CHAPTER 1
FROM THE ISLAND OF ULVA; THE CHILD ON THE DOORSTEP
“Ulva dark, and Colonsay,
And all the group of islets gay
That guard famed Staffa round.”
“Learn how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong.”
“I leave this precept with you—Be honest.”
OUR David went to the works last week, father said Agnes Livingstone to her father, David Hunter. "He's but a little lad to begin the toil that always falls to the poor. It went to my heart like a knife; and yet I was as proud as a queen, when last Saturday night he brought me his first week's wages, a whole half-crown, and threw it into my lap. Not a penny did he take from it for himself: yes, he is loving and winsome, like his father.”
“A wife should always speak fair of her goodman, Agnes!" said her father, as he sat cross-legged upon his board. "Twere better than making complaint of what wives might mend by a little kindness, as many in Blantyre won't do. Yet Neil deserves you, though he won you from me.”
“Nay, father, I am all that I used to be; he only gave you a son as well as a daughter.”
“And seven little ones, too, to fill the old man's heart; God's blessing upon their curly head!" said the old man, removing his spectacles. "They come here and rummage my books over; and ‘let them,' say I. I'm so pleased when they do it; it's like getting new books to see them so pleased. And they are getting to understand them too. I'm glad that your husband himself reads, and sets them reading too.”
“Yes, he ever likes to know about what is going on in the world; and 'tis his stories of what has been or is happening in other lands that makes the little ones crave for knowledge.”
“You were a good daughter, Agnes; only fifteen years old when your mother died, but our minister said, when he saw your kindness to her that's gone, A blessing will follow the lassie.”
“And it has done so, for I count it no small blessing to be wed to a good man like my Neil. Marriage is a hard thing, when husband and wife are ill-mated; but when we are one in the Lord, it is as nigh heaven as may be here below. It's main hard I know to make the little bit o' money answer all our needs; but when he comes In from his rounds, however worried I am, I forget all about it and about his tea-selling; and his gentle, winning face looks like an angel's.”
“I mind when his father brought him to me to learn the tailoring, I saw he was no common man. Little Davie Livingstone must be more than ten years old now?”
“Yes, father, yet it seems but the other day since, when Neil shut the door at dusk thinking all the family were within doors, little Davie, who had been out rambling among the quarries, asking the men strange questions about the fishes and other odd fossils in the rocks, when he found the door closed took out his crust of bread and sat down upon the doorstep without a murmur. I looked from the window, and there he sat as contented as if he had been born there! If I hadn't missed him, he would never have complained.”
“But I wouldn't let him sit up too late at night reading, as Charles tells me he does; you must limit him or he will wear himself out.”
“He has taken his book with him to the works, and says when he's promoted from being a piecer to be a spinner, he will put his book upon the spinning jenny and so learn.”
“There is an evening school to be opened at John M’Nab's, let him go there. Buy him a Ruddiman's Rudiments of Latin,' and let him go.”
“I will; and he is so attentive at service, I am hopeful that a work of grace has begun with him.”
“I wish Neil had not left the Established church, though. I like it not that he should be a deacon of the Independent church at Hamilton. I love the Presbytery, and mind me when a boy of eighteen I stood to hear Secession Erskine preach. Snow was falling at the time, and it lay ankle deep before the sermon ended, but I felt no cold, and got no harm. Then the word of the Lord went to my heart like a fire, and I knew myself a lost, helpless sinner at the feet of Jesus. How I groaned to know my sins forgiven I How grievous sin appeared to me! But it was not for a long time, indeed, until I hearkened to Erskine again, when he preached upon the Balm of Gilead, that my deadly wound was healed. Blessed be God I He hath healed my soul through the blood of Jesus Christ, which cleanses from all sin.
“I'm not quite of your husband's mind, Agnes, about drink, nor for the matter of that do I quite agree with his Sunday School. I think a man ought to be able to exercise habits of control, and that the children ought to be taught at their own firesides. No teaching, I think, is like that of the parents. Solomon learned the way of the Lord from his mother, ye know.”
