to give himself like Carey, became to him dearer than even Fuller was. The place was a low-roofed parlour in the house of Widow Wallis, looking on to a back garden, which many a pilgrim still visits, and around which there gathered thousands in 1842 to hold the first jubilee of modern missions, when commemorative medals were struck. There in 1892 the centenary witnessed a still vaster assemblage.
Can any good come out of Kettering? was the conclusion of the Baptist ministers of London with the one exception of Booth, when they met formally to decide whether, like those of Birmingham and other places, they should join the primary society. Benjamin Beddome, a venerable scholar whom Robert Hall declared to be chief among his brethren, replied to Fuller in language which is far from unusual even at the present day, but showing the position which the Leicester minister had won for himself even then:—
"I think your scheme, considering the paucity of well-qualified ministers, hath a very unfavourable aspect with respect to destitute churches at home, where charity ought to begin. I had the pleasure once to see and hear Mr. Carey; it struck me he was the most suitable person in the kingdom, at least whom I knew, to supply my place, and make up my great deficiencies when either disabled or removed. A different plan is formed and pursued, and I fear that the great and good man, though influenced by the most excellent motives, will meet with a disappointment. However, God hath his ends, and whoever is disappointed He cannot be so. My unbelieving heart is ready to suggest that the time is not come, the time that the Lord's house should be built."
The other Congregationalists made no sign. The Presbyterians, with a few noble exceptions like Dr. Erskine, whose Dutch volume Carey had translated, denounced such movements as revolutionary in a General Assembly of Socinianised "moderates." The Church of England kept haughtily or timidly aloof, though king and archbishop were pressed to send a mission. "Those who in that day sneered that England had sent a cobbler to convert the world were the direct lineal descendants of those who sneered in Palestine 2000 years ago, 'Is not this the carpenter?'" said Archdeacon Farrar in Westminster Abbey on 6th March 1887. Hence Fuller's reference to this time:—"When we began in 1792 there was little or no respectability among us, not so much as a squire to sit in the chair or an orator to address him with speeches. Hence good Dr. Stennett advised the London ministers to stand aloof and not commit themselves."
One man in India had striven to rouse the Church to its duty as Carey had done at home. Charles Grant had in 1787 written from Malda to Charles Simeon and Wilberforce for eight missionaries, but not one Church of England clergyman could be found to go. Thirty years after, when chairman of the Court of Directors and father of Lord Glenelg and Sir Robert Grant, he wrote:—"I had formed the design of a mission to Bengal: Providence reserved that honour for the Baptists." After all, the twelve village pastors in the back parlour of Kettering were the more really the successors of the twelve apostles in the upper room of Jerusalem.
Chapter III.
INDIA AS CAREY FOUND IT
1793
Tahiti v. Bengal—Carey and Thomas appointed missionaries to Bengal—The farewell at Leicester—John Thomas, first medical missionary—Carey's letter to his father—The Company's "abominable monopoly"—The voyage—Carey's aspirations for world-wide missions—Lands at Calcutta—His description of Bengal in 1793—Contrast presented by Carey to Clive, Hastings, and Cornwallis—The spiritual founder of an Indian Empire of Christian Britain—Bengal and the famine of 1769–70—The Decennial Settlement declared permanent—Effects on the landed classes—Obstacles to Carey's work—East India Company at its worst—Hindooism and the Bengalees in 1793—Position of Hindoo women—Missionary attempts before Carey's—Ziegenbalg and Schwartz—Kiernander and the chaplains—Hindooised state of Anglo-Indian society and its reaction on England—Guneshan Dass, the first caste Hindoo to visit England—William Carey had no predecessor.
Carey had desired to go first to Tahiti or Western Africa. The natives of North America and the negroes of the West Indies and Sierra Leone were being cared for by Moravian and Wesleyan evangelists. The narrative of Captain Cook's two first voyages to the Pacific and discovery of Tahiti had appeared in the same year in which the Northampton churches began their seven years' concert of prayer, just after his own second baptism. From the map, and a leather globe which also he is said to have made, he had been teaching the children of Piddington, Moulton, and Leicester the great outlines and thrilling details of expeditions round the world which roused both the scientific and the simple of England as much as the discoveries of Columbus had excited Europe. When the childlike ignorance and natural grace of the Hawaiians, which had at first fired him with the longing to tell them the good news of God, were seen turned into the wild justice of revenge, which made Cook its first victim, Carey became all the more eager to anticipate the disasters of later days. That was work for which others were to be found. It was not amid the scattered and decimated savages of the Pacific or of America that the citadel of heathenism was found, nor by them that the world, old and new, was to be made the kingdom of Christ. With the cautious wisdom that marked all Fuller's action, though perhaps with the ignorance that was due to Carey's absence, the third meeting of the new society recorded this among other articles "to be examined and discussed in the most diligent and impartial manner—In what part of the heathen world do there seem to be the most promising openings?"
The answer, big with consequence for the future of the East, was in their hands, in the form of a letter from Carey, who stated that "Mr. Thomas, the Bengal missionary," was trying to raise a fund for that province, and asked "whether it would not be worthy of the Society to try to make that and ours unite with one fund for the purpose of sending the gospel to the heathen indefinitely." Tahiti was not to be neglected, nor Africa, nor Bengal, in "our larger plan," which included above four hundred millions of our fellowmen, among whom it was an object "worthy of the most ardent and persevering pursuit to disseminate the humane and saving principles of the Christian Religion." If this Mr. Thomas were worthy, his experience made it desirable to begin with Bengal. Thomas answered for himself at the next meeting, when Carey fell upon his neck and wept, having previously preached from the words—"Behold I come quickly, and My reward is with Me." "We saw," said Fuller afterwards, "there was a gold mine in India, but it was as deep as the centre of the earth. Who will venture to explore it? 'I will venture to go down,' said Carey, 'but remember that you (addressing Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland) must hold the ropes.' We solemnly engaged to him to do so, nor while we live shall we desert him."
Carey and Thomas, an ordained minister and a medical evangelist, were at this meeting in Kettering, on 10th January 1793, appointed missionaries to "the East Indies for preaching the gospel to the heathen," on "£100 or £150 a year between them all,"—that is, for two missionaries, their wives, and four children—until they should be able to support themselves like the Moravians. As a matter of fact they received just £200 in all for the first three years when self-support and mission extension fairly began. The whole sum at credit of the Society for outfit, passage, and salaries was £130, so that Fuller's prudence was not without justification when supported by Thomas's assurances that the amount was enough, and Carey's modest self-sacrifice. "We advised Mr. Carey," wrote Fuller to Ryland, "to give up his school this quarter, for we must make up the loss to him." The more serious cost of the passage was raised by Fuller and by the preaching tours of the two missionaries. During one of these, at Hull, Carey met the printer and newspaper editor, William Ward, and cast his mantle over him thus—"If the Lord bless us, we shall want a person of your business to enable us to print the Scriptures; I hope you will come after us." Ward did so in five years.
The 20th March 1793 was a high day in the Leicester chapel, Harvey Lane, when the missionaries were set apart like Barnabas and Paul—a forenoon of prayer; an afternoon of preaching by Thomas from Psalm xvi. 4; "Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another God;" an evening of preaching by the treasurer from Acts xxi. 14, "And when he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, the will of the Lord be done;" and the parting charge by Fuller the secretary, from the risen Lord's own benediction and forthsending of His disciples, "Peace be unto you, as My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you." Often in after days of