It is a significant fact in the history of Enoch, that his piety shone brightest amid family surroundings.  He was not an ascetic or an anchorite.  He was a husband and a father.  It is said that he “walked with God after the birth of Methusaleh.”  With what measure of fervour he served God before the coming of a child into his house, we are not told; but we are told that after that event “he walked with God three hundred years.”  Possibly he had not manifested special piety before.  His children gathered round him, for we are told that after Methusaleh, he had “sons and daughters.”  But the blessing of children in no wise slackened his course of piety.  Not infrequently, family cares and business responsibilities draw men’s thoughts and desires from God; and many who in youth were ardent in religious exercises and unfailing in spiritual duties, in middle life and old age are found to be merely formalists in worship, and paralysed for useful work in the Church.  The fine gold has become dim, through the fretting cares or the surging excitements of life.  It is awful when such is the case, when the promise and interest of youth settles into impotence and rigidity, when the type which once had the die of thought fresh upon it is worn flat by overuse, or when the shell, once the home of life and bright with ocean’s spray, lies with faded colour and emptied hollowness.  This is melancholy, indeed, and many such wrecks of religious life are around us.  But with Enoch, the increase of life’s cares brought an access of fresh devotion.  New gifts of Providence roused new feelings of gratitude, and he grappled himself the closer in attachment to the Giver of enlarged blessing.  This is as it should be.  Every gift of God should be a call to renewed praise and prayer, to a more perfect and joyous service.

This record of Enoch’s piety teaches that the highest spirituality of nature is not found in avoiding the duties and cares of life, or in seeking a cloistered and solitary existence.  The piety of monkery is not the crown of living.  It is neither an experience of healthy joy nor of abundant fruitfulness.  The healthful influences of Christianity are immeasurably more beautiful when manifested in the joys of family and home life, or in the discharge of honest trade and commerce, than in the introspective gloom of the recluse, or the ceremonial round of the ascetic.  It is remarkable that the record states that Enoch’s walk with God lasted “three hundred years after the birth of Methusaleh.”  There was no break in his spiritual course; it was continuous growth and progress until the light of eventide deepened into the glory of heaven.

II.

“He pleased God.”