NOTE. SERAMPORE MISSIONARIES. In this collection of Mr. Hall's works, every thing is inserted that was published with his sanction, and that is known to have been written by him, with the exception of a single letter, which he many years ago engaged to suppress. But, on inserting the letter in reference to the Serampore Missionaries, (Vol. IV. p. 415,) I inadvertently omitted to mention, that it received a place in consequence of the general rule thus adopted, and without asking the concurrence of Mr. Foster. I therefore think it right to insert a letter from Mr. Foster, relative to what he regards as Mr. Hall's misapprehension of some main points in a most painful subject of discussion. The controversy between the London Committee and the Serampore Missionaries, I have always deeply deplored. Yet, I have an entire persuasion that the Committee did every thing in their power to avoid it, and abstained from making it public until they were compelled to do so by a feeling of duty to the Society, with the management of whose concerns they are entrusted. OLINTHUS GREGORY. MY DEAR SIR, TO DR. GREGORY. I observe you have admitted into the fourth volume of Mr. Hall's works, very possibly without having had time, amidst your various and important engagements, for a deliberate consideration, a letter written by Mr. Hall to the " Committee of the Baptist Missionary Society," in March, 1827, on the occasion of a request from the Serampore Missionaries, for a certain annual grant of money from that Society. As that letter is calculated to injure the character of those Missionaries in the estimation of the readers of Mr. Hall's works in times to come, allow me to submit to you, whether it be not a claim of justice that you should give a place, in the concluding volume, to an observation or two which I have to offer. Some of the points alluded to, with implied censure, in that letter, (those respecting the constitutional terms of the relation which had subsisted between the Society and those Missionaries) will be matters of small account in the view of the future generation of readers. But the main purport and effect of that letter must be, in the apprehension of those readers, to fix a dishonourable imputation on personal character. It is charged upon the Serampore fraternity (as well collectively as in their representative, Dr. Marshman) that they were rapacious of money; that they were apparently practising to see how much of it they could extort, on the strength of their reputation, as presumed by them to be of essential importance to that of the Society; that they were already exceeding the utmost pardonable advance of encroachment; that they were likely to be progressive and insatiable in their exactions; and that their possession, at the very same time, of "an extensive revenue," "large pecuniary resources," rendering needless to them the assistance applied for, stamped a peculiar character of arrogance on that attempt at exaction. Suppose a reader at some distant time to form his judgement exclusively on this representation, as an authentic and sufficient evidence; and what can he think of those men, but that they must have been, to say no more, some of the most unreasonable of mankind?—that though they did perform things which remain memorable in religious history, they were not worthy of their high vocation, for that the merit of their performances was spoiled by a grasping selfishness and an exorbitant arrogance? This supposition, that the document in question may have on the judgement of readers an effect inimical to the memory of those original Missionaries, long after they are dead, is authorized by the probability that Mr. Hall's writings will retain a place in public attention and favour, long after the occasional productions of the present time, in explanation and defence of the conduct of those Missionaries, shall have gone out of knowledge. Now, my dear Sir, let me appeal to your sense of justice whether it be right, that this unqualified invective, written for a temporary purpose, without probably the least thought of publication, and written, as I shall prove to you, under extreme error, should be perpetuated in a standard work, as a stigma on the character of those men, without the admission also into the same work, for equal permanence, of a brief notice adapted to correct the wrong. The wrong is no less than this-that the charge, such as I have described it in plain conformity to the document, is made on men who, having prosecuted a course of indefatigable exertions in the christian cause, one of them for more than a quarter of a century, and another a much longer time, during more than twenty years of which they had not received or asked any share of the Society's income-having supported themselves, and performed their great literary, and their other missionary operations gratuitously— having, besides this, expended in the christian service, during a long period, several thousand pounds a-year from resourses created by their own diligence and having also contributed very largely by their high reputation to the public credit and success of the Society itself—could not, after all this, conceive it to be an unreasonable "exaction," or "extortion," to request the aid of a sixth part of the Society's annual income, when at last their own had become greatly diminished, chiefly in consequence of the establishment of other printing offices and schools in the neighbouring city. But the case being so, it may be asked, with some surprise, how Mr. Hall could be betrayed to write such a letter. I can assign what must have been the chief cause. He believed he had reason to place implicit confidence in testimony, which assured him, that the Serampore Missionaries were at that very time in the possession of superabundant wealth; and he happened not to be in communication with informants, who could have proved to him that the contrary was the fact, to a painful extreme. It is from my own immediate knowledge that I make this statement. In a long conversation, just about the time that the letter to the Committee was written, he affirmed to me and several other friends, on the authority of testimony which he assigned, and held to be unquestionable, that those Missionaries had the command of what might truly be called (speaking in relative proportion to such a concern) an immense capital and income. I could give you the sums in figures, but forbear, purely in consideration of their extravagance. Suffice it to say, that the amount was most palpably and enormously beyond any alleged or conceivable necessities of such an establishment. Entirely confident in this belief, he thought, of course, that an application to the Society for aid was a most unreasonable claim; whereas, the fact was, as Dr. Marshman represented, and as Dr. Carey soon after confirmed, that it was made from the pressure of pecuniary difficulty, which was forcing the brethren at Serampore to the alternative of either obtaining assistance in this country, or abandoning several of their missionary stations. Had Mr. Hall been aware of the real state of the case, he would not have written a single sentence of that letter. It was unfortunate that he should have been so credulous to delusive representations. Again appealing to your justice for the insertion of this note of explanation somewhere in the concluding volume, I remain, Yours, with the greatest regard, J. FOSTER. |