, however, than evangelical
dissent in Christian England in the eighteenth century. The providence
which made and kept young Carey so long a shoemaker, put him in the
very position in which he could most fruitfully receive and nurse the
sacred fire that made him the most learned scholar and Bible translator
of his day in the East. The same providence thus linked him to the
earliest Latin missionaries of Alexandria, of Asia Minor, and of Gaul,
who were shoemakers, and to a succession of scholars and divines, poets
and critics, reformers and philanthropists, who have used the
shoemaker's life to become illustrious.[1] St. Mark chose for his
successor, as first bishop of Alexandria, that Annianus whom he had
been the means of converting to Christ when he found him at the
cobbler's stall. The Talmud commemorates the courage and the wisdom of
"Rabbi Jochanan, the shoemaker," whose learning soon after found a
parallel in Carey's. Like Annianus, "a poor shoemaker named Alexander,
despised in the world but great in the sight of God, who did honour to
so exalted a station in the Church," became famous as Bishop of Comana
in Cappadocia, as saint, preacher, and missionary-martyr. Soon after
there perished in the persecutions of Diocletian, at Soissons, the two
missionary brothers whose name of Crispin has ever since been gloried
in by the trade, which they chose at once as a means of livelihood and
of helping their poor converts. The Hackleton apprentice was still a
child when the great Goethe was again adding to the then artificial
literature of his country his own true predecessor, Hans Sachs, the
shoemaker of Nuernberg, the friend of Luther, the meistersinger of the
Reformation. And it was another German shoemaker, Boehme, whose
exalted theosophy as expounded by William Law became one link in the
chain that drew Carey to Christ, as it influenced Wesley and
Whitefield, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge. George Fox was only nineteen
when, after eight years' service with a shoemaker in Drayton,
Leicestershire, not far from Carey's county, he heard the voice from
heaven which sent him forth in 1643 to preach righteousness,
temperance, and judgment to come, till Cromwell sought converse with
him, and the Friends became a power among men.

Carlyle has, in characteristic style, seized on the true meaning that
was in the man when he made to himself a suit of leather and became the
modern hero of Sartor Resartus. The words fit Willia