Through the College of Fort William during thirty long years Carey influenced the ablest men in the Bengal Civil Service, and not a few in Madras and Bombay. "The college must stand or the empire must fall,"

its founder had written to his friends in the Government, so convinced was he that only thus could proper men be trained for the public service and the welfare of our native subjects be secured. How right he was Carey's experience proved. The young civilians turned out after the first three years' course introduced that new era in the administration of India which has converted traders into statesmen and filibusters into soldier-politicals, so that the East Indian services stand alone in the history of the administration of imperial dependencies for spotless integrity and high average ability. Contrast with the work of these men, from the days of Wellesley, the first Minto, and Dalhousie, from the time of Canning to Lawrence and the second Minto, the provincial administration of imperial Rome, of Spain and Portugal at their best, of even the Netherlands and France. For a whole generation of thirty years the civilians who studied Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi came daily under the gentle spell of Carey, who, though he had failed to keep the village school of Moulton in order, manifested the learning and the modesty, the efficiency and the geniality, which won the affectionate admiration of his students in Calcutta.

A glance at the register of the college for its first five years reveals such men as these among his best students. The first Bengali prizeman of Carey was W. b.u.t.terworth Bayley, whose long career of blameless uprightness and marked ability culminated in the temporary seat of Governor-General, and who was followed in the service by a son worthy of him. The second was that Brian H. Hodgson who, when Resident of Nepal, of all his contemporaries won for himself the greatest reputation as a scholar, who fought side by side with the Serampore brotherhood the battle of the vernaculars of the people. Charles, afterwards Lord Metcalfe, had been the first student to enter the college. He was on its Persian side, and he learned while still under its discipline that "humility, patience, and obedience to the divine will" which unostentatiously marked his brilliant life and soothed his spirit in the agonies of a fatal disease. He and Bayley were inseparable. Of the first set, too, were Richard Jenkins, who was to leave his mark on history as Nagpoor Resident and author of the Report of 1826; and Romer, who rose to be Governor of Bombay for a time. In those early years the two Birds pa.s.sed through the cla.s.ses--Robert Mertins Bird, who was to found the great land revenue school of Hindostan; and Wilberforce Bird, who governed India while Lord Ellenborough played at soldiers, and to whom the legal suppression of slavery in Southern Asia is due. Names of men second to those, such as Elliot and Thackeray, Hamilton and Martin, the Shakespeares and Plowdens, the Moneys, the Rosses and Keenes, crowd the honour lists.

One of the last to enjoy the advantages of the college before its abolition was John Lawrence, who used to confess that he was never good at languages, but whose vigorous Hindostani made many an ill-doing Raja tremble, while his homely conversation, interspersed with jokes, encouraged the toiling ryot.

These, and men like these, sat at the feet of Carey, where they learned not only to be scholars but to treat the natives kindly, and--some of them--even as brethren in Christ. Then from teaching the future rulers of the East, the missionary-professor turned to his Bengali preaching and his Benevolent Inst.i.tution, to his visits to the prisoners and his intercourse with the British soldiers in Fort William. And when the four days' work in Calcutta was over, the early tide bore him swiftly up the Hoogli to the study where, for the rest of the week, he gave himself to the translation of the Bible into the languages of the people and of their leaders.

CHAPTER X

THE WYCLIF OF THE EAST--BIBLE TRANSLATION

1801-1832

The Bible Carey's missionary weapon--Other vernacular translators--Carey's modest but just description of his labours--His philological key--Type-cutting and type-casting by a Hindoo blacksmith--The first manufacture of paper and steam-engines in the East--Carey takes stock of the translation work at the opening of 1808--In his workshop--A seminary of Bible translators--William Yates, shoemaker, the Coverdale of the Bengali Bible--Wenger--A Bengali Luther wanted--Carey's Bengali Bible--How the New Testament was printed--The first copy offered to G.o.d--Reception of the volume by Lord Spencer and George III.--Self-evidencing power of the first edition--The Bible in Ooriya--In Maghadi, a.s.samese, Khasi, and Manipoori--Marathi, Konkani, and Goojarati versions--The translation into Hindi and its many dialects--The Dravidian translations--Tale of the Pushtoo Bible--The Sikhs and the Bible--The first Burman version and press--The British and Foreign Bible Society--Deaths, earthquake, and fire in 1812--Destruction of the press--Thomason's description of the smoking ruins--Carey's heroism as to his ma.n.u.scripts--Enthusiastic sympathy of India and Christendom--The ph[oe]nix and its feathers.

