recollect having read anything on the subject till I applied to Mr.
Ryland, senior, to baptise me. He lent me a pamphlet, and turned me
over to his son," who thus told the story when the Baptist
Missionary Society held its first public meeting in
London:--"October 5th, 1783: I baptised in the river Nen, a little
beyond Dr. Doddridge's meeting-house at Northampton, a poor
journeyman shoemaker, little thinking that before nine years had
elapsed, he would prove the first instrument of forming a society
for sending missionaries from England to preach the gospel to the
heathen. Such, however, as the event has proved, was the purpose of
the Most High, who selected for this work not the son of one of our
most learned ministers, nor of one of the most opulent of our
dissenting gentlemen, but the son of a parish clerk."

The spot may still be visited at the foot of the hill, where the Nen
fed the moat of the old castle, in which many a Parliament sat from
the days of King John. The text of that morning's sermon happened to
be the Lord's saying, "Many first shall be last, and the last
first," which asserts His absolute sovereignty in choosing and in
rewarding His missionaries, and introduces the parable of the
labourers in the vineyard. As Carey wrote in the fulness of his
fame, that the evangelical doctrines continued to be the choice of
his heart, so he never wavered in his preference for the Baptist
division of the Christian host. But from the first he enjoyed the
friendship of Scott and Newton, and of his neighbour Mr. Robinson of
St. Mary's, Leicester, and we shall see him in India the centre of
the Episcopal and Presbyterian chaplains and missionaries from
Martyn Wilson to Lacroix and Duff. His controversial spirit died
with the youthful conceit and self-righteousness of which it is so
often the birth. When at eighteen he learned to know himself, he