1804-34

MEN INFLUENCED BY CAREY.

233

learning and the modesty, the efficiency and the geniality, which won the affectionate admiration of his students in Calcutta. We have seen how he had drawn to the higher life a judge like Cunningham of Lainshaw, and a youth like Lang. A glance at the register of the college for its first five years reveals such men as these among his best students. 1 The first Bengali prizeman of Carey was W. Butterworth Bayley, whose long career of blameless uprightness and marked ability culminated in the temporary seat of GovernorGeneral, and who was followed in the service by a son worthy of him. The second was that Brian H. Hodgson who, when Resident of Nepal, of all his contemporaries won for himself the greatest reputation as a scholar, who fought side by side with the Serampore brotherhood the battle of the vernaculars of the people, and who still rejoices in a green old age. Charles, afterwards Lord Metcalfe had been the first student to enter the college. He was on its Persian side, and he learned while still under its discipline that "humility, patience, and obedience to the divine will" which unostentatiously marked his brilliant life and soothed his spirit in the agonies of a fatal disease. He and Bayley were inseparable. Of the first set, too, were Richard Jenkins, who was to leave his mark on history as Nagpoor Resident and author of the Report of 1826; and Romer, who rose to be Governor of Bombay for a time. In those early years the two Birds passed through the classes—Robert Mertins Bird, who was to found the great land revenue school of Hindostan; and Wilberforce Bird, who governed India while Lord Ellenborough played at soldiers, and to whom the legal suppression of slavery in Southern Asia is due. Names of men second to those, such as Elliot and Thackeray, Hamilton and Martin, the Shakespeares and Plowdens, the Moneys, the Rosses and Keenes, crowd the honour lists. One of the last to enjoy the advantages of the college before its abolition

was John Lawrence, who used to confess that he was never good at languages, but whose vigorous Hindostani made. many an ill-doing Raja and Nawab tremble, while his homely and kindly conversation, interspersed with jokes, cheered and encouraged the toiling ryot.

These, and men like these, sat at the feet of Carey, where they learned not only to be scholars but to treat the natives kindly, and—some of them—even as brethren in Christ. Then from teaching the future rulers of the East, the missionaryprofessor turned to his Bengali preaching and his benevolent institution, to his visits to the prisoners and his intercourse with the British soldiers in Fort William. And when the three days' work in Calcutta was over, the last tide bore him swiftly up the Hoogli to the study where, for the rest of the week, he gave himself to the translation of the Bible into the languages of the people and of their leaders.

CHAPTER X.

THE WICLIF OF THE EAST—BIBLE TRANSLATION.

1801-1832.

The Bible Carey's missionary weapon—Other vernacular translators—Carey's modest but just description of his labours—His philological key—Typecutting and type-casting by a Hindoo blacksmith—The first manufacture of paper and steam-engine in the East—First printer's bill for six years' translations—Carey takes stock of the translation work at the opening of 1808—In his workshop—A seminary of Bible translators—William Yates, shoemaker, the Coverdale of the Bengali Bible - Wenger—A Bengali Luther wanted—Carey's Bengali Bible—How the New Testament was printed—The first copy offered to God—Reception of the volume by Lord Spencer and George III.—Self-evidencing power of the first edition—The Bible in Ooriya—In Maghadi, Assamese, Khasi, and Manipoori—Marathi, Konkani, and Goojarati versions—The translation into Hindi and its many dialects—The Dravidian translations—Tale of the Pushtoo Bible —The Sikhs and the Bible—The first Burman version and press— The British and Foreign Bible Society—William Hey's help—Deaths, earthquake, and fire in 1812 — Destruction of the press-Thomason's description of the smoking ruins—Carey's heroism as to his manuscripts —Enthusiastic sympathy of India and Christendom—The phoenix and its feathers.

Every great reform and revolution in the world has been, in the first instance, the work of one man, who, however much he may have been the product or representative of his time, has alone conceived and alone begun to execute the movement which has transformed society. This is true alike of the moral and the physical forces of history, of contemporaries so apparently opposite in character and aims as Carey and Clarkson on the one side and Napoleon and Wellington on the other. Carey stood alone in his persistent determina

He was

tion that the Church should evangelise the world. no less singular in the means which he insisted on as the first essential condition of its evangelisation—the vernacular translation of the Bible. From the Scriptures alone, while yet a journeyman shoemaker of eighteen, "he had formed his own system," and had been filled with the divine missionary idea. That was a year before the first Bible Society was formed in 1780 to circulate the English Bible among soldiers and sailors, and a quarter of a century before his own success led to the formation in 1804 of the British and Foreign Bible Society. From the time of his youth, when he realised the self-evidencing power of the Bible, Carey's unbroken. habit was to begin every morning by reading one chapter of the Bible, first in English, and then in each of the languages, soon numbering six, which he had himself learned.

Hence the translation of the Bible into all the languages and principal dialects of India and Eastern Asia was the work above all others to which Carey set himself from the time, in 1793, when he mastered the Bengali. He preached, he taught, he "discipled" in every form then reasonable and possible, and in the fullest sense of his Master's missionary charge. But the one form of most pressing and abiding importance, the condition without which neither true faith, nor true science, nor true civilisation could exist or be propagated outside of the narrow circle to be reached by the one herald's voice, was the publishing of the divine message in the mother tongues of the millions of Asiatic men and women, boys and girls, and in the learned tongues also of their leaders and priests. Wiclif had first done this for the English-reading races of all time, translating from the Latin, and so had begun the Reformation, religious and political, not only in Britain but in Western Christendom. Erasmus and Luther had followed him—the former in his Greek and Latin New Testament and in his Paraphrase of the Word for women and

1805

VERNACULAR TRANSLATORS OF THE BIBLE.

237

cobblers, clowns, mechanics, and even the Turks "; the latter in his great vernacular translation of the edition of Erasmus, who had never ceased to urge his contemporaries to translate the Scriptures "into all tongues." Tyndale had first given England the Bible from the Hebrew and the Greek. And now one of these cobblers was prompted and enabled by the Spirit who is the author of the truth in the Scriptures, to give to South and Eastern Asia the sacred books which its Syrian sons, from Moses and Ezra to Paul and John, had been inspired to write for all races and all ages. Emphatically, Carey and his later coadjutors deserve the language of the British and Foreign Bible Society when, in 1827, it made to Serampore a last grant of money for translation :—" Future generations will apply to them the words of the translators of the English Bible-Therefore blessed be they and most honoured their names that break the ice and give the onset in that which helped them forward to the saving of souls. Now what can be more available thereto than to deliver God's book unto God's people in a tongue which they understand?' Carey might tolerate interruption when engaged in other work, but for forty years he never allowed anything to shorten the time allotted to the Bible work. "You, madam," he wrote in 1797 to a lady as to many a correspondent, "will excuse my brevity when I inform you that all my time for writing letters is stolen from the work of transcribing the Scriptures into the Bengali language."

When stripped of the extravagance of statement into which they have grown in the course of a century in the missionary periodicals and on the popular platforms of England, the facts are more remarkable than the pious myth which has accreted round them. From no mere humility, which in his case was as manly and honest as his whole nature and not a mockery, but with an accurate judgment in the state of scholarship and criticism at the end of last century,