fallen asleep in Jesus, call us! They testify that there is still an open door of welcome-room for all -grace for all-blood for all!-crowns for all! Can we decline the summons of the mighty multitude gone to colonise the many mansions? Let us not be slothful, but "followers of them (the true seed of Jacob), who, through faith and patience, are now inheriting the promises!" IX. The Ministering Angels. "How oft do they their silver bowers leave, They for us fight, they watch and duly ward, Oh why should heavenly God to men have such regard!" -Spenser's Faerie Queene. "Round this earth and round her children Floats a spirit-land unseen; When our earthly course is ended, -Hymns from the Land of Luther. "Creator of many servants who stand in the higher worlds, and who proclaim aloud with reverence the commands of the Living God, Thy Name be magnified for ever! They are all of them lovely, chosen, and mighty." -Daily Jewish Morning Service. “And behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it."-GEN. xxviii. 12. THE MINISTERING ANGELS. THE exile at Bethel was not a stranger to the ministry of angels. Doubtless, one of the most memorable stories of early childhood, rehearsed by the lips of his grandfather, would be that of the advent of celestial messengers at his tent door in "the plains of Mamre in the heat of the day" (Gen. xviii. 1). The grandson is now to become a personal spectator, in his night-vision, of these divine delegates from the upper sanctuary, thronging the staircase which rose above his couch of stone "The resplendent gates unclose, Far as the eye can glance, on height o'er height, God has in all ages adapted the revelations of Himself to the character and circumstances of His people. To another fugitive of sterner mould, to whom reference has already been made-the boldhearted Elijah-He manifested His presence in the * Croly. earthquake and tempest, the fire and the whirlwind. To Jacob, until now the gentle domestic man, a tender home-flower unused to storms, -ill-fitted, we may suppose, to grapple with the roughnesses of life, He reveals Himself in a dream of angels. Glorious spirits are sent to tend his lonely unsolaced pillow. He beholds no symbols of terror. He listens only to the "still, small voice." So, too, at an after period of great strait and emergency in the Patriarch's history, when solace, comfort, and direction were greatly needed, we are told these same ambassadors of God, in double phalanx, again met him, "and he called the place Mahanaim (two hosts)" (Gen. xxxii. 2). In the present case, a needful and merited rebuke may have been conveyed to the erring fugitive. The God of his fathers, and his own covenant God, would tell him that these messengers of Providence, with their divine ministrations, would accomplish his destiny better far than his own cunning plottings and crooked policy. How Jacob came ultimately to feel and to own this, see how at Peniel, twenty years after, he wrestled with a Mightier than any angel, though in angel-form, and would not let Him go unless he received a blessing! (Gen. xxxii. 24.) In the preceding pages, we have spoken of the wanderer as forming in his own person, on that memorable eventide, a type or picture of fallen humanity; — man lying helpless on the outcast earth; while the ladder of salvation is let down to the pillow on which he slumbers, opening up a way of communication with the Heaven he had forfeited and the God he had offended. The present chapter brings before us a new and interesting topic for consideration. The vision would seem to intimate that the human race, in cutting themselves off from fellowship with their Maker, had also been severed from all that was good, and holy, among the loftier orders of intelligence. But Christ," the second Adam, the Lord from heaven," has, by His incarnation and death, not only re-established a way of approach to the presence of the Holiest, and re-instated the lost in the divine favour, but He has also made, once more, the ministry of bright, pure, unfallen spirits possible to a sin-stricken world. He Himself, in His enigmatical saying to Nathanael, is the best interpreter of the early type. For there can be no doubt that it is Jacob's dreamland and Jacob's radiant pathway which is referred to in the saying, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, hereafter (or as that may rather be rendered, 'from this time forth'), shall ye see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of man" (John i. 51).* The Great Apostle still * The words which thus speak symbolically of the "opened heavens" are supposed to have been addressed not to Nathanael only, |