[Gutenberg 2056] • The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary

"The Life of William Carey" tells the story of the great man who as a "shoemaker by trade, but scholar, linguist and missionary by God's training," Carey worked untiringly to conquer the prevailing indifference to missionary effort and develop a plan for missions. Born in England, Carey first heard the missionary call by reading the "Last Voyage of Captain Cook." To Carey, Cook's Journal was much more than a thrilling story of adventure. It was a revelation of human need. The more Carey read and studied, the more convinced he was that "the peoples of the world need Christ." Formidable obstacles lay in his way: there were no missionary societies and there was no real missionary interest. Carey persisted, and in support of his ideas wrote the now famous "Enquiry Into the Obligations of the Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen."When Carey finally made it to India as a missionary himself, he was faced by years of discouragement (no Indian converts for seven years), debt, disease, deterioration of his wife's mind, and her death. By the grace of God, however, Carey continued and conquered for Christ. When he died in 1834, he had seen the Scriptures translated and printed into forty languages, he had been a college professor, and had founded a college at Serampore. He had seen India open its doors to missionaries, he had seen the edict passed prohibiting sati (burning widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands), and he had seen converts for Christ. Carey is considered by many to be a unique figure, towering above both contemporaries and successors in the ministry of missions. "The Life of William Carey"is his story.