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LIFE OF WILLIAM
CAREY
Shoemaker & Missionary
BY GEORGE SMITH C.I.E., LL.D.
FIRST ISSUE OF THIS EDITION 1909
REPRINTED...1913, 1922
CHAPTER 3
INDIA AS CAREY FOUND IT
1793
Tahiti v. Bengal--Carey and Thomas appointed missionaries to Bengal--The
farewell at Leicester--John Thomas, first medical missionary--Carey’s
letter to his father--The Company’s "abominable monopoly"--The
voyage--Carey’s aspirations for world-wide missions--Lands at
Calcutta--His description of Bengal in 1793--Contrast presented by Carey
to Clive, Hastings, and Cornwallis--The spiritual founder of an Indian
Empire of Christian Britain--Bengal and the famine of 1769-70--The
Decennial Settlement declared permanent--Effects on the landed
classes--Obstacles to Carey’s work--East India Company at its worst--Hindooism
and the Bengalees in 1793--Position of Hindoo women--Missionary attempts
before Carey’s--Ziegenbalg and Schwartz--Kiernander and the chaplains--Hindooised
state of Anglo-Indian society and its reaction on England--Guneshan Dass,
the first caste Hindoo to visit England--William Carey had no predecessor.
CAREY had desired to go first to Tahiti or Western Africa. The natives of
North America and the negroes of the West Indies and Sierra Leone were
being cared for by Moravian and Wesleyan evangelists. The narrative of
Captain Cook’s two first voyages to the Pacific and discovery of Tahiti
had appeared in the same year in which the Northampton churches began
their seven years’ concert of prayer, just after his own second baptism.
From the map, and a leather globe which also he is said to have made, he
had been teaching the children of Piddington, Moulton, and Leicester the
great outlines and thrilling details of expeditions round the world which
roused both the scientific and the simple of England as much as the
discoveries of Columbus had excited Europe. When the childlike ignorance
and natural grace of the Hawaiians, which had at first fired him with the
longing to tell them the good news of God, were seen turned into the wild
justice of revenge, which made Cook its first victim, Carey became all the
more eager to anticipate the disasters of later days. That was work for
which others were to be found. It was not amid the scattered and decimated
savages of the Pacific or of America that the citadel of heathenism was
found, nor by them that the world, old and new, was to be made the kingdom
of Christ. With the cautious wisdom that marked all Fuller’s action,
though perhaps with the ignorance that was due to Carey’s absence, the
third meeting of the new society recorded this among other articles "to be
examined and discussed in the most diligent and impartial manner--In what
part of the heathen world do there seem to be the most promising
openings?"
The answer, big with consequence for the future of the East, was in their
hands, in the form of a letter from Carey, who stated that "Mr. Thomas,
the Bengal missionary," was trying to raise a fund for that province, and
asked "whether it would not be worthy of the Society to try to make that
and ours unite with one fund for the purpose of sending the gospel to the
heathen indefinitely." Tahiti was not to be neglected, nor Africa, nor
Bengal, in "our larger plan," which included above four hundred millions
of our fellowmen, among whom it was an object "worthy of the most ardent
and persevering pursuit to disseminate the humane and saving principles of
the Christian Religion." If this Mr. Thomas were worthy, his experience
made it desirable to begin with Bengal. Thomas answered for himself at the
next meeting, when Carey fell upon his neck and wept, having previously
preached from the words--"Behold I come quickly, and My reward is with
Me." "We saw," said Fuller afterwards, "there was a gold mine in India,
but it was as deep as the centre of the earth. Who will venture to explore
it? ‘I will venture to go down,’ said Carey, ‘but remember that you
(addressing Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland) must hold the ropes.’ We
solemnly engaged to him to do so, nor while we live shall we desert him."
Carey and Thomas, an ordained minister and a medical evangelist, were at
this meeting in Kettering, on 10th January 1793, appointed missionaries to
"the East Indies for preaching the gospel to the heathen," on "?100 or
?150 a year between them all,"--that is, for two missionaries, their
wives, and four children,--until they should be able to support themselves
like the Moravians. As a matter of fact they received just ?200 in all for
the first three years when self-support and mission extension fairly
began. The whole sum at credit of the Society for outfit, passage, and
salaries was ?130, so that Fuller’s prudence was not without justification
when supported by Thomas’s assurances that the amount was enough, and
Carey’s modest self-sacrifice. "We advised Mr. Carey," wrote Fuller to
Ryland, "to give up his school this quarter, for we must make up the loss
to him." The more serious cost of the passage was raised by Fuller and by
the preaching tours of the two missionaries. During one of these, at Hull,
Carey met the printer and newspaper editor, William Ward, and cast his
mantle over him thus--"If the Lord bless us, we shall want a person of
your business to enable us to print the Scriptures; I hope you will come
after us." Ward did so in five years.
