As day after day we wander about on the historic sites of old Egypt, among the temples and tombs, and endeavour to comprehend their magnitude and costliness, the thought and labour bestowed on their construction, and the ideas and sentiments embodied and expressed in the structures themselves, and in the sculptures placed upon them, we are brought to understand that never in any country has religion been so magnificently maintained. Israel had but its single temple; here, however, every city of the land—and no land had a greater number of great cities—had erected a temple, and often more than one, which was intended not so much for time as for eternity. One third of the land of Egypt was devoted to the support of the priesthood. The payments also made by the people for the services of religion must have amounted to large yearly aggregates. The spoils of Asia and Africa were, as well as the royal revenues, appropriated, in a large proportion, to religious purposes. Pharaoh was himself a priest, and his palace was a temple. Both law, as then understood, and commerce, as then carried on, were outworks and supports of religion. The sacred books, in which everything that was established and taught was contained, had the sanction of heaven. And the religion the people professed was not around them and before them only: it was also in their hearts. Their motives were drawn from it, their actions had reference to it, and their whole life was framed upon it. It had inspired literature, created art, organized and legislated for society, made commerce possible, and built up an empire; and no form of religion had or, we may add, has ever, for so long a period of time, made men what they were; for, from the time of Menes, at least, to that of Decius, it had been doing this work.

At last a day came when life suddenly left the organism—for religion is an organism of thought. It was dissolved into its primal elements; and a new organism having been constructed out of them in combination with some other elements recently accrued, the new took the place of the old. That so much had been said and done on its behalf and in its name; that it had borne so much good fruit; that it had had so grand an history; that it had been believed in, and been the source of the higher life to a great people for so many thousand years, were all powerless to save it.

But here the Muse of History whispers to us that it is not enough that we have seen in the monuments the evidence of the existence, of the greatness, and of the overthrow of this religion, but that we must also endeavour to make out what it was that had maintained it, and what it was that overthrew it; and then what are the lessons its maintenance and its overthrow contain for ourselves.

It is useless to turn to the history of Egypt, or of any other country, merely to satisfy an empty curiosity or to feed a barren—and often a mischievous—love of the marvellous. The legitimate aim, and—if it be reached—the precious fruit of such studies, is to enable ourselves to make out the path along which some portion of mankind travelled to the point it reached, and to see how it fared with them by the way; what hindered, and what promoted, their advance; to ascertain what they did, how they did it, and what effects the doing of it had: and all this in order that haply thereby some serviceable light may be thrown on our own path and position. This is the only way in which we can properly either form opinions, or review the grounds of opinions already formed, on many subjects in which we are most concerned: for these are subjects with respect to which the roots of opinion are for us laid in history.

First then—What was the cause of this long life, this stability of the religion of Egypt? The primary cause was that, as we have seen, it was thoroughly in harmony with the circumstances and conditions of the Egypt of its time. It had thoroughly and comprehensively grasped those circumstances and conditions. It had, with a wise simplicity, interpreted them, and adapted itself to them. But that was not all. In a manner possible at that time it had made itself the polity and the social life, as well as the religion, of the nation; and having done this—that is, having absorbed and taken up into itself every element of power—it gave to itself a fixed and immutable form. The physical characteristics, too, of the country, while, as we have seen, they made despotism inevitable in the political order, could not have been favourable to any kind of intellectual liberty. Thenceforth, all fermentation, or disposition to change, in political and social matters, and too in manners and customs, and even in art and thought, became impossible: for all these things go together. The natural condition, therefore, of Egypt became one of fixity and equilibrium: there was no tendency to move from the status quo, or even to do anything in a way different from that, in which men had done it, or to feel in a manner different from that, in which men had felt for, at least, four thousand years. What were now the instincts of the people were all in the opposite direction. It appeared as if Egypt had never been young, and could never become old; as if it had never had a beginning, and could never have an end. Time could not touch it. Society worked with the regularity of the sun and of the river.

This will show us, too, why it did not spread. This religion, and this system, which were so admirably adapted to the existing conditions and natural circumstances of Egypt, were not adapted to the conditions and circumstances of other countries. If the world had been composed, physically and morally, only of so many possible Egypts, so that the discovery of new regions might have issued only in the addition of new Egypts to those already known, then the temples of Abydos, Memphis, Heliopolis, and Karnak would still be crowded with the devout worshippers of the gods of old Egypt, and so would the temples of thousands of other cities. The ideas in the minds of these worshippers would still be the ideas which had existed in the minds of Sethos and Rameses, and the Egyptians of their day—neither better nor worse—and they would have been propagated, and would continue to be propagated, to the other Egypts of the world. But, fortunately, the world is not a repetition of Egypts, nor of anything else; and so an insuperable barrier existed, in the very nature of things, to prevent the outflow of Egyptianism into other lands.

