Mr. Judson’s achievements far transcended the wildest aspirations of his youth. During the early years in Rangoon, when the mighty purpose of evangelizing Burmah began to take definite shape in his mind; even before the first convert, Moung Nau, was baptized; when indeed the young missionary was almost forgotten by his fellow-Christians at home, or merely pitied as a good-hearted enthusiast—the outermost limit reached by his strong-winged hope was that he might, before he died, build up a church of a hundred converted Burmans and translate the whole Bible into their language. But far more than this was accomplished during the ten years in Rangoon, the two years in Ava, and the twenty-three years in Maulmain. At the time of his death, the native Christians (Burmans and Karens publicly baptized upon the profession of their faith) numbered over seven thousand. Besides this, hundreds throughout Burmah had died rejoicing in the Christian faith. He had not only finished the translation of the Bible, but had accomplished the larger and the more difficult part of the compilation of a Burmese dictionary. At the time of his death there were sixty-three churches established among the Burmans and Karens. These churches were under the oversight of one hundred and sixty-three missionaries, native pastors, and assistants. He had laid the foundations of Christianity deep down in the Burman heart where they could never be washed away.
This achievement is the more startling when we consider that all divine operations are slow in the beginning, but rush to the consummation with lightning speed. Many long days elapse while the icy barriers are being slowly loosened beneath the breath of spring. But at last the freshet comes, and the huge frozen masses are broken up and carried rapidly to the sea. The leaves slowly ripen for the grave. Though withered, they still cling to the boughs. But finally a day comes in the autumn when suddenly the air is full of falling foliage. It takes a long time for the apple to reach its growth, but a very brief time suffices for the ripening. Tennyson’s lark
“Shook his song together as he neared His happy home, the ground.”
Nature is instinct with this law, and we may well believe that though the processes are slow and inconspicuous by which the ancient structures of false religions are being undermined, yet the time will come when they will tumble suddenly into ruins, when a nation shall be converted in a day, when, “As the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth, so the Lord will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.” In the baptism of ten thousand Telugus in India within a single year, do we not already see the gray dawn of such an era of culmination?
“We are living, we are dwelling In a grand and awful time, In an age on ages telling; To be living is sublime. Hark! the waking up of nations, Gog and Magog to the fray. Hark! what soundeth? ’Tis creation Groaning for its latter day.”
But it was Mr. Judson’s lot to labor in the hard and obscure period of the first beginnings. And not only so, but he undertook the task of planting Christianity not among a people, like the Sandwich Islanders, without literature and without an elaborate religious system, but rather in a soil already preoccupied by an ancient classical literature and by a time-honored ritual which now numbers among its devotees one-third of the population of our globe. The difficulties of such an attempt are well described in one of his sermons, from which Mrs. Stevens has preserved a striking illustration: