William Carey was a shoemaker during the twelve years of his life from sixteen to twenty-eight, till he went to Leicester. Poverty, which the grace of God used to make him a preacher also from his eighteenth year, compelled him to work with his hands in leather all the week, and to tramp many a weary mile to Northampton and Kettering carrying the product of his labour. At one time, when minister of Moulton, he kept a school by day, made or cobbled shoes by night, and preached on Sunday. So Paul had made tents of his native Cilician goatskin in the days when infant Christianity was chased from city to city, and the cross was a reproach only less bitter, however, than evangelical dissent in Christian England in the eighteenth century. The providence which made and kept young Carey so long a shoemaker, put him in the very position in which he could most fruitfully receive and nurse the sacred fire that made him the most learned scholar and Bible translator of his day in the East. The same providence thus linked him to the earliest Latin missionaries of Alexandria, of Asia Minor, and of Gaul, who were shoemakers, and to a succession of scholars and divines, poets and critics, reformers and philanthropists, who have used the shoemaker's life to become illustrious.[1] St. Mark chose for his successor, as first bishop of Alexandria, that Annianus whom he had been the means of converting to Christ when he found him at the cobbler's stall. The Talmud commemorates the courage and the wisdom of "Rabbi Jochanan, the shoemaker," whose learning soon after found a parallel in Carey's. Like Annianus, "a poor shoemaker named Alexander, despised in the world but great in the sight of God, who did honour to so exalted a station in the Church," became famous as Bishop of Comana in Cappadocia, as saint, preacher, and missionary-martyr. Soon after there perished in the persecutions of Diocletian, at Soissons, the two missionary brothers whose name of Crispin has ever since been gloried in by the trade, which they chose at once as a means of livelihood and of helping their poor converts. The Hackleton apprentice was still a child when the great Goethe was again adding to the then artificial literature of his country his own true predecessor, Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of Nürnberg, the friend of Luther, the meistersinger of the Reformation. And it was another German shoemaker, Boehme, whose exalted theosophy as expounded by William Law became one link in the chain that drew Carey to Christ, as it influenced Wesley and Whitefield, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge. George Fox was only nineteen when, after eight years' service with a shoemaker in Drayton, Leicestershire, not far from Carey's county, he heard the voice from heaven which sent him forth in 1643 to preach righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, till Cromwell sought converse with him, and the Friends became a power among men.