His narrative of their intercourse, written after her death, lets in a flood of light on his home life:—

"During the thirteen years of her union with Dr. Carey, they had enjoyed the most entire oneness of mind, never having a single circumstance which either of them wished to conceal from the other. Her solicitude for her husband's health and comfort was unceasing. They prayed and conversed together on those things which form the life of personal religion, without the least reserve; and enjoyed a degree of conjugal happiness while thus continued to each other, which can only arise from a union of mind grounded on real religion. On the whole, her lot in India was altogether a scene of mercy. Here she was found of the Saviour, gradually ripened for glory, and after having her life prolonged beyond the expectation of herself and all who knew her, she was released from this mortal state almost without the consciousness of pain, and, as we most assuredly believe, had 'an abundant entrance ministered unto her into the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.'"

When, on 24th June 1809, Carey announced at the dinner table that he had that morning finished the Bengali translation of the whole Bible, and he was asked how much more he thought of doing, he answered: "The work I have allotted to myself, in translating, will take me about twenty years." But he had kept the bow too long and too tightly bent, and it threatened to snap. That evening he was seized with bilious fever, and on the eighteenth day thereafter his life was despaired of. "The goodness of God is eminently conspicuous in raising up our beloved brother Carey," wrote Marshman. "God has raised him up again and restored him to his labours; may he live to accomplish all that is in his heart," wrote Rowe. He was at once at his desk again, in college and in his study. "I am this day forty-eight years old," he wrote to Ryland on the 17th August, and sent him the following letters, every line of which reveals the inner soul of the writer:—

"CALCUTTA, 16th August 1809.—I did not expect, about a month ago, ever to write to you again. I was then ill of a severe fever, and for a week together scarcely any hopes were entertained of my life. One or two days I was supposed to be dying, but the Lord has graciously restored me; may it be that I may live more than ever to His glory. Whilst I was ill I had scarcely any such thing as thought belonging to me, but, excepting seasons of delirium, seemed to be nearly stupid; perhaps some of this arose from the weak state to which I was reduced, which was so great that Dr. Hare, one of the most eminent physicians in Calcutta, who was consulted about it, apprehended more danger from that than from the fever. I, however, had scarcely a thought of death or eternity, or of life, or anything belonging thereto. In my delirium, greatest part of which I perfectly remember, I was busily employed in carrying a commission from God to all the princes and governments in the world, requiring them instantly to abolish every political establishment of religion, and to sell the parish and other churches to the first body of Christians that would purchase them. Also to declare war infamous, to esteem all military officers as men who had sold themselves to destroy the human race, to extend this to all those dead men called heroes, defenders of their country, meritorious officers, etc.[13] I was attended by angels in all my excursions, and was universally successful. A few princes in Germany were refractory, but my attendants struck them dead instantly. I pronounced the doom of Rome to the Pope, and soon afterwards all the territory about Rome, the March of Ancona, the great city and all its riches sank into that vast bed of burning lava which heats Nero's bath. These two considerations were the delirious wanderings of the mind, but I hope to feel their force, to pray and strive for their accomplishment to the end of my life. But it is now time to attend to something not merely ideal.

"The state of the world occupied my thoughts more and more; I mean as it relates to the spread of the Gospel. The harvest truly is great, and labourers bear scarcely any proportion thereto. I was forcibly struck this morning with reading our Lord's reply to His disciples, John iv. When He had told them that He had meat to eat the world knew not of, and that His meat was to do the will of His Father and to finish His work, He said, 'Say not ye there are three months and then cometh harvest?' He by this plainly intended to call their attention to the conduct of men when harvest was approaching, for that being the season upon which all the hopes of men hang for temporal supplies, they provide men and measures in time for securing it. Afterwards directing their attention to that which so occupied His own as to be His meat and drink, He said, 'Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields (of souls to be gathered in), for they are white already to harvest.' After so many centuries have elapsed and so many fields full of this harvest have been lost for want of labourers to gather it in, shall we not at last reflect seriously on our duty? Hindostan requires ten thousand ministers of the Gospel, at the lowest calculation, China as many, and you may easily calculate for the rest of the world. I trust that many will eventually be raised up here, but be that as it may the demands for missionaries are pressing to a degree seldom realised. England has done much, but not the hundredth part of what she is bound to do. In so great a want of ministers ought not every church to turn its attention chiefly to the raising up and maturing of spiritual gifts with the express design of sending them abroad? Should not this be a specific matter of prayer, and is there not reason to labour hard to infuse this spirit into the churches?

"A mission into Siam would be comparatively easy of introduction and support on account of its vicinity to Prince of Wales Island, from which vessels can often go in a few hours. A mission to Pegu and another to Arakan would not be difficult of introduction, they being both within the Burman dominions, Missions to Assam and Nepal should be speedily tried. Brother Robinson is going to Bhootan. I do not know anything about the facility with which missions could be introduced into Cochin China, Cambodia, and Laos, but were the trial made I believe difficulties would remove. It is also very desirable that the Burman mission should be strengthened. There is no full liberty of conscience, and several stations might be occupied; even the borders of China might be visited from that country if an easier entrance into the heart of the country could not be found. I have not mentioned Sumatra, Java, the Moluccas, the Philippines, or Japan, but all these countries must be supplied with missionaries. This is a very imperfect sketch of the wants of Asia only, without including the Mahometan countries; but Africa and South America call as loudly for help, and the greatest part of Europe must also be holpen by the Protestant churches, being nearly as destitute of real godliness as any heathen country on the earth. What a pressing call, then, is here for labourers in the spiritual harvest, and what need that the attention of all the churches in England and America should be drawn to this very object!"

Two years after the establishment of the mission at Serampore, David Brown, the senior chaplain and provost of Fort William College, took possession of Aldeen House, which he occupied till the year of his death in 1812. The house is the first in the settlement reached by boat from Calcutta. Aldeen is five minutes' walk south of the Serampore Mission House, and a century ago there was only a park between them. The garden slopes down to the noble river, and commands the beautiful country seat of Barrackpore, which Lord Wellesley had just built. The house itself is embosomed in trees, the mango, the teak, and the graceful bamboo. Just below it, but outside of Serampore, are the deserted temple of Bullubpoor and the Ghat of the same name, a fine flight of steps up which thousands of pilgrims flock every June to the adjoining shrine and monstrous car of Jagganath. David Brown had not been long in Aldeen when he secured the deserted temple and converted it into a Christian oratory, ever since known as Henry Martyn's Pagoda. For ten years Aldeen and the pagoda became the meeting-place of Carey and his Nonconformist friends, with Claudius Buchanan, Martyn, Bishop Corrie, Thomason, and the little band of evangelical Anglicans who, under the protection of Lords Wellesley and Hastings, sweetened Anglo-Indian society, and made the names of "missionary" and of "chaplain" synonymous. Here too there gathered, as also to the Mission House higher up, many a civilian and officer who sought the charms of that Christian family life which they had left behind. A young lieutenant commemorated these years when Brown was removed, in a pleasing elegy, which Charles Simeon published in the Memorials of his friend. Many a traveller from the far West still visits the spot, and recalls the memories of William Carey and Henry Martyn, of Marshman and Buchanan, of Ward and Corrie, which linger around the fair scene. When first we saw it the now mutilated ruin was perfect, and under the wide-spreading banian tree behind a Brahman was reciting, for a day and a night, the verses of the Mahabharata epic to thousands of listening Hindoos.

"Long, Hoogli, has thy sullen stream Been doomed the cheerless shores to lave; Long has the Suttee's baneful gleam Pale glimmered o'er thy midnight wave.

"Yet gladdened seemed to flow thy tide Where opens on the view—Aldeen; For there to grace thy palmy side Loved England's purest joys were seen.

"Yon dome, 'neath which in former days Grim idols marked the pagan shrine, Has swelled the notes of pious praise, Attuned to themes of love divine."

We find this allusion to the place in Carey's correspondence with Dr. Ryland:—"20th January 1807.—It would have done your heart good to have joined us at our meetings at the pagoda. From that place we have successively recommended Dr. Taylor to the work of the Lord at Bombay, Mr. Martyn to his at Dinapoor, Mr. Corrie to his at Chunar, Mr. Parsons to his at Burhampore, Mr. Des Granges to his at Vizagapatam, and our two brethren to theirs at Rangoon, and from thence we soon expect to commend Mr. Thomason to his at Madras. In these meetings the utmost harmony prevails and a union of hearts unknown between persons of different denominations in England." Dr. Taylor and Mr. Des Granges were early missionaries of the London Society; the Rangoon brethren were Baptists; the others were Church of England chaplains. Sacramentarianism and sacerdotalism had not then begun to afflict the Church of India. There were giants in those days, in Bengal, worthy of Carey and of the one work in which all were the servants of one Master.

Let us look a little more closely at Henry Martyn's Pagoda. It is now a picturesque ruin, which the peepul tree that is entwined among its fine brick masonry, and the crumbling river-bank, may soon cause to disappear for ever. The exquisite tracery of the moulded bricks may be seen, but not the few figures that are left of the popular Hindoo idols just where the two still perfect arches begin to spring. The side to the river has already fallen down, and with it the open platform overhanging the bank on which the missionary sat in the cool of the morning and evening, and where he knelt to pray for the people. We have accompanied many a visitor there, from Dr. Duff to Bishop Cotton, and John Lawrence, and have rarely seen one unmoved. This pagoda had been abandoned long before by the priests of Radhabullub, because the river had encroached to a point within 300 feet of it, the limit within which no Brahman is allowed to receive a gift or take his food. The little black doll of an idol, which is famous among Hindoos alike for its sanctity and as a work of art—for had it not been miraculously wafted to this spot like the Santa Casa to Loretto?—was removed with great pomp to a new temple after it had paid a visit to Clive's moonshi, the wealthy Raja Nobokissen in Calcutta, who sought to purchase it outright.

