an ibis or a dog to save you? For when men have sinned against the gods whom all acknowledge, whom will the altar of a cat repel by its terrors ?"1

Classical scholars are familiar with the Satire commonly attributed to Juvenal: "Who does not know what kinds of monsters demented Egypt worships? One part adores the crocodile, another quakes before the ibis gorged with serpents. The golden image of a sacred long-tailed ape glitters where the magic chords resound from mutilated Memnon, and ancient Thebes lies in ruin, with her hundred gates. There whole towns venerate cats, here a river fish, there a dog, but no one Diana. It is impiety to violate and break with the teeth the leek and onion. O holy races, to whom such deities as these are born in their gardens !" 2

It is not wonderful that, with such evidence before them, many writers should at the present day speak of the Egyptian religion as one of the lowest and grossest forms of nature-worship, as consisting in what is commonly called African fetishism, or at least as being based upon it.

How far can such Evidence be relied upon?

Yet the external aspect of a religion as presented to strangers is not often one that is to be trusted.

We

1 These comedians are quoted in Athen. : Deipnos. vii. p. 299.

2 Juvenal, Sat. xv. 1. Mr. Lewis's translation.

have but to remember the accounts of the Jewish religion and of its history which have been left us by heathen writers, and the judgments which the most enlightened of these writers passed upon Christianity in the earliest and purest days of its existence. Christianity was not only considered as an exitiabilis superstitio, but was popularly supposed to involve the worship of a brute animal.' Do you think the prejudices of men holding such opinions would have been weakened had they accidentally heard of "the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world," or read in the Apocalypse of the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes who is the Lord of lords and King of kings, and represented as receiving the worship of the four beasts, the four-and-twenty elders, and innumerable angels?

A Roman soldier, according to the historian Diodoros, incurred the furious wrath of an Egyptian village by the slaughter of a cat. But the fury of a Mohammedan population may at this day be aroused by an attack upon its wild dogs; and there are, or till very

1 The Christians were popularly supposed to worship the ass, but this worship was naturally imagined to have been derived from the Jews, who worshipped not only the ass, but the swine. "Judaeus licet et porcinum numen adoret ;" Petronius Arbiter, p. 224: Berlin, 1842. See Gill's Notices of the Jews and their Country by the Classic Writers of Antiquity, and an essay of Geiger (Juden u. Judenthum nach d. Auffassung d. Schriftsteller d. Alterthums) in the Illustrirte Monatshefte für die gesammten Interessen des Judenthums of Oct. 1865.

lately were, numerous Christian populations which resented the slaughter of doves or pigeons as impious and sacrilegious. Yet neither Moslems nor Christians have ever worshipped dogs or pigeons.1

It is in the nature of things that persons living outside a religion, especially if they are not inclined to it, cannot understand it or its symbols unless their inquiries are conducted under conditions which are generally considered superfluous or wrong. Men are rarely conscious of the prejudices which really incapacitate them from forming impartial and true judgments on systems alien to their own habits of thought. And philosophers who may pride themselves on their freedom from prejudice may yet fail to understand whole classes of psychological phenomena which are the result of religious practice, and are familiar to those alone to whom such practice is habitual.

There is distinct evidence that the absurdity which the Egyptian religion presented to strangers disappeared on closer acquaintance with it. Philo, the philosophical

1 Yet Mr. Herbert Spencer, Sociology, p. 354, after quoting a remark of Mr. McLennan that the dove is almost as great a god among the ancients as the serpent, says, "that the still extant symbolism of Christianity shows us the surviving effect of the belief in the ghostly character of the dove." N'est ce pas chercher midi à quatorze heures? Even if the schoolboy authorities on which Mr. McLellan relies were not absolutely worthless, surely the belief in the gospel narrative would be sufficient to account for the symbolism of the dove among populations who in their heathen condition had never heard of the dove as a divinity.

Jew of Alexandria, tells us that foreigners coming for the first time into Egypt knew not what to do for laughter at the divine beasts, but that the universal superstition finished by overpowering them also. Apollonios of Tyana, according to his biographer Philostratos, decidedly condemned the Egyptian system as absurd and ridiculous. But the form which his objections assume is quite inconsistent with the notion of fetishism. He takes it for granted that the beasts are not deities, but symbols of deity. "If you place a hawk or an owl or a wolf or a dog in your temples to represent Hermes, Athene or Apollon, the beasts and birds may derive dignity from such representations, but the gods will lose theirs." "I think," said Thespesion, "you slight our mode of worship before you have given it a fair examination. For surely what we are speaking of is wise, if anything Egyptian is so; the Egyptians do not venture to give any form to their deities, they only give them in symbols which have an occult meaning that renders them more venerable." Apollonios, smiling at this, said, "O ye sages, great indeed is the advantage you have derived from the wisdom of Egyptians and Ethiopians, if you find anything worthy of your worship in a dog, an ibis or a goat; or if you think such creatures fit to represent your gods..... If what the mind discovers couched under such symbolical figures is entitled to greater veneration, surely the condition of the gods in Egypt

would be more highly respected if no statues whatever were erected to them, and if theology was treated in a different manner, with a little more wisdom and mystery. .... The mind forms to itself a something which it delineates better than what any art can do; but in the present instance you have taken from the gods the very power of appearing beautiful either to the eye or to the understanding."

I do not quote this conversation as in any way deserving to be considered authentic, but only as evidence that the Egyptian worship of animals was considered even by grave opponents as symbolical, and not as pure fetishism. Celsus is quoted by Origen as distinctly denying the worship by the Egyptians of brute creatures of a day (gov pnpepiwv). And some Christian Fathers even admit that the symbolical worship of animals denotes a higher stage of culture than the worship of inanimate images, stocks and stones, or of deities whose actions are inconsistent with the most elementary notions of morality. Porphyry explains the animal worship from a Pantheistic point of view. All living creatures in their degree partake of the Divine essence, and "under the semblances of animals the Egyptians worship the universal power which the gods have revealed in the various forms of living nature."

1 Vit. Apollonii, vi. 19.

2 De Abstinentia, iv. c. 9.