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