CHAPTER XV THE FEAST OF S. MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS "Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Thy glorious Name; evermore praising Thee and saying, HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, Lord God of Hosts, Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory; Glory be to Thee, O Lord Most High."-Order for the Holy Communion. Two of the most beautiful and most helpful festivals of the year come as "the sere and yellow leaf" begins to remind us of the end of all things, and of our own brief life on earth, namely, the feasts of S. Michael and All Angels, or Michaelmas, and All Saints. One tells us of that “innumerable company" "ordained and constituted" by God, not only to "do Him service in heaven," but "that they may succor and defend us on earth".2 The other speaks of the "great cloud of witnesses" 3 watching and waiting for us in Paradise; "the glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets, the noble army of Martyrs"; but especially on this day, those "whom we have loved, and lost awhile." Both days are important to recall us from our forgetfulness of "the things which are unseen" and yet alone are "eternal." "Persons," says Newman, "commonly speak as if the other world did not exist now, but would after death. No, it exists now, though we see it not. It is among us and around us. Jacob was shown this in his dream. Angels were all about him though he knew it not. And what Jacob saw in his sleep, that 1 Heb. xii. 22. • Collect for All Angels. Heb. xii. I Elisha's servant saw as if with his eyes; and the shepherds at the time of the Nativity not only saw but heard." 1 4 There are only two angels mentioned by name in the canonical Scriptures, namely Gabriel 2 and Michael.3 The special commemoration of S. Michael is due doubtless to the fact that he is named in Scripture as a "prince" or "archangel" among the holy inhabitants of heaven. It is a reminder to us that in heaven, as in the Church on earth, there must be many gradations as well as "many mansions.” Even there also "all members have not the same office." The angelic host, or "Sabaoth," has its unequal, vastly diverse personal intelligences. "It has its ranks, its degrees, its various celestial nationalities, so to speak. Daniel tells of 'princes' in the heavenly host, and Holy Scripture elsewhere gives us at least nine orders of the celestial hierarchy, angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, virtues, principalities, powers." 5 In "the books called Apocrypha" two other "princes" among the angels are mentioned by name; Raphael in Tobit viii. 2, and xii. 15, and Uriel in II. Esdras v. 20. The feast of S. Michael the Archangel has been observed in the Eastern Church for 1500 years at least. In the Western Church the day has been September 29th; in the East, November 8th. Practical Christians of to-day are apt to look upon such a commemoration as a pious sentiment fitted rather for imaginative women or childish men. But plainly 1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. iv. 2 Dan. viii. 16; ix. 21; S. Luke i. 19, 26. 4 Rom. xii. 4. 'Col. i. 16; Eph. i. 21; W. Gwynne, Some Purposes of Paradise, p. 55. our Lord did not so judge. In the prayer which He framed for all lips and for our daily use, He deliberately inserted one petition which directs our thought continually to those holy beings, and bids us pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven," that is, by the Angels. As a direct result of His own entrance into this world as Man, there is, He tells us, a great influx, not only of spiritual power, but of spiritual persons, as helpers in that mighty work which He came to do for men. "Ye shall see heaven open," He said to Nathanael, "and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."1 What the ladder was to Jacob in his night vision, Christ would have us know, the Son of Man who was also the Son of God is to us, a ladder connecting heaven and earth, a channel for the tender care and ministrations of angels. Before His coming such ministries were but fitful and infrequent. Not until Christ was born, and angels sang their Gloria in Excelsis over the fields of Bethlehem, not until they waited on Him in His Temptation, and comforted Him in His Agony, and watched at His Sepulchre, and worshipped Him at His Ascension, was that Way fully opened, and that Ladder set up in all its fulness from earth to heaven. No one can read the later books of the New Testament without seeing that all their writers considered the presence and ministration of angels, not as a devout poetical imagination, but as a sober actual fact in the every-day experience of every Christian. "We are come," exclaims one of these writers, "to an innumerable company of angels."2 "Are they not all ministering spirits," he asks, "sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs of salvation?” 3 "Angels came and ministered unto him" is doubtless the simple description of 3 Heb. i. 14. 1 S. John i. 51. 2 Heb. xii. 21. many an event, an assuaged sorrow or a conquered temptation, in our own lives, as it was in that of our Lord.1 The human heart left to its own devices, its sorrows or its struggles, would say "Give me back the spirits of my friends, my loved ones, my children, to be near me and to comfort me." It cries with Tennyson, "Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick -In Memoriam. It is the way That is the heart's unreasoning wish. of fanaticisms in every age, necromancy, and so-called spiritualism, and it is just that which Scripture frowns on and forbids. On the other hand, the promise of angelic messengers in the Bible is full and unreserved. No petition for that loving guardianship is too great for God's fulfilment. Other ages may have been in danger of thinking too much of these heavenly helpers; our danger is that of thinking too little, and therefore slighting and despising them "He shall give His angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways" is a promise of which we are all too forgetful, and for which All Angels' Day is the wholesome and most necessary reminder. It is of their ministry to us on earth that Edmund Spenser writes: "How oft do they their silver bowers leave, 1S. Matt. iv. II They for us fight, they watch and duly ward, And their bright squadrons round about us plant; O why should heavenly God to men have such regard?” It is related of Richard Hooker, the great defender of the Church's "polity," that his friend Dr. Saravia, finding him "deep in contemplation" during his last day on earth, asked him concerning his thoughts, to which Hooker replied, "That he was meditating the number and nature of angels, and their blessed obedience and order, without which, peace could not be in heaven; and oh that it might be so on earth." 1 1 |