Men of the Bible | Page 2

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.