But what was it that overthrew it in its own home, where it was so strong? We may infer that it will probably be something, not that was spontaneously generated within, but that came from without. And so it was. But what was that something? It was not force. That the Persians had tried, and it had been powerless. Nor could the dominion of foreign laws and customs at the summit of society overthrow it: that has, elsewhere, sapped and undermined domestic institutions; but in Egypt it, too, was powerless, as was demonstrated by ages of Greek and Roman rule.

Nor did the religion of old Egypt fall because it had aimed in a wrong direction. By their religion I mean their philosophy of the whole, their purposed organization of the entire domain of experience, and observation, and thought, including in its range the invisible as well as the visible world. Its object had been the moral improvement of man. Though, of course, from this statement some very damaging deductions must be made; for it had not aimed equally at the moral improvement of all, that is to say, of every man because he was a man. It had failed here because it had had another co-ordinate aim, necessary for those times: the maintenance of the social, intellectual, and material advantages of a part of the community at the expense of the rest. This was, though necessary, immoral or, at all events, demoralizing. Still, however, it made the present only a preparation for the higher and the better life. The things that are now seen it regarded as the ladder, by which man mounts to the things that are not yet seen, which alone are eternal realities. Of these aims and doctrines of the religion every man’s understanding and conscience approved. Without this approval the religion could not have maintained itself.

Neither did it fall because the civilization of Egypt had at last, after so many thousands of years, worn itself out. There were no symptoms of the life within it having become enfeebled through time, or from anything time had brought. The propylons, the enclosing wall, the monolithic granite shrine, the mighty roof-stones, the sculptures of the Ptolemaic Temple of Edfou, and the massive monolithic granite shaft of the pillar raised at Alexandria to the honour of Diocletian, prove that, down to the last days of this long period, they could handle, as deftly as ever their forefathers had done, masses of stone so ponderous that to look at them shortens our breathing; and which they sculptured and polished in the same way as of old. The priests who explained the sculptures of Thebes to Germanicus were lineally the descendants of those who had formed the aristocracy, and had supplied the magistracy, and the governing body of Thebes, and of Egypt, under Rameses the Great, under Cheops, under Menes. Nor can we suppose that any such amount of moral, or intellectual degeneration had been brought about, as might not easily have been recovered by the restitution of the old conditions of the country. The Egyptian system, which left so little to the individual, seemed to provide, just as they had taken care that their great buildings should, against whatever contingencies might arise. It still had in itself the capacity for rising, Phœnix-like, into new life.

So would it have been had Egypt been able to maintain its old insulation. The day, however, for that had gone by. It now formed a part of the general system of the civilized world; and, looking at it in its relations to other people, we discover in it elements of weakness, immorality, and effeteness; and these precisely it was that, under the then existing circumstances, caused its fall. The state of things that had arisen could have had no existence during the four thousand years, or more, it had passed through. What that state of things was, and how it acted, is what we have now to make out distinctly to our thoughts.

If the mind of man had been incapable of advancing to other ideas, and the heart of man incapable of higher moral sentiments, than the ideas and sentiments that had been in the minds and hearts of Sethos and Rameses, and the Egyptians of their day, then all things would have continued as they had been. But such has not been, is not, and, we may suppose, will never be, the condition of man on this earth. Ideas and sentiments are powers—the greatest powers among men. And there were ideas and sentiments yet to come which were higher generalizations than those of old Egypt, and which, therefore, were instinct with greater power. Knowledge, and corresponding moral sentiments, had been the power of old Egypt, but now they were to be confronted by profounder knowledge, and more potent moral sentiments. The Egyptians, however, had put themselves into such a position that they could not add the new light to the old, or graft the scion of the improved vine upon the old stock. The only result, then, that was possible was that that which was stronger and better must sweep away that which was not so strong or so good, and take its place. It must be a case, not of amalgamation, but of substitution.

The old Egyptians, in order to perpetuate, and render available their knowledge, and to bring out immediately, and fully, its working power, had swathed both it, and society, in bands of iron. In doing this they had seen clearly what they wanted, and how to produce it. They knew that morality only could make and maintain a nation; and that within certain limits morality could be created, and shaped, and made instinctive. They knew precisely what morality they wanted for their particular purpose, and how they were to create this, and shape it, and how they were to make it instinctive. In this supreme matter they did everything they wanted to do. This, this precisely, and nothing else, was the wisdom of Egypt.[8] It was the greatest wisdom any nation has ever yet shown. It took in hand every individual in the whole community, and made him what it was wished and needed that he should be. If we do not understand these statements the wisdom of Egypt is to us a mere empty phrase. If we do understand them, the phrase conveys to us the profoundest lesson history can teach; and at the present juncture, when the foundations of social order are being shifted, a transference of political power taking place, new principles being introduced, and old ones being applied in a new fashion, and in larger measures, it is, of all the lessons that can be found in the pages of history, the one that would be of most service to ourselves.

