Justified True Belief

(●) The village shoemaker who argued that the command to go to all nations still binds ordinary Christians, and then spent forty-one years in Bengal proving he meant it. + In 1792 a poorly paid Baptist preacher in Leicester, who mended shoes because his congregation could not feed him, published a pamphlet priced at one shilling and sixpence, eighteen pence in all, arguing that Christ’s command to make disciples of all nations had never been cancelled and that Christians were therefore obliged to do something about it. Five months later a missionary society existed. The following year the author sailed for Bengal, and he never came home. Carey matters on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons that pull in different directions. The first is historical: almost every Protestant missionary society founded in the next thirty years, and a great deal of the worldwide church that now exists because of them, can be traced back through his pamphlet to a conversation in a Northamptonshire ministers’ meeting. The second is philosophical. Carey was answering a real argument, made by serious and godly men, that God would convert the nations in his own time and that human effort was presumption. What he wrote against it is a small classic of practical reasoning about how divine sovereignty and human action fit together. One fact about him is worth keeping in view through everything that follows. He had no university, no degree, and no patron. He learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Dutch and French at a cobbler’s bench, and by the end of his life he had held a professorship at Fort William College in Calcutta for thirty years and the press he ran had issued the Bible, whole or in part, in more than forty languages and dialects, four of them translated by his own hand.

(●) 1761 AD: Born to a village weaver in Northamptonshire, and bound apprentice to a shoemaker at sixteen. + William Carey was born on 17 August 1761 at Paulerspury, a Northamptonshire village of looms and small farms, the eldest of five children. His father Edmund wove cloth and later became the parish clerk and the village schoolmaster, which gave the family the schoolhouse to live in and gave the boy a room of his own. He filled it with insects pinned up in every corner so he could watch them change, and with birds he handed over to his sister Mary when he had to be away. An uncle named Peter, a gardener in the same village, taught him the names of plants, and he took over his father’s official garden until it was the best kept in the parish. The other boys called him Columbus, partly for the voyages he was always reading about and partly because he preached to them from the top of an old dwarf elm when they could not get him to play. Captain Cook was still alive and still sailing while Carey was at school, and the published narratives of those voyages were the books he chose over any other. A skin complaint that flared whenever he was long in the sun made field work impossible, and at sixteen he was bound apprentice to a shoemaker named Clarke Nichols, in the hamlet of Hackleton, nine miles from home and part of the neighbouring parish of Piddington. An apprentice in that trade signed away years of his life in exchange for board, training and almost no money, which is a hard bargain at any age and a very hard one at sixteen. What the arrangement gave him, as it happened, was the man at the next bench. The senior apprentice, whom the biographies name John Warr, was a Dissenter, meaning a Protestant who worshipped outside the Church of England rather than in the parish church his neighbours attended, and he argued religion with Carey until Carey gave way. Carey would later call the whole period his schooling as well as his apprenticeship, and he meant both halves of that.

(●) 1783 AD: He was baptized in the River Nene, and a cobbler’s bench became a language school. + On 5 October 1783 John Ryland the younger baptized him in the river Nene at Northampton. Ryland told the story himself at the Baptist Missionary Society’s first public meeting in London: "October 5th, 1783: I baptised in the river Nen, a little beyond Dr. Doddridge’s meeting-house at Northampton, a poor journeyman shoemaker, little thinking that before nine years had elapsed, he would prove the first instrument of forming a society for sending missionaries from England to preach the gospel to the heathen." A journeyman is a tradesman who has finished his apprenticeship but owns no shop of his own, and works for whoever will have him. That is exactly what Carey was, and the sequence behind the word is worth following. When Clarke Nichols died, Carey transferred to a second master, Thomas Old of Hackleton, and in 1781 he married Old’s sister-in-law, Dorothy Plackett. Then Old died too, and Carey inherited both halves of what was left: the keep of Old’s widow, and a business that never paid. He was preaching by 1785, called to the work of the ministry by his church in August 1786, and ordained pastor at Moulton on 1 August 1787, to a congregation so poor that its members could give twopence a month for their own relief. He kept a school, he cobbled, and he taught himself languages off the bench. Latin came first, from a grammar he had memorized at twelve. Greek he began from words copied out of a commentary and explained to him by a local weaver whose drinking had ended a college career. Hebrew he got from the neighbouring ministers, borrowing their books and questioning them. Dutch he taught himself out of a quarto, a big book of folded sheets, found in an old woman’s cottage, and he learned it well enough to translate for Ryland in 1789 a Dutch discourse on the gospel offer that John Erskine of Edinburgh had sent over. French he took in three weeks from a French copy of Ditton’s discourse on the resurrection that had cost him a few coppers. Andrew Fuller, who would become the missionary society’s secretary, walked into Carey’s workroom at Moulton and found the thing that explains the rest of his life hanging on the wall: "a very large map, consisting of several sheets of paper pasted together by himself, on which he had drawn, with a pen, a place for every nation in the known world, and entered into it whatever he met with in reading, relative to its population, religion, etc." Beside it he is said to have kept a globe he had stitched out of leather. He was teaching schoolchildren geography with them, and he was counting how many people had never heard the gospel. Fuller adds, drily, that these researches hindered him from doing much of his business, and that the family often went a long while without meat.

(●) 1786 AD: He asked a room full of ministers whether the Great Commission still bound them, and was called an enthusiast for asking. + At a ministers’ meeting in Northampton the chairman, John Ryland the elder, invited the younger men to propose a subject. Nobody spoke, until Carey suggested "whether the command given to the Apostles, to teach all nations, was not obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent." He meant Matthew 28:19–20, the closing scene of the Gospel that the church has long called the Great Commission, where the risen Christ sends the eleven out to make disciples of all nations. The command to go is welded there to a promise, "I am with you always, to the end of the age", and Carey’s question turns on the weld: if the promise reaches us, so does the command. The reply, as Carey’s friend John Webster Morris of Clipstone remembered it, was a shout: "You are a miserable enthusiast for asking such a question. Certainly nothing can be done before another Pentecost, when an effusion of miraculous gifts, including the gift of tongues, will give effect to the commission of Christ as at first." An enthusiast, in the eighteenth century, was not a keen man. The word meant somebody who claimed private promptings from God and acted on them, a fanatic, and it was the accusation respectable Dissenters most dreaded. Ryland the elder never could recall saying any of it, and the familiar version that circulates now ("Sit down, young man") is a later retelling rather than anything a witness wrote down. What is not in doubt is the position behind it. That position had a name. Hyper-Calvinism is the view, held by a serious and devout wing of English Dissent in that generation, that since salvation is entirely God’s work, it is improper to urge the gospel indiscriminately on people or to organize human schemes for converting them; God will save his elect, the people he has chosen, in his own way and in his own time, and hurrying him is not faith but presumption. Carey belonged to the Particular Baptists, the Calvinistic Baptist churches of England, and the argument was going on inside his own denomination. Andrew Fuller had already begun to dismantle it in print. Carey was silenced in the room, so he went to the press instead, and the pamphlet he wrote is the answer he was not allowed to give.

(●) 1792 AD: An eighteen-penny pamphlet and a sermon at Nottingham produced a missionary society within five months. + The pamphlet came out at Leicester in May 1792, a few weeks before the association met at Nottingham. An association, in Baptist usage, is the yearly meeting of the churches of a district, where the ministers preach to one another and settle the business they hold in common. The printing was paid for by a Birmingham merchant named Thomas Potts who had given Carey ten pounds when he heard the manuscript existed, with the profits promised to the mission it proposed. Its title is a sentence in itself: An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. "Means" is the load-bearing word. In the theology of the time it meant the ordinary instruments God works through, preaching, teaching, prayer, printing, as against a direct miracle, and the whole question was whether Christians were obliged to use them for the unreached world or only to wait. Five sections carry the argument: that the commission still binds, what earlier generations attempted, what the state of the world actually is, whether more is practicable, and what Christians should therefore do. The third section is the part nobody expected from a village shoemaker. It is a country-by-country survey of the world’s population and religion, drawn from the voyage literature and set out in tables, and it is essentially the wall map from Moulton turned into print. On 30 May, at the Northamptonshire Baptist association meeting in Nottingham, Carey preached on Isaiah 54:2–3: "Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities." It is a tent dweller’s text. The family has outgrown the tent, and the remedy is not to fold the thing away but to let the cloth out, lengthen the guy ropes and drive the pegs deeper, because the ground the tent is about to cover is wider than anyone in it has pictured. Ryland the younger wrote afterwards that if the whole congregation had wept aloud he would not have been surprised, so clearly did Carey prove the criminality of their supineness. Supineness is lying flat on your back, and the word carries the charge exactly: the accusation was not that these men had done wicked things, but that they had lain still while the map filled up with people nobody had gone to. Two maxims from that sermon have been carried on the banners of the missionary movement ever since: expect great things from God, attempt great things for God. The wording deserves one small caution. No copy of the sermon survives, and the earliest printed report of it, William Staughton’s narrative of the mission in 1811, gives only the shorter pair, expect great things, attempt great things. The phrases naming God are how the next generation filled them out. The date carries the same modest uncertainty: the association sat on the Wednesday and the Thursday, and the nineteenth-century lives put the sermon on 31 May, while most recent accounts put the preaching on the Wednesday and the business of the meeting on the Thursday. The service ended and the ministers began to leave without doing anything. Carey caught Fuller’s arm and said, "And are you, after all, going again to do nothing?" They minuted a promise to prepare a plan. On 2 October 1792, in a back parlour at Kettering, twelve men founded the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen and subscribed thirteen pounds, two shillings and sixpence between them. Fuller described afterwards what they had done, in the words John Ryland wrote down: "Our undertaking to India really appeared to me, on its commencement, to be somewhat like a few men, who were deliberating about the importance of penetrating into a deep mine, which had never before been explored. We had no one to guide us; and while we were thus deliberating, Carey, as it were, said, ‘Well, I will go down, if you will hold the rope.’" The rope-holders became the name for everyone who stayed.

