Gleanings by Wm. C. Gage

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 21, 1865

Gleanings.

By Wm. C. Gage

We extract the following from a work entitled, ‘American Antiquities,’ a chapter of which is devoted to proving that the antediluvians were of greater stature than the people of the present day.

‘That the antediluvians were of great stature, is strongly supported by a remark of king Solomon’s, found in the Book of Wisdom, in the Apocrypha, 14th chapter, 6th verse, where he calls all the inhabitants of the earth who were destroyed by the deluge, ‘proud giants,’ whose history, by tradition, handed down from the family of Noah, through the lineage of Shem, was well known to that king, the wisest of men in his day and age.

‘And even after the flood, the great stature of men is supported in the Scriptures in several places, who were, for some generations, permitted to live several hundred years, and were all accordingly of great stature. Whole tribes or nations of gigantic inhabitants peopled the country of Canaan, before the Jews drove them out.’ p. 156.

Charles von Rotteck, the celebrated German Historian, makes the following statement in regard to a popular fable:

‘Moses, who proclaimed so loudly the majesty of God, and inculcated so impressively his moral commands, has—and this is quite difficult to explain (?)—been silent upon the immortality of the soul. The zeal for this doctrine, which made its first appearance after the Babylonian captivity, was founded not upon Scripture, but merely upon tradition.’ Hist. of World, vol. i, p. 330.

WM. C. GAGE.