Under this title it is intended to present, in a continued series, some brief remarks on the various individuals noticed in scripture as having intercourse with God, and under the gracious dealings of His hand.
It is not intended, however, to notice these individuals so much in any typical character, or in relation to any offices they may have sustained, as to trace them in the individuality of their exercises and experience, and the molding of their characters as the result of their intercourse with God. This, if rightly pursued, may become the means of the deepest instruction and profit to our souls, while, at the same time, it opens a pathway of profoundest interest in connection with the perfect and living ways of the Lord.
In human biography, or the recorded experience of holy men, there is always this defect, that the estimate of the character of divine intercourse, and of its effects upon the soul, is necessarily imperfect. Intercourse with the Lord may indeed have been true and real, and the effects of His dealings with the soul marked and manifest; still there are a thousand mists and prejudices, in the judging and recording mind, which may operate to hinder their faithful transcription for the contemplation and benefit of others. But here all is unerringly marked. And if the records are brief, there is nothing aside from the purpose; nothing either in excess or defect when viewed in the light in which they were dictated by the Holy Spirit and left for our instruction.
There may be a danger, it is true, of giving to even these records the poor coloring of human thoughts, and the only preservation from this is the sense of the Lord's presence in the soul and the remembrance that they are His recorded ways that we seek to investigate, though they are unfolded in His dealings with men of like passions with ourselves. The result of this will be the wholesome determination that where divine light ceases the imagination shall be refused the rein.