the midnight sky with splendor and proclaiming to earth the glad tidings.  Angels ministered to Jesus in the wilderness and strengthened him in the garden.  More than twelve legions of angels waited to do his bidding when he was arrested.  Angels rolled away the stone from his tomb and sat by the empty grave, announcing his resurrection as they had announced his birth; and as they thronged the skies at his coming, so they hovered in the air at his going; and when he comes again he shall come in his glory with all the holy angels with him.

These angels are still in the world as the ministers of God, though invisible to mortal eyes.  We see the firefly only through the little luminous section of its flight, but it still flies on after it ceases to be visible.  So we see these angels only through that shining section of their path in which they waited on Jesus; but they are still flying through the world as invisible spirits.  The angels of little ones are always before the face of their Father in heaven, and as they bore the spirit of Lazarus to Abraham’s bosom, so they still may bear departing spirits up the shining stairway of the stars to the eternal home.  We know not in what wide ways they minister to us; how there is a rush of angel wings to the cradle of every new-born babe; how they constantly pitch their tents around us in the viewless fields of air; and how often they bear us up lest we dash our feet against a stone.

How little we know of the world in which we live!  We weigh its rocks and grind them up and melt them in our crucibles; we fling our nets through all space and catch the stars; and when we can find nothing more to measure and analyze we think we have found and explained all.  But the finest and best things cannot be grasped by these coarse processes.  Sunbeams cannot be weighed on hay-scales, and gorgeously-colored bits of cloud cannot be caught in a crucible.  We can weigh the new-born baby, but not the mother’s love for her child.  A telescope cannot see an angel, though millions of them may be flying across its field of vision.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.  In our blind materialism we need to have our eyes opened that we may know that this universe, which often seems so empty and dark to us, is a blazing sea of spiritual splendor in which burning suns float as black specks and which is thronged with troops of angels that do the will of God and wait on us.

XI.  Angels and Shepherds

The Christ-child was born, and now the problem was to get the wonderful news out into the world.  There were no newspapers to announce it in startling headlines and cry it out upon the morning air, and, if there had been, their reporters would not have been keen enough to discover it and probably would have had no interest in it.  God used other means.  An angel came from heaven to proclaim the great event