illions sterling a year
to Christianise the majority of the race still outside its pale. It is
not too much to say that were Carey's penny a week from every Christian
a fact, and the prayer which would sooner or later accompany it, the
five millions would be fifty, and Christendom would become a term
nearly synonymous with humanity. The Churches, whether by themselves
or by societies, have yet to pray and organise up to the level of
Carey's penny a week.

The absolute originality as well as grandeur of the unconscious action
of the peasant shoemaker who, from 1779, prayed daily for all the
heathen and slaves, and organised his society accordingly, will be seen
in the dim light or darkness visible of all who had preceded him. They
were before the set time; he was ready in the fulness of the missionary
preparation. They belonged not only to periods, but to nations, to
churches, to communities which were failing in the struggle for
fruitfulness and expansion in new worlds and fresh lands; he was a son
of England, which had come or was about to come out of the struggle a
victor, charged with the terrible responsibility of the special servant
of the Lord, as no people had ever before been charged in all history,
sacred or secular. William Carey, indeed, reaped the little that the
few brave toilers of the wintry time had sown; with a humility that is
pathetic he acknowledges their toll, while ever ignorant to the last of
his own merit. But he reaped only as each generation garners such
fruits of its predecessor as may have been worthy to survive. He was
the first of the true Anastatosantes of the modern world, as only an
English-speaking man could be--of the most thorough, permanent, and
everlasting of all Reformers, the men who turn the world upside down,
because they make it rise up and depart from deadly beliefs and
practices, from the fear and the fate of death, into the life and light
of Christ and the Father.

Who were his predecessors, reckoning from the Renascence of Europe, the
discovery of America, and the opening up of India and Africa? Erasmus
comes first, the bright scholar of compromise who in 1516 gave the New
Testament again to Europe, as three centuries after Carey gave it to
all Southern Asia, and whose missionary treatise, Ecclesiasties, in
1535 anticipated, theoretically at least, Carey's Enquiry by two
centuries and a half. The missionary dream of this escaped monk of
Rotterdam and Basel, who ta