The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

66 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

to murder and madness. But at last, after ages of suffering, the
end comes; it dies the second death, and is annihilated for ever.
The good soul, on the other hand, which has listened in life to
the voice of the divine intelligence, and struggled to overcome
the lusts and passions of the flesh, obtains after death its reward.
Guided by the intelligence, it traverses space, learning the secrets
of the universe, and coming to understand the things that are dark
and mysterious to us here. At length its education in the other
world is completed, and it is permitted to see God face to face
and to lose itself in His ineffable glory.
I need not point out to you how deeply this Hellenised
philosophy of Egypt has affected the religious thought of
Christian Alexandria, and through Alexandria of Christian
Europe. It may be that traces of it may be detected even in
[070] the New Testament. At any rate, much of the psychology of
Christian theologians is clearly derived from it. We are still under
the influence of ideas whose first home was in Egypt, and whose
development has been the work of long ages of time. True or
false, they are part of the heritage bequeathed to us by the past.

[071]