I would like to give the reader some intelligent idea of what it means to establish a new mission in a new country, with an elaborate religion like Buddhism in possession of the field, and difficult to dislodge.

We make our way up the Irrawaddy by one of the splendid steamers of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, and in due time we land at Mandalay, and climb the steep bank of the river, and there we are with our few boxes, strangers in a strange land, knowing nobody belonging to the place, not a word of the Burmese language, with no mission house to turn into, no native Christians, and, worst of all, no native helpers. After thirteen years of very happy work in Ceylon, where we have a flourishing mission and a large staff of native helpers, it required a stout heart to face the difficulties of pioneer work, and no little faith, hope and perseverance. Especially did we miss the aid of our native brethren.

The chief value of the European missionary, and of the European generally, in the East, is in his capacity as a leader of men. Upon him devolves the initiation, and the vigorous working out, of plans of aggression, and he has to find the enthusiasm for everybody about him. But if the European is brain, and heart, and hand to the mission, his native brethren are equally indispensable as the eyes, ears, and feet. My native brother has a knowledge of his country, and of his people, and of all that is going on, extensive, accurate, and intimate beyond anything I can ever attain unto, and he is in touch with his own people as no foreigner can ever be—no, not if he spends half a century among them. This invaluable help I greatly missed.

For some days I lodged with the Rev. J. H. Bateson in a Buddhist monastery, which had been assigned to him by the military authorities. He had arrived from England three weeks previously, in the capacity of Wesleyan Chaplain to the Upper Burma Field Force. It was one of a considerable number of buildings that had been “annexed” for the temporary accommodation of the troops, and which were afterwards handed over again to the Buddhist monks. It was a fine, substantial teak building, raised six or seven feet from the ground, with a broad verandah back and front, and consisted of three rooms. The roof was of the usual fantastic Burmese style, in triple form, and at one end it terminated in a rather tall spire; and the whole of the building, as usual with monasteries, was richly decorated with elaborate carvings in wood. Amidst some disadvantages as a residence it had one very obvious advantage, that we paid no rent for it.

The first duty lying before me was obviously to commence the study of the language, and along with that, to look about and find the best sites for establishing our mission centres, and for the first few months I gave my attention closely to those matters. Whilst I was making these preparations for laying the foundations of our future mission work amongst the natives of the country, there was abundance of work also ready to hand amongst the soldiers and other English-speaking people, congregated in a large military and civil station like Mandalay. Mr. Bateson had to undertake long journeys to other military stations at intervals, in the course of his duties as chaplain to the troops, and it fell to my lot to attend to the English congregation in his absence. I have heard and read of some missionaries who have held that it was no part of their duty, as missionaries to the heathen, to preach in English at all. But I never could see that a white skin, and the fact that a man speaks English, should be deemed to disqualify him from receiving Gospel ministrations; and I can see no reason why the time and attention given to our own countrymen need be allowed to interfere materially with the missionary’s work for the natives. It is in circumstances such as those of Upper Burma at that time, and amidst the rough experiences of pioneer life in a new country, that our countrymen most need the ministrations of the Gospel. In a heathen land and amidst the lax morals which heathenism engenders, absent from home and friends, and, as it was then with many, from wife and family, and all the ordinary restraints and helps of civilised life; in some cases away for months together in lonely stations, where there were no Christian services of any kind, they were sorely tempted to go astray, and do things they never would have done at home. I therefore gladly did what I could.

We had “parade services” for the soldiers, and other public services in English, temperance meetings, Bible classes, and devotional meetings, in quaint Burmese sacred buildings, with the images of Buddha about, wherever we could find a place quiet and convenient, for as yet we had no place of our own set apart for Christian services. Our first public Sunday services for the soldiers were held in the throne room of the royal palace, just at the foot of the throne itself. Though this did not mean much from a missionary point of view, yet it certainly furnished a strange and romantic association of ideas, to be conducting Christian worship in such a place as that, in the midst of a heathen palace, where there had been such a despotic government, and at times so much cruelty and bloodshed. Ever since that time we have had a building set apart within the palace precincts for our military services. Many of the meetings, held amidst such strange and grotesque surroundings, were owned of God to the spiritual benefit of those who attended; and some were accompanied by a solemn melting power of the Spirit, confessions of sin, and aspirations after a better life, such as I have seldom witnessed. Doubtless these services were useful in reminding many of almost forgotten truths, and in reviving blessed memories of home and youth, which, amidst the rough life of campaigning in Burma, they were too apt to forget.

