e better
faith by us, the fathers also enter with us into the holiest place.
"Apart from us they could not be made perfect." The priestly
consecration becomes theirs through us. Such is the unity of the Church,
and such the power of faith, that those who could not believe, or could
not believe in a certain way, for themselves, receive the fulness of the
blessing through the faith of others. Nothing less will do justice to
the Apostle's words than the notion that the saints of the old covenant
have, through the faith of the Christian Church, entered into more
immediate and intimate communion with God than they had before, though
in heaven.

We now understand why they take so deep an interest in the running of
the Christian athletes on earth. They surround their course, like a
great cloud. They know that they will enter into the holiest if we win
the race. For every new victory of faith on earth, there is a new
revelation of God in heaven. Even the angels, the principalities and
powers in the heavenly places, learn, says St. Paul, through the Church
the manifold wisdom of God.[325] How much more will the saints, members
of the Church, brethren of Christ, be better able to apprehend the love
and power of God, Who makes weak, sinful men conquerors over death and
its fear.

The word "witnesses"[326] does not itself refer to their looking on, as
spectators of the race. Another word would almost certainly have been
used to express this notion, which is moreover contained in the phrase
"having so great a cloud surrounding[327] us." The thought seems to be
that the men to whose faith the Spirit of Christ in Scripture bare
witness were themselves witnesses for God in a godless world, in the
same sense in which Christ tells His disciples that they were His
witnesses, and Ananias tells Saul that he would be a witness for
Christ.[328] Every one who confessed Christ before men, him did Christ
also confess before His Church which is on earth, and does now confess
before His Father in heaven, by leading him into God's immediate
presence.

FOOTNOTES:

[289] =hekaston= (xi. 21).

[290] Gen. xlvii. 31.

[291] Chap. xi. 30.

[292] Chap. xi. 31.

[293] Ruth i. 16.

[294] Matt. i. 5.

[295] Judges iv. and v.

[296] Judges vii. 18.

[297] Judges xi. 35.

[298] Judges xiii. 7; xvi. 28.

[299] Robertson, _History of the Christian Church_, book ii., chap. vii.

[300] Chap. xi. 33.

[301] Judges vii.

[302] Judges xi.