James and Isabella Thoburn
SOUTH CENTRAL ASIA: CONFRONTING ANCIENT CREEDS
The beginning of the Protestant missionary movement is conveniently dated as 1800. William Carey is the grand patriarch, and the setting is the subcontinent of India, where the world’s oldest and most complex religions were born and where religious beliefs pervaded every facet of society. From a Western perspective—and in retrospect—this was an eventful moment in Christian missions. But in the eyes of the Indian people—the teeming millions who elbowed their way through the crowded marketplaces—nothing happened. If they had been aware of what was happening, they would have looked with scorn or indifference on those who would bring them a new religion. What could a “Western” religion offer them that Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, or Jainism could not? And what appeal could there be in a religion whose proponents claimed that they alone possessed the truth? Hindus, with thousands of gods, prided themselves in their tolerance.
When Carey arrived in India, the vast country was going through a time of transition in its relation to the outside world. Nearly two hundred years earlier, Queen Elizabeth I had granted a charter to the East India Company. “No idea could be more erroneous,” writes Mary Drewery, “than to suppose that Britain set out deliberately to conquer India with a view to territorial aggrandisement.”1Trade was what the British were seeking. But other countries—particularly France—wanted that lucrative trade as well. Troops were needed to protect the trade, and with the India Act of 1784, the British government officially joined with the East India Company in its effort to wield control over the subcontinent.
The significance of Carey’s ministry lies in its influence on Protestant missions more than on its influence on the Indian people, though he, unlike many missionaries before and since, was able to influence social and political reform. Christianity offered an alternative to the age-old caste system and release from the endless process of reincarnation—especially for the “untouchables.” In spite of the tremendous barriers, Christianity was planted in India and elsewhere in South Central Asia. Through the influence of William Carey, who (in retrospect) symbolically ushered in the “Great Century” of foreign missions, the evangelism of the world began to be viewed as a primary obligation of the Christian church. South Central Asia, however, would never be a fertile field for Christianity, for still today only a tiny minority of the population professes the Christian faith.
The year was 1800. The setting was in Bengal in the northeast of India along the banks of India’s most sacred river, the Ganges. Into that polluted river went a native Indian and an Englishman—a man who had taken seriously the words of Jesus: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel, baptizing them….”After seven long years, William Carey was baptizing the first Hindu convert, Krishna Pal. What a momentous occasion it was—a moment to be remembered as a landmark in Christian missions—the “Father of Modern Missions” baptizing his first convert.
But this sublime scene is only part of the picture. Carey’s wife, who had gone to India against her will, was now deemed “wholly deranged,” and John Thomas, Carey’s partner who had delayed the mission due to his credit problems, had also gone mad. A missionary observer to this momentous occasion filled in the details that we would rather not include in our stories of missionary heroes: “When Carey led Krishna and his own son Felix down into the water of baptism, the ravings of Thomas in the schoolhouse on the one side, and of Mrs. Carey on the other, mingled with the strains of the Bengali hymn of praise.”2
William Carey, an impoverished English shoemaker, was an unlikely candidate to rise to the designation of “Father of Modern Missions.” Indeed, some in recent years have strongly argued that such a title is not fitting. There were others who made significant contributions to the missions cause during this era and before, and whatever greatness Carey achieved was the result of teamwork. According to Christopher Smith, “layers of popular mythology still remain to be cut through before the actual contours of his career as a pre-Victorian mission leader will be uncovered.”3
Yet whether based on popular mythology or not, Carey, more than any other missionary of this period, stirred the imagination of the Christian world and showed by his own humble example what could be done in a wide variety of ways to further the cause of world evangelism. Although he faced almost insurmountable trials during his forty-year missionary career, he demonstrated a dogged determination to succeed. His secret? “I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything.”4
Carey was born in 1761 near Northampton, England, the son of a weaver who worked on a loom in the family living quarters. Life was simple and uncomplicated. The Industrial Revolution had only begun to replace the cottage industries with grimy sweatshops and noisy textile mills. Carey’s childhood was routine except for persistent problems with allergies that prevented him from pursuing his dream of becoming a gardener. Instead, he was apprenticed, at the age of sixteen, to a shoemaker and continued in that vocation until he was twenty-eight. He was converted through the influence of another apprentice, and from that time forward he became actively associated with Baptist Dissenters, devoting his leisure time to Bible study and lay ministries.
In 1781, before he reached his twentieth birthday, Carey married his master’s sister-in-law. Dorothy was more than five years older than he, and like many eighteenth-century English women of her background, she was illiterate. From the beginning it was a mismatched union, and as time passed and Carey’s horizons broadened, the chasm dividing them grew even wider. The earliest years of their marriage were filled with hardship and poverty. But despite the economic hard times, Carey did not turn aside from his study and lay preaching, serving as pastor of two very small Baptist churches while he continued making shoes. During these years in the pastorate, his philosophy of missions began to take shape, sparked first by his reading of Captain Cook’s Voyages. But as he developed a biblical perspective on the subject, he became convinced that missionary work was the central responsibility of the church.
Drawing on certain Reformation teachings, many eighteenth-century churchmen believed that the Great Commission was given only to the apostles and therefore converting the “heathen” was no concern of theirs, especially if it were not tied to colonialism. When Carey presented his ideas to a group of ministers, one of them is said to have exclaimed: “Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine.”5 But Carey would not be silenced. In the spring of 1792 he published an eighty-seven-page book that had far-reaching consequences in its influence on Christian missions.
The booklet, An Enquirey Into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (and that being a shortened title), very ably presented a case for worldwide missions and sought to deflate the arguments dramatizing the impracticality of sending missionaries to faraway lands. Soon after, Carey spoke to a group of ministers at a Baptist Association meeting in Nottingham, where he challenged his audience from Isaiah 54:2–3 and uttered the words that are most often associated with him: “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” The following day the ministers organized a mission agency, which became known as the Baptist Missionary Society. The decision was not made lightly. Most of the Baptist Association ministers were, like Carey, living on very meager incomes, and involvement in foreign missions meant tremendous financial sacrifices from both them and their congregations.
Andrew Fuller, the most prominent minister in support of the new society, became the first home secretary; and the first missionary appointee was John Thomas, a Baptist layman who had gone to India as a doctor for the royal navy and stayed on after his term of service to minister as a freelance missionary doctor and evangelist. Carey immediately offered himself to the new society as a “suitable companion” to Thomas and was accepted.
William Carey, the “Father of Modern Missions.”
