Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/217

Rh which appeared to him by night in his tent: 'I am thy evil genius,' it said, 'we meet again at Philippi.'

As we study the shapes which the attendant spirits of the individual man assumed in early and mediæval Christendom, it is plain that the good and evil angels contending for man from birth to death, the guardian angel watching and protecting him, the familiar spirit giving occult knowledge or serving with magic art, continue in principle, and even in detail, the philosophy of earlier culture. Such beings even take visible form. St. Francisca had a familiar angel, not merely that domestic one that is given as a guardian to every man, but this was as it were a boy of nine years old, with a face more splendid than the sun, clad in a little white tunic; it was in after years that there came to her a second angel, with a column of splendour rising to the sky, and three golden palm-branches in his hands. Or such attendant beings, though invisible, make their presence evident by their actions, as in Calmet's account of that Cistercian monk whose familiar genius waited on him, and used to get his chamber ready when he was coming back from the country, so that people knew when to expect him home. There is a pleasant quaintness in Luther's remark concerning guardian angels, that a prince must have a greater, stronger, wiser angel than a count, and a count than a common man. Bishop Bull, in one of his vigorous sermons, thus sums up a learned argument: 'I cannot but judge it highly probable, that every faithful person at least hath his particular good Genius or Angel, appointed by God over him, as the Guardian and Guide of his Life.' But he