The Legacy of William Carey

When William Carey served as a missionary to India, one of his chief aims was to translate the Word of God into the many dialects spoken in that vast land. He operated a printing press for this purpose and the amount of translated material was tremendous. On March 11, 1812, a fire ravaged the hall where production was taking place. Ten Bible translations perished entirely. Priceless dictionaries, along with fourteen fonts of oriental type, Hebrew, Greek and English type, steel punches, grammar texts and paper were gone. Years of work and thousands of dollars went up in flames. When Carey arrived at the scene, here's what he said.

"In one short evening, the labors of years are consumed. How unsearchable are the ways of God...The Lord has laid me low, that I may look more simply to Him."

Why would God allow a fire to destroy Bible translations that were essential to so many people being able to read the Word of God for the very first time? After all, Carey left his homeland, experienced rejection and suffered terrible hardships as a missionary. Is this how God rewards him? I'm sure Carey asked himself that very question. One thing he did not do, however, was give up. Carey committed himself to an even better press and more scholarly translations.

As it would turn out, God used this fire to make their missions work in India famous around the world. So many contributions came in that one fellow laborer said, "Stop sending contributions!" Within only two months, the first pages of select portions of the New Testament were being shipped to the churches. Carey eventually confessed, "We found on making the trail that the advantages of going over the same ground a second time were so great that they fully counter-balanced the time requisite to be devoted thereto in a second translation. The fire, the cause of which was never discovered...had given birth to revised editions."

Another result of the fire was that God called two new missionaries to join Carey in the work, including what was perhaps the first ever missionary nurse. All of this only goes to show that God is sovereign, and even when we cannot understand His actions, we can trust that we will understand it by and by.