tures in Geneva, said: "Listen now to a voice which has
come forth actually from the recesses of the sepulchre: it reaches us
from ancient Egypt.

"In Egypt, as you know, the degradation of the religious idea was in
popular practice complete. But under the confused accents of
superstition the science of our age is succeeding in catching from afar
the vibrations of a sublime utterance. In the coffins of a large number
of mummies have been discovered rolls of papyrus containing a sacred
text which is called 'The Book of the Dead.' Here is the translation of
some fragments which appear to date from a very remote epoch. It is God
who speaks thus: 'I am the Most Holy, the Creator of all that
replenishes the earth, and of the earth itself, the habitation of
mortals. I am the Prince of the infinite ages. I am the Great and Mighty
God, the Most High, shining in the midst of the careering stars and of
the armies which praise me above thy head.... It is I who chastise the
evil-doers and the persecutors of Godly men. I discover and confound the
liars. I am the all-seeing Avenger, ... the Guardian of my laws in the
land of the righteous.' These words are found mingled in the text, from
which I extract them, with allusions to inferior deities; and it must be
acknowledged that the translation of the ancient documents of Egypt is
uncertain enough; still this uncertainty does not appear to extend to
the general sense and bearing of the recent discoveries of our
_savans_."[153]

Professor Flint as against Cudworth, Ebrard, Gladstone, and others,
maintains that the Egyptian religion at the very dawn of its history had
"certain great gods," though he adds that "there were not so many as in
later times." "Ancestor worship, but not so developed as in later times,
and animal worship, but very little of it compared with later times." On
the other hand, as against Professor Tiele, Miss Amelia B. Edwards, and
others, he says: "For the opinion that its lower elements were older
than the higher there is not a particle of properly historical evidence,
not a trace in the inscriptions of mere propitiation of ancestors or of
belief in the absolute divinity of kings or animals; on the contrary
ancestors are always found propitiated through prayer to some of the
great gods; kings worshipped as emanations and images of the sun god and
the divine animals adored as divine symbols and incarnations."

Among the Greeks there are few traces of monotheism, b