the sacred Scriptures which Carey sent forth was twenty-eight. Of
these seven included the whole Bible, and twenty-one contained the
books of the New Testament. Each translation has a history, a
spiritual romance of its own. Each became almost immediately a
silent but effectual missionary to the peoples of Asia, as well as
the scholarly and literary pioneer of those later editions and
versions from which the native churches of farther Asia derive the
materials of their lively growth.

The Ooriya version was almost the first to be undertaken after the
Bengali, to which language it bears the same relation as rural
Scotch to English, though it has a written character of its own.
What is now the Orissa division of Bengal, separating it from
Madras to the south-west, was added to the empire in 1803. This
circumstance, and the fact that its Pooree district, after centuries
of sun-worship and then shiva-worship, had become the high-place of
the vaishnava cult of Jaganath and his car, which attracted and
often slew hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year, led Carey
to prepare at once for the press the Ooriya Bible. The chief
pundit, Mritunjaya, skilled in both dialects, first adapted the
Bengali version to the language of the Ooriyas, which was his own.
Carey then took the manuscript, compared it with the original
Greek, and corrected it verse by verse. The New Testament was ready
in 1809, and the Old Testament in 1815, the whole in four volumes.
Large editions were quickly bought up and circulated. These led to
the establishment of the General Baptist Society's missionaries at
Cuttak, the capital.

In 1814 the Serampore Bible translation college, as we may call it,
began the preparation of the New Testament in Maghadi, another of