The Man of Macedonia

“And a vision appeared unto Paul in the night. There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying: Come over into Macedonia and help us.” — ACTS xvi. 9.

IT was the moment when a new work was opening before the great apostle; nothing less than the carrying of the gospel into Europe. He had passed through Asia and was sleeping at Troas, with the Mediterranean waters sounding in his ears; and, visible across them, the islands which were the broken fringes of another continent. We cannot think that this was the first time that it had come into Paul’s mind to think of christianizing Europe. We can well believe that on the past day he had stood and looked westward, and thought of the souls of men as hardly any man since him has known how to think of them, and longed to win for his Master the unknown world that lay beyond the waters. But now, in his sleep, a vision comes, and that completes whatever preparation may have been begun before, and in the morning he is ready to start.

And so it is that before every well-done work the vision comes. We dream before we accomplish. We start with the glorified image of what we are to do shining before our eyes, and it is its splendor that encourages and entices us through all the drudgery of the labor that we meet. The captain dreams out his battle sleeping in his tent. The quick and subtle-brained inventor has visions of his new wonder of machinery before the first toothed wheel is fitted to its place. You merchants see the great enterprise that is to make your fortune break out of vacancy and develop all its richness to you, as if it were a very inspiration from above. Nay, what is all our boyhood, that comes before our life, and thinks and pictures to itself what life shall be, that fancies and resolves and is impatient, — what is it but just the vision before the work, the dream of Europe coming to many a young life, as it sleeps at Troas, on the margin of the sea? The visions before the work; it is their strength which conquers the difficulties, and lifts men up out of the failures, and redeems the tawdriness or squalidness of the labor that succeeds.

And such preparatory visions, the best of them, take the form and tone of importunate demands. The man hears the world crying out for just this thing which he is going to start to do to-morrow morning. This battle is to save the cause. This new invention is to turn the tide of wealth. This mighty bargain is to make trade another thing. The world must have it. And the long vision of boyhood is in the same strain too. There is something in him, this new boy says, which other men have never had. His new life has its own distinctive difference. He will fill some little unfilled necessary place. He will touch some little untouched spring. The world needs him. It may prove afterwards that the vision was not wholly true. It may seem as if, after all, only another duplicate life was added to a million others, which the world might very well have done without; but still the power of the vision is not soon exhausted, the mortifying confession is not made at once, and before it wholly fades away the vision gives a power and momentum to the life which the life never wholly loses.

And indeed we well may doubt whether the vision was a false one, even when the man himself, in his colder and less hopeful years, comes to think and say that it was. We well may doubt whether, with the in finite difference of personal life and character which God sends into the world, every true and earnest man has not some work that he alone can do, some place that he alone can fill; whether there is not somewhere a demand that he alone can satisfy; whether the world does not need him, is not calling to him, “Come and help us,” as he used to hear it in the vision that was shown to him upon the sea-shore.

So much we say of preparatory visions in general. I want to look with you at this vision of Paul’s, and see how far we can understand its meaning, and how much we can learn from it. A Macedonian comes before the apostle of Christ, and asks him for the gospel. The messenger is the representative, not of Macedonia only, but of all Europe. Macedonia is only the nearest coun try into which the traveller from Asia must cross first. There he stands in his strange dress, with his strange western look, with his strange gestures, before the waking or the sleeping Paul, begging in a strange language, which only the pentecostal power of spiritual appreciative sympathy can understand, — “Come over and help us.” But what was this Macedonia and this Europe which he represented? Did it want the gospel? Had it sent him out because it was restless and craving and uneasy, and could not be satisfied until it heard the truth about Jesus Christ, which Paul of Tarsus had to tell? Nothing of that kind whatsoever. Europe was going on perfectly contented in its heathenism. Its millions knew of nothing that was wanting to their happiness. They were full of their business and their pleasures, scheming for little self-advancements, taking care of their families, living in their tastes or their passions; a few questioning with themselves deep problems of perplexed philosophy, a few hanging votive wreaths on the cold altars of marble gods and goddesses, some looking upward and some downward and some inward for their life; but none looking eastward to where the apostle was sleeping, or, farther east, beyond him, to where the new sun of the new religion was making the dark sky bright with promise on that silent night. So far as we can know there was not one man in Macedonia who wanted Paul. When he went over there the next day, he found what? — a few bigoted Jews, some crazy soothsayers and witches, multitudes of indifferent heathen, a few open-hearted men and women who heard and believed what he had to tell them, but not one who had believed before, or wanted to believe, — not one who met him at the ship and said, “Come, we have waited for you; we sent for you; we want your help.” But what then means the man from Macedonia? If he was not the messenger of the Macedonians, who was he? Who sent him? Ah! there is just the key to it. God sent him. Not the Macedonians themselves. They did not want the gospel. God sent him, because He saw that they needed the gospel. The mysterious man was an utterance not of the conscious want but of the unconscious need of those poor people. A heart and being of them, deeper and more essential than they knew themselves, took shape in some strange method by the power of God, and came and stood before the sleepingminister and said, “Come over and help us.” The “man of Macedonia” was the very heart and essence of Macedonia, the prof oundest- capacities of truth and goodness and faith and salvation which Macedonia itself knew nothing of, but which were its real self. These were what took form and pleaded for satisfaction. It is not easy to state it; but look at Europe as it has been since, see the new life which has come forth, the profound spirituality, the earnest faith, the thoughtful devotion, the active unselfishness which has been the Europe of succeeding days; and then we may say that this, and more than this, all that is yet to come, was what God saw lying hidden and hampered, and set free to go and beg for help and release, from the disciple who held the key which has unlocked the fetters.

