before the Lord, and the Christians the "seven spirits of God" (Rev.
iii. 1), and the "seven angels which stood before God" (Ibid, viii. 2).
The Persians had four angels--one at each corner of the world;
Revelation has "four angels standing on the four corners of the earth"
(vii. 1). The Persians employed them as Mediators with the Supreme; the
majority of Christians now do the same, and all Christians did so in
earlier times. Origen, Tertullian, Chrysostom, and other Fathers, speak
of angels as ruling the earth, the planets, etc. Michael is the angel of
the Sun, as was Hercules, and he fights with and conquers the dragon, as
Hercules the Python, Horus the monster Typhon, Krishna the serpent. The
Persians believed in devils as well as in angels, and they also had
their chief, Ahriman, the pattern of Satan. These devils--or dews, or
devs--struggled against the good, and in the end would be destroyed, and
Ahriman would be chained down in the abyss, as Satan in Rev. xx. Ahriman
flew down to earth from heaven as a great dragon (Rev. xii. 3 and 9),
the angels arming themselves against him (Ibid, verse 7). Strauss
remarks: "Had the belief in celestial beings, occupying a particular
station in the court of heaven, and distinguished by particular names,
originated from the revealed religion of the Hebrews--had such a belief
been established by Moses, or some later prophet--then, according to the
views of the supranaturalist, they might--nay, they must--be admitted to
be correct. But it is in the Maccabaean Daniel and in the apocryphal
Tobit that this doctrine of angels, in its more precise form, first
appears; and it is evidently a product of the influence of the Zend
religion of the Persians on the Jewish mind. We have the testimony of
the Jews themselves that they brought the names of the angels with them
from Babylon" ("Life of Jesus," vol. i., p. 101).

Dr. Kalisch, after having remarked that "the notions [of the Jews]
concerning angels fluctuated and changed," says that "at an early