or long after
they continued to mingle the attributes of their God and the "gods" with
those of God Almighty and Christ. The Egyptians of their own will never
got away from the belief that the body must be mummified if eternal life
was to be assured to the dead, but the Christians, though preaching the
same doctrine of the resurrection as the Egyptians, went a step further,
and insisted that there was no need to mummify the dead at all. St.
Anthony the Great besought his followers not to embalm his body and keep
it in a house, but to bury it and to tell no man where it had been
buried, lest those who loved him should come and draw it forth, and
mummify it as they were wont to do to the bodies of those whom they
regarded as saints. "For long past," he said, "I have entreated the
bishops and preachers to exhort the people not to continue to observe
this useless custom"; and concerning his own body, he said, "At the
resurrection of the dead I shall receive it from the Saviour
incorruptible." [Footnote: See Rosweyde, _Vitae Patrum_, p. 59; _Life of
St. Anthony_, by Athanusius (Migne), _Patrologiae_, Scr. Graec, tom. 26,
col. 972.] The spread of this idea gave the art of mummifying its
death-blow, and though from innate conservatism, and the love of having
the actual bodies of their beloved dead near them, the Egyptians
continued for a time to preserve their dead as before, yet little by
little the reasons for mummifying were forgotten, the knowledge of the
art died out, the funeral ceremonies were curtailed, the prayers became
a dead letter, and the custom of making mummies became obsolete. With
the death of the art died also the belief in and the worship of Osiris,
who from being the god of the dead became a dead god, and to the
Christians of Egypt, at least, his place was filled by Christ, "the
firstfruits of them that slept," Whose resurrection and power to grant
eternal life were at that time being preached throughout most of the
known world. In Osiris the Christian Egyptians found the prototype of
Christ, and in the pictures and statues of Isis suckling her son Horus,
they perceived the prototypes of the Virgin Mary and her Child. Never
did Christianity find elsewhere in the world a people whose minds were
so thoroughly well prepared to receive its doctrines as the Egyptians.

This chapter may be fittingly ended by a few extracts from, the _Songs
of Isis and Nephthys_, which were sung in the Temple of Amen-R[=a] at
The