Under date four days after we find this entry in the Church Book--"Mr. Carey, our minister, left Leicester to go on a mission to the East Indies, to take and propagate the Gospel among those idolatrous and superstitious heathens. This is inserted to show his love to his poor miserable fellow-creatures. In this we concurred with him, though it is at the expense of losing one whom we love as our own souls." When Carey's preaching had so filled the church that it became necessary to build a front gallery at a cost of £98, and they had applied to several other churches for assistance in vain, he thus taught them to help themselves. The minister and many of the members agreed to pay off the debt "among ourselves" by weekly subscriptions,--a process, however, which covered five years, so poor were they. Carey left this as a parting lesson to home congregations, while his people found it the easier to pay the debt that they had sacrificed their best, their own minister, to the work of missions for which he had taught them to pray. John Thomas, four years older than Carey, was a surgeon, who had made two voyages to Calcutta in the Oxford Indiaman, had been of spiritual service to Charles Grant, Mr. George Udny, and the Bengal civilian circle at Malda, and had been supported by Mr. Grant as a missionary for a time until his eccentricities and debts outraged his friends and drove him home at the time of the Kettering meetings. Full justice has been done to a character and a career somewhat resembling those of John Newton, by his patient and able biographer the Rev. C. B. Lewis. John Thomas has the merit of being the first medical missionary, at a time when no other Englishman cared for either the bodies or souls of our recently acquired subjects in North India, outside of Charles Grant's circle. He has more; he was used by God to direct Carey to the dense Hindoo population of Bengal--to the people and to the centre, that is, where Brahmanism had its seat, and whence Buddhism had been carried by thousands of missionaries all over Southern, Eastern, and Central Asia. But there our ascription of merit to Thomas must stop. However well he might speak the uncultured Bengali, he never could write the language or translate the Bible into a literary style so that it could be understood by the people or influence their leaders. His temper kept Charles Grant back from helping the infant mission, though anxious to see Mr. Carey and to aid him and any other companion. The debts of Thomas caused him and Carey to be excluded from the Oxford, in which his friend the commander had agreed to take them and their party without a licence; clouded the early years of the enterprise with their shadow, and formed the heaviest of the many burdens Carey had to bear at starting. If, afterwards, the old association of Thomas with Mr. Udny at Malda gave Carey a home during his Indian apprenticeship, this was a small atonement for the loss of the direct help of Mr.