AND good angels are among us, moving noiselessly through the
world; and most men can recall one in their own circle.
Of such angels men must often speak and call them good. But if
these are good angels it is by courtesy and figure of speech;
speech that proves how genuine and deep this belief in angels
has been; that shows with what qualities we invest them. If
there are men and women angel-like, there must needs be their
counterparts— the angels themselves; for these good angels are
not what the children would call "real angels," and the simple
primitive question looms up behind. What is an angel! "A
spiritual creature," says Luther, "created by God without a
body, for the service of Christendom, and the Church." "An
intellectual and incorporeal substance," says the more scholastic
Puritan, "free of will, a servant of God, and by His grace immortal
in blessedness." Bishop Bull is even more precise, and
pronounces angels to be, "certain permanent substances, invisible
and imperceptible to our senses." "Incorporeal," say the Fathers,
''Invisible, yet perceptible of sense, rational, intellectual, immortal;
the good, bright and impassable; the bad, passable and
foul." Hooker's definition blossoms into poetry. "Angels," he
says,'' are spirits immaterial and intellectual ; the glorious inhabitants
of those sacred palaces where nothing but light and blessed
immortality, no shadow of matter for tears, discontentments,
griefs, and uncomfortable passions to work upon but all joy
and tranquility and peace forever and over do dwell." There
are five authoritive answers to choose from; of which I confess
to like the simpler one of simple-hearted Luther, instinct as it
is with his bold faith that man is the great object of God, and
therefore of whatever God had made and done. In conceiving
thus dogmatically of angels it is plain we must first dispense with
anything so gross as a body. They are ''incorporeal, invisible. ' '
If they have been ever seen it has been because they assumed a
-visible form, borrowed for the time a body not their own. For
spirits
"In what shape they choose
Diluted or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their airy purposes."
Milton again describes how
"Incorporeal spirits to smallest forms.
Reduced their shapes immense."
And as this union between them and the bodies thus assumed
we are learnedly told, is "not substantial (as between the soul
and body), nor hypostatical (as between the divine and human
nature of Christ), nor accidental ; but assistential. "
—W. Fleming Stevenson.
Virgins visited by angel powers.
—Pope.
The soul refined, angelified. —Farindon.
When musing midnight reigns or silent noon,
Angelic harps are in full concert heard,
And voices chanting from the wood-crowned hill,
The deepening dale, or inmost sylvan glade;
A privilege bestowed on us above,
On contemplation, on the hallow 'd ear
Of poet, swelling to seraphic strain. —Thomson.
