Compare this faith with Abraham’s. “These,”—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,—“all _died_ in faith,” or, as we may render the word, “according to faith,”—according to the faith which they had exhibited in their life. Their death was after the same pattern of faith. Enoch’s contemplative life came to a fitting end in a deathless translation to higher fellowship with God. His way of leaving life became him. Abraham’s repeated conflicts and victories closed with quite as much becomingness in a last trial of his faith, when he was called to die without having received the fulfilment of the promises. But he had already seen the heavenly city and greeted it from afar.[266] He saw the promises, as the traveller beholds the gleaming mirage of the desert. The illusiveness of life is the theme of moralists when they preach resignation. It is faith only that can transform the illusions themselves into an incentive to high and holy aspirations. All profound religion is full of seeming illusions. Christ beckons us onward. When we climb this steep, His voice is heard calling to us from a higher peak. That height gained reveals a soaring mass piercing the clouds, and the voice is heard above still summoning us to fresh effort. The climber falls exhausted on the mountain-side and lays him down to die. Ever as Abraham attempted to seize the promise, it eluded his grasp. The Tantalus of heathen mythology was in Tartarus, but the Tantalus of the Bible is the man of faith, who believes the more for every failure to attain. Such men “declare plainly that they seek a country of their own.”[267] Let not the full force of the words escape us. The Apostle does not mean that they seek to emigrate to a new country. He has just said that they confess themselves to be “strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” They are “pilgrims,” because they are journeying through on their way to another country; they are “strangers,” because they have come hither from another land.[268] His meaning is that they long to return home. That he means this is evident from his thinking it necessary to guard himself against the possibility of being understood to refer to Ur of the Chaldees. They were not mindful of the earthly home, the cradle of their race, which they had left for ever. Not once did they cast a wistful look back, like Lot’s wife and the Israelites in the wilderness. Yet they yearned for their fatherland.[269] Plato imagined that all our knowledge is a reminiscence of what we learned in a previous state of existence; and Wordsworth’s exquisite lines, which cannot lose their sweet fragrance however often they are repeated, are a reflection of the same visionary gleam,—