Ten Years in Burma
9781465686541
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The Church of Jesus Christ has just closed its first century of missionary effort within modern times. The nineteenth century began with only a few heroic spirits urging the Church to awake to its responsibility of giving the gospel to the Christless nations. The century has just closed with a steadily increasing army of missionaries, who are determined to give the gospel to every man in his own tongue at the earliest possible day, while the whole Church is beginning to feel the missionary impulse, so far at least, that an increasing multitude are eager to hear of mission lands, the condition of the peoples without Christ, the victories of the gospel, and to have some share in its triumph. Adoniram Judson, the great missionary hero, enrolled the land of Burma in the list of great mission-fields. He began his labors in Burma during the second decade of the century. The following pages are written as a report of missionary labors and observations in that land in the closing ten years of the century. How the writer came to be a missionary, and to be honored with an appointment to Burma, may warrant a brief statement. In almost all life’s important steps, individual influence proves the determining factor. This is true in my call to the mission-field. In 1867, when only ten years of age, living on my father’s farm in Andrew County, Mo., I heard a Methodist preacher make a plea for the heathen world. I have never been able to recall his name, that being the only time he ever preached in that place, which was a schoolhouse on my father’s farm. The sermon made a profound impression on me, and I decided to give half of my little fortune of one dollar, saved from pennies, to the cause of missions, with pleadings for which he so warmed our hearts and moved our eyes to tears. Later experiences have shown that missionary sermon to have been the most potential influence of my childhood or youth in determining what I should be in after years. The experience itself seemed to die away for a term of years, due, I think, to the fact that I had little religious training and no missionary information during youth. The reawakening of missionary interest came in 1880, when in college in the Iowa Wesleyan University I heard William Taylor tell of his missionary labors in many lands. Had I then been near the close of my college course, instead of at its beginning, I would have volunteered to go to his mission in South America. Seven or eight years went by, and I was in Garrett Biblical Institute. At that time Bishop Thoburn delivered a series of thrilling missionary addresses to the school. I now think, though without being clearly conscious of it, that from that time I was called to go to India. In 1889, I was pastor of the Arlington Methodist Church in Kansas City, Mo., and so became one of the entertainers of the Missionary Committee that met in the city that year. In listening to the missionary addresses for ten days, and more especially in conversation with Dr. Oldham, who was present, being commissioned by Bishop Thoburn to secure re-enforcements for India, the whole question whether my wife and I should offer ourselves to the Missionary Society for work in the foreign field came up for final settlement. I sought the counsel of Bishop Ninde, who had once been to India, and whose kindly manner always invited confidences of this sort. He agreed to come and spend a day with us, two months later, which he did, and as a result of his counsel and advice, we decided to offer to go to India as missionaries. The offer was promptly accepted, and from that time we laid our plans to leave for our new field of work the following fall. It has always been an inspiring memory to recall the steps by which we were led to let go of America and set our faces toward Asia, and the personal agencies that led us to this decision.
