CAREY'S IMMEDIATE INFLUENCE IN GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA
1813-1830
Carey's relation to the new era--The East India Company's Charters of
1793, 1813, and 1833--His double influence on the churches and public
opinion--The great missionary societies--Missionary journals and their
readers--Bengal and India recognised as the most important mission
fields--Influence on Robert Haldane--Reflex effect of foreign on home
missions--Carey's power over individuals--Melville Horne and Douglas of
Cavers--Henry Martyn--Charles Simeon and Stewart of Moulin--Robert Hall
and John Foster--Heber and Chalmers--William Wilberforce on Carey--Mr.
Prendergast and the tub story--Last persecution by the Company's
Government--Carey on the persecution and the charter controversy--The
persecuting clause and the resolution legalising toleration--The
Edinburgh Review and Sydney Smith's fun--Sir James Mackintosh's
opinion--Southey's defence and eulogy of Carey and the brotherhood in
the Quarterly Review--Political value of Carey's labours--Andrew
Fuller's death--A model foreign mission secretary--His friendship with
Carey--The sixteen years' dispute--Dr. Carey's position--His defence of
Marshman--His chivalrous self-sacrifice--His forgiveness of the younger
brethren in Calcutta--His fidelity to righteousness and to friendship.
Himself the outcome of the social and political forces which began in
the French Revolution, and are still at work, William Carey was made a
living personal force to the new era. The period which was introduced
in 1783 by the Peace of Versailles in Europe following the Independence
of the United States of America, was new on every side--in politics, in
philosophy, in literature, in scientific research, in a just and
benevolent regard for the peoples of every land, and in the awakening
of the churches from the sleep of formalism. Carey was no thinker, but
with the reality and the vividness of practical action and personal
sacrifice he led the English-speaking races, to whom the future of the
world was then given, to substitute for the dreams of Rousseau and all
other theories the teaching of Christ as to His kingdom within each
man, and in the progress of mankind.
Set free from the impossible task of administering North America on the
absolutist system which the Georges would fain have continued, Great
Britain found herself committed to the duty of doing for India what
Rome had done for Europe. England was compelled to surrender the free
West to her own children only that she might raise the servile and
idolatrous East to such a Christian level as the genius of its peoples
could in time enable them to work out. But it took the thirty years
from 1783 to 1813 to convince British statesmen, from Pitt to
Castlereagh, that India is to be civilised not according to its own
false systems, but by truth in all forms, spiritual and moral,
scientific and historical. It took other twenty years, to the Charter
of 1833, to complete the conversion of the British Parliament to the
belief that the principles of truth and freedom are in their measure as
good for the East as for the West. At the beginning of this new period
William Pitt based his motion for Parliamentary reform on this fact,
that "our senators are no longer the representatives of British virtue
but of the vices and pollutions of the East." At the close of it Lord
William Bentinck, Macaulay, and Duff, co-operated in the decree which
made truth, as most completely revealed through the English language
and literature, the medium of India's enlightenment. William Carey's
career of fifty years, from his baptism in 1783 and the composition of
his Enquiry to his death in 1834, covered and influenced more than any
other one man's the whole time; and he represented in it an element of
permanent healthy nationalisation which these successors
overlooked,--the use of the languages of the peoples of India as the
only literary channels for allowing the truth revealed through English
to reach the millions of the people.
It was by this means that Carey educated Great Britain and America to
rise equal to the terrible trust of jointly creating a Christian Empire
of India, and ultimately a series of self-governing Christian nations
in Southern and Eastern Asia. He consciously and directly roused the
Churches of all names to carry out the commission of their Master, and
to seek the promised impulse of His Spirit or Divine Representative on
earth, that they might do greater things than even those which He did.
And he, less directly but not less consciously, brought the influence
of public opinion, which every year purified and quickened, to bear
upon Parliament and upon individual statesmen, aided in this up till
1815 by Andrew Fuller. He never set foot in England again, and the
influence of his brethren Ward and Marshman during their visits was
largely neutralised by some leaders of their own church. But Carey's
character and career, his letters and writings, his work and whole
personality, stood out in England, Scotland, and America as the motive
power which stimulated every church and society, and won the triumph of
toleration in the charter of 1813, of humanity, education, and
administrative reform in the legislation of Lord William Bentinck.
We have already seen how the immediate result of Carey's early letters
was the foundation on a catholic basis of the London Missionary
Society, which now represents the great Nonconformist half of England;
of the Edinburgh or Scottish and Glasgow Societies, through which the
Presbyterians sent forth missionaries to West and South Africa and to
Western India, until their churches acted as such; of the Church
Missionary Society which the evangelical members of the Church of
England have put in the front of all the societies; and of Robert
Haldane's splendid self-sacrifice in selling all that he had to lead a
large Presbyterian mission to Hindostan. Soon (1797) the London
Society became the parent of that of the Netherlands, and of that which
is one of the most extensive in Christendom, the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The latter, really founded (1810)
by Judson and some of his fellow-students, gave birth (1814) to the
almost equally great American Baptist Union when Judson and his
colleague became Baptists, and the former was sent by Carey to Burma.
The Religious Tract Society (1799), and the British and Foreign Bible
Society (1804)--each a handmaid of the missionary agencies--sprang as
really though less directly from Carey's action. Such organised
efforts to bring in heathen and Mohammedan peoples led in 1809 to the
at first catholic work begun by the London Society for promoting
Christianity among the Jews. The older Wesleyan Methodist and Gospel
Propagation Societies, catching the enthusiasm as Carey succeeded in
opening India and the East, entered on a new development under which
the former in 1813, and the latter in 1821, no longer confined their
operations to the slaves of America and the English of the dispersion
in the colonies and dependencies of Great Britain. In 1815 Lutheran
Germany also, which had cast out the Pietists and the Moravian brethren
as the Church of England had rejected the Wesleyans, founded the
principal representative of its evangelicalism at Basel. The
succeeding years up to Carey's death saw similar missionary centres
formed, or reorganised, in Leipzig (1819), Berlin (1823), and Bremen
(1836).[23]
The Periodical Accounts sent home from Mudnabati and Serampore,
beginning at the close of 1794, and the Monthly Circular Letters after
1807, gave birth not only to these great missionary movements but to
the new and now familiar class of foreign missionary periodicals. The
few magazines then existing, like the Evangelical, became filled with a
new spirit of earnest aggressiveness. In 1796 there appeared in
Edinburgh The Missionary Magazine, "a periodical publication intended
as a repository of discussion and intelligence respecting the progress
of the Gospel throughout the world." The editors close their preface
in January 1797 with this statement:--"With much pleasure they have
learned that there was never a greater number of religious periodical
publications carried on than at present, and never were any of them
more generally read. The aggregate impression of those alone which are
printed in Britain every month considerably exceeds thirty thousand."
The first article utilises the facts sent home by Dr. Carey as the
fruit of his first two years' experience, to show "The Peculiar
Advantages of Bengal as a Field for Missions from Great Britain."
After describing, in the style of an English statesman, the immense
population, the highly civilised state of society, the eagerness of the
natives in the acquisition of knowledge, and the principles which the
Hindoos and Mohammedans hold in common with Christians, the writer thus
continues:--
"The attachment of both the Mohammedans and Hindoos to their ancient
systems is lessening every day. We have this information from the late
Sir William Jones, one of the Judges of that country, a name dear to
literature, and a lover of the religion of Jesus. The Mussulmans in
Hindostan are in general but little acquainted with their system, and
by no means so zealous for it as their brethren in the Turkish and
Persian empires. Besides, they have not the strong arm of civil
authority to crush those who would convert them. Mr. Carey's letters
seem to intimate the same relaxation among the Hindoos. This decay of
prejudice and bigotry will at least incline them to listen with more
patience, and a milder temper, to the doctrines and evidences of the
Christian religion. The degree of adhesion to their castes, which
still remains, is certainly unfavourable, and must be considered as one
of Satan's arts to render men unhappy; but it is not insuperable. The
Roman Catholics have gained myriads of converts from among them. The
Danish missionaries record their thousands too: and one (Schwartz) of
the most successful missionaries at present in the world is labouring
in the southern part of Hindostan. Besides a very considerable number
who have thrown aside their old superstition, and make a profession of
the Christian religion, he computes that, in the course of his
ministry, he has been the instrument of savingly converting two
thousand persons to the faith of Christ. Of these, above five hundred
are Mohammedans: the rest are from among the different castes of the
Hindoos. In addition to these instances, it is proper to notice the
attention which the Hindoos are paying to the two Baptist missionaries,
and which gives a favourable specimen of their readiness to listen to
the preaching of the Gospel...
