THE WYCLIF OF THE EAST--BIBLE TRANSLATION
1801-1832
The Bible Carey's missionary weapon--Other vernacular
translators--Carey's modest but just description of his labours--His
philological key--Type-cutting and type-casting by a Hindoo
blacksmith--The first manufacture of paper and steam-engines in the
East--Carey takes stock of the translation work at the opening of
1808--In his workshop--A seminary of Bible translators--William Yates,
shoemaker, the Coverdale of the Bengali Bible--Wenger--A Bengali Luther
wanted--Carey's Bengali Bible--How the New Testament was printed--The
first copy offered to God--Reception of the volume by Lord Spencer and
George III.--Self-evidencing power of the first edition--The Bible in
Ooriya--In Maghadi, Assamese, Khasi, and Manipoori--Marathi, Konkani,
and Goojarati versions--The translation into Hindi and its many
dialects--The Dravidian translations--Tale of the Pushtoo Bible--The
Sikhs and the Bible--The first Burman version and press--The British
and Foreign Bible Society--Deaths, earthquake, and fire in
1812--Destruction of the press--Thomason's description of the smoking
ruins--Carey's heroism as to his manuscripts--Enthusiastic sympathy of
India and Christendom--The ph[oe]nix and its feathers.
Every great reform in the world has been, in the first instance, the
work of one man, who, however much he may have been the product of his
time, has conceived and begun to execute the movement which transforms
society. This is true alike of the moral and the physical forces of
history, of contemporaries so apparently opposite in character and aims
as Carey and Clarkson on the one side and Napoleon and Wellington on
the other. Carey stood alone in his persistent determination that the
Church should evangelise the world. He was no less singular in the
means which he insisted on as the first essential condition of its
evangelisation--the vernacular translation of the Bible. From the
Scriptures alone, while yet a journeyman shoemaker of eighteen, "he had
formed his own system," and had been filled with the divine missionary
idea. That was a year before the first Bible Society was formed in
1780 to circulate the English Bible among soldiers and sailors; and, a
quarter of a century before his own success led to the formation in
1804 of the British and Foreign Bible Society. From the time of his
youth, when he realised the self-evidencing power of the Bible, Carey's
unbroken habit was to begin every morning by reading one chapter of the
Bible, first in English, and then in each of the languages, soon,
numbering six, which he had himself learned.
Hence the translation of the Bible into all the languages and principal
dialects of India and Eastern Asia was the work above all others to
which Carey set himself from the time, in 1793, when he acquired the
Bengali. He preached, he taught, he "discipled" in every form then
reasonable and possible, and in the fullest sense of his Master's
missionary charge. But the one form of most pressing and abiding
importance, the condition without which neither true faith, nor true
science, nor true civilisation could exist or be propagated outside of
the narrow circle to be reached by the one herald's voice, was the
publishing of the divine message in the mother tongues of the millions
of Asiatic men and women, boys and girls, and in the learned tongues
also of their leaders and priests. Wyclif had first done this for the
English-reading races of all time, translating from the Latin, and so
had begun the Reformation, religious and political, not only in Britain
but in Western Christendom. Erasmus and Luther had followed him--the
former in his Greek and Latin New Testament and in his Paraphrase of
the Word for "women and cobblers, clowns, mechanics, and even the
Turks"; the latter in his great vernacular translation of the edition
of Erasmus, who had never ceased to urge his contemporaries to
translate the Scriptures "into all tongues." Tyndale had first given
England the Bible from the Hebrew and the Greek. And now one of these
cobblers was prompted and enabled by the Spirit who is the author of
the truth in the Scriptures, to give to South and Eastern Asia the
sacred books which its Syrian sons, from Moses and Ezra to Paul and
John, had been inspired to write for all races and all ages.
Emphatically, Carey and his later coadjutors deserve the language of
the British and Foreign Bible Society, when, in 1827, it made to
Serampore a last grant of money for translation--"Future generations
will apply to them the words of the translators of the English
Bible--'Therefore blessed be they and most honoured their names that
break the ice and give the onset in that which helped them forward to
the saving of souls. Now what can be more available thereto than to
deliver God's book unto God's people in a tongue which they
understand?'" Carey might tolerate interruption when engaged in other
work, but for forty years he never allowed anything to shorten the time
allotted to the Bible work. "You, madam," he wrote in 1797 to a lady as
to many a correspondent, "will excuse my brevity when I inform you that
all my time for writting letters is stolen from the work of
transcribing the Scriptures into the Bengali language."
From no mere humility, but with an accurate judgment in the state of
scholarship and criticism at the opening of last century, Carey always
insisted that he was a forerunner, breaking up the way for successors
like Yates, Wenger, and Rouse, who, in their turn, must be superseded
by purely native Tyndales and Luthers in the Church of India. He more
than once deprecated the talk of his having translated the Bible into
forty languages and dialects.[16] As we proceed that will be a apparent
which he did with his own hand, that which his colleagues accomplished,
that which he revised and edited both of their work and of the
pundits', and that which he corrected and printed for others at the
Serampore press under the care of Ward. It is to these four lines of
work, which centred in him, as most of them originally proceeded from
his conception and advocacy, that the assertion as to the forty
translations is strictly applicable. The Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and
Sanskrit translations were his own. The Chinese was similarly the work
of Marshman. The Hindi versions, in their many dialects, and the
Ooriya, were blocked out by his colleagues and the pundits. He saw
through the press the Hindostani, Persian, Malay, Tamil, and other
versions of the whole or portions of the Scriptures. He ceased not,
night and day, if by any means, with a loving catholicity, the Word of
God might be given to the millions.
Writing in 1904 on the centenary of the British and Foreign Bible
Society, Mr. George A. Grierson, C.I.E., Ph.D., D.Litt., the head of
the Linguistic Survey of India, sums up authoritatively the work of
Carey and his assistants. "The great-hearted band of Serampore
missionaries issued translations of the Bible or of the New Testament
in more than forty languages. Before them the number of Protestant
versions of the Bible in the speeches of India could be counted on the
fingers of one hand. The Dutch of Ceylon undertook a Tamil New
Testament in 1688, which was followed in 1715 by another version from
the pen of Ziegenbalg. The famous missionary, Schultze, between 1727
and 1732 made a Telugu version which was never printed, and later,
between 1745 and 1758, he published at Halle a Hindostani translation
of the New Testament and of a portion of Genesis. A manuscript version
of portions of the Bible in Bengali was made by Thomas in 1791; and
then the great Serampore series began with Carey's Bengali New
Testament published in 1801. Most of these Serampore versions were, it
is true, first attempts and have been superseded by more accurate
versions, but the first step is always the most important one, and this
was taken by Carey and his brethren."
