DIVINE POWER YEAR

FEBRUARY 2002        

Volume 31 Issue 2 No. 311

Hallowed in Halo!

The promise of God for the year to BYM is that "God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think" (Eph 3:20). Little did we expect a fulfillment of this word right in the first major programme of the Mission for the year namely Halo 2002, the 3-day Camp for unmarried young men. Preparations had been made for just around 1750 delegates whereas the number swelled up to 2045!

An astounding statement Daniel heard in one of his visions was, "The people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits" (Dan 11:32). This statement was immortalized in the life and ministry of William Carey (1761-1834). Other than perhaps during the early first century, the word "power" was never used more frequently in Christendom than now. But the Church of today has hardly left any power impact on the society and the systems around it. We often use the slogan of William Carey— "Expect great things from God, and attempt great things for God"—but with little understanding of what that man meant when he said it. Read this article with the prayer that the eyes of your understanding may be enlightened to know what is the exceeding greatness of God’s power towards us who believe! (Eph 1:18,19).

Imagine a quizmaster at the finals of the All India Universities’ Competition. He asks the best-informed Indian students, "Who was William Carey?"

All hands go up simultaneously.

So, he decides to give everyone a chance to answer. The audience is asked to judge which answers are correct.

  "William Carey was the botanist," answers a Science student, "who discovered a new species of Sal-tree in Bhutan, named Careya after him by Dr. Roxburg. Dr. Carey was the first to specialize in the Indian flowers of the Amaryllidaceae family, one of which is named after him.

"Carey brought the English daisy to India and introduced the Linnaean system of gardening. He also published the first books on Science and Natural History in India such as the three-volume Flora Indica; because he believed the Biblical view, "All Your works praise You, O Lord." Carey believed that nature is declared "good" by its Creator; it is not maya (illusion) to be shunned, but a subject worthy of human study. He frequently lectured on science and tried to inject a basic scientific presupposition into the Indian mind that even lowly insects are not ‘souls in bondage,’ but creatures worthy of our study."

"William Carey was the first Englishman to introduce the steam-engine to India at the Serampore Mission Press, and the first to make indigenous paper for the publishing industry," pipes up the student of Mechanical Engineering. "Carey encouraged Indian blacksmiths to make indigenous copies of the steam-engine."

"William Carey was the missionary," announces an Economics major, "who first introduced the concept of a Savings Bank to India, to fight the all-pervasive social evil of usury. Carey believed that God, being righteous, hated usury, and thought that lending at the rate of 36 to 72 percent interest made investment, industry, commerce and the economic development of India impossible."

"The moral dimensions of Carey’s economic efforts," the student continues, "have assumed special importance in India, since the trustworthiness of the Savings Banks has become questionable, due to the greed and corruption of the bankers. The all-pervasive culture of bribery has, in many cases, pushed the interest rates up to as much as l00 percent, and made credit unavailable to honest entrepreneurs."

"In order to attract European capital to India and to modernize Indian agriculture, economy and industry, Carey also advocated the policy that Europeans should be allowed to own land and property in India. Initially the British Government was against such a policy because of its questionable results in the United States. But by the time of Carey’s death, that same Government had acknowledged the far-reaching economic wisdom of his stand. Our own Indian Government too, after one-half century of destructive xenophobia, has again opened the doors for Western capital and industry."

"William Carey was the first man," asserts a Medical student, "who led the campaign for a humane treatment for leprosy patients. Until his time they were sometimes buried or burned alive in India because of the belief that, "A violent end purifies the body and ensures the transmigration into a healthy new existence, while natural death by disease results in four successive births, and a fifth as a leper.’ Carey believed that because Jesus in His love touched and healed leprosy patients, they should be cared for humanely."

The student of Printing Technology stands up next. "Dr. William Carey is the father of printing technology in India. He brought to India and then taught and developed the modern technologies of printing and publishing. He built what was then the largest press in India. Most other printers had to buy their fonts from his Mission Press at Serampore."

"William Carey," responds a student of Mass Communications, "was a Christian missionary who established the first newspaper ever printed in any Asian language because Carey believed that, ‘Above all forms of truth and faith, Christianity seeks free discussion.’ His English-language journal, Friend of India, was the force that gave birth to the social reform movement in India in the first half of the nineteenth century."

"William Carey was the founder of the Agri-Horticultural Society in the 1820s, thirty years before the Royal Agricul- tural Society was established in England," contends a post-graduate student of Agriculture. "Carey did a systematic survey of agriculture in India, wrote for agriculture reform in the journal, Asiatic Researches, and exposed the evils of the indigo cultivation system two generations before it collapsed."

