DR. CAREY.*

Or the learned, the pious, and the amiable Dr. Carey of Serampore, we have, at length, a memoir prepared from authentic materials, by a member of his family, at the request of the Missionary Society to which he belonged, as a tribute of their esteem for him. The biographer, Mr. Eustace Carey, avows that he has "endeavoured to exhibit the Christian and the missionary, rather than the philosopher and the scholar;" though why those parts of his character, which placed him in a conspicuous view before the world, without derogating from or impairing the effect of his more serious labours, should be kept, as it were, out of sight, is more than we can understand. The philosophical and philological pursuits of Dr. Carey were not aberrations from the path of the missionary; his learning and his piety reflected mutual light upon each other; and it is gross affectation for his biographer to pretend to undervalue his claims as a philosopher and a scholar, as if they were incongruous with his merits as a Christian and a missionary.

The early history of Dr. Carey is authenticated by a narrative of his own, addressed to the late Mr. Andrew Fuller, of Kettering, and by an account written by a surviving sister. From hence, it appears, that he was born of parents in humble circumstances (his father being the master of a small free-school), in the village of Paulerspury, in Northamptonshire, 17th August, 1761. His father, brother, and sister have recorded his attention to learning when a boy, and especially his aptitude for figures; and the latter mentions his early fondness for natural history: "The room that was appropriated to his use was full of insects, stuck in every corner, that he might observe their progress: he never walked out, when quite a boy, without observation on the hedges as he passed; and when he took up a plant of any kind, he always observed it with care." His own account is, that he preferred to read books of science, history, voyages, &c. more than any others. At fourteen, he was bound apprentice to a shoe-maker.

The details he gives of his evil propensities when a child, of his stirrings of conscience, and of his awakening to a sense of religion, are by no means extraordinary, and are, in our opinion, out of place in his biography. Carey was an admirer of David Brainerd (whose life Dr. Ryland esteemed "next to his Bible"), whose self-castigation is so severe, and the narrative of whose mental trials and temptations is so wearisome. The discipline of the Baptist and other religious societies, exacts from those who desire admission a minute "confession" of what is termed, we believe, their "experience;" but these disclosures, often humiliating, of internal conflicts, perhaps unconsciously coloured by imagination, are not, in our opinion, proper for publication to the world. Whilst they can be of little or no benefit to the real Christian, they are calculated to invite the sneers and mockery of the light; to add a dangerous stimulus to the fancies of the weak, and to furnish implements available by the hypocritical and designing.

He became, it would appear, with little or no previous preparation, a

• Memoir of William Carey, D.D., late Missionary to Bengal; Professor of Oriental Languages in the College of Fort William, Calcutta. By EUSTACE CAREY. London, 1836. Jackson and Walford.

preacher; and before he was twenty, he married. His master dying before he was reputed to have acquired a competent knowledge of his business (though he insists that he was accounted a good workman), he had to struggle with narrowness of circumstances. The talents he displayed, as a probationary preacher, however, induced the Rev. Thomas Scott (the commentator) to say, as appears from his own letter, that "he would prove no ordinary man;" and that," from the first, he thought young Carey an extraordinary person."

At Moulton and Leicester, he became acquainted with Messrs. Ryland, Fuller, Hall, Pearce of Birmingham, and other ministers of the Baptists; and it is no wonder that Carey, though educated in the doctrines of the Established Church, should have been led to think with these persons, who were men of good abilities and excellent character. With Mr. Fuller, who was a very amiable and estimable man (we speak from personal knowledge of him), Carey formed an intimate union, which eventually facilitated his missionary career in India. The apparent motive of his engaging in that office is thus stated by Mr. Eustace Carey. He kept a school at Moulton, and whilst instructing his pupils in geography, his attention was diverted from the physical to the religious condition of remote nations; and this idea absorbed his mind so much, that when, at a meeting of ministers, at Northampton, about this time, Mr. Ryland, sen., called upon them to propose a topic for discussion, Mr. Carey suggested "the duty of Christians to attempt the spread of the Gospel among heathen nations." The subject, being new, excited surprize, and Mr. Ryland called his young brother an enthusiast for entertaining such an idea. Mr. Fuller also says, that some of the most aged and respectable ministers thought that it was a wild and impracticable scheme that he had got in his head. In a pamphlet, however, which he subsequently wrote, Mr. Carey discussed the perpetuity of the Saviour's commission, and demonstrated the practicability of further attempts to convert the heathen.

