Walking with God

And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him (Genesis 5:24).

This is one of the briefest biographical notices in universal literature, and yet it seems to tell us more about the man of whom it is written than we learn from some voluminous biographies about the persons whose lives they record. Somehow those few words make us feel as if this man, who lived at so remote a period of the world’s history, and under circumstances and conditions so different to our own, were not altogether a stranger to us.

Other notable men existed in that ancient time, to whom we are apparently more indebted than we are to Enoch; men who were the fathers of arts and sciences, and the founders of political institutions—pioneers in the onward march of civilization. We Englishmen owe no small debt to Tubal-cain, the instructor of every artificer in brass and iron, the inaugurator of those vast industries that have done so much to give our country the foremost place in the markets of the world. Where is there an agriculturist among us that is not under an obligation to Jabal, who was the first to claim the services of the lower animals for man, and to enrich the human race with all the spoils of this authority? And where is there a lover of music and the fine arts generally that does not owe a corresponding debt to Jubal, “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ” (Genesis 4:21)?

But what are Jabal, and Jubal, and Tubal-cain to us but so many ciphers associated in our minds with certain objects? We know something of these men’s work; of themselves we know absolutely nothing. Here, on the contrary, nothing is told us of any outward work that the man did; we only have the brief and summarized story of an inner life. But this it is that seems to make him like an old familiar friend; we seem to know the man because his inmost self, in its most sacred