seed had but to drive in his flocks to tread it in, or drag the mud with bushes. There was nearly always "corn in Egypt." The climate was, and still is, a mild one, and the bodily needs are in consequence exceedingly small. A handful of grain, a single shirt, a hut of mud and cane sufficed for existence. Hence, though the actual labourer might receive little benefit himself, he was the means of great and easily acquired wealth; and in addition to the kings and the pashas, large numbers of the priestly and literary classes were able to be supported without the cruel drain upon a people's resources due always to an inordinate proportion of nonproducing classes. To the ranks of the sacred scribes belonged not only the high posts of the priesthood, but the more worldly functions of secretary and custodian of treasuries, granaries, and muniments, while the scribes royal directed the War Office and the Admiralty of the river fleet; and the general body acted usefully as notaries, conveyancers, letter-writers, accountants, market clerks, managers of linen manufactories and of stone quarries, surveyors, engravers, architects, goldsmiths, sculptors, physicians, schoolmasters. Functions were to a certain extent hereditary, but the sacerdotal tribe was not a caste, but a class. Men of ability from any other social class might be admitted to the priesthood.

Man in a simple state of life is an observer of nature's methods. Among prominent objects of attention must always have been the apparent sources of life, and the recurrences of large events. The sun is the apparent origin of physical life, manifesting also a grand apparent certainty of periodicity, which makes days and years and seasons, and marking out, in conjunction with stars, vast circles of time, which possibly expanded the

minds of primitive men to large orbits of thought, as the miracle of his daily life-giving fire disposed them to love and adoration. Besides the sun, God's lieutenant of physical life, sex, the reproducer, has received reverence as the producer; the male element usually dominating as the sun, while from a similar attribute and similar association with a stronger power, the moon and the feminine have gone together.

Natural observations and spiritual intuitions have been joined in correspondences, real or fanciful. The pictorial imagination has often sought to take the place of the spiritual revelation, and has led the mind astray from the true apprehension of the type. That the glorious solar orb should be recognized as the immediate cause of our systemic life, and so as a divine type, is a pantheism by no means inconsistent with the highest worship. When the priest of the esoteric mysteries worshiped Ra, or the creative sun, it was as a wondrous manifestation of the Supreme, or, as it were, the Supreme in specific action. The aspects of divine beneficence being manifold in their natural expression, the signs by which the eternal God was represented were to a certain extent interchangeable. God could not be beheld in His infinity, but He might be seen through any attribute, which attribute was adorable as God. This lofty and subtle Pantheism can only be held in its purity by the mind enfranchised from the rudimentary state and cleansed of the fluff of ignorance.

The litany of the priest ran:"Homage to thee, Ra! Supreme power, He who discloses the earth, and lights the unseen,

He whose principle has become his manifestation,

Who is born under the form of the deity of the great disk."

(Naville, Litany of Ra.)

This was too metaphysical for the generality, who could not take in so purely intellectual a conception as that of the Amen-ra, or hidden fashioner, pouring his creative force into the recipient unseen, and producing a semblance of himself in the radiant sun. So the warmth of the poet invents endearing epithets for the sun as a person, singing that his soul shone in his shape, and that he dwelt in the interior of his dazzling disk; or, if of a metaphysical inclination, he argues that the divine emblem was "born as his own son," that he was wont to "address his eye," and "speak to his head," or in other words, commune with himself. And the popular imagination. demanded further substantivity and an extension of the concrete, and sought out many a quaint minor symbolism, and the artist put it into form. The "beetle that folds his wings, that rests in the empyrean," in some fanciful way, from rolling its eggs before it in a ball of dirt, is made a type, and the bull, as the largest creature known, is elevated to a divine symbol, and both are carven images at the door of the temple. Minor representations of divine attributes may be extended without limit, according as the mind seizes upon one or another external correspondence, or outward and visible sign of an internal and spiritual fact. One part of Egypt feels pride in its temples, where a sacred animal receives veneration as representing such or such a conception of divine power; in an adjoining canton the object of adoration is different, or worshipped in a different form. Certain cities marked out special triads or trinities of deity as objects of their peculiar worship. Rivalry intensifies each worship, until the spiritual attribute of the sign is forgotten. Each party has its god, the pantheistic fervour departs, universal religion wanes,

and sects are born which are both polytheistic and idolatrous. The priest of enfranchised spirit sees still beneath the symbol its secret truth; to a partisan crowd this inner sense seems thin and vain; if he speaks it is to deaf ears, so the acolytes continue to serve at the shrines, and the real magus and priest takes his place, perhaps sadly enough, at the head of the pomp and show which he knows and feels to be empty. The ineffable Amenra is forgotten amid the hosts of gods and goddesses that claim to be emanations of his but are nothing in themselves. Thus was Egypt pantheistic and polytheistic at once; Pantheism being Monotheism made real, and vital, and warm, and Polytheism being Theism frittered away and degraded into countless superstitions and inanities. In other words, the object of Egyptian worship was a plurality in unity, the ignorant catching sight only of the exterior plurality, the seer penetrating deeper to the interior unity.

