Whittier--From Pharisaism to Christ--The last shall be first--The
dissenting preacher in the parish clerk's home--He studies Latin,
Greek and Hebrew, Dutch and French--The cobbler's shed is Carey's
College.

William Carey, the first of her own children of the Reformation whom
England sent forth as a missionary to India, where he became the
most extensive translator of the Bible and civiliser, was the son of
a weaver, and was himself a village shoemaker till he was
twenty-eight years of age. He was born on the 17th August 1761, in
the very midland of England, in the heart of the district which had
produced Shakspere, had fostered Wyclif and Hooker, had bred Fox and
Bunyan, and had for a time been the scene of the lesser lights of
John Mason and Doddridge, of John Newton and Thomas Scott. William
Cowper, the poet of missions, made the land his chosen home, writing
Hope and The Task in Olney, while the shoemaker was studying
theology under Sutcliff on the opposite side of the market-place.
Thomas Clarkson, born a year before Carey, was beginning his
assaults on the slave-trade by translating into English his Latin
essay on the day-star of African liberty when the shoemaker, whom no
university knew, was writing his Enquiry into the Obligations of
Christians to use means for the Conversion of the Heathens.

William Carey bore a name which had slowly fallen into forgetfulness
after services to the Stewarts, with whose cause it had been
identified. Professor Stephens, of Copenhagen, traces it to the
Scando-Anglian Car, CAER or CARE, which became a place-name as
CAR-EY. Among scores of neighbours called William, William of
Car-ey would soon sink into Carey, and this would again become the
family name. In Denmark the name Caròe is common. The oldest