Burma

Burma enters the book as the place to which the American Judson mission was redirected after its missionaries were ordered out of British India. The author treats this turn not as a mere change of destination but as an instance of providence working through obstruction: the East India Company’s resistance to missionary activity helped send the missionaries to a field where their work would succeed.

Missionary Destination

The author identifies Adoniram Judson as an American missionary in the Burmese Empire and places him among missionaries whose aptitude for languages and zeal for proclaiming the gospel suited them to work among people beyond their own country. He also names Ann Judson’s exceptional abilities as among the qualities he regards as providentially fitted to missionary labor in Burma. The location is therefore introduced chiefly through the people and work associated with the mission, rather than through a description of its geography or society.

Expulsion from India and Redirection

In 1812, Ann Judson recorded the East India Company’s strong opposition to missionaries and the narrow permission it had granted even to its own subjects to settle as preachers. The Judsons and their companions were not allowed to remain in India: after about ten days, they were summoned to Calcutta, ordered to return to America, and subjected to a peremptory order that they be sent aboard a Company vessel bound for England. A petty officer accompanied members of the party to their residence and asked them not to leave without permission. The account presents these restrictions as a striking hostility to evangelizing, exercised by a government the author describes as Christian.

A Providential Mission Field

The missionaries’ expulsion did not end their work. The author says they were sent to the Burmese Empire, where their mission succeeded and continued with marked prosperity. In his interpretation, the attempt to bar the gospel from India became the means of opening a different field: Burma’s significance in the book lies in this reversal, in which political restriction redirects missionary effort rather than extinguishing it.