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It is true there are many who deny the existence of any spiritual beings save God and man. The wide universe is to them a solitary land without inhabitants. There is but one oasis filled with living creatures. There is something pitiable in this impertinence. It is a drop of dew in the lonely cup of a gentian, which imagines itself to be all the water in the universe. It is the summer midge which has never left its forest pool, dreaming that it and its companions are the only living creatures in earth or air. There is no proof of the existence of other beings than ourselves, but there is also no proof of the contrary. Apart from revelation, we can think about the subject as we please. But it does seem incredible that we alone should represent in the universe the image of God; and if in one solitary star another race of beings dwell, if we concede the existence of a single spirit other than ourselves, we have allowed the principle; the angelic world of which the Bible speaks is possible to faith. Our life with nature has lost its beauty, its joy, its religion. It was different with the ancient Jew and with the apostles and their followers. They lived in a world peopled with spiritual beings. They believed in invisible assistants, who were doing God's pleasure and sympathising with His children. The hosts of heaven moved in myriads in the sky. The messengers of God went to and fro working His righteous will. The sons of God shouted for joy when the creation leaped to light. In every work of nature, in the summer rain and the winter frost, in the lifting of the billow on the sea and the growth of the flower on the plain, there were holy ones concerned who sang the hymn of continued creation to the Eternal Love. The very winds themselves were angels, and the flaming fires ministers of God.

I. Take first, THE RELATION OF GOD TO ANGELIC LIFE.

1. The first thing we understand of the angels is that in distant eternities God created them. God gave of His own life to others, and filled His silence with living souls. Here we have the principle of the social life of God. He listened with pleasure to the song of joy which filled His universe, and received and gave back in ceaseless reciprocation the offered love of the spirits He had made. And in that thought all social life on earth should be hallowed by being made like to that of God; we should be as gods and angels one to another, interchanging ever love and service. Is that the ideal which in society you strive to reach? Again —

2. The angelic creation reveals to us the very principle of God's proper life. He would not have a life which began and ended in Himself. His life was life in others. In giving of His life He lived.

II. I pass on to THE RELATION OF THE ANGELIC LIFE OF GOD. It is described as a life of exalted praise. The angels are pictured as employed in ceaseless adoration. The nearer that you live to God here, the nearer you will approach the angelic life. Our state of imperfection is characterised by prayer, the state of perfection is characterised by praise; and it. is curious to mark in the history of some of the noblest of God's saints, how, as they drew near the close of life and entered more into communion with the heavenly existence, prayer seems to be replaced by a sacred awe, and a deeper knowledge of holiness breaks forth into continual praise. So far for angelic life in connection with God.

III. We pass on to consider, AS IT IS DESCRIBED IN THE BIBLE, ANGELIC LIFE IN CONNECTION WITH NATURE. The Hebrew religious feeling always retained some traces of its connection through Abraham with Chaldaea. The old pastoral faith which was born on the wide plains of the East, with a magnificent arch of sky above, in which the sun and moon and stars walked cloudless with what seemed the stately step of gods, was always breaking through the pure monotheism which God revealed to the patriarchs. And not only the ordering of the stars, but all manifestations of the forces of nature were, in the poetry of the Hebrews, directed by the angels. Certain masters in science will smile at all this, and ask if that be philosophy? And I answer, No, not philosophy, but something higher — poetry; and as such, not disclosing the relations of phenomena, but revealing, through symbolic phrase, a principle. It matters very little whether the angels be the directing powers of the elements and their combinations or not; but it does much matter to us as spiritual beings with what eyes we look upon the universe — as a living whole informed and supported by a living will, or as dead matter drifting on in obedience to dead laws. So do we grasp the truth of these old Hebrew sayings of the angels — that nature in essence, or rather, in that actual world of which it is the witness, is not inanimate, but living. Then the universe becomes clothed in a more glorious form. "The dead heavy mass which did but block up space is vanished, and in its place there flows forward, with the music of eternal waters, a stream of life and power and action " which issues from the source of all life — the living will of God. Then it happens that to us the whole course of nature, and each separate thing within it, give up to us the secrets they half conceal and half express They speak not to intellect only or to feeling only, but to the entirety of our being. All God s living spirits are doing within the sphere of His life a portion of this redeeming work. The angels do it perchance as He performs it, finding a perfect joy in sacrifice; we are doing it in agony, finding every sacrifice a pain, and yet learning through the very pain to realise the sacrifice as joy; giving up our life with strong crying and with tears, but strangely discovering that we have been led into life: till at last the secret smites upon our heart in an ineffable light which transfigures all our being, and looking up to where, upon the cross of Calvary, all humanity was sacrificed and all life given away in infinite love that the life of the world might be, we know at last in Him the mystery of the universe. We see the very Life itself in the love which, in giving His Son, gave Himself.

(Stopford A. Brooke, M. A.)

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KJV: Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.

WEB: having become so much better than the angels, as he has inherited a more excellent name than they have.