And is not this a very noble and a very true idea? It is the unsatisfied soul, the deep need, all the more needy because the outside life, perfectly satisfied with itself, does not know that it is needy all the time, — it is this that God hears pleading. This soul is the true Macedonia. And so this, as the representative Macedonian, the man of Macedonia, brings the appeal. How noble and touching is the picture which this gives us of God. The unconscious needs of the world are all appeals and cries to Him. He does not wait to hear the voice of conscious want. The mere vacancy is a begging after fulness; the mere poverty is a supplication for wealth; the mere darkness cries for light. Think then a moment of God’s infinite view of the capacities of His universe, and consider what a great cry must be forever going up into His ears to which His soul longs and endeavors to respond. Wherever any man is capable of being better or wiser or purer than he is, God hears the soul of that man crying out after the purity and wisdom and goodness which is its right, and of which it is being defrauded by the angry passions or the stubborn will When you shut out any light or truth from your inner self, by the shutters of avarice or indolence which your outer, superficial, worldly self so easily slips up, — that inner self, robbed, starved, darkened, not conscious of its want, hidden away there under the hard surface of your worldliness, has yet a voice which God can hear, accusing before Him your own cruelty to yourself. What a strong piteous wail of dissatisfaction must He hear from this world which seems so satisfied with itself. Wherever a nation is sunk in slavery or barbarism it cannot be so perfectly contented with its chains but that He hears the soul of it crying out after liberty and civilization. Wherever a man or a body of men is given to bigotry and prejudice, the love of darkness cannot be so complete but that He hears the human heart begging for the light that it was made for. Wherever lust is ruling, He hears the appeal of a hidden, outraged purity somewhere under the foul outside, and sends to it His help. Alas for us if God helped us only when we knew we needed Him and went to Him with full self-conscious wants! Alas for us if every need which we know not, had not a voice for Him and did not call Him to us! Did the world want the Savior? Was it not into a blindness so dark that it did not know that it was blind, into a wickedness so wicked that it was not looking for a Savior, that the Savior came? And when we look back can we say that we wanted the Lord who has taken us into His service and made us His children? Tell me, 0 Christian, was it a conscious want, — was it not the cry of a silent need, that brought the Master to your side at first and so drew you to His? “He first loved us!” Our hope is in the ear which God has for simple need; so that mere emptiness cries out to Him for filling, mere poverty for wealth.

I cannot help turning aside a moment here just to bid you think what the world would be if men were like God in this respect. Suppose that we, all of us, heard every kind of need crying to us with an appeal which we could not resist. Out of every suffering and constraint and wrong, suppose there came to us, as out of Macedonia there came to Paul, a ghost, a vision, presenting at once to us the fact of need and the possibility of what the needy man might be if the need were satisfied and the chain broken. Suppose such visions came and stood around us crying out “Help us.” You go through some wretched street and not a beggar touches your robe or looks up in your face, but the bare, dreadful presence of poverty cries out of every tumbling shanty and every ragged pretence of dress. You go among the ignorant, and out from under their contented ignorance their hidden power of knowledge utters itself and says “0 teach us.” It is not enough for you that the oppressed are satisfied with their oppression. That only makes you the more eager to feed into consciousness and strength that hunger after liberty which they

•7 are too degraded to feel. You see a sick man contented with dogged acquiescence and submission, and you want to show him the possibility and to lead him to the realization, of a resignation and delight in suffering which he never dreams of now. Mere pain is itself a cry for sympathy; mere darkness an appeal for light.