It was our happiness, during those first years, never to be without some godly association amongst the officers of the garrison, and also amongst the civilians; and though there were many removals and changes, we always found some like-minded, who took pleasure in assisting in the Gospel and temperance work. They belonged to various sections and denominations of the Church of Christ, but that made no difference; we were able cordially to work together.

My colleague, Mr. Bateson, established a temporary Soldiers’ Home, with a bar for the sale of food and refreshments, and convenience for reading, writing and games, in a Burmese building granted by the military authorities for the purpose in the palace; and this proved a very welcome resort for large numbers of the soldiers, who wished to spend their evenings in a sober and rational manner. It did excellent service for a year or two, and was eventually closed for the removal of the building; a much larger and far more complete Soldiers’ Institute having by that time been built and furnished by the military authorities.

Attractive as this work was in one’s own language, and amongst one’s own people, I felt from the first that the mission to the Burmans, though an incomparably more difficult, less inviting, and less immediately successful work, was my own most pressing duty, and the work for which I had specially come. On my arrival in Rangoon I had engaged the services of a young Burman, and brought him up to Mandalay that he might teach me Burmese, and with him I commenced the study of the language at once. But if any one imagines that a native munshee teaches as an English teacher teaches, he is greatly mistaken. For want of the ability to impart the knowledge he has, the teaching does not flow from him as from a fountain; it has to be laboriously pumped out of him, and it requires some ingenuity to find how to work that pump, and if you fail to pump, or do not pump judiciously, you get nothing. In learning any Oriental language you have, in fact, to teach yourself, using the so-called teacher in much the same way as you would use the dictionary, or any other passive repository of the necessary knowledge.

In studying Burmese, I found it necessary not only to spend as many hours as I could daily with my munshee and my books, but to go out amongst the people for the sake of learning the spoken language. Every language has some difference between its literary and its colloquial style; and it is quite possible for the foreigner to know a good deal that he reads in the books, and yet to be quite nonplussed with the ordinary talk of the people. Unless the foreigner pays attention to the colloquial, though he may in time find himself able to talk after a bookish fashion, he will be unable to make himself properly understood, and unable also to know what the people say in reply. For this reason I made a practice of going out of an evening, often with one of my children’s picture books in my hand, and sitting down amongst the Burmans at their doors, using the pictures as a means of scraping up a conversation—being myself short of words—with notebook in hand, to take down every new word or idiom I heard. As the Burmans appreciate pictures very much, I found this plan always made them talkative, and thus served my purpose as well as amusing them.

This puts me in mind of an incident which occurred about that time, at a certain Buddhist monastery, where I was in the habit of spending an hour or two of an evening, for the purpose of talking Burmese. The long guerilla war with the forces of disorder and crime was then raging, and the country generally was in a very disturbed state. Plot after plot was set on foot for creating an organised disturbance, with a view to harass the British power, and with some faint hope that they might, by a lucky chance, get the mastery. Judge of my surprise, when one morning I learnt that fifty of the ringleaders of a plot of that kind had been discovered and arrested at midnight, in that very monastery where I was in the habit of visiting. Next time the local paper appeared we were told that we had narrowly escaped such a scene of confusion and bloodshed as was common in the time of the Indian mutiny.