Carey's correspondent in this and purely scholarly subjects was Dr.
Ryland, an accomplished Hebraist and Biblical critic for that day, at
the head of the Bristol College. Carey's letters, plentifully
sprinkled with Hebrew and Greek, show the jealousy with which he sought
to convey the divine message accurately, and the unwearied sense of
responsibility under which he worked. Biblical criticism, alike as to
the original text and to the exegesis of the sacred writings, is so
very modern a science, that these letters have now only a historical
interest. But this communication to Ryland shows how he worked from
the first:--
"CALCUTTA, 14th Dec. 1803.--We some time ago engaged in an undertaking,
of which we intended to say nothing until it was accomplished; but an
unforeseen providence made it necessary for us to disclose it. It is
as follows: About a year and a half ago, some attempts were made to
engage Mr. Gilchrist in the translation of the Scriptures into the
Hindostani language. By something or other it was put by. The Persian
was also at the same time much talked of, but given up, or rather not
engaged in. At this time several considerations prevailed on us to set
ourselves silently upon a translation into these languages. We
accordingly hired two moonshees to assist us in it, and each of us took
our share; Brother Marshman took Matthew and Luke; Brother Ward, Mark
and John; and myself the remaining part of the New Testament into
Hindostani. I undertook no part of the Persian; but, instead thereof,
engaged in translating it into Maharastra, commonly called the Mahratta
language, the person who assists me in the Hindostani being a Mahratta.
Brother Marshman has finished Matthew, and, instead of Luke, has begun
the Acts. Brother Ward has done part of John, and I have done the
Epistles, and about six chapters of the Revelation; and have proceeded
as far as the second epistle of the Corinthians in the revisal: they
have done a few chapters into Persian, and I a few into Mahratta. Thus
the matter stood, till a few days ago Mr. Buchanan informed me that a
military gentleman had translated the Gospels into Hindostani and
Persian, and had made a present of them to the College, and that the
College Council had voted the printing of them. This made it necessary
for me to say what we had been about; and had it not been for this
circumstance we should not have said anything till we had got the New
Testament at least pretty forward in printing. I am very glad that
Major Colebrooke has done it. We will gladly do what others do not do,
and wish all speed to those who do anything in this way. We have it in
our power, if our means would do for it, in the space of about fifteen
years to have the word of God translated and printed in all the
languages of the East. Our situation is such as to furnish us with the
best assistance from natives of the different countries. We can have
types of all the different characters cast here; and about 700 rupees
per month, part of which I hope we shall be able to furnish, would
complete the work. The languages are the Hindostani (Hindi),
Maharastra, Ooriya, Telinga, Bhotan, Burman, Chinese, Cochin Chinese,
Tongkinese, and Malay. On this great work we have fixed our eyes.
Whether God will enable us to accomplish it, or any considerable part
of it, is uncertain."
But all these advantages, his own genius for languages, his
unconquerable plodding directed by a divine motive, his colleagues'
co-operation, the encouragement of learned societies and the public,
and the number of pundits and moonshees increased by the College of
Fort William, would have failed to open the door of the East to the
sacred Scriptures had the philological key of the Sanskrit been wanting
or undiscovered. In the preface to his Sanskrit grammar, quoted by the
Quarterly Review with high approbation, Carey wrote that it gave him
the meaning of four out of every five words of the principal languages
of the whole people of India:--"The peculiar grammar of any one of
these may be acquired in a couple of months, and then the language lies
open to the student. The knowledge of four words in five enables him
to read with pleasure, and renders the acquisition of the few new
words, as well as the idiomatic expressions, a matter of delight rather
than of labour. Thus the Ooriya, though possessing a separate grammar
and character, is so much like the Bengali in the very expression that
a Bengali pundit is almost equal to the correction of an Orissa proof
sheet; and the first time that I read a page of Goojarati the meaning
appeared so obvious as to render it unnecessary to ask the pundit
questions."
The mechanical apparatus of types, paper, and printing seem to have
been provided by the same providential foresight as the intellectual
and the spiritual. We have seen how, when he was far enough advanced
in his translation, Carey amid the swamps of Dinapoor looked to England
for press, type, paper, and printer. He got the last, William Ward, a
man of his own selection, worthy to be his colleague. But he had
hardly despatched his letter when he found or made all the rest in
Bengal itself. It was from the old press bought in Calcutta, set up in
Mudnabati, and removed to Serampore, that the first edition of the
Bengali New Testament was printed. The few rare and venerable copies
have now a peculiar bibliographic interest; the type and the paper
alike are coarse and blurred.
Sir Charles Wilkins, the Caxton of India, had with his own hands cut
the punches and cast the types from which Halhed's Bengali grammar was
printed at Hoogli in 1778. He taught the art to a native blacksmith,
Panchanan, who went to Serampore in search of work just when Carey was
in despair for a fount of the sacred Devanagari type for his Sanskirt
grammar, and for founts of the other languages besides Bengali which
had never been printed. They thus tell the story in a Memoir Relative
to the Translations, published in 1807:--
"It will be obvious that in the present state of things in India it was
in many instances necessary to cast new founts of types in several of
these languages. Happily for us and India at large Wilkins had led the
way in this department; and by persevering industry, the value of which
can scarcely be appreciated, under the greatest disadvantages with
respect to materials and workmen, had brought the Bengali to a high
degree of perfection. Soon after our settling at Serampore the
providence of God brought to us the very artist who had wrought with
Wilkins in that work, and in a great measure imbibed his ideas. By his
assistance we erected a letter-foundry; and although he is now dead, he
had so fully communicated his art to a number of others, that they
carry forward the work of type-casting, and even of cutting the
matrices, with a degree of accuracy which would not disgrace European
artists. These have cast for us two or three founts of Bengali; and we
are now employing them in casting a fount on a construction which bids
fair to diminish the expense of paper, and the size of the book at
least one-fourth, without affecting the legibility of the character.
Of the Devanagari character we have also cast an entire new fount,
which is esteemed the most beautiful of the kind in India. It consists
of nearly 1000 different combinations of characters, so that the
expense of cutting the patterns only amounted to 1500 rupees, exclusive
of metal and casting.
