Part 21 (1/2)
The Indian journals rang with the praises of the missionary whose childlike humility and sincerity, patriotism and learning, had long made India proud of him. After giving himself, William Carey had died so poor that his books had to be sold to provide 187 10s. for one of his sons. One writer a.s.serted that this man had contributed ”sixteen lakhs of rupees” to the cause of Christ while connected with the Serampore Mission, and the statement was everywhere repeated. Dr.
Marshman thereupon published the actual facts, ”as no one would have felt greater abhorrence of such an attempt to impose on the Christian public than Dr. Carey himself, had he been living.” At a time when the old Sicca Rupee was worth half a crown, Carey received, in the thirty-four and a half years of his residence at Serampore, from the date of his appointment to the College of Fort William, 45,000.[35] Of this he spent 7500 on his Botanic Garden in that period. If accuracy is of any value in such a question, which has little more than a curious biographical interest, then we must add the seven years previous to 1801, and we shall find that the shoemaker of Hackleton received in all for himself and his family 600 from the Society which he called into existence, and which sent him forth, while he spent on the Christianisation and civilisation of India 1625 received as a manufacturer of indigo; and 45,000 as Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi, and Bengali Translator to Government, or 46,625 in all.
”It is possible,” wrote Dr. Marshman, ”that if, instead of thus living to G.o.d and his cause with his brethren at Serampore, Dr. Carey had, like the other professors in the college, lived in Calcutta wholly for himself and his family, he might have laid by for them a lakh of rupees in the thirty years he was employed by Government, and had he been very parsimonious, possibly a lakh and a half. But who that contrasts the pleasures of such a life with those Dr. Carey enjoyed in promoting with his own funds every plan likely to plant Christianity among the natives around him, without having to consult any one in thus doing, but his two brethren of one heart with him, who contributed as much as himself to the Redeemer's cause, and the fruit of which he saw before his death in Twenty-six Gospel Churches planted in India within a surface of about eight hundred miles, and above Forty labouring brethren raised up on the spot amidst them--would not prefer the latter? What must have been the feelings on a deathbed of a man who had lived wholly to himself, compared with the joyous tranquillity which filled Carey's soul in the prospect of entering into the joy of his Lord, and above all with what he felt when, a few days before his decease, he said to his companion in labour for thirty-four years: 'I have no fears; I have no doubts; I have not a wish left unsatisfied.'”
In the Danish Church of Serampore, and in the Mission Chapel, and afterwards in the Union Chapel of Calcutta, Dr. Marshman and Mr. Mack preached sermons on William Carey. These and the discourse delivered in Charlotte Chapel, Edinburgh, on the 30th of November, by Christopher Anderson, were the only materials from which a just estimate of Carey and his work could be formed for the next quarter of a century. All, and especially the last, were as worthy of their theme as eloges p.r.o.nounced in such circ.u.mstances could be. Marshman spoke from the text chosen by Carey himself a few weeks before his death as containing the foundation of his hope and the source of his calm and tranquil a.s.surance--”For by grace are ye saved.” Mack found his inspiration again, as he had done in the Bengali village, in Paul's words--”David, after he had served his own generation, by the will of G.o.d fell on sleep.” The Edinburgh preacher turned to the message of Isaiah wherewith Carey used to comfort himself in his early loneliness, and which the Revised Version renders--”Look unto Abraham your father; for when he was but one I called him and I blessed him and made him many.”
And in Bombay the young contemporary missionary who most nearly resembled Carey in personal saintliness, scholars.h.i.+p, and self-devotion, John Wilson, thus wrote:--
”Dr. Carey, the first of living missionaries, the most honoured and the most successful since the time of the Apostles, has closed his long and influential career. Indeed his spirit, his life, and his labours, were truly apostolic...The Spirit of G.o.d which was in him led him forward from strength to strength, supported him under privation, enabled him to overcome in a fight that seemed without hope. Like the beloved disciple, whom he resembled in simplicity of mind, and in seeking to draw sinners to Christ altogether by the cords of love, he outlived his trials to enjoy a peaceful and honoured old age, to know that his Master's cause was prospering, and that his own name was named with reverence and blessing in every country where a Christian dwelt.
