William Carey
The English Baptist shoemaker whose Enquiry of 1792 helped launch the modern Protestant missionary movement. He spent forty-one years in India, translating the Bible into Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi and overseeing its translation into dozens of other languages.
Biography
William Carey was born on August 17, 1761, in Paulerspury, Northamptonshire, the son of a weaver who also kept the village school. He left school young and was apprenticed to a shoemaker. While working at the trade he taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and later Dutch and French, and he read widely in geography and travel. He was converted in his late teens and was baptized as a believer in 1783, joining the Particular Baptists.
Carey supported himself as a shoemaker and schoolmaster while preaching in the villages around Northampton. In 1785 he became pastor of the Baptist congregation at Moulton, and in 1789 he moved to Harvey Lane in Leicester. During these years he studied the reports of Captain Cook's voyages and compiled what he could learn of the population and religion of every known country. The result was An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, published in 1792.
At the Northamptonshire Baptist Association meeting in Nottingham on May 31, 1792, Carey preached on Isaiah 54:2 to 3, urging his hearers to expect great things from God and attempt great things for God. In October of that year, at Kettering, a small group of ministers formed the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen, later known as the Baptist Missionary Society. Carey volunteered to go himself, and in June 1793 he sailed for Bengal with his family and the surgeon John Thomas, arriving in November.
His first years in India were hard. He managed an indigo factory in northern Bengal to support his family while learning Bengali and beginning his translation of the New Testament. In January 1800 he moved to the Danish settlement of Serampore, near Calcutta, where he was joined by Joshua Marshman and William Ward. The three men and their families lived as a single community, ran schools, and operated a printing press. The first Bengali convert, Krishna Pal, was baptized in December 1800, and the Bengali New Testament was printed in 1801.
In 1801 Carey was appointed to teach Bengali at the College of Fort William in Calcutta, where he later also taught Sanskrit and Marathi and held the rank of professor. He compiled grammars and dictionaries, and the Serampore press issued complete Bibles or portions of Scripture in dozens of Indian and Asian languages under his direction. He was also a serious botanist and helped found the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India in 1820. With his colleagues he founded Serampore College in 1818. He died at Serampore on June 9, 1834, having never returned to England.
Life & Career
Why Carey Matters
Carey's Enquiry addressed a question many of his fellow Particular Baptists had left unasked: whether the command of Matthew 28 to teach all nations was still binding on the church or had been fulfilled by the apostles. Carey argued that the command remained in force as long as the promise of Christ's presence attached to it remained in force, and that Christians were obliged to use ordinary means, including organized societies, to carry the gospel abroad. He held firmly to the Calvinist doctrines of grace and saw no conflict between God's sovereignty in salvation and human responsibility to preach.
The Baptist Missionary Society became a model for the voluntary missionary societies that followed in quick succession, including the London Missionary Society in 1795 and the Church Missionary Society in 1799. Carey drew on earlier examples, especially Jonathan Edwards' account of the life of David Brainerd, but it was the Baptist Missionary Society that gave the English-speaking churches a working pattern for sending and supporting missionaries over a long period.
Carey's most lasting work was in Bible translation. He believed that converts needed the Scriptures in their own language and that missionaries must master the languages and literature of the people they served. The Serampore translations were uneven in quality, and many were later revised or replaced, but they established Bible translation as a central task of Protestant missions and laid groundwork in Bengali prose and in the study of Indian languages.
The Serampore missionaries also set out principles that shaped later missionary practice: self-support by the missionaries, the training of local preachers, education, and attention to the social conditions of the people. Carey gathered evidence on the practice of sati, the burning of widows, and pressed for its abolition, which was enacted in Bengal in 1829. His example made the overseas missionary a familiar figure in British and American churches throughout the nineteenth century.
