3,
when Dundas and the Government were with him, was due to the apathy of
public opinion, and especially of the dumb churches. But in the next
twenty years Carey changed all that. Not merely was Andrew Fuller ever
on the watch with pen and voice, but all the churches were roused, the
Established to send out bishops and chaplains, the Nonconformist and
Established Evangelicals together to secure freedom for missionaries
and schoolmasters. In 1793 an English missionary was an unknown and
therefore a much-dreaded monster, for Carey was then on the sea. In
1813 Carey and the Serampore Brotherhood were still the only English
missionaries continuously at work in India, and not the churches only,
but governor-generals like Teignmouth and Wellesley, and scholars like
Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson, were familiar with the grandeur and
political innocency of their labours. Hence this outburst of
Wilberforce in the House of Commons on the 16th July 1813, when he used
the name of Carey to defeat an attempt of the Company to prevent
toleration by omitting the declaratory clauses of the Resolution, which
would have made it imply that the privilege should never be exerted
though the power of licensing missionaries was nominally conceded.

"One great argument of his opponents was grounded on the enthusiastic
character which they imputed to the missionary body. India hitherto has
seen no missionary who was a member of the English Church, and
imputations could be cast more readily on 'Anabaptists and fanatics.'
These attacks Mr. Wilberforce indignantly refuted, and well had the
noble conduct of the band at Serampore deserved this vindication. 'I do
not know,' he often said, 'a finer instance of the moral sublime, than
that a poor cobbler working in his stall should conceive the idea of
converting the Hindoos to Christianity; yet such was Dr. Carey. Why
Milton's planning his Paradise Lost in his old age and blindness was
nothing to it. And then when he had gone to India, and was appointed
by Lord Wellesley to a lucrative and honourable station in the college
of Fort William, with equal nobleness of mind he made over all his
salary (between L1000 and L1500 per annum) to the general objects of
the mission. By the way, nothing ever gave me a more lively sense of
the low and mercenary standard of your men of honour, than the manifest
effect produced upon the House of Commons by my stating this last
circumstance. It seemed to be the only