Life of William Carey | Page 7

wife recumbent head to head, covered a
large altar-tomb in the chancel, and with the Bathurst and other
monuments called forth first the fear and then the pride of the parish
clerk's eldest son. In those days the clerk had just below the pulpit the

desk from which his sonorous "Amen" sounded forth, while his family
occupied a low gallery rising from the same level up behind the pulpit.
There the boys of the free school also could be under the master's eye,
and with instruments of music like those of King David, but now
banished from even village churches, would accompany him in the
doggerel strains of Sternhold and Hopkins, immortalised by Cowper.
To the far right the boys could see and long for the ropes under the
tower, in which the bell-ringers of his day, as of Bunyan's not long
before, delighted. The preaching of the time did nothing more for
young Carey than for the rest of England and Scotland, whom the
parish church had not driven into dissent or secession. But he could not
help knowing the Prayer-Book, and especially its psalms and lessons,
and he was duly confirmed. The family training, too, was exceptionally
scriptural, though not evangelical. "I had many stirrings of mind
occasioned by being often obliged to read books of a religious character;
and, having been accustomed from my infancy to read the Scriptures, I
had a considerable acquaintance therewith, especially with the
historical parts." The first result was to make him despise dissenters.
But, undoubtedly, this eldest son of the schoolmaster and the clerk of
the parish had at fourteen received an education from parents, nature,
and books which, with his habits of observation, love of reading, and
perseverance, made him better instructed than most boys of fourteen far
above the peasant class to which he belonged.
Buried in this obscure village in the dullest period of the dullest of all
centuries, the boy had no better prospect before him than that of a
weaver or labourer, or possibly a schoolmaster like one of his uncles in
the neighbouring town of Towcester. When twelve years of age, with
his uncle there, he might have formed one of the crowd which listened
to John Wesley, who, in 1773 and then aged seventy, visited the
prosperous posting town. Paulerspury could indeed boast of one son,
Edward Bernard, D.D., who, two centuries before, had made for
himself a name in Oxford, where he was Savilian Professor of
Astronomy. But Carey was not a Scotsman, and therefore the university
was not for such as he. Like his school-fellows, he seemed born to the
English labourer's fate of five shillings a week, and the poorhouse in
sickness and old age. From this, in the first instance, he was saved by a

disease which affected his face and hands most painfully whenever he
was long exposed to the sun. For seven years he had failed to find relief.
His attempt at work in the field were for two years followed by
distressing agony at night. He was now sixteen, and his father sought
out a good man who would receive him as apprentice to the
shoemaking trade. The man was not difficult to find, in the hamlet of
Hackleton, nine miles off, in the person of one Clarke Nichols. The lad
afterwards described him as "a strict churchman and, what I thought, a
very moral man. It is true he sometimes drank rather too freely, and
generally employed me in carrying out goods on the Lord's Day
morning; but he was an inveterate enemy to lying, a vice to which I
was awfully addicted." The senior apprentice was a dissenter, and the
master and his boys gave much of the talk over their work to disputes
upon religious subjects. Carey "had always looked upon dissenters with
contempt. I had, moreover, a share of pride sufficient for a thousand
times my knowledge; I therefore always scorned to have the worst in an
argument, and the last word was assuredly mine. I also made up in
positive assertion what was wanting in argument, and generally came
off with triumph. But I was often convinced afterwards that although I
had the last word my antagonist had the better of the argument, and on
that account felt a growing uneasiness and stings of conscience
gradually increasing." The dissenting apprentice was soon to be the
first to lead him to Christ.
William Carey was a shoemaker during the twelve years of his life
from sixteen to twenty-eight, till he went to Leicester. Poverty, which
the grace of God used to make him a preacher also from his eighteenth
year, compelled him to work with his hands in leather all the week, and
to tramp many a weary mile to Northampton and Kettering carrying the