I turn to that dark continent which has had more of human sorrow bound
up in its history than any place on earth. Forty years ago in a cottage
in the highlands of Scotland an aged man said to his son: "David, you
will have family prayer to-day, for when we part we shall never meet
again until we meet before the great white throne." David Livingstone
read the thirty-fourth Psalm, the key-note of that wonderful life, and
then poured out his heart to God in prayer, threw his arms around his
father's neck and kissed him; they parted never to meet again in this
world, and so he went to Africa. He did a wonderful work in the
Bechuana country. He was a carpenter, blacksmith, teacher, laborer,
physician and minister to these poor souls, but the man's heart was in
the interior of Africa. One day, with about as much preparation as I
take when I go to the north woods of Minnesota, he left for the interior
of Africa. His route was along the path of slave traders, and every few
days he came to some place where a poor woman had fainted in the
chain-gang and had been strapped to a tree with her babe at her breast
and left to be stung to death by insects. No wonder that he wrote in
his Journal, and blotted it with tears: "Oh, God, when will the great
sore of the world be healed?"
When you remember that the followers of the false prophet are the only
people engaged in this traffic in human flesh, and that to the poor
African it means slavery or death, you have the answer to the stories of
the progress of Mohammedanism in Africa.
I cannot tell the story of his life. One day he was found dead on his
knees in prayer in an African hut. That life had so impressed itself
upon the heathen folk that they did what will always be a marvel of
history. They wrapped the body in leaves. They covered it with pitch.
They carried it nine months on their shoulders. They fought hostile
tribes. They swam swollen rivers. They cut their way through
impenetrable thickets, and at last stood at the door of a mission house
in Zanzibar, and said, "We have brought the man of God to be buried with
his people." And so David Livingstone sleeps in Westminster Abbey.
Our Stanley took up Livingstone's work, and he laid Africa open to the
gaze of the world. He travelled nine hundred and ninety-nine days, and
the thousandth day reached the sea-coast. In all that journey he did
not meet a single, solitary soul who had heard that Jesus Christ had
come into the world. Stanley tells the reason why he went back to
Africa. He said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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