III. THE BELIEF IN PERSONAL MORAL RESPONSIBILITY AND IN IMMORTALITY, AS EXPRESSED IN THE BOOK OF THE DEAD." 66 THE heathen philosopher tells us 144 that, on the occasion of a solemn funereal ceremony, the bowels of the deceased, before the relations proceeded to the embalmment, were placed in a vessel set apart for the purpose, which was held up and exhibited to the all-searching Helios-Ra, while one of the assistants offered the following prayer for the deceased, as translated by Euphantos from the Egyptian: 66 "O king Helios, and all ye life-giving Gods! [Gods: Take me to yourselves; suffer me to be companion of the eternal For I have honoured the Gods my whole life through, to whom my parents devoted me. To the persons of my parents have I always shown respect : Of other men none have I put to death; None have I defrauded of what was intrusted to me; Nor have I been guilty of any other impious act. But if I have sinned in life by eating or drinking what was not permitted, I have not so sinned from myself, but owing to these." "And saying this," Porphyry concludes, "he cast the vessel into the river." It would seem that the last line is really a translation of an Egyptian apophthegm found in a monumental inscription, which, as far as I know, was first translated and published by Rosellini145, and confronted by him with Porphyry's text. It consists of four monosyllabic words: Righteousness to his spirit! 144 De Abstinentiâ, IV. § 10. See the sagacious and truth-loving Rosellini's remarks on this subject generally, in the Mon. Civ. iii. cap. vii. pp. 284-502., by far the best offered by any Egyptologer. 145 Mon. Civ. p. 330. But the whole prayer is authentic. We find more than one of such formularies of an exactly similar kind. The two most explicit are those contained in chap. cxxvi. of the "Book of the Dead," that justification of man before God which was appropriately termed by Champollion "the negative confession of sins." We have now the satisfaction of laying the whole before our readers, from the printed sheets of Mr. Birch's translation for the supplementary volume of this work. This remarkable document is a speech addressed by the soul of the deceased to Osiris and the forty-two judges assisting him in the tribunal of Hades, "the Lords of Truth." Some of the unintelligible ritual allusions and names are omitted. "Он ye Lords of Truth! Oh thou Great God, Lord of Truth! I have come to thee, my Lord. I have brought myself to see thy blessings. I have known thee. I have known thy name. I have known the names of the forty-two of the Gods who are with thee in the Hall of Two Truths, living by catching the wicked, fed off their blood, the day of reckoning words, before the Good Being, the justified. Placer of Spirits, Lord of Truth, is thy name. "Oh ye Lords of Truth! let me know ye. I have brought ye truth. Rub ye away my faults. I have not done privily evil against mankind. I have not afflicted persons or men. I have not told falsehoods in the tribunal of Truth. I have had no acquaintance with evil. I have not done any wicked thing. I have not made the labouring man do more than his task daily. I have not let my name approach to the boat. My name approaches to the mast, when . . . . I have not been idle. I have not failed. I have not ceased. I have not been weak. I have not done what is hateful to the Gods. I have not calumniated the slave to his master. I have not sacrificed. I have not made to weep. I have not murdered. I have not given orders to smite a person privily. I have not done fraud to men. I have not changed the measures of the country. I have not injured the images of the Gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of the dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not spat against the priest of the God of my country. I have not thrown down, I have not falsified measures. I have not thrown out the weight of the balance [?]; I have not cheated in the weight of the balance. I have not withheld milk from mouths of sucklings. I have not current. hunted wild animals in their pasturages. I have not netted sacred birds. I have not caught the fish which typify them. I have not stopped running water. I have not separated the water from its I have not put out a light at its [proper] hour. I have not robbed the Gods of their offered haunches. I have not turned away the cattle of the Gods. I have not stopped a God from his manifestation. I am pure! I am pure! I am pure! I am pure ! I am pure! 1. I have not been idle. 2. I have not waylaid. 3. I have not boasted. 4. I have not stolen. 5. I have not smitten men privily. 6. I have not counterfeited rings or measures. 7. I have not played the hypocrite. 8. I have not stolen the things of the Gods. 9. I have not told falsehoods. 10. I have not spared eating bread. 11. I have not caused to weep. 12. I have not rejected. 13. I have not been idle. 14. I have not eaten the heart. 