^ That we should establish ourselves in a sense of God's Presence, by continually conversing with Him, That it was a shameful thing to quit His conversation to think of trifles and fooleries.^
% That in order to form a habit of conversing with God con- tinually, and referring all we do to Him, we must at first apply to Him with some diligence : but that after a little care we should find His love inwardly excite us to it without any diffi- culty.*
' Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of Ood, 6. » Ibid. 10.
GENESIS V. 24 153
Hifl priest am I, before Him day and night,
Within His holy place; And death, and life, and all things dark and bright,
I spread before His Face. Kejoicing with His joy, yet ever still,
For silence is my song ; My work to bend beneath His blessed will.
All day, and all night long — For ever holding with Him converse sweet. Yet speechless, for my gladness is complete.^
Enoch walked with GtOD.
The phrase " walking with God " is used continually throughout the Old Testament to characterize a religious life. In the brief record of Enoch's life in Gen. v. 22-24 it is mentioned twice that he "walked with God." It was evidently the fact which was most noticeable in him, and it passed down to posterity as his distinguishing mark. Again in Gen. vL 9 the same statement is made about Noah, the preacher of righteousness before the Flood. In Gen. xvii. a slightly different expression is used of Abraham : God said to him, "Walk before me, and be thou perfect," and Abraham afterwards, in chapter xxiv., speaks of God as " The Lord before whom I walk." This expression about Abraham is taken up again in the prayer of Hezekiah : " Eemember, 0 Lord," he says, " how I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart." And one of the Psalmists in the 111th Psalm declares his intention of " walking before the Lord in the land of the living." In the 16th Psalm, again, the same thought is stated in a different way : " I have set the Lord always before me : because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved." In the Prophet Micah, this " walking with God " is mentioned as one of three things that God requires of man : " To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." And then, in the last book of the Old Testament, we are told about Levi that he " walked with God in peace and uprightness, and turned many away from their iniquity " (Mai. ii. 6).
* G«rhardt Tersteegen, trans, by Frances Bevan,
154 WALKING WITH GOD
In the New Testament we learn that we are to " walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." We are to " walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called." We are to "walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing." We are to " walk circum- spectly." We are to " walk in the light." We are to " walk by faith."
What are we to understand, then, when we are told that Enoch walked with God ?
1. First of all it is implied that God is a person as Enoch is a person. This twofold conception is necessary to any adequate idea of religion. There is a theory which makes man the only active spirit in religion ; all religion is but man's reflection upon the world, and upon his own nature. Now, that theory is in truth a denial of religion. To negate God, to blot out the Divine Personality, is to undermine religion. Some reverence in face of the mysterious forces of the world, and the majesty of the uni- verse, some sort of naturalistic piety, there might be, but it would fall short altogether of what is the very essence of religion. That essence is communion and intercourse between persons — the person man and the Person God. Communion with a universe depersonalized does not yield religion, and it leaves man in that most terrible loneliness — the embodiment of a great need for which there is no satisfaction, and his life one great agonizing cry to which there is no response.
^ Herbert Spencer's suggestion that God may be superper- sonal, some sort of Being other and higher than personal, does not serve us at all. If God is superpersonal. He is nothing to us, for the highest being we can conceive is conceived in the terms of personality. We cannot think outside ourselves, and an absolutely inconceivable God is to us no God. The basis of religion rests on this as one of its two fundamental convictions — that there resides in this universe the eternal self-conscious Spirit who made it, who goes on making it, and who reveals Himself to man. Eeligious truth is not the product of the action of man's mind upon a passive universe. Something is given to man — given by One who knows that He gives ; a communication is made by the eternal self-conscious Spirit to the human spirit.^
2. To walk with God, in the next place, impHes harmony. "The carnal man is enmity against God," and there must first