"Reflect, O disciple of Jesus! on what has been presented to thy view.
The cause of Christ is thy own cause. Without deep criminality thou
canst not be indifferent to its success. Rejoice that so delightful a
field of missions has been discovered and exhibited. Rouse thyself
from the slumbers of spiritual languor. Exert thyself to the utmost of
thy power; and let conscience be able to testify, without a doubt, even
at the tribunal of Jesus Christ, If missionaries are not speedily sent
to preach she glorious Gospel in Bengal, it shall not be owing to me."
That is remarkable writing for an Edinburgh magazine in the year 1797,
and it was Carey who made it possible. Its author followed up the
appeal by offering himself and his all, for life and death, in a "Plan
of the Mission to Bengal," which appeared in the April number. Robert
Haldane, whose journal at this time was full of Carey's doings, and his
ordained associates, Bogue, Innes, and Greville Ewing, accompanied by
John Ritchie as printer, John Campbell as catechist, and other lay
workers, determined to turn the very centre of Hindooism, Benares, into
a second Serampore. Defeated by one set of Directors of the East India
Company, he waited for the election of their successors, only to find
the East India Company as hostile to the Scottish gentleman as they had
been to the English shoemaker four years before.
The formation of the great Missionary and Bible Societies did not, as
in the case of the Moravian Brethren and the Wesleyans, take their
members out of the Churches of England and Scotland, of the Baptists
and Independents. It supplied in each case an executive through which
they worked aggressively not only on the non-christian world, but still
more directly on their own home congregations and parishes. The
foreign mission spirit directly gave birth to the home mission on an
extensive scale. Not merely did the Haldanes and their agents,
following Whitefield and the Scottish Secession of 1733, become the
evangelists of the north when they were not suffered to preach the
Gospel in South Asia; every member of the churches of Great Britain and
America, as he caught the enthusiasm of humanity, in the Master's
sense, from the periodical accounts sent home from Serampore, and soon
from Africa and the South Seas, as well as from the Red Indians and
Slaves of the West, began to work as earnestly among the neglected
classes around him, as to pray and give for the conversion of the
peoples abroad. From first to last, from the early days of the
Moravian influence on Wesley and Whitefield, and the letters of Carey,
to the successive visits to the home churches of missionaries like Duff
and Judson, Ellis and Williams, Moffat and Livingstone, it is the
enterprise of foreign missions which has been the leaven of Christendom
no less really than of the rest of the world. Does the fact that at
the close of the year 1796 there were more than thirty thousand men and
women in Great Britain who every month read and prayed about the then
little known world of heathenism, and spared not their best to bring
that world to the Christ whom they had found, seem a small thing? How
much smaller, even to contemptible insignificance, must those who think
so consider the arrival of William Carey in Calcutta to be three years
before! Yet the thirty thousand sprang from the one, and to-day the
thirty thousand have a vast body of Christians really obedient to the
Master, in so far as, banded together in five hundred churches and
societies, they have sent out eighteen thousand missionaries instead of
one or two; they see eighty thousand Asiatics, Africans, and
Polynesians proclaiming the Christ to their countrymen, and their
praying is tested by their giving annually a sum of £5,000,000, to
which every year is adding.
The influence of Carey and his work on individual men and women in his
generation was even more marked, inasmuch as his humility kept him so
often from magnifying his office and glorifying God as the example of
Paul should have encouraged him to do. Most important of all for the
cause, he personally called Ward to be his associate, and his writings
drew Dr. and Mrs. Marshman to his side, while his apostolic charity so
developed and used all that was good in Thomas and Fountain, that not
even in the churches of John and James, Peter and Paul, Barnabas and
Luke, was there such a brotherhood. When troubles came from outside he
won to himself the younger brethren, Yates and Pearce, and healed half
the schism which Andrew Fuller's successors made. His Enquiry,
followed "by actually embarking on a mission to India," led to the
publication of the Letters on Missions addressed to the Protestant
Ministers of the British Churches by Melville Horne, who, after a brief
experience as Church of England chaplain in Zachary Macaulay's
settlement of Sierra Leone, published that little book to excite in all
Christians a passion for missions like the Master's. Referring to the
English churches, Established and Nonconformist, he wrote:--"Except the
Reverend Mr. Carey and a friend who accompanies him, I am not informed
of any...ministers who are engaged in missions." Such was the
impression made by Carey on John Newton that, in 1802, he rebuked his
old curate, Claudius Buchanan, for depreciating the Serampore
missionaries, adding, "I do not look for miracles, but if God were to
work one in our day, I should not wonder if it were in favour of Dr.
Carey."
The Serampore Mission, at an early period, called forth the admiration
of the Scottish philanthropist and essayist, James Douglas of Cavers,
whose Hints on Missions (1822), a book still full of suggestiveness,
contains this passage:--"Education and the press have only been
employed to purpose of very late years, especially by the missionaries
of Serampore; every year they have been making some improvements upon
their former efforts, and...it only requires to increase the number of
printing presses, schools, teachers, translators, and professors, to
accelerate to any pitch the rate of improvement...To attempt to convert
the world without educating it, is grasping at the end and neglecting
the means." Referring to what Carey had begun and the Serampore
College had helped to develop in Asia, as in Africa and America,
Douglas of Cavers well described the missionary era, the new
crusade:--"The Reformation itself needed anew a reform in the spirit if
not in the letter. That second Reformation has begun; it makes less
noise than that of Luther, but it spreads wider and deeper; as it is
more intimate it will be more enduring. Like the Temple of Solomon, it
is rising silently, without the din of pressure or the note of previous
preparation, but notwithstanding it will be not less complete in all
its parts nor less able to resist the injuries of time!"
Henry Martyn died, perhaps the loftiest and most loving spirit of the
men whom Carey drew to India. Son of a Cornish miner-captain, after
passing through the Truro Grammar School, he was sixteen--the age at
which Carey became a shoemaker's apprentice--when he was entered at St.
John's, and made that ever since the most missionary of all the
colleges of Cambridge. When not yet twenty he came out Senior
Wrangler. His father's death drove him to the Bible, to the Acts of
the Apostles, which he began to study, and the first whisper of the
call of Christ came to him in the joy of the Magnificat as its strains
pealed through the chapel. Charles Simeon's preaching drew him to
Trinity Church. In the vicarage, when he had come to be tutor of his
college, and was preparing for the law, he heard much talk of William
Carey, of his self-sacrifice and his success in India. It was the
opening year of the nineteenth century, the Church Missionary Society
had just been born as the fruit partly of a paper written by Simeon
four years previously, and he offered himself as its first English
missionary. He was not twenty-one, he could not be ordained for two
years. Meanwhile a calamity made him and his unmarried sister
penniless; he loved Lydia Grenfell with a pure passion which enriched
while it saddened his short life, and a chaplaincy became the best mode
in every way of his living and dying for India. What a meeting must
that have been between him and Carey when, already stricken by fever,
he found a sanctuary in Aldeen, and learned at Serampore the sweetness
of telling to the natives of India in one of their own tongues the love
of God. William Carey and Henry Martyn were one in origin, from the
people; in industry, as scholars; in genius, as God-devoted; in the
love of a great heart not always returned. The older man left the
church of his fathers because there was no Simeon and no missionary
society, and he made his own university; he laid the foundation of
English missions deep and broad in no sect but in Christ, to whom he
and Martyn alike gave themselves.
