dually
improved. When shall Bengal see its own Luther?

The Bengali Bible was the first as it was the most important of the
translations. The province, or lieutenant-governorship then had the
same area as France, and contained more than double its population, or
eighty millions. Of the three principal vernaculars, Bengali is spoken
by forty-five millions of Hindoos and Mohammedans. It was for all the
natives of Bengal and of India north of the Dekhan ("south") tableland,
but especially for the Bengali-speaking people, that William Carey
created a literary language a century ago.

The first Bengali version of the whole New Testament Carey translated
from the original Greek before the close of 1796. The only English
commentary used was the Family Expositor of Doddridge, published in
1738, and then the most critical in the language. Four times he
revised the manuscript, with a Greek concordance in his hand, and he
used it not only with Ram Basu by his side, the most accomplished of
early Bengali scholars, but with the natives around him of all classes.
By 1800 Ward had arrived as printer, the press was perfected at
Serampore, and the result of seven years of toil appeared in February
1801, in the first edition of 2000 copies, costing L612. The printing
occupied nine months. The type was set up by Ward and Carey's son
Felix with their own hands; "for about a month at first we had a
Brahman compositor, but we were quite weary of him. We kept four
pressmen constantly employed." A public subscription had been opened
for the whole Bengali Bible at Rs. 32, or L4 a copy as exchange then
was, and nearly fifty copies had been at once subscribed for. It was
this edition which immediately led to Carey's appointment to the
College of Fort William, and it was that appointment which placed Carey
in a position, philological and financial, to give the Bible to the
peoples of the farther East in their own tongue.

Some loving memories cluster round the first Bengali version of the New
Testament which it is well to collect. On Tuesday, 18th March 1800,
Ward's journal[19] records: "Brother Carey took an impression at the
press of the first page in Matthew." The translator was himself the
pressman. As soon as the whole of this Gospel was ready, 500 copies of
it were struck off for immediate circulation, "which we considered of
importance as containing a complete life of the Redeemer." Four days
after an advertisement in the