ather of William Carey--Early training in
Paulerspury--Impressions made by him on his sister--On his companions
and the villagers--His experience as son of the parish
clerk--Apprenticed to a shoemaker of Hackleton--Poverty--Famous
shoemakers from Annianus and Crispin to Hans Sachs and Whittier--From
Pharisaism to Christ--The last shall be first--The dissenting preacher
in the parish clerk's home--He studies Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Dutch
and French--The cobbler's shed is Carey's College.

William Carey, the first of her own children of the Reformation whom
England sent forth as a missionary to India, where he became the most
extensive translator of the Bible and civiliser, was the son of a
weaver, and was himself a village shoemaker till he was twenty-eight
years of age. He was born on the 17th August 1761, in the very midland
of England, in the heart of the district which had produced Shakspere,
had fostered Wyclif and Hooker, had bred Fox and Bunyan, and had for a
time been the scene of the lesser lights of John Mason and Doddridge,
of John Newton and Thomas Scott. William Cowper, the poet of missions,
made the land his chosen home, writing Hope and The Task in Olney,
while the shoemaker was studying theology under Sutcliff on the
opposite side of the market-place. Thomas Clarkson, born a year before
Carey, was beginning his assaults on the slave-trade by translating
into English his Latin essay on the day-star of African liberty when
the shoemaker, whom no university knew, was writing his Enquiry into
the Obligations of Christians to use means for the Conversion of the
Heathens.

William Carey bore a name which had slowly fallen into forgetfulness
after services to the Stewarts, with whose cause it had been
identified. Professor Stephens, of Copenhagen, traces it to the
Scando-Anglian Car, CAER or CARE, which became a place-name as CAR-EY.
Among scores of neighbours called William, William of Car-ey would soon
sink into Carey, and this would again become the family name. In
Denmark the name Caroe is common. The oldest English instance is the
Cariet who coined money in London for AEthelred II. in 1016. Certainly
the name, through its forms of Crew, Carew, Carey, and Cary, still
prevails on the Irish coast--from which depression of trade drove the
family first to Yorkshire, then to the Northamptonshire village of
Yelvertoft, and finally to Paulerspury, farther south--as well as over
the whole Danegelt from Linc