Part 19 (2/2)
1830-1834
The college and mission stripped of all their funds--Failure of the six firms for sixteen millions--Carey's official income reduced from 1560 to 600--His Thoughts and Appeal published in England--His vigour at seventy--Last revision of the Bengali Bible--Final edition of the Bengali New Testament--Carey rejoices in the reforms of Lord William Bentinck's Government--In the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves--Carey sketched by his younger contemporaries--His latest letters and last message to Christendom--Visits of Lady William Bentinck and Bishop Daniel Wilson--Marshman's affection and promise as to the garden--The English mail brings glad news a fortnight before his death--His last Sabbath--He dies--Is buried--His tomb among his converts--His will--The Indian press on his poverty and disinterestedness--Dr. Marshman and Mack, Christopher Anderson and John Wilson of Bombay on his character--His influence still as the founder of missions--Dr. c.o.x and Robert Hall on Carey as a man--Scotland's estimate of the father of the Evangelical Revival and its foreign missions.
The last days of William Carey were the best. His sun went down in all the splendour of a glowing faith and a burning self-sacrifice. Not in the penury of Hackleton and Moulton, not in the hards.h.i.+ps of Calcutta and the Soondarbans, not in the fevers of the swamps of Dinapoor, not in the apprehensions twice excited by official intolerance, not in the most bitter sorrow of all--the sixteen years' persecution by English brethren after Fuller's death, had the father of modern missions been so tried as in the years 1830-1833. Blow succeeded blow, but only that the fine gold of his trust, his humility, and his love might be seen to be the purer.
The Serampore College and Mission lost all the funds it had in India.
By 1830 the financial revolution which had laid many houses low in Europe five years before, began to tell upon the merchant princes of Calcutta. The six firms, which had developed the trade of Northern India so far as the Company's monopolies allowed, had been the bankers of the Government itself, of states like Haidarabad, and of all the civil and military officials, and had enriched a succession of partners for half a century, fell one by one--fell for sixteen millions sterling among them. Palmer and Co. was the greatest; the house at one time played a large part in the history of India, and in the debates and papers of Parliament. Mr. John Palmer, a personal friend of the Serampore men, had advanced them money at ten per cent. four years previously, when the Society's misrepresentation had done its worst.
The children in the Eurasian schools, which Dr. and Mrs. Marshman conducted with such profit to the mission, depended chiefly on funds deposited with this firm. It suddenly failed for more than two millions sterling. Although the catastrophe exposed the rottenness of the system of credit on which commerce and banking were at that time conducted, in the absence of a free press and an intelligent public opinion, the alarm soon subsided, and only the more business fell to the other firms. But the year 1833 had hardly opened when first the house of Alexander and Co., then that of Mackintosh and Co., and then the three others, collapsed without warning. The English in India, officials and merchants, were reduced to universal poverty. Capital disappeared and credit ceased at the very time that Parliament was about to complete the partial concession of freedom of trade made by the charter of 1813, by granting all Carey had argued for, and allowing Europeans to hold land.
The funds invested for Jessor and Delhi; the legacy of Fernandez, Carey's first convert and missionary; his own tenths with which he supported three aged relatives in England; the property of the partner of his third marriage, on whom the money was settled, and who survived him by a year; the little possessed by Dr. Marshman, who had paid all his expenses in England even while working for the Society--all was swept away. Not only was the small balance in hand towards meeting the college and mission expenditure gone, but it was impossible to borrow even for a short time. Again one of Dr. Carey's old civilian students came to the rescue. Mr. Garrett, grandson of Robert Raikes who first began Sunday schools, pledged his own credit with the Bank of Bengal, until Samuel Hope of Liverpool, treasurer of the Serampore Mission there, could be communicated with. Meanwhile the question of giving up any of the stations or shutting the college was not once favoured. ”I have seen the tears run down the face of the venerable Dr. Carey at the thought of such a calamity,” wrote Leechman; ”were it to arrive we should soon have to lay him in his grave.” When the interest of the funds raised by Ward in America ceased for a time because of the malicious report from England that it might be applied by Dr. Marshman to the purposes of family aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, Carey replied in a spirit like that of Paul under a similar charge: ”Dr. Marshman is as poor as I am, and I can scarcely lay by a sum monthly to relieve three or four indigent relatives in Europe. I might have had large possessions, but I have given my all, except what I ate, drank, and wore, to the cause of missions, and Dr. Marshman has done the same, and so did Mr. Ward.”
