Four years in Upper Burma

by W. R. Winston

Happening to take up one day an influential religious newspaper, I met with a notice of John G. Paton’s book, which spoke in very high terms of it, and of him, concluding with the following sentence, in which the editor most innocently and unconsciously brings up in another form this same false ideal, even after reading the book; which shows how prevalent the error is, and difficult to eradicate. “Now that civilisation is spreading, and owing to the general extension of facilities for travel to every part of the earth, it is to be feared that such records of missionary experience will soon be amongst the things of the past.” “It is to be feared” say the stay-at-home people, and editors in easy chairs. Any missionary, especially Paton himself, would have said, “It is to be hoped.” If the reader will but ponder that word “feared,” and take in all that it means, he will see that it is the very notion Paton complains of, and that I am here seeking to correct.

We still need to take to heart Dr. Johnson’s exhortation to “clear our minds of cant.” After praying times without number that cannibalism, and all the cruel horrors and barbarities of heathenism might come to an end, we are found fearing that our prayer is so near being answered, that soon there will be no more such tales to tell!

The immense wave of sympathy that was evoked through the lamented illness and death of Father Damien, and which spread throughout the civilised world, was another proof of the prevalence of the “object lesson” ideal of the missionary. Missionaries had been at work succouring and tending lepers for many years before that, and a noble society, the Mission to Lepers, established in 1874, has now some thirty homes for lepers under its care, in India, Burma and China, under the management of twelve different Protestant missionary societies. But all this work goes on in comparative obscurity, the whole of it together not attracting one hundredth part of the sympathy and notice that this one case of suffering attracted. Father Damien died of leprosy. “This, this is what we want; this touches our hearts and our pockets,” cries out universal Christendom. It seems it is not mission work but missionary sufferings the people want to hear about. A false ideal.

A further proof how widespread is this notion will appear from a recent article in the March number of the Missionary Review of the World for the year 1892. The writer states it as frankly as words and repetition can express it, quite unconscious that there is anything wrong about it. The article is on “Missionary Fellowship.” It is not written by a missionary; no missionary could possibly write such rank nonsense. This is what he says: “Suffering, after all, is the test of missionary character.... It is not so much what the missionary does as what he is, and what he is can be shown only by suffering for the Gospel’s sake.” He goes on to say that it is Judson’s and his wife’s sufferings in Burma, more than their missionary labours, that “canonise them as martyrs of modern missions”; and there is a good deal more “high falutin’” of the same kind.

To my mind this is a false and absurd ideal—mischievously false. Men have gone on thinking it, and occasionally saying it, until they fail to see the falsity and absurdity; but if we think for a moment we must admit that the Bible tells us that every missionary’s work, every Christian’s work, must be the test of the man, and not his sufferings, and gives no countenance whatever to this error. Our sufferings are matters for which we are not personally answerable in any way, except as we may cause them ourselves; otherwise they are beyond our control, and can be therefore no test of the man. Judson would have been one of the very greatest of missionaries, all the same, if he had never seen the inside of a Burmese prison. His lifetime of earnest evangelistic labours, his Burmese Bible, his two dictionaries, his Burmese grammar, his other precious literary remains, and the many souls saved through his instrumentality, and long since gone to glory—these are the enduring monuments that entitle him to our reverence, and constitute that bright example which some of us are humbly trying to follow. His sufferings were indeed severe, but to dwell upon them, and laud them as being of far more importance than his work, not only does an injustice to the memory of the man himself, but it feeds a false ideal, and keeps from view the real purpose for which we go to the heathen.

The sooner we give up this nonsense entirely, and take our stand upon truth and common sense, the sooner shall we find the sound, and only sure basis for that increase of missionary enthusiasm, which is so much needed at the present time. So long as our enthusiasm is based upon any such shadowy and precarious foundation as the sufferings of missionaries, whether supposed or real, so long will the results disappoint us.

But there is a further objection against this false ideal, on the ground that abroad, in the mission field, it gives rise to a powerful and subtle temptation in some minds, and leads to waste of precious power. In most mission fields the hardness of the hearts of many of the heathen, and the deep sense of isolation from the people which the missionary feels, and which is inevitable from the difference of race, language and habits, are so distressing, that there are few conscientious souls that have not felt, at some time or other, a strong tendency towards an ascetic mode of life: “O! let me do this, let me do that, let me do anything, if I can only come nearer the people.” There is quite enough tendency to this abroad, without its being further stimulated by a demand at home.