Part 3 (1/2)
Under date four days after we find this entry in the Church Book--”Mr.
Carey, our minister, left Leicester to go on a mission to the East Indies, to take and propagate the Gospel among those idolatrous and superst.i.tious heathens. This is inserted to show his love to his poor miserable fellow-creatures. In this we concurred with him, though it is at the expense of losing one whom we love as our own souls.” When Carey's preaching had so filled the church that it became necessary to build a front gallery at a cost of 98, and they had applied to several other churches for a.s.sistance in vain, he thus taught them to help themselves. The minister and many of the members agreed to pay off the debt ”among ourselves” by weekly subscriptions,--a process, however, which covered five years, so poor were they. Carey left this as a parting lesson to home congregations, while his people found it the easier to pay the debt that they had sacrificed their best, their own minister, to the work of missions for which he had taught them to pray.
John Thomas, four years older than Carey, was a surgeon, who had made two voyages to Calcutta in the Oxford Indiaman, had been of spiritual service to Charles Grant, Mr. George Udny, and the Bengal civilian circle at Malda, and had been supported by Mr. Grant as a missionary for a time until his eccentricities and debts outraged his friends and drove him home at the time of the Kettering meetings. Full justice has been done to a character and a career somewhat resembling those of John Newton, by his patient and able biographer the Rev. C. B. Lewis. John Thomas has the merit of being the first medical missionary, at a time when no other Englishman cared for either the bodies or souls of our recently acquired subjects in North India, outside of Charles Grant's circle. He has more; he was used by G.o.d to direct Carey to the dense Hindoo population of Bengal--to the people and to the centre, that is, where Brahmanism had its seat, and whence Buddhism had been carried by thousands of missionaries all over Southern, Eastern, and Central Asia.
But there our ascription of merit to Thomas must stop. However well he might speak the uncultured Bengali, he never could write the language or translate the Bible into a literary style so that it could be understood by the people or influence their leaders. His temper kept Charles Grant back from helping the infant mission, though anxious to see Mr. Carey and to aid him and any other companion. The debts of Thomas caused him and Carey to be excluded from the Oxford, in which his friend the commander had agreed to take them and their party without a licence; clouded the early years of the enterprise with their shadow, and formed the heaviest of the many burdens Carey had to bear at starting. If, afterwards, the old a.s.sociation of Thomas with Mr.
Udny at Malda gave Carey a home during his Indian apprentices.h.i.+p, this was a small atonement for the loss of the direct help of Mr. Grant. If Carey proved to be the John among the men who began to make Serampore ill.u.s.trious, Thomas was the Peter, so far as we know Peter in the Gospels only.
Just before being ejected from the Oxford, as he had been deprived of the effectual help of Charles Grant through his unhappy companion, when with only his eldest son Felix beside him, how did Carey view his G.o.d-given mission? The very different nature of his wife, who had announced to him the birth of a child, clung anew to the hope that this might cause him to turn back. Writing from Ryde on the 6th May he thus replied with sweet delicacy of human affection, but with true loyalty to his Master's call:--
”Received yours, giving me an account of your safe delivery. This is pleasant news indeed to me; surely goodness and mercy follow me all my days. My stay here was very painful and unpleasant, but now I see the goodness of G.o.d in it. It was that I might hear the most pleasing accounts that I possibly could hear respecting earthly things. You wish to know in what state my mind is. I answer, it is much as when I left you. If I had all the world, I would freely give it all to have you and my dear children with me; but the sense of duty is so strong as to overpower all other considerations; I could not turn back without guilt on my soul. I find a longing desire to enjoy more of G.o.d; but, now I am among the people of the world, I think I see more beauties in G.o.dliness than ever, and, I hope, enjoy more of G.o.d in retirement than I have done for some time past...You want to know what Mrs. Thomas thinks, and how she likes the voyage...She would rather stay in England than go to India; but thinks it right to go with her husband...Tell my dear children I love them dearly, and pray for them constantly. Felix sends his love. I look upon this mercy as an answer to prayer indeed.
Trust in G.o.d. Love to Kitty, brothers, sisters, etc. Be a.s.sured I love you most affectionately. Let me know my dear little child's name.--I am, for ever, your faithful and affectionate husband,
”WILLIAM CAREY.
”My health never was so well. I believe the sea makes Felix and me both as hungry as hunters. I can eat a monstrous meat supper, and drink a couple of gla.s.ses of wine after it, without hurting me at all.
Farewell.”
She was woman and wife enough, in the end, to do as Mrs. Thomas had done, but she stipulated that her sister should accompany her.
