George Smith · 20 of 21

Ch XVI. Carey’s Last Days · Part 2

“Deeply solemn was that interview, and important the lesson I then received. Here was one of the most holy and harmless men whom I ever knew--who had lived above the breath of calumny for upwards of forty years, surrounded by and in close intimacy with many, both Europeans and natives, who would have rejoiced to have witnessed any inconsistency in his conduct, but who were constrained to admire his integrity and Christian character--whilst thus convinced of the certainty of his salvation, through the merits of that Saviour whom he had preached, yet so impressed with the exceeding sinfulness of sin, that he trembled at the thought of appearing before a holy God! A few days after this event, Dr. Carey retired to his bed, from which he never rose.”

So long before this as 17th March 1802, Carey had thus described himself to Dr. Ryland:--“A year or more ago you, or some other of my dear friends, mentioned an intention of publishing a volume of sermons as a testimony of mutual Christian love, and wished me to send a sermon or two for that purpose. I have seriously intended it, and more than once sat down to accomplish it, but have as constantly been broken off from it. Indolence is my prevailing sin, and to that are now added a number of avocations which I never thought of; I have also so continual a fear that I may at last fall some way or other so as to dishonour the Gospel that I have often desired that my name may be buried in oblivion; and indeed I have reason for those fears, for I am so prone to sin that I wonder every night that I have been preserved from foul crimes through the day, and when I escape a temptation I esteem it to be a miracle of grace which has preserved me. I never was so fully persuaded as I am now that no habit of religion is a security from falling into the foulest crimes, and I need the immediate help of God every moment. The sense of my continual danger has, I confess, operated strongly upon me to induce me to desire that no publication of a religious nature should be published as mine whilst I am alive. Another reason is my sense of incapacity to do justice to any subject, or even to write good sense. I have, it is true, been obliged to publish several things, and I can say that nothing but necessity could have induced me to do it. They are, however, only grammatical works, and certainly the very last things which I should have written if I could have chosen for myself.”

On 15th June 1833 the old man was still able to rejoice with others. He addressed to his son Jonathan the only brief letter which the present writer possesses from his pen, in a hand as clear as that of a quarter of a century before:--

“MY DEAR JONATHAN--I congratulate you upon the good news you have received. But am sorry Lucy continues so ill. I am too weak to write more than to say your mother is as well as the weather will permit us to expect. I could scarcely have been worse to live than I have been the last fortnight.--Your affectionate father, W. CAREY.”

The hot season had then reached its worst.

His last letters were brief messages of love and hope to his two sisters in England. On 27th July 1833 he wrote to them:--

“About a week ago so great a change took place in me that I concluded it was the immediate stroke of death, and all my children were informed of it and have been here to see me. I have since that revived in an almost miraculous manner, or I could not have written this. But I cannot expect it to continue. The will of the Lord be done. Adieu, till I meet you in a better world.--Your affectionate brother, “W. CAREY.”

Two months later he was at his old work, able “now and then to read a proof sheet of the Scriptures.”

“SERAMPORE, 25th Sept. 1833.

“MY DEAR SISTERS--My being able to write to you now is quite unexpected by me, and, I believe, by every one else; but it appears to be the will of God that I should continue a little time longer. How long that may be I leave entirely with Him, and can only say, ‘All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come.’ I was, two months or more ago, reduced to such a state of weakness that it appeared as if my mind was extinguished; and my weakness of body, and sense of extreme fatigue and exhaustion, were such that I could scarcely speak, and it appeared that death would be no more felt than the removing from one chair to another. I am now able to sit and to lie on my couch, and now and then to read a proof sheet of the Scriptures. I am too weak to walk more than just across the house, nor can I stand even a few minutes without support. I have every comfort that kind friends can yield, and feel, generally, a tranquil mind. I trust the great point is settled, and I am ready to depart; but the time when, I leave with God.

“3rd Oct.--I am not worse than when I began this letter.--I am, your very affectionate brother, WM. CAREY.”

