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"He walked with God."

Therefore he knew God. The articles of his creed were not many, but he was fixed on this foundation-truth of all religion. Further than this, he knew God as taking a living interest in His creatures, as one who could be approached by them in prayer and communion, and who was sympathetically responsive to their needs. He somehow knew God, also, as being righteous and holy, and he must have had a rudimentary idea of the Christ, as it unfolded itself in the great promise of a deliverer from evil made to our first parents in Paradise. However scanty in number were the articles of his creed, they were not scanty in results. They produced a great life and a great name. The results were that "he walked with God." Walking is the habitual exercise of a man's life. A man runs sometimes. Under great strain, or the demand of special circumstances, he runs, but finds that exhaustion follows; or if he runs too frequently, total collapse is the inevitable consequence. Two of the most eminent ministers of our times recently died owing to overstrain and over-exertion. But we have some now living who have done signal service for the Church during a ministry of fifty years, and who are still hale and having a green old age. To walk at a steady pace, fulfilling life's responsibilities and the demands of duty, is to fulfil the will of God and serve our generation. This rule refers to man's religious and spiritual life. To walk onward and upward in the highest things is to grow in excellence and grace.

As man is a social being, he must walk with someone in life. Perpetual solitude dries up the springs of existence, and true manhood is shrivelled up. Solitary confinement is the saddest and cruellest punishment that can be inflicted by man on his fellow. The prisoner in the Bastille, when his reason reeled through prolonged silence and loneliness, was saved from mental collapse by the friendship of a rat; and a similar story is told of an English prisoner, who, under similar circumstances, found solace in the company of a pigeon. Man craves for fellowship and friendship. Happiest is he who has the noblest companion. God alone fills the deep craving of the heart for a congenial and helpful presence, and Enoch "walked with God." The words imply regular, unbroken, well-sustained communion with Him. With a sublime and lofty aspiration Enoch had risen above shadows, idols, and pretences, and with simple, manly faith had grasped the unseen substance and reality, the personal God, the Father of us all.

This "walking with God" may be fairly inferred to have been carried out in all the affairs of life. The statement has no exceptions in it. Other saints have their failings and sins recorded with an admirable candour, but we are left to conclude that this was a saint of pure life and character. In tending his flocks and herds, in carrying out the barter of the markets in the early world, in commanding his children and ordering his household, in preaching righteousness and foretelling judgment, the great law of his life was here, "walking with God."

When such unbroken intercourse with God is maintained, all duty and labour have a new meaning, and are suffused with a new glory. Every occupation or profession becomes a transparency by which divine truth and purity are translated to the world. No man is then a menial or a slave, but a free man, living in love and by love. He becomes an evangel, who, by words of holiness and deeds of sacrifice, adorns the doctrine of God and Christ in all things. Nothing is common, nothing is unclean; all life is sanctified and beautiful; the man is a temple consecrated by and for God alone.

In such habitual fellowship there is constant growth in familiarity and intimacy. God becomes known more and more in the tenderness and considerateness of His love. He unfolds Himself to the soul of His friend in such love-compelling charm as that the believer is constrained to ever-growing reverence, gratitude, and devotion. The man is transfigured. His thoughts, motives, desires, actions, are all inspired by the Divine Mind and framed after a Divine Pattern. The limitations of human nature are relaxed, and the man expands into newness of life; he soars into heavenly places; he is charged with holy influences. "The trivial round, the common task," become media to him, by which he can interpret and make known to all, the beauty of holiness as revealed to him by communion with God.

It is a significant fact in the history of Enoch, that his piety shone brightest amid family surroundings. He was not an ascetic or an anchorite. He was a husband and a father. It is said that he "walked with God after the birth of Methusaleh." With what measure of fervour he served God before the coming of a child into his house, we are not told; but we are told that after that event "he walked with God three hundred years." Possibly he had not manifested special piety before. His children gathered round him, for we are told that after Methusaleh, he had "sons and daughters." But the blessing of children in no wise slackened his course of piety. Not infrequently, family cares and business responsibilities draw men's thoughts and desires from God; and many who in youth were ardent in religious exercises and unfailing in spiritual duties, in middle life and old age are found to be merely formalists in worship, and paralysed for useful work in the Church. The fine gold has become dim, through the fretting cares or the surging excitements of life. It is awful when such is the case, when the promise and interest of youth settles into impotence and rigidity, when the type which once had the die of thought fresh upon it is worn flat by overuse, or when the shell, once the home of life and bright with ocean's spray, lies with faded colour and emptied hollowness. This is melancholy, indeed, and many such wrecks of religious life are around us. But with Enoch, the increase of life's cares brought an access of fresh devotion. New gifts of Providence roused new feelings of gratitude, and he grappled himself the closer in attachment to the Giver of enlarged blessing. This is as it should be. Every gift of God should be a call to renewed praise and prayer, to a more perfect and joyous service.

This record of Enoch's piety teaches that the highest spirituality of nature is not found in avoiding the duties and cares of life, or in seeking a cloistered and solitary existence. The piety of monkery is not the crown of living. It is neither an experience of healthy joy nor of abundant fruitfulness. The healthful influences of Christianity are immeasurably more beautiful when manifested in the joys of family and home life, or in the discharge of honest trade and commerce, than in the introspective gloom of the recluse, or the ceremonial round of the ascetic. It is remarkable that the record states that Enoch's walk with God lasted "three hundred years after the birth of Methusaleh." There was no break in his spiritual course; it was continuous growth and progress until the light of eventide deepened into the glory of heaven.