The warning, above all the story, acted as a stimulus instead of the reverse. Yet another strange door was set ajar; my eyes, big with wonder and questions, peered through. “Earth’s Earliest Ages,” by G. H. Pember, an evangelical, but an imaginative evangelical, was placed in my hands, accompanied by further solemn warnings. Pember, a writer of the prophetic school, had style, imagination, a sense of the marvellous, a touch of genuine drama too; he used suggestion admirably, his English was good, he had proportion, he knew where to stop. As a novelist of fantastic kind--an evangelical Wells, a “converted” Dunsany--he might have become a best-seller. He had, moreover, a theme of high imaginative possibilities, based upon a sentence in Genesis (vi. 2)--“The Sons of God saw the Daughters of men that they were fair ... and took to themselves wives from among 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.