The absolute originality as well as grandeur of the unconscious action of the peasant shoemaker who, from 1779, prayed daily for all the heathen and slaves, and organised his society accordingly, will be seen in the dim light or darkness visible of all who had preceded him. They were before the set time; he was ready in the fulness of the missionary preparation. They belonged not only to periods, but to nations, to churches, to communities which were failing in the struggle for fruitfulness and expansion in new worlds and fresh lands; he was a son of England, which had come or was about to come out of the struggle a victor, charged with the terrible responsibility of the special servant of the Lord, as no people had ever before been charged in all history, sacred or secular. William Carey, indeed, reaped the little that the few brave toilers of the wintry time had sown; with a humility that is pathetic he acknowledges their toll, while ever ignorant to the last of his own merit. But he reaped only as each generation garners such fruits of its predecessor as may have been worthy to survive. He was the first of the true Anastatosantes of the modern world, as only an English-speaking man could be--of the most thorough, permanent, and everlasting of all Reformers, the men who turn the world upside down, because they make it rise up and depart from deadly beliefs and practices, from the fear and the fate of death, into the life and light of Christ and the Father. Who were his predecessors, reckoning from the Renascence of Europe, the discovery of America, and the opening up of India and Africa? Erasmus comes first, the bright scholar of compromise who in 1516 gave the New Testament again to Europe, as three centuries after Carey gave it to all Southern Asia, and whose missionary treatise, Ecclesiasties, in 1535 anticipated, theoretically at least, Carey's Enquiry by two centuries and a half. The missionary dream of this escaped monk of Rotterdam and Basel, who taught women and weavers and cobblers to read the Scriptures, and prayed that the Book might be translated into all languages, was realised in the scandalous iniquities and frauds of Portuguese and Spanish and Jesuit missions in West and East. Luther had enough to do with his papal antichrist and his German translation of the Greek of the Testament of Erasmus. The Lutheran church drove missions into the hands of the Pietists and Moravians--Wiclif's offspring--who nobly but ineffectually strove to do a work meant for the whole Christian community. The Church of England thrust forth the Puritans first to Holland and then to New England, where Eliot, the Brainerds, and the Mayhews sought to evangelise tribes which did not long survive themselves.