This I Said, Though While Waiting At Kilimane
A Letter Came From The Directors Of The London Missionary Society
Stating
That "they were restricted in their power of aiding plans
connected only remotely with the spread of the Gospel,
and
That the financial circumstances of the society were not such as to afford
any ground of hope that it would be in a position, within any definite period,
to enter upon untried, remote, and difficult fields of labor."
This has been explained since as an effusion caused by temporary
financial depression; but, feeling perfect confidence in my Makololo friends,
I was determined to return and trust to their generosity.
The old love of independence, which I had so strongly
before joining the society, again returned. It was roused
by a mistaken view of what this letter meant; for the directors,
immediately on my reaching home, saw the great importance of the opening,
and entered with enlightened zeal on the work of sending the Gospel
into the new field. It is to be hoped that their constituents
will not only enable them to begin, but to carry out their plans,
and that no material depression will ever again be permitted,
nor appearance of spasmodic benevolence recur. While I hope
to continue the same cordial co-operation and friendship
which have always characterized our intercourse, various reasons induce me
to withdraw from pecuniary dependence on any society. I have done something
for the heathen, but for an aged mother, who has still more sacred claims
than they, I have been able to do nothing, and a continuance of the connection
would be a perpetuation of my inability to make any provision
for her declining years. In addition to "clergyman's sore throat",
which partially disabled me from the work, my father's death
imposed new obligations; and a fresh source of income having been opened to me
without my asking, I had no hesitation in accepting what would enable me
to fulfill my duty to my aged parent as well as to the heathen.
If the reader remembers the way in which I was led, while teaching
the Bakwains, to commence exploration, he will, I think,
recognize the hand of Providence. Anterior to that, when Mr. Moffat
began to give the Bible - the Magna Charta of all the rights and privileges
of modern civilization - to the Bechuanas, Sebituane went north,
and spread the language into which he was translating the sacred oracles
in a new region larger than France. Sebituane, at the same time,
rooted out hordes of bloody savages, among whom no white man
could have gone without leaving his skull to ornament some village.
He opened up the way for me - let us hope also for the Bible.
Then, again, while I was laboring at Kolobeng, seeing only
a small arc of the cycle of Providence, I could not understand it,
and felt inclined to ascribe our successive and prolonged droughts
to the wicked one. But when forced by these and the Boers to become explorer,
and open a new country in the north rather than set my face southward,
where missionaries are not needed, the gracious Spirit of God
influenced the minds of the heathen to regard me with favor;
the Divine hand is again perceived. Then I turned away westward
rather than in the opposite direction, chiefly from observing
that some native Portuguese, though influenced by the hope of a reward
from their government to cross the continent, had been obliged
to return from the east without accomplishing their object. Had I gone
at first in the eastern direction, which the course of the great Leeambye
seemed to invite, I should have come among the belligerents near Tete
when the war was raging at its height, instead of, as it happened,
when all was over. And again, when enabled to reach Loanda,
the resolution to do my duty by going back to Linyanti probably saved me
from the fate of my papers in the "Forerunner". And then, last of all,
this new country is partially opened to the sympathies of Christendom,
and I find that Sechele himself has, though unbidden by man,
been teaching his own people. In fact, he has been doing
all that I was prevented from doing, and I have been employed in exploring -
a work I had no previous intention of performing. I think that I see
the operation of the unseen hand in all this, and I humbly hope
that it will still guide me to do good in my day and generation in Africa.
Viewing the success awarded to opening up the new country
as a development of Divine Providence in relation to the African family,
the mind naturally turns to the probable influence it may have
on negro slavery, and more especially on the practice of it
by a large portion of our own race. We now demand increased supplies
of cotton and sugar, and then reprobate the means our American brethren adopt
to supply our wants. We claim a right to speak about this evil,
and also to act in reference to its removal, the more especially
because we are of one blood. It is on the Anglo-American race
that the hopes of the world for liberty and progress rest.
Now it is very grievous to find one portion of this race
practicing the gigantic evil, and the other aiding, by increased demands
for the produce of slave labor, in perpetuating the enormous wrong.
The Mauritius, a mere speck on the ocean, yields sugar,
by means of guano, improved machinery, and free labor,
equal in amount to one fourth part of the entire consumption of Great Britain.
On that island land is excessively dear and far from rich:
no crop can be raised except by means of guano, and labor has to be brought
all the way from India. But in Africa the land is cheap, the soil good,
and free labor is to be found on the spot. Our chief hopes rest
with the natives themselves; and if the point to which
I have given prominence, of healthy inland commercial stations, be realized,
where all the produce raised may be collected, there is little doubt
but that slavery among our kinsmen across the Atlantic will,
in the course of some years, cease to assume the form of a necessity
to even the slaveholders themselves.
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