The 20th March 1793 was a high day in the Leicester chapel, Harvey Lane,
when the missionaries were set apart like Barnabas and Paul--a forenoon of
prayer; an afternoon of preaching by Thomas from Psalm xvi. 4; "Their
sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another God;" an evening of
preaching by the treasurer from Acts xxi. 14, "And when he would not be
persuaded, we ceased, saying, the will of the Lord be done;" and the
parting charge by Fuller the secretary, from the risen Lord’s own
benediction and forthsending of His disciples, "Peace be unto you, as My
Father hath sent Me, even so send I you." Often in after days of solitude
and reproach did Carey quicken his faith by reading the brave and loving
words of Fuller on "the objects you must keep in view, the directions you
must observe, the difficulties you must encounter, the reward you may
expect."
Under date four days after we find this entry in the Church Book--"Mr.
Carey, our minister, justify Leicester to go on a mission to the East
Indies, to take and propagate the Gospel among those idolatrous and
superstitious heathens. This is inserted to show his love to his poor
miserable fellow-creatures. In this we concurred with him, though it is at
the expense of losing one whom we love as our own souls." When Carey’s
preaching had so filled the church that it became necessary to build a
front gallery at a cost of ?98, and they had applied to several other
churches for assistance in vain, he thus taught them to help themselves.
The minister and many of the members agreed to pay off the debt "among
ourselves" by weekly subscriptions,--a process, however, which covered
five years, so poor were they. Carey justify this as a parting lesson to
home congregations, while his people found it the easier to pay the debt
that they had sacrificed their best, their own minister, to the work of
missions for which he had taught them to pray.
John Thomas, four years older than Carey, was a surgeon, who had made two
voyages to Calcutta in the Oxford Indiaman, had been of spiritual service
to Charles Grant, Mr. George Udny, and the Bengal civilian circle at Malda,
and had been supported by Mr. Grant as a missionary for a time until his
eccentricities and debts outraged his friends and drove him home at the
time of the Kettering meetings. Full justice has been done to a character
and a career somewhat resembling those of John Newton, by his patient and
able biographer the Rev. C. B. Lewis. John Thomas has the merit of being
the first medical missionary, at a time when no other Englishman cared for
either the bodies or souls of our recently acquired subjects in North
India, outside of Charles Grant’s circle. He has more; he was used by God
to direct Carey to the dense Hindoo population of Bengal--to the people
and to the centre, that is, where Brahmanism had its seat, and whence
Buddhism had been carried by thousands of missionaries all over Southern,
Eastern, and Central Asia. But there our ascription of merit to Thomas
must stop. However well he might speak the uncultured Bengali, he never
could write the language or translate the Bible into a literary style so
that it could be understood by the people or influence their leaders. His
temper kept Charles Grant back from helping the infant mission, though
anxious to see Mr. Carey and to aid him and any other companion. The debts
of Thomas caused him and Carey to be excluded from the Oxford, in which
his friend the commander had agreed to take them and their party without a
licence; clouded the early years of the enterprise with their shadow, and
formed the heaviest of the many burdens Carey had to bear at starting. If,
afterwards, the old association of Thomas with Mr. Udny at Malda gave
Carey a home during his Indian apprenticeship, this was a small atonement
for the loss of the direct help of Mr. Grant. If Carey proved to be the
John among the men who began to make Serampore illustrious, Thomas was the
Peter, so far as we know Peter in the Gospels only.
Just before being ejected from the Oxford, as he had been deprived of the
effectual help of Charles Grant through his unhappy companion, when with
only his eldest son Felix beside him, how did Carey view his God-given
mission? The very different nature of his wife, who had announced to him
the birth of a child, clung anew to the hope that this might cause him to
turn back. Writing from Ryde on the 6th May he thus replied with sweet
delicacy of human affection, but with true loyalty to his Master’s call:--
"Received yours, giving me an account of your safe delivery. This is
pleasant news indeed to me; surely goodness and mercy follow me all my
days. My stay here was very painful and unpleasant, but now I see the
goodness of God in it. It was that I might hear the most pleasing accounts
that I possibly could hear respecting earthly things. You wish to know in
what state my mind is. I answer, it is much as when I justify you. 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. I
find a longing desire to enjoy more of God; but, now I am among the people
of the world, I think I see more beauties in godliness than ever, and, I
hope, enjoy more of God in retirement than I have done for some time
past...You want to know what Mrs. Thomas thinks, and how she likes the
voyage...She would rather stay in England than go to India; but thinks it
right to go with her husband...Tell my dear children I love them dearly,
and pray for them constantly. Felix sends his love. I look upon this mercy
as an answer to prayer indeed. Trust in God. Love to Kitty, brothers,
sisters, etc. Be assured I love you most affectionately. Let me know my
dear little child’s name.--I am, for ever, your faithful and affectionate
husband,
"WILLIAM CAREY.
