Carey's ideal system of missionary administration realised
for fifteen years--Spiritual heroism of the Brotherhood.
The first two English missionaries to India seemed to those who sent
them forth to have disappeared for ever. For fourteen months, in those
days of slow Indiamen and French privateers, no tidings of their
welfare reached the poor praying people of the midlands, who had been
emboldened to begin the heroic enterprise. The convoy, which had seen
the Danish vessel fairly beyond the French coast, had been unable to
bring back letters on account of the weather. At last, on the 29th
July 1794, Fuller, the secretary; Pearce, the beloved personal friend
of Carey; Ryland in Bristol; and the congregation at Leicester,
received the journals of the voyage and letters which told of the first
six weeks' experience at Balasore, in Calcutta, Bandel, and Nuddea,
just before Carey knew the worst of their pecuniary position. The
committee at once met. They sang "with sacred joy" what has ever since
been the jubilee hymn of missions, that by William Williams--
"O'er those gloomy hills of darkness."
They "returned solemn thanks to the everlasting God whose mercy
endureth for ever, for having preserved you from the perils of the sea,
and hitherto made your ways prosperous. In reading the short account
of your labours we feel something of that spirit spoken of in the
prophet, 'Thine heart shall fear and be enlarged.' We cordially thank
you for your assiduity in learning the languages, in translating, and
in every labour of love in which you have engaged. Under God we
cheerfully confide in your wisdom, fidelity, and prudence, with
relation to the seat of your labours or the means to carry them into
effect. If there be one place, however, which strikes us as of more
importance than the rest, it is Nuddea. But you must follow where the
Lord opens a door for you." The same spirit of generous confidence
marked the relations of Carey and the committee so long as Fuller was
secretary. When the news came that the missionaries had become indigo
planters, some of the weaker brethren, estimating Carey by themselves,
sent out a mild warning against secular temptations, to which he
returned a half-amused and kindly reply. John Newton, then the aged
rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, on being consulted, reassured them: "If
the heart be fired with a zeal for God and love to souls," he said,
"such attention to business as circumstances require will not hurt it."
Since Carey, like the Moravians, meant that the missionaries should
live upon a common stock, and never lay up money, the weakest might
have recognised the Paul-like nobleness, which had marked all his life,
in relinquishing the scanty salary that it might be used for other
missions to Africa and Asia.
The spiritual law which Duff's success afterwards led Chalmers to
formulate, that the relation of foreign to home missions acts not by
exhaustion but by fermentation, now came to be illustrated on a great
scale, and to result in the foundation of the catholic missionary
enterprise of the evangelicals of England, Scotland, Ireland, America,
Germany, and France, which has marked the whole nineteenth century. We
find it first in Fuller himself. In comforting Thomas during his
extremest dejection he quoted to him from his own journal of 1789 the
record of a long period of spiritual inactivity, which continued till
Carey compelled him to join in the mission. "Before this I did little
but pine over my misery, but since I have betaken myself to greater
activity for God, my strength has been recovered and my soul
replenished." "Your work is a great work, and the eyes of the religious
world are upon you. Your undertaking, with that of your dear colleague,
has provoked many. The spirit of missions is gone forth. I wish it
may never stop till the Gospel is sent unto all the world."
Following the pietist Francke, who in 1710 published the first
missionary reports, and also the Moravians, Fuller and his coadjutors
issued from the press of J. W. Morris at Clipstone, towards the end of
1794, No. I. of their Periodical Accounts relative to a Society formed
among the Particular Baptists for Propagating the Gospel among the
Heathen. That contained a narrative of the foundation of the Society
and the letters of Carey up to 15th February 1794 from the Soondarbans.
Six of these Accounts appeared up to the year 1800, when they were
published as one volume with an index and illustrations. The volume
closes with a doggerel translation of one of several Gospel ballads
which Carey had written in Bengali in 1798. He had thus early brought
into the service of Christ the Hindoo love of musical recitative, which
was recently re-discovered--as it were--and now forms an important mode
of evangelistic work when accompanied by native musical instruments.
The original has a curious interest and value in the history of the
Bengali language, as formed by Carey. As to the music he wrote:--"We
sometimes have a melody that cheers my heart, though it would be
discordant upon the ears of an Englishman."
Such was the immediate action of the infant Baptist Society. The
moment Dr. Ryland read his letter from Carey he sent for Dr. Bogue and
Mr. Stephen, who happened to be in Bristol, to rejoice with him. The
three returned thanks to God, and then Bogue and Stephen, calling on
Mr. Hey, a leading minister, took the first step towards the foundation
of a similar organisation of non-Baptists, since known as the London
Missionary Society. Immediately Bogue, the able Presbyterian, who had
presided over a theological school at Gosport from which missionaries
went forth, and who refused the best living in Edinburgh when offered
to him by Dundas, wrote his address, which appeared in the Evangelical
Magazine for September, calling on the churches to send out at least
twenty or thirty missionaries. In the sermon of lofty eloquence which
he preached the year after, he declared that the missionary movement of
that time would form an epoch in the history of man,--"the time will be
ever remembered by us, and may it be celebrated by future ages as the
Æra of Christian Benevolence."
On the same day the Rev. T. Haweis, rector of All Saints, Aldwinkle,
referring to the hundreds of ministers collected to decide where the
first mission should be sent, thus burst forth: "Methinks I see the
great Angel of the Covenant in the midst of us, pluming his wings, and
ready to fly through the midst of heaven with his own everlasting
Gospel, to every nation and tribe and tongue and people." In Hindostan
"our brethren the Baptists have at present prevented our wishes...there
is room for a thousand missionaries, and I wish we may be ready with a
numerous host for that or any other part of the earth."
"Scotland[10] was the next to take up the challenge sent by Carey.
Greville Ewing, then a young minister of the kirk in Edinburgh,
published in March 1796 the appeal of the Edinburgh or Scottish
Missionary Society, which afterwards sent John Wilson to Bombay, and
that was followed by the Glasgow Society, to which we owe the most
successful of the Kafir missions in South Africa. Robert Haldane sold
all that he had when he read the first number of the Periodical
Accounts, and gave £35,000 to send a Presbyterian mission of six
ministers and laymen, besides himself, to do from Benares what Carey
had planned from Mudnabati; but Pitt as well as Dundas, though his
personal friends, threatened him with the Company's intolerant Act of
Parliament. Evangelical ministers of the Church of England took their
proper place in the new crusade, and a year before the eighteenth
century closed they formed the agency, which has ever since been in the
forefront of the host of the Lord as the Church Missionary Society,
with Carey's friend, Thomas Scott, as its first secretary. The sacred
enthusiasm was caught by the Netherlands on the one side under the
influence of Dr. Van der Kemp, who had studied at Edinburgh University,
and by the divinity students of New England, of whom Adoniram Judson
was even then in training to receive from Carey the apostolate of
Burma. Soon too the Bengali Bible translations were to unite with the
needs of the Welsh at home to establish the British and Foreign Bible
Society.
As news of all this reached Carey amid his troubles and yet triumphs of
faith in the swamps of Dinajpoor, and when he learned that he was soon
to be joined by four colleagues, one of whom was Ward whom he himself
had trysted to print the Bengali Bible for him, he might well write, in
July 1799:--"The success of the Gospel and, among other things, the
hitherto unextinguishable missionary flame in England and all the
western world, give us no little encouragement and animate our hearts."
To Sutcliff he had written eighteen months before that:--"I rejoice
much at the missionary spirit which has lately gone forth: surely it is
a prelude to the universal spread of the Gospel! Your account of the
German Moravian Brethren's affectionate regard towards me is very
pleasing. I am not much moved by what men in general say of me; yet I
cannot be insensible to the regards of men eminent for
godliness...Staying at home is now become sinful in many cases, and
will become so more and more. All gifts should be encouraged, and
spread abroad."
The day was breaking now. Men as well as money were offered for
Carey's work. In Scotland especially Fuller found that he had but to
ask, but to appear in any evangelical pulpit, and he would receive sums
which, in that day of small things, rebuked his little faith. Till the
last Scotland was loyal to Carey and his colleagues, and with almost a
prevision of this he wrote so early as 1797:--"It rejoices my heart
much to hear of our brethren in Scotland having so liberally set
themselves to encourage the mission." They approved of his plans, and
prayed for him and his work. When Fuller called on Cecil for help, the
"churchy" evangelical told him he had a poor opinion of all Baptists
except one, the man who wrote The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation.
When he learned that its author was before him, the hasty offender
apologised and offered a subscription. "Not a farthing, sir!" was the
reply, "you do not give in faith;" but the persistent Cecil prevailed.
