1834 HIS DEFENCE OF EVANGELISING BY EDUCATION. 409 Having translated the Gospels into the language of the Khasias in the Assam hills, he determined in 1832 to open a new mission at the village of Cherra, which the Serampore Brotherhood were the first to use as a sanitarium in the hot season. For this he gave up £60 of his Government pension and Mr. Garrett gave a similar sum. He sent another of his students, Mr. Lisk, to found the mission, which prospered until it was transferred to the Welsh Calvinists, who have made it the centre of extensive and successful operations. Thus the influence of his middle age and old age in the Colleges of Fort William and of Serampore combined to make the missionary patriarch the father of two bands—that of the Society and that of the Brotherhood. Dr. Carey's last report, at the close of 1832, was a defence of what has since been called, and outside of India and of Scotland has too often been misunderstood as, educational missions or Christian Colleges. To a purely divinity college for Asiatic Christians he preferred a divinity faculty as part of an Arts and Science College,1 in which the converts study side by side with their inquiring countrymen, the inquirers are influenced by them as well as by the Christian teaching and secular teaching in a Christian spirit, and the Bible consecrates the whole. The Free Church of Scotland has, alike in India and Africa, proved the wisdom, the breadth, and the spiritual advantage of Carey's policy. When the Society opposed him, scholars like Mack from Edinburgh and Leechman from Glasgow rejoiced to work out his Paul-like concep 1 In 1834, the year Carey died, there were in the college ten European and Eurasian students learning Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Bengali, mathematics, chemistry, mental philosophy, and history (ancient and ecclesiastical). There were forty-eight resident native Christians and thirty-four Hindoos, sons of Brahmans chiefly, learning Sanskrit, Bengali, and English. "The Bengal language is sedulously cultivated. . . . The Christian natives of India will most effectually combat error and diffuse sounder information with a knowledge of Sanskrit. The communication, therefore, of a thoroughly classic Indian education to Christian youth is deemed an important but not always an indispensable object." tion. When not only he, but Dr. Marshman, had passed away Mack bravely held aloft the banner they bequeathed, till his death in 1846. Then John Marshman, who in 1835 had begun the Friend of India as a weekly paper to aid the College, transferred the mission to the Society under the Rev. W. H. Denham. When in 1854 a new generation of the English Baptists accepted the College also as their own, it received a Principal worthy to succeed the giants of those days, the Rev. John Trafford, M.A., a student of Foster's and of Glasgow University. For twenty-six years he carried out the principles of Carey in all things, save that, when Serampore became one of the colleges of the Calcutta University, the Society would not apply for the same grant in aid from Government which other Nonconformist colleges enjoy. The result was that after Mr. Trafford's retirement1 the college of Carey and Marshman ceased with the year 1883, and in the same building a purely native Christian Training Institution took its place. There, however, the many visitors from Christendom still find the library and museum; the bibles, grammars, and dictionaries; the natural history collections, and the Oriental MSS.; the Danish charter, the royal portraits, and the British treaty; as well as the native Christian classes, -all of which re-echo William Carey's appeal to posterity. 1 On the 6th March 1879 a meeting was held by the old students of Serampore College to bid farewell to their Principal, the Rev. J. Trafford, M.A. An address was read by Babu Narayan Bhattacharjya expressing appreciation of Mr. Trafford's motives and labours, and admiration of the way in which he had performed the task he set before him. One last kindness they asked of him was to send his picture to be hung up in the college hall. Pundit Jadhob Bhattarcharjya then read a poetical address in Sanskrit. An address was also given in Sanskrit by the second pundit of the college, after which an address in English was given by the entrance class. Mr. Trafford strove in his reply to make clear to them the object for which he had laboured as a teacher. He said that he had been glad to introduce them to much that was useful and elevating in English literature, and both he and they had therefrom received benefit and enjoyment. But the object of his life at Serampore had been to make the Bible known to them and theirs. CHAPTER XV. CAREY'S LAST DAYS. 1830-1834. The college and mission stripped of all their funds-Failure of the six firms for sixteen millions - Carey's official income reduced from £1560 to £600-His Thoughts and Appeal published in England-His vigour at seventy-Last revision of the Bengali Bible-Final edition of the Bengali New Testament-Carey rejoices in the reforms of Lord William Bentinck's Government-In the emancipation of the slaves-Carey sketched by his