CHAPTER VIII

Summary

This narrative has now reached the period of those unhappy differences with the Baptist Missionary Society, which, from this time forward, and for twenty years, embittered the lives and cramped the energies of the Serampore missionaries; but the writer is anxious to avoid any reference to them, beyond that which may be indispensable to the completeness of this biography. The death of Mr Fuller was an irreparable loss to the interests of the mission. It broke the bond of confidence and cordiality which had so long united the two bodies in England and India, and had contributed so greatly to the success of their united labours. The management of the affairs of the Society devolved on men who, with one exception, were strangers to those at Serampore, and new feelings and tendencies were developed, foreign to the associations of the preceding twenty years. The old ecomony of missions, under which Dr Carey, Dr Marshman, and Mr Ward had embarked for India, depending for the means of subsistence mainly on their own exertions, with supplementary aid from England, had passed away. The Societies, strengthened by ample resources, were now enabled to undertake the entire support of their missionaries, and this brought into exercise a principle of subordination to the home authorities, to which the early missionaries had been strangers. Men who had always acted in the spirit of independence, could ill brook the designation, which now began to be applied to them of the “senior servants of the Society.”