The mother of David Livingstone was a woman of great charm and force of character—“a delicate little woman, with a wonderful flow of good spirits.” In her, rare devoutness and sterling common sense were combined. She was the careful and thrifty housewife, who had to make every sixpence go as far as possible; but she was remembered for her unfailing cheerfulness and serenity, and there was always something to be saved out of the meagre income when the work of the Church of Christ needed extra support. She came of Covenanting stock, and her father, David Hunter, the tailor, received his first religious impressions at an open-air service, held while the snow was falling fast, and used to tell that so absorbed was he in the realisation of the truth of the Gospel, that, though before the end of the sermon the snow was ankle-deep, he had no sensation of cold. He lived to be eighty-seven, was a close and prolific reader, bore severe reverses of fortune with unflinching courage, and earned the high respect of the countryside.
It is impossible to exaggerate what David Livingstone owed to the stock from which he sprang and the bracing influences of his early environment. There were two drawbacks to his home education. It seems that the Deacon had put two classes of book on his private index expurgatorius, as being dangerous—novels, and books of science. So far as novels are concerned the harm done was probably slight; for no one is well-read in the Bible and the Pilgrim’s Progress without receiving a liberal education, and the cultivation of the imagination; while history, biography, books of travel, and missionary records amply served the same purpose. But the proscription of books of science was an evidence of the old evil creed that there is essential antagonism between science and religion. This assumption came near to doing David permanent injury. His religious difficulties did not disappear until in his own words “having lighted on those admirable works of Dr. Thomas Dick, ‘The Philosophy of Religion,’ and ‘The Philosophy of a Future State’ it was gratifying to find that he had enforced my own conviction that religion and science were friendly to one another.” Few people in the nineteenth century were destined to do more towards the practical reconciliation of science and religion than David Livingstone.
It is interesting to find that even in his very young days he had a mind and will of his own, and that not even the love and respect he felt for his father could shake his own conviction of truth. The last time his father “applied the rod” was when David refused to read “Wilberforce’s Practical Christianity.” The boy thought the matter over in his canny Scotch way, and concluded that, on the whole, the rod was the less severe form of punishment. So he took the rod, and refused a religious book for which he had no use. Looking back upon his own religious development in after years, he used to confess that at this stage he was “colour-blind.” When he was led to see that God and Nature are “not at strife,” and that God does not say one thing to the theologian and its contrary to the scientist, he accepted in his own simple and sincere way the Christian Gospel, and drew from it the same splendid faith in the universality of the Kingdom of God that inspired the souls of the first apostles. To David Livingstone, to become a Christian was to become in spirit and desire a missionary. It is only necessary to add that the faith which he accepted with the full consent of heart and mind as a lad in Blantyre was the faith in which he died.
The days of David Livingstone’s boyhood were great days for missions. The churches were everywhere awakening to their opportunity and responsibility. A new “Acts of the Apostles” was being written. Letters from remote parts of the world, where the ancient battle between Christ and heathenism was being fought out anew, were eagerly read and deeply pondered. The romance and heroism of the majestic campaign captured and kindled both young and old. The year of Livingstone’s birth was a year of singular triumph in the South Seas. It was the year when his great countryman Robert Morrison completed his translation of the New Testament into Chinese. When he was some six or seven years old, another famous Scotch missionary, Robert Moffat, was settling on the Kuruman; and Mrs. Moffat bore in her arms a baby girl destined to become David Livingstone’s wife. The life of Henry Martyn was a supreme call to consecration; while the story of the heroes and heroines of the Moravian missions was almost as familiar in that humble Scottish home as the history of the Apostle Paul.
A specially powerful influence in moving Livingstone to his life-decision was the appeal of Charles Gutzlaff for medical missionaries for China.
Livingstone was a born naturalist; and despite his father’s old-fashioned prejudices, he made himself a scientist at a very early age, searching old quarries for the shells in the carboniferous limestone, “scouring Clyde-side for simples,” and arranging the flora of the district in botanical order. These expeditions were often very prolonged, and involved the endurance of fatigue and hunger; but the lad could not be discouraged. Unconsciously he was bracing himself physically for the toils and tasks of after years. There is a fine story about the revenge he took upon his native African escort, on one occasion, who had been misguided enough to talk disrespectfully about his slim figure and shortness of stature. Thereupon, Livingstone took them along for two or three days at the top of their speed till they cried out for mercy! He had not scoured Clyde-side for simples for nothing. His fearlessness is well illustrated in his daring and reckless exploit of climbing the ruins of Bothwell Castle, so that he might carve his name higher than any other boy had carved his. There, too, was the childlike ambition, which remained with him to the end, to do something which nobody else could surpass. “No one,” he wrote at the very end of his life, on his last expedition, “will cut me out after this exploration is accomplished.” Then he adds finely, “and may the good Lord of all help me to show myself one of his stout-hearted servants, an honour to my children, and perhaps to my country and race.” The story of Livingstone is told there: it is the story of one of the good Lord’s stout-hearted servants.
All the drudgery and hardship of his lot went to make him the man he was. The days of his boyhood were “the good old days”—the days when children of ten years old were sent to work in the factories; and David went with the rest. No eight hours’ day his! No humane legislature thought it wise and well to forbid or curtail child labour. From six o’clock in the morning till eight o’clock at night he worked as a piecer; and all the world knows how he used to place the book he was studying on a portion of the spinning-jenny, and snatch a sentence or two as he passed at his work. He tells us he thus kept “a pretty constant study, undisturbed by the roar of machinery,” and that this habit
THE CLYDE AND RUINS OF THE OLD MILL AT BLANTYRE.
WHERE LIVINGSTONE LIVED AT ONGAR.
of concentration stood him in good stead in after years when he wanted to read and write even “amidst the dancing and song of savages.” As if this were not enough, after a fourteen hours’ day in the factory he would go off to a night-school provided by the employers; and then home to work at his Latin till “mother put out the candle.” It is well for ten-year-old humanity when it has a mother to put out the candle, or Mother Nature might have put out another candle, and where would Africa have been then? Nine years of such severe and determined work as this brought him to University age; and as Glasgow University was hard by, and as he was promoted to be a spinner by this time and able to earn enough in the summer to keep him during the other six months, he entered as a student for Greek and medicine,