His latest message to Christendom was sent on the 30th September, most appropriately to Christopher Anderson:--“As everything connected with the full accomplishment of the divine promises depends on the almighty power of God, pray that I and all the ministers of the Word may take hold of His strength, and go about our work as fully expecting the accomplishment of them all, which, however difficult and improbable it may appear, is certain, as all the promises of God are in Him, yea, and in Him, Amen.” Had he not, all his career, therefore expected and attempted great things?

He had had a chair fixed on a small platform, constructed after his own direction, that he might be wheeled through his garden. At other times the chief gardener Hullodhur, reported to him the state of the collection of plants, then numbering about 2000. Dr. Marshman saw his friend daily, sometimes twice a day, and found him always what Lord Hastings had described him to be--“the cheerful old man.” On the only occasion on which he seemed sad, Dr. Marshman as he was leaving the room turned and asked why. With deep feeling the dying scholar looked to the others and said, “After I am gone Brother Marshman will turn the cows into my garden.” The reply was prompt, “Far be it from me; though I have not your botanical tastes, the care of the garden in which you have taken so much delight, shall be to me a sacred duty.”

Of strangers his most frequent visitor was the Governor-General’s wife, Lady William Bentinck. Her husband was in South India, and she spent most of her time in Barrackpore Park retreat opposite to Carey’s house. From her frequent converse with him, in his life as well as now, she studied the art of dying. Daniel Wilson, Bishop of Calcutta, learned to delight in Serampore almost from the beginning of his long episcopate, and in later years he lived there more than in Calcutta. On the 14th February 1833 he first visited Carey, “his interview with whom, confined as he was to his room, and apparently on the verge of the celestial world, was peculiarly affecting.” In the last of subsequent visits the young Bishop asked the dying missionary’s benediction. With all the talk was the same, a humble resignation to the will of God, firm trust in the Redeemer of sinners, a joyful gratitude for the wonderful progress of His Kingdom. What a picture is this that his brethren sent home six weeks before he passed away. “Our aged and venerable brother feels himself growing gradually weaker. He can scarcely rise from his couch, and it is with great difficulty that he is carried out daily to take the air. Yet he is free from all pain as to disease, and his mind is in a most serene and happy state. He is in full possession of his faculties, and, although with difficulty, on account of his weakness, he still converses with his friends from day to day.”

The hottest season of the year crept wearily on during the month of May and the first week of June. Each night he slept well, and each day he was moved to his couch in the dining-room for air. There he lay, unable to articulate more than a word or two, but expressing by his joyful features union in prayer and interest in conversation. On the 22nd May the English mail arrived with gladdening intelligence from Mr. Hope--God’s people were praying and giving anew for the mission. Especially was his own latest station of Cherra-poonjee remembered. As he was told that a lady, anonymously, had offered £500 for that mission, £500 for the college, £500 for the translations, and £100 for the mission generally, he raised his emaciated hands to heaven and murmured praise to God. When the delirium of departure came he strove to reach his desk that he might write a letter of thanks, particularly for Cherra. Then he would recall the fact that the little church he at first formed had branched out into six and twenty churches, in which the ordinances of the Gospel were regularly administered, and he would whisper, “What has God wrought!”

The last Sabbath had come--and the last full day. The constant Marshman was with him. “He was scarcely able to articulate, and after a little conversation I knelt down by the side of his couch and prayed with him. Finding my mind unexpectedly drawn out to bless God for His goodness, in having preserved him and blessed him in India for above forty years, and made him such an instrument of good to His church; and to entreat that on his being taken home, a double portion of his spirit might rest on those who remained behind; though unable to speak, he testified sufficiently by his countenance how cordially he joined in this prayer. I then asked Mrs. Carey whether she thought he could now see me. She said yes, and to convince me, said, ‘Mr. Marshman wishes to know whether you now see him?’ He answered so loudly that I could hear him, ‘Yes, I do,’ and shook me most cordially by the hand. I then left him, and my other duties did not permit me to reach him again that day. The next morning, as I was returning home before sunrise, I met our Brethren Mack and Leechman out on their morning ride, when Mack told me that our beloved brother had been rather worse all the night, and that he had just left him very ill. I immediately hastened home, through the college in which he has lived these ten years, and when I reached his room, found that he had just entered into the joy of his Lord--Mrs. Carey, his son Jabez, my son John, and Mrs. Mack being present.”

