of the
closing paragraph, the heartbroken, the tortured, the wanderers of the
dens and caves, who all alike, amidst a thousand differences of
condition and of character, "obtained a good report through faith"; and
all won through faith that victory, so great when we reflect upon
it--that they died "not having received the promise." They trusted _to
the very end_. When they sank down in death upon their shadowy path of
pilgrimage, "the promise," the promised Christ, had not yet come.
Nevertheless they treated the hope of Him as fact, and they won their
victory by faith.

And now they are parts and members of the "great cloud" who watch us in
our turn--us, with things unseen and hoped-for still in front, but with
JESUS at our side.

CHAPTER X

FOLLOWERS OF THEM

HEB. xii. 1-14

The Epistle approaches its close. The Writer has much yet to say to the
disciples upon many things, all connected with that main interest of
their lives, a resolute fidelity to the Lord, to the Gospel, and to one
another. But he has not yet quite done with that side of their
"exceeding need" to which the antidote is _the faith_ which can deal
with the future as the present, with the unseen as the seen. Upon this
theme, from one aspect or another, is spent the passage now before us.

First, the appeal is to the recollection that the combat, the race, the
victory of faith, as it was for the Hebrew believers, "the contest set
before _us_" (ver. 1), not only had been fought and won before them by
the saints of the old time, but that those saints were now, from their
blessed rest, as "spirits of the just made perfect" (ver. 23), watchers
and witnesses of their successors' course. "We have, lying around us,
so great a cloud of witnesses" (ver. 1). "We" are running, like the
competitors in the Hellenic stadium, in the public view of a mighty
concourse, so vast, so aggregated, so placed aloft, that no word less
great than "cloud" occurs as its designation: that "long cloud" as it is
finely called in Isaac Watts' noble hymn, "Give me the wings of faith."
True, the multitudinous watchers are unseen, but this only gives faith
another opportunity of exercise; we are to treat the Blessed as seen,
for we know that they are there, living to God, one with us, fellows of
our life and love. So let us address ourselves afresh to the spiritual
race, the course of faith. Let us, as athletes of the soul, strip all
encumbrance off, "every weight" of allow