der knows how very
little such things are represented in the holy histories as being the
"daily bread" of the life of the old believers. Even in the lives where
they occur most often they come at long and difficult intervals, and in
some lives not at all, or hardly at all. And assuredly we gather here
that, to the mind of the apostolic Writer, no experience of miracles, no
permission even to hold direct colloquy with the Eternal, ever made up
for that immeasurable "aid to faith" which we enjoy who know the
Incarnate Son as fact, and walk on an earth which has seen the God-Man
traverse it, and die upon it, and rise again.

These "elders" were men called to live, in an eminent and most trying
degree, not by sight but by faith, by mere reliance upon a Promiser.
Therefore their living witness to the capacity of faith to make the
unseen visible and the hoped-for present is the more precious to us. We,
with the Christ of God manifested to us, displayed in history,
experienced in the heart--what are not we to find the power of faith to
be in our lives, having, for our supreme seal upon faith, the promise
fulfilled, the Image of the Invisible God, made one with our nature and
dwelling in our hearts?

One partial exception, and only one, to this great ruling lesson of the
chapter is to be noted; it occurs in the second verse. There "by faith
we perceive that the worlds," the _aeons_, the dispensations and
evolutions of created being, "have been framed," perfected, adjusted to
one another, "by the Word of God, so that not from things which appear
has that which is seen originated." These words appear to be inserted
where they stand in order, so to speak, to carry the sequence of the
references to the Old Testament down from its very first page. The work
of faith has exercise in face of the mysterious narrative of Creation,
and in this one instance the exercise is quoted as what concerns us now
quite as much as "the elders." They like us, we like them, get our
guarantee as to the facts of the primal past not by sight but by faith,
by taking God at His word. He, in His revelation, tells us that "in the
beginning"--the beginning of whatever existence is other than
eternal--"God created." Things finite, things visible, came into
original being not as evolved from previous similar material, but as of
His will.

But when that pregnant side-word has once been said, the argument
settles itself forthwith upon the recorded examples of t