[Illustration: David Livingstone.]
[Illustration: Sir John Franklin.]
Exploration--Arctic, African, Oriental and Occidental--has had its
heroic devotees, sometimes its martyrs. Witness Franklin, Burke and
Wills, and Livingstone. The long uncertainty overhanging the fate of
the gallant Franklin, after he and the expedition he commanded had
vanished into the darkness of Arctic winter in 1845, and the
unfaltering faithfulness with which his widow clung to the search for
her lost husband, form one of the most pathetic chapters of English
story. The veil was lifted at last and the secret of the North-West
Passage, to which so many lives had been sacrificed, was brought to
light in the course of the many efforts made to find the dead
discoverer. As Franklin had disappeared in the North, so Livingstone
was long lost to sight in the wilds of Africa, and hardly less
feverish interest centred round the point, so long disputed, of his
being in life or in death--interest freshly awakened when the remains
of the heroic explorer, who had been found only to be lost again,
were brought home to be laid among the mighty dead of England. The
fervent Christian philanthropy of Livingstone endeared him yet more
to the national heart; and we may here note that very often, as in
his case, the missionary has served not only Christianity, as was his
first and last aim, but also geographical and ethnological science
and colonial and commercial development. We have briefly referred
already to some of the struggles, the sufferings, and the triumphs of
missionary enterprise in our day: to chronicle all its effort and
achievement would be difficult, for these have been world-wide, and
often wonderfully successful. Nor has much less success crowned other
agencies for meeting the ever-increasing need for religious
knowledge, which multiply and grow in number and in power. Witness,
among many that might be named, the continuous development of the
Sunday School system and the immensely extended operations of the
unsectarian Bible Society.
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