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Show RELIGION OF EGYPT. <br><br> The most ancient landmark between the pre-historic chaos and the recorded course of the world's history is the religion of Egypt, as read in her temples and monuments, and especially in the "Book of the Dead." If in the liturgy of Egypt, as in that of India, we find a mingling of the puerile and grotesque with the thoughtful and sublime, there is, on the whole, in the faith of Egypt more of mystery, and in her worship more of majesty. In Egypt, as in India, we find in the religious odes a frequent interblending of subjective and objective, of metafysical [metaphysical] conceptions, rising to pure monotheism and nature-worship, taking upon them much sooner than in India the symbolic form of idolatry. A the same time we are left in suspense as to the order of manifestation, whether polytheistic forms sprang from a monotheistic root, or from the broad base of nature-worship religion rose like a pyramid tapering upward to a single point. But the Egyptian, whether he worshipped the sun as a god or as a manifestation of the Deity, whether he worship Osiris as the vivifying, fructifying potency in nature or as a type of the ever-living, ever-progressing soul, did certainly conceive of a supreme divinity, self-originated, invisible, incorruptible, imperishable, the creator and lord of all. The worship was elaborate and imposing, and the priesthood almost absolute over domestic life, and even in affairs of state. "The Egyptians," said Herodotus, "are religious to excess, far beyond any other race of men." But that faith can hardly be called a superstition which projected itself beyond the world and time into the regions of spiritual life and drew thence motives to the noblest conduct of this life - to justice, honesty, temperance, chastity, truth, reverence, piety, kindness, and beneficence. <br><br> - Rev. J.P. Thompson. |