"In the Orissa we have been compelled also to cast a new fount of
types, as none before existed in that character. The fount consists of
about 300 separate combinations, and the whole expense of cutting and
casting has amounted to at least 1000 rupees. The character, though
distinct, is of a moderate size, and will comprise the whole New
Testament in about 700 pages octavo, which is about a fourth less than
the Bengali. Although in the Mahratta country the Devanagari character
is well known to men of education, yet a character is current among the
men of business which is much smaller, and varies considerably in form
from the Nagari, though the number and power of the letters nearly
correspond. We have cast a fount in this character, in which we have
begun to print the Mahratta New Testament, as well as a Mahratta
dictionary. This character is moderate in size, distinct and
beautiful. It will comprise the New Testament in perhaps a less number
of pages than the Orissa. The expense of casting, etc., has been much
the same. We stand in need of three more founts; one in the Burman,
another in the Telinga and Kernata, and a third in the Seek's
character. These, with the Chinese characters, will enable us to go
through the work. An excellent and extensive fount of Persian we
received from you, dear brethren, last year."
Panchanan's apprentice, Monohur, continued to make elegant founts of
type in all Eastern languages for the mission and for sale to others
for more than forty years, becoming a benefactor not only to literature
but to Christian civilisation to an extent of which he was unconscious,
for he remained a Hindoo of the blacksmith caste. In 1839, when he
first went to India as a young missionary, the Rev. James Kennedy[17]
saw him, as the present writer has often since seen his successor,
cutting the matrices or casting the type for the Bibles, while he
squatted below his favourite idol, under the auspices of which alone he
would work. Serampore continued down till 1860 to be the principal
Oriental typefoundry of the East.[18]
Hardly less service did the mission come to render to the manufacture
of paper in course of time, giving the name of Serampore to a variety
known all over India. At first Carey was compelled to print his
Bengali Testament on a dingy, porous, rough substance called Patna
paper. Then he began to depend on supplies from England, which in
those days reached the press at irregular times, often impeding the
work, and was most costly. This was not all. Native paper, whether
mill or hand-made, being sized with rice paste, attracted the bookworm
and white ant, so that the first sheets of a work which lingered in the
press were sometimes devoured by these insects before the last sheets
were printed off. Carey used to preserve his most valuable manuscripts
by writing on arsenicated paper, which became of a hideous yellow
colour, though it is to this alone we owe the preservation in the
library of Serampore College of five colossal volumes of his polyglot
dictionary prepared for the Bible translation work. Many and long were
the experiments of the missionaries to solve the paper difficulty,
ending in the erection of a tread-mill on which relays of forty natives
reduced the raw material in the paper-engine, until one was
accidentally killed.
The enterprise of Mr. William Jones, who first worked the Raneegunj
coal-field, suggested the remedy in the employment of a steam-engine.
One of twelve-horse power was ordered from Messrs. Thwaites and
Rothwell of Bolton. This was the first ever erected in India, and it
was a purely missionary locomotive. The "machine of fire," as they
called it, brought crowds of natives to the mission, whose curiosity
tried the patience of the engineman imported to work it; while many a
European who had never seen machinery driven by steam came to study and
to copy it. The date was the 27th of March 1820, when "the engine went
in reality this day." From that time till 1865 Serampore became the
one source of supply for local as distinguished from imported and
purely native hand-made paper. Even the cartridges of Mutiny notoriety
in 1857 were from this factory, though it had long ceased to be
connected with the mission.
Dr. Carey thus took stock of the translating enterprise in a letter to
Dr. Ryland:--
"22nd January 1808.--Last year may be reckoned among the most important
which this mission has seen--not for the numbers converted among the
natives, for they have been fewer than in some preceding years, but for
the gracious care which God has exercised towards us. We have been
enabled to carry on the translation and printing of the Word of God in
several languages. The printing is now going on in six and the
translation into six more. The Bengali is all printed except from
Judges vii. to the end of Esther; Sanskrit New Testament to Acts
xxvii.; Orissa to John xxi.; Mahratta, second edition, to the end of
Matthew; Hindostani (new version) to Mark v., and Matthew is begun in
Goojarati. The translation is nearly carried on to the end of John in
Chinese, Telinga Kurnata, and the language of the Seeks. It is carried
on to a pretty large extent in Persian and begun in Burman. The whole
Bible was printed in Malay at Batavia some years ago. The whole is
printed in Tamil, and the Syrian Bishop at Travancore is now
superintending a translation from Syriac into Malayala. I learnt this
week that the language of Kashmeer is a distinct language.
"I have this day been to visit the most learned Hindoo now living; he
speaks only Sanskrit, is more than eighty years old, is acquainted with
the writings and has studied the sentiments of all their schools of
philosophy (usually called the Darshunas of the Veda). He tells me
that this is the sixteenth time that he has travelled from Rameshwaram
to Harhu (viz. from the extreme cape of the Peninsula to Benares). He
was, he says, near Madras when the English first took possession of it.
This man has given his opinion against the burning of women."
Four years later, in another letter to Ryland, he takes us into his
confidence more fully, showing us not only his sacred workshop, but
ingenuously revealing his own humility and self-sacrifice:--"10th
December 1811.--I have of late been much impressed with the vast
importance of laying a foundation for Biblical criticism in the East,
by preparing grammars of the different languages into which we have
translated or may translate the Bible. Without some such step, they
who follow us will have to wade through the same labour that I have, in
order to stand merely upon the same ground that I now stand upon. If,
however, elementary books are provided, the labour will be greatly
contracted; and a person will be able in a short time to acquire that
which has cost me years of study and toil.
"The necessity which lies upon me of acquiring so many languages,
obliges me to study and write out the grammar of each of them, and to
attend closely to their irregularities and peculiarities. I have
therefore already published grammars of three of them; namely, the
Sanskrit, the Bengali, and the Mahratta. To these I have resolved to
add grammars of the Telinga, Kurnata, Orissa, Punjabi, Kashmeeri,
Goojarati, Nepalese, and Assam languages. Two of these are now in the
press, and I hope to have two or three more of them out by the end of
the next year.
"This may not only be useful in the way I have stated, but may serve to
furnish an answer to a question which has been more than once repeated,
'How can these men translate into so great a number of languages?' Few
people know what may be done till they try, and persevere in what they
undertake.
"I am now printing a dictionary of the Bengali, which will be pretty
large, for I have got to page 256, quarto, and am not near through the
first letter. That letter, however, begins more words than any two
others.
"To secure the gradual perfection of the translations, I have also in
my mind, and indeed have been long collecting materials for, An
Universal Dictionary of the Oriental languages derived from the
Sanskrit. I mean to take the Sanskrit, of course, as the groundwork,
and to give the different acceptations of every word, with examples of
their application, in the manner of Johnson, and then to give the
synonyms in the different languages derived from the Sanskrit, with the
Hebrew and Greek terms answering thereto; always putting the word
derived from the Sanskrit term first, and then those derived from other
sources. I intend always to give the etymology of the Sanskrit term,
so that that of the terms deduced from it in the cognate languages will
be evident. This work will be great, and it is doubtful whether I
shall live to complete it; but I mean to begin to arrange the
materials, which I have been some years collecting for this purpose, as
soon as my Bengali dictionary is finished. Should I live to accomplish
this, and the translations in hand, I think I can then say, 'Lord, now
lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.'"
