homas Scott, the author of the Commentary on the Bible,
and it was from him that Carey first received any strong religious
impressions. Scott was a Baptist; and young Carey, who had grown up in
the days of the deadness of the Church, was naturally led to his
teacher's sect, and began to preach at eighteen years of age. He always
looked back with humiliation to the inexperienced performances of his
untried zeal at that time of life; but he was doing his best to study,
working hard at grammar, and every morning reading his portion of the
Scripture for the day in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as English.
Well might Mr. Scott say, as he looked at the little cobbler's shop,
"That was Mr. Carey's college;" for all this time he was working at his
trade, and, on his master's death, took the business, and married the
daughter of the house before he was twenty.

It was an unlucky marriage, for she was a dull, ignorant woman, with no
feeling for her husband's high aims or superior powers, and the business
was not a flourishing one; but he never manifested anything but warm
affection and tenderness towards this very uncompanionable person, and
perhaps, like most men of low station and unusual intellect, had no idea
that more could be expected of a wife.

Perhaps, in spite of his kindness, Mrs. Carey had to endure the disasters
common to the wives of struggling great men: for William Carey's shoes
were not equal to his sermons, and his congregation were too poor even to
raise means to clothe him decently. His time was spent in long tramps to
sell shoes he had made and to obtain the mending of others, and,
meantime, he was constantly suffering from fever and ague.

In 1786, when in his twenty-fifth year, he obtained a little Baptist
chapel and the goodwill of a school at Moulton; but as a minister he only
received 16_l._ per annum, and at the same time proved, as many have done
before him, that aptness to learn does not imply aptness to teach. He
could not keep order, and his boys first played tricks with him and then
deserted, till he came nearly to starvation, and had to return to his
last and his leather.

Yet it was the geography lessons of this poor little school that first
found the way to the true chord of Carey's soul. Those broad tracts of
heathenism that struck his eye in the map, and the summary of nations and
numbers professing false religions, were to a mind like his no mere items
of information to be driven