They knew that they could make the morality they required instinctive. If they could not have done this the whole business would have been with them, as it proved with so many other people, a more or less well-meant, but still only a melancholy fiasco. They did, however, thoroughly succeed in their great attempt, and this is what we have now to look into.

First we must get hold of the fact that morality is instinctive. The moral sentiments are instincts engendered in our suitably prepared physical and mental organization by the circumstances and conditions of the life of the community; this is the spontaneous self-acting cause; and then, secondarily,—this, however, has ultimately the same source and origination—by the deliberate and purposed arrangements established by governing mind, that is, by laws and religion, the formal embodiments of that mind. They are instincts precisely in the sense in which we apply the word to certain physio-psychal phenomena of the lower animals. They are formed among mankind in the same way, with, as we have just said, the additional cause of the foreseen and intended action of those regulations, which are suggested by the working of human societies, and which are devised, and designedly introduced, by an exercise of the reasoning faculties. They are transmitted in the same way, act in the same way, and are modified, extinguished, and reversed in the same way. Whatever, for instance, may be predicated of the maternal instinct in a hen may be predicated of the maternal sentiment in the human mother, and vice versâ, due allowance having been made for modifying conditions, for there are other instincts in the human mother, (for instance, that of shame at the dread of the discovery of a lapse from virtue,) which may enable her to overpower and extinguish the maternal sentiment—a state to which the hen, through the absence of other counteracting instincts, and from defects of reason, can never be brought. This is true of all the moral sentiments from the bottom to the top of the scale. The necessities of human life, and chiefly the working of human society, have originated every one of them. This accounts for every phenomenon belonging to them that men have observed and commented on, and endeavoured to explain; as, for instance, for their endless diversity, and yet for their substantial identity; for their universality; for their apparent foundation in utility; for their apparent origination in the will of the Creator; for their apparent innateness; and for their apparent non-innateness. They are diverse, they are identical, they are universal, they are founded on utility, they originate in the will of the Creator, they are innate, they are non-innate, in the sense in which instincts generated by the necessities of human life, and the working of human societies (everywhere endlessly modified by times and circumstances, yet substantially the same), must possess every one of these qualities. A volume might be written on the enlargement and proof of this statement. The foregoing paragraph will, however, I trust, make my meaning sufficiently clear.

By an instinct I mean an impulse, apparently spontaneous and involuntary, and not the result of a process of reasoning at the time, disposing one to feel and act in a certain regular manner. Observation and experience have taught us that dispositions of this kind in any individual may have been either created in himself, or received transmissively from his parents, having in the latter case been congenital. On the ground of this distinction instincts may be divided into the two classes of those which have been acquired, which are generally called habits, and of those that have been inherited, which are generally called instincts. This division, however, has respect only to that which is unessential and accidental, because that which brings any feeling, or act, into either class is that it originated in an impulse that arises, on every occasion that properly requires its aid, regularly, and without any apparent process, or effort, of reason. It is founded on an apparent difference in origination, but primarily the origination in both members of the division must have been the same. In this particular these moral conditions may be illustrated by an incident, or accident, of the property men have in things; an estate is not the less property because its possessor acquired it, nor is another the more so because he inherited it from his predecessors. And just as we distinguish between the unessential circumstances that a property has been acquired by a self-made man, or that it has been inherited, so do we between these two divisions of instinct. It is, however, clear that a habit is merely an acquired instinct, and an instinct an inherited habit. That the thing spoken of should be habitual, that it originated in a certain regular impulse, and not in a conscious exercise of the reasoning faculties at the time; and that the impulse to which it is attributable arises regularly whenever required, and produces, on like occasions, like acts and feelings, are the essential points.

How the dispositions were acquired in cases where they are not hereditary, though a most interesting and important inquiry, and one upon which the old Egyptians would have had a great deal to tell us, is not material to the point now before us. In whatever way the dispositions may have been acquired, the feelings and acts resulting from them are instinctive. As a matter of fact, instincts may be acquired in many ways, as, for instance, through the action of fear, hope, law, religion, training, and even of imitation. A generalization which would include far the greater part of these causes is one I have already frequently used—that of the working of society. Perhaps still more of them may be summed up in the one word knowledge. What a man knows is always present to him, and always putting constraint upon him, disposing him to act in one definite way, conformably to itself, and regularly, instead of in any one of ten thousand other possible ways. This, sooner or later, issues in the habit which is inchoate instinct, and at last in the instinct which is hereditary habit. The hereditary habit, however, is still reversible.