The ardent scholar had twenty-three years of toil before him in this
happy work. But he did not know this, while each year the labour
increased, and the apprehension grew that he and his colleagues might
at any time be removed without leaving a trained successor. They
naturally looked first to the sons of the mission for translators as
they had already done for preachers.
To Dr. Carey personally, however, the education of a young missionary
specially fitted to be his successor, as translator and editor of the
translations, was even more important. Such a man was found in William
Yates, born in 1792, and in the county, Leicestershire, in which Carey
brought the Baptist mission to the birth. Yates was in his early years
also a shoemaker, and member of Carey's old church in Harvey Lane, when
under the great Robert Hall, who said to the youth's father, "Your son,
sir, will be a great scholar and a good preacher, and he is a holy
young man." In 1814 he became the last of the young missionaries
devoted to the cause by Fuller, soon to pass away, Ryland, and Hall.
Yates had not been many months at Serampore when, with the approval of
his brethren, Carey wrote to Fuller, on 17th May 1815:--"I am much
inclined to associate him with myself in the translations. My labour
is greater than at any former period. We have now translations of the
Bible going forward in twenty-seven languages, all of which are in the
press except two or three. The labour of correcting and revising all
of them lies on me." By September we find Yates writing:--"Dr. Carey
sends all the Bengali proofs to me to review. I read them over, and if
there is anything I do not understand, or think to be wrong, I mark it.
We then converse over it, and if it is wrong, he alters it; but if not,
he shows me the reason why it is right, and thus will initiate me into
the languages as fast as I can learn them. He wishes me to begin the
Hindi very soon. Since I have been here I have read three volumes in
Bengali, and they have but six of consequence in prose. There are
abundance in Sanskrit." "Dr. Carey has treated me with the greatest
affection and kindness, and told me he will give me every information
he can, and do anything in his power to promote my happiness." What
Baruch was to the prophet Jeremiah, that Yates might have been to
Carey, who went so far in urging him to remain for life in Serampore as
to say, "if he did not accept the service it would be, in his judgment,
acting against Providence, and the blessing of God was not to be
expected." Yates threw in his lot with the younger men who, in
Calcutta after Fuller's death, began the Society's as distinct from the
Serampore mission. If Carey was the Wyclif and Tyndale, Yates was the
Coverdale of the Bengali and Sanskrit Bible. Wenger, their successor,
was worthy of both. Bengal still waits for the first native revision
of the great work which these successive pioneers have gradually
improved. When shall Bengal see its own Luther?
The Bengali Bible was the first as it was the most important of the
translations. The province, or lieutenant-governorship then had the
same area as France, and contained more than double its population, or
eighty millions. Of the three principal vernaculars, Bengali is spoken
by forty-five millions of Hindoos and Mohammedans. It was for all the
natives of Bengal and of India north of the Dekhan ("south") tableland,
but especially for the Bengali-speaking people, that William Carey
created a literary language a century ago.
The first Bengali version of the whole New Testament Carey translated
from the original Greek before the close of 1796. The only English
commentary used was the Family Expositor of Doddridge, published in
1738, and then the most critical in the language. Four times he
revised the manuscript, with a Greek concordance in his hand, and he
used it not only with Ram Basu by his side, the most accomplished of
early Bengali scholars, but with the natives around him of all classes.
By 1800 Ward had arrived as printer, the press was perfected at
Serampore, and the result of seven years of toil appeared in February
1801, in the first edition of 2000 copies, costing £612. The printing
occupied nine months. The type was set up by Ward and Carey's son
Felix with their own hands; "for about a month at first we had a
Brahman compositor, but we were quite weary of him. We kept four
pressmen constantly employed." A public subscription had been opened
for the whole Bengali Bible at Rs. 32, or £4 a copy as exchange then
was, and nearly fifty copies had been at once subscribed for. It was
this edition which immediately led to Carey's appointment to the
College of Fort William, and it was that appointment which placed Carey
in a position, philological and financial, to give the Bible to the
peoples of the farther East in their own tongue.
Some loving memories cluster round the first Bengali version of the New
Testament which it is well to collect. On Tuesday, 18th March 1800,
Ward's journal[19] records: "Brother Carey took an impression at the
press of the first page in Matthew." The translator was himself the
pressman. As soon as the whole of this Gospel was ready, 500 copies of
it were struck off for immediate circulation, "which we considered of
importance as containing a complete life of the Redeemer." Four days
after an advertisement in the official Calcutta Gazette, announcing
that the missionaries had established a press at Serampore and were
printing the Bible in Bengali, roused Lord Wellesley, who had fettered
the press in British India. Mr. Brown was able to inform the
Governor-General that this very Serampore press had refused to print a
political attack on the English Government, and that it was intended
for the spiritual instruction only of the natives. This called forth
the assurance from that liberal statesman that he was personally
favourable to the conversion of the heathen. When he was further told
that such an Oriental press would be invaluable to the College of Fort
William, he not only withdrew his opposition but made Carey first
teacher of Bengali. It was on the 7th February 1801 that the last
sheet with the final corrections was put into Carey's hands. When a
volume had been bound it was reverently offered to God by being placed
on the Communion-table of the chapel, and the mission families and the
new-made converts gathered around it with solemn thanksgiving to God
led by Krishna Pal. Carey preached from the words (Col. iii. 11) "Let
the Word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom." The centenary
was celebrated in Calcutta in 1901, under Dr. Rouse, whose fine
scholarship had just revised the translation.
When the first copies reached England, Andrew Fuller sent one to the
second Earl Spencer, the peer who had used the wealth of Sarah, Duchess
of Marlborough, to collect the great library at Althorp. Carey had been
a poor tenant of his, though the Earl knew it not. When the Bengali New
Testament reached him, with its story, he sent a cheque for £50 to help
to translate the Old Testament, and he took care that a copy should be
presented to George III., as by his own request. Mr. Bowyer was
received one morning at Windsor, and along with the volume presented an
address expressing the desire that His Majesty might live to see its
principles universally prevail throughout his Eastern dominions. On
this the lord in waiting whispered a doubt whether the book had come
through the proper channel. At once the king replied that the Board of
Control had nothing to do with it, and turning to Mr. Bowyer said, "I
am greatly pleased to find that any of my subjects are employed in this
manner."
