“King M’tesa of Uganda has been asking me about the white man’s God....  Oh that some practical missionary would come here.  M’tesa would give him anything that he desired—­houses, land, cattle, ivory.  It is the practical Christian who can ... cure their diseases, build dwellings, teach farming and turn his hand to anything like a sailor—­this is the man who is wanted.  Such a one, if he can be found, would become the saviour of Africa.”

Stanley called for “a practical man who could turn his hand to anything—­if he can be found.”

The words burned their way into Mackay’s very soul.

“If he can be found.”  Why here, here in this very room he sits—­the boy who has worked in the village at the carpenter’s bench and the saddler’s table, in the smithy and the mill, when his mother wished him to be at his books; the lad who has watched the ships building in the docks of Aberdeen, and has himself with hammer and file and lathe built and made machines in the engineering works—­he is here—­the “man who can turn his hand to anything.”  And he had, we remember, already written in his diary: 

    “Livingstone died—­a Scotsman and a Christian—­loving God and his
    neighbour, in the heart of Africa.  ‘Go thou and do likewise.’”

Mackay did not hesitate.  Then and there he took pen and ink and paper and wrote to London to the Church Missionary Society which was offering, in the daily paper that lay before him, to send men out to King M’tesa.  The words that Mackay wrote were these: 

“My heart burns for the deliverance of Africa, and if you can send me to any one of those regions which Livingstone and Stanley have found to be groaning under the curse of the slave-hunter I shall be very glad.”

Within four months Mackay, with some other young missionaries who had volunteered for the same great work, was standing on the deck of the S.S. Peshawur as she steamed out from Southampton for Zanzibar.

He was in the footsteps of Livingstone—­“a Scotsman and a Christian”—­making for the heart of Africa and “ready to turn his hand to anything” for the sake of Him who as

  “... the Carpenter of Nazareth
  Made common things for God.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 49:  “What is the minister gazing at, with his son Alec, in the dust of the road?”]

[Footnote 50:  See Chapter XV.]

[Footnote 51:  December 12, 1875.]

[Footnote 52:  May 1, 1873.]

CHAPTER XIX

THE ROADMAKER

Alexander Mackay

(Date, 1878)