Carey's trust in G.o.d, for the mission and for himself, was to be still further tried. On 12th July 1828 we find him thus writing from Calcutta to Jabez:--”I came down this morning to attend Lord W.
Bentinck's first levee. It was numerously attended, and I had the pleasure of seeing there a great number of gentlemen who had formerly studied under me, and for whom I felt a very sincere regard. I hear Lady Bentinck is a pious woman, but have not yet seen her. I have a card to attend at her drawing-room this evening, but I shall not go, as I must be at home for the Sabbath, which is to-morrow.” It soon fell to Lord William Bentinck to meet the financial consequences of his weak predecessor's administration. The College of Fort William had to be sacrificed. Metcalfe and Bayley, Carey's old students whom he had permanently influenced in the higher life, were the members of council, and he appealed to them. They sent him to the good Governor-General, to whose sympathy he laid bare all the past and present of the mission's finance. He was told to have no fear, and indeed the Council held a long sitting on this one matter. But from June 1830 the college ceased to be a teaching, and became an examining body. When the salary was reduced one-half, from Rs. 1000 a month, the Brotherhood met to pray for light and strength. Mr. Robinson, the Java missionary who had attached himself to Serampore, and whose son long did good service as a Bengali scholar and preacher, gives us this glimpse of its inner life at this time:--
”The two old men were dissolved in tears while they were engaged in prayer, and Dr. Marshman in particular could not give expressions to his feelings. It was indeed affecting to see these good old men, the fathers of the mission, entreating with tears that G.o.d would not forsake them now grey hairs were come upon them, but that He would silence the tongue of calumny, and furnish them with the means of carrying on His own cause.”
They sent home an appeal to England, and Carey himself published what is perhaps the most chivalrous, just, and weighty of all his utterances on the disagreeable subject--Thoughts upon the Discussions which have arisen from the Separation between the Baptist Missionary Society and the Serampore Missions. ”From our age and other circ.u.mstances our contributions may soon cease. We have seen a great work wrought in India, and much of it, either directly or indirectly, has been done by ourselves. I cannot, I ought not to be indifferent about the permanency of this work, and cannot therefore view the exultation expressed at the prospect of our resources being crippled otherwise than being of a character too satanic to be long persisted in by any man who has the love of G.o.d in his heart.”
The appeal to all Christians for ”a few hundred pounds per annum” for the mission station closed thus: ”But a few years have pa.s.sed away since the Protestant world was awakened to missionary effort. Since that time the annual revenues collected for this object have grown to the then unthought-of sum of 400,000. And is it unreasonable to expect that some unnoticeable portion of this should be intrusted to him who was amongst the first to move in this enterprise and to his colleagues?” The Brotherhood had hardly despatched this appeal to England with the sentence, ”Our present incomes even are uncertain,”
when the shears of financial reduction cut off Dr. Carey's office of Bengali translator to Government, which for eight years had yielded him Rs. 300 a month. But such was his faith this final stroke called forth only an expression of regret that he must reduce his contributions to the missionary cause by so much. He was a wonder to his colleagues, who wrote of him: ”Though thus reduced in his circ.u.mstances the good man, about to enter on his seventieth year, is as cheerful and as happy as the day is long. He rides out four or five miles every morning, returning home by sunrise; goes on with the work of translation day by day; gives two lectures on divinity and one on natural history every week in the college, and takes his turn of preaching both in Bengali and in English.”
When the Christian public responded heartily to his appeal Carey was loud and frequent in his expressions of grat.i.tude to G.o.d, who, ”in the time of our great extremity, appeared and stirred up His people thus willingly to offer their substance for His cause.” With respect to myself, I consider my race as nearly run. The days of our years are three score years and ten, and I am now only three months short of that age, and repeated bilious attacks have weakened my const.i.tution. But I do not look forward to death with any painful antic.i.p.ations. I cast myself on and plead the efficacy of that atonement which will not fail me when I need it.”
Dr. Marshman gives us a brighter picture of him. ”I met with very few friends in England in their seventieth year so lively, as free from the infirmities of age, so interesting in the pulpit, so completely conversible as he is now.” The reason is found in the fact that he was still useful, still busy at the work he loved most of all. He completed his last revision of the entire Bible in Bengali--the fifth edition of the Old Testament and the eighth edition of the New--in June 1832. Immediately thereafter, when presiding at the ordination of Mr.