Perhaps no man ever exerted a greater influence for good on a great cause. Who that saw him, poor and in seats of learning uneducated, embark on such an enterprise, could ever dream that, in little more than forty years, Christendom should be animated with the same spirit, thousands forsake all to follow his example, and that the Word of Life should be translated into almost every language and preached in almost every corner of the earth?”
As the Founder and Father of Modern Missions, the character and career of William Carey are being revealed every year in the progress, and as yet, the purity of the expansion of the Church and of the English-speaking races in the two-thirds of the world which are still outside of Christendom. The 13:2:6 of Kettering became 400,000 before he died, and is now 5,000,000 a year. The one ordained English missionary is now a band of 20,000 men and women sent out by 558 agencies of the Reformed Churches. The solitary converts, each with no influence on his people, or country, or generation, are now a community of 3,000,000 in India alone, and in all the lands outside of Christendom 5,000,000, of whom 80,000 are missionaries to their own countrymen, and many are leaders of the native communities. Since the first edition of the Bengali New Testament appeared at the beginning of the century 250,000,000 of copies of the Holy Scriptures have been printed, of which one half are in 370 of the non-English tongues of the world. The Bengali School of Mudnabati, the Christian College of Serampore, have set in motion educational forces that are bringing nations to the birth, are pa.s.sing under Bible instruction every day more than a million boys and girls, young men and maidens of the dark races of mankind.
The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the greatest and most practical Evangelical of the nineteenth century after William Wilberforce, wrote thus in his Journal of the cla.s.s whom Carey headed in the eighteenth, and whom Wordsworth commemorated as
”Not sedentary all, there are who roam To scatter seeds of Life on barbarous sh.o.r.es.”
1847. ”Aug. 30th--RYDE.--Reading Missionary Enterprises by Williams...Zeal, devotion, joy, simplicity of heart, faith, love; and we here have barely affection enough to thank G.o.d that such deeds have been done. Talk of 'doing good' and being 'useful in one's generation,' why, these admirable men performed more in one month than I or many others shall perform in a whole life!”
The eloquent Dr. Richard Winter Hamilton, reflecting that sacrifice to heroes is reserved until after sunset, recalled William Carey, eight years after his death, as ”wielding a power to which all difficulties yielded, but that power noiseless as a law of nature; great in conception as well as in performance; profound as those deep combinations of language in which the Indian philosophy and polytheism hide themselves, but gentle as the flower which in his brief recreation he loved to train; awful as the sage, simple as the child; speaking through the Eastern world in as many languages, perhaps, as 'the cloven tongues of fire' represented; to be remembered and blessed as long as Ganges rolls!”
The historian of the Baptist Missionary Society, and Robert Hall, whom Sir James Mackintosh p.r.o.nounced the greatest English orator, have both attempted an estimate of Carey's genius and influence. Dr. F. A. c.o.x remarks:--”Had he been born in the sixteenth century he might have been a Luther, to give Protestantism to Europe; had he turned his thought and observations merely to natural philosophy he might have been a Newton; but his faculties, consecrated by religion to a still higher end, have gained for him the sublime distinction of having been the Translator of the Scriptures and the Benefactor of Asia.” Robert Hall spoke thus of Carey in his lifetime:--”That extraordinary man who, from the lowest obscurity and poverty, without a.s.sistance, rose by dint of unrelenting industry to the highest honours of literature, became one of the first of Orientalists, the first of Missionaries, and the instrument of diffusing more religious knowledge among his contemporaries than has fallen to the lot of any individual since the Reformation; a man who unites with the most profound and varied attainments the fervour of an evangelist, the piety of a saint, and the simplicity of a child.”
