The Black-Bearded Barbarian : The Life of George Leslie Mackay of Formosa
John Stuart Mill · en
It was only the next day that these newly-awakened people decided that
they must have a church building. And they went to work to get one in a
way that might have shamed a congregation of people in a Christian land.
This new wonderful hope that had been raised in their hearts by the
knowledge that God loved them set them to work with glad energy. Kai
Bok-su and his men still preached and prayed and sang and taught in the
crazy old wind-flapped tent by the seashore, and the people listened
eagerly, and then, when services were over, every one,--preacher,
assistants, and congregation,--set bravely to work to build a church.
Brave they certainly had to be, for at the very beginning they had to
risk their lives for their chapel. A party sailed down the coast and
entered savage territory for the poles to construct the building. They
were attacked and one or two were badly wounded, though they managed to
escape. But they were quite ready to go back and fight again had it been
necessary. Then they made the bricks for the walls. Rice chaff mixed
with clay were the materials, and the Kap-tsu-lan plain had an abundance
of both. The roof was made of grass, the floor of hard dried earth, and
a platform of the same at one end served as a pulpit.
When the little chapel was finished, every evening the big shell rang
out its summons through the village; and out from every house came the
people and swarmed into the chapel to hear Kai Bok-su explain more of
the wonders of God and his Son Jesus Christ.
Mackay's home during this period was a musty little room in a damp
mud-walled hut; and here every day he received donations of idols,
ancestral tablets, and all sorts of things belonging to idol-worship. He
was requested to burn them, and often in the mornings he dried his damp
clothes and moldy boots at a fire made from heathen idols.
For eight weeks the missionary party remained in this place, preaching,
teaching, and working among the people. It was a mystery to the students
how their teacher found time for the great amount of Bible study and
prayer which he managed to get. He surely worked as never man worked
before. Late at night, long after every one else was in bed, he would
be bending over his Bible, beside his peanut-oil lamp, and early in the
morning before the stars had disappeared he was up and at work again.
Four hours' sleep was all his restless, active mind could endure, and
with that he could do work that would have killed any ordinary man.