Then there is another requisite. 'How can two walk together except
they be agreed?' 'He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also
so to walk even as He walked.' There is no union with God in such
communion possible, unless there be a union with Him by conformity
of will and submission of effort and aim to His commandments. Well,
then, is that life possible for us? Look at this instance before us.
We know very little about how much knowledge of God these people in
old days had, but, at all events, it was a great deal less than you
and I have. Their theology was very different from ours; their
religion was absolutely identical with ours. Their faith, which
grasped the God revealed in their creed, was the same as our faith,
though the creed which their faith grasped was only an outline
sketch of yours and mine. But at all times and in all generations,
the element and essence of the religious life has been the same-that
is, the realising sense of the living divine presence, the
effort and aspiration after communion with Him, and the quiet
obedience and conformity of the practical life to His will. And so
we can reach out our hands across all the centuries to this pre-
Noachian, antediluvian patriarch, dim amongst the mists, and feel
that he too is our brother.

And he has set us the example that in all conditions of life, and
under the most unfavourable circumstances, it is possible to live in
this close touch with God. For in his time, not only was there, as I
have said, an incomplete and rudimentary knowledge of God, but in
his time the earth was filled with violence, and gigantic forms of
evil are represented as having dominated mankind. Amidst it all, the
Titanic pride, the godlessness, the scorn, the rudeness, and the
violence, amidst it all, this one 'white flower of a blameless life'
managed to find nutriment upon the dunghill, and to blossom fresh