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 1809 till 1830, or practically through the rest of Carey's life,
the co-operation of Serampore and the Bible Society was honourable to
both. Carey loyally clung to it when in 1811, under the spell of Henry
Martyn's sermon on Christian India, the chaplains established the
Calcutta Auxiliary Bible Society in order to supersede its
corresponding committee. In the Serampore press the new auxiliary,
like the parent Society, found the cheapest and best means of
publishing editions of the New Testament in Singhalese, Malayalam, and
Tamil. The press issued also the Persian New Testament, first of the
Romanist missionary, Sebastiani--"though it be not wholly free from
imperfections, it will doubtless do much good," wrote Dr. Marshman to
Fuller--and then of Henry Martyn, whose assistant, Sabat, was trained
at Serampore. Those three of Serampore had a Christ-like tolerance,
which sprang from the divine charity of their determination to live
only that the Word of God might sound out through Asia. When in 1830
this auxiliary--which had at first sought to keep all missionaries out
of its executive in order to conciliate men like Sydney Smith's
brother, the Advocate-General of Bengal--refused to use the
translations of Carey and Yates, and inclined to an earlier version of
Ellerton, because of the translation or transliteration of the Greek
words for "baptism," these two scholars acted thus, as described by the
Bible Society's annalist--they, "with a liberality which does them
honour, permitted the use of their respective versions of the Bengali
Scriptures, with such alterations as were deemed needful in the
disputed word for 'baptism,' they being considered in no way parties to
such alterations." From first to last the British and Foreign Bible
Society, to use its own language, "had the privilege of aiding the
Serampore brethren by grants, amounting to not less than £13,500." Of
this £1475 had been raised by Mr. William Hey, F.R.S., a surgeon at
Leeds, who had been so moved by the translation memoir of 1816 as to
offer £500 for the publication of a thousand copies of every approved
first translation of the New Testament into any dialect of India. It
was with this assistance that most of the Hindi and the Pushtoo and
Punjabi versions were produced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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