them ... and there were giants in the earth in those days...." These Sons of God were some kind of higher beings, mighty spirits, angels of a sort; but rather fallen angels; their progeny formed a race apart from humans; for some reason, now slipped from my memory, Pember was convinced that this unlawful procreation was being resumed in modern days. The Nephilim, as he called them, were aiming at control of the world, Anti-Christ, a gorgeous but appalling figure, naturally, at their head.
It was a magnificent theme; he treated it, within the limits he set himself, with ingenious conviction. The danger was imminent; the human race, while shuddering, must be on its guard. In the night, in the twinkling of an eye, the catastrophe might come. Signs the Nephilim brought with them were spiritualism, theosophy, the development of secret powers latent in man, a new and awful type of consciousness, magic, and all the rest of the "occult" movement that was beginning to show its hydra head about this time.
In a moment Moody went to the bottom of the class, and Pember reigned in his stead. By hook or by crook I obtained the books that Pember signalled as so dangerously subversive of the truth: "Magic Black and White" by Dr. Franz Hartmann; "The Perfect Way," by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland; "Esoteric Buddhism," by A. P. Sinnett; "Voice of the Silence," by Mabel Collins; "The Bhagavad Gita," from the Upanishads; and Emma Hardinge Britten's "History of American Spiritualism." My first delicious alarm lest the sky might fall any moment, and Satan appear with the great and terrible Nephilim princes to rule the world, became less threatening.... Soon afterwards, too, I happened upon my first novel, Laurence Oliphant's "Massollam," followed, a good deal later, by his "Scientific Religion" and his "Sympneumata." This history of his amazing subservience to Thomas Luke Harris helped to peel another thin skin from my eyes; Oliphant seemed a hero, but Harris a vile humbug. By this time other books had brought grist to the
mill as well: Amiel's "Journal Intime"; Drummond's
