The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

228 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

and that his confession in the judgment-hall of Osiris had been
in agreement with the truth and with the eternal order of the
universe.
Of the moral character of the Osirian creed I have already
spoken. It is the first official recognition by religion that what
God requires is uprightness of conduct and not ceremonial
orthodoxy, the first identification of religion with morality. And
the god who required this uprightness of conduct was not a“lord
of hosts,”who compelled adoration by the display of his power,
but Un-nefer,“the good being,”who existed in order to do good
to men. In the conflict with evil he had apparently been worsted;
but though he had died a shameful death, his disciples believed
that it had been endured on their behalf, and that for those who
[248] followed in his footsteps, and whose lives resembled his, he
had provided a better and a happier Egypt in another world, into
which sin and pain and death could not enter, and where he ruled
eternally over the cities and fields of the blest.
In the Osirian creed, writer after writer has discovered“fore-
gleams”of Christianity more striking even than the doctrine of
the Trinity, which belongs to the philosophy of faith. But there is
nothing wonderful in the continuity of religious thought. One of
the chief lessons impressed upon us by the science of the century
which has just passed away, is that of continuity; throughout the
world of nature there is no break, no isolated link in the long
chain of antecedent and consequent, and still less is there any
in the world of thought. Development is but another name for
the continuity which binds the past to the present with stronger
fetters than those of destiny. It is not only the philosophy of
Christianity, or the wider and more general doctrines of its creed,
which find an echo in the religion of ancient Egypt; in details also
Egypt is linked with the modern world. Long before the Hebrew
prophets pictured the kingdom of the Messiah, an Egyptian poet,
in the reign of ThothmesIII., had said:“A king shall come from
the south, Ameni, the truth-declaring, by name. He shall be the