r," he says, "that the very same text which
recurred to my mind at every turn of my course in life in
this country and even in England, should be the same as
Captain Maclure, the discoverer of the Northwest Passage,
mentions in a letter to his sister as familiar in his
experience: 'Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean
not to thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge
Him and He shall direct thy steps. Commit thy way unto thy
Lord; trust also in Him and He shall bring it to pass.' Many
more, I have no doubt, of our gallant seamen feel that it is
graceful to acknowledge the gracious Lord in whom we live and
move and have our being. It is an advance surely in humanity
from that devilry which gloried in fearing neither God, nor
man, nor Devil, and made our wooden walls floating hells."

His being enabled to reach the sanctuary of perfect peace in the
presence of his enemies was all the more striking if we consider--what
he felt keenly--that to live among the heathen is in itself very far
from favorable to the vigor or the prosperity of the spiritual life.
"Traveling from day to day among barbarians," he says in his Journal,
"exerts a most benumbing effect on the religious feelings of the soul."

Among the subjects that occupied a large share of his thoughts in these
long and laborious journeys, two appear to have been especially
prominent: first, the configuration of the country; and second, the best
way of conducting missions, and bringing the people of Africa to Christ.

The configuration of intertropical South Africa had long been with him a
subject of earnest study, and now he had come clearly to the conclusion
that the middle part was a table-land, depressed, however, in the
centre, and flanked by longitudinal ridges on the east and west; that
originally the depressed centre had contained a vast accumulation of
water, which had found ways of escape through fissures in the encircling
fringe of mountains, the result of volcanic action or of earthquakes.
The Victoria Falls presented the most remarkable of these fissures, and
thus served to verify and complete his theory. The great lakes in the
great heart of South Africa were the remains of the earlier accumulation
before the fissures were formed. Lake 'Ngami, large though it was, was
but a little fraction of the vast lake that had once spread itself over
the south. This view of the s