nary of Bible translators--William Yates,
shoemaker, the Coverdale of the Bengali Bible--Wenger--A Bengali Luther
wanted--Carey's Bengali Bible--How the New Testament was printed--The
first copy offered to God--Reception of the volume by Lord Spencer and
George III.--Self-evidencing power of the first edition--The Bible in
Ooriya--In Maghadi, Assamese, Khasi, and Manipoori--Marathi, Konkani,
and Goojarati versions--The translation into Hindi and its many
dialects--The Dravidian translations--Tale of the Pushtoo Bible--The
Sikhs and the Bible--The first Burman version and press--The British
and Foreign Bible Society--Deaths, earthquake, and fire in
1812--Destruction of the press--Thomason's description of the smoking
ruins--Carey's heroism as to his manuscripts--Enthusiastic sympathy of
India and Christendom--The ph[oe]nix and its feathers.

Every great reform in the world has been, in the first instance, the
work of one man, who, however much he may have been the product of his
time, has conceived and begun to execute the movement which transforms
society. This is true alike of the moral and the physical forces of
history, of contemporaries so apparently opposite in character and aims
as Carey and Clarkson on the one side and Napoleon and Wellington on
the other. Carey stood alone in his persistent determination that the
Church should evangelise the world. He was no less singular in the
means which he insisted on as the first essential condition of its
evangelisation--the vernacular translation of the Bible. From the
Scriptures alone, while yet a journeyman shoemaker of eighteen, "he had
formed his own system," and had been filled with the divine missionary
idea. That was a year before the first Bible Society was formed in
1780 to circulate the English Bible among soldiers and sailors; and, a
quarter of a century before his own success led to the formation in
1804 of the British and Foreign Bible Society. From the time of his
youth, when he realised the self-evidencing power of the Bible, Carey's
unbroken habit was to begin every morning by reading one chapter of the
Bible, first in English, and then in each of the languages, soon,
numbering six, which he had himself learned.

Hence the translation of the Bible into all the languages and principal
dialects of India and Eastern Asia was the work above all others to
which Carey set himself from the time, in 1793, when he acquired the
Bengali. He preached, he taugh