"My health never was so well. I believe the sea makes Felix and me both as
hungry as hunters. I can eat a monstrous meat supper, and drink a couple
of glasses of wine after it, without hurting me at all. Farewell."
She was woman and wife enough, in the end, to do as Mrs. Thomas had done,
but she stipulated that her sister should accompany her.
By a series of specially providential events, as it seemed, such as marked
the whole early history of this first missionary enterprise of modern
England, Carey and Thomas secured a passage on board the Danish Indiaman
Kron Princessa Maria, bound from Copenhagen to Serampore. At Dover, where
they had been waiting for days, the eight were roused from sleep by the
news that the ship was off the harbour. Sunrise on the 13th June saw them
on board. Carey had had other troubles besides his colleague and his wife.
His father, then fifty-eight years old, had not given him up without a
struggle. "Is William mad?" he had said when he received the letter in
which his son thus offered himself up on the missionary altar. His mother
had died six years before:--
"LEICESTER, Jan. 17th, 1793.
"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. I am
appointed to go to Bengal, in the East Indies, a missionary to the Hindoos.
I shall have a colleague who has been there five or six years already, and
who understands their language. They are the most mild and inoffensive
people in all the world, but are enveloped in the greatest superstition,
and in the grossest ignorance...I hope, dear father, you may be enabled to
surrender me up to the Lord for the most arduous, honourable, and
important work that ever any of the sons of men were called to engage in.
I have many sacrifices to make. I must part with a beloved family, and a
number of most affectionate friends. Never did I see such sorrow
manifested as reigned through our place of worship last Lord’s-day. But I
have set my hand to the plough.--I remain, your dutiful son,
"WILLIAM CAREY."
When in London Carey had asked John Newton, "What if the Company should
send us home on our arrival in Bengal?" "Then conclude," was the reply,
"that your Lord has nothing there for you to accomplish. But if He have,
no power on earth can hinder you." By Act of Parliament not ten years old,
every subject of the King going to or found in the East Indies without a
licence from the Company, was guilty of a high crime and misdemeanour, and
liable to fine and imprisonment. Only four years previously a regulation
had compelled every commander to deliver to the Hoogli pilot a return of
the passengers on board that the Act might be enforced. The Danish
nationality of the ship and crew saved the missionary party. So grievously
do unjust laws demoralise contemporary opinion, that Fuller was
constrained to meet the objections of many to the "illegality" of the
missionaries’ action by reasoning, unanswerable indeed, but not now
required: "The apostles and primitive ministers were commanded to go into
all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature; nor were they to
stop for the permission of any power upon earth, but to go, and take the
consequences. If a man of God, conscious of having nothing in his heart
unfriendly to any civil government whatever, but determined in all civil
matters to obey and teach obedience to the powers that are, put his life
in his hand, saying, I will go, and if I am persecuted in one city I will
flee to another’...whatever the wisdom of this world may decide upon his
conduct, he will assuredly be acquitted, and more than acquitted, at a
higher tribunal."
Carey’s journal of the voyage begins with an allusion to "the abominable
East Indian monopoly," which he was to do more than any other man to break
down by weapons not of man’s warfare. The second week found him at
Bengali, and for his companion the poems of Cowper. Of the four
fellow-passengers one was a French deist, with whom he had many a debate.
"Aug. 2.--I feel myself to be much declined, upon the whole, in the more
spiritual exercises of religion; yet have had some pleasant exercises of
soul, and feel my heart set upon the great work upon which I am going.
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! I have been much concerned for fear the power of the Company should
oppose us...
"Aug. 20.--I have reason to lament over a barrenness of soul, and am
sometimes much discouraged; for if I am so dead and stupid, how can I
expect to be of any use among the heathen? Yet I have of late felt some
very lively desires after the success of our undertaking. If there is
anything that engages my heart in prayer to God, it is that the heathen
may be converted, and that the society which has so generously exerted
itself may be encouraged, and excited to go on with greater vigour in the
important undertaking...
