ich
I began some years ago. I say all this, my dear brother, to induce you
to give me your advice about the best manner of conducting myself in
this station, and to induce you to pray much for me, that God may, in
all things, be glorified by me. We presented a copy of the Bengali New
Testament to Lord Wellesley, after the appointment, through the medium
of the Rev. D. Brown, which was graciously received. We also presented
Governor Bie with one.

"Serampore is now in the hands of the English. It was taken while we
were in bed and asleep; you may therefore suppose that it was done
without bloodshed. You may be perfectly easy about us: we are equally
secure under the English or Danish Government, and I am sure well
disposed to both."

For seven years, since his first settlement in the Dinapoor district,
Carey had given one-third of his long working day to the study of
Sanskrit. In 1796 he reported:--"I am now learning the Sanskrit
language, that I may be able to read their Shasters for myself; and I
have acquired so much of the Hindi or Hindostani as to converse in it
and speak for some time intelligibly...Even the language of Ceylon has
so much affinity with that of Bengal that out of twelve words, with the
little Sanskrit that I know, I can understand five or six." In 1798 he
wrote:--"I constantly employ the forenoon in temporal affairs; the
afternoon in reading, writing, learning Sanskrit, etc.; and the evening
by candle light in translating the Scriptures...Except I go out to
preach, which is often the case, I never deviate from this rule."
Three years before that he had been able to confute the Brahmans from
their own writings; in 1798 he quoted and translated the Rig Veda and
the Purana in reply to a request for an account of the beliefs of the
priesthood, apologising, however, with his usual self-depreciation:--"I
am just beginning to see for myself by reading the original Shasters."
In 1799 we find him reading the Mahabharata epic with the hope of
finding some allusion or fact which might enable him to equate Hindoo
chronology with reliable history, as Dr. John Wilson of Bombay and
James Prinsep did a generation later, by the discovery of the name of
Antiochus the Great in two of the edicts of Asoka, written on the
Girnar rock.

By September 1804 Carey had completed the first three years' course of
collegiate training in Sanskrit. The Governor-General summoned a
brilliant assembly to listen to the disp