By a series of specially providential events, as it seemed, such as marked the whole early history of this first missionary enterprise of modern England, Carey and Thomas secured a pa.s.sage on board the Danish Indiaman Kron Princessa Maria, bound from Copenhagen to Serampore. At Dover, where they had been waiting for days, the eight were roused from sleep by the news that the s.h.i.+p was off the harbour. Sunrise on the 13th June saw them on board. Carey had had other troubles besides his colleague and his wife. His father, then fifty-eight years old, had not given him up without a struggle. ”Is William mad?” he had said when he received the letter in which his son thus offered himself up on the missionary altar. His mother had died six years before:--
”LEICESTER, Jan. 17th, 1793.
”DEAR AND HONOURED FATHER,--The importance of spending our time for G.o.d alone, is the princ.i.p.al theme of the gospel. I beseech you, brethren, says Paul, by the mercies of G.o.d, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is your reasonable service. To be devoted like a sacrifice to holy uses, is the great business of a christian, pursuant to these requisitions. I consider myself as devoted to the service of G.o.d alone, and now I am to realise my professions. I am appointed to go to Bengal, in the East Indies, a missionary to the Hindoos. I shall have a colleague who has been there five or six years already, and who understands their language. They are the most mild and inoffensive people in all the world, but are enveloped in the greatest superst.i.tion, and in the grossest ignorance...I hope, dear father, you may be enabled to surrender me up to the Lord for the most arduous, honourable, and important work that ever any of the sons of men were called to engage in. I have many sacrifices to make. I must part with a beloved family, and a number of most affectionate friends.
Never did I see such sorrow manifested as reigned through our place of wors.h.i.+p last Lord's-day. But I have set my hand to the plough.--I remain, your dutiful son,
”WILLIAM CAREY.”
When in London Carey had asked John Newton, ”What if the Company should send us home on our arrival in Bengal?” ”Then conclude,” was the reply, ”that your Lord has nothing there for you to accomplish. But if He have, no power on earth can hinder you.” By Act of Parliament not ten years old, every subject of the King going to or found in the East Indies without a licence from the Company, was guilty of a high crime and misdemeanour, and liable to fine and imprisonment. Only four years previously a regulation had compelled every commander to deliver to the Hoogli pilot a return of the pa.s.sengers on board that the Act might be enforced. The Danish nationality of the s.h.i.+p and crew saved the missionary party. So grievously do unjust laws demoralise contemporary opinion, that Fuller was constrained to meet the objections of many to the ”illegality” of the missionaries' action by reasoning, unanswerable indeed, but not now required: ”The apostles and primitive ministers were commanded to go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature; nor were they to stop for the permission of any power upon earth, but to go, and take the consequences. If a man of G.o.d, conscious of having nothing in his heart unfriendly to any civil government whatever, but determined in all civil matters to obey and teach obedience to the powers that are, put his life in his hand, saying, I will go, and if I am persecuted in one city I will flee to another'...whatever the wisdom of this world may decide upon his conduct, he will a.s.suredly be acquitted, and more than acquitted, at a higher tribunal.”
Carey's journal of the voyage begins with an allusion to ”the abominable East Indian monopoly,” which he was to do more than any other man to break down by weapons not of man's warfare. The second week found him at Bengali, and for his companion the poems of Cowper.
Of the four fellow-pa.s.sengers one was a French deist, with whom he had many a debate.
”Aug. 2.--I feel myself to be much declined, upon the whole, in the more spiritual exercises of religion; yet have had some pleasant exercises of soul, and feel my heart set upon the great work upon which I am going. Sometimes I am quite dejected when I see the impenetrability of the hearts of those with us. They hear us preach on the Lord's-day, but we are forced to witness their disregard to G.o.d all the week. O may G.o.d give us greater success among the heathen. I am very desirous that my children may pursue the same work; and now intend to bring up one in the study of Sanskrit, and another of Persian. O may G.o.d give them grace to fit them for the work! I have been much concerned for fear the power of the Company should oppose us...
”Aug. 20.--I have reason to lament over a barrenness of soul, and am sometimes much discouraged; for if I am so dead and stupid, how can I expect to be of any use among the heathen? Yet I have of late felt some very lively desires after the success of our undertaking. If there is anything that engages my heart in prayer to G.o.d, it is that the heathen may be converted, and that the society which has so generously exerted itself may be encouraged, and excited to go on with greater vigour in the important undertaking...
”Nov. 9.--I think that I have had more liberty in prayer, and more converse with G.o.d, than for some time before; but have, notwithstanding, been a very unfruitful creature, and so remain. For near a month we have been within two hundred miles of Bengal, but the violence of the currents set us back when we have been at the very door. I hope I have learned the necessity of bearing up in the things of G.o.d against wind and tide, when there is occasion, as we have done in our voyage.”
