boys and girls, young men and maidens of the dark
races of mankind.

The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the greatest and most practical
Evangelical of the nineteenth century after William Wilberforce, wrote
thus in his Journal of the class whom Carey headed in the eighteenth,
and whom Wordsworth commemorated as

"Not sedentary all, there are who roam
To scatter seeds of Life on barbarous shores."

1847. "Aug. 30th--RYDE.--Reading Missionary Enterprises by
Williams...Zeal, devotion, joy, simplicity of heart, faith, love; and
we here have barely affection enough to thank God that such deeds have
been done. Talk of 'doing good' and being 'useful in one's
generation,' why, these admirable men performed more in one month than
I or many others shall perform in a whole life!"

The eloquent Dr. Richard Winter Hamilton, reflecting that sacrifice to
heroes is reserved until after sunset, recalled William Carey, eight
years after his death, as "wielding a power to which all difficulties
yielded, but that power noiseless as a law of nature; great in
conception as well as in performance; profound as those deep
combinations of language in which the Indian philosophy and polytheism
hide themselves, but gentle as the flower which in his brief recreation
he loved to train; awful as the sage, simple as the child; speaking
through the Eastern world in as many languages, perhaps, as 'the cloven
tongues of fire' represented; to be remembered and blessed as long as
Ganges rolls!"

The historian of the Baptist Missionary Society, and Robert Hall, whom
Sir James Mackintosh pronounced the greatest English orator, have both
attempted an estimate of Carey's genius and influence. Dr. F. A. Cox
remarks:--"Had he been born in the sixteenth century he might have been
a Luther, to give Protestantism to Europe; had he turned his thought
and observations merely to natural philosophy he might have been a
Newton; but his faculties, consecrated by religion to a still higher
end, have gained for him the sublime distinction of having been the
Translator of the Scriptures and the Benefactor of Asia." Robert Hall
spoke thus of Carey in his lifetime:--"That extraordinary man who, from
the lowest obscurity and poverty, without assistance, rose by dint of
unrelenting industry to the highest honours of literature, became one
of the first of Orientalists, the first of Missionaries, and the
instrument of diffusing more religious knowledge among his
contem