h the people.
Then a fever struck him. He lay lingering for some days. Then he
died--aged only forty-one.

If Mackay, instead of becoming a missionary, had entered the
engineering profession he might have become a great engineer. When he
was a missionary in Africa, the British East Africa Company offered
him a good position. He refused it. General Gordon offered him a high
position in his army in Egypt. He refused it.

He held on when his friends and the Church Missionary Society called
him home. This is what he said to them, "What is this you write--'Come
home'? Surely now, in our terrible dearth of workers, it is not the
time for anyone to desert his post. Send us only our first twenty men,
and I may be tempted to come to help you to find the second twenty."

He died when quite young; homeless, after a life in constant danger
from fever and from a half-mad tyrant king--his Christian disciples
having been burned.

Was it worth while?

To-day the Prime Minister of Uganda is Apolo Kagwa, who as a boy
was kicked and beaten and stamped upon by King M'wanga for being
a Christian; and the King of Uganda, Daudi, M'wanga's son, is a
Christian. At the capital there stands a fine cathedral in which brown
Baganda clergy lead the prayers of the Christian people. On the place
where the boys were burned to death there stands a Cross, put there by
70,000 Baganda Christians in memory of the young martyrs.

Was their martyrdom worth while?

To-day all the slave raiding has ceased for ever; innocent people are
not slaughtered to appease the gods; the burning of boys alive has
ceased.

Mackay began the work. He made the first rough road and as he made it
he wrote: "This will certainly yet be a highway for the King Himself;
and all that pass this way will come to know His name."

"And a highway shall be there and a way; and it shall be a way of
holiness."

But the Way is not finished. And the last words that Mackay wrote
were: "Here is a sphere for your energies. Bring with you your highest
education and your greatest talents, and you will find scope for the
exercise of them all."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 55: There is no record of the precise words, but Mackay
gives the argument in a letter home.]

CHAPTER XXI

THE BLACK APOSTLE OF THE LONELY LAKE

_Shomolekae_

In the garden in Africa where, you remember, David Livingstone
plighted troth with Mary Moffat, as they stood under an almond tree,
there lived years