The Nile with the Egyptians was as marked an instance of periodicity and beneficence as the sun, and was worshipped as representative of many mystic attributes. As in the belief of the sages there existed a substantial sun that was but the emblem or presentment of an unseen life-giving power, so too was there a spiritual as well as a visible Nile. The first conception of this was the water of a firmament that was supposed to enwrap the world, as in the early Greek tradition is the office assigned to Okeanos, or Ocean, a sort of liquid space. We moderns only conceive of the firmament as aërial, and refer to the Greek Ouranos as meaning heaven or sky, but that very Ouranos we must father upon the Egyptian word Urnas, or the Celestial Water, and indeed, we retain the root yet in our English word "urn," or watervessel, and in another common

word signifying water, but now used in a limited sense.

"The Nile-God traverses heaven; his course there corresponds to that of the river on earth," says the Hymn. On the spiritual or unseen Nile floats, according to the Egyptian creed, the bark of the unseen sun; and the disembodied spirit vanishes from earth by that way, after the manner of the sun duskily departing at eve.

One of the most serious and permanent of religious types, in which the spiritual fact and its natural metaphor seem to bear to each other more than a casual relation and correspondence, is that of water as an intervenience and ordeal to be traversed between the corporeal and the spiritual world. As in baptism the old self is symbolised as being washed away, and the new self cleansed and brightened, so in death there is the course across the river, be it known as Nile or Jordan, to face, in which passage the most easily detachable part of the still clinging earth-life is cleared away, and the soul is ushered as far as may be into that state wherein there is no wrappage of heredity possible, or material veil that may hide the real man,the state of naked truth.

The notion of a spiritual fact will entwine itself so closely with material emblems that it is often impossible to discover whether a glimmering consciousness of the fact first suggested the suitable emblem, or whether some ordinary event of physical life led the way to the idea. It may be, indeed it often is, from the clear view of a physical fact that we are enabled to proceed a step further to a conception of some deeper truth.

In Egypt the burial places were mostly in the mountains of the west, or sunset side, of the Nile; and when a death occurred on the eastern side, the ferrying of the

mummy across the river became an important symbolic ceremony. By this passage was the soul, like the sun entering the underworld of the west, typified as sped on its way to the unseen. When a death took place on the western side of the Nile, the same procession was conveyed by boat across a pool within the temple precincts.

This symbolism of the passage from life to death has a very general acceptation under various kindred forms. A correspondence, it is of course understood, is not a minute picture, but a foreshadowing, a whisper audible on one plane and in its own language, of what takes place on another, where the language is not the same. There has been a readiness, not explicable by the physical influence of the Egyptian ceremonial, or wholly derivable from the Jewish imagery of Jordan, to make use of the river as a type of the passage of the soul as a disembodied being. Even the Greeks, though they borrowed the notion from Egypt, held the belief of the encircling rivers of Hades, and borrowed their silent boatman Charon from the Egyptian Kharu, one of the imagined attendant demons of the death-process. But they added the strange superstition that those whose corpses by any mischance remained unburied or uncovered by soil, were not permitted to enter the ferryman's barge without previously passing a hundred years in vain wanderings to and fro upon the shore. The Greeks were imaginative rather than inspired; a more real reason for the spirits' wandering close to earth would have been, not that the body was not buried, but that certain earthly ties were not put aside which drew the spirit down and prevented it from passing through that river on the thither side of which is the entrance to life.

So far as can be seen, we ought not to regard the ancient Egyptians as a priest-ridden people, in the mediæval sense of the term. We have seen in how many necessary occupations of practical life the Egyptian priest was engaged; and in his more especial function he was not only ceremonialist, but philosopher and poet. Such natural outlet may reasonably be supposed to have kept the priestly mind free from that morbidness into which it is apt to lapse when the work to be done is all of an internal character. The secret lust of dominance, uncoiling itself in the spiritual sphere, is a more harmful evil than the rude power of open tyranny.

