Fortunate are those who take the first step. Someday people will realize that men and women are capable of speaking the language of the angels - that all of us are possessed of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and that we can perform miracles, cure, prophesy, and understand.
The medieval doctors of divinity who did not pretend to settle how many angels could dance on the point of a needle cut a very poor figure as far as romantic credulity is concerned beside the modern physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimetre every movement and position in the dance of the electrons. Not for worlds would I question the precise accuracy of these calculations or the existence of electrons (whatever they may be). The fate of Joan is a warning to me against such heresy.
Only by obedience to his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise beforea man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.
Man is without doubt the most interesting fool there is. He concedes that God made the angels immune from pain and death, and that he could have been similarly kind to man, but denies that he was under any moral obligation to do so.
God is here, right now, at our side. We can see him in this mist, in the ground we're walking on, even in my shoes. His angels keep watch while we sleep and help us in our work. In order to find God, you have only to look around.
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
O darkness, the sky is a gloomy precinct Whose door you close, and whose key the soul owns; And night divides itself in half, being diabolical and holy, Between Ilis, the black angel, and Christ, the starry Human Being.
The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.