"Nov. 9.--I think that I have had more liberty in prayer, and more
converse with God, than for some time before; but have, notwithstanding,
been a very unfruitful creature, and so remain. For near a month we have
been within two hundred miles of Bengal, but the violence of the currents
set us back when we have been at the very door. I hope I have learned the
necessity of bearing up in the things of God against wind and tide, when
there is occasion, as we have done in our voyage."
To the Society he writes for a Polyglot Bible, the Gospels in Malay,
Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, and Sowerby’s English Botany, at his own
cost, and thus plans the conquest of the world:--"I hope the Society will
go on and increase, and that the multitudes of heathen in the world may
hear the glorious words of truth. Africa is but a little way from England;
Madagascar but a little way farther; South America, and all the numerous
and large islands in the Indian and Chinese seas, I hope will not be
passed over. 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!"
On the 7th November, as the ship lay in the roads of Balasore, he and
Thomas landed and "began our labours." For three hours the people of the
bazaar listened with great attention to Thomas, and one prepared for them
a native dinner with plantain leaf for dish, and fingers for knives and
forks. Balasore--name of Krishna--was one of the first settlements of the
English in North India in 1642, and there the American Baptist successors
of Carey have since carried on his work. On the 11th November, after a
five months’ voyage, they landed at Calcutta unmolested. The first
fortnight’s experience of the city, whose native population he estimated
at 200,000, and of the surrounding country, he thus condenses:--"I feel
something of what Paul felt when he beheld Athens, and ‘his spirit was
stirred within him.’ I see one of the finest countries in the world, full
of industrious inhabitants; yet three-fifths of it are an uncultivated
jungle, abandoned to wild beasts and serpents. If the gospel flourishes
here, ‘the wilderness will in every respect become a fruitful field.’"
Clive, Hastings (Macpherson during an interregnum of twenty-two months),
and Cornwallis, were the men who had founded and administered the empire
of British India up to this time. Carey passed the last Governor-General
in the Bay of Bengal as he retired with the honours of a seven years’
successful generalship and government to atone for the not unhappy
surrender of York Town, which had resulted in the independence of the
United States. Sir John Shore, afterwards Lord Teignmouth, who had been
selected by Pitt to carry out the reforms which he had elaborated along
with his predecessor, had entered on his high office just a fortnight
before. What a contrast was presented, as man judges, by the shy
shoemaker, schoolmaster, and Baptist preacher, who found not a place in
which to lay his head save a hovel lent to him by a Hindoo, to Clive,
whose suicide he might have heard of when a child; to Hastings, who for
seventeen years had stood before his country impeached. They were men
described by Macaulay as of ancient, even illustrious lineage, and they
had brought into existence an empire more extensive than that of Rome. He
was a peasant craftsman, who had taught himself with a skill which Lord
Wellesley, their successor almost as great as themselves, delighted
publicly to acknowledge--a man of the people, of the class who had used
the Roman Empire to build out of it a universal Christendom, who were even
then turning France upside down, creating the Republic of America, and
giving new life to Great Britain itself. The little Englishman was about
to do in Calcutta and from Serampore what the little Jew, Paul, had done
in Antioch and Ephesus, from Corinth and Rome. 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.
It is no fanatical criticism, but the true philosophy of history, which
places Carey over against Clive, the spiritual and secular founders, and
Duff beside Hastings, the spiritual and secular consolidators of our
Indian Empire.
Carey’s work for India underlay the first period of forty years of
transition from Cornwallis to Bentinck, as Duff’s covered the second of
thirty years to the close of Lord Canning’s administration, which
introduced the new era of full toleration and partial but increasing
self-government directed by the Viceroy and Parliament.
Carey had been sent not only to the one people outside of Christendom
whose conversion would tell most powerfully on all Asia, Africa, and their
islands--the Hindoos; but to the one province which was almost entirely
British, and could be used as it had been employed to assimilate the rest
of India--Bengal. Territorially the East India Company possessed, when he
landed, nothing outside of the Ganges valley of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares,
save a few spots on the Madras and Malabar coasts and the portion just
before taken in the Mysore war. The rest was desolated by the Marathas,
the Nizam, Tipoo, and other Mohammedan adventurers. On the Gangetic delta
and right up to Allahabad, but not beyond, the Company ruled and raised
revenue, leaving the other functions of the state to Mohammedans of the
type of Turkish pashas under the titular superiority of the effete Emperor
of Delhi. The Bengali and Hindi-speaking millions of the Ganges and the
simpler aborigines of the hills had been devastated by the famine of
1769-70, which the Company’s officials, who were powerless where they did
not intensify it by interference with trade, confessed to have cut off
from ten to twelve millions of human beings. Over three-fifths of the area
the soil was justify without a cultivator. The whole young of that
generation perished, so that, even twenty years after, Lord Cornwallis
officially described one-third of Bengal as a jungle inhabited only by
wild beasts. A quarter of a century after Carey’s language was, as we have
seen, "three-fifths of it are an uncultivated jungle abandoned to wild
beasts and serpents."
