Carey quicken his faith by
reading the brave and loving words of Fuller on "the objects you must
keep in view, the directions you must observe, the difficulties you
must encounter, the reward you may expect."

Under date four days after we find this entry in the Church Book--"Mr.
Carey, our minister, left Leicester to go on a mission to the East
Indies, to take and propagate the Gospel among those idolatrous and
superstitious heathens. This is inserted to show his love to his poor
miserable fellow-creatures. In this we concurred with him, though it
is at the expense of losing one whom we love as our own souls." When
Carey's preaching had so filled the church that it became necessary to
build a front gallery at a cost of L98, and they had applied to several
other churches for assistance in vain, he thus taught them to help
themselves. The minister and many of the members agreed to pay off the
debt "among ourselves" by weekly subscriptions,--a process, however,
which covered five years, so poor were they. Carey left this as a
parting lesson to home congregations, while his people found it the
easier to pay the debt that they had sacrificed their best, their own
minister, to the work of missions for which he had taught them to pray.

John Thomas, four years older than Carey, was a surgeon, who had made
two voyages to Calcutta in the Oxford Indiaman, had been of spiritual
service to Charles Grant, Mr. George Udny, and the Bengal civilian
circle at Malda, and had been supported by Mr. Grant as a missionary
for a time until his eccentricities and debts outraged his friends and
drove him home at the time of the Kettering meetings. Full justice has
been done to a character and a career somewhat resembling those of John
Newton, by his patient and able biographer the Rev. C. B. Lewis. John
Thomas has the merit of being the first medical missionary, at a time
when no other Englishman cared for either the bodies or souls of our
recently acquired subjects in North India, outside of Charles Grant's
circle. He has more; he was used by God to direct Carey to the dense
Hindoo population of Bengal--to the people and to the centre, that is,
where Brahmanism had its seat, and whence Buddhism had been carried by
thousands of missionaries all over Southern, Eastern, and Central Asia.
But there our ascription of merit to Thomas must stop. However well he
might speak the uncultured Bengali, he never could write the language
or transl