singular appearance at the right side of the altar, which he took to be a celestial genius. All that followed was the mere working of his imagination, aided by the fond wishes of his heart, to which he had given utterance in prayer. The address of the angel, his own interrogatories, and the reply that was made to them, were all purely ideal! But the psychological interpreter does not stop here. By the magic touch of his hermeneutical wand, the dumbness of Zechariah is resolved into simple silence—a silence which, for the space of nine months, he was afraid to break, lest it might frustrate the hopes which had been excited in his mind!* It may truly be affirmed, that how deficient soever the Scriptures may appear in real miracles to the eye of thorough-paced Rationalists, there is no lack of the wonderful and incredible in the expositions which they have furnished of such passages as contain them.

But what student of the Divine oracles is there who has made himself acquainted with the various circumstances connected with the early revelations, and interpreted the language of the historical documents in which they are embodied, according to just principles of exegesis, who does not discover in the account which Luke furnishes of the communications between the angel and Zechariah, features of supernatural interposition perfectly parallel in character with those which took place under preceding economies? The description here given is in the same simple, unadorned, narrative style, which we find in the writings of Moses, and other books of the Old Testament containing statements respecting the appearance of angelic beings to the servants of Jehovah, There is evidently, in this respect, an almost imperceptible transition from the ancient state of things to that which introduced the Christian dispensation. The ministering spirits who had formerly been commissioned to make known the will of

* Exeget. Handbuch.

God, and especially to announce important future events, are now employed to prepare the way for the grand revelation, with a prospective view to which all the others had been imparted. Of these one is selected to enjoy the distinguished honour of predicting the immediate birth of the Saviour, and of his harbinger and relative, John. On presenting himself at first to Zechariah, he is spoken of indefinitely as "an angel of the Lord;" and it is clear the officiating priest could only have regarded him as one of those celestial messengers of whom he had often read in the holy Scriptures; but, in the course of his interview with him, he ascertained from himself that he was the identical angel who had announced to Daniel the period of the seventy weeks, and the advent and death of Messiah. With the exception of Michael, who is designated designated "one of the chief princes," (Dan. x. 13,) he is the only angel specified by name in the inspired volume. From the circumstance of his assuming the human form, and conversing familiarly as the messenger of God in that form, he was called, GABRIEL, i. e. "the man of God;" and it is in reference to this that Daniel describes him as

, THE MAN GABRIEL, (ch. ix. 21.) He speaks of himself as standing in the presence of God, by which is intimated the favour in which he was with the Most High, and his readiness to receive and execute Divine commands. On the present occasion he was not only commissioned to promise Zechariah a son, who should prepare the world for the long-expected Messiah, but empowered miraculously to deprive him for a time of the use of speech, as a mark of the displeasure of God on account of his unbelief.

Six months afterwards the same exalted messenger was despatched to Nazareth, for the specific purpose of communicating to the Virgin Mary the news that she was to be the mother of our Lord. His appearance filled her with perturbation of mind, which he immediately proceeded to remove; and after delivering his message, and

assuring her of the certainty of the promise which it contained receiving its fulfilment, he withdrew into the invisible world.

On comparing the instances of the actual appearance of angels, of which those we have just investigated are merely a specimen, the conviction is irresistibly forced upon the mind, that, upon such occasions, they assumed real, though not permanent, material bodies. Functions, proper to real bodies, are unequivocally ascribed to them. They became the subjects of real, not of imaginary vision. They spoke in audible language. They came into real and palpable contact with those to whom they were sent. They were recognised as real material objects, endowed with intelligence, not only by one, but by more persons at the same time. In short, the evidence in support of the conclusion at which we have arrived, is so full and satisfactory, that it is difficult to perceive how it can be resisted.

That angels are not, in their own nature, pure spirits, but are invested with tenuous, subtile bodies, is an opinion which was early imported from the Platonic school into the Christian Church, Most of the Fathers held that pure incorporeity is a property exclusively distinctive of the Divine nature, and that all other spirits have a corporeal vestment-thin, indeed, ethereal, and totally different from whatever belongs to the grossness of our material bodies, yet as completely distinguishing them from the absolutely incorporeal God, as those with which mankind are invested remove them to a distance from these celestial intelligences. So extensively did this tenet at length prevail, that at the seventh Ecumenical, or second Nicene council, held at Nicæa in the year 787, it was established as a point of orthodox belief. It was afterwards, however, called in question by many of the schoolmen, who adopted the opinion of Lombard, that the angels have no corpus proprium, i. e., no body of their own, but have it in their

*

power to assume one, in order to become visible to men. Several of the modern continental divines, as Reinhard, Döderlein, Ammon, and Bretschneider,† have revived the ancient dogma; and it has been thought by some that the admission of such thin, subtile bodies of fire or air, would facilitate our conceptions of the operations of angels within the sphere of the material world. But an impartial investigation of the various phenomena connected with their actual appearances as described in Scripture, shows that even if we were to adopt this opinion, it would not advance us a single step in our knowledge of the subject, nor enable us to form, in any degree, a more satisfactory judgment respecting the mode in which those superior beings placed themselves in material contact with humanity. The production of those bodies or vehicles through which they held intercourse with men, was, so far as our acquaintance with material bodies goes, strictly miraculous; and it is difficult to conceive how pure spirituality on the one hand, or an ethereal corporeity of angelic nature on the other, in any way affects this undeniable fact of the case.

*Knapp's Christian Theology, vol. i. pp. 430, 431.

+ Bretschneider's Handbuch der Dogmatik, vol. i. p. 597.

LECTURE III.

DIFFERENT MODES OF INSPIRATION-(continued.)

"God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto

the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds."-HEBREWS i. 1, 2.

In the last Lecture a view was taken of the employment of angelic agency in revealing the will of God to his church; and several instances were adduced with a view to elucidate the manner in which it was rendered available for that end. There remains to be considered a transaction of a mixed character in the history of Divine revelations, in which the angels are represented as having taken partthe giving of the law from Mount Sinai. In asserting that this transaction, so memorable in the history of the Hebrews, exhibits a mixed character, we do it on the ground that it consisted partly in the exercise of the mediatorial agency of the Logos, and partly in that of angels, and combined, in the entireness of the scene, a remarkable personal manifestation with the employment of invisible power, and the widely-extended production of audible and intelligible language.

The presence of an immense number of angels on that occasion can only be called in question by those who make light of the testimony of Scripture, or do not believe in the existence of such beings, or in their ministry in reference to human affairs. In direct allusion to this event, the author of Psa. lxviii. 17, sings in the following strains :