Of that faith something ought to be said. In his earliest letters which have been preserved, we can see how strongly he was influenced by forms of theology that have long since ceased to be regarded as Scriptural. That the heathen who had never heard of Christ were perishing eternally was a doctrine that inspired much missionary devotion. These dogmas, it is clear, very gradually became impossible to him in view of the actual facts of the vast heathen world. But the supreme motive never changed. In a letter written just at the time of his ordination, he expresses his sense of the honour done to him in being accepted by Christ Jesus as one of His witnesses. The absolute surrender of his own will and mind to “his fair Captain Christ” was the fact most fundamental to Livingstone’s whole career. To the last, he never felt that he was really in the way of duty unless he was doing missionary work and bearing witness to the lordship of Christ. Stanley bore his testimony to the practical character of Livingstone’s religion. “In him religion exhibits its loveliest features; it governs his conduct not only towards his servants, but towards the natives, the bigoted Mohammedans, and all who come in contact with him.” In another striking phrase, he says: “Religion has tamed him and made him a Christian gentleman.” Until his physical powers utterly failed, he never omitted to gather his men around him for evening service, read and pray with them, and add some simple exhortation.
He was a man of deep convictions. Once thoroughly alive to some fact, he took a tenacious grip of it, and gave it a place in all his thinking. That was how it came to pass that neither the politicians nor the men of science could prevail upon him to leave the social sore of Africa to others and devote himself to exploration and discovery. Livingstone’s Puritan soul, that knew how to put first things in the first place, realised that the fact of most moment in Africa was not the sources of the Nile, but the sources of the slave trade. This great social problem had to be attacked if religious and spiritual work was not to be negatived. Much might be written about his courage in alienating those who sympathised with his work as an explorer and those who might have assisted him financially. He knew quite well that a price must be paid by any one who was really in earnest to destroy the slave trade. But nothing moved him. Henceforth it was a case of “this one thing I do.” Perhaps the most remarkable fact of all is, how early in his life he perceived that here lay the path he was to tread. There lies before me as I write an old brown and much torn letter which must have been the first he wrote from the Cape on his arrival there, and is dated March 10, 1841. Every inch of the large sheet is covered with writing, and among the last words is a reference to the resistance of certain of the Boers to the policy of emancipation. Then follows this sentence: “Oh! when shall the time come in which every man that feels the heat of the sun shall be freed from all other fetters but bonds of love to our Saviour!” So the young missionary wrote in his first letter from Africa; so he prayed and strove for thirty laborious and weary years; and so he prays still from his grave in the Abbey, and few will claim that that prayer has been vainly uttered in the ear of God and man.
His unique influence over the natives of Africa is admitted. It may not be possible wholly to analyse his secret, for such words as “personality” and “magnetism” are easily written, and do not help us very much. Two things we may say on this subject, and leave it. Firstly, he believed in them; and secondly, he did not expect too much of them. This is no more than to say that he entered into his inheritance by means of the two ancient and Scriptural keys—faith and patience. He was abundantly rewarded for his faith. “Any one,” he said once, “who lives long among them (i.e., the natives) forgets that they are black and remembers only that they are fellow-men.” That was certainly all that he remembered. The stories of Sechele, Sebituane, Sekeletu, and others would have set the crown on his reputation were it not that that was reserved for the heroic band who attended him on the last of his journeys, and made themselves an everlasting name by their final and supreme act of devotion. But, if he saw their splendid possibilities underneath all their degradation, he never expected too much of them. His scientific mind appreciated all that they owed to centuries of savagery and superstition. He was infinitely patient with them. He forgave them until seventy times seven. He quietly and gently reasoned with them when any other white man would have lost his temper and resorted to force. He could hardly be persuaded even to punish the recreant with any severity. “I have faults myself,” he would say simply.
The last word should concern his single-mindedness and disinterestedness. Neither as missionary nor as Government official is there any trail of commercialism over his life. When the bank in Bombay failed, with the money he had lodged in its keeping, it hardly cost him a pang. All his money was dedicated to the cause in which he gave his life, and his personal serenity was quite independent of possessions. He refused to bargain with the Government as to terms; and when Lord Palmerston sent a friend to ask what he could do for him, Livingstone’s whole ambitions were centred on an international arrangement that would sanction the creation of settlements which could stand between the natives and the slavers. At no single period in his life is there any tittle of evidence that he cared for money save as it might advance the cause that was dearer to him than life itself.
The world still argues and disputes as to what it is that constitutes the highest form of greatness. In the common acceptation of the term Livingstone was not a man of genius. He was not brilliant; he was not strikingly original. What he achieved was done by the genius, falsely so called, of taking pains. But this we may surely say: If human greatness consists not in any natural endowment alone, whether of the genius of those
“Who seem not to compete nor strive,
Yet with the foremost aye arrive”;
or the genius of industry in those who believe that “it is dogged as does it”; but rather in all the powers and faculties of a man’s nature brought into subjection to one supreme disinterested ambition for the glory of God and the good of man, then few greater men have ever walked this earth than David Livingstone.
Map of Livingstone’s Journeys
in
Africa