In this cool old pagoda Henry Martyn, on one of his earliest visits to Aldeen after his arrival as a chaplain in 1806, found an appropriate residence. Under the vaulted roof of the shrine a place of prayer and praise was fitted up with an organ, so that, as he wrote, "the place where once devils were worshipped has now become a Christian oratory." Here, too, he laid his plans for the evangelisation of the people. When suffering from one of his moods of depression as to his own state, he thus writes of this place:—"I began to pray as on the verge of eternity; and the Lord was pleased to break my hard heart. I lay in tears, interceding for the unfortunate natives of this country; thinking within myself that the most despicable soodra of India was of as much value in the sight of God as the King of Great Britain." It was from such supplication that he was once roused by the blaze of a Suttee's funeral pyre, on which he found that the living widow had been consumed with the dead before he could interfere. He could hear the hideous drums and gongs and conch-shells of the temple to which Radhabullub had been removed. There he often tried to turn his fellow-creatures to the worship of the one God, from their prostrations "before a black image placed in a pagoda, with lights burning around it," whilst, he says, he "shivered as if standing, as it were, in the neighbourhood of hell." It was in the deserted pagoda that Brown, Corrie, and Parsons met with him to commend him to God before he set out for his new duties at Dinapoor. "My soul," he writes of this occasion, "never yet had such divine enjoyment. I felt a desire to break from the body, and join the high praises of the saints above. May I go 'in the strength of this many days.' Amen." "I found my heaven begun on earth. No work so sweet as that of praying and living wholly to the service of God." And as he passed by the Mission House on his upward voyage, with true catholicity "Dr. Marshman could not resist joining the party: and after going a little way, left them with prayer." Do we wonder that these men have left their mark on India?

As years went by, the temple, thus consecrated as a Christian oratory, became degraded in other hands. The brand "pagoda distillery" for a time came to be known as marking the rum manufactured there. The visits of so many Christian pilgrims to the spot, and above all, the desire expressed by Lord Lawrence when Governor-General to see it, led the Hindoo family who own the pagoda to leave it at least as a simple ruin.

Corrie, afterwards the first bishop of Madras, describes the marriage of Des Granges in the oratory, and gives us a glimpse of life in the Serampore Mission House:—

"1806.—Calcutta strikes me as the most magnificent city in the world; and I am made most happy by the hope of being instrumental to the eternal good of many. A great opposition, I find, is raised against Martyn and the principles he preaches...Went up to Serampore yesterday, and in the evening was present at the marriage of Mr. Des Granges. Mr. Brown entered into the concern with much interest. The pagoda was fixed on, and lighted up for the celebration of the wedding; at eight o'clock the parties came from the Mission House [at Serampore], attended by most of the family. Mr. Brown commenced with the hymn, 'Come, gracious Spirit, heavenly dove!' A divine influence seemed to attend us, and most delightful were my sensations. The circumstance of so many being engaged in spreading the glad tidings of salvation,—the temple of an idol converted to the purpose of Christian worship, and the Divine presence felt among us,—filled me with joy unspeakable. After the marriage service of the Church of England, Mr. Brown gave out 'the Wedding Hymn'; and after signing certificates of the marriage we adjourned to the house, where Mr. Brown had provided supper. Two hymns given out by Mr. Marshman were felt very powerfully. He is a most lively, sanguine missionary; his conversation made my heart burn within me, and I find desires of spreading the Gospel growing stronger daily, and my zeal in the cause more ardent...I went to the Mission House, and supped at the same table with about fifty native converts. The triumph of the Cross was most evident in breaking down their prejudices, and uniting them with those who formerly were an abomination in their eyes. After supper they sang a Bengali hymn, many of them with tears of joy; and they concluded with prayer in Bengali, with evident earnestness and emotion. My own feelings were too big for utterance. O may the time be hastened when every tongue shall confess Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father!

"On Friday evening [Oct. 10th], we had a meeting in the pagoda, at which almost all the missionaries, some of their wives, and Captain Wickes attended, with a view to commend Martyn to the favour and protection of God in his work. The Divine presence was with us. I felt more than it would have been proper to express. Mr. Brown commenced with a hymn and prayer, Mr. Des Granges succeeded him, with much devotion and sweetness of expression: Mr. Marshman followed, and dwelt particularly on the promising appearance of things; and, with much humility, pleaded God's promises for the enlargement of Zion; with many petitions for Mr. Brown and his family. The service was concluded by Mr. Carey, who was earnest in prayer for Mr. Brown: the petition that 'having laboured for many years without encouragement or support, in the evening it might be light,' seemed much to affect his own mind, and greatly impressed us all. Afterwards we supped together at Mr. Brown's...

"13th Oct.—I came to Serampore to dinner. Had a pleasant sail up the river: the time passed agreeably in conversation. In the evening a fire was kindled on the opposite bank; and we soon perceived that it was a funeral pile, on which the wife was burning with the dead body of her husband. It was too dark to distinguish the miserable victim...On going out to walk with Martyn to the pagoda, the noise so unnatural, and so little calculated to excite joy, raised in my mind an awful sense of the presence and influence of evil spirits."

Corrie married the daughter of Mrs. Ellerton, who knew Serampore and Carey well. It was Mr. Ellerton who, when an indigo-planter at Malda, opened the first Bengali school, and made the first attempt at translating the Bible into that vernacular. His young wife, early made a widow, witnessed accidentally the duel in which Warren Hastings shot Philip Francis. She was an occasional visitor at Aldeen, and took part in the pagoda services. Fifty years afterwards, not long before her death at eighty-seven, Bishop Wilson, whose guest she was, wrote of her: "She made me take her to Henry Martyn's pagoda. She remembers the neighbourhood, and Gharetty Ghat and House in Sir Eyre Coote's time (1783). The ancient Governor of Chinsurah and his fat Dutch wife are still in her mind. When she visited him with her first husband (she was then sixteen) the old Dutchman cried out, 'Oh, if you would find me such a nice little wife I would give you ten thousand rupees.'"

It was in Martyn's pagoda that Claudius Buchanan first broached his plan of an ecclesiastical establishment for India, and invited the discussion of it by Carey and his colleagues. Such a scheme came naturally from one who was the grandson of a Presbyterian elder of the Church of Scotland, converted in the Whitefield revival at Cambuslang. It had been suggested first by Bishop Porteous when he reviewed the Company's acquisitions in Asia. It was encouraged by Lord Wellesley, who was scandalised on his arrival in India by the godlessness of the civil servants and the absence of practically any provision for the Christian worship and instruction of its officers and soldiers, who were all their lives without religion, not a tenth of them ever returning home. Carey thus wrote, at Ryland's request, of the proposal, which resulted in the arrival in Calcutta of Bishop Middleton and Dr. Bryce in 1814:—"I have no opinion of Dr. Buchanan's scheme for a religious establishment here, nor could I from memory point out what is exceptionable in his memoir. All his representations must be taken with some grains of allowance." When, in the Aldeen discussions, Dr. Buchanan told Marshman that the temple lands would eventually answer for the established churches and the Brahmans' lands for the chaplains, the stout Nonconformist replied with emphasis, "You will never obtain them." We may all accept the conversion of the idol shrine into a place of prayer—as Gregory I. taught Augustine of Canterbury to transform heathen temples into Christian churches—as presaging the time when the vast temple and mosque endowments will be devoted by the people themselves to their own moral if not spiritual good through education, both religious and secular.

The change wrought in seventeen years by Carey and such associates as these on society in Bengal, both rich and poor, became marked by the year 1810. We find him writing of it thus:—"When I arrived I knew of no person who cared about the Gospel except Mr. Brown, Mr. Udny, Mr. Creighton, Mr. Grant, and Mr. Brown an indigo-planter, besides Brother Thomas and myself. There might be more, and probably were, though unknown to me. There are now in India thirty-two ministers of the Gospel. Indeed, the Lord is doing great things for Calcutta; and though infidelity abounds, yet religion is the theme of conversation or dispute in almost every house. A few weeks ago (October 1810), I called upon one of the Judges to take breakfast with him, and going rather abruptly upstairs, as I had been accustomed to do, I found the family just going to engage in morning worship. I was of course asked to engage in prayer, which I did. I afterwards told him that I had scarcely witnessed anything since I had been in Calcutta which gave me more pleasure than what I had seen that morning. The change in this family was an effect of Mr. Thomason's ministry...About ten days ago I had a conversation with one of the Judges of the Supreme Court, Sir John Boyd, upon religious subjects. Indeed there is now scarcely a place where you can pay a visit without having an opportunity of saying something about true religion."

Carey's friendly intercourse, by person and letter, was not confined to those who were aggressively Christian or to Christian and ecclesiastical questions. As we shall soon see, his literary and scientific pursuits led him to constant and familiar converse with scholars like Colebrooke and Leyden, with savants like Roxburgh, the astronomer Bentley, and Dr. Hare, with publicists like Sir James Mackintosh and Robert Hall, with such travellers and administrators as Manning, the friend of Charles Lamb, and Raffles.

In Great Britain the name of William Carey had, by 1812, become familiar as a household word in all evangelical circles. The men who had known him in the days before 1793 were few and old, were soon to pass away for ever. The new generation had fed their Christian zeal on his achievements, and had learned to look on him, in spite of all his humility which only inflamed that zeal, as the pioneer, the father, the founder of foreign missions, English, Scottish, and American. They had never seen him; they were not likely to see him in the flesh. The desire for a portrait of him became irresistible. The burning of the press, to be hereafter described, which led even bitter enemies of the mission like Major Scott Waring to subscribe for its restoration, gave the desired sympathetic voice, so that Fuller wrote to the missionaries:—"The public is now giving us their praises. Eight hundred guineas have been offered for Dr. Carey's likeness...When you pitched your tents at Serampore you said, 'We will not accumulate riches but devote all to God for the salvation of the heathen.' God has given you what you desired and what you desired not. Blessed men, God will bless you and make you a blessing. I and others of us may die, but God will surely visit you...Expect to be highly applauded, bitterly reproached, greatly moved, and much tried in every way. Oh that, having done all, you may stand!"

