Chapter 16
Chapter 16
Growing Pains
The act of Parliament that amended the charter of the East India Company and allowed for the free flow of missionaries into India brought many opportunities to the Serampore mission. For the first time, the governor-general was allowed to officially request missionary help. Within weeks of receiving notification of the new law, the governor-general at the time, Lord Moira, asked William to visit him to ask William for missionaries to be sent to the Moluccan island of Amboyna on the other side of the Bay of Bengal.
William rushed back to Serampore to share the good news and ask for a volunteer to go. To his surprise, his nineteen-year-old son, Jabez, took up the call. Within three days, Jabez was baptized, ordained as a Baptist minister, married, and ready to go! His brother Felix, himself married with three children, was visiting Serampore at the time and was able to participate in the service to commission Jabez for his new calling.
Felix knew what it was like to go out alone as a missionary. Several years earlier he had set out from Serampore and gone to Burma, where he had established his own mission station. He had his father’s gift for languages and translated portions of the Bible into Burmese. He also compiled a dictionary of the Burmese language.
Before leaving for Burma, he had also become interested in medicine and had read about Edward Jenner’s daring experiment in 1796 with the first smallpox vaccine. After he arrived in Burma, Felix became convinced that the Burmese people were likely to catch many deadly diseases as their contact with people from other places grew. He convinced the king of Burma to let him give smallpox vaccinations to the local people. At that time, this represented the most widespread use of a vaccine in the world. When it proved successful, Felix Carey became well-known in Burma.
Sadly, though, on the trip back to Burma after visiting Serampore, the boat in which Felix and his family were traveling capsized in a storm. Felix was the only one who made it to shore. The rest of his family were drowned. A printing press, copies of the Gospels in Burmese, and the only copy of his Burmese dictionary were also lost. The loss of his family sent Felix into deep depression, from which he took a long time to recover.
Soon after Eustace Carey’s arrival in Serampore as the first licensed English missionary to India, more missionaries followed. This should have been a good thing, but it turned out not to be so. The new missionaries being sent by the Baptist Missionary Society, as the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel was now called, were all young and did not know much about missionary work. Instead of quietly watching and listening to the older missionaries and following their advice, they soon began to hold private meetings among themselves to complain about and criticize the older missionaries’ way of doing things. For William, this was heartbreaking, and more so when his nephew Eustance joined their meetings.
The new missionaries complained that Joshua Marshman was too bossy and expected them to obey him and that William Ward wanted them to work too hard. They wondered why William Carey dressed up and ate fabulous meals at the governor-general’s mansion. Did he think he was better than everyone else in the mission? And why did the print shop at Serampore print schoolbooks that made no mention of religion in them? And what happened to all of the money the Baptist Missionary Society sent to Serampore?
They could have easily got the answers to their questions by simply asking the older missionaries, but they seemed more content to talk among themselves and stir up trouble.
When the original group of missionaries had settled in Serampore thirteen years before and established their community, they had set it up in such a way that every male missionary had one vote on important issues. Now that system worked against the longtime missionaries. After years of working in great agreement together, William Ward, Joshua Marshman, and William Carey found themselves outvoted on almost every decision concerning missionary work at Serampore. This was difficult for the three of them to accept, but they tried to be as gracious as possible. What was more difficult for them to accept was the fact that these new missionaries had also written letters to the missionary society complaining about them.
Finally, the community came to an uneasy peace that lasted for several years. However, in 1814, John Sutcliff died, followed a year later by Andrew Fuller. These two men, along with John Ryland, had been “holding the ropes” for William back in England throughout his time in India. They had been the core of the original missionary society committee. With the growth of the mission, they had been joined on the committee by nineteen new members. These new members were good friends of the young missionaries who had recently been sent out, but they had never met William Carey, Joshua Marshman, or William Ward.
Now with John Ryland left as the only person in the missionary society who had been directly involved in sending out William Carey, the new committee decided to find out whether the longtime missionaries in Serampore would follow its orders. It issued an order that all of the mission’s property in Serampore, including the printing press, paper supplies, established churches and schools, and all houses and related buildings, be signed over to the committee in England so that it could take direct control over the property.
When William Carey, now fifty-five years old, read the order, he wrote immediately to the committee and announced that he had no intention of handing over the property. He argued, as he had in his book Enquiry twenty-four years before, that a mission cannot be successfully run from halfway around the world. For one thing, it took far too long to communicate problems and decisions back and forth to England. For another, the committee had little idea of the circumstances the missionaries faced in India. William also appealed desperately to John Ryland to try to make the rest of the committee be reasonable.
