and exalt the banner of the Cross in the day of judgment; and to him likewise was assigned the reception of the immortal spirits when released by death. It was his task to weigh them in a balance (Dan. v. 27; Ps. lxii. 9): those whose good works exceeded their demerits, he presented before the throne of God; but those who were found wanting he gave up to be tortured in purgatory, until their souls, from being ‘as crimson, should become as white as snow.’ Therefore, in the hour of death, he is to be invoked by the faithful, saying, ‘_O Michael, militiæ cœlestis signifer, in adjutorium nostrum veni, princeps et propugnator!_’ Lastly, when it pleased the Almighty to select from among the nations of the earth one people to become peculiarly his own, He appointed St. Michael to be president and leader over that chosen people.[64] ‘At that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people’ (Dan. x. 13, xii. 1): and when the power of the Synagogue was supposed to cease, and to be replaced by the power of the Church, so that the Christians became the people of God, then Michael, who had been the great prince of the Hebrew people, became the prince and leader of the Church militant in Christendom, and the guardian of redeemed souls, against his old adversary the Prince of Hell. (Rev. xii. 6, 7.) The worship paid to St. Michael, and which originated in the far East, is supposed to have been adopted by the Oriental Christians in consequence of a famous apparition of the Archangel at Colossæ, in Phrygia, which caused him to be held in especial honour by the people of that city, and perhaps occasioned the particular warning of St. Paul addressed to the Colossians. But although the worship of angels was considered among the heresies of the early Church, we find Constantine no sooner master of the empire, and a baptized Christian, than he dedicates a church to the Archangel Michael (by his Greek name Michaëlion), and this church, one of the most magnificent in Constantinople, became renowned for its miracles, and the parent and model of hundreds more throughout the East. In the West, the honours paid to St. Michael are of later date: that a church dedicated to him must have existed in Rome long before the year 500 seems clear, because at that time it is mentioned as having fallen into ruin. But the West had its angelic apparitions as well as the East, and St. Michael owes his wide-spread popularity in the middle ages to three famous visions which are thus recorded.