Embassy to Ava - The Decision (1809)

C H A P T E R V I I

Embassy to Ava —— The Decision

[ 1809 ]

DONlRAM had banished his old dreams of literary and political

ambition, but had he banished ambition itself? Urges implanted in childhood, beyond earliest memories, sometimes persist in unrecognized forms when we are grown. Age as we will, beneath the wrinkling skin we still remain all the persons we were. Infant, child and youth still live within us, without our knowledge or will, never giving up their deep purposes. One way blocked, they seek another, like the shoots of a plant in a dark cellar twisting and reaching toward the tiniest crack of light.

With one kind of ambition, Adoniram was done for good and all. In June of 1809, about the time he joined his father’s church, he was offered a tutorship at Brown. A year before he would have snapped at the opportunity. Now he declined. Whatever his destiny, he was sure it did not lie in college or university. Nevertheless, he still felt as always that he was marked for something out of the ordinary: not merely something greater than other men achieved, but something different, something distinctive. It was the feeling that had been planted in him when he learned to read at the age of three, and his father had taken him in his lap and told him for the firSt time that he would surely be a great man.

But how could he reconcile ambition with the service of God? His present course led to a pulpit, nothing more, no matter in how great a church. And had he not felt a sudden flash of insight as a boy, when he lay sick in Plymouth, that the fame of an obscure country paStor would resound longer and louder in heaven than that of the eminent divine in a fine city church? Unconsciously he was caSting about for a direction to his life, watching for a sign.

The sign appeared in September, when he had completed his fist year at Andover. That month he came across a printed copy of a sermon which had aroused a great deal of interest in America. It was entitled “The Star in the East,” and had been preached by a Dr. Claudius Buchanan not long before in the parish church in Bristol, England. Buchanan belonged to the evangelical school of the Church of England and had spent many years in India as a chaplain for the East India Company. He had taken for his text the part of the second chapter of Matthew which reads, “For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” Buchanan recounted how the Gospel had been brought to India, and how it had progressed. He emphasized that the time was ripe to spread Christianity among Eastern people by a greater effort than any up to this time. Most interesting to Adoniram, he told about the work of the beloved German missionary Schwartz, who had spent nearly fifty years teaching the GOSpel to the Indian heathen.

As Adoniram, sitting alone in his little room, read Buchanan’s stirring account with growing fascination, the stories of other pioneers must have risen to his mind. As long ago as 1715 Bartholomeus Ziegenbalg had fashioned the New Testament into the Tamil language of India. William Carey, an English cobbler, had made his way to India and within Adoniram’s own lifetime eStablished a mission center in Serampore, a few miles above Calcutta, where in 1800 he had brought out the Gospel of St. Matthew in Bengali. Americans knew a great deal about Carey’s Baptist Serampore group, for Captain Benjamin Wickes, who carried Carey’s coworkers Marsh and Ward to India in 1799, had arrived in Philadelphia in 1805 and told the story so appealingly that Protestant ministers of every denomination had raised several thousand dollars to aid the Serampore missionaries.

In Canton, Robert Morrison, masquerading as a mercantile clerk and interpreter, was translating the Bible into Chinese, with death waiting if the real nature of what he and his Chinese helpers were doing should be discovered by the government.

And only two years before, in 1807, as Adoniram surely knew, Morrison had been in Boston arranging passage for China because the East India Company had refused to take a missionary of any kind to the Orient. Morrison’s mission had been approved by such prominent men as Mr. Madison, then Secretary of State, soon to become President. Adoniram could hardly have missed hearing of Morrison’s Stout reply when the owner of the ship on which he was to sail had commented skeptically, “And so, Mr. Morrison, you really expeCt to make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese empire.” To which the missionary had made his now oftrepeated rejoinder: “No, sir; I expect God will.”

But none of these missionaries had been Americans. New England had sent missions to the “red men” in the West and to the sparsely settled regions weSt of the Hudson. In 1800 Adoniram’s own father had made that summer missionary journey to “the interior parts of Vermont.” The northern seacoast states teemed with missionary societies and “mite” and “cent” societies to support endeavors such as these. But no American, so far as Adoniram knew, had even thought of going out of North America, and no organization existed in the country to support American foreign missionaries.

All at once his imagination kindled. An amazing, a brilliant, a dazzling prOSpect appeared to him. Why should not be be a foreign missionary to one of these remote parts of the world as yet unreached by the Gospel? He would be the first Congregational foreign missionary— the first American, the very first!

Everything in his life had prepared him for the idea. A career as the first American foreign missionary curiously combined his many conflicting ambitions. Fame, eminence, humility, self-sacrifice, obscurity, adventure, uniqueness, the service of God —it had all of these.

No work in the ministry could be more useful. Dark souls by the million were waiting to learn about the Gospel, the only key to salvation. Did not Jeremiah say, “0 earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord”? And Matthew, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost”? Had not Hopkins, spiritual mentor of Adoniram’s father, written of the time when “Christianity shall spread over the whole world... forming men to a high degree of universal benevolence and disinterested affection... uniting all mankind into one happy family, teaching them to love each other as brethren, each seeking and rejoicing in the public good and in the happiness of individuals”?

And did not all foreign missionaries have to be translators? How could the natives read the Gospel unless it were put into their own tongue? And who had more aptitude for languages than Adoniram Judson?

