I never could satisfy myself as to the continuance and catholicity of this strange Egyptian tenet in the very face of St. Paul's indignant, 'Thou fool! not that, &c.' I have at times almost been tempted to conjecture that Paul taught a different doctrine from the Palestine disciples on this point, and that the Church preferred the sensuous and therefore more popular belief of the Evangelists' [Greek: katà sárka] to the more intelligible faith of the spiritual sage of the other Athens; for so Tarsus was called. And was there no symptom of a commencing relapse to the errors of that Church which had equalled the traditions of men, yea, the dreams of phantasts with the revelations of God, when a chosen elder with the law of truth before him, and professing to divide and distribute the bread of life, could, paragraph after paragraph, place such unwholesome vanities as these before his flock, without even a hint which might apprize them that the gew-gaw comfits were not part of the manna from heaven? All this superstitious trash about angels, which the Jews learned from the Persian legends, asserted as confidently as if Hacket had translated it word for word from one of the four Gospels! Salmasius, if I mistake not, supposes the original word to have been bachelors, young unmarried men. Others interpret angels as meaning the bishop and elders of the Church. More probably it was a proverbial expression derived from the Cherubim in the Temple: something as the country folks used to say to children, Take care, the Fairies will hear you! It was a common notion among the Jews, in the time of St. Paul, that their angels were employed in carrying up their prayers to the throne of God. Of course they must have been in special attendance in a house of prayer. After much search and much thought on the subject of angels as a diverse kind of finite beings, I find no sufficing reason to hold it for a revealed doctrine, and if not revealed it is assuredly no truth of philosophy, which, as I have elsewhere remarked, can conceive but three kinds; 1. the infinite reason; 2. the finite rational; and 3. the finite irrational--that is, God, man, and beast. What indeed, even for the vulgar, is or can an archangel be but a man with wings, better or worse than the wingless species according as the feathers are white or black? I would that the word had been translated instead of Anglicised in our English Bible. The following paragraph is one of Hacket's sweetest passages. It is really a beautiful little hymn.