The video is a summary of a sermon on the importance of missions and the involvement of the church in spreading the gospel. The speaker, Kerry, emphasizes the vastness of the world and the number of nations that have no access to the gospel. He addresses practical concerns raised by his contemporaries, such as the distance to these countries, and argues that if people can travel for financial gain, Christians should be willing to go for the sake of souls. Kerry also highlights the value of souls and the need for fervent prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit in missionary work.

The topic for this evening, and for those for whom this will cause some inconvenience, I apologize, I'm going to do William Carey tonight and Andrew Fuller in two weeks, and I thought it more appropriate, and when we get to Andrew Fuller you'll see why, that we look at the more famous of these two friends, and Carey and Fuller are both very close friends, and so I want to think about William Carey this evening, and the cause of missions, and lay upon your minds and hearts the burden that gripped Carey at the beginning of what is known as the modern missionary movement, which begins in the 18th century, and I think still should grip us. I have friends, well I have acquaintances, who have talked about the day of missions as we have known it, where we in the West send out missionaries to other countries is past, and we need to be supporting, as it were, nationals in these countries. I do not believe that at all. I think the day of missions is still very much with us, and I hope that as we think about Carey tonight, and his argumentation for modern, for missions, that you will see the force of his arguments are still very persuasive. They're not things that simply are historical in nature, but they pertain to the essence of the gospel, and so I apologize for those who came thinking that we were going to talk about Andrew Fuller, and the challenge of the modern world, what is known as modernity, and we want to think about that in two weeks. Well tonight, then, we want to think about the legacy of William Carey, born 1761, died in 1834. I venture to hope that William Carey is a name that you do not need to be acquainted with. You know the name. It could very well be, and I hope it is, that by the end of the evening you'll know more about that name, but I trust that of the names that we have looked at in this course of study, his is as famous as John and Charles Bradley, or George Whitefield, who we looked at in previous weeks. Now he was born in the middle of the 18th century, and the 18th century was a period of great achievement for the British people. Great achievement along a number of fronts, and I want to think about one in contrast to the work of Carey. It was a period of great empire building. The British had had an empire which they had lost a number of years after Carey had reached manhood. In the great war of 1776 to 1783, the first British empire really disappeared as the American colonies that comprised that empire were lost to the British control. But in these last decades of the 18th century, the British were building another empire, and one thinks of the achievements of men like Clive in India fighting against the French. The 18th century is almost one long war between the British and the French. Clive in India fighting against the French, defeating the French at a battle called the Battle of Plassey, which opened up most of India to British conquest and domination. Or one thinks of something much closer to home, the year 1759. I hope that year does ring some bells in Canadian history. That's the year of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham when General James Wolfe, a man at that time, a general in his 40s, who had fought at Culloden in 1745, sailed up to St. Lawrence and with British soldiers did what the French garrison at Quebec City did not think the British would do. They scaled the cliffs at Quebec City and the French found themselves facing an English or British army outside the walls of Quebec. You can still go to Quebec City and actually see, as you come into the older part of town, where that battlefield was. Last time I was there, it was a soccer field, which may well be appropriate. But there were certain markers on that soccer field which indicated where General James Wolfe was killed in that battle. The French general Montcalm was also killed, but it resulted in a British victory and changed the entire course of North American history because it opened up Canada for British domination and so on. Or one thinks, not now in the realm of the military, one thinks of the voyages of discovery of Captain James Cook, discovering in the South Pacific the islands of Tahiti and Hawaii and Australia and New Zealand. And it's Cook, for instance, who mapped the coastlines of New Zealand and Australia and therefore provides another venue for British emigration and the part of another aspect of the British Empire, the second British Empire. But I want to think with you tonight about a different type of empire building, very distinct, the empire building that was done in the wake of William Carey. It's building a different kingdom. Carey's kingdom would have as permanent, in fact, much more permanent results. And that is his mission to India and his inspiration of a host of missionaries through the 19th century. One thinks of many of the great missionaries of the 19th century, Hudson Taylor, Livingston, and so on. Nearly all of them read the life of Carey. Carey's life since his death in 1834 has been written up at least 60 times. I have a strange avocation, a strange hobby, which is collecting biographies of William Carey. I have about 30 of them. His life was abundantly detailed for Victorians and became kind of household reading among evangelicals and provided inspiration on both sides of the Atlantic for many who laid to heart God's great desire for the nations. And that is that they hear the gospel and that Christ's name be known from the rising of the sun to its setting. And so Carey stands at the fountainhead of that. He has been rightly described as the father of modern mission. Now, as we will see, that description of Carey is an appropriate one if we are thinking of the man who was the inspiration of so much of the modern missionary movement. If we think that title means that he was the first and there were no others in the modern era, then we are wrong. Because there were others, and in particular one community, and I'm going to talk about them briefly, a group known as the Moravians, who are before Carey and from whom Carey himself was deeply inspired by their self-sacrificial going to the ends of the earth. In Carey's own day, Carey did not have to wait to die to be regarded with wonder by many of his contemporaries. John Newton, who made Carey only twice, John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, could write. Now, you need to bear in mind that these words are coming from an Anglican. Newton could say of Carey, such a man as Carey is more to me than a bishop or an archbishop. He is an apostle. Newton, like a number of his contemporaries, was what we would describe as a cessationist, did not believe that the miraculous gifts of the apostolic era continued in his day, and yet he could say the following, if God were to work a miracle in our day, I should not wonder if it were in favor of Dr. Carey. Very different Carey's opinion of himself, though. And when Carey came to die in 1834, he gave explicit instruction that on his tombstone there be written the following verse from a hymn of Isaac Watts, A wretched, poor, helpless worm, on thy kind arms I fall. And this evening, I do not want to make the mistake, which I think has been often done, of decking Carey out like some sort of medieval saint with halo and flawless character. He was not that. He knew himself that he was not a flawless individual. There is one area of his life which Victorians generally in their biographies didn't like to talk about, because it was a very painful area, and that is his wife's insanity. And we want to mention a little of that as we get into our looking at Carey. And yet we also want to note that Carey is the illustration of a man who had gifts that he gave unreservedly to God, and how we want to see how God used those gifts. In one area he is probably brilliant, but in so many other areas he is like us. A man of ordinary character, and yet God, through his plodding, he often describes himself as a plodder. God did great things. Well, Carey is born in 1761. He is born in a little town called Paulers-Purey, P-A-U-L-E-R-S-P-U-R-Y, Paulers-Purey, P-A-U-L-E-R-S-P-U-R-Y. It's a little hamlet in the heart of England, in the area known as Northamptonshire. And even today it's a sleepy little hamlet, and Carey's day would have been even sleepier in many respects. His father was a parish clerk, or clerk, of the Anglican church, and the man's responsibilities as such was to keep the marriage registers, the register of burials and baptisms, to make sure that various hymns were announced on time in the church service, to read out maybe one of the lessons in the church service, and also, we're told, he was to make sure that the children in the village were in the church and dogs were not. Apparently, there must have been some problem with dogs, at least in that area of England, getting into the church unwantedly. So, young William was regularly taken to church. This is the important point of all that. William was taken to church. He learned, he would say, much in the historical nature of the scriptures. But he could say, up until the age of 14, of real experimental, that is experiential, religion. In the 18th century, generally the word religion is a good term. Of real experimental religion, I scarcely heard anything until I was 14 years of age. He went to school up until the age of 10, and then his parents took him out and apprenticed him, as we will see, to a shoemaker. Now, young