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.

    45/474 (page 31)
    years ago, induced the people to preserve corpses ? If so, they must have had greater moral influence in their day than any set of rulers have in ours ; or, the people with whom they had then to do must have been more obedient, or more reasonably willing to adopt sensible measures, than are to be found in England this century. Yet, if sanitary, would the priests have succeeded so well in their benevolent and patriotic enterprise had they merely appealed to reason } Had not religion something to do with the change t Were not the native and natural im- pulses to reverence the spiritual acted upon to procure so ready and so universal a response } If religion, what ideas were presented, and how and when did they arise t We must be willing to admit with Fichte that “ superstition has restrained its subjects to abandon many pernicious practices and to adopt many useful ones.” We cannot turn to other nations for a solution of these queries. The Cushite tribes, the Chaldeans, the Hindoos, have nothing to tell us, even inferentially, for long ages after the early revelations of Egypt. We cannot divine whether the Egyptian colonists brought the practice with them into the country, or even the notions which gave it being. It is possible that some peculiarities of the new land were the indirect cause. The time had been, before the institution of canals and drainage works, that the waters of the Nile, ungoverned and unrestrained, made the land of the valley impracticable for burials, and exposed the living to greater danger. But, then, was it any more needful for interments to be in the valley than it was afterwards.? Was not the desert close to the narrow home of fertility} Could they not have taken the corpse to the sandy and rocky plateau, where no flood ever came .? Was it not probable that, from the first, the uninundated ground would become the cemetery, especially when it was not productive .?