A TALK ABOUT ANGELS.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 191, 14 July 1916, Page 1 (Supplement)

A TALK ABOUT ANGELS.

THE WORLD WE DON'T SEE—AND THE RELIGION OF "WAIT AND SEE."

My THE REV. R. J. CAMPBELL, in the 'lllustrated Sunday Herald.'

Henrik Ibsen said, "Life is a battle with the phantoms of the mind." And : this is a saying arrestingly true. Our ' chiefest struggles are not with things in themselves but with what we think they are. Our greatest conflicts arise within our own nature. i

I am not saying this ought not to be. i I am only noting the fact. If we did not beiieve the presence of someone, to 1)0 neccesaryv to our happiness, we should not mourn h's absence. If we did not feel death to be the great disscverer of human relations, wo should not so dread his advent in our own particular circle. ; If we did not attribute great import- j ance to tther people's opinion of us, wo should not worry when we are slan- ; dered and misrepresented. If we did , not love our friends or our family in such a way as to fear for their physical security, we should not trouble, when what the world calLs disasters happen ' to them. i If we were not convinced that the i things that money can buy are necessary to our well-being, we should not ' get anxious and depressed when in- , vestments go wrong or we lose a situa- ' tion. It is quite natural to do all j these things—l am not suggesting otherwise —but sco what a difference might he made to our feelings about them, if the mental image we form of them were other than it is. i

Suppose, on the one hand, we stood lower m the scale of being than we do —if, say, we were as savages or cows—how wou'd the same sort of facts affect us then? No person, however agreeable, would mean any more to us than an apple tree in blossom. We should enjoy them while they were there, but would not miss them much when they were gone nor allow their departure to cast a shadow over our spirits. Perhaps this is not quite true of the savage or the cow, but it is near enough. Maurice Hewlett, I think it is. somewhere pictures a fairy as a delightfulcompanion, but unhuman in the sense that he or she does not dwell for a moment upon a terminated fellowship. It is done with, and that is all there is about it. THE BIGGEST BOGEY.

If Are were like that! Imagine what it would be i* we viewed the death of anybody or anything with the same im difference that we bestowed upon a withered flower. Imagine people hying without giving a thought to the light in which they regarded each other or having any interest in each other's mutual attractions and repulsions. Just conceive being so independent! of all human judgment as to go on doing exactly what you please at all times without eo much as pausing to consider whether anyone els© approves or disapproves of you. , " What will people say ?" is the biggest bogrv the English mmd has any knowledge of. No one that I haveover heard of is completely emancipated from the dread of it. Defying it is not q» ite what * mean - I mean being unconscious that it. exists. And, oh, the- thousand and one things that) we worry and grieve about! Suppose we did not care at all. Suppose we could get rid of all emotion, all apprehension as to what may or may not happen in any given instance would not life wear an altogether different hue? „ , «• u Reading Alfred Russel Wallaces biography and letters the other day I was greatly struck with his description in this respect between savage and civilised man. He first came across the former in the wilds of Brazil, and to the end of his life he never got over the astonishment he experienced at the immensity of the gulf he found between his mentality and ours \s far as* he could judge the emotional tractions of the savage to the facts of life were so radically different from ours that it was impossible to interpret one in terms of the other. The sources of our chief miseries and ioys mean nothing to the savage, and vice versa. Watch a, cow in the held or a cat on the hearth. Both inhabit your world, hist they don t see «t with vour eves. Wars and rumours of wars Pa " s ovVr them unheeded. They do not reflect upon augmented income tax, Irish insurrections, conscription measures, and the like To them General Townshond's resistance at Kut was neither admirable nor the reverse I hey do not cure how many men fell at Verdun, how many cows were eaten or how many cats were shoPed out of then chimney corners cither. TF THERE WERE GIANT ANTS. You mav say it is because they possess no intelligence, but that does not fe.l'ow. Thev might have all the mteligencc of a demigod and yet he utterWithout ruth or pity. Jn fact one o the most terrible suggestions von can conjure up is that of a mmd like the Pr 'sian but infinitely cold, Hear Poetically limrt'ess Im range, but incapable of .»f\ or teal / S nipv and tenaciously intent on purJS which have nothing to do with human weal or woe. ""Somebody once said about an ant that a perfectly horrible thing todts(over when viewing it under a m.ero- ,; , e was that it had plenty of intelT,,„ im face. Tt had no cxpresSd They would have their superman beyond all question. But noon my word I should nrcfer tl,» Kniw or anybody who could get K rv about something. He would be JS deadly and awful, a little nearer fl ourselves. A world of gigantic ants 5 word of intellectual monsters, would 1,0 n v.or'd of utmost horror to us as Tn"as we survived in it. Our shrift would be short though m all probabil- ' What I want to insist upon is that nur iovs and sorrows a-,- from 0:11 mental constitution, and would be non existent in the very same v. oriel, mil

