of Hopkins's Three Sermons on the Effects of
Sin on the Universe, preached in 1759, he had made this entry on 9th
August 1787--"Gulielm. Careius perlegit." He starved himself to
purchase a few books at the sale which attended Dr. Ryland's removal
from Northampton to Bristol. In an old woman's cottage he found a
Dutch quarto, and from that he so taught himself the language that in
1789 he translated for Ryland a discourse on the Gospel Offer sent to
him by the evangelical Dr. Erskine of Edinburgh. The manuscript is in
an extremely small character, unlike what might have been expected from
one who had wrought with his hands for eight years. French he
acquired, sufficiently for literary purposes, in three weeks from the
French version of Ditton on the Resurrection, which he purchased for a
few coppers. He had the linguistic gift which soon after made the
young carpenter Mezzofanti of Bologna famous and a cardinal. But the
gift would have been buried in the grave of his penury and his
circumstances had his trade been almost any other, and had he not been
impelled by the most powerful of all motives. He never sat on his
stall without his book before him, nor did he painfully toil with his
wallet of new-made shoes to the neighbouring towns or return with
leather without conning over his lately-acquired knowledge, and making
it for ever, in orderly array, his own. He so taught his evening
school and his Sunday congregations that the teaching to him, like
writing to others, stereotyped or lighted up the truths. Indeed, the
school and the cobbling often went on together--a fact commemorated in
the addition to the Hackleton signboard of the Piddington nail on which
he used to fix his thread while teaching the children.

But that which sanctified and directed the whole throughout a working
life of more than half a century, was the missionary idea and the
missionary consecration. With a caution not often shown at that time
by bishops in laying hands on those whom they had passed for deacon's
orders, the little church at Olney thus dealt with the Father of Modern
Missions before they would recognise his call and send him out "to
preach the gospel wherever God in His providence might call him:"

"June 17, 1785.--A request from William Carey of Moulton, in
Northamptonshire, was taken into consideration. He has been and still
is in connection with a society of people at Hackleton. He is
occasionally engaged with acceptance