Every great reform in the world has been, in the first instance, the work of one man, who, however much he may have been the product of his time, has conceived and begun to execute the movement which transforms society. This is true alike of the moral and the physical forces of history, of contemporaries so apparently opposite in character and aims as Carey and Clarkson on the one side and Napoleon and Wellington on the other. Carey stood alone in his persistent determination that the Church should evangelise the world. He was no less singular in the means which he insisted on as the first essential condition of its evangelisation--the vernacular translation of the Bible. From the Scriptures alone, while yet a journeyman shoemaker of eighteen, "he had formed his own system," and had been filled with the divine missionary idea. That was a year before the first Bible Society was formed in 1780 to circulate the English Bible among soldiers and sailors; and, a quarter of a century before his own success led to the formation in 1804 of the British and Foreign Bible Society. From the time of his youth, when he realised the self-evidencing power of the Bible, Carey's unbroken habit was to begin every morning by reading one chapter of the Bible, first in English, and then in each of the languages, soon, numbering six, which he had himself learned.

Hence the translation of the Bible into all the languages and princ.i.p.al dialects of India and Eastern Asia was the work above all others to which Carey set himself from the time, in 1793, when he acquired the Bengali. He preached, he taught, he "discipled" in every form then reasonable and possible, and in the fullest sense of his Master's missionary charge. But the one form of most pressing and abiding importance, the condition without which neither true faith, nor true science, nor true civilisation could exist or be propagated outside of the narrow circle to be reached by the one herald's voice, was the publishing of the divine message in the mother tongues of the millions of Asiatic men and women, boys and girls, and in the learned tongues also of their leaders and priests. Wyclif had first done this for the English-reading races of all time, translating from the Latin, and so had begun the Reformation, religious and political, not only in Britain but in Western Christendom. Erasmus and Luther had followed him--the former in his Greek and Latin New Testament and in his Paraphrase of the Word for "women and cobblers, clowns, mechanics, and even the Turks"; the latter in his great vernacular translation of the edition of Erasmus, who had never ceased to urge his contemporaries to translate the Scriptures "into all tongues." Tyndale had first given England the Bible from the Hebrew and the Greek. And now one of these cobblers was prompted and enabled by the Spirit who is the author of the truth in the Scriptures, to give to South and Eastern Asia the sacred books which its Syrian sons, from Moses and Ezra to Paul and John, had been inspired to write for all races and all ages.

Emphatically, Carey and his later coadjutors deserve the language of the British and Foreign Bible Society, when, in 1827, it made to Serampore a last grant of money for translation--"Future generations will apply to them the words of the translators of the English Bible--'Therefore blessed be they and most honoured their names that break the ice and give the onset in that which helped them forward to the saving of souls. Now what can be more available thereto than to deliver G.o.d's book unto G.o.d's people in a tongue which they understand?'" Carey might tolerate interruption when engaged in other work, but for forty years he never allowed anything to shorten the time allotted to the Bible work. "You, madam," he wrote in 1797 to a lady as to many a correspondent, "will excuse my brevity when I inform you that all my time for writting letters is stolen from the work of transcribing the Scriptures into the Bengali language."

From no mere humility, but with an accurate judgment in the state of scholarship and criticism at the opening of last century, Carey always insisted that he was a forerunner, breaking up the way for successors like Yates, Wenger, and Rouse, who, in their turn, must be superseded by purely native Tyndales and Luthers in the Church of India. He more than once deprecated the talk of his having translated the Bible into forty languages and dialects.[16] As we proceed that will be a apparent which he did with his own hand, that which his colleagues accomplished, that which he revised and edited both of their work and of the pundits', and that which he corrected and printed for others at the Serampore press under the care of Ward. It is to these four lines of work, which centred in him, as most of them originally proceeded from his conception and advocacy, that the a.s.sertion as to the forty translations is strictly applicable. The Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit translations were his own. The Chinese was similarly the work of Marshman. The Hindi versions, in their many dialects, and the Ooriya, were blocked out by his colleagues and the pundits. He saw through the press the Hindostani, Persian, Malay, Tamil, and other versions of the whole or portions of the Scriptures. He ceased not, night and day, if by any means, with a loving catholicity, the Word of G.o.d might be given to the millions.