But the British peace, in Bengal at least, had allowed abundant crops to
work their natural result on the population. The local experience of
Shore, who had witnessed the horrors he could do so little to relieve, had
united with the statesmanship of Cornwallis to initiate a series of
administrative reforms that worked some evil, but more good, all through
Carey’s time. First of all, as affecting the very existence and the social
development of the people, or their capacity for being educated,
Christianised, civilised in the highest sense, there was the relation of
the Government to the ryots ("protected ones") and the zameendars
("landholders"). In India, as nearly all over the world except in
feudalised Britain, the state is the common landlord in the interests of
all classes who hold the soil subject to the payment of customary rents,
directly or through middlemen, to the Government. For thirty years after
Plassey the Government of India had been learning its business, and in the
process had injured both itself and the landed classes, as much as has
been done in Ireland. From a mere trader it had been, more or less
consciously, becoming a ruler. In 1786 the Court of Directors, in a famous
letter, tried to arrest the ruin which the famine had only hastened by
ordering that a settlement of the land-tax or revenue or rent be made, not
with mere farmers like the pashas of Turkey, but with the old zameendars,
and that the rate be fixed for ten years. Cornwallis and Shore took three
years to make the detailed investigations, and in 1789 the state rent-roll
of Bengal proper was fixed at ?2,858,772 a year. The English peer, who was
Governor-General, at once jumped to the conclusion that this rate should
be fixed not only for ten years, but for ever. The experienced Bengal
civilian protested that to do that would be madness when a third of the
rich province was out of cultivation, and as to the rest its value was but
little known, and its estates were without reliable survey or boundaries.
We can now see that, as usual, both were right in what they asserted and
wrong in what they denied. The principle of fixity of tenure and tax
cannot be over-estimated in its economic, social, and political value, but
it should have been applied to the village communities and cultivating
peasants without the intervention of middlemen other than the large
ancestral landholders with hereditary rights, and that on the standard of
corn rents. Cornwallis had it in his power thus to do what some years
afterwards Stein did in Prussia, with the result seen in the present
German people and empire. The dispute as to a permanent or a decennial
settlement was referred home, and Pitt, aided by Dundas and Charles Grant,
took a week to consider it. His verdict was given in favour of feudalism.
Eight months before Carey landed at Calcutta the settlement had been
declared perpetual; in 1795 it was extended to Benares also.
During the next twenty years mismanagement and debt revolutionised the
landed interest, as in France at the same time, but in a very different
direction. The customary rights of the peasant proprietors had been
legislatively secured by reserving to the Governor-General the power "to
enact such regulations as he may think necessary for the protection and
welfare of the dependent talookdars, ryots, and other cultivators of the
soil." The peasants continued long to be so few that there was competition
for them; the process of extortion with the aid of the courts had hardly
begun when they were many, and the zameendars were burdened with charges
for the police. But in 1799 and again in 1812 the state, trembling for its
rent, gave the zameendars further authority. The principle of permanence
of assessment so far co-operated with the splendid fertility of the Ganges
valley and the peaceful multiplication of the people and spread of
cultivation, that all through the wars and annexations, up to the close of
the Mutiny, it was Bengal which enabled England to extend the empire up to
its natural limits from the two seas to the Himalaya. But in 1859 the
first attempt was made by the famous Act X. to check the rack-renting
power of the zameendars. And now, more than a century since the first step
was taken to arrest the ruin of the peasantry, the legislature of India
has again tried to solve for the whole country these four difficulties
which all past landed regulations have intensified--to give the state
tenants a guarantee against uncertain enhancements of rent, and against
taxation of improvements; to minimise the evil of taking rent in cash
instead of in kind by arranging the dates on which rent is paid; and to
mitigate if not prevent famine by allowing relief for failure of crops. As
pioneering, the work of Carey and his colleagues all through was
distinctly hindered by the treatment of the land question, which at once
ground down the mass of the people and created a class of oppressive
landlords destitute for the most part of public spirit and the higher
culture. Both were disinclined by their circumstances to lend an ear to
the Gospel, but these circumstances made it the more imperative on the
missionaries to tell them, to teach their children, to print for all the
glad tidings. Carey, himself of peasant extraction, cared for the millions
of the people above all; but his work in the classical as well as the
vernacular languages was equally addressed to their twenty thousand
landlords. The time of his work--before Bentinck; and the centre of
it--outside the metropolis, justify the use of the English weapon against
Brahmanism largely for Duff.