“Ah,” do you say, “that must be a most uncomfortable way of living. The world forever clamoring for help! Those things are not my mission, not my work. If the world does not know its needs I will not tell it. Let it rest content. That is best for it”? But there have been, and, thank God, there are, men of a better stuff than you; men who cannot know of a need in all the world, from the need of a child fallen in the street, whose tears are to be wiped away, to the need of a nation lying in sin, whose wickedness must be rebuked to its face at the cost of the rebuker’s life; there are men who cannot know of a need in all the world without its taking the shape of a personal appeal to them. They must go and do this thing. There are such men who seem to have a sort of magnetic attraction for all wrongs and pains. All grievances and woes fly to them to be righted and consoled. They attract need. They who cannot sleep at Troas but the soul of Macedonia finds them out and comes across and begs them “Come and help us.” We all must be thankful to know that there are such men among us, however little we may feel that we are such men our selves; nay, however little we may want to be such men.

But let us come a little nearer to the truth that we are studying. It seems to me that all which we have said about the man of Macedonia includes the real state of the case with reference to the essential need of the human soul for the Gospel. We often hear of the great cry of human nature for the truth of Christ, man craving the Savior. What does it mean? The world moves on and every face looks satisfied. Eating and drinking and working and studying, loving and hating, struggling and enjoying, — those things seem to be sufficient for men’s wants. There is no discontent that men will tell you of. They are not conscious of a need. I stop you, the most careless hearer in the church to-night, as you go out, and say “Are you satisfied? “and honestly you answer” Yes! My business and my family, they are enough for me “;” Do you feel any need of Christ? “and honestly you answer” No! Some times I fear that it will go ill with me by and by, if I do not seek Him, but at present I do not want Him; I do not see how I should be happier if I had Him here.” That is about the honest answer which your heart would make. But what then? Just as below the actual Macedonia which did not care for Paul nor want him, there was another possible, ideal Macedonia which God saw and called forth and sent in a visionary form to beg the help it could not do without, so to that civil flippant answerer of my question at the church door I could say:” Below this outer self of yours which is satisfied with family and business, there is another self which you know nothing of but which God sees, which He values as your truest and deepest self, which to His sight is a real person pleading so piteously for help that

He has not been able to resist its pleading, but has sent His ministers, has sent His Bible, — nay, has come Him self to satisfy it with that spiritual aid it cannot do without.” I can imagine a look of perplexity and wonder, a turning back, an inward search for this inner self, a strange, bewildered doubt whether it exists at all.

And yet, this coming forth of inner selves with their demands, is it not the one method of all progress? What does it mean when a slave, long satisfied with being fed and housed and clothed, some day comes to the knowledge that he was meant to be free, and can rest satisfied as a slave no longer? What is it when the savage’s inner nature is touched by the ambition of knowledge, and he cannot rest until he grows to be a scholar? What is it when a hard, selfish man’s crust is broken, and a sensitive, tender soul uncovered, which makes life a wretched thing to him from that moment, unless he has somebody besides himself to love and help and cherish? These men would not believe an hour before that such appetites and faculties were in them; but God knew them, and heard them all the time; and long before the men dreamed of it themselves, the slave was crying out to Him for freedom, and the savage for culture, and the tyrant for love. Now is it strange that, also unknown to you, there should be other appetites and faculties in you which need a satisfaction? The Bible says there are. Experience says there are. Let us see if we can find some of them.

1. The first need is a God to love and worship. Any body who looks wisely back into history sees, T think, regarding man’s need of a God to love and worship, just what I have stated to be true. Not that man was always seeking God, or always miserable, when he did not find Him. One sees multitudes of men, and some times whole periods, or whole countries, that seem to have no sense of want whatever, to have settled down into the purest materialism and the most utter self-content. But he sees also indications everywhere that the need was present, even where the want was not felt. He sees the idea of God keeping a sort of persistent foothold in the human heart, which proves to him that it belongs there; that, whether the heart wants it or not, it and the heart are mates, made for one another, and so tending towards each other by a certain essential gravitation, whatever accidental causes may have tried to produce an estrangement between them. Take one such indication only, a very striking one, I think. There is in man a certain power of veneration, of awe, of adoration. This has always showed itself. In all sorts of men, in all sorts of places, it has broken out; and men have tried to adapt it to all sorts of objects, to satisfy it with all sorts of food. The idolater has offered to his faculty of reverence his wooden idol, and said “There, worship that;” the philosopher has offered it his abstract truth, and said “Venerate that;” the philanthropist has offered it his ideal humanity, and said “Worship that;” and one result has always followed. Everywhere where nothing higher than the idol, the theory, or the humanity was offered for the reverence to fasten on, everywhere where it was offered no one supreme causal God, not merely the object of reverence has ceased to be reverenced, but the very power of reverence itself has been dissipated and lost; and idolatry, philosophy, philanthropy alike have grown irreverent, and man has lost and often come to despise that faculty of venerating and submissive awe, the awe of love, for which he found no use. If this be true, that there is a faculty in man which dies out on any other food, and thrives only on the personal Deity, then have we not exactly what I tried to describe, a need of which one may be utterly unconscious, and yet which is no less a need, crying, though the man does not hear it, for supply?

