"Osiris and Isis," says Dr. Prichard, "are the universal Being the soul of nature corresponding to the Pantheistic or masculo-feminine Jupiter of the Orphic verses. Typhon represents physical evil. To him are attributed eclipses, tempests, and irregular seasons. He is the sea which swallows up the good Nile and produces drought and famine. He is the enemy of Osiris, and his wife Nephthys is the enemy of Isis. Nephthys is represented by the desert; and the inundation of the Nile is the Deity leaving his garland in her bed. Typhon is the south wind of the desert, and to him all hideous beasts are sacred. Another Deity is Horus, the brother of Osiris; he too is the sun, the world, the all of nature. He is supposed to be identical with Harpocrates, who is sometimes called the son of Isis. Harpocrates was the god of silence-the emblem of nature in her silent progress. When the buds opened in spring time, and the tender shoots burst silently from the earth, then was Harpocrates born. Every spring was the festival of his birth. The young god died, but his everlasting mother lived and reproduced him as the seasons changed." Apuleius, an Egyptian priest of the third century, represents Isis as thus addressing him after he had been initiated into the Egyptian mysteries, “I am she that is the natural mother of all things-mistress and governor of all the elements-the initial progeny of worlds-chief of divine powers-queen of heaven-the principal of the gods celestial-the light of the godesses-at my will are disposed the planets of the air-the wholesome winds of the seas; and the silences of the unseen world-my divinity is adored through all the world, in divers manners, with various rites, and by many names. The Phrygians call me the mother of the gods; the Athenians call me Minerva; the Cyprians, Venus; the Candians, Diana; the Sicilians, Proserpina; some call me Ceres, Juno, Bellona, Hecate; the Ethiopians and the Egyptians worship me as Queen Isis."*

What was said of Isis was said also of Kneph. The Egyptians, according to Porphyry, acknowledged one intellectual author and creator of the world under the name of Kneph. They worshipped him in a statue of human form, with a dark blue complexion, holding in his hand a girdle or sceptre, wearing upon his head a royal plume, and thrusting an egg from his mouth. Iamblichus, quoting from the Hermaic books teaches nearly the same concerning Kneph. "This god is placed as the

*Fable of the Golden Ass.

ruler of the celestial gods. He is a self-intelligent mind absorbed in his own contemplations. Before Kneph, is a Being without parts, the first occult power, and by Hermes called Eikton. He is worshipped only in silence. After these, are the powers that preside over the formation of the visible world. The creative mind which forms the universe is called Ammon Ptah, or Osiris, according to the character it may assume."

There was another deity to speak the wisdom of God, this was Hermes, the wisdom of Ammon, the teacher of wisdom among men.* Osiris was the great body of nature, Hermes the incarnation of the divine intellect; he was called by other names, Anubis "the golden," that which shines in the sun, the leader of the stars, the dog star. He was also called Thoth the pillar, because a pillar is the bearer of all the Egyptian wisdom which was preserved by the priests-Hermes is speech and wisdom; he is the discoverer of astronomy, the teacher of science, the inventor of arts. Among the gods he is pre-eminently the good spirit, the giver of gifts intellectual and spiritual. Osiris and Isis are the good king and queen, Hermes the wise priest. As Sirius in the highest part of the firmament overlooks the other planets, and protects the fiery animals of heaven, so does Hermes protect and care for all creatures; the whole of nature is revealed before him, his wise mind rules the world. He is physician, lawyer, judge; he teaches immortality, he guides souls in their wanderings, by imparting wisdom he makes men one with himself-the wise priest becomes Hermes. If all nature be as we have seen the exteriority of God, the exhibition to the senses of the invisible Ammon, it must then be all divine, and, if divine, why may it not be worshipped? How indeed can we worship the "veiled God," but through His works which declare His wisdom and His power? So perhaps the Egyptians reasoned, or rather more probably concluded without reasoning, and consecrated the visible world as an object of worship.

The Persian, with his clear and ever radiant sky, saw God in the light. The Arabian, with his thoughts directed to the starry heavens, saw God in the planets; the Egyptian, too, saw God both in the daylight and in the stars, but much more in that

Kneph forms the limbs of Osiris in contradistinction to Ptah, who, as the strictly Demiurgic principle, forms the visible world. The second order are children of the first: Hermes or Thoth is of this order; his sign is the ibis, and his name is connected with the Egyptian root for "word;" he is the scribe of the Gods, and is called "Lord of the divine words and scribe of truth," "the guardian of the pure souls in the hall of the two truths."

abundant fertility which came he knew not whence, with the overflowing of the Nile, without which Egypt would have been a desert. How sacred then, above all things, the river Nile!* How it must have connected itself with the life and thought and religion of every Egyptian! It was the father of the country, on it depended the strength of Pharoah. But the Nile is only an inanimate object-true, all things may have come from sand and water originally created by the Unknown Darkness. From these has sprung the lotus with which the Nile abounds, but the Nile has higher developments of existence than sand or water, higher forms of life than the vegetable lotus. It has beasts innumerable, the true children of father Nilus, cherished in his bosom, and abundantly provided for. They are very terrible, they are stronger than men and apparently wiser. They are the genii of that bountiful river, the gods of the stream, why may they not be worshipped if only for their terribleness?

