PART I.

"I can just remember,' says a theologian of the last century, when the women first taught me to say my prayers, I used to have an idea of a venerable old man, of a composed, benign countenance, with his own hair, clad in a morning gown of a grave-coloured flowered damask, sitting in an elbow-chair.' And he proceeds to say that, in looking back to these beginnings, he is in no way disturbed at the grossness of his infant theology. The image thus shaped by the imagination of the child was, in truth, merely one example of the various forms and conceptions fitted to divers states and seasons, and orders and degrees, of the religious mind, whether infant or adult, which represent the several approximations such minds at such seasons can respectively make to the completeness of faith. These imperfect ideas should be held to be reconciled and comprehended in that completeness, not rejected by it; and the nearest approximation which the greatest of human minds can accomplish is surely to be regarded as much nearer to the imperfection of an infantine notion than to the fulness of truth. The gown of flowered damask and the elbow-chair may disappear; the anthropomorphism of childhood may give place to the divine incarnation of the Second Person in after-years; and we may come to conceive of the Deity as Milton did when his epithets were most abstract :

So spake the SOVRAN PRESENCE.'

But after all, these are but different grades of imperfection in the forms of doctrinal faith; and if there be a devouter love on the part of the child for what is pictured in his imagination as a venerable old man, than in the philosophic poet for the 'Sovran Presence,' the child's faith has more of the efficacy of religious truth in it than the poet's and philosopher's. (Vide "Notes on Life," by HENRY TAYLOR, p. 136.)

THERE is something so very attractive and poetical, as well as soothing to our helpless finite nature, in all the superstitions connected with the popular notion of Angels, that we cannot wonder at their prevalence in the early ages of the world. Those nations who acknowledged one Almighty Creator, and repudiated with horror the idea of a plurality of Gods, were the most willing to accept, the most enthusiastic in accepting, these objects of an intermediate homage; and gladly placed between their humanity and the awful supremacy of an unseen God, the ministering spirits who were the agents of his will, the witnesses of his glory, the partakers of his bliss, and who in their preternatural attributes of love and knowledge filled up that vast space in the created universe which intervened between mortal man, and the infinite, omnipotent LORD OF ALL.

The belief in these superior beings, dating from immemorial antiquity, interwoven as it should seem with our very nature, and authorised by a variety of passages in Scripture, has descended to our time. Although the bodily forms assigned to them are allowed to be impossible, and merely allegorical, although their supposed functions as rulers of the stars and elements have long been set aside by a knowledge of the natural laws, still the coexistence of many orders of beings superior in nature to ourselves, benignly interested in our welfare, and contending for us against the powers of evil, remains an article of faith. Perhaps the belief itself, and the feeling it excites in the tender and contemplative mind, were never more beautifully expressed than by our own Spenser.

"And is there care in heaven? And is there love

In heavenly spirits to these creatures base,
That may compassion of their evils move?
There is!-else much more wretched were the case
Of men than beasts! But O th' exceeding grace

Of highest God that loves his creatures so,
And all his works with mercy doth embrace,
That blessed angels he sends to and fro

To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe!

"How oft do they their silver bowers leave,

And come to succour us that succour want?
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave
The fitting skies, like flying pursuivant,
Against foul fiends, to aid us militant?

They for us fight, they watch, and duly ward,

And their bright squadrons round about us plant,

And all for love, and nothing for reward!

Oh why should heavenly God to men have such regard !"

It is this feeling, expressed or unexpressed, lurking at the very core of all hearts, which renders the usual representations of angels, spite of all incongruities of form, so pleasing to the fancy: we overlook the anatomical solecisms, and become mindful only of that emblematical significance which through its humanity connects it with us, and through its supernatural appendages connects us with heaven.

But it is necessary to give a brief summary of the scriptural and theological authorities, relative to the nature and functions of angels,

before we can judge of the manner in which these ideas have been attended to and carried out in the artistic similitudes. Thus angels are represented in the Old Testament,

1. As beings of a higher nature than men, and gifted with superior intelligence and righteousness.1

2. As a host of attendants surrounding the throne of God, and as a kind of celestial court or council.2

3. As messengers of His will conveyed from heaven to earth: or as sent to guide, to correct, to instruct, to reprove, to console.

4. As protecting the pious.

5. As punishing by command of the Most High the wicked and disobedient.3

6. As having the form of men; as eating and drinking.

7. As wielding a sword.

8. As having power to slay.*

I do not recollect any instance in which angels are represented in Scripture as instigated by human passions; they are merely the agents of the mercy or the wrath of the Almighty.

After the period of the captivity, the Jewish ideas concerning angels were considerably extended and modified by an admixture of the Chaldaic belief, and of the doctrines taught by Zoroaster. It is then that we first hear of good and bad angels, and of a fallen angel or impersonation of evil, busy in working mischief on earth and counteracting good; also of archangels, who are alluded to by name; and of guardian angels assigned to nations and individuals; and these foreign ideas concerning the spiritual world, accepted and promulgated by the Jewish doctors, pervade the whole of the New Testament, in which angels are far more familiar to us as agents, more frequently alluded to, and more distinctly brought before us, than in the Old Testament. For example: they are represented, —

1 2 Sam. xiv. 17.

* Gen. xxxii. 1, 2.; Ps. ciii. 21.; 1 Kings, xxii. 19.; Job, i. 6.

* Gen. xxii. 11.; Exod. xiv. 19.; Num. xx. 16.; Gen. xxi. 17.; Judg. xiii. 3.; 2 Kings, i. 3.; Ps. xxxiv. 7.; Judith, xiii. 20.

♦ 2 Sam. xxiv. 16.; 2 Kings, xix. 35.; Gen. xviii. 8.; Num. xxii. 31.; 1 Chron. xxi. 16.;

Gen. xix. 13.

• Calmet.