The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & MissionarySmith, George
Religion
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
Smith, George
Carey, William, 1761-1834; Missions -- India
and go to its utmost limits. The charter, the encouragements of
Christians are exceeding great, and the returns promised infinitely
superior. "Suppose a company of serious Christians, ministers and
private persons, were to form themselves into a society."
The man was ready who had been specially fitted, by character and
training, to form the home organisation of the society, while Carey
created its foreign mission. For the next quarter of a century William
Carey and Andrew Fuller worked lovingly, fruitfully together, with the
breadth of half the world between them. The one showed how, by Bible
and church and school, by physical and spiritual truth, India and all
Asia could be brought to Christ; the other taught England, Scotland,
and America to begin at last to play their part in an enterprise as old
as Abraham; as divine in its warrant, its charge, its promise, as
Christ Himself. Seven years older than Carey, his friend was born a
farmer's son and labourer in the fen country of Cromwell whom he
resembled, was self-educated under conditions precisely similar, and
passed through spiritual experiences almost exactly the same. The two,
unknown to each other, found themselves when called to preach at
eighteen unable to reconcile the grim dead theology of their church
with the new life and liberty which had come to them direct from the
Spirit of Christ and from His Word. Carey had left his ancestral church
at a time when the biographer of Romaine could declare with truth that
that preacher was the only evangelical in the established churches of
all London, and that of twenty thousand clergymen in England, the
number who preached the truth as it is in Jesus had risen from not
twenty in 1749 to three hundred in 1789. The methodism of the Wesleys
was beginning to tell, but the Baptists were as lifeless as the
Established Church. In both the Church and Dissent there were
individuals only, like Newton and Scott, the elder Robert Hall and
Ryland, whose spiritual fervour made them marked men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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