Men, however, were a greater want than money at that early stage of the
modern crusade. Thomas and Fountain had each been a mistake. So were
the early African missionaries, with the exception of the first
Scotsman, Peter Greig. Of the thirty sent out by the London Missionary
Society in the Duff only four were fit for ordination, and not one has
left a name of mark. The Church Mission continued to send out only
Germans till 1815. In quick succession four young men offered
themselves to the Baptist Society to go out as assistants to Carey, in
the hope that the Company would give them a covenant to
reside--Brunsdon and Grant, two of Ryland's Bristol flock; Joshua
Marshman with his wife Hannah Marshman, and William Ward called by
Carey himself.
In nine months Fuller had them and their families shipped in an
American vessel, the Criterion, commanded by Captain Wickes, a
Presbyterian elder of Philadelphia, who ever after promoted the cause
in the United States. Charles Grant helped them as he would have aided
Carey alone. Though the most influential of the Company's directors,
he could not obtain a passport for them, but he gave them the very
counsel which was to provide for the young mission its ark of defence:
"Do not land at Calcutta but at Serampore, and there, under the
protection of the Danish flag, arrange to join Mr. Carey." After five
months' prosperous voyage the party reached the Hoogli. Before
arriving within the limits of the port of Calcutta Captain Wickes sent
them off in two boats under the guidance of a Bengali clerk to
Serampore, fifteen miles higher up on the right bank of the river.
They had agreed that he should boldly enter them, not as assistant
planters, but as Christian missionaries, rightly trusting to Danish
protection. Charles Grant had advised them well, but it is not easy
now, as in the case of their predecessors in 1795 and of their
successors up to 1813, to refrain from indignation that the British
Parliament, and the party led by William Pitt, should have so long lent
all the weight of their power to the East India Company in the vain
attempt to keep Christianity from the Hindoos. Ward's journal thus
simply tells the story of the landing of the missionaries at this Iona,
this Canterbury of Southern Asia:--
"Lord's-day, Oct. 13, 1799.--Brother Brunsdon and I slept in the open
air on our chests. We arrived at Serampore this morning by daylight,
in health and pretty good spirits. We put up at Myerr's, a Danish
tavern to which we had been recommended. No worship to-day. Nothing
but a Portuguese church here.
"Oct. 14.--Mr. Forsyth from Calcutta, missionary belonging to the
London Missionary Society, astonished us by his presence this
afternoon. He was wholly unknown, but soon became well known. He gave
us a deal of interesting information. He had seen brother Carey, who
invited him to his house, offered him the assistance of his Moonshi,
etc.
"Oct. 16--The Captain having been at Calcutta came and informed us that
his ship could not be entered unless we made our appearance. Brother
Brunsdon and I went to Calcutta, and the next day we were informed that
the ship had obtained an entrance, on condition that we appeared at the
Police Office, or would continue at Serampore. All things considered we
preferred the latter, till the arrival of our friends from Kidderpore
to whom we had addressed letters. Captain Wickes called on Rev. Mr.
Brown, who very kindly offered to do anything for us in his power. Our
Instructions with respect to our conduct towards Civil Government were
read to him. He promised to call at the Police Office afterwards, and
to inform the Master that we intended to stay at Serampore, till we had
leave to go up the country. Captain Wickes called at the office
afterwards, and they seemed quite satisfied with our declaration by
him. In the afternoon we went to Serampore.
"Oct. 19.--I addressed a letter to the Governor to-day begging his
acceptance of the last number of our Periodical Accounts, and informing
him that we proposed having worship to-morrow in our own house, from
which we did not wish to exclude any person.
"Lord's-day, Oct. 20.--This morning the Governor sent to inquire the
hours of our worship. About half-past ten he came to our house with a
number of gentlemen and their retinue. I preached from Acts xx. 24.
We had a very attentive congregation of Europeans: several appeared
affected, among whom was the Governor."
The text was well chosen from Paul's words to the elders of Ephesus, as
he turned his face towards the bonds and afflictions that awaited
him--"But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear
unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the
ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel
of the grace of God." It proved to be a history of the three men
thenceforth best known as the Serampore Missionaries. Ward, too, the
literary member of the mission, composed the hymn which thus
concluded:--
"Yes, we are safe beneath Thy shade,
And shall be so 'midst India's heat:
What should a missionary dread,
For devils crouch at Jesus' feet.