This now rare volume, to be found on the shelves of the Serampore
College Library, where it leads the host of the Carey translations, is
coarse and unattractive in appearance compared with its latest
successors. In truth the second edition, which appeared in 1806, was
almost a new version. The criticism of his colleagues and others,
especially of a ripe Grecian like Dr. Marshman, the growth of the
native church, and his own experience as a Professor of Sanskrit and
Marathi as well as Bengali, gave Carey new power in adapting the
language to the divine ideas of which he made it the medium. But the
first edition was not without its self-evidencing power. Seventeen
years after, when the mission extended to the old capital of Dacca,
there were found several villages of Hindoo-born peasants who had given
up idol-worship, were renowned for their truthfulness, and, as
searching for a true teacher come from God, called themselves
"Satya-gooroos." They traced their new faith to a much-worn book kept
in a wooden box in one of their villages. No one could say whence it
had come; all they knew was that they had possessed it for many years.
It was Carey's first Bengali version of the New Testament of our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ. In the wide and elastic bounds of Hindooism,
and even, as we shall see, amid fanatical Mussulmans beyond the
frontier, the Bible, dimly understood without a teacher, has led to
puritan sects like this, as to earnest inquirers like the chamberlain
of Queen Candace.
The third edition of the Bengali Testament was published in 1811 in
folio for the use of the native congregations by that time formed. The
fourth, consisting of 5000 copies, appeared in 1816, and the eighth in
1832. The venerable scholar, like Columba at Iona over the
thirty-fourth psalm, and Baeda at Jarrow over the sixth chapter of
John's Gospel, said as he corrected the last sheet--the last after
forty years' faithful and delighted toil: "My work is done; I have
nothing more to do but to wait the will of the Lord." The Old Testament
from the Hebrew appeared in portions from 1802 to 1809. Such was the
ardour of the translator, that he had finished the correction of his
version of the first chapter of Genesis in January 1794. When he read
it to two pundits from Nuddea, he told Fuller in his journal of that
month they seemed much pleased with the account of the creation, but
they objected to the omission of patala, their imaginary place beneath
the earth, which they thought should have been mentioned. At this
early period Carey saw the weakness of Hindooism as a pretended
revelation, from its identification with false physics, just as Duff
was to see and use it afterwards with tremendous effect, and
wrote:--"There is a necessity of explaining to them several
circumstances relative to geography and chronology, as they have many
superstitious opinions on those subjects which are closely connected
with their systems of idolatry." The Bengali Bible was the result of
fifteen years' sweet toil, in which Marshman read the Greek and Carey
the Bengali; every one of their colleagues examined the proof sheets,
and Carey finally wrote with his own pen the whole of the five octavo
volumes. In the forty years of his missionary career Carey prepared
and saw through the press five editions of the Old Testament and eight
editions of the New in Bengali.
The Sanskrit version was translated from the original, and written out
by the toiling scholar himself. Sir William Jones is said to have been
able to secure his first pundit's help only by paying him Rs. 500 a
month, or £700 a year. Carey engaged and trained his many pundits at a
twentieth of that sum. He well knew that the Brahmans would scorn a
book in the language of the common people. "What," said one who was
offered the Hindi version, "even if the books should contain divine
knowledge, they are nothing to us. The knowledge of God contained in
them is to us as milk in a vessel of dog's skin, utterly polluted."
But, writes the annalist of Biblical Translations in India, Carey's
Sanskrit version was cordially received by the Brahmans. Destroyed in
the fire in 1812, the Old Testament historical books were again
translated, and appeared in 1815. In 1827 the aged saint had strength
to bring out the first volume of a thorough revision, and to leave the
manuscript of the second volume, on his death, as a legacy to his
successors, Yates and Wenger. Against Vedas and Upanishads, Brahmanas
and Epics, he set the Sanskrit Bible.
The whole number of completely translated and published versions of the
sacred Scriptures which Carey sent forth was twenty-eight. Of these
seven included the whole Bible, and twenty-one contained the books of
the New Testament. Each translation has a history, a spiritual romance
of its own. Each became almost immediately a silent but effectual
missionary to the peoples of Asia, as well as the scholarly and
literary pioneer of those later editions and versions from which the
native churches of farther Asia derive the materials of their lively
growth.
The Ooriya version was almost the first to be undertaken after the
Bengali, to which language it bears the same relation as rural Scotch
to English, though it has a written character of its own. What is now
the Orissa division of Bengal, separating it from Madras to the
south-west, was added to the empire in 1803. This circumstance, and
the fact that its Pooree district, after centuries of sun-worship and
then shiva-worship, had become the high-place of the vaishnava cult of
Jaganath and his car, which attracted and often slew hundreds of
thousands of pilgrims every year, led Carey to prepare at once for the
press the Ooriya Bible. The chief pundit, Mritunjaya, skilled in both
dialects, first adapted the Bengali version to the language of the
Ooriyas, which was his own. Carey then took the manuscript, compared it
with the original Greek, and corrected it verse by verse. The New
Testament was ready in 1809, and the Old Testament in 1815, the whole
in four volumes. Large editions were quickly bought up and circulated.
These led to the establishment of the General Baptist Society's
missionaries at Cuttak, the capital.
In 1814 the Serampore Bible translation college, as we may call it,
began the preparation of the New Testament in Maghadi, another of the
languages allied to the Bengali, and derived from the Sanskrit through
the Pali, because that was the vernacular of Buddhism in its original
seat; an edition of 1000 copies appeared in 1824. It was intended to
publish a version in the Maithili language of Bihar, which has a
literature stretching back to the fourteenth century, that every class
might have the Word of God in their own dialect. But Carey's literary
enthusiasm and scholarship had by this time done so much to develop and
extend the power of Bengali proper, that it had begun to supersede all
such dialects, except Ooriya and the northern vernaculars of the valley
of the Brahmapootra. In 1810 the Serampore press added the Assamese
New Testament to its achievements. In 1819 the first edition appeared,
in 1826 the province became British, and in 1832 Carey had the
satisfaction of issuing the Old Testament, and setting apart Mr. Rae, a
Scottish soldier, who had settled there, as the first missionary at
Gowhatti. To these must be added, as in the Bengali character though
non-Aryan languages, versions in Khasi and Manipoori, the former for
the democratic tribes of the Khasia hills among whom the Welsh
Calvinists have since worked, and the latter for the curious Hindoo
snake-people on the border of Burma, who have taught Europe the game of
polo.