It was just because the Egyptians observed a multitude of these social, family, and self-regarding instincts in the lower animals, who possessed each those necessary for itself, without the aid of speech or law, or other human manifestations of reason, that they made them the symbols of the attributes of divinity.

That they had designedly studied the whole of this subject of instinct carefully and profoundly, and that their study of it had been most successful and fruitful, are as evident to us at this day as that they built the Pyramids and Karnak. We see the attractiveness the study had for them in the fact that they had trained cats to retrieve wounded water-fowl, and lions to accompany their kings in war, and assist them in the chase; and that they recorded in their sculptures and paintings that they had thus triumphed over nature, obliterating her strongest instincts, and implanting in their place what they pleased. This tells us, as distinctly as words could, the interest they took in the subject, and the importance they attached to it; and that they had formulated the two ideas, first that instincts can be created and reversed, and then that everything depends upon them. All this had been consciously thought out, and worked out by them; and was as clear to their minds as the axioms of political economy are to our modern economists.

The Egyptians then deliberately undertook to make instinctive a sense of social order, and of submission to what was established, and a disposition to comply with all the ordinary duties of morality as then understood, and which were set forth in the forty-two denials of sin the mummy would have to make at the day of judgment. All this they effected chiefly by their system of castes; and by the logical and practical manner in which they had worked out, and constructed, their doctrine of the future life; and had brought it to bear on the conduct, the thoughts, and the sentiments of every member of the community: and they effected it most thoroughly and successfully.

And now we must advance a step further, and note some of the incidents that belonged to, and consequences that ensued on, what they did. We must bear in mind that their times were not as our times. The means they had to work with, the materials they had to work upon, and the manner in which they were obliged to deal with their means and their materials, necessitated the construction of an inelastic and iron system. This was necessary then and there. Like all the oriental systems, it altered not, and could not alter; and being thus inexpansive and unaccommodating, it besides, in its institution of castes, involved injustice at home; and, in its being for Egyptians alone, exclusiveness towards the rest of the world, which was, in a sense, the denial of the humanity of all who were not Egyptians. Being settled once for all, it abrogated human freedom. It rejected and excluded all additional light and knowledge; it denied all truth, excepting that to which it had itself already attained: that is to say, however good it may have been for its own time, it eventually, when brought into contact with a differently circumstanced, and advancing world, made immorality, injustice, falsehood, thraldom of every kind, and ignorance, essential parts of religion. This it was that caused its overthrow.

Let us separate from the list just given of the elements of its eventual weakness, one which was peculiar to those early times, and the history of which is very distinct and interesting: it is that of national exclusiveness. We can see clearly enough how this instinct of repulsion arose. Those were times when the difficulties in the way of forming a nation were great. Tribes and cities that had always been hostile to one another, and populations composed of conquerors and the conquered, were the materials that had to be compacted in a homogeneous body, animated by one soul. Not cementing, but the most violently dissevering, traditions alone exist. No community of interests is felt. The instincts of submission to law have not been formed; every man is for doing what is right in his own eyes, or at most in the eyes of the few, who feel and think as he does. Communications are difficult. A common literature does not exist to inspire common sentiments. It seems almost impossible, under such circumstances, out of such elements, to form a nation: but unless this be done, all good perishes. On no other condition can anything good be maintained. This is the one indispensable condition. Here, then, is a case in which the feeling of exclusiveness, if it can be created, will go very far towards bringing about what is needed. It can bind together; it is the sentiment of sundering difference from others, the corollary to which is the sentiment of closest unity among themselves. It is then good and desirable: it must by all means be engendered and cherished. The governing and organizing mind of the community sees this. Efforts therefore are made to establish it as a national instinct.

In Egypt these efforts were made with complete success. At first Egypt had been a region of independent cities: the instincts that had arisen out of that state of things had to be obliterated. A feeling also of intense dislike to their Hyksos neighbours had to be created. All this was done. They were brought to feel that they were a peculiar people, separate from the rest of the world. That they were not as other people. They had no fellow-feeling towards them. They shrank from them. They hated them. It was quite agreeable to their feelings to ravage, to spoil, to oppress, to put to the sword, to degrade, to insult, to inflict the most cruel sufferings on, to make slaves of, to sacrifice to their gods, those who were not Egyptians. This moral sentiment—in us it would be destructive of morality—had originated in, and been fed by, their circumstances; and had been shaped and strengthened by their institutions deliberately designed for this purpose. It had become habitual. It was, taking the word literally, an Egyptian instinct. We can imagine a very different condition of the moral atmosphere of the world: such, indeed, as it is about ourselves in the Europe of the present day. The sentiment of nationality has everywhere been formed. It can maintain itself without any assistance. What is needed is not something that will separate peoples, but something that will bring them to act together. The instinct of exclusiveness, of repulsion, will lead only to troubles, to hostile tariffs, to wars. No good, but only evil, can come of it. Whatever will promote friendliness and intercourse, and prevent their interruption, must be cherished. The old instinct of exclusiveness has now become a mistake, an anachronism, a nuisance, a sin. Everybody sees that what is wanted is the sentiment of universal brotherhood. This, therefore, in its turn, comes to be generally understood, and to some extent to be acted on. That is to say, a moral instinct has been reversed: the old one, which did good service in its day, is dying out; and that which has come to be needed, and so is superseding it, is its direct opposite.