William wanted to be a gardener. His uncle, Peter Carey, was a gardener, and William had great admiration for his uncle. Peter had actually seen something of the world. He had fought with wolves on the plains of Abraham in 1759, and he had seen something of the vastness and the wilderness that Canada was then. Still vast, whether it's a wilderness or not is another question, but it was then. And he came home to England, that small island, with these tales of the far-off North America that gripped William's imagination. And it is interesting how God is at work in what we often regard as the most mundane of things. Here is God using his uncle's experiences to sink deep into William's heart, a longing to see other lands. But he wanted to be a gardener. Peter Carey returned home from his campaigns in Canada to be a gardener in Polis Puri, and Peter, young William, wanted to follow his uncle's train. But as it turned out, he could not. He could not because whenever he was out in the sun for more than a half an hour or 45 minutes, he would develop a very painful rash. And recently, actually, I met somebody who had such an experience, and still did have such an experience, that long exposure to the sun gave them quite a painful rash. It's very interesting. Carey will go to India later in his life. He will spend hours out in the much warmer, hotter Indian sun and not experience anything like what he knew as a child. Maybe it was only a childhood disease. It could very well be that God did the miraculous in Carey's life and healed him, but we don't know. But as a young boy, he couldn't spend time in the sun, and so his parents apprenticed him to a shoemaker who trained Carey to be a cobbler. There's a difference between a shoemaker and a cobbler. A shoemaker makes shoes. A cobbler mends shoes. And England, very socially minded, or class minded, class conscious, on the class scale, a cobbler is lower down the social class level than a shoemaker. Many years later, when Carey was a professor of Sanskrit and Oriental literature at the College of Fort William, which trained administrators for the British rule in India, and Carey was teaching the sons of aristocrats, he was invited to a very important dinner. And one of the men there, who had no liking for Carey's evangelical convictions, and had no liking for Carey because of his class, wanted to put him down publicly, and said in the hearing of probably most of the dinner tables, Mr. Carey, I understand that you started off life as a shoemaker. And in other words, he was a very clear jive and insult. And Carey's response was, no sir, not a shoemaker, a cobbler, which is lower down. Well, so Carey was apprenticed to be a cobbler and worked for a man named Clark Nichols. And Carey went to live with Nichols, he lived about seven miles from Polisbury, in a place called Piddington. So these are very little villages in this part of England. Now what is significant, again, God is at work in all of this, because there is a man, there is another young boy apprenticed there, a boy whose name we now know as John Warr, W-A-R-R, John Warr. And it will be this young man through whom God will bring Carey to Christ. As I said, we probably all were familiar with the name of Carey. If I'd asked you about the name of John Warr, very few, I would suspect, of you would know the role that God had designed for this man. In fact, up until the First World War, John Warr's name was not known. It was known, long known, that Carey had been brought to Christ by a fellow apprentice. But the name was not known. And then in the First World War, during that war, the Baptist Missionary Society would send Carey to India, and Carey would be part of the founding group of that society. They were moving their offices, and somebody noticed in the corner of an office a safe that had been there for eons. And somebody thought that instead of simply moving it, they should check out and see what might be in it. And lo and behold, as they opened the safe, they found a sheaf of papers. Among them was one letter of William Carey's identifying this, the man who had brought him to Christ as John Warr. And so the name was discovered. Now, John Warr was a congregationalist. Carey is an Anglican. And although Carey comes from a fairly poor social background, at least he knew he was above a congregationalist. He was an Anglican. He was part of the state church. And he had great pride in that. And it's getting very difficult for us to put ourselves, I think, back into the period of time in which we're talking, in which Anglicans generally looked down with scorn upon anybody who was outside of the Church of England, be they Presbyterian, be they Congregationalist, or Baptist, or Quaker. And this is the period the Methodists have yet to separate from the Church of England. There's a very illuminating little note I read recently of an Anglican minister. By the way, this is nothing against Anglicans. It's simply trying to tell you and give you a feel for what Anglicans often thought of others outside of the Church of England. An Anglican minister in the 1830s, where the article that I read was describing his life and some of his convictions. And it mentioned, I found this very illuminating, that there was a number of ways in which this particular minister's day or week could be ruined. And one of the ways in which his week could be ruined is if he had to sit down to lunch with a Baptist minister. If for some reason he found himself having to have lunch with a Baptist minister, it just ruined his entire week. And that, I think, gives you a good insight into the way many Anglicans felt about others outside the Church of England. They may be low down the social scale, but at least they belonged to the state church, the church that God had instituted. And these others, well, they were far off the beaten track. And so it was, Cary looked with scorn on John Moore. John Moore was a Christian. And I hope we are, while we are conscious that because there are, of historical circumstances, etc., and tradition, we find ourselves in different denominational bodies. Our glory and joy ultimately are that we are Christians. And I have certain convictions that attach me to the body of men and women that I worship with, but ultimately, the most important thing is I'm a Christian. And that in glory, it'll be that name and not the other names which will be prominent. And John Moore was a Christian. He was a Congregationalist, but he was a Christian. And he began to share his faith with Cary, but Cary wanted none of it. Who is this man outside of the established church, outside of the state church, to be trying to instruct him? And so he wouldn't listen. He refused the offer of books. He refused to go with Moore to worship until an event took place in 1777, when Cary was 16. He still apprenticed to Nichols. Christmas time had rolled around, and it was a custom at Christmas, in that period of time, that apprentices would often be given a small gift of money by the businessmen with whom the master had dealings. Nichols had dealings with a number of businesses in the area, and he sent Cary out around Christmas time, before Christmas of 1777, to collect some debts. And Cary knew that as he went along the way, he would be given a small gift by a number of these men, at least he hoped he would, as a Christmas token or Christmas gift. And so it was, he came to one village where he had to collect the money from his master from an ironmonger, or what we would describe today as kind of a grocery store or a variety store. And this ironmonger decided to play a little trick on Cary. He gave him a counterfeit shilling. He meant to tell Cary after Christmas of his little joke, but he wondered how Cary would take it. Well, Cary gets his master's money from the man and gets his gift, and he's going back to see Nichols and deliver the money, and on the way he's looking at the coin, and he realizes his counterfeit must have been a very poor replica. And even Cary realized it was a counterfeit coin. And then he starts to think, well, he didn't like that, and thought, well, maybe what I could do is substitute it for one of the other coins. He had collected money from a number of men that morning, and his master wouldn't know which one had given him the counterfeit coin, and he'd have to write it off as a bad debt. And so Cary did a switch with Mr. Nichols' money of a genuine coin for a counterfeit coin. Cary was aware that this was wrong, and began to pray, Lord, get me through this, and I'll never do anything like this again. Well, Cary many years later would say, God did not get me through. A gracious God did not get me through. Because when he got back, he gave the money to Nichols. Nichols, initially, as he went through it, he too realized one of the coins was counterfeit, had no idea where it came from, had to write it off as a bad debt, until after Christmas, he met the ironmonger. How did young William enjoy my little joke on him? Oh, what was that? Why, I gave him a counterfeit coin. And suddenly, Nichols knew his apprentice had cheated him. And it was out all over the village. And everyone in the village knew. I mean, one of the joys and griefs of living in a small village or town is you know everything about everybody else, which can be good, but everybody knows everything else about you too, which is not so good sometimes. And everybody in the town knew that young William had been guilty of dishonesty. And Cary said he was ashamed to show his face outdoors. But even more, he said that subsequently, this was the cause of him seeing more of myself I had ever seen before, and to seek for mercy with greater earnestness. One of the important things that God needs to do in all of our lives is to bring us to realize who we are and what we are, to show us the nature of our hearts, apart from saving grace, that we are sinners in need of a Savior, in need of a Savior for pardon and for cleansing. And it's not surprising then that this is the critical