The teeming air and prodigal. Which droops its azure over all, Is full of immortalities That look on us with unseen eyes.*
(1) When we speak of our unseen spiritual helpers we go with timid feet, not sure of the ground we walk on and yet sure that there is ground, and irresistibly impelled to feel for it and find it. We cannot separate ourselves from the great human conviction that beside the supreme personal life of God, which is the source of all existence, there are other spiritual beings, of many varying orders, who do His will, who help His children, and are the emanations of His life in other worlds, as man is here in this grosser world of flesh and blood. The Divine existence multiplies itself. The company of spiritual beings who surround Him with their loyalty and love, the angels in countless orders sweeping upward, from the ministers of man's lower wants up to those who stand nearest to the throne — all these in some behef ' Tennyson, The Ancient Sage. ' Philip P. Cooke,
484 THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE
or other have been included in the faith of every race of men, of almost every man, who has come to the knowledge of a spiritual world and trusted in a God.
^ There is nothing clearer or more striking in the Bible than the calm, familiar way with which, from end to end, it assumes the present existence of a world of spiritual beings always close to and acting on this world of flesh and blood. It does not belong to any one part of the Bible. It runs throughout its whole vast range. From creation to judgment, the spiritual beings are for ever present. They act as truly in the drama as the men and women who with their unmistakable humanity walk the sacred stage in the successive scenes. There is nothing of hesitation about the Bible's treatment of the spiritual world. There is no reserve, no vagueness which would leave a chance for the whole system to be explained away into dreams and metaphors. The spiritual world with all its multitudinous existence is just as real as the crowded cities, and the fragrant fields and the loud battle- grounds of the visible and palpable Judea in which the writers of the sacred books were living. You take away the unseen world with all its unseen actors from the story, and you have not merely made the Bible like other books, you have set it below other books ; for you have taken the colour out of all its life, the motive out of all its action.^
It lies around us like a cloud, —
A world we do not see; Yet the sweet closing of an eye
May bring us there to be.
Its gentle breezes fan our cheek ;
Amid our worldly cares, Its gentle voices whisper love,
And mingle with our prayers.
Sweet hearts around us throb and beat,
Sweet helping hands are stirred. And palpitates the veil between
With breathings almost heard.
The silence, awful, sweet, and calm.
They have no power to break; For mortal words are not for them
To utter or partake.
* Phillips Brooks.
2 KINGS VI. 17 485
So thin, so soft, so sweet, they gHde,
So near to press they seem, They lull us gently to our rest,
And melt into our dream.
And in the hush of rest they bring
'Tis easy now to see How lovely and how sweet a pass
The hour of death may be; —
To close the eye and close the ear,
Wrapped in a trance of bliss, And gently dream in loving arms.
To swoon to that — from this, —
Scarce knowing if we wake or sleep,
Scarce asking where we are. To feel all evil sink away,
All sorrow and all care.
Sweet souls around us ! watch us still ;
Press nearer .to our side ; Into our thoughts, into our prayers,
With gentle helpings glide.
Let death between us be as naught,
A dried and vanished stream: Your joy be the reality.
Our suffering life the dream.^
(2) But the Bible goes farther. It not merely believes in and everywhere assumes the existence of spiritual beings ; it also believes that to certain conditions, even of our fleshly humanity, these beings become visible. There is an opening of the eyes that lets us see what is going on in this finer purer region round about us all the time. Is not this the idea of life that the Bible gives us, as if we were blind men walking in the midst of a great city, hearing its noise, feehng its jostling, and now and then in some peculiar moments of our life opening our eyes, catching one sudden flash of the movement that is going on around us and then shutting them again and taking the moment's sight back with us into the darkness, to ponder over and too ^ Harriet Beeclier Stowo.
486 THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE
often, by and by, to come to doubt whether we really saw it ? So here and there an eye is opened ; and to that keener sense it is recorded that spiritual beings made themselves visible, as if it were no stranger a thing than for the opened eye of the flesh to see the sparkling splendour of the Temple and the Mount of Olives and the high priest walking down the street, and all the familiar scenery of Jerusalem. The Hebrew maiden goes about her pure and simple life in Nazareth, and she opens her eyes and sees the messenger who hails her as the highly favoured of her Lord ; the shepherds are watching in the fields, and suddenly they see the angels as truly and as clearly as they see the stars. The women go to the sepulchre, and there sit the ministers beside the place where Jesus lay. St. Paul rides towards Damascus, and lo ! he has fallen from his horse and hears a voice which is intelligible to him alone. What shall we say ? There is no doubt of what the Bible teaches, and it is what the human heart, taught by God through its own deepest instincts, has always guessed at and believed — that this world of fleshly life is not all, that everywhere there is a realm of spiritual life close to us, and that there is an inner sense to which, when it is awakened, these spiritual beings have often been actually visible and have given words of cheer and guidance and encouragement to toiling and discouraged men.