Joshua Marshman and his wife Hannah were members of Broadmead Baptist Church, where they regularly heard numerous stirring accounts of William Carey’s missionary activity in eastern India. This is not surprising given Ryland’s friendship with Carey and deep involvement in the Baptist Missionary Society that had sent Carey to India in 1793. But it was the determination of their friend William Grant to follow Carey to India as a missionary that eventually turned the minds of the Marshmans to thoughts of missionary service.
In fact, within a few weeks of their deciding to be missionaries in 1799, the Marshmans and their children John and Susannah were on board a ship taking them, along with Grant, his wife, as well as William Ward, to India. After a ten-week voyage, they landed in Calcutta at the end of the year.
Two weeks later Marshman was stunned by the death of his friend Grant. Christopher Smith well captures what must have been Marshman’s feelings at the time: “Quite probably he was acutely aware that he would not have left England in Christ’s service, but for his young friend. Yet that was how Providence worked to bring the members of the future mission Trio together.”
“A prodigy of diligence and prudence”
Due to his need for funds, Carey had been managing an indigo factory in a town called Mudnabati in West Bengal. But when Marshman and Ward arrived, he linked up with them at a Danish colony on the west bank of the Hooghly River fifteen or so miles due north of Calcutta. The place was called Serampore.
Carey was thrilled with having both men as colleagues. As Carey told his close friend and former pastor John Sutcliff (1752–1814) about Ward and Marshman:
They are of the right sort; and perhaps as striking a proof as ever was exhibited of the possibility of persons of different tempers and abilities being able to live in one family in the exercise of Christian love. Probably there has seldom been a greater diversity in natural disposition and temper; yet this diversity serves for mutual correction. We really love one another.
Writing to Ryland, Carey informed him that Marshman was “a man from whom I have great expectations.” He is “a prodigy of diligence and prudence,” Carey further wrote to Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), the secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society and his close friend, “learning the language is mere play to him; he has already acquired as much as I did in double the time.”
Carey’s first impressions accurate
These were Carey’s first impressions about Marshman (and Ward), but they proved to be accurate ones. As Carey got to know Marshman, he also realized his new colleague excelled in apologetics and the defence of the Christian Faith. Marshman could talk for hours with Hindus and unbelieving Europeans living in India and never seem to tire.
As Carey once noted in a telling remark in an 1810 letter to Ryland, “In point of zeal he is a Luther and I am Erasmus.” Ward similarly noted with candour to Fuller: “Bro[ther] Marshman is a most important acquisition and a good help to the Mission … in his ardent zeal. But he is too volatile, & has too much quicksilver in him.”
But as Christopher Smith has pointed out, unlike Erasmus and Luther, Carey and Marshman never fell out with one another. In fact, Carey said of Marshman in 1818, “a more excellent and holy man does not exist in the Mission.”
To be continued
Michael A. G. Haykin©2018
