The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & MissionarySmith, George
Religion
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
Smith, George
Carey, William, 1761-1834; Missions -- India
The "Form of Agreement" which regulated the social economy and
spiritual enterprise of the brotherhood, and also its legal relations
to the Baptist Society in England, deserves study, in its divine
disinterestedness, its lofty aims, and its kindly common sense. Fuller
had pledged the Society in 1798 to send out £360 a year for the joint
family of six missionaries, their wives, and children. The house and
land at Serampore cost the Society Rs.6000. On Grant's death, leaving a
widow and two children, the five missionaries made the first voluntary
agreement, which "provided that no one should trade on his own private
account, and that the product of their labour should form a common fund
to be applied at the will of the majority, to the support of their
respective families, of the cause of God around them, and of the widow
and family of such as might be removed by death." The first year the
schools and the press enabled the brotherhood to be more than
self-supporting. In the second year Carey's salary from the College of
Fort-William, and the growth of the schools and press, gave them a
surplus for mission extension. They not only paid for the additional
two houses and ground required by such extension, but they paid back to
the Society all that it had advanced for the first purchase in the
course of the next six years. They acquired all the property for the
Serampore Mission, duly informing the home Committee from time to time,
and they vested the whole right, up to Fuller's death in 1815, in the
Society, "to prevent the premises being sold or becoming private
property in the families." But "to secure their own quiet occupation
of them, and enable them to leave them in the hands of such as they
might associate with themselves in their work, they declared themselves
trustees instead of proprietors."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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