Time Must Bring a Harvest (1816 - 1817)

C H A P T E R V I

Time MUSt Bring a Harvest

[ 1816—1817 ]

BOUT a month after Roger’s death a sea captain named Kidd,

“a pious man,” came to live with the Judsons in the mission house. By this time Adoniram was suffering such pains in head and eyes that he could not even stand the sound of Nancy reading to him.

Kidd suggested that Adoniram try a voyage to Calcutta with him. Adoniram was on the point of accepting when letters came with the news that the Houghs were in Calcutta and about to leave for Rangoon. A printing press and types donated by the Serampore missionaries had already been shipped. He decided to wait.

The captain was in the habit of riding a horse for exercise, and persuaded Adoniram to try it. Although “this exercise was at first painful,” Adoniram persisted and soon found he was growing better. After a while he bought a horse for himself and rode every morning before sunrise.

The summer passed. Nancy, perhaps partly to forget Roger by her activity, started a small school for little girls, and began to write a simple catechism in Burmese. The press and types arrived, but the Houghs were inexplicably delayed. Adoniram thought it would “probably be impossible to keep the press long in Rangoon. It will be ordered up to Java, as soon as the news of such a curiosity reaches the king’s ears.” If so, he conjectured hopefully, the press might be the means of letting the missionaries persuade the king to open all Burma to the propagation of the GOSpel.

The Houghs with their two children did nor arrive until the middle of October, 1816. They had left Calcutta late in June, but the ship proved to be unseaworthy and both captain and pilot drunkards who anchored Opposite every tavern along the Hooghly and usually had to be carried back to the ship. After a few days of this, the alarmed Houghs returned to Calcutta to look for another ship. September was well along before they found one and made a fast, uneventful passage to Rangoon. But the misadventure had cost three months.

The Houghs immediately settled down in the mission house. To avoid the possibility of disputes each family had a certain number of the six rooms allotted to it for its own use. After the tedious work of passing the Houghs’ possessions through customs, Adoniram and Hough sat down together and drew up a set of rules to govern their conduct and their relations with the mission and with each other. The Serampore missionaries had learned by painful experience the necessity of such rules, placed in writing and signed. Sooner or later missionaries were offered temporary appointments, usually by the government, which were often desirable for the good of the mission. These appointments were usually well paid; but they took the missionary from his regular duties. Where should the money go in such a case? Unless everything was understood and agreed to in advance, a good deal of heartburn could arise out of such a situation.

Therefore Adoniram and Hough agreed “to engage in no secular business, for the purpose of individual emolument; and not at all, unless, in the opinion of the brethren, the great object of the mission can be best promoted thereby.” Any compensation or gifts of property were to be placed in the mission fund, “provided, that nothing in this article be construed to affect our private right to inheritances, or personal favours, not made in compensation of service.”

All members of the mission family were to have an equal claim on the mission fund for support, “the claims of widows and orphans not to be, in the least, affected by the death of the head of their family.” Appropriations were to be made by a majority vote of the missionaries involved in the compact.

After this agreement, the missionaries buckled down to work. A building was erected to house the press, and Hough studied the manuscript of Adoniram’s Burmese grammar in order to learn enough about the language to begin printing. Adoniram continued his translation of Matthew during the day, and in the evenings met with Burmese men. Nancy continued with her school for Burmese girls, its numbers now swollen to twenty or thirty, and used the opportunities it gave to tell their mOthers about Christianity. She also undertook a translation of the Old Testament book of Jonah, not because she considered it more important than other parts of the Bible, but because it was “easier to translate.” Mrs. Hough took care of the children and applied herself to learning how to manage a Burmese household.

It was not necessary to know much about Burmese to begin printing, and Hough was ready within a few months. All he had to do was match the odd-looking strings of circles Adoniram had written with the appropriate circles in his fonts of Burmese type. For manuscript, he had the tract Adoniram had completed that summer.

In seven printed pages the tract attempted to outline what Christianity was and why the missionaries were preaching it. It began with the idea—startling to Burmans, as Adoniram knew—that: “There is one Being who exists eternally; who is exempt from sickness, old age, and death; who was, and is, and will be, without beginning, and without end. Besides this, the true God, there is no other God.”