(●) 1793 AD: He sailed for Bengal, and seven years there brought fever, debt, a dead son, and not one convert. + The going was worse than the deciding. Dorothy Carey, pregnant and with three small children, refused to leave England, and Carey resolved to go without her, taking their eldest boy Felix. Their first ship put them off at the Isle of Wight after a passenger’s complaint to the East India Company, and from Ryde he wrote to her: "If I had all the world, I would freely give it all to have you and my dear children with me; but the sense of duty is so strong as to overpower all other considerations; I could not turn back without guilt on my soul." She changed her mind on condition that her sister Kitty came too. On 13 June 1793 the whole party boarded a Danish ship, the Kron Princessa Maria, at Dover, because no English vessel would carry a missionary to India. They reached Calcutta in November. The East India Company, which governed Bengal, kept missionaries out as a matter of policy, on the reasoning that preaching against Hindu and Muslim religion would make the country ungovernable. Carey had no licence to reside and no money; his colleague John Thomas had spent most of what they had. For a year the family moved between rented rooms, a stretch of jungle in the Sundarbans, and the charity of strangers. Then a Christian indigo planter named George Udny offered him the management of a factory at Mudnabati in the north, which came with a Company licence, ninety workmen, and a salary. Indigo is the blue dye that Bengal grew and processed for export, and running a factory was Carey’s cover, his income, and his congregation all at once. It nearly finished them. Fever took him close to death in his first September. In October 1794 his five-year-old son Peter died of dysentery, and caste rules made it hard to find anyone who would dig the grave. Caste is the hereditary ranking that ordered Hindu society, and part of what it fixes is who may do which work and who may handle what; the dead belong to particular groups and to nobody else, so a grieving father from outside the system could not simply hire a pair of hands. Dorothy never recovered. What Carey’s colleague Thomas called her disease, and what her contemporaries called monomania, a settled delusion fixed on one subject in a mind clear about everything else, became permanent: she accused her husband of things he had not done, and for the last twelve years of her life she was mentally ill beyond the reach of the medicine of the day. Through all of it Carey preached, learned Bengali well enough to argue in it, and by 1797 had a New Testament translated and no press to print it on. Seven years passed without a single Indian convert. By any ordinary measure the mission had failed, and Carey had committed the rest of his life to it before the first of those years was over.