Writing in 1904 on the centenary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Mr. George A. Grierson, C.I.E., Ph.D., D.Litt., the head of the Linguistic Survey of India, sums up authoritatively the work of Carey and his a.s.sistants. "The great-hearted band of Serampore missionaries issued translations of the Bible or of the New Testament in more than forty languages. Before them the number of Protestant versions of the Bible in the speeches of India could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Dutch of Ceylon undertook a Tamil New Testament in 1688, which was followed in 1715 by another version from the pen of Ziegenbalg. The famous missionary, Schultze, between 1727 and 1732 made a Telugu version which was never printed, and later, between 1745 and 1758, he published at Halle a Hindostani translation of the New Testament and of a portion of Genesis. A ma.n.u.script version of portions of the Bible in Bengali was made by Thomas in 1791; and then the great Serampore series began with Carey's Bengali New Testament published in 1801. Most of these Serampore versions were, it is true, first attempts and have been superseded by more accurate versions, but the first step is always the most important one, and this was taken by Carey and his brethren."

Carey's correspondent in this and purely scholarly subjects was Dr.

Ryland, an accomplished Hebraist and Biblical critic for that day, at the head of the Bristol College. Carey's letters, plentifully sprinkled with Hebrew and Greek, show the jealousy with which he sought to convey the divine message accurately, and the unwearied sense of responsibility under which he worked. Biblical criticism, alike as to the original text and to the exegesis of the sacred writings, is so very modern a science, that these letters have now only a historical interest. But this communication to Ryland shows how he worked from the first:--

"CALCUTTA, 14th Dec. 1803.--We some time ago engaged in an undertaking, of which we intended to say nothing until it was accomplished; but an unforeseen providence made it necessary for us to disclose it. It is as follows: About a year and a half ago, some attempts were made to engage Mr. Gilchrist in the translation of the Scriptures into the Hindostani language. By something or other it was put by. The Persian was also at the same time much talked of, but given up, or rather not engaged in. At this time several considerations prevailed on us to set ourselves silently upon a translation into these languages. We accordingly hired two moonshees to a.s.sist us in it, and each of us took our share; Brother Marshman took Matthew and Luke; Brother Ward, Mark and John; and myself the remaining part of the New Testament into Hindostani. I undertook no part of the Persian; but, instead thereof, engaged in translating it into Maharastra, commonly called the Mahratta language, the person who a.s.sists me in the Hindostani being a Mahratta.

Brother Marshman has finished Matthew, and, instead of Luke, has begun the Acts. Brother Ward has done part of John, and I have done the Epistles, and about six chapters of the Revelation; and have proceeded as far as the second epistle of the Corinthians in the revisal: they have done a few chapters into Persian, and I a few into Mahratta. Thus the matter stood, till a few days ago Mr. Buchanan informed me that a military gentleman had translated the Gospels into Hindostani and Persian, and had made a present of them to the College, and that the College Council had voted the printing of them. This made it necessary for me to say what we had been about; and had it not been for this circ.u.mstance we should not have said anything till we had got the New Testament at least pretty forward in printing. I am very glad that Major Colebrooke has done it. We will gladly do what others do not do, and wish all speed to those who do anything in this way. We have it in our power, if our means would do for it, in the s.p.a.ce of about fifteen years to have the word of G.o.d translated and printed in all the languages of the East. Our situation is such as to furnish us with the best a.s.sistance from natives of the different countries. We can have types of all the different characters cast here; and about 700 rupees per month, part of which I hope we shall be able to furnish, would complete the work. The languages are the Hindostani (Hindi), Maharastra, Ooriya, Telinga, Bhotan, Burman, Chinese, Cochin Chinese, Tongkinese, and Malay. On this great work we have fixed our eyes.