It was Monday the 9th June 1834, at half-past five, as the morning sun was ascending the heavens towards the perfect day. The rain-clouds burst and covered the land with gloom next morning when they carried William Carey to the converts’ burial-ground and made great lamentation. The notice was too short for many to come up from Calcutta in those days. “Mr. Duff, of the Scottish Church, returned a most kind letter.” Sir Charles Metcalfe and the Bishop wrote very feelingly in reply. Lady Bentinck sent the Rev. Mr. Fisher to represent the Governor-General and herself, and “a most kind and feeling answer, for she truly loved the venerable man,” while she sadly gazed at the mourners as they followed the simple funeral up the right bank of the Hoogli, past the College and the Mission chapel. Mr. Yates, who had taken a loving farewell of the scholar he had been reluctant to succeed, represented the younger brethren; Lacroix, Micaiah Hill, and Gogerly, the London Missionary Society. Corrie and Dealtry do not seem to have reached the spot in time. The Danish Governor, his wife, and the members of council were there, and the flag drooped half-mast high as on the occasion of a Governor’s death. The road was lined by the poor, Hindoo and Mohammedan, for whom he had done so much. When all, walking in the rain, had reached the open grave, the sun shone out, and Leechman led them in the joyous resurrection hymn, “Why do we mourn departing friends?” “I then addressed the audience,” wrote Marshman, “and, contrary to Brother Mack’s foretelling that I should never get through it for tears, I did not shed one. Brother Mack was then asked to address the native members, but he, seeing the time so far gone, publicly said he would do so at the village. Brother Robinson then prayed, and weeping--then neither myself nor few besides could refrain.” In Jannuggur village chapel in the evening the Bengali burial hymn was sung, Pœritran Christer Morone, “Salvation by the death of Christ,” and Pran Krishna, the oldest disciple, led his countrymen in prayer. Then Mack spoke to the weeping converts with all the pathos of their own sweet vernacular from the words, “For David, after he had served his own generation, by the will of God fell on sleep.” Had not Carey’s been a royal career, even that of a king and a priest unto God?

“We, as a mission,” wrote Dr. Marshman to Christopher Anderson, “took the expense on ourselves, not suffering his family to do so, as we shall that of erecting a monument for him. Long before his death we had, by a letter signed by us all, assured him that the dear relatives, in England and France, should have their pensions continued as though he were living, and that Mrs. Carey, as a widow, should have Rs. 100 monthly, whatever Mackintosh’s house might yield her.”

Twenty-two years before, when Chamberlain was complaining because of the absence of stone, or brick, or inscription in the mission burial-ground, Carey had said, “Why should we be remembered? I think when I am dead the sooner I am forgotten the better.” Dr. Johns observed that it is not the desire of the persons themselves but of their friends for them, to which Carey replied, “I think of others in that respect as I do of myself.” When his second wife was taken from him, his affection so far prevailed that he raised a memorial stone, and in his will left this “order” to Mack and William Robinson, his executors: “I direct that my funeral be as plain as possible; that I be buried by the side of my second wife, Charlotte Emilia Carey; and that the following inscription and nothing more may be cut on the stone which commemorates her, either above or below, as there may be room, viz.:--

WILLIAM CAREY, BORN AUGUST 17, 1761; DIED

A wretched, poor, and helpless worm,

On Thy kind arms I fall.”

