so many immortal words touched with fire from the altar. Whether it
were the effect of the prophet's words, or from other causes, the
little that is told of him is good, and he is eulogised as having
imitated his father's God-pleasing acts, and not having stained
himself by repeating his father's sin. The rest that we hear of him in
Chronicles is a mere sketch of campaigns, buildings, and victories,
and then he and his reign are summed up in the words of our text,
which is the analysis of the man and the disclosure of the secret of
his prosperity: 'He became mighty, because he prepared his ways'--and,
more than that, 'he prepared them before the Lord his God.'

So then, if we begin, as it were, at the bottom, as we ought to do, in
studying a character, taking the deepest thing first, and laying hold
upon the seminal and germinal principle of the whole, this text
reminds us that--The secret of true strength lies in the continual
recognition that life is lived 'Before the Lord our God.'

Now to say, 'Walk thou _before_ Me,' the command given to
Abraham, suggests a somewhat different modification of the idea from
the apparently parallel phrase, 'to walk _with_ God' which is
declared to have been the life's habit of Enoch. The one expression
suggests simple companionship and communion; the other suggests rather
the vivid and continual realisation of the thought that we are 'ever
in the great Taskmaster's eye.' To walk before God is to feel
thrillingly and continually, and yet without being abased or crushed
or discomposed, but rather being encouraged and quickened and calmed
and ennobled and gladdened thereby: 'Thou God seest me.' It seems to
me that one of the plainest pieces of Christian duty, and, alas! one
of the most neglected of them, is the cultivation, definitely and
consciously, by effort and by self-discipline, of that consciousness