Let Us Go to the Golden Feet (1819)

C H A P T E R I X

Let Us Go to the Golden Feet

[ I819 ]

Y the end of that June in which Maung Nau was baptized there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Wheelock had only a few months to live. No doubt, that is, in any mind but Eliza Wheelock’s. The weaker he grew, the more vehemently she denied that he was even seriously ill.

A confusing struggle began to be waged around him—for custody of his body, now mere skin and bones; and for his mind, now slowly losing its grip on reality.

On one side were the Colmans and Judsons, led by Nancy and Adoniram; on the other Eliza Wheelock. Each side strove for Wheelock’s best interests, as they saw them.

Nancy tried to make him comfortable by exerting all her inventiveness to prepare for him foods he especially wanted. By some legerdemain she even managed to make him custards. His mind and soul she tried to ease with items of news about the progress of the mission. After Maung Nau’s conversion she Spent hours at a time by \Vheelock’s bed “interpreting to him the new learnt language of the convert, which highly interested the feelings of our dying brother.”

But there was one duty more which the missionaries felt they owed Wheelock for the welfare of his son]. They felt strongly that they should talk with him on the subject of his coming death, to help prepare him for the transition which they were sure could not be far away. Such a service was customary with religious people in the America they knew. It was no more than Samuel Newell had done for Harriet in her last days in Isle of France.

Eliza Wheelock would have none of it. She seemed to feel that the other missionaries were plotting to steal her husband from her. Nancy’s laboriously prepared foods, her interpretations of the talk of the Burmans who visited the mission, probably most of all her attitude that Wheelock was dying and must be prepared for the next world—all these, Eliza must have felt, were ways of excluding her. From this frame of mind it was only a step to her suspicion that the Judsons and Colmans—and even those Strange dark-skinned natives with their unintelligible jabber — were arrayed against her, and were intent on some mysterious harm to Wheelock. She defended herself by keeping the missionaries out of Wheelock’s room as much as she could. She voiced her suspicions to him and tried to persuade him that his only hope of safety was to take ship for Bengal.

At first he did not believe her. But eventually he became “so weak, and his mind in such a state of distraction, that he could hardly bear the noise of a person’s walking across the room.” His mind began to wander and he opposed his wife no longer. About the end of July or the beginning of August, she engaged passage on a ship anchored in the river fifteen miles below Rangoon and prepared for departure.

By now everyone in the mission was convinced that a sea voyage would only end Wheelock’s life sooner. It was the worst season of the year for sea travel, and Wheelock had always suffered so badly from seasickness that he dreaded the ocean. Even getting to the ship would mean a long, uncomfortable trip down-river in a small open boat. Adoniram, Nancy, Colman and Mrs. Colman all remonstrated with Mrs. Wheelock by turns, and with Wheelock on the rare occasions they could see him. Eliza was adamant. As a last gesture, Nancy and Mrs. Colman offered to help her pack her trunks. She refused. Wheelock, in a moment of lucidity, accepted all the preserves they had in the mission to help improve the ship’s poor fare, but for the rest the missionaries were permitted to do for the \Vheelocls only what Mrs. Wheelock could not do for herself. This amounted to Adoniram’s seeing their baggage through customs and procuring a boat, and Colman’s accompanying them to the ship and seeing them on board.

It was noc a pleasant way to part. The missionaries were heartsick to see Wheelock go to what they knew mUSt be his death, but they muSt have heaved a sigh of relief when they saw the last of his wife.

The result they learned much later. It was what might have been expected. On the stormy waters of the Bay of Bengal, Wheelock became almost crazed by violent fever. On the thirteenth day of the passage, Mrs. Wheelock took a few moments to write a letter ——-thinking he was asleep. The writing table was so placed that her back was turned to his bed. Suddenly she heard the cabin door close and turned around to discover him gone. She ran after him, but it was too late. He had made his way to the deck and plunged into the sea. In the high wind it was impossible for the ship to attempt a rescue.

