'We cannot afford to leave them without C'

This week I was able to finish a biography of William Carey, mssnry to India in the late 18th-early 19th century. Below is an excerpt, not of William Carey's words, but of the author's, Samuel Pearce Carey, William's great-grandson.

Eliot and Brainerd transformed America’s Indians through the power of the Gspl as no European civilization ever could have done. Barbarism baffled no traders. Even to distant Alaska they ventured just for otters. If we Chrstns loved men as merchants love money, no fierceness of peoples would keep us from their midst. Their very barbarism would evoke our swifter help. Eliot and Brainerd, by the grace of the Gspl, both subdued and uplifted men. We cannot afford to leave even the most dehumanized races without C.

Even if service of barbarian races should involve death, no true Chrstn should grudge it. Hunger will be less serious than we think. Native food, if not inviting, will suffice. A servant of C will be ready for hardship, forgoing crowded churches, kind friends, a civilized country, legal protection, and affluence, and be prepared for rejection, hatred, false friends, imprisonment, torture, the company of barbarians of uncouth speech, miserable housing, hunger and thirst, weariness and painfulness, hard work and little encouragement.

If lay workers are also sent with ordained mssnrs, whose knowledge of farming, fishing, and fowling [or in our day, business, law, linguistics…] shall supply the mission’s creaturely necessities, the initial outlay will often be the only and the whole expense.

Traders learn the language: so can we. A year, or at the most two, should enable us ‘even with no every extraordinary talents to communicate with any foreign people.’ (William Carey, 69)

What reason do we have to stay, unless we have been called to do so? "I will be with you alway."