Colour Blindness Cured

“The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament showeth his handiwork.”

— Psalm 19:1, ASV

Doctrine Without Life

David Livingstone grew up knowing the gospel. His parents taught it to him, he heard it every Sunday, and he could have explained the doctrines of the Scottish catechism as well as any boy in Blantyre. But in his teens he found that knowing the doctrine was not the same as possessing what it described. His account of what happened next, written twenty years later in the opening pages of Missionary Travels, is brief and careful, and it is the only account of his conversion that he ever published.

His parents, he wrote, had taken great pains to teach him the doctrines of Christianity, and he had no difficulty understanding the theory of free salvation through the atonement of Christ. But it was only at about this time, in his late teens, that he really began to feel his own need of that atonement, and the value of applying it personally to his own case.

It is the language of a nineteenth-century Scottish Protestant, and it is worth reading slowly. Livingstone does not say that he discovered a new doctrine. He says that a doctrine he already believed became his own. The atonement of Christ, which had been a theory, became something he needed and received personally. The story has none of the drama of a sudden conversion. There is no single night, no sermon, no named preacher. There is a young man who knew the truth and came, over a period of months or years, to rest his own life on it.

The Trouble With Science

What had held him back, he later suggested, was the apparent conflict between his faith and his love of the natural world. His father’s religion was suspicious of science, and some of the preachers he heard seemed to set Christianity against the study of geology and astronomy. A boy who wanted to know how shells got into limestone could easily conclude that he had to choose between his Bible and his rocks. For a time, Livingstone seems to have felt that he could not be a real Christian without giving up the questions he loved, and that he was not willing to give them up.

The book that helped him was Thomas Dick’s The Philosophy of a Future State. Dick was a Scottish minister, schoolteacher and amateur astronomer who wrote popular books arguing that science and Christianity were allies, not enemies. The universe, he taught, was God’s handiwork, and the study of it was a form of worship. The more we learn about the creation, the more we see of the wisdom and goodness of the Creator. Livingstone read Dick and found that the wall he had imagined between faith and science was not there. He could love both, because they had the same author.

He later visited Dick at his home near Dundee, and he never lost the outlook he learned from him. For the rest of his life, Livingstone saw no contradiction between his work as a missionary and his work as a naturalist and geographer. He collected plants, measured rainfall, studied the habits of animals, took astronomical observations to fix his position, and wrote about African geology and disease, and he regarded all of it as part of the same calling. The psalm at the head of this chapter would have been one of his favourites: “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament showeth his handiwork.” When he lay on his back in the African night, with a sextant in his hand, working out his latitude from the stars, he was, as he understood it, reading God’s other book.

This conviction is one of the most attractive things about him, and also one of the sources of his later difficulties. Because he saw exploration and science as part of his missionary calling, he could pursue them with a clear conscience long after his supporters began to think he had stopped being a missionary at all. He was never able to see what they were complaining about.

Like Colour Blindness

He described the change that came over him with an image from medicine. It was like what might happen, he wrote, if it were possible to cure a case of colour blindness. A colour-blind person sees everything that others see, but not as they see it. Shapes and objects are all there, but something essential is missing. Then, if such a thing were possible, the colours come. Nothing new appears in the world, but the whole world looks different.

That is a striking way for a scientifically minded young man to describe conversion, and it is accurate to the experience of many believers. Livingstone did not say that he saw new things. He said that he saw the same things truly. The doctrines he had learned as a child now had colour. The created world he loved now had colour. And so, he went on to say, did the needs of other people.

The Alleviation of Human Misery

In the glow of love that Christianity inspires, he wrote, he soon resolved to devote his life to the relief of human misery.

The sentence moves directly from conversion to service. Livingstone does not describe a period of private devotion first, or a slow growth in holiness. He describes a heart warmed by love, and a resolution to spend that love on others. It is a very practical Christianity, and a very Scottish one. Love, for him, was something you did.