With the Wheelocks gone, the members of the mission resumed their routine. Colman made good progress in learning Burmese, al—though his health Still did not permit him to do a full day’s work. Nancy kept on with her female meetings and the supervision of the household. Her spare time she spent studying Siamese, an occupation she had begun more than a year before. She had translated the catechism, and Adoniram’s tract and the Matthew into Siamese, and then for amusement a Siamese book into English—~“an account of the incarnation of one of their deities, when he existed in the form of a great elephant.” Adoniram continued with his days in the zayat.

The conversion of Maung Nau seemed to have given the mission an impetus. Rangoon’s idle curiosity about the new religion had been satisfied. The inquirers who came now were genuinely inter—ested in Christianity as a faith for themselves.

Some of them were people who had built huts in the unused parts of the mission yard, in the free and easy manner of the country, and had been living there for months. Building a bamboo hut was almOSt as simple as pitching a tent, and the ordinary Burmans were in the habit of setting up houses wherever they pleased and staying as long as they wanted.

One of these squatters was a young man named Maung Thahlah, who settled in the yard with his sister, Mah Baik, and her husband. One day when Adoniram happened to ask him “the state of his mind” he replied with considerable feeling that he knew he was a sinner and subject to future punishment, like all men. He was disturbed, because although according to Buddhism there was no hope of pardon, according to Adoniram there was, and a heaven, and a way of reaching it.

Adoniram began to explain Christianity to Maung Thahlah while Nancy did the same with his sister Mah Baik. Mah Baik, even more independent and quarrelsome than m05t Burmese women, presently fell by the wayside through her inability to control her temper. She tried hard to cultivate Christian humility, but a sharp word from one of the other women living in the compound was enough to touch her off. She would explode in rage and for an hour or so would enjoy the intoxication of unleashed wrath. Afterwards, like a repentant drunkard, she felt remorse. But with her, as with her native sisters, quarreling was like liquor to an alcoholic: she simply could not resist it.

But her brother Maung Thahlah was made of different stuff. He persevered and grew in grace. Adoniram was particularly interested in him because, although by no means a learned man, he was much better read and had greater natural ability than anyone else living in the mission yard. A few weeks after the departure of the Wheelocks Adoniram became convinced he was a convert.

Maung Byaay was another man who had moved into the mission yard with his family. Unlike most Burman men, he had achieved the age of fifty without learning to read or write until he had joined a class which Adoniram and Nancy taught in the main room of the zayat. Here, along with five or six others, each with a torch and blackboard, he laboriously formed the letters and repeated the sounds by rote—kwa, lewar, have lewee, lewa lewoo, and so on—from which the words were formed. To Adoniram, Maung Byaay had seemed at first “too legalistic and narrow, too set on good moral works alone to become a real Christian at heart.” But this may have been due to an illiterate’s exaggerated respect for the written word, for soon his mind began to open rapidly.

About this time a man named Maung Ing, a poor fisherman, also began visiting the mission, where he spent most of his time with Maung Thahlah. He told Maung Thahlah that “he had long been looking after the true religion, and was ready to wish he had been born a brute rather than to die in delusion and go to hell.” His mother had married a Roman Catholic and been christened. His father had disappeared a long time ago, but Maung Ing had kept from childhood some vague memories of an eternal God. Under Maung Thahlah’s influence these memories came to life. Soon he too was clearly on the way to adopting Christianity.

Maung Thahlah, Maung Byaay and Maung Ing, all three poor, all belonging to the lower classes like the baptized Maung Nau, appealed to Adoniram’s heart. The winning of their souls, he knew, would be as pleasing to God as the soul of the emperor himself. But now there came to the zayat a man who interested Adoniram even more because he appealed to his mind.

