WILLIAM CAREY AND HIS CROP
William Carey arrived in India in 1793 with a burden to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who had never heard the name.
For seven years he proclaimed the gospel message faithfully week after week, month after month, with not a single native of India converted to Christ. Through years of struggle and doubt, Carey was often discouraged but never defeated. To his sisters back home in England he wrote:
I feel as a farmer does about his crop: sometimes I think the seed is springing, and thus I hope; a little blasts all, and my hopes are gone like a cloud. They were only weeds which appeared; or if a little corn sprung up, it quickly dies, being either chocked with weeds, or parched up by the sun of persecution. Yet I still hope in God, and will go forth in his strength, and make mention of his righteousness, even of his only. (George, Faithful Witness, 116.)
On December 28, 1800, Carey baptized in the Ganges River his first Hindu convert, a carpenter named Krishna Pal. William Ward, who witnessed the dramatic deliverance of this man from the grip of paganism into the glorious truth of the gospel, wrote in his diary:
"Ye gods of stone and clay, did ye
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