William Carey: The Apprentice Who Lost an Argument

The shop was small, and it smelled of leather, wax and tallow candles. Two young men sat at their benches, bent over shoes, with awls and thread and hammers in their hands. And they were arguing about God.

This was a village in Northamptonshire, in the middle of England, in the late 1770s. One of the apprentices was William Carey, about seventeen, quick, stubborn and proud of being right. He belonged to the Church of England, like his father, who was the parish clerk in his home village, and he looked down on the “Dissenters,” the Christians who worshipped outside the national church in their plain little meeting houses. The other apprentice, John Warr, was a Dissenter, and a serious one. As they worked, he talked to William about sin, and about Jesus, and about what it meant to be truly changed by God.

William argued back. He was good at arguing. But years later, looking back, he admitted that Warr had something he did not have, and that the arguments he kept winning were not the point. John Warr lent him books. He kept talking. And slowly, in a shoemaker’s shop, a boy who thought he had all the answers began to lose.

William Carey would become one of the most famous missionaries who ever lived. But his story starts here, at a cobbler’s bench, with a fellow apprentice who would not stop being kind and would not stop telling the truth.

A Weaver’s Son

William Carey was born on 17 August 1761 in Paulerspury, a village in Northamptonshire. His father, Edmund, was a weaver who worked at a loom in their cottage, and later became the village schoolmaster and parish clerk. The family was poor, but there were books in the house, and William could read them.

He was a curious boy. He kept birds and insects in his room. He loved plants, and spent time with his uncle Peter, a gardener. Above all he loved stories of travel and faraway places, especially the voyage of Christopher Columbus, and other boys reportedly nicknamed him “Columbus.” He also had a stubborn streak. A family story tells of him trying again and again to climb a tree to reach a bird’s nest, falling, and going back up until he got it. Whether or not every detail is right, his sister remembered that whatever he started, he finished.

He wanted to be a gardener. But he had a painful skin condition that made it hard for him to work in the sun. So at fourteen his father apprenticed him to a shoemaker, Clarke Nichols, in the nearby village of Piddington. An apprentice in those days lived with his master, worked long hours for his keep, and learned the trade over several years. It was not a path that led anywhere grand. That is the point of the story.

A Bad Shilling

The shoemaker’s shop is where everything began to change, and not only because of John Warr.

William was, by his own later account, not a good boy, whatever he looked like on the outside. He went to church, and sometimes he swore and lied. One Christmas, when apprentices went round collecting small gifts of money from their master’s customers, he was given a bad shilling, a fake coin worth nothing. He tried to get rid of it by swapping it for a good one from money that belonged to his master, and he told lies to cover it. He was found out. In a small village that was a real humiliation, and he was ashamed to show his face.

Carey later saw this as one of the ways God brought him low. He had thought of himself as a decent, church-going young man, better than the Dissenters he despised. Now he knew he was a thief and a liar, and he could not argue his way out of that. Meanwhile Warr kept talking with him about Christ, and William began to go, sometimes, to the prayer meeting at the Dissenters’ chapel.

We should be honest about how much we do not know. Carey never gave a single date for his conversion. As far as we can tell from what he wrote later, it was not one dramatic night but a slow turning, over months, in which he stopped trusting in his church-going and his own goodness and began to trust in Jesus Christ alone. He came to believe that he was a sinner who could do nothing to save himself, that Christ had died in the place of sinners, and that anyone who trusted Christ would be forgiven and made new. By the time he was about seventeen or eighteen, he was a different person.

Outside the Camp

One date we do have. On 10 February 1779, the government called for a national day of fasting and prayer, because Britain was at war with its American colonies. Carey went to the prayer meeting at the little Dissenting chapel in Hackleton. A visiting minister preached on a verse from Hebrews, which Carey heard in the words of the King James Bible: “Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach” (Hebrews 13:13).

The verse is about Jesus, who was put to death outside the walls of Jerusalem, like an outcast. It calls Christians to follow him even when it means being looked down on. Carey took it personally. He decided he must leave the respectable church of his family and join the despised Dissenters he had once mocked. For a teenager whose father was the parish clerk, that was not a small step. It meant going “outside the camp” of everything he had grown up in.