His name was Maung Shway-gnong. He was a man of middle age, a teacher and scholar of considerable distinction in Rangoon, who was accompanied wherever he went by a group of adherents, like an itinerant Sophist of ancient Greece. He did, in fact, have something in common with the Sophists. To Adoniram he seemed “half deist and half skeptic, the first of the sort I have met with among the Burmans,” although he bowed to convention by worshiping at the pagodas and conforming to “all the prevailing customs.” Adoniram enjoyed Maung Shway-gnong more than any Burman he had ever met. “He is the most powerful reasoner,” thought Adoniram, “I have yet met with in this country except my old teacher 00 Oungmen (now dead), and he is not at all inferior to him.”

Soon the two men were spending whole days together at the zayat, surrounded by Maung Shway-gnong’s followers. Their words dealt with theology and philosophy, but privately each one took as keen a pleasure in exploring the other’s mind as in the discussion itself.

At first the scholar baffled Adoniram. He seemed to be “a complete Proteus in religion, and I never know where to find him. We went over a vast deal of ground, and ended where we began, in apparent incredulity.” In a short time Adoniram learned, however, that caution played an important part in Maung Shway-gnong’s verbal elusiveness. One night the two men talked so late that the Burman’s adherents left and the two men were alone. Immediately Maung Shway-gnong’s attitude changed. His half-ironic, skeptical manner dropped away. With some Show of emotion he admitted that he had no inner knowledge of religion and asked Adoniram to teach him. And when he left be amazed and flattered Adoniram by prostrating himself in the obeisance called the shee/ao—“an act of homage which a Burman never performs but to an acknowledged superior.”

In one of their day-long discussions Adoniram finally found out why Maung Shway—gnong wanted to learn about Christianity:

It appears that he accidently obtained the idea of an eternal Being about eight years ago; and it has been floating about in his mind, and disturbing his Buddhistic ideas ever since. When he heard of us, which was through one of his adherents, to whom I had given a tract, this idea received considerable confirmation; and today he has fully admitted the truth of this first grand principle. The latter part of the day we were chiefly employed in discussing the possibility and necessity of a divine revelation, and the evidence which proves that the writings of Jesus contain that revelation; and I think I may say that he is half inclined to admit all this. He is certainly a most interesting case. The way seems to be prepared in his mind for the special operation of divine grace.”

All this represented progress—more than the mission had ever seen. But progress increased danger, because it meant that the purpose of the mission was becoming more widely known. Even during the reign of the priest-hating old King Bodawpaya, inquirers had warned Adoniram again and again that he could not hope to make many converts without the favor, or at least the acquiescence, of the lord of land and water in Ava. Fear of the royal displeasure hung over the people like a sword suspended by a hair. Every official strove to read the king’s faintest mood as if his life depended on it -—-which it did. A frown could turn loose death preceded by unimaginable tortures on any Burman even remOtely connected with the mission.

No one knew how the new king, Bagyidaw, would take the news that some of his slaves were deserting Gautama for Christ, but there were ominous signs. In that fall of 1819, following his accession to the throne, new pagodas began to be built in increasing numbers. There were rumors that Bagyidaw, unlike his predecessor, was encouraging the Buddhist priests. If so, Christians might soon expect persecution for heresy—or even, since Christianity was identified with alien countries, for subversion, espionage or treason.

The danger made Maung Thahlah and Maung Byaay hesitate to take the final step of asking for baptism. Maung Ing, when Adoniram asked him whether he loved Christ better than his own life, replied “very slowly and deliberately, ‘When I meditate upon this religion, I know not what it is to love my own life.’ ”

But Maung Ing had to go off on a long fishing trip from which he might not return for months, and in Adoniram’s opinion was not quite ready for baptism, although he was certainly a true believer. When it came to the final step of baptism Adoniram then, as always, insisted on far more preparation from Burman converts than any minister would ask of people in England or America. But he knew Burman Christians had to withstand pressures which an Englishman or American, safe in a friendly Christian environment, could not even imagine.

His good sense was vindicated one day that autumn when the viceroy rode by “on a huge elephant, attended by his guards and numerous suite, and, as he passed, eyed us very narrowly.” An hour or so later two of his private secretaries visited the zayat with an order for Adoniram to show the viceroy how printing was done. Adoniram told them that the teacher who understood printing had gone to Bengal, taking the type with him, an answer which plainly displeased the secretaries.

