I’ll lean on thee, and then, just as if Paul felt that Jesus might tell him once again that he was Jesus of Nazareth whom Pilate had condemned to the cross, he began to put questions:  was Jesus sure that it was not an angel disguised as a bird that had directed him?  Jesus could only answer that as far as he knew the bird was a bird and no more.  But birds and angels are alike contained within the will of God; whereupon Paul invited Jesus to speak of the angels that doubtless alighted among the rocks and conversed with the Essenes without fear of falling into sin, there being no women in the cenoby.  But in the churches and synagogues it was different, and he had always taught that women must be careful to cover their hair under veils lest angels might be tempted.  For the soiled angel, he explained, is unable to return to heaven, and therefore passes into the bodies of men and women and becomes a demon, and when the soiled angel can find neither men nor women to descend into they abide in animals, and become arch demons.

Paul, who had seemed to Jesus to have recovered a great part of his strength, spoke with great volubility and vehemence, saying that angels were but the messengers of God, and to carry on the work of the world God must have messengers, but angels had no power to carry messages from man back to God.  There was but one Mediator, and he was on the point of saying that this Mediator was Jesus Christ our Lord, but he checked himself, and said instead that the power to perform miracles was not transmitted from God to man by means of angels.  Angels, he continued, were no more than God’s messengers, and he related that when he had shed a mist and darkness over the eyes of Elymas, the sooth-sayer in Cyprus, he had received the power to do so direct from God; he affirmed too, and in great earnestness, that it was not an angel but God himself that had prompted him to tell the cripple at Iconium to stand upright on his feet; he had been warned in a vision not to go into Bithynia; and at Troas a man had appeared to him in the night and ordered him to come over to Macedonia, which was his country; he did not know if the man was a real man in the flesh or the spirit of a man who had lived in the flesh:  but he was not an angel.  Of that Paul was sure and certain; then he related how he had taken ship and sailed to Samothrace, and next day to Neopolis, and the next day to Philippi, and how in the city of Thyatira he had bidden a demon depart out of a certain damsel who brought her master much gain by soothsaying.  And for doing this he had been cast into prison.  He knew not of angels, and it was an earthquake that caused the prison doors to open and not an angel.  Peter had met angels, but he, Paul, had never met one, he knew naught of angels, except the terrible Kosmokratores, the rulers of this world, the planetary spirits of the Chaldeans, and he feared angel worship, and had spoken to the Colossians against it, saying:  remember there is always but one Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ our Lord, who came to deliver us from those usurping powers and their chief, the Prince of the Powers of the Air.  They it was, as he had told the Corinthians, that crucified the Lord of glory.  But perhaps even they may be saved, for they knew not what they did.