Mackay and the students sang and the people listened eagerly. The Pe-po-hoan by nature were more musical than the Chinese, and the singing delighted them. Then the missionary arose and addressed them. He told clearly and simply why he had come and preached to them of the true God. Afterward the congregation was allowed to ask questions, and they learned much of this God and of his love in his Son Jesus Christ.
The wonder of the great news shone in the eyes upturned to the preacher. In the gloom of the half-lighted tent their dark faces took on a new expression of half-wondering hope. Could it be possible that this was true? Their poor, benighted minds had always been held in terror of their gods and of the evil spirits that forever haunted their footsteps. Could it be possible that God was a great Father who loved his children? They asked so many eager questions, and the story of Jesus Christ had to be told over and over so many times, that before this first church service ended a gray gleam of dawn was spreading out over the Pacific.
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.
One evening some new faces looked up at him from his congregation in the little brick church. When the last hymn was sung the missionary stepped down from his pulpit and spoke to the strangers. They explained that they were from the next village. They had heard rumors of this new doctrine, and had been sent to find out more about it. They had been charmed with the singing, for that evening over two hundred voices had joined in a ringing praise to the new Jehovah-God. They wanted to hear more, they said, and they wanted to know what it was all about. Would Kai Bok-su and his students deign to visit their village too?
Would he? Why that was just what he was longing to do. He had been driven out of that village by dogs only a few weeks before, but a little thing like that did not matter to a man like Mackay. This village lay but a short distance away, being connected with their own by a path winding here and there between the rice-fields. Early the next evening Mackay formed a procession. He placed himself at its head, with A Hoa at his side. The students came next, and then the converts in a double row. And thus they marched slowly along the pathway singing as they went. It was a stirring sight. On either side the waving fields of rice, behind them the gleam of the blue ocean, before them the great towering mountains clothed in green. Above them shone the clear dazzling sky of a tropical evening. And on wound the long procession of Christians in a heathen land, and from them arose the glorious words:
O thou, my soul, bless God the Lord, And all that in me is Be stirred up his holy name To magnify and bless.
And the heathen in the rice-fields stopped to gaze at the strange sight, and the mountains gave back the echo of that Name which is above every name.