"There, sweetest Saviour! let Thy cross
Win many Hindoo hearts to Thee;
This shall make up for every loss,
While Thou art ours eternally."
In his first letter to a friend in Hull Ward used language which
unconsciously predicted the future of the mission:--"With a Bible and a
press posterity will see that a missionary will not labour in vain,
even in India." But one of their number, Grant, was meanwhile removed
by death, and, while they waited for a month, Carey failed to obtain
leave for them to settle as his assistants in British territory. He
had appealed to Mr. Brown, and to Dr. Roxburgh, his friend in charge of
the Botanic Garden, to use his influence with the Government through
Colebrooke, the Oriental scholar, then high in the service. But it was
in vain. The police had seen with annoyance the missionaries slip from
their grasp because of the liberality of the Governor-General of whom
Carey had written to Ryland a year before: "At Calcutta, I saw much
dissipation; but yet I think less than formerly. Lord Mornington has
set his face against sports, gaming, horse-racing, and working on the
Lord's-day; in consequence of which these infamous practices are less
common than formerly." The missionaries, too, had at first been
reported not as Baptist but as "Papist," and the emissaries of France,
believed to be everywhere, must be watched against. The brave little
Governor let it be understood that he would protect to the last the men
who had been committed to his care by the Danish consul in London. So
Ward obtained a Danish passport to enable him to visit Dinapoor and
consult with Carey.
It was Sunday morning when he approached the Mudnabati factory,
"feeling very unusual sensations," greatly excited. "At length I saw
Carey! He is less altered than I expected: has rather more flesh than
when in England, and, blessed be God! he is a young man still." It was
a wrench to sacrifice his own pioneer mission, property worth £500, the
school, the church, the inquirers, but he did not hesitate. He thus
stated the case on the other side:--"At Serampore we may settle as
missionaries, which is not allow here; and the great ends of the
mission, particularly the printing of the Scriptures, seem much more
likely to be answered in that situation than in this. There also
brother Ward can have the inspection of the press; whereas here we
should be deprived of his important assistance. In that part of the
country the inhabitants are far more numerous than in this; and other
missionaries may there be permitted to join us, which here it seems
they will not." On the way down, during a visit to the Rajmahal Hills,
round which the great Ganges sweeps, Carey and Ward made the first
attempt to evangelise the Santal and other simple aboriginal tribes,
whom the officials Brown and Cleveland had partly tamed. The Paharis
are described, at that time, as without caste, priests, or public
religion, as living on Indian corn and by hunting, for which they carry
bows and arrows. "Brother Carey was able to converse with them."
Again, Ward's comment on the Bengali services on the next Sunday, from
the boats, is "the common sort wonder how brother Carey can know so
much of the Shasters." "I long," wrote Carey from the spot to his new
colleagues, "to stay here and tell these social and untutored heathen
the good news from heaven. I have a strong persuasion that the
doctrine of a dying Saviour would, under the Holy Spirit's influence,
melt their hearts." From Taljheri and Pokhuria, near that place, to
Parisnath, Ranchi, and Orissa, thousands of Santals and Kols have since
been gathered into the kingdom.
On the 10th January 1800 Carey took up his residence at Serampore, on
the 11th he was presented to the Governor, and "he went out and
preached to the natives." His apprenticeship was over; so began his
full apostolate, instant in season and out of season, to end only with
his life thirty-four years after.
Thus step by step, by a way that he knew not, the shoemaker lad--who
had educated himself to carry the Gospel to Tahiti, had been sent to
Bengal in spite of the Company which cast him out of their ship, had
starved in Calcutta, had built him a wooden hut in the jungles of the
Delta, had become indigo planter in the swamps of Dinapoor that he
might preach Christ without interference, had been forced to think of
seeking the protection of a Buddhist in the Himalaya morass--was driven
to begin anew in the very heart of the most densely peopled part of the
British Empire, under the jealous care of the foreign European power
which had a century before sent missionaries to Tranquebar and taught
Zinzendorf and the Moravians the divine law of the kingdom; encouraged
by a Governor, Colonel Bie, who was himself a disciple of Schwartz. To
complete this catalogue of special providences we may add that, if
Fuller had delayed only a little longer, even Serampore would have been
found shut against the missionaries. For the year after, when
Napoleon's acts had driven us to war with Denmark, a detachment of
British troops, under Lord Minto's son, took possession of
Fredericksnagore, as Serampore was officially called, and of the Danish
East India Company's ship there, without opposition.
