he potency of
faith as "the elders" exercised it. We see man after man enabled to
treat the invisible as visible, the promised as present, by reliant rest
upon the word of God, however conveyed. To Abel, we know not how, it was
divinely said that the sacrificed "firstling" was the acceptable
offering, and, antecedent to any possible experience, he offered it. To
Enoch, we know not how, it was made known that the Eternal, as invisible
to him as to us, cared for man's worshipping company, and he addressed
himself through his age-long life to "walk with God." Noah was apprised,
for the first time in man's known history, of an approaching cataclysm
and of the way of escape; the promise came to him wrapped in the cloud
of an awful warning, and it was long delayed, but he acted upon it in
the steady energy of faith. Abraham was "called," we know not precisely
how, but in some way which tested his reliance on things "not seen as
yet," and he set out on that wonderful life of a hundred years of faith.
He renounced the settled habits and old civilization of Chaldea for the
new life of a Syrian nomad, "settling permanently in tents" ([Greek: en
skenais katoikesas]), he and his son and his grandson after him, all in
view of an invisible future made visible by the trusted promise, a
future culminating at last to his "eye of faith," so here we are
solemnly assured, in the city of the saints, in the Canaan of the
heavens. The same reliance on the sheer word of promise nerved him to
the awful ordeal of the all-but immolation of his son. And that son in
his turn, against all appearances, and rather bowing to the Word of God
than embracing it, blessed _his_ least-loved son above his dearest; and
that son in his turn, and his son in his turn, carried the process on,
treating the greatness of Ephraim and the deliverance from Egypt as
things seen and present, because God had so spoken. The parents of
Moses, and then Moses himself, in his strange life of disappointments
and wonders, deal likewise with the future, the unseen, the seemingly
impossible, on the warrant of a promise. Figures as little heroic in
natural character as Sarah, as little noble in life as Rahab, take place
in the long procession, as those who treat the invisible as visible by
faith. So do the thronging "elders" of ver. 32--a group singularly
diverse in everything but this victory over the seen and present by
faith in the promise. So do the unnamed confessors and martyrs