It was Clive himself who brought to Calcutta the first missionary, Kiernander the Swede, but he was rather a chaplain, or a missionary to the Portuguese, who were nominal Christians of the lowest Romanist type. The French had closed the Danish mission at Cuddalore, and in 1758 Calcutta was without a Protestant clergyman to bury the dead or baptize or marry the living. Two years before one of the two chaplains had perished in the tragedy of the Black Hole, where he was found lying hand in hand with his son, a young lieutenant. The other had escaped down the river only to die of fever along with many more. The victory of Plassey and the large compensation paid for the destruction of old Calcutta and its church induced thousands of natives to flock to the new capital, while the number of the European troops and officials was about 2000. When chaplains were sent out, the Governor-General officially wrote of them to the Court of Directors so late as 1795:—“ Our clergy in Bengal, with some exceptions, are not respectable characters." From the general relaxation of morals, he added, "a black coat is no security." They were so badly paid from £50 to £230 a year, increased by £120 to meet the cost of living in Calcutta after 1764-that they traded. The Rev. John Owen, a friend of Cecil, retired with £25,000 in ten years, and that was only a modest half of what some of his colleagues realised chiefly from shares in Clive's monopolies. Preaching was the least of the chaplains' duties; burying was the most onerous. Anglo-Indian society, cut off from London, itself not much better, by a six months' voyage, was corrupt. Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, his hostile colleague in Council, lived in open adultery. The majority of the officials had native women, and the increase of their children, who lived in a state worse than that of the heathen, became so alarming that the compensation paid by the Mohammedan Government of Moorshedabad for the

1793

HE HAD NO PREDECESSOR.

77

destruction of the church was applied to the foundation of the useful charity still known as the Free School. The fathers not unfrequently adopted the Hindoo pantheon along with the zanana. The pollution, springing from England originally, was rolled back into it in an increasing volume, when the survivors retired as nabobs with fortunes, to corrupt social and political life, till Pitt cried out; and it became possible for Burke almost to succeed in his eighteen years' unjust impeachment of Hastings. The literature of the close of the eighteenth century is full of alarm. Professor Seeley is within the truth when he emphasises the two dangers as these-lest the English character should be corrupted, and lest the balance of the constitution should be upset.1

Kiernander is said to have been the means of converting 209 heathens and 380 Romanists of whom three were priests, during the twenty-eight years of his Calcutta career. Claudius Buchanan declares that Christian tracts had been translated into Bengali-one written by the Bishop of Sodor and Man-and that in the time of Warren Hastings Hindoo Christians had preached to their countrymen in the city. The "heathen" were probably Portuguese descendants, in whose language Kiernander preached as the lingua franca of the time. He could not even converse in Bengali or Hindostani, and when Charles Grant went to him for information as to the way of a sinner's salvation this happened"My anxious inquiries as to what I should do to be saved appeared to embarrass and confuse him exceedingly. He could not answer my questions, but he gave me some good instructive books." On Kiernander's bankruptcy, caused by his son when the father was blind, the "Mission Church" was bought by Grant, who wrote that its labours "have been confined to the descendants of Europeans, and have hardly ever embraced a single heathen, so that a mission to the

1 The Expansion of England, 1883.

Hindoos and Mohammedans would be a new thing." The Rev. David Brown, who had been sent out the year after as master and chaplain of the Military Orphan Society, for the education of the children of officers and soldiers, and was to become one of the Serampore circle of friends, preached to Europeans only in the Mission Church. Carey could find no trace of Kiernander's work among the natives six years after his death. The only converted Hindoo known of in Northern India up to that time was Guneshan Das, of Delhi, who when a boy joined Clive's army, who was the first man of caste 2 to visit England, and who, on his return with the Calcutta Supreme Court Judges in 1774 as Persian interpreter and translator, was baptized by Kiernander, Mr. Justice Chambers being sponsor.

