in the state of
scholarship and criticism at the opening of last century, Carey always
insisted that he was a forerunner, breaking up the way for successors
like Yates, Wenger, and Rouse, who, in their turn, must be superseded
by purely native Tyndales and Luthers in the Church of India. He more
than once deprecated the talk of his having translated the Bible into
forty languages and dialects.[16] As we proceed that will be a apparent
which he did with his own hand, that which his colleagues accomplished,
that which he revised and edited both of their work and of the
pundits', and that which he corrected and printed for others at the
Serampore press under the care of Ward. It is to these four lines of
work, which centred in him, as most of them originally proceeded from
his conception and advocacy, that the assertion as to the forty
translations is strictly applicable. The Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and
Sanskrit translations were his own. The Chinese was similarly the work
of Marshman. The Hindi versions, in their many dialects, and the
Ooriya, were blocked out by his colleagues and the pundits. He saw
through the press the Hindostani, Persian, Malay, Tamil, and other
versions of the whole or portions of the Scriptures. He ceased not,
night and day, if by any means, with a loving catholicity, the Word of
God might be given to the millions.

Writing in 1904 on the centenary of the British and Foreign Bible
Society, Mr. George A. Grierson, C.I.E., Ph.D., D.Litt., the head of
the Linguistic Survey of India, sums up authoritatively the work of
Carey and his assistants. "The great-hearted band of Serampore
missionaries issued translations of the Bible or of the New Testament
in more than forty languages. Before them the number of Protestant
versions of the Bible in the speeches of India could be counted on the
fingers of one hand. The Dutch of Ceylon undertook a Tamil New
Testament in 1688, which was followed in 1715 by another version from
the pen of Ziegenbalg. The famous missionary, Schultze, between 1727
and 1732 made a Telugu version which was never printed, and later,
between 1745 and 1758, he published at Halle a Hindostani translation
of the New Testament and of a portion of Genesis. A manuscript version
of portions of the Bible in Bengali was made by Thomas in 1791; and
then the great Serampore series began with Carey's Bengali New
Testament published in 1801. Most of these Serampore versions were, it
is tr