fe asylum at
Danish Serampore--then the metropolis and centre of all Southern Asia;
but he was sent at the very time when the life of the people could best
be purified and elevated on its many sides, and he was specially fitted
to influence each of these sides save one. An ambassador for Christ
above all things like Paul, but, also like him, becoming all things to
all men that he might win some to the higher life, Carey was
successively, and often at the same time, a captain of labour, a
schoolmaster, a printer, the developer of the vernacular speech, the
expounder of the classical language, the translator of both into
English and of the English Bible into both, the founder of a pure
literature, the purifier of society, the watchful philanthropist, the
saviour of the widow and the fatherless, of the despairing and the
would-be suicide, of the downtrodden and oppressed. We have now to see
him on the scientific or the physical and economic side, while he still
jealously keeps his strength for the one motive power of all, the
spiritual, and with almost equal care avoids the political or
administrative as his Master did. But even then it was his aim to
proclaim the divine principles which would use science and politics
alike to bring nations to the birth, while, like the apostles, leaving
the application of these principles to the course of God's providence
and the consciences of men. In what he did for science, for
literature, and for humanity, as in what he abstained from doing in the
practical region of public life, the first English missionary was an
example to all of every race who have followed him in the past century.
From Carey to Livingstone, alike in Asia and Africa, the greatest
Christian evangelists have been those who have made science and
literature the handmaids of missions.

Apart from the extreme south of the peninsula of India, where the
Danish missionaries had explored with hawk's eyes, almost nothing was
known of its plants and animals, its men, as well as its beasts, when
Carey found himself in a rural district of North Bengal in the closing
decade of the eighteenth century. Nor had any writer, official or
missionary, anywhere realised the state of India and the needs of the
Hindoo and Mohammedan cultivators as flowing from the relation of the
people to the soil. India was in truth a land of millions of peasant
proprietors on five-acre farms, rack-rented or plundered by powerful
middlemen, both s