We trust our readers will not be displeased to receive these items from the biography of a very remarkable, a singularly romantic and chequered, as well as singularly useful career. References to Silas Told will be found in most of the biographies of Wesley. Southey passes him by with a very slight allusion. Tyerman dwells on his memory with a little more tenderness; but, with the exception of Stevens, none has touched with real interest upon this extraordinary though obscure man, and his romantic life and labours in a very strange path of Christian benevolence and usefulness. He was known, far and near, as the “prisoners’ chaplain,” although an unpaid one. He closed his life in 1778, in the sixty-eighth year of his age. As we have seen, John Wesley appropriately officiated at his funeral, and pronounced an affectionate encomium over the remains of his honoured old friend and fellow-labourer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XII MISSIONARY SOCIETIES. Illustrating what we have said before, it remains to be noticed, that nearly all the great societies sprang into existence almost simultaneously. The foremost among these,[14] founded in 1792, was the Baptist Missionary Society. It appears to have arisen from a suggestion of William Carey, the celebrated Northamptonshire shoemaker, who proposed as an inquiry to an association of Northamptonshire ministers, “whether it were not practicable and obligatory to attempt the conversion of the heathen.” It is certainly still a moot question whether Le Verrier or Adams first laid the hand of science on the planet Neptune; but it seems quite certain that, when one of God’s great thoughts is throbbing in the heart of one of His apostles, the same impulse and passion is stirring another, perhaps others, in remote and faraway scenes. Altogether unknown to William Carey, that same year the great Claudius Buchanan was dreaming his divine dreams about the conquest of India for Christ, in St. Mary’s College, Cambridge.[15] Undoubtedly the honour of the first consolidation of the thought into a missionary enterprise must be given to William Carey and his little band of obscure believers. Footnote 14: It is not implied that these were the first modern missionary agencies. The Moravians had already sent the Gospel into many regions. There were Swedish and Danish Missionary Societies also at work. In 1649 a Society for Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England had been formed, and about 1697 the “Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge” and the “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts” were established. See page 256 and foot note. Footnote 15: See Appendix. [Illustration: William Carey. ]