PREPARATION TIME.
Mr. and Mrs. Judson might well have been excused had they hesitated to
settle in Rangoon, for the prospects before them in that place were
anything but hopeful. The Emperor of Burmah was an absolute monarch, and
rumour gave him the credit of being unjust, tyrannical, grasping,
capricious and cruel. The people were described as "indolent,
inhospitable, deceitful and crafty;" and in spite of the natural wealth
of the land the majority of the inhabitants were miserably poor. This
was largely due to the fact that all property was held on the most
uncertain tenure, everything being liable to be seized at any time by
the emperor or by some of his officials.
More than one unsuccessful attempt had been made to form a missionary
settlement in Rangoon previous to the arrival of the Judsons. Preachers
had been sent out from Serampore, and by the London Missionary Society;
but none of them had been able to occupy the field for any length of
time. When the Judsons arrived there was only one other Christian
teacher in Burmah, Mr. Felix Carey, who was then at Ava, the residence
of the emperor. Mrs. Carey, a native of the country, was staying at
Rangoon, in a house built by the Serampore Baptist missionaries, and she
welcomed the new-comers to her home, where they stayed for some months.
The first work to which the Judsons set themselves was the study of the
Burmese tongue. This was a task of extreme difficulty, for the only part
of the language put into writing which would help them was a small
portion of a grammar and six chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel, which had
been translated by Mr. Felix Carey. Even with all the aids at present in
use, Burman is anything but easy to acquire. It has been called the
"round O language," on account of each word being made up of a number of
small circles; and to an untrained eye the words seem almost exactly
alike. "The letters and words are all totally destitute of the least
resemblance to any language we have ever met with," Mr. Judson wrote to
a friend in Salem, "and these words are not fairly divided and
distinguished as in Western writing by breaks, and points, and capitals,
but run together in one continuous line, a sentence or paragraph seeming
to the eye but one long word; instead of clear characters on paper, we
find only obscure scratches on palm leaves, strung together and called a
book. We have no dictionary and no interpreter to explain a single word,
and must get something of the language before we can avail ourselves of
the assistance of a native teacher.... It unavoidably takes several
years to acquire such a language in order to converse and write
intelligibly on the truths of the Gospel."
Mr. and Mrs. Judson obtained a native teacher, and settled down to a
daily struggle with their task. The man was at first unwilling to have
Mrs. Judson as a pupil, thinking it below his dignity to instruct a
woman: but when he saw that she was determined to persevere he abandoned
his opposition. As the teacher knew no English and the pupils knew no
Burman, progress was of necessity very slow. "Our only mode of
ascertaining the names of objects which met our eye," wrote Mrs. Judson,
"was by pointing to them in the presence of our teacher, who would
immediately speak the names in Burman; we then expressed them as nearly
as possible by the Roman character, till we had sufficiently acquired
the power of the Burman."
In order to get more in contact with the people, they left Mr. Carey's
hospitable roof and took up their residence in the centre of the town.
This obliged Mrs. Judson to commence housekeeping on her own account,
and consequently she had less time to devote to study; yet to her
surprise she made faster progress now than she had ever done before. She
thus described her daily life, in a letter home: "We are busily employed
all day long. Could you look into a large open room, which we call a
verandah, you would see Mr. Judson bent over his table covered with
Burman books, with his teacher at his side, a venerable-looking man in
his sixtieth year, with a cloth wrapped round his middle and a
handkerchief on his head. They talk and chatter all day long with hardly
any cessation.
"My mornings are busily employed in giving directions to the servants,
providing food for the family, etc. At ten my teacher comes, when, were
you present, you might see me in an inner room at one side of my study
table, and my teacher the other, reading Burman, writing, talking, etc.
I have many more interruptions than Mr. Judson, as I have the entire
management of the family. This I took on myself for the sake of Mr.
Judson's attending more closely to the study of the language; yet I have
found, by a year's experience, that it is the most direct way I could
have taken to acquire the language, as I am frequently obliged to speak
Burman all day. I can talk and understand others better than Mr. Judson,
though he knows more about the nature and construction of the language."
It was impossible to do any direct evangelistic work until the language
had been more fully mastered, and Mrs. Judson was continually spurred on
in her studies by the desire to speak to the natives about the Lord
Jesus Christ. "O Thou Light of the world," she prayed, as she realised
more fully the ignorance of the people, "dissipate the thick darkness
which covers Burmah, and let Thy light arise and shine!"