Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick.

  • James Bonwick
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of right belief.” It is easier to assume a Church as the depository of truth than to prove it to be so. In the same way, an Egyptian under the Pharaohs might assume the priests to be right, and be confirmed in his faith from the long continuance of that form of religion. But the man of the Pyramid age might, possibly, object to that position, and ask whether there was a time when Osiris and Anubis were unknown. He might say, “ Did my ancestors always deem it necessary to have Anubis as conductor of souls V' or, “What made them think the soul went to Hades at all He would have been, doubtless, speedily stopped in his speculations by the priest of the period, and have been told that inquiry was doubt, and doubt was sin. Alarm of conscience might induce him to bind himself anew with the fetters of the Infallibility of his Church. If not, he would become a cynic, or plunge alone in the maze of metaphysical theology. What, then, was the more ancient religion ? “ Is there,” asks Mr, Distant,. “ a primeval germ that has given birth to all the great religious.institutions of the world.?” We must, however, carefully remember that one key will not open all locks. Dr. Eugene Flotard says, “ It is easy, in running through all the hymns of the Rig Veda Avith attention, to discover the vestiges of this ancient religion.” But he styles the book “ the most ancient monument of Naturalism or adoration of the deified physical nature ; ” though, while perceiving nature worship, he is conscious of some spiritual breath there. Zoroaster condemned the Vedas as opposed to the primitive faith, which, with him, had a God. Prof. Whitney, of Yale, finds there “ an almost pure nature worship.” Plutarch calls the ancient religion “ nothing more than a system of physics, a picture of the