The names of Carey and Simeon, thus linked to each other by Martyn,
find another pleasant and fruitful tie in the Rev. Alexander Stewart,
D.D., Gaelic scholar and Scottish preacher. It was soon after Carey
went out to India that Simeon, travelling in the Highlands, spent a
Sunday in the manse of Moulin, where his personal intercourse and his
evening sermon after a season of Communion were blessed to the
evangelical enlightenment of Stewart. Moulin was the birthplace ten
years after of Alexander Duff, whose parents previously came under the
power of the minister's new-found light.[24] Like Simeon, Dr. Stewart
thenceforth became a warm supporter of foreign missions. Finding in
the Periodical Accounts a letter in which Carey asked Fuller to send
him a copy of Van der Hooght's edition of the Hebrew Bible because of
the weakness of his eyesight, Dr. Stewart at once wrote offering his
own copy. Fuller gladly accepted the kindness. "I with great
pleasure," writes Dr. Stewart, "followed the direction, wrote a letter
of some length to Carey, and sent off my parcel to London. I daresay
you remember my favourite Hebrew Bible in two volumes. I parted with
it with something of the same feelings that a pious parent might do
with a favourite son going on a mission to the heathen--with a little
regret but with much goodwill." This was the beginning of an
interesting correspondence with Carey and Fuller.
Next to Andrew Fuller, and in the region of literature, general culture
and eloquence before him, the strongest men among the Baptists were the
younger Robert Hall and John Foster. Both were devoted to Carey, and
were the most powerful of the English advocates of his mission. The
former, for a time, was led to side with the Society in some of the
details of its dispute with Dr. Marshman, but his loyalty to Carey and
the principles of the mission fired some of the most eloquent orations
in English literature. John Foster's shrewder common sense never
wavered, but inspired his pen alike in the heat of controversy and in
his powerful essays and criticisms. Writing in 1828, he declared that
the Serampore missionaries "have laboured with the most earnest
assiduity for a quarter of a century (Dr. Carey much longer) in all
manner of undertakings for promoting Christianity, with such a
renunciation of self-interest as will never be surpassed; that they
have conveyed the oracles of divine truth into so many languages; that
they have watched over diversified missionary operations with
unremitting care; that they have conducted themselves through many
trying and some perilous circumstances with prudence and fortitude; and
that they retain to this hour an undiminished zeal to do all that
providence shall enable them in the same good cause." The expenditure
of the Serampore Brotherhood up to that time, leaving out of account
the miscellaneous missionary services, he showed to have been upwards
of £75,000. Dr. Chalmers in Scotland was as stoutly with Carey and his
brethren as Foster was in England, so that Marshman wrote:--"Thus two
of the greatest and wisest men of England are on our side, and, what is
more, I trust the Lord God is with us." What Heber thought, alike as
man and bishop, his own loving letter and proposal for "reunion of our
churches" in the next chapter will show.
Of all the publicists in the United Kingdom during Carey's long career
the foremost was William Wilberforce; he was not second even to Charles
Grant and his sons. Defeated in carrying into law the "pious clauses"
of the charter which would have opened India to the Christian
missionary and schoolmaster in 1793, he nevertheless succeeded by his
persuasive eloquence and the weight of his character in having them
entered as Resolutions of the House of Commons. He then gave himself
successfully to the abolition of the slave-trade. But he always
declared the toleration of Christianity in British India to be "that
greatest of all causes, for I really place it before the abolition, in
which, blessed be God, we gained the victory." His defeat in 1793,
when Dundas and the Government were with him, was due to the apathy of
public opinion, and especially of the dumb churches. But in the next
twenty years Carey changed all that. Not merely was Andrew Fuller ever
on the watch with pen and voice, but all the churches were roused, the
Established to send out bishops and chaplains, the Nonconformist and
Established Evangelicals together to secure freedom for missionaries
and schoolmasters. In 1793 an English missionary was an unknown and
therefore a much-dreaded monster, for Carey was then on the sea. In
1813 Carey and the Serampore Brotherhood were still the only English
missionaries continuously at work in India, and not the churches only,
but governor-generals like Teignmouth and Wellesley, and scholars like
Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson, were familiar with the grandeur and
political innocency of their labours. Hence this outburst of
Wilberforce in the House of Commons on the 16th July 1813, when he used
the name of Carey to defeat an attempt of the Company to prevent
toleration by omitting the declaratory clauses of the Resolution, which
would have made it imply that the privilege should never be exerted
though the power of licensing missionaries was nominally conceded.
"One great argument of his opponents was grounded on the enthusiastic
character which they imputed to the missionary body. India hitherto has
seen no missionary who was a member of the English Church, and
imputations could be cast more readily on 'Anabaptists and fanatics.'
These attacks Mr. Wilberforce indignantly refuted, and well had the
noble conduct of the band at Serampore deserved this vindication. 'I do
not know,' he often said, 'a finer instance of the moral sublime, than
that a poor cobbler working in his stall should conceive the idea of
converting the Hindoos to Christianity; yet such was Dr. Carey. Why
Milton's planning his Paradise Lost in his old age and blindness was
nothing to it. And then when he had gone to India, and was appointed
by Lord Wellesley to a lucrative and honourable station in the college
of Fort William, with equal nobleness of mind he made over all his
salary (between £1000 and £1500 per annum) to the general objects of
the mission. By the way, nothing ever gave me a more lively sense of
the low and mercenary standard of your men of honour, than the manifest
effect produced upon the House of Commons by my stating this last
circumstance. It seemed to be the only thing which moved them.' Dr.
Carey had been especially attacked, and 'a few days afterwards the
member who had made this charge came to me, and asked me in a manner
which in a noted duellist could not be mistaken, "Pray, Mr.
Wilberforce, do you know a Mr. Andrew Fuller, who has written to desire
me to retract the statement which I made with reference to Dr. Carey?"
"Yes," I answered with a smile, "I know him perfectly, but depend upon
it you will make nothing of him in your way; he is a respectable
Baptist minister at Kettering." In due time there came from India an
authoritative contradiction of the slander. It was sent to me, and for
two whole years did I take it in my pocket to the House of Commons to
read it to the House whenever the author of the accusation should be
present; but during that whole time he never once dared show himself in
the House.'"
The slanderer was a Mr. Prendergast, who affirmed that Dr. Carey's
conduct had changed so much for the worse since the departure of Lord
Wellesley, that he himself had seen the missionary on a tub in the
streets of Calcutta haranguing the mob and abusing the religion of the
people in such a way that the police alone saved him from being killed.
So, and for the same object of defeating the Resolutions on Toleration,
Mr. Montgomerie Campbell had asserted that when Schwartz was in the
heat of his discourse in a certain village and had taken off his stock,
"that and his gold buckle were stolen by one of his virtuous and
enlightened congregation; in such a description of natives did the
doctrine of the missionaries operate." Before Dr. Carey's exposure
could reach England this "tub" story became the stock argument of the
anti-christian orators. The Madras barrister, Marsh, who was put up to
answer Wilberforce, was driven to such language as this:--
"Your struggles are only begun when you have converted one caste; never
will the scheme of Hindoo conversion be realised till you persuade an
immense population to suffer by whole tribes the severest martyrdom
that has yet been sustained for the sake of religion--and are the
missionaries whom this bill will let loose on India fit engines for the
accomplishment of this great revolution? Will these people, crawling
from the holes and caverns of their original destinations, apostates
from the loom and the anvil--he should have said the awl--and renegades
from the lowest handicraft employments, be a match for the cool and
sedate controversies they will have to encounter should the Brahmans
condescend to enter into the arena against the maimed and crippled
gladiators that presume to grapple with their faith? What can be
apprehended but the disgrace and discomfiture of whole hosts of tub
preachers in the conflict?"
Lord Wellesley's eulogy of the Serampore mission in the House of Lords
was much more pronounced than appears from the imperfect report. But
even in that he answered the Brahmanised member of the House of Commons
thus:--
"With regard to the missionaries, he must say that while he was in
India he never knew of any danger arising from their proceedings,
neither had he heard of any impression produced by them in the way of
conversion. The greater number of them were in the Danish settlement
of Serampore; but he never heard of any convulsions or any alarm
produced by them. Some of them, particularly Mr. Carey, were very
learned men, and had been employed in the College of Fort William. He
had always considered the missionaries who were in India in his time a
quiet, orderly, discreet, and learned body; and he had employed them in
the education of youth and the translation of the Scriptures into the
eastern languages. He had thought it his duty to have the Sacred
Scriptures translated into the languages of the East, and to give the
learned natives employed in the translation the advantage of access to
the sacred fountain of divine truth. He thought a Christian governor
could not have done less; and he knew that a British governor ought not
to do more."