The choice of a site for the mission premises was the first matter to settle. It involved much going to and fro in that great city, and much weighing of advantage and disadvantage, for it was a most important question. At length a block of Government land 5½ acres in extent was fixed upon. I attended the sale. Several pieces of land were put up for sale before ours, and the bidding was fairly brisk. When ours was put up I made a bid; not another voice was heard; they all abstained from bidding because the land was for mission purposes, though I had said not a word on the matter to anybody, and it was knocked down to us at the merely nominal price of one hundred rupees an acre (say £7 10s.). A substantial mission house of teak was at once commenced, and at the earliest possible date we moved into it. Later on we erected on this land a Boys’ Training Institution for teachers, and a Girls’ Boarding School and Training Institution, and a humble beginning has thus been made in the work of training native helpers, the end of which who can predict?

For the first year we lived there we had no proper roads, and when the rainy season came on, we were separated from the rest of the world by a sea of soft, tenacious, black mud, ankle deep; and for many days I could not get either to or from the house without taking off my shoes and socks, and wading barefoot through it. But in course of time these early pioneer experiences became things of the past. Other houses were built around us, also the Government Courts and offices; good streets were made and lighted with lamps at night, and drains were dug at the sides of the roads to run off the surplus water, and things gradually got into shape.

In September 1887 two more workers arrived—two Singhalese young men, trained by our mission in South Ceylon. We do not of course contemplate permanently looking to Ceylon to supply us with men, but at the outset of the mission it seemed likely that these brethren, being from an older Christian community, and far better educated and trained than any Burmans could possibly be for years to come, would be able to render us material help in the pioneer work, and would bring to bear upon it a degree of Christian knowledge, and a maturity of Christian character and habits, far in advance of anything in Burma. These two brethren are now working in the mission with a fair measure of success, and have justified the expectation we formed of them. Their success in acquiring the language, and their consistent Christian life, as they have gone in and out amongst the people, have been a stay and a help to the work.

It was our desire from the first to begin an Anglo-vernacular school in Mandalay, as the first of a series of educational efforts. It is self-evident to the experienced eye that so long as the youth of Burma remain in the hands of the monks, in connection with the monastery schools, to learn idleness, and to have all the springs of life and thought saturated with Buddhism from their youth, the downfall of that religion will be indefinitely postponed. We must enter into friendly competition with the monastery schools, must take hold of the awakening desire for Western learning, and we must give an education so undeniably better than the monks can give that we shall thus win our way to success. I have used, about equally, each and every kind of missionary method within my reach, and I hold no brief for the educational method; but thirteen years of mission work amongst the Hindus in Ceylon, where we have an elaborate system of religion to deal with, has shown me that, in the long run, Christian education plays quite as important a part in the conversion of the people as any other agency. The educational and evangelistic work go hand in hand, and we cannot afford to dispense with either. Educational work gives a backbone of intelligence and solidity to the mission, and to the converts; it introduces us to the most intelligent and influential classes of the people, and gives us a powerful influence we could acquire in no other way, and it leads directly to hopeful conversions. So long as we are merely the preachers of another religion amongst them, our influence is circumscribed within that condition. But if, in addition to that, we move amongst the people as the trusted guides and teachers of their youth, it vastly increases our power for good. In the East the teacher of the young is always treated with the utmost respect. And this position of influence, which so legitimately belongs to the preachers of the Gospel, we cannot afford to despise or forego.

After advertising for several months for teachers, we managed at last to engage a young Christian Karen, from Lower Burma, as the teacher, and we began a school in a rented house, near the centre of the town. This school has developed into a good Anglo-vernacular School. In due course, and after much trouble and delay, from having to buy up some twenty or thirty small holdings, with bamboo houses on them, we managed to secure and clear a good site, and there we erected a neat, substantial brick school-chapel, to which our work was transferred from the rented house, and there we have regularly held services in English, in Burmese, and in Tamil.

