against spiritualism; but there was a particular kind of spiritualism in the Apostolic Church which we have honestly to face.
Christians at that time believed in the existence of spirits, personal and very active, 'angels' they might be, or 'daemons', good, bad, or neutral. It is curious that, side by side with the horror of spiritualism, largely fostered by the Roman Church, which had dogmatized so freely about the next world as to have the strongest reasons for discouraging investigation of it—side by side with this has continued the belief in spirits, under the name of angels. Christian people forget that angels are spirits, because art has so long materialized them with armour and vestments, and with wings constructed in defiance of the laws both of flight and of anatomy. Now, angels must be spirits; and a guardian angel would really be, not like the beautifully draped lady of nineteenth-century art, but much more like the daemon, the δαιμόνιον, of Socrates, which, although according to Xenophon and Plato it was neither a divinity nor a genius, appeared to the philosopher as a warning voice, which he heard frequently with his outward ear, and never disobeyed. The whole matter has not been adequately dealt with by theologians, because their methods are still so predominantly scholastic, and at the very mention of an angel or a daemon, they fly to the rummaging of Hebrew texts. Such research into ancient
