glery, who taught the women the motions of the stars and the knowledge of things celestial, by whose power they conceived the giants as their children, by whom wickedness came to its heights on the earth, until God decreed that the whole race of the living should perish in their impiety by the Deluge."
Extant Fragments of the Five Books of the Chronography of Julius Africanus, in Georgius Syncellus, Chron. p. 19, al 15, ed. Paris, 11 Venet.
Nevertheless, Rationalists and Materialists are in the minority among the Fathers of the Church as regards this subject. The majority accepted the accounts in Genesis and Enoch at their face value.
To briefly sum up the majority's views of the early church on this matter:
1. Angels of a superior order did come into the earthly life whether (a) because God sent them, or (b) because they were moved with indignation at the ingratitude of men toward God and came voluntarily in order to reconcile God and man, or (c) because they were enticed by women on the earth, the traditions do not agree.
2. Having come into this earthly life, they became either the lovers or the husbands of women, whether beguiled thereto in part by the Devil, or wholly by the women or, partially or wholly by their own desires, the traditions again do not agree. One tradition, as we have seen, hints at the sin of Sodom; and an interference on the astral plane with the rights of earthly husbands; others hint at illicit amours; but Tertullian demonstrates unanswerably from sacred Scripture that the angels were the wedded husbands of the daughters of men, and that these daughters were virginal at the time of wedding their angelic lovers.
This was not, however, all their sin. One tradition, as we have seen, makes a vague allusion to the sin of Sodom in connection with the intercourse of angels with women.
3. That an angelic woman should seek in honorable marriage, especially an earthly woman, it would appear, was reckoned a sin. When asked why, we find that the
