Mr. Marshman’s school, and likewise the subscriptions received from England. Here were their chapel, their schools, and their printing-press, from whence emanated such books and tracts in Bengalee as could be useful for their purpose, and likewise their great work, the translation of the Scriptures, which Marshman and Carey were continually revising and improving as their knowledge of the language became more critical. Thence Mr. Carey went to give instruction at Fort William, and thence the preachers, as the opposition relaxed, went forth on expeditions into the country to teach, argue, and persuade, without any very wide-spread success, but still every year gaining a few converts—sometimes as many as twenty—who, when they had given sufficient evidence of faith, were always publicly baptized by immersion, according to the custom of the sect, which indeed acknowledged no other form as valid, and re-baptized such members of other communions as joined them. Every missionary to the East Indies, whether belonging to their own society or not, was certain to visit and hold council with them, as the veterans of the Christian army in India, and the men most experienced in the character and language of the natives; they were the prime leaders and authorities in all that concerned the various vernacular translations of the Scriptures, and their example was as a trumpet-call to others to follow them in their labours; while all the time the simplicity, humility, self-denial, and activity of the men themselves remained unspoiled.
Wonderful, too, had been the effect produced by the stirring of the sluggish waters of indifference. The Society that had been with such difficulty established at home, was numbering multitudes of subscribers both in England and America; it had awakened a like spirit in other sects, and whereas no dissenting minister in London had at first taken up Carey’s cause, it had become a scandal for a minister not to subscribe to or promote missions to the heathen. Missionary reports were everywhere distributed, young men aspired to the work, and American Universities did honour to the ability and scholarship of the pioneers of Serampore.
Mrs. Carey died on the 7th of December, 1807, having spent twelve years in a state of constant melancholy and often raving insanity. Poor woman! she was from the first a victim to her husband’s aspirations, which she never understood. There is
something piteous in the cobbler’s daughter marrying the apprentice to keep on the business, and finding him a genius and a hero on her hands, starving, being laughed at, and at last carried off to a strange land and fatal climate, all without the least comprehension or sympathy for the cause, and her mind failing before the material prosperity came, which she might have regarded as compensation.
In 1807, when some progress had been made, the grant for the translation of the Scriptures was withdrawn; but the superintendents resolved to persevere on their own account, and at the same time to collect all the information in their power respecting the Christians in India, so as to be able to rouse the cold hearts at home to the perception that a real work was in progress. For this purpose, Dr. Claudius Buchanan, the Provost of the College at Fort William, made an expedition of inquiry among the various Christians, and his little book, “Christian Researches,” brought much before the public at home, of which they had hitherto been ignorant.
Before his time the enormities of the worship of Jaghernauth, and the horrors of the car, beneath which human victims threw themselves, had hardly been realized; and his very effective style of writing brought into full prominence the atrocities of the Suttee, or burning of widows on the funeral pile, a custom with which it was supposed to be impossible to interfere, but which has been proved to be entirely a corrupt practice, unsanctioned by any ancient law, only encouraged by the Brahmins out of avarice. Happily the present generation only knows of these atrocities as almost proverbial expressions, but when the century came in they were in full force.
It was Buchanan, too, who first revealed to the English the existence of those Nestorian Christians of St. Thomas, on the coast of Malabar, who had probably had no ecclesiastical intercourse with this country since the embassy of King Alfred, nine hundred years before. He also brought into public notice the effect of Swartz’s labours, by describing a visit that he made to Tanjore, where he had a most kind reception from Serfojee, and greatly admired the numerous charitable foundations of that beneficent Rajah. He also heard the services held in three languages in Swartz’s church, and was greatly struck, when the Tamul sermon began, by hearing a universal scratching and grating all round him. This was caused, he
found, by the iron pens upon the palmyra leaves upon which most of the native congregation were taking notes, writing nearly as fast as the minister spoke. He also heard Sattianadem—now a white-haired old man—preach on the “Marvellous Light,” and he felt that a great man had verily left his impress on these districts.
Carey’s second marriage was curiously different from his first. It was to a lady named Charlotte Rumohr, of noble extraction, belonging to a family of high rank, in the duchy of Schleswig. She was small and slightly deformed, but of good abilities; she had been highly educated, and being generally a prisoner on a couch, she had read deeply in many languages. She had come out to India in search of a warm climate, and residing at Serampore, had fallen under the influence of the missionaries, and had some years previously been admitted to their congregation by immersion. For the first time, Dr. Carey now enjoyed a really happy home, with a lady equal to conversing with him after the labours of the day.
But this mission, though subsisting for some years longer, hardly affords many more events. It was not without troubles. At times came friendly support; at others, opposition from the authorities—the committee at home were sometimes ignorantly meddlesome, sometimes sordid in their fits of economy; insufficiently tested fellow-labourers came out and failed; promising converts fell away; the climate was one steady unrelaxing foe, which took victims out of every family: but all these things were as the dust of the highway, trials common to man, and only incident to the very position that had been so wondrously achieved, since the day when the poor Baptist cobbler was so peremptorily silenced for but venturing to hint at the duty of converting the heathen.