William Carey

[John Henry]

WILLIAM CAREY
1761 - 1834

William Carey was born in 1761 in the remote village of Paulerspury,
Nothamptonshire, England. At the time of his birth John and Charles
Wesley were at the pinnacle of their influence and George Whitfield
was preparing for his sixth journey to the Americas. Whitfield and
the Wesleys were educated within the confines of prestigious Oxford
but Carey would know no such formal education. Instead, the majority
of his education would be of the trial-and-error method, his school a
heart set afire for lost people in far away lands, and his degree a
Doctorate in suffering for the cause of Christ.

Just as both Bunyan and Spurgeon rose from rural obscurity, so did
William Carey. His parents were rather plain people who belonged to
the accepted church. At the age of seven young William developed a
skin disease that was aggravated by exposure to sunlight. Because of
this condition Carey's parents realized he would have to learn a
skill which allowed him to stay inside. So at the age of fourteen
William was apprenticed as a shoemaker with Clarke Nichols. John
Warr, a fellow apprentice and a Dissenter stands as one of those
great unknowns who led a person to Christ whose name would be
remembered above his own. Through careful seed-planting John led
Carey to a realization of his own sinfulness and need for a Savior.
Soon he was saved and seeking baptism among those same Dissenters.
Carey now had to add to his list of lower-class traits that of being a Baptist.

Soon after his conversion William Carey began to speak at various
Dissenting churches and soon felt called to pastor among the
Baptists. If Carey's future success had been judged by his early days
in preaching he would have been deemed hopeless for the ministry. He
was never considered a good speaker. Carey was slight of build,
prematurely bald, and crude in his speech. His first year at Olney
was so unimpressive that the church refused to ordain him. One hearer
commented about his sermon as, "weak and crude as anything ever
called a sermon." Carey often said of himself that his one great
strength was that he was a "plodder". He may not have had the
greatest skills but he had extraordinary tenacity. So, the young
preacher persevered and was finally ordained. His next ten years were
served first as bi-vocational and then full-time pastor. In 1781
Carey married Dorothy Plackett. He was only 19 and she was 25. Though
they were married for 26 years there was great sorrow in that time
and the ending was tragic.

As a young boy, William developed a love for the explorers; so much
so that his friends nicknamed him Columbus. That love for adventure
became a love for adventuring for Christ as an adult. As a pastor,
Carey also worked as a schoolteacher. While serving in that capacity
he designed a shoe-leather globe to teach his students about
geography. It is said that at times while he was teaching his eyes
would fall on that globe. Soon Carey would be weeping, crying out,
"And these are pagans, pagans!"Many a young Christian, including this
author, have been moved toward the ministry by reading the account of
Carey's shoe-leather globe and his passion for the unreached masses.
As he studied and prayed William Carey saw in Christ the perfect
example of a missionary. He wrote:

"If Christ could stoop so low as to visit our ... sinful world, and
be moved with compassion upon the most undeserving and guilty, the
most sinful and depraved ...in what better way could we demonstrate
that we are partakers of His grace than by earnest endeavor to
imitate His example ... by laboring to promote the salvation of the
most ignorant and helpless of mankind?"

Through his association with Andrew Fuller and others, Carey began to
formulate a distinct sense of his calling to missions from God. That
calling soon translated into a burden for others to see the same need
for missionaries to far off lands. Sadly, Carey met a great deal of
opposition to begin with concerning foreign missions. When He
addressed the Minister's Fraternal of the Northampton Baptist
Association in 1787 concerning missions John Ryland Sr. replied, "Sit
down young man. You are an enthusiast! When God pleases to convert
the heathen, He will do it without consulting you or me." Such a
reprimand only served to spur William Carey on in his zeal for
missions. In 1792 Carey wrote An Enquiry into the Obligations of
Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. This would
become the Magna Carta for the modern mission movement. It was also
in that year that he preached his famous sermon, "Expect great
things. Attempt great things." By the end of that same day the
Northamptonshire Baptist Association adopted a resolution penned by
Andrew Fuller:

"Resolved, that a plan be prepared against the next minister's
meeting at Kettering, for forming a Baptist Society for propagating
the gospel among the heathen."

