Augel

[Gr. aggelos; Lat. angelus; Fr. ange, a me enger of God.] ( Eccl. Hist.) The name given to those spiritual, intelligent beings who are supposed to execute the will of God in the government of the world. Their office is to serve the Deity, whose agents they are, in effecting his good purposes, as the tutelary spirits of whole nations, as the heralds of his commands, and as the guardians of particular individuals. They were supposed to be spirits with ethereal bodies. This conception of them was established as a dectrine of the church by the council of Nice, in 787, but is at variance with the decision of the Later an council of 1215, which makes them immaterial beings. Those who regard the body merely as an incumbrance, or prison of the soul, and conceive a very exalted idea of pure spirits, hold angels to be such spirits, and explain their visible appearance by supposing that they have the power of a uming at will bodily forms and a human shape. Those who consider it no imperfection for a spirit to exist in a body, maintain that angels have bodies. As finite beings, they must have some place where they reside. The ancients easily found a habitation for them in their heaven, which was conceived to be a vast azure hall, where God dwelt with his angels; but we, who have very different ideas of heaven and the universe, can only suppose that, if they still operate on human things, they dwell invisibly with and about us. As to their names, the Catholic Church receives only three as sanctioned by the Scriptures, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael; but their number is always represented as immensely great, and also that there is a subordination among them. Hence, ecclesiastical writers make an hierarchy of nine orders of angels. But besides these, we read of evil angels, the ministers of God's wrath; as the destroying angel, the angel of death, the angel of Satan, the angel of the bottomle pit, and the fallen angels, or those who kept not their first estate, but fell from their obedience into sin, and were expelled the regions of light. In general, good and bad angels are distinguished by the opposite terms of angels of light, and angels of darkne . IMG:content-0229.png:[ocr errors] The coin was worth ten shillings.