Whether G.o.d will enable us to accomplish it, or any considerable part of it, is uncertain."

But all these advantages, his own genius for languages, his unconquerable plodding directed by a divine motive, his colleagues'

co-operation, the encouragement of learned societies and the public, and the number of pundits and moonshees increased by the College of Fort William, would have failed to open the door of the East to the sacred Scriptures had the philological key of the Sanskrit been wanting or undiscovered. In the preface to his Sanskrit grammar, quoted by the Quarterly Review with high approbation, Carey wrote that it gave him the meaning of four out of every five words of the princ.i.p.al languages of the whole people of India:--"The peculiar grammar of any one of these may be acquired in a couple of months, and then the language lies open to the student. The knowledge of four words in five enables him to read with pleasure, and renders the acquisition of the few new words, as well as the idiomatic expressions, a matter of delight rather than of labour. Thus the Ooriya, though possessing a separate grammar and character, is so much like the Bengali in the very expression that a Bengali pundit is almost equal to the correction of an Orissa proof sheet; and the first time that I read a page of Goojarati the meaning appeared so obvious as to render it unnecessary to ask the pundit questions."

The mechanical apparatus of types, paper, and printing seem to have been provided by the same providential foresight as the intellectual and the spiritual. We have seen how, when he was far enough advanced in his translation, Carey amid the swamps of Dinapoor looked to England for press, type, paper, and printer. He got the last, William Ward, a man of his own selection, worthy to be his colleague. But he had hardly despatched his letter when he found or made all the rest in Bengal itself. It was from the old press bought in Calcutta, set up in Mudnabati, and removed to Serampore, that the first edition of the Bengali New Testament was printed. The few rare and venerable copies have now a peculiar bibliographic interest; the type and the paper alike are coa.r.s.e and blurred.

Sir Charles Wilkins, the Caxton of India, had with his own hands cut the punches and cast the types from which Halhed's Bengali grammar was printed at Hoogli in 1778. He taught the art to a native blacksmith, Panchanan, who went to Serampore in search of work just when Carey was in despair for a fount of the sacred Devanagari type for his Sanskirt grammar, and for founts of the other languages besides Bengali which had never been printed. They thus tell the story in a Memoir Relative to the Translations, published in 1807:--

"It will be obvious that in the present state of things in India it was in many instances necessary to cast new founts of types in several of these languages. Happily for us and India at large Wilkins had led the way in this department; and by persevering industry, the value of which can scarcely be appreciated, under the greatest disadvantages with respect to materials and workmen, had brought the Bengali to a high degree of perfection. Soon after our settling at Serampore the providence of G.o.d brought to us the very artist who had wrought with Wilkins in that work, and in a great measure imbibed his ideas. By his a.s.sistance we erected a letter-foundry; and although he is now dead, he had so fully communicated his art to a number of others, that they carry forward the work of type-casting, and even of cutting the matrices, with a degree of accuracy which would not disgrace European artists. These have cast for us two or three founts of Bengali; and we are now employing them in casting a fount on a construction which bids fair to diminish the expense of paper, and the size of the book at least one-fourth, without affecting the legibility of the character.

Of the Devanagari character we have also cast an entire new fount, which is esteemed the most beautiful of the kind in India. It consists of nearly 1000 different combinations of characters, so that the expense of cutting the patterns only amounted to 1500 rupees, exclusive of metal and casting.

"In the Orissa we have been compelled also to cast a new fount of types, as none before existed in that character. The fount consists of about 300 separate combinations, and the whole expense of cutting and casting has amounted to at least 1000 rupees. The character, though distinct, is of a moderate size, and will comprise the whole New Testament in about 700 pages octavo, which is about a fourth less than the Bengali. Although in the Mahratta country the Devanagari character is well known to men of education, yet a character is current among the men of business which is much smaller, and varies considerably in form from the Nagari, though the number and power of the letters nearly correspond. We have cast a fount in this character, in which we have begun to print the Mahratta New Testament, as well as a Mahratta dictionary. This character is moderate in size, distinct and beautiful. It will comprise the New Testament in perhaps a less number of pages than the Orissa. The expense of casting, etc., has been much the same. We stand in need of three more founts; one in the Burman, another in the Telinga and Kernata, and a third in the Seek's character. These, with the Chinese characters, will enable us to go through the work. An excellent and extensive fount of Persian we received from you, dear brethren, last year."

