ork that ever any of the sons of
men were called to engage in. I have many sacrifices to make. I must
part with a beloved family, and a number of most affectionate friends.
Never did I see such sorrow manifested as reigned through our place of
worship last Lord's-day. But I have set my hand to the plough.--I
remain, your dutiful son,

"WILLIAM CAREY."

When in London Carey had asked John Newton, "What if the Company should
send us home on our arrival in Bengal?" "Then conclude," was the reply,
"that your Lord has nothing there for you to accomplish. But if He
have, no power on earth can hinder you." By Act of Parliament not ten
years old, every subject of the King going to or found in the East
Indies without a licence from the Company, was guilty of a high crime
and misdemeanour, and liable to fine and imprisonment. Only four years
previously a regulation had compelled every commander to deliver to the
Hoogli pilot a return of the passengers on board that the Act might be
enforced. The Danish nationality of the ship and crew saved the
missionary party. So grievously do unjust laws demoralise contemporary
opinion, that Fuller was constrained to meet the objections of many to
the "illegality" of the missionaries' action by reasoning, unanswerable
indeed, but not now required: "The apostles and primitive ministers
were commanded to go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every
creature; nor were they to stop for the permission of any power upon
earth, but to go, and take the consequences. If a man of God,
conscious of having nothing in his heart unfriendly to any civil
government whatever, but determined in all civil matters to obey and
teach obedience to the powers that are, put his life in his hand,
saying, I will go, and if I am persecuted in one city I will flee to
another'...whatever the wisdom of this world may decide upon his
conduct, he will assuredly be acquitted, and more than acquitted, at a
higher tribunal."

Carey's journal of the voyage begins with an allusion to "the
abominable East Indian monopoly," which he was to do more than any
other man to break down by weapons not of man's warfare. The second
week found him at Bengali, and for his companion the poems of Cowper.
Of the four fellow-passengers one was a French deist, with whom he had
many a debate.

"Aug. 2.--I feel myself to be much declined, upon the whole, in the
more spiritual exercises of religion; yet have had some pleasant
e