irst native
Christian marriage feast in North India--Hindoo Christian death and
burial--The first Christian schools and school-books in North
India--The first native Sunday school--Boarding schools for the higher
education of country-born Christians--Carey on the mixed Portuguese,
Eurasians, and Armenians--The Benevolent Institution for destitute
children of all races--A hundred schools--English only
postponed--Effect on native opinion and action--The leaven of the
Kingdom--The Mission breaks forth into five at the close of 1810.

For seven years Carey had daily preached Christ in Bengali without a
convert. He had produced the first edition of the New Testament. He
had reduced the language to literary form. He had laid the foundations
in the darkness of the pit of Hindooism, while the Northamptonshire
pastors, by prayer and self-sacrifice, held the ropes. The last
disappointment was on 25th November 1800, when "the first Hindoo"
catechumen, Fakeer, offered himself for baptism, returned to his
distant home for his child, and appeared no more, probably "detained by
force." But on the last Sunday of that year Krishna Pal was baptised
in the Hoogli and his whole family soon followed him. He was
thirty-five years of age. Not only as the first native Christian of
North India of whom we have a reliable account, but as the first
missionary to Calcutta and Assam, and the first Bengali hymn-writer,
this man deserves study.

Carey's first Hindoo convert was three years younger than himself, or
about thirty-six, at baptism. Krishna Pal, born in the neighbouring
French settlement of Chandernagore, had settled in the suburbs of
Serampore, where he worked as a carpenter. Sore sickness and a sense
of sin led him to join the Kharta-bhojas, one of the sects which, from
the time of Gautama Buddha, and of Chaitanya, the reformer of Nuddea,
to that of Nanak, founder of the Sikh brotherhood have been driven into
dissent by the yoke of Brahmanism. Generally worshippers of some form
of Vishnoo, and occasionally, as in Kabeer's case, influenced by the
monotheism of Islam, these sects begin by professing theism and
opposition to caste, though Hindooism is elastic enough to keep them
always within its pale and ultimately to absorb them again. For
sixteen years Krishna Pal was himself a gooroo of the Ghospara sect, of
which from Carey's to Duff's earlier days the missionaries had a hope
which proved vain. He recovered from sickness, bu