William Carey

 In 1792 a Baptist pastor, William Carey (1761-1834), co-founded the Baptist Missionary Society at a house in Lower Street, Kettering.

William Carey portrait sketch by Colesworthey Grant

Carey had for many years had an interest in worldwide mission and his avocation of sending missionaries to convert the heathen was unusual in an age when much of the church believed that missions had died with the apostles. His interest in mission once led him to make an inventory naming every place in the world and its religion. From that he calculated there were 731 million people in the world, of which 421 million were pagans. This survey formed the basis of his influential 1792 pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, which argued that the Great Commission still applied to Christians of his own day.

Carey and his family, together with another minister, John Thomas, were chosen in 1793 as the first Baptist missionaries to India.

Carey achieved much in India, he founded mission schools, conceived the idea for a college to train native church leaders and campaigned against widow burning, infanticide and assisted suicide. In addition he developed a vast library system, printed the first Indian language newspaper, and introduced the idea of saving banks.

A gifted linguist, Carey translated the entire Bible into the major Indian languages and from 1801-30 he was the Professor of Oriental languages at Fort William College, Calcutta.

Carey is considered to be a pioneer of the modern missionary movement and laid the foundation for many succeeding missionaries in India. A legacy of his trailblazing work, is that by the end of the nineteenth century there were over half a million native Indian Protestants.

Before he ever set foot in India, Carey earned his living as a shoemaker in the Northamptonshire villages of Piddington and Hackleton, teaching himself Latin, Greek and Hebrew at his cobbler's bench while pastoring a small church for very little pay.

In 1818, together with fellow missionaries Joshua Marshman and William Ward, known collectively as the Serampore Trio, Carey founded Serampore College to train Indian ministers and teach the arts and sciences to students regardless of caste or creed; in 1827 it became the first institution in Asia empowered to award degrees.

An accomplished botanist in his spare time, Carey laid out a five-acre botanic garden at Serampore planted on the Linnaean system, and he helped found the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India in 1820.

Carey's Serampore Mission Press published his Bengali and Sanskrit grammars, and by his death in 1834 the mission had printed Scripture, in whole or in part, in over 40 languages and dialects across Asia.

Carey was also an outspoken campaigner against the transatlantic slave trade and against the exploitative indigo-planting system imposed on Bengali farmers by the East India Company.

He is buried in Serampore beneath a stone bearing an epitaph he wrote himself: "A wretched, poor and helpless worm, on Thy kind arms I fall" — a final expression of the humility for which he was known throughout his 41 years in India.