y be used for any purely secular purpose. Literature and science
were only branches of theology. Art labored only in the service of worship
and to glorify the gods. Religious observances were so numerous and so
imperative, that the most common labors of daily life could not be
performed without a perpetual reference to some priestly regulation. The
Egyptian only lived to worship. His fate in the future life was constantly
present to him. The sun, when it set, seemed to him to die; and when it
rose the next morning, and tricking its beams flamed once more in the
forehead of the sky, it was a perpetual symbol of a future resurrection.
Religion penetrated so deeply into the habits of the land, that it almost
made a part of the intellectual and physical organization of its
inhabitants. Habits continued during many generations at last become
instincts, and are transmitted with the blood.[154] So religion in Egypt
became an instinct. Unaltered by the dominion of the Persians, the
Ptolemies, and Romans, it was, of all polytheisms, the most obstinate in
its resistance to Christianity, and retained its devotees down to the
sixth century of our era.[155]

There were more festivals in Egypt than among any other ancient people,
the Greeks not excepted. Every month and day was governed by a god. There
were two feasts of the New-Year, twelve of the first days of the months,
one of the rising of the dog-star (Sirius, called Sothis), and others to
the great gods, to seed-time and harvest, to the rise and fall of the
Nile. The feast of lamps at Sais was in honor of Neith, and was kept
throughout Egypt.[156] The feast of the death of Osiris; the feast of his
resurrection (when people called out, "We have found him! Good luck!");
feasts of Isis (one of which lasted four days); the great feast at
Bubastis, greatest of all,--these were festivals belonging to all Egypt.
On one of them as many as seven hundred thousand persons sailed on the
Nile with music. At another, the image of the god was carried to the
temple by armed men, who were resisted by armed priests in a battle in
which many were often killed.

The history of the gods was embodied in the daily life of the people. In
an old papyrus described by De Rouge,[157] it is said: "On the twelfth of
Chorak no one is to go out of doors, for on that day the transformation
of Osiris into the bird Wennu took place; on the fourteenth of Toby no
voluptuous songs must be listened to, for Isis and