minister of Moulton, he kept a school by day, made or cobbled shoes
by night, and preached on Sunday. So Paul had made tents of his
native Cilician goatskin in the days when infant Christianity was
chased from city to city, and the cross was a reproach only less
bitter, however, than evangelical dissent in Christian England in
the eighteenth century. The providence which made and kept young
Carey so long a shoemaker, put him in the very position in which he
could most fruitfully receive and nurse the sacred fire that made
him the most learned scholar and Bible translator of his day in the
East. The same providence thus linked him to the earliest Latin
missionaries of Alexandria, of Asia Minor, and of Gaul, who were
shoemakers, and to a succession of scholars and divines, poets and
critics, reformers and philanthropists, who have used the
shoemaker's life to become illustrious.1 St. Mark chose for his
successor, as first bishop of Alexandria, that Annianus whom he had
been the means of converting to Christ when he found him at the
cobbler's stall. The Talmud commemorates the courage and the wisdom
of "Rabbi Jochanan, the shoemaker," whose learning soon after found
a parallel in Carey's. Like Annianus, "a poor shoemaker named
Alexander, despised in the world but great in the sight of God, who
did honour to so exalted a station in the Church," became famous as
Bishop of Comana in Cappadocia, as saint, preacher, and
missionary-martyr. Soon after there perished in the persecutions of
Diocletian, at Soissons, the two missionary brothers whose name of
Crispin has ever since been gloried in by the trade, which they
chose at once as a means of livelihood and of helping their poor
converts. The Hackleton apprentice was still a child when the great
Goethe was again adding to the then artificial literature of his
country his own true predecessor, Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of
Nürnberg, the friend of Luther, the meistersinger of the