Angels

Angels play quite a prominent part in Chapters 1 and 2. There seems to be some confusion on just what an angel is. How thankful we are that Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures gives us satisfactory definitions, such as on p. 581 line 4 –

ANGELS. God’s thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality.  S&H 581:4.

The passage on angels in the chapter Science of Being (p. 298:25-17) deserves to be quoted in full:

Angels are not etherealised human beings, evolving animal qualities in their wings; but they are celestial visitants, flying on spiritual, not material pinions. Angels are pure thoughts from God, winged with Truth and Love, no matter what their individualism may be. Human  conjecture confers upon angels its own forms of thought, marked with superstitious outlines, making them human creatures with suggestive feathers; but this is only fancy. It has behind it no more reality than has the sculptor’s thought when he carves his “Statue of Liberty,” which embodies his conception of an unseen quality or condition, but which has no physical antecedent reality save in the artist’s own observation and “chambers of imagery.”

My angels are exalted thoughts, appearing at the door of some sepulchre, in which human belief has buried its fondest earthly hopes. With white fingers they point upward to a new and glorified trust, to higher ideals of life and its joys. Angels are God’s representatives. These upward-soaring beings never lead to self, sin, or materiality, but guide to the divine Principle of all good, whither every real individuality, image, or likeness of God, gathers. By giving earnest heed to these spiritual guides they tarry with us, and we entertain “angels unawares.”

How good it is to be reminded of those truths! And to know that in the words from hymn number nine from the Christian Science Hymnal,

O longing hearts that wait on God

Through all the world so wide;

He knows the angels that you need,

And sends them to your side,

To comfort, guard and guide.

Yes. God knows the angels which each one of His children needs and does provide them with grace and glory in the oneness of His being.

Joyce Voysey