r Burke almost to succeed in his eighteen years'
impeachment of Hastings. The literature of the close of the eighteenth
century is full of alarm lest the English character should be
corrupted, and lest the balance of the constitution should be upset.

Kiernander is said to have been the means of converting 209 heathens
and 380 Romanists, of whom three were priests, during the twenty-eight
years of his Calcutta career. Claudius Buchanan declares that
Christian tracts had been translated into Bengali--one written by the
Bishop of Sodor and Man--and that in the time of Warren Hastings Hindoo
Christians had preached to their countrymen in the city. The "heathen"
were probably Portuguese descendants, in whose language Kiernander
preached as the lingua franca of the time. He could not even converse
in Bengali or Hindostani, and when Charles Grant went to him for
information as to the way of a sinner's salvation this happened--"My
anxious inquiries as to what I should do to be saved appeared to
embarrass and confuse him exceedingly. He could not answer my
questions, but he gave me some good instructive books." On
Kiernander's bankruptcy, caused by his son when the father was blind,
the "Mission Church" was bought by Grant, who wrote that its labours
"have been confined to the descendants of Europeans, and have hardly
ever embraced a single heathen, so that a mission to the Hindoos and
Mohammedans would be a new thing." The Rev. David Brown, who had been
sent out the year after as master and chaplain of the Military Orphan
Society, for the education of the children of officers and soldiers,
and was to become one of the Serampore circle of friends, preached to
Europeans only in the Mission Church. Carey could find no trace of
Kiernander's work among the natives six years after his death.[8] The
only converted Hindoo known of in Northern India up to that time was
Guneshan Dass, of Delhi, who when a boy joined Clive's army, who was
the first man of caste to visit England, and who, on his return with
the Calcutta Supreme Court Judges in 1774 as Persian interpreter and
translator, was baptised by Kiernander, Mr. justice Chambers being
sponsor.

William Carey had no predecessor in India as the first ordained
Englishman who was sent to it as a missionary; he had no predecessor in
Bengal and Hindostan proper as the first missionary from any land to
the people. Even the Moravians, who in 1777 had sent two brethren to
Serampore