Although Carey had long been avidly interested in missions, the decision to offer himself for overseas missions was nothing less than rash. That his church was distressed at losing its pastor and his father judged him “mad” might be overlooked, but his wife was also strongly opposed. With three little ones and another on the way, it is no wonder Dorothy was adamantly opposed to leaving her homeland to embark on a hazardous five-month voyage (complicated by France’s very recent declaration of war against England) to spend the rest of her life in the deadly tropical climate of India. Other women had willingly made such sacrifices, and thousands more would in the future, but not she. If there is a “Mother of Modern Missions,” it was not Dorothy Carey. She refused to go.
However, if Dorothy thought her refusal to accompany her husband would change his mind, she was wrong. Carey was determined to go, even if it meant going without her. He went ahead with his plans, which included booking a passage for Felix, his eight-year-old son. In March of 1793, after months of deputation, Carey and Thomas were commissioned by the Society; and the following month they, along with Felix and Thomas’s wife and daughter, boarded a ship on the Thames River that was to take them to India. But the trip to India ended abruptly at Portsmouth, England. Officials boarded the ship and refused to allow the party to leave the country until Thomas had satisfied his creditors.
The delay led to a dramatic change in plans. Dorothy, having delivered her baby three weeks before, grudgingly agreed to join the mission party with her little ones, provided that Kitty, her younger sister, could accompany her. Obtaining funds for the additional passengers was a difficult hurdle, but on June 13, 1793, they boarded a Danish vessel and set sail for India. The long and dangerous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope was at times terrifying, but on November 19 they arrived safely in India.
The time of their arrival was not favorable for establishing mission work. The East India Company was in virtual control of the country, and its hostility to mission work was soon made plain. The company feared anything that might interfere with its commercial ventures, and Carey was left with no doubts that he was very unwelcome. Fearing deportation, he moved with his family to the interior. Here, surrounded by malarial swamps, the Careys lived in dire circumstances. Dorothy and the two oldest boys became deathly ill, and family cares required his constant attention. She and Kitty were “continually exclaiming against”6 him and were resentful of the Thomas family, who were living in relative affluence in Calcutta. After some months their plight was alleviated by the kindness and generosity of Mr. Short, an East India Company official who took pity on them and welcomed them into his home. Soon, however, the family moved on to Malda, nearly three hundred miles north, where Carey worked as an indigo factory foreman.
The years in Malda were difficult ones. Although Carey was content in his new position and found the indigo factory to be a choice language school and field for evangelism, family troubles persisted. Kitty had stayed back to marry Mr. Short, and Dorothy’s health and mental stability steadily declined. Then the tragic death of their five-year-old son Peter in 1794 pushed her into serious mental illness.
Dorothy was apparently suffering from a delusional disorder that convinced her that her husband was unfaithful in their marriage. John Thomas wrote to Andrew Fuller about incidents that had occurred in 1795:
Mrs. Carey has given us much trouble and vexation…. She has taken it into her head that C(arey) is a great whoremonger, and her jealously burns like fire unquenchable; and this horrible idea has night and day filled her heart for about 9 or 10 months past; so that if he goes out of his door by day or night, she follows him; and declares in the most solemn manner that she has catched him with his servants, with his friends, with Mrs. Thomas, and that he is guilty every day and every night…. She has even made some attempt on his life.7
Her mental delusions not only caused great personal turmoil for Carey but also created confusion and questions about his ministry and message. “He attempted to argue for the moral superiority of Christianity and how Christ could liberate Hindus and Moslems from the tragedies of paganism,” writes James Beck. “But how could he evangelize with his wife following him through the streets accusing him in the vilest language of adultery?”8 It was a distressing situation, and she was later described by coworkers as being “wholly deranged.”
The circumstances, not surprisingly, took a toll on Carey, as is evident in his journal entries through 1795: “This is indeed the Valley of the Shadow of Death to me…. O what a load is a barren heart…. Oh that this day could be consigned to oblivion…. Much to complain of, such another dead soul I think scarcely exists in the world…. Mine is a lonely life indeed…. My soul is overwhelmed with depression.”9
Despite his traumatic family situation and his continued factory work, Carey spent hours every day in Bible translation work and evangelism. By the end of 1795 a Baptist church had been established in Malda. It was a start, even though its entire membership equaled only four, and they were Englishmen. The services, however, drew curious onlookers among the Bengali people, and Carey asserted that “the name of Jesus Christ is no longer strange in this neighborhood.” But there was no fruit. After nearly seven years of toil in Bengal, Carey could not claim even one Indian convert.10
In spite of his lack of outward success, Carey was satisfied with his missionary work in Malda and was keenly disappointed to leave in 1800. New missionaries had arrived from England, and in order to avoid continual harassment from the East India Company, they settled near Calcutta in the Danish territory of Serampore. Carey’s help was urgently needed in setting up the new mission station to accommodate them, so he reluctantly set out for Serampore.
Serampore soon became the center of Baptist missionary activity in India, and it was there that Carey would spend the remaining thirty-four years of his life. Carey and his coworkers, Joshua Marshman and William Ward, referred to as the Serampore Trio, would become one of the most famous missionary teams in history. But “trio” is a misnomer. Hannah Marshman was as much a part of that team as were the men. The team is more correctly termed the Serampore quartet. “They were amazingly close-knit as a leadership team,” writes Christopher Smith. “Indeed, very few people in Britain ever realized how dependent Carey was on his partners for insight and a wide range of initiatives.”11 The mission compound, which housed ten missionaries and their nine children, enjoyed a family atmosphere. The missionaries lived together and kept most things in common. On Saturday nights they met to pray and to air their grievances, “pledging themselves to love one another.” Responsibilities were divided according to abilities, and the work progressed smoothly.
The success of the Serampore Mission during the early years can be credited, in part, to Carey’s kindly disposition. His own willingness to sacrifice material wealth and to go beyond the call of duty was a continual example to the rest, and he easily overlooked the faults in others. Even in regard to Thomas, who mismanaged the mission funds—the man who had “set himself up in a fine house with 12 servants and a coach to carry him about the city”12—Carey could say, “I love him, and we live in the greatest harmony.” Describing his coworkers, Carey wrote: “Brother Ward is the very man we wanted…. He enters into the work with his whole soul. I have much pleasure in him…. Brother Marshman is a prodigy of diligence and prudence, as is also his wife.”13
The Serampore mission demonstrated effective teamwork, and there were results to show for it. Schools were organized, a large printing establishment was set up, and Carey’s translation work continued. During his years at Serampore, he translated the whole Bible in Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi; helped in other whole Bible translations; and translated the New Testament and portions of Scripture into many more languages and dialects. His quality, however, did not match his quantity. Home Secretary Andrew Fuller scolded him for inconsistent spelling and other problems in the copy he sent back to England for printing: “I never knew a person of so much knowledge as you profess of other languages, to write English so bad…. You huddle half a dozen periods into one…. If your Bengal N.T. shd be thus pointed I shd tremble for its fate.”14 Fuller’s fears were well-founded, and Carey, to his bitter disappointment, found that some of his work was incomprehensible. But he did not give up. He reworked his translations until he was satisfied that they could be understood.
