Life of William Carey by George Smith - The Jesus Army

Lahore “the book of Jesus is spoken of, is read, and has caused a considerable stir in the minds of the people.”
A Thug, asked how he could have committed so many murders, pointed to it and said, “If I had had this book
I could not have done it.” A fakeer, forty miles from Lodiana, read the book, founded the community of worshippers
of the Sachi Pitè Isa, and suffered much persecution in a native State.
When Felix Carey returned to Serampore in 1812 to print his Burmese version of the Gospel of Matthew and
his Burmese grammar, his father determined to send the press at which they were completed to Rangoon.
The three missionaries despatched with it a letter to the king of Ava, commending to his care “their beloved
brethren, who from love to his majesty’s subjects had voluntarily gone to place themselves under his protection,
while they translated the Bible, the Book of Heaven, which was received and revered” by all the countries
of Europe and America as “the source whence all the knowledge of virtue and religion was drawn.” The
king at once ordered from Serampore a printing-press, like that at Rangoon, for his own palace at Ava, with
workmen to use it. In this Carey saw the beginning of a mission in the Burman capital, but God had other
designs which the sons and daughters of America, following Judson first of all, are still splendidly developing,
from Rangoon to Kareng-nee, Siam, and China. The ship containing the press sank in the Rangoon river, and
the first Burmese war soon followed.
Three months after the complete and magnificent plan of translating the Bible into all the languages of the far
East, which the assistance of his two colleagues and the college of Fort William led Carey to form, had been
laid before Fuller in Northamptonshire, the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in London. Joseph
Hughes, the Nonconformist who was its first secretary, had been moved by the need of the Welsh for the
Bible in their own tongue. But the ex-Governor-General, Lord Teignmouth, became its first president, and the
Serampore translators at once turned for assistance to the new organisation whose work Carey had individually
been doing for ten years at the cost of his two associates and himself. The catholic Bible Society at once
asked Carey’s old friend, Mr. Udny, then a member of the Government in Calcutta, to form a corresponding
committee there of the three missionaries--their chaplain friends, Brown and Buchanan, and himself. The
chaplains delayed the formation of the committee till 1809, but liberally helped meanwhile in the circulation
of the other appeals issued from Serampore, and even made the proposal which resulted in Dr. Marshman’s
wonderful version of the Bible in Chinese and Ward’s improvements in Chinese printing. To the principal
tributary sovereigns of India Dr. Buchanan sent copies of the vernacular Scriptures already published.
From 1809 till 1830, or practically through the rest of Carey’s life, the co-operation of Serampore and the
Bible Society was honourable to both. Carey loyally clung to it when in 1811, under the spell of Henry Martyn'-
s sermon on Christian India, the chaplains established the Calcutta Auxiliary Bible Society in order to supersede
its corresponding committee. In the Serampore press the new auxiliary, like the parent Society, found
the cheapest and best means of publishing editions of the New Testament in Singhalese, Malayalam, and
Tamil. The press issued also the Persian New Testament, first of the Romanist missionary,
Sebastiani--“though it be not wholly free from imperfections, it will doubtless do much good,” wrote Dr.
Marshman to Fuller--and then of Henry Martyn, whose assistant, Sabat, was trained at Serampore. Those
three of Serampore had a Christ-like tolerance, which sprang from the divine charity of their determination to
live only that the Word of God might sound out through Asia. When in 1830 this auxiliary--which had at first
sought to keep all missionaries out of its executive in order to conciliate men like Sydney Smith’s brother, the
Advocate-General of Bengal--refused to use the translations of Carey and Yates, and inclined to an earlier
version of Ellerton, because of the translation or transliteration of the Greek words for “baptism,” these two
scholars acted thus, as described by the Bible Society’s annalist--they, “with a liberality which does them honour,
permitted the use of their respective versions of the Bengali Scriptures, with such alterations as were
deemed needful in the disputed word for ‘baptism,’ they being considered in no way parties to such alterations.”
From first to last the British and Foreign Bible Society, to use its own language, “had the privilege of
aiding the Serampore brethren by grants, amounting to not less than £13,500.” Of this £1475 had been raised
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