CHAPTER III.
PREPARATION TIME.
Mr. and Mrs. Judson might well have been excused had they hesitated to settle in Rangoon, for the prospects before them in that place were anything but hopeful. The Emperor of Burmah was an absolute monarch, and rumour gave him the credit of being unjust, tyrannical, grasping, capricious and cruel. The people were described as "indolent, inhospitable, deceitful and crafty;" and in spite of the natural wealth of the land the majority of the inhabitants were miserably poor. This was largely due to the fact that all property was held on the most uncertain tenure, everything being liable to be seized at any time by the emperor or by some of his officials.
More than one unsuccessful attempt had been made to form a missionary settlement in Rangoon previous to the arrival of the Judsons. Preachers had been sent out from Serampore, and by the London Missionary Society; but none of them had been able to occupy the field for any length of time. When the Judsons arrived there was only one other Christian teacher in Burmah, Mr. Felix Carey, who was then at Ava, the residence of the emperor. Mrs. Carey, a native of the country, was staying at Rangoon, in a house built by the Serampore Baptist missionaries, and she welcomed the new-comers to her home, where they stayed for some months.
The first work to which the Judsons set themselves was the study of the Burmese tongue. This was a task of extreme difficulty, for the only part of the language put into writing which would help them was a small portion of a grammar and six chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel, which had been translated by Mr. Felix Carey. Even with all the aids at present in use, Burman is anything but easy to acquire. It has been called the "round O language," on account of each word being made up of a number of small circles; and to an untrained eye the words seem almost exactly alike. "The letters and words are all totally destitute of the least resemblance to any language we have ever met with," Mr. Judson wrote to a friend in Salem, "and these words are not fairly divided and distinguished as in Western writing by breaks, and points, and capitals, but run together in one continuous line, a sentence or paragraph seeming to the eye but one long word; instead of clear characters on paper, we find only obscure scratches on palm leaves, strung together and called a book. We have no dictionary and no interpreter to explain a single word, and must get something of the language before we can avail ourselves of the assistance of a native teacher…. It unavoidably takes several years to acquire such a language in order to converse and write intelligibly on the truths of the Gospel."
Mr. and Mrs. Judson obtained a native teacher, and settled down to a daily struggle with their task. The man was at first unwilling to have Mrs. Judson as a pupil, thinking it below his dignity to instruct a woman: but when he saw that she was determined to persevere he abandoned his opposition. As the teacher knew no English and the pupils knew no Burman, progress was of necessity very slow. "Our only mode of ascertaining the names of objects which met our eye," wrote Mrs. Judson, "was by pointing to them in the presence of our teacher, who would immediately speak the names in Burman; we then expressed them as nearly as possible by the Roman character, till we had sufficiently acquired the power of the Burman."
In order to get more in contact with the people, they left Mr. Carey's hospitable roof and took up their residence in the centre of the town. This obliged Mrs. Judson to commence housekeeping on her own account, and consequently she had less time to devote to study; yet to her surprise she made faster progress now than she had ever done before. She thus described her daily life, in a letter home: "We are busily employed all day long. Could you look into a large open room, which we call a verandah, you would see Mr. Judson bent over his table covered with Burman books, with his teacher at his side, a venerable-looking man in his sixtieth year, with a cloth wrapped round his middle and a handkerchief on his head. They talk and chatter all day long with hardly any cessation.
"My mornings are busily employed in giving directions to the servants, providing food for the family, etc. At ten my teacher comes, when, were you present, you might see me in an inner room at one side of my study table, and my teacher the other, reading Burman, writing, talking, etc. I have many more interruptions than Mr. Judson, as I have the entire management of the family. This I took on myself for the sake of Mr. Judson's attending more closely to the study of the language; yet I have found, by a year's experience, that it is the most direct way I could have taken to acquire the language, as I am frequently obliged to speak Burman all day. I can talk and understand others better than Mr. Judson, though he knows more about the nature and construction of the language."
It was impossible to do any direct evangelistic work until the language had been more fully mastered, and Mrs. Judson was continually spurred on in her studies by the desire to speak to the natives about the Lord Jesus Christ. "O Thou Light of the world," she prayed, as she realised more fully the ignorance of the people, "dissipate the thick darkness which covers Burmah, and let Thy light arise and shine!"