With this purpose in mind, Carey went to the meetings of his brethren, longing for an opportunity of expressing his thoughts and calling forth their sympathies. But he had to endure a terrible trial at the outset--a trial which only Christian faith and love could endure. The older men, who ruled in an almost supreme manner in these councils, sternly rebuked his presumption, as they deemed it, and called him an "enthusiast"--a term employed very recently by a noble duke in the House of Lords in the same connection. No term could have described Carey more correctly. It was a term of honor, though meant in reproach and condemnation. The word means one inspired by God, and surely Carey's Christlike thought and zeal for his fellow-men was an inspiration. He was an enthusiast of the type of Robert Raikes of Gloucester, who only six or seven years before[40] had begun the work of Sabbath-schools in that city; or John Howard, whose great work, published within a year or two of this time,[41] on the condition of the prisons in Europe, and especially in England and Ireland, created a merciful revolution in the treatment of our criminal class; or Thomas Charles of Bala, whose pity for the Welsh girl who had no Bible of her own, and had been unable to walk six or seven miles to a place where she could have access to one, led him to take steps which resulted in the formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society. The founder of the Baptist Missionary Society was a man of this type, and such men are the greatest benefactors of their race, no matter whether they be clergymen like Charles, or country gentlemen like Howard, or cobblers and Nonconformist village pastors like Carey. [40] The first Sunday-school was opened in Gloucester in 1780. [41] Viz., 1789.