event that begins to break open Cary's heart and mind and begins to lead him to be attentive now to John Moore. And within two years, by 1779, he was converted. He didn't know many ministers at first. He went with war to the Congregationalist church at a place called Hackleton. These are, as I say, very small villages. He didn't have much opportunity for conversation with other Christians and found himself building his views from Scripture. And much of his later convictions, the strength of his convictions, is found in this early period of his life where he developed the habits of the study of the Word of God, deep, deep habits, and spending time in prayer and the study of the Word. And it gave him deep convictions and a rich knowledge of God's Word in later years. He becomes a Baptist in 1785 and within two years finds himself as a pastor in 1787. During this period of time, he's still cobbling, mending shoes. He also has become a teacher. And although he would have two pastors in England, one of them, the first one definitely, and I think also the second one, he had to keep school as well as do his cobbling to pay for his family. By the time that he would leave England in 1793, he would have three children, another on the way. I've been in the home in which he lived in a place called Moulton, which is where his first church was, M-O-U-L-T-O-N, not far from a large town called Northampton in Northamptonshire. And in his home, you can actually still go into his home in Moulton, you can go into the room where he had his workshop, which also functioned as the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and the study. Now there were two other rooms in that house where Cary lived with his wife, three children, his wife's parents, and I think a sister. In that context, Cary found himself having to do a variety of other things beyond pasturing, just simply to make ends meet. One of the things that begins to grip him in this period is the whole area of missions. He reads, as many British people did, the story of Captain James Cook's voyages in the South Pacific. They had begun in the 1760s, they began to be published in pamphlet form in the 1770s, and Cary would later say that the first thing that gripped him regarding missions was reading Captain Cook's story of the voyages in the South East. In particular, Cary, or rather Cook, actually when he went to Tahiti, he asked the question, it's a remarkable question, he said, would the British ever send out missionaries to Tahiti? And then he answered the question, he said, absolutely not. There is no conceivable reason why the British would ever send out anybody to Tahiti. Now you have to remember, I'm not sure what that name, at least for me, it conjures up kind of beaches and kind of one of these places where people go for kind of a paradisiacal holiday and so on. Hawaii the same. Those are not the images of the 18th century. In the 18th century, these were places where most of the inhabitants, the Polynesians who lived there, were still firmly under the control of cannibalistic practices. In fact, James Cook, and I forget whether it's, I think it's Hawaii, he's killed in Hawaii by some of the Hawaiians. And so when these people, when the British thought of these places, they weren't thinking of places to kind of sail to where they could lie on the beach for months on end. But no, these were very cannibalistic societies. And so Cook's thinking about these societies, barbarous societies, would the British ever send people out here as a vandalism? No, no, not at all. And it could well be that Kerry read those words and began to be gripped by a concern for the people of these lands. In fact, Kerry, in his early thinking, wanted to go to Tahiti as a missionary. In those days it was called Otahite, O-T-A-H-E-I-T-E. But what is important is that Kerry, in the 1780s, begins to keep a diary or a table of the nations of the world. Every opportunity he gets, either reading books of geography, reading books like Cook's, or reading newspapers, he begins to detail, what are the nations of the world? How big are they in terms of square miles? What is their religion? How many people do they have in them? And he begins to realise the overwhelming task that still faced the church in his day. A task in which he realised that if we are talking about evangelical Christianity in the 18th century, at the end of the 18th century, it basically was found in two areas of the world. It's found in Europe, in particular Northern Europe, Britain, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, parts of France, Scandinavia, Denmark, maybe Hungary in Eastern Europe. I'm thinking here primarily of evangelical Christianity. Obviously, if we broaden it to include Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, it's Europe. But the other part of the world is North America, strung out along the coast of the continent of North America, the American colonies, which stretch over the United States and the British North America, the Maritimes and down through to South Carolina, Florida still being in the hands of the Spanish at this time, is the other area of evangelical Christianity. If you want to broaden it again, then you've got areas, maybe if you want to include Catholicism, areas of South America. But that's it. And Kerry realised there was no real evangelical witness at all in Africa, and none in Asia. How things have changed, radically changed, and we'll touch on that at the end. And so Kerry then begins to think about a world beyond the horizon of the fields of England. And you need to realise that Kerry lived in a day in which to go 20 miles was a major undertaking. One major means of transport in England in those days was horse or carriage. The roads were terrible, most of them. Mechanisation, that is the ability to produce a road that was smooth, smooth enough and tough enough to last through the winter, doesn't start to take effect really until the next century, until the 1800s. And roads in England, even the major roads in England, were often in horrific shape after winter. In fact, some of them, the potholes were so big, I've got a number of stories I could give you, two stories, of potholes so big that when the men were riding along, they would be down almost to the, up to the neck of the horse. That's how deep some of these potholes would be, filled with water after the spring run-off. And so travelling was a very difficult affair in Europe in this period of time. And here is Kerry now thinking of going a lot further than 20 miles down the road, thinking of going around the other side of the world. Now Kerry was introduced to a number of ministers in a ministerial of which he had become a part by becoming a minister of Moulton. And the ministerial group was called the Northamptonshire Baptist Association. And it was the practice or the habit or the custom of the Northamptonshire Association that ministers would meet together once a month. It was a very good habit. It provided contact between the ministers, contact between churches where they could tell each other of concerns and prayer needs and encourage one another with victories and so on. And so it was that Kerry sat in on probably his first meeting in 1785-1786. And the story is that at that meeting one of the men there was a man named John Ryland Senior. There were two John Rylands. The younger man who was John Ryland Senior's son would actually become one of Kerry's close friends. But John Ryland Senior was kind of the patriarch of the group of ministers. And he invariably asked a young minister who had just come in for the first time, please propose for us a question that we can spend some time discussing theologically. And so Kerry asked the following question. Matthew 28. At the end there where we read all power is given unto me in heaven and earth. Go ye therefore and teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. And Kerry's question was this. Is verse 19, which I've just read there, is verse 19 still in force? I think that's an easy question to answer. It's obvious. But it was not so obvious. There was a school of thought that had been circulating since the 1600s that the gospel in the early centuries had actually been preached to the ends of the earth. That actually the gospel had already been preached to all the nations. Those who argued this sometimes would add a number of texts that they would refer to. One of them is found in the book of Colossians. Colossians chapter 1 where the Apostle Paul talking about his ministry can say the following. Colossians 1 verse 23. Paul is talking about his readers continuing in the faith. If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel which ye have heard and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven. Notice that phrase there at the end where he says that the gospel was preached to every creature under heaven. And some theologians in the 1600s and the 1700s look very clearly. Paul preached the gospel to every nation. Many of those nations rejected it. We have no responsibility to take the gospel ever to them again. And so the question was not an idle question. There were those in Britain who said should we take the gospel to Africa? Should we take the gospel to Asia? And the argument was no. Those nations are stunk in hedonism and darkness and it's their own fault. They rejected it back in the time of St. Paul. Now it's a fallacious argument as I hope you realize. Even in the book of Acts where Paul would go to a town and preach the gospel and inevitably went to a synagogue and often at the end the synagogue would toss him out and he would say I turn now to the Gentiles. The next town he was in he'd always go first again to the Jews. And that was one of the arguments they used that God has they've rejected the gospel to these nations. We have no responsibility to take it to them again. There is no evidence I know of that the gospel was brought to North America back in the days of the apostles. No evidence it was taken to the