walk." Again, "God before whom my father did stand." Again, "Guilty before God,"-"Just before God." All these expressions denote to walk in the presence of God, in the light of his countenance, in communion with him, in short, to live in confidence in him. Enoch walked with God, Abraham walked before God, - both practically held close, personal, and intimate communion with God, and such communion as this denotes and involves perfect confidence in God. The meaning of the word faith is, properly, confidence. It is not intellectual credence, but an apprehension by the heart of the conviction previously lodged in the intellect; and therefore the creation of perfect peace within, with perfect happiness without. Dread God, and you will try to appease him by lacerations of the flesh, mortifications, penances; suspect God, and you will shrink from him; doubt God, and you will tremble before him; have confidence in God, as Abraham had, and you will walk before him in unreserved, unquestioning obedience, till grace ends in glory, and you are made perfect in the presence of the Lamb. The idea, therefore, involved in walking before God is simply that of communion with God. This is, first, an inner thing, real religion is between the individual heart and God. The tendency of human nature is to make it a corporate thing, a sacramental thing, an ecclesiastical thing; the whole tendency of the Bible is to make it a living, personal, heart-felt communion with God. It is, therefore, first of all, a personal intimacy with God; but this communion with God, this walking before him, is unfolded in different ways. One expression of it, or one mode of expressing it, is reading God's holy word. This is communion with God. When it is read as God's word, in order to find in it, not David's poetry, nor Paul's eloquence, nor James's diction, nor Luke's beautiful writing, but to hear God in it, then we

hold, by reading it, communion with God. For what, after all, is the Bible? It is the only portrait of Deity, it is the autograph of God himself, it is the only celestial relic that he has bequeathed to mankind, in which he bids us look and gaze continually, as the Apocalypse of himself, the revelation of his inner feelings as well as of his outer dealings. So that when I read God's holy word, his promises break like the waves of the sea in music on the shores of my heart; his truth, his delineation of himself, dawns upon the soul as the light of the Sun in which alone the Sun can be beheld; and reading that blessed Book, I hear, not what man thinks, nor what intellect guesses, but what God himself is, and what He has actually said. If I want a crucifix that is really divine, I read the 53d chapter of Isaiah; if I want the only portrait of Jesus that is really the portrait of what he was, I read the Gospel according to St. John. If I desire to know what Deity is, not in his outer glory, but in his inner life, I open the Bible, and there I have God's portrait of himself, painted by his own bright beams, the great "I am," the "All-sufficient," "My Father."

I hold communion with God in prayer. When I read the Bible, God speaks to me; when I pray, I speak to God. Hence, God's word is the Oracle from which he addresses me; God's footstool is the place where I kneel and speak to Him.

In the Bible God proclaims himself, "I am the Allsufficient;" at the throne of grace I respond to that proclamation by saying, "therefore I will walk before thee, and be perfect." It has been said by a person of some authority, that the English Church is a praying Church, that the Scotch Church is a preaching Church. If either Church were exclusively the one or the other, it would be exclusively wrong. Where all is prayer and no preaching, prayer degenerates into a form. Where all is preaching and no prayer, preaching ceases to have a blessing. Both

are the ordinances of God-the one is to accompany the other; what God hath joined let no man, therefore, rend asunder. But whether we preach or pray, we so far express by outward acts our inward communion with God, and not only express, but in some measure feel it; for reading God's word is not only the fruit of our communion with God, but it is also the spring and source of it. By a beautiful reflex influence, when I read God's word, I express my communion with him, but he feeds, inspires, elevates that communion through the contact, a sanctified and divine contact, with himself. It is, therefore, looking into that perfect law of liberty, that I am transformed from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord.

See in this the perfection of pure, or the characteristic of true and spiritual, religion. God reveals himself to Abraham "I am the All-sufficient." Then, what is the logical inference. Therefore fear me? Therefore seek the priest to introduce you to me? Therefore have recourse to angels or saints to mediate between me and you? No — “I am the All-sufficient one". - therefore come at once into my presence, and in confiding and filial love "walk before me and be perfect." What seems presumption in the Protestant Christian coming at once to God to have peace and communion with him, is real humility; and what seems humility in the Romanist, who alleges that first of all we are to ask the aid of angels and of saints, is what the Apostle Paul brands as "voluntary humility, and worshipping of angels," and therefore, substantially, real and thorough pride. Every corrupt and vicious system of religion has this grand and characteristic flaw, it interposes something, whatever that something may be, between God and the poor trembling fugitive from his presence, who is bidden by him to turn, come back to his bosom, and be at peace with him; and the instructive glory of Scriptural religion, the

grand and distinguishing feature of Protestant Christianity, is just this that it lifts the fugitive from the dust where sin has laid him, places him at once, through Christ, in the very presence of the all-sufficient God, and bids him, in the light and love of the countenance of his Father, walk before him like a son, and attain ultimate and great perfection. The great brand of the false system of religion is this— that it bids man task every energy, seize every crutch, have recourse to every angel that will, and every saint that may, and thus work his way amid difficulties uphill until he reach God; and at last, when he finds God, he finds an angry, unreconciled, and offended Being. But the peculiarity of the true religion is, that it places man first, as its initial act, in union and communion with God, and then bids him go forth and serve God, not as a slave through fear, not as a hireling for wages, but as a son from the inspiration of a glorious and inexhaustible love. In other words, the false system makes man walk towards heaven, if peradventure he may reach it; the true system gives man heaven first by grace, and bids him, therefore, go forth and serve God. The false system makes man work, and ask his wages, or heaven, as his reward; the true system gives man the wages by grace, and bids man go forth and serve God from gratitude. The first is Romanism, the second is Protestant Christianity the first makes God the end, the last makes him the beginning - the first makes God the goal toward which we are to struggle and strive; the last makes God the starting place, from which we are to set out with an elastic footstep, and a bounding because a filial heart, and serve God as a son serveth the father that loves him.

Having thus seen what is the very commencement of all Christianity, lét me notice, in the next place, the progressiveness of this walk. We have seen, first, the revelation of God; secondly, communion or union with Him arising from

confidence in him; and thirdly, we may illustrate this course as a progressive one. It is, "Walk before me not quietism, for it is walk, active service-not precipitancy, it is not run, or hasten, but walk-and it is not standing still, or stationary, for it is walk. In other words, a Christian is not a fixture. Justification by faith is his first thing, but it is not his final thing. When a Christian finds peace with God through the blood of sprinkling, he has not found what is the ultimate thing, he has only received what is the initial preparative for an endless, glorious, ever advancing progression. Communion with God is not the ultimate, but the initial step of a ceaseless progression, so much so that the Christian is described in these words, "forgetting those things that are behind, and pressing onward to those things that are before," he is to seek the "prize of the high calling in Christ Jesus." In other words, a Christian, having found Christ as his righteousness, and at that point having got rid of every fear, and every suspicion, almost of every doubt, forthwith starts toward and after Christ as his bright and luminous Example, and, by a ceaseless and unsuspended progression, he approaches Christ in character, who, like a distant star, becomes more beautiful to his eye, the nearer he comes to him in likeness and assimilation. The Christian, in other words, like the eagle, rises riveting his eye upon the Sun, and by the ceaseless beat of his pinion gives prophecy of the perfection which shall be the end of his growing and untiring progression. Thus, God's revelation of his glory not only brought Abraham into communion with himself, but also sent him forth upon a pilgrimage from grace to grace, from one attainment to another, until he now enjoys that perfection which the saints in glory alone possess. That this perfection is to be our aim and our object is obvious, even from the benediction in the sermon on the mount.