And now we must follow this sentiment of national exclusiveness and repulsion into the neighbouring country of Israel. There we find that it had been quite as necessary, probably even more necessary than in Egypt. It had been engendered by the same process, and for the same purpose. Between these two peoples the feeling was reciprocated with more than its normal intensity. Their history accounts for this. But now it was to be abrogated in both, and its abrogation in Egypt was to come from Israel. And what we have to do here is to note the steps by which this great moral revolution was brought about.

Fifteen hundred years had passed since the night when the Hebrew bondman had fled out of Egypt, or, as the Egyptian annals described the event, had, at the command of the gods of Egypt, been ignominiously cast out of the land. They had ordered his expulsion, so ran the record, because he was the incurable victim, and the prolific source, of a foul leprosy. This was the evil disease of Egypt that bondman never forgot. Those fifteen hundred years, from the days of the making of the brick for which no straw had been given, and from the building of Pithom and Ramses, had been very chequered years. In that time the fugitive people had had to pass through many a fiery furnace of affliction. Their old task-masters had again, as others, too, had done, set their heel upon them.

During that long lapse of time what a stumbling-block to the Hebrew mind must have been the good things of Egypt: its wealth, its splendour, its power, its wisdom; even its abundance of corn and its fine linen: all that this world could give given to the worshippers of cats and crocodiles. Egypt must have occupied in the Hebrew mind much the same place that is held in the minds of many of ourselves by the existence of evil. It was a great fact, and a great mystery. Something which could neither be denied, nor explained, which it is unpleasant to be reminded of, and which had better be kept altogether out of the thoughts of the simple. The Hebrew “was grieved at seeing the Egyptian in such prosperity. He was in no peril of death. He was strong and lusty. He came not into misfortune, neither was he plagued like other men. This was why he was so holden with pride, and overwhelmed with cruelty. His eyes swelled with fatness, and he did even as he lusted. He spake wicked blasphemy against the Most High. He stretched forth his mouth unto the heavens, and his tongue went through the world. The people fell before him, and he sucked out from them no small advantage.” Such was the aspect in which the prosperity of Egypt presented itself to the mind of the Hebrew. “He sought to understand it, but it was too hard for him.” How grand, then, how noble, and for us how absolutely beyond all price, is the reiterated assertion of the Hebrew prophets, even in the worst and darkest times of this long and trying period, of the ultimate triumph of right; of a new heavens and a new earth, that is, of a time when mundane societies would be animated by diviner principles; and, pre-eminently, by those of universal inclusion and concord.

At last came a large instalment of what many preachers of righteousness had anticipated, and had desired to see, but had not seen. That they had anticipated it under such adverse circumstances, and had lived and died in the faith of it, is one of the chief contributories to the historical argument for natural morality. What they had anticipated came about, however, in a manner and from a quarter of which they could have had no foresight. Beyond the Great Sea in the distant West, a city, whose name Isaiah could never have heard, and which was not even a name in the days of Rameses, and for many centuries after his time, had grown into an empire, in which had come to be included the whole civilized world. All nations had been cast into this crucible, and were being fused into one people. Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, were each of them the children of a more ancient, and, in some respects, of a higher and better civilization; but they, like all the rest, had been absorbed into the world-embracing dominion, and were powerless within it, except so far as ideas give power. Every people was now being brought face to face with all other people, and into union and communion with them. The way in which the religions of the world were thus made acquainted with each other acted as a confutation of each in particular, or rather of its external distinctive mythology. We can form no adequate conception of what the effect must have been. They were all alike discredited. The exclusiveness of each was confuted by the logic of facts. It was out of this conjuncture of circumstances that arose the new idea and sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind. What had hitherto everywhere obscured the view of it was now falling into decay; and what must suggest it had been established.