With Carey's sermon and Fuller's resolution, the modern mission
movement was born. Nearly a century later that great Southern
Baptist, B.H. Carroll wrote of Carey's sermon:

"William Carrey ... preached his great sermon, 'Expect Great Things,
Attempt Great Things.' From the top of that sermon, if you were to
sight backwards on a dead level,, no other sermon will be high enough
to cross the line until you strike Peter's sermon on the Day of Pentecost."

Before long it was William Carey who had been chosen by the new
missionary society to head for India with the Gospel. Dorothy,
Carey's wife was not so ready to leave England and only after much
persuasion did she agree to go. Time would prove that Dorothy's heart
probably never made it to the distant shores of India. Times for
missionaries were quite different then than they are now. Today,
missionaries tend to go to lands they have been well prepared for.
They go with the benefit of language school and seminary degrees in
missiology. Such was not the case in 1800. Like the first
missionaries who followed him, William Carey was in unknown waters
when he went to India. There was no precedent to follow. There were
no mission textbooks to carry along. There were no experienced
missionaries to show the way. "For the first few years in India,
Carey was essentially in missionary orientation. He had not
precedents to guide him, no sizeable body of missionary literature to
offer insights, and few missionary colleagues with whom to compare
notes. Carey's work was trial and error until after a few years he
hammered out a missionary strategy to go with the missionary theology
he had developed in England."

Along with his associate, a Doctor Thomas, William Carey and family
arrived in the city of Calcutta in 1793. It was a town of over
200,000 people from many parts of the world. Because of the British
influence, Calcutta was a town of varied shades. It teemed with
everything from Indian street beggars to English aristocrats. It
seemed like the perfect place to begin a mission. Perfect, accept for
the greater plans of God. From the beginning things began to fall
apart. Dr. Thomas was a terrible money manager and they were quickly
forced to move 30 miles out into the countryside. Almost immediately
Thomas faced something he would for the rest of his life, creditors.
Soon he squandered most of the mission money leaving Carey and his
family nearly penniless. At this point Carey wrote, "Now all my
friends are but one; I rejoice, however, that He is all-sufficient,
and can supply all my wants, spiritual and temporal." There is much
we could learn from the spirit of a man who was willing to reveal his
doubts and fears and rejoice in the great faithfulness of his God at
the same time.

All did not remain bleak, however. Under conviction for what he had
done, Dr. Thomas returned to Carey and they soon found employment
managing an indigo plantation. Carey's love for reading books about
horticulture and farming proved a great preparation for providing
their livelihood in India. India was a formidable environment for the
fair skinned Britts. In her jungles lurked man-eating tigers, rogue
elephants, snakes, malaria and death with a thousand faces. In 1796
fever swept through the Carey family and claimed the life of their 5
year old son, Peter. Dorothy never recovered from this and blamed
Carey for their son's death. Mrs. Carey was to become mentally
unstable and unable to cope with life throughout the rest of her
years on earth. Feeling the depth of loss and alienation from his
wife Carey wrote in his diary:

"This is indeed the valley of the shadow of death to me ... O what I
would give for a sympathetic friend ... to whom I might open my
heart! But I rejoice that I am here, not withstanding; and God is
here, who can not only have compassion, but is able to save to the uttermost."

Trials always precede triumphs as night does day. By 1799 more
missionaries had arrived and finally the work was established. Carey
spent the first seven years without a convert but now the tide was
turning. Finally in December of 1800 Carey baptized his first Hindu
and by 1821 the missionaries had baptized over 1400 new Christians.
Working without any kind of a real support system, William Carey had
expected great things and attempted great things. God had blessed his
commitment.

