Judson the Pioneer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 17, 1907

Judson the Pioneer

ADONIRAM JUDSON; Burma—two names of strangely differing sound, linked together forever in letters of living light.

The intensity of Judson’s spirit is one reason for the unique place which he holds in our missionary history; the other is found in the remarkable conditions in which he wrought out his splendid work. These were never known before; they never can be again.

Every stage in Judson’s career is marked by storm and stress. Dec. 2, 1808, is noted in his diary as the time when he gave his heart to God. He was then twenty years old, but he had come out of a country parsonage to be an avowed skeptic, and to travel about the country as a reckless, strolling player. Then, profoundly moved by Buchanan’s “Star in the East,” through exalted spiritual experiences he came to the determination to spend his life as a missionary to the heathen; and still further the deeps of his soul were troubled when, as he sailed in the “Caravan” with his sweet young wife in the spring of 1812, Judson, after his study of the New Testament, sorrowfully separated from those who had sent him forth, and cast in his lot with the Baptists.

In Burma, then the kingdom of a native despot, every day brought conflict or suffering. There were no helps for Judson in learning the difficult language; the haughty Buddhists despised him and ridiculed his religion; then came the war between the Burmese and the British, when Judson was arrested and cast into prison. What he suffered in body and mind, no words can ever describe. All that flesh can feel of pain, he felt, and day by day he saw his beautiful and devoted wife, as she came to the prison to minister to him, fading and failing by reason of her trials.

Yet Judson never for a moment faltered in his purpose. The prospects, he said, were “as bright as the promises of God.” He was willing to wait seven years for the first convert, and when friends at home grew impatient, he wrote, “Give us twenty-five or thirty years more, and then inquire again.”

He lived to baptize many scores of Burmans, to know of thousands of converts throughout the country, to translate the whole Bible into Burmese, and then, as he sought a little rest and some relief from his sufferings, he fell asleep on the open sea, and rests beneath the waters that cast their spray against the rocky coast of his boyhood home at Plymouth, and lave the tropic shores of Burma.—Baptist Missionary Magazine.