Carey's letters to Fuller in 1810-12 are filled with importunate
appeals to agitate, so that the new charter might legalise Christian
mission work in India. Fuller worked outside of the House as hard as
Wilberforce. In eight weeks of the session no fewer than nine hundred
petitions were presented, in twenties and thirties, night after night,
till Lord Castlereagh exclaimed, "This is enough, Mr. Fuller." There
was more reason for Carey's urgency than he knew at the time he was
pressing Fuller. The persecution of the missionaries in Bengal,
excused by the Vellore mutiny, which had driven Judson to Burma and
several other missionaries elsewhere, was renewed by the Indian
Government's secretaries and police. The Ministry had informed the
Court of Directors that they had resolved to permit Europeans to settle
in India, yet after five weeks' vacillation the Governor-General
yielded to his subordinates so far as to issue an order on 5th March
1812, for the expulsion of three missionaries, an order which was so
executed that one of them was conducted like a felon through the
streets and lodged in the native jail for two hours. Carey thus wrote
to Ryland on the persecution:--
"CALCUTTA, 14th April 1813.--Before this reaches you it is probable
that you will have heard of the resolution of Government respecting our
brethren Johns, Lawson, and Robinson, and will perhaps have even seen
Brother Johns, who was by that cruel order sent home on the
Castlereagh. Government have agreed that Brother Lawson shall stay
till the pleasure of the Court of Directors is known, to whom a
reference will be made. Brother Robinson was gone down the river, and
was on board a ship bound to Java when the order was issued; he
therefore got out without hearing of it, but I understand it will be
sent thither after him. Jehovah reigneth!
"Since Brother Johns's departure I have tried to ascertain the cause of
the severity in Government. I had a long conversation with H. T.
Colebrooke, Esq., who has been out of Council but a few months, upon
the matter. I cannot learn that Government has any specific dislike to
us, but find that ever since the year 1807 the orders of the Court of
Directors to send home all Europeans not in the service of Her Majesty
or the Company, and who come out without leave of the Directors, have
been so peremptory and express that Government cannot now overlook any
circumstance which brings such persons to notice. Notwithstanding the
general way in which the Court of Directors have worded their orders, I
cannot help putting several circumstances together, which make me fear
that our Mission was the cause of the enforcement of that general law
which forbids Europeans to remain in India without the leave of the
Court of Directors.
"Whether Twining's pamphlet excited the alarm, or was only an echo of
the minds of a number of men hostile to religion, I cannot say, but if
I recollect dates aright the orders of the Court of Directors came as
soon as possible after that pamphlet was published; and as it would
have been too barefaced to have given a specific order to send home
missionaries, they founded their orders on an unjust and wicked clause
in the charter, and so enforced it that it should effectually operate
on missionaries.
"I hope the friends of religion will persevere in the use of all
peaceful and lawful means to prevail on the legislature to expunge that
clause, or so to modify it that ministers of the Gospel may have leave
to preach, form and visit churches, and perform the various duties of
their office without molestation, and that they may have a right to
settle in and travel over any part of India for that purpose. Nothing
can be more just than this wish, and nothing would be more politic than
for it to be granted; for every one converted from among the heathen is
from that time a staunch friend of the English Government. Our necks
have, however, been more or less under the yoke ever since that year,
and preaching the Gospel stands in much the same political light as
committing an act of felony. Witness what has been done to Mr.
Thompson, the five American brethren, and our three brethren. Mr.
Thomason, the clergyman, has likewise hard work to stand his ground.
"I trust, however, it is too late to eradicate the Gospel from Bengal.
The number of those born in the country who preach the Word is now very
considerable. Fifteen of this description preach constantly, and seven
or eight more occasionally exhort their countrymen, besides our
European brethren. The Gospel is stationed at eighteen or twenty
stations belonging to our Mission alone, and at several of them there
are churches. The Bible is either translated or under translation into
twenty-four of the languages of the East, eighteen of which we are
employed about, besides printing most of the others. Thirteen out of
these eighteen are now in the press, including a third edition of the
Bengali New Testament. Indeed, so great is the demand for Bibles that
though we have eight presses constantly at work I fear we shall not
have a Bengali New Testament to sell or give away for the next twelve
months, the old edition being entirely out of print. We shall be in
almost the same predicament with the Hindostani. We are going to set
up two more presses, which we can get made in Calcutta, and are going
to send another to Rangoon. In short, though the publishing of the
Word of God is a political crime, there never was a time when it was so
successful. 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the
Lord.'
"Through divine mercy we are all well, and live in peace and love. A
small cloud which threatened at the time Brother Johns left us has
mercifully blown over, and we are now in the utmost harmony. I will,
if possible, write to my nephew Eustace by these ships, but I am so
pressed for time that I can never promise to write a letter. The Lord
has so blessed us that we are now printing in more languages than we
could do before the fire took place.
"Give my love to Eustace, also to all who recollect or think of me. I
am now near fifty-two years of age; yet through mercy I am well and am
enabled to keep close to work twelve or fourteen hours a day. I hope to
see the Bible printed in most of the languages in which it is begun.--I
am, very affectionately yours, WM. CAREY."
Carey had previously written thus to Fuller:--"The fault lies in the
clause which gives the Company power thus to send home interlopers, and
is just as reasonable as one which should forbid all the people in
England--a select few excepted--to look at the moon. I hope this
clause will be modified or expunged in the new charter. The
prohibition is wrong, and nothing that is morally wrong can be
politically right."
It was left to the charter of 1853 fully to liberalise the Company, but
each step was taken too late to save it from the nemesis of 1857 and
extinction in 1858. "Let no man think," Wilberforce had said to the
House of Commons in 1813, "that the petitions which have loaded our
table have been produced by a burst of momentary enthusiasm. While the
sun and moon continue to shine in the firmament so long will this
object be pursued with unabated ardour until the great work be
accomplished."
The opposition of Anglo-Indian officials and lawyers, which vainly used
no better weapons than such as Mr. Prendergast and his "tub"
fabrication, had been anticipated and encouraged by the Edinburgh
Review. That periodical was at the height of its influence in 1808,
the year before John Murray's Quarterly was first published. The Rev.
Sydney Smith, as the literary and professional representative of what
he delighted to call "the cause of rational religion," was the foe of
every form of earnest Christianity, which he joined the mob in
stigmatising as "Methodism." He was not unacquainted with Indian
politics, for his equally clever brother, known as Bobus Smith, was
long Advocate-General in Calcutta, and left a very considerable fortune
made there to enrich the last six years of the Canon's life. Casting
about for a subject on which to exercise at once his animosity and his
fun, he found it in the Periodical Accounts, wherein Fuller had
undoubtedly too often published letters and passages of journals
written only for the eye of the private friend. Carey frequently
remonstrated against the publicity given to some of his communications,
and the fear of this checked his correspondence. In truth, the
new-born enthusiasm was such that, at first, the Committee kept nothing
back. It was easy for a litterateur like Sydney Smith in those days to
extract passages and to give them such headings as "Brother Carey's
Piety at Sea," "Hatred of the Natives to the Gospel." Smith produced
an article which, as republished in his collected essays, has a
historical value as a test of the bitterness of the hate which the
missionary enterprise had to meet in secular literature till the death
of Livingstone, Wilson, and Duff opened the eyes of journalism to the
facts. In itself it must be read in the light of its author's own
criticism of his articles, thus expressed in a letter to Francis
Jeffrey, and of the regret that he had written it which, Jeffrey told
Dr. Marshman, he lived to utter:--"Never mind; let them" (his articles)
"go away with their absurdity unadulterated and pure. If I please, the
object for which I write is attained; if I do not, the laughter which
follows my error is the only thing which can make me cautious and
tremble." But for that picture by himself we should have pronounced
Carlyle's drawing of him to be almost as malicious as his own of the
Serampore missionaries--"A mass of fat and muscularity, with massive
Roman nose, piercing hazel eyes, shrewdness and fun--not humour or even
wit--seemingly without soul altogether."
