, too, it
may perhaps be found that the same aversion to discard anything old
and sacred manifests itself, the same disposition rather to carry on
the old and the new together.

I. ANIMAL WORSHIP

We begin with that element in Egyptian religion which is to our eyes
least rational. In the ages before and after the Christian era, when
a number of Greek and Latin writers tell us about Egypt, we find that
the religion of the country is described as consisting mainly in the
worship of animals. This excited the wonder of these writers in no
small degree. Herodotus asserts that the Egyptians counted all
animals sacred, and gives a list of those which were specially
worshipped. The hippopotamus, he says, is sacred at Papremis, the
crocodile at Thebes; and some animals are sacred all over the
country. He has much to tell of the manner in which the sacred
animals are fed and tended, and of the honours paid to them at their
death. Lucian says: "In Egypt the temple is a building of great size
and splendour, adorned with precious stones and decorated with gold
and with inscriptions; but if you go in and look for the god, you
find an ape or an ibis or a goat or a cat." The same statement is
made by Clement of Alexandria; and Celsus, the early Roman assailant
of Christianity, speaks to the same effect. Thus the popular religion
of Egypt, before and after the Christian era, had animals for its
principal objects. A representative of the sacred species sat or
crawled or hopped in the temple, and in that nome that animal was not
eaten. In the nome in which the cat was sacred all cats were
inviolable; any insult offered to a cat roused the whole population
to frenzy, and one who killed a cat, even though he was a stranger in
the place and unacquainted with its manners, forfeited his own life.
In the next nome the cat was not sacred but some other animal; and
these local differences of religion might occasion war between one
nome and another. Juvenal gives in his fifteenth satire an account of
a religious war of old standing between two neighbouring nomes, each
of which hated and insulted the animal which was worshipped in the
other. This may explain why it was impossible for the Israelites to
offer sacrifice to Jehovah in Egypt. They had to go out into the
wilderness, off Egyptian soil, before they could sacrifice animals
Egypt held sacred.

The worship of a sacred animal in its own nome, a member of the
species dwelling in the temp