Michael A. G. Haykin’s Account of the Alleged Statements of John Ryland Sr. to William Carey Regarding Missions

Now it was in this forum of ministerial meetings that Carey first tested his ideas concerning the obligation of believers to be involved in evangelism outside of Britain. Fuller tells us that at several of the meetings between 1787 and 1790, Carey’s convictions were the topic of conversation. ‘Some of our most aged and respectable ministers,’ Fuller added, thought that ‘it was a wild and impracticable scheme that he [i.e. Carey] had got in his mind, and therefore gave him no encouragement.’⁷⁵ Fuller did not specify which of the association’s ‘most aged and respectable ministers’ pooh-poohed Carey’s ideas. Tradition, on the other hand, has especially attributed this disdain for Carey’s vision to John Collett Ryland, the father of Carey’s close friend.

The first writer to mention the elder Ryland’s name in this connection was John Webster Morris. In the first edition of his memoirs of Andrew Fuller, published in 1816, Morris claimed that ‘before the end of 1786’ Carey and ‘another minister of the same age and standing’—in his account Morris does not indicate that this other minister was actually himself—attended a minsterial meeting in Northampton. That evening, as a number of the ministers were chatting, the elder Ryland ‘imperiously demanded’ that Carey and the other minister each propose a topic for discussion. After much hesitation, Carey suggested the topic on which he had been long ruminating: ‘Whether the command given to the apostles to “teach all nations” was not obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent?’ Carey’s question had obviously grown out of his reflections on Matthew 28:18–20. The promise he had in mind is clearly that given by the Lord Jesus in verse 20, and the command that in the first part of verse 19. If, Carey reasoned, Christ’s promise of his presence is for all time (v. 20), what of his command (v. 19)? As we have seen, this sort of reasoning was later made the subject of an extensive rebuttal in the first section of Carey’s Enquiry. In Morris’s narration of this event, Ryland promptly responded to Carey that ‘Nothing could be done before another Pentecost, when an effusion of miraculous gifts, including the gift of tongues, would give effect to the commission of Christ as at first.’ Moreover, according to Morris, Ryland gruffly told Carey that he was ‘a most miserable enthusiast for asking such a question’! However, in Morris’s second edition of the Fuller memoirs, which appeared in 1826, he suggested that all of Ryland’s remarks may simply have been ‘a piece of pleasantry,’ or even ‘intended as ironical.’⁷⁶

Eustace Carey, when he recounted this event in his 1836 biography of his uncle, identified Morris as having been present on the occasion and said that Carey himself had mentioned the event to him not long after Eustace arrived in India in 1814. Eustace Carey did not remember the exact words that his uncle said were spoken to him, but he did ‘distinctly recollect that some strong epithet was said to have been used.’ Even though Eustace knew that his uncle questioned the accuracy of Morris’s recollection when it first appeared in print, he was prepared to believe Morris’s version of the event, because of ‘the characteristic vehemence’ of the elder Ryland and the novelty of foreign missions at the time when the event is said to have taken place.⁷⁷

Yet a third account comes from the hand of John C. Marshman (1794–1877), the son of Carey’s co-worker in India, Joshua Marshman. Writing in 1859, he stated that when the elder Ryland heard Carey’s proposed topic, he ‘denounced the proposition with a frown’ and told Carey in no uncertain terms: ‘Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your aid or mind.’⁷⁸

Understandably, John Ryland, Jr denied that his father ever uttered such sentiments. In a lengthy footnote which appeared in both editions of his life of Fuller, that of 1816 and that of 1818, Ryland questioned Morris’s dating of the event as having taken place ‘before tne end of 1786.’ Ryland stated that his father had left Northampton for Enfield, just outside of London, before any of the minsterial meetings in 1786. This is confirmed by Ryland’s diary, in which it is stated that his father left Northampton on 11 November 1785 and never returned during his entire sojourn at Enfield, where he died in 1792.⁷⁹ This narrows the event down to 1785. In addition to the annual assembly that year, there was a ministerial meeting in Northampton on 30 September. Fuller, Sutcliff and Thomas Skinner (d.1795), the Baptist minister at Towcester, preached during the day. That evening there was discussion between the pastors which centered on two questions: ‘To what causes, in ministers, may much of their want of success be imputed?’ and ‘What was a sufficient call, to attempt introducing village-preaching into places where it had not ben usual before?’⁸⁰ Since this meeting was in Northampton, the elder Ryland would almost certainly have been present. But his son, who was also present, claimed that the first time he heard of what his father purportedly said to Carey was when Morris published his life of Fuller in 1816. Moreover, Ryland maintained the words that Morris attributed to his father did not sound at all like his father! ‘No man prayed and preached about the latter-day glory, more than my father,’ Ryland said. In other words, the elder Ryland longed for the day when the knowledge of Christ would fill the earth. In sum, the younger Ryland said, it was an ‘ill-natured anecdote.’

Yet, two years before his death in 1834, Carey spent an evening reminiscing with his old co-worker Joshua Marshman about the early days of their missionary enterprise. According to a letter that Marshman wrote in the early hours of the following morning, 23 May 1832, Carey made particular mention of the way in which God had kept alive his feelings about overseas missionary work when ‘good old John Ryland (the Doctor’s father) denounced them as unscriptural.’⁸¹ Thus, despite the younger Ryland’s defense of his father, the evidence would seem to indicate that the elder Ryland, who had definite High Calvinist predilections and who could express himself quite vehemently at times, did indeed administer a sizzling rebuke to Carey during the evening of 30 September 1785.
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75. Ibid. [Carey, Memoir of William Carey], p. 69.
76. Morris, Memoirs of the Life and Death of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, pp. 96–7; Culross, The Three Rylands, p. 61.
77. Carey, Memoir of William Carey, pp. 47–8.
78. Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward, vol. I, p. 10.
79. Ryland, Life and Death of the Rev. Andrew Fuller (1818 ed.), p. 112, note; Ryland, ‘Autograph Reminiscences,’ p. 11.
80. Ryland, Life and Death of the Rev. Andrew Fuller (1818 ed.), pp. 111–12 and note.
81. Cited in Periodical Accounts of the Serampore Mission, N. S., (1834), pp. 638–9. For another perspective on the elder Ryland, see Iain H. Murray, ‘William Carey: Climbing the Rainbow,’ The Banner of Truth, 349 (October 1992), pp. 20–21.

Michael A. G. Haykin, One Heart and One Soul: John Sutcliff of Olney, His Friends and His Times (Darlington, UK: Evangelical Press, 1994), 193-196.