(●) 1800 AD: Serampore gave the mission a press, and the last Sunday of the year gave it its first Bengali convert, a carpenter named Krishna Pal. + On 10 January 1800 Carey moved to Serampore, a small Danish settlement fifteen miles up the Hooghly from Calcutta, where the Danish governor was willing to protect what the English Company would not permit. Joshua Marshman, a schoolmaster, and William Ward, a printer, had just arrived from England, and the three of them became what mission history calls the Serampore Trio. Ward was the man Carey had told, years before in Leicester, that he would need a printer when the translations were ready. They held everything in common. The Form of Agreement they drew up in 1805, to be read aloud at every station on the first Lord’s day in January, May and October, bound them to trade on no private account and to pool the product of their labour for their families, the mission, and the widows and orphans of any of them who died. Its last section is the shape of their whole enterprise: "Let us never think that our time, our gifts, our strength, our families, or even the clothes we wear, are our own. Let us sanctify them all to God and His cause." On the last Sunday of December 1800 Carey baptized Krishna Pal in the Hooghly, in front of the Danish governor and a crowd of onlookers. Krishna Pal was a carpenter of about thirty-five who had dislocated his arm falling at his bathing tank; Thomas set the joint and told him that Christ was waiting to heal his soul. He was the first Bengali convert of the Serampore mission, and he became its first Bengali hymn writer and, in time, a missionary to Calcutta and Assam. Breaking caste by eating with Europeans caused more scandal than the baptism did, which tells you which of the two his neighbours took to be the real crossing. The next year brought two more things. The Bengali New Testament came off Ward’s press, the first of the Serampore versions. And to Carey’s astonishment he was invited to teach Bengali at the new Fort William College in Calcutta, where the Company trained its junior civil servants. "To my great surprise I was asked to undertake the Bengali professorship," he wrote home. "I also knew myself to be incapable of filling such a station with reputation and propriety... I therefore consented, with fear and trembling." He held the chair for thirty years, added Sanskrit and Marathi to it, and gave the salary to the mission.

(●) 1812 AD: Fire took the printing house and years of manuscripts, and every lost fount of type was recast within six months. + On the evening of 11 March 1812 smoke came out of the type room at Serampore. Ward and Marshman fought it for four hours with the doors and windows shut and nearly saved the building, until somebody opened a window and the air set the whole length of it alight. By midnight the roof was gone. Carey was in Calcutta and came upriver the next evening to look at it. The losses were his. Fourteen founts of Oriental type went up, a fount being the whole set of cast metal letters for one language in one size, months of casting in every drawer. So did the paper stock and ten Bible versions standing in the press. So did the Sikh and Telugu grammars, the translation of the Ramayana that he and Marshman had spent a year on, and the polyglot dictionary he had been collecting material for since 1811, a single work meant to hold side by side every language descended from Sanskrit. That dictionary would have set his name among the first rank of philologists, the scholars who trace how languages are built and how they are related, and he never went back to it. What survived were the five presses and the steel punches with their matrices, the master letters and the moulds struck from them in which fresh type is cast, which Ward found unharmed in the rubble the next morning. The rebuilding is the part that reads like a parable. Type was being cast from the melted lumps the day after the ashes cooled, because the punches were safe and metal that has been ruined as letters is still perfectly good as metal. Within six months every Oriental fount had been replaced. In England, meanwhile, the news raised the money to restore everything in about fifty days, and the fire did more for the mission’s reputation at home than a decade of appeals had done. Carey and his colleagues noted afterwards that going over the same ground a second time had improved the translations enough to be worth the years it cost. The fire sits in the middle of two decades in which the rest of the work was built, and the pattern of that work is easier to see with the pieces beside each other. Serampore College opened in 1818 to train Indian ministers and to teach Indian students of any religion, and Frederick VI of Denmark gave it a royal charter on 23 February 1827 with the power to grant degrees. On 23 May 1818, the same year the college opened, the Serampore press brought out the Samachar Darpan, a Bengali weekly and one of the first newspapers printed in an Indian language, so that people who had only just been given a printed prose in their own tongue had something new to read in it every week. Then, in 1820, Carey issued the prospectus for an Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, and he wrote into it that Indian gentlemen be eligible not merely as members but as officers, "in precisely the same manner as Europeans." That was not a common sentence in the Calcutta of 1820, and he put it in the founding document rather than saving it for a speech.

