An example of one pioneer

After hearing Robert Moffatt, young Livingstone's mind was haunted by the vision of a distant trail, leading to Cape Town and on to Kuruman, South Africa, thence to the great plain on the north with its teeming villages without the saving Gospel. His favorite passage now spoke to him with new imperiousness. Two commands and a promise stood out in bold relief, as if Christ were speaking directly to him:

"Go! -- as a trail-blazer, a pathfinder, a pioneer! Evangelize! -- do the work of a missionary! And lo, I am with you! -- hence you will never be alone and you will have nothing to fear!" "That is a promise I can rely upon," said Livingstone, "for it is the word of a Gentleman of honor."

Shortly thereafter he received appointment under the London Missionary Society. He hurried home to Scotland for a one-day visit with his parents. He saw the cotton mill where, beginning at the age of ten, he worked from six in the morning till six at night, and remembered how, by, placing a book on a portion of the spinning jenny so he could catch a few sentences in passing, he managed to study Latin and to read a wide variety of books. He recalled a venerable neighbor, David Hogg, who on his death bed had said to him: "Now, lad, make religion the every-day business of your life, not a thing of fits and starts."

Thus accompanied and thus reassured, he continues his labors. "I am immortal," he declares, "till my work is accomplished. And though I see few results, future missionaries will see conversions follow every sermon. May they not forget the pioneers who worked in the thick gloom with few rays to cheer, except such as flow from faith in the precious promises of God's Word."