These were the last years at Olney of William Cowper before he removed to the Throckmortons' house at Weston village, two miles distant. Carey must often have seen the poet during the twenty years which he spent in the corner house of the market-square, and in the walks around. He must have read the poems of 1782, which for the first time do justice to missionary enterprise. He must have hailed what Mrs. Browning calls "the deathless singing" which in 1785, in The Task, opened a new era in English literature. He may have been fired with the desire to imitate Whitefield, in the description of whom, though reluctant to name him, Cowper really anticipated Carey himself:--
"He followed Paul; his zeal a kindred flame, His apostolic charity the same; Like him crossed cheerfully tempestuous seas, Forsaking country, kindred, friends and ease; Like him he laboured and, like him, content To bear it, suffered shame where'er he went."
Moulton the Mission's birthplace--Carey's fever and poverty--His Moulton school--Fired with the missionary idea--His very large missionary map--Fuller's confession of the aged and respectable ministers' opposition--Old Mr. Ryland's rebuke--Driven to publish his Enquiry--Its literary character--Carey's survey of the world in 1788--His motives, difficulties, and plans--Projects the first Missionary Society--Contrasted with his predecessors from Erasmus--Prayer concert begun in Scotland in 1742--Jonathan Edwards--The Northamptonshire Baptist movement in 1784--Andrew Fuller--The Baptists, Particular and General--Antinomian and Socinian extremes opposed to Missions--Met by Fuller's writings and Clipstone sermon--Carey's agony at continued delay--His work in Leicester--His sermon at Nottingham--Foundation of Baptist Missionary Society at last--Kettering and Jerusalem.
The north road, which runs for twelve miles from Northampton to Kettering, passes through a country known last century for the doings of the Pytchley Hunt. Stories, by no means exaggerated, of the deep drinking and deeper play of the club, whose gatehouse now stands at the entrance of Overstone Park, were rife, when on Lady Day 1785 William Carey became Baptist preacher of Moulton village, on the other side of the road. Moulton was to become the birthplace of the modern missionary idea; Kettering, of evangelical missionary action.