works of the
patriarchs as they were handed down from age to age by tradition.

48. It is this public ministry that Moses lauds, exalting the pious
Enoch as a sun above all the other patriarchs and teachers of the
primeval world. Wherefore, we may gather from all these circumstances
that Enoch possessed a particular fullness of the Holy Spirit, and a
preeminent greatness of mind, seeing that he opposed with a strength
of faith excelling that of all the other patriarchs, Satan and the
church of the Cainites. To walk with God, is not, as we have before
observed, for a man to flee into a desert, or to conceal himself in
some corner, but to go forth in his vocation, and to set himself
against the iniquity and malice of Satan and the world, and to confess
the seed of the woman; to condemn the religion and the pursuits of the
world, and to preach, through Christ, another life after this.

49. This is the manner of life led for three hundred years by the
greatest prophet and high priest of his generation, Enoch, the man who
had six patriarchs for his teachers. Most deservedly, therefore, does
Moses extol him as a disciple of greatest eminence, taught and trained
by many patriarchal masters, and those the greatest and most
illustrious; and, moreover, so equipped with the Holy Spirit that he
was the prophet of prophets and the saint of saints in that primeval
world. The greatness of Enoch, then, consisted in the first place in
his office and ministry.

50. In the second place, he receives preeminent praise because it was
the will of God that he should be an example to the whole world in
verifying, and showing the comfort of, the faith in the future life.
This text, therefore, is worthy of being written in letters of gold
and of being deeply engraven in the inmost heart.

51. Here we have another view of what it means to walk with God. It is
to preach the life beyond this present life; to teach concerning the
seed to come, concerning the serpent's head that is to be bruised and
the kingdom of Satan that is to be destroyed. Such was the preaching
of Enoch, who nevertheless was a husband, and the father of a family;
who had a wife and children, who governed his household, and procured
his subsistence by the labor of his own hands. Wherefore say or think
no more about living in a monastery, which has merely the outward show
of walking with God. When this godly man had lived, after the birth of
Methuselah, 300 years in the truest