^ r. E. BruBsWll.
62 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
"He shall give His angels charge over Thee, To keep Tiiee in all Thy ways. They shall bear Thee up in their hands, Iiest Thou dash Thy foot against a stone."
1. We find here, therefore, the " Son of Man," man as God meant Him to be, the ideal man of the Psalms, standing in suggestive environment — between the savage animals on the one hand, and the holy angels on the other, freely recognised and served by both — " with the wild beasts," and at the same time " ministered unto by angels." It is to be noticed that this same strange and remarkable association of man with the higher and lower orders of beings had already appeared in the Psalms. The same Psalm (xci.) which promises, " He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways," goes on immediately to add, " Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder : the young lion and the serpent shalt thou trample under feet" (vers. 11-13). And very similarly in Ps. viii., "Thou hast made him [but] a little lower than the angels," is followed by " Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field" (vers. 5-7).
^ Thus, what in a special manner proved true of the Incarnate Son of Man is in a measure and in a certain sense true of every son of man in his degree. We all stand between the wild beasts and the holy angels. The angelic will not let us sink utterly to the brutal, nor the brutal let us soar altogether with the angelic. And so we are in a strait betwixt two. But these elements preponderate differently in different men.
Some, like beasts, their senses' pleasure take; And some, like augels, doe contemplate still. Therefore the fables turned some men to flowres, And others did with brutish formes inuest; And did of others make celestiall powers. Like angels, which still trauell, yet still rest.^
It may be true, says Dr. A. Smythe Palmer, that only by a slow development and evolution man passed out of the highest rank of animals into the lowest rank of humanity. It may be that sin is in some particulars a relic of heredity, an undestroyed residuum of his old animal stage — still, a spark of the Divine is glowing in him, the breath of God is stirring in him ; his progress is ever upwards towards the angels.
* Sir J. Davies, Noaee Teipnim.
ST. MARK 63
If my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat finer than their
own, I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice be
mute ? No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne, Hold the sceptre, Human Soul, and rule thy Province of the
brute.
I have climb'd to the snows of Age, and 1 gaze at a field in
the Past, Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a
low desire, But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet at
last As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a
height that is higher.^
The idea of angels is usually treated as fanciful. Imagin- ative it is, but not altogether fanciful ; and though the physical appearance and attributes of such imaginary beings may have been over-emphasised or misconceived, yet facts known to me indicate that we are not really lonely in our struggle, that our destiny is not left to haphazard, that there is no such thing as laissez /aire in a highly organised universe. Help may be rejected, but help is available ; a ministry of benevolence surrounds us — a cloud of witnesses — not witnesses only but helpers, agents like ourselves of the immanent God.
Hidden as they are to our present senses, poets can realise their presence in moments of insight, can become aware of their assistance in periods of dejection — dejection which else would be despair. So it has been with one and another of the band of poets who, stranded and unknown in a great city, have felt the sting of poverty ; to them at times have the heavens opened, the everyday surroundings have become transfigured, — as Cheapside was, in "Wordsworth's poem, at the song of the thnish, — and, to the vision of Francis Thompson, angels have ascended and descended in the very streets of London : —
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) Cry; — and upon thy sore loss Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.*
* Tennyson. ' Oliver Lodge, Reason and Belief, 43.
64 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
2. In what ways may their ministry be thought of ?
(1) They supplied His bodily wants. — The angels ministered to Christ ; they brought Him that which He needed. Perhaps the truth to be learned is that when the unlawful gratification of the desires of our nature is resisted, the lawful gratification is a Divine thing. We feel that Heaven is giving it to us to enjoy. Or perhaps the truth is, that when we resist unlawful pleasures, God compensates us by sending into our souls, through His heavenly messengers. Divine joys and a spiritual fulness. It is sweet to have resisted temptation ; the mind is filled with a heavenly satisfaction.