Reformation. And it was another German shoemaker, Boehme, whose
exalted theosophy as expounded by William Law became one link in the
chain that drew Carey to Christ, as it influenced Wesley and
Whitefield, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge. George Fox was only
nineteen when, after eight years' service with a shoemaker in
Drayton, Leicestershire, not far from Carey's county, he heard the
voice from heaven which sent him forth in 1643 to preach
righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, till Cromwell
sought converse with him, and the Friends became a power among men.

Carlyle has, in characteristic style, seized on the true meaning
that was in the man when he made to himself a suit of leather and
became the modern hero of Sartor Resartus. The words fit William
Carey's case even better than that of George Fox:--"Sitting in his
stall, working on tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin,
swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had
nevertheless a Living Spirit belonging to him; also an antique
Inspired Volume, through which, as through a window, it could look
upwards and discern its celestial Home." That "shoe-shop, had men
known it, was a holier place than any Vatican or
Loretto-shrine...Stitch away, every prick of that little instrument
is pricking into the heart of slavery." Thirty-six years after Fox
had begun to wear his leathern doublet he directed all Friends
everywhere that had Indians or blacks to preach the Gospel to them.

But it would be too long to tell the list of workers in what has
been called the gentle craft, whom the cobbler's stall, with its
peculiar opportunities for rhythmic meditation, hard thinking, and
oft harder debating, has prepared for the honours of literature and
scholarship, of philanthropy and reform. To mention only Carey's