ould consider an ample reward. "A delirious and fatuous
enterprise, a Quixotic scheme!" some will say. Not so; he builded better
than even he knew or dared hope, and posterity will reap the reward.

The missionary starting out must resolve to bear poverty, suffering,
hardship, and, if need be, to lose his life. The explorer must resolve
to be impervious to exquisite little tortures, to forget comforts, and
be a stranger to luxuries; to lose _his_ life, even, in order that the
world may add another line or dot to its maps. The explorer-missionary
must do all these things, and add to them the zeal for others that shall
illumine his labors, and make him at one with God. David Livingstone had
all these qualities, coupled with the sublime indifference of the truly
great to the mere side issues of life. You and I sit down to our
comfortable meals, sleep in our well-appointed beds, read our Bibles
with perfunctory boredom, and babble an occasional prayer for those who
endure hardships--when we are reminded from the pulpit to do so. When we
read of some awful calamity, such as has blazoned across the pages of
history within the past few weeks, we shudder that men should lay down
their lives in the barren wastes of ice. When we read of the thirty
years of steady suffering which Livingstone endured in the forests of
Africa, the littleness of our own lives comes home to us with awful
realization. You who fear to walk the streets with a coat of last
year's cut, listen to his half whimsical account of how he "came to the
Cape in 1852, with a black coat eleven years out of fashion, and Mrs.
Livingstone and the children half naked." You who shudder at the tale of
a starving child in the papers, and lamely wonder why the law allows
such things, read his recital of the sufferings of his wife and little
ones during the days without water under a tropic sun, and of the
splendid heroism of the mother who did not complain, and the father who
did not dare meet her eye, for fear of the unspoken reproach therein.

He was never in sufficient funds, and what little means he could gather
here and there were often stolen from him, or he found himself cheated
out of what few supplies he could get together to carry on his travels.
Months of delay occurred, and sometimes it seemed that all his labors
and struggles would end in futility; that the world would be little
better for his sufferings; yet that patient, Christian fortitude
sustained him with