The attack called forth a reply by Mr. Styles so severe that Sydney
Smith wrote a rejoinder which began by claiming credit for "rooting out
a nest of consecrated cobblers." Sir James Mackintosh, then in Bombay,
wrote of a similar assault by Mr. Thomas Twining on the Bible
Societies, that it "must excite general indignation. The only measure
which he could consistently propose would be the infliction of capital
punishment on the crime of preaching or embracing Christianity in
India, for almost every inferior degree of persecution is already
practised by European or native anti-christians. But it fell to
Southey, in the very first number of the Quarterly Review, in April
1809, to deal with the Rev. Sydney Smith, and to defend Carey and the
Brotherhood as both deserved. The layman's defence was the more
effective for its immediate purpose that he started from the same
prejudice as that of the reverend Whig rationalist--"the Wesleyans, the
Orthodox dissenters of every description, and the Evangelical churchmen
may all be comprehended under the generic name of Methodists. The
religion which they preach is not the religion of our fathers, and what
they have altered they have made worse." But Southey had himself faith
as well as a literary canon higher than that of his opponent who wrote
only to "please" his patrons. He saw in these Methodists alone that
which he appreciated as the essence of true faith--"that spirit of
enthusiasm by which Europe was converted to Christianity they have in
some measure revived, and they have removed from Protestantism a part
of its reproach." He proceeded to tell how "this Mission, which is
represented by its enemies as so dangerous to the British Empire in
India, and thereby, according to a logic learnt from Buonaparte, to
England also, originated in a man by name William Carey, who till the
twenty-fourth year of his age was a working shoemaker. Sectarianism
has this main advantage over the Established Church, that its men of
ability certainly find their station, and none of its talents are
neglected or lost. Carey was a studious and pious man, his faith
wrong, his feelings right. He made himself competently versed in
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He is now probably a far more learned
orientalist than any European has ever been before him, and has been
appointed Professor of Sanskrit and Bengali at the College of Fort
William." Then follow a history of the Mission written in a style
worthy of the author of the Life of Nelson, and these statements of the
political and the purely missionary questions, which read now almost as
predictions:--
"The first step towards winning the natives to our religion is to show
them that we have one. This will hardly be done without a visible
church. There would be no difficulty in filling up the establishment,
however ample; but would the archbishop, bishops, deans, and chapters
of Mr. Buchanan's plan do the work of missionaries? Could the Church
of England supply missionaries?--where are they to be found among them?
In what school for the promulgation of sound and orthodox learning are
they trained up? There is ability and there is learning in the Church
of England, but its age of fermentation has long been over; and that
zeal which for this work is the most needful is, we fear, possessed
only by the Methodists...
"Carey and his son have been in Bengal fourteen years, the other
brethren only nine; they had all a difficult language to acquire before
they could speak to a native, and to preach and argue in it required a
thorough and familiar knowledge. Under these circumstances the wonder
is, not that they have done so little, but that they have done so much;
for it will be found that, even without this difficulty to retard them,
no religious opinions have spread more rapidly in the same time, unless
there was some remarkable folly or extravagance to recommend them, or
some powerful worldly inducement. Their progress will be continually
accelerating; the difficulty is at first, as in introducing vaccination
into a distant land; when the matter has once taken one subject
supplies infection for all around him, and the disease takes root in
the country. The husband converts the wife, the son converts the
parent, the friend his friend, and every fresh proselyte becomes a
missionary in his own neighbourhood. Thus their sphere of influence
and of action widens, and the eventual issue of a struggle between
truth and falsehood is not to be doubted by those who believe in the
former. Other missionaries from other societies have now entered India,
and will soon become efficient labourers in their station. From
Government all that is asked is toleration for themselves and
protection for their converts. The plan which they have laid for their
own proceedings is perfectly prudent and unexceptionable, and there is
as little fear of their provoking martyrdom as there would be of their
shrinking from it, if the cause of God and man require the sacrifice.
But the converts ought to be protected from violence, and all cramming
with cow-dung prohibited on pain of retaliation with beef-tea.
"Nothing can be more unfair than the manner in which the scoffers and
alarmists have represented the missionaries. We, who have thus
vindicated them, are neither blind to what is erroneous in their
doctrine or ludicrous in their phraseology; but the anti-missionaries
cull out from their journals and letters all that is ridiculous
sectarian, and trifling; call them fools, madmen, tinkers, Calvinists,
and schismatics; and keep out of sight their love of man, and their
zeal for God, their self-devotement, their indefatigable industry, and
their unequalled learning. These low-born and low-bred mechanics have
translated the whole Bible into Bengali, and have by this time printed
it. They are printing the New Testament in the Sanskrit, the Orissa,
Mahratta, Hindostan, and Guzarat, and translating it into Persic,
Telinga, Karnata, Chinese, the language of the Sieks and of the
Burmans, and in four of these languages they are going on with the
Bible. Extraordinary as this is, it will appear more so when it is
remembered that of these men one was originally a shoemaker, another a
printer at Hull, and a third the master of a charity-school at Bristol.
Only fourteen years have elapsed since Thomas and Carey set foot in
India, and in that time have these missionaries acquired this gift of
tongues, in fourteen years these low-born, low-bred mechanics have done
more towards spreading the knowledge of the Scriptures among the
heathen than has been accomplished, or even attempted, by all the
princes and potentates of the world--and all the universities and
establishments into the bargain.
"Do not think to supersede the Baptist missionaries till you can
provide from your own church such men as these, and, it may be added,
such women also as their wives."
Soon after the Charter victory had been gained "that fierce and fiery
Calvinist," whose dictum Southey adopted, that the question in dispute
is not whether the natives shall enjoy toleration, but whether that
toleration shall be extended to the teachers of Christianity, Andrew
Fuller, entered into rest on the 7th May 1815, at the age of sixty-two.
Sutcliff of Olney had been the first of the three to be taken away[25]
a year before, at the same age. The scholarly Dr. Ryland of Bristol
was left alone, and the home management of the Mission passed into the
hands of another generation. Up to Fuller's death that management had
been almost ideally perfect. In 1812 the Committee had been increased
by the addition of nineteen members, to represent the growing interest
of the churches in Serampore, and to meet the demand of the
"respectable" class who had held aloof at the first, who were eager
that the headquarters of so renowned an enterprise should be removed to
London. But Fuller prevailed to keep the Society a little longer at
Kettering, although he failed to secure as his assistant and successor
the one man whose ability, experience, and prudence would have been
equal to his own, and have prevented the troubles that
followed--Christopher Anderson. As Fuller lay dying, he dictated a
letter to Ryland wherein he thus referred to the evangelical doctrine
of grace which he had been the one English theologian of his day to
defend from the hyper-calvinists, and to use as the foundation of the
modern missionary enterprise:--"I have preached and written much
against the abuse of the doctrine of grace, but that doctrine is all my
salvation and all my desire. I have no other hope than from salvation
by mere sovereign, efficacious grace through the atonement of my Lord
and Saviour: with this hope I can go into eternity with composure. We
have some who have been giving it out of late that if Sutcliff and some
others had preached more of Christ and less of Jonathan Edwards they
would have been more useful. If those who talk thus had preached
Christ half as much as Jonathan Edwards did, and were half as useful as
he was, their usefulness would be double what it is. It is very
singular that the Mission to the East originated with one of these
principles, and without pretending to be a prophet, I may say if it
ever falls into the hands of men who talk in this strain (of
hyper-calvinism) it will soon come to nothing."
Andrew Fuller was not only the first of Foreign Mission Secretaries; he
was a model for all. To him his work was spiritual life, and hence,
though the most active preacher and writer of his day, he was like
Carey in this, that his working day was twice as long as that of most
men, and he could spend half of his time in the frequent journeys all
over the kingdom to raise funds, in repeated campaigns in London to
secure toleration, and in abundant letters to the missionaries. His
relation to the Committee, up to the last, was equally exemplary. In
the very earliest missionary organisation in England it is due to him
that the line was clearly drawn between the deliberative and judicial
function which is that of the members, and the executive which is that
of the secretary. Wisdom and efficiency, clearness of perception and
promptitude of action, were thus combined. Fuller's, too, was the
special merit of realising that, while a missionary committee or church
are fellow-workers only with the men and women abroad, the Serampore
Brotherhood was a self-supporting, and to that extent a self-governing
body in a sense true of no foreign mission ever since. The two
triumvirates, moreover, consisted of giants--Carey, Marshman, and Ward
abroad; Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland at home. To Carey personally the
death of Fuller was more than to any other. For almost the quarter of
a century he had kept his vow that he would hold the rope. When Pearce
died all too soon there was none whom Carey loved like Fuller, while
Fuller's devotion to Carey was all the greater that it was tempered by
a wise jealousy for his perfectness. So early as 1797, Fuller wrote
thus to the troublesome Fountain:--"It affords us good hope of your
being a useful missionary that you seem to love and revere the counsels
of Brother Carey. A humble, peaceful, circumspect, disinterested,
faithful, peaceable, and zealous conduct like his will render you a
blessing to society. Brother Carey is greatly respected and beloved by
all denominations here. I will tell you what I have foreborne to tell
him lest it should hurt his modesty. Good old Mr. Newton says: 'Mr.