Another immediate successor of the Bengali translation was the Marathi,
of which also Carey was professor in the College of Fort William. By
1804 he was himself hard at work on this version, by 1811 the first
edition of the New Testament appeared, and by 1820 the Old Testament
left the press. It was in a dialect peculiar to Nagpoor, and was at
first largely circulated by Lieutenant Moxon in the army there. In
1812 Carey sent the missionary Aratoon to Bombay and Surat just after
Henry Martyn had written that the only Christian in the city who
understood his evangelical sermon was a ropemaker just arrived from
England. At the same time he was busy with a version in the dialect of
the Konkan, the densely-peopled coast district to the south of Bombay
city, inhabited chiefly by the ablest Brahmanical race in India. In
1819 the New Testament appeared in this translation, having been under
preparation at Serampore for eleven years. Thus Carey sought to turn
to Christ the twelve millions of Hindoos who, from Western India above
and below the great coast-range known as the Sahyadri or "delectable"
mountains, had nearly wrested the whole peninsula from the Mohammedans,
and had almost anticipated the life-giving rule of the British, first
at Panipat and then as Assye. Meanwhile new missionaries had been
taking possession of those western districts where the men of Serampore
had sowed the first seed and reaped the first fruits. The charter of
1813 made it possible for the American Missionaries to land there, and
for the local Bible Society to spring into existence. Dr. John Wilson
and his Scottish colleagues followed them. Carey and his brethren
welcomed these and retired from that field, confining themselves to
providing, during the next seven years, a Goojarati version for the
millions of Northern Bombay, including the hopeful Parsees, and
resigning that, too, to the London Missionary Society after issuing the
New Testament in 1820.
Mr. Christopher Anderson justly remarks, in his Annals of the English
Bible, published half a century ago:--"Time will show, and in a very
singular manner, that every version, without exception, which came from
Carey's hands, has a value affixed to it which the present generation,
living as it were too near an object, is not yet able to estimate or
descry. Fifty years hence the character of this extraordinary and
humble man will be more correctly appreciated."
In none of the classes of languages derived from the Sanskrit was the
zeal of Carey and his associates so remarkable as in the Hindi. So
early as 1796 he wrote of this the most widely extended offspring of
the Sanskrit:--"I have acquired so much of the Hindi as to converse in
it and preach for some time intelligibly...It is the current language
of all the west from Rajmahal to Delhi, and perhaps farther. With this
I can be understood nearly all over Hindostan." By the time that he
issued the sixth memoir of the translations Chamberlain's experiences
in North-Western India led Carey to write that he had ascertained the
existence of twenty dialects of Hindi, with the same vocabulary but
different sets of terminations. The Bruj or Brijbhasa Gospels were
finished in 1813, two years after Chamberlain had settled in Agra, and
the New Testament was completed nine years after. This version of the
Gospels led the Brahman priest, Anand Masih, to Christ. In their
eagerness for a copy of the Old Testament, which appeared in 1818, many
Sepoys brought testimonials from their commanding officers, and in one
year it led eighteen converts to Christ. The other Hindi dialects, in
which the whole New Testament or the Gospels appeared, will be found at
page 177 {see footnote number 16}. The parent Hindi translation was
made by Carey with his own hand from the original languages between
1802 and 1807, and ran through many large editions till Mr.
Chamberlain's was preferred by Carey himself in 1819.
We may pass over the story of the Dravidian versions, the Telugoo[20]
New Testament and Pentateuch, and the Kanarese. Nor need we do more
than refer to the Singhalese, "derived from the previous labours of Dr.
Carey" by Tolfrey, the Persian, Malayalam, and other versions made by
others, but edited or carefully carried through the press by Carey.
The wonderful tale of his Bible work is well illustrated by a man who,
next to the Lawrences, was the greatest Englishman who has governed the
Punjab frontier, the hero of Mr. Ruskin's book, A Knight's Faith. In
that portion of his career which Sir Herbert Edwardes gave to the world
under the title of A Year on the Punjab Frontier in 1848-49, and in
which he describes his bloodless conquest of the wild valley of Bunnoo,
we find this gem embedded. The writer was at the time in the Gundapoor
country, of which Kulachi is the trade-centre between the Afghan pass
of Ghwalari and Dera Ismail Kan, where the dust of Sir Henry Durand now
lies:--
"A highly interesting circumstance connected with the Indian trade came
under my notice. Ali Khan, Gundapoor, the uncle of the present chief,
Gooldâd Khan, told me he could remember well, as a youth, being sent by
his father and elder brother with a string of Cabul horses to the fair
of Hurdwâr, on the Ganges. He also showed me a Pushtoo version of the
Bible, printed at Serampore in 1818, which he said had been given him
thirty years before at Hurdwâr by an English gentleman, who told him to
'take care of it, and neither fling it into the fire nor the river; but
hoard it up against the day when the British should be rulers of his
country!' Ali Khan said little to anybody of his possessing this book,
but put it carefully by in a linen cover, and produced it with great
mystery when I came to settle the revenue of his nephew's country,
'thinking that the time predicted by the Englishman had arrived!' The
only person, I believe, to whom he had shown the volume was a Moolluh,
who read several passages in the Old Testament, and told Ali Khan 'it
was a true story, and was all about their own Muhommudan prophets,
Father Moses and Father Noah.'
"I examined the book with great interest. It was not printed in the
Persian character, but the common Pushtoo language of Afghanistan; and
was the only specimen I had ever seen of Pushtoo reduced to writing.
The accomplishment of such a translation was a highly honourable proof
of the zeal and industry of the Serampore mission; and should these
pages ever meet the eye of Mr. John Marshman, of Serampore,[21] whose
own pen is consistently guided by a love of civil order and religious
truth, he may probably be able to identify 'the English gentleman' who,
thirty-two years ago on the banks of the Ganges, at the then frontier
of British India, gave to a young Afghan chief, from beyond the distant
Indus, a Bible in his own barbarous tongue, and foresaw the day when
the followers of the 'Son of David' should extend their dominion to the
'Throne of Solomon.'"
Hurdwâr, as the spot at which the Ganges debouches into the plains, is
the scene of the greatest pilgrim gathering in India, especially every
twelfth year. Then three millions of people used to assemble, and too
often carried, all over Asia, cholera which extended to Europe. The
missionaries made this, like most pilgrim resorts, a centre of
preaching and Bible circulation, and doubtless it was from Thompson,
Carey's Missionary at Delhi, that this copy of the Pushtoo Bible was
received. It was begun by Dr. Leyden, and continued for seven years by
the same Afghan maulavee under Carey, in the Arabic character. The
Punjabi Bible, nearly complete, issued first in 1815, had become so
popular by 1820 as to lead Carey to report of the Sikhs that no one of
the nations of India had discovered a stronger desire for the
Scriptures than this hardy race. At Amritsar and Lahore "the book of
Jesus is spoken of, is read, and has caused a considerable stir in the
minds of the people." A Thug, asked how he could have committed so
many murders, pointed to it and said, "If I had had this book I could
not have done it." A fakeer, forty miles from Lodiana, read the book,
founded the community of worshippers of the Sachi Pitè Isa, and
suffered much persecution in a native State.