Evangelism was also an important part of the work at Serampore, though it progressed slowly. By 1818, after twenty-five years of Baptist missions to India, there were some six hundred baptized converts and a few thousand more who attended classes and services.
Despite his busy schedule of translation and evangelistic work, Carey found time to do more. One of his greatest achievements was the founding of Serampore College in 1819 for the training of indigenous church planters and evangelists. The school opened with thirty-seven Indian students, more than half of whom were Christians. Another area of educational achievement involved his teaching at Fort William College in Calcutta, where he was invited to become the Professor of Oriental Languages. The position not only brought in much-needed income to the missionaries but also placed them in better standing with the East India Company and gave him an opportunity to improve his language skills while being challenged by his students.
As busy as he was, Carey neglected his children, failing to give them the parenting they so desperately needed. Even when he was with them, his easygoing nature stood in the way of firm discipline, a lack that was plainly exhibited in the boys’ behavior. In speaking of this situation, Hannah Marshman wrote, “The good man saw and lamented the evil but was too mild to apply an effectual remedy.”15 Had it not been for her stern reprimands and William Ward’s fatherly concern, the Carey boys would have gone entirely their own way.
In 1807, at the age of fifty-one, Dorothy Carey died. She had long since ceased to be a useful member of the mission family. In fact, she was a hindrance to the work. John Marshman wrote how Carey often worked on his translations “while an insane wife, frequently wrought up to a state of most distressing excitement, was in the next room.”16 Marshman himself suffered from mental illness—“terror and anguish”—which Carey described as “morbid depression.”17
During his years at Serampore, Carey had developed a friendship with Lady Charlotte Rumohr, born into Danish royalty and living at Serampore, hoping the climate would improve her poor health. Though she came to Serampore as a skeptic, she attended services at the mission, was converted, and was baptized by Carey in 1803. After that she devoted her time and much of her money to the work of the mission. In 1808, only a few months after the death of Dorothy, Carey announced his engagement to Lady Charlotte, causing an upheaval in the usually tranquil mission family. So great was the opposition that a petition was circulated in an effort to prevent the marriage, but to no avail. The marriage, conducted by Marshman, took place in May, just six months after Dorothy had been laid to rest.
Carey’s thirteen-year marriage to Charlotte was a happy one. Charlotte had a brilliant mind and a gift for linguistics, and she was a valuable assistant in his translation work. She also maintained close relationships with the boys and became the mother they had never had. When she died in 1821, Carey wrote, “We had as great a share of conjugal happiness as ever was enjoyed by mortals.”Two years later, at the age of sixty-two, Carey married again, this time to Grace Hughes, a widow seventeen years younger than he. Though Grace was not as well-endowed intellectually as Charlotte had been, he praised her for her “constant and unremitting care and excellent nursing” during his frequent illnesses.18
One of the most devastating setbacks that Carey faced during his forty uninterrupted years in India was the loss of his priceless manuscripts in a warehouse fire in 1812. He was away at the time, but the news that his massive polyglot dictionary, two grammar books, and whole versions of the Bible had been destroyed devastated him. Had his temperament been different, he might never have recovered, but he accepted the tragedy as a judgment from the Lord and began all over again with even greater zeal.
Carey and his colleagues were conscious of communicating the gospel effectively in the Indian culture—though ever recognizing that their efforts were trifling in comparison to what native Indians themselves would be able to do. One of their means of cross-cultural communication was through music. “Hindu ballad singers were commonly seen on the streets and marketplaces of that day,” writes Timothy George. “Carey, Marshman, and Ward assumed this role for themselves. Standing at a busy intersection of four roads, they began to sing a ‘Christian ballad.’ People looked out of their houses, stopped their business activities, and gathered around in astonishment at the sight.” The ballad related the story of an Indian man who renounced various Hindu gods and put his faith in Christ. Printed copies were distributed to the curious bystanders.19
Carey’s first fifteen years at Serampore were years of cooperation and team-work. Except for occasional problems such as the one relating to his second marriage, the little Baptist community in India lived in harmony. But the peace did not last, and the fifteen years that followed were filled with turmoil. The spirit of unity was broken when new missionaries arrived who were unwilling to live in the communal fashion of the Serampore missionaries. One missionary demanded “a separate house, stable, and servants.” There were other differences too. The new missionaries found their seniors—particularly Joshua Marshman—dictatorial, assigning them duties and locations not to their liking. The senior workers were settled into their system, and they were not open to change. Bitter accusations were made against the senior missionaries, and the result was a split between the two groups. The junior missionaries formed the Calcutta Missionary Union and began working only miles away from their Baptist colleagues. “Indelicate” was the word William Ward used to describe the situation.20
The ordeal became even more critical when the Home Committee received the news and became involved. The original committee headed by Andrew Fuller no longer existed. That little committee of three had grown, and most of the members knew Carey only through his letters. Fuller and one of the other original members had died, leaving the home committee clearly stacked in favor of the junior members whom it had personally commissioned as missionaries. While Fuller had been at the helm, he had insisted for two reasons that Serampore be self-governing: “One is, we think them better able to govern themselves than we are to govern them. Another is, they are at too great a distance to wait for our direction.”21 But the reconstructed home committee strongly disagreed. The members believed that all the important affairs of the Serampore Mission should be under their direct control. Finally, in 1826, after years of wearying conflict, the Serampore Mission severed its relationship with the Baptist Missionary Society.
The final split between Serampore and the Baptist Missionary Society was a financial blow to the Serampore missionaries. Although the Serampore team had been financially self-sufficient during most of its history, receiving only a small percentage of its funds from England, times were changing. There were missionaries at more than a dozen outstations who needed support, and medical care was needed for others. No longer could the Serampore team support them all. Carey and Marshman (Ward having since died) had no choice but to swallow their pride and submit themselves and the mission to the authority of the Society. Soon after that a substantial sum of money and kind letters arrived from the home committee. The healing process had begun.
