219
June, 1939
T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
What Held Him There? By W ILL IS R. HO T CH K IS S * Kericho, Kenya Colony, British East Africa
T HERE the message shone: “May you have strength to suffer and willing ness to serve." The words fairly leaped at me from the page of the faded letter I held in my hand. And well they might. It was an unforgettable moment in my life, the fragrance of which lingers with me after the lapse of a third of a century. I was a guest in the home of Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, an aged solicitor in the city of London. This man of God had been a personal friend and confidant of David Livingstone. And I, who had come into the world the same year that Livingstone had gone out of it to meet his Lord, was sitting there talking with Livingstone’s friend about the man and the land we both loved. Presently he reached in his desk and took out a packet of old letters. He handled them fondly, tenderly, and a far-away look was in his eyes, as if he were seeing again the gaunt, rugged figure which once claimed the fascinated attention of the world, and which ever since has been its ideal of the knight-errant of the cross. Carefully selecting a letter from the pack et in his hand, he passed it to me and with a rare smile said in his Quakerly fashion, "Willis Hotchkiss, would thee like to read this letter?" W e had been talking about Livingstone, and I suspected that the letter had some bearing on the conversation, but I could not guess how close it was. I took the letter in my hand, and as you would do under similar circumstances, I turned the page to look at the signature. You see it is the one who writes a letter that makes a world of difference as to our reaction to the reading of it. Some letters are tossed
gether, Stanley tried to persuade Living stone to return to England to receive the honors that awaited him for his vast geo graphic discoveries. But Livingstone was not thinking then of his own aggrandize ment. He was seeing burning villages and desolated landscapes, the horrid trail of the slave traffic; he was forever hearing the crack of slavers’ rifles and the lash of slav ers’ whips on naked black bodies. So he shook his head and went back again to his lonely quest. Then I thought I could see that last tragic journey of his when the fever-racked body no longer could stand the strain even of being carried, and the poor blistered feet no longer could bear his weight. His faith ful black servants set him down, and they built a grass shelter over him. There he lay until one night, sensing the fact that the end was near, he pulled himself painfully from his cot to his knees. And there they found him the next morning. But Living stone had gone, gone home to the house of many rooms—he who had known no home through the weary years, gone to receive the plaudits beside which all the plaudits of all earth’s empires would have been as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal in com parison, gone into the presence of the King of Kings to hear from His own lips the "Well done, good and faithful servant,. . . enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.” The Choice We Face Do you suppose there has ever been a shadow of regret over that decision, a de cision which lost him the applause of earth
would be engraved on my memory. But on the contrary, in spite of all my interest, I have forgotten everything the letter con tained except a part of one sentence. But that part of a sentence leaped from the page and gripped me, and I have never been able to get away from it. There it is at the be ginning of this message. “Strength to suffer—willingness to serve" —only six words, but those six words epito mize a whole life. They sum up in them selves all the splendid heroism, the undevi ating devotion, of the man who wrote them. They explain the unfaltering courage which kept him at his self-appointed—nay, rather, shall we not say his God-appointed task through the weary years of wandering in fever-stricken jungles and over blazing plains; persisting against heart-breaking dis appointments which would have broken a lesser spirit; heeding neither the praise of his friends nor the detraction of his critics; robbed and spoiled by African savages and Arab slavers; traduced by others envious of his fame, and deserted by his supporters in critical situations; yet with unconquerable resolution going on until the worn-out frame no longer could support the indomitable spirit of the man and he died, as he had lived, on his knees, in the little hut at Hala by Lake Tanganyika. In the light of those challenging words, I could visualize that memorable occasion when Stanley met Livingstone. For long years the missionary pioneer had been lost to the outside world. But that world was standing on tiptoe gazing toward thè Dark Continent, that continent so enshrouded in mystery, peopled with monstrous shapes
into the wastebas ket without further ado; some are read, noted, and then for gotten; others are read ag a in and again and then are preserved because a loved personality attaches to them.
but b rough t th'e glad a ccla im of heaven? Yet you and I are facing to day and every day that same choice. And a la s! how many there are who are choosing this as a g a in st that— the
“Strength to Suffer — and
Willingness to Serve” — David Livingstone.
and reeking with tragedy. Yes, the world was waiting anxiously for some word from a lone missionary who had taken upon himself at the call of God the Herculean task of blazing a trail through the trackless wilderness that the way of the Lord might be prepared. Stanley found Livingstone, but the hard- boiled reporter found something else, some thing that changed the whole current of his life and left him henceforth a humble fol lower of the Christ whom he saw in the weary man before him. And it was through Stanley that Uganda first heard about the Book which has made that great native kingdom the miracle field of modern mis sions. During those days that they spent to
I leave you to judge the thrill I experi enced when I saw there in his own hand writing the signature of the great missionary hero himself. It was indeed a letter from Livingstone to his son-in-law John Moffatt, a letter that so far as I know has never been published in any of the many lives of Liv ingstone. The Message of a Life Perhaps you can guess the eagerness with which I read that priceless letter. And doubtless you suppose that every sentence *Missionary in Kenya Colony, East Africa, for over forty years; author o f Then and Now in Kenya Colony ( Revell Co.; $1.50).
present passing enjoyment against the im perishable joy! The thing seen, though it be temporal, is chosen rather than the eternal thing because it is unseen. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” says your stupid worldly-wise man, and like the man in Bunyan’s immortal allegory he goes on grubbing amid the muck of things earthly and never senses the jewels, the diadems, the crowns that are just above his head. "And this is the fruit of it,” declares spy after spy who has gone into the promised land and has seen its exhaustless riches and tasted its enduring satisfactions. .Yet we mill around the edges and argue and end up by wandering in the wilderness of uncer tainty and confusion. True, there is no fighting in the wilderness—only marking
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