"I am indeed poor, and shall always be so until the Bible is published in Bengali and Hindostani, and the people want no further instruction."--_Dr. William Carey, Letter from India, 1794._ WILLIAM CAREY. Between the years 1786 and 1789, when William Gifford, just liberated by the generous interference of a friend from the yoke of apprenticeship to a cruel master, was receiving instruction from the Rev. Thomas Smerdon, when Robert Bloomfield, a journeyman shoemaker in London, was preparing in his mind the materials for the "Farmer's Boy," and when Samuel Drew, the young shoemaker of St. Austell, was reading "Locke on the Understanding," and learning to think and reason as a metaphysician, there lived at Moulton in Northamptonshire a poor shoemaker, school-teacher, and village pastor, who was cherishing in his great heart the project of forming a society for the purpose of sending out Christian missionaries to the heathen world. This poor young man, in spite of his obscure position, his meagre social influence, his limited resources, and his lack of early educational advantages, became the originator of the great foreign missionary enterprises which constitute so remarkable a feature in the religious history of this country at the close of the last and the beginning of the present century. He was the first missionary chosen to be sent out by the committee of the society he had been the means of establishing. His field of labor was India, where for more than forty years, "without a visit to England or even a voyage to sea to recruit his strength," and without losing a vestige of his early enthusiasm for his Christian enterprise, he toiled on at the work of preaching the gospel and translating the Sacred Scriptures. From 1801 to 1830, he was Professor of Oriental Languages in a college founded at Fort William by the Marquis of Wellesley, Governor-General of India. As an Oriental linguist he had few equals in his day, and few have ever exceeded him in the extent and exactitude of his acquaintance with the languages of India. He compiled grammars and dictionaries in Mahratta, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telugu, Bengali, and Bhotana. But his chief work was the translation of the Scriptures into Bengali and other languages. No less than twenty-four different translations of the Bible were made and edited by him, and passed through the press at Serampore under his supervision. One account speaks of "two hundred thousand Bibles, or portions thereof, in about forty Oriental languages or dialects, besides a great number of tracts and other religious works in various languages;" and adds that "a great proportion of the actual literary labor involved in these undertakings was performed" by this prodigious worker. A truly noble life-work was this for any man. It may be questioned if more work of a solid and useful character was ever pressed into one human life. What monarch or ruler of a vast empire,