inner reaches of Africa. No evidence that it was taken to the heartland of Asia. And what Paul is talking about there he's talking from the perspective of a citizen of the Roman world. The gospel had been preached throughout the Roman world but beyond the borders of the Roman Empire certainly not so. But Cary was confronted with this. Cary was also confronted with what we call today Hyper-Calvinism. And Cary was a Calvinist in his theology. And that is his conviction was that when it comes to salvation it is God who saves men and women. The Hyper-Calvinist went one step further and upped the ante as it were and argued that if it's God who saves men and women we needn't do a thing. God's going to save who is elect. He'll save who we want and we don't need to be involved. In fact it brings more glory to God if we're not involved because then it's quite clear God is doing the saving not us. Well again that's a fallacious argument. One of the things I think that is very clear in the scriptures is that while God saves he does so through means. He delights in using feeble, fallible men and women as his instruments. He doesn't need us. We should never make the mistake that we are indispensable to the kingdom. But he delights in using us. And so Cary got quite a blast as we now will see. Cary had asked, is that still in force? And apparently John Ryland Sr. blasted him. And now there's debate about what exactly the nature of the blast, how it was worded. I have no doubt that Cary received a frigid answer. According to one source Cary was told by Ryland, you are a miserable fanatic for asking such a question. Certainly nothing can be done before another Pentecost when an effusion of miraculous gifts, including the gift of tongues, will give effect to the commission of Christ as the first. What sir? Can you preach in Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, Bengali? You think it your duty to send the gospel to the heathen. Another account has this. Young man sit down. When God pleases and converts the heathen he'll do it without your aid or mine. And we don't know exactly. There's actually another couple of possibilities of what he was told. That he received a very frigid answer, I have no doubt. And that there was significant sectors of the church in England that had no interest in taking the gospel beyond the borders of Great Britain is also clear. And one of the things that Cary is going to have to address is this whole issue theologically. And Cary was not put off by that answer. He was a young man in his twenties. It probably silenced him at the moment. But he went away from that meeting with a deeper conviction that he needed to study the issue and pray about the issue. Because over the years that followed, the next four or five years, we find a number of instances of Cary with other ministers meeting for prayer, praying for revival in their own lives, in the lives of their churches, and to the sending of the gospel to the ends of the earth. We find Cary in 1792 preaching a great sermon on Isaiah 54 verses 2 and 3. And I don't have an Old Testament with me, unfortunately. But that's that passage in Isaiah which talks about stretching out the cords of the tent, lengthening the stakes. And we know Cary, we don't have the actual sermon Cary preached on that occasion. But we have the two divisions of the sermon. And the two divisions are these. Let us expect great things. Let us attempt great things. Later history would remember the division this way. Let us expect great things from God. And let us attempt great things for God. Cary probably didn't have the from God and the for God explicitly mentioned. But that's what he had in mind. The order is important. We begin in prayer. All of the great movements of God are birthed in prayer. They're not birthed in our counsel, our strength. They're brought into being by men and women of God waiting on God. I feel distressed when I look out across the evangelical landscape in southern Ontario and when you ask the question of many about the centrality of the prayer meeting in their churches and you find so often the answer given, oh well, we have 250 on a Sunday morning. How many at a prayer meeting? 25. You think that might not be wrong. You might think that might be an exaggeration. But about 10 years ago I preached in one of the largest evangelical churches west of London. And there were about three or four hundred on a Sunday morning when I was speaking. And I asked somebody, because I was speaking on the issue of Vermont, I asked, how many at your prayer meeting in the midweek? And I thought, well at least 70, 80, but there were 25. That could be. They had other prayer meetings and it could be they had different formats. I don't know that. But frequently I've come across this whole kind of typical kind of statistic. Large numbers there on a Sunday morning. Very few meaningful prayer. It doesn't bode well. And we have lost the conviction that many of our forebears had that if anything is going to be dumped from God, we begin by waiting on God. Begin by seeking His will, His purpose. Let us expect great things from God. That's the concept of prayer. But we don't stop there. There was a stunning series today, excuse me, who wanted to stop there. And they're expecting but they never go on to attempting. At some point we need to move out. We need to move into, translate prayer into action. Let us expect great things from God. Let us attempt great things for God. And so it is that Cary finds himself meeting with other like-minded men. Among them Andrew Fuller, who we'll talk about in two weeks. Meeting with men and women praying about revival in their own churches. Praying about the need of their own churches to get a vision of the world. To get a global vision. And Cary finally wrote also a book. And we want to talk a little bit. And let me introduce it. And then we'll break. And then we'll conclude our look at it in the next hour. He wrote a book and the title was this. An Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. An Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. Now the word heathen is one we don't usually use today. We usually use the term unbeliever. But it was a common term in the 18th century. A couple of things are important about the title. First of all, there is the duty that Christians are under to share their faith. And duty probably is not the best of words. It should be a delight. God has breathed into our souls light. And he's given us a vision of the saviour and the hope of glory. It should not be burdensome to share that faith as God gives opportunities. But at least at his bottom we have a duty. God has called us to be his witnesses. I know there are some whom God in his providence calls into what we call full-time or vocational service. But that doesn't let the rest of us off the hook. All of us are to live lives of integrity and Christian character in our families and in the workplace and in our communities. And be witnesses. And from time to time as God gives opportunities, speak our faith to others. As Peter says in 1 Peter 3, to the Christian wives who are married to unbelieving husbands, the question is how should they share their faith? Well, live out your life with integrity in front of these men. And never be afraid to give an answer for the hope that is in you. The second, we are to utilize various means for the conversion of the lost. And we'll see what Kerry means by that when we get to the last section. The book is divided into five sections. The first section, the book by the way was published in 1792. The book is divided into five sections. The first section deals with the theology of missions. And he focuses on Matthew 28, 19 and 20, the great commission. The passage I read earlier. And obviously he's been thinking about that answer that John Rollins Sr. gave him. Is verse 19 still in force? And his argument, of course it's in force. You notice in the text, and he's speaking, because Kerry was a Baptist, he's speaking to Baptists. You notice in the text he says, Go ye therefore teach all nations, baptizing them. And he knew that his fellow Baptists jumped on this verse. This was one of the key verses for the Baptist argument for believer's baptism. And if you don't believe me, you just have to come to the school where I teach and you go through some of our courses. And this just comes up again and again and again. It's a central argument. Well Kerry said, how is it that this is still in force? If you as a Baptist believe that. And the missions aspect of this verse, go and make disciples, isn't it? You can't have it both ways. You can't have the Baptist part of it in force, and not of the missions part. And Kerry knew what he was doing. He's speaking to Baptists who love this verse. This is one of the key verses they went to again and again to argue for believer's baptism. Well Kerry says, that if used as an argument for believer's baptism, that's another part of this verse. In fact, the greater part of this verse, and Kerry knew his Greek, is go and make disciples. That's the heart of the verse. The baptizing is a subsidiary part of that. Also Kerry said, notice how the phrase ends, go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world. Why does Jesus add, Kerry asks, that statement, I am with you to the end of the age, or end of the world? Surely he adds that because he expects that the command be recognized to be enforced all the way through the history of the church. So he's got two very strong arguments. That yes, Matthew 28, 19 to 20 is still enforced. The second part of the book is a study of the history of mission, and Kerry had obviously been reading whatever he could get his hands on about the history of mission. He goes back to the book of Acts, and let me strongly suggest, we can't develop this here tonight, but let me strongly suggest that the theme of the book of Acts is the spread of the gospel. It is the expansion and the victory of the word of God in the power of the spirit, all