THE INVOCATION OF ANGELS AND SAINTS.
ATR. ORBY SHIPLEY, who is indefatigable in restoring to in the Church of England that vast apparatus of minute religious procedure and tawdry ornament of which the Reformation purged her, has just taken a fresh step in the same direction by trying to repeople our prayers with the figures of innumerable Saints and Angels whom he urges on us to invoke. He reminds us, of course, that the English Reformers disapproved of the practice, which he considers a great argument in its favour ; for he tells us, speaking of these worthies in a bold and sweeping way, without reserves, that " their fair fame has received a severe shock," and that,—so at least we understand him,—neither their public character nor their private lives are worthy of respect. Of course, Mr. Orby Shipley has been well assured that none of these same Reformers is amongst the saints or martyrs for whose intercession he teaches us to ask ; for we should judge from his tone that he would not have their intercession if he could, and probably it would be a real blow to him to know that any of them were in a position to intercede on his behalf, or were at the present moment, say,—which is quite as probable as most of his own spiritual assumptions,—beseeching that he may be diverted by spiritual guidance from any further trifling with the painted shadows with which be is seeking to amuse the spiritual vision of a Church certainly not too earnest and ardent even in its direct communion with God. Mr. Shipley's view, of course, is that all this emblazoning and illuminating of our prayers with the figures of saints of whom we know little, and of angels of whom we know nothing, tends, how he does not tell us, to add to and not diminish their fervour. Indeed, he seems to take the very eccentric view that not to ask the intercession of this host of beings, who are mere names to us at best, and often not as much as that, is to treat them with contempt and " disesteem." " It is beyond controversy," he says, " that the disesteem in which the saints of God are held, and the contempt with which they are treated by members of the Church of England, does incalculable injury not only to the interests of true religion, but also to the great cause all Catholics have at heart, the visible reunion of Christendom ?" As if there were any contempt and disesteem in not weaving into our prayers doubtful biographies of persons who may either have been very great and good, or worthy middling sort of people, or rather poor and narrow-natured, or even may never have existed at all, so exceedingly slight is the hold of anything that can be called history on many of those personages with whom Mr. Orby Shipley and his school wish to fill our prayers as full as a ray of sunlight is filled with dancing motes. Is it the fault of us poor mortals, groping a painful and doubtful way to wards God in a world full of doubt, that we cannot stop to consider whether, for instance, Bartholomew was the same as Nathaniel or not ? if not, what single faint human characteristic is there by which we can make to ourselves even the slightest eidolon of him ? and even if he was, can it be worth one's while to pause in our prayers to the God whom Bartholomew's principal use on earth was to aid in revealing, to invoke help from him while we are profoundly ignorant whether he could ever give it, even if he could know that it has been appealed to ?
It seems to us, we confess, that the High-Church notion of helping us hard-pressed mortals out of our doubts in these difficult days is to multiply incredible and disputable matter so enormously in the whole sphere of spiritual things, that we are compelled either to give up abjectly, and say we will assume as true anything and everything that is foisted into our prayers, or to reject everything, and disembarrass ourselves of endless controversy by rejecting in limine the whole circle of Christian conceptions. Look only at Mr. Orby Shipley's invocations to angels, — of whom we may confidently say that we know nothing in the world. That there are intermediate ranks of beings between man and God is of course highly probable ; but as ' angel' means nothing but messenger, and the winds and lightnings are spoken of by the Hebrew prophets as the angels of God ; and as it adds absolutely nothing to our knowledge to have a name Gabriel' or Michael' put upon the medium of any such communication,—and as even these are hardly ever added except in highly mystical passages, like some in Daniel and Revelations, which even divinity professors hardly venture to expound or assert that they comprehend,—what possible assistance can it be to any human being's prayers to intersperse them with such an astounding assertion as that God has " vouchsafed to raise St. Michael above the ranks of Thy messengers " ? What we know of the name (Michael) referred to, is, first, that the one book of the Old Testament on the authenticity of which the most weighty doubts have been cast,—Daniel,—mentions a vision in which there appeared to the author of the book "a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz," whose " body was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as laths of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude ;" and that this visionary being spoke to the writer in his vision of one " Michael, one of the chief princes," who had helped him in a battle with the prince of the kingdom of Persia; further, the book of Revelations mentions "Michael and his angels " fighting against the dragon who was cast out into the earth ; but to what either of these passages refers, and whether they were intended to be anything more than symbolic by the writers, and whether, if they were intended to be more than symbolic, the writers had any clear conception of what it was, we do not, and apparently shall never, know. What we do know is, that on the strength of these two highly enigmatic passages, we are asked by Mr. Orby Shipley's school to assume that St. Michael is what they are pleased to call an archangel " above the ranks of Thy messengers ;" that it is a good and pious thing to call upon him personally " to come and free the souls of Thy faithful people," to beseech God that our prayers " may be presented" to Him by Michael's hand,—whatever that may mean,—to entreat to have Michael guard our going-out and coming-in, to beg that Michael may personally take charge of our souls at the hour of death, and a good deal more of the same kind. Like prayers are addressed to