The Acts of the Apostles

LANDS, NATIONS, CITIES, AND HOUSES 99
forbidden " by the Spirit of Jesus." Finally, he was
also led through Mysia without venturing to preach
there, and at last arrived at Troas ;
yet even here he
had not reached the appointed goal, but the Spirit
directed him to Macedonia. The final direction of
the Spirit embodied itself in the vision by night
of the Man of Macedonia. Nothing in the book
approaches the conviction with which at this place
the leading of the Apostle by the Spirit is pictured.
In this way St. Luke heralds, not the entry of a new
source, but the coming of St. Paul to Macedonia and
his own meeting with St. Paul. According to Ramsay
St. Luke himself was the man of Macedonia—an
attractive conjecture, which had also once suggested
itself to me before I knew of Ramsay's hypothesis
—
but it cannot be proved, and there is also much to be
said against it. In its favour stands the circumstance
that the appearance of the " we " at this point would
receive a good explanation, and would no longer
startle us like a sudden pistol-shot. It would well
suit the delicacy of St. Luke's literary feeling that he
should have introduced himself in this way, hinting
that St. Paul learned to know him in Troas, and
that God had used him as a means to bring the
Apostle to Macedonia. But the thread here is too
fine, and, moreover, it cannot be proved that St.
Luke was at home in Macedonia. As for the unful-
filled plans of the Apostle, his sudden passage from
Galatia to Macedonia—without preaching in the
countries on his way !—is so paradoxical that it can
neither have been invented nor does it admit of a
« rational " explanation. The epithet « rational "