Life of William Carey by George Smith - The Jesus Army

CHAPTER VII
CALCUTTA AND THE MISSION CENTRES FROM DELHI TO AMBOYNA
1802-1817
The East India Company an unwilling partner of Carey--Calcutta opened to the Mission by his
appointment as Government teacher of Bengali--Meeting of 1802 grows into the Lall Bazaar
mission--Christ-like work among the poor, the sick, the prisoners, the soldiers and sailors and
the natives--Krishna Pal first native missionary in Calcutta--Organisation of subordinate stations--Carey’s
“United Missions in India”--The missionary staff thirty strong--The native missionaries--The
Bengali church self-propagating--Carey the pioneer of other missionaries--Benares--Burma
and Indo-China--Felix Carey--Instructions to missionaries--The missionary shrivelled
into an ambassador--Adoniram and Ann Judson--Jabez Carey--Mission to Amboyna--Remarkable
letter from Carey to his third son.
THE short-sighted regulation of the East India Company, which dreamed that it could keep Christianity
out of Bengal by shutting up the missionaries within the little territory of Danish Serampore, could
not be enforced with the same ease as the order of a jailer. Under Danish passports, and often without
them, missionary tours were made over Central Bengal, aided by its network of rivers. Every printed Bengali
leaf of Scripture or pure literature was a missionary. Every new convert, even the women, became an apostle
to their people, and such could not be stopped. Gradually, as not only the innocency but the positive political
usefulness of the missionaries’ character and work came to be recognised by the local authorities, they were
let alone for a time. And soon, by the same historic irony which has marked so many of the greatest
reforms--“He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh”--the Government of India became, though unwittingly,
more of a missionary agency than the Baptist Society itself. The only teacher of Bengal who could be found for
Lord Wellesley’s new College of Fort William was William Carey. The appointment, made and accepted
without the slightest prejudice to his aggressive spiritual designs and work, at once opened Calcutta itself for
the first time to the English proselytising of natives, and supplied Carey with the only means yet lacking for
the translation of the Scriptures into all the languages of the farther East. In spite of its own selfish fears the
Company became a principal partner in the Christianisation of India and China.
From the middle of the year 1801 and for the next thirty years Carey spent as much of his time in the metropolis
as in Serampore. He was generally rowed down the eighteen miles of the winding river to Calcutta at
sunset on Monday evening and returned on Friday night every week, working always by the way. At first he
personally influenced the Bengali traders and youths who knew English, and he read with many such the
English Bible. His chaplain friends, Brown and Buchanan, with the catholicity born of their presbyterian and
evangelical training, shared his sympathy with the hundreds of poor mixed Christians for whom St. John’s
and even the Mission Church made no provision, and encouraged him to care for them. In 1802 he began a
weekly meeting for prayer and conversation in the house of Mr. Rolt, and another for a more ignorant class in
the house of a Portuguese Christian. By 1803 he was able to write to Fuller: “We have opened a place of worship
in Calcutta, where we have preaching twice on Lord’s day in English, on Wednesday evening in Bengali,
and on Thursday evening in English.” He took all the work during the week and the Sunday service in rotation
with his brethren. The first church was the hall of a well-known undertaker, approached through lines of
coffins and the trappings of woe. In time most of the evangelical Christians in the city promised to relieve the
missionaries of the expense if they would build an unsectarian chapel more worthy of the object. This was
done in Lall Bazaar, a little withdrawn from that thoroughfare to this day of the poor and abandoned Christians,
of the sailors and soldiers on leave, of the liquor-shops and the stews. There, as in Serampore, at a time
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