The next day Adoniram managed to secure an audience with the viceroy, who seemed to accept his explanation without displeasure. But, the day after that, the viceroy rode again past the zayat and a little later sent a message that Adoniram should translate, and have printed, some historical writings about America. Adoniram evaded this order by promising to call on the viceroy at the first opportunity. When he called he begged off, by saying he was not familiar with the Style of Burmese historical writing; and he gave the viceroy a copy of a tract as a specimen of the kind he was accustomed to printing. The viceroy handed the tract to a secretary to read, but after only a sentence stopped the reading with the cold remark: “This is the same as a writing I have already heard, and I do not want that kind of writing.”

A few weeks later, Adoniram became aware that Maung Shwaygnong was growing indifferent, if not antagonistic, to Christianity. He seemed to avoid any discussion of his personal beliefs, and even alone with Adoniram was “as crabbed as possible; sometimes a Berkeleian, sometimes a Humite or complete skeptic.” Soon he stopped visiting the zayat altogether. Rangoon gossip told why.

For some time, the Buddhist priests and teachers had been watching the mission. The visits of Maung Shway—gnong had been reported to them.

At length one of the teachers, — known as “the Mangen teacher” — had arranged for it to be mentioned in the viceroy’s hearing that Maung Shway-gnong had renounced his native religion. The viceroy had merely said, “Inquire further.”

This was enough for Maung Shway-gnong. As soon as he heard of the incident he went to the informer to clear himself, and—remarked Adoniram with a mixture of sorrow and disgust—“I suppose, apologized, and explained, and flattered.”

It was three weeks before Maung Shway-gnong returned to the mission. When he did, he denied that he had really recanted; and Adoniram hoped he had not. “But he is evidently falling off from the investigation of the Christian religion. He made but a short Visit, and took leave, as soon as he could decently.”

After the affair of Maung Shway-gnong, Adoniram thought it prudent to stay away from the zayat for a while. No native of Rangoon dared be seen in it, and, with the coming of one of the great annual festivals on the firSt of November, Pagoda Road would be thronged with immense crowds of Buddhist worshipers. The festival coincided with both the new king’s coronation in Ava and his birthday. For a white foreigner to be seen in the zayat at such a time, propagating his subversive un-Burman, un-Buddhist notions, seemed foolhardy. Even Maung Thahlah and Maung Byaay, who had presented the missionaries with applications for baptism, were intimidated. They followed their applications with a request to be baptized “not absolutely in private, but about sunset, away from public observation.” They had been searching the Scriptures, they said in their new petition, and could not find “that John and other baptizers administered baptism on any particular time, or day, or hour. We, therefore, venture to beg of the two teachers, that they will grant, that on the 6th day of the wane of the Tanzoungmong moon, at 6 o’clock at night, we may this once receive baptism at their hands.”

Adoniram and Colman questioned the two hesitating disciples closely, with a suSpicion that Maung Thahlah and Maung Byaay might want to behave as Buddhists in public and as Christians only in private. But they denied any such intention. If they were actually brought before the authorities and accused of heresy, “they could not think of denying their Saviour.” Finally the missionaries agreed that the request was reasonable. It would not be the first time in history Christians had needed to be discreet about flaunting their beliefs.

Therefore, on Sunday, the seventh of November, 1819, the mission family had worship as usual—in the mission house, not the zayat. About half an hour before sunset, when service was over and the Burmese visitors had left, the two candidates presented themselves at the zayat with three or four friends. After a brief prayer, the little party proceeded as inconspicuously as possible to the pond overlooked by the huge image of Buddha where Maung Nau had been baptized. The sun had set and the still water was nearly dark. Here Maung Thahlah and Maung Byaay, the second and third converted Burmans, received baptism and afterwards quietly made their way back to the mission for communion.

