ernal life of the soul
after the death of the body of man on this earth; whether a belief in
rewards or punishments to be suffered or enjoyed by the soul after
such death, for actions done by man in this earthly life, existed at
that time, we cannot as yet, with certainty, affirm; but it is quite
likely it did. In this connection a study of the "Pyramid Texts"
published by Maspero in his _Recueil de Travaux_, is of great value to
the student.

An element of great value to the student of religions is, that the
scarabaeus symbol, is the earliest expression of the most ancient idea
of the immortality of the soul after death that has reached our day,
taking us back however to a period which may be considered as
civilized and enlightened and yet, so encompassed with the mists of
the past, that the mental eye of to-day cannot grasp that past with
much tangibility, and giving us almost cause to think, that the
doctrine of the immortality of the human soul was a remnant of an
early divine revelation, or at least, an advanced instinct of early
humanity; for it is a curious phase of archaic Egyptian thought, that
the further we go back in our investigations of the origins of its
religious ideas, the more ideal and elevated they appear as to the
spiritual powers and the unseen world. Idolatry made its greatest
advance subsequent to the epoch of the Ancient Empire, and progressed
until it finally merged itself into the animalism of the New Empire
and the gross paganism of the Greeks and Romans.

We have not yet many religious texts of the Ancient Empire that have
been fully studied and made known, but those that have been, exhibit
an idealism as to the Supreme Deity and a belief in the immortality of
the soul, based on the pious, ethical and charitable conduct of man,
which speak highly for an early very elevated thought in religious
ideas.

There is however one thought which must strike the student of
religions forcibly, that is the fact, that the idea of the re-birth
and future eternal life of the pious and moral dead, existed among the
Ancient Egyptians as an accepted dogma, long before the period in
which Moses is said to have lived. Moses has been asserted both in the
New Testament (Acts VII., 22), and by the so-called profane writers
Philo and Josephus, to have been learned in all the wisdom and
knowledge of the Egyptians of his time, yet we have not in the pages
of the Pentateuch, which is usually by the theologians ascr