Crucified, and to eat and drink at
the simple Eucharist, the rite of Thanksgiving for--the Master's awful
death!

Recollecting these facts of the position, it is no wonder that the
Writer emphasizes the greatness and glory of faith, and that now he
devotes this whole noble and extended chapter to illustrate that glory.

We come thus to the opening words of the passage, and listen to him as
he takes the word "faith" up, and sets it apart, to look afresh at its
significance and to describe its potency, before he proceeds, with the
tact and skill of sympathy, to illustrate his account of it from the
history so deeply sacred to the tried Hebrew Christian's heart.

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things
not seen." So the Revisers translate the first verse. They place in
their margin, as an alternative, a rendering which makes faith to be
"the giving substance to things hoped for, the test of things not seen."
I presume to think that the margin is preferable as a representation of
the first clause in the Greek, and the text as a representation of the
second. So I would render (with the one further variation, in view of
the Greek, that I dispense with the definite article): "Now faith is a
giving of substance to things hoped for, a demonstration of things not
seen." And we may paraphrase this rendering somewhat thus: "Faith is
that by which the hoped-for becomes to us as if visible and tangible,
and by which the unseen is taken and treated as proven in its
verity."[L]

[L] A friend has pointed out to me that in the recently discovered
papyri, which, although a relatively small part of them only has been
read as yet, have thrown much deeply interesting light on the character
and vocabulary of Greek as used by the New Testament writers, the word
[Greek: hypostasis] is found with the meaning of "title-deeds." On the
hypothesis of such a meaning here (we can only speak with reserve), we
may paraphrase: "Faith enables us to treat things hoped for as a
property of which we hold the deeds."

In the light of what we have recalled regarding the position of the
first readers of the words, we have only to render them thus to see
their perfect appropriateness, their adjustment to an "exceeding need."
The Gospel led its disciple supremely and ultimately always towards the
hoped-for and the unseen. True, it had a reference of untold value and
power to the seen and present. There was then, as there is in