The surviving brethren seem to have taken the small oblong stone, with the inscription added as directed, and to have placed it on the south side of the domed square block of brick and white plaster--since renewed from time to time--which stands in the left corner of the God’s-acre, now consecrated by the mingled dust of four generations of missionaries, converts, and Christian people. Ward’s monument stands in the centre, and that of the Marshman family at the right hand. Three and a half years afterwards Joshua Marshman followed Carey; not till 1847 was Hannah Marshman laid beside him, after a noble life of eighty years. Mack had gone the year before, cut off by cholera like Ward. But the brotherhood cannot be said to have ended till John Marshman, C.S.I., died in London in 1877. From first to last the three families contributed to the cause of God from their own earnings, ninety thousand pounds, and the world would never have known it but for the lack of the charity that envieth not on the part of Andrew Fuller’s successors.

Carey’s last will and testament begins: “I utterly disclaim all or any right or title to the premises at Serampore, called the mission premises, and every part and parcel thereof; and do hereby declare that I never had, or supposed myself to have, any such right or title. I give and bequeath to the College of Serampore the whole of my museum, consisting of minerals, shells, corals, insects, and other natural curiosities, and a Hortus Siccus; also the folio edition of Hortus Woburnensis, which was presented to me by Lord Hastings; Taylor’s Hebrew Concordance, my collection of Bibles in foreign languages, and all my books in the Italian and German languages.” His widow, Grace, who survived him a short time, had the little capital that was hers before her marriage to him, and he desired that she would choose from his library whatever English books she valued. His youngest son, Jonathan, was not in want of money. He had paid Felix and William Rs. 1500 each in his lifetime. In order to leave a like sum to Jabez, he thus provided: “From the failure of funds to carry my former intentions into effect, I direct that my library be sold.” In dying as in living he is the same--just to others because self-devoted to Him to whom he thus formally willed himself, “On Thy kind arms I fall.”

The Indian journals rang with the praises of the missionary whose childlike humility and sincerity, patriotism and learning, had long made India proud of him. After giving himself, William Carey had died so poor that his books had to be sold to provide £187 10s. for one of his sons. One writer asserted that this man had contributed “sixteen lakhs of rupees” to the cause of Christ while connected with the Serampore Mission, and the statement was everywhere repeated. Dr. Marshman thereupon published the actual facts, “as no one would have felt greater abhorrence of such an attempt to impose on the Christian public than Dr. Carey himself, had he been living.” At a time when the old Sicca Rupee was worth half a crown, Carey received, in the thirty-four and a half years of his residence at Serampore, from the date of his appointment to the College of Fort William, £45,000. Of this he spent £7500 on his Botanic Garden in that period. If accuracy is of any value in such a question, which has little more than a curious biographical interest, then we must add the seven years previous to 1801, and we shall find that the shoemaker of Hackleton received in all for himself and his family £600 from the Society which he called into existence, and which sent him forth, while he spent on the Christianisation and civilisation of India £1625 received as a manufacturer of indigo; and £45,000 as Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi, and Bengali Translator to Government, or £46,625 in all.

“It is possible,” wrote Dr. Marshman, “that if, instead of thus living to God and his cause with his brethren at Serampore, Dr. Carey had, like the other professors in the college, lived in Calcutta wholly for himself and his family, he might have laid by for them a lakh of rupees in the thirty years he was employed by Government, and had he been very parsimonious, possibly a lakh and a half. But who that contrasts the pleasures of such a life with those Dr. Carey enjoyed in promoting with his own funds every plan likely to plant Christianity among the natives around him, without having to consult any one in thus doing, but his two brethren of one heart with him, who contributed as much as himself to the Redeemer’s cause, and the fruit of which he saw before his death in Twenty-six Gospel Churches planted in India within a surface of about eight hundred miles, and above Forty labouring brethren raised up on the spot amidst them--would not prefer the latter? What must have been the feelings on a deathbed of a man who had lived wholly to himself, compared with the joyous tranquillity which filled Carey’s soul in the prospect of entering into the joy of his Lord, and above all with what he felt when, a few days before his decease, he said to his companion in labour for thirty-four years: ‘I have no fears; I have no doubts; I have not a wish left unsatisfied.’”