the way through the book of Acts. And Kerry knew that, and Kerry could see that. And then he goes back to some of the early evangelists, men like Philip and Paul and others. And then he comes outside the New Testament, and he looks at some of the early Christian figures. He looks at people like Patrick, taking the gospel to the Irish. And then he comes up to the more modern era. And one group he especially mentions are the Moravians. And let me say a few words about this group, and then we'll close or we'll break. The Moravians were a community that had its roots in Germany. In fact, the heart of the disciples, or the successors, or descendants, descendants is the word I want, descendants from John Hus, a great reformer before the Reformation. Hus, who was martyred in 1415. And he was a Czech. And his followers stayed in what is now, what was Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic now. And in the 1700s, though, they were forced to move north and emigrated because of persecution to Germany, and found a home on the lands of a man named Nicholas von Zinzendorf, a Lutheran, man who was a very godly individual, a man who would claim in life, and no reason to doubt his claim, that he had known Christ ever since he was a very small child. He could never remember a time. As he grew to manhood, he was the inheritor of a huge amount of wealth, and he opened his lands up to a variety of religious refugees, among them the Moravians. And he sought in the 1720s to build a community out of these, this group. And there were Lutherans, and there were Calvinists, and there were some Catholics, and it was a bit of a mishmash. And they were all at each other's throats until August of 1727, when Zinzendorf would say, we experienced, there was a church service that day, a particular Sunday in August of 1727, and the Spirit of God came down, as it were, and melted that community into one, and gave them a passion for the gospel being spread to the ends of the earth. At its height, the community probably comprised about 6,000 people. But between the years of 1727 and 1760, they sent out as missionaries around 600. Ten percent of the congregation sent out as missionaries. That is awesome. I don't know any congregation today that has anywhere like statistics. For ten percent of the congregation, 600 men and women went out over the course of 30 years to be missionaries. And not simply missionaries in Europe. Some of them were in Europe. But they went to places like Algeria and Morocco. I mean, they were like, they were like what they are now then, solid bastions of Islam. There were missionaries sent out to the Eskimos in Greenland, or to a variety of the African peoples in the South Africa. There were missionaries sent out to Sri Lanka. Some missionaries actually went to the West Indies. There's a great story of two missionaries who were willing to sell themselves into slavery, that they might reach the Africans who had been enslaved by the slave trade and brought the slaves to the West Indies. Two Moravians. They never actually did it, but they were prepared to go to that length. If it meant becoming a slave that we could reach these men and women who had been enslaved by Europeans, they were willing to do it. One of the great stories, at least one I find so thrilling, and with this we will close. And these stories gripped Kerry. He knew about these missionary endeavors of the Moravians. One of the great stories is the story of David Zeisberger. Zeisberger, German, was gripped by the needs of the First Peoples in North America. And he came over to labor in upstate New York in the 1750s. And what a shock the English British had we tend to think of upstate New York as a very busy place and never think of it as what it was back then, which is a battlefield. It was a major battlefield taking place in upstate New York and then later the Ohio Valley. And the French under Montcalm came down, I'm going to say right through this area, but not far from here. They came down through the Niagara Peninsula with their Huron allies. And they crossed into what would become the United States. And they began to raid British forts which were built along the Appalachian, the Allegheny Mountains. Eastern New York was a battlefield. If any of you have ever seen the movie Alaska the Mohicans, it's a very good movie in its depiction of the theater of war in that period of time. And Zeisberger went right there and began to labor among a number of the Algonquin people. And he built two or three Christian communities comprising around two to three thousand Algonquins who had found Christ. He was arrested by the British. They asked him what on earth he was doing out here in a battle zone. And his reply is I'm here building the kingdom of God. He would go on to labor in the Ohio Valley after the American Revolution. He would labor in the Ohio Valley. Again he built a number of prominent communities of first peoples. A number of them, this is shameful, a number of them were just burned to the ground by Americans. By the end of his life he died in the early 1800s. He had actually fled to Canada with some of the survivors of these communities and then went back to what was the United States. By the end of his life he had virtually nothing to show for close to 55 years of that part of the world. Virtually nothing to show. What he left behind was a model of what it means to give one's life. And these things gripped Cary. And Cary, that's what I mentioned at the beginning of the talk, if we think of Cary as the originator of the modern missionary movement, we're wrong. Because he was not. There were these other Moravians who went before him. But if we think of Cary as the one who inspired by these himself became a model and an inspiration for so many, we are right. But Cary didn't draw his inspiration out of nowhere. He had the scriptures ultimately, preeminently. In fact if we only had the scriptures we wouldn't need anything else to give us the command to go to the nations of the world. But he had the examples of others too. Well let me stop here and then when we come back it's around midway between 25 and 22. Why don't we stop for about 10 or 12 minutes and then when we come back we'll go to around 9.30 with the rest of Cary's story and have time for questions. The age 19 to 20. The second part deals with the history of missions. The third part of his inquiry is basically about 15 to 20 pages of tables. Just simply pages after page of tables. In which he lays down all the countries of the world, their geographical size in square miles as far as he could ascertain from books on geography, books on discovery like Captain Cook or from newspapers. And then a column which indicated the size of population and then a final column which indicated religion. It is noteworthy that the inquiry unlike some later books dealing with missions is not an overtly or overly emotional book. Missions is not presented the necessity of the church in being involved in missions. There is not a overplay as it were on the emotion of the reader. But Cary is laying out there very clearly. Look at the world in which you live. Look at its size. Look at the nations of the world and how many of them have no opportunity for the gospel. How many of them were sunk in pagan religion. In the fourth section he dealt with some of the practical problems about sending out missionaries. Problems that were raised by his contemporaries. Some of the problems it is intriguing are the same that are raised now. For instance it was said, how on earth are we ever going to get to these countries? They're miles away. And Cary's response to that was an easy one. Well, if Captain James Cook can brave the seas to sail around halfway around the world for the purpose of monetary, financial, temporal gain, how much more we who value the eternal souls of men and women can go. We can go on board their ships he said. We don't have to wait to be miraculously transported there. He had not seen Star Trek and that machine that beamed people up and down. But I mean that's the kind of feel I often get when he says we don't have to wait to be miraculously transported. We can go on board their ships. God has already opened the way. We don't need to make use of the technology that is around. Or some said, if we go to these countries, how on earth should we eat? What will we live on? Well, Cary says, the natives of these countries eat, don't they? They've got food. We can learn how to eat their food. In fact, Cary thought this was a very good idea and would make it a practice that when he did get to India in 1793, from 1793 to 1834 when he lived there half of his life, never came back to Britain, that he sought to adapt himself as much as he could to the culture of India. And part of that was learning how to appreciate and eat Indian food. He said, we can go there and eat what the people of those countries eat. We can go and grow our own garden. And Cary would have eventually five acres under cultivation in Bengal. And again, if you go to East India, Bengal in particular, and you mention the name of William Cary, two things come to mind. To even the average person in the street, and one of them is agriculture. Cary became a pioneer in revolutionizing methods of agriculture in Bengal. In fact, he founded a horticultural society. And I've read a number of his letters back to friends in England. Please, why don't you go out into the fields and get me, and he starts to list all kinds of flowers, the seeds and bulbs. He's writing to ministers. A number of them write back, we haven't got time to be going out looking for flowers and seeds. What are you doing out there? Oh, Cary said, go and pay a boy a penny to get these flowers. Many of the flowers in that part of India were introduced by William Cary. Eventually, he'll actually write a book on horticulture. And so he says to those who say, well, we won't have anything to eat out there. Cary says, we can grow our own food, or we can eat. Or Cary says, well, what