But Egypt is peculiarly a land of beasts. a land of beasts. It is prolific in animal life, the lion comes from the desert, the ibis gathers its food on the river's banks, the crocodile basks among the rushes. The Egyptian sees all forms of brute life everywhere abundant, he sees them guided by a wisdom which is above human wisdom, he sees a regularity in their movements which is equalled only by the regularity in the works of nature. As the fruitful Nile ebbs and flows, as summer, winter, spring, and autumn, come and go, by the same law do the brutes live; they have their part in the same order. In some respects man is superior to these creatures; they build no tents, they plough no fields, neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, yet in many respects they are superior to man. Without his cares and disappointments, they lead a joyful life. The law of nature holds its dominion in them, they are determined by a high wisdom. "The stork in the heavens knows her appointed season." They live the universal life, and, as the Egyptian would call it the highest life, they are unconsciously one with the being of the universe. How natural for the Egyptian to worship the brute creation: to see in the wisdom which guided them a high reflection of that wisdom which is manifest in all nature. †

The Nile, like the Ganges, is a deity-" The father of the father of the gods," the terrestrial and material representation of the Divine purpose.— Bunsen. The Egyptian priests, says Porphyry, having profited by their diligent study of philsophy, and their intimate acquantance with the nature of the gods, have

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WORSHIP OF ANIMALS.

Animal worship is usually the lowest form of idolatry and the mark of a low degree of civilization, but in Egypt it prevailed among a people famed in antiquity for cultivation and learning, and had its roots in a philosophy of being.* We must distinguish between the worship of animals, and the worship of them as symbols: the latter was that of the Egyptians, it did not obscure the worship of the gods, but was rather connected with it. Their deities were mostly represented in the forms of beasts, even Hermes had a dog's head because of his connection with the dog star: Kneph† was a good deity, and therefore was represented as a harmless serpent. Osiris had the hawk for his symbol, and his image was usually formed with a hawk's head; this bird was symbolic of the soul, the crocodile was sacred to the highest God; Plutarch assigns as the cause of this, that it is the only animal living in water which has its eyes covered with a transparent membrane falling down over them, by means of which it sees and is not seen, which is a thing that belongs to the supreme God, " to see all things, Himself being unseen," Plutarch says in another place, "Neither were the Egyptians without a plausible reason for worshipping God symbolically in the crocodile, it being said to be an imitation of of God in this, that it is the only animal without a tongue, for

learnt that the divinity permeates not only human beings that man is not the only creature on the earth possessed of soul, but that nearly the same spiritual essence pervades all the tribes of living creatures. On this account

in fashioning the images of the gods, they have adopted the forms of all animals, and have sometimes joined the human figure with that of beasts. They adore, under these semblances, the universal power which the gods have secretly displayed, in the various forms of living nature.

*The following Pantheistic description of Serapis was given by an oracle of the god :-"My divinity shall be described in the words, I shall now utter. The canopy of heaven is my head, the sea is my belly, the earth is my feet, my ears are in the ethereal regions, and my eye is the resplendent and far-shining sun.-Macrobius."

Kneph as creator appears under the figure of a potter with a wheel. In Philae, a work of the Ptolemaic epoch, he is represented making a figure of Osiris with the inscription Num, who forms on a wheel the limbs of Osiris, who is enthroned in the great hall of life. He is likewise called Num-ra," who forms the mother, the genetrix of the gods.' In a representation of the time of the Roman Emperors he is called "the sculptor of all men." In a monument at Esneh, of the same date, he is said to have made mankind on his wheel, and fashioned the gods, and is called the god who has made the sun and moon to revolve under the heavens and above the world and all things on it.

According to Plutarch and Diodorus, the name of the Egyptian Zeus signifies "a spirit," which can only refer to Kneph. At Esneh he is said to be "the breath of those who are in the firmament."

the Divine Logos or Reason does not stand in need of speech, but going on through a silent path of justice in the world with out noise, righteously governs and dispenses all human affairs." Horus Apollo in the hieroglyphics says the Egyptians acknowledged a superior Being who was Governor of the world, that they represented Him symbolically by a serpent, and that they also "pictured a great house or palace within its circumference, because the world is the royal palace of the Deity," and again he says" that the serpent as it were, feeding upon itself, fitly represents that all things produced in the world by Divine Providence are resolved into it again." "The serpent," says Philo Byblius quoting from Sanchoniathon, "was deified by the Egyptian Hermes, because it is immortal and is resolved into itself." Sometimes the symbol of the Deity was a serpent with a hawk's head, and sometimes the hawk alone. In the temple of Sais there was a hieroglyphic which consisted of an old man, a young man, and a hawk, to make up the meaning, says Plutarch, "that both the beginning and the end of human life depends on God." We need not suppose that the multitudes of Egypt who paid their devotions to the sacred beasts had any conscious conception, that in so doing they were worshipping the One and All of nature. They saw God in nature and therefore they worshipped all the parts of nature as parts of the Divine.*

God soul, the world, to primal man were one-
In shapely stone, in picture, and in song.

They worshipped Him who was both one and all;
God-like to them was human kind. God dwelt
In the piled mountain rock, the veined plant,
And pulsing brute, and where the planets wheel
Through the blue skies God-head moved in them.
Bunsen's Egypt.

* Anchises, in the sixth book of the Eneid, explaining to Æneas the law of the transmigration of souls, says, "The spirit within nourishes heaven and earth and the watery plains, and the enlightened orb of the moon, and the shining stars; and diffused through the parts, a mind, actuates the whole fabric, and mingles itself with the large body: hence the races of men and cattle, and the lives of birds and monsters, which the sea produces under its marble plain." "This," says Bishop Warburton, "was the doctrine of the old Egyptians, as we learn from Plato, who says, they taught that Jupiter is the spirit which pervades all things." He adds that "the Greek philosophy corrupted this principle into Spinozism, of which we have an instance in the fourth Georgic -"Some have said that bees have a part of the Divine mind and ethereal draughts, for that God pervades all lands and tracts of the sea and the lofty heavens. Hence flocks, herds, men, all the race of wild beasts, each at birth derive their slender lives." This might pass for simple Egyptian doctrine, without supposing that it has undergone the corrupting (?) influence of Greek philosophy.