THE KING’S BUSINESS Livingstone’s Life of Faith* A Study in Personality and Achievement By BASIL MATHEWS, M. A. Editorial Secretary of the London Missionary Society
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I F EVER any man-of the past century could have as the epitome of the whole of his personality and deeds the title, “The Life of Faith,” that man was David Livingstone. Every day of his life was a launching on the unknown in faith. From the hour when, as a young man, having read Gutzlaff’s Appeal, he resolved to go out in the footsteps of God’s Son as a medical missionary, Livingstone relied not primarily on organization or elaborate equipment, not on any knowledge of the way which he was to tread, but on the Divine guidance of his footsteps, on God’s illumination of his understanding. He explored Africa, but he did something greater still—he explored the infinite resources of God to protect His servants in peril, and to lead them to the great goal. The Livingstone centenary which is being celebrated on a world scale this week, brings us face to face with a personality whose daily adventure of his whole life and the promise, “Lo, I am with you,” is a challenge to our faith, and a touchstone of its adequacy. This week we shall follow the story of the Lanarkshire boy of ten working his fourteen-hour days in the cotton mill, mending broken threads and s p i n n i n g thought-threads that stretched out and out to the ends of the earth where he won “deathless renown.” We shall think of Livingstone, a student, facing the vision of unknown Africa, and in Moffat’s words, “The
great plain to the north where he had sometimes seen in the morning sun the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had ever been.” CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION There he went; saved the little slave girl at the opening of his first journey—a prophecy and parable of all his later life. With his own right hand he built three houses, dug watercourses for his African villages, healed their bodies and lifted their feet from the clay, was felled by the lion from whom he was delivering his friends, and went maimed all his days with a fractured -arm and eleven great lion tooth-marks in his shoulder. Over veldt and desert, through swamp and marsh, the hero-scout of Christ and Empire met his adventures among wild beasts and savage men, in perilous journeys in wagon and by canoe, on ox-back and on foot, along the rivers and through the tangled forests of Africa, where no white man had ever been before, with his motto, “I will go anywhere provided it be forward.” A. perfect geographer, Livingstone discovered unknown lakes, plains and river systems, and mapped his route with a scientific accuracy that is the admiration and despair today of men with far more perfect mechanical equipment. He revolutionized the world’s outlook on Africa, and in the steps first made by this pathfinder commerce and Empire have walked. As missionary and British Consul —:and who shall discover in Livingstone where one began and the other
♦ From th e Life of F aith .
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