“I have talked with you; your presence is almost palpable, though you are absent....
“It seems as if I had left a community of friends and relations. The utter loneliness of myself, the void that has been created, the pang at parting, the bleak aspect of the future, is the same as I have felt before, when parting from dear friends.
“Why should people be subjected to these partings, with the several sorrows and pangs that surely follow them?—It is a consolation, however, after tearing myself away, that I am about to do you a service, for then I have not quite parted from you; you and I are not quite separate. Though I am not present to you bodily, you must think of me daily until your caravan arrives. Though you are not before me visibly, I shall think of you constantly, until your least wish has been attended to. In this way the chain of remembrance will not be severed.
“‘Not yet,’ I say to myself, ‘are we apart,’ and this to me, dear Doctor, is consoling, believe me. Had I a series of services to perform for you, why then! we should never have to part.
“Do not fear then, I beg, to ask, nay, to command, whatever lies in my power. And do not, I beg of you, attribute these professions to interested motives, but accept them, or believe them, in the spirit in which they are made, in that true David Livingstone spirit I have happily become acquainted with.”
And out from that lonely spot in eastern Africa, the younger man came to begin a new career; all the old aimlessness and shiftlessness and drifting gone forever from his life, to pass on now to lift up the mission which, beneath the dripping eaves of the hut in which he died, David Livingstone laid down. The tide of a new life and a new service was in him. “I came that ye may have life, and that ye may have it abundantly.” He had seen Christ and felt the contagion of the life of Christ in Livingstone, and Christ’s word, articulate or inarticulate, had come to live in him. And that life is life in the power and desire to serve.
This life that Christ came to give is the only real and satisfying life, because it alone endures. We gather at Northfield each summer and always go up to read afresh the brief inscription on Mr. Moody’s grave on Round Top, “The world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” We sing the same great truth constantly in George Matheson’s hymn:
“I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.”