with the very same stimuli, to with a different psychic nature. Did not Walt Whitman once corners that he would like to know how it feit to be one of the lower animals? They do not He awake at night and weep for their sins, he said, nor make one sick talking about their duty to God. " Not one of them is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth." GOVERNED BY PHANTOMS. Ili thus .speculating what might be if we were creatures of a different mould I have deliberately dropped down below the gamut of ordinary human experience. Wo sec how conceivable it is that our who'e* area of troubles and delights could be wiped out of existence by a certain change within ourselves,'not for the better but the worse as I 'snpjose most people would admit. . Better suffer and be capable of feeling for one another than enjoy without it. It would perhaps be hard to demonstrate why we should hold this preference though I hope we should. There are harassing times when we would rather be as the birds and beasts, but not for long. It is at once our privilege and our disability that we are *o made or have no developed .as to bo governed to so large an extent by phantoms of the mind of whlci Ibsen spoke. For if instead of dropping bebw we rise in thought above the gamut of ordinary human experience, we »ind that they are but phantoms after al'. Angels are super-men but not magni'Vl Prussians or colossal ants. Tliey .vie beings who can feel but not fear. I am conscious of taking a good deal for granted in saying this, but it is worth saying. Don't laugh reader. Angels are quite as probable as ants and a good deal more desirable than Prussians. /

Why should we assume that man is the universe's highest product? As Sir Oliver Lodge says, it k far more likely that there exist order upon order of beings, successively greater than we, till we come to the great God Himself, who is the life

and goal of all. That these should lie invisible to us is, only to be expected. For visibility is a matter of eth'eric vibration, and the vibrations which constitute our total sense experience—that is, make op our world as it appears to us—aro comparatively few in number. We are able to see a spectrum of five or seven primary colours, but there may be seven million for aught we know. The world we don't see is no doubt a more glorious spectacle than the on 3 we do, and as full of busy inhabitants—most of them better ones, let us hope. A "CREEPY" SUGGESTION. A bril'iant friend of mino in Brighton a medical man, once scandalised an audience to which he was lecturing by telling his hearers that he had no doubt whatever but that we were surrounded by orders of beings invisible to us but far more advanced than ourselves and with interests and pursuits of their own better worth entertaining than merely looking after ns. It made some people feel creepy and others resent the suggestion tliat angels, if angels they might be called, could have any more important work than that of shepherding the human race. What sublime egoism we poor earthbound creatures are capable of \ That the majestic masters of the spheres should have anything e'se to do besides fussing about us and our doings seems to some folk intolerable. It does not follow cither that these higher beings have ever been on our earth at all. Angels are not necessarily our deceased kindred. When we. sing Newman's "Lead kindly light" most of us take for granted that the closing lines— And with the morn those angel iaces smile, Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile—refer to persons whom the writer had loved and lost in early lite. But according to Archbishop Alexander that was not the case.' As a child Newman used- to have supernormal v ; sion of angicl faces. As he grew older he gradually lost tho power of perceiving them, to his own great regret. He never for a moment thought of them r.s beings who had once lived in the flesh. Now this is what I have in mind when I say that it is reasonable to suppose that there are orders of tiding higher than ours to whom tho things that disquiet ns are seen to have no real existence, to be in fact phantoms of the mind. They may never have had to battle at we have, never have had to strugglo and suffer. But on the other hand we know some beaut : iul things from the inside which they cannot. And that is why doubtless some of the saints ol old days have so often declared that in certain ways wo were privileged above the angels. I would rather have to fight my way through life, and give and receive tenderness and human fealty at a gre.it cost in pain, than never know anything of the sympathy which is born of sacrifice and tho sharing of untoward conditions. It is good to be needed by somebody, raid good to need in return, good to bs bound together by the ills that have to be endured in a common cause worthy of our endeavour. NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. But—here is the thought I have Rpociallv*u view—if we could only get up to the vantage point whence these greater beings survey our difficulties and deprivations, as one day we shall. we should see that there is nothing really to worry about. That sounds like superficial optimism, but it is not. We do have a hard time on earth, more or later we shall see. and which wo were noi meant to see at this stage. But it ought to be some comfort to us to know that in

this respect as in most others things are not what they seem. To go back to the beginning again—love is necessary to perfect felicity. And the truth is we never lose it. Only apparently it seems to bo so. Other souls arc necessary to our happiness, and we do not have to giro them up. It only looks like it, and even then no', for long. People's opinion of us does matter, but only when it is the truth, and that means' only when it sees r.s heaven sees and wills our good -i> heaven wills. The security of those we care for is of the utmost importance, but shei nothing has really ever impaired it. Nothing can be slain that ?'s essential to life, it only rises from ono plane to rnothev, and waits for us to ascend thereto. Nor can we ever lose or forfeit aught that is truly ours. For that which we are is the complement. < f what wo possess and its surest guarantee in fields elysian. A friend getting well into years 'Hd a most suggestive thing to me day. Speaking of the horrors and illusionments of tho present period of ware and tumults and private sorrows, he remarked:— "Yes, it is all very terrible on the outside. But when you are as old <is I am I think you will come to distrust appearances, and to feel as I increasingly do that somehow the good in I/e is invulnerable, and ono learns better how to wait without impatience pr.d without misgiving for tho dawn of all.*' R. J. CAMPBELL. (Copyright in the United Stites and Canada.)