that son in his turn, and his son in his turn, carried the process on, treating the greatness of Ephraim and the deliverance from Egypt as things seen and present, because God had so spoken. The parents of Moses, and then Moses himself, in his strange life of disappointments and wonders, deal likewise with the future, the unseen, the seemingly impossible, on the warrant of a promise. Figures as little heroic in natural character as Sarah, as little noble in life as Rahab, take place in the long procession, as those who treat the invisible as visible by faith. So do the thronging "elders" of ver. 32--a group singularly diverse in everything but this victory over the seen and present by faith in the promise. So do the unnamed confessors and martyrs 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.