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George Smith
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
e-artnow, 2020
Contact: [email protected]
EAN 4064066058586
Table of Contents
Chapter II: The Birth of England's Foreign Missions
Chapter III: India as Carey Found It
Chapter IV: Six Years in North Bengal—Missionary and Indigo Planter
Chapter V: The New Crusade—Serampore and the Brotherhood
Chapter VI: The First Native Converts and Christian Schools
Chapter VII: Calcutta and the Mission Centres From Delhi to Amboyna
Chapter VIII: Carey's Family and Friends
Chapter IX: Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi
Chapter X: The Wyclif of the East—Bible Translation
Chapter XI: What Carey Did for Literature and for Humanity
Chapter XIII: Carey's Immediate Influence in Great Britain and America
Chapter XIV: Carey as an Educator—The First Christian College in the East
Chapter XV: Carey's Christian University for the People of India
Chapter XVI: Carey's Last Days
I.—Charter of Incorporation of Serampore College
II.—Statutes and Regulations of Serampore College
PREFACE
On the death of William Carey In 1834 Dr. Joshua Marshman promised to write the Life of his great colleague, with whom he had held almost daily converse since the beginning of the century, but he survived too short a time to begin the work. In 1836 the Rev. Eustace Carey anticipated him by issuing what is little better than a selection of mutilated letters and journals made at the request of the Committee of the Baptist Missionary Society. It contains one passage of value, however. Dr. Carey once said to his nephew, whose design he seems to have suspected, "Eustace, if after my removal any one should think it worth his while to write my Life, I will give you a criterion by which you may judge of its correctness. If he give me credit for being a plodder he will describe me justly. Anything beyond this will be too much. I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything."
In 1859 Mr. John Marshman, after his final return to England, published The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward, a valuable history and defence of the Serampore Mission, but rather a biography of his father than of Carey.
When I first went to Serampore the great missionary had not been twenty years dead. During my long residence there as Editor of the Friend of India, I came to know, in most of its details, the nature of the work done by Carey for India and for Christendom in the first third of the century. I began to collect such materials for his Biography as were to be found in the office, the press, and the college, and among the Native Christians and Brahman pundits whom he had influenced. In addition to such materials and experience I have been favoured with the use of many unpublished letters written by Carey or referring to him; for which courtesy I here desire to thank Mrs. S. Carey, South Bank, Red Hill; Frederick George Carey, Esq., LL.B., of Lincoln's Inn; and the Rev. Jonathan P. Carey of Tiverton.
My Biographies of Carey of Serampore, Henry Martyn, Duff of Calcutta, and Wilson of Bombay, cover a period of nearly a century and a quarter, from 1761 to 1878. They have been written as contributions to that history of the Christian Church of India which one of its native sons must some day attempt; and to the history of English-speaking peoples, whom the Foreign Missions begun by Carey have made the rulers and civilisers of the non-Christian world.
Chapter I.
CAREY'S COLLEGE
1761–1785
The Heart of England—The Weaver Carey who became a Peer, and the weaver who was father of William Carey—Early training in Paulerspury—Impressions made by him on his sister—On his companions and the villagers—His experience as son of the parish clerk—Apprenticed to a shoemaker of Hackleton—Poverty—Famous shoemakers from Annianus and Crispin to Hans Sachs and Whittier—From Pharisaism to Christ—The last shall be first—The dissenting preacher in the parish clerk's home—He studies Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Dutch and French—The cobbler's shed is Carey's College.
William Carey, the first of her own children of the Reformation whom England sent forth as a missionary to India, where he became the most extensive translator of the Bible and civiliser, was the son of a weaver, and was himself a village shoemaker till he was twenty-eight years of age. He was born on the 17th August 1761, in the very midland of England, in the heart of the district which had produced Shakspere, had fostered Wyclif and Hooker, had bred Fox and Bunyan, and had for a time been the scene of the lesser lights of John Mason and Doddridge, of John Newton and Thomas Scott. William Cowper, the poet of missions, made the land his chosen home, writing Hope and The Task in Olney, while the shoemaker was studying theology under Sutcliff on the opposite side of the market-place. Thomas Clarkson, born a year before Carey, was beginning his assaults on the slave-trade by translating into English his Latin essay on the day-star of African liberty when the shoemaker, whom no university knew, was