In 1789, he removed from Moulton to Leicester, which increased his opportunities for the acquisition of every species of knowledge, and improved his circumstances. In a letter to his father, he describes the methodical manner in which he apportioned to each day its appropriate labour.

His mind was still intent upon missionary views, and by degrees he succeeded in bringing his ministerial brethren to sympathize with him and to promote his design; and at length they agreed to form a society, and the outline of the plan was offered at Kettering in October, 1792, when a committee was formed, and the nucleus of a fund contributed, to the amount of £13. 2s. 6d.* At this meeting, Mr. Carey offered to become the first missionary: he was accepted, and appointed to go to Bengal. At a subsequent period of his life, however, he told Mr. Swan, "I became a missionary because I could not say no."

⚫ Mr. Fuller says: "At the Kettering meeting, brother Carey was present, and after the public services of the day were over, the ministers withdrew into a private room, and there, in a solemn vow, pledged themselves to God and one another, as a society, to make at least an attempt for carrying the Gospel somewhere into the heathen world. A committee was chosen, and Mr. Carey was a member of it."

When the machinery was thus set in motion, contributions flowed in, and Mr. Carey soon found a colleague in his arduous enterprize, Mr. John Thomas. In April, 1793, they engaged a passage in one of the Company's ships, but without previously obtaining permission from the authorities at home, and without distinctly stating their object. They were consequently obliged to forego their voyage for the present. The account which the Rev. Mr. Scott gives is this. He states that Mr. Carey applied to him to use his influence with Mr. Charles Grant, to procure him and Mr. Thomas license to go out in the Company's ships, as missionaries to the British settlements in India: "what I said of Mr. Carey so far satisfied Mr. Grant, that he said, if Mr. Carey was going alone, or with one equally to be depended on along with him, he would not oppose him; but his strong disapprobation of Mr. T., on what ground I know not, induced his negative.” Carey records, at the very outset of his Journal, that he was prevented from going in the Oxford, "by reason of the abominable East-India monopoly!" Mr. Thomas, the person objected to, was of the medical profession, had been engaged in trade or speculations in India, and was deeply in debt; the disinclination, therefore, to allow such a person, who had assumed the character of a preacher, to go out to India in the novel guise of a missionary to the Hindus, is not extraordinary or unreasonable. Mr. Fuller, in his letter to Dr. Ryland, on learning the impediment, says: we are all undone-I am grieved-yet, perhaps, 'tis best-Thomas's debts and embranglements damped my pleasure before—perhaps 'tis best he should not go." The result was, that a passage was taken for Mr. Carey and his family (by whom he was not originally intended to be accompanied, Mrs. Carey obstinately refusing to go with him), in a Danish ship.

The infant Baptist Mission Society had yet many difficulties to contend with. Incessant contributions were required for its funds, and some members of the Baptist body, in no captious or malevolent spirit (though Mr. Eustace Carey implies this), thought it rather absurd "to exhaust resources in distant countries, whilst so much remained to be effected at home." A jealousy seems, also, to have been entertained at the project having originated amongst the provincial ministers; those of London were "not disposed to commit themselves, and to compromise the denomination to a mere experiment:" at a meeting in the City, to form an auxiliary society, the proposition was negatived.

The vessel in which the missionaries sailed, the Kron Princessa Maria, was owned and commanded by an Englishman, named Christmas, one of the most polite, accomplished gentlemen," Dr. Carey stated, "that ever bore the name of a sea-captain." He made them very comfortable; and the voyage, on the whole, was a pleasant one. They reached Calcutta on the 11th November, 1793, and took up their residence at the Portuguese settlement of Bandell, about thirty miles distant.

His

The embarrassments and afflictions which Mr. Cary underwent, for the first year and a-half after his arrival, appear to have been great. biographer seems to have hesitated as to the propriety of publishing "some

delicate points which, upon first consideration, it seemed desirable to escape from noticing facts are called into review, which a feeling heart would rather wish to conceal, and even to obliterate." This refers to Mrs. Carey, who had been very reluctantly prevailed upon, by the entreaties of Mr. Thomas, to accompany her husband to India, and when severe trials arose, she was unequal to them. Their slender resources hourly diminished, without the prospect of replenishment, until they were, in a few months, reduced to destitution, and almost on the brink of starvation. "Everything in her former life and her physical constitution," to use Mr. Eustace Carey's expressions, "was unfavourable to the stern and sublime exercise of the Christian virtues to which her circumstances now called her :" with a spirit unusually timid, and a bodily frame always feeble, "the incipient inroad of monomania was [were] unhinging her intelligence and corroding her passions." In one of his letters, he says: "if my family were but hearty in the work, I should find a great burthen removed; but the carnal discourse of the passage, and the pomp and grandeur of Europeans here, have intoxicated their minds." This was one great source of Mr. Carey's sufferings; another affliction arose from the character of his companion, Mr. Thomas, who was "unthinking, unthrifty, versatile, and capricious; the little money they had in hand was in Mr. Thomas's keeping, who took his measures, and disbursed funds, almost independently of the advice, and frequently with too little apparent regard to the comfort of his friend: he also appeared for a time as though disposed to relinquish the mission, and actually commenced business in his own profession." He eventually became deranged, and was placed in a lunatic asylum in Calcutta.

