nd Law-giver of man, fell away from that
position and grew more and more polytheistic. "It is more than 5000
years since in the valley of the Nile the hymn began to the unity of
God and the immortality of the soul, and we find Egypt arrived in the
last ages at the most unbridled Polytheism."

The sublimer part of Egyptian religion is demonstrably ancient, as
Mr. Le Page Renouf says; yet we are not shut up to the conclusion
that Egyptian religion as a whole is nothing but a backsliding and a
failure. If we were obliged to regard that monotheism which Egypt had
at first but failed to maintain, as a gift conferred from above,
which human powers proved unequal to conserve, then the opening of
the history of this religion would be indeed most melancholy. But
though monotheism appeared in Egypt so early, there is no necessity
to think that it was not attained by human powers. For all we know,
it was not an early but a mature product of thought, and was reached
after a long development. It is not impossible for the human mind,
starting from the works of God, to rise by its own efforts to the
belief in His invisible power and Godhead. The beginnings of this
rise of thought may be witnessed among savages, and the Egyptians in
their secluded valley had an opportunity such as no other nation had,
to work out, as their civilisation grew up from rude beginnings to
its unequalled splendour, a noble view of the Deity whose works they
adored. The god ruling from his heaven of light over the great empire
of a monarch who knew no equal in the world, possessing for his
earthly abode a temple of unsurpassed magnificence, uniting perhaps
under his sway districts long at war and extending his influence over
remote continents as the armies of Egypt prospered, such a being drew
to himself from his worshipping retinue of priests and nobles, the
highest praise and adoration, was exalted far above all other powers
in heaven and earth, and extolled even as the Creator and Ruler of
all.

Monotheism is thus approached in thought, but only in a prophetic and
anticipatory way; the circumstances of the country forbade its
realisation as a general belief or as a working system. Even in the
highest flights of those early thinkers, when they seem to be
speaking of a god quite universal and supreme, it is a local deity
that lies at the basis of their speculations, a being who has his
temple in a certain place, who is symbolised in a certain animal, who