Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/83

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Men are indispensable in enabling God to get His other men. He gives men guidance for their lives. But how? I appeal to your own hearts. How do we get the guidance of our lives? There are many who are sure of having divine guidance in their lives, surer of that than they are of any material thing, and yet, as we look back upon this supernatural guidance, we realize that it has all been mediated through men. We can name man after man who did for our lives, in smaller measure, just what that man of Macedonia did for Paul. We get our guidance through men. Saint Paul got his through a man. Through what man was it? Sir William Ramsay has no doubt whatever that the man whom Saint Paul saw in his dreams was none other than his friend Luke. A real man and a friend, and no ghost figure, was the man of Macedonia through whom God gave Paul his great missionary call.

It would be easy to recall the lives of great missionaries and point out how they received their divine guidance through other men—not even through a dream, far less through some miraculous vision, but through a brother man who came to talk with them, reasoned with them, and showed them the best way in which a man could use his life. Men are indispensable to God in order to guide other men into the work which God has for them to do. And one