on in detail: the term [Greek:
hypostasis] alone may be interpreted in at least three ways. But I do
not think that this need disturb us as to the essential meaning of the
description. Each and all of the renderings leave us with the thought
that faith has a power in it to make the thing hoped-for act upon us as
if it were attained, and the invisible as if it were before our eyes.

We may pause so far further over the description of faith here as to
point out that it is precisely this, a description, not a definition. To
quote Heb. xi. 1 as a good definition of faith is to mistake its import
altogether. I have often recalled, in speech or writing, a story told
me forty years ago by an Oxford friend when we were masters together at
a public school. He had attended a Greek Testament lecture at his
college a few years before, and the lecturer one day asked the class for
a definition of faith. Some one quoted Heb. xi. 1, and the lecturer's
answer was, "You could not have given a worse definition." My old
friend, a "broad" but most reverent Churchman, referred to this as an
instance of painful flippancy. It may have been so. But I am prepared to
think that the lecturer may not have meant it so at all. He may only
have expressed rather crudely his view, the right view, to my mind, that
we have here not a definition of faith at all but a description of faith
as an operative force, an account of what faith looks like when it is at
work; and this is a very different matter.

What is a definition? A precise and exclusive statement of the
essentials of a thing, such that it will fit no other thing. A
description may be something altogether different from this. It may so
handle the object that the terms are not exclusive at all, but are
equally applicable to something else; as here for example, where the
phraseology would equally well describe imagination in its more vivid
forms--a thing as different as possible from faith. To be quite
practical, we have here, if we read this first verse in the light of
the whole subsequent development of the chapter, a description of faith
at work, of the potency and victories of faith, rather than a definition
of faith in its distinctive essence. A true parallel to this passage is
the familiar sentence, "Knowledge is power." Those words do not define
knowledge, obviously; to do that would demand a totally different
phrase. What the words do is to give us one great resultant of
knowledge; to tell