Later that year his master, Clarke Nichols, died, and William went to work for another shoemaker, Thomas Old, in Hackleton. In June 1781, aged nineteen, he married Old’s sister-in-law, Dorothy Plackett. She was some years older than him, from a Dissenting family, and, like most poor country women then, she could not read or write. Soon after, Thomas Old died, and William took over the business, along with the care of Old’s widow and children. He was still only about twenty.

The Cobbler’s Bench

Here is the thing people remember most about the young William Carey: he taught himself languages while he mended shoes.

As a boy he had already worked his way through a Latin vocabulary book. In Clarke Nichols’s shop, according to his own account, he found a commentary on the New Testament with some Greek words in it. He could not read them, so he copied them out carefully and took them to a weaver in his home village named Tom Jones, who had once had a good education and could tell him what they meant. That is how he started Greek. Later he learned Hebrew, and then Dutch and French, mostly by himself, often with a book propped open at his bench while his hands worked the leather.

He was not, he insisted, a genius. He was simply someone who did not stop. Years later he told his nephew that if anyone ever wrote his life and called him a plodder, that would be an accurate description. He meant it.

In October 1783, when he was twenty-two, he was baptised as a believer in the River Nene at Northampton, by a young Baptist minister named John Ryland. He began to preach in nearby villages, walking miles each Sunday, and in 1785 he moved to Moulton, where he was minister of a tiny Baptist church, ran a village school and still made shoes, because none of the three paid enough to live on.

The Map on the Wall

It was during these years, in his early twenties, that something seized him and would not let go.

He read books about the world. He was especially gripped by the published journals of Captain James Cook, the English explorer who had sailed across the Pacific and died in Hawaii in 1779. Carey later said that reading Cook’s last voyage first set him thinking about the peoples of the world who had never heard of Jesus. He began collecting every fact he could find: how many people lived in each country, what languages they spoke, what they believed.

There are stories, told by people who knew him and repeated ever since, that he made his own large map of the world and hung it on the wall by his bench, covered in his own notes about the population and religion of each land, and that for his school pupils he made a globe from scraps of leather. Some details may have grown in the telling. But the picture is true to him: a young shoemaker, glancing up from his work at a hand-made map of nations, and praying for them.

The question that kept him awake was simple. Jesus had told his followers, “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). Did that command still apply? Many ministers of Carey’s day thought it had been given to the first apostles only. If God wanted to save people in far countries, they said, he would do it himself, in his own time. There is a famous story that when Carey raised the question at a ministers’ meeting in the mid-1780s, an older minister told him to sit down, because when God pleased to convert the heathen, he would do it without Carey’s help. The story was told years later and the minister’s son denied his father said it, so we cannot be sure of the words. But it captures what Carey was up against.

Expect Great Things

Carey did not give up. In 1789 he became minister of a Baptist church in Leicester. And in May 1792, when he was thirty, he published a book with a very long title: An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. Its opening sentence argued that since Christ told us to pray for his kingdom to come, “it becomes us not only to express our desires of that event by words, but to use every lawful method to spread the knowledge of his name.”

That was his point. It was not enough to pray and wait. Christians should actually do something: raise money, send people, learn languages. The Enquiry answered the objections one by one: the distance, the danger, how a missionary would live, and the difficulty of strange languages. And in the middle he set out pages of tables listing every country he could find, with its size, its population and its religion. The cobbler had turned his wall map into an argument.

A few weeks later, at the end of May 1792, Carey preached to a meeting of Baptist ministers in Nottingham. His text was Isaiah 54:2–3, which he read in the King James wording: “Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes.” As far as we can tell from those who heard it, his point was that God was telling his people to expect him to do far more than they imagined, and to make room for it.

The sermon itself has not survived. What has survived is its two-part message, which became the most famous thing Carey ever said. Today it is almost always quoted as “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” But the earliest written reports give it in a shorter form, simply “Expect great things; attempt great things.” The words “from God” and “for God” seem to have been added later, as the saying was retold. Either way, the meaning is the same.

