It can easily be understood how a religion, which was above all a religion of revelation, should accept such popular conceptions in its constant record of the appearance of God and His Word in human life. Accordingly, in the earliest documents of the Hebrews, we find angels who bring to Israel the blessings, curses and commands of Jehovah.[890] Apart from this duty and their human appearance, these beings are not conceived to be endowed either with character or, if we may judge by their namelessness,[891] with individuality. They are the Word of God personified. Acting as God’s mouthpiece, they are merged in Him, and so completely that they often speak of themselves by the Divine _I_.[892] “The _function_ of an Angel so overshadows his _personality_ that the Old Testament does not ask who or what this Angel is, but what he does. And the answer to the last question is, that he represents God to man so directly and fully that when he speaks or acts God Himself is felt to speak or act.”[893] Besides the carriage of the Divine Word, angels bring back to their Lord report of all that happens: kings are said, in popular language, to be _as wise as the wisdom of an angel of God, to know all the things that are in the earth_.[894] They are also employed in the deliverance and discipline of His people.[895] By them come the pestilence,[896] and the restraint of those who set themselves against God’s will.[897] Now the prophets before the Exile had so spiritual a conception of God, worked so immediately from His presence, and above all were so convinced of His personal and practical interest in the affairs of His people, that they felt no room for Angels between Him and their hearts, and they do not employ Angels, except when Isaiah in his inaugural vision penetrates to the heavenly palace and court of the Most High.[898] Even when Amos sees a plummet laid to the walls of Jerusalem, it is by the hands of Jehovah Himself,[899] and we have not encountered an Angel in the mediation of the Word to any of the prophets whom we have already studied. But Angels reappear, though not under the name, in the visions of Ezekiel, the first prophet of the Exile. They are in human form, and he calls them _Men_. Some execute God’s wrath upon Jerusalem,[900] and one, whose appearance is as the appearance of brass, acts as the interpreter of God’s will to the prophet, and instructs him in the details of the building of City and Temple.[901] When the glory of Jehovah appears and Jehovah Himself speaks to the prophet out of the Temple, this _Man_ stands by the prophet,[902] distinct from the Deity, and afterwards continues his work of explanation. “Therefore,” as Dr. Davidson remarks, “it is not the sense of distance to which God is removed that causes Ezekiel to create these intermediaries.” The necessity for them rather arises from the same natural feeling, which we have suggested as giving rise to the earliest conceptions of Angels: the unwillingness, namely, to engage