hope that it will still guide me to do good in my day and generation in Africa." In looking forward to the work to which Providence seemed to be calling him, a communication received at Quilimane disturbed him not a little. It was from the London Missionary Society. It informed him that the Directors were restricted in their power of aiding plans connected only remotely with the spread of the gospel, and that even though certain obstacles (from tsetse, etc.) should prove surmountable, "the financial circumstances of the Society are not such as to afford any ground of hope that it would be in a position within any definite period to undertake untried any remote and difficult fields of labor." Dr. Livingstone very naturally understood this as a declinature of his proposals. Writing on the subject to Rev. William Thompson, the Society's agent at Cape Town, he said: "I had imagined in my simplicity that both my preaching, conversation, and travel were as nearly connected with the spread of the gospel as the Boers would allow them to be. A plan of opening up a path from either the East or West Coast for the teeming population of the interior was submitted to the judgment of the Directors, and received their formal approbation. "I have been seven times in peril of my life from savage men while laboriously and without swerving pursuing that plan, and never doubting that I was in the path of duty. "Indeed, so clearly did I perceive that I was performing good service to the cause of Christy that I wrote to my brother that I would perish rather than fail in my enterprise. I shall not boast of what I have done, but the wonderful mercy I have received will constrain me to follow out the work in spite of the veto of the Board. "If it is according to the will of God, means will be provided from other quarters." A long letter to the Secretary gives a fuller statement of his views. It is so important as throwing light on his missionary consistency, that we give it in full in the Appendix[47]. [Footnote 47: Appendix No. III.] The Directors showed a much more sympathetic spirit when Livingstone came among them, but meanwhile, as he tells us in his book, his old feeling of independence had returned, and it did not seem probable that he would remain in the same relation to the Society.