When Felix Carey returned to Serampore in 1812 to print his Burmese
version of the Gospel of Matthew and his Burmese grammar, his father
determined to send the press at which they were completed to Rangoon.
The three missionaries despatched with it a letter to the king of Ava,
commending to his care "their beloved brethren, who from love to his
majesty's subjects had voluntarily gone to place themselves under his
protection, while they translated the Bible, the Book of Heaven, which
was received and revered" by all the countries of Europe and America as
"the source whence all the knowledge of virtue and religion was drawn."
The king at once ordered from Serampore a printing-press, like that at
Rangoon, for his own palace at Ava, with workmen to use it. In this
Carey saw the beginning of a mission in the Burman capital, but God had
other designs which the sons and daughters of America, following Judson
first of all, are still splendidly developing, from Rangoon to
Kareng-nee, Siam, and China. The ship containing the press sank in the
Rangoon river, and the first Burmese war soon followed.
Three months after the complete and magnificent plan of translating the
Bible into all the languages of the far East, which the assistance of
his two colleagues and the college of Fort William led Carey to form,
had been laid before Fuller in Northamptonshire, the British and
Foreign Bible Society was founded in London. Joseph Hughes, the
Nonconformist who was its first secretary, had been moved by the need
of the Welsh for the Bible in their own tongue. But the
ex-Governor-General, Lord Teignmouth, became its first president, and
the Serampore translators at once turned for assistance to the new
organisation whose work Carey had individually been doing for ten years
at the cost of his two associates and himself. The catholic Bible
Society at once asked Carey's old friend, Mr. Udny, then a member of
the Government in Calcutta, to form a corresponding committee there of
the three missionaries--their chaplain friends, Brown and Buchanan, and
himself. The chaplains delayed the formation of the committee till
1809, but liberally helped meanwhile in the circulation of the other
appeals issued from Serampore, and even made the proposal which
resulted in Dr. Marshman's wonderful version of the Bible in Chinese
and Ward's improvements in Chinese printing. To the principal
tributary sovereigns of India Dr. Buchanan sent copies of the
vernacular Scriptures already published.
From 1809 till 1830, or practically through the rest of Carey's life,
the co-operation of Serampore and the Bible Society was honourable to
both. Carey loyally clung to it when in 1811, under the spell of Henry
Martyn's sermon on Christian India, the chaplains established the
Calcutta Auxiliary Bible Society in order to supersede its
corresponding committee. In the Serampore press the new auxiliary,
like the parent Society, found the cheapest and best means of
publishing editions of the New Testament in Singhalese, Malayalam, and
Tamil. The press issued also the Persian New Testament, first of the
Romanist missionary, Sebastiani--"though it be not wholly free from
imperfections, it will doubtless do much good," wrote Dr. Marshman to
Fuller--and then of Henry Martyn, whose assistant, Sabat, was trained
at Serampore. Those three of Serampore had a Christ-like tolerance,
which sprang from the divine charity of their determination to live
only that the Word of God might sound out through Asia. When in 1830
this auxiliary--which had at first sought to keep all missionaries out
of its executive in order to conciliate men like Sydney Smith's
brother, the Advocate-General of Bengal--refused to use the
translations of Carey and Yates, and inclined to an earlier version of
Ellerton, because of the translation or transliteration of the Greek
words for "baptism," these two scholars acted thus, as described by the
Bible Society's annalist--they, "with a liberality which does them
honour, permitted the use of their respective versions of the Bengali
Scriptures, with such alterations as were deemed needful in the
disputed word for 'baptism,' they being considered in no way parties to
such alterations." From first to last the British and Foreign Bible
Society, to use its own language, "had the privilege of aiding the
Serampore brethren by grants, amounting to not less than £13,500." Of
this £1475 had been raised by Mr. William Hey, F.R.S., a surgeon at
Leeds, who had been so moved by the translation memoir of 1816 as to
offer £500 for the publication of a thousand copies of every approved
first translation of the New Testament into any dialect of India. It
was with this assistance that most of the Hindi and the Pushtoo and
Punjabi versions were produced.
The cold season of 1811-12 was one ever to be remembered. Death
entered the home of each of the staff of seven missionaries and carried
off wife or children. An earthquake of unusual violence alarmed the
natives. Dr. Carey had buried a grandson, and was at his weekly work
in the college at Calcutta. The sun had just set on the evening of the
11th March 1812, and the native typefounders, compositors, pressmen,
binders, and writers had gone. Ward alone lingered in the waning light
at his desk settling an account with a few servants. His two rooms
formed the north end of the long printing-office. The south rooms were
filled with paper and printed materials. Close beyond was the
paper-mill. The Bible-publishing enterprise was at its height.
Fourteen founts of Oriental types, new supplies of Hebrew, Greek, and
English types, a vast stock of paper from the Bible Society, presses,
priceless manuscripts of dictionaries, grammars, and translations, and,
above all, the steel punches of the Eastern letters--all were there,
with the deeds and account-books of the property, and the iron safe
containing notes and rupees. Suffocating smoke burst from the long
type-room into the office. Rushing through it to observe the source of
the fire, he was arrested at the southern rooms by the paper store.
Returning with difficulty and joined by Marshman and the natives, he
had every door and window closed, and then mounting the south roof, he
had water poured through it upon the burning mass for four hours, with
the most hopeful prospect of arresting the ruin. While he was busy
with Marshman in removing the papers in the north end some one opened a
window, when the air set the entire building on flame. By midnight the
roof fell in along its whole length, and the column of fire leapt up
towards heaven. With "solemn serenity" the members of the mission
family remained seated in front of the desolation.
The ruins were still smoking when next evening Dr. Carey arrived from
Calcutta, which was ringing with the sad news. The venerable scholar
had suffered most, for his were the manuscripts; the steel punches were
found uninjured. The Sikh and Telugoo grammars and ten Bible versions
in the press were gone. Second editions of Confucius. A Dissertation
on the Chinese Language, and of Ward on the Hindoos, and smaller works
were destroyed. The translation of the Ramayana, on which he and
Marshman had been busy for a year, was stopped for ever; fifty years
after the present writer came upon some charred sheets of the fourth
volume, which had been on the press and rescued. The Circular Letter
for April 1812 is printed on paper scorched at the edge. Worst of all
was the loss of that polyglot dictionary of all the languages derived
from the Sanskrit which, if Carey had felt any of this world's
ambition, would have perpetuated his name in the first rank of
philologists.
