St. David Livingstone

MUCH has appeared this spring in righteous appreciation of David Livingstone. Many of us have been renewing the days, and the reading, and the pictures of our youth when ‘ Livingstone — Stanley — Africa ’ were magic words. Did not every good American family have those volumes on How I Found Livingstone: books filled with pictures which terrified and fascinated us? But now as we read Livingstone we are most impressed with his ‘gracious words’ and ‘mighty deeds.’

It calls to my mind a famous story of Cardinal Manning. That belligerent ecclesiastic, dressed in a violet gown, and wearing around his neck a massive gold chain, used to say, with a melancholy smile, ‘No saints have walked in England since the Reformation.’

And while he was musing, the fire burned; while he was speaking, Livingstone was walking across a continent.

I don’t know how many miles a man must walk in order to be canonized, but 29,000 seem enough to silence any ‘advocatus diaboli.’ And could any candidate for the highest hagiology exhibit a nobler courage or a finer faith than Livingstone made manifest in that grim crisis on the Loangwa? And surely if ‘irresistible grace’ be the mark of the saint, how irresistible was that grace so visibly manifest in his life and so quietly in his words, which opened for him pathways in deserts and in forests, which won for him the hearts of black folks, which went out from him as virtue to Stanley at Ujiji, and which after his death led Susi, Chumah, and a nameless company of devoted men, to carry his body to the sea, and England. And what sacerdotalist of the strictest and straitest sect, if called upon to imagine a fitting departure for his saint, could ask for a translation so eloquent, so impressive, so glorious, as that of the silent man, kneeling in prayer, beside his bed, in a hut built by Africans in the heart of Africa? And could any pious monk, or golden legend, devise a more appropriate sepulchre than that which loyalty and love gave to David Livingstone? For his heart was buried in the heart of the continent to which he gave heart, and his bones in the great abbey of the land which gave him birth. And to complete the requirements of hagiology, what pious puns the gentle monks could have made on living stones, and what scriptures they could have found in Holy Writ for this modern David fighting his Goliath, the slave trade!

Have no saints walked in England since the Reformation? Are gentlemen in violet and gold of necessity so despondent ?