And no people had been so thoroughly disciplined for receiving this idea as the Jews. They had been brought into closest contact with Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, and other oriental people; and it had been that kind of contact which obliges men to understand what other people think. And after they had received this hard schooling from their neighbours, they had been brought into the same kind of contact with Greek thought. They had been obliged to take into their consideration the knowledge, and the ways of thinking, of the Greeks. They had even been to a great extent compelled to learn their language. Some of the writers of the New Testament, it is clear, had been taught Greek, just as we may be taught French; and Homer, it is evident, had been the school-book employed in teaching them the language. And now, together with all the rest of the world, they had become members of the universal empire of Rome. All this would have led to nothing except obliteration and absorption, as it did elsewhere, if the Jews had been like other people. They were incapable, however, of succumbing in this way, because they had ideas and moral sentiments that were, in some important respects, truer, and stronger, and better than those of their conquerors and oppressors. Hence originated the idea of their conquerors that they were the enemies of the human race. It was, then, for this reason, because, being indestructible and unassimilable, they had been obliged to consider the meaning and worth of other peoples’ ideas, and of facts, that Jerusalem came to be the definite spot upon which the fruitful contact of the different integers of the East with each other, and of East with West, of Europe with Asia, actually took place. Here were collected, as into a focus, the knowledge and the circumstances which would engender the new sentiment that was to reverse the old one. The old one had been that of narrow exclusiveness. It could not have been otherwise. The only one that could be engendered by the new knowledge, and the new circumstances, was one of universal inclusiveness: not the idea of a peculiar people, such as the Egyptians had regarded themselves, but its very opposite, that of the universal brotherhood of mankind. We see the embryo of the thought endeavouring to assume form at Rome, at the very time that it was being preached with the sharpest and clearest definition at Jerusalem. But it never could have assumed its proper, clear, distinct form at Rome, because morality would always there have been hazy and corrupt, and inextricably entangled with ideas of self and dominion. In Jerusalem only, the one true home of single-purposed morality, could it assume its true shape, pure and undefiled. When the words were uttered, “Ye all are brethren,” the idea was formulated. That was the moment of its birth. It then took its place in the moral creation, a living form, with life, and the power of giving life; with power to throw down and to build up. This was the new commandment, the seminal idea of the new religion, and Jerusalem was the seed-bed, prepared for it by the long series of antecedent events, where it must germinate first. When that had been done, scions from it might be taken to other localities. But it is plain that, as moral instincts die hard, Jerusalem is also precisely one of the spots in which the new sentiment will meet with the most determined and violent antagonism; nor will it ever find there general reception, or, indeed, so much reception as among other races, where the instinct of repulsion had not been so completely and firmly established.

The new sentiment had to be evoked from man’s inner consciousness, as it was acted upon and affected by the new order of things. This could not be done until the authority of this inner consciousness had been recognized. This means a great deal. What it had come to regard as true and good was to be religion, as distinguished from written law, which is imposed by the State, has convenience and expediency for its object, and is limited in its purview by the necessities of its application, and by the ignorance and low sentiment of public opinion. The Christ-enlightened, God-taught, pure conscience is a better and higher and more searching rule of life than any legislation. That would only drag conscience and life down again to the common level. To make that religion would be making Cæsar God: an evil necessity that had, to some extent, inhered in the Old Dispensation. It would kill conscience, which aims higher, goes deeper, and sees farther than written statutes and enactments, however well meant, or wisely drawn. The new religion, therefore, stood aloof from, and placed itself above, all existing legislation, except in the sense of submitting to it, and obeying it as a social and political necessity. But though it submitted itself to, and obeyed, it could not receive, a written code as the rule of life. While, therefore, it recognized the rights and necessities of the kingdoms of this world, it found in man’s conscience the law of a kingdom not of this world. The polity it created was not of them. It was God’s kingdom among men. The kingdoms of the world might at some future time become the kingdoms of God, but at present Cæsar and God were distinct powers, and represented distinctly different applications of the principles of right. Cæsar’s application was partial only, and, moreover, full of corruption; God’s was all-embracing and incorrupt.