With the delicacy which always marked him Dr. Marshman had himself gone
down to Calcutta next morning to break the news to Carey, who received
it with choking utterance. The two then called on the friendly
chaplain, Thomason, who burst into tears. When the afternoon tide
enabled the three to reach Serampore, after a two hours' hard pull at
the flood, they found Ward rejoicing. He had been all day clearing
away the rubbish, and had just discovered the punches and matrices
unharmed. The five presses too were untouched. He had already opened
out a long warehouse nearer the river-shore, the lease of which had
fallen in to them, and he had already planned the occupation of that
uninviting place in which the famous press of Serampore and, at the
last, the Friend of India weekly newspaper found a home till 1875. The
description of the scene and of its effect on Carey by an eye-witness
like Thomason has a value of its own:--
"The year 1812 was ushered in by an earthquake which was preceded by a
loud noise; the house shook; the oil in the lamps on the walls was
thrown out; the birds made a frightful noise; the natives ran from
their houses, calling on the names of their gods; the sensation is most
awful; we read the forty-sixth Psalm. This fearful prodigy was
succeeded by that desolating disaster, the Serampore fire. I could
scarcely believe the report; it was like a blow on the head which
stupefies. I flew to Serampore to witness the desolation. The scene
was indeed affecting. The immense printing-office, two hundred feet
long and fifty broad, reduced to a mere shell. The yard covered with
burnt quires of paper, the loss in which article was immense. Carey
walked with me over the smoking ruins. The tears stood in his eyes.
'In one short evening,' said he, 'the labours of years are consumed.
How unsearchable are the ways of God! I had lately brought some things
to the utmost perfection of which they seemed capable, and contemplated
the missionary establishment with perhaps too much self-congratulation.
The Lord has laid me low, that I may look more simply to Him.' Who
could stand in such a place, at such a time, with such a man, without
feelings of sharp regret and solemn exercise of mind. I saw the ground
strewed with half-consumed paper, on which in the course of a very few
months the words of life would have been printed. The metal under our
feet amidst the ruins was melted into misshapen lumps--the sad remains
of beautiful types consecrated to the service of the sanctuary. All
was smiling and promising a few hours before--now all is vanished into
smoke or converted into rubbish! Return now to thy books, regard God in
all thou doest. Learn Arabic with humility. Let God be exalted in all
thy plans, and purposes, and labours; He can do without thee."
Carey himself thus wrote of the disaster to Dr. Ryland:--"25th March
1812.--The loss is very great, and will long be severely felt; yet I
can think of a hundred circumstances which would have made it much more
difficult to bear. The Lord has smitten us, he had a right to do so,
and we deserve his corrections. I wish to submit to His sovereign
will, nay, cordially to acquiesce therein, and to examine myself
rigidly to see what in me has contributed to this evil.
"I now, however, turn to the bright side; and here I might mention what
still remains to us, and the merciful circumstances which attend even
this stroke of God's rod; but I will principally notice what will tend
to cheer the heart of every one who feels for the cause of God. Our
loss, so far as I can see, is reparable in a much shorter time than I
should at first have supposed. The Tamil fount of types was the first
that we began to recast. I expect it will be finished by the end of
this week, just a fortnight after it was begun. The next will be the
small Devanagari, for the Hindostani Scriptures, and next the larger
for the Sanskrit. I hope this will be completed in another month. The
other founts, viz., Bengali, Orissa, Sikh, Telinga, Singhalese,
Mahratta, Burman, Kashmeerian, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese, will
follow in order, and will probably be finished in six or seven months,
except the Chinese, which will take more than a year to replace it. I
trust, therefore, that we shall not be greatly delayed. Our English
works will be delayed the longest; but in general they are of the least
importance. Of MSS. burnt I have suffered the most; that is, what was
actually prepared by me, and what owes its whole revision for the press
to me, comprise the principal part of the MSS. consumed. The ground
must be trodden over again, but no delay in printing need arise from
that. The translations are all written out first by pundits in the
different languages, except the Sanskrit which is dictated by me to an
amanuensis. The Sikh, Mahratta, Hindostani, Orissa, Telinga, Assam,
and Kurnata are re-translating in rough by pundits who have been long
accustomed to their work, and have gone over the ground before. I
follow them in revise, the chief part of which is done as the sheets
pass through the press, and is by far the heaviest part of the work.
Of the Sanskrit only the second book of Samuel and the first book of
Kings were lost. Scarcely any of the Orissa, and none of the
Kashmeerian or of the Burman MSS. were lost--copy for about thirty
pages of my Bengali dictionary, the whole copy of a Telinga grammar,
part of the copy of the grammar of Punjabi or Sikh language, and all
the materials which I had been long collecting for a dictionary of all
the languages derived from the Sanskrit. I hope, however, to be
enabled to repair the loss, and to complete my favourite scheme, if my
life be prolonged."
Little did these simple scholars, all absorbed in their work, dream
that this fire would prove to be the means of making them and their
work famous all over Europe and America as well as India. Men of every
Christian school, and men interested only in the literary and secular
side of their enterprise, had their active sympathy called out. The
mere money loss, at the exchange of the day, was not under ten thousand
pounds. In fifty days this was raised in England and Scotland alone,
till Fuller, returning from his last campaign, entered the room of his
committee, declaring "we must stop the contributions." In Greenock,
for instance, every place of worship on one Sunday collected money. In
the United States Mr. Robert Ralston, a Presbyterian, a merchant of
Philadelphia, who as Carey's correspondent had been the first American
layman to help missions to India, and Dr. Staughton, who had taken an
interest in the formation of the Society in 1792 before he emigrated,
had long assisted the translation work, and now that Judson was on his
way out they redoubled their exertions. In India Thomason's own
congregation sent the missionaries £800, and Brown wrote from his dying
bed a message of loving help. The newspapers of Calcutta caught the
enthusiasm; one leading article concluded with the assurance that the
Serampore press would, "like the phoenix of antiquity, rise from its
ashes, winged with new strength, and destined, in a lofty and
long-enduring flight, widely to diffuse the benefits of knowledge
throughout the East." The day after the fire ceased to smoke Monohur
was at the task of casting type from the lumps of the molten metal.
In two months after the first intelligence Fuller was able to send as
"feathers of the phoenix" slips of sheets of the Tamil Testament,
printed from these types, to the towns and churches which had
subscribed. Every fortnight a fount was cast; in a month all the
native establishment was at work night and day. In six months the
whole loss in Oriental types was repaired. The Ramayana version and
Sanskrit polyglot dictionary were never resumed. But of the Bible
translations and grammars, Carey and his two heroic brethren
wrote:--"We found, on making the trial, that the advantages in going
over the same ground a second time were so great that they fully
counter-balanced the time requisite to be devoted thereto in a second
translation." The fire, in truth, the cause of which was never
discovered, and insurance against which did not exist in India, had
given birth to revised editions.