Carey has favoured me with a letter, which, indeed, I accept as a
favour, and I mean to thank him for it. I trust my heart as cordially
unites with him as though I were a brother Baptist myself. I look to
such a man with reverence. He is more to me than bishop or archbishop;
he is an apostle. May the Lord make all who undertake missions
like-minded with Brother Carey!'" As the home administrator, no less
than as the theological controversialist, Andrew Fuller stands only
second to William Carey, the founder of Modern English Missions.
Fuller's last letter to Carey forms the best introduction to the little
which it is here necessary to record of the action of the Baptist
Missionary Society when under the secretaryship of the Rev. John Dyer.
Mr. John Marshman, C.S.I., has written the detailed history of that
controversy not only with filial duty, but with a forgiving charity
which excites our admiration for one who suffered more from it than all
his predecessors in the Brotherhood, of which he was the last
representative. The Society has long since ceased to approve of that
period. Its opinion has become that of Mr. Marshman, to which a
careful perusal of all the documents both in Serampore and England has
led us--"Had it been possible to create a dozen establishments like
that of Serampore, each raising and managing its own funds, and
connected with the Society as the centre of unity in a common cause, it
ought to have been a subject of congratulation and not of regret." The
whole policy of every missionary church and society is now and has long
been directed to creating self-supporting and self-propagating
missions, like Serampore, that the regions beyond may be
evangelised--whether these be colleges of catechumens and inquirers,
like those of Duff and Wilson, Hislop and Dr. Miller in India, and of
Govan and Dr. Stewart in Lovedale, Kafraria; or the indigenous churches
of the West Indies, West Africa, the Pacific Ocean, and Burma. To us
the long and bitter dispute is now of value only in so far as it brings
out in Christ-like relief the personality of William Carey.
At the close of 1814 Dr. Carey had asked Fuller to pay £50 a year to
his father, then in his eightieth year, and £20 to his (step) mother if
she survived the old man. Protesting that an engraving of his portrait
had been published in violation of the agreement which he had made with
the artist, he agreed to the wish of each of his relatives for a copy.
To these requests Fuller had replied:--"You should not insist on these
things being charged to you, nor yet your father's £50, nor the books,
nor anything necessary to make you comfortable, unless it be to be paid
out of what you would otherwise give to the mission. To insist on
their being paid out of your private property seems to be dictated by
resentment. It is thus we express our indignation when we have an
avaricious man to deal with."
The first act of the Committee, after Fuller's funeral, led Dr. Ryland
to express to Carey his unbounded fears for the future. There were two
difficulties. The new men raised the first question, in what sense the
Serampore property belonged to the Society? They then proceeded to
show how they would answer it, by appointing the son of Samuel Pearce
to Serampore as Mr. Ward's assistant. On both sides of their
independence, as trustees of the property which they had created and
gifted to the Society on this condition, and as a self-supporting,
self-elective brotherhood, it became necessary, for the unbroken peace
of the mission and the success of their work, that they should
vindicate their moral and legal position. The correspondence fell
chiefly to Dr. Marshman. Ward and he successively visited England, to
which the controversy was transferred, with occasional references to
Dr. Carey in Serampore. All Scotland, led by Christopher Anderson,
Chalmers, and the Haldanes--all England, except the Dyer faction and
Robert Hall for a time, among the Baptists, and nearly all America,
held with the Serampore men; but their ever-extending operations were
checked by the uncertainty, and their hearts were nearly broken. The
junior missionaries in India formed a separate union and congregation
by themselves in Calcutta, paid by the Society, though professing to
carry out the organisation of the Serampore Brotherhood in other
respects. The Committee's controversy lasted sixteen years, and was
closed in 1830, after Ward's death, by Carey and Marshman drawing up a
new trust-deed, in which, having vindicated their position, the old men
made over properties which had cost them £7800 to eleven trustees in
England, stipulating only that they should occupy them rent free till
death, and that their colleagues--who were John Marshman and John Mack,
of Edinburgh University--might continue in them for three years
thereafter, paying rent to the Society. Such self-sacrifice would be
pronounced heroic, but it was only the outcome of a life of
self-devotion, marked by the spirit of Him who spake the Sermon on the
Mount, and said to the first missionaries He sent forth:--"Be wise as
serpents, harmless as doves." The story is completed by the fact that
John Marshman, on his father's death, again paid the price of as much
of the property as the Hoogli had not swallowed up when the Committee
were about to put it in the market.
Such was Dr. Carey's position in the Christian world that the Dyer
party considered it important for their interest to separate him from
his colleagues, and if not to claim his influence for their side, at
least to neutralise it. By trying to hold up Dr. Marshman to odium,
they roused the righteous indignation of Carey, while outraging his
sense of justice by their blows at the independence of the Brotherhood.
Dr. Marshman, when in England, met this course by frankly printing the
whole private correspondence of Carey on the subject of the property,
or thirty-two letters ranging from the year 1815 to 1828. One of the
earliest of these is to Mr. Dyer, who had so far forgotten himself as
to ask Dr. Carey to write home, alone, his opinion of his "elder
brethren," and particularly of Dr. Marshman. The answer, covering
eleven octavo pages of small type, is a model for all
controversialists, and especially for any whom duty compels to rebuke
the minister who has failed to learn the charity which envieth not. We
reproduce the principal passages, and the later letters to Christopher
Anderson and his son Jabez, revealing the nobleness of Carey and the
inner life of the Brotherhood:--
"SERAMPORE, 15th July 1819.
"MY DEAR BROTHER--I am sorry you addressed your letter of January the
9th to me alone, because it places me in a most awkward situation, as
it respects my elder brethren, with whom I have acted in concert for
the last nineteen years, with as great a share of satisfaction and
pleasure as could reasonably be expected from a connection with
imperfect creatures, and whom I am thereby called to condemn contrary
to my convictions, or to justify at the expense of their accusers. It
also places me in a disagreeable situation as it respects my younger
brethren, whom I highly respect as Christians; but whose whole conduct,
as it respects the late unhappy differences, has been such as makes it
impossible for me to do otherwise than condemn it...
"You ask, 'Is there no ground for the charges of profusion, etc.,
preferred against Brother Marshman?' Brother Marshman has always been
ardently engaged in promoting the cause of God in India, and, being of
a very active mind, has generally been chosen by us to draw up our
Reports, to write many of our public letters, to draw up plans for
promoting the objects of the mission, founding and managing schools,
raising subscriptions, and other things of a like nature; so that he
has taken a more active part than Brother Ward or myself in these
public acts of the mission. These things placed him in the foreground,
and it has been no uncommon thing for him to bear the blame of those
acts which equally belong to Brother Ward and myself, merely because he
was the instrument employed in performing them.
"The charge of profusion brought against Dr. Marshman is more extensive
than you have stated in your letter. He is charged with having his
house superbly furnished, with keeping several vehicles for the use of
his family, and with labouring to aggrandise and bring them into public
notice to a culpable extent. The whole business of furniture, internal
economy, etc., of the Serampore station, must exclusively belong to
ourselves, and I confess I think the question about it an unlovely one.
Some person, we know not whom, told some one, we know not whom, 'that
he had been often at Lord Hastings's table, but that Brother Marshman's
table far exceeded his.' I have also often been at Lord Hastings's
table (I mean his private table), and I do therefore most positively
deny the truth of the assertion; though I confess there is much
domestic plainness at the table of the Governor-General of India
(though nothing of meanness; on the contrary, everything is marked with
a dignified simplicity). I suspect the informant never was at Lord
Hastings's table, or he could have not been guilty of such
misrepresentation. Lord Hastings's table costs more in one day than
Brother Marshman's in ten.