Except the portrait in London and the bust in Calcutta, no memorial, national, catholic, or sectarian, marks the work of Carey. That work is meanwhile most appropriately embodied in the College for natives at Serampore, in the Lall Bazaar chapel and Benevolent Inst.i.tution for the poor of Calcutta. The Church of England, which he left, like John Wesley, has allowed E. S. Robinson, Esq., of Bristol, to place an inscription, on bra.s.s, in the porch of the church of his native village, beside the stone which he erected over the remains of his father, Edmund, the parish clerk:--”To the Glory of G.o.d and in memory of Dr. Wm. Carey, Missionary and Orientalist.”
Neither Baptist nor Anglican, the present biographer would, in the name of the country which stood firm in its support of Carey and Serampore all through the forty-one years of his apostolate, add this final eulogy, p.r.o.nounced in St. George's Free Church, Edinburgh, on the man who, more than any other and before all others, made the civilisation of the modern world by the English-speaking races a Christian force.[36] Carey, childlike in his humility, is the most striking ill.u.s.tration in all Hagiology, Protestant or Romanist, of the Lord's declaration to the Twelve when He had set a little child in the midst of them, ”Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Yet we, nigh a century after he went forth with the Gospel to Hindostan, may venture to place him where the Church History of the future is likely to keep him--amid the uncrowned kings of men who have made Christian England what it is, under G.o.d, to its own people and to half the human race. These are Chaucer, the Father of English Verse; Wyclif the Father of the Evangelical Reformation in all lands; Hooker, the Father of English Prose; Shakspere, the Father of English Literature; Milton, the Father of the English Epic; Bunyan, the Father of English Allegory; Newton, the father of English Science; Carey, the Father of the Second Reformation through Foreign Missions.
APPENDIX
I.--CHARTER OF INCORPORATION OF SERAMPORE COLLEGE
WE, Frederick the Sixth, by the Grace of G.o.d King of Denmark, the Venders and Gothers, Duke of Slesvig Holsten, Stormarn, Ditmarsken, Limessborg and Oldenborg, by writings these make known and publicly declare, that whereas William Carey and Joshua Marshman, Doctors of Divinity, and John Clark Marshman, Esq., inhabitants of our town of Fredericksnagore (or Serampore) in Bengal, being desirous of founding a College to promote piety and learning particularly among the native Christian population of India, have to secure this object erected suitable buildings and purchased and collected suitable books, maps, etc., and have humbly besought us to grant unto them and such persons as shall be elected by them and their successors to form the Council of the College in the manner to be hereafter named, our Royal Charter of Incorporation that they may the more effectually carry into execution the purposes above-mentioned:--We, being desirous to encourage so laudable an undertaking, have of our special grace and free motion ordained, const.i.tuted, granted and declared, and by the presents We do for ourselves, our heirs and successors ordain, const.i.tute, grant and declare:
1. That the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman, and such other person or persons as shall successively be elected and appointed the Council of the said College, in the manner hereafter mentioned, shall by virtue of the presents be for ever hereafter one body politic and incorporate by the name of the Serampore College for the purposes aforesaid to have perpetual succession and to have a common seal, and by the said name to sue and be sued, to implead and be impleaded, and to answer and be answered unto in every court and place belonging to us, our heirs and successors.
2. And We do hereby ordain, const.i.tute and declare that the persons hereby incorporated and their successors shall for ever be competent in law to purchase, hold and enjoy for them and their successors any goods and chattels whatsoever and to receive, purchase, hold and enjoy, they and their successors, any lands, tenements or hereditaments whatever, and that they shall have full power and authority to sell, exchange or otherwise dispose of any real or personal property to be by them acquired as aforesaid, unless the sale or alienation of such property be specially prohibited by the donor or donors thereof, and to do all things relating to the said College or Corporation in as ample a manner or form as any of our liege subjects, or any other body politic or corporate in our said kingdom or its dependencies may or can do.
