was brought into full
manifestation. And thus room was made for the anticipation of further
and deeper disclosures, of truths still under the veil of the letter,
and in their season to be revealed. The visible world still remains
without its divine interpretation; Holy Church in her sacraments and her
hierarchical appointments, will remain, even to the end of the world,
after all but a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her
mysteries are but the expressions in human language of truths to which
the human mind is unequal. It is evident how much there was in all this
in correspondence with the thoughts which had attracted me when I was
young, and with the doctrine which I have already associated with the
Analogy and the Christian Year.

It was, I suppose, to the Alexandrian school and to the early Church,
that I owe in particular what I definitely held about the Angels. I
viewed them, not only as the ministers employed by the Creator in the
Jewish and Christian dispensations, as we find on the face of Scripture,
but as carrying on, as Scripture also implies, the Economy of the
Visible World. I considered them as the real causes of motion, light,
and life, and of those elementary principles of the physical universe,
which, when offered in their developments to our senses, suggest to us
the notion of cause and effect, and of what are called the laws of
nature. This doctrine I have drawn out in my Sermon for Michaelmas day,
written in 1831. I say of the Angels, "Every breath of air and ray of
light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of
their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God."
Again, I ask what would be the thoughts of a man who, "when examining a
flower, or a herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as
something so beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered
that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind
the visible things he was inspecting,--who, though concealing his wise
hand, was giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being
God's instrument for the purpose,--nay, whose robe and ornaments those
objects were, which he was so eager to analyze?" and I therefore remark
that "we may say with grateful and simple hearts with the Three Holy
Children, 'O all ye works of the Lord, &c., &c., bless ye the Lord,
praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.'"

Also, besides the hosts of evil spirits, I