During this period, Carey's first wife, Dorothy, passed from this
world. He was married again quite quickly to Charlotte which caused
some talk among the other missionaries. Soon, however, others in the
mission compound realized the need Carey had for a companion and a
mother to his four children. They were to be married for 13 years
that would prove to be the happiest of Carey's life. In 1821, William
laid another wife to rest in the soil of India. In 1822 he married
his third wife, Grace. They would remain together for the rest of their lives.

William Carey was not a formally educated man. He had none of the
worldly training of someone with money. Yet, In spite of his poor
education, Carey proved to be a brilliant linguist. After 71/2 years
of work his first edition of the Bengali New Testament was ready in
1801. The Old Testament was finished in segments by 1809. Carey's
translating work was prodigious. By 1837, he and his helpers had
translated portions of the Scripture into more than 40 languages. The
mission's first school for natives was opened in 1798 and in the next
20 years 102 more schools were opened with nearly 7,000 students.
Carey's crowning jewel was the Serampore College which is still in
operation to this present day.

On June 9, 1834, William Carey left this earth at the age of 73. Once
he left England he never returned to his homeland. At his death he
had requested the words of an Isaac Watts hymn be written on his
tombstone: "A wretched, poor, and helpless worm, On Thy kind arms I
fall." A young missionary who attended the funeral wrote these words:

" And what shall we do? God has take up our Elijah to heaven ... But
we must not be discouraged. The God of missions lives forever. His
Cause must go on ... With our departed leader all is well. He had
finished his course gloriously. But the work now descends on us."

Like most great men, Carey was complex. He experienced many triumphs
and yet also many defeats. His life and witness were forged in the
hot furnace of trial and disappointment. There can be no doubt that
Dorothy's mental illness was the darkest thing in Carey's life. She
never adjusted to the wild life of the jungles of India. After
Peter's death, Dorothy slowly slipped into an ever-increasing
madness. Imagine William Carey trying to study and translate in the
still night hours as he heard the screams and curses of his demented
wife from the room next door. Finally, after 12 years of deep
oppression Dorothy died on December 8, 1807. Should he have brought
his reluctant wife to such a distant and remote land? God is the judge of that.

Carey's other great trial was the schism that rose between the
mission society he had helped form in England and the missionaries in
India. In our day of instant communication it is quite possible that
the problems which arose would never have even happened. Because news
traveled so slowly with no way to confirm information without month's
delay, rumors had a way of becoming fact before the accused could
even speak. Some accused Carey of becoming wealthy as a missionary.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Everything he made
was turned into the mission compound. After Andrew Fuller's death,
there was no one in Great Britain to speak sense to younger
nay-sayers. So, Carey and the mission society his sermon began over
40 years earlier parted ways.

Great men cast long shadows. Carey's influence shadowed an entire
world. His influence reached America quickly. Missionaries on their
way to India often traveled through America and stayed with Baptists
along the way. Their zeal for missions was passed on to American
Christians. Carey influenced missionaries even before he met them.
When Ann and Adonirum Judson left the states as Congregationalists
they knew they would soon meet Carey, a Baptist. In preparation the
Judsons studied everything they could in their Greek New Testament
concerning baptism. Thinking they would find a rebuttal to immersion
for Carey, they instead came to embrace immersion and were baptized
when they arrived in India.

William Carey's influence on Indian society was also felt keenly.
Through his papers and efforts the Calcutta government finally
outlawed the infanticide of babies being thrown to the alligators in
the Ganges River. The practice of sati (widows being burned at their
deceased husband's funeral pier) especially horrified Carey. Through
his bold stance along with other missionaries, that practice came to
an end in 1829.

Most importantly, Carey was a theological missionary. He was a
committed follower of the Doctrines of Grace along with Fuller and
yet was equally committed to the Great Commission. William Carey once
called himself a "plodder for Christ." He just kept on doing what he
was called to do and plodded toward the kingdom with sure and
measured steps. May we have more plodders!