One hundred and two years ago last April 12th Adoniram Judson laid down his life "scarcely three days out of sight of the mountains of Burma." It was the end of a career described thus in The Encyclopedia of Religion: "Judson, Adoniram: (1788-1850) Pioneer Baptist missionary. . . . Translator of Bible into Burmese and author of Burmese dictionary. . . . Body buried at sea." These lines give a brief hint of a life that was rich in adventure, in experience and faith.
Adoniram Judson, Sr., the father of the most illustrious of the Judsons, was a Congregational minister in Maiden, Mass., reared when the great awakening of New England, based upon the warm and personalizing breath Jonathan Edwards had breathed into Calvinism, was in full flower. Two years after his marriage to Miss Abigail Brown, their first child was born and given the Biblical name of his father, Adoniram.
The elder Adoniram was a stern man of ab solutely inflexible integrity; his household was ruled with patriarchal firmness. But he was not unloved by his family. Once when the father was absent on a journey, Mrs. Judson conceived the idea of teaching her son to read, in order that she might give her husband an agreeable surprise on his return. Although Adoniram was only three years old, he saluted his father's re turn by reading to him a chapter from the Bible!
The family moved from Maiden to Wenham, Mass., the town where Judson went to grammar school. Even before going to school, the boy used to gather his playmates together to play church, he officiating as the minister. The hymn he gave out more often than any other began with the words, "Go preach my gospel, saith the Lord."
His was a restless, inquiring mind. After being duly instructed that the earth revolves around the sun, it became a serious question in his mind as to whether or not the sun moved at all. His little sister was confident that it did; she could see it, couldn't she? But he distrusted the simple testimony of his senses and talked about positive proof. Not long after he was missed for several hours, his uneasy father finally going in search for him. He found him in a field flat on his back, his hat with a circular hole cut in its crown over his face, and his swollen eyes almost blinded from prolonged exposure to in tense light and heat. But he was satisfied that the sun did move. His schoolmates nicknamed him "Virgil" because of his proficiency in the classics. The family moved to Braintree, and two years later to Plymouth. In another two years he entered Rhode Island College, later to be known as Brown University. At nineteen he graduated as class valedictorian.
Conversion
He had become something of a skeptic under the tutelage of a friend a year ahead of him in school. A year of school teaching proved to be too quiet for him, so he set out for Albany and a ride on the newly invented Fulton steamboat. Arriving in New York, he joined a traveling stock company which protected its proceeds by cheating landlords and everyone else at every opportunity. He left them but not from any moral scruples intending to journey westward.
The next night, stopping at a country inn, he was put in a room next to a dying man. The landlord apologized and said he hoped he wouldn't be disturbed. Judson assured him it would cause him no bother; but it did. He spent a restless night punctuated by groans from the adjoining room. And the thought persistently pressed itself upon him was the stranger ready to die? Then he would try to shrug it off how his late companions of the theatre would scoff at him! And how his intellectual and witty college friends would laugh if they knew! When morning came, he inquired for his fellow-lodger, only to learn that, as expected, he had died. Did the landlord know who he was, by any chance? "Oh, yes, a young man from Rhode Island College," and he named Judson's friend by name!
Stunned, Judson turned his horse toward Plymouth and home; within a month he had enrolled in the Theological Institution at Andover. He was admitted only by special favor, as he was neither a professor of religion nor a candidate for the ministry. He didn't join the Third Congregational Church of Plymouth until the following May.
His two-year course half completed, a sermon preached by Dr. Buchanan fell into his hands. It was entitled, "The Star In The East," and dealt with the progress of Christianity in India. It provided the spark to ignite the tinder of his soul; one day during a solitary walk in the woods, meditating and praying on the subject rather dejectedly, the words of the Gospel came to him with compelling force, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." He resolved to become a missionary to the heathen.
Four of his seminary friends were like-minded. Advised by their elders to submit their suggestion to the Congregational Association of Massachusetts, they did so, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the mother of American missionary societies, was the direct result. Another direct result of this meeting was the acquaintanceship of Judson with a Miss Ann Hasseltine.
The first official act of the Board was to send Judson to England to discuss the possibility of cooperation with the London Missionary Society. His ship was captured by a French privateer en route. The young man with the rosy face, small physique, brown eyes, brown hair, a deep voice and practically no money was thrown into the hold with the common seamen. In that dim light he amused himself by translating his Hebrew Bible into Latin. Landed and imprisoned in France, he was rescued by a fellow- American and hidden until passage for England could be found.
