Our angel friends in ministry and song

Front matter

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT

Author's Preface

Permit me to say that the work as a whole is in commemoration of an angel's visit to me when a youth. The message was this:— Preach! Preach! Preach!

At the angel's bidding, a promising business career was at once abandoned, and a life work in the ministry begun. Since then the study of Angels has been a work of love, and the bringing of this book to completion,— what a joy it has been!

And now:

I send this little volume forth Preened as an angel's wing, East and West and South and North A constant song to sing.

Untrobuctton

BY MAKGAKET E. 8ANGSTER

THE trend of our times is toward materialism. Commercial aggrandizement is the goal of the great nations. East and West, the mighty world powers watch each other, resolute to check the least advance that one or another may make, lest it somehow invade the rights or snatch the privileges which have to do with the acquisition of wealth. Communities, families, and individuals catch the contagion of the period. To he rich is to be envied. To increase in goods and lands and stocks and mines is to reach the ultimate end of most human ambition. The spiritual side of many a nature is hopelessly wrecked on the lee-shore of indifference and apathy, rather than of honest doubt, or open hostility, because people care so much for the mere material gains of existence, so little for the unseen and eternal realities.

Yet, the fashion of this world passeth away. In the midst of business, of competition, of almost savage struggles to* get on, death lays its chill arrest on men, and they are no more in the rush of this worrying age. They go to meet and face the world that has been around them from birth, of which they have thought little, about which they have had no concern.

The spiritual, the supernatural, the intangible, is around us as we walk our earthly ways, just as it was around our predecessors on the globe when the earth was new. Angels still come hither on God's errands. Angels hover over the cradle and stand sentinel- wise over the child whom God loves, and are with men

INTRODUCTION and women in the strife with temptation, or the hour of great anguish and deep distress. " Angels ever bright and fair" may form an unseen background for our happiest occasions. An angel stern and shadowy, yet with love in his heart, comes to emancipate the soul and lead it from the body's prison, to the freedom of the city that lies foursquare on the banks of the river of life.

It is well that we should sometimes pause amid earth's bustling activities and hear the silver trumpet call from the heavenly heights. It is well that we should listen, if haply in our homes we may hear some soft rustle of angelic wings, some gentle murmur of angelic tones.

In the book which Mr. Fowler has compiled with great pains and loving ardor from sources ancient and modem, he has gathered up the records of poetry and symbolism and art in which allusion is reverentially made to the ministry of angels. One may read these pages and be wafted in spirit to the better land where

' ' The gardens and the gallant walks Continually are green."

Faint yet thrilling echoes of the melody evermore surging around the throne are here. To study as Mr. Fowler has, the ministry of the angels, is to be impressed with the glory and beauty of the other world, and to feel in deeper earnestness that there lies about us " a world we do not see, ' ' though ' ' the sweet closing of an eye may bring us there to be. ' '

Glancing through this book, one is pleased to observe its catholicity. Gleaning from a wide range of literature, the aim has been to exclude nothing appropriate to the theme in hand, and to include whatever, from any author or volume attainable, has a bearing on the subject. The result is a Thesaurus of the angels, of what devout souls have felt, and devout pens have written

INTRODUCTION about them ; and the effect of the whole work is bracing, tonic, and exceedingly helpful.

If there are those who approach the subject here illuminated with curiosity or patronage, regarding it as' belonging to the realm of fairy lore or mythology, they will speedily become aware that their point of view is indefensible. The whole fabric of this and kindred books is founded on Scripture, on the revelations of the apostles and prophets, on the testimony of our blessed Lord Himself, to Whom in every . crisis of this amazing life, angels came in swift and gentle ministry. The litanies of the angels are composed in heaven. What we know about angels we learn in the Word of God. Hence a book like this may lie on the shelf with our Bibles and be the companion of our silent hours when we enter into our closet and shut the door.

I am happy in giving this volume my word of commendation as it starts on its way.

Untrobuction.

BY CHANCELLOR BUR WASH, S. T. D.

I N ALL ages of the Christian Church the Angels have formed * a subject of interesting and poetic thought. In the Old Testament they had their place as the messengers of Divine acts both of mercy and of judgment. The same faith passed into the New Testament and appears in the Gospels, the Acts and especially in the Book of Revelation. The faith thus presented has in it nothing of wild or erratic speculation. It is a simple and sober presentation of a link of mediation between God and human history.

The reverent mystery which everywhere surrounds the language of Scripture when speaking of God is maintained here; and scarcely the outline of a material likeness is drawn. The presentation is one of relationship, spiritual and ethical in its character, always solemn and earnest as becomes a true religious faith, often full of holy gladness, sometimes full of awful terror, but always suggesting to our thoughts the highest ethical ideals and religious spirit of worship.

It is not surprising that the Christian poet should find in this part of the Bible an exceedingly fertile field. Philosophy seeks for truth in exact definition and logical demonstration. Science seeks for causal forces and their laws of operation. But it is the glory of the poet to express the truth which is but dimly shadowed forth in Nature and in history, and where he cannot express the full truth itself, so half revealed yet half concealed, at least to give utterance to the deep emotion by which our nature attests its kinship with the Unseen Author of all truth.

12 INTRODUCTION.

To science and philosophy mystery is abhorrent. Not so to that intuitive feeling after mysterious truth which forms the inspiration of the past. It rejoices with trembling in the presence of mystery and waits not for definition or demonstration to open its purblind eyes to all God-given light. Out of its emotion, by the help of a chastened and reverent imagination, it fashions an expression for the dimly apprehended truth, and in symbolic language expresses what as yet it cannot fully understand. Thus has it pictured heaven. Thus has it described the angels. Gathering np the scattered allusions of Scripture, it has placed before us a countless army of Divine messengers. It has linked them with birth and death, with the mysterious guidance of the pathway of human life, with our joys and our sorrows, our conflicts and our victories, till they seem to us a part of our family,, the friendly partners of our daily life.

Nor has this been the favorite field of the poet alone. The artist on the canvas and in marble has been equally prolific in the creation of forms of expression which have linked in with the idea of the angel almost every phase of moral and religious truth and all the highest ideals of moral and religious character.

There has thus grown up through the Christian centuries not so much a doctrine as an ideal of the ministry of angels. It would be doubtless a great mistake to crystallize this into hard dogma. Even many, if not most, of the Scriptural expressions themselves were never designed as material for rigid dogmatic definition. But they all enable us to hold fast to a dimly revealed truth ; and they keep alive a right feeling in the hearts of men. They build up within us the true, the beautiful and the good.

It is thus no matter of surprise that the preacher as well as the poet and the artist has entered this same field, and gathering up the material which these have created for him has used it as a powerful means for his peculiar work, the demonstration of all

Introduction

truth to religious faith. Nor do we wonder that what has thus been set forth before the Christian world by poet's pen and artist's brush and sculptor's chisel and orator's tongue has entered deeply into all our life, bringing a bright and beneficent, if mysterious, influence into all its darkness and pain and hardness, and shedding a new radiance around its brightness and joy.

Mr. Fowler 's collection of the gems of Christian thought and art on this subject will, I am sure, find a sympathetic reception from all Christian souls, and will aid not a* little to bring the blessedness of Christian faith to heighten the joys and soothe the sorrows of human life.

Zo /I&otber

ARCHANGEL GABRIEL EXPELLING ADAM AND EVE PROM PARADISE