That night Adoniram wrote sadly of the baptism:

No hymn of praise expressed the exultant feelings of joyous hearts. Stillness and solemnity pervaded the scene. We felt, on the banks of the water, as a little, feeble, solitary band. But perhaps some hovering angels took note of the event, with more interest than they witnessed the late coronation; perhaps Jesus looked down on us, pitied and forgave our weaknesses, and marked us for his own; perhaps, if we deny him not, he will acknowledge us another day, more publicly than we venture at present to acknowledge him.

After a week or so Adoniram appeared again at the zayat. But though the street was thronged and the weather at its finest, he passed whole days sitting on the veranda without a single visitor.

He knew why.

We and our objects are now well known throughout Rangoon. None wish to call, as formerly, out of curiosity; and none dare to call from a principle of religious inquiry. And were not the leaders in ecclesiastical circles confident that we shall never succeed in making converts, I have no doubt we should meet with direct persecution and mistreatment. In fact, that very day Adoniram and Nancy had undergone an unpleasant encounter with the Mangen teacher, their implacable enemy. The experience was not quite persecution, at least not as Adoniram understood the word, but it certainly fell in the category of malicious annoyance. Adoniram and Nancy both had horses by now and were in the habit of taking a ride early every morning to bathe in a mineral pond a few miles distant. Their way took them along one of the roads leading to the Shwe Dagon pagoda. Suddenly the Mangen teacher had stepped out from the side of the road and stopped them. He must have watched them for days to learn the route they usually followed. Emboldened by investiture with a little brief authority, he arrogantly forbade them to ride anywhere on the roads near the pagoda. If they attempted it again they should be well beaten.

Bewildered, they turned their horses home and proceeded to look into the matter. Sure enough, the viceroy had just issued an order—at the Mangen teacher’s request—providing that thenceforth no one “wearing a hat, shoes, or umbrella, or mounted on a horse, shall approach within the sacred ground belonging to the great pagoda” ——an area which included all the land for half a mile around the Shwe Dagon and every main road in the vicinity. As the missionaries were the only people in Rangoon who habitually rode horses and wore hats and shoes (they carried umbrellas, too, but so did some Burmans) and while doing these things traversed the roads near the pagoda on the way to their daily bath, there was no question that the order was aimed solely at them. No one in the mission house, or in Rangoon, for that matter, could possibly mistake its meaning. From now on they were to be subjeCted to every kind of petty harassment which the Mangen teacher and the prieStly party could get the viceroy to permit.

There was only one way to stop it:

Our business must be fairly laid before the emperor. If he frown upon us, all missionary attempts within his dominion will be out of the question. If he favour us, none of our enemies, during the continuance of his favour, can touch a hair of our heads.

Colman agreed, and toward the end of November the two began to make their preparations.

A trip to Ava was no light undertaking. The city was three hun—dred and fifty miles up the Irrawaddy, in the interior of the country. Only a handful of foreigners had ever been there. For most of the way the river was infested with pirates, the shores with dacoits —-a class of robbers in India and Burma who plundered in armed bands.

There were other dangers, for the Golden Presence was the source of arbitrary power itself, wrapped around in layer on layer of intrigue and hence perilous even to approach. The dangers, however, were lessened by the fact that Adoniram had at least a few friends at court. Mr. Gibson and Mr. Rodgers were both in Ava. Rodgers could not be relied on, but Gibson had proved a friend in Rangoon and might again. More important, the old spearcarrying Viceroy of Rangoon, Mya-day—men, he whose wife had done so much to console Nancy at the time of little Roger’s death, was now the emperor’s prime miniSter, the exalted Wungyi, highest in the kingdom next to the emperor himself.

Because of her close friendship with the Wungyi’s wife, Nancy wanted to make the trip with Adoniram. But Adoniram refused. For a foreign missionary to prostrate himself at the Golden Feet with a petition asking toleration to propagate an alien religion enough. For him to bring his among Burmans was revolutionary wife to a court where no foreign woman had ever appeared would be too much.

