The Cobbler God Kept in His Quiver

William Carey mended shoes in the English village of Moulton, a self-taught cobbler with a homemade leather globe stitched together on his workbench. He had traced every coastline, memorized the populations of nations he would never visit, and prayed over countries whose languages he could not yet speak. His fellow ministers saw only a poor shoemaker. When Carey stood at a ministers' meeting in 1786 and proposed sending missionaries overseas, the elder John Ryland reportedly snapped, "Sit down, young man.…