The Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, “Interesting Letters — 'Mistakes of Ptolemy, the Pagan Historian' (a reader's letter)”
“Needless to say, the testimony of the Great Pyramid, the Lord’s “stone witness” in which Brother Russell still declared his implicit faith in his last notice of this monument, in his new preface to Volume III just about a month before his death—is quite against the new (?) chronological views of the Herald. But of course the Herald writers have no use for the Pyramid’s testimony now. They have thrown that aside … The Great Pyramid substantiates the views held by Brother Russell beyond all doubt. … The Herald writers are quite wrong in very many of their interpretations. They are certainly not safe guides to the Lord’s people.”
This is not the magazine speaking in its own voice. It is a private letter from Morton Edgar, a Bible Student writer on the Great Pyramid, which the magazine chose to print under its standing heading 'INTERESTING LETTERS' with the sub-heading 'MISTAKES OF PTOLEMY, THE PAGAN HISTORIAN'. The magazine introduces it on p. 253 in square brackets: 'A private letter from Brother Morton Edgar addressed to a sister in Christ has been handed to us with request to publish; and since it deals with subject-matter of particular interest to the church at this time, we take pleasure in publishing it, as follows'. The letter argues against the rival journal The Herald of Christ's Kingdom on chronology. The last sentence quoted here stands a few lines earlier in the letter than the pyramid passage and is about the Herald writers' interpretations generally, not about the pyramid alone. The issue header reads 'Vol. XLIII AUGUST 15, 1922 No. 16'.
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Provenance and verification note for The Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, Interesting Letters — 'Mistakes of Ptolemy, the Pagan Historian' (a reader's letter)
Confidence note. The bound volume was opened and the letter read in this session on pp. 253-254; wording, issue, pages, heading and signature confirmed, and the printed page numbers read from the leaves' own numerals. The OCR renders a few words imperfectly ('Jcre-miah', 'wiiters', 'chro-nological'); these are obvious and have been corrected without supplying any word absent from the scan. This source carries the weight of a correspondent whose letter the Society printed with approval, not of a Watch Tower article.
Scan provenance. Internet Archive item 'magazines-the-watchtower-and-herald-christ-presence-1922' (bound volume). Public domain. The item's page_numbers.json maps leaf 254 to printed page 254.
Corroborated by. src-pyr-ss3-1916-foreword
Notes. Two things this establishes. First, it confirms from outside the book itself that Russell's 1916 foreword existed and was written about a month before his death. Second, it shows the Society in 1922 printing, with a commendatory introduction, a correspondent who treated abandonment of the pyramid's testimony as a mark of unsoundness — six years before the Society did the same thing itself. The opinion is the correspondent's; the decision to print it is the magazine's.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-pyr-w-1922-0815-implicit-faith