And Adoniram and Colman were already having trouble enough deciding how to present themselves in suitable fashion. The emperor would have to be given a gift, they knew. But what could two poor missionaries give an Oriental emperor that could tempt him to look with favor on them?

They finally settled on a Bible, of which they had a magnificent copy in English, in six volumes. They had one of the many artisans in gold in the city cover the volumes with gold leaf and make a rich wrapper. It was the best they could do, and at least, they assured themselves, the gift would be both apprOpriate and unusual.

Another problem was what to wear when they were presented to the emperor. The ordinary black suit of the missionaries seemed all wrong. The saffron—yellow robe of the Buddhist priests would be in character but would convey a false impression. At length they each had made a white robe something like a surplice. The robes would distinguish them as religious teachers and the color would show they were not Buddhists.

They were well into their preparations when old Maung Shwaygnong paid the mission another visit. He no longer would go near the zayat, but he did not seem to be able to stay away from Adoniram. This time he spent hours raising hair-splitting objections, all of which Adoniram answered fully. Suddenly Maung Shway-gnong admitted that he did not believe a word of what he had been saying. He had merely been trying to test Adoniram and his religion.

“Do you think I would pay you the least attention if I found you could not answer all my questions and solve all my difficulties?” he said. He really did believe in God, in His son Jesus, and in the atonement. In short, he was a Christian at heart.

Adoniram was skeptical. “Do you believe all that is contained in the book of St. Matthew that I have given you? In particular, do you believe that the Son of God died on a cross?”

“Ah, you have caught me now,” the old teacher admitted with some chagrin. “I believe that He suffered death. But I cannot admit He suffered the shameful death of the cross.”

Adoniram, knowing Maung Shway-gnong, had expCCted the answer. It was difficult for a Burman, particularly a high-born scholar, to imagine a God who would permit His Son to undergo any kind of indignity. The whole idea was abhorrent. Adoniram pressed home its meaning: “Therefore you are not a disciple of Christ. A true disciple inquires not whether a fact is agreeable to his own reason, but whether it is in the book. His pride has yielded to the Divine testimony. Teacher, your pride is still unbroken. Break down your pride, and yield to the word of God.”

Maung Shway-gnong stopped to think. Then he said: “As you utter those words I see my error. I have been trusting in my own reason, not in the word of God.” Someone entered and he fell silent. When the intruder left after a little while, he said thoughtfully, “This day is different from all the days on which I have visited you. I see my error in trusting in my own reason; and I now believe the crucifixion of Christ, because it is contained in the Scripture.”

They talked for a while at random and the conversation led to the uncertainty of life. Maung Shway-gnong had a new thought. “I think I shall not be lost even though I should die suddenly.”

“Why?”

“Because I love Jesus Christ.”

“Do you really love Him?”

“No one that really knows Him can help loving Him,’

, said the old man with feeling; and so departed.

Maung Shway-gnong’s visit was a welcome interlude in the labor of getting a boat. Adoniram hunted the river front for a week before he found one he wanted.

It had the typical needlelike lines of a Burman river boat. Although its length was forty feet, its width at the widest point was only six feet. Its pointed prow swept up and forward into the Viking-like dragon head most native craft carried. The stern took a similar leap upwards, but backwards, and terminated in a high, elaborately carved seat for the steersman, whose position of honorable responsibility was indicated by a large umbrella placed overhead for his protection.

Adoniram immediately employed workmen to lay down a light bamboo deck along the whole length of the boat. Aft, he had a tiny low-roofed cabin made where he and Colman could sleep. It was just high enough so the missionaries could crawl in and sit down, provided they kept their heads low.

When the work was well begun, he applied to the Viceroy “for a pass to go up to the Golden Feet, and lift up our eyes to the Golden Face.” The pass was granted at once, “in very polite terms.”

Now there was no obstacle to their going to Ava. Nothing remained to be done but find a crew and depart.