vellous profusion of plant and
animal life, they naturally regarded the sun as the Creator, and so
deified him in that capacity. The origin of all life, vegetable and
animal, to those who stood, as it were, by its cradle, when the world
was young and haunted by heaven, seemed a greater mystery and wonder
than it is to us in these later faithless ages. Long familiarity with
it in its full-grown proportions has made it commonplace to us.

Both the obelisk and the pyramid were solar symbols, the obelisk being
the symbol of the rising sun, and the pyramid of the setting. The
fundamental idea of the obelisk was that of creation by light; that of
the pyramid, death through the extinction of light. And this
symbolical difference between the two objects was practically
expressed by the different situations in which they were placed; the
obelisks being all located on the eastern side of the Nile, that being
the region of the rising sun, and of the dawn of life; while the
pyramids are all found on the western bank of the river, the region
of the sunset, with its awfully sterile hills and silent untravelled
desert of sand from which no tidings had ever come to living man,
where the dead were buried under the shades of night, in their
rock-cut cemeteries. It might thus seem, that by placing obelisks in
our churchyards in association with the dead, we were violating their
original significance, and guilty of adding another to the many
incongruities which have arisen from adopting pagan symbols in
Christian burying-places. But in reality we find a deeper reason for
the association. In some of the oldest sculptures in Egypt, an obelisk
is represented as standing on the top of a pyramid; and by this
combination it was meant to signify the power of life triumphing over
death. And hence the obelisk is the most suitable of all forms to
indicate in our cemeteries the glorious truth of the resurrection,
life rising victorious out of the transitory condition of death.

And how admirably did the obelisk lend itself to its symbolical
purposes! There was a most wonderful harmony between the idea and the
object which expressed it. Being composed of the most durable of all
materials, the hard indestructible granite, the eternal sun was thus
fittingly represented by an object that lifts its stern finger in
unchangeable defiance of the vicissitudes of the seasons and the ages.
Its highly polished surface and rich rosy red colour, its sharply
defi