Page 36 - Hindsight Issue 26 April 2020

PeoPLe
THE CAREY EXPERIENCE
Margaret Williams
‘The Carey Experience’ is shared by four Northamptonshire churches to tell the inspirational story of 18th century William Carey 1761-1834. Margaret Williams is the Visits Co-ordinator and also Curator at Moulton. In this article she writes about the inspirational life of the man who is remembered in Paulerspury, Moulton, Hackleton and Kettering. Contact Margaret to visit any of the four
churches associated with William Carey.
this is a remarkable story of how a weaver’s son, with very little formal education, became a university professor in India; how he mastered six languages in england and many more languages in India; how he founded a Christian missionary movement that would bring about great change in the world.
He was born in Paulerspury where he was fortunate to have a basic education in the village’s charity school. He went on to be apprenticed to a Piddington cordwainer and became both a shoemaker and cobbler. After his Church of england upbringing he threw in his lot with the dissenters at Hackleton. Later he was baptised in the nene where northampton railway station is today, and became a Baptist and the minister of the Baptist Meeting House at Moulton.
Here ideas grew of how the church in this country should be responding to the needs of the world. For example, the abolition of slavery became one of his life-long concerns and campaigns. He became passionately egalitarian, believing every person was of equal value in the sight of god. After leaving Moulton for Leicester he encouraged the formation of a Baptist missionary society which took place in Kettering in 1792. several other denominations would follow suit. As the first Baptist missionary he went to India where he established a Christian community, with all members using their skills to become self-supporting and to develop the work of the mission. He translated the bible into six Indian languages and parts of it into 29 others, together with dictionaries and grammars. He started a printing and publishing business and founded the first Indian newspaper. He imported a steam engine for paper milling, and got Indians to disassemble it so that they could replicate it. As well as founding churches, he opened fee-paying schools for europeans, and free schools for Bengali children, pioneering female education. the east India Company employed him at their Fort William College in Calcutta to train their personnel in Indian languages and culture.
eventually he and his colleagues founded the first modern university in Asia, and this self-educated man became one of its first professors. science was his
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