with a skill which Lord Wellesley, their successor
almost as great as themselves, delighted publicly to acknowledge--a man
of the people, of the class who had used the Roman Empire to build out
of it a universal Christendom, who were even then turning France upside
down, creating the Republic of America, and giving new life to Great
Britain itself. The little Englishman was about to do in Calcutta and
from Serampore what the little Jew, Paul, had done in Antioch and
Ephesus, from Corinth and Rome. England might send its nobly born to
erect the material and the secular fabric of empire, but it was only,
in the providence of God, that they might prepare for the poor village
preacher to convert the empire into a spiritual force which should in
time do for Asia what Rome had done for Western Christendom. But till
the last, as from the first, Carey was as unconscious of the part which
he had been called to play as he was unresting in the work which it
involved. It is no fanatical criticism, but the true philosophy of
history, which places Carey over against Clive, the spiritual and
secular founders, and Duff beside Hastings, the spiritual and secular
consolidators of our Indian Empire.

Carey's work for India underlay the first period of forty years of
transition from Cornwallis to Bentinck, as Duff's covered the second of
thirty years to the close of Lord Canning's administration, which
introduced the new era of full toleration and partial but increasing
self-government directed by the Viceroy and Parliament.

Carey had been sent not only to the one people outside of Christendom
whose conversion would tell most powerfully on all Asia, Africa, and
their islands--the Hindoos; but to the one province which was almost
entirely British, and could be used as it had been employed to
assimilate the rest of India--Bengal. Territorially the East India
Company possessed, when he landed, nothing outside of the Ganges valley
of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares, save a few spots on the Madras and
Malabar coasts and the portion just before taken in the Mysore war.
The rest was desolated by the Marathas, the Nizam, Tipoo, and other
Mohammedan adventurers. On the Gangetic delta and right up to
Allahabad, but not beyond, the Company ruled and raised revenue,
leaving the other functions of the state to Mohammedans of the type of
Turkish pashas under the titular superiority of the effete Emperor of
Delhi. The Bengali and Hindi-speaking millio