Abstract
There are few points on which the Egyptian and Christian religious so nearly analogize, and which are more striking in their resemblances, than that one doctrine which has always been regarded, and rightly so, as a special result of revelation,-the doctrine of a Vicarious Deliverer of mankind in the person of a mysterious Being, who is at once both very God and very man. The definite language of the Nicene Creed, and its commentary, the symbol of St. Athanasius, explains the nature and attributes of the founder of our religion, and it is my province, as far as I am able to do so, to show to-night in what degree that nature and those attributes were anticipated in the Egyptian dogma of Horus Nets, the only-begotten son of his father-the Deliverer of Mankind from the Evil One. Perhaps you will allow me, before I proceed to examine my subject, to remove a little misapprehension which may arise in your minds as to the manner in which I shall treat it, and the standpoint from which it will be viewed, since the topic is one to Christians of the most serious interest, and one which has formed the foundation of a variety of heretical expositions in the first three centuries of our era, and has been overlaid with a mass of pseudo-science and philology by the sceptical writers of the earlier part of this. There are, I take it, then, in all religions, and notably in the oldest, certain fundamental truths which were derived from a primeval revelation,fundamental-truths which have in some theologies been neglected, in others lost sight of, in a third misunderstood, and in a fourth perverted and corrupted. In the depths of His infinite mercy, we are told, that the Supreme Being left not Himself without witness in the world, -such a witness, for example, as is afforded by the science of natural theology,-and He revealed to the earlier civilizers of mankind certain salvatory truths, the full elucidation of which He reserved for the ages to come. Hence it follows, that as in all ages there were those to whom He was pleased to reveal Himself and to teach His word, there must always have existed among the traditions of the human race the remembrance of those elementary, doctrines which were derived from what was really the pre-patriarchal church; but hence, also, it by no means as necessarily follows that those traditions should be based upon a revelation made known only to the Jews as the descendants of Abraham,; since, if we were to require such a postulate, we should have to deduce our arguments from creeds which arose among nations having had subsequent contact with the Jews ; and that position in the case of the ancient Egyptians would be utterly untenable ; rather, instead, would I base my argument upon this hypothesis therefore, that long prior to the time of Abraham the cardinal dogmas of the Church were known to the nations of the world, and that it was reserved to the Father of the faithful and his descendants to hold and to transmit to us the whole of those dogmas in their integrity; but that even to the Jews themselves the full import of their own articles of faith was not fully known, while isolated doctrines, which were held in common by them and by other nations, were expanded to a degree which the patriarchs never understood, and which in some points anticipated, so far as these expansions arose from, the conscious yearnings of the soul after God. the tenets of Christian revelation. Do not, I pray you, think, me tedious in these prefatory remarks, for, singular as some of the Egyptian doctrines are, which I shall presently examine, they were all held in the land of the Pharaohs centuries before the call of Abraham or the birth of Moses. Place the period of Abraham where you may, that of the XIIth Egyptian Dynasty must precede it; the arrival of Jacob and his family cannot have been earlier than the XVIIIth, and the expulsion of the Exodus than the XIXth dynasties. Therefore the compilation of the Pentateuch must be posterior to the time of Rameses II.; although certain integral portions may be, nay, undoubtedly are, infinitely older; and the Ritual of the Dead, which dates from the IVth Dynasty, and the Litanies of the Sun, which are found in the XIIth Dynasty, must be, the oldest theological texts in existence. There is this most important consideration, however,'--the rubrics and commentaries upon these, and the beautiful mystical hymns which form so large a part of the ancient hieroglyphic literature, are of a more recent period, and were the subject of continual recensions and additions; so that while the essential parts of the myth of Horns mount up to the period of the Great Pyramid, the oldest of Egyptian buildings; the expositions and adaptations of that myth descend as low as to the grand temple of Edfu, which was erected by Cleopatra Cocce and Ptolemy Euergetes II., and was only completed by Augustus Caesar.