The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & MissionarySmith, George
Religion
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
Smith, George
Carey, William, 1761-1834; Missions -- India
preacher to convert the empire into a spiritual force which should in
time do for Asia what Rome had done for Western Christendom. But till
the last, as from the first, Carey was as unconscious of the part which
he had been called to play as he was unresting in the work which it
involved. It is no fanatical criticism, but the true philosophy of
history, which places Carey over against Clive, the spiritual and
secular founders, and Duff beside Hastings, the spiritual and secular
consolidators of our Indian Empire.
Carey's work for India underlay the first period of forty years of
transition from Cornwallis to Bentinck, as Duff's covered the second of
thirty years to the close of Lord Canning's administration, which
introduced the new era of full toleration and partial but increasing
self-government directed by the Viceroy and Parliament.
Carey had been sent not only to the one people outside of Christendom
whose conversion would tell most powerfully on all Asia, Africa, and
their islands--the Hindoos; but to the one province which was almost
entirely British, and could be used as it had been employed to
assimilate the rest of India--Bengal. Territorially the East India
Company possessed, when he landed, nothing outside of the Ganges valley
of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares, save a few spots on the Madras and
Malabar coasts and the portion just before taken in the Mysore war.
The rest was desolated by the Marathas, the Nizam, Tipoo, and other
Mohammedan adventurers. On the Gangetic delta and right up to
Allahabad, but not beyond, the Company ruled and raised revenue,
leaving the other functions of the state to Mohammedans of the type of
Turkish pashas under the titular superiority of the effete Emperor of
Delhi. The Bengali and Hindi-speaking millions of the Ganges and the
simpler aborigines of the hills had been devastated by the famine of
1769-70, which the Company's officials, who were powerless where they
did not intensify it by interference with trade, confessed to have cut
off from ten to twelve millions of human beings. Over three-fifths of
the area the soil was left without a cultivator. The whole young of
that generation perished, so that, even twenty years after, Lord
Cornwallis officially described one-third of Bengal as a jungle
inhabited only by wild beasts. A quarter of a century after Carey's
language was, as we have seen, "three-fifths of it are an uncultivated
jungle abandoned to wild beasts and serpents."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account