15. I have not plundered. 16. I have not killed sacred beasts. 17. I have not made conspiracies. 18. I have not robbed the streams. 19. I have not listened. 20. I have not let my mouth wander. 21. I have not taken a tittle of things. 22. I have not corrupted the wife of another. 23. I have not polluted myself. 26. I have not burned my mouth. 27. I have not been inattentive to the words of truth. 28. I have not blasphemed. arm. 30. I have not made delays, or dawdled. 31. I have not hastened my heart. 32. I have not clipped the skins of the sacred beasts. 33. I have not multiplied words in speaking. 34. I have not lied or done any wicked sin. 35. I have not reviled the face of the king or of my father. 36. I have not defiled the ri ver. 37. I have not made loud words. 38. I have not blasphemed a God. 39. I have not injured the Gods, or calumniated the slave to his master. 40. I have not laid plans, I have not made his account, I have not ordered. 41. I have not augmented plans, I have not taken the clothes of the dead. 42. I have not despised a God in my heart, or to his face, or in things. The ejaculations 15. and 25. are identical, but addressed to different Gods. This document exhibits as the groundwork of Egyptian religion the principle of moral responsibility, but few traces of which are found in the Vedas and all the monuments of physical religions. There exists therefore an undeniable similarity between this declaration and the decalogue and the other moral precepts of the Mosaic Law. There is also a similarity between the Egyptian and Mosaic legislation in the abomination of unclean things which pervades them both. In the 53rd chapter, for instance, we read: "I hate what is unclean, and eat it not." The Semitic idea of uncleanness was, therefore, also a Khamitic feeling, as the most ancient documents of Egypt prove. On the other hand it is clear that the self-justifying conscience clung to external works, and to the selfsatisfaction and self-righteousness connected with them. However, the general impression on an honest Egyptian mind, as to these formulas and their teaching, must have been something like this. Any one unable to make such a confession with a good conscience before the infallible Judge of the Souls will not appear at all before his face, nor be admitted to behold him. is doomed to pursue the dark path of destiny through the lower forms of creation. Eternal life is living in the presence of God. Man is the son of God Almighty: the Gods of nature (deified and worshipped elements, including the disk of the sun) are not the lords of man, but destined to serve him. He does not require their mediation to approach God, his father. He Innumerable are the passages of the "Book of the Dead," in documents scarcely posterior to 3000 years before our era, expressing this doctrine. We have no space here for the details, or for chronological argu ments. We merely subjoin the opening of the Book of Transformations in the Ritual, ch. Ixxiii. : "Oh Soul! greatest of created beings, let me come, having seen and passed, having passed the Gate to see my father Osiris. I have made way through the darkness to my father Osiris. I am his beloved. I have come to see my father Osiris. I stab the heart of Sut. I do [or make] the things of my father Osiris. I have opened every door in heaven and earth. I am his beloved son. I have come from the dead an instructed Spirit. Oh every God and Goddess! I have come along." In chap. lxxxv. the moral, and therefore Biblical, character is very prominent, where the soul of the departed says: "I do not go to the place of punishment. I do not do any thing to arouse the hatred of the Gods; for I am the ruling spirit of Osiris, who loves me." The former of these quotations seems to make direct reference to the migration of the soul. The supposition is that the soul, coming out of the regions of the dead, appears before the Hall of Judgment, which is guarded by Anubis, the accuser of the souls, and demands entrance. It begs to see its father Osiris; it claims to be his child: the sorrows and trials of its wanderings are over. But there is beneath that longing for the world to come a deep sadness as to the present. On the whole, the origin of all such fictions from the other world can only be a retrospective reflex of finite consciousness into the Infinite, a projection of the life of man on earth and the earthly condition of the soul into the Divinity. The state of the real world does not produce the consciousness of the Infinite, but it certainly modifies it. The germ and foundation of historical religion in Egypt lie in the feeling of terrestrial existence being a burthen, of the life in the body being a prison-house, in short, in despair as to the realities of existence. This is the predominant feeling in Egypt and in historical gentile Asia. There were, doubtless, minds of a higher order, in which it was |