At all events, the poetic decorum, the proportion, and the antithetic parallelism, demand a somewhat as much below God, as the horse is below man.

The opposition of 'flesh' and 'spirit' in the Gospel of St.John, who thought in Hebrew, though he wrote in Greek, favours our common version,--'flesh and not spirit': but the place in which this passage stands, namely, in one of the first forty chapters of Isaiah, and therefore written long before the Captivity, together with the majestic simplicity characteristic of Isaiah's name gives perhaps a greater probability to the other: 'Egypt is man, and not God; and her horses flesh, and not wind'.

If Mr.Oxlee renders the fourth verse of Psalm civ.--'He maketh spirits his messengers', (for our version--'He maketh his angels spirits'-- is without a violent inversion senseless), this is a case in point for the use of the word, 'spirits', in the sense of incorporeal beings.

(Mr.
Oxlee will hardly, I apprehend, attribute the opinion of some later Rabbis, that God alone and exclusively is a Spirit, to the Sacred Writers, easy as it would be to quote a score of texts in proof of the contrary.) I, however, cannot doubt that the true rendering of the above-mentioned verse in the Psalms is;--'He maketh the winds his angels or messengers, and the lightnings his ministrant servants'.
As to Mr.Oxlee's 'abstract intelligences,' I cannot but think 'abstract' for 'pure,' and even pure intelligences for incorporeal, a lax use of terms.

With regard to the point in question, the truth seems to be this.