Page:Heavenly Bridegrooms.djvu/22

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transgressed the laws of nature, or the resulting offspring would not have been so well developed physically (as giants) nor mentally (as "mighty men which were, of old, men of renown.")

Clement of Alexandria, in his Miscellanies (Stromaba,) appears to blame the sinning angels in addition because they "told to the women the secrets which had come to their knowledge; while the rest of the angels concealed them, or, rather, kept them against the coming of the Lord." These "secrets", we learn from several of the Christian Fathers, were the arts of metallurgy, dyeing, the properties of herbs, astronomy and astrology, etc. Reasoning from this assumption that certain sciences and industrial arts were imparted to mankind from sinful angels, we need not wonder that Tertullian pertinently asks:

"But, if the self-same angels who disclosed both the material substances of this kind and their charms—of gold, I mean, and lustrous stones—and taught men how to work them, and by and by instructed them, among their other [instructions] in [the virtue of] eye-lid powder and the dyeing of fleeces, have been condemned by God, as Enoch tells us, how shall we please God while we joy in the things of those [angels] who, on these accounts, have provoked the anger and vengeance of God?"

Tertul. on Female Dress, II. 10.

This thought seems to have been to him a matter of serious moment, for he enlarges upon it as follows when speaking of the dress and ornamentation of women:

"For they, withal, who instituted them and assigned, under condemnation, to the penalty of death—those angels to wit, who rushed from heaven on the daughters of men; so that this ignominy also attached to women. For when to an age much more ignorant [than ours] they had disclosed certain well-concealed material substances, and several not well-revealed scientific arts—if it is true that they had laid bare the operations of metallurgy, and had divulged the natural properties of herbs, and had promulgated the powers of enchantment, and had traced out every curious art, even to the interpretation of the stars—they conferred properly