66 shineth more and more unto the perfect day," Prov. iv. 18. "This I say," says St. Paul, "walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh," Gal. v. 16, that is proceed under the influences of spiritual affections-press forward in pursuit of spiritual objects, and you will, at every step, leave carnal lusts farther and farther behind you. They go," says the Psalmist, speaking of those whose strength is in God, "from strength to strength," Ps. lxxxiv. 7, that is, they walk with God, and acquire spiritual sufficiency as they advance; and Paul, recording his own plan of spiritual improvement, informs us, "This one thing I do, forgetting those things that are behind, and reaching forth unto those things that are before; I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus," Phil. iii. 13, 14. O that we could all thus walk, and well might we 'go on our way rejoicing," Acts viii. 39; but which of us can claim exclusion from that sad society of which the same apostle says, Many walk of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ ?" Phil. iii. 18. 66 66 (5.) Perseverance. Enoch, doubtless, had many stumbling blocks laid in his heavenward path, but he put them aside and pressed on. Thus must our christian walk be pursued in spite of flattering friends and threatening foes. We must say with the Psalmist, "Our heart is not turned back, neither have our steps declined from thy way: though thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons and covered us with the shadow of death," Ps. xliv. 18, 19. We must remember that it is "he who endures to the end that shall be saved," Mat. xxiv. 13; but that "he who puts his hand to the plough and looks back," is declared upon infallible testimony, to be "unfit for the kingdom of God," Luke ix. 62. God will not pause until He has accomplished all His purposes in Christ, and if we walk with Him we must continue to labor and to strive. It now remains that we briefly contemplate the sequel to Enoch's exemplary career. "He was not; for God took him," which the apostle explains by saying that was translated that he should not see death, and was not found because God had translated him," Heb. xi. 5. Observe, regarding this remarkable event he 1. That it seems the necessary consequence of his walking closely with God. In the enjoyment of that heavenly privilege and the constant and familiar intercourse to which he was admitted, he must have "beheld with open face, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, and been changed into the same image from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord," 2 Cor. iii. 18. Thus, being assimilated to his Creator, he became gradually more dead to the world, and his "life was hid with Christ in God," so that through the power of the Holy Ghost he was at length prepared to appear with Christ his life in glory, Col. iii. 3, 4. And such is the process now, only that God's assimilated ones must wait till their Life appears, when they too shall be translated never to see death any more. Reader, shall you and I be among the number? Is Christ our life? Are we seeking to be changed into His image by the close and constant contemplation of His glory? O, no wonder that men are earthly-minded and unfit for heaven, when earthly things are the sole objects of their study-when they are the centre around which all their thoughts, affections, and desires, continually revolve. 2. Enoch gave his whole being to God, and God took him, soul and body, and spirit-all belonged to the Great Creator, the service of all were claimed by Him, and all shared in the glorious reward with which the regenerate creature was crowned. God thus reminds us that he created the whole man for himself, and as the whole complex being revolted from Him, nothing less will satisfy Him than the recovery of the entire. This he aims at in the work of Christ, who "was made in all things like unto his brethren," Heb. ii. 17—that he might restore man in the full integrity of his nature, by a sacrifice in which humanity in all its elements participated. Let us not, therefore, offer ourselves to God in fragments-the head without the heart-the tongue without the hands-the ears without the mind-the body without the soul, or the soul without the body. Let us not imagine that religion should engage our mental and not our physical faculties, or that the world may have one part of us while God must have another. He has provided for no such schism in our nature. Whatever be Enoch's place or condition now, he occupies it as Enoch, not as a part of his former self-and so it will be with us."Glory, honor, and immortality," are prepared for the whole renewed man- -"tribulation and anguish" for the whole unrenewed man; Jesus is now exalted in His manhood, and we know of nothing which He represents, or of any created beings who shall hereafter share in his edemption glory, but those who are "members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones," Eph. v. 30. Reader, we must have Christ's spirit or we are none of His, Rom. viii. 9, but we must have his body tooour "vile bodies" must be made "like unto His glorious body," Phil. iii. 21, therefore, let us look for both a spiritual and physical resurrection-to rise from the death of sin now-to rise from the dust, the worm, and corruption hereafter, and let us not adopt any religious notions which would dispense with either, for God has indisolubly united them. ex 3. The advantage of a testimony to the power and intention of God to rescue man from the sentence which sin had provoked, and to receive him back to Himself, has been contributed to the antideluvian, postdeluvian and Christian dispensations, in the persons of Enoch, Elijah, and the man Christ Jesus. For this we have to "thank God and take courage,' Acts xxviii. 