which we can say that it is walking with God. The first of these
clearly is the one that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews
puts his finger upon, when he makes faith the spring of Enoch's
career. The first requisite to true communion with God is vigorous
exercise of that faculty by which we realise the fact of His
presence with us; and that not as a jealous-eyed inspector, from
whose scrutiny we would fain escape, but as a companion and friend
to whom we can cleave. 'He that cometh to God,' and walks with God,
must first of all 'believe that He _is_'; and passing by all
the fascinations of things seen, and rising above all the
temptations of things temporal, his realising eye must fix upon the
divine Father and see Him nearer and more clearly than these. You
cannot walk with God unless you are emancipated from the dominion of
sense and time, and are living by the power of that great faculty,
which lays hold of the things that are unseen as the realities, and
smiles at the false and forged pretensions of material things to be
the real. We have to invert the teaching of the world and of our
senses. My fingers and my eyes and my ears tell me that this gross,
material universe about me is the real, and that all beyond it is
shadowy and (sometimes we think) doubtful, or, at any rate, dim and
far off. But that is false, and the truth is precisely the other
way. The Unseen is the Real, and the Material is the merely
Apparent. Behind all visible objects, and giving them all their
reality, lies the unchangeable God.

Cultivate the faculty and habit of vigorous faith, if you would walk
with God. For the world will put its bandages over your eyes, and
try to tempt you to believe that these poor, shabby illusions are
the precious things; and we have to shake ourselves free from its
harlot kisses and its glozing lies, by very vigorous and continual