WHAT CAREY DID FOR LITERATURE AND FOR HUMANITY
The growth of a language--Carey identified with the transition stage of Bengali--First printed books--Carey's own works--His influence on indigenous writers--His son's works--Bengal the first heathen country to receive the press--The first Bengali newspaper--The monthly and quarterly Friend of India--The Hindoo revival of the eighteenth century fostered by the East India Company--Carey's three memorials to Government on female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and widow-burning--What Jonathan Duncan and Col. Walker had done--Wellesley's regulation to prevent the sacrifice of children--Beginning of the agitation against the Suttee crime--Carey's pundits more enlightened than the Company's judges--Humanity triumphs in 1832--Carey's share in Ward's book on the Hindoos--The lawless supernaturalism of Rome and of India--Worship of Jaganath--Regulation identifying Government with Hindooism--The swinging festival--Ghat murders--Burning of lepers--Carey establishes the Leper Hospital in Calcutta--Slavery in India loses its legal status--Cowper, Clarkson, and Carey.
Like the growth of a tree is the development of a language, as really and as strictly according to law. In savage lands like those of Africa the missionary finds the living germs of speech, arranges them for the first time in grammatical order, expresses them in written and printed form, using the simplest, most perfect, and most universal character of all--the Roman, and at one bound gives the most degraded of the dark peoples the possibility of the highest civilisation and the divinest future. In countries like India and China, where civilisation has long ago reached its highest level, and has been declining for want of the salt of a universal Christianity, it is the missionary again who interferes for the highest ends, but by a different process. Mastering the complex classical speech and literature of the learned and priestly class, and living with his Master's sympathy among the people whom that class oppresses, he takes the popular dialects which are instinct with the life of the future; where they are wildly luxuriant he brings them under law, where they are barren he enriches them from the parent stock so as to make them the vehicle of ideas such as Greek gave to Europe, and in time he brings to the birth nations worthy of the name by a national language and literature lighted up with the ideas of the Book which he is the first to translate.