Carey died in 1834, leaving a legacy for other missionaries to follow. In addition to evangelism, education, and translation, he had focused his attention on social issues—particularly in his long struggle against widow burning and infanticide. But otherwise, he sought to leave the culture intact. Carey was ahead of his time in missionary methodology. He had respect for the Indian culture, and he never tried to import Western substitutes as so many missionaries who came after him would seek to do. His goal was to build an indigenous church “by means of native preachers” and by providing the Scriptures in the native tongue, and to that end he dedicated his life.
But Carey’s influence was felt well beyond India. His work was being closely followed not only in England but also on the Continent and in America, where the inspiration derived from his daring example outweighed in importance all his accomplishments in India.
While Carey and his colleagues were conducting mission work in India, the Judsons were initiating mission outreach in Burma. Their destination had been India, but like so many missionaries before them, they discovered the East India Company to be an unyielding barrier to missionary work. After months of complications and delays, they were forced to leave India. They painfully separated from Carey and the other missionaries and sailed to Burma. There they would spend the rest of their lives under extreme hardship and privation in an effort to bring the gospel to the people of that closed and uninviting land.
Even as layers of popular mythology surrounded Carey, so also with Ann and Adoniram Judson, who became the heroes of America’s first venture into overseas missions. As with many missionaries of this era, the biographical material is laudatory and limited by lack of original sources. According to his “official” biographer, Adoniram, due to “peculiar views of duty … had caused to be destroyed” all of his early family letters and personal papers. And later on, during his imprisonment, Ann destroyed his more current correspondence—no doubt fearing the letters would fall into the hands of Burmese authorities.22
Adoniram Judson was born in Massachusetts in 1788, the son of a Congregational minister. He was barely sixteen when he entered Brown University, and he graduated three years later as valedictorian of his class. During his student days, according to his biographers, he had grown close to a fellow student, Jacob Eames, who espoused deism, a denial of the personal God of the Bible. But Eames’s views made a strong impact on young Judson, who had grown dissatisfied with the biblical faith of his father. After graduation Judson returned home to teach school, but he was restless. Disregarding his parents’ pleas, he set out for New York City, hoping to become a playwright.
His stay in New York was short and unfulfilling. After a matter of weeks he was on his way back to New England, dejected and frustrated about his future. He stopped one night at an inn, during which time his sleep was interrupted by the groans of a sick man in the room next to his. In the morning, as the story goes, he inquired about the unfortunate traveler, only to be informed that the man—Jacob Eames—had died during the night. It was a terrible shock to the twenty-year-old Judson, a time for soul-searching as he slowly made his way home.
There was an air of excitement at the parsonage at Plymouth when Adoniram arrived home in September of 1808. His father was one of several ministers involved in establishing a new seminary at Andover that, unlike Harvard and the other New England divinity schools, would stand on the orthodox tenets of the faith. With the encouragement of his father and the other ministers, Adoniram agreed to enroll. He was admitted as a special student, making no profession of faith, but after only a few months he made a “solemn dedication” of himself to God.23
Adoniram Judson, pioneer missionary to Burma.
Soon after this commitment, Adoniram read a printed copy of a stirring missionary message given by a British minister. So moved was he that he vowed he would be the first American foreign missionary. Andover Seminary was hardly a beehive of missionary zeal, but there were other students who were very supportive, including Samuel Mills from Williams College, who had been the leader of the “Haystack Prayer Meeting” some years before. This outdoor prayer meeting, an unplanned event, was a landmark in American foreign missions. A group of missionary-minded Williams College students, known as the Society of the Brethren, often met outside for prayer. Caught in a thunderstorm one afternoon, they took shelter under a nearby haystack. It was there under that haystack that they pledged themselves to missionary service. The son of a minister, Mills listened to stories of the missionary pioneers from his mother. Though he never served as an overseas missionary, he was, according to Alan Neely, “a prime mover in the founding of the first foreign mission societies in North America.”24 He led in the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American Bible Society, the United Foreign Mission Society, and other benevolent organizations.
Unable to secure the necessary funds for a missionary vocation from the newly formed American Board, Adoniram Judson sailed to England in hopes of obtaining funding for himself and six others through the London Missionary Society (LMS). The LMS, he discovered, was not averse to sponsoring an American missionary, but the directors were not willing to finance him under the American Board. He was prepared to offer himself and his colleagues to the LMS, but when word came of a sizable inheritance received by the American Board, he returned home.
Before he had gone to England, Adoniram had “commenced an acquaintanceship” with Ann (“Nancy”) Hasseltine. Some years earlier Ann, like Adoniram, had undergone a life-changing religious conversion and had sensed a call to overseas missions—a call not prompted by “an attachment to an earthly object,” meaning Adoniram, but because of an “obligation to God … with a full conviction of its being a call.”25 In February of 1812 she and Adoniram were married, and thirteen days later they set sail for India, arriving in Calcutta in mid-June.
Ann (Nancy) Hasseltine Judson, the first wife of Adoniram Judson.
For Adoniram and Ann the long sea voyage was more than an extended honeymoon. They spent many hours in Bible study—with a particular focus on the meaning and mode of baptism, a subject that had been weighing on Adoniram’s mind. The more he studied the more convinced he became that the Congregational view of infant baptism by sprinkling was wrong. Ann was initially distressed, arguing that the issue was not crucial and stating that even if he became a Baptist she would not. After more study and much persuasion, however, she accepted his view, and after arriving in India they were both baptized by William Ward of Serampore.
When word reached home that the Judsons as well as Luther Rice (one of the other six missionaries commissioned to India by the American Board) had become Baptists, there was an uproar among the Congregationalists. How could their star missionary desert them after all they had invested in him? The Baptists, however, were pleased, and they quickly moved to form their own missionary society and underwrite the necessary support.
Unable to remain in India, the Judsons traveled from place to place until they settled in Burma, which had been Adoniram’s first choice for mission work—until he heard frightening reports of brutal treatment of foreigners. Their arrival in Rangoon was a depressing and difficult time for them. Ann, who had undergone a stillbirth on the voyage, was bedridden. Unlike India, Burma had no European community. Poverty was everywhere. The narrow, filthy streets of Rangoon were lined with run-down huts. They were not the first Protestant missionaries in Burma. Others had come and gone, but only Felix Carey and his wife remained. They left soon after the Judsons arrived when Felix was offered a position by the Burmese government (to which his father had bitterly commented, “Felix is shriveled from a missionary into an ambassador”). Later Felix returned to India to join his father in the mission work there.
Two years after they had sailed from America, Adoniram and Ann were serving alone in Burma, spending up to twelve hours a day in language study. The large Baptist mission house in Rangoon had been left to them. Ann, through her daily contacts with Burmese women, caught on to the spoken tongue quickly, but Adoniram struggled laboriously with the written language, a continual sequence of letters with no punctuation or capitals and no divisions between words, sentences, or paragraphs.
