Life of William Carey | Page 8

product of his labour. At one time, when 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 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 contemporaries, the
career of these men ran parallel at home with his abroad--Thomas
Shillitoe, who stood before magistrates, bishops, and such sovereigns
as George III. and IV. and the Czar Alexander I. in the interests of
social reform; and John Pounds, the picture of whom as the founder of
ragged schools led Thomas Guthrie, when he stumbled on it in an inn
in Anstruther, to do the same Christlike work in Scotland. Coleridge,
who when at Christ's Hospital was ambitious to be a shoemaker's
apprentice, was right when he declared that shoemakers had given to
the world a larger number of eminent men than any other handicraft.
Whittier's own early experience in Massachusetts fitted him to be the
poet-laureate of the craft which for some years he adorned. His Songs
of Labour, published in 1850, contain the best English lines on
shoemakers since Shakspere put into the mouth of King Henry V. the
address on the eve of Agincourt, which begins: "This day is called the
feast of