ngs.... As the Eternal, who existed before all
worlds, then as organiser of the universe, and finally as the Providence
who each day watches over his work, he is always the same being,
reuniting in his essence all the attributes of divinity." It was the
hidden God who was adored under the name whatever the latter might be,
the God who is described in the texts as "without form" and "whose name
is a mystery," and of whom it is said that He is the one God, "beside
whom there is no other." In Ptah of Memphis or Amon of Thebes or Ra of
Heliopolis, the more educated Egyptian recognised but a name and symbol
for the deity which underlay them all.

Along with this growth in a spiritual conception of religion went, as
was natural, a growth in scepticism. There was a sceptical as well as a
believing school, such as finds its expression in the festal Dirge of
King Antef of the Eleventh dynasty. Here we read in Canon Rawnsley's
versified translation--

"What is fortune? say the wise.
Vanished are the hearths and homes,
What he does or thinks, who dies,
None to tell us comes.

Eat and drink in peace to-day,
When you go, your goods remain;
He who fares the last, long way,
Comes not back again."

A curious work of much later date that has come down to us is in the
form of a discussion between an Ethiopian cat and the unbelieving jackal
Kufi, in which the arguments of a sceptical philosophy are urged with
such force and sympathy as to show that they were the author's own. But
such scepticism was confined to the few; the Egyptian enjoys this life
too much, as a rule, to be troubled by doubts about another, and he has
always been distinguished by an intensity of religious belief.

With his religion there were associated ideas and beliefs some of which
have a strangely Christian ring. He was a believer in the resurrection
of the body; hence the care that was taken from the time of the Third
dynasty onwards to preserve it by embalmment, and to place above the
heart the scarab beetle, the symbol of evolution, which by its magical
powers would cause it to beat again. Hence, too, the long texts from the
Ritual of the Dead which enabled the deceased to pass in safety through
the perils that encompassed the entrance to the next world, as well as
the endeavour to place the corpse where it should not be found and
injured.

The Egyptian believed also in a Messiah. Thus, in a papyrus of the