This is precisely the ground which I would take with any thoughtful man who told me seriously and without flippancy that he felt no want of God, that he felt no lack in the absence of relations between his life and that of a supreme infinite Father. “Yes,” I would say,” but there is in you a power of loving awe which needs infinite perfection and mercy to call it out and satisfy it. There is an affection which you cannot exercise towards any imperfect being. It is that mixture of admiration and reverence and fear and love, which we call worship. Now ask yourself, Are you not losing the power of worship? Is it not dying for want of an object? Are you not conscious that a power of the soul, which other men use, which you used once perhaps, is going from you? Are you not substituting critical, carefully limited, philosophical, partial approbations of imperfect men and things, for that absolute, unhindered, whole-souled outpouring of worship which nothing but the perfect can demand or justify? If this power is not utterly to die within you, do you not need God? If you are not to lose that highest reach of love and fear where, uniting, they make worship, must you not have God? Lo! before this expiring faculty the personal

God comes and stands, and it lifts up its dying hands to reach after Him; it opens its dying eyes to look upon Him; as when a man is perishing of starvation, the sight of bread summons him back to life. He need not die, but live, for here is his own life-food come to him.”

Woe to the man who loses the faculty of worship, the faculty of honoring and loving and fearing not merely something better than himself, but something which is the absolute best, the perfect good, — his God! The life is gone out of his life when this is gone. There is a cloud upon his thought, a palsy on his action, a chill upon his love. Because you must worship, therefore you must have God.

2. But more than this. Every man needs not merely a God to worship, but also, taking the fact which meets us everywhere of an estrangement by sin between mankind and God, every man needs some power to turn him and bring him back; some reconciliation, some Reconciler, some Savior for his soul. Again I say he may not know his need, but none the less the need is there. But, if a man has reached the first want and really is desiring God, then I think he generally does know, or in some vague way suspect, this second want, and does desire reconciliation. It is so natural! Two of you, who have been friends, have quarrelled. Your very quarrel, it may be, has brought out to each of you how much you need each other. You never knew your friend was so necessary to your comfort and your happiness. You cannot do without him. Then at once, “How shall I get to him?” becomes your question. 0 the awkwardness and difficulty, the stumbling and shuffling and blundering of such efforts at return. Men are afraid and ashamed to try. They do not know how they will be received. They cannot give up their old pride. Rebellious tempers and bad habits block the way. I doubt not, so frequent are they, that there are people here to-night who are stumbling about in some such bog of unsettled quarrel, longing to get back to some friend whom they value more in their disagreement than even in the old days of unbroken peace. Their whole soul is hungering for reconciliation. The misery of their separation is that each at heart desires what neither has the frankness and the courage to attain.

Now under all outward rebellion and wickedness, there is in every man who ought to be a friend of God, and that means every man whom God has made, a need of reconciliation. To get back to God, that is the struggle. The soul is Godlike and seeks its own. It wants its Father. There is an orphanage, a home sickness of the heart which has gone up into the ear of God, and called the Savior, the Reconciler, to meet it by His wondrous life and death. I, for my part, love to see in every restlessness of man’s moral life everywhere, whatever forms it takes, the struggles of this imprisoned desire. The reason may be rebellious, and vehemently cast aside the whole story of the New Testament, but the soul is never wholly at its rest away from God. Does this not put it most impressively before us? Is it not something at least to startle us and make us think, if we come to know that the very God of heaven saw a want, a struggle, a longing of our souls after Himself, which was too deep, too obscure, too clouded over with other interests for even us to see ourselves, and came to meet that want with the wonderful manifestation of the incarnation, the atonement? We hear of the marvellous power of the Gospel, and we come to doubt it when we see the multitudes of unsaved men. But it is true. The Gospel is powerful, omnipotent. A truth like this, thoroughly believed, and taken in, must melt the hardest heart and break down the most stubborn will. It does not save men, simply because it is not taken in, not believed. The Gospel is powerless, just as the medicine that you keep corked in its vial on the shelf is powerless. If you will not take it, what matters it what marvellous drugs have lent their subtle virtues to it? Believe and thou art saved. Understand and know, and thoroughly take home into your affection and your will, the certain truth that Christ saw your need of Him when you did not know it yourself, and came to help you at a cost past all calculation, — really believe this and you must be a new man and be saved.

