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tions?]. Pray humbly with a loving heart all the He will protect words of which are uttered in secret.

thee in thine affairs; He will listen to thy words; He will accept thine offerings."

It

"In making thine oblation to God, beware of what Exaggerate not the liturgical preHe abhors. scriptions; it is forbidden to give more than what is prescribed. Let thine eyes consider the acts of His wrath. Thou shalt make adorations in His name. is He who granteth genius with endless aptitudes; who magnifieth him who becometh great. The God of the world is in the light above the firmament; His emblems are upon earth; it is to them that worship is rendered daily."

Another section is upon maternal affection. It describes the self-sacrifice of an affectionate mother from the earliest moments of the child's existence, and continues as follows: "Thou wast put to school, and whilst thou wast being taught letters she came punctually to thy master, bringing thee the bread and the Thou art now come to man's drink of her house. estate; thou art married and hast a house; but never do thou forget the painful labour which thy mother endured, nor all the salutary care which she has taken of thee. Take heed lest she have cause to complain of thee, for fear that she should raise her hands to God and He should listen to her prayer.”

"Give thyself to God, keep thyself continually for

God, and let to-morrow be like to-day. Let thine eyes consider the acts of God; it is He who smiteth him that is smitten."

5. The author of the Maxims contained in the demotic papyrus of the Louvre.

"Curse not thy master before God."

It was in this style that in all periods of their history, in the earliest not less confidently than in the latest, the Egyptians spoke of the Nutar in the singular number. There can, I trust, be no doubt who that Power is which, in our translations, we do not hesitate to call God. It is unquestionably the true and only God, who "is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being," whose "eternal power and Godhead" and government of the world were made known through "that Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world." In the extracts which I have quoted, and in many similar passages, we recognize the elements of true religion, free from all admixture of mythology. if such be the Power, what are the "powers" (nutriu), and what are their relations to it?

But

The Powers.

In the formation of a theory of the universe, the notion of Power productive of results may, according as it is defined, lead to very different consequences. It may be conceived very much in the same sense as a

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Cause, and lead, as the notion of Cause will always lead reflecting men, in spite of the protests of critical philosophers, to the admission of One First Cause or Power from which all others are derived. But, as we know equally well from the history of speculation, the notions of Power and Substance may be identified, and it is easy to imagine one universal Force in nature, in itself eternal and unchangeable, but manifesting itself in the most different forms. In both cases the result is Unity; Theistic in the first case, Pantheistic in the second. I shall have occasion to speak of the complete and final triumph of the latter of these conceptions. But the triumph did not take place till a comparatively late period, and till then the Egyptian religion may be considered as susceptible of either a Theistic or a Pantheistic interpretation. In either case the gods of the mythology represent the real or imaginary powers of the universe; and what these powers were in the most primitive conception entertained of them by the Egyptians, can only be discovered by the same scientific process which has been applied with such success to the mythology of the Indo-European

The most common opinion held by the best scholars only a few years ago was, that however many gods the Egyptians might have, they had no mythology properly speaking. The only myth they were supposed to

possess was that about Osiris, and even this was imagined to have been brought into shape through Hellenic influences. This opinion is altogether an erroneous one: it confuses the notion of myth with that of mythological tale or legend; and whilst the Egyptians really had an abundance of legendary tales, their myths are simply innumerable. The tale of Osiris is as old as Egyptian civilization itself; that is, very much more than two thousand years before Hellenic influences came into operation.

Several mythological tales of considerable extent are now well known to us. The legend of the revolt of the first men against the god Ra and his destruction of them was discovered by M. Naville in one of the tombs at Bibān-el-moluk. A long narrative of the victories of Horus was copied by the same accomplished scholar from the walls of the temple at Edfu. It is written in the style of the heroic annals of the kings of Egypt, and accounts for the names of geographical localities by the exploits of the divine warrior. The tale of Osiris, as told in the Greek work attributed to Plutarch, is made up out of several genuine Egyptian legends, and the wanderings of the widowed Isis formed. the subject of many legendary narratives. But the religious texts are literally crowded with allusions to mythological legends, and these allusions, though they are necessarily obscure to us, must have been familiar to the Egyptians.

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The mythological legend grew out of the myth, but The myth was in must not be confounded with it. Egypt, what it was everywhere else, a mere phrase, often consisting of not more than a single word, descriptive of some natural phenomenon, such as the rising or setting of the sun, the struggle between light and darkness, and the alternate victory of the one or the other. The science of Language has established the fact that all names were general terms; and one of the most eminent masters of the science1 begins a work on "Proper Names" by laying it down as a first principle that for the etymologist there are no such things as proper names," but only "appellatives." These appellatives, when applied to natural phenomena, are either such predicates as the most prosaic observer might use at the present day, or they are metaphorical. An early stage of language is always highly metaphorical, its terms being derived from sensuous perception, and being ill adapted to express abstract ideas. Many roots were required to express the different stages or determinations of a single notion. Even in reference to so simple a notion as that expressed by the verb to see, the Greeks had recourse to no less than three roots (in δράω, ὄψομαι, είδον), according as the action was considered as continued, completed or momentary. We ourselves say I go, but I went; je vais, nous allons,

1 Pott, "Die Personennamen."