Language was not the only barrier standing between the Judsons and the Burmese people. They could find no Burmese concept of an eternal God who personally cared for them. Their first attempts to share the gospel were discouraging: “You cannot imagine how very difficult it is to give them any idea of the true God and the way of salvation by Christ, since their present ideas of deity are so very low.” Buddhism was the religion of Burma, a religion of ritual and idol worship: “It is now two thousand years since Gaudama [Gautama], their last deity, entered on his state of perfection; and though he now ceases to exist, they still worship a hair of his head, which is enshrined in an enormous pagoda, to which the Burmans go every eighth day.”26
America’s first foreign missionaries, commissioned February 5, 1812.
The Judsons’ status as the only Protestant missionaries in Burma was brief. Not long after they moved into the spacious mission house, their privacy ended as they made room for George and Phebe Hough and their children. Hough, a printer, came with his press and type and soon was printing portions of Scripture that Adoniram had slowly been translating. Within two years, two more families arrived; but death, disease, and early departures kept the mission force small.
Burma was a discouraging field of service. At times there were encouraging signs of interest, but then the inquiries would suddenly drop off as rumors of official crackdowns surfaced. Toleration of the missionaries fluctuated from one extreme to another with the continual turnover of viceroys in Rangoon. When the Judsons were in favor at the court, they were free to propagate the gospel and the Burmese responded to the relaxed controls; but when they were out of favor, they maintained a low profile, spending their time at the mission house in translation work.
From their early days in Rangoon, the Judsons were unhappy with the out-of-the-way location of the mission house. For a short while they moved out of the mission house and lived in a small dwelling among the teeming population of the city, but a fire ravaged their area and drove them back to the secluded mission house. However, their dream of attracting large numbers of people came to fruition through the concept of a zayat. A zayat was a shelter open to anyone who wanted to rest or to discuss the day’s events or to listen to Buddhist lay teachers who often stopped by. It was a place to relax and forget the pressures of the day, and there were many such shelters in Rangoon. In 1819, five years after the Judsons arrived in Burma, they secured property not far from the mission house on the Pagoda Road, a well-traveled thoroughfare. Their zayat was a 20-by-20-foot hut with a wide veranda, all elevated on poles several feet off the ground. This was not to be an Asian version of a New England meeting-house. They attended a religious service at a nearby zayat to familiarize themselves with seating patterns and other cultural peculiarities.
The concept worked. Almost immediately visitors who would never have come to the mission house began stopping by, and the Judsons entered a new phase of their ministry. The following month Maung Nau made profession of faith at a Sunday service in the zayat packed with Burmese people. This was the beginning of the Burmese church in Rangoon, and by the summer of 1820 there were ten baptized members. From the beginning, the Burmese converts took an active role in evangelism: one woman opened a school in her house; a young man became an assistant pastor; and others distributed tracts. The work went forward even when the Judsons were away.
Both Adoniram and Ann suffered frequent bouts of tropical fevers, and baby Roger, born to them the year after they settled in Rangoon, died of fever at six months. In 1820 they returned to India for medical care for Ann, and two years later she took an extended sick leave back to the United States.
While Ann was away, Adoniram buried himself in his translation work, completing the New Testament in less than a year. In the meantime, his situation had drastically changed. Dr. Jonathan Price, a medical missionary working with Adoniram, was ordered to appear before the emperor at Ava, several weeks’ journey upriver. Adoniram, fluent in the Burmese language, felt obligated to accompany him. For a time the two missionaries enjoyed the favor of the royal court, but by early 1824 the political situation in Burma began to look ominous. Ann had returned from the United States, and she joined Adoniram in Ava, but their reunion was brief. War broke out between Burma and England, and all foreigners were suspected of being spies. Both Adoniram and Price were arrested and confined in a death prison, where they awaited execution.
Life in prison was appalling. The missionaries were incarcerated with common criminals in a filthy, vermin-infested, dank prison house, with fetters binding their ankles. At night the Spotted Faces (prison guards whose face and chest were branded for being one-time criminals themselves) hoisted the ankle fetters to a pole suspended from the ceiling, until only their heads and shoulders rested on the ground. By morning the weary prisoners were numb and stiff, but the daytime offered them little relief. Each day executions were carried out, and the prisoners never knew who would be next.
Adoniram’s suffering was difficult for Ann. Daily she sought out officials, explaining that, as an American citizen, Adoniram had no connections with the British government. Sometimes her pleas and bribes allowed her a brief visit and gained Adoniram temporary relief; but all the while he continued to languish in prison. Her visits stopped for a time, but then in mid-February of 1825, eight months after Adoniram had been arrested, she returned carrying a small bundle—baby Maria, less than three weeks old.
The following May, with British troops marching toward Ava, the prisoners were suddenly removed from the prison house and forced on a death march to a location farther north. Having been bound in prison for most of a year without exercise, the prisoners were unprepared for the arduous pace under the scorching sun, and some died on the way. For Adoniram death would have been relief. His bare feet were raw and bleeding—each step was excruciating. As they marched, they crossed a bridge spanning a dry rocky riverbed, and for a moment he was tempted to hurl himself over the edge and end it all.
Within days, Ann arrived at the new location, once again pleading her husband’s case. But her own life and baby Maria’s was now in jeopardy. She was so ill that she could no longer nurse the baby. Sympathetic guards permitted Adoniram to go out of the prison twice daily to seek nourishment for his baby from other nursing mothers.
Finally, in November of 1825, after nearly a year and a half of prison confinement, Adoniram was released with the stipulation that he would help interpret peace negotiations with the British. He was also allowed a reunion with Ann and the baby. Of this time Ann wrote, “No persons on earth were ever happier than we were during the fortnight we passed at the English Camp.”27 After that, they returned to Rangoon for a short time and then went to Amherst, where Ann remained with Maria while Adoniram returned to help finalize the negotiations. The weeks dragged into months, and before he was able to return, Adoniram received a letter with a black seal. Ann had died of fever, followed a few months later by baby Maria.
