d for us--are what the whole
Christian world owes to the religious feeling of the Hebrews. The
first and second chapters of S. Luke are most important in the
history of Christian mythology and art. They are far from containing
the whole of what we mean by Christmas; but the religious poetry
which gathers round that season must be sought upon their pages.
Angels, ever since the Exodus, played a first part in the visions of
the Hebrew prophets and in the lives of their heroes. We know not
what reminiscences of old Egyptian genii, what strange shadows of
the winged beasts of Persia, flitted through their dreams. In the
desert, or under the boundless sky of Babylon, these shapes became
no less distinct than the precise outlines of Oriental scenery. They
incarnated the vivid thoughts and intense longings of the prophets,
who gradually came to give them human forms and titles. We hear of
them by name, as servants and attendants upon God, as guardians of
nations, and patrons of great men. To the Hebrew mind the whole
unseen world was full of spirits, active, strong, and swift of
flight, of various aspect, and with power of speech. It is hard to
imagine what the first Jewish disciples and the early Greek and
Roman converts thought of these great beings. To us, the hierarchies
of Dionysius, the services of the Church, the poetry of Dante and
Milton, and the forms of art, have made them quite familiar.
Northern nations have appropriated the Angels, and invested them
with attributes alien to their Oriental origin. They fly through our
pine-forests, and the gloom of cloud or storm; they ride upon our
clanging bells, and gather in swift squadrons among the arches of
Gothic cathedrals; we see them making light in the cavernous depth
of woods, where sun or moon beams rarely pierce, and ministering to
the wounded or the weary; they bear aloft the censers of the mass;
they sing in the anthems of choristers, and live in strains of
poetry and music; our churches bear their names; we call our
children by their titles; we love them as our guardians, and the
whole unseen world is made a home to us by their imagined presence.
All these things are the growth of time and the work of races whose
myth-making imagination is more artistic than that of the Hebrews.
Yet this rich legacy of romance is bound up in the second chapter of
S. Luke; and it is to him we must give thanks when at Christmas-tide
we read of the shepherds and the angels in Englis