: The Life of William Carey Shoemaker & Missionary by Smith George - Carey William 1761-1834; Missions India

@FreeBooks

Posted in: #FreeBooks #FreeBooksIndia #FreeBooksApp #gg

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY, D.D.

CAREY'S COLLEGE

The Heart of England--The Weaver Carey who became a Peer, and the weaver who was father of William Carey--Early training in Paulerspury--Impressions made by him on his sister--On his companions and the villagers--His experience as son of the parish clerk--Apprenticed to a shoemaker of Hackleton--Poverty--Famous shoemakers from Annianus and Crispin to Hans Sachs and Whittier--From Pharisaism to Christ--The last shall be first--The dissenting preacher in the parish clerk's home--He studies Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Dutch and French--The cobbler's shed is Carey's College.

William Carey, the first of her own children of the Reformation whom England sent forth as a missionary to India, where he became the most extensive translator of the Bible and civiliser, was the son of a weaver, and was himself a village shoemaker till he was twenty-eight years of age. He was born on the 17th August 1761, in the very midland of England, in the heart of the district which had produced Shakspere, had fostered Wyclif and Hooker, had bred Fox and Bunyan, and had for a time been the scene of the lesser lights of John Mason and Doddridge, of John Newton and Thomas Scott. William Cowper, the poet of missions, made the land his chosen home, writing Hope and The Task in Olney, while the shoemaker was studying theology under Sutcliff on the opposite side of the market-place. Thomas Clarkson, born a year before Carey, was beginning his assaults on the slave-trade by translating into English his Latin essay on the day-star of African liberty when the shoemaker, whom no university knew, was writing his Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use means for the Conversion of the Heathens.

The Careys who became famous in English history sprang from Devon. For two and a half centuries, from the second Richard to the second Charles, they gave statesmen and soldiers, scholars and bishops, to the service of their country. Henry Carey, first cousin of Queen Elizabeth, was the common ancestor of two ennobled houses long since extinct--the Earls of Dover and the Earls of Monmouth. A third peerage won by the Careys has been made historic by the patriotic counsels and self-sacrificing fate of Viscount Falkland, whose representative was Governor of Bombay for a time. Two of the heroic Falkland's descendants, aged ladies, addressed a pathetic letter to Parliament about the time that the great missionary died, praying that they might not be doomed to starvation by being deprived of a crown pension of ?80 a year. The older branch of the Careys also had fallen on evil times, and it became extinct while the future missionary was yet four years old. The seventh lord was a weaver when he succeeded to the title, and he died childless. The eighth was a Dutchman who had to be naturalised, and he was the last. The Careys fell lower still. One of them bore to the brilliant and reckless Marquis of Halifax, Henry Carey, who wrote one of the few English ballads that live. Another, the poet's granddaughter, was the mother of Edmund Kean, and he at first was known by her name on the stage.

At that time when the weaver became the lord the grandfather of the missionary was parish clerk and first schoolmaster of the village of Paulerspury, eleven miles south of Northampton, and near the ancient posting town of Towcester, on the old Roman road from London to Chester. The free school was at the east or "church end" of the village, which, after crossing the old Watling Street, straggles for a mile over a sluggish burn to the "Pury end." One son, Thomas, had enlisted and was in Canada. Edmund Carey, the second, set up the loom on which he wove the woollen cloth known as "tammy," in a two-storied cottage. There his eldest child, WILLIAM, was born, and lived for six years till his father was appointed schoolmaster, when the family removed to the free schoolhouse. The cottage was demolished in 1854 by one Richard Linnell, who placed on the still meaner structure now occupying the site the memorial slab that guides many visitors to the spot. The schoolhouse, in which William Carey spent the eight most important years of his childhood till he was fourteen, and the school made way for the present pretty buildings.

