purified into a longing after sinlessness, after the life in God, a longing compatible with a happy life on earth; but the former sentiment was the one generally entertained.

The chapter certainly would not be older than the thirteenth century B.C., if Set (Sut, Sothis) were here represented as Typhon, the God of destruction, the Evil One, the Serpent; whose heart Horus has pierced through, as every believer was likewise expected to do. Still the phrase is old, in a symbolic sense, as referring to the solar year.

The main points in the formulas of the "Book of the Dead" may therefore be summed up as follows. According to the creed of the Egyptians, the soul of man was divine, and therefore immortal. It is subject to personal moral responsibility. The consequence of evil actions is banishment from the presence of God. Faith transfers venial sins to the account of the body, which is, in consequence, doomed to annihilation. Man, when justified, becomes conscious that he is a son of God, and destined to behold God at the termination of his wanderings. We read on the tomb of Rameses V., in respect to the souls of the wicked: 146

"They behold not this Great God (Helios-Ra):

Their eyes are not refreshed by the rays of his disk:

Their souls are not illuminated in the world:

They hear not the voice of the Great God

Who rises above their path."

Of the souls of the good, on the contrary, it is said:
"This Great God speaketh to them, and they to him:
The splendour of his disk illumines them,

Standing in their path."

These words are obviously to be understood morally. The sun's path is clearly only the sacred symbol for the path of man on earth, and for the wandering of the soul after death. Light and darkness are life and death. This view of the connexion between the belief in im146 Ros. Mon. Civ. p. 327-329.

mortality and that of the migration of the soul through animal bodies explains the doctrine of animal-worship, and the representation of deities with human bodies and animal heads; it is, however, to be remarked that Osiris, the God of the spiritual world, the Judge of the soul, has never any but the human form. The Egyptians believed that there was something divine in every animal. Some of them, the bull and the goat, for instance, were direct symbols of the generating power of nature. Each of these might contain the soul of some ancestor still undergoing its purgatorial wandering, and, as already remarked, the worship of the dead is one of the primitive elements of Egyptian religion. Every coffin shows that this ancestral worship had taken a very firm hold of their minds, as firm almost as it has of the Chinese.

It is equally clear, however, that with this comfortless incubus of symbolism were closely connected ethical ideas; those moral feelings which regulate human life and repress the outbursts of savage nature, namely, the faith in a moral government of the world, in personal moral responsibility, in a personal divine judgment.

IV.

THE METEMPSYCHOSIS IN THE EGYPTIAN NOVEL, AND

CONCLUSION.

THE belief in the transmigration of the soul seems to have pervaded even the latest and most popular branch of Egyptian literature, the novel. The remarkable romance of the "Two Brothers," for which we are indebted to De Rougé, proves how deep-seated an influence the doctrine of the wandering of the soul had exercised on the habits and customs of the Egyptians. On it the whole plot and machinery of the story are based. The hero may die as often as the author pleases; it seems even that he may become a tree

for a considerable period. At last, however, the supremacy of the moral government of the world is shown in his case as in the history of Job. Evil is punished; the Good Principle is victorious; the hero becomes a man again, and his daughter attains a high destiny.

As regards the idea itself which was represented symbolically in this animal-worship, we may acknowledge a general affinity between it and that which led in early times to the worship of the golden calf in Asia, and to the representation of the Creative deity as the generative power in the bull. But we must not lose sight of the difference, that the notion was generalised by the Egyptians, the adoration was paid to the living animal as the symbol of the living Gods. It was a religious animal-hieroglyph carried out to the full.

This connexion between animal-worship and the belief in immortality alone explains the most extraordinary phenomena in this symbolism; for instance, the solemn and costly interment and the preservation of the mummies of the sacred animals, as we now find them in the Apis shrines of Memphis.

We have noticed the ethical side of the worship, which gave a higher significancy to popular belief and ennobled it. But we have not altogether exhausted the idea of the transmigration. It does not exclude the existence of a higher feeling, even though that may have remained incomplete in a dialectical point of view. The Egyptians, who taught or transmitted this idea, started from the notion which Plato has so grandly developed in the Phædrus and others of his writings. Man has no remembrance of an anterior state of personal being, and yet the appearance of the soul in the world cannot be explained without a slumbering consciousness of things and of their connexion. The dogma of the wandering of the soul into animals, as being an expiation of past sins, explained to him both these intuitive feelings.

It is only by considering how very deeply this sense of immortality was engrafted in the Egyptian mind. that we can comprehend the passion for the monstrous and colossal proportions of the Pyramids, and at the same time the glorious emblematical and artistic charac ter of those works of the Old Empire. As animal-worship is merely the Egyptianised African form of an early Asiatic conception, so is also the combination of the care for the preservation of the body, and, if possible, its protection from destruction, connected with the doctrine of immortality. The soul was immortal, but its happiness, if not the possibility of its continuing to live, depended upon the preservation of the body. The destruction of the body consequently involved the destruction of the soul.

We assuredly owe the stupendous fabric of the Pyramids to a superstitious fear of the destruction of the body, rather than to the mere vanity and love of display on the part of their builders. The judgment passed by the people on their kings after death (as upon every other person who died) was, at the epoch of the first dynasties, no empty form. Now the royal builders of the largest Pyramids were, according to universal tradition, haughty cruel tyrants, who had good reasons to be apprehensive of the popular verdict, the ordeal they would have to pass at the hands of the people and priests. It was no easy matter for any one to find his way into the Pyramids; each of them had its own secret barrier to prevent intrusion: but, at all events, a forcible entry into them was quite impossible.

We find therefore on all sides a deep-seated and strong religious foundation, accompanied however, invariably, with a comfortless inability to embrace the idea in its purity. This inability, combined with the artistic impulses of the Egyptians, led to the colossal perversities which arose out of a superstitious adherence to the

notion of the value of the body, and which clung with a rigid gripe to the materialistic principle. This was the tribute paid by the Asiatics, in earliest times, for the occupation of Africa and the possession of the valley of the Nile. Nevertheless the services which the Egyptians have rendered to mankind are very great, by giving an ethical development to that intoxicating and perplexing worship of nature which existed in Asia, by raising it into a belief in undying personality, and making this the popular creed. They have therefore a claim to the merit of having, in their own way, treated religion in a highly ethical sense, and they have made this view the people's faith. The combination of the idea with external worship was effected by moral views. The ordeal of the conscience of the people is the type of the inevitable ordeal of Osiris, the infallible and the true. Man's conscience is God's judgment. The soul of every pious and good man becomes Osirian, strictly speaking Osiris himself, that is to say, is deified. Man dies to live again, as Osiris (the soul of the sun) dies daily:

"The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun, daily: for as the sun dies and is born in the morning, so the Osiris is born." (chap. iii.)

To God, the father of the soul, the Eternal, every soul born into this world is tending through the darkness of death. Thus says the departed to Osiris, the soul of the world:

"O Soul, greatest of things created, let the Osiris enter: he has been seen passing from the gate: he sees his father Osiris: he makes a way in the darkness to his father Osiris: he is his beloved son: he has come to see his father Osiris: he is the son beloved by his father he has come from the mummy a prepared spirit." (ch. ix.)

The soul comes with stains upon it, but upon its entreaty God wipes them off:

"The God Strife is then as the God Peace with the great staff in his hand, and he says: I have brought it to thee; thou livest by it: the Osiris lives by it, he is at rest: obliterating the evil stain which is in thy heart." (chap. xiv.)