Page:Heavenly Bridegrooms.djvu/26

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22
Theodore Schroeder

a law was prescribed to God through an angel, how they should live. For being bastards in race, of the fire of angels and the blood of woman, and therefore liable to desire a certain race of their own, they were anticipated by a certain righteous law."

Clementine Homilies, VIII, 18.

Inasmuch as the Deluge had already destroyed every one on the earth except Noah and his family, we see that the author cannot mean by those who survived in the world any giants still in the flesh. Moreover, the decree which followed and which prescribed that they are to have power over only those human beings who break the moral law and practice magic would indicate these "giants" had then entered upon what sophists would call astral, and from the paragraph quoted above, it is evidently taken for granted that these astral giants would propagate their kind. This is an important point—the testimony of a Christian Father of a tradition that human beings (not created angels) who had once inhabited bodies, could beget children on the plane of the astral unless prevented by the direct prohibition of Heaven. If it be objected that the author refers to giants still in earthly form when he speaks to "those who survived in the world" I am sure that the statement follows a remark about the Deluge and that in that case the surviving giants must have been Noah and his family. This view, however, is absurd, when we consider that the decree forbade the giants to assume power over any but the human race. If Noah and his family were the surviving giants, where would be the sense in promulgating such a decree to them? This same author gives an account of the doings of the angelic fathers of these giants which reminds one strongly of the spirit seances of the late Rev. Stainton Moses, when under conditions which precluded all fraud or illusion, tiny pearls and other precious stones suddenly materialized before the sitters. Here is the tradition recorded by the Christian Fathers:

"For of the spirits who inhabit the heaven, the angels who dwell in the lowest region, being grieved at the ingratitude of man to God, asked that they might come