Panchanan's apprentice, Monohur, continued to make elegant founts of type in all Eastern languages for the mission and for sale to others for more than forty years, becoming a benefactor not only to literature but to Christian civilisation to an extent of which he was unconscious, for he remained a Hindoo of the blacksmith caste. In 1839, when he first went to India as a young missionary, the Rev. James Kennedy[17]

saw him, as the present writer has often since seen his successor, cutting the matrices or casting the type for the Bibles, while he squatted below his favourite idol, under the auspices of which alone he would work. Serampore continued down till 1860 to be the princ.i.p.al Oriental typefoundry of the East.[18]

Hardly less service did the mission come to render to the manufacture of paper in course of time, giving the name of Serampore to a variety known all over India. At first Carey was compelled to print his Bengali Testament on a dingy, porous, rough substance called Patna paper. Then he began to depend on supplies from England, which in those days reached the press at irregular times, often impeding the work, and was most costly. This was not all. Native paper, whether mill or hand-made, being sized with rice paste, attracted the bookworm and white ant, so that the first sheets of a work which lingered in the press were sometimes devoured by these insects before the last sheets were printed off. Carey used to preserve his most valuable ma.n.u.scripts by writing on a.r.s.enicated paper, which became of a hideous yellow colour, though it is to this alone we owe the preservation in the library of Serampore College of five colossal volumes of his polyglot dictionary prepared for the Bible translation work. Many and long were the experiments of the missionaries to solve the paper difficulty, ending in the erection of a tread-mill on which relays of forty natives reduced the raw material in the paper-engine, until one was accidentally killed.

The enterprise of Mr. William Jones, who first worked the Raneegunj coal-field, suggested the remedy in the employment of a steam-engine.

One of twelve-horse power was ordered from Messrs. Thwaites and Rothwell of Bolton. This was the first ever erected in India, and it was a purely missionary locomotive. The "machine of fire," as they called it, brought crowds of natives to the mission, whose curiosity tried the patience of the engineman imported to work it; while many a European who had never seen machinery driven by steam came to study and to copy it. The date was the 27th of March 1820, when "the engine went in reality this day." From that time till 1865 Serampore became the one source of supply for local as distinguished from imported and purely native hand-made paper. Even the cartridges of Mutiny notoriety in 1857 were from this factory, though it had long ceased to be connected with the mission.

Dr. Carey thus took stock of the translating enterprise in a letter to Dr. Ryland:--

"22nd January 1808.--Last year may be reckoned among the most important which this mission has seen--not for the numbers converted among the natives, for they have been fewer than in some preceding years, but for the gracious care which G.o.d has exercised towards us. We have been enabled to carry on the translation and printing of the Word of G.o.d in several languages. The printing is now going on in six and the translation into six more. The Bengali is all printed except from Judges vii. to the end of Esther; Sanskrit New Testament to Acts xxvii.; Orissa to John xxi.; Mahratta, second edition, to the end of Matthew; Hindostani (new version) to Mark v., and Matthew is begun in Goojarati. The translation is nearly carried on to the end of John in Chinese, Telinga Kurnata, and the language of the Seeks. It is carried on to a pretty large extent in Persian and begun in Burman. The whole Bible was printed in Malay at Batavia some years ago. The whole is printed in Tamil, and the Syrian Bishop at Travancore is now superintending a translation from Syriac into Malayala. I learnt this week that the language of Kashmeer is a distinct language.

"I have this day been to visit the most learned Hindoo now living; he speaks only Sanskrit, is more than eighty years old, is acquainted with the writings and has studied the sentiments of all their schools of philosophy (usually called the Darshunas of the Veda). He tells me that this is the sixteenth time that he has travelled from Rameshwaram to Harhu (viz. from the extreme cape of the Peninsula to Benares). He was, he says, near Madras when the English first took possession of it.

This man has given his opinion against the burning of women."

Four years later, in another letter to Ryland, he takes us into his confidence more fully, showing us not only his sacred workshop, but ingenuously revealing his own humility and self-sacrifice:--"10th December 1811.--I have of late been much impressed with the vast importance of laying a foundation for Biblical criticism in the East, by preparing grammars of the different languages into which we have translated or may translate the Bible. Without some such step, they who follow us will have to wade through the same labour that I have, in order to stand merely upon the same ground that I now stand upon. If, however, elementary books are provided, the labour will be greatly contracted; and a person will be able in a short time to acquire that which has cost me years of study and toil.

"The necessity which lies upon me of acquiring so many languages, obliges me to study and write out the grammar of each of them, and to attend closely to their irregularities and peculiarities. I have therefore already published grammars of three of them; namely, the Sanskrit, the Bengali, and the Mahratta. To these I have resolved to add grammars of the Telinga, Kurnata, Orissa, Punjabi, Kashmeeri, Goojarati, Nepalese, and a.s.sam languages. Two of these are now in the press, and I hope to have two or three more of them out by the end of the next year.

"This may not only be useful in the way I have stated, but may serve to furnish an answer to a question which has been more than once repeated, 'How can these men translate into so great a number of languages?' Few people know what may be done till they try, and persevere in what they undertake.

"I am now printing a dictionary of the Bengali, which will be pretty large, for I have got to page 256, quarto, and am not near through the first letter. That letter, however, begins more words than any two others.

"To secure the gradual perfection of the translations, I have also in my mind, and indeed have been long collecting materials for, An Universal Dictionary of the Oriental languages derived from the Sanskrit. I mean to take the Sanskrit, of course, as the groundwork, and to give the different acceptations of every word, with examples of their application, in the manner of Johnson, and then to give the synonyms in the different languages derived from the Sanskrit, with the Hebrew and Greek terms answering thereto; always putting the word derived from the Sanskrit term first, and then those derived from other sources. I intend always to give the etymology of the Sanskrit term, so that that of the terms deduced from it in the cognate languages will be evident. This work will be great, and it is doubtful whether I shall live to complete it; but I mean to begin to arrange the materials, which I have been some years collecting for this purpose, as soon as my Bengali dictionary is finished. Should I live to accomplish this, and the translations in hand, I think I can then say, 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.'"

The ardent scholar had twenty-three years of toil before him in this happy work. But he did not know this, while each year the labour increased, and the apprehension grew that he and his colleagues might at any time be removed without leaving a trained successor. They naturally looked first to the sons of the mission for translators as they had already done for preachers.

To Dr. Carey personally, however, the education of a young missionary specially fitted to be his successor, as translator and editor of the translations, was even more important. Such a man was found in William Yates, born in 1792, and in the county, Leicestershire, in which Carey brought the Baptist mission to the birth. Yates was in his early years also a shoemaker, and member of Carey's old church in Harvey Lane, when under the great Robert Hall, who said to the youth's father, "Your son, sir, will be a great scholar and a good preacher, and he is a holy young man." In 1814 he became the last of the young missionaries devoted to the cause by Fuller, soon to pa.s.s away, Ryland, and Hall.

Yates had not been many months at Serampore when, with the approval of his brethren, Carey wrote to Fuller, on 17th May 1815:--"I am much inclined to a.s.sociate him with myself in the translations. My labour is greater than at any former period. We have now translations of the Bible going forward in twenty-seven languages, all of which are in the press except two or three. The labour of correcting and revising all of them lies on me." By September we find Yates writing:--"Dr. Carey sends all the Bengali proofs to me to review. I read them over, and if there is anything I do not understand, or think to be wrong, I mark it.