Judson’s immediate reaction to her death was to drown his sorrows in work. For more than a year he kept up a hectic pace of translation work and evangelism, but his heart was not in his labors. He attempted to suppress his guilt and grief, but he could not forgive himself for not being with Ann and the baby when he was needed most. As the depression increased, his output decreased, and he avoided contact with others—no longer eating with the other missionaries at the mission house. Finally, some two years after Ann’s death, he went into the jungle, built a hut, and lived as a recluse. He dug a grave where he kept vigil for days on end, filling his mind with morbid thoughts of death. Spiritual desolation engulfed him: “God is to me the Great Unknown. I believe in him, but I find him not.”28
Adoniram’s mental problems raised great concern among both missionaries and native converts. They visited him and brought him food and prayed for him. Slowly, he recovered from the paralyzing depression—with a new depth of spirituality that intensified his ministry. He traveled in Burma, helping other missionaries at their outposts. As he did, he sensed a new spirit of interest “through the whole length and breadth of the land.” It was a profound feeling: “I sometimes feel alarmed like a person who sees a mighty engine beginning to move, over which he knows he has no control.”29
As exhilarating as Judson’s itinerant ministry was, he knew that there was an even greater task to be accomplished—completing the Burmese Bible. That required setting aside two years and keeping up a pace of translating of more than twenty-five Old Testament verses each day from Hebrew into Burmese—two enormously complex languages. He met his goal, but then followed more years of revision work. Not until 1840, fourteen years after Ann’s death, was he able to send the last page of his Burmese Bible to the printer.
In the meantime, Judson had been concentrating on more than his revisions. In 1834, at the age of forty-six, he married Sarah Boardman, a thirty-year-old widow who had continued her mission work after the death of her husband. During the first ten years of their marriage, she gave birth to eight children (and buried two). The strain was too much. In 1845, the year after her last child was born, while they were en route to the United States, Sarah died.
Adoniram and three of their children who had accompanied Sarah arrived in America deeply sorrowful at a time that would have been a joyous reunion with family and friends. It had been thirty-three years since he had last seen his native land. Country towns and fishing wharves had turned into great cities and seaports. He hardly recognized the once-familiar New England countryside. Thirty-three years of progress had changed his homeland and had changed him. He suddenly found himself a celebrity. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to see and hear this man whose name had become a household word and whose missionary work had become a legend. Though he shunned publicity, he agreed to accommodate his enthusiastic supporters and began a tiring circuit of speaking engagements.
During his travels, Judson was introduced to Emily Chubbock, a young author of popular fiction written under the pseudonym Fanny Forrester. He was impressed with her lively writing style, but he was astounded that such brilliant talent of a professing Christian (and a Baptist at that) would be wasted on secular endeavors. His suggestion that Emily write a biography of Sarah was eagerly accepted, and their friendship quickly blossomed. He proposed marriage in January of 1846, less than a month after their first meeting. The decision to marry Emily was controversial. Judson was a venerated saint of Protestant America, and as such the prospects of his marrying a secular author still in her twenties, only half his age, was viewed with shock and displeasure. But the barrage of criticism did not dissuade them, and in June of 1846 they were married.
The following month they sailed for Burma, leaving Adoniram’s three children in the care of two different families—never to see their father again. There were three more children who had been left behind in Burma. The Judson saga, as much as any missionary story, illustrates the trauma that missionary families endured—the trauma of crying, frightened little ones clinging to their parents, never comprehending why they were being torn from the only love and security they had ever known. Yet the children somehow weathered these ordeals. Of Judson’s five children by Sarah who grew to adulthood, two became ministers, one a physician, another a headmistress of an academy, and another served in the Union Army until he was disabled in battle.
In November of 1846 Adoniram and his new bride arrived in Burma. Emily had faired the voyage well and was ready to fill Sarah’s shoes to the best of her ability. She became a mother to Judson’s little ones (only two of whom had survived), and she enthusiastically plunged into language study and missionary work, never forgetting her talent for writing. Through her pen came some graphic pictures of the stark reality of missionary life. She was bothered by the “thousands and thousands of bats,” but most of the other little creatures she took in stride:
We are blessed with our full share of cockroaches, beetles, lizards, rats, ants, mosquitoes, and bed-bugs. With the last the woodwork is all alive, and the ants troop over the house in great droves…. Perhaps twenty have crossed my paper since I have been writing. Only one cockroach has paid me a visit, but the neglect of these gentlemen has been fully made up by a company of black bugs about the size of the end of your finger—nameless adventurers.30
Adoniram and Emily served three years together in Burma. The birth of a baby girl brought happiness to them, but much of the time was marred by illness. In the spring of 1850, with Emily soon expecting another child, Adoniram, seriously ill, left on a sea voyage. Less than a week later he died and was buried at sea. Ten days later Emily underwent a stillbirth, and not until August did she hear of her husband’s death. The following January she, along with her daughter and Adoniram’s two young sons, sailed for Boston to make a home for the children in the United States. But her own health was broken. She died three years later at the age of thirty-six.
Adoniram Judson, unlike William Carey, left behind a legacy of evangelistic ministry that was carried on through succeeding generations. Maung Ing, his fourth convert, had shown his loyalty throughout Adoniram’s prison term and worked with him after he was released. Ing’s fourth daughter, Mei-Phaw, was also a Christian. Her life was threatened by her own son, Tha Doon Aung, who was a “king’s man” and a “rigid Buddhist.” In the very act of attacking his mother, Tha Doon Aung suddenly recognized the power of his mother’s faith and was converted. His children and grandchildren carried on the faith, and his greatgrandson, Tin Maung Tun, founded “Witnessing for Christ,” an evangelistic movement that has continued to this day the work the Judsons started.31
Sarah and George Boardman arrived in Burma from the United States at the close of the Anglo-Burmese War, soon after the death of Ann Judson. They knew well the perils of coming to such a land. In fact, their concern for Burmese missions and their subsequent marriage was stimulated by the untimely death of James Coleman, one of Judson’s missionary colleagues. So deeply moved by this sacrifice was George Boardman, a graduate of Colby College, that he enrolled at Andover Seminary to prepare for missionary service. In much the same way Sarah Hall, a sober-minded teenager and the oldest of thirteen children, was touched by the tragedy. Her response was to write a poem about Coleman—lines that would change the course of her life. The poem, published in a religious journal, stirred the curiosity of Boardman. He was not satisfied until he located her, and within months after their initial meeting, they became engaged.
