Abstract
NOW, as in the year 1874, which followed his death, discussions are being carried on as to whether Livingstone was more a missionary of religion than a man of science or an enthusiastic and skilful geographer. Such contentions are a waste of argument. Livingstone ardently believed in the supreme value of Christian ethics and the power of undenominational, basic Christianity to raise the backward peoples to a happier condition of life; but to his broad mind—a mind fifty years in advance of most of its contemporaries—reason able religion and honest science were the same thing. Most of the dogmas of his day—for which people were still being persecuted—he tacitly ignored as being either unprovable or so little essential to “true religion and undefiled” as not to be worth discussion.
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JOHNSTON, H. Livingstone as a Man of Science . Nature 91, 89–90 (1913). https://doi.org/10.1038/091089a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/091089a0