The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & MissionarySmith, George
Religion
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
Smith, George
Carey, William, 1761-1834; Missions -- India
Though the greatest, this was only one of the crimes against humanity
and morality which Carey opposed all his life with a practical
reasonableness till he saw the public opinion he had done so much to
create triumph. He knew the people of India, their religious, social,
and economic condition, as no Englishman before him had done. He stood
between them and their foreign Government at the beginning of our
intimate contact with all classes as detailed administrators and
rulers. The outcome of his peculiar experience is to be found not only
in the writings published under his own name but in the great book of
his colleague William Ward, every page of which passed under his
careful correction as well as under the more general revision of Henry
Martyn. Except for the philosophy of Hindooism, the second edition of
A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos,
including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and
Translations from their Principal Works, published in 1818 in two
quarto volumes, stands unrivalled as the best authority on the
character and daily life and beliefs of the 200,000,000 to whom Great
Britain had been made a terrestrial providence, till Christianity
teaches them to govern themselves and to become to the rest of Asia
missionaries of nobler truth than that wherewith their Buddhist fathers
covered China and the farther East.
All the crimes against humanity with which the history of India teems,
down to the Mutiny and the records of our courts and tributary states
at this hour, are directly traceable to lawless supernaturalism like
that of the civilised world before the triumph of Christianity. In
nothing does England's administration of India resemble Rome's
government of its provinces in the seven centuries from the reduction
of Sicily, 240 B.C., to the fall of the Western Empire, 476 A.D., so
much as in the relation of nascent Christianity to the pagan cults
which had made society what it was. Carey and the brotherhood stood
alone in facing, in fighting with divine weapons, in winning the first
victories over the secular as well as spiritual lawlessness which fell
before Paul and his successors down to Augustine and his City of God.
The gentle and reasonable but none the less divinely indignant father
of modern missions brings against Hindoo and Mohammedan society
accusations no more railing than those in the opening passage of the
Epistle to the Romans, and he brings these only that, following Paul,
he may declare the more excellent way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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