The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary. George Smith

monopoly," which he was to do more than any other man to break down by weapons not of man's warfare. The second week found him at Bengali, and for his companion the poems of Cowper. Of the four fellow-passengers one was a French deist, with whom he had many a debate.

      "Aug. 2.—I feel myself to be much declined, upon the whole, in the more spiritual exercises of religion; yet have had some pleasant exercises of soul, and feel my heart set upon the great work upon which I am going. Sometimes I am quite dejected when I see the impenetrability of the hearts of those with us. They hear us preach on the Lord's-day, but we are forced to witness their disregard to God all the week. O may God give us greater success among the heathen. I am very desirous that my children may pursue the same work; and now intend to bring up one in the study of Sanskrit, and another of Persian. O may God give them grace to fit them for the work! I have been much concerned for fear the power of the Company should oppose us …

      "Aug. 20.—I have reason to lament over a barrenness of soul, and am sometimes much discouraged; for if I am so dead and stupid, how can I expect to be of any use among the heathen? Yet I have of late felt some very lively desires after the success of our undertaking. If there is anything that engages my heart in prayer to God, it is that the heathen may be converted, and that the society which has so generously exerted itself may be encouraged, and excited to go on with greater vigour in the important undertaking …

      "Nov. 9.—I think that I have had more liberty in prayer, and more converse with God, than for some time before; but have, notwithstanding, been a very unfruitful creature, and so remain. For near a month we have been within two hundred miles of Bengal, but the violence of the currents set us back when we have been at the very door. I hope I have learned the necessity of bearing up in the things of God against wind and tide, when there is occasion, as we have done in our voyage."

      To the Society he writes for a Polyglot Bible, the Gospels in Malay, Curtis's Botanical Magazine, and Sowerby's English Botany, at his own cost, and thus plans the conquest of the world:—"I hope the Society will go on and increase, and that the multitudes of heathen in the world may hear the glorious words of truth. Africa is but a little way from England; Madagascar but a little way farther; South America, and all the numerous and large islands in the Indian and Chinese seas, I hope will not be passed over. A large field opens on every side, and millions of perishing heathens, tormented in this life by idolatry, superstition, and ignorance, and exposed to eternal miseries in the world to come, are pleading; yea, all their miseries plead as soon as they are known, with every heart that loves God, and with all the churches of the living God. Oh, that many labourers may be thrust out into the vineyard of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the gentiles may come to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Him!"

      On the 7th November, as the ship lay in the roads of Balasore, he and Thomas landed and "began our labours." For three hours the people of the bazaar listened with great attention to Thomas, and one prepared for them a native dinner with plantain leaf for dish, and fingers for knives and forks. Balasore—name of Krishna—was one of the first settlements of the English in North India in 1642, and there the American Baptist successors of Carey have since carried on his work. On the 11th November, after a five months' voyage, they landed at Calcutta unmolested. The first fortnight's experience of the city, whose native population he estimated at 200,000, and of the surrounding country, he thus condenses:—"I feel something of what Paul felt when he beheld Athens, and 'his spirit was stirred within him.' I see one of the finest countries in the world, full of industrious inhabitants; yet three-fifths of it are an uncultivated jungle, abandoned to wild beasts and serpents. If the gospel flourishes here, 'the wilderness will in every respect become a fruitful field.'"

      Clive, Hastings (Macpherson during an interregnum of twenty-two months), and Cornwallis, were the men who had founded and administered the empire of British India up to this time. Carey passed the last Governor-General in the Bay of Bengal as he retired with the honours of a seven years' successful generalship and government to atone for the not unhappy surrender of York Town, which had resulted in the independence of the United States. Sir John Shore, afterwards Lord Teignmouth, who had been selected by Pitt to carry out the reforms which he had elaborated along with his predecessor, had entered on his high office just a fortnight before. What a contrast was presented, as man judges, by the shy shoemaker, schoolmaster, and Baptist preacher, who found not a place in which to lay his head save a hovel lent to him by a Hindoo, to Clive, whose suicide he might have heard of when a child; to Hastings, who for seventeen years had stood before his country impeached. They were men described by Macaulay as of ancient, even illustrious lineage, and they had brought into existence an empire more extensive than that of Rome. He was a peasant craftsman, who had taught himself with a skill which Lord Wellesley, their successor almost as great as themselves, delighted publicly to acknowledge—a man of the people, of the class who had used the Roman Empire to build out of it a universal Christendom, who were even then turning France upside down, creating the Republic of America, and giving new life to Great Britain itself. The little Englishman was about to do in Calcutta and from Serampore what the little Jew, Paul, had done in Antioch and Ephesus, from Corinth and Rome. England might send its nobly born to erect the material and the secular fabric of empire, but it was only, in the providence of God, that they might prepare for the poor village preacher to convert the empire into a spiritual force which should in time do for Asia what Rome had done for Western Christendom. But till the last, as from the first, Carey was as unconscious of the part which he had been called to play as he was unresting in the work which it involved. It is no fanatical criticism, but the true philosophy of history, which places Carey over against Clive, the spiritual and secular founders, and Duff beside Hastings, the spiritual and secular consolidators of our Indian Empire.

      Carey's work for India underlay the first period of forty years of transition from Cornwallis to Bentinck, as Duff's covered the second of thirty years to the close of Lord Canning's administration, which introduced the new era of full toleration and partial but increasing self-government directed by the Viceroy and Parliament.

      Carey had been sent not only to the one people outside of Christendom whose conversion would tell most powerfully on all Asia, Africa, and their islands—the Hindoos; but to the one province which was almost entirely British, and could be used as it had been employed to assimilate the rest of India—Bengal. Territorially the East India Company possessed, when he landed, nothing outside of the Ganges valley of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares, save a few spots on the Madras and Malabar coasts and the portion just before taken in the Mysore war. The rest was desolated by the Marathas, the Nizam, Tipoo, and other Mohammedan adventurers. On the Gangetic delta and right up to Allahabad, but not beyond, the Company ruled and raised revenue, leaving the other functions of the state to Mohammedans of the type of Turkish pashas under the titular superiority of the effete Emperor of Delhi. The Bengali and Hindi-speaking millions of the Ganges and the simpler aborigines of the hills had been devastated by the famine of 1769–70, which the Company's officials, who were powerless where they did not intensify it by interference with trade, confessed to have cut off from ten to twelve millions of human beings. Over three-fifths of the area the soil was left without a cultivator. The whole young of that generation perished, so that, even twenty years after, Lord Cornwallis officially described one-third of Bengal as a jungle inhabited only by wild beasts. A quarter of a century after Carey's language was, as we have seen, "three-fifths of it are an uncultivated jungle abandoned to wild beasts and serpents."

      But the British peace, in Bengal at least, had allowed abundant crops to work their natural result on the population. The local experience of Shore, who had witnessed the horrors he could do so little to relieve, had united with the statesmanship of Cornwallis to initiate a series of administrative reforms that worked some evil, but more good, all through Carey's time. First of all, as affecting the very existence and the social development of the people, or their capacity for being educated, Christianised, civilised in the highest sense, there was the relation of the Government to the ryots ("protected ones") and the zameendars ("landholders"). In India, as nearly all over the world except in feudalised Britain, the state is the common landlord in the interests of all classes who hold the soil subject to the payment of customary rents, directly or through middlemen, to the Government. For thirty years after Plassey the Government of India had been learning its business, and in the process had injured both itself and the landed classes, as much as has been done in Ireland.