Gabriel. To Raphael, whose name is even only mentioned in a poor sort of half-fairy, half-religious story called "Tobit,"— .uot half as impressive as many of the German mediaeval saint stories of the same type collected by the brothers Grimm,—which is contained in the Apocrypha, invocations are also to be addressed on the strength of this apocryphal mention. We are advised to invoke him thus :—" 0 heavenly physician and most faithful companion, holy Raphael, who restoredst the sight of Tobit, and leddest Tobias through the whole course of his journey," Sze., " drive from me the mists of ignorance, and constantly stand by me amid the dangerous pilgrimage of this life, till thou leadest me back to my heavenly fatherland where I may enjoy the beatific vision for ever." Now, we cannot help calling this sort of thing a careful discipline in fancy-religion. Mr. Orby Shipley has about as much reason to believe in Raphael as he has to believe in Dante's Beatrice as a heavenly intercessor. If he does believe in Raphael, he might just as well entreat him to help him and his High-Church brethren to catch the fish whose " heart and liver," when burnt before a person possessed by an evil spirit, have power to cast out the spirit so that they shall be vexed no more,— as beseech him to drive away the " mists of ignorance," which it does not appear, on the face of the legend, that Raphael did. Would Mr. Shipley hesitate or not to drag the fish's " liver and heart and gall " into his prayers ? If he would, why foist Raphael upon us at all, whose name is known only in connection with this absurd legend? We suspect that the secret creed of Mr. Shipley's school is really this,—that it is pious to regard all names mentioned in con nection with supernatural powers of good, in any writings which any section of the Church before the Reformation had ever used for devotional purposes, as names of really existing saints or angels. Supposing they were,—which is just assuming that all religious people are supernaturally preserved from assuming anything that is not true, a supposition manifestly contrary to the fact,—what possible help can it be towards approaching God to name the name of a creature of His of whom we know nothing, and that in the very presence of Him of whom we know all that we can know ? It is like inviting some little whiff of rosy-white cumulus in the Eastern sky to warm us in the very presence of the rising sun. We can understand fully the feeling which encircles the mother of our Lord with a depth of tender light and sweet affections such as it is hard to attribute to any other human being. That she who nursed and watched and loved the Divine innocence and love as it grew towards youth and manhood, must have felt depths of passionate tenderness such as we who worship it from a distance can never conceive, and such as no other mother can ever adequately imagine, is not mere conjecture,—it is the highest moral probability without the history, and a moral certainty with it. We have never doubted the naturalness of the yearning to approach -our Lord, as it were, through her whose human relation to Him must have been one of such surpassing sweetness. But what religious advantage any one can expect to gain from overloading his prayers with the names of genii with which the Jews made acquaintance in their captivity or the names of apostles or disciples of whom we know no specific characteristic whatever, external or internal, except that they were Christians, is quite past our conception. If one of the Epistles had not accidentally contained a condemnation of Demas, the Church would be asking for the inter-cession of Demas to this day. It is the mere superfluity of naughtineasto adulterate what should be the most sincere and severely truthful act of the soul,—prayer,—with a crowd of petty assumptions just as likely to be false as true, and which are yet grafted into the very substance of our communion with God. The incorporation of all these doubtful legends into prayer, makes it, to our minds, bear the same relation to true prayer that /Esop's fables do to the truths they illustrate. Who can help shrinking from playing at prayer? What is it but playing at prayer to ask for the intercession of Raphael, who told Tobias the properties of the fish's 4‘ heart, liver, and gall "?
What renders all this invocation of saints, of most of whom we know far less than of the worthy neighbours who are eulogized in funeral sermons at our parish church on their decease, and of angels of whom we do not even know whether they ever were at all, so utterly unnatural to our minds, is that the faith in God and Christ, to which with much toil we may attain out of the study of the Scriptures, seems to us to throw into such intense relief what faith -really means, that it is more than ever difficult to fancy that it can guarantee to us a lot of doubtful little specks of tradition, which, whether they float in the light of Christ or not, in no degree enhance it, or demand our faith. If "I believe " means what it does in "I believe in God the Father," &c., how can any one use it for ." I believe in Raphael and Tobit or Tobias "? And if it does not mean the same thing in the last sentence as in the first, how can .any genuine man put it into his prayers ? We have all heard of -the prayer " 0 God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul," but such a prayer is piety itself in its agony of doubt 'to " 0 Raphael, if there be a Raphael (though it does not matter a halfpenny to me whether there be or not), who is said in one of the least credible of all the Apocryphal books to have restored Tobit (if there ever were a Tobit) to sight, and led Tobias (if there ever were a Tobias) through the whole course -uf his journey, be thou the physician of my soul and body, always -supposing it is in your power !" &c. Yet this is the sort of meaning this prayer must have for a good many even of earnest High Churchmen, and this is the sort of fanciful stuff they substitute for going directly to the fountain of life and heat itself. Can it be that the school who recommend this sort of hypothetical request for intercession to some highly conjectural and ill-defined finite beings, accidentally jotted down by name in a book in some distant age, can really think prayer the most strenuous and solemn and real act of life? We know that they do. But that they do so, is one of those marvellous ecclesiastical omens which we strive in vain to understand.
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