When Cornwallis, following Warren Hastings, completed the substitution of
the British for the Mohammedan civil administration by a system of courts
and police and a code of regulations, he was guilty of one omission and
one mistake that it took years of discussion and action to rectify. He did
not abolish from the courts the use of Persian, the language of the old
Mussulman invaders, now foreign to all parties; and he excluded from all
offices above ?30 a year the natives of the country, contrary to their
fair and politic practice. Bengal and its millions, in truth, were
nominally governed in detail by three hundred white and upright civilians,
with the inevitable result in abuses which they could not prevent, and
oppression of native by native which they would not check, and the delay
or development of reforms which the few missionaries long called for in
vain. In a word, after making the most generous allowance for the good
intentions of Cornwallis, and conscientiousness of Shore, his successor,
we must admit that Carey was called to become the reformer of a state of
society which the worst evils of Asiatic and English rule combined to
prevent him and other self-sacrificing or disinterested philanthropists
from purifying. The East India Company, at home and in India, had reached
that depth of opposition to light and freedom in any form which justifies
Burke’s extremest passages--the period between its triumph on the
exclusion of "the pious clauses" from the Charter of 1793 and its defeat
in the Charter of 1813. We shall reproduce some outlines of the picture
which Ward drew:--7
"On landing in Bengal, in the year 1793, our brethren found themselves
surrounded with a population of heathens (not including the Mahometans)
amounting to at least one hundred millions of souls.
"On the subject of the divine nature, with the verbal admission of the
doctrine of the divine unity, they heard these idolaters speak of
330,000,000 of gods. Amidst innumerable idol temples they found none
erected for the worship of the one living and true God. Services without
end they saw performed in honour of the elements and deified heroes, but
heard not one voice tuned to the praise or employed in the service of the
one God. Unacquainted with the moral perfections of Jehovah, they saw this
immense population prostrate before dead matter, before the monkey, the
serpent, before idols the very personifications of sin; and they found
this animal, this reptile, and the lecher Krishnu {u with inverted ^ like
s?nd his concubine Radha, among the favourite deities of the Hindoos...
"Respecting the real nature of the present state, the missionaries
perceived that the Hindoos laboured under the most fatal misapprehensions;
that they believed the good or evil actions of this birth were not
produced as the volitions of their own wills, but arose from, and were the
unavoidable results of, the actions of the past birth; that their present
actions would inevitably give rise to the whole complexion of their
characters and conduct in the following birth; and that thus they were
doomed to interminable transmigrations, to float as some light substance
upon the bosom of an irresistible torrent...
"Amongst these idolaters no Bibles were found; no sabbaths; no
congregating for religious instruction in any form; no house for God; no
God but a log of wood, or a monkey; no Saviour but the Ganges; no worship
but that paid to abominable idols, and that connected with dances, songs,
and unutterable impurities; so that what should have been divine worship,
purifying, elevating, and carrying the heart to heaven, was a corrupt but
rapid torrent, poisoning the soul and carrying it down to perdition; no
morality, for how should a people be moral whose gods are monsters of
vice; whose priests are their ringleaders in crime; whose scriptures
encourage pride, impurity, falsehood, revenge, and murder; whose worship
is connected with indescribable abominations, and whose heaven is a
brothel? As might be expected, they found that men died here without
indulging the smallest vestige of hope, except what can arise from
transmigration, the hope, instead of plunging into some place of misery,
of passing into the body of some reptile. To carry to such a people the
divine word, to call them together for sacred instruction, to introduce
amongst them a pure and heavenly worship, and to lead them to the
observance of a Sabbath on earth, as the preparative and prelude to a
state of endless perfection, was surely a work worthy for a Saviour to
command, and becoming a christian people to attempt."
The condition of women, who were then estimated at "seventy-five millions
of minds," and whom the census shows to be now above 144,000,000, is thus
described after an account of female infanticide:--
"To the Hindoo female all education is denied by the positive injunction
of the shastru {u with inverted ^ like s?and by the general voice of the
population. Not a single school for girls, therefore, all over the
country! With knitting, sewing, embroidery, painting, music, and drawing,
they have no more to do than with letters; the washing is done by men of a
particular tribe. The Hindoo girl, therefore, spends the ten first years
of her life in sheer idleness, immured in the house of her father.