Mack as co-pastor with Dr. Marshman and himself over the church at Serampore, he took with him into the pulpit the first copy of the sacred volume which came from the binder's hands, and addressed the converts and their children from the words of Simeon--”Lord now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.” As the months went on he carried through the press still another and improved edition of the New Testament, and only then he felt and often said that the work of his heart was done.
He had other sources of saintly pleasure as he lay meditating on the Word, and praising G.o.d for His goodness to the college and the mission stations increased to nineteen by young Sir Henry Havelock, who founded the church at Agra. Lord William Bentinck, having begun his reign with the abolition of the crime of suttee, was, with the help of Carey's old students, steadily carrying out the other reforms for which in all his Indian career the missionary had prayed and preached and published.
The judicial service was reorganised so as to include native judges.
The uncovenanted civil service was opened to all British subjects of every creed. The first act of justice to native Christians was thus done, so that he wrote of the college:--”The students are now eligible to every legal appointment in India which a native can hold; those who may possess no love for the Christian ministry have the prospect of a profitable profession as advocates in the judicial courts, and the hope of rising to posts of honourable distinction in their native land.”
The Hindoo law of inheritance which the Regulating Act of Parliament had so covered that it was used to deprive converts to Christianity of all civil rights, was dealt with so far as a local regulation could do so, and Carey, advised by such an authority as Harington, laid it on his successor in the apostolate, the young Alexander Duff, to carry the act of justice out fully, which was done under the Marquis of Dalhousie. The orders drawn up by Charles Grant's sons at last, in February 1833, freed Great Britain from responsibility for the connection of the East India Company with Temple and mosque endowments and the pilgrim tax.
His son Jonathan wrote this of him two years after his death:--
”In principle my father was resolute and firm, never shrinking from avowing and maintaining his sentiments. He had conscientious scruples against taking an oath; and condemned severely the manner in which oaths were administered, and urged vehemently the propriety of altogether dispensing with them. I remember three instances in which he took a conspicuous part in regard to oaths, such as was characteristic of the man. On one occasion, when a respectable Hindoo servant of the college of Fort William, attached to Dr. Carey's department, was early one morning proceeding to the Ganges to bathe, he perceived a dead body lying near the road; but it being dark, and no person being present, he pa.s.sed on, taking no further notice of the circ.u.mstance. As he returned from the Ganges after sunrise, he saw a crowd near the body, and then happened to say to one of the watchmen present that in the morning he saw the body on the other side of the road. The watchman took him in custody, as a witness before the coroner; but, when brought before the coroner, he refused to take an oath, and was, consequently, committed to prison for contempt. The Hindoo being a respectable person, and never having taken an oath, refused to take any nourishment in the prison. In this state he continued a day and a half, my father being then at Serampore; but upon his coming to Calcutta, the circ.u.mstances were mentioned to him. The fact of the man having refused to take an oath was enough to make him interest himself in his behalf. He was delighted with the resolution the man took--rather to go to prison than take an oath; and was determined to do all he could to procure his liberation. He first applied to the coroner, but was directed by him to the sheriff. To that functionary he proceeded, but was informed by him that he could make no order on the subject. He then had an interview with the then chief judge, by whose interference the man was set at liberty.
”Another instance relates to him personally. On the occasion of his last marriage, the day was fixed on which the ceremony was to take place--friends were invited--and all necessary arrangements made; but, three or four days prior to the day fixed, he was informed that it would be necessary for him to obtain a licence, in doing which, he must either take an oath or have banns published. To taking an oath he at once objected, and applied to the then senior judge, who informed him that, as he was not a quaker, his oath was indispensable; but, rather than take an oath, he applied to have the banns published, and postponed the arrangements for his marriage for another three weeks.
”The third instance was as follows:--It was necessary, in a certain case, to prove a will in court, in which the name of Dr. Carey was mentioned, in connection with the Serampore missionaries as executors.
An application was made by one of his colleagues, which was refused by the court, on account of the vagueness of the terms, 'Serampore missionaries;' but as Dr. Carey's name was specifically mentioned, the court intimated that they would grant the application if made by him.
The communication was made: but when he was informed that an oath was necessary, he shrunk with abhorrence from the idea; but after much persuasion, he consented to make the application, if taking an oath would be dispensed with. He did attend, and stated his objections to the then chief judge, which being allowed, his affirmation was received and recorded by the court.
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