3. I should like to point out another of the needs of man which God has heard appealing to Him and has satisfied completely. I know that I must speak about it very briefly. It is the need of spiritual guidance; and it is a need whose utterance not God’s ear alone can hear. Every man hears it in the race at large, and hears it in his brethren, however deaf he may be to it in himself. I think there never was a materialist so complete that he did not realize that the great mass of men were not materialists, but believed in spiritual forces and longed for spiritual companies. He might think the spiritual tendency the wildest of delusions, but he could not doubt its prevalence. How could he? Here is the whole earth full of it. Language is all shaped upon it.

Thought is all saturated with it. In the most imposing and the most vulgar methods, by solemn oracles and rocking tables, men have been always trying to put themselves into communication with the spiritual world and to get counsel and help from within the vail. And if we hear the cry from one another, how much more God hears it. Do you think, poor stumbler, that God did not know it when you found no man to tell you what you ought to do in a perplexity which, as it rose around you, seemed, as it was, unlike any bewilderment that had ever puzzled any man before? Do you think, poor sufferer, that God did not hear it when in your sickness and pain men came about you with their kindness, fed you with delicacies, and spread soft cushions under the tortured body, and all the time the mind diseased, feeling so bitterly that these tender cares for the body’s comfort did not begin to touch its spiritual pain, lay moaning and wailing out its hopeless woe? Do you think now, my brother, when you have got a hard duty to do, a hard temptation to resist; when you have felt all about you for strength, called in prudence and custom and respectability and interest to keep you straight, and found them all fail because, by their very nature, they have no spiritual strength to give; when now you stand just ready to give way and fall, ready to go to-morrow morning and do the wrong thing that you have struggled against so long, — do you think that God does not know it all, and does not hear the poor frightened soul’s cry for help against the outrage that is threatening her, and has not prepared a way of aid? The power of the Holy Spirit! — an everlasting spiritual presence among men. What but that is the thing we want? That is what the old oracles were dreaming of, what the modern spiritualists to-night are fumbling after. The power of the Holy Ghost by which every man who is in doubt may know what is right, every man whose soul is sick may be made spiritually whole, every weak man may be made a strong man, — that is God’s one sufficient answer to the endless appeal of man’s spiritual life; that is God’s one great response to the unconscious need of spiritual guidance, which he hears crying out of the deep heart of every man.

I hope that I have made clear to you what I mean. I would that we might understand ourselves, see what we might be; nay, see what we are. While you are living a worldly and a wicked life, letting all sacred things go, caring for no duty, serving no God, there is another self, your possibility, the thing that you might be, the thing that God gave you a chance to be; and that self, wronged and trampled on by your recklessness, escapes and flies to God with its appeal: — “0, come and help me. I am dying. I am dying. Give me Thyself for Father. Give me Thy Son for Savior. Give me Thy Spirit for my guide.” So your soul pleads before God; pleads with a pathos all the more piteous in his ears, because you do not hear the plea yourself; pleads with such sacred prevalence that the great merciful Heart yields and gives all that the dumb appeal has asked.

What does it mean? Here is the Gospel in its fulness. Here is God for you to worship. Here is Christ to save you. Here is the Comforter. Have you asked for them, my poor careless brother, that here they stand with such profusion of blessing, waiting to help you? “Ah, no,” you say, “I never asked.” Suppose, when Paul landed in Macedonia, he had turned to the careless group who watched him as he stepped ashore, and said, u Here am I; you sent for me. Here am I with the truth, the Christ you need,” — what must their answer have been? “O, no, you are mistaken; we never sent; we do not know you; we do not want you!” Yet they had sent. Their needs had stood and begged him to come over, out of the lips of that mysterious man of Macedonia. And when they came to know this, they must have found all the more precious the preciousness of a gospel which had come to them in answer to a need they did not know themselves.

And so your needs have stood, they are standing now before God. They have moved Him to deep pity and care for you. And He has sent the supply for them be fore you knew you wanted it. And here it is, — a God to worship, a Savior to believe in, a Comforter to rest upon. O, if you ever do come, as I would to God that you might come to-night, to take this mercy, and let your thirsty soul drink of this water of life! then you will feel most deeply the goodness which provided for you before you even knew that you needed any such provision; then you will understand those words of Paul: “God commendeth His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”

Till that time comes, what can God do but stand and call you and warn you and beg you to know yourself. “Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in the lire, that thou mayest be rich. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in and sup with him, and he with Me.”