uth." The Egyptians,
like most other Eastern polytheists, held the doctrine which was
afterwards called Manicheism; they believed in a good and in a wicked
god, who governed the world between them. Of these the former made
himself threefold, because three is a perfect number, and they adopted
into their religion that curious metaphysical opinion that everything
divine is formed of three parts; and accordingly, on the Theban
monuments we often see the gods in groups of three. They worshipped
Osiris, Isis, and Horus under the form of a right-angled triangle, in
which Horus was the side opposite to the right angle. The favourite
part of their mythology was the lamentation of Isis for the death of
her husband Osiris. By another change the god Horus, who used to be a
crowned king of manly stature, was now a child holding a finger to his
mouth, and thereby marking that he had not yet learned to talk. The
Romans, who did not understand this Egyptian symbol for youthfulness,
thought that in this character he was commanding silence; and they gave
the name of Harpocrates, _Horus the powerful_, to a god of silence.
Horus was also often placed as a child in the arms of his mother Isis;
and thus by the loving nature of the group were awakened the more tender
feelings of the worshipper. The Egyptians, like the Greeks, had always
been loud in declaring that they were beloved by their gods; but they
received their favours with little gratitude, and hardly professed that
they felt any love towards the gods in return. But after the time of the
Christian era, we meet with more kindly feelings even among the pagans.
We find from the Greek names of persons that they at least had begun to
think their gods deserving of love, and in this group of the mother and
child, such a favourite also in Christian art, we see in what direction
these more kindly feelings found an entrance into the Egyptian religion.
As fast as opinion was raising the great god Serapis above his fellows
and making the wrathful judge into the ruler of the world, so fast was
the same opinion creating for itself a harbour of refuge in the child
Horus and its mother.

[Illustration: 080.jpg HARPOCRATES]

The deep earnestness of the Egyptians in the belief of their own
religion was the chief cause of its being adopted by others. The Greeks
had borrowed much from it. Though in Rome it had been forbidden by law,
it was much cultivated there in private; and the engraved rings on t