METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW. JANUARY, 1876. ART. I.-AFRICA. Livingstone's Last Journals. Harpers, 1875. Schweinfurth's Heart of Africa. Harpers, 1874. IN reading Livingstone's last book and comparing it with his two former works, "Missionary Researches," and the "Expedition to the Zambezi," one is struck with the tone of sadness that pervades the later volume. Its spirit is autumnal. The great discoverer of Lake Ngami, the Victoria Falls, Lakes Nyassa, Moero, Bangweolo and Kamolondo treads bravely on to the last, despite sickness, poverty, and African ignorance and perversity, "The first," says Waller, "to set foot on the shores of vast inland seas, and with the simple appliances of his bodily stature for a sounding pole, and his stalwart stride for a measuring tape, to lay down new rivers by the hundred," yet the cheerful elasticity of earlier years is gone, expended in toil and destroyed by disease in part: ingraved, in part, no doubt, with the partner of his youth and earlier missionary labors on the banks of the Shupanga. All through these "Last Journals," the reader discerns the veteran traveler's dominant passion, "to work while the day lasts," feeling that the afternoon shadows are lengthening, and that coming night sends forward its monitory chills. His latest anniversary prayers grow earnest, and finally agonizing: Jan. 1, 1871. O, Father, help me to finish this work to thy honor! Jun. 1, 1872. May the Almighty help me to finish my work this year, for Christ's sake! FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXVIII.—1 March 19, 1872. Birthday-Grant, O gracious Father, that ere this year is gone I may finish my task. March 19, 1873. (Sixtieth and last birth-day.) Can I hope for ultimate success? So many obstacles have arisen! Let not Satan prevail over me, O my good Lord Jesus! * Belief in the divineness of his mission was an ever present stimulus to exertion, a living guarantee of ultimate success. Though, from the time when he became a geographical explorer, he ceased to draw pay from the funds of the Society, dropped direct missionary labor and immediate connection with the London Board, Livingstone never ceased to be a missionary. After nine years of peaceful and successful Christian labors among the Bakwains (1843 to 1852) a treaty between the English and the Dutch Boers, left the missionaries out in the cold and the station of Kolobeng was broken up, the mission premises plundered, and the natives driven to the mountains or carried into slavery. It was then that Livingstone uttered those plucky words that give the key to his future course. "The Boers," said he, "resolved to shut up the interior, and I determined to open the country, and we shall see who have been most successful in resolution, they or I."+ Which would beat, Dutch or Scotch? The next twenty years would show. He traversed Africa, from Linyanti to St. Paul de Loando on the Atlantic coast, (1853-4,) and then tramped down the Zambezi to Kilimane, (1855-6,) eleven thousand miles, discovered Victoria Falls, grander in some respects than Niagara, never before seen by European eyes, but "scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight; cut his initials on a tree, with the date, 1855, in the midst of their thunder and spray; the only instance in which he indulged in this piece of vanity. The expedition to the Zambezi, in 1858, was organized to explore its mouths and tributaries, with a view to their being used as highways for commerce and Christianity to pass into the vast interior of Africa. In 1866 the veteran traveler was at Zanzibar, setting out upon a tour of exploration from which he never returned. In these twenty years of geographical research he never laid aside his missionary character or remitted his missionary * "Livingstone's Last Journals," pp. 354, 405, 414, 497. "Travels and Researches," p. 45. labors. The Christian Sabbath was always duly observed, and, to the last, a portion of the day was set apart for public prayers, reading the Scriptures, and instructing the natives or his camp followers. Jan. 12, 1869, he writes: "Short of food; obliged to travel on Sunday. We had prayers before starting, but I always feel that I am not doing right-it lessens the sense of obligation in the minds of my companions; but I have no choice." 6 One of the last entries in Livingstone's diary, one of those of which autograph fac-similes are given in the "Last Journals," "20th April, 1873," has the so-often-recurring "S," on which his editor remarks (p. 182) in a note: "In his journal the doctor writes S,' and occasionally 'service,' whenever a Sunday occurs;" and, at all times, during his travels " uses the services of the Church of England," though, on page 94, we find this characteristic note, (Sept. 16, 1866:) "The Prayer-book does not give ignorant persons any idea of an unseen Being addressed; it looks more like reading or speaking to the book. Kneeling and praying with the eyes shut is better than our usual way of holding divine service." Stanley's record is: "Each Sunday morning he [Livingstone] gathers his little flock around him, and reads prayers, and a chapter from the Bible, in a natural, unaffected, and sincere tone, and afterward delivers a short address in the Kisawahili language about the subject read to them, which is listened to with evident interest and attention." It is this intense devotion to the moral and spiritual well being of the African, earnest belief in his susceptibility for instruction and elevation, and his ultimate conversion and regeneration, that weds Livingstone to the heart of the Christian world. Years ago he wrote: "I view the end of the geographical feat as the beginning of the missionary enterprise." He has opened the way, and his grateful countrymen, as one tribute to his memory, have raised fifty thousand pounds to found an industrial mission on Lake Nyassa, a region of which it is said in the "Zambezi," never before in Africa have we seen any thing like the dense population on the shores of Lake Nyassa. In the southern part there was "an almost unbroken chain of villages," "hundreds of men, women and children," "a wondering multitude," "a thicket of dark bodies." It is his life testimony against slavery, his labors for its suppression, his exposure of its horrors in its native home, that interest philanthropists more than his scientific discoveries. In his letter to James Gordon Bennett, Jun., November, 1871, he says: "If my disclosures regarding the terrible Ujijian slavery should lead to the suppression of the East Coast slave-trade, I shall regard that as a greater matter by far than the discovery of all the Nile sources together." Slavery, called by Wesley, in 1772, the "execrable sum of all villainies," was named by Livingstone, a hundred years later, the open sore of the world, a phrase so felicitous that his countrymen immortalized it by engraving it on his tomb-stone in Westminster Abbey. Old as the human race, and a vice peculiar to hot climates, barbarism, or low civilization, slavery received a new impetus at the discovery of America. The new continent had boundless land, but lacked laborers, and forthwith sprung up trade in muscles and sinews. Africans were deported to slaughter virgin forests, to test the capability of virgin soils, and to enrich both hemispheres with sugar, tobacco, cotton, and wines. It is due to the terrors of its harborless coast, the malaria of its mangrove swamps, its burning deserts, its dangerous beasts and reptiles, its impenetrable jungles, its wary tribes, prepared either for fight or flight, that Africa was not entirely depopulated to satisfy the greed of Christian nations for slaves during the last four centuries. For the last hundred years, since, by the burning words of Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Wesley, the Christian conscience of England was aroused on the subject, (England was last to engage in the nefarious traffic and first out of it,) the wants and woes of the oppressed sons of Ham have fixed the attention of philanthropists steadily on Africa. Outlawed in England, abolished in the British possessions, made piracy on the high seas, expelled from the American continent, slavery, after having made the tour of the world, has been driven back to its original birthplace, the starting-point of the human race, where the corners of the three Eastern continents touch each other, where the Japhetic, Semitic, and Cushite races meet and mingle, the present possession of Turk and Moslem; there, pursued by the hostile sentiment of Buddhist and Christian, |