The day of trial had been long in coming, but it had come at last; and what we have been recalling to the reader’s mind was what the wisdom of Egypt had to confront now. It was the apotheosis of the ideas men could now attach to the words, Truth, Freedom, Justice, Goodness, Knowledge, Humanity. These were of God, and made man one with God. The time, then, had come for the Hebrew bondman to be revenged: for the Hebrew invasion of Egypt. We may contrast it with the old Egyptian invasions of Syria, and with the Hyksos invasion of Egypt. It was of a kind of which the organized wisdom of Egypt could have formed no anticipation; and against which the temples and the priesthood of Egypt were as powerless as heaps of stones, and dead men. It was an invasion of ideas which could now be understood, and of sentiments which could now be felt; and which were better than any the priests, and priest-kings of old Egypt had in their day felt or understood; and the feeling and the understanding of which would utterly abolish the system they had maintained. These ideas and sentiments had been proclaimed in the cities and villages of Judea and Galilee as the new commandment, as the fulfilment of all religion. The whole Roman world was ripening for their reception. They were carried down into Egypt in the thoughts and hearts of those who had received them. They spread from mind to mind, and from heart to heart. The fugitive bondman, the cast-out leper had returned; but he had now come to bestow a glorious liberty, to communicate the contagion of regenerating ideas and sentiments, and of a larger and better humanity. The Hyksos had again come down into the old Nile land; but this time they came not to oppress, not to exact tribute, but to break bonds, and to enrich, and to place men on a higher level than they had occupied before. This was an invasion to which Egypt, in all its thousands of years of national life, had never yet been exposed. Invasions of this kind can be very rare in the history of nations, and in the history of the human race; but if, when they do come, minds are prepared for them, they are irresistible. And so it was now with old Egypt. The old order of things passed away, and the new order of things came in its place. The priesthood, with all their lore, their science, their wisdom, their legitimacy of at least four thousand years, their impregnable temple-fortresses, their territorial supremacy, the awful authority with which a religion so old, that the memory of the world ran not to the contrary, invested them, passed away like a morning mist. The whole system fell, as the spreading symmetrical pine-tree falls, never to burst forth again into new life—the overthrow having killed the root, as well as all that had grown from the root. Even the very Houses of the Gods which, as the thought of the days of Rameses had phrased it, had been built for myriads of years, passed away with it, excepting the few which have been preserved to tell the history of what once had been.

All had been overthrown: but the Christian ideas and sentiments, which had done the work, were too grand and simple for Egypt, where the most inveterate of all instincts was for the mind to be swathed. And so the new revelation was soon obscured. The reaction came in the forms of asceticism and theology.

But asceticism and theology are not religion; or, at all events, not such religion as can inspire much nobility of soul, or which has any power and vitality, except under the circumstances which created it: and so this, too, fell; and the religion which superseded it—that of the Egypt of to-day—is, in its simplest expression, a reversion to the old oriental idea, which seems always to have been a necessity there, of authoritative, unchangeable legislation, combined, however, with the Christian idea of the brotherhood of mankind. The form in which the Christian idea has been incorporated into it is that of an universal religion, which gives no sanction to exclusive pretensions, either of nationality, or of caste.

It is natural for the traveller to wish that he could behold Egypt in its old world order and glory; but he must console himself with the reflection that what perished was what deserved to perish—what had become narrow and false; and that what was good, true, and wise, including the lessons Egypt’s history teaches, survived the crash. Of all that we are the inheritors.

The fortunes and the future of the Christian idea and sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind, which gave the new doctrine so much of its power to overthrow the wisdom of old Egypt, interests and concerns us all. From the days of its first triumphs down to our own day it has been actively at work in Europe. Through all these centuries it has been gaining strength. The first logical deduction from it which, like its parent, becomes a sentiment as well as an idea, is that of universal equality, for if all are brothers, then none is greater or less than another. The flower with which this offshoot blossoms is that of humanity. Under the old exclusive systems, which placed impassable barriers between peoples, cities, and tribes; and then between the classes of the same community; and had therefore, said to human hearts, ‘So far may you go, and no further; beyond this you need not—you ought not—to feel pity; beyond this hatred and repulsion, the sword, the torch, the chain are only to be thought of;’ the idea of humanity had been impossible: but when all men are recognized as in essentials equally men, that which makes them men assumes the definite form of this idea. ‘Honour all men’—that is, do all in your power to elevate every one you may come in contact with, and nothing that has a tendency to degrade any human being, whatever may be his complexion, blood, caste, or position—was, we know, a very early injunction.

The greatest outward and visible achievement of the idea and sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind was the abolition of slavery and serfdom. This was effected very slowly. We are, however, rather surprised that so Herculean a labour should ever have been achieved by it at all. When we consider the inveteracy and the universality of the institution; that it was the very foundation on which society was, almost everywhere, built; that it was everywhere the interest of the governing part of the community, that is, of those who had power in their hands, to maintain it; that, in the early days of the new idea, it never soared so high as the thought of so great an achievement; and yet find, notwithstanding, that the old institution has fallen everywhere; that no combination of circumstances has anywhere been able to secure it; we begin to understand the irresistible force of the idea. This was the greatest of all political and social revolutions ever effected in this world.

The manifestations of the sentiment we are now thinking of have been very various, in conformity with the circumstances of the times, and the condition of those in whom it was at work. Some centuries ago it came to the surface in Jacqueries and Anabaptist vagaries. Now for some three generations it has been seen in volcanic operation in French outbreaks and revolutions. It is the soul of American democracy. It is at this moment working, like leaven in a lump of dough, in the hearts and minds of all Christian communities. There is no man in this country but feels its disintegrating, and reconstructing force. Every village school that is opened, every invention and discovery that is made, every book, every newspaper that is printed, every sermon that is preached, aids in propagating it. Its continued growth and spread gradually deprive governing classes of heart, thus betraying them from within, and of a logically defensive position in the forum of what has now come to be recognized as public opinion. It is at this day the greatest power among men. The future, whatever it is to be, must be largely shaped by it.

Here the study of the wisdom of old Egypt teaches us much. One most useful lesson is that stability in human societies can be attained; but that, as the constitution and sentiments of European societies are now very different from the state of things to which the wisdom of Egypt was applied, we must give to our efforts a form and character that will be suitable to our altered circumstances. The method they adopted was that of eliminating the elements of political and social change, by arranging society in the iron frame of caste, and by petrifying all knowledge in the form of immutable doctrine. We cannot do this, and it would not be desirable for us to do it, if we could. The obvious advantages of the Egyptian method were that, under the then existing circumstances, it secured order and quiet; and that it assigned to every man his work, and taught him how to do it. Its disadvantages were that ultimately it repressed all higher moral progress, denied all new truths, and consecrated what had become falsehood and injustice. It was also worked, though with a great immediate gain of power, from thorough organization, yet with a great waste of the highest form of power, for it altogether overlooked natural aptitudes, and, quite irrespectively of them, decided for every man what he was to be, and what he was to do. We cannot suppose, on the one hand, that there are no other methods of securing social order and stability than these; nor, on the other hand, that American democracy and Chinese mandarinism have exhausted all alternatives now possible. This, however, is a problem we shall have to consider for ourselves. Here it will be enough for us to see that, even if it were within our power to attain to stability by the Egyptian application of the Egyptian method, the result would still be subject to the limitation of the rise of new ideas, and even of the propagation, more widely throughout the community, of existing ideas. These are absolutely irresistible. There is nothing under heaven, especially in these days of rapid and universal interchange and propagation of thought, which can arrest their progress. Their elements pervade the moral atmosphere, which acts on our moral being, just as the air, we cannot but breathe, does on our bodily constitution.

We may also learn from this history that progress, about which there has been so much debate—some glorying in it, some denying it,—is an actual positive historic fact. What we have been reviewing enables us, furthermore, to see precisely in what it consists. It does not consist in the abundance of the things we possess, nor in mastery over nature. We may continuously be overcoming more and more of the hindrances nature has placed in our path; we may be compelling her to do more and more of our bidding; we may be extorting from her more and more of her varied and wondrous treasures; but all this, in itself, possesses no intrinsic value. It is valuable only as a means to something else. The old Egypt of the Pharaohs might, conceivably, have possessed railways, power-looms, electric telegraphs, and yet the old Egyptian might have been, and might have continued to be for four thousand years longer, very much what he was in the days of Sethos and Rameses. The modern Egyptian possesses all these things, and the printing-press besides, and yet is inferior, under the same sky, and on the same ground, to his predecessors of those old times. The end and purpose of material aids, and of material well-being, are to strengthen, and to develop, that which is highest, and best, and supreme in man—that which makes him man. Otherwise it is only pampering, and rendering life easy to, so many more animals. The difference would be little whether this were done for so many such men, or for so many crocodiles and bulls. That which is supreme in man—which makes a man a man—is his intellectual and moral being. If this has been strengthened, enlarged, enriched, progress has been made; he has been raised to a higher level; his horizon has been extended; he has been endued with new power. History and observation show that without some amount of material advancement, intellectual and moral advancement is not possible, and that all material gains may be turned to account in this way. This is their proper place—that of means, and not of ends. They are ever placing larger and larger proportions of mankind in the position in which intellectual and moral advancement becomes possible to them. That, then, to which they contribute, and which they make possible, is their true use and purpose. Whoever makes them for himself the end, dethrones that within himself, the supremacy of which alone can make him a true man. Every one who has done anything towards enriching, and purifying, and strengthening the intellect, or the heart of man, or towards extending to an increased proportion of the community the cultivation and development of moral and intellectual power, has contributed towards human progress.

The greatest advance that has been made in the historic period was the implanting in the minds of men the idea, and in their hearts the sentiment, of the brotherhood of mankind. The idea and sentiment of responsibility dates back beyond the ken of history. Our observation, however, of what is passing in rude and simple communities, where social arrangements and forces are still in an almost embryonic condition, leads us to suppose that it is an instinct developed by the working, the necessities, and the life of society. To our own times belongs the scientific presentment of the idea of the cosmos, which, though a construction of the intellect, affects us also morally. Who can believe that even the oldest of these ideas is bearing all the fruit of which it is capable, and—that it will have no account to give of even better fruit in the future than it has ever produced in the past? How wide then is the field, in the most advanced communities, for moral and intellectual, the only truly human, progress! How impossible is it to foresee any termination of this progress!