(●) 1829 AD: He lived to see widow-burning made a crime, and died at Serampore five years later. + Sati, sometimes written suttee, was the burning of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. Carey came on one in the spring of 1799, travelling by river near the village of Noya Serai, and argued with the family until arguing was no use. He did not begin with a protest. He began with arithmetic: he sent his pundits, the Indian scholars who worked with him daily on the translations, out for thirty miles around Calcutta to count the cases, and in six months of 1803 they brought back two hundred and seventy-five burnings from that small district alone. The numbers went before the government in a series of memorials, a memorial being a formal written petition that lays out a case and asks the authorities to act on it. He did the same for the sacrifice of children at Sagar Island, where the Ganges meets the sea, and that practice was declared murder and punishable by death in 1802. The widows took longer, and the delay was not for want of asking. Lord Wellesley took a first step on Carey’s memorial in 1805. The government of 1812 chose instead to regulate the practice, setting out the conditions under which a burning would be lawful, and that made it worse rather than better. Regulating a thing is a way of endorsing it: a burning conducted by the rules now had the countenance of the law behind it. Carey kept the evidence coming, the Serampore press kept publishing it, and his own chief pundit Mritunjaya, the head jurist of the College of Fort William, gave the judgment that mattered most in the argument: the Hindu law books permit a widow’s burning as an alternative to a life of austerity, and an alternative has not the force of a command. On 4 December 1829 Lord William Bentinck, advised by civil servants Carey had trained, made it culpable homicide. A later tradition says Carey was handed the edict on a Sunday morning, sent word that there would be no church for him that day, and translated it into Bengali at once so that no widow should die for want of an hour; the story is told by his later biographers rather than by any document from that week. He finished his last revision of the whole Bengali Bible in June 1832, the fifth edition of the Old Testament and the eighth of the New, and carried the first copy out of the binder’s hands into the pulpit at John Mack’s ordination as co-pastor, speaking to the converts and their children from Simeon’s words, "Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation" (Luke 2:29–30). He died at Serampore on 9 June 1834, aged seventy-two, having never once returned to England in forty-one years. Near the end the young Scottish missionary Alexander Duff sat with him and talked about Carey’s life until the dying man whispered for prayer. As Duff was leaving he heard his name and turned back: "Mr. Duff, you have been speaking about Dr. Carey, Dr. Carey; when I am gone, say nothing about Dr. Carey; speak about Dr. Carey’s Saviour." His will directed that his funeral be as plain as possible and that nothing be cut on the stone but his name, his dates, and two lines of Isaac Watts: "A wretched, poor, and helpless worm, On Thy kind arms I fall."

What He Taught

(T1) Christ’s command to disciple all nations still binds ordinary Christians. + Think of an order left by an employer who has gone abroad. If nobody has countermanded it, if there is still work of that kind to do, and if the thing can physically be done, then the order stands, and "we are waiting for a sign" is not an answer. That is exactly how Carey argues in the first section of the Enquiry, and it is the argument the ministers at Northampton had refused to hear. He takes the objection seriously first. The apostles were extraordinary men with extraordinary gifts, and much that was right for them would be presumption in us, so perhaps the command to go was theirs alone. Carey answers in three moves. If the command to teach all nations was limited to the apostles, the command to baptize in the same sentence must be limited too, and every church that baptizes is acting without warrant. If it was limited to them, then every ordinary minister who has ever carried the gospel to a foreign people has run before he was sent. And if it was limited to them, the promise attached to it must be limited as well, which is impossible, because the promise is worded to exclude that: "I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). Then he turns the question around and asks what could actually release a person from a command God has given. There are four things, he says, and only four. The command could be repealed outright, the way the ceremonial law of Israel was, the sacrifices and purity rules that ended when Christ fulfilled them. There could be nobody left to obey it toward, the way the law of release, the cancelling of debts every seventh year, has nothing to do in a land where God has blessed his people so that there is no poor person in it (Deuteronomy 15:4). There could be a fresh word from God countermanding the old one, as when the Spirit stopped Paul and Silas at the border and would not let them preach in Bithynia (Acts 16:6–7). Or the thing could be flatly impossible in the nature of the case. None of the four applies, he says, and the last one least of all. Merchants were already crossing the very oceans the church was calling impassable, and they were doing it for otter skins.

(Q) "Where a command exists nothing can be necessary to render it binding but a removal of those obstacles which render obedience impossible, and these are removed already." + Source: William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, Section I (Leicester, 1792). The sentence comes in his reply to the people who said the church should not force its way but wait for the openings and leadings of Providence. Carey’s point is that waiting for a providential opening is not humility once the opening has come and been used by somebody selling cloth (T3).

(T2) Praying for the world’s conversion without working for it is half an obedience. + Carey is not arguing against prayer, and it would be a serious misreading of him to think so. The fifth section of the Enquiry opens by naming fervent and united prayer as the first and most important duty in the whole business, and says flatly that every other means used without the Spirit will be ineffectual. He had good reason to think so. Since 1784 the Northamptonshire Baptist churches had kept a monthly hour of prayer for the spread of the gospel, prompted by Jonathan Edwards’ Humble Attempt, which John Sutcliff went on to reprint at Olney in 1789. Carey trusts those eight years of meetings have not been in vain, feeble and unimportunate as he says the praying has been, unimportunate being his own word for asking that never presses. What he refuses is the separation of the praying from the going, and the comparison he reaches for is the one nobody in his audience could pretend not to understand. The trading companies of his day did not stop at obtaining a charter and hoping. They fitted out ships, chose their officers, crossed the worst seas on the map, and lived in suspense until the cargo came home, and they did all that because their happiness depended on it. Christians have a charter that is wider and returns that are better, and act as though neither existed. This is the practical answer to hyper-Calvinism (the view that since God alone converts, human schemes for converting are presumption), and it is worth noticing how Carey answers it. He does not deny that God alone gives the increase. He denies that this makes the planting optional. Paul plants and Apollos waters, and it is still God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6); no farmer has ever concluded from that verse that he need not sow.

(Q) "We must not be contented however with praying, without exerting ourselves in the use of means for the obtaining of those things we pray for." + Source: William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, Section V (Leicester, 1792). The sentence immediately precedes his description of the trading company that goes to the utmost limits of its charter, and it is followed by his proposal that a society be formed, with a committee, rules, and subscriptions of a penny a week.

(T3) The hardships that stop the church are hardships merchants cross every year for profit. + The fourth section of the Enquiry is a list of excuses with an answer under each: distance, the unfamiliar manner of life, the danger of being killed, the difficulty of getting food, and the languages. Carey takes them one at a time, and the method is the same each time. He asks who is already doing this, and for what. Distance, he says, was an argument before the mariner’s compass and is not one now, when ships cross the Pacific as reliably as the Mediterranean. Danger is real, and he does not pretend otherwise: whoever goes must put his life in his hand. But the Moravian Brethren, the German Protestant community whose missionaries were already in Greenland, Labrador and the West Indies, have gone into worse places than anyone was proposing, and so have the traders. Learning a language takes a year or two of patience and mixing with people, which is what merchants manage when there is money in it. And the accusation of savagery he turns straight around: the people are as capable as we are of adorning the gospel and defending it in writing, and their condition is an argument for going rather than against it. He is hardest on the comfortable. Ministers, he says, are already committed to this by ordination. A Christian minister is in a peculiar sense not his own, and it is inconsistent for him to picture a numerous congregation, cordial friends, legal protection and a competent income as the terms of his service. Carey then went and lived the paragraph for forty-one years, which is why it has never been easy to answer.

(Q) "It only requires that we should have as much love to the souls of our fellow-creatures, and fellow sinners, as they have for the profits arising from a few otter-skins, and all these difficulties would be easily surmounted." + Source: William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, Section IV (Leicester, 1792). The otter skins are the North American fur trade, whose agents were living for years among peoples that English Christians called unreachable. Carey’s sentence is not sarcasm at their expense. It is a measurement: the traders’ motive is weaker than ours and their performance is better.

(T4) A people has not been reached until it has the Scriptures in its own tongue. + A preacher reaches as far as his voice carries. A printed Bible in the language people dream in reaches everyone who can read and everyone the readers read to, and it keeps reaching them after the preacher dies. That conviction is why Carey, who could have spent his life preaching, spent most of it at a desk, and why he guarded those hours against every other demand for forty years. The scale is easier to grasp in pieces than in totals. When he arrived, Bengali had almost no printed literature; he could find only forty separate works in manuscript at Nuddea, the region’s centre of learning, for a population of tens of millions. Brahmin and Mughal scholarship alike treated the vernacular, the everyday language people actually spoke to each other at home, as fit only for demons and women. Carey printed a Bengali New Testament in 1801, then a grammar, then a book of dialogues written out of the idiom and slang of ordinary conversation, then a dictionary of eighty thousand words. He set his pundits to writing Bengali prose and printed that too, and one of them produced what is generally counted the first Bengali prose book on a historical subject. He was clear that he was a forerunner and said so repeatedly. The Serampore versions were first attempts, made fast and by a small team with limited helps, and Carey expected them to be superseded, first by better European scholars and then by Indian translators of their own. He deprecated the talk of his having translated the Bible into forty languages, and the honest accounting he offered is fourfold: some versions were his own work, some his colleagues’ and their pundits’, some he revised and edited, and some he only saw through his press. The Bengali, Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi were his.

(Q) "You, madam, will excuse my brevity when I inform you that all my time for writting letters is stolen from the work of transcribing the Scriptures into the Bengali language." + Source: Carey, letter of 1797, quoted in George Smith, The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker and Missionary, chapter 10 (London, 1885). The spelling of "writting" is Carey’s own, as Smith prints it. He was four years into Bengal, with no press, no convert, and a New Testament in manuscript. The apology is to a correspondent who had asked for longer letters, and he sent much the same note to many others.