Two unfinished autobiographical sketches, written from India at the request of Fuller and of Ryland, and letters of his youngest sister Mary, his favourite "Polly" who survived him, have preserved for us in still vivid characters the details of the early training of William Carey. He was the eldest of five children. He was the special care of their grandmother, a woman of a delicate nature and devout habits, who closed her sad widowhood in the weaver-son's cottage. Encompassed by such a living influence the grandson spent his first six years. Already the child unconsciously showed the eager thirst for knowledge, and perseverance in attaining his object, which made him chiefly what he became. His mother would often be awoke in the night by the pleasant lisping of a voice "casting accompts; so intent was he from childhood in the pursuit of knowledge. Whatever he began he finished; difficulties never seemed to discourage his mind." On removal to the ancestral schoolhouse the boy had a room to himself. His sister describes it as full of insects stuck in every corner that he might observe their progress. His many birds he entrusted to her care when he was from home. In this picture we see the exact foreshadowing of the man. "Though I often used to kill his birds by kindness, yet when he saw my grief for it he always indulged me with the pleasure of serving them again; and often took me over the dirtiest roads to get at a plant or an insect. He never walked out, I think, when quite a boy, without observation on the hedges as he passed; and when he took up a plant of any kind he always observed it with care. Though I was but a child I well remember his pursuits. He always seemed in earnest in his recreations as well as in school. He was generally one of the most active in all the amusements and recreations that boys in general pursue. He was always beloved by the boys about his own age." To climb a certain tree was the object of their ambition; he fell often in the attempt, but did not rest till he had succeeded. His Uncle Peter was a gardener in the same village, and gave him his first lessons in botany and horticulture. He soon became responsible for his father's official garden, till it was the best kept in the neighbourhood. Wherever after that he lived, as boy or man, poor or in comfort, William Carey made and perfected his garden, and always for others, until he created at Serampore the botanical park which for more than half a century was unique in Southern Asia.

We have in a letter from the Manse, Paulerspury, a tradition of the impression made on the dull rustics by the dawning genius of the youth whom they but dimly comprehended. He went amongst them under the nickname of Columbus, and they would say, "Well, if you won't play, preach us a sermon," which he would do. Mounting on an old dwarf witch-elm about seven feet high, where several could sit, he would hold forth. This seems to have been a resort of his for reading, his favourite occupation. The same authority tells how, when suffering toothache, he allowed his companions to drag the tooth from his head with a violent jerk, by tying around it a string attached to a wheel used to grind malt, to which they gave a sharp turn.

The boy's own peculiar room was a little library as well as museum of natural history. He possessed a few books, which indeed were many for those days, but he borrowed more from the whole country-side. Recalling the eight years of his intellectual apprenticeship till he was fourteen, from the serene height of his missionary standard, he wrote long after:--"I chose to read books of science, history, voyages, etc., more than any others. Novels and plays always disgusted me, and I avoided them as much as I did books of religion, and perhaps from the same motive. I was better pleased with romances, and this circumstance made me read the Pilgrim's Progress with eagerness, though to no purpose." The new era, of which he was to be the aggressive spiritual representative from Christendom, had not dawned. Walter Scott was ten years his junior. Captain Cook had not discovered the Sandwich Islands, and was only returning from the second of his three voyages while Carey was still at school. The church services and the watchfulness of his father supplied the directly moral training which his grandmother had begun.

The Paulerspury living of St. James is a valuable rectory in the gift of New College, Oxford. Originally built in Early English, and rebuilt in 1844, the church must have presented a still more venerable appearance a century ago than it does now, with its noble tower in the Perpendicular, and chancel in the Decorated style, dominating all the county. Then, as still, effigies of a Paveli and his wife, and of Sir Arthur Throckmorton and his wife recumbent head to head, covered a large altar-tomb in the chancel, and with the Bathurst and other monuments called forth first the fear and then the pride of the parish clerk's eldest son. In those days the clerk had just below the pulpit the desk from which his sonorous "Amen" sounded forth, while his family occupied a low gallery rising from the same level up behind the pulpit. There the boys of the free school also could be under the master's eye, and with instruments of music like those of King David, but now banished from even village churches, would accompany him in the doggerel strains of Sternhold and Hopkins, immortalised by Cowper. To the far right the boys could see and long for the ropes under the tower, in which the bell-ringers of his day, as of Bunyan's not long before, delighted. The preaching of the time did nothing more for young Carey than for the rest of England and Scotland, whom the parish church had not driven into dissent or secession. But he could not help knowing the Prayer-Book, and especially its psalms and lessons, and he was duly confirmed. The family training, too, was exceptionally scriptural, though not evangelical. "I had many stirrings of mind occasioned by being often obliged to read books of a religious character; and, having been accustomed from my infancy to read the Scriptures, I had a considerable acquaintance therewith, especially with the historical parts." The first result was to make him despise dissenters. But, undoubtedly, this eldest son of the schoolmaster and the clerk of the parish had at fourteen received an education from parents, nature, and books which, with his habits of observation, love of reading, and perseverance, made him better instructed than most boys of fourteen far above the peasant class to which he belonged.

