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and maintaining a holy familiarity with the great Jehovah. Methought I saw one talking with
God. Methought I saw a spiritual merchant in a heavenly exchange, driving a rich trade
for the treasures of another world. Oh, what a glorious sight it was! Methinks I see him
still. How sweetly did his face shine! Oh, with what a lovely countenance did he walk up
and down—his lips going, his body oft reaching up, as if he would have taken his flight into
heaven! His looks, smiles, and every motion spake him to be upon the very confines of
glory. Oh, had one but known what he was then feeding on! Surely he had meat to eat which
the world knew not of!" This is to live indeed. What a rebuke to our cold devotions! This is
walking with God.

The biographer of the Rev. W.H. Hewitson begins his memoir thus: "'To restore a
commonplace truth,' writes Mr. Coleridge, 'to its first uncommon luster, you need only
translate it into action.' Walking with God is a very commonplace truth. Translate this truth
into action—how lustrous it becomes! The phrase, how hackneyed!—the thing, how rare! It
is such a walk—not an abstract ideal, but a personality, a life—which the reader is invited to
contemplate in the subject of this memoir." Oh, that we would only set ourselves in right
earnest to this rare work of

translation!

It is said of the energetic, pious, and successful John Berridge, that "communion with God
was what he enforced in the latter stages of his ministry. It was, indeed, his own meat and
drink, and the banquet from which he never appeared to rise." This shows us the source of his
great strength. If we were always sitting at this banquet, then it might be recorded of
us ere long, as of him, "He was in the first year visited by about a thousand persons under
serious impressions."

To the men even more than to their doctrine we would point the eye of the inquirer who asks,
Whence came their success? Why, may not the same success be ours? We may take the
sermons of Whitefield or Berridge or Edwards for our study or our pattern, but it is the
individuals themselves that we must mainly set before us; it is with the spirit of the men,
more than of their works, that we are to be imbued, if we are emulous of a ministry as
powerful, as victorious as theirs. They were spiritual men, and walked with God. It is living
fellowship with a living Saviour which, transforming us into His image, fits us for being able
and successful ministers of the gospel. Without this nothing else will avail. Neither
orthodoxy, nor learning, nor eloquence, nor power of argument, nor zeal, nor fervor, will
accomplish aught without this. It is this that gives power to our words and persuasiveness
to our arguments, making them either as the balm of Gilead to the wounded spirit or as
sharp arrows of the mighty to the conscience of the stout-hearted rebel. From them that walk
with Him in holy, happy intercourse, a virtue seems to go forth, a blessed fragrance seems to
compass them whithersoever they go. Nearness to Him, intimacy with Him, assimilation
to His character— these are the elements of a ministry of power. When we can