Ten years in Burma

by Julius Smith

The Church of Jesus Christ has just closed its first century of missionary effort within modern times. The nineteenth century began with only a few heroic spirits urging the Church to awake to its responsibility of giving the gospel to the Christless nations. The century has just closed with a steadily increasing army of missionaries, who are determined to give the gospel to every man in his own tongue at the earliest possible day, while the whole Church is beginning to feel the missionary impulse, so far at least, that an increasing multitude are eager to hear of mission lands, the condition of the peoples without Christ, the victories of the gospel, and to have some share in its triumph.

Adoniram Judson, the great missionary hero, enrolled the land of Burma in the list of great mission-fields. He began his labors in Burma during the second decade of the century. The following pages are written as a report of missionary labors and observations in that land in the closing ten years of the century.

How the writer came to be a missionary, and to be honored with an appointment to Burma, may warrant a brief statement. In almost all life’s important steps, individual influence proves the determining factor. This is true in my call to the mission-field. In 1867, when only ten years of age, living on my father’s farm in Andrew County, Mo., I heard a Methodist preacher make a plea for the heathen world. I have never been able to recall his name, that being the only time he ever preached in that place, which was a schoolhouse on my father’s farm. The sermon made a profound impression on me, and I decided to give half of my little fortune of one dollar, saved from pennies, to the cause of missions, with pleadings for which he so warmed our hearts and moved our eyes to tears. Later experiences have shown that missionary sermon to have been the most potential influence of my childhood or youth in determining what I should be in after years. The experience itself seemed to die away for a term of years, due, I think, to the fact that I had little religious training and no missionary information during youth. The reawakening of missionary interest came in 1880, when in college in the Iowa Wesleyan University I heard William Taylor tell of his missionary labors in many lands. Had I then been near the close of my college course, instead of at its beginning, I would have volunteered to go to his mission in South America. Seven or eight years went by, and I was in Garrett Biblical Institute. At that time Bishop Thoburn delivered a series of thrilling missionary addresses to the school. I now think, though without being clearly conscious of it, that from that time I was called to go to India. In 1889, I was pastor of the Arlington Methodist Church in Kansas City, Mo., and so became one of the entertainers of the Missionary Committee that met in the city that year. In listening to the missionary addresses for ten days, and more especially in conversation with Dr. Oldham, who was present, being commissioned by Bishop Thoburn to secure re-enforcements for India, the whole question whether my wife and I should offer ourselves to the Missionary Society for work in the foreign field came up for final settlement. I sought the counsel of Bishop Ninde, who had once been to India, and whose kindly manner always invited confidences of this sort. He agreed to come and spend a day with us, two months later, which he did, and as a result of his counsel and advice, we decided to offer to go to India as missionaries. The offer was promptly accepted, and from that time we laid our plans to leave for our new field of work the following fall. It has always been an inspiring memory to recall the steps by which we were led to let go of America and set our faces toward Asia, and the personal agencies that led us to this decision.

There was another consideration which had great weight in our choice of the foreign mission-field. At home there are men ready for all places. In the foreign mission-fields, especially in Southern Asia, to which we were drawn, there are several places for every man. Here any one of a dozen valuable men can be had for any important charge. On the mission-fields there are most important posts that call in vain for re-enforcements. At home supplies can be had to meet any emergency within a very short time; but on the mission-field we often must wait years for the right man. I left Kansas City in the morning, and my successor, a very worthy and successful man, arrived in the evening of the same day. But out in Burma I have pleaded for years for one man to re-enforce the mission. The Arlington Church, which I was serving, was then and is now a very enjoyable pastorate—one in which the people, always cherish their pastor, and better, where they have from the founding of the Church cordially supported every effort for the salvation of men. The decision to leave that Church to go half way round the world to a people I had never seen, was largely due to the fact that we were needed most on this picket-line of missions, and good men, who for any reason could not go to the foreign fields, could be found to take up promptly the work I laid down at home.

The farewells in Kansas City were of the cheerful and happy kind that send missionaries on their way to their peculiar missions strong in heart. Arlington Church spoke its own farewell in a reception to their pastor and his family, while Grand Avenue Church, the Methodists of Kansas City, followed with a general reception to the outgoing missionaries. This general gathering was under the direction of the pastor, Dr. Jesse Bowman Young, and Dr. O. M. Stewart, the presiding elder. The latter sounded the note of cheerfulness for the farewell. He said, “Let us have nothing of a funeral sort about this reception.” We have always thanked him for the cheerful and hopeful tone which ran all through the meeting. Dr. Young was of the same spirit, and in his address, which at one moment bordered on the emotional at the thought of a long parting from those to whom he had been one of the best of friends, recovered himself by saying, “If you discover anything suspicious in my eyes, charge it up to the hayfever.” These good brethren did more than they knew to set a standard of joyful anticipation on the part of the Church and the outgoing missionaries in the honorable service to which they were called, that toned up their courage when facing the actual separation from home ties. This was of very great value to us who were leaving a very enjoyable pastorate, a native land in which we had taken deep root, and most of all, an aged father and mother.

