make of it, let us direct our inquiries. And (1) we may briefly advert to the clearness of the testimony borne to their existence. The name "angels" means messengers. And, by angels, we do not understand celestial beings generally-the occupants of all other places of the dominions of God where sin is not-but intelligent beings employed by God as His servants in conducting His government in this world, and who are spoken of as associated with us in a close community of interests and a fellowship of destiny. There are some parts of revelation in regard to which we may hesitate as to whether we should interpret them literally or not. Desirous of bowing to the authority of the record, we stand in doubt as to its import. But there seems to be no place at all for such hesitancy in respect to the being of angels. The evidence, both direct and incidental, is too plain and decisive to leave room for disputation. It is, indeed, true that the term is sometimes applied to things inanimate, for God makes the winds His messengers and the flames His servants. There may also be good reason for doubting, in certain cases, whether an intelligent or a merely material agency be intended by the word angel or messenger, as when it is said the angel of the Lord went forth in the night and smote the host of Assyria. Some have thought that the messenger of the Divine justice was none other than the simoom or pestilential wind of the desert; though, probably, if an angel had not been employed as directly executing vengeance, or at least as controlling for the time being the fatal night-blast, a different phraseology would have been used in the narrative. But be this as it may, when we are told in the narrative of Luke that an angel of the Lord appeared to Peter in the prison, smote him, raised him up, spoke to him, led the way out of the prison, accompanied him the distance of one street and then departed from him, there is no escape from the conclusion that the record does bear the most explicit testimony to the presence and ministry of the angel. Equally in point is the manner in which the great Teacher, who came down from heaven, spoke of its angelic inhabitants. We cannot, surely, read His words and escape the conviction that He is not speaking in similitudes, but of beings really existing. "Of that day knoweth no man, no, not the angels in heaven." "Could I not pray, and there should be given Me more than twelve legions of angels?" "Him that confesseth Me, I will confess before the angels of God." In a manner thus simple and direct, and with great frequency, was our Lord

accustomed to refer to those holy servants of God. Nor is the indirect evidence less conclusive. "In heaven they do not marry, but are like the angels of God"-a declaration not to be explained on any other supposition than the real existence of angels. So, too, the argument carried out at some considerable length at the commencement of the Epistle to the Hebrews rests entirely on the same supposition.

It may have seemed needless to advert, even in these few sentences, to a point so indisputable as the testimony of Scripture to the existence of angels. The object was not so much the removal of doubt, as the confirmation of a truth which we do not call in question, but greatly fail to apprehend; a truth which rather floats in the mind as a beautiful vision of the imagination, than abides there as a substantial reality and a powerful motive to fidelity and diligence in the service of God. It is a part of the word of Christ which is to dwell in us richly in all spiritual understanding, that there are holy angels who fear God and love us.

(2) The number of the angels is great. There is no plain testimony, I believe, to this fact in the early portions of the Bible. Jacob, indeed, saw in vision a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, and the angels of God ascending and descending; which vision, however, would not necessarily involve the idea of the presence of a multitude of angels. The angelic ministry of early times (at least as far as it was then explained) would seem to have been usually limited to the agency of one or two, commonly of one. They were not sent like the apostles, two and two. They needed not to be thus sustained in their work; one was competent to the fulfilment of his mission, and one was sent. Yet there are not wanting some intimations of very early date of the multitude of the angelic host. Thus, in the ancient Book of Job, the patriarch was asked by the voice Divine, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"-an inquiry commonly and most reasonably thought to refer to the gladness of angels at the era of the Adamic creation, and caused by that event. So Enoch, we are told, prophesied that the Lord was coming with "ten thousands of His saints [that is, His holy ones] to execute judgment "a prophecy which probably related to the Deluge, and seems to have contained an allusion to the participation of angels in that deed of justice, as we are assured they are to participate in the final judgment. When the law was given, it was by the disposition

of angels (Deut. xxxiii. 2). David sang of the chariots of God as being "twenty thousand, even thousands of angels: the Lord being among them, as in Sinai." Certainly in the days of David the words that have been quoted show that it was known to the Israelites that a multitude of holy angels were present and took their part in the grand transaction, the proclamation of the law. "Thousand thousands," said the prophet Daniel, "ministered unto Him." And to these references we might add not a few from the New Testament, such as the mention by our Lord of twelve legions which He could have readily summoned to His aid; the innumerable company spoken of in the Epistle to the Hebrews; and several others of similar import in the Book of Revelation-" the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the beasts, and the elders; and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands." Unquestionably these representations, without teaching us anything definite as to the exact number of the sinless hosts of heaven, are adapted and intended to teach us that the number of angels is great. Well, indeed, do they sustain the conception of the poet: "All

The multitude of angels, with a shout,

Loud as from numbers without number, sweet

As from blest voices, uttering joy, heaven rung
With jubilee, and loud hosannas fill’d
The eternal regions."

