The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & MissionarySmith, George
Religion
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
Smith, George
Carey, William, 1761-1834; Missions -- India
From the middle of the year 1801 and for the next thirty years Carey
spent as much of his time in the metropolis as in Serampore. He was
generally rowed down the eighteen miles of the winding river to
Calcutta at sunset on Monday evening and returned on Friday night every
week, working always by the way. At first he personally influenced the
Bengali traders and youths who knew English, and he read with many such
the English Bible. His chaplain friends, Brown and Buchanan, with the
catholicity born of their presbyterian and evangelical training, shared
his sympathy with the hundreds of poor mixed Christians for whom St.
John's and even the Mission Church made no provision, and encouraged
him to care for them. In 1802 he began a weekly meeting for prayer and
conversation in the house of Mr. Rolt, and another for a more ignorant
class in the house of a Portuguese Christian. By 1803 he was able to
write to Fuller: "We have opened a place of worship in Calcutta, where
we have preaching twice on Lord's day in English, on Wednesday evening
in Bengali, and on Thursday evening in English." He took all the work
during the week and the Sunday service in rotation with his brethren.
The first church was the hall of a well-known undertaker, approached
through lines of coffins and the trappings of woe. In time most of the
evangelical Christians in the city promised to relieve the missionaries
of the expense if they would build an unsectarian chapel more worthy of
the object. This was done in Lall Bazaar, a little withdrawn from that
thoroughfare to this day of the poor and abandoned Christians, of the
sailors and soldiers on leave, of the liquor-shops and the stews.
There, as in Serampore, at a time when the noble hospitals of Calcutta
were not, and the children of only the "services" were cared for,
"Brother Carey gave them medicine for their bodies and the best
medicine for their poor souls," as a contemporary widow describes it.
The site alone cost so much--a thousand pounds--that only a mat chapel
could be built. Marshman raised another £1100 in ten days, and after
delays caused by the police Government sanctioned the building which
Carey opened on Sunday, 1st January 1809. But he and his colleagues
"not episcopally ordained" were forbidden to preach to British soldiers
and to the Armenians and Portuguese. "Carey's Baptist Chapel" is now
its name. Here was for nearly a whole generation a sublime
spectacle--the Northamptonshire shoemaker training the governing class
of India in Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi all day, and translating the
Ramayana and the Veda, and then, when the sun went down, returning to
the society of "the maimed, the halt, and the blind, and many with the
leprosy," to preach in several tongues the glad tidings of the Kingdom
to the heathen of England as well as of India, and all with a loving
tenderness and patient humility learned in the childlike school of Him
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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