“I Never Made a Sacrifice”

“For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward.” — Romans 8:18 (ASV)

In December 1856 Livingstone landed in England after sixteen years away. His children hardly knew him. His father had died that February. And he was suddenly the most famous man in Britain. He met the Queen, received honours, and drew crowds everywhere, though he read his speeches badly and hated the attention. His book, Missionary Travels, sold some seventy thousand copies. For the first time in his life, he had money.

The missionary society was less thrilled. Their missionary had spent years exploring instead of preaching. Livingstone was offended; he believed everything he did opened a way for the gospel. When the government offered him a post as consul and the leadership of an expedition up the Zambezi, he resigned from the society. He insisted he was still a missionary. From now on, though, he was paid by the government.

On 4 December 1857 he spoke to a packed hall at Cambridge University. “People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa,” he said. “Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?” And: “It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege.” He finished that passage with the words that became famous: “I never made a sacrifice.”

He was echoing Paul: present suffering isn’t worth comparing with the glory to come. It’s true, and it was sincere. But hear it alongside the last four years. Livingstone hadn’t made a sacrifice, he said. Mary had, in her rented rooms. The children had. Sekwebu had. Much of the cost of his calling was paid by other people.

He ended with an appeal: “I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity.” Students from Cambridge and Oxford answered by founding a new mission to Central Africa. Later, his phrase was stretched into a slogan, “Christianity, commerce and civilisation,” and used by people who cared nothing for Christ to justify taking over Africa. He didn’t mean conquest. He believed Africans should keep their land and govern themselves, and he attacked the Boers and the Portuguese for seizing both. But he believed British trade was basically Christian and good, and he underestimated how fast trade turns into exploitation when one side has the guns and ships. Jesus said, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Livingstone thought he could harness money for God. It’s harder than it looks.

In 1858 the Zambezi Expedition set out. Mary came, but she was pregnant again and stayed at Kuruman, where their daughter Anna Mary was born. The expedition’s steamer was so feeble that canoes paddled past it.

Then came Kebrabasa. On his way down in 1856 Livingstone had walked round a stretch of the river where he had been told there were rapids, and assumed a steamer could get through. In November 1858 he went to look. The whole river forced its way through a narrow, rocky gorge in rapids and falls. No steamer could pass. His colleague John Kirk saw it at once. Livingstone wouldn’t accept it, and asked the government for a stronger boat. The great plan, the river highway, was blocked by something he hadn’t seen because he had walked round it.

He was a hard leader of Europeans. He took disagreement as disloyalty. He dismissed the young geologist Richard Thornton, and he sent home the artist Thomas Baines in disgrace after his brother Charles accused Baines of theft, without giving him a real hearing. Baines denied it all his life, and historians have generally believed him. Neither man ever got an apology.

The same stubbornness that carried him across Africa made it almost impossible for him to say “I was wrong.” Sometimes perseverance is faith. Sometimes it’s just pride.

One thing to do this week: think of one time recently you were wrong but didn’t admit it. Go to the person this week and say so, plainly, without excuses.