Lecture II. Egyptian Religion. 27
was not easily to be reconciled with the mummified body which
was eventually to lead a life in the other world that should be a
repetition and reflection of its life in this. How theBaand the
mummy were to be united, the official cult never endeavoured to [027]
explain; the task was probably beyond its powers. It was content
to leave the two conceptions side by side, bidding the individual
believer reconcile them as best he could.
The fact illustrates another which must always be kept in mind
in dealing with Egyptian religion. Up to the last it remained
without a philosophic system. There were, it is true, certain
sides of it which were reduced to systems, certain parts of the
official creed which became philosophies. But as a whole it
was a loosely-connected agglomeration of beliefs and practices
which had come down from the past, and one after the other had
found a place in the religion of the State. No attempt was ever
made to form them into a coherent and homogeneous whole, or
to find a philosophic basis upon which they all might rest. Such
an idea, indeed, never occurred to the Egyptian. He was quite
content to take his religion as it had been handed down to him,
or as it was prescribed by the State; he had none of that inner
retrospection which distinguishes the Hindu, none of that desire
to know the causes of things which characterised the Greek. The
contradictions which we find in the articles of his creed never
troubled him; he never perceived them, or if he did they were
ignored. He has left to us the task of finding a philosophic
basis for his faith, and of fixing the central ideas round which it
revolved; the task is a hard one, and it is rendered the harder by
the imperfection of our materials.
The Egyptian was no philosopher, but he had an immense
veneration for the past. The past, indeed, was ever before him;
he could not escape from it. Objects and monuments which
would have perished in other countries were preserved almost in
their pristine freshness by the climate under which he lived. As
to-day, so too in the age of the Pharaohs, the earliest and the [028]