"Before she has attained to this age, however, she is sought after by the
ghutuks, men employed by parents to seek wives for their sons. She is
betrothed without her consent; a legal agreement, which binds her for
life, being made by the parents on both sides while she is yet a child. At
a time most convenient to the parents, this boy and girl are brought
together for the first time, and the marriage ceremony is performed; after
which she returns to the house of her father.
"Before the marriage is consummated, in many instances, the boy dies, and
this girl becomes a widow; and as the law prohibits the marriage of
widows, she is doomed to remain in this state as long as she lives. The
greater number of these unfortunate beings become a prey to the seducer,
and a disgrace to their families. Not long since a bride, on the day the
marriage ceremony was to have been performed, was burnt on the funeral
pile with the dead body of the bridegroom, at Chandernagore, a few miles
north of Calcutta. Concubinage, to a most awful extent, is the fruit of
these marriages without choice. What a sum of misery is attached to the
lot of woman in India before she has attained even her fifteenth year!
"In some cases as many as fifty females, the daughters of so many Hindoos,
are given in marriage to one bramhun {u with inverted ^ like s?in order to
make these families something more respectable, and that the parents may
be able to say, we are allied by marriage to the kooleens…
"But the awful state of female society in this miserable country appears
in nothing so much as in dooming the female, the widow, to be burnt alive
with the putrid carcase of her husband. The Hindoo legislators have
sanctioned this immolation, showing herein a studied determination to
insult and degrade woman. She is, therefore, in the first instance,
deluded into this act by the writings of these bramhuns {u with inverted ^
like s?in which also she is promised, that if she will offer herself, for
the benefit of her husband, on the funeral pile, she shall, by the
extraordinary merit of this action, rescue her husband from misery, and
take him and fourteen generations of his and her family with her to
heaven, where she shall enjoy with them celestial happiness until fourteen
kings of the gods shall have succeeded to the throne of heaven (that is,
millions of years!) Thus ensnared, she embraces this dreadful death. I
have seen three widows, at different times, burnt alive; and had repeated
opportunities of being present at similar immolations, but my courage
failed me...
"The burying alive of widows manifests, if that were possible, a still
more abominable state of feeling towards women than the burning them
alive. The weavers bury their dead. When, therefore, a widow of this tribe
is deluded into the determination not to survive her husband, she is
buried alive with the dead body. In this kind of immolation the children
and relations dig the grave. After certain ceremonies have been attended
to, the poor widow arrives, and is let down into the pit. She sits in the
centre, taking the dead body on her lap and encircling it with her arms.
These relations now begin to throw in the soil; and after a short space,
two of them descend into the grave, and tread the earth firmly round the
body of the widow. She sits a calm and unremonstrating spectator of the
horrid process. 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. There does not seem to have been there one genuine convert from
any of the Asiatic faiths; there had never been even the nucleus of a
native church.
In South India, for the greater part of the century, the Coast Mission, as
it was called, had been carried on from Tranquebar as a centre by the
Lutherans whom, from Ziegenbalg to Schwartz, Francke had trained at Halle
and Friedrich IV. of Denmark had sent forth to its East India Company’s
settlement. From the baptism of the first convert in 1707 and translation
of the New Testament into Tamil, to the death in 1798 of Schwartz, with
whom Carey sought to begin a correspondence then taken up by Guericke, the
foundations were laid around Madras, in Tanjore, and in Tinnevelli of a
native church which now includes nearly a million. But, when Carey landed,
rationalism in Germany and Denmark, and the Carnatic wars between the
English and French, had reduced the Coast Mission to a state of inanition.
Nor was Southern India the true or ultimate battlefield against
Brahmanism; the triumphs of Christianity there were rather among the
demon-worshipping tribes of Dravidian origin than among the Aryan races
till Dr. W. Miller developed the Christian College. But the way for the
harvest now being reaped by the Evangelicals and Anglicans of the Church
of England, by the Independents of the London Missionary Society, the
Wesleyans, and the Presbyterians of Scotland and America, was prepared by
the German Ziegenbalg and Schwartz under Danish protection. The English
Propagation and Christian Knowledge Societies sent them occasional aid,
the first two Georges under the influence of their German chaplains wrote
to them encouraging letters, and the East India Company even gave them a
free passage in its ships, and employed the sculptor Bacon to prepare the
noble group of marble which, in St. Mary’s Church, Madras, expresses its
gratitude to Schwartz for his political services.