In the Danish Church of Serampore, and in the Mission Chapel, and afterwards in the Union Chapel of Calcutta, Dr. Marshman and Mr. Mack preached sermons on William Carey. These and the discourse delivered in Charlotte Chapel, Edinburgh, on the 30th of November, by Christopher Anderson, were the only materials from which a just estimate of Carey and his work could be formed for the next quarter of a century. All, and especially the last, were as worthy of their theme as éloges pronounced in such circumstances could be. Marshman spoke from the text chosen by Carey himself a few weeks before his death as containing the foundation of his hope and the source of his calm and tranquil assurance--“For by grace are ye saved.” Mack found his inspiration again, as he had done in the Bengali village, in Paul’s words--“David, after he had served his own generation, by the will of God fell on sleep.” The Edinburgh preacher turned to the message of Isaiah wherewith Carey used to comfort himself in his early loneliness, and which the Revised Version renders--“Look unto Abraham your father; for when he was but one I called him and I blessed him and made him many.” And in Bombay the young contemporary missionary who most nearly resembled Carey in personal saintliness, scholarship, and self-devotion, John Wilson, thus wrote:--

“Dr. Carey, the first of living missionaries, the most honoured and the most successful since the time of the Apostles, has closed his long and influential career. Indeed his spirit, his life, and his labours, were truly apostolic...The Spirit of God which was in him led him forward from strength to strength, supported him under privation, enabled him to overcome in a fight that seemed without hope. Like the beloved disciple, whom he resembled in simplicity of mind, and in seeking to draw sinners to Christ altogether by the cords of love, he outlived his trials to enjoy a peaceful and honoured old age, to know that his Master’s cause was prospering, and that his own name was named with reverence and blessing in every country where a Christian dwelt. Perhaps no man ever exerted a greater influence for good on a great cause. Who that saw him, poor and in seats of learning uneducated, embark on such an enterprise, could ever dream that, in little more than forty years, Christendom should be animated with the same spirit, thousands forsake all to follow his example, and that the Word of Life should be translated into almost every language and preached in almost every corner of the earth?”

As the Founder and Father of Modern Missions, the character and career of William Carey are being revealed every year in the progress, and as yet, the purity of the expansion of the Church and of the English-speaking races in the two-thirds of the world which are still outside of Christendom. The £13:2:6 of Kettering became £400,000 before he died, and is now £5,000,000 a year. The one ordained English missionary is now a band of 20,000 men and women sent out by 558 agencies of the Reformed Churches. The solitary converts, each with no influence on his people, or country, or generation, are now a community of 3,000,000 in India alone, and in all the lands outside of Christendom 5,000,000, of whom 80,000 are missionaries to their own countrymen, and many are leaders of the native communities. Since the first edition of the Bengali New Testament appeared at the beginning of the century 250,000,000 of copies of the Holy Scriptures have been printed, of which one half are in 370 of the non-English tongues of the world. The Bengali School of Mudnabati, the Christian College of Serampore, have set in motion educational forces that are bringing nations to the birth, are passing under Bible instruction every day more than a million boys and girls, young men and maidens of the dark races of mankind.

The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the greatest and most practical Evangelical of the nineteenth century after William Wilberforce, wrote thus in his Journal of the class whom Carey headed in the eighteenth, and whom Wordsworth commemorated as

“Not sedentary all, there are who roam

To scatter seeds of Life on barbarous shores.”

1847. “Aug. 30th--RYDE.--Reading Missionary Enterprises by Williams...Zeal, devotion, joy, simplicity of heart, faith, love; and we here have barely affection enough to thank God that such deeds have been done. Talk of ‘doing good’ and being ‘useful in one’s generation,’ why, these admirable men performed more in one month than I or many others shall perform in a whole life!”

The eloquent Dr. Richard Winter Hamilton, reflecting that sacrifice to heroes is reserved until after sunset, recalled William Carey, eight years after his death, as “wielding a power to which all difficulties yielded, but that power noiseless as a law of nature; great in conception as well as in performance; profound as those deep combinations of language in which the Indian philosophy and polytheism hide themselves, but gentle as the flower which in his brief recreation he loved to train; awful as the sage, simple as the child; speaking through the Eastern world in as many languages, perhaps, as ‘the cloven tongues of fire’ represented; to be remembered and blessed as long as Ganges rolls!”