about the dangers out there? These are barbarous people. And Cary has, again, a good response to that. He said, well, there was once upon a time with the British. You go back far enough in the history of the Dark Ages, and he says, God who sent Roman missionaries, talking here about men and women raised in the Roman Empire, who sent them to barbarous Britain and raised us up to sit in Christ. Well, we can do the same. Some said we might be killed by the natives out there. And Cary said the numbers of Europeans being killed are minimal. In fact, but the point he makes is we are not our own. When you sign up for the service of a person, your own master, you are now his. You should not heed the dangers. Then some said, well, what about the languages? Now, in this one area, Cary was completely and utterly unrealistic. He was a linguistic genius. He was brilliant linguistically. By the time he leaves England, he probably has about eight European languages. A couple of them, the ancient languages of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. But he also, when he gets to India, he will learn about five or six major languages. He's absolutely brilliant. And his answer is, well, it's nothing. You go out there, you live among a people for a year or two, and you know their language. Well, it doesn't work that way, unfortunately. I spend a significant amount of, well, I spend a number of weeks each year in Quebec. I wish it did work that way. And I have friends who've been laboring into just feeling that they're getting to the point of, so Cary misunderstood. And then in the final section, that's in the fourth section where he deals with the practical issues. The final section, he says, what is it then in come, what must we do? What are the steps we must take? The first step, he says, and this is important, you have fervent and united prayer. However, the influence of the Holy Spirit may be set at naught and run down by many, it'll be found upon trial that all means which we can use without the spirit will be ineffectual. If a temple is going to be raised for God in the heathen world, it'll not be by might, nor by power, nor by the authority of the magistrate, or the eloquence of the orator, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts. Zechariah chapter four. Thus, he says, we must be fervent in prayer, and we must be committed to praying together. Again, Cary rightly understood that great works of God are brought to birth in the womb of prayer. The second thing he emphasized is that there must be action, and Cary was pressed by the burden of the nations of the world, sunk in darkness, no light of the gospel. And so he says, suppose a company of Christians were to form a society. Societies were a common thing being formed in those days. They could make a plan of action, they could determine who should be sent out as missionaries, they could interview them, they could raise money. What he's talking about is a missionary society. Before this point in time, in the English-speaking world, there were probably only two groups who even came close to being what we call a missionary society. There was the Society for the Propagation of Christians, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, SPG. The SPCK, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, and the SPG, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Neither of them were really what we would call cross-cultural missionary societies. Both of them worked mostly in Christian areas. What Cary was arguing for was something very, very new. Today, Christian societies, or missionary societies, are not exactly a dime a dozen, but there are many of them. There are probably anywhere between three to five hundred alone in North America. None existed, basically. And so Cary's suggestion would be taken up, as we will see. One point further, before we conclude the book of the Inquiry, as Cary comes to the end, he raises the issue of how is this going to be funded? How are we going to raise funds for this? Most of the men in the circles with whom he moved were poor country pastors and people. How are we going to raise funds? Well, Cary said, one of the things that we can do is we can set aside, each family in our churches can set aside some money each week. And then he makes this point, and I like, what I like about the following point is the way in which the Gospel was enmeshed, or interwoven with social action. He says, what we can do is we can use the money that many of us are saving because we no longer take sugar in it. One of the things that many evangelicals, and we'll look at this in the last week, when we look at William Wilberforce, one of the things that many evangelicals in the last two decades of the 18th century gave up was sugar. And they gave up sugar because sugar came from one source. Namely, it was gothy in Jamaica, the blood and the sweat of slaves. One of the reasons why the slave trade was continued by the British was because the palate, the taste for sugar had deeply embedded itself in British meals, and they couldn't think of giving up their sugar. So many evangelicals gave up the sugar, and they didn't substitute anything else for it. And the money saved, Cary says, we can set that aside, and we'll fund missions. Well, Cary's dream came true in October 1792. Fourteen men in the back room of a widow's house in Northampton, a woman named Widow Wallace, you can actually still go to the house, I was there about seven, eight years ago. It's now a senior's complex, the bulk of it, but the room where these men met, and they passed around a little snuff box. They all gave a contribution of money. How much money was raised, but it was on that basis that William Cary was sent to India in the spring of 1793. It was a voyage of six months, and he sets foot in Calcutta in November 1793. Now I should mention a little bit about Cary's wife, Dorothy. Dorothy did not want to go, and Dorothy's story, when the Victorians told the story, those who came after Cary, the Victorian era really begins in 1837 when Queen Victoria ascended the throne. It ends really probably in 1914. She died in 1901, but the next 13 years of the reign of her son, Edward VII, were really the Victorian era. And the Victorians didn't like to talk about Dorothy, they didn't like to talk about this side of Cary's story. When they did, Dorothy always got a rough shake. She was a stumbling block to Cary. She was a thorn in his side. She never was appreciated fairly. Dorothy did not want to go to India. She was a woman who, when William met her, was completely illiterate. Cary taught her to read and to write. She had never traveled more than 20 miles, or all her family lived in that one area. She had never seen large numbers of people, the numbers that she would see, for instance, in India. It's been rightly said that if on a Monday morning at rush hour, you are down at Union Station and the subway line, and you stand there on the platform for one hour, you will see more people in that one hour than most people in England, rural England, saw in their whole lives. She had lived a very secluded life. Her horizon had been the next field over, or the hills, as you can see. And suddenly now, her husband's talking about going to India, and she refused to go. Cary was so burdened by the vision of the Gospel being planted in India, that he eventually came up with this solution. He would go to India with their eldest son, set up home, and then he would come back for her. Eventually that was agreed on, and Cary set sail in 1793. But England is at war with France, a war that began in 1792 and would not end until 1815, 23 years of war, as Napoleon seeks to spread the French Revolution throughout Europe. And Cary's ship is held up in a little place called the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England, and it can't sail because of a French blockade. One of the men that Cary was sailing with, he was sailing with another man named John Thomas, a surgeon who was going out with him to Calcutta, said to Cary, we can't have this break-up in your family. He went back to speak to Dorothy, and pled with her, she was adamant, she was not going. And finally though, he said to her, how can you see your family split up like this? Would you go if your sister Kitty went? I don't know whether he talked to Kitty already, I hope he had, but she said yes. And she agreed that if Kitty, her sister, went along, she would go. And so Dorothy went, a reluctance, very reluctant. They reach India, and Cary had a very important choice to make. Within months, the money that he had been sent with is running out, he has the funds that are being sent by his friends back in England, very loyal friends, is not enough, and he realizes he needs to take a job. He has to make a very difficult decision, he decides not to stay in Calcutta, where there was an English quarter, but to go north about 280 miles to a place called Mudavasi. Now Mudavasi would be ideal for Cary to learn Bengali, and to learn a number of Indian languages. He would be immersed in Indian culture and language. There are no Europeans for miles, it would be deadly. At least in Calcutta there were other Europeans to talk to. In Mudavasi, there are none to talk to. And Cary takes a job as a manager of an indigo factory, the manufacture of a dye, indigo, the dark blue. Dorothy is at home, and then the unthinkable happens, the eldest son dies. And she begins in the 1790s a descent into India, and by 1797-98 she is completely insane. She attacks William at least twice, trying to kill him. Spreads rumors about him in the area, there are some whom she can speak to, and eventually has to be placed in a strait, and it's a horrifying story. And the cost to Cary is one that we have to think about, and I'll be honest, I'm a child of my time, and I don't have an answer for raising this part of the story. And the question that we have to face is, was Cary right to go to India? He knew he was called, but should he have gone when