(3) Let us mention some of the attributes of angels of which the Bible informs us. They are holy, spiritual, swift, strong, wise, happy. Holy. Christ Himself calls them so. "The Son of Man shall come, and all His holy angels with Him." And we are justified in inferring that this holiness has not, as in the case of the spirits of just men, been lost and restored, but has belonged to them from the commencement of their being until now. We are justified in inferring this, not only from the general tenor of Scripture, but also from passages in which wicked spirits are spoken of as not having kept their first estate, and as the angels that sinned, implying that other angels have not sinned, but have kept their primeval state of uprightness. That angels have undergone some test of their obedience and lived through a time of probation, would appear to us to be an essential condition of their creation; but, whatever the trial, they stood fast in their obedience; in reference to which they are called the elect angels. Habits of virtue

and obedience and love are perfected by exercise, as are habits of evil; and we can easily conceive of holy beings being in this way so wedded to all that is good as that their perseverance in it becomes a moral certainty, and may be pronounced by the All-wise Being an actual certainty. There is a fatalism in iniquity. That awful truth the Bible proclaims when it tells of some whom it is impossible to renew again to repentance. There is also a fatalism in virtue, by which holy beings are to rise towards, though never positively to attain to, the necessary excellence of the Divine nature "of God who cannot lie." On the whole, we think of angels, not only as having never been polluted by the stain of transgression, but as having, by their own experience and by the revelation of God in various ways, especially in Christ, risen to a state of perfect security and made their election sure.

Again, angels are spiritual. We use this word without pretending to be able to explain its meaning otherwise than relatively. We are conversant with matter in many of its forms-in the ponderous form of the granite rock, in the delicate substance of the insect's wing, in the yet more subtle shapes which it assumes in its gaseous existence; nay, more, man investigates it in the mystic and flitting form of electricity. Not that he knows much more, or indeed any more, of the thing itself-matter-than he does of spirit; but we come into contact with it at many points, that is, through the medium of all our senses, while for our knowledge of spirit we are indebted to the one evidence of consciousness; and certainly man feels his ignorance much more in the latter case than in the former. The term used to designate spirit was the same as that employed to designate the wind, the wind being the most subtle element which the ancients knew. When we speak also of angels as spirits, we mean that they are not ponderous and allied like us to the millstone which sinks in the flood, but by their very constitution refined, ethereal, resembling (for we must resort to comparison) those modes of material being in which our senses with the greatest difficulty take cognizance of it.

The proof that they are so is supplied by many instances of their manifestation to men. Very much in point is the appearance, already mentioned, to Peter when in prison, and in the second ward of the prison. The prison opened into the street by an iron gate. The angel enters, the gate being closed, and, when his commission to serve

was executed, passes away again forthwith to that sphere of spiritual existence of which the Scriptures continually speak. At the birth of Christ an angel is present to the shepherds, or, to adopt the expression of the Evangelist, "An angel came upon them." It was a sudden appearance-an apparition. And not less so the subsequent appearance of the hymning multitude who raised the song, "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, good will to men." It were useless to multiply references in point, but let us aim to lay hold of the glorious truth that there are in existence, and connected with us, creatures, living, moving, acting, thinking, and all-benevolent, impalpable to sense, but revealed to faith, whom, should they be at our right hand, as often, probably, they have been, we should neither see, nor hear, nor feel-creatures the perfection of whose being shields them from the apprehension of our imperfect senses.

Being spiritual, angels are fleet in their movements. Ponderous matter is moved with difficulty, and slowly; but when it assumes its lighter forms, how speedy its flight! Air, electricity, light, how swiftly do they fly! While man is but slightly distinguished from the more cumbrous forms of living matter which "drag their slow length along," not such is the imperfection of angelic beings. We walk or creep, they fly; what is distant to us, to them is near; what is speed to us, to them is very sluggishness. Daniel prayed. At the commencement of his prayer the angel Gabriel received a commission and flew to execute it, tasking to the utmost, as the record teaches us, his swift pinions, and about the time of the evening sacrifice he stood as a comforter before the humbled prophet.

Angels are not only swift, but strong. Speed and strength are to a great extent disunited among the creatures of earth. Beyond a very limited measure, the one is not to be augmented without the diminution of the other. In angelic existence both attributes are conjoined. The swift-winged messengers of the Divine justice or goodness are also great in might; they excel in strength. The Saviour of men, having been crucified, was buried; the place of His interment was an excavation in the rock; a great stone closed up the entrance to the tomb; the angel descends; the stone is rolled back. No trace of mighty exertion marks his bright visage nor his snowy vesture. What were the seal, the stone, the guards, to him whose approach had been heralded by an earthquake? Daniel was cast into the den of lions, but the angel of God was there, and the lion was powerless