ll things upon the earth, the cause of germination
and growth, of fruitage and harvest, the dispenser to man of ten
thousand blessings, the sustainer of his life and health and happiness.
With some the worship was purely and wholly material--the sun was viewed
as a huge mass of fiery matter, uninformed by any animate life,
unintelligent, impersonal; but with others, sun-worship was something
higher than this: the orb of day was regarded as informed by a good,
wise, bright, beneficent Spirit, which lived in it, and worked through
it, and was the true benefactor of mankind and sustainer of life and of
the universe. Sun-worship of this latter kind was no mean form of
natural religion. If not purged from the debasing element of
materialism, if not incompatible with a certain kind of polytheism, it
is yet consistent with the firmest belief in the absolute supremacy of
one God over all others, with the conception of that God as all-wise,
all-powerful, pure, holy, kind, loving, and with the entire devotion of
the worshipper to Him exclusively. And this latter form of sun-worship
was, quite conceivably, the religion of the "Disk worshippers." "Aten"
is probably the same as "Adon," the root of Adonis and Adonai, and has
the signification of "Lord"--a term implying personality, and when used
specially of one Being, implying absolute mastery and lordship, an
exclusive right to worship, homage, and devotion. It is not unlikely
that the "Disk-worshippers" were drawn on towards their monotheistic
creed by the presence in Egypt at the time of a large monotheistic
population, the descendants of Joseph and his brethren, who by this time
had multiplied greatly, and must have attracted attention, from their
numbers and from the peculiarity of their tenets. A historian of Egypt
remarks that "curious parallels might be drawn between the external
forms of the worship of the Israelites in the desert and those set up by
the Disk-worshippers at Tel-el-Amarna; portions of the sacred furniture,
as the 'table of shewbread,' described in the Book of Exodus as placed
within the Tabernacle, are repeated among the objects belonging to the
worship of Aten, and do not occur among the representations of any other
epoch." He further notes that the commencement of the persecution of the
Israelites in Egypt coincides nearly with the downfall of the
"Disk-worshippers" and the return of the Egyptians to their old creed,
as if the captive race had been involved