fragile and
chronically afflicted with shattering nervous disease. No one could
have gone through his labors or suffered the stoning, the scourgings
and other tortures he endured without having an exceptionally tough and
sound constitution. It is true that he was sometimes worn out with
illness and torn down with the acts of violence to which he was
exposed; but the rapidity of his recovery on such occasions proves what
a large fund of bodily force he had to draw upon. And who can doubt
that, when his face was melted with tender love in beseeching men to be
reconciled to God or lighted up with enthusiasm in the delivery of his
message, it must have possessed a noble beauty far above mere
regularity of feature?

123. Enterprise.--There was a good deal that was natural in another
element of his character on which much depended--his spirit of
enterprise. There are many men who like to grow where they are born;
to have to change into new circumstances and make acquaintance with new
people is intolerable to them. But there are others who have a kind of
vagabondism in the blood; they are the persons intended by nature for
emigrants and pioneers; and, if they take to the work of the ministry,
they make the best missionaries.

In modern times no missionary has had this consecrated spirit of
adventure in the same degree as that great Scotchman, David
Livingstone. When he first went to Africa, he found the missionaries
clustered in the south of the continent, just within the fringe of
heathenism; they had their houses and gardens, their families, their
small congregations of natives; and they were content. But he moved at
once away beyond the rest into the heart of heathenism, and dreams of
more distant regions never ceased to haunt him, till at length he began
his extraordinary tramps over thousands of miles where no missionary
had ever been before; and, when death overtook him, he was still
pressing forward.

Paul's was a nature of the same stamp, full of courage and adventure.
The unknown in the distance, instead of dismaying, drew him on. He
could not bear to build on other men's foundations, but was constantly
hastening to virgin soil, leaving churches behind for others to build
up. He believed that, if he lit the lamp of the gospel here and there
over vast areas, the light would spread in his absence by its own
virtue. He liked to count the leagues he had left behind him, but his
watchword was ever Forward