October 25

"Hast Thou not made an hedge about him?"—Job 1:10.

IT is what God has done. He has made a whole labyrinth of hedges about me, to shut out what will harm.

His providence is a hedge. The events of my history are of His preparing. By prosperity, by delay, by heartbreak, He would warn me against old sin and encourage me to new grace.

A Christian friend is a hedge. I cannot give way to evil when he is near. He is a conscience which reproves me. I am ashamed when I compare my soiled life with his transparency.

The ministry of the angels is a hedge. They are about me, as they were about Jacob asleep, and Elisha besieged in Dothan, and the shepherds watching their flocks. "Every breath of air and ray of light," as Newman says, "is the skirts of their garments."

The Bible is a hedge. It discovers the plague of my heart. It makes me clean in proportion as I listen to its voice. It should transform my soul.

The calls of the Spirit are God's hedges. Often I have heard His message, alarming like the wind of winter, or gentle like a mother awakening her child. He summons me to conversion, to purity, to service, to assurance and joy.

But His grace in Christ is the best of His hedges. I see the "place somewhat ascending where stands a Cross, and, a little below, a Sepulchre." If I remember it I can never permit myself to transgress.

Now, may it not be true of me—

"Yet all these fences and their whole array One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away."