It was Clive himself who brought to Calcutta the first missionary,
Kiernander the Swede, but he was rather a chaplain, or a missionary to the
Portuguese, who were nominal Christians of the lowest Romanist type. The
French had closed the Danish mission at Cuddalore, and in 1758 Calcutta
was without a Protestant clergyman to bury the dead or baptise or marry
the living. Two years before one of the two chaplains had perished in the
tragedy of the Black Hole, where he was found lying hand in hand with his
son, a young lieutenant. The other had escaped down the river only to die
of fever along with many more. The victory of Plassey and the large
compensation paid for the destruction of Old Calcutta and its church
induced thousands of natives to flock to the new capital, while the number
of the European troops and officials was about 2000. When chaplains were
sent out, the Governor-General officially wrote of them to the Court of
Directors so late as 1795:--"Our clergy in Bengal, with some exceptions,
are not respectable characters." From the general relaxation of morals, he
added, "a black coat is no security." They were so badly paid--from ?50 to
?230 a year, increased by ?120 to meet the cost of living in Calcutta
after 1764--that they traded. Preaching was the least of the chaplains’
duties; burying was the most onerous. Anglo-Indian society, cut off from
London, itself not much better, by a six months’ voyage, was corrupt.
Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, his hostile colleague in Council,
lived in open adultery. The majority of the officials had native women,
and the increase of their children, who lived in a state worse than that
of the heathen, became so alarming that the compensation paid by the
Mohammedan Government of Moorshedabad for the destruction of the church
was applied to the foundation of the useful charity still known as the
Free School. The fathers not infrequently adopted the Hindoo pantheon
along with the zanana. The pollution, springing from England originally,
was rolled back into it in an increasing volume, when the survivors
retired as nabobs with fortunes, to corrupt social and political life,
till Pitt cried out; and it became possible for Burke almost to succeed in
his eighteen years’ impeachment of Hastings. The literature of the close
of the eighteenth century is full of alarm lest the English character
should be corrupted, and lest the balance of the constitution should be
upset.
Kiernander is said to have been the means of converting 209 heathens and
380 Romanists, of whom three were priests, during the twenty-eight years
of his Calcutta career. Claudius Buchanan declares that Christian tracts
had been translated into Bengali--one written by the Bishop of Sodor and
Man--and that in the time of Warren Hastings Hindoo Christians had
preached to their countrymen in the city. The "heathen" were probably
Portuguese descendants, in whose language Kiernander preached as the
lingua franca of the time. He could not even converse in Bengali or
Hindostani, and when Charles Grant went to him for information as to the
way of a sinner’s salvation this happened--"My anxious inquiries as to
what I should do to be saved appeared to embarrass and confuse him
exceedingly. He could not answer my questions, but he gave me some good
instructive books." On Kiernander’s bankruptcy, caused by his son when the
father was blind, the "Mission Church" was bought by Grant, who wrote that
its labours "have been confined to the descendants of Europeans, and have
hardly ever embraced a single heathen, so that a mission to the Hindoos
and Mohammedans would be a new thing." The Rev. David Brown, who had been
sent out the year after as master and chaplain of the Military Orphan
Society, for the education of the children of officers and soldiers, and
was to become one of the Serampore circle of friends, preached to
Europeans only in the Mission Church. Carey could find no trace of
Kiernander’s work among the natives six years after his death.8 The only
converted Hindoo known of in Northern India up to that time was Guneshan
Dass, of Delhi, who when a boy joined Clive’s army, who was the first man
of caste to visit England, and who, on his return with the Calcutta
Supreme Court Judges in 1774 as Persian interpreter and translator, was
baptised by Kiernander, Mr. justice Chambers being sponsor.
William Carey had no predecessor in India as the first ordained Englishman
who was sent to it as a missionary; he had no predecessor in Bengal and
Hindostan proper as the first missionary from any land to the people. Even
the Moravians, who in 1777 had sent two brethren to Serampore, Calcutta,
and Patna, had soon withdrawn them, and one of them became the Company’s
botanist in Madras--Dr. Heyne. Carey practically stood alone at the first,
while he unconsciously set in motion the double revolution, which was to
convert the Anglo-Indian influence on England from corrupting heathenism
to aggressive missionary zeal, and to change the Bengal of Cornwallis into
the India of Bentinck, with all the possibilities that have made it grow,
thus far, into the India of the Lawrences.
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