We early commenced street preaching in Mandalay, and have continued to hold several open-air meetings every week. As a means of publishing the Gospel to the people at large, we have found nothing better. The streets of Mandalay are broad and spacious, so that even a large crowd does not impede the traffic. The people are generally very willing to listen, tolerant, respectful, and not inclined to cavil. We usually commence by singing a hymn. A number of children are on the scene at once, some of them quite naked up to seven or eight years of age. By the time we have finished the hymn, a crowd of men, women and children has collected, and most of them, having once come, stay till the close. The people, as a rule, look well nourished and healthy, but in almost every Oriental crowd there are evidences of the prevalence of skin disease, in one form or another. Amongst the Tamil people itch is the special form, and in Burma there is quite an excess of ringworm. In Burma many of the people are observed to be pitted with smallpox, for until lately, vaccination was not practised in Upper Burma; and ophthalmia is not uncommon, especially amongst children. The individuals composing the crowd change somewhat. Some are only passers-by, and have to go about their errands; others again have to retire, to attend to household duties. Occasionally a man leaves because he feels a prejudice against hearing the doctrine, or, as one old man put it, because if he listened he would only get “mixed” in his mind. But for the most part they stay and listen attentively until the end. In trying to follow up the address, by conversation with the people at their doors after preaching, I have generally found the Burmans reticent, but still polite.

They are certainly good-natured hearers, and give the preacher a fair chance. To see them sitting on their heels, or on the ground, placidly smoking their cheroots, and looking intently, nodding the head occasionally, and interjecting, “Hoakba, Hoakba” (true, true), one might go away with the idea that they had intelligently taken in the whole discourse, but it does not do to be too sanguine about that. It has to be taken into account that though they may understand the words used, they are sure at first to understand them in a Buddhist sense; and there is such a great deal that is absolutely new to them in Christianity, so many strange names and unfamiliar ideas, that the subject matter of the discourse is by no means easy for them to understand. We are much more liable to underrate than to overrate the difficulty all heathen people have in understanding Christian preaching, at the first. In addressing them on the subject of religion we must use religious terms. But unfortunately those terms have already a Buddhist meaning clinging to them, which is widely different from the Christian sense; and the higher the truths to which we are seeking to give expression, the greater is the difficulty of putting the meaning into the words at our disposal. How are you to get a Buddhist to realise, for example, any adequate notion of the Divine Being, when he has no such conception in his own religion?

True, there is the word “Paya,” and that is the word we have to use. But what meaning does that word convey to a Buddhist? It means primarily Buddha himself, and the philologists tell us that it is that name in another dress. But Buddha never claimed to be God. He was a sage, philosopher, religious reformer, ascetic, who lived and died, and, according to Buddhist teaching, passed into Nirvana, five centuries before Christ. “Paya” may mean also the image of Buddha; or it may be applied to the shrine in which the image is placed; or it may be applied—alas! for the degradation of human language—to you, or to me, or to any person, Burman or European, whom, for the time being, it is worth while to treat with rather a special degree of respect. Which of these meanings attaching to this Burmese word “Paya” brings us even a single step towards the true conception of the Christian revelation of God? And yet, inadequate as it is, it is all the name there is for us to use.

Even the familiar term “man,” about which it might seem there could hardly be two opinions, is subject to the same difficulty, when it comes to be used in a theological and religious sense. What with the doctrines of transmigration, and karma, which, as we have already seen, the Burmans all firmly believe, the real nature, and circumstances, and final destiny of human beings, as we have to teach these truths, are all new and strange to their minds.

“Sin” is a thing to be recognised and dealt with in preaching; but here again precisely the same difficulty meets you as you stand before a congregation of Burman Buddhists. The Burman, like other Orientals, will not, probably, deny the fact of sin, but if you come to know his notion of what sin is, you will find that it is very different from yours, and that the term does not at all cover the same ground when used in his language and to him, as it does in yours to you. Nor can you, all at once, read into his term for sin the ideas you wish to teach, by merely using it in preaching; that reading in of new meanings is a lengthy process.

Of sacrifice for sin, or the necessity for it, or its efficacy, the Buddhist religion knows nothing; there is no Mediator, no atonement, no pardon, no renewal of our nature; so that all allusions to these great cardinal truths of the Christian religion will carry at first no meaning whatsoever, and the utmost they can do at first is to say with the Athenians, “Thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean.”

The simplicity of the Gospel is often made a theme of in Christian circles, and it is simple when one has been trained up from infancy in its principles, and facts, and lessons, but in the case of a heathen people, brought up in an elaborate system of religion alien to Christianity, the simplicity cannot be at all apparent.

