“If the reader remembers the way in which I was led, while teaching the Bakwains, to commence exploration, he will, I think, recognize the hand of Providence.  Anterior to that, when Mr. Moffat began to give the Bible—­the Magna Charta of all the rights and privileges of modern civilization—­to the Bechuanas, Sebituane went north, and spread the language into which he was translating the sacred oracles, in a new region larger than France.  Sebituane, at the same time, rooted out hordes of bloody savages, among whom no white man could have gone without leaving his skull to ornament some village.  He opened up the way for me—­let us hope also for the Bible.  Then, again, while I was laboring at Kolobeng, seeing only a small arc of the cycle of Providence, I could not understand it, and felt inclined to ascribe our successive and prolonged droughts to the wicked one.  But when forced by these, and the Boers, to become explorer, and open a new country in the north rather than set my face southward, where missionaries are not needed, the gracious Spirit of God influenced the minds of the heathen to regard me with favor, the Divine hand is again perceived.  Then I turned away westward, rather than in the opposite direction, chiefly from observing that some native Portuguese, though influenced by the hope of a reward from their Government to cross the continent, had been obliged to return from the east without accomplishing their object.  Had I gone at first in the eastern direction, which the course of the great Leeambye seemed to invite, I should have come among the belligerents near Tette when the war was raging at its height, instead of, as it happened, when all was over.  And again, when enabled to reach Loanda, the resolution to do my duty by going back to Linyanti probably saved me from the fate of my papers in the ‘Forerunner.’  And then, last of all, this new country is partially opened to the sympathies of Christendom, and I find that Sechele himself has, though unbidden by man, been teaching his own people.  In fact, he has been doing all that I was prevented from doing, and I have been employed in exploring—­a work I had no previous intention of performing.  I think that I see the operation of the Unseen Hand in all this, and I humbly hope that it will still guide me to do good in my day and generation in Africa.”

In looking forward to the work to which Providence seemed to be calling him, a communication received at Quilimane disturbed him not a little.  It was from the London Missionary Society.  It informed him that the Directors were restricted in their power of aiding plans connected only remotely with the spread of the gospel, and that even though certain obstacles (from tsetse, etc.) should prove surmountable, “the financial circumstances of the Society are not such as to afford any ground of hope that it would be in a position within any definite period to undertake untried any remote and difficult fields of labor.”  Dr. Livingstone very naturally understood this as a declinature of his proposals.  Writing on the subject to Rev. William Thompson, the Society’s agent at Cape Town, he said: