The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England by Oldridge Darren;

Author:Oldridge, Darren; [Darren Oldridge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317278184
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

5

Angels

The guard of God’s children

Towards the end of his life in 1691, the minister Richard Baxter attended an unusual meeting with a small group of his London flock. The subject of the gathering was “a gentleman of considerable rank” – Baxter concealed his identity in the written account – who in recent months had succumbed often, and with some enthusiasm, to the sin of drunkenness. The man’s younger brother was a member of Baxter’s congregation, and he and his wife had raised their concerns with the venerable pastor. Their testimony touched on more than intemperance, however. On every night that the gentleman returned to his chamber to sleep off his excesses, he was awakened by a rapping noise on his bedstead. When he stayed at his brother’s house, the sound was heard by other members of the family, who began to watch over him as he slept in an attempt, unsuccessfully, to detect its source. The invisible knockings became so common and disturbing that the man and his family met with Baxter, who determined that a spirit of some kind was warning him to change his ways. In his subsequent reflections on the affair, the minister wondered “what kind of spirit this is that hath such a care of this man’s soul.… Do good spirits dwell so near us? Or are they sent on such messages? Or is it his guardian angel?” He reserved the matter to the hidden wisdom of God, “who keepeth such things from us, in the dark”.1

Baxter’s uncertainty was understandable. It was rare for angels to manifest themselves so directly – though reports of angelic visitations appeared in cheap print during the seventeenth century. English Protestants were generally wary of visions of angels, which were associated with popery and the subterfuges of the Devil. On the whole, angels were not expected to reveal themselves to the physical senses at all: in the delicate phrase of Joseph Hall, the Caroline Bishop of Norwich, they embraced humankind with “unfelt hands”.2 Nonetheless, it is striking that Baxter did not question the good intentions of the spirit that tapped at the drunkard’s bed, and on this basis surmised that it was an angel. In warning an errant Christian of the dangers of sin, it certainly behaved like a member of the heavenly host. It was the duty of angels to protect and nurture human souls and to guide them away from sin. As William Perkins had written in the reign of Elizabeth, they were “the guard of God’s children”.3

If Baxter was right, the spirit in his parishioners’ bedroom was a rare outward manifestation of an unseen kingdom of angels. Few doubted that the cosmos was populated by an immense company of good spirits. This belief was underpinned by biblical authority: as Perkins reminded the readers of A Golden Chaine (1591), ten thousand times ten thousand angels stood before God in the vision of Daniel (Dan. 7:10), and the members of this host served as “ministering spirits” to all faithful Christians.4 But despite their ubiquity, angels were an ambivalent presence in the English church.

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