To the Society he writes for a Polyglot Bible, the Gospels in Malay, Curtis's Botanical Magazine, and Sowerby's English Botany, at his own cost, and thus plans the conquest of the world:--”I hope the Society will go on and increase, and that the mult.i.tudes of heathen in the world may hear the glorious words of truth. Africa is but a little way from England; Madagascar but a little way farther; South America, and all the numerous and large islands in the Indian and Chinese seas, I hope will not be pa.s.sed over. A large field opens on every side, and millions of peris.h.i.+ng heathens, tormented in this life by idolatry, superst.i.tion, and ignorance, and exposed to eternal miseries in the world to come, are pleading; yea, all their miseries plead as soon as they are known, with every heart that loves G.o.d, and with all the churches of the living G.o.d. Oh, that many labourers may be thrust out into the vineyard of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the gentiles may come to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Him!”
On the 7th November, as the s.h.i.+p lay in the roads of Balasore, he and Thomas landed and ”began our labours.” For three hours the people of the bazaar listened with great attention to Thomas, and one prepared for them a native dinner with plantain leaf for dish, and fingers for knives and forks. Balasore--name of Krishna--was one of the first settlements of the English in North India in 1642, and there the American Baptist successors of Carey have since carried on his work.
On the 11th November, after a five months' voyage, they landed at Calcutta unmolested. The first fortnight's experience of the city, whose native population he estimated at 200,000, and of the surrounding country, he thus condenses:--”I feel something of what Paul felt when he beheld Athens, and 'his spirit was stirred within him.' I see one of the finest countries in the world, full of industrious inhabitants; yet three-fifths of it are an uncultivated jungle, abandoned to wild beasts and serpents. If the gospel flourishes here, 'the wilderness will in every respect become a fruitful field.'”
Clive, Hastings (Macpherson during an interregnum of twenty-two months), and Cornwallis, were the men who had founded and administered the empire of British India up to this time. Carey pa.s.sed the last Governor-General in the Bay of Bengal as he retired with the honours of a seven years' successful generals.h.i.+p and government to atone for the not unhappy surrender of York Town, which had resulted in the independence of the United States. Sir John Sh.o.r.e, afterwards Lord Teignmouth, who had been selected by Pitt to carry out the reforms which he had elaborated along with his predecessor, had entered on his high office just a fortnight before. What a contrast was presented, as man judges, by the shy shoemaker, schoolmaster, and Baptist preacher, who found not a place in which to lay his head save a hovel lent to him by a Hindoo, to Clive, whose suicide he might have heard of when a child; to Hastings, who for seventeen years had stood before his country impeached. They were men described by Macaulay as of ancient, even ill.u.s.trious lineage, and they had brought into existence an empire more extensive than that of Rome. He was a peasant craftsman, who had taught himself with a skill which Lord Wellesley, their successor almost as great as themselves, delighted publicly to acknowledge--a man of the people, of the cla.s.s who had used the Roman Empire to build out of it a universal Christendom, who were even then turning France upside down, creating the Republic of America, and giving new life to Great Britain itself. The little Englishman was about to do in Calcutta and from Serampore what the little Jew, Paul, had done in Antioch and Ephesus, from Corinth and Rome. England might send its n.o.bly born to erect the material and the secular fabric of empire, but it was only, in the providence of G.o.d, that they might prepare for the poor village preacher to convert the empire into a spiritual force which should in time do for Asia what Rome had done for Western Christendom. But till the last, as from the first, Carey was as unconscious of the part which he had been called to play as he was unresting in the work which it involved. It is no fanatical criticism, but the true philosophy of history, which places Carey over against Clive, the spiritual and secular founders, and Duff beside Hastings, the spiritual and secular consolidators of our Indian Empire.
Carey's work for India underlay the first period of forty years of transition from Cornwallis to Bentinck, as Duff's covered the second of thirty years to the close of Lord Canning's administration, which introduced the new era of full toleration and partial but increasing self-government directed by the Viceroy and Parliament.
Carey had been sent not only to the one people outside of Christendom whose conversion would tell most powerfully on all Asia, Africa, and their islands--the Hindoos; but to the one province which was almost entirely British, and could be used as it had been employed to a.s.similate the rest of India--Bengal. Territorially the East India Company possessed, when he landed, nothing outside of the Ganges valley of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares, save a few spots on the Madras and Malabar coasts and the portion just before taken in the Mysore war.