the even more wretched widow, has always courted suicide." Carey did
not rest until he had brought about the establishment of a leper
hospital in Calcutta, near what became the centre of the Church
Missionary Society's work, and there benevolent physicians, like the
late Dr. Kenneth Stuart, and Christian people, have made it possible to
record, as in Christ's days, that the leper is cleansed and the poor
have the Gospel preached to them.

By none of the many young civilians whom he trained, or, in the later
years of his life, examined, was Carey's humane work on all its sides
more persistently carried out than by John Lawrence in the Punjab.
When their new ruler first visited their district, the Bedi clan amazed
him by petitioning for leave to destroy their infant daughters. In
wrath he briefly told them he would hang every man found guilty of such
murder. When settling the land revenue of the Cis-Sutlej districts he
caused each farmer, as he touched the pen in acceptance of the
assessment, to recite this formula--

"Bewa mat jalao,
Beti mat maro,
Korhi mat dabao"

("Thou shalt not burn thy widow, thou shalt not kill thy daughters,
thou shalt not bury thy lepers.")

From the hour of Carey's conversion he never omitted to remember in
prayer the slave as well as the heathen. The same period which saw his
foundation of modern missions witnessed the earliest efforts of his
contemporary, Thomas Clarkson of Wisbeach, in the neighbouring county
of Cambridge, to free the slave. But Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and
their associates were so occupied with Africa that they knew not that
Great Britain was responsible for the existence of at least nine
millions of slaves in India, many of them brought by Hindoo merchants
as well as Arabs from Eastern Africa to fill the hareems of
Mohammedans, and do domestic service in the zananas of Hindoos. The
startling fact came to be known only slowly towards the end of Carey's
career, when his prayers, continued daily from 1779, were answered in
the freedom of all our West India slaves. The East India answer came
after he had passed away, in Act V. of 1843, which for ever abolished
the legal status of slavery in India. The Penal Code has since placed
the praedial slave in such a position that if he is not free it is his
own fault. It is penal in India to hold a slave "against his will,"
and we trust the time is not far distant when the last three words may
be struck out.

Wi