“Yes, father; but Neil has seen so much of the evil that drink has done, and he says no child of his shall say, My father took it; and none of the children have ever tasted it. I say now, that I would rather see him with us on the Sabbath; but so many parents neglect their duty of teaching their children Christian ways or do it so badly, that we should be sadly off without Sunday School teachers like my Neil. And as he goes about the country selling tea, he gives away tracts and encourages the reading of good books. When the day of the Lord comes, perhaps, my husband will be found to have done more work for God than many a man who had his reward In the praises of men or their gifts.”
“Ay truly, the world would have lost much had it not been for workers whose names are never known below. ‘Tis my faith, Agnes, that if we do our duty faithfully, it will bless not only the people in Blantyre, but may even have some influence upon the world at large.”
In the little village of Blantyre, on the beautiful banks of the Clyde, near Glasgow, DAVID LIVINGSTONE, the famous African missionary and traveler, was born on the 19th March, 1813. He was the second son of Neil Livingstone and Agnes Hunter.
Livingstone's grandfather had been a crofter in Ulva, a small island in the Western Hebrides, where his son Neil was born. Finding the croft insufficient to maintain his family, he removed to Blantyre about 1792, and found employment in the large cotton factory there, several of his sons also becoming connected with the same works.
When Neil Livingstone (who had formerly been a clerk in the factory) married, he began business on his own account as a traveling tea dealer; but the returns from the trade were so small that it was found necessary to send his children to work at a very early age. Although thus unable even to allow them the full advantage of the education provided by the parish school, both parents showed to them from infancy an example of constant piety that was of far greater value than mere book-learning.
When Neil's father died he called all his sons around him, and told them how his own father had died at Culloden fighting for the misguided Stuarts. The old man described six generations of Livingstones, and concluded with the following remarkable and earnest words: “I have searched into our past, but I cannot discover one dishonest man among all our ancestors. If, therefore, any of you, or any of your children, should take to dishonest ways, it will not be because it was in our blood; it does not belong to you. I leave this precept with you —BE HONEST.”
At the age of nineteen David Livingstone became a cotton spinner, and having by the instruction of Dick's "Philosophy of a Future State" been brought to a saving knowledge of Christ, in whom he now cherished a living faith, he began to prepare himself for missionary work in China, by studying at the Glasgow University. He toiled during the summer at the factory, and studied during the winter, his lodgings costing him 2s. 6d. per week while in Glasgow. He turned his attention to medicine, and having obtained his diploma, came to London in September, 1838, to see the Directors of the London Missionary Society, by whom he hoped to be sent to China.
As he bade farewell to his family, for what, at that time, was a very long journey, David Hogg, a patriarch of the village, shook hands with the young doctor, and said “Now lad! make religion the every-day business of your life; and not a thing of fits and starts; for, if you do not, temptation and other things will get the better of you.”
“I will," said David Livingston; and he kept his word.
The opium war, one of the most iniquitous wars ever waged by Britain, having closed China, by chance-as men say—Livingstone met Moffat, then visiting England for the first time, and decided upon Africa as the scene of his future work. So we are decided by trifles, as men call them; trifles that are the turntables or points, perhaps, by which a life is transferred to another line of rails, with consequences none can foresee!
After a severe illness, which compelled David to return to Scotland on the 17th November, 1839, Neil Livingstone stood upon the Broomielaw Bridge in Glasgow, looking for the last time upon the face of his son, going by the Liverpool steamer to England. On the 20th November David was ordained, and on the 8th December he started for Africa. During the three months' voyage, in the course of which they touched at Rio de Janeiro, Livingstone studied theology. Upon arriving at the Cape he proceeded at once to Algoa Bay, and thence went to the Kuruman, the little paradise created in the desert by the hard toil of Moffat and Hamilton.
As day after day no precise orders came from London, Livingstone began to contemplate the possibility of proceeding as a missionary into Abyssinia, saying to his friends, "Wherever my life may be spent, so as but to promote the glory of our gracious God, I feel anxious to do it. My life may be spent as profitably as a pioneer as in any other way.”
So now and then the spirit catches a glimpse of its future, which is indeed made ours by the desires and longings which are part of the work of God within us.