Making Angels | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Apr 6, 1882

Making Angels.

THE business of manufacturing angels is carried on quite extensively and successfully in this country, if the popular theory of human psychology be true. A man recently murdered his wife in San Francisco, cutting her in a most brutal manner. At one of the first "interviews" held with him in his prison cell, he said, with a congratulatory air, that she is now an angel! And this is the manner in which angels are made, according to the popular theological belief. Is it, or is it not, a bad business to follow? Ought, or ought not, our government to provide for the protection, or perhaps for the reward, of those who take poor suffering creatures and turn them into glorious and happy angels?

Not long since a young woman married a brute of a man in San Francisco, on the very eve of his departure for the penitentiary, where he was sent for the murder of his wife. Perhaps she, too, wanted "to be an angel, and with the angels stand," and so she married a man who was in the angel-making business. But she will have to wait a while, as the Court which convicted him broke up his business for ten years.

Now in all seriousness, we protest against the (more than) folly of this theory of the origin of angels, by reason of which murderers are led to look at the blood of their victims with self-complacency. As long as inhuman monsters are led to believe that their action converted their victims into glorious and happy angels in Heaven, and they themselves are petted and flattered by silly fools, and society, and the laws permit it, so long may we expect that the murder of wives will prevail in the land. This sickly sentimentality is owing to a false theology, which is a disgrace to the name of Christianity. The heathenism of the Platonic school has been grafted upon the gospel of Christ; and the pall of the "dark ages" hangs over the churches of to-day, enfeebling their influence for good by perverting their faith and morals. A murderer stood upon his gallows in an Eastern city, under the instruction of his ministers, and expressed his gratification that he had been permitted to commit the crime which had thrown him under the influence of religious teachers, and had led him to discover his lost condition, and to receive the salvation of Christ. We are not only shocked at the depravity of the man who spoke thus, but at the immoral tendency of the religious teaching which leads to such an expression.

The Scriptures do not justify the idea that angels are of human origin, yet it is a common expression among religious people to speak of their dead friends as ever being with them as their "guardian angels." Bishop Bowman, in a sermon preached in Oakland when he was on his way to Japan, said he was not a Spiritualist; and the disclaimer was certainly needed, for any one who heard his reference to the loving calls of his glorified wife, would surely have supposed he was a Spiritualist in full faith. To degrade the angels of God, to whom the saints shall be equal in the resurrection, Luke 20:35, 36 (but are not now), by making them to be demons or dead men, is to blaspheme them that dwell in Heaven. Rev. 13:6. Heaven had its glorious inhabitants before man was created, for "all the sons of God shouted for joy" when the foundations of the earth were laid; Job 38:7. The cherubim were in the garden of Eden to keep the way of the tree of life before death had fallen upon man.

We regret to say it, but it is truth, that the theology of the schools, the popular belief of the present day, is responsible for the growth of Spiritualism, and all its kindred vagaries.