Invisible Helpers

The child was naturally very much terrified, but the fireman distinctly and repeatedly declared that as he made his way toward the boy at great risk, he saw a form like an angel—here his exact words are given—a something “all gloriously white and silvery, bending over the bed and smoothing down the counterpane.” He said he could not possibly have been mistaken about it, for it was visible in a glare of light for some moments, and in fact disappeared only when he was within a few feet of it.

Another curious feature of this story is that the child’s mother found herself unable to sleep that night in Colchester but was constantly harassed by a strong feeling that something was wrong with her child, to the point that she was at last compelled to rise and spend some time in earnest prayer that the little one might be protected from the danger she instinctively felt was hanging over him. The intervention was thus evidently what a Christian would call an answer to prayer; a Theosophist, putting the same idea in more scientific phraseology, would say that her intense outpouring of love constituted a force which one of our invisible helpers was able to use for the rescue of her child from a terrible death.