Bound for the Mission Field
The English brothers wisely felt that Americans should conduct their own missions, and Judson returned to America and his betrothed sweetheart. Ann Hasseltine was to become the first American woman to leave her native land as a missionary. They were married on the fifth of February, 1812; the next day Judson was ordained, and two weeks later they were not only launched upon the seas of matrimony, but also the broad Atlantic bound for Calcutta, under auspices of the American Board.
It was a four month journey around the Cape of Good Hope, and in the course of it Judson changed his denominational latitude and longitude as well as his geographical. Expecting that controversy might arise with Baptist missionaries, he set out to arm himself from the New Testament to defend the Congregational practice of child-baptism. His honest mind was reluctantly forced to admit the correctness of the two basic Baptist tenets: "that faith should always precede baptism, and that baptism is immersion." Many an hour did he and Ann talk about it; she always maintaining, as he began to waver, that whatever he did, she would never become a Baptist. But she did. Later she was to write to a friend, "We are confirmed Baptists, not because we wished to be, but be cause truth compelled us to be."
Their position was somewhat ambiguous. Honor compelled them to sever their connection with the Board that had undertaken their support as Congregationalists. But no American Baptist Society was in existence to which to turn. Arrival in India only complicated matters; England not being on friendly terms with America, the East India Co. told them they could not stay in India. A vessel was sailing for Rangoon, Burma. Rather than return home they booked passage on it.
Burma was an independent country ruled by a native king. Thence they repaired, after being baptized by immersion by an English missionary. Still they were without any financial support, and it was two years before delegates convened in the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia to organize "The General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions." In gathering and rallying to the support of Adoniram Judson, the Baptists awoke to self-consciousness and denominational strength.
Laboring Under Difficulties
The Judsons settled in Rangoon in the house of a former English missionary who had entered the government service, and began learning the language. They did not propose to install Christianity as a state religion; they set out to win the Burmese one by one to the Gospel of Christ. Judson did not believe that Christianity should follow in the wake of Western civilization. He did not intend to spend his time in teaching the arts and sciences, in raising the standard of living, in establishing schools. He proposed to preach the word of God to the adult mind. His indispensable ally was the familiarity of the Burmese with literature. Buddhism is a religion of holy scriptures, and as soon as Judson had learned to express himself, he began publishing tracts for distribution. But the oral proclamation of the gospel from a zayat or chapel by the side of the road to whoever would listen was his chief means. He embarked on a process of spiritual button-holing.
The language was not easy. After two years' work, he could say that he had learned more French in two months. The tropical climate was debilitating. A son was born and died at the age of seven months. It was four full years be fore he could write home, "I have this day been visited by the first inquirer after religion that I have seen in Burma." And two years more passed before he baptized his first convert. Persecution followed in the wake of this event, and the work of the mission came to a standstill. An appeal to the king was denied. Only the pleading of his three converts kept him in Rangoon. For the work of nearly ten years, there were only 18 converts to count.
Royal favor shone on them at last, however, and they moved to Ava, the capital, with high hopes. Scarcely had they arrived than war broke out between England and Burma; suspicion fell at once upon all foreigners; Judson was arrested, fettered, and thrown into the death-prison; his wife was left alone.
After eleven months of imprisonment, the prisoners were stripped of all clothing except shirt and pants, bound together by twos, and under the mid-day sun marched eight and a half miles to Oung-pen-la, another prison, for execution. Mrs. Judson followed, though more dead than alive herself. Only the death of the government official who had ordered their execution saved their lives.
It was six months before relief came, in the form of an order returning Judson to Ava to serve as an interpreter in negotiations with the British. This done, he was recommitted. The British, however, insisted on his release. Reluctantly he was handed over to them.
Although offered a salary of three thousand dollars a year by the British to remain as their interpreter, he turned to his work unhesitatingly, resolving to know nothing but "Jesus Christ and Him crucified." His little mission had been completely broken up by the war. Hope returned with their health, even though only four Christians of the eighteen were to be found. Since to stay in Rangoon was impossible it not being under the control of England, and he being in disfavor with the native king these four and the few supplies of the mission were transplanted to Amherst. The English, having difficulties in negotiation, finally prevailed on him to act as their interpreter on the condition that a clause be inserted into the treaty of peace demanding religious freedom for all of Burma.
He returned to Ava, leaving Ann to establish the mission. He never saw her again; stricken with fever, weakened by the years of harrowing uncertainty she had just undergone, her body no longer could respond to her will. She died without a non-Burmese voice to speak to her. Three months later came the news of his father's death. The mission at Amherst was a complete failure. At the age of thirty-nine, heart-broken, health-shattered, his family buried one in Rangoon, two in Amherst, he held himself in readiness to follow them.