The historian of the Baptist Missionary Society, and Robert Hall, whom Sir James Mackintosh pronounced the greatest English orator, have both attempted an estimate of Carey’s genius and influence. Dr. F. A. Cox remarks:--“Had he been born in the sixteenth century he might have been a Luther, to give Protestantism to Europe; had he turned his thought and observations merely to natural philosophy he might have been a Newton; but his faculties, consecrated by religion to a still higher end, have gained for him the sublime distinction of having been the Translator of the Scriptures and the Benefactor of Asia.” Robert Hall spoke thus of Carey in his lifetime:--“That extraordinary man who, from the lowest obscurity and poverty, without assistance, rose by dint of unrelenting industry to the highest honours of literature, became one of the first of Orientalists, the first of Missionaries, and the instrument of diffusing more religious knowledge among his contemporaries than has fallen to the lot of any individual since the Reformation; a man who unites with the most profound and varied attainments the fervour of an evangelist, the piety of a saint, and the simplicity of a child.”

Except the portrait in London and the bust in Calcutta, no memorial, national, catholic, or sectarian, marks the work of Carey. That work is meanwhile most appropriately embodied in the College for natives at Serampore, in the Lall Bazaar chapel and Benevolent Institution for the poor of Calcutta. The Church of England, which he left, like John Wesley, has allowed E. S. Robinson, Esq., of Bristol, to place an inscription, on brass, in the porch of the church of his native village, beside the stone which he erected over the remains of his father, Edmund, the parish clerk:--“To the Glory of God and in memory of Dr. Wm. Carey, Missionary and Orientalist.”

Neither Baptist nor Anglican, the present biographer would, in the name of the country which stood firm in its support of Carey and Serampore all through the forty-one years of his apostolate, add this final eulogy, pronounced in St. George’s Free Church, Edinburgh, on the man who, more than any other and before all others, made the civilisation of the modern world by the English-speaking races a Christian force. Carey, childlike in his humility, is the most striking illustration in all Hagiology, Protestant or Romanist, of the Lord’s declaration to the Twelve when He had set a little child in the midst of them, “Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Yet we, nigh a century after he went forth with the Gospel to Hindostan, may venture to place him where the Church History of the future is likely to keep him--amid the uncrowned kings of men who have made Christian England what it is, under God, to its own people and to half the human race. These are Chaucer, the Father of English Verse; Wyclif the Father of the Evangelical Reformation in all lands; Hooker, the Father of English Prose; Shakspere, the Father of English Literature; Milton, the Father of the English Epic; Bunyan, the Father of English Allegory; Newton, the father of English Science; Carey, the Father of the Second Reformation through Foreign Missions.

APPENDIX

I.--CHARTER OF INCORPORATION OF SERAMPORE COLLEGE

WE, Frederick the Sixth, by the Grace of God King of Denmark, the Venders and Gothers, Duke of Slesvig Holsten, Stormarn, Ditmarsken, Limessborg and Oldenborg, by writings these make known and publicly declare, that whereas William Carey and Joshua Marshman, Doctors of Divinity, and John Clark Marshman, Esq., inhabitants of our town of Fredericksnagore (or Serampore) in Bengal, being desirous of founding a College to promote piety and learning particularly among the native Christian population of India, have to secure this object erected suitable buildings and purchased and collected suitable books, maps, etc., and have humbly besought us to grant unto them and such persons as shall be elected by them and their successors to form the Council of the College in the manner to be hereafter named, our Royal Charter of Incorporation that they may the more effectually carry into execution the purposes above-mentioned:--We, being desirous to encourage so laudable an undertaking, have of our special grace and free motion ordained, constituted, granted and declared, and by the presents We do for ourselves, our heirs and successors ordain, constitute, grant and declare: