George Smith

“ Every great reform in the world has been, in the first instance, the work of one man, who, however much he may have been the product of his time, has conceived and begun to execute the movement which transforms society. This is true alike of the moral and the physical forces of history, of contemporaries so apparently opposite in character and aims as Carey and Clarkson on the one side and Napoleon and Wellington on the other. ”

“ She sees the earth rising higher and higher around her, without upbraiding her murderers, or making the least effort to arise and make her escape. At length the earth reaches her lips—covers her head. The rest of the earth is then hastily thrown in, and these children and relations mount the grave, and tread down the earth upon the head of the suffocating widow—the mother!"
Before Carey, what had been done to turn the millions of North India from such darkness as that? Nothing, beyond the brief and impulsive efforts of Thomas. ”

“ I have also so continual a fear that I may at last fall some way or other so as to dishonour the Gospel that I have often desired that my name may be buried in oblivion; and indeed I have reason for those fears, for I am so prone to sin that I wonder every night that I have been preserved from foul crimes through the day, and when I escape a temptation I esteem it to be a miracle of grace which has preserved me. I never was so fully persuaded as I am now that no habit of religion is a security from falling into the foulest crimes, and I need the immediate help of God every moment. ”

“ What a meeting must that have been between him and Carey when, already stricken by fever, he found a sanctuary in Aldeen, and learned at Serampore the sweetness of telling to the natives of India in one of their own tongues the love of God. William Carey and Henry Martyn were one in origin, from the people; in industry, as scholars; in genius, as God-devoted; in the love of a great heart not always returned. The older man left the church of his fathers because there was no Simeon and no missionary society, and he made his own university ”

“ Like the growth of a tree is the development of a language, as really and as strictly according to law. In savage lands like those of Africa the missionary finds the living germs of speech, arranges them for the first time in grammatical order, expresses them in written and printed form, using the simplest, most perfect, and most universal character of all—the Roman, and at one bound gives the most degraded of the dark peoples the possibility of the highest civilisation and the divinest future. ”

“ In an obscure village, toiling save when he slept, and finding rest on Sunday only by a change of toil, far from libraries and the society of men with more advantages than his own, this shoemaker, still under thirty, surveys the whole world, continent by continent, island by island, race by race, faith by faith, kingdom by kingdom, tabulating his results with an accuracy, and following them up with a logical power of generalisation which would extort the admiration of the learned even of the present day. ”

“ In what he did for science, for literature, and for humanity, as in what he abstained from doing in the practical region of public life, the first English missionary was an example to all of every race who have followed him in the past century. From Carey to Livingstone, alike in Asia and Africa, the greatest Christian evangelists have been those who have made science and literature the handmaids of missions. ”

“ No man in England had apparently a more wretched lot or more miserable prospects than he. He had started in life as a journeyman shoemaker at eighteen, burdened with a payment to his first master's widow which his own kind heart had led him to offer, and with the price of his second master's stock and business. Trade was good for the moment, and he had married, before he was twenty, one who brought him the most terrible sorrow a man can bear. ”

“ A large field opens on every side, and millions of perishing heathens, tormented in this life by idolatry, superstition, and ignorance, and exposed to eternal miseries in the world to come, are pleading; yea, all their miseries plead as soon as they are known, with every heart that loves God, and with all the churches of the living God. Oh, that many labourers may be thrust out into the vineyard of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the gentiles may come to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Him! ”

“ Judge yourself whether it is comely that a man, who has laboriously and disinterestedly served the mission so many years—who has by his diligence and hard labour raised the most respectable school in India, as well as given a tone to all the others—who has unvaryingly consecrated the whole of that income, as well as his other labours, to the cause of God in India,—should be arraigned and condemned without a hearing by a few young men just arrived, and one of whom had not been a month in the country before he joined the senseless outcry? ”

“ DEAR AND HONOURED FATHER,—The importance of spending our time for God alone, is the principal theme of the gospel. I beseech you, brethren, says Paul, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is your reasonable service. To be devoted like a sacrifice to holy uses, is the great business of a christian, pursuant to these requisitions. I consider myself as devoted to the service of God alone, and now I am to realise my professions. ”

“ At this hour, more than a century since Carey wrote, and after a remarkable missionary revival in consequence of what he wrote and did, all Christendom, Evangelical, Greek, and Latin, does not give more than five millions sterling a year to Christianise the majority of the race still outside its pale. It is not too much to say that were Carey's penny a week from every Christian a fact, and the prayer which would sooner or later accompany it, the five millions would be fifty, and Christendom would become a term nearly synonymous with humanity. ”

