him, becoming all things to all men that he might win some to the
higher life, Carey was successively, and often at the same time, a
captain of labour, a schoolmaster, a printer, the developer of the
vernacular speech, the expounder of the classical language, the
translator of both into English and of the English Bible into both,
the founder of a pure literature, the purifier of society, the
watchful philanthropist, the saviour of the widow and the
fatherless, of the despairing and the would-be suicide, of the
downtrodden and oppressed. We have now to see him on the scientific
or the physical and economic side, while he still jealously keeps
his strength for the one motive power of all, the spiritual, and
with almost equal care avoids the political or administrative as his
Master did. But even then it was his aim to proclaim the divine
principles which would use science and politics alike to bring
nations to the birth, while, like the apostles, leaving the
application of these principles to the course of God's providence
and the consciences of men. In what he did for science, for
literature, and for humanity, as in what he abstained from doing in
the practical region of public life, the first English missionary
was an example to all of every race who have followed him in the
past century. From Carey to Livingstone, alike in Asia and Africa,
the greatest Christian evangelists have been those who have made
science and literature the handmaids of missions.

Apart from the extreme south of the peninsula of India, where the
Danish missionaries had explored with hawk's eyes, almost nothing
was known of its plants and animals, its men, as well as its beasts,
when Carey found himself in a rural district of North Bengal in the
closing decade of the eighteenth century. Nor had any writer,
official or missionary, anywhere realised the state of India and the