William Carey

English missionary

• Born: August 17, 1761
• Birthplace: Paulerspury, Northamptonshire, England
• Died: June 9, 1834
• Place of death: Frederiksganar (now Serampore), India

As the first English-speaking Protestant missionary, Carey set a pattern for the modern missionary movement. A brilliant self-taught linguist, he spent his entire career as a missionary in India, where he translated the Bible into several languages and founded an important institute of higher learning and many schools and churches.

Early Life

William Carey (KAYR-ee) rose from humble origins to become a world-famous missionary and a professor of Bengali in Calcutta, India. He was born in a small village in the East Midlands area of England. His parents, adherents of the Church of England, apprenticed him to a shoemaker so that he could learn an indoor trade because of a skin allergy to sunlight that the young William developed. Under the influence of a fellow apprentice, John Warr, Carey underwent a religious conversion and became a Baptist. The East Midlands area was one of two centers of small Baptist denominations in England at the end of the eighteenth century. The famous Baptist preacher and writer John Bunyan lived in the same area during the previous century.

Carey began to preach in the local chapels and soon felt the call to become a pastor, but his preaching was so poor that his first church initially refused to ordain him. He was largely self-taught, learning Latin and Greek while working at his cobbler’s bench. His workshop wall held a large world map, on to which he wrote as many details of each country’s culture, religion and languages as he could discover. He eventually gave up cobbling to combine pastoring with teaching in the village school. There, famously, he constructed a leather-covered globe of the world, impressing on his students the needs and extent of “the heathen.”

Until that time, Protestant missionary work had been confined to the British colonies of North America. Carey developed a far wider vision. In 1792 he published a pamphlet titled An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen . Its purpose was to counter the hyper-Calvinistic theology of some of his denominational colleagues, who believed God would convert the non-Christian world without human intervention at some moment in the future. The pamphlet was also a call to take worldwide missionary work seriously. Carey reinforced his pamphlet with a now-famous sermon before his fellow ministers, in which he took as his text: “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.”

At a meeting in Kettering in 1792, the Northamptonshire Baptist Association resolved to set up a “Particular Baptist Missionary Society for propagating the gospel among the heathen.” This organization later became known as the Baptist Missionary Society, the first English-speaking Protestant missionary society, shortly to be followed by the primarily Congregational London Missionary Society in 1795, and the Anglican Church Missionary Society in 1799. Andrew Fuller became the secretary and correspondent to the new society, working tirelessly for it in England until his death in 1815.

Life’s Work

In June, 1793, Carey, with his wife Dorothy, her sister, and their five children, sailed for Calcutta, India, which was then under the rule of the chartered British East India Company. They were accompanied by Dr. John Thomas and his wife. Thomas was a former employee of the company and had put before Carey the needs of India. The party arrived in India on November 11, 1793.

Technically, Carey was not the first missionary to India. Roman Catholic missions to India dated back to the beginnings of the Portugese commercial empire in the sixteenth century, and before that, to the Mar Thoma church of South India, reputedly founded by the apostle Thomas. There had also been a small Danish Lutheran and Moravian mission during the first part of the eighteenth century centered on one of the two small Danish trading enclaves, Tranquebar, also in South India. The Danish missionaries had built a good reputation under Otto Ziegenbalg and Christian Schwarz, but without reinforcements to follow, their work made no lasting mark.

The East India Company’s policy at that time was to oppose all missionary work for fear of upsetting the delicate status quo between British traders and the Indian peoples, who were mainly Hindu and Muslim. The missionaries were therefore technically illegal and were certainly unwelcome. Morever, the missionaries’ funds evaporated under Thomas’s mismanagement. Forced to move out of Calcutta, they had to resort to hunt for their food in the Sunderbans, a jungle area in the Ganges Delta, before Carey secured the managership of an indigo plantation in the Malda district of Bengal. There, Carey’s son Peter died in 1796. The boy’s death help to disorder the mind of Carey’s wife, who died in 1807. Carey’s second wife also died, and he married a third time.

While he managed the plantation, Carey taught himself Bengali, the local language, and struggled to translate the New Testament into that language. He was to have to make seven further attempts to achieve an acceptable version, but in the end he succeeded in establishing a prose literature for Bengali, which previously had only possessed a high-flown poetic literature. He also began studying the great classical Indian language, Sanskrit, and Persian, the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent at that time.

