this Divine Being was a powerful helper to those who trusted him. He resolved to be faithful to God; then, he believed, he would have the Protector and Friend of whom he was now going to stand so much in need.

So they travelled on over that dreary stretch of country between Canaan and Egypt; and then they came, first to a few patches of grass, next to larger stretches of verdure; and finally, they had before them the seemingly interminable green of the Delta, all one lovely plain of grass, till in the immeasurable distance sky and earth seemed to

meet.

We shall see probably in a future part of this book that in the hundred and ninety-three years since Abraham's visit to this country, the Hyksos had been expelled, and that the old Egyptian dynasties, once more restored, had now been about eighty-one years in the rulership of this country. The shepherd-kings, during the five hundred and eleven years of their possession of it, had seemingly, toward the last, slid gradually into many of the usages of the more refined, conquered people; so that, when the change of dynasties came, we may suppose that there was no great transition, except in the governing power. Joseph appears to have been brought into the country at the beginning of the reign of Tuthmosis III. (Tetmes, Ra-menKheper), the fifth sovereign of the new dynasties, an active and powerful king, whose great edifices are abundant even as far up as the second cataract of the Nile.

The sovereigns were all called Pharaoh, from the god Phrah, signifying "the sun," and were to their subjects the representative of the deity. They were considered the emblems of the god of light; their royal authority was believed to be directly from the gods, and these were supposed to communicate through them their choicest blessings to men. The king was the head of the religion of the state, was the judge and lawgiver, and commanded the army and led it to

war.

It was his right to preside over the sacrifices and pour out libations to the gods, and whenever he was present, he had the privilege of being the officiating high priest. He was himself always of the military or the priestly class, and the princes also belonged to one of these classes.1

The course of our record brings us again among these remarkable people, and we shall have frequent occasion to notice their peculiar habits; but, for the present, we simply accompany the young Joseph as he goes along, gazing, wondering, himself and his company gazed at, and the subjects, as he soon perceived, of no very complimentary remark by the inhabitants. The reason of this last he discovered subsequently, when he came to know that every person in Egypt was shaved,-the head as well as face; and that so particular were the Egyptians on this point that to have neglected it was a subject of reproach and ridicule; and that whenever they intended to convey the idea of a man of low condition, or a slovenly person, their artists represented him with a beard. If foreigners who were brought to Egypt as slaves had beards on their arrival, as soon as they were put to service among these people they were compelled to conform to the cleanly habits of their masters; their beards and heads were shaved, and they adopted the close cap. The hair of the beards and heads of Egyptians was allowed to grow only in mourning, or in times of great misfortune, as a sign of distress.2

So the Hebrew lad, while staring at the close-shaven people along the way, with their bare heads quite exposed or covered with a close-fitting cap, was in return stared and sneered at; and again he saw that, strangely enough, while they shaved the beard, they wore false beards made of plaited hair, those of private individuals restricted exactly to two inches in length. That of the king, we know

1 See Wilkinson's "Ancient Egyptians."

2 Ibid.

was long and square: for the sculptured or painted gods it was turned up at the end; after death, any one worthy of it might be represented with the turned-up beard, signifying that he had been absorbed into their deity.

1, Memphis. 2, The Pyramids, 3, Present City of Cairo. 4, The most sacred City of On, or Hara, the Heliopolis of the Greeks. 5, Pithom, and Raamses, the two Treasure-cities built by Ramesses II. His canal between them. 7, 7, Chief road to and from Canaan.

There is not space here to notice the many strange sights constantly occurring and thickening along the way, as Joseph went on; and we only accompany him along, near the wonderful pyramids and into the immense city of Memphis, whose suburbs began in the shadow of the pyramids, although the heart of it was not reached till eight miles further on. Arrived there, he was purchased by Potiphar, captain of the king's guard, and was taken to the palace of his new master, and his own head shaved. He wore also the dress of the Egyptians; there was a complete metamorphosis in his exterior; but he was a youth of fine personal appearance, and in any costume would compare advantageously with his Egyptian companions. It is not to be in

ferred that the heads were always left in this extreme simplicity of bareness, or of the close-fitting cap; for wigs were in common use amongst both men and women, and were often most elaborately and carefully made. The following are from Wilkinson's copies of Egyptian paintings, representing heads and head ornaments of Egyptians.

Joseph remained about ten years in Potiphar's house. The name of his master, as we have it on the monuments, Pet-Pa-Ra, or Pet-Ph-Ra,' "belonging to the sun," shows us that the young Hebrew was here brought into close contact with the imposing religious systems of that country, well adapted to mystify and to enchant, to work upon the imagination and the outward senses, and, being in connection with what was evidently his worldly interest, also to ensnare his heart.

The religion of the Egyptians, although entirely idolatrous, was of a much more refined, and, if we may use the word, spiritualized character than that which we have been looking at in Ur of the Chaldees. Both had their origin undoubtedly in the primitive true idea of God; but while that of the Chaldees soon took the form of worshipping him in what they considered his representatives, the sun and

1 We have the name again with slight difference of orthography in the priest of the sun, afterward Joseph's father-in-law, Pati-Ph-Ra.

moon, and so finally into utter grossness and sensuality, this of the Egyptians began with deifying the qualities of God, as in AMUN, the Divine Mind in operation; NEFF, the Spirit of God; PTHAH, the creative power, &c. This was the beginning; but it must be seen that a system which encouraged and took pleasure in multiplying emblems as gods, would soon not only have an abundance of such objects of worship, but would become obscure by its own vastness of amplifications and its complications. "As the subtlety of philosophical speculation entered into the originally simple theory, numerous subdivisions of the divine nature were made; and at length anything which appeared to partake of or bear analogy to it, was admitted to a share of the worship. Hence arose the various grades of deities, and they were known as gods of the first, second and third orders." It was a polytheism in a pantheism; but their religious system soon became so large and involved, and full of subtleties, that its secrets were known only to the priests, who took care to keep the knowledge of them confined to themselves. These, with the numerous religious observances, gave this order of men "that influence which they so long possessed; but they had obtained a power which, while it raised their own class, could not fail to degrade the rest of the people; who, allowed to substitute superstition for religion and credulity for belief, were taught to worship the figures of imaginary beings, while they were excluded from a real knowlege of the Deity, and those truths which constituted the wisdom of the Egyptians."2

One of the greatest of their gods, Osiris, one of whose titles was, "The manifester of good and truth," had probably his origin in the deification of the quality of goodness in the Deity; but to this idea of Osiris were so many adjuncts and myths as to make him one of the greatest mys

1 Wilkinson.

2 Ibid.