[Pioneers and Founders by Charlotte Mary Yonge]@TWC D-Link bookPioneers and Founders CHAPTER V 21/31
The Society that had been with such difficulty established at home, was numbering multitudes of subscribers both in England and America; it had awakened a like spirit in other sects, and whereas no dissenting minister in London had at first taken up Carey's cause, it had become a scandal for a minister not to subscribe to or promote missions to the heathen.
Missionary reports were everywhere distributed, young men aspired to the work, and American Universities did honour to the ability and scholarship of the pioneers of Serampore. Mrs.Carey died on the 7th of December, 1807, having spent twelve years in a state of constant melancholy and often raving insanity.
Poor woman! she was from the first a victim to her husband's aspirations, which she never understood.
There is something piteous in the cobbler's daughter marrying the apprentice to keep on the business, and finding him a genius and a hero on her hands, starving, being laughed at, and at last carried off to a strange land and fatal climate, all without the least comprehension or sympathy for the cause, and her mind failing before the material prosperity came, which she might have regarded as compensation. In 1807, when some progress had been made, the grant for the translation of the Scriptures was withdrawn; but the superintendents resolved to persevere on their own account, and at the same time to collect all the information in their power respecting the Christians in India, so as to be able to rouse the cold hearts at home to the perception that a real work was in progress.
For this purpose, Dr.Claudius Buchanan, the Provost of the College at Fort William, made an expedition of inquiry among the various Christians, and his little book, "Christian Researches," brought much before the public at home, of which they had hitherto been ignorant. Before his time the enormities of the worship of Jaghernauth, and the horrors of the car, beneath which human victims threw themselves, had hardly been realized; and his very effective style of writing brought into full prominence the atrocities of the Suttee, or burning of widows on the funeral pile, a custom with which it was supposed to be impossible to interfere, but which has been proved to be entirely a corrupt practice, unsanctioned by any ancient law, only encouraged by the Brahmins out of avarice.
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