Judson’s Counsel to Missionary Candidates by William A. Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 4, 1913

Judson’s Counsel to Missionary Candidates

By William A. Spicer

THIS autumn season finds many of our fellow workers on the way to mission fields, or in earnest preparation to go forward. For their special benefit we print a portion of the letter that Adoniram Judson, the pioneer apostle of Burma, wrote to a band of student volunteers in 1832. The counsel is just as good for workers already in the fields as for those newly entering mission service.

“You are contemplating a missionary life,” Judson wrote from Burma; and added:—

Then let it be a missionary life; that is, come out for life, and not for a limited term. Do not fancy that you have a true missionary spirit while you are intending all along to leave the heathen soon after acquiring their language. Leave them! for what? To spend the rest of your days in enjoying the ease and plenty of your native land? . . .

Beware of the reaction which will take place soon after reaching your field of labor. There you will perhaps find native Christians, of whose merits or demerits you cannot judge correctly without some familiar acquaintance with their language. Some appearances will combine to disappoint and disgust you. You will meet with disappointments and discouragements, of which it is impossible to form a correct idea from written accounts, and which will lead you, at first, almost to regret that you have embarked in the cause. You will see men and women whom you have been accustomed to view through a telescope some thousands of miles long. Such an instrument is apt to magnify. Beware, therefore, of the reaction you will experience from a combination of all these causes, lest you become disheartened at commencing your work, or take up a prejudice against some persons and places, which will embitter all your future lives.

Beware of the greater reaction which will take place after you have acquired the language, and become fatigued and worn out with preaching the gospel to a disobedient and gainsaying people. You will sometimes long for a quiet retreat, where you can find a respite from the tug of toiling at native work—the incessant, intolerable friction of the missionary grindstone. And Satan will sympathize with you in this matter; and he will present some chapel of ease, in which to officiate in your native tongue, some government situation, some professorship or editorship, some literary or scientific pursuit, some supernumerary translation, or, at least some system of schools; anything, in a word, that will help you, without much surrender of character, to slip out of real missionary work. . . .

Beware of pride; not the pride of proud men, but the pride of humble men—that secret pride which is apt to grow out of the consciousness that we are esteemed by the great and good. This pride sometimes eats out the vitals of religion before its existence is suspected. In order to check its operations, it may be well to remember how we appear in the sight of God, and how we should appear in the sight of our fellow men, if all were known. Endeavor to let all be known. Confess your faults freely, and as publicly as circumstances will require or admit. When you have done something of which you are ashamed, and by which, perhaps, some person has been injured, (and what man is exempt?) be glad not only to make reparation, but improve the opportunity for subduing your pride. . . .

Beware of that indolence which leads to a neglect of bodily exercise. The poor health and premature death of most Europeans in the East must be eminently ascribed to the most wanton neglect of bodily exercise.

Beware of genteel living. Maintain as little intercourse as possible with fashionable European society. The mode of living adopted by many missionaries in the East is quite inconsistent with that

familiar intercourse with the natives which is essential to a missionary.

There are many points of self-denial that I should like to touch upon,—but a consciousness of my own deficiency constrains me to be silent. I have also left untouched several topics of vital importance, it having been my aim to select such only as appear to me to have been not much noticed nor enforced. I hope you will excuse the monitorial style that I have accidentally adopted. I assure you, I mean no harm.

It is sound counsel, all will agree, just as valuable to the missionary worker now as in that day of the beginning of modern mission enterprise.

W. A. S.