Are angels realities? Science and Health explains that "they are pure thoughts from God." Without question God's thoughts are real, and as such angels or "messages" have each an identity by which we may know one from another, as we know our friends in this mortal life.
Not long since an angelic group of rare beauty and symmetry, as outlined in a letter from the Founder of Christian Science to one of her students, came under the writer's notice, which he would in the interests of the general good see more widely introduced. It was as follows: "Oh, may you feel the touch of the spiritual idea that is the light in your path! God gives you daily supplies. Never ask for to-morrow; it is enough that Love is an ever-present help, and if you trust, never doubting, you will have all you need every moment. What a glorious inheritance is given to us through the understanding of omnipresent Love!A correction was made in the September 1893 Journal: "In the article entitled 'Angels,' by James F. Gilman, the quotation from Mrs. Eddy's letter to her student, was made to read, 'Oh what an inheritance is given to 'me,' whereas it should have read, 'Oh what an inheritance it has given to 'us.'" More we cannot ask; more we do not want; more we cannot have. This sweet assurance is the 'Peace be still' to all human fears and suffering of every sort."
If viewed coldly, and merely intellectually, this group of pure thoughts become not to us living angels; but taken to heart, and tested in actual experience, they become living, vitalized entities, with power to impart the sense of God and heaven. In few words, they express the very essence of Christian Science. Finding them attractive they impressed their beautiful outlines upon the writer's memory, but without realizing then their living potency as "pure thoughts from God;" but the leaven of their purity, truth, power and beauty, was working silently and unconsciously in the mind, as it afterwards appeared in experience when he had seemed to be under a cloud of despondency, because of the apparent rejection of the Christian Science idea by every one to whom he had sought to introduce it. The false thought seemed to voice itself in these words "Nobody wants Christian Science; all seem utterly apathetic on the subject. One cannot rightly beg people to hear it, or the sick to become patients, nor would that avail. All one can do is to fold the hands and wait."