"Carey did all this," adds the agriculturist, "not because he was hired to do it, but because he was horrified to see that three-fifths of one of the finest countries in the world, full of industrious inhabitants, had been allowed to become an uncultivated jungle abandoned to wild beasts and serpents."

"Carey was a Bible translator, who was the first person to translate into English and publish great Indian religious classics such as the Ramayana, and philosophical treatises such as Samkhya, into English," says the student of Literature. "Carey transformed Bengali, which was previously considered ‘fit only for demons and women,’ into the foremost literary language of India. He wrote Gospel ballads in Bengali to bring the Hindu love of musical recitations to the service of his Lord. He prepared Bengali dictionary and grammars, and wrote the first Sanskrit dictionary for scholars, including Greek and Hebrew synonyms."

"Carey was a British cobbler," joins in the student of Education, "who became the first professor of Bengali, Sanskrit and Marathi at the Fort William College in Calcutta where the civil servants were trained. Though he himself only had some home-schooling till age 14, Carey began dozens of schools for Indian children of all castes and launched the first vernacular college in Asia at Serampore near Calcutta. Without any formal education, Carey taught himself six European languages. He and his assistants then translated parts or all of the Bible into more than 40 Indian languages. He wanted to develop the Indian mind and liberate it from the darkness of superstition. For nearly three thousand years India’s religious culture had denied to most Indians a free access to knowledge. The Hindu, Mughal, and British rulers had gone along with this high caste strategy of keeping the masses in the bondage of ignorance. Carey displayed enormous spiritual strength in standing against the Brahmin priests and their vested interests in depriving the masses of the freedom and power that comes from knowledge of truth."

"William Carey introduced the study of Astronomy into the Subcontinent," declares a student of Mathematics. "He cared deeply about the destructive cultural ramifications of astrology, which are fatalism, superstitious fear, and an inability to organize and manage time.

"Carey wanted to introduce India to the scientific culture of astronomy. He did not believe that the heavenly bodies were ‘deities that governed our lives.’ He knew that human beings are created to govern nature, and that the sun, moon, and the planets are created to assist us in our task of governing and keeping time. Carey thought that the heavenly bodies ought to be carefully studied since the Creator had made them to be signs or markers. They help divide the monotony of the universe, of space into directions—East, West, North and South— and of time into days, years, and seasons. They make it possible for us to devise calendars and measure time to microseconds; to study geography and history; and to plan our lives, our work and our societies. The culture of astronomy sets us free to be rulers, whereas the culture of astrology had made us subjects—our lives determined by the stars."

A post-graduate student of Library Science stands up next. "William Carey," she reveals, "pioneered the idea of lending libraries in the Subcontinent."

"While the East India Company was importing shiploads of ammunition and soldiers to subdue India, Carey asked his friends in the Baptist Missionary Society in England to load educational books and seeds into those same ships. He believed that would facilitate his task of regenerating the Indian soul and soil and of empowering the Indian people to embrace ideas that would generate freedom of mind. Carey’s objective was to create indigenous literature in the vernacular. However, he believed, that until such indigenous literature was available, Indians needed to receive knowledge and wisdom from around the world to catch up quickly with other cultures. He wanted to make worldwide information available to Indians through lending libraries."

"William Carey was an evangelist," maintains the student from the Indian Forest Institute, "who thought that if the Gospel flourished in India, the wilderness will, in every respect, become a fruitful field. Therefore, he became the first man in India to write essays on forestry, almost fifty years before the government made its very first attempt toward forest conservation in Malabar. Carey both practiced and vigorously advocated the cultivation of timber, giving practical advice on how to plant trees for environmental, agricultural and commercial purposes. His motivation came from his belief that God has made man responsible for the earth. It was in response to Carey’s journal, Friend of India, that the government first appointed Dr. Brandis of Bonn to care for the forests of Burma and arranged for Dr. Clegham to supervise the forests of South India."

"William Carey," argues a feminist, a Social Science scholar, "was the first man to stand against both the ruthless murders and the widespread diabolical oppression of women, virtually synonymous with Hinduism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Hindu male in India was crushing the female through polygamy, female infanticide, child marriage, widow-burning, temple prostitution, euthanasia and forced female illiteracy, all in the name of ‘religion.’ The British Government had timidly accepted these social evils as being an irreversible and intrinsic part of India’s religious mores. Carey began to conduct systematic sociological and scriptural research. He published his reports in order to raise public opinion and protest both in Bengal and in England. He influenced a whole generation of civil servants who were his students at the Fort William College to resist these evils. Carey opened schools for girls. When widows converted to Christianity, he arranged marriages for them. It was Carey’s persistent battle against Sati (widow burning) for twentyfive years, which, finally, led to Lord Bentinck’s famous Edict in 1829, banning one of the most abominable of all religious practices in the world."