Carey was, fortunately for posterity, not rebellious in the matter of the portrait; he was passive. As he sat in his room in the college of Fort William, his pen in hand, his Sanskrit Bible before him, and his Brahman pundit at his left hand, the saint and the scholar in the ripeness of his powers at fifty was transferred to the canvas which has since adorned the walls of Regent's Park College. A line engraving of the portrait was published in England the year after at a guinea, and widely purchased, the profit going to the mission. The painter was Home, famous in his day as the artist whom Lord Cornwallis had engaged during the first war with Tipoo to prepare those Select Views in Mysore, the Country of Tipoo Sultaun, from Drawings taken on the Spot, which appeared in 1794.

Of his four sons, Felix, William, Jabez, and Jonathan, Carey's correspondence was most frequent at this period with William, who went forth in 1807 to Dinapoor to begin his independent career as a missionary by the side of Fernandez.

"2nd April 1807.—We have the greatest encouragement to go forward in the work of our Lord Jesus, because we have every reason to conclude that it will be successful at last. It is the cause which God has had in His mind from eternity, the cause for which Christ shed His blood, that for which the Spirit and word of God were given, that which is the subject of many great promises, that for which the saints have been always praying, and which God Himself bears an infinite regard to in His dispensations of Providence and Grace. The success thereof is therefore certain. Be encouraged, therefore, my dear son, to devote yourself entirely to it, and to pursue it as a matter of the very first importance even to your dying day.

"Give my love to Mr. and Mrs. Creighton and to Mr. Ellerton, Mr. Grant, or any other who knows me about Malda, also to our native Brethren."

"CALCUTTA, 29th September 1808.—A ship is just arrived which brings the account that Buonaparte has taken possession of the whole kingdom of Spain, and that the Royal family of that country are in prison at Bayonne. It is likely that Turkey is fallen before now, and what will be the end of these wonders we cannot tell. I see the wrath of God poured out on the nations which have so long persecuted His Gospel, and prevented the spread of His truth. Buonaparte is but the minister of the Divine vengeance, the public executioner now employed to execute the sentence of God upon criminal men. He, however, has no end in view but the gratifying his own ambition."

"22nd December 1808.—DEAR WILLIAM—Be steadfast...Walk worthy of your high calling, and so as to be a pattern to others who may engage in similar undertakings. Much depends upon us who go first to the work of the Lord in this country; and we have reason to believe that succeeding Ministers of the Gospel in this country will be more or less influenced by our example...All, even the best of men, are more likely to be influenced by evil example than benefited by good: let it, therefore, be your business and mine to live and act for God in all things and at all times.

"I am very glad you wrote to Jabez and Jonathan. O that I could see them converted!"

"30th May 1809.—When you come down take a little pains to bring down a few plants of some sort. There is one grows plentifully about Sadamahal which grows about as high as one's knee, and produces a large red flower. Put half a dozen plants in pots (with a hole in the bottom). There is at Sadamahal (for I found it there) a plant which produces a flower like Bhayt, of a pale bluish colour, almost white; and indeed several other things there. Try and bring something. Can't you bring the grasshopper which has a saddle on its back, or the bird which has a large crest which he opens when he settles on the ground? I want to give you a little taste for natural objects. Felix is very good indeed in this respect."

"26th April 1809.—You, my dear William, are situated in a post which is very dear to my remembrance because the first years of my residence in India were spent in that neighbourhood. I therefore greatly rejoice in any exertions which you are enabled to make for the cause of our Redeemer...Should you, after many years' labour, be instrumental in the conversion of only one soul, it would be worth the work of a whole life...I am not sure that I have been of real use to any one person since I have been in this country, yet I dare not give up the work in which I am engaged. Indeed, notwithstanding all the discouragements which I feel from my own unfitness for any part of it, I prefer it to everything else, and consider that in the work of my Redeemer I have a rich reward. If you are enabled to persevere you will feel the same, and will say with the great Apostle—'I count not my life dear to me that I may fulfil the ministry which I have received of the Lord.' 'Unto me is this grace (favour) given that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.' Hold on, therefore, be steady in your work, and leave the result with God.

"I have been thinking of a mission to the Ten Tribes of Israel, I mean the Afghans, who inhabit Cabul...I leave the other side for your mother to write a few lines to Mary, to whom give my love."

"CALCUTTA, 1st November 1809.—Yesterday was the day for the Chinese examination, at which Jabez acquitted himself with much honour. I wish his heart were truly set on God. One of the greatest blessings which I am now anxious to see before my death is the conversion of him and Jonathan, and their being employed in the work of the Lord.

"Now, dear William, what do we live for but to promote the cause of our dear Redeemer in the world? If that be carried on we need not wish for anything more; and if our poor labours are at all blessed to the promotion of that desirable end, our lives will not be in vain. Let this, therefore, be the great object of your life, and if you should be made the instrument of turning only one soul from darkness to marvellous light, who can say how many more may be converted by his instrumentality, and what a tribute of glory may arise to God from that one conversion. Indeed, were you never to be blessed to the conversion of one soul, still the pleasure of labouring in the work of the Lord is greater than that of any other undertaking in the world, and is of itself sufficient to make it the work of our choice. I hope Sebuk Ram is arrived before now, and that you will find him to be a blessing to you in your work. Try your utmost to make him well acquainted with the Bible, labour to correct his mistakes, and to establish him in the knowledge of the truth.

"You may always enclose a pinch of seeds in a letter."

"17th January 1810.—Felix went with Captain Canning, the English ambassador to the Burman Empire, to the city of Pegu. On his way thither he observed to Captain Canning that he should be greatly gratified in accompanying the Minister to the mountains of Martaban and the country beyond them. Captain Canning at his next interview with the Minister mentioned this to him, which he was much pleased with, and immediately ordered several buffalo-carts to be made ready, and gave him a war-boat to return to Rangoon to bring his baggage, medicines, etc. He had no time to consult Brother Chater before he determined on the journey, and wrote to me when at Rangoon, where he stayed only one night, and returned to Pegu the next morning. He says the Minister has now nearly the whole dominion over the Empire, and is going to war. He will accompany the army to Martaban, when he expects to stay with the Minister there. He goes in great spirits to explore those countries where no European has been before him, and where he goes with advantages and accommodations such as a traveller seldom can obtain. Brother and Sister Chater do not approve of his undertaking, perhaps through fear for his safety. I feel as much for that as any one can do, yet I, and indeed Brethren Marshman, Ward, and Rowe, rejoice that he has undertaken the journey. It will assist him in acquiring the language; it will gratify the Minister, it will serve the interests of literature, and perhaps answer many other important purposes, as it respects the mission; and as much of the way will be through uninhabited forests, it could not have been safely undertaken except with an army. He expects to be absent three months. I shall feel a great desire to hear from him when he returns, and I doubt not but you will join me in prayer for his safety both of mind and body...

"One or two words about natural history. Can you not get me a male and female khokora—I mean the great bird like a kite, which makes so great a noise, and often carries off a duck or a kid? I believe it is an eagle, and want to examine it. Send me also all the sorts of ducks and waterfowls you can get, and, in short, every sort of bird you can obtain which is not common here. Send their Bengali names. Collect me all the sorts of insects, and serpents, and lizards you can get which are not common here. Put all the insects together into a bottle of rum, except butterflies, which you may dry between two papers, and the serpents and lizards the same. I will send you a small quantity of rum for that purpose. Send all the country names. Let me have the birds alive; and when you have got a good boat-load send a small boat down with them under charge of a careful person, and I will pay the expenses. Spare no pains to get me seeds and roots, and get Brother Robinson to procure what he can from Bhootan or other parts.

"Remember me affectionately to Sebuk Ram and his wife, and to all the native brethren and sisters."

"5th February 1810.—Were you hunting the buffalo, or did it charge you without provocation? I advise you to abstain from hunting buffaloes or other animals, because, though I think it lawful to kill noxious animals, or to kill animals for food, yet the unnecessary killing of animals, and especially the spending much time in the pursuit of them, is wrong, and your life is too valuable to be thrown away by exposing it to such furious animals as buffaloes and tigers. If you can kill them without running any risk 'tis very well, but it is wrong to expose yourself to danger for an end so much below that to which you are devoted...

"I believe the cause of our Redeemer increases in the earth, and look forward to more decided appearances of divine power. The destruction of the temporal power of the Pope is a glorious circumstance, and an answer to the prayers of the Church for centuries past...

"I send you a small cask of rum to preserve curiosities in, and a few bottles; but your best way will be to draw off a couple of gallons of the rum, which you may keep for your own use, and then put the snakes, frogs, toads, lizards, etc., into the cask, and send them down. I can easily put them into proper bottles, etc., afterwards. You may, however, send one or two of the bottles filled with beetles, grasshoppers, and other insects."

In the absence of Mr. Fernandez, the pastor, William had excluded two members of the Church.

"4th April 1810.—A very little knowledge of human nature will convince you that this would have been thought an affront in five instances out of six. You would have done better to have advised them, or even to have required them to have kept from the Lord's table till Mr. Fernandez's return, and to have left it to him to preside over the discipline of the church. You, no doubt, did it without thinking of the consequences, and in the simplicity of your heart, and I think Mr. Fernandez is wrong in treating you with coolness, when a little conversation might have put everything to rights. Of that, however, I shall say no more to you, but one of us shall write to him upon the subject as soon as we can.

