It is interesting to find that even in his very young days he had a mind and will of his own, and that not even the love and respect he felt for his father could shake his own conviction of truth. The last time his father “applied the rod” was when David refused to read “Wilberforce’s Practical Christianity.” The boy thought the matter over in his canny Scotch way, and concluded that, on the whole, the rod was the less severe form of punishment. So he took the rod, and refused a religious book for which he had no use. Looking back upon his own religious development in after years, he used to confess that at this stage he was “colour-blind.” When he was led to see that God and Nature are “not at strife,” and that God does not say one thing to the theologian and its contrary to the scientist, he accepted in his own simple and sincere way the Christian Gospel, and drew from it the same splendid faith in the universality of the Kingdom of God that inspired the souls of the first apostles. To David Livingstone, to become a Christian was to become in spirit and desire a missionary. It is only necessary to add that the faith which he accepted with the full consent of heart and mind as a lad in Blantyre was the faith in which he died. The days of David Livingstone’s boyhood were great days for missions. The churches were everywhere awakening to their opportunity and responsibility. A new “Acts of the Apostles” was being written. Letters from remote parts of the world, where the ancient battle between Christ and heathenism was being fought out anew, were eagerly read and deeply pondered. The romance and heroism of the majestic campaign captured and kindled both young and old. The year of Livingstone’s birth was a year of singular triumph in the South Seas. It was the year when his great countryman Robert Morrison completed his translation of the New Testament into Chinese. When he was some six or seven years old, another famous Scotch missionary, Robert Moffat, was settling on the Kuruman; and Mrs. Moffat bore in her arms a baby girl destined to become David Livingstone’s wife. The life of Henry Martyn was a supreme call to consecration; while the story of the heroes and heroines of the Moravian missions was almost as familiar in that humble Scottish home as the history of the Apostle Paul. A specially powerful influence in moving Livingstone to his life-decision was the appeal of Charles Gutzlaff for medical missionaries for China.