A bit about William Carey

I read an excerpt about the life of William Carey today that I wanted to share. The excerpt comes from F.W. Boreham's A Bunch of Everlastings:

"Now the life of William Carey is both the outcome and the exemplification of a stupendous principle. That principle was never better stated than by the prophet from whose flaming lips Carey borrowed his text. 'Thine eyes,' said Isaiah, 'Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty; they shall behold the land that stretches very far off.' The vision kingly stands related to the vision continental; the revelation of the Lord leads to the revelation of the limitless landscape. What was it that happened one memorable day upon the road to Damascus? It was simply this: Saul of Tarsus saw the King in His beauty! And what happened as a natural and inevitable consequence? There came into his life the passion of the far horizon. All the narrowing limits of Jewish prejudice and the cramping bonds of Pharisaic superstition fell from him like the scales that seemed to drop from his eyes. The world is at his feet. Single-handed and alone, taking his life in his hand, he storms the great centres of civilization, the capitals of proud empires, in the name of Jesus Christ. No difficulty can daunt him; no danger impede his splendid progress. He passes from sea to sea, from island to island, from continent to continent. The hunger of the earth is in his soul; there is no coast or colony to which he will not go. He feels himself a debtor to Greek and to barbarian, to bond and to free. He climbs mountains, fords rivers, crosses continents, bears stripes, endures imprisonments, suffers shipwreck, courts insult, and dares a thousand deaths out of the passion of his heart to carry the message of hope to every crevice and corner of the earth. A more thrilling story of hazard, hardship, heroism and adventure has never been written. On the road to Damascus Paul saw the King in His beauty, and he spent the remainder of his life in exploiting the limitless landscape that unrolled itself before him. The vision of the king opened to his eyes the vision of the continents. In every age these two visions have always gone side by side. In the fourteenth century, the vision of the King broke upon the soul of John Wickliffe. Instantly, there arose the Lollards, scouring city, town, and hamlet with the new evangel, the representatives of the instinct of the far horizon. The fifteenth century contains two tremendous names. As soon as the world received the vision kingly by means of Savonarola, it received the vision continental by means of Christopher Columbus. In the sixteenth century, the same principle holds. It is, on the one hand, the century of Martin Luther, and, on the other, the century of Raleigh, Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, Grenville and the great Elizabethan navigators. All the oceans of the world became a snowstorm of white sails. The seventeenth century gave us, first the Puritans, and then the sailing of the Mayflower. So we come to the eighteenth century. And the eighteenth century is essentially the century of John Wesley and of William Carey. At Aldersgate Street the vision of the King in His beauty dawned graciously upon the soul of John Wesley. During the fifty years that followed, that vision fell, through Wesley's instrumentality, upon the entire English people. The Methodist revival of the eighteenth century is one of the most gladsome records in the history of Europe. And then, John Wesley having impressed upon all men the vision of the King, William Carey arose to impress upon them the vision of the Continents."

"'We must do something!' he cried....Expect great things! Attempt great things!'"

Such is a brief look at the life of William Carey and his desire to take the gospel into the world. He saw the King in His beauty and saw the world in its need! Would that the same could be said of us!