We left Kansas City on September 3, 1890, and after a little over two months spent in resting and arranging our affairs, we sailed from New York for Liverpool on November 12th. The closing hours in New York were very different from those in Kansas City, and made it appear very real to us that we were being plucked up from the home land and transplanted to a foreign country. We had no acquaintances at all in New York, except one of the Missionary Secretaries, who had visited us in Kansas City. He and his associates were as kind as they could be; but then as now, they were men worked beyond their strength with the burdens of business there is upon them, and at that particular time were hurried to get off to Boston, to the annual Missionary Committee meeting, and they had to tell us a hasty farewell at the Mission Rooms, and leave us to go alone to the ship. While our sailing was more lonely than that of most missionaries, yet it is now the custom to make very little out of the departure of men and women to mission-fields, however distant. The older missionaries contrast this formal dispatch of recruits with the custom of forty years ago, when men still in active service, were first sent out. Then it was the plan to have the new missionaries gathered in one or more churches, and after speeches and exchange of good-will all around, to send them forth with the feeling that their outgoing on this great mission was a matter of moment to the whole Church. It is presumable that custom may change in this matter from time to time, and especially as the number and frequency of the departure of missionaries increase; but it is certain that the departure of missionaries to our distant fields on this, the highest mission of the Church, can not be made less of than it has been in recent years.

We sailed on the steamship City of New York, the largest and swiftest ship then afloat. She loosed her moorings at five o’clock in the morning of November 12th. It was a gloomy morning with a cold rain, and though I was on deck to note any objects of interest amidst the gloom, nothing at all of importance was in view, save the Statue of Liberty holding its light aloft in the harbor. No departure from the shores of the home-land could have been less cheering and romantic. But as the great ship made her way out to sea, there was a peculiar satisfaction in the feeling that came over us, that we were actually on our way to Burma. Some time before sailing, it had been decided that we would go there, making headquarters at Rangoon, the capital of that province of the Indian Empire.

Our voyage across the Atlantic was uneventful for the most part, but not uninteresting. On a great ship one has a good opportunity to study his fellow-passengers. One among our company has since become an international character, and even then had become widely known. This personage was none other than Paul Kruger, President, then and since, of the Transvaal Republic. We then thought of Majuba Hill and its consequences, but could not foresee that this son of the African velt would, before ten years had passed, throw so large a part of the world into turmoil and lead in a great war. I was impressed with his strong leonine features, and the less heroic fact that he was one of the first among the passengers to yield to the power of a rough sea.

Four days out we ran into a great storm that lasted nearly two days. Up to that time we were making a quick passage, but the wind and waves soon destroyed all hopes of making a high record. The storm was worst at midnight, and as we were being rolled until it was hardly possible to remain in our berths, the ammonia pipes broke and flooded the lower cabins with gas. Our cabin was located near that part of the ship where the trouble occurred, but no one was seriously injured. A similar thing recently happened on the same ship in a storm on the Atlantic, and again the suffocating gas spread through the ship with one fatality and a number of prostrations.

Landing at Liverpool, we went to London for ten days, returning to the former place to take the first ship direct for Rangoon. There are two general routes from English ports to points in India. By one you travel across the continent, and usually take ship at some Mediterranean port, and sail to Bombay. By the other you sail via Gibraltar, and so go by sea all the way. Our route was the latter course, and at the time we went out there was only one line of steamers, the Patrick Henderson, direct from English ports to Rangoon. We took passage on a new vessel, the steamship Pegu, making its third voyage. “What a strange name for a ship!” we said. We soon learned that the name was taken from an old, ruined city of Burma, and that all the company’s steamers bear the name of some city, ancient or modern, in the land of Burma. So, at the very docks, as we started Eastward, we met a name suggestive of the ancient history of the land of our future labors. In the appointments of the steamer we were much impressed with the fact that we had no arrangement for heating the vessel, but every plan for thorough ventilation. We found it very cold on board until we passed the Suez Canal. Otherwise the appointments were every way satisfactory, and the fare reasonable.