stood alone in India, as Grant and Wilberforce did in England, in the
darkest hour of England's moral degradation and spiritual death, when
the men who were shaping the destinies of India were the Hindooising
Stewarts and Youngs, Prendergasts, Twinings, and Warings, some of whom
hated missions from the dread of sedition, others because their hearts
"seduced by fair idolatresses had fallen to idols foul."

The most atrociously inhuman of all the Brahmanical customs, and yet
the most universal, from the land of the five rivers at Lahore to the
far spice islands at Bali, was the murder of widows by burning or
burying them alive with the husband's corpse. We have seen how the
first of the many such scenes which he was doomed to witness for the
next thirty years affected Carey. After remonstrances, which the
people met first by argument and then by surly threats, Carey
wrote:--"I told them I would not go, that I was determined to stay and
see the murder, and that I should certainly bear witness of it at the
tribunal of God." And when he again sought to interfere because the two
stout bamboos always fixed for the purpose of preventing the victim's
escape were pressed down on the shrieking woman like levers, and they
persisted, he wrote: "We could not bear to see more, but left them
exclaiming loudly against the murder and full of horror at what we had
seen." The remembrance of that sight never left Carey. His naturally
cheerful spirit was inflamed to indignation all his life through, till
his influence, more than that of any other one man, at last prevailed
to put out for ever the murderous pyre. Had Lord Wellesley remained
Governor-General a year longer Carey would have succeeded in 1808,
instead of having to wait till 1829, and to know as he waited and
prayed that literally every day saw the devilish smoke ascending along
the banks of the Ganges, and the rivers and pools considered sacred by
the Hindoos. Need we wonder that when on a Sunday morning the
regulation of Lord William Bentinck prohibiting the crime reached him
as he was meditating his sermon, he sent for another to do the
preaching, and taking his pen in his hand, at once wrote the official
translation, and had it issued in the Bengali Gazette that not another
day might be added to the long black catalogue of many centuries?

On the return of the Marquis Wellesley to Calcutta from the Tipoo war,
and his own appointment to the College of Fort William, Care