s not only over specially religious matters but
over social life, and even over the thoughts of the individual heart.
The gods enjoin on a man not only to offer sacrifice and to respect
the sacred beasts, but also to do his duty as a citizen and as a
neighbour, and to keep his own lips unpolluted and his own heart
pure. It is to the same effect when we find that a man's
justification depends on the state of his heart at death. His heart
is weighed against the truth, and if it is found defective, he cannot
live again; if it turns out well, then he is justified and goes to
the fields of Aalu, the place of the blessed of Osiris.

CONCLUSION

This doctrine of the life to come, like the theistic doctrine the
Egyptians at one time attained, might have seemed destined to lead to
a pure spiritual faith, from which superstition should have
disappeared. But in neither case is that result attained. The later
history of Egyptian religion is that of the increase of magic, and of
the rise of a priestly class absorbing to itself, as the older
priests who were closely connected with the civil life of the nation
had never done, all the functions of religion. Doctrine grows more
pantheistic and more recondite, mysteries and symbols are multiplied,
all to the increase of the influence of the priesthood, and to the
infinite exercise of ingenuity in coming times. Popular religion, on
the other hand, comes to be more taken up with such matters as charms
and amulets and horoscopes; and while morals did not decline from the
high level they had gained from the reign of the gods of light, the
spirit of the nation lost vigour under the growth of religiosity at
the expense of patriotism, and healthy reform grew more and more
impossible. What of the religion of Egypt lived on in other lands
which felt her influence, it is hard to say. The religious art of
Egypt, and with it no doubt some tincture of the ideas it embodied,
undoubtedly went northwards to Phenicia; and Greece owed to Phenicia,
as we shall see, many a suggestion in religious matters. Long before
Isis and Serapis were introduced in Rome in their own persons, the
legend of Osiris had flourished in Greece under new names, and the
Greek doctrine of the life to come, taught in the mysteries, has
suggested to some scholars an Egyptian origin. To the Greeks and
Romans this religion afforded an infinity of puzzles and mysteries;
to the modern world it affords the greatest example of a reli