The Boardmans were known for their ministry among the Karens, a mountain tribe spurned by the more sophisticated Burmese. The Karens had a long tradition that white men would one day bring the “book of life” to them, and thus they were open to the teaching of the missionaries who had a book. Shortly after the Boardmans arrived in Burma, they left the comfortable mission confines of Moulmein to move to Tavoy for pioneer work among the Karens. With them they brought Ko Tha Byu, a converted criminal who by his own admission had committed some thirty murders. He was a native Karen who had a vibrant testimony and a contagious Christian faith—so much so that after revival broke out, his house was broken down as a result of people pressing in to see him. A letter requesting help was sent to Adoniram Judson: “We are in distress and send to you for relief. For the last several days, our house and the house of Ko Tha Byu, ten cubits square, have been thronged…. Karens are thronging in from many places.”32 The Boardmans worked with him in their evangelistic ministry, but George Boardman’s health was seriously declining. He died in 1831 after less than five years in Burma. Unlike Judson, who served several years before he saw even one convert, Boardman had the privilege of seeing many make profession of faith. During the last two months of his life, fifty-seven Karens were baptized, and the Tavoy church alone had seventy members. In the years that followed, Ko Tha Byu continued on in work despite strong persecution from those who resented his effective evangelistic ministry.
After her husband’s death, Sarah was tempted to return to the United States with little George, her two-year-old son, but through Judson’s urging, she decided to continue in her ministry. She had established a girls’ school and feared that it would falter were she to leave. For three years she remained with the Karens, spending her time teaching and continuing her husband’s itinerant ministry into the mountain villages with her son, whom the Karens affectionately called “Little Chief.”
In 1834, Adoniram Judson came to Tavoy to visit Sarah, and during his extended visit they were married. The following year the six-year-old “Little Chief “ was sent to the United States to be properly educated. It was a traumatic experience for the boy, whom Sarah described as having “a clinging tenderness and sensitivity which peculiarly unfitted him for contact with strangers.”33 He never saw his mother again. The emptiness in Sarah’s life was soon filled with more little ones, and she became encumbered with the duties of motherhood, but she never entirely set aside her ministry to the Burmese people. In addition to teaching a girls’ school, she made effective use of her language skills. She wrote hymns and curriculum material in Burmese and translated other material, including part of Pilgrim’s Progress, which she was working on at the time of her death.
Sarah’s marriage to Judson did not mean an end to the missionary involvement with the Karens. Others came to work among them and to translate Scripture, and by the 1850s there were more than ten thousand church members.
One of the most innovative missionaries to serve in India was Alexander Duff, who arrived in Calcutta with his wife in 1830. Duff had not been impressed with the reports of missionary work in India, some of which claimed evangelism among the Indians was a complete failure. The critics charged that the few converts that had been made were largely among the outcastes, who then remained dependent on the mission with no influence on their fellow countrymen. While the reports may have been unduly pessimistic, it was true that no concerted effort had been made to reach high-caste Indians, and it was Duff ’s mission to remedy that situation.
Duff was born and raised in Scotland and educated at the University of St. Andrews. The evangelical awakening in Scotland during the 1820s transformed this young university student, and at the age of twenty-three he became the first overseas missionary of the Church of Scotland. But there were setbacks before he even began. On the voyage to India there were two shipwrecks, resulting in the loss of his entire personal library—a crushing blow to one as consumed as he was with scholarship and education.
On arriving in India, Duff put his plan into action—teaching arts and sciences in English to India’s educated elite, who were very interested in Western ideas and education. The Bible would also be taught and studied, and through this method Duff was convinced that Christianity would be firmly planted in India. His critics were numerous—both missionaries and Indian educators—but he had two notable supporters: the aged and highly respected William Carey, and Ram Mohum Roy, an educated and liberal Brahman. Roy was a popular reformer with a wide following, and it was largely his influence that opened up opportunities. Roy prided himself in being open-minded and did not object to Duff ’s emphasis on the Bible. He had read the Bible without becoming a Christian, and he urged Duff ’s students to do the same and judge for themselves.
Within a few short months, Duff opened his school. He started out with five students under a banyan tree, but word spread quickly. By the end of the week there were more than three hundred students clamoring to enroll. The school was a success in its efforts to disseminate Western education and perhaps only slightly less so in its efforts to disseminate the gospel. Within three years he had baptized four converts, a small number for the size of his school. But even the news of those few conversions created such a disturbance that students left and his work for a time was jeopardized. Slowly students returned, however, and by the end of his first decade in India his school enrollment averaged eight hundred. Later he opened a school for high-caste girls that also attracted wide interest.
The major criticism of Duff ’s work was that the vast majority of his students came to his school only for the secular education, and of these thousands there were only thirty-three recorded converts during his lifetime. Most of those thirty-three, however, were young men from influential families who themselves became influential Christians. Some of them served as missionaries and ministers, and others became prominent Christian lay leaders.
Alexander Duff, missionary educator in India.
Duff was a staunch, sober, humorless Presbyterian whose monumental achievements were not fulfilled without sacrifice to his family life. In 1839 he and his wife returned to India after their first furlough, leaving their four little children (including their infant boy) behind with a “widow-lady,” and they did not return until 1850, when that little boy was eleven years old—a time remembered with mixed emotions. Wasting no time to drill his son on his catechism, Duff, who was obviously not schooled in the principles of positive reinforcement, rebuked him: “The heathen boys in my Institution in Calcutta know more of the Bible than you do.”34
Young Duff later described his father as having “no wit, no humour, and still less of rollicking fun.” He resented his father’s aloofness, and his own recollections of his parents’ departure for India in 1855, when he was a teenager, certainly bear this out:
I … well remember how my mother’s and my own heart were well-nigh breaking, and how at the London Bridge my father possessed himself of the morning Times, and left us to cry our eyes out in mutual sorrow…. And so we parted … a sadder parting as between mother and son there never was. The father buried in his Times … parted from the son without any regret on the latter’s part.35
If Duff failed as a father, he succeeded as a missionary statesman. During his second furlough he toured England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the United States; and everywhere he went he was highly acclaimed. In the United States he preached to Congress and had a private meeting with the president. He has been described as “the most eloquent missionary orator”36 of his century, and his impact on foreign missions was significant. Through his influence hundreds volunteered for foreign missionary service, and tens of thousands contributed financially to the cause. His concept of combining education and evangelism was copied the world over, despite the controversy the method frequently aroused.
