The Bengal Asiatic Society, on the motion of the Lord Bishop and Colonel Sir Jer. Bryant, entered these words on their Journal:—"The Asiatic Society cannot note upon their proceedings the death of the Rev. W. Carey, D.D., so long an active member and an ornament of this Institution, distinguished alike for his high attainments in the Oriental languages, for his eminent services in opening the stores of Indian literature to the knowledge of Europe, and for his extensive acquaintance with the sciences, the natural history and botany of this country, and his useful contributions on every hand towards the promotion of the objects of the Society, without placing on record this expression of their high sense of his value and merits as a scholar and a man of science; their esteem for the sterling and surpassing religious and moral excellencies of his character, and their sincere grief for his irreparable loss."
CHAPTER XIII
CAREY'S IMMEDIATE INFLUENCE IN GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA
1813-1830
Carey's relation to the new era—The East India Company's Charters of 1793, 1813, and 1833—His double influence on the churches and public opinion—The great missionary societies—Missionary journals and their readers—Bengal and India recognised as the most important mission fields—Influence on Robert Haldane—Reflex effect of foreign on home missions—Carey's power over individuals—Melville Horne and Douglas of Cavers—Henry Martyn—Charles Simeon and Stewart of Moulin—Robert Hall and John Foster—Heber and Chalmers—William Wilberforce on Carey—Mr. Prendergast and the tub story—Last persecution by the Company's Government—Carey on the persecution and the charter controversy—The persecuting clause and the resolution legalising toleration—The Edinburgh Review and Sydney Smith's fun—Sir James Mackintosh's opinion—Southey's defence and eulogy of Carey and the brotherhood in the Quarterly Review—Political value of Carey's labours—Andrew Fuller's death—A model foreign mission secretary—His friendship with Carey—The sixteen years' dispute—Dr. Carey's position—His defence of Marshman—His chivalrous self-sacrifice—His forgiveness of the younger brethren in Calcutta—His fidelity to righteousness and to friendship.
Himself the outcome of the social and political forces which began in the French Revolution, and are still at work, William Carey was made a living personal force to the new era. The period which was introduced in 1783 by the Peace of Versailles in Europe following the Independence of the United States of America, was new on every side—in politics, in philosophy, in literature, in scientific research, in a just and benevolent regard for the peoples of every land, and in the awakening of the churches from the sleep of formalism. Carey was no thinker, but with the reality and the vividness of practical action and personal sacrifice he led the English-speaking races, to whom the future of the world was then given, to substitute for the dreams of Rousseau and all other theories the teaching of Christ as to His kingdom within each man, and in the progress of mankind.
Set free from the impossible task of administering North America on the absolutist system which the Georges would fain have continued, Great Britain found herself committed to the duty of doing for India what Rome had done for Europe. England was compelled to surrender the free West to her own children only that she might raise the servile and idolatrous East to such a Christian level as the genius of its peoples could in time enable them to work out. But it took the thirty years from 1783 to 1813 to convince British statesmen, from Pitt to Castlereagh, that India is to be civilised not according to its own false systems, but by truth in all forms, spiritual and moral, scientific and historical. It took other twenty years, to the Charter of 1833, to complete the conversion of the British Parliament to the belief that the principles of truth and freedom are in their measure as good for the East as for the West. At the beginning of this new period William Pitt based his motion for Parliamentary reform on this fact, that "our senators are no longer the representatives of British virtue but of the vices and pollutions of the East." At the close of it Lord William Bentinck, Macaulay, and Duff, co-operated in the decree which made truth, as most completely revealed through the English language and literature, the medium of India's enlightenment. William Carey's career of fifty years, from his baptism in 1783 and the composition of his Enquiry to his death in 1834, covered and influenced more than any other one man's the whole time; and he represented in it an element of permanent healthy nationalisation which these successors overlooked,—the use of the languages of the peoples of India as the only literary channels for allowing the truth revealed through English to reach the millions of the people.
It was by this means that Carey educated Great Britain and America to rise equal to the terrible trust of jointly creating a Christian Empire of India, and ultimately a series of self-governing Christian nations in Southern and Eastern Asia. He consciously and directly roused the Churches of all names to carry out the commission of their Master, and to seek the promised impulse of His Spirit or Divine Representative on earth, that they might do greater things than even those which He did. And he, less directly but not less consciously, brought the influence of public opinion, which every year purified and quickened, to bear upon Parliament and upon individual statesmen, aided in this up till 1815 by Andrew Fuller. He never set foot in England again, and the influence of his brethren Ward and Marshman during their visits was largely neutralised by some leaders of their own church. But Carey's character and career, his letters and writings, his work and whole personality, stood out in England, Scotland, and America as the motive power which stimulated every church and society, and won the triumph of toleration in the charter of 1813, of humanity, education, and administrative reform in the legislation of Lord William Bentinck.
We have already seen how the immediate result of Carey's early letters was the foundation on a catholic basis of the London Missionary Society, which now represents the great Nonconformist half of England; of the Edinburgh or Scottish and Glasgow Societies, through which the Presbyterians sent forth missionaries to West and South Africa and to Western India, until their churches acted as such; of the Church Missionary Society which the evangelical members of the Church of England have put in the front of all the societies; and of Robert Haldane's splendid self-sacrifice in selling all that he had to lead a large Presbyterian mission to Hindostan. Soon (1797) the London Society became the parent of that of the Netherlands, and of that which is one of the most extensive in Christendom, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The latter, really founded (1810) by Judson and some of his fellow-students, gave birth (1814) to the almost equally great American Baptist Union when Judson and his colleague became Baptists, and the former was sent by Carey to Burma. The Religious Tract Society (1799), and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804)—each a handmaid of the missionary agencies—sprang as really though less directly from Carey's action. Such organised efforts to bring in heathen and Mohammedan peoples led in 1809 to the at first catholic work begun by the London Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews. The older Wesleyan Methodist and Gospel Propagation Societies, catching the enthusiasm as Carey succeeded in opening India and the East, entered on a new development under which the former in 1813, and the latter in 1821, no longer confined their operations to the slaves of America and the English of the dispersion in the colonies and dependencies of Great Britain. In 1815 Lutheran Germany also, which had cast out the Pietists and the Moravian brethren as the Church of England had rejected the Wesleyans, founded the principal representative of its evangelicalism at Basel. The succeeding years up to Carey's death saw similar missionary centres formed, or reorganised, in Leipzig (1819), Berlin (1823), and Bremen (1836).[23]