"The great thing to be done now is the effecting of a reconciliation between you, and whether you leave Sadamahal, or stay there, this is absolutely necessary. In order to this you both must be willing to make some sacrifice of your feelings; and as those feelings, which prevent either of you from making concessions where you have acted amiss, are wrong, the sooner they are sacrificed the better. I advise you to write to Mr. Fernandez immediately, and acknowledge that you did wrong in proceeding to the exclusion of the members without having first consulted with him, and state that you had no intention of hurting his feelings, but acted from what you thought the urgency of the case, and request of him a cordial reconciliation. I should like much to see a copy of the letter you send to him. I have no object in view but the good of the Church, and would therefore rather see you stoop as low as you can to effect a reconciliation, than avoid it through any little punctilio of honour or feeling of pride. You will never repent of having humbled yourself to the dust that peace may be restored, nothing will be a more instructive example to the heathen around you, nothing will so completely subdue Brother Fernandez's dissatisfaction, and nothing will make you more respected in the Church of God.

"It is highly probable that you will some time or other be removed to another situation, but it cannot be done till you are perfectly reconciled to each other, nor can it possibly be done till some time after your reconciliation, as such a step would be considered by all as an effect of resentment or dissatisfaction, and would be condemned by every thinking person. We shall keep our minds steadily on the object, and look out for a proper station; but both we and you must act with great caution and tenderness in this affair. For this reason also I entreat you not to withdraw yourself from the church, or from any part of your labours, but go on steadily in the path of duty, suppress and pray against every feeling of resentment, and bear anything rather than be accessory to a misunderstanding, or the perpetuating of one. 'Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ, who made himself of no reputation.' I hope what I have said will induce you to set in earnest about a reconciliation with Brother Fernandez, and to spare no pains or concession (consistent with truth) to effect it."

William had applied to be transferred to Serampore.

"3rd August 1811.—The necessities of the mission must be consulted before every other consideration. Native brethren can itinerate, but Europeans must be employed to open new missions and found new stations. For were we to go upon the plan of sending Europeans where natives could possibly be employed, no subscriptions or profits could support them. We intend to commence a new station at Dacca, and if you prefer that to Cutwa you may go thither. One of the first things to be done there will be to open a charity school, and to overlook it. Dacca itself is a very large place, where you may often communicate religious instructions without leaving the town. There are also a number of Europeans there, so that Mary would not be so much alone, and at any rate help would be near. We can obtain the permission of Government for you to settle there.

"I ought, however, to say that I think there is much guilt in your fears. You and Mary will be a thousand times more safe in committing yourselves to God in the way of duty than in neglecting obvious duty to take care of yourselves. You see what hardships and dangers a soldier meets in the wicked trade of war. They are forced to leave home and expose themselves to a thousand dangers, yet they never think of objecting, and in this the officers are in the same situation as the men. I will engage to say that no military officer would ever refuse to go any whither on service because his family must be exposed to danger in his absence; and yet I doubt not but many of them are men who have great tenderness for their wives and families. However, they must be men and their wives must be women. Your undertaking is infinitely superior to theirs in importance. They go to kill men, you to save them. If they leave their families to chance for the sake of war, surely you can leave yours to the God of providence while you go about His work. I speak thus because I am much distressed to see you thus waste away the flower of your life in inactivity, and only plead for it what would not excuse a child. Were you in any secular employment you must go out quite as much as we expect you to do in the Mission. I did so when at Mudnabati, which was as lonesome a place as could have been thought of, and when I well knew that many of our own ryots were dakoits (robbers)."

William finally settled at Cutwa, higher up the Hoogli than Serampore, and did good service there.

"1st December 1813.—I have now an assistant at College, notwithstanding which my duties are quite as heavy as they ever were, for we are to receive a number of military students—I suppose thirty at least. The translation, and printing also, is now so much enlarged that I am scarcely able to get through the necessary labour of correcting proofs and learning the necessary languages. All these things are causes of rejoicing more than of regret, for they are the very things for which I came into the country, and to which I wish to devote my latest breath...Jabez has offered himself to the Mission, a circumstance which gives me more pleasure than if he had been appointed Chief Judge of the Supreme Court...Your mother has long been confined to her couch, I believe about six months."

The following was written evidently in reply to loving letters on the death of his wife, Charlotte Emilia:—

"4th June 1821.—MY DEAR JONATHAN—I feel your affectionate care for me very tenderly. I have just received very affectionate letters from William and Brother Sutton (Orissa). Lord and Lady Hastings wrote to Brother Marshman, thinking it would oppress my feelings to write to me directly, to offer their kind condolence to me through him. Will you have the goodness to send five rupees to William for the Cutwa school, which your dear mother supported. I will repay you soon, but am now very short of money.—I am your very affectionate father, W. CAREY."

Of the many descendants of Dr. Carey, one great grandson is now an ordained missionary in Bengal, another a medical missionary in Delhi, and a third is a member of the Civil Service, who has distinguished himself by travels in Northern Tibet and Chinese Turkestan, which promise to unveil much of the unexplored regions of Asia to the scholar and the missionary.

Thus far we have confined our study of William Carey to his purely missionary career, and that in its earlier half. We have now to see him as the scholar, the Bible translator, the philanthropist, the agriculturist, and the founder of a University.



CHAPTER IX

PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT, BENGALI, AND MARATHI

1801-1830

Carey the only Sanskrit scholar in India besides Colebrooke—The motive of the missionary scholar—Plans translation of the sacred books of the East—Comparative philology from Leibniz to Carey—Hindoo and Mohammedan codes and colleges of Warren Hastings—The Marquis Wellesley—The College of Fort William founded—Character of the Company's civil and military servants—Curriculum of study, professors and teachers—The vernacular languages—Carey's account of the college and his appointment—How he studied Sanskrit—College Disputation Day in the new Government House—Carey's Sanskrit speech—Lord Wellesley's eulogy—Sir James Mackintosh—Carey's pundits—He projects the Bibliotheca Asiatica—On the Committee of the Bengal Asiatic Society—Edition and translation of the Ramayana epic—The Hitopadesa—His Universal Dictionary—Influence of Carey on the civil and military services—W. B. Bayley; B. H. Hodgson; R. Jenkins; R. M. and W. Bird; John Lawrence.

When, in the opening days of the nineteenth century, William Carey was driven to settle in Danish Serampore, he was the only member of the governing race in North India who knew the language of the people so as to teach it; the only scholar, with the exception of Colebrooke, who could speak Sanskrit as fluently as the Brahmans. The Bengali language he had made the vehicle of the teaching of Christ, of the thought of Paul, of the revelation of John. Of the Sanskrit, hitherto concealed from alien eyes or diluted only through the Persian, he had prepared a grammar and begun a dictionary, while he had continually used its great epics in preaching to the Brahmans, as Paul had quoted the Greek poets on the Areopagus. And all this he had done as the missionary of Christ and the scholar afterwards. Reporting to Ryland, in August 1800, the publication of the Gospels and of "several small pieces" in Bengali, he excused his irregularity in keeping a journal, "for in the printing I have to look over the copy and correct the press, which is much more laborious than it would be in England, because spelling, writing, printing, etc., in Bengali is almost a new thing, and we have in a manner to fix the orthography." A little later, in a letter to Sutcliff, he used language regarding the sacred books of the Hindoos which finds a parallel more than eighty years after in Professor Max Mueller's preface to his series of the sacred books of the East, the translation of which Carey was the first to plan and to begin from the highest of all motives. Mr. Max Mueller calls attention to the "real mischief that has been and is still being done by the enthusiasm of those pioneers who have opened the first avenues through the bewildering forests of the sacred literature of the East." He declares that "Eastern nations themselves would not tolerate, in any of their classical literary compositions, such violations of the simplest rules of taste as they have accustomed themselves to tolerate, if not to admire, in their sacred books." And he is compelled to leave untranslated, while he apologises for them, the frequent allusions to the sexual aspects of nature, "particularly in religious books." The revelations of the Maharaj trial in Bombay are the practical fruit of all this.

"CALCUTTA, 17th March 1802.—I have been much astonished lately at the malignity of some of the infidel opposers of the Gospel, to see how ready they are to pick every flaw they can in the inspired writings, and even to distort the meaning, that they may make it appear inconsistent; while these very persons will labour to reconcile the grossest contradictions in the writings accounted sacred by the Hindoos, and will stoop to the meanest artifices in order to apologise for the numerous glaring falsehoods and horrid violations of all decency and decorum, which abound in almost every page. Any thing, it seems, will do with these men but the word of God. They ridicule the figurative language of Scripture, but will run allegory-mad in support of the most worthless productions that ever were published. I should think it time lost to translate any of them; and only a sense of duty excites me to read them. An idea, however, of the advantage which the friends of Christianity may obtain by having these mysterious sacred nothings (which have maintained their celebrity so long merely by being kept from the inspection of any but interested Brahmans) exposed to view, has induced me, among other things, to write the Sanskrit grammar, and to begin a dictionary of that language. I sincerely pity the poor people, who are held by the chains of an implicit faith in the grossest of lies; and can scarcely help despising the wretched infidel who pleads in their favour and tries to vindicate them. I have long wished to obtain a copy of the Veda; and am now in hopes I shall be able to procure all that are extant. A Brahman this morning offered to get them for me for the sake of money. If I succeed, I shall be strongly tempted to publish them with a translation, pro bono publico."

It was not surprising that the Governor-General, even if he had been less enlightened than Lord Wellesley, found in this missionary interloper, as the East India Company officially termed the class to which he belonged, the only man fit to be Professor of Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi in the College of Fort William, and also translator of the laws and regulations of the Government.

In a memoir read before the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which he had founded in the first year of the eighteenth century, Leibniz first sowed the seed of the twin sciences of comparative philology and ethnology, to which we owe the fruitful results of the historical and critical school. That century was passed in the necessary collection of facts, of data. Carey introduced the second period, so far as the learned and vernacular languages of North India are concerned—of developing from the body of facts which his industry enormously extended, the principles upon which these languages were constructed, besides applying these principles, in the shape of grammars, dictionaries, and translations, to the instruction and Christian civilisation alike of the learned and of the millions of the people. To the last, as at the first, he was undoubtedly only what he called himself, a pioneer to prepare the way for more successful civilisers and scholars. But his pioneering was acknowledged by contemporary[14] and later Orientalists, like Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson, to be of unexampled value in the history of scientific research and industry, while the succeeding pages will show that in its practical results the pioneering came as nearly to victory as is possible, until native India lives its own national Christian life.

When India first became a united British Empire under one Governor-General and the Regulating Act of Parliament of 1773, Warren Hastings had at once carried out the provision he himself had suggested for using the moulavies and pundits in the administration of Mussulman and Hindoo law. Besides colleges in Calcutta and Benares to train such, he caused those codes of Mohammedan and Brahmanical law to be prepared which afterwards appeared as The Hedaya and The Code of Gentoo Laws. The last was compiled in Sanskrit by pundits summoned from all Bengal and maintained in Calcutta at the public cost, each at a rupee a day. It was translated through the Persian, the language of the courts, by the elder Halhed into English in 1776. That was the first step in English Orientalism. The second was taken by Sir William Jones, a predecessor worthy of Carey, but cut off all too soon while still a young man of thirty-four, when he founded the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1784 on the model of Boyle's Royal Society. The code of Warren Hastings had to be arranged and supplemented into a reliable digest of the original texts, and the translation of this work, as done by pundit Jaganatha, was left, by the death of Jones, to Colebrooke, who completed it in 1797. Charles Wilkins had made the first direct translation from the Sanskrit into English in 1785, when he published in London The Bhagavat-Geeta or Dialogue of Krishna and Arjoon, and his is the imperishable honour thus chronicled by a contemporary poetaster:—

"But he performed a yet more noble part, He gave to Asia typographic art."

In Bengali Halhed had printed at Hoogli in 1783, with types cut by Wilkins, the first grammar, but it had become obsolete and was imperfect. Such had been the tentative efforts of the civilians and officials of the Company when Carey began anew the work from the only secure foundation, the level of daily sympathetic intercourse with the people and their Brahmans, with the young as well as the old.

The Marquis Wellesley was of nearly the same age as Carey, whom he soon learned to appreciate and to use for the highest good of the empire. Of the same name and original English descent as John and Charles Wesley, the Governor-General was the eldest and not the least brilliant of the Irish family which, besides him, gave to the country the Duke of Wellington and Lord Cowley. While Carey was cobbling shoes in an unknown hamlet of the Midlands and was aspiring to convert the world, young Wellesley was at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, acquiring the classical scholarship which, as we find its fruits in his Primiti[oe] et Reliqui[oe], extorted the praise of De Quincey. When Carey was starving in Calcutta unknown the young lord was making his mark in the House of Commons by a speech against the Jacobins of France in the style of Burke. The friend of Pitt, he served his apprenticeship to Indian affairs in the Board of Control, where he learned to fight the directors of the East India Company, and he landed at Calcutta in 1798, just in time to save the nascent empire from ruin by the second Mysore war and the fall of Tipoo at Seringapatam. Like that other marquis who most closely resembled him half a century after, the Scottish Dalhousie, his hands were no sooner freed from the uncongenial bonds of war than he became even more illustrious by his devotion to the progress which peace makes possible. He created the College of Fort William, dating the foundation of what was fitted and intended to be the greatest seat of learning in the East from the first anniversary of the victory of Seringapatam. So splendidly did he plan, so wisely did he organise, and with such lofty aims did he select the teachers of the college, that long after his death he won from De Quincey the impartial eulogy, that of his three services to his country and India this was the "first, to pave the way for the propagation of Christianity—mighty service, stretching to the clouds, and which in the hour of death must have given him consolation."

When Wellesley arrived at Calcutta he had been shocked by the sensual ignorance of the Company's servants. Sunday was universally given up to horse-racing and gambling. Boys of sixteen were removed from the English public schools where they had hardly mastered the rudiments of education to become the magistrates, judges, revenue collectors, and governors of millions of natives recently brought under British sway. At a time when the passions most need regulation and the conscience training, these lads found themselves in India with large incomes, flattered by native subordinates, encouraged by their superiors to lead lives of dissipation, and without the moral control even of the weakest public opinion. The Eton boy and Oxford man was himself still young, and he knew the world, but he saw that all this meant ruin to both the civil and military services, and to the Company's system. The directors addressed in a public letter, dated 25th May 1798, "an objurgation on the character and conduct" of their servants. They re-echoed the words of the new Governor-General in their condemnation of a state of things, "highly discreditable to our Government, and totally incompatible with the religion we profess." Such a service as this, preceding the creation of the college, led Pitt's other friend, Wilberforce, in the discussions on the charter of 1813, to ascribe to Lord Wellesley, when summoning him to confirm and revise it, the system of diffusing useful knowledge of all sorts as the true foe not only of ignorance but of vice and of political and social decay.

Called upon to prevent the evils he had been the first to denounce officially, Lord Wellesley wrote his magnificent state paper of 1800, which he simply termed Notes on the necessity of a special collegiate training of Civil Servants. The Company's factories had grown into the Indian Empire of Great Britain. The tradesmen and clerks, whom the Company still called "writer," "factor," and "merchant," in their several grades, had, since Clive obtained a military commission in disgust at such duties, become the judges and rulers of millions, responsible to Parliament. They must be educated in India itself, and trained to be equal to the responsibilities and temptations of their position. If appointed by patronage at home when still at school, they must be tested after training in India so that promotion shall depend on degrees of merit. Lord Wellesley anticipated the modified system of competition which Macaulay offered to the Company in 1853, and the refusal of which led to the unrestricted system which has prevailed with varying results since that time. Nor was the college only for the young civilians as they arrived. Those already at work were to be encouraged to study. Military officers were to be invited to take advantage of an institution which was intended to be "the university of Calcutta," "a light amid the darkness of Asia," and that at a time when in all England there was not a military college. Finally, the college was designed to be a centre of Western learning in an Eastern dress for the natives of India and Southern Asia, alike as students and teachers. A noble site was marked out for it on the stately sweep of Garden Reach, where every East Indiaman first dropped its anchor, and the building was to be worthy of the founder who erected Government House.

The curriculum of study included Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit; Bengali, Marathi, Hindostani (Hindi), Telugoo, Tamil, and Kanarese; English, the Company's, Mohammedan and Hindoo law, civil jurisprudence, and the law of nations; ethics; political economy, history, geography, and mathematics; the Greek, Latin, and English classics, and the modern languages of Europe; the history and antiquities of India; natural history, botany, chemistry, and astronomy. The discipline was that of the English universities as they then were, under the Governor-General himself, his colleagues, and the appellate judges. The senior chaplain, the Rev. David Brown, was provost in charge of the discipline; and Dr. Claudius Buchanan was vice-provost in charge of the studies, as well as professor of Greek, Latin, and English. Dr. Gilchrist was professor of Hindostani, in teaching which he had already made a fortune; Lieutenant J. Baillie of Arabic; and Mr. H. B. Edmonstone of Persian. Sir George Barlow expounded the laws or regulations of the British Government in India. The Church of England constitution of the college at first, to which Buchanan had applied the English Test Act, and his own modesty, led Carey to accept of his appointment, which was thus gazetted:—"The Rev. William Carey, teacher of the Bengali and Sanskrit languages."

The first notice of the new college which we find in Carey's correspondence is this, in a letter to Sutcliff dated 27th November 1800:—"There is a college erected at Fort William, of which the Rev. D. Brown is appointed provost, and C. Buchanan classical tutor: all the Eastern languages are to be taught in it." "All" the languages of India were to be taught, the vernacular as well as the classical and purely official. This was a reform not less radical and beneficial in its far-reaching influence, and not less honourable to the scholarly foresight of Lord Wellesley, than Lord William Bentinck's new era of the English language thirty-five years after. The rulers and administrators of the new empire were to begin their career by a three years' study of the mother tongue of the people, to whom justice was administered in a language foreign alike to them and their governors, and of the Persian language of their foreign Mohammedan conquerors. That the peoples of India, "every man in his own language," might hear and read the story of what the one true and living God had done for us men and our salvation, Carey had nine years before given himself to acquire Bengali and the Sanskrit of which it is one of a numerous family of daughters, as the tongues of the Latin nations of Europe and South America are of the offspring of the speech of Caesar and Cicero. Now, following the missionary pioneer, as educational, scientific, and even political progress has ever since done in the India which would have kept him out, Lord Wellesley decreed that, like the missionary, the administrator and the military officer shall master the language of the people. The five great vernaculars of India were accordingly named, and the greatest of all, the Hindi, which was not scientifically elaborated till long after, was provided for under the mixed dialect or lingua franca known as Hindostani.

When Carey and his colleagues were congratulating themselves on a reform which has already proved as fruitful of results as the first century of the Renascence of Europe, he little thought, in his modesty, that he would be recognised as the only man who was fit to carry it out. Having guarded the college, as they thought, by a test, Brown and Buchanan urged Carey to take charge of the Bengali and Sanskrit classes as "teacher" on Rs. 500 a month or L700 a year. Such an office was entirely in the line of the constitution of the missionary brotherhood. But would the Government which had banished it to Serampore recognise the aggressively missionary character of Carey, who would not degrade his high calling by even the suspicion of a compromise? To be called and paid as a teacher rather than as the professor whose double work he was asked to do, was nothing to the modesty of the scholar who pleaded his sense of unfitness for the duties. His Master, not himself, was ever Carey's first thought, and the full professorship, rising to L1800 a year, was soon conferred on the man who proved himself to be almost as much the college in his own person as were the other professors put together. A month after his appointment he thus told the story to Dr. Ryland in the course of a long letter devoted chiefly to the first native converts:—

"SERAMPORE, 15th June 1801...We sent you some time ago a box full of gods and butterflies, etc., and another box containing a hundred copies of the New Testament in Bengali...Mr. Lang is studying Bengali, under me, in the college. What I have last mentioned requires some explanation, though you will probably hear of it before this reaches you. You must know, then, that a college was founded last year in Fort William, for the instruction of the junior civil servants of the Company, who are obliged to study in it three years after their arrival. I always highly approved of the institution, but never entertained a thought that I should be called to fill a station in it. To my great surprise I was asked to undertake the Bengali professorship. One morning a letter from Mr. Brown came, inviting me to cross the water, to have some conversation with him upon this subject. I had but just time to call our brethren together, who were of opinion that, for several reasons, I ought to accept it, provided it did not interfere with the work of the mission. I also knew myself to be incapable of filling such a station with reputation and propriety. I, however, went over, and honestly proposed all my fears and objections. Both Mr. Brown and Mr. Buchanan were of opinion that the cause of the mission would be furthered by it; and I was not able to reply to their arguments. I was convinced that it might. As to my ability, they could not satisfy me; but they insisted upon it that they must be the judges of that. I therefore consented, with fear and trembling. They proposed me that day, or the next, to the Governor-General, who is patron and visitor of the college. They told him that I had been a missionary in the country for seven years or more; and as a missionary I was appointed to the office. A clause had been inserted in the statutes to accommodate those who are not of the Church of England (for all professors are to take certain oaths, and make declarations); but, for the accommodation of such, two other names were inserted, viz., lecturers and teachers, who are not included under that obligation. When I was proposed, his lordship asked if I was well affected to the state, and capable of fulfilling the duties of the station; to which Mr. B. replied that he should never have proposed me if he had had the smallest doubt on those heads. I wonder how people can have such favourable ideas of me. I certainly am not disaffected to the state; but the other is not clear to me.

"When the appointment was made, I saw that I had a very important charge committed to me, and no books or helps of any kind to assist me. I therefore set about compiling a grammar, which is now half printed. I got Ram Basu to compose a history of one of their kings, the first prose book ever written in the Bengali language; which we are also printing. Our pundit has also nearly translated the Sanskrit fables, one or two of which Brother Thomas sent you, which we are also going to publish, These, with Mr. Foster's vocabulary, will prepare the way to reading their poetical books; so that I hope this difficulty will be gotten through. But my ignorance of the way of conducting collegiate exercises is a great weight upon my mind. I have thirteen students in my class; I lecture twice a week, and have nearly gone through one term, not quite two months. It began 4th May. Most of the students have gotten through the accidents, and some have begun to translate Bengali into English. The examination begins this week. I am also appointed teacher of the Sanskrit language; and though no students have yet entered in that class, yet I must prepare for it. I am, therefore, writing a grammar of that language, which I must also print, if I should be able to get through with it, and perhaps a dictionary, which I began some years ago. I say all this, my dear brother, to induce you to give me your advice about the best manner of conducting myself in this station, and to induce you to pray much for me, that God may, in all things, be glorified by me. We presented a copy of the Bengali New Testament to Lord Wellesley, after the appointment, through the medium of the Rev. D. Brown, which was graciously received. We also presented Governor Bie with one.

"Serampore is now in the hands of the English. It was taken while we were in bed and asleep; you may therefore suppose that it was done without bloodshed. You may be perfectly easy about us: we are equally secure under the English or Danish Government, and I am sure well disposed to both."

For seven years, since his first settlement in the Dinapoor district, Carey had given one-third of his long working day to the study of Sanskrit. In 1796 he reported:—"I am now learning the Sanskrit language, that I may be able to read their Shasters for myself; and I have acquired so much of the Hindi or Hindostani as to converse in it and speak for some time intelligibly...Even the language of Ceylon has so much affinity with that of Bengal that out of twelve words, with the little Sanskrit that I know, I can understand five or six." In 1798 he wrote:—"I constantly employ the forenoon in temporal affairs; the afternoon in reading, writing, learning Sanskrit, etc.; and the evening by candle light in translating the Scriptures...Except I go out to preach, which is often the case, I never deviate from this rule." Three years before that he had been able to confute the Brahmans from their own writings; in 1798 he quoted and translated the Rig Veda and the Purana in reply to a request for an account of the beliefs of the priesthood, apologising, however, with his usual self-depreciation:—"I am just beginning to see for myself by reading the original Shasters." In 1799 we find him reading the Mahabharata epic with the hope of finding some allusion or fact which might enable him to equate Hindoo chronology with reliable history, as Dr. John Wilson of Bombay and James Prinsep did a generation later, by the discovery of the name of Antiochus the Great in two of the edicts of Asoka, written on the Girnar rock.

By September 1804 Carey had completed the first three years' course of collegiate training in Sanskrit. The Governor-General summoned a brilliant assembly to listen to the disputations and declamations of the students who were passing out, and of their professors, in the various Oriental languages. The new Government House, as it was still called, having been completed only the year before at a cost of L140,000, was the scene, in "the southern room on the marble floor," where, ever since, all through the century, the Sovereign's Viceroys have received the homage of the tributary kings of our Indian empire. There, from Dalhousie and Canning to Lawrence and Mayo, and their still surviving successors, we have seen pageants and durbars more splendid, and representing a wider extent of territory, from Yarkand to Bangkok, than even the Sultanised Englishman as Sir James Mackintosh called Wellesley, ever dreamed of in his most imperial aspirations. There councils have ever since been held, and laws have been passed affecting the weal of from two to three hundred millions of our fellow-subjects. There, too, we have stood with Duff and Cotton, Ritchie and Outram, representing the later University of Calcutta which Wellesley would have anticipated. But we question if, ever since, the marble hall of the Governor-General's palace has witnessed a sight more profoundly significant than that of William Carey addressing the Marquis Wellesley in Sanskrit, and in the presence of the future Duke of Wellington, in such words as follow.

The seventy students, their governors, officers, and professors, rose to their feet, when, at ten o'clock on Thursday the 20th of September 1804, His Excellency the Visitor entered the room, accompanied, as the official gazette duly chronicles, by "the Honourable the Chief Justice, the judges of the Supreme Court, the members of the Supreme Council, the members of the Council of the College, Major-General Cameron, Major-General the Honourable Arthur Wellesley, Major-General Dowdeswell, and Solyman Aga, the envoy from Baghdad. All the principal civil and military officers at the Presidency, and many of the British inhabitants, were present on this occasion; and also many learned natives."

After Romer had defended, in Hindostani, the thesis that the Sanskrit is the parent language in India, and Swinton, in Persian, that the poems of Hafiz are to be understood in a figurative or mystical sense, there came a Bengali declamation by Tod senior on the position that the translations of the best works extant in the Sanskrit with the popular languages of India would promote the extension of science and civilisation, opposed by Hayes; then Carey, as moderator, made an appropriate Bengali speech. A similar disputation in Arabic and a Sanskrit declamation followed, when Carey was called on to conclude with a speech in Sanskrit. Two days after, at a second assemblage of the same kind, followed by a state dinner. Lord Wellesley presented the best students with degrees of merit inscribed on vellum in Oriental characters, and delivered an oration, in which he specially complimented the Sanskrit classes, urged more general attention to the Bengali language, and expressed satisfaction that a successful beginning had been made in the study of Marathi.

It was considered a dangerous experiment for a missionary, speaking in Sanskrit, to avow himself such not only before the Governor-General in official state but before the Hindoo and Mohammedan nobles who surrounded him. We may be sure that Carey would not show less of his Master's charity and wisdom than he had always striven to do. But the necessity was the more laid on him that he should openly confess his great calling, for he had told Fuller on Lord Wellesley's arrival he would do so if it were possible. Buchanan, being quite as anxious to bring the mission forward on this occasion, added much to the English draft—"the whole of the flattery is his," wrote Carey to Fuller—and sent it on to Lord Wellesley with apprehension. This answer came back from the great Proconsul:—"I am much pleased with Mr. Carey's truly original and excellent speech. I would not wish to have a word altered. I esteem such a testimony from such a man a greater honour than the applause of Courts and Parliaments."

"MY LORD, it is just that the language which has been first cultivated under your auspices should primarily be employed in gratefully acknowledging the benefit, and in speaking your praise. This ancient language, which refused to disclose itself to the former Governors of India, unlocks its treasures at your command, and enriches the world with the history, learning, and science of a distant age. The rising importance of our collegiate institution has never been more clearly demonstrated than on the present occasion; and thousands of the learned in distant nations will exult in this triumph of literature.

"What a singular exhibition has been this day presented to us! In presence of the supreme Governor of India, and of its most learned and illustrious characters, Asiatic and European, an assembly is convened, in which no word of our native tongue is spoken, but public discourse is maintained on interesting subjects in the languages of Asia. The colloquial Hindostani, the classic Persian, the commercial Bengali, the learned Arabic, and the primaeval Sanskrit are spoken fluently, after having been studied grammatically, by English youth. Did ever any university in Europe, or any literary institution in any other age or country, exhibit a scene so interesting as this? And what are the circumstances of these youth? They are not students who prosecute a dead language with uncertain purpose, impelled only by natural genius or love of fame. But having been appointed to the important offices of administering the government of the country in which these languages are spoken, they apply their acquisitions immediately to useful purpose; in distributing justice to the inhabitants; in transacting the business of the state, revenual and commercial; and in maintaining official intercourse with the people, in their own tongue, and not, as hitherto, by an interpreter. The acquisitions of our students may be appreciated by their affording to the suppliant native immediate access to his principal; and by their elucidating the spirit of the regulations of our Government by oral communication, and by written explanations, varied according to the circumstances and capacities of the people.

"The acquisitions of our students are appreciated at this moment by those learned Asiatics now present in this assembly, some of them strangers from distant provinces; who wonder every man to hear in his own tongue important subjects discussed, and new and noble principles asserted, by the youth of a foreign land. The literary proceedings of this day amply repay all the solicitude, labour, and expense that have been bestowed on this institution. If the expense had been a thousand times greater, it would not have equalled the immensity of the advantage, moral and political, that will ensue.

"I, now an old man, have lived for a long series of years among the Hindoos. I have been in the habit of preaching to multitudes daily, of discoursing with the Brahmans on every subject, and of superintending schools for the instruction of the Hindoo youth. Their language is nearly as familiar to me as my own. This close intercourse with the natives for so long a period, and in different parts of our empire, has afforded me opportunities of information not inferior to those which have hitherto been presented to any other person. I may say indeed that their manners, customs, habits, and sentiments are as obvious to me as if I was myself a native. And knowing them as I do, and hearing as I do their daily observations on our government, character, and principles, I am warranted to say (and I deem it my duty to embrace the public opportunity now afforded me of saying it) that the institution of this college was wanting to complete the happiness of the natives under our dominion; for this institution will break down that barrier (our ignorance of their language) which has ever opposed the influence of our laws and principles, and has despoiled our administration of its energy and effect.

"Were the institution to cease from this moment, its salutary effects would yet remain. Good has been done, which cannot be undone. Sources of useful knowledge, moral instruction, and political utility have been opened to the natives of India which can never be closed; and their civil improvement, like the gradual civilisation of our own country, will advance in progression for ages to come.

"One hundred original volumes in the Oriental languages and literature will preserve for ever in Asia the name of the founder of this institution. Nor are the examples frequent of a renown, possessing such utility for its basis, or pervading such a vast portion of the habitable globe. My lord, you have raised a monument of fame which no length of time or reverse of fortune is able to destroy; not chiefly because it is inscribed with Maratha and Mysore, with the trophies of war and the emblems of victory, but because there are inscribed on it the names of those learned youth who have obtained degrees of honour for high proficiency in the Oriental tongues.

"These youth will rise in regular succession to the Government of this country. They will extend the domain of British civilisation, security, and happiness, by enlarging the bounds of Oriental literature and thereby diffusing the spirit of Christian principles throughout the nations of Asia. These youth, who have lived so long amongst us, whose unwearied application to their studies we have all witnessed, whose moral and exemplary conduct has, in so solemn a manner, been publicly declared before this august assembly, on this day; and who, at the moment of entering on the public service, enjoy the fame of possessing qualities (rarely combined) constituting a reputation of threefold strength for public men, genius, industry, and virtue;—these illustrious scholars, my lord, the pride of their country, and the pillars of this empire, will record your name in many a language and secure your fame for ever. Your fame is already recorded in their hearts. The whole body of youth of this service hail you as their father and their friend. Your honour will ever be safe in their hands. No revolution of opinion or change of circumstances can rob you of the solid glory derived from the humane, just, liberal, and magnanimous principles which have been embodied by your administration.

"To whatever situation the course of future events may call you, the youth of this service will ever remain the pledges of the wisdom and purity of your government. Your evening of life will be constantly cheered with new testimonies of their reverence and affection, with new proofs of the advantages of the education you have afforded them, and with a demonstration of the numerous benefits, moral, religious, and political, resulting from this institution;—benefits which will consolidate the happiness of millions of Asia, with the glory and welfare of our country."

The Court of Directors had never liked Lord Wellesley, and he had, in common with Colebrooke, keenly wounded them by proposing a free trade movement against their monopoly. They ordered that his favourite college should be immediately abolished. He took good care so to protract the operation as to give him time to call in the aid of the Board of Control, which saved the institution, but confined it to the teaching of languages to the civilians of the Bengal Presidency only. The Directors, when thus overruled chiefly by Pitt, created a similar college at Haileybury, which continued till the open competitive system of 1854 swept that also away; and the Company itself soon followed, as the march of events had made it an anachronism.

The first law professor at Haileybury was James Mackintosh, an Aberdeen student who had leaped into the front rank of publicists and scholars by his answer to Burke, in the Vindici[oe] Gallic[oe], and his famous defence of M. Peltier accused of a libel on Napoleon Buonaparte. Knighted and sent out to Bombay as its first recorder, Sir James Mackintosh became the centre of scholarly society in Western India, as Sir William Jones had been in Bengal. He was the friend of Robert Hall, the younger, who was filling Carey's pulpit in Leicester, and he soon became the admiring correspondent of Carey himself. His first act during his seven years' residence in Bombay was to establish the "Literary Society." He drew up a "Plan of a comparative vocabulary of Indian languages," to be filled up by the officials of every district, like that which Carey had long been elaborating for his own use as a philologist and Bible translator. In his first address to the Literary Society he thus eulogised the College of Fort William, though fresh from a chair in its English rival, Haileybury:—"The original plan was the most magnificent attempt ever made for the promotion of learning in the East...Even in its present mutilated state we have seen, at the last public exhibition, Sanskrit declamation by English youth, a circumstance so extraordinary, that if it be followed by suitable advances it will mark an epoch in the history of learning."

Carey continued till 1831 to be the most notable figure in the College of Fort William. He was the centre of the learned natives whom it attracted, as pundits and moonshees, as inquirers and visitors. His own special pundit was the chief one, Mrityunjaya Vidyalankar, whom Home has immortalised in Carey's portrait. In the college for more than half the week, as in his study at Serampore, Carey exhausted three pundits daily. His college-room was the centre of incessant literary work, as his Serampore study was of Bible translation. When he declared that the college staff had sent forth one hundred original volumes in the Oriental languages and literature, he referred to the grammars and dictionaries, the reading-books, compilations, and editions prepared for the students by the professors and their native assistants. But he contributed the largest share, and of all his contributions the most laborious and valuable was this project of the Bibliotheca Asiatica.

"24th July, 1805.—By the enclosed Gazette you will see that the Asiatic Society and the College have agreed to allow us a yearly stipend for translating Sanskrit works: this will maintain three missionary stations, and we intend to apply it to that purpose. An augmentation of my salary has been warmly recommended by the College Council, but has not yet taken place, and as Lord Cornwallis is now arrived and Lord Wellesley going away, it may not take place. If it should, it will be a further assistance. The business of the translation of Sanskrit works is as follows: About two years ago I presented proposals (to the Council of the College) to print the Sanskrit books at a fixed price, with a certain indemnity for 100 copies. The plan was thought too extensive by some, and was therefore laid by. A few months ago Dr. Francis Buchanan came to me, by desire of Marquis Wellesley, about the translation of his manuscripts. In the course of conversation I mentioned the proposal I had made, of which he much approved, and immediately communicated the matter to Sir John Anstruther, who is president of the Asiatic Society. Sir John had then been drawing out a proposal to Lord Wellesley to form a catalogue raisonne of the ancient Hindoo books, which he sent to me, and entering warmly into my plan, desired that I would send in a set of proposals. After some amendments it was agreed that the College of Fort William and the Asiatic Society should subscribe in equal shares 300 rupees a month to defray the current expenses, that we should undertake any work approved of by them, and print the original with an English translation on such paper and with such a type as they shall approve; the copy to be ours. They have agreed to recommend the work to all the learned bodies in Europe. I have recommended the Ramayana to begin with, it being one of the most popular of all the Hindoo books accounted sacred. The Veda are so excessively insipid that, had we begun with them, we should have sickened the public at the outset. The Ramayana will furnish the best account of Hindoo mythology that any one book will, and has extravagancy enough to excite a wish to read it through."

In 1807 Carey became one of the most active members of the Bengal Asiatic Society. His name at once appears as one of the Committee of Papers. In the ninth volume of the Asiatic Researches for that year, scholars were invited to communicate translations and descriptive accounts of Asiatic books. Carey's edition of The Ramayana of Valmeeki, in the original Sanskrit, with a prose translation and explanatory notes, appeared from the Serampore press in three successive quartos from 1806 to 1810. The translation was done by "Dr. Carey and Joshua Marshman." Until Gorresio published his edition and Italian translation of the whole poem this was the first and only attempt to open the seal of the second great Sankrit epic to the European world. In 1802 Carey had encouraged the publication at his own press of translations of both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into Bengali. Carey's Ramayana excited a keen interest not only among the learned of Europe, but among poetical students. Southey eagerly turned to it for materials for his Curse of Kehama, in the notes to which he makes long quotations from "the excellent and learned Baptist missionaries of Serampore." Dean Milman, when professor of poetry in Oxford, drew from the same storehouse many of the notes with which he enriched his verse translations from both epics. A. W. von Schlegel, the death of whose eldest brother at Madras early led him to Oriental studies, published two books with a Latin translation. Mr. Ralph T. H. Griffith most pleasantly opened the treasures of this epic to English readers in his verse translations published since 1868. Carey's translation has always been the more rare that the edition despatched for sale in England was lost at sea, and only a few presentation copies are extant, one of which is in the British Museum.

