e considerations set forth in the preceding pages, and from the
extracts from religious texts of various periods, and from the hymns
quoted, the reader may himself judge the views which the ancient
Egyptian held concerning God Almighty and his visible type and symbol
R[=a], the Sun-god. Egyptologists differ in their interpretations of
certain passages, but agree as to general facts. In dealing with the
facts it cannot be too clearly understood that the religious ideas of
the prehistoric Egyptian were very different from those of the cultured
priest of Memphis in the IInd dynasty, or those of the worshippers of
Temu or Atum, the god of the setting sun, in the IVth dynasty. The
editors of religious texts of all periods have retained many grossly
superstitious and coarse beliefs, which they knew well to be the
products of the imaginations of their savage, or semi-savage ancestors,
not because they themselves believed in them, or thought that the laity
to whom they ministered would accept them, but because of their
reverence for inherited traditions. The followers of every great
religion in the world have never wholly shaken off all the superstitions
which they have in all generations inherited from their ancestors; and
what is true of the peoples of the past is true, in a degree, of the
peoples of to-day. In the East the older the ideas, and beliefs, and
traditions, are, the more sacred they become; but this has not prevented
men there from developing high moral and spiritual conceptions and
continuing to believe in them, and among such must be counted the One,
self-begotten, and self-existent God whom the Egyptians worshipped.

CHAPTER II.

OSIRIS THE GOD OF THE RESURRECTION.

The Egyptians of every period in which they are known to us believed
that Osiris was of divine origin, that he suffered death and mutilation
at the hands of the powers of evil, that after a great struggle with
these powers he rose again, that he became henceforth the king of the
underworld and judge of the dead, and that because he had conquered
death the righteous also might conquer death; and they raised Osiris to
such an exalted position in heaven that he became the equal and, in
certain cases, the superior of R[=a], the Sun-god, and ascribed to him
the attributes which belong unto God. However far back we go, we find
that these views about Osiris are assumed to be known to the reader of
religious texts and accepted by him, and in the e