when shall the time come in which every man that feels the heat of the sun shall be freed from all other fetters but bonds of love to our Saviour!” So the young missionary wrote in his first letter from Africa; so he prayed and strove for thirty laborious and weary years; and so he prays still from his grave in the Abbey, and few will claim that that prayer has been vainly uttered in the ear of God and man. His unique influence over the natives of Africa is admitted. It may not be possible wholly to analyse his secret, for such words as “personality” and “magnetism” are easily written, and do not help us very much. Two things we may say on this subject, and leave it. Firstly, he believed in them; and secondly, he did not expect too much of them. This is no more than to say that he entered into his inheritance by means of the two ancient and Scriptural keys--faith and patience. He was abundantly rewarded for his faith. “Any one,” he said once, “who lives long among them (_i.e._, the natives) forgets that they are black and remembers only that they are fellow-men.” That was certainly all that he remembered. The stories of Sechele, Sebituane, Sekeletu, and others would have set the crown on his reputation were it not that that was reserved for the heroic band who attended him on the last of his journeys, and made themselves an everlasting name by their final and supreme act of devotion. But, if he saw their splendid possibilities underneath all their degradation, he never expected too much of them. His scientific mind appreciated all that they owed to centuries of savagery and superstition. He was infinitely patient with them. He forgave them until seventy times seven. He quietly and gently reasoned with them when any other white man would have lost his temper and resorted to force. He could hardly be persuaded even to punish the recreant with any severity. “I have faults myself,” he would say simply. The last word should concern his single-mindedness and disinterestedness. Neither as missionary nor as Government official is there any trail of commercialism over his life. When the bank in Bombay failed, with the money he had lodged in its keeping, it hardly cost him a pang. All his money was dedicated to the cause in which he gave his life, and his personal serenity was quite independent of possessions. He refused to bargain with the Government as to terms; and when Lord Palmerston sent a friend to ask what he could do for him, Livingstone’s whole ambitions were centred on an international arrangement that would sanction the creation of settlements which could stand between the natives and the slavers. At no single period in his life is there any tittle of evidence that he cared for money save as it might advance the cause that was dearer to him than life itself.