Even so, the ministers nearly went home without doing anything. According to a tradition, Carey pleaded with his friend Andrew Fuller not to let the moment pass. Whatever was said, it worked. On 2 October 1792, in a widow’s house in Kettering, a dozen or so ministers formed a small society to send missionaries overseas, and pledged a little over thirteen pounds. It became the Baptist Missionary Society. A story handed down from those early days says that Carey compared the work to going down a deep mine: he would go down, if the others would hold the ropes. The exact words vary, but the arrangement was real. Fuller held the ropes in England for the rest of his life.

Going, and the Cost

Carey offered to go himself, to India, with a doctor named John Thomas who had already worked there.

Not everyone was pleased. His father is said to have asked if he was mad. And his wife Dorothy said no. She had three young sons and was expecting a fourth child. She had never been far from her village. She did not want to take her children across the world on a voyage of five months, to a hot country full of illnesses, with no money and no promise of a return. It is easy to tell this story as if she simply lacked faith. That is not fair. She had good reasons, and she had not been the one who felt the call.

At first Carey planned to go without her, taking only their eldest son, Felix. That first attempt failed when the ship sailed without them, because they had no permission from the East India Company, which controlled British trade with India and did not want missionaries. Then, at the last minute, with her new baby only weeks old, Dorothy agreed to come, if her sister Kitty came too. On 13 June 1793 the whole family sailed from Dover on a Danish ship. William Carey was thirty-one. He never saw England again.

It would be dishonest to stop there, as if the story became an adventure. In India the family was poor and often ill. Their five-year-old son Peter died of dysentery in 1794. Dorothy, who had never wanted to come, grew seriously mentally ill, with delusions and terrible fears, and never recovered. For years Carey worked on with her suffering beside him, until she died in 1807. Some who have studied his life believe he neglected his family, and especially his sons, for the work. That is a fair question to ask, and there is no tidy answer to it.

What Came After

Carey’s first years in India were spent in Bengal, partly managing an indigo works to support his family while he learned Bengali with the help of an Indian teacher, Ram Basu. In 1800 he moved to Serampore, a small Danish settlement near Calcutta (now Kolkata), where the British could not expel missionaries. There he worked with Joshua Marshman, a schoolteacher, and William Ward, a printer.

For seven years there was not a single Indian convert. Then in December 1800 a Bengali carpenter named Krishna Pal was baptised in the river at Serampore, alongside Carey’s son Felix. Krishna Pal became a preacher and wrote hymns in Bengali.

The plodder kept plodding. With Indian scholars working beside him, Carey and his colleagues translated the whole Bible into six languages, including Bengali and Sanskrit, and parts of it into dozens more. He became a professor at a college in Calcutta, wrote grammars and dictionaries, and founded Serampore College to train Indian students. He campaigned against the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral fires, which was finally banned in Bengal in 1829. In 1812 a fire destroyed the mission’s printing works and years of manuscripts, and he began again.

He died at Serampore on 9 June 1834, aged seventy-two, after more than forty years in India. On his grave he asked for no titles, only two lines from a hymn by Isaac Watts: “A wretched, poor, and helpless worm, / On thy kind arms I fall.” The boy who had argued with John Warr at the cobbler’s bench had learned the lesson Warr taught him: the only one worth trusting is Christ.

In Their Own Words

“I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything.”

— William Carey, to his nephew Eustace Carey, in Eustace Carey’s Memoir of William Carey (1836)

Think It Through

1. John Warr kept talking to William about Christ even though William argued with him. What makes someone’s faith hard to argue with? Is there anyone you could be that kind of friend to?
2. Carey said he was not a genius but a plodder. Which matters more for what God might do through you: talent or perseverance? Why?
3. Many Christians in Carey’s time thought God would reach the nations without their help. What reasons do people give today for not getting involved in what God is doing in the world?
4. Dorothy Carey did not want to go to India, and paid a heavy price. How should a person weigh a sense of God’s call against the needs of the people they love?

Read More on Ochorus

William Carey’s own writings, including the Enquiry, are not yet in the Ochorus library, but his full biography is on his author page, with the story of the Serampore fire and his years of translation. Charles Spurgeon tells how Carey chose the words for his own gravestone in Morning by Morning, in the reading for 29 August. To read the book that inspired him and many missionaries after him, turn to The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, whose story comes just before this one.