In 1799, the small missionary party was reinforced by four recruits from England, and the decision was made to relocate to Frederiksganar (now Serampore), the other Danish enclave in India, some sixteen miles west of Calcutta. Although two of the recruits succumbed to the climate and disease, the remaining two, Joshua Marshman and William Ward, a printer and former newspaper editor, stayed with Carey, with whom they formed a noble trio in the translation and printing of the Bible. Ward eventually also produced a four-volume work on Hinduism and became the pastor of the first permanent church to be founded by the mission.

As the Danish pioneers had found a century earlier, Indian converts came slowly—from both Hinduism and Islam. Carey himself did not baptize his first convert till December, 1800—seven years after his arrival in India. However, by 1821 the missionaries had baptized more than 1,400 people. Meanwhile, they lived communally, pooling their resources.

In 1798, Carey secured a well-paid position as professor of Bengali at the newly opened College of Fort William in Calcutta and held that post for twenty years. His income helped the mission to be financially independent. Carey’s interest in horticulture also helped the mission maintain self-sufficiency in its food supply.

One of the main goals of the missionaries was to provide the Bible to Indians in their own languages. In addition to the Bengali Bible that they completed in 1809, the three men printed at least portions of Christian scriptures in more than forty languages by 1837. Carey alone managed to translate the entire Bible into Sanskrit, Marathi, Oraya, Hindi, and Assamese. He also wrote a well-respected Sanskrit grammar, and with Marshman a translation of the Hindu epic The Ramayana.

The missionaries also did educational work; they opened their first school in 1798, and over the next twenty years they opened another 126 schools, which had some 10,000 students. They also opened a boarding school for expatriate children that saw a good profit. Finally, in 1819 Carey founded Serampore College as a training college for native pastors and a liberal arts college for others that included a medical faculty. The king of Denmark awarded the school degree status in 1827.

Carey’s interest in horticulture led him to help found the Agricultural Society of India in 1820. He also campaigned against the Indian practices of infanticide and the Hindu practice of suttee, which required widows to be burned with their dead husbands. His campaigning helped lead to the outlawing of both practices during his lifetime. Carey never returned to England and died in Frederiksganar in 1834.

Significance

When Carey and his missionary colleagues started their work, they had no prototype to follow to show them what Protestant mission activity should be. Their instincts were to form independent churches from among their converts, train native pastors and leaders, equip them educationally, and provide Bibles in the local languages. They also saw the importance of understanding local cultures and belief systems and sought to be financially independent. In fact, they were so successful financially controversy arose in England over their “wealth” that was fueled by previous incidents of quick fortunes acquired by unscrupulous Englishmen in India.

Carey’s instincts were proved correct by the test of time. Later Protestant missions followed similar patterns over the next 150 years, not only in India but also in other areas of Asia and Africa, though local constraints often meant subsidies from the sending countries. In the modern neocolonialist controversy over mission work, Carey cannot be accused of any imperialistic designs. It was not until 1813 that the East India Company revised its charter to permit mission work. Carey’s humble origins and his identification with India exempt him from any of the grander political strategies that went on around him that led eventually to the formation of the British Raj.

Bibliography

Annett, E. A. William Carey: Pioneer Missionary. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Ambassador Productions, 2001. This biography is typical of the large number of popular biographies of William Carey, largely of a semi-inspirational nature, stressing his spiritual qualities and his fortitude and single-mindedness.

Carey, William. An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. London: Lightning Source U.K., 2002. A reprint on a website of Carey’s groundbreaking pamphlet on world mission.

Mangalwadi, Ruth, and Vishal Mangalwadi. Carey, Christ and Cultural Transformation. London: Authentic Lifestyle/Tyndale, 1997. Asks large sociological and missiological questions about Carey, especially in the context of postcolonial discourse.

Mangalwadi, Vishal, and Ruth Mangalwadi. The Legacy of William Carey: A Model for the Transformation of a Culture. Crossway Books, 1999. Looks to see how Carey’s methods can still be applied today.

Neill, Stephen. A History of the Christian Church in India. 2 vols. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The most scholarly account of the Indian church by a former missionary in India, and helps put Carey’s endeavors into a wider context.