The whole course of the chapter, when it comes down to particulars and persons, bears this out. From first to last the message carried to us by the lives and actions of the faithful is this, that they took their Lord at His word, simply as His word, and in the power of that reliance found themselves able to act as if the unseen were seen and the hoped-for were present. "The elders" (ver. 2) are in view from the first--that is to say, the pre-Christian saints, who were in _that_ sense distinctively men who proved the power of faith, that they all lived and died before the visible fulfilment of the great promise of salvation. To them, to be sure, or rather to many of them, not to all, merciful helps were granted. The unseen and the hoped-for was sometimes, not always, made more tangible to them by the grant of some sign and token, some portent or miracle, by the way. But the careful Bible-reader 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?