Life of William Carey by George Smith - The Jesus Army

most worthless productions that ever were published. I should think it time lost to translate any
of them; and only a sense of duty excites me to read them. An idea, however, of the advantage
which the friends of Christianity may obtain by having these mysterious sacred nothings (which
have maintained their celebrity so long merely by being kept from the inspection of any but interested
Brahmans) exposed to view, has induced me, among other things, to write the Sanskrit
grammar, and to begin a dictionary of that language. I sincerely pity the poor people, who are
held by the chains of an implicit faith in the grossest of lies; and can scarcely help despising the
wretched infidel who pleads in their favour and tries to vindicate them. I have long wished to
obtain a copy of the Veda; and am now in hopes I shall be able to procure all that are extant. A
Brahman this morning offered to get them for me for the sake of money. If I succeed, I shall be
strongly tempted to publish them with a translation, pro bono publico.”
It was not surprising that the Governor-General, even if he had been less enlightened than Lord Wellesley,
found in this missionary interloper, as the East India Company officially termed the class to which he belonged,
the only man fit to be Professor of Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi in the College of Fort William, and
also translator of the laws and regulations of the Government.
In a memoir read before the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which he had founded in the first year of the eighteenth
century, Leibniz first sowed the seed of the twin sciences of comparative philology and ethnology, to
which we owe the fruitful results of the historical and critical school. That century was passed in the necessary
collection of facts, of data. Carey introduced the second period, so far as the learned and vernacular languages
of North India are concerned--of developing from the body of facts which his industry enormously extended,
the principles upon which these languages were constructed, besides applying these principles, in the
shape of grammars, dictionaries, and translations, to the instruction and Christian civilisation alike of the
learned and of the millions of the people. To the last, as at the first, he was undoubtedly only what he called
himself, a pioneer to prepare the way for more successful civilisers and scholars. But his pioneering was acknowledged
by contemporary 14 and later Orientalists, like Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson, to be of unexampled
value in the history of scientific research and industry, while the succeeding pages will show that in its practical
results the pioneering came as nearly to victory as is possible, until native India lives its own national
Christian life.
When India first became a united British Empire under one Governor-General and the Regulating Act of Parliament
of 1773, Warren Hastings had at once carried out the provision he himself had suggested for using
the moulavies and pundits in the administration of Mussulman and Hindoo law. Besides colleges in Calcutta
and Benares to train such, he caused those codes of Mohammedan and Brahmanical law to be prepared
which afterwards appeared as The Hedaya and The Code of Gentoo Laws. The last was compiled in Sanskrit
by pundits summoned from all Bengal and maintained in Calcutta at the public cost, each at a rupee a day. It
was translated through the Persian, the language of the courts, by the elder Halhed into English in 1776. That
was the first step in English Orientalism. The second was taken by Sir William Jones, a predecessor worthy of
Carey, but cut off all too soon while still a young man of thirty-four, when he founded the Bengal Asiatic Society
in 1784 on the model of Boyle’s Royal Society. The code of Warren Hastings had to be arranged and supplemented
into a reliable digest of the original texts, and the translation of this work, as done by pundit
Jaganatha, was left, by the death of Jones, to Colebrooke, who completed it in 1797. Charles Wilkins had
made the first direct translation from the Sanskrit into English in 1785, when he published in London The
14 In a criticism of the three Sanskrit grammars of Carey, Wilkins, and Colebrooke, the first number of the
Quarterly Review in 1809 pronounces the first “everywhere useful, laborious, and practical. Mr. Wilkins
has also discussed these subjects, though not always so amply as the worthy and unwearied missionary.
We have been much pleased with Dr. Carey’s very sensible preface.”
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