The district or county of Hoogli and Howrah, opposite Calcutta and
Barrackpore, of which Serampore is the central port, swarms with a
population, chiefly Hindoo but partly Mussulman, unmatched for density
in any other part of the world. If, after years of a decimating fever,
each of its 1701 square miles still supports nearly a thousand human
beings or double the proportion of Belgium, we cannot believe that it
was much less dense at the beginning of the century. From Howrah, the
Surrey side of Calcutta, up to Hoogli the county town, the high ridge
of mud between the river and the old channel of the Ganges to the west,
has attracted the wealthiest and most intellectually active of all the
Bengalees. Hence it was here that Portuguese and Dutch, French and
English, and Danish planted their early factories. The last to obtain
a site of twenty acres from the moribund Mussulman Government at
Moorshedabad was Denmark, two years before Plassey. In the half
century the hut of the first Governor sent from Tranquebar had grown
into the "beautiful little town" which delighted the first Baptist
missionaries. Its inhabitants, under only British administration since
1845, now number 45,000. Then they were much fewer, but then even more
than now the town was a centre of the Vishnoo-worship of Jagganath,
second only to that of Pooree in all India. Not far off, and now
connected with the port by railway, is the foul shrine of Tarakeswar,
which attracts thousands of pilgrims, many of them widows, who measure
the road with their prostrate bodies dripping from the bath.
Commercially Serampore sometimes distanced Calcutta itself, for all the
foreign European trade was centred in it during the American and French
wars, and the English civilians used its investments as the best means
of remitting their savings home. When the missionaries landed there
was nothing but a Portuguese Catholic church in the settlement, and the
Governor was raising subscriptions for that pretty building in which
Carey preached till he died, and the spire of which the
Governor-General is said to have erected to improve the view of the
town from the windows of his summer palace at Barrackpore opposite.
Removed from the rural obscurity of a Bengali village, where the cost
of housing, clothing, and living was small, to a town in the
neighbourhood of the capital much frequented by Europeans, Carey at
once adapted the practical details of his communistic brotherhood to
the new circumstances. With such wisdom was he aided in this by the
business experience of Marshman and Ward, that a settlement was formed
which admitted of easy development in correspondence with the rapid
growth of the mission. At first the community consisted of ten adults
and nine children. Grant had been carried off in a fever caused by the
dampness of their first quarters. The promising Brunsdon was soon
after removed by liver complaint caught from standing on an unmatted
floor in the printing-office. Fountain, who at first continued the
mission at Dinapoor, soon died there a happy death. Thomas had settled
at Beerbhoom, but joined the Serampore brethren in time to do good
though brief service before he too was cut off. But, fortunately as it
proved for the future, Carey had to arrange for five families at the
first, and this is how it was done as described by Ward:--
"The renting of a house, or houses, would ruin us. We hoped therefore
to have been able to purchase land, and build mat houses upon it; but
we can get none properly situated. We have in consequence purchased of
the Governor's nephew a large house in the middle of the town for
Rs.6000, or about £800; the rent in four years would have amounted to
the purchase. It consists of a spacious verandah (portico) and hall,
with two rooms on each side. Rather more to the front are two other
rooms separate, and on one side is a storehouse, separate also, which
will make a printing-office. It stands by the river-side upon a pretty
large piece of ground, walled round, with a garden at the bottom, and
in the middle a fine tank or pool of water. The price alarmed us, but
we had no alternative; and we hope this will form a comfortable
missionary settlement. Being near to Calcutta, it is of the utmost
importance to our school, our press, and our connection with England."
"From hence may the Gospel issue and pervade all India," they wrote to
Fuller. "We intend to teach a school, and make what we can of our
press. The paper is all arrived, and the press, with the types, etc.,
complete. The Bible is wholly translated, except a few chapters, so
that we intend to begin printing immediately, first the New and then
the Old Testament. We love our work, and will do all we can to lighten
your expenses."
This house-chapel, with two acres of garden land and separate rooms on
either side, continued till 1875 to be the nucleus of the settlement
afterwards celebrated all over South Asia and Christendom. The chapel
is still sacred to the worship of God. The separate rooms to the left,
fronting the Hoogli, became enlarged into the stately residence of Mr.
John Marshman, C.S.I., and his two successors in the Friend of India,
while beyond were the girl's school, now removed, the residence of Dr.