We then converse over it, and if it is wrong, he alters it; but if not, he shows me the reason why it is right, and thus will initiate me into the languages as fast as I can learn them. He wishes me to begin the Hindi very soon. Since I have been here I have read three volumes in Bengali, and they have but six of consequence in prose. There are abundance in Sanskrit." "Dr. Carey has treated me with the greatest affection and kindness, and told me he will give me every information he can, and do anything in his power to promote my happiness." What Baruch was to the prophet Jeremiah, that Yates might have been to Carey, who went so far in urging him to remain for life in Serampore as to say, "if he did not accept the service it would be, in his judgment, acting against Providence, and the blessing of G.o.d was not to be expected." Yates threw in his lot with the younger men who, in Calcutta after Fuller's death, began the Society's as distinct from the Serampore mission. If Carey was the Wyclif and Tyndale, Yates was the Coverdale of the Bengali and Sanskrit Bible. Wenger, their successor, was worthy of both. Bengal still waits for the first native revision of the great work which these successive pioneers have gradually improved. When shall Bengal see its own Luther?

The Bengali Bible was the first as it was the most important of the translations. The province, or lieutenant-governorship then had the same area as France, and contained more than double its population, or eighty millions. Of the three princ.i.p.al vernaculars, Bengali is spoken by forty-five millions of Hindoos and Mohammedans. It was for all the natives of Bengal and of India north of the Dekhan ("south") tableland, but especially for the Bengali-speaking people, that William Carey created a literary language a century ago.

The first Bengali version of the whole New Testament Carey translated from the original Greek before the close of 1796. The only English commentary used was the Family Expositor of Doddridge, published in 1738, and then the most critical in the language. Four times he revised the ma.n.u.script, with a Greek concordance in his hand, and he used it not only with Ram Basu by his side, the most accomplished of early Bengali scholars, but with the natives around him of all cla.s.ses.

By 1800 Ward had arrived as printer, the press was perfected at Serampore, and the result of seven years of toil appeared in February 1801, in the first edition of 2000 copies, costing 612. The printing occupied nine months. The type was set up by Ward and Carey's son Felix with their own hands; "for about a month at first we had a Brahman compositor, but we were quite weary of him. We kept four pressmen constantly employed." A public subscription had been opened for the whole Bengali Bible at Rs. 32, or 4 a copy as exchange then was, and nearly fifty copies had been at once subscribed for. It was this edition which immediately led to Carey's appointment to the College of Fort William, and it was that appointment which placed Carey in a position, philological and financial, to give the Bible to the peoples of the farther East in their own tongue.

Some loving memories cl.u.s.ter round the first Bengali version of the New Testament which it is well to collect. On Tuesday, 18th March 1800, Ward's journal[19] records: "Brother Carey took an impression at the press of the first page in Matthew." The translator was himself the pressman. As soon as the whole of this Gospel was ready, 500 copies of it were struck off for immediate circulation, "which we considered of importance as containing a complete life of the Redeemer." Four days after an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the official Calcutta Gazette, announcing that the missionaries had established a press at Serampore and were printing the Bible in Bengali, roused Lord Wellesley, who had fettered the press in British India. Mr. Brown was able to inform the Governor-General that this very Serampore press had refused to print a political attack on the English Government, and that it was intended for the spiritual instruction only of the natives. This called forth the a.s.surance from that liberal statesman that he was personally favourable to the conversion of the heathen. When he was further told that such an Oriental press would be invaluable to the College of Fort William, he not only withdrew his opposition but made Carey first teacher of Bengali. It was on the 7th February 1801 that the last sheet with the final corrections was put into Carey's hands. When a volume had been bound it was reverently offered to G.o.d by being placed on the Communion-table of the chapel, and the mission families and the new-made converts gathered around it with solemn thanksgiving to G.o.d led by Krishna Pal. Carey preached from the words (Col. iii. 11) "Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom." The centenary was celebrated in Calcutta in 1901, under Dr. Rouse, whose fine scholarship had just revised the translation.

When the first copies reached England, Andrew Fuller sent one to the second Earl Spencer, the peer who had used the wealth of Sarah, d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, to collect the great library at Althorp. Carey had been a poor tenant of his, though the Earl knew it not. When the Bengali New Testament reached him, with its story, he sent a cheque for 50 to help to translate the Old Testament, and he took care that a copy should be presented to George III., as by his own request. Mr. Bowyer was received one morning at Windsor, and along with the volume presented an address expressing the desire that His Majesty might live to see its principles universally prevail throughout his Eastern dominions. On this the lord in waiting whispered a doubt whether the book had come through the proper channel. At once the king replied that the Board of Control had nothing to do with it, and turning to Mr. Bowyer said, "I am greatly pleased to find that any of my subjects are employed in this manner."

