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

church of Piddington, a village to which he afterwards moved his shop. Never had minister, missionary, or scholar a less sympathetic mate, due largely to that latent mental disease which in India carried her off; but for more than twenty years the husband showed her loving reverence. As we stand in the Hackleton shed, over which Carey placed the rude signboard prepared by his own hands, and now in the library of Regent's Park College, "Second Hand Shoes Bought and—,"² we can realise the low estate to which Carey fell, even below his father's loom and schoolhouse, and from which he was called to become the apostle of North India as Schwartz was of the South.

      How was this shed his college? We have seen that he brought with him from his native village an amount of information, habits of observation, and a knowledge of books unusual in rustics of that day, and even of the present time. At twelve he made his first acquaintance with a language other than his own, when he mastered the short grammar in Dyche's Latine Vocabulary, and committed nearly the whole book to memory. When urging him to take the preaching at Barton, Mr. Sutcliff of Olney gave him Ruddiman's Latin Grammar. The one alleviation of his lot under the coarse but upright Nichols was found in his master's small library. There he began to study Greek. In a New Testament commentary he found Greek words, which he carefully transcribed and kept until he should next visit home, where a youth whom dissipation had reduced from college to weaving explained both the words and their terminations to him. All that he wanted was such beginnings. Hebrew he seems to have learned by the aid of the neighbouring ministers; borrowing books from them, and questioning them "pertinently," as he did Scott.³ At the end of Hopkins's Three Sermons on the Effects of Sin on the Universe, preached in 1759, he had made this entry on 9th August 1787—"Gulielm. Careius perlegit." He starved himself to purchase a few books at the sale which attended Dr. Ryland's removal from Northampton to Bristol. In an old woman's cottage he found a Dutch quarto, and from that he so taught himself the language that in 1789 he translated for Ryland a discourse on the Gospel Offer sent to him by the evangelical Dr. Erskine of Edinburgh. The manuscript is in an extremely small character, unlike what might have been expected from one who had wrought with his hands for eight years. French he acquired, sufficiently for literary purposes, in three weeks from the French version of Ditton on the Resurrection, which he purchased for a few coppers. He had the linguistic gift which soon after made the young carpenter Mezzofanti of Bologna famous and a cardinal. But the gift would have been buried in the grave of his penury and his circumstances had his trade been almost any other, and had he not been impelled by the most powerful of all motives. He never sat on his stall without his book before him, nor did he painfully toil with his wallet of new-made shoes to the neighbouring towns or return with leather without conning over his lately-acquired knowledge, and making it for ever, in orderly array, his own. He so taught his evening school and his Sunday congregations that the teaching to him, like writing to others, stereotyped or lighted up the truths. Indeed, the school and the cobbling often went on together—a fact commemorated in the addition to the Hackleton signboard of the Piddington nail on which he used to fix his thread while teaching the children.

      But that which sanctified and directed the whole throughout a working life of more than half a century, was the missionary idea and the missionary consecration. With a caution not often shown at that time by bishops in laying hands on those whom they had passed for deacon's orders, the little church at Olney thus dealt with the Father of Modern Missions before they would recognise his call and send him out "to preach the gospel wherever God in His providence might call him:"

      "June 17, 1785.—A request from William Carey of Moulton, in Northamptonshire, was taken into consideration. He has been and still is in connection with a society of people at Hackleton. He is occasionally engaged with acceptance in various places in speaking the Word. He bears a very good moral character. He is desirous of being sent out from some reputable church of Christ into the work of the ministry. The principal Question was—'In what manner shall we receive him? by a letter from the people of Hackleton, or on a profession of faith, etc.?' The final resolution of it was left to another church Meeting.

      "July 14—Ch. Meeting. W. Carey appeared before the Church, and having given a satisfactory account of the work of God upon his soul, he was admitted a member. He had been formerly baptised by the Rev. Mr. Ryland, jun., of Northampton. He was invited by the Church to preach in public once next Lord's Day.

      "July 17.—Ch. Meeting, Lord's Day Evening. W. Carey, in consequence of a request from the Church, preached this Evening. After which it was resolved that he should be allowed to go on preaching at those places where he has been for some time employed, and that he should engage again on suitable occasions for some time before us, in order that farther trial may be made of ministerial gifts.

      "June 16, 1786.—C.M. The case of Bror. Carey was considered, and an unanimous satisfaction with his ministerial abilities being expressed, a vote was passed to call him to the Ministry at a proper time.

      "August 10.—Ch. Meeting. This evening our Brother William Carey was called to the work of the Ministry, and sent out by the Church to preach the Gospel, wherever God in His providence might call him.

      "April 29, 1787.—Ch. M. After the Orde. our Brother William Carey was dismissed to the Church of Christ at Moulton in Northamptonshire with a view to his Ordination there."

      These were the last years at Olney of William Cowper before he removed to the Throckmortons' house at Weston village, two miles distant. Carey must often have seen the poet during the twenty years which he spent in the corner house of the market-square, and in the walks around. He must have read the poems of 1782, which for the first time do justice to missionary enterprise. He must have hailed what Mrs. Browning calls "the deathless singing" which in 1785, in The Task, opened a new era in English literature. He may have been fired with the desire to imitate Whitefield, in the description of whom, though reluctant to name him, Cowper really anticipated Carey himself:—

      "He followed Paul; his zeal a kindred flame,

       His apostolic charity the same;

       Like him crossed cheerfully tempestuous seas,

       Forsaking country, kindred, friends and ease;

       Like him he laboured and, like him, content

       To bear it, suffered shame where'er he went."

Chapter II.

      THE BIRTH OF ENGLAND'S FOREIGN MISSIONS

       Table of Contents

      1785–1792

      Moulton the Mission's birthplace—Carey's fever and poverty—His Moulton school—Fired with the missionary idea—His very large missionary map—Fuller's confession of the aged and respectable ministers' opposition—Old Mr. Ryland's rebuke—Driven to publish his Enquiry—Its literary character—Carey's survey of the world in 1788—His motives, difficulties, and plans—Projects the first Missionary Society—Contrasted with his predecessors from Erasmus—Prayer concert begun in Scotland in 1742—Jonathan Edwards—The Northamptonshire Baptist movement in 1784—Andrew Fuller—The Baptists, Particular and General—Antinomian and Socinian extremes opposed to Missions—Met by Fuller's writings and Clipstone sermon—Carey's agony at continued delay—His work in Leicester—His sermon at Nottingham—Foundation of Baptist Missionary Society at last—Kettering and Jerusalem.

      The north road, which runs for twelve miles from Northampton to Kettering, passes through a country known last century for the doings of the Pytchley Hunt. Stories, by no means exaggerated, of the deep drinking and deeper play of the club, whose gatehouse now stands at the entrance of Overstone Park, were rife, when on Lady Day 1785 William Carey became Baptist preacher of Moulton village, on the other side of the road. Moulton was to become the birthplace of the modern missionary idea; Kettering, of evangelical missionary action.

      No man in England had apparently a more wretched lot or more miserable prospects than he. He had started in life as a journeyman shoemaker at eighteen, burdened with a payment to his first master's widow which his own kind heart had led him to offer, and with the price of his second master's stock and business. Trade was good for