Excerpt from Our Angel Friends in Ministry and Song: A Gift Book for Every Day in the Year

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 pres ence 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 wha't as yet it cannot fully understand. Thus has it pictured heaven. Thus has it described the angels. Gathering up 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.

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