younger contemporaries-By Leslie, Tyerman, Alexander Duff, Mrs. J. T. Jones of America, Leechman, Mack, Gogerly-His latest letters and last message to Christendom-Visits of Lady William Bentinck and Bishop Daniel Wilson-Marshman's affection and promise as to the garden-The English mail brings glad news a fortnight before his death -His last Sabbath-He dies-Is buried-His tomb among his converts -His will-The Indian press on his poverty and disinterestedness-Dr. Marshman and Mack, Christopher Anderson and John Wilson of Bombay on his character-His influence still as the founder of missions-Dr. Cox and Robert Hall on Carey as a man-Scotland's estimate of the father of the Evangelical Revival and its foreign missions. THE last days of William Carey were the best. His sun went down in all the splendour of a glowing faith and a burning self-sacrifice. Not in the penury of Hackleton and Moulton, not in the hardships of Calcutta and the Soondarbans, not in the fevers of the swamps of Dinajpoor, not in the apprehensions twice excited by official intolerance, not in the most bitter sorrow of all-the sixteen years' persecution by English brethren after Fuller's death, had the father of modern missions been so tried as in the years 1830-33. Blow succeeded blow, but only that the fine gold of his trust, his humility, and his love might be seen to be the purer. The Serampore College and Mission lost all the funds it had in India. By 1830 the financial revolution which had laid many houses low in Europe five years before, began to tell upon the merchant princes of Calcutta. The six firms, which had developed the trade of Northern India so far as the Company's monopolies allowed, had been the bankers of the Government itself, of states like Haidarabad, and of all the civil and military officials, and had enriched a succession of partners for half a century, fell one by one-fell for sixteen millions sterling among them. Palmer and Co. was the greatest; the house at one time played a large part in the history of India, and in the debates and papers of Parliament. Mr. John Palmer, a personal friend of the Serampore men, had advanced them money at ten per cent four years previously, when the Society's misrepresentation had done its worst. The children in the Eurasian schools, which Dr. and Mrs. Marshman conducted with such profit to the mission, depended chiefly on funds deposited with this firm. It suddenly failed for more than two millions sterling. Although the catastrophe exposed the rottenness of the system of credit on which commerce and banking were at that time conducted, in the absence of a free press and an intelligent public opinion, the alarm soon subsided, and only the more business fell to the other firms. But the year 1833 had hardly opened when first the house of Alexander and Co., then that of Mackintosh and Co., and then the three others, collapsed without warning. The English in India, officials and merchants, were reduced to universal poverty. Capital disappeared and credit ceased at the very time that Parliament was about to complete the partial concession of freedom of trade made by the charter of 1813, by granting all Carey had argued for, and allowing Europeans to hold land. 1833 FAILURE OF THE SIX CALCUTTA FIRMS. 413 The funds invested for Jessor and Delhi; the legacy of Fernandez, Carey's first convert and missionary; his own tenths with which he supported three aged relatives in England; the property of the partner of his third marriage, on whom the money was settled, and who survived him by a year; the little possessed by Dr. Marshman, who had paid all his expenses in England even while working for the Society-all was swept away. Not only was the small balance in hand towards meeting the college and mission expenditure gone, but it was impossible to borrow even for a short time. Again one of Dr. Carey's old civilian students came to the rescue. Mr. Garrett, nephew of Robert Raikes who first began Sunday schools, pledged his own credit with the Bank of Bengal, until the generous and devoted Samuel Hope of Liverpool, treasurer of the Serampore Mission there, could be communicated with. Meanwhile the question of giving up any of the stations or shutting the college was not once favoured. "I have seen the tears run down the face of the venerable Dr. Carey at the thought of such a calamity," wrote Leechman; were it to arrive we should soon have to lay him in his grave." When the interest of the funds raised by Ward in America ceased for a time because of the malicious report from England that it might be applied by Dr. Marshman to the purposes of family aggrandisement, Carey replied in a spirit like that of Paul under a similar charge: 'Dr. Marshman is as poor as I am, and I can scarcely lay by a sum monthly to relieve three or four indigent relatives in Europe. I might have had large possessions, but I have given my all, except what I ate, drank, and wore, to the cause of missions, and Dr. Marshman has done the same, and so did Mr. Ward." Carey's trust in God, for the mission and for himself, was to be still further tried. On 12th July 1828 we find him thus writing from Calcutta to Jabez: "I came down |