mind on hearing those words which broke me off from the Church of
England. The idea was certainly very crude, but useful in bringing
me from attending a lifeless, carnal ministry to one more
evangelical. I concluded that the Church of England, as established
by law, was the camp in which all were protected from the scandal of
the cross, and that I ought to bear the reproach of Christ among the
dissenters; and accordingly I always afterwards attended divine
worship among them."

At eighteen Carey was thus emptied of self and there was room for
Christ. In a neighbouring village he consorted much for a time with
some followers of William Law, who had not long before passed away
in a village in the neighbourhood, and select passages from whose
writings the Moravian minister, Francis Okely, of Northampton, had
versified. These completed the negative process. "I felt ruined and
helpless." Then to his spiritual eyes, purged of self, there
appeared the Crucified One; and to his spiritual intelligence there
was given the Word of God. The change was that wrought on Paul by a
Living Person. It converted the hypocritical Pharisee into the
evangelical preacher; it turned the vicious peasant into the most
self-denying saint; it sent the village shoemaker far off to the
Hindoos.

But the process was slow; it had been so even in Paul's case. Carey
found encouragement in intercourse with some old Christians in
Hackleton, and he united with a few of them, including his
fellow-apprentice, in forming a congregational church. The state of
the parish may be imagined from its recent history. Hackleton is
part of Piddington, and the squire had long appropriated the living
of £300 a year, the parsonage, the glebe, and all tithes, sending