They didn't come with a blare of trumpets. One man, a Rev. Adoniram Judson, and his wife started out from Salem, Massachusetts, came to Burma and settled here in Rangoon, to wrest from Buddha his adherents, and add them to the Baptist Church. They worked six years without winning a convert. After one hundred and one years the results are:
| Baptists | 66,000 |
| Buddhists | 10,000,000 |
from which figures one must agree with me that Buddha ploughed deep and planted thoroughly. The other Christian denominations have about 66,000 members between them.
There are of baptized Baptists in Burma 66,000, all other Christians about the same number. The Christians claim an adherent, or nominal Christian, for every church member; so baptized and nominal Christians in Burma number 264,000.
This makes 10,264,000 Buddhists and Christians. The balance of the 12,000,000 in Burma are non-Christians or non-Buddhists, and are composed of various peoples, and tribes: the Karens, Chins, Kachins, Musos, etc.
But the Baptists admit that the great majority of their converts were not made from Buddhists, but from the Karens, Chins, Kachins, and Musos, chiefly from the Karens.
To quote from the minutes of the Judson Centennial held here in Rangoon in 1913:
"But what of the Buddhist population, which is so greatly in the majority that out of a total of 12,115,217 dwellers in the land, 10,384,579 are returned as Buddhists? From among the Buddhists only 3,197 are members of our own Baptist churches, and a correspondingly small number are members of other communions. It is thus readily seen that, while the success of our missions in Burma has been very great, those who have professed belief in Christ have come very largely from the non-Buddhist population.
"Of the ten million Buddhists, eight million are Burmans, and of Burman Baptist Christians we find but 2,700. Please bear that fact in mind—2,700 Burmans in our churches and eight million Buddhist Burmans. To each Burman Baptist church member there are 3,000 Burman Buddhists looking us in the face as we turn to our task for the coming century."
The Baptists here are hotly contesting the field; bombarding it with a thoroughly up-to-date publishing plant; with a college, schools, and missionaries. For the first twenty years of work we find them with 2,000 converts to their credit.