A Day in the Life

Known as 'the father of modern missions', William Carey is famous for his pioneering missionary work in India.

Here is the record of one his days in India, reconstructed from his diary in 1806.

He rose at a quarter to six, read a chapter from the Hebrew Bible and spent some time in private devotion.

At seven the servants came in for family prayers in Bengali, after which, while waiting for his chota (i.e., little breakfast), he spent some time reading Persian with a munshi and then a portion of Scripture in Hindustani. The moment breakfast was over, he settled down to the translation of the Ramayana from Sanskrit into English.

At ten o’clock he went to the college, where his classes and other duties kept him until two o’clock. On returning to his lodgings he examined a proofsheet of his Bengali translation of Jeremiah until dinnertime.

After this meal, assisted by the chief pundit of the college, he translated most of the eighth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel into Sanskrit, until six o’clock when he sat down with a Telugu pundit more fully to study that language. At half past seven he preached in English to a congregation of forty persons, including one of the judges (from whom at the close of the service he got a subscription of five hundred rupees toward the new chapel).

At nine o’clock, “the service being over and the congregation gone,” he sat down and translated Ezekiel 11 into Bengali—which took him nearly two hours. He wrote a letter to a friend in England; then, after reading a chapter from his Greek Testament by way of private devotion, he went to bed.

"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of."
Benjamin Franklin