“ Nor had any writer, official or missionary, anywhere realised the state of India and the needs of the Hindoo and Mohammedan cultivators as flowing from the relation of the people to the soil. India was in truth a land of millions of peasant proprietors on five-acre farms, rack-rented or plundered by powerful middlemen, both squeezed or literally tortured by the Government of the day, and driven to depend on the usurer for even the seed for each crop. War and famine had alternated in keeping down the population. Ignorance and fear had blunted the natural shrewdness of the cultivator. ”

“ After all, the uncivilised state of the heathen, instead of affording an objection against preaching the gospel to them, ought to furnish an argument for it. Can we as men, or as Christians, hear that a great part of our fellow-creatures, whose souls are as immortal as ours, and who are as capable as ourselves of adorning the gospel and contributing by their preachings, writings, or practices to the glory of our Redeemer's name and the good of his church, are enveloped in ignorance and barbarism? ”

“ Perhaps no man ever exerted a greater influence for good on a great cause. Who that saw him, poor and in seats of learning uneducated, embark on such an enterprise, could ever dream that, in little more than forty years, Christendom should be animated with the same spirit, thousands forsake all to follow his example, and that the Word of Life should be translated into almost every language and preached in almost every corner of the earth? ”

“ Carey, childlike in his humility, is the most striking illustration in all Hagiology, Protestant or Romanist, of the Lord's declaration to the Twelve when He had set a little child in the midst of them, "Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven." Yet we, nigh a century after he went forth with the Gospel to Hindostan, may venture to place him where the Church History of the future is likely to keep him—amid the uncrowned kings of men who have made Christian England what it is, under God, to its own people and to half the human race. ”

“ His intercourse with the chaplains and bishops of the Church of England, and with the missionaries of other Churches and societies, was as loving in its degree as his relations to his own people. With men of the world, from the successive Governor-Generals, from Wellesley, Hastings, and Bentinck, down to the scholars, merchants, and planters with whom he became associated for the public good, William Carey was ever the saint and the gentleman whom it was a privilege to know. ”

“ There was no reply, till at last the Moulton preacher suggested, doubtless with an ill-restrained excitement, "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." Neither Fuller nor Carey himself had yet delivered the Particular Baptists from the yoke of hyper-calvinism which had to that hour shut the heathen out of a dead Christendom, and the aged chairman shouted out the rebuke—"You are a miserable enthusiast for asking such a question. ”

“ Carey wrote from his own experience, and he unwittingly painted his own character. The peasant bearing of his early youth showed itself throughout his life in a certain shyness, which gave a charm to his converse with old and young. Occasionally, as in a letter which he wrote to his friend Pearce of Birmingham, at a time when he did not know whether his distant correspondent was alive or dead, he burst forth into an unrestrained enthusiasm of affection and service. ”

“ Sometimes I am quite dejected when I see the impenetrability of the hearts of those with us. They hear us preach on the Lord's-day, but we are forced to witness their disregard to God all the week. O may God give us greater success among the heathen. I am very desirous that my children may pursue the same work; and now intend to bring up one in the study of Sanskrit, and another of Persian. O may God give them grace to fit them for the work! ”

“ For years Carey stood alone in India, as Grant and Wilberforce did in England, in the darkest hour of England's moral degradation and spiritual death, when the men who were shaping the destinies of India were the Hindooising Stewarts and Youngs, Prendergasts, Twinings, and Warings, some of whom hated missions from the dread of sedition, others because their hearts "seduced by fair idolatresses had fallen to idols foul." ”

“ Brother Marshman is no more perfect than other men, partakers like him of the grace of God. His natural bias and habits are his own, and differ as much from those of other men as theirs differ from one another. I do not deny that he has an inclination to display his children to advantage. This, however, is a foible which most fond parents will be inclined to pardon. I wish I had half his piety, energy of mind, and zeal for the cause of God. ”

“ England might send its nobly born to erect the material and the secular fabric of empire, but it was only, in the providence of God, that they might prepare for the poor village 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. ”

“ Would not the spread of the gospel be the most effectual mean of their civilisation? Would not that make them useful members of society? We know that such effects did in a measure follow the afore-mentioned efforts of Eliot, Brainerd, and others amongst the American Indians; and if similar attempts were made in other parts of the world, and succeeded with a divine blessing (which we have every reason to think they would) , might we not expect to see able divines, or read well-conducted treatises in defence of the truth, even amongst those who at present seem to be scarcely human? ”