Buried in this obscure village in the dullest period of the dullest of all centuries, the boy had no better prospect before him than that of a weaver or labourer, or possibly a schoolmaster like one of his uncles in the neighbouring town of Towcester. When twelve years of age, with his uncle there, he might have formed one of the crowd which listened to John Wesley, who, in 1773 and then aged seventy, visited the prosperous posting town. Paulerspury could indeed boast of one son, Edward Bernard, D.D., who, two centuries before, had made for himself a name in Oxford, where he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy. But Carey was not a Scotsman, and therefore the university was not for such as he. Like his school-fellows, he seemed born to the English labourer's fate of five shillings a week, and the poorhouse in sickness and old age. From this, in the first instance, he was saved by a disease which affected his face and hands most painfully whenever he was long exposed to the sun. For seven years he had failed to find relief. His attempt at work in the field were for two years followed by distressing agony at night. He was now sixteen, and his father sought out a good man who would receive him as apprentice to the shoemaking trade. The man was not difficult to find, in the hamlet of Hackleton, nine miles off, in the person of one Clarke Nichols. The lad afterwards described him as "a strict churchman and, what I thought, a very moral man. It is true he sometimes drank rather too freely, and generally employed me in carrying out goods on the Lord's Day morning; but he was an inveterate enemy to lying, a vice to which I was awfully addicted." The senior apprentice was a dissenter, and the master and his boys gave much of the talk over their work to disputes upon religious subjects. Carey "had always looked upon dissenters with contempt. I had, moreover, a share of pride sufficient for a thousand times my knowledge; I therefore always scorned to have the worst in an argument, and the last word was assuredly mine. I also made up in positive assertion what was wanting in argument, and generally came off with triumph. But I was often convinced afterwards that although I had the last word my antagonist had the better of the argument, and on that account felt a growing uneasiness and stings of conscience gradually increasing." The dissenting apprentice was soon to be the first to lead him to Christ.

William Carey was a shoemaker during the twelve years of his life from sixteen to twenty-eight, till he went to Leicester. Poverty, which the grace of God used to make him a preacher also from his eighteenth year, compelled him to work with his hands in leather all the week, and to tramp many a weary mile to Northampton and Kettering carrying the product of his labour. At one time, when minister of Moulton, he kept a school by day, made or cobbled shoes by night, and preached on Sunday. So Paul had made tents of his native Cilician goatskin in the days when infant Christianity was chased from city to city, and the cross was a reproach only less bitter, however, than evangelical dissent in Christian England in the eighteenth century. The providence which made and kept young Carey so long a shoemaker, put him in the very position in which he could most fruitfully receive and nurse the sacred fire that made him the most learned scholar and Bible translator of his day in the East. The same providence thus linked him to the earliest Latin missionaries of Alexandria, of Asia Minor, and of Gaul, who were shoemakers, and to a succession of scholars and divines, poets and critics, reformers and philanthropists, who have used the shoemaker's life to become illustrious. St. Mark chose for his successor, as first bishop of Alexandria, that Annianus whom he had been the means of converting to Christ when he found him at the cobbler's stall. The Talmud commemorates the courage and the wisdom of "Rabbi Jochanan, the shoemaker," whose learning soon after found a parallel in Carey's. Like Annianus, "a poor shoemaker named Alexander, despised in the world but great in the sight of God, who did honour to so exalted a station in the Church," became famous as Bishop of Comana in Cappadocia, as saint, preacher, and missionary-martyr. Soon after there perished in the persecutions of Diocletian, at Soissons, the two missionary brothers whose name of Crispin has ever since been gloried in by the trade, which they chose at once as a means of livelihood and of helping their poor converts. The Hackleton apprentice was still a child when the great Goethe was again adding to the then artificial literature of his country his own true predecessor, Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of N?rnberg, the friend of Luther, the meistersinger of the Reformation. And it was another German shoemaker, Boehme, whose exalted theosophy as expounded by William Law became one link in the chain that drew Carey to Christ, as it influenced Wesley and Whitefield, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge. George Fox was only nineteen when, after eight years' service with a shoemaker in Drayton, Leicestershire, not far from Carey's county, he heard the voice from heaven which sent him forth in 1643 to preach righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, till Cromwell sought converse with him, and the Friends became a power among men.

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)

Login to post a comment!