his wife had no sense of that? The Victorians generally answered that question easily, their answer was easy, of course he should go. And they had models like that, David Livingston, Livingston was out in Africa, probably for 20-25 years, looking for the source of the Nile, evangelizing various peoples as he went along. His wife was back in England for about 20 years, 25 years. C.C. Studs even worse, the founder of Worldwide Evangelization Crusade. He goes to China for 20 years, has a great time planting churches there, his wife's back in India, he comes back for a year, most of the time spent going around the country, telling people of the need for missionaries in India, then he takes off to the Congo, what becomes the Belgian Congo, or Zaire currently, for another 20 years, and he sees his wife maybe for one year or so, out of like 40 years. Now I personally, and you might disagree with me, I personally find that appalling. The Victorians had no problem with it, it seems. To me that's not a marriage, a man should never have gotten married. And I'm personally convinced that if a man is called into vocational ministry, he needs, or he senses a call to vocational ministry, his wife has to have equally that sense. Now you may disagree with me, it's a question I'm wrestling with personally, I haven't answered. I'm in the midst of actually doing a biography of one of William Carey's close friends, a man named Samuel Pearce, and Samuel Pearce wrestled with the same question. He felt God was calling him to be a missionary with Carey. Now thankfully in his case his wife was complete, but he has a long section in a diary which has never been published in which he goes through scriptural arguments, pro and con, as to whether or not if his wife was unwilling, should he go. The example he's got in the back of his mind is William Carey. It's not an easy, it's not an easy question. I'll be honest, I am a child of my time, and I find it very difficult, the decision that Carey made. Some of the Victorians found it to be easy to work through it because they never talked about story, they just ignored her. But certainly her experience needs to be brought into question here. And yes I know, and I'm committed to that when it comes to the cause of Christ, we are to love the Lord Jesus Christ more than wife or husband, father, mother, a child. But surely there's something else going on. Carey had vows that he had made to his wife, to honour her and love her. And were those vows fulfilled in the situation he put her in? I'll be honest and I don't have an easy answer. It was a difficult part. He will marry after her death and he'll marry a woman named, it was a Danish, Charlotte Rumor, and she was fully committed to the mission. It would be the wife that cared. It's a difficult part of the story. I don't have an answer. Why did he bring it up if he doesn't have an answer for it? Because it's part of the story and we need to see that God uses power and God does great things for William Carey. And I have great admiration for the applauding of this man. And yet there's this part of his story. Now Carey was illegally in India. India, when the British conquered India from the French, or at least this portion of India from the French, and began to build an empire in India, they put in charge of India a company called the East India Company. And the East India Company was a trading venture. And its goal, to put it bluntly, its goal was to rape India and to get as much money and wealth out to transport it back into British hands. And they didn't like the presence of missionaries in India. Missionaries would upset the whole thing. They might get the Muslims and the Hindus up in arms. And the East India Company wanted a peaceful, as much as they could obtain, a peaceful situation in which to carry out their business. And so it was illegal for any missionary to be in India. And Carey's presence, this was another reason why he didn't want to stay in Calcutta. It would be soon discovered why he was there. If he went to Mudnavati, he could escape that discovery. Carey realised that he was in India illegally. But again, I think rightly so, in this case rightly so, he was to heed the call of the summons of the King of Heaven. But it is because of this, in 1799 he decides to move from Mudnavati to join two other missionaries who came out William Ward and Joshua Marshman. William Ward was single. Joshua Marshman would come with his wife Hannah. And Hannah Marshman would be responsible for raising Carey's three boys. One died, the other three sons would be raised by Hannah Marshman. They were actually running wild. Dorothy's completely incapacitated. And Carey's too busy with a variety of things to take care of his sons. And Hannah Marshman raises them. And all three become solid Christians and all three will become missionaries. And so Carey moves from Mudnavati, comes down to a place called Serampore. S-E-R-A-M-P-O-R-E. And he will be at Serampore for the rest of his life, from 1800 to 1800. And he and Marshman and Ward become known as the Serampore Trio. And they establish a community at Serampore. Carey realises a number of things. He realises from the Moravians that to successfully plant a church in parts of the world, you need a base community as it were. He needs the support of other men and women. He needs their gifts alongside his. Never get the impression that the best of missionaries whom God has used in the history of the church are lone rangers out there by themselves. They are often, or nearly always, men and women whom God places in union with other men and women who support them and whose gifts facilitate theirs or complement theirs. And Marshman and Ward's gifts complemented Carey's. Carey was a great linguist. Ward was a great preacher. Marshman was a great administrator. And Marshman administrated this entire community. They each had their own individual homes, but all of the excess money went into the community. Eventually, Carey would be appointed Professor of Sanskrit and Oriental Languages at the College of Fort William in Calcutta. The College of Fort William had been founded by the British in Calcutta to train civil servants for the running of India. And here is Carey educating the children of aristocrats. It's quite a turnaround in terms of British society. He comes from a very low class, and here he is training the very, very wealthy. Earning oodles of money, to put it in our language. Far more money than he would ever have seen back in India. Most of that money is ploughed back into this Serempore community. Why Serempore? I forgot. It was a Danish colony. It was a little kind of haven of Danes, not far, about 20 miles north of Calcutta. And so the East India Company had no jurisdiction there, and they could carry on their ministry. A huge printing press is established, and over the next 30 years, close to 50% of the new Bible versions that appear, new translations, are put out at Serempore. And it becomes a place where the Gospel is sent forth physically. Missionaries coming over, lodging there for a while, and then being sent out to plant churches. The Gospel is sent forth by the printed word. Carey rightly understood that the printed page was a powerful medium for the propagation of the Gospel. There were six principles, and I want to touch on them briefly, and then draw our story to a close. There were six principles that guided Carey. The first was to fix in their minds the value of the souls of the Indian people. This is a very important point. And maybe because Carey came from the lower classes, he was able to do this, maybe better than some who came from the higher classes in England. In England, the British were very class conscious. Also, there was, in much of British culture, like it or not, there were elements of racism. The British then viewed themselves as better than many of the non-European peoples of the world, and especially when they thought of the Indians. When Carey got out there, one of the things he wanted to fix firmly in his own mind was that these men and women are human beings whom God loves. They have immortal souls. And he needed to realize that his persevering in the work was intimately related to his placing a great value on the souls of these men and women. And thus he could talk about how they needed to think about the way the wicked one had India in his power, but how God had loved them. May our hearts bleed, he said, over these poor idolaters. But he had great hope. He raised a selfish and brutalized Britain. If you know anything about British history, if you go back far enough to the Celt, when the Romans first encountered them, the Britons who went into battle, painting their bodies blue, spiking their hair, the whole recent hairstyles with spiked hair was nothing new. Contemporary archaeologists believe that the early Celts would get a kind of a mud mixture to spike their hair up as they went into battle. That's where the rest of the Britons, many of them, come from. Or the Angles, and the Saxons, or the Vikings, I mean brutal people groups. He raised the selfish and brutalized Britons to sit in heavenly places. In Christ Jesus can raise these slaves, that is the Indians, these slaves. That's the first thing. They needed to appreciate these people for who, what they were. They were human beings in the image of the living God with immortal souls. Secondly, Kerry emphasized, we need to approach these people in their own languages and cultures. We need to learn their languages. Kerry found that easy, but some of them didn't. But they had to approach the Indians in their own languages. They had to learn their cultures. That's why Kerry emphasized, and actually started, printing Bengali literature. I mentioned two things, if you mention the name of William Kerry, if you go to Bengal today, two things. The average Bengali knows about William Kerry. He is the renovator and the founder of Bengali horticulture and agriculture, and he is the key person in the renaissance of Bengali