While Duff was being hailed as an innovator in evangelizing the elite, others continued to work with the untouchables and the members of the degraded low castes. In 1865 John and Harriet Clough of the American Baptist Mission began their work at the Lone Star Mission at Ongole, India. Their ministry included famine relief, and in 1878 they witnessed a mass movement among the outcastes, baptizing some nine thousand converts during a six-week period. Clough strongly believed that converts should remain in their social setting as opposed to attaching themselves to a mission compound as was sometimes the case. “For this purpose his evangelistic work was centered on villages,” writes Frederick Downs, “where he encouraged inquirers to wait until a family or group was ready to be baptized with them. Churches were organized in the villages in accordance with indigenous social structures.” Clough also strongly promoted the ministry of native preachers, “encouraging them to adopt as their model the Hindu guru.”37
There were other missionaries who strongly encouraged the ministry of Indian evangelists and whose ministry led to mass movements, among them the noted Methodist Bishop, James Thoburn. Sherwood Eddy, a leading figure in the Student Volunteer Movement, captured the spirit of Thoburn’s ministry in his own recollections:
My first contact with him was at the Northfield Students Conference in 1890. He made a powerful appeal, voicing the needs of India, and mentioning incidentally that very simple Indian workers could be supported for thirty dollars a year, though he made no request for money. Mr. Moody silenced the applause which greeted this address by saying it would be better to support some of Bishop Thoburn’s workers than merely to applaud. He said that he and Mr. Sankey would each take one subscription, and that a leader on the platform would be ready to receive others. I was one of the hundred there who gave thirty dollars each, and Bishop Thoburn was left breathless as he received three thousand dollars contributed on the spot. At the end of the same year, when I was told that the Indian worker supported by my thirty dollars had brought over a hundred men to Christ, I took another subscription, and another, and finally sold the gold case of my watch to support yet one more evangelist.38
Born into an Irish immigrant family from Ohio, James Thoburn and his sister Isabella both served as missionaries to India, he as an evangelist, church planter, pastor, and later a bishop, and she as an educator. After completing studies at Allegheny College, James entered the Methodist ministry and sailed to India with his wife Sarah in 1859. Through his encouragement, Isabella joined them in 1866 in Luchnow, where “there was not one woman who could read or write, and there was bitter prejudice on the part of the Hindus against the education of women.”39 It was an inauspicious beginning with only six girls, but the enrollment quickly grew to more than twenty, and the mission purchased property for a boarding school. Bringing girls together to live and study was a monumental undertaking. Caste was the issue—an issue that would continue for generations to thwart mission work in India. In his biography of his sister, James Thoburn addressed this problem:
Many differences, some of them petty and some of them painful, grew out of this question of race from time to time, and it is probable that Miss Thoburn at times suffered more acutely in her feelings on this account than from any other one cause during her whole life in India. She believed that in a country like India, where the very atmosphere seemed surcharged with caste and class feeling, it would be impossible to plant a pure and aggressive Christianity, unless the problem of raising up a people “of one mind and one heart” could be practically solved. She knew well that this problem could never be solved by artificial adaptations. The highest could not be brought down to the level of the lowest, nor the lowest all elevated to the plane of the highest. There could be no uniformity of salary, of occupation, of dress, of style, of taste, or of position. And yet there could be, and there must be, a blessed unity which would bind all hearts in a common family relationship.40
James Thoburn’s ministry had also been impeded by caste. Initially he had conducted village evangelism and church planting, but the work was slow, and he was searching for new strategies. In 1870 he sought help from William Taylor, a controversial Methodist minister known for his successful evangelistic campaigns and for his emphasis on self-supporting missionaries and mission churches. Taylor conducted a revival ministry in India for most of five years, paving the way, he believed, for others to follow. In Calcutta, however, he was met with indifference. Not until after he left India and Thoburn moved his own ministry to Calcutta did the church there begin to grow. Indeed, according to Gerald Anderson, “Thoburn presided over an era of rapid growth of the Methodist Church in India, with mass movements of converts into membership, and expansion into Southeast Asia.”41
In the meantime, Isabella Thoburn’s school was growing, and the young women who were graduating wanted further education. When she returned home for furlough in the 1880s, she spoke strongly for the cause and distributed a leaflet in which she had written: “There are over one hundred colleges in India for young men, but only one for young women, and that not Christian. Think what efforts we would make if there were only one college for women in America, and, in some measure, let us recognize the universal sisterhood and make like efforts for the women of India.”42
In 1887 the Isabella Thoburn College opened its doors—the first Christian women’s college in Asia. It was an impossible achievement—at least in the minds of many observers in India. The great missionary educator Alexander Duff had scoffed, “You might as well try to scale a wall fifty feet high as to educate the women of India.”43 But despite the obstacles, Isabella had fulfilled her dream—a dream that was shared with many of her supporters when she returned to America with Lilavati Singh, a brilliant student who later taught at the college. Singh impressed audiences with her academic excellence and her biblical insights. When she spoke at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in NewYork in 1900, President Harrison, who was in the audience, reportedly said that if he had “given a million dollars to foreign missions,” and Singh was all there was to show for it, he would have felt “amply repaid.”44
Like her brother James, Isabella would leave a legacy of training Indian nationals for the gospel ministry. Speaking of her teacher, Lilavati Singh wrote:
I shall never forget her Sunday afternoon prayer-meetings with us. How clearly she explained the laws of the spiritual kingdom…. Another thing that Miss Thoburn trained us in particularly was voluntary Christian work…. Sunday after Sunday, two by two, bands of Christian girls and teachers … still go out to the native part of the city to teach the little girls in the zenana [harem] of the blessed Savior.45
The final decades of the nineteenth century were decades of optimism. James Thoburn expanded his horizons, initiating Methodist mission outreach in Burma in 1879, and six years later in Singapore, and on to the Philippines in 1899. But he never turned away from the work in India—the land where one day “the entire out-caste and the lowest caste … may speedily be won to Christ in tens of millions.”46
There was similar optimism regarding the whole region. In 1892 Henry Mabie, secretary of the American Baptist Missionary Union, enthusiastically reflected on the growth of the Baptist Church in Burma and elsewhere. With confidence he quoted Adoniram Judson, who some seventy years earlier had predicted that “The churches of Jesus will soon supplant these idolatrous monuments, and the chanting of the devotees of Buddha will die away before the Christian hymn of praise.” Mabie was brimming with confidence as the centennial of Baptist mission work approached: “The Orient,” he exulted, “is pulsating with the world-thrill of human and divine action.”47 In the generations that followed, as missionaries were no longer permitted entry into Burma and India, the air of triumphalism faded.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Courtney. To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972.
Beck, James R. Dorothy Carey: The Tragic and Untold Story of Mrs. William Carey. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of Adoniram Judson. New York: Free Press, 1980.
Drewery, Mary. William Carey: A Biography. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979.
George, Timothy. Faithful Witness: The Life and Mission of William Carey. Birmingham: New Hope, 1991.
Oldham, W. F. Thoburn—Called of God. New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1918.
Paton, William. Alexander Duff: Pioneer of Missionary Education. New York: Doran, 1922.
Richter, Julius. A History of Missions in India. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1908.
Thoburn, James M. Life of Isabella Thoburn. New York: Eaton & Mains, 1903.