And there may have been other motives, not so self-evident. A foreign missionary automatically removed himself from the acrimonious religious controversy of the time that had embroiled his father so often. Adoniram, so far as he knew, was free of doubt concerning his creed. But might not it be a relief to sidestep metaphysical hairsplitting for the straightforward job of translating the Scriptures just as they stood and conveying them to a heathen people? Not only that, but in what other career could he both defy his father and obey him; be like him, but unlike; follow, yet surpass? But thoughts such as these, if they came to him at all, he must have put hastily away in the glorious conception of the idea as a whole.

“For some days,” Adoniram wrote years later, “I was unable to attend to the studies of my class, and spent my time in wondering at my past stupidity, depicting the most romantic scenes in missionary life, and roving about the college rooms declaiming on the subject of missions.” He even talked rather wildly about offering himself to the London Missionary Society at once, since there was no American organization able to send him.

His enthusiasm kindled no answering flame whatever in the other students. His ideas were “condemned by all and not infrequently ridiculed and reproached.” Under this deluge of cold water he began keeping his thoughts a little more to himself. Meanwhile, he “devoured with great greediness every scrap of information concerning Eastern countries.” In this pursuit he presently came across a book entitled A72 Account of an Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava. It had been written by Michael Symes, a British army officer who had been sent in 1795 by the Governor General of India to the mysterious empire of Burma. It began provocatively, “There are no countries on the habitable globe, where the arts of civilized life are understood, of which we have so limited a knowledge, as those that lie between the British possessions in India and the empire of Burma.”

Much of the book was given over to long accounts of past wars and Symes’s fruitless negotiations with the Burman court. But through this dull matter one could glimpse bright reflections of a strange, colorful, feudal empire, populous and rich, which had no counterpart on the globe.

Its people were civilized. They could read and write, and had an extensive literature along with so overweening a national pride that, “Like the Sovereign of China, his Majesty of Ava acknowledges no equal; indeed it is the fixed principle of all nations eastward of Bengal, to consider foreign ministers as suppliants come to solicit protection, not as representatives who may demand redress; rather as vassals to render homage, than as persons vested with authority to treat on equal terms.”

Everything about this sovereign was “Golden.” To journey to see him was to be invited to “kneel at the Golden Feet.” The King never heard anything; instead, the news “reached the Golden Ears.” He was an absolute monarch who had not, so far, extended his sway over the rest of the world only because up to now he had hardly thought it worth the trouble. His courtiers and the wealthy wore long robes of flowered satin or velvet, reaching to the ankles, with a scarf flung over the shoulders. Their heads were covered with high velvet caps embroidered with flowers of gold. In their ears dangled solid gold earrings three inches long, shaped like speaking trumpets.

The nation was warlike and particularly well equipped with war vessels, some of which were a hundred feet long but no more than eight feet wide, each propelled by fifty to sixty oarsmen. These needlelike craft carried cannons in the bow, although grappling and hand-to-hand combat were the preferred battle procedures. As they darted away toward the enemy, their crews sang weird war songs.

The country contained incalculable riches—not only great forests of teak, so much desired by the English for building ships, but mines of gold and silver, rubies and sapphires, amethysts, garnets, chrysolite, jasper, and amber. It even had wells of a natural oil, earth oil, sometimes called “petroleum” by scientists, a nauseous liquid which was collected in barrels and used in lamps all over the kingdom. Symes, however, was scarcely interested enough in this useless substance to visit the wells himself.

The people were utterly pagan, wrote Symes. They worshiped Buddha and believed each person went through many cycles of existence, sometimes as a human, sometimes as an animal —— a dog, a cat, even an insect. Yet—read Adoniram with special interest——His Majesty granted toleration to all sects. There was even one missionary, a Catholic, an Italian named Sangermano, whose “congregation consisted of the descendants of former Portuguese colo—nists, who, though numerous, are in general very poor.”

What a prospect for a missionary! thought Adoniram as he turned the pages of Symes’s book. Surely a people like this needed nothing but the true Word of God. Once it was brought to them, literate and civilized as they were, they would certainly seize on it. What Other place on earth offered promise of such a harvest of souls? And no missionaries except Sangermano, who, since he was both a Catholic and a minister to Europeans rather than Burmans, hardly counted.

From this time on, Burma was much in Adoniram’s thoughts. But he kept those thoughts to himself for the moment, not only because of the reception they could expect, but—more important—because although he had talked so glowingly in the seminary halls about missions, he had not yet quite made up his mind whether he really wanted to become a missionary.

He debated the problem with himself all through that fall of 1809. Christmas passed, and the New Year came. The snow lay thick on the ground. Then one day in February, coldest month of the year, a message came to him while he was walking in the grove. One can imagine him slowly pacing the snowy ground between the bare, spectral trees, his breath pluming in the frost, his mittened hands stuffed in his coat pockets. It may have been late in the afternoon with the pale sun low in the west and the first lights gleaming from under the eaves of Phillips Hall. He never recorded the day or the time of day. We know only that “It was during a solitary walk in the woods behind the college, while meditating and praying on the subject, and feeling half inclined to give it up, that the command of Christ, ‘Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every' creature,’ was presented to my mind with such clearness and power, that I came to a full decision, and though great difficulties appeared in my way, resolved to obey the command at all events.”

Every urge, every eXperience from the beginning of his life, had brought its influence to this one focus.

From this time on, he never doubted his destiny.