In 1816, John Ryland died. All three of the original “rope holders” were now gone. William also got more bad news about this time. His father, with whom he had kept in regular contact, had died. If William had ever been thinking about returning to England for a furlough, such thoughts were now gone. “Wherever I look,” William wrote about England, “I see a blank. Were I to revisit that dear country, I should have an entirely new set of friendships to form.”
Finally, in August 1817, the uneasy peace that had existed between the old and the new missionaries in Serampore was shattered with the arrival of William Pearce and his wife.
William Pearce was an experienced printer and should have been a great help to William Ward. The problem was that the committee in England had sent William Pearce to India and had “ordered” him to stay in Serampore. Up until this time, the missionaries in Serampore had been the ones who made the final decision on where a new missionary should serve. As the years passed, a number of other mission stations had been established around India, and most new missionaries were sent on to help staff these stations. But this time, the committee had said where it wanted a new missionary to be stationed. Although this didn’t seem like a major problem, especially since Pearce was a printer and the print shop was in Serampore, it showed William Carey, Joshua Marshman, and William Ward that the committee in England was challenging them for control of the mission in India.
The whole situation weighed heavily on William, who had come to India to do the peaceful work of sharing the gospel message, not to argue and squabble over who controlled the mission. At the same time, William was worried about Felix, who had become depressed and mentally unstable after the drowning of his family. The last time William had heard from him, he was wandering aimlessly in the state of Assam. On top of this, William’s health was not good. William had been riding in a horse-drawn buggy when the horse had bolted. He had been forced to leap to safety, but in doing so, he had broken several bones in his foot. His foot had taken many months to heal, forcing him to have to be carried to and from Fort William College. Even after his foot finally did heal, William had a pronounced limp for the rest of his life.
By the end of 1817, the young missionaries and their families had left Serampore and, with the approval and support of the Baptist Missionary Society, had set up their own mission center fourteen miles downriver in Calcutta. There they established a mission identical to the mission in Serampore, complete with a printing press, church, school, and translation center. William would not have minded this so much had they gone to some other unevangelized part of India to set up their work, but establishing an identical center in Calcutta was a waste of resources and a duplication of effort, especially since the Serampore mission already had established a missionary center in Calcutta from which Hindu Christians shared the gospel message with other Hindus. Indeed, the situation raised many questions in the minds of people in Serampore and Calcutta. William hoped that people would just ignore it all and not be upset or confused by it. But there were those who could not ignore it, and the strange goings-on among the missionaries became a regular subject of gossip.
Despite the situation among the missionaries, the British rulers of India realized the value of missionary work. Missionaries opened schools, translated documents, and were mostly a peaceful presence wherever they went. Lord Hastings, the new governor-general of India, invited William Carey and Joshua Marshman to dinner to discuss with them sending missionaries to Rajputana. About the same time, Sir David Ochterlony, commercial resident for the newly opened up areas in the foothills of the Himalayas, wrote begging for missionaries to be sent there.
For the first time in all his years in India, William Carey was in the strange position of being in high demand by government officials, even while he was being ignored by the younger missionaries and the missionary society he had helped found back in England. It was a bitter turn of events, and one that upset him more than anything else he’d had to endure in his life. He was especially saddened when he was accused of gathering personal riches. Nothing was further from the truth. Yes, he was paid well for his work as a professor at Fort William College, but all the money he earned was ploughed back into the work of the mission. From the day he left England, William had only ever received six hundred pounds from the missionary society for his personal support. In return, he had given the mission at least forty thousand pounds, which in 1817 was a fortune. William gave more money to the Baptist Missionary Society in India than any other person anywhere in the world. And William had given the mission not only money but also virtually all his time and talent over the past twenty-four years. For some reason, the members of the committee in England had not added up the accounts to see the plain truth for themselves.
Regarding the situation, William wrote to his son Jabez, “Nothing I ever met with in my life—and I have met with many distressing things—ever preyed so much upon my spirit as this difference.”
Still, William Carey, Joshua Marshman, and William Ward plodded on in Serampore. Jabez and Mary Carey returned from Amboyna Island, which had been claimed by the Dutch at the end of the Napoleonic War in Europe, and volunteered to go to Rajputana. At the same time, William Ward’s son began missionary work on the island of Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies.
William was still worried about Felix, though. Every six months or so he received a letter from his son. As far as he could tell, Felix was still wandering around Assam gathering botany samples and learning new languages.
