Again, we see how incoherent is the whole section which contains the alleged prayer to angels:  “Thou wast yesterday under a demon, to-day thou art under an angel:  the angels minister to thy salvation; they are granted for the ministry of the Son of God, &c.  All things are full of angels.  Come, Angel, take up one who is converted from his ancient error, &c.  And call to thee other companions of thy ministry, that all of you alike may train up to the faith those who were once deceived.”  Indeed the passage seems to carry within itself its own condemnation so entirely, that what we have before alleged, both of internal and external evidence, may appear superfluous.  Surely the conceit of a preacher of God’s word addressing an angel, (which of them he thus individually addresses does not appear; for he says not “My Angel,” as though he were appealing to one whom he regarded as his guardian, the view gratuitously suggested in the marginal note of the Benedictine editor, “the invocation of a guardian angel,”) and bidding some one angel, as a sort of summoner, to go and call to himself all the angels of heaven to come in one body, and instruct those who are in error, is, even as a rhetorical apostrophe, as unworthy the mind of a Christian philosopher, as it is in the light of a prayer totally inconsistent with the plain sentiments of Origen on the very subject of angelic invocation.  Even had Origen not left us his deliberate opinions in works of undoubted genuineness, such a {162} strange, incoherent, and childish rhapsody could never be relied upon by sober and upright men as a precedent sanctioning a Christian’s prayer to angels; no one would rely upon such evidence in points of far less moment, even were it uncontradicted by the same witness.

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SECTION VII.—­ST. CYPRIAN.

In the middle of the third century, Cyprian [Jerom, vol. iv. p. 342.], a man of substance and a rhetorician of Carthage, was converted to Christianity.  He was then fifty years of age; and his learning, virtues, and devotedness to the cause which he had espoused, very soon raised him to the dignity, the responsibility, and, in those days, the great danger, of the Episcopate. (Cyprian is said to have been converted about A.D. 246, to have been consecrated A.D. 248, and to have suffered martyrdom A.D. 258.) Many of his writings of undoubted genuineness are preserved, and they have been appealed to in every age as the works of a faithful son of the Catholic Church.  On the subject of prayer he has written very powerfully and affectingly; but I find no expression which can by possibility imply that he practised or countenanced the invocation of saints and angels.  I have carefully examined every sentence alleged by its most strenuous defenders, and I cannot extract from them one single grain of evidence which can bear the test of inquiry.  Even did the passages quoted require to be taken in the sense affixed to them {163} by those advocates, they prove nothing; they do not bear even remotely upon the subject, whilst I am persuaded that to every unprejudiced mind a meaning will appear to have been attached to them which the author did not intend to convey.