Slow of Speech

“And Moses said unto Jehovah, Oh, Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant; for I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.”

— Exodus 4:10, ASV

Ongar

The London Missionary Society did not send its candidates straight to the field. In September 1838, Livingstone was sent with several other probationers to Chipping Ongar, a small town in Essex, to study under the Reverend Richard Cecil, a Congregational minister who prepared young men for the Society. They lived in lodgings in the town, studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew and theology with Cecil, and took turns preaching in the village chapels around about. Cecil reported on each of them to the Society’s secretary in London. Those letters survive, and they show that Livingstone came close to being sent home.

The problem was not his character, which Cecil admired, or his learning, which was adequate. It was his manner. Livingstone was awkward, shy in company, and hesitant in public prayer and speech. He spoke with a broad Lanarkshire accent and a thick, slow delivery that Londoners found hard to follow. Cecil wrote that he had sense and quiet vigour and that his temper was good, but that he was heavy in manner and his prayers were not what a minister’s should be. Early in 1839 he recommended that Livingstone’s probation should be extended before the Society made up its mind.

A Sermon Forgotten

A story told by his biographer Blaikie, from the memory of those who knew him at Ongar, shows why. Livingstone was sent one Sunday to preach in the chapel at a village near Ongar, in place of a minister who was ill. He had written out his sermon and learned it. He went into the pulpit, read out his text, and then found that his mind was completely empty. After a painful silence, by Blaikie’s account, he told the congregation that he had forgotten everything he had meant to say, and came down from the pulpit and left the chapel.

It is a story that later admirers liked to tell for its humility, and it is worth taking seriously for what it reveals. Livingstone was never a good preacher. He knew it, and so did everyone who heard him. In Africa he would preach in Setswana, a language he came to speak well, and some who heard him there found him plain and moving. But he never had the gifts that the Victorian church valued most in a minister, and he never pretended to. When he became famous and was asked to speak to great crowds in Britain, he did it badly, read his speeches, and hated it.

The verse at the head of this chapter is Moses’s protest at the burning bush. God has told him to go to Pharaoh, and Moses says that he cannot speak. God’s answer is not to make him eloquent. It is to remind him who made his mouth: “Who hath made man’s mouth? … is it not I, Jehovah? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth” (Exodus 4:11-12, ASV). Moses was given Aaron to speak for him, and he went. Livingstone was never made eloquent either. But God did not need him to be a great preacher. He needed him to walk, and to write, and to tell the world what he had seen, and he was given gifts for that.

A Night Walk

A fellow student at Ongar, Joseph Moore, later remembered another side of him. Moore told Blaikie that Livingstone once walked to London on an errand for his family, a journey of over twenty miles, and set out to walk back the same day. On the road home in the dark, he found a woman who had been thrown from a gig, and he stopped to help her, carrying her to a house nearby and making sure she was cared for before he went on. He lost his way, and reached Ongar at last in the early morning, utterly exhausted. Moore said he had never seen him look so done in. It is a small story, and we have it only at second hand, but it fits everything else we know of him: the endurance, the practical kindness, the refusal to pass by someone who was hurt. Livingstone could not preach a sermon about the Good Samaritan from memory. He could be one in the dark on a country road.

In the end the Society’s directors decided that his strengths outweighed his weaknesses. He was accepted in 1839, and sent to London to complete his medical training.

China Closed

He had offered himself for China, and while he was at Ongar the door closed. In 1839 the long dispute between Britain and China over the British opium trade turned into war. Britain was fighting to force the Chinese government to allow British merchants to sell opium, grown in British India, to Chinese people. It was one of the most shameful wars in British history, and it made missionary work in China impossible for the time being.

Livingstone could not wait. The Society suggested the West Indies, but he did not want to go where there was already an established church and a settled ministry. He wanted to go where the gospel was not known. It was in London, in the winter of 1839 to 1840, that he found his direction.

Robert Moffat

Robert Moffat was the most famous missionary in Britain. A Scottish gardener by training, he had gone to southern Africa for the London Missionary Society in 1816 and built a station at Kuruman, on the southern edge of the Kalahari, among the Batlhaping people. He had learned Setswana and was translating the Bible into it, and he was in Britain from 1839 to 1843 to raise support and see his New Testament through the press. His book Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa appeared in 1842 and was widely read.

Livingstone met him in London and was captivated. According to the account Moffat gave Blaikie many years later, Livingstone asked him whether he thought he would do for Africa. Moffat said that he would, if he would not go to an old station but would push on to the vast unoccupied country to the north, where, Moffat said, he had sometimes seen in the morning sun the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had ever been.

That phrase became part of the Livingstone legend, and later storytellers embroidered it. One popular version has a boy pumping the bellows of a church organ, hidden in the loft, who hears a visiting missionary describe the smoke of a thousand villages and resolves to go. There is no evidence for the organ loft. The phrase itself comes from Moffat’s later memory of a private conversation. It is the kind of thing Moffat might well have said, and it fits what Livingstone did next, but it should be held lightly.

What is certain is that Moffat pointed him north, beyond Kuruman, to the peoples of the interior who had never heard the gospel, and that Livingstone accepted the direction at once. The Society agreed to send him to southern Africa.

Doctor and Minister

He spent 1840 completing his medical studies in London, attending lectures and hospital practice, and in November he went back to Glasgow to take his medical qualification, as a Licentiate of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. He had very little time at home. Blaikie records the last night: father and son sat up talking about the prospects of missions, and the next morning the family rose at five. David read Psalm 121 and Psalm 135 at family worship, and prayed. Then his father walked with him to Glasgow, where he took the steamer for Liverpool. They never saw each other again.

Psalm 121 was a natural choice for a family saying goodbye to a son they did not expect to see for many years: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: From whence cometh my help? My help cometh from Jehovah, Who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1-2, ASV). It ends with a promise that the Livingstones took literally: “Jehovah will keep thy going out and thy coming in From this time forth and for evermore” (Psalm 121:8, ASV).

He was ordained as a missionary on 20 November 1840 at Albion Chapel in London, together with another candidate, and on 8 December he sailed from London on the George, bound for the Cape of Good Hope. He was twenty-seven.

Lunars on the George

The voyage took three months, and Livingstone used it as he used everything. The ship’s captain taught him to take lunar observations, measuring the angle between the moon and a star to work out longitude, a difficult skill that would become the foundation of his reputation as a geographer. He sat up at night with the captain on deck, learning to use the sextant. He also tried, with little success by his own account, to interest the crew in the gospel.

The George called at Rio de Janeiro on the way, and Livingstone went ashore to see the city, his first sight of the tropics. Then the ship sailed on, and in March 1841 it reached Simon’s Bay, near Cape Town.

The Mouth God Made

At the Cape he met John Philip, the Society’s superintendent in southern Africa, a controversial figure who had spent years campaigning for the rights of the Khoikhoi and other African peoples against the colonial government and the settlers. Livingstone took a dislike to the arrangements at the Cape, as he would to most church arrangements, and was glad to leave. He sailed round to Algoa Bay and went north by ox-wagon, a journey of several hundred miles at the slow pace of the oxen. On 31 July 1841 he arrived at Kuruman.

He was a doctor who had trained in a hurry, a minister who could not preach from memory, and a young man with no experience of any country but his own. What he had was a strong body, a stubborn will, a working knowledge of medicine, a sextant he had learned to use on the voyage, and a faith that the God who had made his mouth would be with it. Moses, too, began badly. “Oh, Lord, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send,” he said, which is to say, send someone else (Exodus 4:13, ASV). God sent him anyway. Livingstone never asked to be excused. He only asked to be sent further.