Joshua Marshman before his death, and the boys' school presented to the
mission by the King of Denmark. The separate rooms to the right grew
into the press; farther down the river was the house of the Lady Rumohr
who became Carey's second wife, with the great paper-mill behind; and,
still farther, the second park in which the Serampore College was
built, with the principal's house in which Carey died, and a hostel for
the Native Christian students behind. The whole settlement finally
formed a block of at least five acres, with almost palatial buildings,
on the right bank of the Hoogli, which, with a breadth of half a mile
when in flood, rolls between it and the Governor-General's summer house
and English-like park of Barrackpore. The original two acres became
Carey's Botanic Garden; the houses he surrounded and connected by
mahogany trees, which grew to be of umbrageous beauty. His favourite
promenade between the chapel and the mill, and ultimately the college,
was under an avenue of his own planting, long known as "Carey's Walk."
The new colleagues who were to live with him in loving brotherhood till
death removed the last in 1837 were not long in attracting him. The two
were worthy to be associated with him, and so admirably supplemented
his own deficiencies that the brotherhood became the most potent and
permanent force in India. He thus wrote to Fuller his first
impressions of them, with a loving self-depreciation:--"Brother Ward is
the very man we wanted: he enters into the work with his whole soul. I
have much pleasure in him, and expect much from him. Brother Marshman
is a prodigy of diligence and prudence, as is also his wife in the
latter: learning the language is mere play to him; he has already
acquired as much as I did in double the time." After eight months of
study and evangelising work they are thus described:--"Our brother
Marshman, who is a true missionary, is able to talk a little; he goes
out frequently, nay almost every day, and assaults the fortress of
Satan. Brother Brunsdon can talk a little, though not like Marshman.
Brother Ward is a great prize; he does not learn the language so
quickly, but he is so holy, so spiritual a man, and so useful among the
children."
Thus early did Carey note the value of Hannah Marshman, the first woman
missionary to India. Granddaughter of the Baptist minister of
Crockerton in Wiltshire, she proved to be for forty-six years at once a
loving wife, and the equal of the three missionaries of Christ and of
civilisation whom she aided in the common home, in the schools, in the
congregation, in the Native Christian families, and even, at that early
time, in purely Hindoo circles. Without her the mission must have been
one-sided indeed. It gives us a pathetic interest to turn to her
household books, where we find entered with loving care and thoughtful
thrift all the daily details which at once form a valuable contribution
to the history of prices, and show how her "prudence" combined with the
heroic self-denial of all to make the Serampore mission the light of
India. Ward's journal supplies this first sketch of the brotherhood,
who realised, more than probably any in Protestant, Romanist, or Greek
hagiology, the life of the apostolic community in Jerusalem:--
"January 18, 1800.--This week we have adopted a set of rules for the
government of the family. All preach and pray in turn; one
superintends the affairs of the family for a month, and then another;
brother Carey is treasurer, and has the regulation of the medicine
chest; brother Fountain is librarian. Saturday evening is devoted to
adjusting differences, and pledging ourselves to love one another. One
of our resolutions is, that no one of us do engage in private trade;
but that all be done for the benefit of the mission...
"August 1.--Our labours for every day are now regularly arranged. About
six o'clock we rise; brother Carey to his garden; brother Marshman to
his school at seven; brother Brunsdon, Felix, and I, to the
printing-office. At eight the bell rings for family worship: we
assemble in the hall; sing, read, and pray. Breakfast. Afterwards,
brother Carey goes to the translation, or reading proofs: brother
Marshman to school, and the rest to the printing-office. Our
compositor having left us, we do without: we print three half-sheets of
2000 each in a week; have five pressmen, one folder, and one binder.
At twelve o'clock we take a luncheon; then most of us shave and bathe,
read and sleep before dinner, which we have at three. After dinner we
deliver our thoughts on a text or question: this we find to be very
profitable. Brother and sister Marshman keep their schools till after
two. In the afternoon, if business be done in the office, I read and
try to talk Bengali with the bràmmhàn. We drink tea about seven, and
have little or no supper. We have Bengali preaching once or twice in
the week, and on Thursday evening we have an experience meeting. On
Saturday evening we meet to compose differences and transact business,
after prayer, which is always immediately after tea. Felix is very
useful in the office; William goes to school, and part of the day
learns to bind. We meet two hours before breakfast on the first Monday
in the month, and each one prays for the salvation of the Bengal
heathen. At night we unite our prayers for the universal spread of the
Gospel."
