Article December 13, 1913 Issue

Entertaining Angels

BLANCHE HERSEY HOGUE

Centuries ago a good and devout Israelitish king declared, "The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivered them." So long as we think of angels as personal celestial beings, distinct from God and separate from man, we gain little from this statement save its poetic value and the religious feeling it may nourish. When, however, we learn through Christian Science that angels are "God's thoughts passing to man" (Science and Health, p. 581), we become conscious of the spiritual law concerning salvation. As we read the Bible we find both in the Old Testament and the New that the holy men of olden time were saved from direst danger by angels, but Christian people have too long been accustomed to think that these were personal visitations which belonged to a bygone period, and that they are not available for us today. There is therefore great need that we lay hold anew upon the Scripture promises, which are so wonderfully illumed in Christian Science, and find that "God's thoughts" do deliver all those who trust Him.

In Christian Science we are taught that God is divine Mind. This Mind is infinite, everywhere present. It is wholly and only good, knowing no evil. It is the only power. Man, the spiritual, eternal, real man, the original which mortal mind claims to counterfeit in a fleshly man, exists as an idea in the divine Mind, and as such has no relation to the material counterfeit falsely called man; knows, in truth, only spiritual things. Divine Mind supplies to its ideas its own qualities-wholly good, spiritual thoughts, spiritual understanding. The real man, the true consciousness, is the spiritual understanding of God, man, and the universe, while mortality, with its belief in matter, in sin, sickness, and death, is the false sense of God, man, and the universe. Whenever, therefore, any one of us individually lays aside a wrong belief about existence and receives spiritual understanding into his thinking, an angel straight from God has come to him; a spiritual idea lights his mentality and puts out mental and moral darkness, and brings healing and strength now and always.

A personified concept of "angel" has usually seemed vague and uncertain, a being we might or might not believe in, but one with whom we could not affiliate. The angel of spiritually right thinking, however, is something which can come inside our own mental borders and abide with us. We can keep thought receptive to the divine idea through the sincere desire for good and by abandoning evil as soon as we see it to be evil. Standing mentally at this point of receptivity, we truly pray; and this is the open doorway through which angels crowd. Then, as these luminous thoughts, God-given, multiply righteousness within the secret place where motive and purpose are born, protection, too, is vouchsafed to growing pureness of heart, and the encamping angels do deliver us from trouble.

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