At this same period Mrs. Judson thus opened her sorrowful heart to a lady in Beverly, Mass.:
“Rangoon, May 10, 1816.
“The sun of another holy Sabbath has arisen upon us, and though no chime of bells has called us to the house of God, yet we, two in number, have bowed the knee to our Father in heaven, have invoked His holy name, have offered Him our feeble praise, have meditated on His Sacred Word, and commemorated the dying love of a Saviour to a perishing world. Inestimable privileges! Not denied even in a land where the Prince of Darkness reigns!
“Since worship I have stolen away to a much-loved spot, where I love to sit and pay the tribute of affection to my lost darling child. It is a little enclosure of mango-trees, in the centre of which is erected a small bamboo-house on a rising spot of ground, which looks down on the new-made grave of an infant boy. Here I now sit; and though all nature around wears a most romantic, delightful appearance, yet my heart is sad, and my tears frequently stop my pen. You, my dear Mrs. Lovett, who are a mother, may guess my feelings; but if you have never lost a first-born, an only son, you can not know my pain. Had you even buried your little boy, you are in a Christian country, surrounded by friends and relatives who could soothe your anguish and direct your attention to other objects. But behold us solitary and alone, with this one single source of recreation! Yet even this is denied us; this must be removed, to show us that we need no other source of enjoyment but God himself! Do not think, though I thus write, that I repine at the dealings of Providence, or would wish them to be otherwise than they are. No; ‘though He slay me, I will trust in Him,’ is the language I would adopt. Though I say with the prophet, ‘Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow,’ yet I would also say with him, ‘It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not.’”
While engaged in the hard task of learning the Burman language, Mr. Judson caught eagerly at every opportunity of imparting Christian truth. We give his record of a conversation with his teacher:
“September 30, 1815. Had the following conversation with my teacher, as nearly as I can recollect it. This man has been with me about three months, and is the most sensible, learned, and candid man that I have ever found among the Burmans. He is forty-seven years of age, and his name is Oo Oungmen. I began by saying, Mr. J—— is dead. Oo. I have heard so. J. His soul is lost, I think. Oo. Why so? J. He was not a disciple of Christ. Oo. How do you know[know] that? You could not see his soul. J. How do you know whether the root of that mango-tree is good? You can not see it; but you can judge by the fruit on its branches. Thus I know that Mr. J. was not a disciple of Christ, because his words and actions were not such as indicate a disciple. Oo. And so all who are not disciples of Christ are lost? J. Yes, all, whether Burmans or foreigners. Oo. This is hard. J. Yes, it is hard indeed; otherwise I should not have come all this way, and left parents and all, to tell you of Christ. He seemed to feel the force of this, and after stopping a little he said, How is it that the disciples of Christ are so fortunate above all men? J. Are not all men sinners, and deserving of punishment in a future state? Oo. Yes, all must suffer in some future state for the sins they commit. The punishment follows the crime as surely as the wheel of the cart follows the footsteps of the ox. J. Now, according to the Burman system, there is no escape. According to the Christian system, there is. Jesus Christ has died in the place of sinners—has borne their sins; and now those who believe on Him, and become His disciples, are released from the punishment they deserve. At death, they are received into heaven, and are happy forever. Oo. That I will never believe. My mind is very stiff on this one point, namely, that all existence involves in itself principles of misery and destruction. The whole universe is only destruction and reproduction. It therefore becomes a wise man to raise his desires above all things that exist, and aspire to nigban, the state where there is no existence. J. Teacher, there are two evil futurities, and one good. A miserable future existence is evil, and annihilation, or nigban, is an evil, a fearful evil. A happy future existence is alone good. Oo. I admit that is best, if it could be perpetual; but it can not be. Whatever is, is liable to change, and misery, and destruction. Nigban is the only permanent good, and that good has been attained by Gaudama, the last deity. J. If there be no eternal being, you can not account for anything. Whence this world, and all that we see? Oo. Fate. J. Fate! The cause must always be equal to the effect. See, I raise this table. See also that ant under it Suppose I were invisible, would a wise man say the ant raised it? Now, fate is not even an ant. Fate is a word; that is all. It is not an agent; not a thing. What is fate? Oo. The fate of creatures is the influence which their good or bad deeds have on their future existence. J. If influence be exerted, there must be an exerter. If there be a determination, there must be a determiner. Oo. No, there is no determiner. There can not be an eternal being. J. Consider this point. It is a main point of true wisdom. Whenever there is an execution of a purpose, there must be an agent. Oo. (After a little thought.) I must say that my mind is very decided and hard, and unless you tell me something more to the purpose, I shall never believe. J. Well, teacher, I wish you to believe, not for my profit, but for yours. I daily pray the true God to give you light that you may believe. Whether you will ever believe in this world, I do not know; but when you die, I know you will believe what I now say. You will then appear before the God that you now deny. Oo. I don’t know that. J. I have heard that one Burman, many years ago, embraced the Portuguese religion, and that he was your relation. Oo. He was a brother of my grandfather. J. At Ava, or here? Oo. At Ava he became a Portuguese; afterwards went to a ship country with a ship-priest, and returned to Ava. J. I have heard he was put to death for his religion. Oo. No, he was imprisoned and tortured by order of the emperor. At last he escaped from their hands, fled to Rangoon, and afterwards to Bengal, where they say he died. J. Did any of his family join him? Oo. None; all forsook him; and he wandered about, despised and rejected by all. J. Do you think that he was a decided Christian, and had got a new mind? Oo. I think so; for when he was tortured hard, he held out. J. Did he ever talk with you about religion? Oo. Yes. J. Why did you not listen to him? Oo. I did not listen. J. Did you ever know any other Burman that changed his own for a foreign religion? Oo. I have heard that there is one now in Rangoon, who became a Portuguese; but he keeps himself concealed, and I have never seen him.”
After almost three years of the closest application to study, Mr. Judson was taken ill. He wrote to Dr. Baldwin:
“I began to enter into my studies with such pleasure and spirit, and to make such rapid progress, as encouraged me to hope that the time was not far distant when I should be able to commence missionary operations. I was going forward in a course of most valuable Burman reading, and, at the same time, had begun to translate one of the Gospels, and to write a ‘View of the Christian Religion’ in Burman, which, in imagination, were already finished and circulating among the natives, when, all of a sudden, in the midst of the hot season, which in this country is most severe during the months of March and April, I was seized with a distressing weakness and pain in my eyes and head, which put a stop to all my delightful pursuits, and reduced me to a pitiable state indeed. Since that time, excepting at some intervals, I have been unable to read, or write, or make any exertion whatever. Sometimes I have almost given up the hope that I should ever be of any more service; sometimes I have been on the point of trying a short voyage at sea. But, thanks be to God, it is now ten days since I have experienced a turn of severe pain, though I still feel great weakness in my head, and, indeed, throughout my whole nervous system. I begin now to hope that I shall gradually recover, though I fear I never shall be as I formerly was.”
He improved even the hours of his illness by collecting what knowledge he had acquired of the language and “putting it together in the shape of a grammar that it might not be wholly lost to others.” Fearing that his own life might soon come to a close, he determined to blaze the trees through this hitherto untrodden wilderness of the Burmese language, by preparing a grammar. On July 13, 1816, exactly three years to a day after his arrival, he completed a work with the modest title, “Grammatical Notices of the Burman Language.” It was printed twenty years afterward; and although it was the result of a study of only three years, of one of the most difficult Oriental languages, and was written to relieve the tedium of a sick-bed, yet its merits were such as to command the following notice in the Calcutta Review:
“He (Dr. Judson) published another work, a grammar of no pretensions, and of very small dimensions, yet a manual which indicated the genius of the man, perhaps, more strikingly than anything else, except his Bible. He has managed, from a thorough knowledge of the language, to condense into a few short pages (only seventy-six) a most complete grammar of this difficult tongue; and, as the student grows in knowledge, pari passu, this little volume rises in his estimation; for its lucid, comprehensive conciseness becomes more and more manifest. In our limited acquaintance with languages, whether of the East or West, we have seen no work in any tongue which we should compare with it for brevity and completeness; yet we have, in our day, had to study and wade through some long and some would-be short grammars.”