562 LIFE OF DA YID LIVINGSTONE, LL.R 



think that God mocks us. It is well that no room is given us to debate or to 

 hesitate. To all our doubts and difficulties, honest or pretended, there is the 

 one plain answer, ' Go thou and preach the gospel !' It seems a hopeless 

 task, you say, especially among the barbarous blacks of Western Africa. No 

 doubt it seems so, and that so much as to try the confidence of the most 

 hopeful. But, as a believer in God, and in the Bible as His word to His ser- 

 vants and their rule of duty, I have no choice but to go on in the seemingly 

 hopeless enterprise. But it is the very reverse of hopeless. Unless the Bible 

 is intended to mislead, to conceal God's thoughts instead of revealing them, 

 the enterprise that aims at the conversion of the world is the most hopeful 

 and the most certain of success of all enterprises to which we can put our 

 hands. The Ethiopian is included in the promise of blessings to our race 

 from the extension and universal establishment of the kingdom of God. And 

 past experience, while it shows that the task of evangelising Africans on their 

 own soil is most arduous, also assures us that there is nothing in them and 

 in their surroundings that will refuse to yield to the steady and persevering 

 zeal of Christians, and to that divine power that works by their agency." 



Perhaps there is not to be met with, in the annals of missionary enter- 

 prise, anything more romantic than that of a gentleman of high professional 

 standing and Christian worth, surrounded with all the comforts and luxuries 

 of a happy home, and in the enjoyment of the sympathy and society of a 

 wide circle of admiring friends — relinquishing them all, in order that he might 

 go forth into one of the most unhealthy and uninviting fields of mission- 

 ary labour, to make himself thoroughly acquainted with the difficulties and 

 dangers which beset the path of the Christian missionary in Africa, and to 

 consecrate his time, his talents, and his substance, to the amelioration of their 

 lot, and in making provision for those frequent visitations of sickness and 

 disease which have operated so fatally in the removal of many of our most 

 promising and distinguished Christian labourers in the African mission field. 

 Surely such an instance as the following is a sufficient answer to those who 

 would lay an embargo on the Christian Church from sending forth labourers 

 to the benighted children of Ham. Whatever may be the perils arising from 

 the unhealthiness of the African climate, or the barbarism of many of its most 

 degraded tribes, the Lord is able to devise adequate means, and to raise up 

 an efficient instrumentality for successfully carrying out his great purposes of 

 mercy to the inhabitants of the African continent. " Mr. John Thomson, for 

 many years an architect in Glasgow, and an elder in Gordon Street and St. 

 Vincent Street churches there, went out to Africa nearly four years ago to do 

 what good he could in connection with mission work. It was especially his 

 desire and purpose to erect on Cameroons Mountain, which rises to the height 

 of twelve thousand feet, a sanatarium or health-station, similar to those which 

 have been found so beneficial in India at Simla and on the Neilgherries, 



