American Minute

November 10

"Doctor Livingstone, I presume," was the greeting NOVEMBER 10, 1871, by New York Herald newspaper reporter Henry Stanley as he met David Livingstone on the banks of Africa's Lake Tanganyika.

Livingstone, an internationally renowned missionary who had discovered the Zambezi River, Victoria Falls, and searched for the source of the Nile, had not been heard from in years and was rumored to have died.

Stanley, a skeptic, set out to find him and write a story.

He described Dr. Livingstone as:

"A man who is manifestly sustained as well as guided by influences from Heaven...

The...enthusiasm...of his life comes, beyond question, from Christ.

There must, therefore, be a Christ."

David Livingstone's letters, books, and journals had stirred up a public outcry for the abolition of slavery.

In his journals, David Livingstone recorded an incident:

"We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. Onlookers said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer."

In a letter to the editor of the New York Herald, David Livingstone wrote:

"And 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."

Livingstone was so loved by Africans that when he was found dead in 1873, kneeling beside his bed near Lake Bangweulu after suffering from malaria, his followers buried his heart in Africa before sending his body, packed in salt, back to England to be buried in Westminster Abbey.

In his journal, David Livingstone wrote:

"I place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of Christ. If anything will advance the interests of the kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving or keeping it I shall promote the glory of Him to whom I owe all my hopes in time and eternity."

In his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, 1857, Dr. David Livingstone reflected on his motivation:

"The perfect fullness with which the pardon of all our guilt is offered in God's Book, drew forth feelings of affectionate love to Him who bought us with His blood...

A sense of deep obligation to Him for His mercy has influenced...my conduct ever since."

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