Ye too must fly before a chasing hand,
Angels and saints in every hamlet mourned!
Ah! if the old idolatry be spurn’d,
Let not your radiant shapes desert the land!
Her adoration was not your demand,—
The fond heart proffer’d it,—the servile heart,
And therefore are ye summon’d to depart;
Michael, and thou St. George, whose flaming brand
The Dragon quell’d; and valiant Margaret,
Whose rival sword a like opponent slew;
And rapt Cecilia, seraph-haunted queen
Of harmony; and weeping Magdalene,
Who in the penitential desert met
Gales sweet as those that over Eden blew! WORDSWORTH.
‘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.