And, should the preacher, unmindful of the uninstructed condition of his heathen audience, allow himself to slip into the well known metaphors, and allusions, and phraseology—that “language of Canaan,” in which Christians often express themselves on religious subjects—it will become in the vernacular nothing more than a jargon.

An incident will illustrate this. One Sunday afternoon I went, in company with a missionary brother, who had just arrived in Burma, to hold an out-door service. We sang a hymn to begin with, which I may say was not with any idea that they would understand it, but merely to attract the people to come and hear the preaching. When the singing was finished, he very naturally suggested that it would be well to explain the hymn. It so happened that we had, inadvertently, hit upon a Burmese translation of that well-known hymn—

Let me ask the reader to divest his mind for a moment of every sacred association surrounding that hymn, and calmly consider the words just as they stand, and try to imagine what sense, if any, they would convey to the mind of a pious Buddhist, whose ideas of sin are totally different from ours, who has no conception of the nature or need of a sacrifice or atonement, and to whom the shedding of blood, and the taking of all life, even the killing of an insect, is utterly abhorrent, as a deadly sin. Since that incident I have not been inclined to select that hymn for out-door services.

We avoid controversy in preaching to the Buddhists. It seems to be quite unnecessary, and likely to do far more harm than good. The best thing we can do is to tell, as simply and plainly as we can, such portion of the Scripture narrative, particularly the life and teachings of Christ, as we find they can easily grasp, and to deal with the more prominent doctrines of the Christian religion, as they apply to the hearts and lives of the people before us. It is only when a Buddhist has grasped at least the outlines of Christian truth, and not before, that he will be in any position to assent to the proposition that Buddhism is false. Until he does see that, the assertion in public that it is false, together with all that is said in disparagement of it, must appear to him premature, if not gratuitously abusive. In any case it is the unfolding of the truth that convinces, as it is the belief of the truth (not disbelief in error) that saves. No Oriental can fail to see for himself that the teaching of Christ is antagonistic to that of his own religion, on many essential points, and the clear exposition of our own teaching, therefore, is far more essential than emphasizing the differences. One evening, at a street service, a foolish Burman endeavoured to make it out that their religion and ours taught the very same. The incredulous smiles on the faces of the audience at once showed us that it was unnecessary for us to say more than that if their religion taught the same as ours, so much the better. The wish was father to the thought in that case, and the fact that he saw a difference made him anxious to prove there was none. In cases where a person wishes to study the teachings of the two religions, and compare the two closely, the best plan is to put into his hands a tract bearing on the subject, and let him take it home and study it, rather than engage in heated controversy in the streets.

At the same time we do not wish to silence respectful inquiry. Occasionally a question has been asked at these street services, but we have never experienced anything approaching to abuse or disturbance. One evening, not a Burman but a Ponnâ, an astrologer, one of the fortune-telling fraternity, the descendants of the Brahmins from Manipur, spoke up and said he had an inquiry to make. It was with reference to the putting away of sin through Christ, of which we were speaking, and the inquiry seemed quite respectful, and bonâ fide. For his part he could not see how there could be any putting away of sin. If there was, where was it? For example, said he, if a man commits murder, he receives the full penalty of his crime in the body by hanging; and as for the spirit, that passes, by transmigration, at once into some other body, where it receives the appropriate consequences of past deeds, according to the man’s karma (fate), irrespective of any atonement or any intervention of another. What place then was there for the pardon and removal of transgression? This question will show that in Burma we have to do with a people not wanting in acuteness. Our answer was an explanation of the Christian doctrine of a future life.

At the end of our first year we were able to report that we had made a beginning in preaching the Gospel in the vernacular. It was a humble beginning, and consisted only of reading to a small congregation, in the little rented schoolroom, before we built our own, a short written address; only a beginning, but a beginning in the right direction. We were also glad to welcome an addition to our little staff of workers, in the Rev. A. H. Bestall, a missionary sent out from England.