Finally, in 1818, on a trip east to the Chittagong missionary station, William Ward met up with Felix and persuaded him to return to Serampore. Everyone was delighted to see him when he arrived, and there was plenty of work for him to do. Felix spoke Bengali like a native and was soon put to work supervising the mission’s latest project, producing newspapers and magazines. There were three publications. The first was a monthly magazine called Dig-Darshan, which meant “the signpost.” It was for schoolchildren and was filled with interesting articles about animals, adventurers, explorers, and current events. Many schools in India ordered copies for their students, and soon the mission was printing three thousand copies a month. The second project was the Samachar Darpan (news mirror). This was the first newspaper ever to be published in an Asian language, and it too was very popular.
Neither Dig-Darshan nor Samachar Darpan carried many articles about Christianity. The missionaries in Serampore were concerned about both the educational and the spiritual welfare of the Indian people. Thus, they believed that anything that made people think and understand more about the world around them would also challenge them to look more closely at their own lives, including their religious beliefs.
The third publication was more openly Christian. It was written in English and was called Friend of India. Inside the magazine were articles of general interest and a lot of news about what was going on in the country. William Carey used the magazine to remind people about the horrors of the practice of sati and child sacrifice. Although infanticide had been officially outlawed for nearly twenty years, it was still secretly practiced in some places. What bothered William more was that sati was still legal in a country under British rule. William wrote articles telling how brides as young as eleven years of age were being forced onto their husband’s funeral pyre. (Girls this young may not have even met their husbands yet. They had been “married” by their parents when they were three or four years old to husbands they would go to live with when they reached childbearing age. Often the husband’s family insisted the bride be burned to death so that she would have no claim on her husband’s property.)
Felix loved working with William Ward. Together they made a great team. In his spare time, Felix translated Pilgrim’s Progress and A History of British India and of England into Bengali. His father used the books in his classes at Fort William College.
With Felix Carey back at Serampore, William Ward felt free to travel back to England for a break. It was the first time he had returned to England in twenty years. He planned to meet with the missionary society committee while in England and explain the situation in Serampore. He was hopeful that this would help to smooth out some of the difficulties that existed between the missionaries and the missionary society.
While William Ward was away, William Carey and Joshua Marshman set about bringing their next dream to life. Since his early days with Dr. Thomas, William Carey had dreamed of a college similar to Fort William College, but for Indians. There were already two colleges for Indians in Calcutta, one for Hindus and one for Moslems, but William wanted to start a college for Christians to attend. Until this time, a Christian student was not allowed to enroll in either of the other colleges. By now, about six hundred Indians had become Christian converts and had been baptized by William. William was anxious for many of these converts to continue their education, especially learning Sanskrit, so that they could talk intelligently about the gospel message with other educated Indians.
William wanted Serampore College, as he named it, to be a place where Christians from every denomination would feel welcome. This, however, brought him into disagreement again with the missionary society committee back in England. The committee reminded William and Joshua Marshman that it was the Baptist Missionary Society and had sent out Baptist missionaries to begin Baptist churches and schools. Back in England, William Ward was able to smooth out the disagreement a little, but the committee could see no value in supporting an interdenominational college.
The Danish people in Serampore understood better than his English “support team” what William Carey was trying to do. The king of Denmark, who carefully followed the work of the Serampore mission, donated five acres of land adjacent to the mission on which to build the college. Soon after, Lord Hastings agreed to be a patron of the college and gave one hundred twenty-five pounds to the building fund. The British government even agreed to pay the cost of hiring a professor of medicine.
William Ward finally arrived back in India with five thousand pounds he had collected from Christians in Great Britain and America. (The Baptist Missionary Society had not approved of his asking Baptists for money for the new college, but many Baptists had given to him privately anyway.)
Despite all his other duties and the responsibilities of starting a new college, William had desired for a long time to do one other thing. He wanted to establish a society to help Indian people better use their farmland to feed more people. He had often spoken to Lady Hastings about this desire, since she shared his love of plants. She encouraged him to do it, and so in 1820, William Carey founded the Agri-Horticultural Society of India. Lady Hastings signed up as the new society’s first member. William and Charlotte loved to host the society’s meetings in their home. It was exciting for them to meet with other people who loved the flowers and trees of India as much as they did.
At fifty-nine years of age, it may have looked to outsiders that it was time for William Carey to slow down and enjoy old age. But not William. He had struggled against huge obstacles all his life, and the struggle was not yet over.