as still flourishing.

The Egyptian's opinion of the creation was the growth of his own river's
bank. The thoughtful man, who saw the Nile every year lay a body of
solid manure upon his field, was able to measure against the walls of
the old temples that the ground was slowly but certainly rising. An
increase of the earth was being brought about by the river. Hence he
readily believed that the world itself had of old been formed out of
water, and by means of water. The philosophers were nearly of the same
opinion. They held that matter was itself eternal, like the other gods,
and that our world, in the beginning, before it took any shape upon
itself, was like thin mud, or a mass of water containing all things that
were afterwards to be brought forth out of it. When the water had by its
divine will separated itself from the earth, then the great Ra, the sun,
sent down his quickening heat, and plants and animals came forth out of
the wet-land, as the insects are spawned out of the fields, before
the eyes of the husbandman, every autumn after the Nile's overflow
has retreated. The crafty priests of the Nile declared that they had
themselves visited and dwelt in the caverns beneath the river, where
these treasures, while yet unshaped, were kept in store and waiting to
come into being.

[Illustration: 287.jpg HORUS ON THE CROCODILES. BULAK MUSEUM.]

And on the days sacred to the Nile, boys, the children of priestly
families, were every year dedicated to the blue river-god that they
might spend their youth in monastic retirement, and as it was said in
these caverns beneath his waves. These early Egyptian myths seem to have
influenced the compilers of the Hebrew Scriptures. The author of the
book of Genesis tells us that the Hebrew God formed the earth and its
inhabitants by dividing the land from the water, and then commanding
them both to bring forth living creatures; and again one of the
Psalmists says that his substance, while yet imperfect, was by the
Creator curiously wrought in the lowest depths of the earth. The Hebrew
writer, however, never thinks that any part of the creation was its own
creator. But in the Egyptian philosophy sunshine and the river Nile are
themselves the divine agents; and hence fire and water received divine
honours, as the two purest of the elements; and every day when the
temple of Serapis in Alexandria was opened, the singer standing on the
steps of the portico sprinkled water over the marble