In a hundred words or so, the tract went on to tell the story of the creation, and of Adam and Eve and their transgression—on account of which they became subjeCt to sickness and death, “and they became deserving of suffering, in... the dreadful punishment of hell.” But after about four thousand years, God, moved with compassion, sent to earth Jesus, and the tract summarized His message. The true religion later spread into the EaSt, and now to Burma a teacher of religion from America had arrived to proclaim the glad news. In a few hundred years, added Adoniram optimistically, “the religion of Christ will pervade the whole world; all quarrels and wars will cease, and all the tribes of men will be like a band of mutually loving brothers.”

After defining a disciple of Christ as one who is inwardly reborn, the tract succinctly attacked the doctrine that one could achieve heaven merely by performing good works, for: “The unrenewed man, influenced by pride, hates the humbling religion of Jesus ChriSt.

When seized with alarm, he endeavors to perform meritorious deeds in order to make atonement for his sins, and obtain salvation. The renewed man, knowing surely that man, having sinned against God, and contraCted great guilt, can not perform meritorious deeds, firmly fixes in his mind that it is on account of the God-man, Jesus Christ alone, that sin can be expiated, and the happiness of heaven obtained; and therefore, through supreme love to Jesus Christ, and a desire to do his will, endeavors to avoid evil deeds, and to perform good deeds only, according to the divine commands.”

The last part of the tract consisted of the Commandments, and of these there were twenty-five instead of the familiar ten, for Adoniram wanted to include all the principal rules of conduct in the New Testament, including the one which distinguished Baptists from members of other denominations: “On becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ, receive baptism in water.”

Such was the message. But Adoniram added a little more to explain his own position in Burma.

The teacher who composed this writing, seeing the great evil which is coming on the Burmans, left his own country from compassion, and from an immense distance has arrived, by ship, to this, the country of Burmah. He desires neither fame nor riches. Offering and gifts he seeks not. The disciples of Christ in his own country, moved with compassion for the Burmans, make offering sufficient for his use. He has no other motive but this: Being a disciple of Christ, and therefore seeking the good of others as his own, he has come, and is laboring that the Burmans may be saved from the dreadful punishment of hell, and enjoy the happiness of heaven.

In the year of Christ, 1816-, in the Burman year, [178; in the 967th day of the lord of the Saddan elephant, and master of the Sakyah weapon; and in the 33rd year of his reign; in the division Pashoo; on Tuesday, the 12th day of the wane of the moon Wahgoung, after the double beat, this writing, entitled The Way to Heaven, was finished. May the reader obtain light. Amen.

By early 1817 Hough had set the tract in type and printed a thousand copies. When he finished, he went to work on Nancy’s catechism and after that on Adoniram’s translation of Matthew.

But he could print much faster than Adoniram could write, and had plenty of time left over to see what went on around him in the mission and in the city. Though he printed faithfully, he was beginning to doubt whether either preaching or printing by themselves could move the hearts of the Burmans. Their laws, morals, customs, and the religion of the people, seemed too fixed to be changed. He wondered whether the Burmese could even understand Western ideas, so great were the differences in the two civilizations.

Along with the rest. of the mission household he had attended the funeral of a Burman priest—a cremation attended with “loud shoutings, clapping of hands, the sound of drums, of tinkling and wind instruments, and a most disgusting exhibition of female dancing, but not weeping or wailing.”

He had seen executions; in one case the disemboweling alive of some thieves who had been caught tunneling under a pagoda for the treasures beneath, in another the shooting of several criminals. He had seen the executioners shoot at one of these criminals four times and miss every time. “At every shot there was a loud peal of laughter from the surrounding spectators.”

Everyone knew bribery was responsible for the misses. The man was the elder of two brothers who had asked pardon if they should be missed four times. The younger was killled by the second shot, the elder pardoned according to the agreement. For other crimes he had gone through the same experience twice before, and on each of those earlier occasions he had been missed six times successively. “He is now considered to be a wonderful man,” wrote Hough in disgust, “and that a bullet cannot prove him mortal.... He is now raised to a high rank among the governor’s attendants.”