The Journal of Mr. Carey, at this period, contains little in addition to his religious experience, besides the details of his difficulties, the imprudence of his friend Thomas, the ignorance and "stupid superstition" of the natives with whom he conversed, his movements from place to place in search of a station, and his progress in the study of the language and the translation of the Scriptures into Bengali, under the direction of his moonshi, Ram Ram Boshu, a person who makes rather a conspicuous figure in the early history of the Baptist Mission. He is described in the Journal, at this time, as "a discerning man, very inquisitive and intelligent." His criticism on our absurd graphic representation of angels (which is adopted from the Pagan images of embodied virtues) is just. "Seeing a picture," says Mr. Carey," in which an angel was represented, he made this inquiry: Sir, are angels women or birds? I see they have got feathers; therefore, they must be birds, and then I can see them and catch them. Now we think that they are great powers, which can go any where in an instant, without wings or any such helps.' He is now much hurt at seeing pretended pictures of God, or the Holy Spirit with wings like a dove; and many of those representations, in cuts with the Bible, are to him, and others who are still heathens, a very great stumbling-block." Ram Boshu was, in the end, discharged for the crime of adultery, and was suspected, but not by Mr. Carey, of dishonesty.

Carey's circumstances were improved by his appointment, by Mr. Udney, to a situation in an indigo-factory at Malda, at a salary of Rs. 200 a-month. It is not difficult to appreciate his care and frugality, when we hear that, of this slender stipend, after providing for the wants of a large family (Mrs. Carey's indisposition also preventing her from superintending it), in such a climate as Bengal, he contrived to spare from one-third to onefourth for missionary purposes. Nor did his secular engagements, though sufficient to occupy an ordinary man, prevent him from attempting native education, acquiring the dialect of the province, addressing the natives daily, maintaining an extensive correspondence, and mastering the elements of so difficult a language as the Sanscrit. The Society in England, however, we are told, "felt a serious demur" (such is the phraseology of the biographer), upon learning that Mr. Carey and his colleague had accepted secular employment.

As he proceeded in his labours of translation, he became sensible of the difficulty of finding fit expressions in which to render European words; and he mentions, in one place, being forced, by the poverty of the language, to use, when speaking of "sin coming from the heart," a word which signified the heart, as part of the body—" a sheep's heart as well as a man's." But this is only an acknowledgment of ignorance on his part; for it is impossible to conclude that in any one of the Indian dialects, more than in Bengali, there is wanting a word which is understood to signify, "the seat of the affections."

The real difficulties of a conscientious missionary were, likewise, soon revealed to him. "It is matter of devout joy," Mr. Eustace Carey observes, "when the Gospel is so far successful as to induce any to renounce idolatry and assume the Christian profession; but the burden of a missionary is thenceforward rather augmented than relieved; he is then unremittingly to watch the renewing process; he has daily to inform the ignorant and excite the torpid mind: the errors which beset native converts are so numerous and insinuating, and the perils to which the principles and character are liable to, so imminent, that the solicitude of a missionary on their behalf is painful."

After nearly three years spent in missionary labours, he found" instead of success, appearances more against them than ever;" and he felt much "lest the friends of religion should faint" at the prospect. "I certainly," he adds, "expected more success than has attended us at present." Mr. Thomas's subsequent conduct had redeemed him in the opinion of Mr. Carey, whose warm and constant attachment to a friend who caused him much pain and uneasiness, is an evidence of the amiable qualities of his character. He began now to call for more missionaries to be sent to India; since if he and Mr. Thomas died, without successors on the spot, the good work would be greatly retarded. He had already conceived the idea of such an union as the Serampore Mission; for, in a letter to Mr. Fuller, dated November 16th, 1796, he suggests that seven or eight missionary families might be sent out: "I recommend," he says, "all living together, in a number of