“The letter from Maulmain with no appropriation for our contemplated expedition, and giving us only twenty rupees to cover the eighty-six rupees we were even then monthly expending, came upon us like a sudden tornado in a sunny day. Oddly enough, it had not once occurred to us that the _money_ could be wanting. You will readily appreciate the one broad feature of the case, which would have made the blow heavy to any sincere Christian having much of the missionary spirit; but to my husband there was additional bitterness in the manner of his disappointment, and in the hands from which it came. ‘I thought they loved me,’ he would say, mournfully, ‘and they would scarcely have known it if I had died.’ ‘All through our troubles, I was comforted with the thought that my brethren in Maulmain, and in America, were praying for us, and they have never once thought of us.’ At other times he would draw startling pictures of missionaries abandoning the spirit of their mission, and sacrificing everything to some darling project; and at others he would talk hopelessly of the impulsive nature of the home movements, and then pray, in a voice of agony, that these sins of the children of God might not be visited on the heathen. This was an unnatural state of excitement—for _him_ peculiarly unnatural—and he was not long in recovering from it. He very soon began to devise apologies for everybody, and said we must remember that so far as _we_ were concerned, or the missionary cause itself, God had done this thing, and done it, as He always does, for good. It was not His will that we should go to Ava then, and we had no right to complain of the means He made use of to prevent it. He insisted, too, that our obedience was not to be yielded grudgingly; that it must be a cheerful acquiescence in all that God had done, and a sincere, careful study of the indications of His providence afterward, without any suspicion that our ways were hedged by anything harder or thornier than His love and mercy. By the time he had an opportunity to send letters to Maulmain and Boston, his mind was restored to its usual serenity. My impression, however, is, that his first letter to the Board was written in a slightly discouraged tone. He wrote more hopefully to Maulmain, but I have sometimes thought that his generosity took the point from his letter, and that his meaning was not understood in saying that it was _for the best_. I think now that they mistook resignation to God for a personal willingness to abandon the enterprise.”
Two years afterward, only a few months before his death, he received permission from the Board to go to Ava. It was couched in the following resolutions:
1. “That the Executive Committee accede to the proposition of Dr. Judson to visit Ava, for the purpose of perfecting his Burman dictionary.
2. “That the sum of one thousand rupees be appropriated to defray the expense of said visit.
3. “That the Foreign Secretary be requested to assure Dr. Judson of the earnest wish of the Committee, that he should carefully avoid all that may jeopard his life, or interfere with his invaluable labors.”
But this permission came too late. The opportunity of penetrating Burmah proper had passed, and the aid of an excellent Burmese scholar, once a priest at Ava, had been secured at Maulmain, and then the toiling translator replied to the resolutions as follows:
“Considering, therefore, the uncertainty of life, and the state of my manuscripts, so effaced by time, or so erased and interlined as to be illegible to any other person but myself, I have thought it was my duty to forego, for the present, what I can not but regard as an interesting expedition, in order to drive forward the heavy work of the dictionary in the most satisfactory manner, and without increasing the hazard of any serious interruption.”
Thus after spending half a year of toil and suffering at Rangoon, he was compelled to fall back upon Maulmain. He arrived there with his family on September 5, 1847.
From the time of his return to Maulmain until his last sickness, he worked steadily at the dictionary. Again and again in his letters he alludes to this colossal undertaking.