The question was where to do it. The answer came from China. Around 1834, an appeal was circulated in Britain by Karl Gützlaff, a German missionary in China, for medical missionaries to go to that country. Gützlaff argued that doctors could gain an entrance for the gospel where preachers could not, by healing the sick and so winning the trust of the people. The appeal reached the Livingstone household. Neil Livingstone was enthusiastic. His son, who had been thinking of a life of service but had no clear direction, now had one. He would become a doctor and go to China.

Turning the idea over, he wrote, he came to feel that to be a pioneer of Christianity in China might bring material benefit to parts of that immense empire, and so he set himself to gain a medical education to qualify for the work. The word pioneer is already there. Livingstone never wanted to go where others had been. From the beginning he wanted to be first.

Glasgow

In the winter of 1836, at the age of twenty-three, he went to Glasgow to study. He enrolled at the Andersonian University, a college founded to bring science and medicine to people who could not afford the ancient universities, and attended classes in medicine and chemistry. He also took Greek at the University of Glasgow, and theology under Ralph Wardlaw, a leading Congregational minister. He lived in a cheap rented room and walked the eight miles home to Blantyre at weekends. In the summer he went back to the mill to earn the money for the next winter’s fees.

At the Andersonian he made a lifelong friend. James Young was the assistant to the professor of chemistry, Thomas Graham, and he and Livingstone became close. Young would later make a fortune from the refining of paraffin oil, and he became one of Livingstone’s most generous supporters, paying for much of his last expedition. In the laboratory the two young men worked side by side, and Livingstone learned, among other things, to make and mend scientific instruments. It was the kind of practical skill he valued above all, and it served him in Africa, where there was no one to mend anything if he could not.

He was a serious, quiet student, more interested in learning than in making friends, and he left little mark on the college except in the memory of a few classmates. He was not brilliant. He was tenacious. He passed his examinations by the same method he had used in the mill: he simply went on working after everyone else had stopped.

The Society

By 1837 he had come to see that he could not pay for a full medical training by himself, and friends urged him to apply to a missionary society. He chose the London Missionary Society, partly because of its link with his father’s Independent church, and partly because of its principles. He approved of the Society’s own description of itself: that it sent to the heathen neither episcopacy, nor presbyterianism, nor independency, but the gospel of Christ. That, he said, agreed exactly with his idea of what a missionary society ought to do. He did not want to export a Scottish denomination. He wanted to preach Christ.

The word heathen in that description was the ordinary word of his time for people who were not Christians, Jews or Muslims, and it carried a sense of moral and cultural inferiority that most readers today would reject. Livingstone used it all his life, as almost all his contemporaries did. It is used here because it was his. It is worth noticing that his concern, even in this early statement, was that the gospel should not arrive dressed in the clothes of a particular European church. That concern did not always survive his later enthusiasm for British influence, but it was there from the beginning.

He filled in the Society’s application papers early in 1838. One of them asked about his religious experience and his motives. He answered with the same plain seriousness he would show all his life, describing his wish to make known the gospel by teaching and example, and his hope to combine it with medicine. The directors liked what they read. In the summer of 1838 he was summoned to London for interview, and accepted on probation.

The Glory of God in His Works

Psalm 19 has two halves. The first praises God for the heavens and the sun, which speak without words to every nation. The second praises God for his law: “The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul” (Psalm 19:7, ASV). The psalmist does not set the two halves against each other. The God who made the sun also gave the law, and both reveal him.

Livingstone came to faith when he saw that this was true. He did not have to choose between the God of his father’s Bible and the God of the rocks and stars. They were the same God, and he could serve him with his whole mind. That conviction made him a missionary who never stopped being a scientist, and a scientist who never stopped praying. It also gave him a confidence that God’s purposes and his own curiosity would usually point in the same direction. Sometimes they did. In the years ahead, there would be times when it was very hard to tell the difference.