“For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office.  People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa.  Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?  Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter?  Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought!  It is emphatically no sacrifice.  Say rather it is a privilege.  Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment.  All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in and for us.  I never made a sacrifice.  Of this we ought not to talk when we remember the great sacrifice which He made who left his father’s throne on high to give himself for us; ’who being the brightness of that Father’s glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.’...

“I beg to direct your attention to Africa:  I know that in a few years I shall be cut off in that country, which is now open; do not let it be shut again!  I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity; do you carry out the work which I have begun, I LEAVE IT WITH YOU!”

In a prefatory letter prefixed to the volume entitled Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures, the late Professor Sedgwick remarked, in connection with this event, that in the course of a long academic life he had often been present in the senate-house on exciting occasions; in the days of Napoleon he had heard the greetings given to our great military heroes; he had been present at four installation services, the last of which was graced by the presence of the Queen, when her youthful husband was installed as Chancellor, amid the most fervent gratulations that subjects are permitted to exhibit in the presence of their Sovereign.  But on none of these occasions “were the gratulations of the University more honest and true-hearted than those which were offered to Dr. Livingstone.  He came among us without any long notes of preparation, without any pageant or eloquence to charm and captivate our senses.  He stood before us, a plain, single-minded man, somewhat attenuated by years of toil, and with a face tinged by the sun of Africa....  While we listened to the tale he had to tell, there arose in the hearts of all the listeners a fervent hope that the hand of God which had so long upheld him would uphold him still, and help him to carry out the great work of Christian love that was still before him.”