The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & MissionarySmith, George
Religion
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
Smith, George
Carey, William, 1761-1834; Missions -- India
compromise.
Alas! Carey could not manage to get out of Calcutta and its
neighbourhood for five months. As he thought to live by farming,
Thomas was to practise his profession; and their first year's income of
£150 had, in those days when the foreign exchanges were unknown, to be
realised by the sale of the goods in which it had been invested. As
usual, Thomas had again blundered, so that even his gentle colleague
himself half-condemned, half-apologised for him by the shrewd
reflection that he was only fit to live at sea, where his daily
business would be before him, and daily provision would be made for
him. Carey found himself penniless. Even had he received the whole of
his £75, as he really did in one way or other, what was that for such a
family as his at the beginning of their undertaking? The expense of
living at all in Calcutta drove the whole party thirty miles up the
river to Bandel, an old Portuguese suburb of the Hoogli factory. There
they rented a small house from the German hotel-keeper, beside the
Augustinian priory and oldest church in North India, which dates from
1599 and is still in good order. There they met Kiernander, then at the
great age of eighty-four. Daily they preached or talked to the people.
They purchased a boat for regular visitation of the hamlets, markets,
and towns which line both banks of the river. With sure instinct Carey
soon fixed on Nuddea, as the centre of Brahmanical superstition and
Sanskrit learning, where "to build me a hut and live like the natives,"
language recalled to us by the words of the dying Livingstone in the
swamps of Central Africa. There, in the capital of the last of the
Hindoo kings, beside the leafy tols or colleges of a river port which
rivals Benares, Poona, and Conjeeveram in sanctity, where Chaitanya the
Vaishnaiva reformer was born, Carey might have attacked Brahmanism in
its stronghold. A passage in his journal shows how he realised the
position. Thomas, the pundit, and he "sought the Lord by prayer for
direction," and this much was the result--"Several of the most learned
Pundits and Brahmans wished us to settle there; and, as that is the
great place for Eastern learning, we seemed inclined, especially as it
is the bulwark of heathenism, which, if once carried, all the rest of
the country must be laid open to us." But there was no available land
there for an Englishman's cultivation. From Bandel he wrote home these
impressions of Anglo-Indian life and missionary duty:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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