l had guided him. My eyes are not young enough to follow footsteps
in the sand, Jesus replied, and I saw no angel, but a bird turned aside
from the rock on which he was about to alight abruptly, and going to
seek the cause of it I found thee.... Now if thy strength be coming back
we will try to walk a little farther.

I'll lean on thee, and then, just as if Paul felt that Jesus might tell
him once again that he was Jesus of Nazareth whom Pilate had condemned
to the cross, he began to put questions: was Jesus sure that it was not
an angel disguised as a bird that had directed him? Jesus could only
answer that as far as he knew the bird was a bird and no more. But birds
and angels are alike contained within the will of God; whereupon Paul
invited Jesus to speak of the angels that doubtless alighted among the
rocks and conversed with the Essenes without fear of falling into sin,
there being no women in the cenoby. But in the churches and synagogues
it was different, and he had always taught that women must be careful to
cover their hair under veils lest angels might be tempted. For the
soiled angel, he explained, is unable to return to heaven, and therefore
passes into the bodies of men and women and becomes a demon, and when
the soiled angel can find neither men nor women to descend into they
abide in animals, and become arch demons.

Paul, who had seemed to Jesus to have recovered a great part of his
strength, spoke with great volubility and vehemence, saying that angels
were but the messengers of God, and to carry on the work of the world
God must have messengers, but angels had no power to carry messages from
man back to God. There was but one Mediator, and he was on the point of
saying that this Mediator was Jesus Christ our Lord, but he checked
himself, and said instead that the power to perform miracles was not
transmitted from God to man by means of angels. Angels, he continued,
were no more than God's messengers, and he related that when he had shed
a mist and darkness over the eyes of Elymas, the sooth-sayer in Cyprus,
he had received the power to do so direct from God; he affirmed too, and
in great earnestness, that it was not an angel but God himself that had
prompted him to tell the cripple at Iconium to stand upright on his
feet; he had been warned in a vision not to go into Bithynia; and at
Troas a man had appeared to him in the night and ordered him to come
over to Macedonia, which was his country; he did n