1792 THE BACK PARLOUR IN KETTERING. 53 treasurer was the only rich—and not self-denying—man of the twelve, who soon resigned his office into a layman's hands, as was right. Of the others we need now point only to Samuel Pearce, the seraphic preacher of Birmingham, who went home and sent £70 to the collection, and who, since he desired to give himself like Carey, became to him dearer than even Fuller was. The place was a low-roofed parlour in the house of Widow Wallis, looking on to a back garden, which many a pilgrim still visits, and around which there gathered thousands in 1842 to hold the first jubilee of modern missions. Already the centenary is at hand. Can any good come out of Kettering? was the conclusion to which the Baptist ministers of London came, with the one exception of Booth, when they met formally to decide whether like those of Birmingham and other places they should join the primary society. Benjamin Beddome, a venerable scholar whom Robert Hall declared to be chief among his brethren, replied to Fuller in language which is far from unusual even at the present day, but showing the position which the Leicester minister had won for himself even then :— "I think your scheme, considering the paucity of well-qualified ministers, hath a very unfavourable aspect with respect to destitute churches at home, where charity ought to begin. I had the pleasure once to see and hear Mr. Carey; it struck me he was the most suitable person in the kingdom, at least whom I knew, to supply my place, and make up my great deficiencies when either disabled or removed. A different plan is formed and pursued, and I fear that the great and good man, though influenced by the most excellent motives, will meet with a disappointment. However, God hath His ends, and whoever is disappointed He cannot be so. My unbelieving heart is ready to suggest that the time is not come, the time that the Lord's house should be built." The other Congregationalists made no sign. The Presbyterians, with a few noble exceptions like Dr. Erskine whose Dutch volume Carey had translated, denounced such move ments as revolutionary in a General Assembly of socinianised "moderates." The Church of England kept haughtily or timidly aloof, though king and archbishop were pressed to send a mission. Hence Fuller's reference to this time :— "When we began in 1792 there was little or no respectability among us, not so much as a squire to sit in the chair or an orator to address him with speeches. Hence good Dr. Stennett advised the London ministers to stand aloof and not commit themselves." One man in India had striven to rouse the Church to its duty as Carey had done at home. Charles Grant had in 1787 written from Malda to Charles Simeon and Wilberforce for eight missionaries, but not one Church of England clergyman could be found to go. Thirty years after, when chairman of the Court of Directors and father of Lord Glenelg and Sir Robert Grant, he wrote:—"I had formed the design of a mission to Bengal: Providence reserved that honour for the Baptists." After all, the twelve village pastors in the back parlour of Kettering were the more really the successors of the twelve apostles in the upper room of Jerusalem. CHAPTER III. INDIA AS CAREY FOUND IT. 1793. Tahiti v. Bengal—Carey and Thomas appointed missionaries to Bengal—The farewell at Leicester—John Thomas, first medical missionary—Carey's letter to his father—The Company's "abominable monopoly "—The voyage Carey's aspirations for world-wide missions Lands at Calcutta—His description of Bengal in 1793—Contrast presented by Carey to Clive, Hastings, and Cornwallis—The spiritual founder of an Indian Empire of Christian Britain—Bengal and the famine of 1769-70— The Decennial Settlement declared permanent—Effects on the landed classes—Obstacles to Carey's work—East India Company at its worst —Hindooism and the Bengalees in 1793—Position of Hindoo women— Missionary attempts before Carey's — Ziegenbalg and Schwartz — Kiernander and the chaplains—Hindooised state of Anglo-Indian society and its reaction on England—Guneshan Dass, the first caste Hindoo to visit England—William Carey had no predecessor. Carey had desired to go first to Tahiti or Western Africa. Pearce preferred the Pelew Islands, whence Captain Henry Wilson had brought the king's son to England. The natives of North America and the negroes of the West Indies and Sierra Leone were being cared for by Moravian and Wesleyan evangelists. The narrative of Captain Cook's two first voyages to the Pacific and discovery of Tahiti had appeared in the same year in which the Northampton churches began their seven years' concert of prayer, just after his own second baptism. From the map, and a leathern globe which also he is said to have made, he had been teaching the children of Piddington, Moulton, and Leicester the great outlines and |