"The following statement may explain the whole business of Brother
Marshman's furniture, etc., which you have all been so puzzled to
account for, and have certainly accounted for in a way that is not the
true one. We have, you know, a very large school, perhaps the largest
in India. In this school are children of persons of the first rank in
the country. The parents or guardians of these children frequently
call at the Mission-house, and common propriety requires that they
should be respectfully received, and invited to take a breakfast or
dinner, and sometimes to continue there a day or two. It is natural
that persons who visit the Mission-house upon business superintended by
Brother Marshman should be entertained at his house rather than
elsewhere. Till within the last four or five years we had no
particular arrangement for the accommodation of visitors who came to
see us; but as those who visited us on business were entertained at
Brother Marshman's, it appeared to be the most eligible method to
provide for the entertainment of other visitors there also; but at that
time Brother Marshman had not a decent table for persons of the above
description to sit down to. We, therefore, voted him a sum to enable
him to provide such articles as were necessary to entertain them with
decency; and I am not aware that he has been profuse, or that he has
provided anything not called for by the rules of propriety. I have no
doubt but Brother Ward can enumerate and describe all these articles of
furniture. It is, however, evident that you must be very imperfect
judges of their necessity, unless you could at the same time form a
just estimate of the circumstances in which we stand. It ought also to
be considered that all these articles are public property, and always
convertible into their full value in cash. I hope, however, that
things are not yet come to that pass, that a man who, with his wife,
has for nineteen or twenty years laboured night and day for the
mission, who by their labour disinterestedly contribute between 2000
and 3000 rupees monthly to it, and who have made sacrifices which, if
others have not seen, Brother Ward and I have,--sacrifices which ought
to put to the blush all his accusers, who, notwithstanding their cries
against him, have not only supported themselves, but also have set
themselves up in a lucrative business at the Society's expense; and
who, even to this day, though they have two prosperous schools, and a
profitable printing-office, continue to receive their monthly
allowance, amounting (including Miss Chaffin's) to 700 rupees a month
from the Society; I feel indignant at their outcry on the subject of
expense, and I say, merely as a contrast to their conduct, So did not
Brother Marshman. Surely things are not come to that pass, that he or
any other brother must give an account to the Society of every plate he
uses, and every loaf he cuts.
"Till a very few years ago we had no vehicle except a single horse
chaise for me to go backwards and forwards to Calcutta. That was
necessarily kept on the opposite side of the river; and if the strength
of the horse would have borne it, could not have been used for the
purposes of health. Sister Marshman was seized with a disease of the
liver, a disease which proves fatal in three cases out of four. Sister
Ward was ill of the same disorder, and both of them underwent a long
course of mercurial treatment, as is usual in that disease. Exercise
was considered by the physicians as of the first importance, and we
certainly thought no expense too great to save the valuable lives of
our sisters. A single horse chaise, and an open palanquin, called a
Tonjon, were procured. I never ride out for health; but usually spend
an hour or two, morning and evening, in the garden. Sister Ward was
necessitated to visit England for hers. Brother Ward had a saddle
horse presented to him by a friend. My wife has a small carriage drawn
by a man. These vehicles were therefore almost exclusively used by
Brother Marshman's family. When our brethren arrived from England they
did not fail to put this equipage into the account against Brother
Marshman. They now keep three single horse chaises, besides
palanquins; but we do not think they keep more than are necessary.
"Brother Marshman retains for the school a French master, a music
master, and a drawing master. The expenses of these are amply repaid
by the school, but Brother Marshman's children, and all those belonging
to the family, have the advantage of their instructions. Brother
Marshman's children are, however, the most numerous, and envy has not
failed to charge him with having retained them all for the sake of his
own children. Surely a man's caring for his family's health and his
children's education is, if a crime, a venial one, and ought not to be
held up to blacken his reputation. Brother Marshman is no more perfect
than other men, partakers like him of the grace of God. His natural
bias and habits are his own, and differ as much from those of other men
as theirs differ from one another. I do not deny that he has an
inclination to display his children to advantage. This, however, is a
foible which most fond parents will be inclined to pardon. I wish I
had half his piety, energy of mind, and zeal for the cause of God.
These excellencies, in my opinion, so far overbalance all his defects
that I am constrained to consider him a Christian far above the common
run. I must now close this defence of Brother Marshman by repeating
that all matters of furniture, convenience, etc., are things belonging
to the economy of the station at Serampore, and that no one beside
ourselves has the smallest right to interfere therewith. The Calcutta
brethren are now acting on the same principle, and would certainly
repel with indignation any attempt made by us to regulate their affairs.
"I have said that 'I never ride out for the sake of health'; and it may
therefore be inquired, 'Why are vehicles, etc., for the purpose of
health more necessary for the other members of the family than for
you?' I reply that my health is in general good, and probably much
benefited by a journey to and from Calcutta two or three times a week.
I have also a great fondness for natural science, particularly botany
and horticulture. These, therefore, furnish not only exercise, but
amusement for me. These amusements of mine are not, however, enjoyed
without expense, any more than those of my brethren, and were it not
convenient for Brother Marshman's accusers to make a stepping-stone of
me, I have no doubt but my collection of plants, aviary, and museum,
would be equally impeached as articles of luxury and lawless expenses;
though, except the garden, the whole of these expenses are borne by
myself.
"John Marshman is admitted a member of the union, but he had for some
time previously thereto been a member of the church. I perceive
plainly that all your objections to him have been excited by the
statements of the Calcutta brethren, which you certainly ought to
receive with much caution in all things which regard Bother Marshman
and his family. You observe that the younger brethren especially look
up to me with respect and affection. It may be so; but I confess I
have frequently thought that, had it been so, they would have consulted
me, or at least have mentioned to me the grounds of their
dissatisfaction before they proceeded to the extremity of dividing the
mission. When I engaged in the mission, it was a determination that,
whatever I suffered, a breach therein should never originate with me.
To this resolution I have hitherto obstinately adhered. I think
everything should be borne, every sacrifice made, and every method of
accommodation or reconciliation tried, before a schism is suffered to
take place...
"I disapprove as much of the conduct of our Calcutta brethren as it is
possible for me to disapprove of any human actions. The evil they have
done is, I fear, irreparable; and certainly the whole might have been
prevented by a little frank conversation with either of us; and a
hundredth part of that self-denial which I found it necessary to
exercise for the first few years of the mission, would have prevented
this awful rupture. I trust you will excuse my warmth of feeling upon
this subject, when you consider that by this rupture that cause is
weakened and disgraced, in the establishment and promotion of which I
have spent the best part of my life. A church is attempted to be torn
in pieces, for which neither I nor my brethren ever thought we could do
enough. We laboured to raise it: we expended much money to accomplish
that object; and in a good measure saw the object of our desire
accomplished. But now we are traduced, and the church rent by the very
men who came to be our helpers. As to Brother Marshman, seriously,
what do they want? Would they attempt to deny his possessing the grace
of God? He was known to and esteemed by Brother Ryland as a Christian
before he left England. I have lived with him ever since his arrival
in India, and can witness to his piety and holy conduct. Would they
exclude him from the mission? Judge yourself whether it is comely that
a man, who has laboriously and disinterestedly served the mission so
many years--who has by his diligence and hard labour raised the most
respectable school in India, as well as given a tone to all the
others--who has unvaryingly consecrated the whole of that income, as
well as his other labours, to the cause of God in India,--should be
arraigned and condemned without a hearing by a few young men just
arrived, and one of whom had not been a month in the country before he
joined the senseless outcry? Or would they have his blood? Judge, my
dear brother, yourself, for I am ashamed to say more on this subject.