literature. And what Kerry did was he went back, and many of the old stories that went back a couple of thousand years, some of them in print, some of them not in print, passed down orally. Kerry put them down on paper. He knew that you need to learn how people think. There was no way that they were going to be able to reach the Bengalis or any of the other Indian people groups unless they learned how they think. How did they learn how they think? They needed to read their literature and their stories and learn their culture. Later missionaries that came out from Britain in the late Victorian era, the 1870s onward, through to probably around 1910, the First World War, forgot this very important principle. And many of those later missionaries went out as agents unknowingly, unwittingly, of British imperialism, and sought to make the people they evangelised Britain, and did not respect the cultures of these people. There were areas, this is a very delicate issue, I know, there were areas where Kerry knew he had to fight Indian culture. For instance, the practice of saki, where a widow would throw herself or be forced to throw herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband. Kerry saw this time and again, and Kerry fought it, and sought to encourage the East India Company to pass laws to forbid it, and eventually they did. Or the practice of caste, C-A-S-T-E, that practice whereby Indians in one social group would have absolutely nothing to do with others in a lower social group, because these people had been unfortunate to be wicked in a previous life, and therefore they'd been brought back in this life as street sweepers, or garbage pickers, or whatever. And when Kerry evangelised Indians, and they were converted, they had to break caste, because Kerry knew if all he focused on was one group of Indians, the Christians would be blocked into that caste, and wouldn't be able to reach above or below. There was an old church in India called the Mark Thoma Church, goes back to Syrian missions in the 3rd or 4th century, and the Mark Thoma Church had had that happen to them. They'd been blocked into a certain caste. And that was another area Kerry fought. Kerry fought the practice of the dedication of young Indian girls to temples where they would become temple prostitutes. So there were areas where Kerry was very critical of Indian culture, but there were many areas of Indian culture that were neutral, so to speak. They did things differently from the British, maybe initially the British didn't like it, but they didn't penetrate to the heart of the Gospel, and if they were going to win these men and women, they had to become like them, and try to make other people in the world, other cultures, British. And some of the reaction in this century against the Gospel in parts of Africa and Asia has been because the Gospel was sometimes seen as an agent of imperialism. Thirdly, at the heart of Kerry's preaching was Christ and Christ crucified. Listen to Kerry's words. In preaching the heathen, we must keep to the example of Paul and make the great subject of our preaching Christ the crucified. The doctrine of Christ's expiatory death and all sufficient merits has been and must ever remain the grand means of conversion. It was the proclaiming of this doctrine that made the Reformation in the time of Luther spread with such rapidity. It was this truth which filled the sermons of the most useful men in the 18th century. We've looked at two of them, Whitefield and Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards. So far as our experience goes in this work, we've freely acknowledged that every Hindu among us who has been gained to Christ has been won by the astonishing, all-constraining love exhibited in our Redeemer's propitiatory death. Fourthly, Kerry emphasized that when the missionaries went out to preach, they shouldn't begin by attacking the follies of Islam. That's not where they are to begin. Yes, at a certain point you need to get to that, but that's not where you begin. You don't begin by alienating your audience. You begin in a positive direction by speaking of Christ and Christ crucified, the revelation of the gospel in our Lord Jesus Christ. He emphasized missionaries shouldn't go out to Hindu temples and start to tear down the images. Fifthly, as soon as a person professed conversion, they were to break cast and they were to be baptized. Baptism, Kerry rightly knew, was the Jordan, or maybe that's not the... the Rubicon, is the word I want. The Rubicon in a man and woman's life. You know the story of the Rubicon, the Rubicon, that river in northern Italy when Julius Caesar was marching down with his legions into northern Italy and the Roman Senate basically told him, you leave your legions beyond, on the north side of the Rubicon. If Caesar crosses with his legions across the Rubicon, it is a declaration of war against the Roman Senate. He crossed, as history tells us, with his legions across the Rubicon. The Rubicon, the place of decision. Likewise, baptism, and we're talking, now some of you might be thinking, well he's a Baptist, that's why he's talking like this, but we're talking about the first generation. For them, the baptism was the place of the Rubicon. As it is today, it's interesting, among Muslims, it is when a person is baptized, that point is a point of no return. Likewise, among Jews, Orthodox Jews, it is baptism at which point it is declared, that person is now dead to our family, to our culture, to our people. The first person baptized, baptized in the Ganges River, that river holy, at least to Hindus, was a man named Krishnapal, the carpenter. He never changed his name, Cary had no interest in making these people change their names, Krishna, the name of Hindu deity. He becomes a great missionary, for about 20 years in India. Finally, the sixth point, is Cary knew the importance of theological education, and Cary started Serempore College, to educate men, in that day only men, but eventually men and women, potential missionaries. And they studied there, not only Christian thought, but they also read the Bengali classics. Cary had them learn Sanskrit, a language akin to Latin, in his day. Cary would die in 1834, he had never taken a furlough. When he was dying, he was visited by Alexander Duff, Scottish, young man at the time, he would be a Presbyterian missionary in India, for many years. Duff was only 28, and he came in, and he was in awe at Cary. Any missionary who came out to India, didn't matter what denomination, always went to see Cary. And Duff went to see Cary, and he was in awe at Cary, and began to tell Cary, Cary's dying. He's telling Cary about all of his achievements. Finally, Cary whispered to him to pray, and Duff knelt and prayed, and then began to leave, and he had gotten as far as the door, and he heard a feeble voice calling him back. And then he heard these words, Mr. Duff, you have been speaking about Dr. Cary. When I'm gone, say nothing about Dr. Cary. Speak about Cary's saviour. Duff apparently went away, rebuked of a lesson he never forgot. I'm not sure William Cary would have liked our two lectures tonight, but I hope I've been true to the spirit that he imbibed most of his life after his conversion, which is a longing that he be hid in Christ, and that Christ be known, and Christ be seen. It's a longing he has inscribed, as I mentioned, on his tombstone, a wretched, poor, and helpless worm, on thy kind arms. What is his legacy? Two things, very quickly. First of all, the importance of prayer. If we want to see great things done for God, we must be expecting great things. If we want to see great things done for God, we must expect them in the context of prayer. We must be people given to prayer. And prayer, especially the gospel, be spread throughout the world. There are still somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 languages in this world that do not have any portion of the scriptures in them. 6,000 languages according to the latest stats in the world. Some of those languages only have a few hundred people. But nonetheless, 2,000 languages. One thinks of that whole block of the world that runs from North Africa, places like Algeria, Morocco, through the Middle East, the Saudi Peninsula, and Iran, and Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Muslim world. And surely the Lord Jesus wants people from that sector of humanity around the throne. And I find it somewhat audacious that men and women think that the gospel has been sent to the ends of the earth, and the past has been fulfilled in our days. Or even more audacious that we can fulfill it in a few years. And maybe I'm wrong. But I think that one thing, wrong in terms of the time period, but one thing I think is certain, is we cannot sit back and think the task is done. We must be men and women committed to prayer. Men and women committed to asking God, raise up in our churches, in our midst, those who will go, who will not count the cost. It could be that God is speaking to one here tonight. We need to think seriously on these matters. If God can use a plotter like William Carey. Now he's brilliant linguistically. If God can use a William Carey. The other thing that Carey knew, and the other part of his legacy, is Carey was willing to hazard, and I'm to bring the gospel to multitudes lost in darkness. They believed in the eternal punishment, not the annihilation of the wicked. They entertained no hopeful views of the salvation that general revelation could come, but that salvation was found alone in the gospel. And we need to have the same conviction. We need to weigh seriously the situation of men and women. Not only across the seas, but in our own communities. We need to ask God to give us the spirit of boldness. We need to live lives of integrity in a day in which our culture increasingly is living lives of lies. We need to live lives of integrity and truth. And when God gives opportunity. Well let me stop here and ask if there might be any questions.