The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & MissionarySmith, George
Religion
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
Smith, George
Carey, William, 1761-1834; Missions -- India
In Great Britain the name of William Carey had, by 1812, become
familiar as a household word in all evangelical circles. The men who
had known him in the days before 1793 were few and old, were soon to
pass away for ever. The new generation had fed their Christian zeal on
his achievements, and had learned to look on him, in spite of all his
humility which only inflamed that zeal, as the pioneer, the father, the
founder of foreign missions, English, Scottish, and American. They had
never seen him; they were not likely to see him in the flesh. The
desire for a portrait of him became irresistible. The burning of the
press, to be hereafter described, which led even bitter enemies of the
mission like Major Scott Waring to subscribe for its restoration, gave
the desired sympathetic voice, so that Fuller wrote to the
missionaries:--"The public is now giving us their praises. Eight
hundred guineas have been offered for Dr. Carey's likeness...When you
pitched your tents at Serampore you said, 'We will not accumulate
riches but devote all to God for the salvation of the heathen.' God
has given you what you desired and what you desired not. Blessed men,
God will bless you and make you a blessing. I and others of us may
die, but God will surely visit you...Expect to be highly applauded,
bitterly reproached, greatly moved, and much tried in every way. Oh
that, having done all, you may stand!"
Carey was, fortunately for posterity, not rebellious in the matter of
the portrait; he was passive. As he sat in his room in the college of
Fort William, his pen in hand, his Sanskrit Bible before him, and his
Brahman pundit at his left hand, the saint and the scholar in the
ripeness of his powers at fifty was transferred to the canvas which has
since adorned the walls of Regent's Park College. A line engraving of
the portrait was published in England the year after at a guinea, and
widely purchased, the profit going to the mission. The painter was
Home, famous in his day as the artist whom Lord Cornwallis had engaged
during the first war with Tipoo to prepare those Select Views in
Mysore, the Country of Tipoo Sultaun, from Drawings taken on the Spot,
which appeared in 1794.
Of his four sons, Felix, William, Jabez, and Jonathan, Carey's
correspondence was most frequent at this period with William, who went
forth in 1807 to Dinapoor to begin his independent career as a
missionary by the side of Fernandez.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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