(T5) Every soul is of equal value to God, and that belief has consequences a government can be made to act on. + Carey’s campaigns against widow-burning and child sacrifice did not come out of a general benevolence. They came out of what he believed about the people among whom he lived: that a Sudra, a member of the lowest of the four traditional castes, and an English gentleman were of one value in the sight of God, and that a government could be made to act as though that were true. The Form of Agreement he signed in 1805 opens with it, binding the brotherhood to set an infinite value upon immortal souls before it says anything about method. Notice how he worked, because it is not how a modern campaign works. He did not denounce; he counted. Pundits were sent thirty miles around Calcutta to record every case of sati by name and place, and in six months of 1803 they came back with two hundred and seventy-five. The numbers went to the government in memorials with the legal question attached: does the Hindu law actually command this, or merely permit it as one option among others? When his own chief pundit Mritunjaya, the senior jurist of the College of Fort William, gave the answer that the law books permit rather than require it, the religious defence of the practice lost its ground. The same method carried the regulation against child sacrifice at Sagar Island in 1802 and, after twenty-five more years, the ban of 1829. Alongside the campaigns he built the ordinary things: schools that took Hindu and Muslim children, a college that trained Indian ministers and taught Indian students of any religion, a newspaper, a savings bank for the poor, a botanic garden, and a horticultural society with Indian officers. He published his friend William Roxburgh’s Flora Indica at his own risk when no English botanist would, and set a line from the Psalms on its title page: All Thy works praise Thee, O Lord.

(Q) "I told them I would not go, that I was determined to stay and see the murder, and that I should certainly bear witness of it at the tribunal of God." + Source: Carey to John Ryland, Mudnabati, 1 April 1799, quoted in George Smith, The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker and Missionary, chapters 4 and 11 (London, 1885). He was walking beside the river near the village of Noya Serai, coming back from Calcutta, when he saw the crowd and the pile. He asked whether it was the widow’s own choice, was told it was entirely voluntary, and talked until reasoning was of no use; then he exclaimed against it and called it shocking murder. They answered that it was a great act of holiness and suggested, in a very surly manner, that if he did not like to watch he might stand farther off. It was the first of the many such scenes he would see, and thirty years of counting, memorials and printed evidence grew out of it.

(Q) "If he give me credit for being a plodder he will describe me justly. Anything beyond this will be too much. I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything." + Source: Carey to his nephew Eustace Carey, in Eustace Carey, Memoir of William Carey, D.D. (London, 1836), quoted in George Smith, The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker and Missionary, preface (London, 1885). He said it to the nephew he suspected of planning to write his life, and offered it as the test of whether any such book was accurate. He had written much the same to John Ryland in December 1811, when asked how his team could possibly translate into so many languages: "Few people know what may be done till they try, and persevere in what they undertake."

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His pamphlet settled an argument inside his own tradition about whether the gospel may be pressed on anyone at all. + The men Carey had to persuade were not worldlings. John Gill and John Brine, the leading Particular Baptist theologians of the previous generation, had taught that since faith is a gift given to the elect, a preacher may describe the gospel but may not urge unbelievers to believe it, because they cannot and the call would be a mockery. It was a position reached by taking God’s sovereignty with complete seriousness, and its practical effect was a church that had no reason to go anywhere. The theological answer came from Andrew Fuller, whose The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1785) argued that the inability of a sinner to come to Christ is a moral inability, an unwillingness rather than a missing faculty, and that the gospel may therefore be pressed on everyone without qualification. The distinction is an ordinary one once it is put in ordinary terms. A man with two broken legs cannot come to dinner, and urging him to walk over would be a cruelty. A man who simply will not sit at that table can walk perfectly well, and urging him is the kindest thing anyone could do for him, because the only thing keeping him away is that he does not want to come. Fuller’s case is that every sinner is the second man and none is the first. Carey’s Enquiry is the practical half of the same case: if the gospel may be pressed on everyone, then everyone includes Bengal. Fuller himself put the division of labour plainly when he stayed home to hold the ropes while Carey went down the mine. The two together changed the temper of English evangelical Calvinism, and Fullerism, as their opponents and then everybody else came to call it, became the working theology of the missionary societies that followed. Carey never abandoned the Calvinism he was raised in; what he abandoned was the inference that had been drawn from it, and the Serampore mission was built on the conviction that God’s decree includes the means as surely as the end.