Carey's contributions to Sanskrit scholarship were not confined to what he published or to what appeared under his own name. We are told by H. H. Wilson that he had prepared for the press translations of treatises on the metaphysical system called Sankhya. "It was not in Dr. Carey's nature to volunteer a display of his erudition, and the literary labours already adverted to arose in a great measure out of his connection with the college of Calcutta, or were suggested to him by those whose authority he respected, and to whose wishes he thought it incumbent upon him to attend. It may be added that Dr. Carey spoke Sanskrit with fluency and correctness."

He edited for the college the Sanskrit text of the Hitopadesa, from six MSS. recensions of this the first revelation to Europe of the fountain of Aryan folk-tales, of the original of Pilpay's Fables.[15] H. H. Wilson remarks that the errors are not more than might have been expected from the variations and defects of the manuscripts and the novelty of the task, for this was the first Sanskrit book ever printed in the Devanagari character. To this famous work Carey added an abridgment of the prose Adventures of Ten Princes (the Dasa Kumara Carita), and of Bhartri-hari's Apophthegms. Colebrooke records his debt to Carey for carrying through the Serampore press the Sanskrit dictionary of Amara Sinha, the oldest native lexicographer, with an English interpretation and annotations. But the magnum opus of Carey was what in 1811 he described as A Universal Dictionary of the Oriental Languages, derived from the Sanskrit, of which that language is to be the groundwork. The object for which he had been long collecting the materials of this mighty work was the assisting of "Biblical students to correct the translation of the Bible in the Oriental languages after we are dead."

Through the College of Fort William during thirty long years Carey influenced the ablest men in the Bengal Civil Service, and not a few in Madras and Bombay. "The college must stand or the empire must fall," its founder had written to his friends in the Government, so convinced was he that only thus could proper men be trained for the public service and the welfare of our native subjects be secured. How right he was Carey's experience proved. The young civilians turned out after the first three years' course introduced that new era in the administration of India which has converted traders into statesmen and filibusters into soldier-politicals, so that the East Indian services stand alone in the history of the administration of imperial dependencies for spotless integrity and high average ability. Contrast with the work of these men, from the days of Wellesley, the first Minto, and Dalhousie, from the time of Canning to Lawrence and the second Minto, the provincial administration of imperial Rome, of Spain and Portugal at their best, of even the Netherlands and France. For a whole generation of thirty years the civilians who studied Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi came daily under the gentle spell of Carey, who, though he had failed to keep the village school of Moulton in order, manifested the learning and the modesty, the efficiency and the geniality, which won the affectionate admiration of his students in Calcutta.

A glance at the register of the college for its first five years reveals such men as these among his best students. The first Bengali prizeman of Carey was W. Butterworth Bayley, whose long career of blameless uprightness and marked ability culminated in the temporary seat of Governor-General, and who was followed in the service by a son worthy of him. The second was that Brian H. Hodgson who, when Resident of Nepal, of all his contemporaries won for himself the greatest reputation as a scholar, who fought side by side with the Serampore brotherhood the battle of the vernaculars of the people. Charles, afterwards Lord Metcalfe, had been the first student to enter the college. He was on its Persian side, and he learned while still under its discipline that "humility, patience, and obedience to the divine will" which unostentatiously marked his brilliant life and soothed his spirit in the agonies of a fatal disease. He and Bayley were inseparable. Of the first set, too, were Richard Jenkins, who was to leave his mark on history as Nagpoor Resident and author of the Report of 1826; and Romer, who rose to be Governor of Bombay for a time. In those early years the two Birds passed through the classes—Robert Mertins Bird, who was to found the great land revenue school of Hindostan; and Wilberforce Bird, who governed India while Lord Ellenborough played at soldiers, and to whom the legal suppression of slavery in Southern Asia is due. Names of men second to those, such as Elliot and Thackeray, Hamilton and Martin, the Shakespeares and Plowdens, the Moneys, the Rosses and Keenes, crowd the honour lists. One of the last to enjoy the advantages of the college before its abolition was John Lawrence, who used to confess that he was never good at languages, but whose vigorous Hindostani made many an ill-doing Raja tremble, while his homely conversation, interspersed with jokes, encouraged the toiling ryot.

These, and men like these, sat at the feet of Carey, where they learned not only to be scholars but to treat the natives kindly, and—some of them—even as brethren in Christ. Then from teaching the future rulers of the East, the missionary-professor turned to his Bengali preaching and his Benevolent Institution, to his visits to the prisoners and his intercourse with the British soldiers in Fort William. And when the four days' work in Calcutta was over, the early tide bore him swiftly up the Hoogli to the study where, for the rest of the week, he gave himself to the translation of the Bible into the languages of the people and of their leaders.



CHAPTER X

THE WYCLIF OF THE EAST—BIBLE TRANSLATION

1801-1832

The Bible Carey's missionary weapon—Other vernacular translators—Carey's modest but just description of his labours—His philological key—Type-cutting and type-casting by a Hindoo blacksmith—The first manufacture of paper and steam-engines in the East—Carey takes stock of the translation work at the opening of 1808—In his workshop—A seminary of Bible translators—William Yates, shoemaker, the Coverdale of the Bengali Bible—Wenger—A Bengali Luther wanted—Carey's Bengali Bible—How the New Testament was printed—The first copy offered to God—Reception of the volume by Lord Spencer and George III.—Self-evidencing power of the first edition—The Bible in Ooriya—In Maghadi, Assamese, Khasi, and Manipoori—Marathi, Konkani, and Goojarati versions—The translation into Hindi and its many dialects—The Dravidian translations—Tale of the Pushtoo Bible—The Sikhs and the Bible—The first Burman version and press—The British and Foreign Bible Society—Deaths, earthquake, and fire in 1812—Destruction of the press—Thomason's description of the smoking ruins—Carey's heroism as to his manuscripts—Enthusiastic sympathy of India and Christendom—The ph[oe]nix and its feathers.

Every great reform in the world has been, in the first instance, the work of one man, who, however much he may have been the product of his time, has conceived and begun to execute the movement which transforms society. This is true alike of the moral and the physical forces of history, of contemporaries so apparently opposite in character and aims as Carey and Clarkson on the one side and Napoleon and Wellington on the other. Carey stood alone in his persistent determination that the Church should evangelise the world. He was no less singular in the means which he insisted on as the first essential condition of its evangelisation—the vernacular translation of the Bible. From the Scriptures alone, while yet a journeyman shoemaker of eighteen, "he had formed his own system," and had been filled with the divine missionary idea. That was a year before the first Bible Society was formed in 1780 to circulate the English Bible among soldiers and sailors; and, a quarter of a century before his own success led to the formation in 1804 of the British and Foreign Bible Society. From the time of his youth, when he realised the self-evidencing power of the Bible, Carey's unbroken habit was to begin every morning by reading one chapter of the Bible, first in English, and then in each of the languages, soon, numbering six, which he had himself learned.

Hence the translation of the Bible into all the languages and principal dialects of India and Eastern Asia was the work above all others to which Carey set himself from the time, in 1793, when he acquired the Bengali. He preached, he taught, he "discipled" in every form then reasonable and possible, and in the fullest sense of his Master's missionary charge. But the one form of most pressing and abiding importance, the condition without which neither true faith, nor true science, nor true civilisation could exist or be propagated outside of the narrow circle to be reached by the one herald's voice, was the publishing of the divine message in the mother tongues of the millions of Asiatic men and women, boys and girls, and in the learned tongues also of their leaders and priests. Wyclif had first done this for the English-reading races of all time, translating from the Latin, and so had begun the Reformation, religious and political, not only in Britain but in Western Christendom. Erasmus and Luther had followed him—the former in his Greek and Latin New Testament and in his Paraphrase of the Word for "women and cobblers, clowns, mechanics, and even the Turks"; the latter in his great vernacular translation of the edition of Erasmus, who had never ceased to urge his contemporaries to translate the Scriptures "into all tongues." Tyndale had first given England the Bible from the Hebrew and the Greek. And now one of these cobblers was prompted and enabled by the Spirit who is the author of the truth in the Scriptures, to give to South and Eastern Asia the sacred books which its Syrian sons, from Moses and Ezra to Paul and John, had been inspired to write for all races and all ages. Emphatically, Carey and his later coadjutors deserve the language of the British and Foreign Bible Society, when, in 1827, it made to Serampore a last grant of money for translation—"Future generations will apply to them the words of the translators of the English Bible—'Therefore blessed be they and most honoured their names that break the ice and give the onset in that which helped them forward to the saving of souls. Now what can be more available thereto than to deliver God's book unto God's people in a tongue which they understand?'" Carey might tolerate interruption when engaged in other work, but for forty years he never allowed anything to shorten the time allotted to the Bible work. "You, madam," he wrote in 1797 to a lady as to many a correspondent, "will excuse my brevity when I inform you that all my time for writting letters is stolen from the work of transcribing the Scriptures into the Bengali language."

From no mere humility, but with an accurate judgment in the state of scholarship and criticism at the opening of last century, Carey always insisted that he was a forerunner, breaking up the way for successors like Yates, Wenger, and Rouse, who, in their turn, must be superseded by purely native Tyndales and Luthers in the Church of India. He more than once deprecated the talk of his having translated the Bible into forty languages and dialects.[16] As we proceed that will be a apparent which he did with his own hand, that which his colleagues accomplished, that which he revised and edited both of their work and of the pundits', and that which he corrected and printed for others at the Serampore press under the care of Ward. It is to these four lines of work, which centred in him, as most of them originally proceeded from his conception and advocacy, that the assertion as to the forty translations is strictly applicable. The Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit translations were his own. The Chinese was similarly the work of Marshman. The Hindi versions, in their many dialects, and the Ooriya, were blocked out by his colleagues and the pundits. He saw through the press the Hindostani, Persian, Malay, Tamil, and other versions of the whole or portions of the Scriptures. He ceased not, night and day, if by any means, with a loving catholicity, the Word of God might be given to the millions.