The "Form of Agreement" which regulated the social economy and
spiritual enterprise of the brotherhood, and also its legal relations
to the Baptist Society in England, deserves study, in its divine
disinterestedness, its lofty aims, and its kindly common sense. Fuller
had pledged the Society in 1798 to send out £360 a year for the joint
family of six missionaries, their wives, and children. The house and
land at Serampore cost the Society Rs.6000. On Grant's death, leaving a
widow and two children, the five missionaries made the first voluntary
agreement, which "provided that no one should trade on his own private
account, and that the product of their labour should form a common fund
to be applied at the will of the majority, to the support of their
respective families, of the cause of God around them, and of the widow
and family of such as might be removed by death." The first year the
schools and the press enabled the brotherhood to be more than
self-supporting. In the second year Carey's salary from the College of
Fort-William, and the growth of the schools and press, gave them a
surplus for mission extension. They not only paid for the additional
two houses and ground required by such extension, but they paid back to
the Society all that it had advanced for the first purchase in the
course of the next six years. They acquired all the property for the
Serampore Mission, duly informing the home Committee from time to time,
and they vested the whole right, up to Fuller's death in 1815, in the
Society, "to prevent the premises being sold or becoming private
property in the families." But "to secure their own quiet occupation
of them, and enable them to leave them in the hands of such as they
might associate with themselves in their work, they declared themselves
trustees instead of proprietors."
The agreement of 1800 was expanded into the "Form of Agreement" of 1805
when the spiritual side of the mission had grown. Their own
authoritative statement, as given above, was lovingly recognised by
Fuller. In 1817, and again in 1820, the claims of aged and destitute
relatives, and the duty of each brother making provision for his own
widow and orphans, and, occasionally, the calls of pity and humanity,
led the brotherhood to agree that "each shall regularly deduct a tenth
of the net product of his labour to form a fund in his own hands for
these purposes." We know nothing in the history of missions, monastic
or evangelical, which at all approaches this in administrative
perfectness as well is in Christlike self-sacrifice. It prevents
secularisation of spirit, stimulates activity of all kinds, gives full
scope to local ability and experience, calls forth the maximum of local
support and propagation, sets the church at home free to enter
incessantly on new fields, provides permanence as well as variety of
action and adaptation to new circumstances, and binds the whole in a
holy bond of prayerful co-operation and loving brotherhood. This
Agreement worked for seventeen years, with a success in England and
India which we shall trace, or as long as Fuller, Ryland, and Sutcliff
lived "to hold the ropes," while Carey, Marshman, and Ward excavated
the mine of Hindooism.
The spiritual side of the Agreement we find in the form which the three
drew up in 1805, to be read publicly at all their stations thrice every
year, on the Lord's Day. It is the ripe fruit of the first eleven years
of Carey's daily toil and consecrated genius, as written out by the
fervent pen of Ward. In the light of it the whole of Carey's life must
be read. In these concluding sentences the writer sketches Carey
himself:--"Let us often look at Brainerd in the woods of America,
pouring out his very soul before God for the perishing heathen, without
whose salvation nothing could make you happy. Prayer, secret, fervent,
believing prayer, lies at the root of all personal godliness. A
competent knowledge of the languages current where a missionary lives,
a mild and winning temper, and a heart given up to God in closet
religion; these, these are the attainments which more than all
knowledge or all other gifts, will fit us to become the instruments of
God in the great work of human redemption. Finally, let us give
ourselves unreservedly to this glorious cause. Let us never think that
our time, our gifts, our strength, our families, or even the clothes we
wear are our own. Let us sanctify them all to God and His cause. Oh!
that He may sanctify us for His work. Let us for ever shut out the
idea of laying up a cowrie (mite) for ourselves or our children. If we
give up the resolution which was formed on the subject of private
trade, when we first united at Serampore, the mission is from that hour
a lost cause. Let us continually watch against a worldly spirit, and
cultivate a Christian indifference towards every indulgence. Rather
let us bear hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. No private
family ever enjoyed a greater portion of happiness, even in the most
prosperous gale of worldly prosperity, than we have done since we
resolved to have all things in common. If we are enabled to persevere
in the same principles, we may hope that multitudes of converted souls
will have reason to bless God to all eternity for sending His Gospel
into this country."
Such was the moral heroism, such the spiritual aim of the Serampore
brotherhood; how did it set to work?