r5o DAVID LIVINGSTONE. [chap. vii. 



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 Sechele. 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 serpent 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 would 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 pointed 

 out, as that by which Christ's kingdom is to be promoted, that if the 

 Society should object, I would consider it my duty to withdraw from 

 it. . . . 



" P.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 his preparations for the 

 journey from Linyanti to Loanda. Sekeletu was kind and 

 generous. The road was impracticable for wagons, and 

 the native trader, George Fleming, returned to Kuruman. 

 The Kuruman guides had not done well, so that Living- 

 stone resolved to send them back, and to get Makololo 



