ship on which they went
was wrecked soon after they had landed from it. A number of our
members are now gone to Java; I trust their going thither will not be
in vain. Brother Chamberlain is, ere this, arrived at Agra...We preach
every week in the Fort and in the public prison, both in English and
Bengali."

Carey had not been six months at Serampore when he saw the importance
of using the English language as a missionary weapon, and he proposed
this to Andrew Fuller. The other pressing duties of a pioneer mission
to the people of Bengal led him to postpone immediate action in this
direction; we shall have occasion to trace the English influence of the
press and the college hereafter. But meanwhile the vernacular schools,
which soon numbered a hundred altogether, were most popular, and then
as now proved most valuable feeders of the infant Church. Without
them, wrote the three missionaries to the Society, "the whole plan must
have been nipped in the bud, since, if the natives had not cheerfully
sent their children, everything else would have been useless. But the
earnestness with which they have sought these schools exceeds
everything we had previously expected. We are still constantly
importuned for more schools, although we have long gone beyond the
extent of our funds." It was well that thus early, in schools, in
books and tracts, and in providing the literary form and apparatus of
the vernacular languages, Carey laid the foundation of the new national
or imperial civilisation. When the time for English came, the
foundations were at least above the ground. Laid deep and strong in
the very nature of the people, the structure has thus far promised to
be national rather than foreign, though raised by foreign hands, while
marked by the truth and the purity of its Western architects.

The manifestation of Christ to the Bengalees could not be made without
rousing the hate and the opposition of the vested interests of
Brahmanism. So long as Carey was an indigo planter as well as a
proselytiser in Dinapoor and Malda he met with no opposition, for he
had no direct success. But when, from Serampore, he and the others, by
voice, by press, by school, by healing the sick and visiting the poor,
carried on the crusade day by day with the gentle persistency of a law
of nature, the cry began. And when, by the breaking of caste and the
denial of Krishna's Christian daughter Golook to the Hindoo to whom she
had been betro