There was a very wholesome feeling in Egypt with regard to productive labour, though the law that enforced it was armed with a sanction that seems to us severe. Herodotus tells us (11.177) “Amasis [King Aahmes II. of the XXVIth Dynasty; probably a mistake for Aahmes I., (Amosis) of a much earlier time, the XVIIIth Dynasty, which King was a great reformer, promoting commerce and opening roads] established the law that every Egyptian should appear once a year before the governor of his canton and shew his means of living; or failing to do so, and to prove that he got an honest livelihood, should be put to death. Solon, the Athenian, borrowed this law from the Egyptians, and imposed it on his countrymen, who have observed it ever since it is indeed an excellent custom."

:

The condemnation of the idle to death might arise from the fact of social science that in a simple community of labourers he that did not labour was self-condemned to die of starvation, unless, indeed, he were within reach of the charity of others. This sorrowful result of idleness is referred to in the Hymn to the Nile, the type of beneficent action

in its fecundating and enriching power:

"Idle hands he loathes

If the gods in heaven are grieved,
[as by idleness]

Then sorrow cometh upon men." One of the confessions of innocence in the Ritual runs, "Oh, Stripper of Words, I have not made delays, or dawdled."

Where religious feeling is pure and pantheistic, orthodoxy is genial and comprehensive. To add a new emblem of divinity to the pantheon is not to disturb the old; it is but to reveal another attribute of the unseen, which, when assimilated with what men have felt before, enriches the conception of God. There were in Egypt and in Greece terrible degradations of religion; by those degradations it is no more right to judge the purest current of their thought than it is to condemn the inner spirit of our own faith by any popular presentment in which it is turned all awry, and well nigh upside down. There were sectarian disputes in Egypt, but they appear to have arisen from local feeling and prejudice rather than purely religious difference or vital divergence of doctrine. A main danger against which we have to guard in our estimate of the warm pantheistic faiths, is that of supposing that they were doctrinal in the sense in which we have known of doctrine from the metaphysical discussions of wrangling and ignorant ecclesiastic fathers, the dogmatic bulls of most Christian Emperors and Popes, and the narrow shibboleths of zealous extirpators of heresy, and promoters of auto-da-fè.

In a general view of the characteristics of the Egyptian system there stands out most impressively the importance in which was held from the earliest ages the question of life in the hereafter. Clement of Alexandria goes so far as to state that "From Pythagoras Plato

derived the immortality of the soul, and he from the Egyptians." This at least shews that the subject appeared then to hold, and to have held, as prominent a place in the ethics of Egypt as is proved now to us, who hold many centuries of her history within our reach. The sense of vast sweep of time evidenced in astronomic knowledge, and the acquaintance with the Sothic period,* may have led, as we should naturally expect, to a consciousness of the shortness of the span of earthly life, and hence to a readiness to take in the idea of continued existence after death. The enduring pyramids and mighty mausolea represent the endeavour to outlive time; and their paintings and sculptures mainly portray the belief in the outliving of earthly life, and the passage into the state bevond.

A prominent picture in this year's Exhibition of the Royal Academy exemplifies a custom that proceeds from this tendency. At the Egyptian banquet in the midst of the gaiety is dragged in an image of the sacred boat of the dead; upon which lies the figure of a mummy wrought over with all the painted symbolisms of death and judgment. Herodotus tells us that as the servant who draws this strange burden shews it to each guest by turn, he says, "Gaze here, and drink, and be merry, for when you die, such will you be." There was probably, in the bright faith of the Egyptian, as much joy as solemnity in the address.

We may briefly sketch that mystic passage of man trayed in the Ritual. shall find much that yet our beliefs.

as porIn it we lives in

First we have the embalmment in the Moum-a bituminous drug or wax-which converted the steeped body into the almost imperishable mummy. Bandaged in hundreds of yards of fine linen, placed in the case or cartonage, over which were inscribed extracts from the ritual of the dead, and finally in the coffin of fragrant wood or of finest stone, the corpse lay upon the lion-shaped couch.

The solemn festal dirge peals from those that stand around :"No man comes from thence

Who tells of their sayings,
Who tells of their affairs,
Who encourages our hearts.
Ye go

To the place whence they return

not.

(Transl., C. W. Goodwin.) At the funeral of priests and priestesses, and of a later epoch, there is a more doctrinal service, known as the Book of Respirations (translated by P. J. de Horrack), the papyrus of which is found deposited with their remains :— "Thou dost enter the horizon with the Sun.

Thy soul is received in the barque
Neshem with Osiris.

Thy soul is divinized in the Hall of
Seb.

Thou art justified for ever and ever.
Hail to the Osiris-
Thine individuality is permanent.
Thy body is durable.
Thy mummy doth germinate.