litarian
considerations, but from an instinct of reverence. It is possible, indeed,
that such a reverential instinct may have been awakened towards certain
animals, by seeing their vast importance arising from their special
instincts and faculties. The cow and the ox, the dog, the ibis, and the
cat, may thus have appeared to the Egyptians, from their indispensable
utility, to be endowed with supernatural gifts. But this feeling itself
must have had its root in a yet deeper tendency of the Egyptian mind. They
reverenced the mysterious manifestation of God in all outward nature. No
one can look at an animal, before custom blinds our sense of strangeness,
without a feeling of wonder at the law of instinct, and the special,
distinct peculiarity which belongs to it. Every variety of animals is a
manifestation of a divine thought, and yet a thought hinted rather than
expressed. Each must mean something, must symbolize something. But what
does it mean? what does it symbolize? Continually we seem just on the
point of penetrating the secret; we almost touch the explanation, but are
baffled. A dog, a cat, a snake, a crocodile, a spider,--what does each
mean? why were they made? why this infinite variety of form, color,
faculty, character? Animals thus in their unconscious being, as
expressions of God's thoughts, are mysteries, and divine mysteries.[170]

Now every part of the religion of Egypt shows how much they were attracted
toward _variety_, toward nature, toward the outward manifestations of the
Divine Spirit. These tendencies reached their utmost point in their
reverence for animal life. The shallow Romans, who reverenced only
themselves, and the Greeks, who worshipped nothing but human nature more
or less idealized, laughed at this Egyptian worship of animals and plants.
"O sacred nation! whose gods grow in gardens!" says Juvenal. But it
certainly shows a deeper wisdom to see something divine in nature, and to
find God in nature, than to call it common and unclean. And there is more
of truth in the Egyptian reverence for animal individuality, than in the
unfeeling indifference to the welfare of these poor relations which
Christians often display. When Jesus said that "not a sparrow falls to the
ground without your Father," he showed all these creatures to be under the
protection of their Maker. It may be foolish to worship animals, but it is
still more foolish to despise them.

That the belief in transmigration is the expl