The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & MissionarySmith, George
Religion
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
Smith, George
Carey, William, 1761-1834; Missions -- India
"Scotland[10] was the next to take up the challenge sent by Carey.
Greville Ewing, then a young minister of the kirk in Edinburgh,
published in March 1796 the appeal of the Edinburgh or Scottish
Missionary Society, which afterwards sent John Wilson to Bombay, and
that was followed by the Glasgow Society, to which we owe the most
successful of the Kafir missions in South Africa. Robert Haldane sold
all that he had when he read the first number of the Periodical
Accounts, and gave £35,000 to send a Presbyterian mission of six
ministers and laymen, besides himself, to do from Benares what Carey
had planned from Mudnabati; but Pitt as well as Dundas, though his
personal friends, threatened him with the Company's intolerant Act of
Parliament. Evangelical ministers of the Church of England took their
proper place in the new crusade, and a year before the eighteenth
century closed they formed the agency, which has ever since been in the
forefront of the host of the Lord as the Church Missionary Society,
with Carey's friend, Thomas Scott, as its first secretary. The sacred
enthusiasm was caught by the Netherlands on the one side under the
influence of Dr. Van der Kemp, who had studied at Edinburgh University,
and by the divinity students of New England, of whom Adoniram Judson
was even then in training to receive from Carey the apostolate of
Burma. Soon too the Bengali Bible translations were to unite with the
needs of the Welsh at home to establish the British and Foreign Bible
Society.
As news of all this reached Carey amid his troubles and yet triumphs of
faith in the swamps of Dinajpoor, and when he learned that he was soon
to be joined by four colleagues, one of whom was Ward whom he himself
had trysted to print the Bengali Bible for him, he might well write, in
July 1799:--"The success of the Gospel and, among other things, the
hitherto unextinguishable missionary flame in England and all the
western world, give us no little encouragement and animate our hearts."
To Sutcliff he had written eighteen months before that:--"I rejoice
much at the missionary spirit which has lately gone forth: surely it is
a prelude to the universal spread of the Gospel! Your account of the
German Moravian Brethren's affectionate regard towards me is very
pleasing. I am not much moved by what men in general say of me; yet I
cannot be insensible to the regards of men eminent for
godliness...Staying at home is now become sinful in many cases, and
will become so more and more. All gifts should be encouraged, and
spread abroad."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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