"William Carey was an English missionary," pronounces a student of Public Administration, "who initially was not allowed to enter British India because the East India Company was against the conversion of Hindus. Therefore, Carey worked in the Danish territory of Serampore. Later, however, because the Company could not find a suitable professor of Bengali for the Fort William College, he was invited to teach there. During his professorship lasting thirty years, Carey transformed the ethos of the British administration from indifferent imperial exploitation to that of a ‘civil’ service."

"By policy the East India Company did not interfere with the socio-religious practices of their subjects in India, however evil they were. On the other hand, Indians influenced their British rulers. The idolatry, the ‘women of easy virtue,’ the Nawabs, and the colony’s wealth, combined to create havoc with the morals of the British officers. Carey, being a missionary and not a ruler, put up a determined and persistent opposition to this corruption. He also imparted a religious spirit of gentleness, and a missionary spirit of service to the administrators. His influence in transforming the British administration is often considered greater than that of the legislative work of the Governor-Generals from Cornwallis to Bentinck."

"William Carey," reflects a student of Indian Philosophy, "was a preacher, who revived the ancient idea that ethics and morality were inseparable from religion. This had been an assumption underlying the Vedic religion. But the Upanishadic teachers separated ethics from spirituality. They thought that the human self (Atman) was the divine Self (Brahma). Therefore, our spirit could not sin. Our Atman only gets deluded and begins to imagine itself as distinct from God. What we require is not deliver ance from sin but enlightenment, which is a direct experience of our ‘divinity.’ This denial of human sinfulness and emphasis on the mystical experience of our divinity made it possible for us in India to be intensely ‘religious’ yet at the same time unabashedly immoral.

"Carey began to affirm that human beings were sinners and needed both forgiveness for sin and deliverance from its power over them. He taught that it was not ignorance but sin that had separated us from God; therefore, it was impossible to please God without holiness. According to him, true spirituality began only when we repented for our sin. This teaching revolutionized the nineteenth century religious scene in India. For example, after Raja Ram Mohun Roy, one of the greatest Hindu scholars of the nineteenth century, came in contact with Carey and the other mission- aries at Serampore, he began to seriously question the spirituality then prevalent in India. He summed up his conclusions thus:

A student of History stands up last. "Dr. William Carey is the father of the Indian Renaissance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hindu India had reached its intellectual, artistic, architectural and literary zenith by the ninth century A.D. After the Absolute Monism of Adi Shankaracharya began to sweep the Indian subcontinent the creative springs of humanity dried up, and India’s great decline began. The material environment, human rationality, and all that enriches human culture became suspect. Asceticism, untouchability, mysticism, the occult, superstition, idolatry, witchcraft, and oppressive beliefs and practices became the hallmark of Indian culture. The consequent invasion, exploitation, and the resulting political dominance of the foreign rulers made matters worse."

"Into this chaos came Carey and initiated the process of India’s reform. He saw India not as a foreign country to be exploited, but as his Heavenly Father’s land to be loved and served, a society where truth, not ignorance, needed to rule. Carey’s movement culminated in the birth of Indian nationalism and of India’s subsequent independence. Carey believed that God’s image was in man, not in idols; therefore, it was oppressed humanity that ought to be served. He believed in understanding and control- ling nature instead of fearing, appeasing, or worshiping it; in developing one’s intellect instead of killing it, as mysticism taught. He emphasized enjoying literature and culture instead of shunning it as maya. His this-worldly spirituality, with as strong an emphasis on justice and love for one’s fellowmen, as on love for God, marked the turning point of Indian culture from a downward trend to an upward swing. The early Indian leaders of the Hindu Renaissance such as Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Keshub Chandra Sen and others, drew their inspiration from William Carey and the missionaries associated with him."

So, who was William Carey? Well, he was the pioneer of the modern missionary movement of the West; a pioneer of the Protestant Church in India; and the translator and/or publisher of the Bible in forty different Indian languages. Carey was an evangelist who used every available medium to illumine every dark facet of Indian life with the light of truth. He is the central character in the story of India’s modernization.