t, he "discipled" in every form then
reasonable and possible, and in the fullest sense of his Master's
missionary charge. But the one form of most pressing and abiding
importance, the condition without which neither true faith, nor true
science, nor true civilisation could exist or be propagated outside of
the narrow circle to be reached by the one herald's voice, was the
publishing of the divine message in the mother tongues of the millions
of Asiatic men and women, boys and girls, and in the learned tongues
also of their leaders and priests. Wyclif had first done this for the
English-reading races of all time, translating from the Latin, and so
had begun the Reformation, religious and political, not only in Britain
but in Western Christendom. Erasmus and Luther had followed him--the
former in his Greek and Latin New Testament and in his Paraphrase of
the Word for "women and cobblers, clowns, mechanics, and even the
Turks"; the latter in his great vernacular translation of the edition
of Erasmus, who had never ceased to urge his contemporaries to
translate the Scriptures "into all tongues." Tyndale had first given
England the Bible from the Hebrew and the Greek. And now one of these
cobblers was prompted and enabled by the Spirit who is the author of
the truth in the Scriptures, to give to South and Eastern Asia the
sacred books which its Syrian sons, from Moses and Ezra to Paul and
John, had been inspired to write for all races and all ages.
Emphatically, Carey and his later coadjutors deserve the language of
the British and Foreign Bible Society, when, in 1827, it made to
Serampore a last grant of money for translation--"Future generations
will apply to them the words of the translators of the English
Bible--'Therefore blessed be they and most honoured their names that
break the ice and give the onset in that which helped them forward to
the saving of souls. Now what can be more available thereto than to
deliver God's book unto God's people in a tongue which they
understand?'" Carey might tolerate interruption when engaged in other
work, but for forty years he never allowed anything to shorten the time
allotted to the Bible work. "You, madam," he wrote in 1797 to a lady as
to many a correspondent, "will excuse my brevity when I inform you that
all my time for writting letters is stolen from the work of
transcribing the Scriptures into the Bengali language."

From no mere humility, but with an accurate judgment