Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission fieldYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
History
Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission field
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Missionaries
She had been a widow four years, when Adoniram Judson, who had returned
from Rangoon, and was about to take charge of the station at Moulmein,
made her his second wife, on the 10th of April, 1834. At the same time,
an opportunity offered of sending little George back to America for
education; but year after year filled the house at Moulmein with other
little ones,--careful comforts, in that fatal climate, which had begun to
tell on the health of both the parents. Pain and sorrow went for little
with this devoted pair. To be as holy as the Apostles though without
their power, was the endeavour which Judson set before himself, and the
work of such a man was one of spirit that drew all to hear and follow
him. The Burmese converts were numbered by hundreds, and one of the
missionaries in the Karen country could write: "I no longer date from a
heathen land. Heathenism has fled from these banks; I eat the rice and
fruits cultivated by Christian hands, look on the fields of Christians,
see no dwellings but those of Christian families. I am seated in the
midst of a Christian village, surrounded by a people that live as
Christians, converse as Christians, act as Christians, and, to my eyes,
look like Christians."
All this, like every other popular conversion, involved many individual
disappointments from persons not keeping up to the Christian standard,
and from coolness setting in when the excitement of the change was over;
and great attention had to be paid to rules, discipline, &c., as well as
to providing books and schools. Judson himself had to work hard at the
completion and correction of the Burmese Bible, to which he devoted
himself, the more entirely because an affection of the throat and cough
came on, and for some time prevented him from preaching. In 1839, he
tried to alleviate it by a voyage to Calcutta, where he was received by
both Bishop Wilson and by the Marshman family at Serampore; but, as he
observes, "the glory of Serampore had departed," and his stay there must
have been full of sad associations. His work upon the Scriptures was
finished in 1840, and he then began a complete Burmese dictionary, while
his wife was translating the Pilgrim's Progress; but both were completely
shattered in health, and their children, four in number, had all been
brought low by the hooping cough, and then by other complaints. A voyage
to Calcutta was imperatively enjoined on all; but it was stormy and full
of suffering, and soon after they arrived at Serampore their youngest
child, little Henry, died. A still further voyage was thought advisable,
and the whole family went as far as the Isle of France, where they
recovered some measure of health, and their toil at Moulmein was resumed.
Four more years passed, three more children were born, and then the
strength that had been for nineteen years so severely tried, gave way,
and the doctors pronounced that Sarah Judson's life could only be saved
by a voyage to America.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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