consecrated virgin-mother, the birth of the long expected Messiah, as well as his nativity to the shepherds, who were peacefully attending their flocks--and also probably pointed out the phenomenon of a particular star, which directed the Magi to the manger which cradled the infant Christ, at Bethlehem—it was an angel that warned Joseph, in a dream, to retire, with the holy family, into Egypt, and escape the barbarous stratagem of Herod-they were angels who attended upon our Saviour after his temptation in the wilderness; and an angel descended from heaven to administer to his agony in the sorrowful garden of Olives; and after his resurrection, angels appeared to the holy women who came to the consecrated tomb to embalm his body-angels were seen by the apostles after the Resurrection of the ascended Saviour―the angel of the Lord delivered the apostles from their prisons-the law was given to Moses by the ministration of angels; but without extending the enumeration, evidential of their real existence and diverse operations as revealed in the Scriptures, we will only add, that the belief of this attractive doctrine has obtained amongst the Mahometans, Greeks, Romans, and other nations of the earth,--under every imaginable form, use, and worship, in strict correspondence with the respective systems of their senseless idolatry, the theories of their pseudo-philosophy, and the delusions of their debasing superstitions.

We have now reached a point in our reflections, from which we shall not deem it expedient to venture into the imaginative and hazardous regions of abstract speculations, and which has provoked the curiosity, taxed the ingenuity, and exercised the girded efforts of the loftiest intellects, whether in the character of the philosopher, the metaphysician, the moralist, or the theologian; and therefore, it behooves us to observe the utmost Christian circumspection while treating

of the supposed constitution of angelical natures, in reference either to the immateriality or corporeity of their subsistence, the mode of their intercourse with, or those vehicles. of communication in which they have appeared to the apostate inhabitants of this sublunary planet, lest in the daring excursion beyond the precincts of biblical ethics and Scriptural information, we incur the analogical penalty of that reiterated interdict which guarded the sanctified Mount, upon the delivery and enactment of the Decalogue, from the unhallowed gaze and forbidden intrusion of the children of Israel, as it trembled amidst the thunder and lightnings, the smoking cloud and reverberating voice of the trumpet waxing louder and louder, increasing the terrific solemnity of the distant and august scenery which glorified the sacred and awful summit of Sinai!

A very brief survey, then, of the opinions which have. been entertained on this difficult subject will be sufficient; as any ineffective attempt at critical inquiries on so abstruse a matter would be alike vain, dissatisfactory and unprofitable.

The ancient philosophers, including the peripatetics of the Grecian schools, considered that angels or demons (for these appellatives were employed synonymously) were composed of two qualities, corporeal and incorporeal, corresponding to the body and soul of man; the only difference being, that the souls of angels never descended into such gross and terrestrial bodies as the human, and are invariably invested with acrial or fiery substances; classifying their genii into demons, angels and heroes, of which distinction, those were esteemed angels whose appropriate sphere was placed nearest to the heavens: others, giving them also, a double substanceigneous and ethereal-slightly varying in their representations, viz., that by their empyreal essence they were enabled

to contemplate God, but by their material element they became visible to men.

The fathers of the church supposed angels to be possessed of subtle, ethereal, and aerial bodies, making this difference between good and evil angels, to wit, the former being clothed with a radiant splendor, and the latter with a dark fuliginous obscurity--the good angels being constituted of transcendently refined substances which always accompanied their development to mortal vision, and which they believe was only the phlogistic or ethereal essence belonging to their nature.*

The specific nature of angels, whether pure spirits divested of all corporeal vehicles, has been a controversy of long standing, not only among the ancient philosophers, but of the Christian fathers; whilst Divine Revelation has maintained an admonitory silence upon this mysterious theme of human investigation. The nature of angels is expressed in the Scriptures by the epithet "spirit." They are of a spiritual nature, not compounded of parts as bodies are,

* Angelical bodies send forth rays and splendors such as would dazzle mortal eyes, and cannot be borne by them; but the demoniac body, though it seemeth to have been such once (from Isaias calling him, that fell from heaven, Lucifer), yet it is now dark and obscure, foul and squalid, and grievous to behold, it being deprived of its cognate light and beauty. Again, the angelical body is so devoid of gross matter that it can pass through any solid thing, it being indeed more impassible than the sunbeams; for though these can permeate pellucid bodies, yet are they hindered by earthy and opaque substances by which they are refracted; whereas the angelical body is such, as that there is nothing that can resist or exclude it.—CUDWORTH, Intellectual System.

The angels are not subject to any change, saith St. Bazil, for amongst them there is neither child, young man nor old; but in the same state in which they were created in the beginning, in that they everlastingly remain; the substance of their proper nature being permanent in simplicity and immutability. By nature angels were created mutable, but by contem plation immutable.—HEYWOOD, Hierarchie.

and yet they are not simple and uncompounded as God is, who is a spirit.

To the human mind it is difficult to entertain a proper perception of a spirit. Even in our endeavors to impart our individual and inadequate conceptions of the varied operations of Deity, we are confined to the imperfect medium of anthropological expressions; whilst the apostle Paul, in his striking illustrations of the doctrine of the resurrection, drawn from the analogies of the material world, makes the distinction of terrestrial and celestial bodies:-There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body. "From angels being called spirits, it is not necessary to conclude that they have no body, nor material frame at all; to be entirely immaterial, is probably peculiar to the Father of spirits, to whom we cannot attribute a body without impiety, and involving ourselves in absurdities. When the term spirit is employed to denote the angelical nature, it is most natural. to take it in a lower sense, to denote their exemption from those gross and earthly bodies which the inhabitants of this world possess. Their bodies are spiritual bodies, "for there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body;" the latter of which the righteous are to receive at the resurrection, who are to be made equal to the angels.

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Whether there is in the universe any being purely spiritual, and perfectly detached from matter, except the Great Supreme, is a question, perhaps, not easy to solve, nor is the solution of it at all essential to our present inquiry. 'God is a spirit,' and we cannot conceive of any portion or modification of matter, as entering into his essence without being betrayed into contradiction and absurdity. In regard to every other class of being, it is conjectured, that the thinking principle is united to some corporeal vehicle through which it derives its perceptions, and by which it operates;

while perfect spirituality, utterly separate from matter in any possible state, is the exclusive attribute of the Deity. When angels are spoken of as spirits, this mode of expression may possibly denote no more, than that the material vehicle with which they are united, is of a nature highly subtle and refined, at a great remove from flesh and blood which compose the bodily frame. Who will presume to set limits to creative power in the organization of matter, or affirm that it is not, in the hand of its Author, susceptible of a refinement which shall completely exclude it from the notice of the senses? He who compares the subtlety and velocity of light with grosser substances, which are found in the material system, will be reluctant to assign any bounds. to the possible modification of matter, much more affirm there can be none beyond the comprehension of our corporeal organs."*

But if in physics there are unfathomable depths, is it not reasonable to expect that in the obscure regions of ontological investigations—in that science particularly conversant with God and spiritual essences, that we shall be stopped, at almost every step, by phenomena beyond our comprehension? "It is childish," remarks John Foster, "to babble about the "impossibilities of religion," until we understand the entire scheme of the intellectual and physical world—until we can explain who we are, whence we are, and wherefore we are. Until we know what laws govern the elements, mould them into sentient forms, and again after a season, dissolve those warm and beautiful structures, and give their dust to the wind. Until we can decide the nature of that mysterious principle which we term life, discover how in some it becomes a fountain of motion, in others, of passion, intellectuality, and all those marvellous phenomena which we ob

* Robert Hall.