Life of William Carey by George Smith - The Jesus Army

strangers, thought it our duty to come from a country so distant, for this purpose, much more
was it incumbent on them to labour for the same end. This was therefore the grand business of
our lives.
“3. That if a brother in discharge of this duty went out forty or fifty miles, he could not labour
for his family; it therefore became the church to support such, seeing they were hindered from
supporting themselves, by giving themselves wholly to that work in which it was equally the
duty of all to take a share.
“4. We therefore proposed to unite the support of itinerant brethren with the care of the poor,
and to throw them both upon the church fund, as being both, at least in a heathen land, equally
the duty of a church.
“Every one of these ideas our native brethren entered into with the greatest readiness and the
most cordial approbation.”
Carey’s scheme so early as 1810 included not only the capital of the Great Mogul, Surat far to the west, and
Maratha Nagpoor to the south, but Lahore, where Ranjeet Singh had consolidated the Sikh power, Kashmeer,
and even Afghanistan to which he had sent the Pushtoo Bible. To set Chamberlain free for this enterprise he
sent his second son William to relieve him as missionary in charge of Cutwa. “This would secure the gradual
perfection of the version of the Scriptures in the Sikh language, would introduce the Gospel among the
people, and would open a way for introducing it into Kashmeer, and eventually to the Afghans under whose
dominion Kashmeer at present is.” Carey and his two colleagues took possession for Christ of the principal
centres of Hindoo and Mohammedan influence in India only because they were unoccupied, and provided
translations of the Bible into the principal tongues, avowedly as a preparation for other missionary agencies.
All over India and the far East he thus pioneered the way of the Lord, as he had written to Ryland when first
he settled in Serampore: “It is very probable we may be only as pioneers to prepare the way for most successful
missionaries, who perhaps may not be at liberty to attend to those preparatory labours in which we have
been occupied--the translation and printing of the Scriptures,” etc. His heart was enlarged like his Master’s
on earth, and hence his humbleness of mind. When the Church Missionary Society, for instance, occupied
Agra as their first station in India, he sent the Baptist missionary thence to Allahabad. To Benares “Brother
William Smith, called in Orissa under Brother John Peters,” the Armenian, was sent owing to his acquaintance
with the Hindi language; he was the means of bringing to the door of the Kingdom that rich Brahman
Raja Jay Narain Ghosal, whom he encouraged to found in 1817 the Church Mission College there which bears
the name of this “almost Christian” Hindoo, who was “exceedingly desirous of diffusing light among his own
countrymen.”
The most striking illustrations of this form of Carey’s self-sacrifice are, however, to be found outside of India
as it then was, in the career of his other two sons in Burma and the Spice Islands. The East India Company’s
panic on the Vellore mutiny led Carey to plan a mission to Burma, just as he had been guided to settle in Danish
Serampore ten years before. The Government of India had doubled his salary as Bengali, Marathi, and
Sanskrit Professor, and thus had unconsciously supplied the means. Since 1795 the port of Rangoon had been
opened to the British, although Colonel Symes had been insulted eight years after, during his second embassy
to Ava. Rangoon, wrote the accurate Carey to Fuller in November 1806, is about ten days’ sail from Calcutta.
“The Burman empire is about eight hundred miles long, lying contiguous to Bengal on the east; but is inaccessible
by land, on account of the mountains covered with thick forests which run between the two countries.
The east side of this empire borders upon China, Cochin China, and Tongking, and may afford us the
opportunity ultimately of introducing the Gospel into those countries. They are quite within our reach, and
the Bible in Chinese will be understood by them equally as well as by the Chinese themselves. About twenty
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