There were associates in Maulmain, but he did not seek their company. He built a bamboo hermitage in the jungle and there spent many an hour; he had a grave dug and "would sit by the verge of it and look into it, imagining how each feature and limb would appear . . . years after he had lain there." He set out to crucify the flesh by monastic quietism, and wrote of the "inveterate habits" he had "contracted through a long course of religious sinning." He took to living for days at a time in his hermitage. He adopted a self-imposed set of rules for living, the last of which reads "Endeavor to rejoice in every loss and suffering incurred for Christ's sake . . . remembering that . . . like death, they are great gain." He turned over all his personal property, amounting to about |6,000 dollars, to the Mission Board, and renounced as worldly the honorary doctorate conferred upon him in his absence by his alma mater.
Translating the Bible
But sickness, sorrow, and solitude could not master him. He never completely ceased his missionary labors, and gradually became more and more engrossed in them once more. The new mission at Maulmain exposed to robbers on its river-side and tigers on its jungle-side, needed all his efforts. Soon he had a chapel on one of the dirtiest, noisiest streets in town, where he would meet and talk with such as would be attracted to him. And he turned his time more fully to the task of translating the whole Bible into Burmese. Previously he had only done selected portions a Gospel, a few psalms, and so forth. Now he set out upon the whole task. Cheering news came from Rangoon, where one of the early converts, long lost sight of, was carrying on the work himself. Encouraged, Judson set out to carry his message to the heart of native Burma Prome. But the prejudice against the foreigner was too great; he was driven out. Absent from America for 18 years, never a ship sailed for England or America but that he wished to board it.
Instead, he took up the task the death of one of his associates, George Boardman, had left unfinished: missionary tours among the Karens, the least civilized and most heartily despised people of Burma. Three tours he made, and found in Boardman's widow a kindred spirit. He was forty-six when he married Sarah; in eleven years, there were eight children.
Thorough as had been his work on his Bible translation every word from the Hebrew or Greek direct to the Burmese he spent seven years in revising it, keeping up his preaching of course, every day. Disease fastened on his chest, entailing the loss of his voice and accompanied by intense pain. He regarded his work as completed. Mrs. Judson's health began rapidly to fail also.
Burmese Dictionary
The Missionary Board was urging on him another task, however, the compilation of a Burmese dictionary. He alone had the intimate knowledge required, and since his voice forbade preaching he reluctantly took up his last great effort in his twenty-eighth year without rest or respite of effort in Burma.
Four years later, a return to America became imperative in order to preserve Mrs. Judson's life. Taking the three elder children, they em barked for London. But it was too late: Mrs.Judson grew steadily worse, and died while the ship was in harbor at St. Helena.
America was a foreign land to Judson now; but his name was a household word. His pulmonary difficulty prevented his speaking above a whisper so that he had to speak, as it were, to the great audiences through an interpreter. Many times he disappointed public assemblies by failing to relate his own adventures, preaching instead the story of the cross.
During a visit in Philadelphia, he met a Miss Emily Chubbuck, who had achieved a wide reputation as a writer of light literature. She had been disciplined in the hard school of poverty; at the age of eleven she had worked in a woolen factory for one dollar and twenty-five cents a week. Mr. Judson, given one of her books to while away a tedious delay, read it and recognized her talent. "I should be glad to know her," he remarked. "The lady who writes so well ought to write better. It's a pity that such fine talents should be employed on such subjects." He was hoping to have her write a memoir of Sarah Judson. Six months later, the two were united in a marriage pleasing neither the literary nor the religious world. The one thought the brilliant writer was throwing herself away on an old missionary, the other thought the great cause was compromised by the marriage of its founder to a writer of fiction. Both were wrong. Within six weeks, they were bound for Burma.
One familiar face was missing little Charlie had died in his absence. The dictionary demanded attention. But Judson's eye was still on the unreaped fields of native Burma. So it was once again to Rangoon. Things went badly. Once more he was turned back.
One night, while sharing with Mrs. Judson the care of one of the children who had been taken suddenly ill, Judson caught a severe cold. A terrible cough and fever followed, then dysentery and a congestive fever. A long sea voyage was all the doctor could suggest.
The ocean had never before failed to invigorate him. He was carried on board the French barque, the "Aristide Marie"; but his life ebbed away, as unfortunate delays held up her sailing. Four days and nights of intense agony preceded his last hour, when his pains left him.
"At eight o'clock in the evening the crew assembled, the larboard port was opened, and in perfect silence, broken only by the voice of the captain, all that was mortal of Dr. Judson was committed to the deep."