This now rare volume, to be found on the shelves of the Serampore College Library, where it leads the host of the Carey translations, is coa.r.s.e and unattractive in appearance compared with its latest successors. In truth the second edition, which appeared in 1806, was almost a new version. The criticism of his colleagues and others, especially of a ripe Grecian like Dr. Marshman, the growth of the native church, and his own experience as a Professor of Sanskrit and Marathi as well as Bengali, gave Carey new power in adapting the language to the divine ideas of which he made it the medium. But the first edition was not without its self-evidencing power. Seventeen years after, when the mission extended to the old capital of Dacca, there were found several villages of Hindoo-born peasants who had given up idol-worship, were renowned for their truthfulness, and, as searching for a true teacher come from G.o.d, called themselves "Satya-gooroos." They traced their new faith to a much-worn book kept in a wooden box in one of their villages. No one could say whence it had come; all they knew was that they had possessed it for many years.

It was Carey's first Bengali version of the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. In the wide and elastic bounds of Hindooism, and even, as we shall see, amid fanatical Mussulmans beyond the frontier, the Bible, dimly understood without a teacher, has led to puritan sects like this, as to earnest inquirers like the chamberlain of Queen Candace.

The third edition of the Bengali Testament was published in 1811 in folio for the use of the native congregations by that time formed. The fourth, consisting of 5000 copies, appeared in 1816, and the eighth in 1832. The venerable scholar, like Columba at Iona over the thirty-fourth psalm, and Baeda at Jarrow over the sixth chapter of John's Gospel, said as he corrected the last sheet--the last after forty years' faithful and delighted toil: "My work is done; I have nothing more to do but to wait the will of the Lord." The Old Testament from the Hebrew appeared in portions from 1802 to 1809. Such was the ardour of the translator, that he had finished the correction of his version of the first chapter of Genesis in January 1794. When he read it to two pundits from Nuddea, he told Fuller in his journal of that month they seemed much pleased with the account of the creation, but they objected to the omission of patala, their imaginary place beneath the earth, which they thought should have been mentioned. At this early period Carey saw the weakness of Hindooism as a pretended revelation, from its identification with false physics, just as Duff was to see and use it afterwards with tremendous effect, and wrote:--"There is a necessity of explaining to them several circ.u.mstances relative to geography and chronology, as they have many superst.i.tious opinions on those subjects which are closely connected with their systems of idolatry." The Bengali Bible was the result of fifteen years' sweet toil, in which Marshman read the Greek and Carey the Bengali; every one of their colleagues examined the proof sheets, and Carey finally wrote with his own pen the whole of the five octavo volumes. In the forty years of his missionary career Carey prepared and saw through the press five editions of the Old Testament and eight editions of the New in Bengali.

The Sanskrit version was translated from the original, and written out by the toiling scholar himself. Sir William Jones is said to have been able to secure his first pundit's help only by paying him Rs. 500 a month, or 700 a year. Carey engaged and trained his many pundits at a twentieth of that sum. He well knew that the Brahmans would scorn a book in the language of the common people. "What," said one who was offered the Hindi version, "even if the books should contain divine knowledge, they are nothing to us. The knowledge of G.o.d contained in them is to us as milk in a vessel of dog's skin, utterly polluted."

But, writes the annalist of Biblical Translations in India, Carey's Sanskrit version was cordially received by the Brahmans. Destroyed in the fire in 1812, the Old Testament historical books were again translated, and appeared in 1815. In 1827 the aged saint had strength to bring out the first volume of a thorough revision, and to leave the ma.n.u.script of the second volume, on his death, as a legacy to his successors, Yates and Wenger. Against Vedas and Upanishads, Brahmanas and Epics, he set the Sanskrit Bible.

The whole number of completely translated and published versions of 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 ma.n.u.script, 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.