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TURNING BENGAL UPSIDE DOWN

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of Krishna's Christian daughter Golook to the Hindoo to whom she had been betrothed from infancy, the Brahmans began dimly to apprehend that not only their craft but the whole structure of society was menaced, the cry became louder, and, as in Ephesus of old, an appeal was made to the magistrates against the men who were turning the world upside down. At first the very boys taunted the missionaries in the streets with the name of Jesus Christ. Then, after Krishna and his family had broken caste, they were seized by a mob and hurried before the Danish magistrate, who at first refused to hand over a Christian girl to a heathen, and gave her father a guard to prevent her from being murdered, until the Calcutta magistrate decided that she must join her husband but would be protected in the exercise of her new faith. The commotion spread over the whole densely-peopled district. But the people were not with the Brahmans, and the excitement sent many a sin-laden inquirer to Serampore from a great distance. "The fire is now already kindled for which our Redeemer expressed his strong desire," wrote Carey to Ryland in March 1801. A year later he used this language to his old friend Morris at Clipstone village :-"I think there is such a fermentation raised in Bengal by the little leaven, that there is a hope of the whole lump by degrees being leavened. God is carrying on his work; and though it goes forward, yet no one can say who is the instrument. Doubtless, various means contribute towards it; but of late the printing and dispersing of New Testaments and small tracts seem to have the greatest effect."

In a spirit the opposite of Jonah's the whole brotherhood, then consisting of the three, of Carey's son Felix, and of a new missionary, Chamberlain, sent home this review of their position at the close of 1804 :

"We are still a happy, healthful, and highly favoured family. But though we would feel incessant gratitude for these gourds, yet we would not feel content unless Nineveh be brought to repentance. We did not come into this country to be placed in what are called casy circumstances respecting this world; and we trust that nothing but the salvation of souls will satisfy us. True, before we set off, we thought we

could die content if we should be permitted to see the half of what we have already seen; yet now we seem almost as far from the mark of our missionary high calling as ever. If three millions of men were drowning, he must be a monster who should be content with saving one individual only; though for the deliverance of that one he would find cause for perpetual gratitude."

In 1810 the parent mission at Serampore had so spread into numerous stations and districts that a new organisation became necessary. There were 300 converts, of whom 105

had been added in that year. CC Did you expect to see this eighteen years ago?" wrote Marshman to the Society. "But what may we not expect if God continues to bless us in years to come?" Marshman forgot how Carey had, in 1792, told them on the inspired evangelical prophet's authority to "expect great things from God." Henceforth the one mission became fivefold for a time.

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The East India Company an unwilling partner of Carey-Calcutta opened to the Mission by his appointment as Government teacher of Bengali

Meeting of 1802 grows into the Lall Bazaar mission-Christlike work among the poor, the sick, the prisoners, the soldiers and sailors, and the natives-Krishna Pal first native missionary in Calcutta-Organisation of subordinate stations-Carey's "United Missions in India"-The missionary staff thirty strong-The native missionaries -The Bengali church self-propagating-Carey the pioneer of other missionaries-Benares-Burma and Indo-China - Felix Carey-Instructions to missionaries-The missionary shrivelled into an ambassador-Adoniram and Ann Judson-Jabez Carey-Mission to Amboyna-Remarkable letter from Carey to his third son.

THE short-sighted regulation of the East India Company, which dreamed that it could keep Christianity out of Bengal by shutting up the missionaries within the little territory of Danish Serampore, could not be enforced with the same ease as the order of a jailer. Under Danish passports, and often without them, missionary tours were made over Central Bengal, aided by its marvellous network of rivers. Every printed Bengali leaf of Scripture or pure literature was a missionary. Every new convert, even the women, became an apostle to their people, and such could not be stopped. Gradually, as not only the innocency but the positive political usefulness of the missionaries' character and work came to be recognised by the local authorities, they were let alone for a time. And soon, by the same

historic irony which has marked so many of the greatest reforms—“ He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh". the Government of India became, though unwittingly, more of a missionary agency than the Baptist Society itself. The only teacher of Bengali who could be found for Lord Wellesley's new college of Fort William was William Carey. The appointment, made and accepted without the slightest prejudice to his aggressive spiritual designs and work, at once opened Calcutta itself for the first time to the English proselytising of natives, and supplied Carey with the only means yet lacking for the translation of the Scriptures into all the languages of the farther East. In spite of its own selfish fears the Company became a principal partner in the Christianisation of India and China.

From the middle of the year 1801 and for the next thirty years Carey spent as much of his time in the metropolis as in Serampore. He generally rowed down the eighteen miles of the winding river to Calcutta at sunset on Monday evening and returned on Friday night every week, working always by the way. At first he personally influenced the Bengali traders and youths who knew English, and he read with many such the English Bible. His chaplain friends, Brown and Buchanan, with the catholicity born of their presbyterian and evangelical training, shared his sympathy with the hundreds of poor mixed Christians for whom St. John's and even the Mission Church made no provision, and encouraged him to care for them. In 1802 he began a weekly meeting for prayer and conversation in the house of Mr. Rolt, and another for a more ignorant class still in the house of a Portuguese Christian. By 1803 he was able to write to Fuller:-"We have opened a place of worship in Calcutta, where we have preaching twice on Lord's day in English, on Wednesday evening in Bengali, and on Thursday evening in English." He took all the work during the week and the Sunday service in rotation with his brethren. The first church was the hall of a well-known undertaker, approached through lines of coffins and the trappings of

woe.

In time most of the evangelical Christians in the

1807]

EVANGELISING CALCUTTA

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city promised to relieve the missionaries of the expense if they would build an unsectarian chapel more worthy of the object. This was done in Lall Bazaar, a little withdrawn from that thoroughfare to this day of the poor and abandoned Christians, of the sailors and soldiers on leave, of the liquor-shops and the stews. There, as in Serampore, at a time when the noble hospitals of Calcutta were not and the children of only the "services" were cared for, "Brother Carey gave them medicine for their bodies and the best medicine for their poor souls," as a contemporary widow describes it. He had in the end to meet half the cost of the building out of his own pocket, and as the number of churches in Calcutta increased, the chapel became one of the two Baptist places of worship in the city. Here was for nearly a whole generation a sublime spectacle -the Northamptonshire shoemaker training the governing class of India in Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi all day, and translating the Ramayana and the Veda, and then, when the sun went down, returning to the society of "the maimed, the halt, and the blind, and many with the leprosy," to preach in several tongues the glad tidings of the Kingdom to the heathen of England as well as of India, and all with a loving tenderness and patient humility learned in the childlike school of Him who said, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"

Street preaching was added to the apostolic agencies, and for this prudence dictated recourse to the Asiatic and Eurasian converts. We find the missionaries writing to the Society at the beginning of 1807, after the mutiny at Vellore, occasioned as certainly by the hatlike turban then ordered, as the mutiny of Bengal half a century after was by the greased cartridges :

"We now return to Calcutta ; not, however, without a sigh. How can we avoid sighing when we think of the number of perishing souls which this city contains, and recollect the multitudes who used of late to hang upon our lips; standing in the thick-wedged crowd for hours together, in the heat of a Bengal summer, listening to the word of life! We feel thankful, however, that nothing has been found against us, except in the matters of our God. Conscious of the most cordial

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