crossed cheerfully tempestuous seas,
Forsaking country, kindred, friends and ease;
Like him he laboured and, like him, content
To bear it, suffered shame where'er he went."

CHAPTER II

THE BIRTH OF ENGLAND'S FOREIGN MISSIONS

1785-1792

Moulton the Mission's birthplace--Carey's fever and poverty--His
Moulton school--Fired with the missionary idea--His very large
missionary map--Fuller's confession of the aged and respectable
ministers' opposition--Old Mr. Ryland's rebuke--Driven to publish his
Enquiry--Its literary character--Carey's survey of the world in
1788--His motives, difficulties, and plans--Projects the first
Missionary Society--Contrasted with his predecessors from
Erasmus--Prayer concert begun in Scotland in 1742--Jonathan
Edwards--The Northamptonshire Baptist movement in 1784--Andrew
Fuller--The Baptists, Particular and General--Antinomian and Socinian
extremes opposed to Missions--Met by Fuller's writings and Clipstone
sermon--Carey's agony at continued delay--His work in Leicester--His
sermon at Nottingham--Foundation of Baptist Missionary Society at
last--Kettering and Jerusalem.

The north road, which runs for twelve miles from Northampton to
Kettering, passes through a country known last century for the doings
of the Pytchley Hunt. Stories, by no means exaggerated, of the deep
drinking and deeper play of the club, whose gatehouse now stands at the
entrance of Overstone Park, were rife, when on Lady Day 1785 William
Carey became Baptist preacher of Moulton village, on the other side of
the road. Moulton was to become the birthplace of the modern
missionary idea; Kettering, of evangelical missionary action.

No man in England had apparently a more wretched lot or more miserable
prospects than he. He had started in life as a journeyman shoemaker at
eighteen, burdened with a payment to his first master's widow which his
own kind heart had led him to offer, and with the price of his second
master's stock and business. Trade was good for the moment, and he had
married, before he was twenty, one who brought him the most terrible
sorrow a man can bear. He had no sooner completed a large order for
which his predecessor had contracted than it was returned on his hands.
From place to place he wearily trudged, trying to sell the shoes.
Fever carried off his first child and brought himself so near to the
grave that he sent for his mother to help in the nursing. At
Piddington he worked ear