3. And We do hereby ordain, grant and declare that the number of Professors, Fellows or Student Tutors and Students, shall be indefinite and that the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman, shall be the first Council of the said College, and that in the event of its appearing to them necessary during their life-time, or in the case of the death of any one of the three members of the said first Council, the survivors or survivor shall and may under their respective hands and seals appoint such other person or persons to be members of the Council of the College, and to succeed each other so as to become Members of the said Council in the order in which they shall be appointed, to the intent that the Council of the said College shall for ever consist of at least three persons.
4. And We do hereby further ordain, grant and declare, that for the better government of the said College, and the better management of its concerns, the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman, the members of the first Council, shall have full power and authority for the s.p.a.ce of ten years from the date of these presents, to make and establish such statutes as shall appear to them useful and necessary for the government of the said College, in which statutes they shall define the powers to be entrusted to their successors, to the Professors, the Fellows or Student Tutors and the other Officers thereof, and the duties to be performed by these respectively for the management of the estates, lands, revenues and goods--and of the business of the said College, and the manner of proposing, electing, admitting and removing all and every one of the Council, the Professors, the Fellows or Tutors, the officers, the students and the servants thereof, and shall make and establish generally all such other statutes as may appear to them necessary for the future good government and prosperity of the said College, provided that these statutes be not contrary to the laws and statutes of our realm.
5. And we do hereby further ordain, grant and declare, that the statutes thus made and established by the said three members of the first Council, and given or left in writing under their respective hands, shall be valid and in full force at the expiration of ten years from the date of these presents, so that no future Council of the College shall have power to alter, change or vary them in any manner whatever and that the statutes shall for ever be considered the const.i.tution of the said College. And we do hereby appoint and declare that these statutes shall be made and established by the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman alone, so that in case either of them should die before the expiration of ten years, the power of completing or perfecting these statutes shall devolve wholly on the survivors or survivor; and that in case all three of them should die before the expiration of ten years, the statutes which they have left in writing under their hands, or under the hand of the last survivor among them shall be considered ”The Fundamental Statutes and Const.i.tution of Serampore College,” incapable of receiving either addition or alteration, and shall and may be registered in our Royal Court of Chancery as ”The Statutes and Const.i.tution of Serampore College.”
6. And We do hereby further appoint, grant and declare that from and after the completion of the statutes of the said College in the above said time of ten years, the said Council of the College shall be deemed to consist of a Master or President and two or four members who may be Professors or otherwise as the Statutes may direct so that the said Council shall not contain less than three, nor more than five persons, as shall be defined in the Statutes. The Council shall ever be elected as the Statutes of the College may direct, yet the said Master or President shall always previously have been a Member of the said College; and upon the decease of the said Master or President, the Council of the said College shall be unable to do any act or deed until the appointment of a new Master or President, save and except the appointment of such a Master.
7. And We further appoint, grant and declare, that the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman and John Clark Marshman, the members of the first Council, and their successors for ever, shall have the power of conferring upon the students of the said College, Native Christians as well as others, degrees of rank and honour according to their proficiency in as ample a manner as any other such College, yet the said Serampore College shall only have the power of conferring such degrees on the students that testify their proficiency in Science and no rank or other special right shall be connected therewith in our dominions. And We do hereby further appoint, grant and declare, that after the expiration of the said ten years, the said Council of the College and their successors for ever shall have power to make and establish such orders and bye-laws as shall appear to them useful and necessary for the government of the said College, and to alter, suspend or repeal those already made, and from time to time make such new ones in their room as shall appear to them most proper and expedient provided the same be not repugnant to the Statutes of the College, or to the laws of our realm, and that after the expiration of these ten years any member of the Council shall have power to move the enactment of any new bye-law, or the alteration, suspension or repeal of any existing one provided notice of such motion shall have been delivered in writing to the Master and read from the Chair at one previous meeting of the Council of the said College, but that no such motion shall be deemed to have pa.s.sed in the affirmative, until the same shall have been discussed and decided by ballot at another meeting summoned especially for that purpose, a majority of the members then present having voted in the affirmative; and in this, as in all other cases, if the votes be equal, the Master or President shall have the casting vote.