Personal life of David Livingstone, chiefly from his unpublished journals and correspondance in the possession of his family / by William Garden Blaikie.

  • William Garden Blaikie
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Personal life of David Livingstone, chiefly from his unpublished journals and correspondance in the possession of his family / by William Garden Blaikie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the glorious object of this journey: viz., while preaching the gospel beyond every other man’s line of things made ready to our hands, to dis- cover a healthy location for a mission, and I determined to improve the time by teaching to read. This produced profound deliberation and lengthened palavers, and at length the chief told me that he feared learning to read would change his heart and make him content with one wife like Sech^le. He has four. It was in vain I urged that the change contemplated made the affair as voluntary as if he would now change his mind from four to thirty, as his father had. He could not realise the change that would give relish to any other system than the present. He felt as the man who is mentioned by Serle as saying he would not like to go to heaven to be employed for ever singing and praising on a bare cloud without anything to eat or drink. . . . “ The conversion of a few, however valuable their souls may be, cannot be put into the scale against the knowledge of the truth spread over the whole country. In this I do and will exult. As in India, we are doomed to perpetual disappointment; but the knowledge of Christ spreads over the masses. We are like voices crying in the wilderness. We prepare the way for a glorious future in which mis- sionaries telling the same tale of love will convert by every sermon. I am trying now to establish the Lord’s kingdom in a region wider by far than Scotland. Fever seems to forbid ; but I shall work for the glory of Christ’s kingdom—fever or no fever. All the intelligent men who direct our society and understand the nature of my movements, support me warmly. A few, I understand, in Africa, in writing home, have styled my efforts as ‘ wanderings.’ The very word contains a lie coiled like a serjient in its bosom. It means travelling without an object, or uselessly. I am now performing the duty of writing you. If this were termed ‘ dawdling,’ it Avould be as true as the other. . . . I have actually seen letters to the Directors in which I am gravely charged with holding the views of the Plymouth Brethren. So very sure am I that I am in the path which God’s Providence has iDointed out, as that by which Christ’s kingdom is to be jn-omoted, that if the Society should object, I would consider it my duty to withdraw from it. . . . “ T.S.—My throat became well during the long silence of travelling across the desert. It plagues again now that I am preaching in a moist climate.” Dr. Livingstone now began bis preparations for tbe journey from Linyanti to Loanda. Sekeldtu was kind and generous. The road was impracticable for wagons, and the native trader, George Fleming, returned to Kiu’uman. The Kuruman guides had not done well, so that Living- stone resolved to send them back, and to get Makololo