knowledge you would acquire would render you, as it has
rendered me, dissatisfied with the state of things around you. Had it
not been for this most unfortunate accident I should never have spoken
to you further on the subject, but as it is I feel that it is my duty
to tell you more.

"I have had a hard struggle with myself, and have, since you left me,
thought over from every point of view what I ought to do. On the one
hand, I should have to tell you things known only to an inner circle,
things which were it known I had whispered to any one my life would be
forfeited. On the other hand, if I keep silent I should doom you to a
life of misery. I have resolved to take the former alternative. I may
first tell you what you do not know, that I have long been viewed with
suspicion by those of the higher priesthood who know my views, which
are that the knowledge we possess should not be confined to ourselves,
but should be disseminated, at least among that class of educated
Egyptians capable of appreciating it.

"What I am about to tell you is not, as a whole, fully understood
perhaps by any. It is the outcome of my own reflections, founded upon
the light thrown upon things by the knowledge I have gained. You asked
me one day, Chebron, how we knew about the gods--how they first
revealed themselves, seeing that they are not things that belong to
the world? I replied to you at the time that these things are
mysteries--a convenient answer with which we close the mouths of
questioners.

"Listen now and I will tell you how religion first began upon earth,
not only in Egypt, but in all lands. Man felt his own powerlessness.
Looking at the operations of nature--the course of the heavenly
bodies, the issues of birth and life and death--he concluded, and
rightly, that there was a God over all things, but this God was too
mighty for his imagination to grasp.

"He was everywhere and nowhere, he animated all things, and yet was
nowhere to be found; he gave fertility and he caused famine, he gave
life and he gave death, he gave light and heat, he sent storms and
tempests. He was too infinite and too various for the untutored mind
of the early man to comprehend, and so they tried to approach him
piecemeal. They worshiped him as the sun, the giver of heat and life
and fertility; they worshiped him as a destructive god, they invoked
his aid as a beneficent being, they offered sacrifices to appease his
wrath as a terrible one. And so in