15. Although these cases are ceptions to a general rule, they prove that there is to be a resurrection harvest, since a few ears of corn can already be exhibited as a specimen, and one of them the richest and best is declared to be the firstfruits presented to God, and anticipative of the general ingathering, 1 Cor. xv. 20. And from what we have now learned of Enoch, we may, for the present, conclude, that none but those who walk with God during their earthly pilgrimage shall sit down at the heavenly banquet which He is preparing for the children of the resurrection. LECTURE VI. METHUSELAH. LENGTH OF DAYS. "And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.”—Gen. v. 27. Ir might at first view appear that there is too little of incident afforded in the Scripture record of this son of Enoch to supply matter for profitable meditation; but while the fact itself of the long lives vouchsafed to the earliest of the sons of Adam, and which is the prominent feature of almost an entire chapter of God's word, seems worthy of occupying our attention before we proceed farther in the history of our race: I think we can find in the brief notice of Methuselah, who was the longest liver of them all, something from which we may derive no little instruction, of a kind suited to all ranks and conditions-all ages and all characters of men and which is the more valuable, inasmuch as it is calculated, under the Holy Spirit's teaching, to remove some of the most fatal delusions with which the god of this world continues to "blind the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ should shine unto them," 2 Cor. iv. 4. Among the causes which we may be permitted to conjecture for the great length of life granted to the antedeluvian patriarchs, may be mentioned the speedy multiplication of mankind in the earth, and the preservation of the knowledge of God among the posterity of Adam. Had generations of men been then cut off by death as rapidly as they are now, and no written record of Adam's knowledge and experience been handed down, we can conceive, from the history of what is called tradition, both in ancient and modern times, what would have been the fate of the first man's testimony. In what a mutilated, distorted, and corrupted state it would have reached the family of Noah, and been by them transmitted to future generations of men. Indeed, the fact is rendered but too certain by what has actually occurred in the case of those nations which have been formed out of the posterity of Adam or Noah, and which, although carrying with them, in their removal to the various parts of the earth allotted for their habitation, the knowledge of the true God and His dealings with man, have, in process of time, so corrupted and deformed it, as to leave but so much trace of its original features as just to enable us to discover the source from whence it has been derived, and the extent to which the depraved instincts of men have set their stamp upon it. Nothing saved God's revelation of Himself to Adam from similar usage during the sixteen or seventeen hundred years of the antedeluvian world's existence, but the prolongation of human life, and the consequently few hands through which it passed. In fact, as Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years, and Methuselah nearly a thousand, they must have been contemporaries for upwards of two hundred and fifty years-Methuselah having been born when Adam was under seven hundred years old, and thus there was but one intermediate step between Adam and Noah, who was born in the three hundred and sixty-ninth year of Methuselah's age--the latter having lived long enough to instruct thoroughly the age to which Noah belonged, and having conversed sufficiently long with Adam to become himself thoroughly indoctrinated with the truths which he only could convey from the Fountain Head. This wise arrangement on the part of an all-seeing God, to provide His revelation with the protection which He knew it required from the vitiating tendencies of man's fallen nature, shows us how utterly valueless in His sight are those legends which the Church of Rome would impose upon us under the name of apostolic traditions, and to which she pretends to attach an importance scarcely second to that which belongs to the inspired Scriptures. Until His truth was committed to |