Life of William Carey by George Smith - The Jesus Army

CHAPTER VIII
CAREY’S FAMILY AND FRIENDS
1807-1812
The type of a Christian gentleman--Carey and his first wife--His second marriage--The Lady Rumohr--His
picture of their married life--His nearly fatal illness when forty-eight years old--His
meditations and dreams--Aldeen House--Henry Martyn’s pagoda--Carey, Marshman, and the
Anglican chaplains in the pagoda--Corrie’s account of the Serampore Brotherhood--Claudius
Buchanan and his Anglican establishment--Improvement in Anglo-Indian Society--Carey’s literary
and scientific friends--Desire in the West for a likeness of Carey--Home’s portrait of him--
Correspondence with his son William on missionary consecration, Buonaparte, botany, the missionary
a soldier, Felix and Burma, hunting, the temporal power of the Pope, the duty of reconciliation--Carey’s
descendants.
“A
GENTLEMAN is the next best character after a Christian, and the latter includes the former,”
were the father’s words to the son whom he was sending forth as a Christian missionary and state
superintendent of schools. Carey wrote from his own experience, and he unwittingly painted his
own character. The peasant bearing of his early youth showed itself throughout his life in a certain shyness,
which gave a charm to his converse with old and young. Occasionally, as in a letter which he wrote to his
friend Pearce of Birmingham, at a time when he did not know whether his distant correspondent was alive or
dead, he burst forth into an unrestrained enthusiasm of affection and service. But his was rather the even tenor
of domestic devotion and friendly duty, unbroken by passion or coldness, and ever lighted up by a steady
geniality. The colleagues who were associated with him for the third of a century worshipped him in the old
English sense of the word. The younger committee-men and missionaries who came to the front on the death
of Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland, in all their mistaken conflicts with these colleagues, always tried to separate
Carey from those they denounced, till even his saintly spirit burst forth into wrath at the double wrong thus
done to his coadjutors. His intercourse with the chaplains and bishops of the Church of England, and with the
missionaries of other Churches and societies, was as loving in its degree as his relations to his own people.
With men of the world, from the successive Governor-Generals, from Wellesley, Hastings, and Bentinck,
down to the scholars, merchants, and planters with whom he became associated for the public good, William
Carey was ever the saint and the gentleman whom it was a privilege to know.
In nothing perhaps was Carey’s true Christian gentlemanliness so seen as in his relations with his first wife,
above whom grace and culture had immeasurably raised him, while she never learned to share his aspirations
or to understand his ideals. Not only did she remain to the last a peasant woman, with a reproachful tongue,
but the early hardships of Calcutta and the fever and dysentery of Mudnabati clouded the last twelve years of
her life with madness. Never did reproach or complaint escape his lips regarding either her or Thomas, whose
eccentric impulses and oft-darkened spirit were due to mania also. Of both he was the tender nurse and
guardian when, many a time, the ever-busy scholar would fain have lingered at his desk or sought the scanty
sleep which his jealous devotion to his Master’s business allowed him. The brotherhood arrangement, the
common family, Ward’s influence over the boys, and Hannah Marshman’s housekeeping relieved him of
much that his wife’s illness had thrown upon him at Mudnabati, so that a colleague describes him, when he
was forty-three years of age, as still looking young in spite of the few hairs on his head, after eleven years in
Lower Bengal of work such as never Englishman had before him. But almost from the first day of his early
married life he had never known the delight of daily converse with a wife able to enter into his scholarly pursuits,
and ever to stimulate him in his heavenly quest. When the eldest boy, Felix, had left for Burma in 1807
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