Life of William Carey by George Smith - The Jesus Army

From Plassey in 1757 to 1829, three quarters of a century, Christian England was responsible, at first indirectly
and then most directly, for the known immolation of at least 70,000 Hindoo widows. Carey was the first
to move the authorities; Udny and Wellesley were the first to begin action against an atrocity so long continued
and so atrocious. While the Governor-Generals and their colleagues passed away, Carey and his associates
did not cease to agitate in India and to stir up Wilberforce and the evangelicals in England, till the victory
was gained. The very first number of the Friend of India published their essay on the burning of widows,
which was thereafter quoted on both sides of the conflict, as “a powerful and convincing statement of the real
facts and circumstances of the case,” in Parliament and elsewhere. Nor can we omit to record the opinion of
Carey’s chief pundit, with whom he spent hours every day as a fellow-worker. The whole body of law-pundits
wrote of Sati as only “permitted.” Mritunjaya, described as the head jurist of the College of Fort William and
the Supreme Court, decided that, according to Hindooism, a life of mortification is the law for a widow. At
best burning is only an alternative for mortification, and no alternative can have the force of direct law. But in
former ages nothing was ever heard of the practice, it being peculiar to a later and more corrupt era. “A woman'-
s burning herself from the desire of connubial bliss ought to be rejected with abhorrence,” wrote this colossus
of pundits. Yet before he was believed, or the higher law was enforced, as it has ever since been even in our
tributary States, mothers had burned with sons, and forty wives, many of them sisters, at a time, with polygamous
husbands. Lepers and the widows of the devotee class had been legally buried alive. Magistrates, who
were men like Metcalfe, never ceased to prevent widow-murder on any pretext, wherever they might be
placed, in defiance of their own misguided Government.
Though from 4th December 1829--memorable date, to be classed with that on which soon after 800,000
slaves were set free--“the Ganges flowed unblooded to the sea” for the first time, the fight lasted a little
longer. The Calcutta “orthodox” formed a society to restore their right of murdering their widows, and found
English lawyers ready to help them in an appeal to the Privy Council under an Act of Parliament of 1797. The
Darpan weekly did good service in keeping the mass of the educated natives right on the subject. The Privy
Council, at which Lord Wellesley and Charles Grant, venerable in years and character, were present, heard
the case for two days, and on 24th June 1832 dismissed the petition!
Though the greatest, this was only one of the crimes against humanity and morality which Carey opposed all
his life with a practical reasonableness till he saw the public opinion he had done so much to create triumph.
He knew the people of India, their religious, social, and economic condition, as no Englishman before him
had done. He stood between them and their foreign Government at the beginning of our intimate contact
with all classes as detailed administrators and rulers. The outcome of his peculiar experience is to be found
not only in the writings published under his own name but in the great book of his colleague William Ward,
every page of which passed under his careful correction as well as under the more general revision of Henry
Martyn. Except for the philosophy of Hindooism, the second edition of A View of the History, Literature,
and Mythology of the Hindoos, including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations
from their Principal Works, published in 1818 in two quarto volumes, stands unrivalled as the best
authority on the character and daily life and beliefs of the 200,000,000 to whom Great Britain had been
made a terrestrial providence, till Christianity teaches them to govern themselves and to become to the rest of
Asia missionaries of nobler truth than that wherewith their Buddhist fathers covered China and the farther
East.
All the crimes against humanity with which the history of India teems, down to the Mutiny and the records of
our courts and tributary states at this hour, are directly traceable to lawless supernaturalism like that of the
civilised world before the triumph of Christianity. In nothing does England’s administration of India resemble
Rome’s government of its provinces in the seven centuries from the reduction of Sicily, 240 B.C., to
the fall of the Western Empire, 476 A.D., so much as in the relation of nascent Christianity to the pagan cults
which had made society what it was. Carey and the brotherhood stood alone in facing, in fighting with divine
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