‘I can just remember,’ says a theologian of the last century, ‘when the women first taught me to say my prayers, I used to have an idea of a venerable old man, of a composed, benign countenance, with his own hair, clad in a morning gown of a grave-coloured flowered damask, sitting in an elbow-chair.’ And he proceeds to say that, in looking back to these beginnings, he is in no way disturbed at the grossness of his infant theology. The image thus shaped by the imagination of the child was, in truth, merely one example of the various forms and conceptions fitted to divers states and seasons, and orders and degrees, of the religious mind, whether infant or adult, which represent the several approximations such minds at such seasons can respectively make to the completeness of faith. These imperfect ideas should be held to be reconciled and comprehended in that completeness, not rejected by it; and the nearest approximation which the greatest of human minds can accomplish is surely to be regarded as much nearer to the imperfection of an infantine notion than to the fulness of truth. The gown of flowered damask and the elbow-chair may disappear; the anthropomorphism of childhood may give place to the divine incarnation of the Second Person in after-years; and we may come to conceive of the Deity as Milton did when his epithets were most abstract:— ‘So spake the SOVRAN PRESENCE.’ But after all, these are but different grades of imperfection in the forms of doctrinal faith; and if there be a devouter love on the part of the child for what is pictured in his imagination as a venerable old man, than in the philosophic poet for the ‘Sovran Presence,’ the child’s faith has more of the efficacy of religious truth in it than the poet’s and philosopher’s. (_Vide_ ‘Notes on Life,’ by HENRY TAYLOR, p. 136.) [Illustration: 3 Gloria in excelsis Deo!] Of Angels and Archangels. I. THE ANGELS. There is something so very attractive and poetical, as well as soothing to our helpless finite nature, in all the superstitions connected with the popular notion of Angels, that we cannot wonder at their prevalence in the early ages of the world. Those nations who acknowledged one Almighty Creator, and repudiated with horror the idea of a plurality of Gods, were the most willing to accept, the most enthusiastic in accepting, these objects of an intermediate homage; and gladly placed between their humanity and the awful supremacy of an unseen God, the ministering spirits who were the agents of his will, the witnesses of his glory, the partakers of his bliss, and who in their preternatural attributes of love and knowledge filled up that vast space in the created universe which intervened between mortal man and the infinite, omnipotent LORD OF ALL.