In due course the acceptance of his offer arrived, and in the early autumn of 1838 he travelled to London, where he was to appear before the Mission Board at 57 Aldersgate Street. One can imagine that, apart altogether from the momentous character of his visit, and the anxiety he must have felt as to his acceptance by the Directors, this first visit to London must have been a most impressive one to the young Scotsman. He heard many distinguished preachers, and visited the famous sites of London. Among other places, he went with a companion to Westminster Abbey. It is a thrilling thought, as Mr. Thomas Hughes reminds us, that he was never known to enter that Abbey again until his remains were borne thither amid the lamentations of the whole civilised world, and all the honours that the living can ever pay to the dead. The examination by the Directors was satisfactory; and according to the custom of the time Livingstone was committed for a short period of probation to the tutorship of the Rev. Richard Cecil, the minister of the little town of Chipping Ongar in Essex. There he was expected to give proof of his preaching ministry, with what result is generally known. He was sent one Sunday evening to preach in the village of Stanford Rivers, where the tradition of Livingstone’s first effort at preaching is still cherished. The raw, somewhat heavy-looking Scotch youth, to whom public speech was always a difficulty, gave out his text “very deliberately.” That was all the congregation got. The sermon composed on the text had fled, owing to the nervous embarrassment produced by a handful of people in a village chapel. “Friends,” said the youth, “I have forgotten all I had to say”--“and hurrying out of the pulpit he left the chapel.” I have no doubt that “hurrying” is the right word. Never was failure more absolute. It is hardly to be wondered at that the Rev. Richard Cecil reported to the Directors his fears that Livingstone had mistaken his vocation. It was a risk to send someone to preach to the heathen who might possibly forget what he had come to say when he arrived. Moreover, criticism was made of his extreme slowness and hesitancy in prayer. Yet the man who was nearly rejected by the Society on this account, died on his knees in the heart of Africa, while all the world was awed by the thought that David Livingstone passed away in the act of prayer. As it was his probation was extended, and at the end of another two months he was finally accepted, and went up to London to continue his medical studies in the London Hospitals. One of the most striking things ever written about him was by the celebrated Dr. Isaac Taylor, of Ongar. “Now after nearly forty years,” he writes, “I remember his step, the characteristic forward tread, firm, simple, resolute, neither fast nor slow, no hurry and no dawdle, but which evidently meant--getting there!” In November, 1840, he was able to return to Glasgow, and qualify as a Licentiate of the Faculty of