William Carey had no predecessor in India as the first ordained Englishman who was sent to it as a missionary; he had no predecessor in Bengal and Hindostan proper as the first missionary from any land to the people. Even the Moravians, who in 1777 had sent two brethren to Serampore, Calcutta, and Patna, had soon withdrawn them, and one of them became the Company's botanist in Madras — Dr. Heyne. Carey practically stood alone at the first, while he unconsciously set in motion the double revolution, which was to convert the Anglo-Indian influence on England from corrupting heathenism to aggressive missionary zeal, and to change the Bengal of Cornwallis into the India of Bentinck, with all the possibilities that have made it grow, thus far, into the India of the Lawrences.

1 In the only reliable life of Kiernander, in the Calcutta Review for 1847, vol. vii. pp. 124-184, the Rev. James Long, of the Church Missionary Society, claims for Carey and his colleagues "all the credit due to an original attempt in devising and carrying out three excellent plans which have laid so broad a foundation on which to build the native churches" of North India. 2 Plütschau in 1711 took one of his converts, Timothy, home to Halle to be educated as a missionary.

CHAPTER IV.

SIX YEARS IN NORTH BENGAL-MISSIONARY AND

INDIGO PLANTER.

1794-1799.

Carey's two missionary principles-Destitute in Calcutta-Bandel and Nuddea -Applies in vain to be under-superintendent of the Botanic GardenHoused by a native usurer-Translation and preaching work in Calcutta-Secures a grant of waste land at Hashnabad-Estimate of the Bengali language, and appeal to the Society to work in Asia and Africa rather than in America-The Udny family-Carey's summary of his first year's experience-Superintends the indigo factory of Mudnabati-Indigo and the East India Company's monopolies-Carey's first nearly fatal sickness-Death of his child and chronic madness of his wife-Formation of first Baptist church in India-Early progress of Bible translation- Sanskrit studies; the Mahabarata—The wooden printing-press set up at Mudnabati-His educational ideal; school-work-The medical mission-Lord Wellesley-Carey seeks a mission centre among the Bhooteas-Describes his first sight of a Sati-Projects a mission settlement at Kidderpore.

CAREY was in his thirty-third year when he landed in Bengal. Two principles regulated the conception, the foundation, and the whole course of the mission which he now began. He had been led to these by the very genius of Christianity itself, by the example and teaching of Christ and of Paul, and by the experience of the Moravian brethren. He had laid them down in his Enquiry, and every month's residence during forty years in India confirmed him in his adhesion to them. These principles are that (1) a missionary must be one of the companions and equals of the people to whom he is sent; and (2) a missionary must as soon as possible become

indigenous, self-supporting, self-propagating, alike by the labours of the mission and of the converts. Himself a man of the people yet a scholar, a shoemaker and a schoolmaster yet a preacher and pastor to whom the great Robert Hall gloried in being a successor, Carey had led the two lives as Paul had done. Now that he was fairly in Calcutta, he resumed the divine toil, and ceased it not till he entered on the eternal rest. He prepared to go up country to Malda to till the ground among the natives of the rich district around the ruined capital of Gour. He engaged as his pundit and interpreter Ram Basu, one of the professing inquirers whom Thomas had attracted in former days. Experience soon taught him that, however correct his principle, Malda is not a land where the white man can be a farmer. So he became, in the different stages of his career, a captain of labour as an indigo planter, a teacher of Bengali, and professor of Sanskrit and Marathi, and the Government translator of Bengali. Nor did he or his associates ever make the mistake-or commit the fraud-of the Jesuit missionaries, whose idea of equality with the people was not that of brotherhood in Christ, but that of dragging down Christian doctrine, worship and civilisation to the base level of idolatrous heathenism, and deluding the ignorant into accepting the blasphemous compromise.

Alas! Carey could not manage to get out of Calcutta and its neighbourhood for five months. As he thought to live by farming, Thomas was to practise his profession; and their first year's income of £150 had, in those days when the foreign exchanges were unknown, to be realised by the sale of the goods in which it had been invested. As usual, Thomas had again blundered, so that even his gentle colleague himself half-condemned, half-apologised for him by the shrewd reflection that he was only fit to live at sea, where his daily business would be before him, and daily provision would be made for him. Carey found himself penniless.