It was plain to Hough that “the Burmans are subtle, thievish, mercenary, addicted to robbery and fraud; truth and honesty are not known among them as virtues.” Although they had “every motive, according to their religion, to practice good works, yet no people can be worse.”

He had to admit that all the men could read, and that they constantly asked for “our holy books.” But those “with whom brother Judson has conversed, since I have been here, appear inaccessible to truth. They sit unaffected, and go away unimpressed with what they have heard. They are unconvinced by arguments, and unmoved by love; and the conversion of a Burman, or even the excitement of a thought toward the truth, must and will be a sovereign act of Divine power.”

Hough was too pessimistic. The first “sovereign act of Divine power” occurred in the last month of the Burman year —— “Tabaung” to the Burmese, March to the Americans.

This month marked the climax of the nation’s largest religious festival. Preliminary celebrations of it began as early as January and from then on the missionaries always found their ears “almost stunned with the noise and confusion.” Pilgrims from all over Burma came by tens of thousands to worship day and night at the gold Shwe Dagon pagoda with its eight precious hairs of the great Gautama, the great Buddha himself, enshrined in sealed vaults far below its foundations. When they were not worshiping, the people were watching the great processions led by the Viceroy, and enjoying “boxing, dancing, singing, theatrical exhibitions and fire-works.”

It was about the time the festival began that Hough finished the printing of Adoniram’s tract. During the next few months copies trickled, a few at a time, out of the mission house, carried by the Burmans who had asked for the missionaries’ “holy books.” To Hough, they may have seemed unaffected and unimpressed—as most, probably, were—but they must have read the tracts, and some of them mu5t have passed their copies along to friends.

At any rate, one day in March, when the feStival was at its height, a Burman, followed by a servant, came up the steps of the mission house veranda where Adoniram was studying with his teacher and sat down beside him. He was well dressed, obviously a man of considerable re5pectability. His name was Maung Yah.

Adoniram asked the queStion with which he always opened conversations with strange Burmans—where he came from. The man gave a rather vague reply. and Adoniram began to think he was a government official come “to enforce a trifling request, which, in the morning, we had declined.”

He was soon undeceived, however; for, after a few obligatory politenesses, the man asked bluntly: “How long will it take me to learn the religion of Jesus?”

Concealing his astonishment, Adoniram replied, “Such a question cannot be answered. If God gives light and wisdom, the religion of Jesus is soon learned. Without God, a man may study all his life long and make no progress. But how,” he continued curiously, “came you to know anything of Jesus? Have you been here before?”

“No.”

“Have you seen any writings concerning Jesus?”

“He is the Son of God,” said the man, “who, pitying human creatures, came into this world and suffered death in their stead.”

“Who is God?”

“He is a Being without beginning or end, Who is not subject to old age or death, but always is.”

Instantly Adoniram recognized the wording of his own tract. An indescribable mixture of awe and exultation flooded over him. This was the first acknowledgment of the existence of an eternal God he had ever heard from the lips of a Burman. Without words he handed the man a copy of the tract and of Nancy’s catechism. The man recognized both, and, leafing through them, read aloud here and there, remarking to his servant occasionally, “This is the true God. This is the right way.”

Scenting a convert, Adoniram tried to tell the man more about Christianity, but he hardly listened. Unlike the other Burmans Adoniram had met, he had no interest in Adoniram’s clothing or the peculiar customs and manners of the English. All he wanted was “more of this sort of writing.”

Adoniram told him two or three times that he had finished no other book, but if the man could wait a few months he could give him a larger one which he was busy every day translating.

“But have you not a little of that book done, which you will graciously give me now?” the man insisted.

Finally Adoniram, thinking “that God’s time was better than man’s,” folded and gave him the first two printed half-sheets, which contained the firm five chapters on Matthew.

The man accepted them, immediately rose, nodded noncommittally to Adoniram’s “Come again,” and departed, followed by his servant.

Later that month Adoniram met one of his acquaintances “who says, that he reads our books all the day, and shows them to all who call upon him.” But nevertheless he never returned to the mission house and never asked for any more of Adoniram’s writing.

In a few weeks Adoniram’s first elation faded. But hope remained. The seed broadcast in the form of tracts and catechisms had sprouted at least once. Time must surely bring a harveSt.