"I need not say that circumstances must in a great measure determine
where missionaries should settle. The chief town of each of these
countries would be preferable, if other circumstances permit; but
sometimes Government would not allow this, and sometimes other things
may close the door. Missionaries however must knock loud and push hard
at the door, and if there be the smallest opening, must force
themselves in; and, once entered, put their lives in their hands and
exert themselves to the utmost in dependence upon divine support, if
they ever hope to do much towards evangelising the heathen world. My
situation in the college, and Brother Marshman's as superintending the
first academy in India, which, I likewise observe, has been established
and brought to its present flourishing state wholly by his care and
application, have made our present situation widely different from what
it was when first engaged in the mission. As a missionary I could go
in a straw hat and dine with the judge of the district, and often did
so; but as a Professor in the College I cannot do so. Brother Marshman
is placed in the same predicament. These circumstances impose upon us
a necessity of making a different appearance to what we formerly did as
simple missionaries; but they furnish us with opportunities of speaking
to gentlemen of the first power and influence in government, upon
matters of the highest importance to the great work in which we are
engaged; and, as a proof that our opportunities of this nature have not
been in vain, I need only say that, in a conversation which I had some
time ago with one of the secretaries to Government, upon the present
favourable bias of government and the public in general to favour all
plans for doing good, he told me that he believed the whole was owing
to the prudent and temperate manner in which we had acted; and that if
we had acted with precipitancy and indiscretion, he had every reason to
believe the general feeling would have been as hostile to attempts to
do good as it is now favourable to them.
"I would not wish you to entertain the idea that we and our brethren in
Calcutta are resolved upon interminable hatred. On the contrary, I
think that things are gone as far as we may expect them to go; and I
now expect that the fire of contention will gradually go out. All the
distressing and disagreeable circumstances are, I trust, past; and I
expect we shall be in a little time on a more friendly footing. Much
of what has taken place originated in England. Mistakes and false
conclusions were followed by all the circumstances I have detailed. I
think the whole virulence of opposition has now spent itself. Our
brethren have no control over us, nor we over them. And, if I am not
mistaken, each side will soon acknowledge that it has gone too far in
some instances; and ultimate good will arise from the evil I so much
deplore.
"Having now written to you my whole sentiments upon the business, and
formerly to my very dear Brother Ryland, allow me to declare my
resolution not to write anything further upon the subject, however much
I may be pressed thereto. The future prosperity of the mission does
not depend upon the clearing up of every little circumstance to the
satisfaction of every captious inquirer, but upon the restoration of
mutual concord among us, which must be preceded by admitting that we
are all subject to mistake, and to be misled by passion, prejudice, and
false judgment. Let us therefore strive and pray that the things which
make for peace and those by which we may edify one another may abound
among us more and more. I am, my dear brother, very affectionately,
yours in our Lord Jesus Christ, W. CAREY."
"14th May 1828.
"MY DEAR BROTHER ANDERSON--Yours by the Louisa, of October last, came
to hand a few days ago with the copies of Brother Marshman's brief
Memoir of the Serampore Mission. I am glad it is written in so
temperate and Christian a spirit, and I doubt not but it will be
ultimately productive of good effects. There certainly is a great
contrast between the spirit in which that piece is written and that in
which observations upon it, both in the Baptist and Particular Baptist
Magazines, are written. The unworthy attempts in those and other such
like pieces to separate Brother Marshman and me are truly contemptible.
In plain English, they amount to thus much--'The Serampore
Missionaries, Carey, Marshman, and Ward, have acted a dishonest part,
alias are rogues. But we do not include Dr. Carey in the charge of
dishonesty; he is an easy sort of a man, who will agree to anything for
the sake of peace, or in other words, he is a fool. Mr. Ward, it is
well known,' say they, 'was the tool of Dr. Marshman, but he is gone
from the present scene, and it is unlovely to say any evil of the
dead.' Now I certainly hold those persons' exemption of me from the
blame they attach to Brother Marshman in the greatest possible
contempt. I may have subscribed my name thoughtlessly to papers, and
it would be wonderful if there had been no instance of this in so long
a course of years. The great esteem I had for the Society for many
years, undoubtedly on more occasions than one put me off my guard, and
I believe my brethren too; so that we have signed writings which, if we
could have foreseen the events of a few years, we should not have done.
These, however, were all against our own private interest, and I
believe I have never been called an easy fool for signing of them. It
has only been since we found it necessary to resist the claims of the
Committee that I have risen to this honour.
"It has also been hinted that I intend to separate from Brother
Marshman. I cannot tell upon what such hints or reports are founded,
but I assure you, in the most explicit manner, that I intend to
continue connected with him and Serampore as long as I live; unless I
should be separated from him by some unforeseen stroke of Providence.
There may be modifications of our union, arising from circumstances;
but it is my wish that it should remain in all things essential to the
mission as long as I live.
"I rejoice to say that there is very little of that spirit of hostility
which prevails in England in India, and I trust what still remains will
gradually decrease till scarcely the remembrance of it will continue.
Our stations, I mean those connected with Serampore, are of great
importance, and some of them in a flourishing state. We will do all we
can to maintain them, and I hope the friends to the cause of God in
Britain will not suffer them to sink for want of that pecuniary help
which is necessary. Indeed I hope we shall be assisted in attempting
other stations beside those already occupied; and many such stations
present themselves to my mind which nothing prevents being immediately
occupied but want of men and money. The college will also require
assistance, and I hope will not be without it; I anticipate the time
when its salutary operation in the cause of God in India will be felt
and acknowledged by all.
"These observations respecting my own conduct you are at liberty to use
as you please. I hope now to take my final leave of this unpleasant
subject, and have just room to say that I am very affectionately yours,
W. CAREY."
Throughout the controversy thus forced upon him, we find Dr. Carey's
references, in his unpublished letters to the brethren in Calcutta, all
in the strain of the following to his son Jabez:--
"15th August 1820.--This week we received letters from Mr. Marshman,
who had safely arrived at St. Helena. I am sure it will give you
pleasure to learn that our long-continued dispute with the younger
brethren in Calcutta is now settled. We met together for that purpose
about three weeks ago, and after each side giving up some trifling
ideas and expressions, came to a reconciliation, which, I pray God, may
be lasting. Nothing I ever met with in my life--and I have met with
many distressing things--ever preyed so much upon my spirits as this
difference has. I am sure that in all disputes very many wrong things
must take place on both sides for which both parties ought to be
humbled before God and one another.
"I wish you could succeed in setting up a few more schools...Consider
that and the spread of the gospel as the great objects of your life,
and try to promote them by all the wise and prudent methods in your
power. Indeed we must always venture something for the sake of doing
good. The cause of our Lord Jesus Christ continues to prosper with us.
I have several persons now coming in who are inquirers; two or three of
them, I hope, will be this evening received into the Church. Excuse my
saying more as my room is full of people."
Eight years after, on the 17th April 1828, he thus censured Jabez in
the matter of the Society's action at home:--"From a letter of yours to
Jonathan, in which you express a very indecent pleasure at the
opposition which Brother Marshman has received, not by the Society but
by some anonymous writer in a magazine, I perceive you are informed of
the separation which has taken place between them and us. What in that
anonymous piece you call a 'set-down' I call a 'falsehood.' You ought
to know that I was a party in all public acts and writings, and that I
never intend to withdraw from all the responsibility connected
therewith. I utterly despise all the creeping, mean assertions of that
party when they say they do not include me in their censures, nor do I
work for their praise. According to their and according to your
rejoicing...I am either a knave or a fool--a knave if I joined with
Brother Marshman; but if, as those gentlemen say, and as you seem to
agree with them, I was only led as he pleased, and was a mere
cat's-paw, then of course I am a fool. In either way your thoughts are
not very high as it respects me. I do not wonder that Jonathan should
express himself unguardedly; his family connection with Mr. Pearce
sufficiently accounts for that. We have long been attacked in this
country--first by Mr. Adam,[26] and afterwards by Dr. Bryce.[27] Bryce
is now silenced by two or three pieces by John Marshman in his own
newspaper, the John Bull; and as to some of the tissues of falsehood
published in England, I shall certainly never reply to them, and I hope
no one else will. That cause must be bad which needs such means to
support it. I believe God will bring forth our righteousness as the
noonday."
On the 12th July 1828 the father again writes to his son Jabez
thus:--"Your apologies about Brother Marshman are undoubtedly the best
you can offer. I should be sorry to harbour hostile sentiments against
any man on the earth upon grounds so slight. Indeed, were all you say
matter of fact you ought to forgive it as God for Christ's sake
forgives us. We are required to lay aside all envy and strife and
animosities, to forgive each other mutually and to love one another
with a pure heart fervently. 'Thine own friend and thy father's friend
forsake not.'"