Page:The Urantia Book, 1st Edition.djvu/922

 856 A period of one-half year intervened between the production of each midwayer, and when one thousand such beings had been born to each couple, no more were ever forthcoming. And there is no explanation available as to why this power was exhausted upon the appearance of the one thousandth offspring. No amount of further experimentation ever resulted in anything but failure.

These creatures constituted the intelligence corps of the Prince's administration. They ranged far and wide, studying and observing the world races and rendering other invaluable services to the Prince and his staff in the work of influencing human society remote from the planetary headquarters.

This regime continued until the tragic days of the planetary rebellion, which ensnared a little over four fifths of the primary midwayers. The loyal corps entered the service of the Melchizedek receivers, functioning under the titular leadership of Van until the days of Adam.

While this is the narrative of the origin, nature, and function of the midway creatures of Urantia, the kinship between the two orders—primary and secondary—makes it necessary to interrupt the story of the primary midwayers at this point in order to follow out the line of descent from the rebel members of the corporeal staff of Prince Caligastia from the days of the planetary rebellion to the times of Adam. It was this line of inheritance which, in the early days of the second garden, furnished one half of the ancestry for the secondary order of midway creatures.

The physical members of the Prince's staff had been constituted sex creatures for the purpose of participating in the plan of procreating offspring embodying the combined qualities of their special order united with those of the selected stock of the Andon tribes, and all of this was in anticipation of the subsequent appearance of Adam. The Life Carriers had planned a new type of mortal embracing the union of the conjoint offspring of the Prince's staff with the first-generation offspring of Adam and Eve. They had thus projected a plan envisioning a new order of planetary creatures whom they hoped would become the teacher-rulers of human society. Such beings were designed for social sovereignty, not civil sovereignty. But since this project almost completely miscarried, we shall never know what an aristocracy of benign leadership and matchless culture Urantia was thus deprived of. For when the corporeal staff later reproduced, it was subsequent to the rebellion and after they had been deprived of their connection with the life currents of the system.

The postrebellion era on Urantia witnessed many unusual happenings. A great civilization—the culture of Dalamatia—was going to pieces. "The Nephilim (Nodites) were on earth in those days, and when these sons of the gods went in to the daughters of men and they bore to them, their children were the 'mighty men of old,' the 'men of renown.'" While hardly "sons of the gods," the staff and their early descendants were so regarded by the evolutionary mortals of those distant days; even their stature came to be magnified by tradition. This, then, is the origin of the well-nigh universal folk tale of the gods who came down to earth and there with the daughters of men begot an ancient race of heroes. And all this legend became further confused with the race mixtures of the later appearing Adamites in the second garden.