The Jews held this Word, or Angel of the Lord, to be the future Messiah, as appears from the writings of their older rabbins. So that he appears as the Jehovah of all the three dispensations, and yet is invariably described as a separate person from the unseen Jehovah who sends him. He was then the Word to be made flesh, and to dwell for a time among us, to open the way to God by his sacrifice, and to rescue the race, whose nature he should assume, from sin and death. This he has now actually effected; and the Patriarchal, Mosaic, and Christian religions are thus founded upon the same great principles,--the fall and misery of mankind, and their deliverance by a _Divine Redeemer_. ANGELICS, worshippers of angels. Those who consider this as a sect of the Apostolic age, think St. Paul, Coloss. ii, 18, cautions Christians against a superstitious reverence of these celestial agents of the Deity, which they conceive to have been borrowed from the idolatrous reverence paid by the Heathen to genii and demons. The Jews of that time are also accused of worshipping angels, and probably this superstition might through them influence the Judaizing members of some of the Apostolic churches. This idolatry may now be too justly charged upon the Romish and some other corrupt churches. ANGER, a resentful emotion of the mind, arising upon the receipt, or supposed receipt, of an affront or injury; and also simple feeling of strong displacency at that which is in itself evil, or base, or injurious to others. In the latter sense it is not only innocent but commendable. Strong displeasure against evil doers, provided it be free from hatred and malice, and interferes not with a just placableness, is also blameless, Eph. iv, 26. When it is vindictive against the person of our neighbour, or against the innocent creatures of God, it is wicked, Matt. v, 22. When anger, hatred, wrath, and fury, are ascribed to God, they denote no tumultuous passion, but merely his holy and just displeasure with sin and sinners; and the evidence of it in his terrible threatenings, or righteous judgments, Psalm vi, 1, and vii, 11. We must, however, take care that we refine not too much. These are Scriptural terms, and are often used of God; and though they express not a tumultuous, much less an unjust, passion, there is something in God which answers to them. In him they are _principles_ arising out of his holy and just nature; and for this reason they are more steady and uniform, and more terrible, than if they were emotions, or as we say passions. Nor can we rightly regard the severity of the judgments which God has so often executed upon sin without standing in awe of him, “as a consuming fire” to the ungodly.