alone.

Strong is Amon, knowing how to answer,

fulfilling the desire of him who cries to him."

Another hymn says: "Come to me, O thou Sun; Horus of the horizon, give me (help); thou art he that giveth (help); there is no help without thee, except thou givest it. . . . . Let my desires be fulfilled, let my heart be joyful, my inmost heart in gladness. Hear my vows, my humble supplications every day, my adorations by night..... O Horus of the horizon, there is no other besides like him, protector of millions, deliverer of hundreds of thousands, the defender of him that calls to him. . . . . Reproach me not with my many sins."

It is remarkable that a religious reformation at the end of the 18th dynasty in behalf of one god, spent its special wrath upon the name of Amon. The king, whose title would under ordinary circumstances have been Amenhotep IV., set up the worship of a single god whose symbol was the sun-disk; he caused the names of other gods, particularly that of Amon, to be hammered out of inscriptions even when it only occurred in proper names, as in his own, which he changed into Chut en Aten," Glory of the Sun-disk." And as Thebes was the great seat of the worship of Amon, he abandoned it and tried to set up another capital. His reformation lasted but a short time, his own immediate family having abandoned it after his death. All his monuments were destroyed by his successors, yet

several hymns belonging to this short-lived phase of religion have escaped destruction. One of them says:

"The whole land of Egypt and all people repeat all thy names at thy rising, to magnify thy rising in like manner as thy setting. Thou, O God, who in truth art the living one, standest before the Two Eyes. Thou art he which createst what never was, which formest everything, which art in all things: we also have come into being through the word of thy mouth."

Another says: Thou living God! there is none other beside thee! Thou givest health to the eyes by thy beams. Creator of all beings. Thou goest up on the eastern horizon of heaven to dispense life to all that thou hast created: to man, to four-footed beasts, birds, and all manner of creeping things on the earth where they live. Grant to thy son who loves thee, life

The language of these hymns and prayers is exactly similar to that of ordinary Egyptian orthodoxy, and there is nothing heterodox in the symbol itself; the heresy consisted in refusing worship to all the other gods.

Pantheism.

But the magnificent predicates of the one and only God, however recognized by Egyptian orthodoxy, never in fact led to actual Monotheism. They stopped short

in Pantheism—namely, in the doctrine that "all individual things are nothing but modifications, affections, of the One and All, the eternal and infinite Godworld; that there is but one universal force in nature in different forms, in itself eternal and unchangeable."

This doctrine is perhaps most clearly expressed in a hymn upon the walls of the temple in the oasis of ElKhargeh:

"The gods salute his royal majesty as their Lord, who revealeth himself in all that is, and hath names in everything, from mountain to stream. That which persisteth in all things is Amon. This lordly god was from the very beginning. He is Ptah, the greatest of the gods. Thy secret is in the depths of the secret waters and unknown. Thou hast come on the road, thou hast given light in the path, thou hast overcome all difficulties in thy mysterious form. Each god has assumed thy aspect; without shape is their type compared to thy form. To thee, all things that are give praise when thou returnest to the nether world at even. Thou raisest up Osiris by the radiance of thy beams. To thee, those give praise who lie in their tombs, and the damned rise up in their abodes. . . . . Thou art the King, thine is the kingdom

The gods are

of heaven, and the earth is at thy will. in thine hand, and men are at thy feet. What god is like to thee? Thou hast made the double world, as Ptah. Thou hast placed thy throne in the life of the

double world, as Amon. Thy soul is the pillar and the ark of the two heavens. Thy form emanated at first whilst thou shinest as Amon, Rā and Ptah. . . . . Shu, Tefnut, Nut and Chonsu are thy form, dwelling in thy shrine under the types of the ithyphallic god, raising his tall plumes, king of the gods... .... Thou art Mentu Rā. Thou art Sekar; thy transformations are into the Nile. Thou art Youth and Age. Thou givest life to the earth by thy stream. Thou art heaven, thou art earth, thou art fire, thou art water, thou art air, and whatever is in the midst of them."

This very remarkable hymn is put in the mouth of the gods of the elements, eight in number, four male and four female. What these elements are is not perfectly clear. They used to be thought peculiar to the Ptolemaic period, and were then supposed to have been borrowed from the four Greek elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, but they have been recognized in much earlier texts. They are, in fact, the eight gods mentioned in the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead, and belong to the oldest cosmogonical part of the religion. This chapter, as we have already seen, speaks of a time when as yet there was no firmament, and when these eight divinities were set up as the gods of Hermopolis; in other words, when chaos disappeared, and the elements began to rule with fixed and unchangeable laws.

Another hymn, copied by Brugsch at the same tem

ple, sings "the mysterious names of the God who is immanent in all things (men em xet neb), the soul of Shu (breath) to all the gods. He is the body of the living man, the creator of the fruit-bearing tree, the author of the inundation; without him nothing liveth within the circuit of the earth, whether north or south, under his name of Osiris, the giver of light: he is the Horus of the living souls, the living god of the generations yet to come. He is the creator of every animal under his names of Ram of the sheep, god of the goats, Bull of the cows. . . . . He loves the scorpion in his hole; he is the god of the crocodiles who plunge in the water. ... he is the god of those who rest in their graves. Amon is an image, Atmu is an image, Chepera is an image, Ra is an image; he alone maketh himself in millions of ways. He is a great architect, who was from the beginning, who fashioned his body with his own hands, in all forms according to his will. Permanent and enduring, he never passeth away. Through millions upon millions of endless years he traverseth the heavens, he compasseth the nether world each day. . . . . He is the moon in the night and king of the stars, who maketh the division of seasons, months and years; he cometh living everlastingly both in his rising and in his setting. There is no other like him; his voice is heard, but he remains unseen to every creature that breathes. He strengthens the heart of the woman in travail, and gives life to those who are