The following posts (if I get it right) are from pages of a book that includes this description of Piazzi Smyth.
Doug
Start and end of the "Seventy Years" according to the WTS
by Doug Mason 13 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Doug Mason
Another prominent British Israelite was Charles Piazzi Smyth, then the Astronomer Royal for Scotland. He too had attended some of Wilson’s lectures and was convinced of the truth of what he heard because it chimed with another passion of his: pyramidology. The origins of this movement, which for a time ran in parallel with British Israelitism before being virtually taken over by it, go back to the work of John Greaves and his 1638 survey of the pyramids of Giza. As we have seen, from Greaves’s data on the measurements of the King’s Chamber Sir Isaac Newton had been able to work out that the ancient Egyptians must have made use of a particular unit of measure that he called the ‘profane cubit’ but which is now more generally referred to as the ‘royal cubit’. This cubit he worked out as being equivalent to 20.62 British inches, which implied it was 21 Egyptian inches - each Egyptian inch being only slightly shorter than the modern-day British unit. The implication of this discovery was that British units of measure owed their origins not to the Romans but rather to the Egyptians: the ‘fathers’ of geometry.
Newton further proposed that the Egyptians had also used a longer measure of 25 inches, which he called a ‘sacred cubit’. Evidence for this was not as obvious as for the other unit, and from the start it was treated with some scepticism. However, the idea was revived in the 1860s by John Taylor, editor of the London Magazine.Himself a skilled mathematician, he computed that the perimeter of the Great Pyramid was exactly 36,653.76 British inches, which could compute to 36,600 pyramid inches - each pyramid inch being slightly shorter than the British measure. To Taylor this implied that the Great Pyramid had been intended to be a species of calendar, with each 100 inches of its perimeter representing one day. On this analysis a full circuit of the pyramid symbolized 366 days, or approximately a whole year. Though the Royal Society rejected his paper on the subject, Taylor published his results in 1864 in a booklet entitled: The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? & Who Built It?Like others of his time, John Taylor was deeply influenced by the Bible and the apparent need to attribute knowledge relating to measures to divine influence. He died the same year that his book was published but his mantle was quickly taken up by Charles Piazzi Smyth, who had been in correspondence with him for some months prior to his death. Shortly afterwards Piazzi Smyth made his own survey of the pyramids, finding further proof that the Great Pyramid was designed not just as a calendar but as an almanac of the ages. He believed that the lengths of its internal corridors, as measured in pyramid inches, mapped out the course of world civilization, with each pyramid inch representing one year. The role of Britain as ‘Israel’ was read into the measures of mute stones, especially the Great Step at the top of the pyramid’s Grand Gallery. Summing up how the Grand Gallery symbolized the Christian era and the ascent of true Christians to the light represented by the messiah, Smyth felt able to write [the following] in all seriousness: -
Doug Mason
“And who are more particularly, the great national body of these rising, improving, and we may trust approved Christians?
“Some will claim the Church of one nation, and some another; some will argue for spiritual Israel, whether spread among Teutonic people, or mainly confined to the British Isles and America. And who shall decide amongst them?
“None but the Great Pyramid itself. Advance we, therefore, to the great step of 1813 A. D. (i.e. at 1,813 Pyramid inches from the North, or Christian nativity, beginning) of the Grand Gallery, and inquire there what is signified.
“The step marks there, by that date, the most energetic advances made by Great Britain in its latter-day spread of the Bible, and its latter-day preaching of Christianity to all the world . . .
“What manner of people, then, ought not we of Great Britain now, of Israel in ages past, to be at this juncture of our eventful history; saved above all nations by the providence of God in a manner we have never deserved, and for divine purpose in the future, respecting which nothing but the glorious Scriptures of Inspiration can give us any sufficient or saving idea; a halcyon time, when Ephraim shall be united once more with Judah, and both shall be on the Lord’s side.”Today, given the prevailing scepticism of modern society concerning the existence of God, it is difficult to appreciate the powerful influence the idea that they were really Israelites in disguise had on Britons of the mid- to late nineteenth century. For very many people this was a plausible explanation for the extraordinary providence shown by God to Victorian Britain.
(“The New Jerusalem”, Adrian Gilbert, pages 359-361)
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Billy the Ex-Bethelite
Doug,
On Friday of this year's DC, there's a part something like "Bible Questions Answered." Several of the questions involved the 144000 anointed, that there were ALWAYS some genuine anointed alive on the earth from the time of Jesus down to today. They mentioned the names of some early Russell cronies, I think a couple of others during earlier centuries that were anti-trinity, including Sir Isaac Newton.
So, Newton was anti-trinity and pro-pyramidology. That's two thumbs up in Watchtowerland!