(†) Within twenty years of the Kettering meeting, most of the Protestant world had copied it. + The Baptist society of 1792 had twelve subscribers and thirteen pounds. What followed is one of the clearest chains of cause and effect in church history, and the dates tell it better than any summary of them. The London Missionary Society was founded in 1795. The Scottish and Glasgow societies came in 1796, the Church Missionary Society in 1799, the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810, and then the American Baptist convention of 1814, which came into being for the odd reason that a missionary had already sailed and somebody now had to support him. That missionary was Adoniram Judson. He and his wife Ann left for India in February 1812 as Congregationalists, studied the question of baptism on the voyage, and were baptized at Calcutta that September by William Ward; it was to the Serampore brotherhood that they came, and Judson went on to Burma. The men who went afterwards said where they had got it. Henry Martyn, the Cambridge scholar who translated the New Testament into Urdu and Persian before dying at thirty-one, worked in Carey’s circle and prayed in the converted pagoda near the Serampore mission house. Alexander Duff came to Carey for advice before founding the schools that reshaped Scottish missions in India. Hudson Taylor, who founded the China Inland Mission, belonged to the generation formed by the story. The Bible societies took up the translation work on a scale Serampore could not sustain, and the versions Carey had called first attempts were revised or replaced, which is what he had said would happen and wanted to happen. He had described himself as breaking up the ground for successors, and named them: better scholars first, and then Indian translators of their own, whom he compared to Tyndale and Luther.

(†) In India his legacy is as much in printing, schooling and law as in the churches he planted. + Bengali literature is the clearest case. Carey found a language that scholars refused to write in and left it with a grammar, a dictionary of eighty thousand words, a body of printed prose, a newspaper, and a generation of Indian writers and printers trained at his press. George Grierson, who directed the Linguistic Survey of India, summed the Serampore work up on the Bible Society’s centenary in 1904: before them the Protestant versions in the languages of India could be counted on the fingers of one hand; most of the Serampore versions were first attempts and have been superseded, "but the first step is always the most important one, and this was taken by Carey and his brethren." Serampore College, chartered by Frederick VI of Denmark in 1827, still grants degrees under the oldest such charter in India, and it was founded on the principle that Indian students of any religion could be taught there and Indian ministers trained there rather than imported. The regulations against child sacrifice in 1802 and widow-burning in 1829 stand on evidence Carey’s pundits collected. Indian writers have been arguing about him ever since, and not always in his favour, but the argument is about a man whose work is woven into the period rather than laid on top of it. Within the churches, the pattern he set at Serampore has proved more durable than any single institution: preach, translate the Scriptures into the mother tongue, plant a church with its own members and its own pastors, and train indigenous ministers from the start. Krishna Pal, the carpenter he baptized in 1800, was preaching in Calcutta before long and carried the gospel as far as Assam, and the mission’s station lists carry Bengali names from the first decade.

(†) Where his own record is uneven: he treated his wife’s refusal as an obstacle rather than a claim. + Honesty requires the other column of the ledger, and here it is short but real, because it comes from Carey’s own letters rather than from anyone else’s use of his example. Dorothy Carey did not want to go to Bengal. She was pregnant, she had small children, she could not read, and she had never been more than a few miles from the village she was born in. Carey’s response was to sail without her and take their eldest son, and his letter from Ryde states the reasoning without flinching: "If I had all the world, I would freely give it all to have you and my dear children with me; but the sense of duty is so strong as to overpower all other considerations; I could not turn back without guilt on my soul." She followed only because the first ship put them ashore, and only on condition that her sister came with her. What the voyage she had not wanted eventually cost her is all on the record: she buried a son at Mudnabati, she lost her mind there, and she died in 1807, after twelve years of an illness no one in Bengal knew how to treat. Carey never spoke a word of reproach against her, nursed her himself for years when he would rather have been at his desk, and by every account of the Serampore brotherhood behaved toward her with unfailing gentleness. The difficulty is upstream of all that. He had reasoned his way to the conclusion that a divine command overrides every competing consideration, and the reasoning that produced the Enquiry is the same reasoning that produced that letter. Scripture does not treat a wife’s claim as a lesser consideration to be overpowered (Ephesians 5:25–29; 1 Peter 3:7), and Carey’s own Enquiry had recommended that missionaries go two together and as married men, with others sent along to provide for the households. He was more candid about the other criticism. Asked how his team could translate into so many languages at once, he defended the pace, but he also said repeatedly that the versions were first attempts and would need replacing. Both things turned out to be true: the reach was extraordinary and much of the work was rough, and he is the first witness for the second half of that sentence.