an
eternal dwelling. They even instituted endowments to secure due
offerings to the dead in all coming time.

Cultivated as this part of religion was in Egypt, it could not fail
to assume a special character. For one thing, there is a variety of
names for what survives of man after death; we hear of his heart, his
soul, his shade, his luminosity; and in the later doctrine these are
all combined and made parts of one theory; all the different parts of
the man have to come together again after their dispersion at death
before his person is complete. The principal term, however, is the
"ka," image, or, as we say, genius, of the man, a non-substantial
double of him which has journeys and adventures to make, and to which
the offerings are addressed. The "ka" needs food, and regular gifts
are made to it of all it can require; it needs guidance and
instruction, and these can be conveyed to it by pictures and writings
on the walls of the tomb or in the mummy-case; even its amusement and
its need of society and of ministration can be to some extent met in
this way. It is not peculiar to Egypt that the advantages of wealth
and rank are continued after death, and that the rich can do much
more, or cause much more to be done for his eternal welfare, than the
poor. The king's mummy lies in a pyramid, where it will never be
moved; that of the noble in a rock-tomb or a stately edifice or
"mastaba"; the poor man has to be content with an inferior kind of
embalming, and a tomb of tiles if he gets any at all; and no priest
can be retained to pray for him.

2. The Spirit in the Under-world.--Before history opens, this common
belief and practice in regard to the dead had come to be combined in
Egypt with the worship of a solar deity; a step of immense
importance, which added immeasurably to the pathos and the moral
power of this kind of religion.

Milton says in _Lycidas_--

So sinks the daystar in the ocean bed;
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky;
So Lycidas sank low, but mounted high.

But what to Milton was a poetic imagination was to the early Egyptian
a serious belief. If the sun was his god, he did not say like
Wordsworth in his early period--

Our fate how different from thine, blest star, in this,
That no to-morrow shall our beams restore,

but he was convinced that the history of his god, who sank