THE WISDOM OF EGYPT, AND ITS FALL.
So work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule of nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.—SHAKSPEARE.
As day after day we wander about on the historic sites of old Egypt,
among the temples and tombs, and endeavour to comprehend their magnitude
and costliness, the thought and labour bestowed on their construction,
and the ideas and sentiments embodied and expressed in the structures
themselves, and in the sculptures placed upon them, we are brought to
understand that never in any country has religion been so magnificently
maintained. Israel had but its single temple; here, however, every city
of the land—and no land had a greater number of great cities—had erected
a temple, and often more than one, which was intended not so much for
time as for eternity. One third of the land of Egypt was devoted to the
support of the priesthood. The payments also made by the people for the
services of religion must have amounted to large yearly aggregates.
The spoils of Asia and Africa were, as well as the royal revenues,
appropriated, in a large proportion, to religious purposes. Pharaoh
was himself a priest, and his palace was a temple. Both law, as then
understood, and commerce, as then carried on, were outworks and supports
of religion. The sacred books, in which everything that was established
and taught was contained, had the sanction of heaven. And the religion
the people professed was not around them and before them only: it was
also in their hearts. Their motives were drawn from it, their actions
had reference to it, and their whole life was framed upon it. It had
inspired literature, created art, organized and legislated for society,
made commerce possible, and built up an empire; and no form of religion
had or, we may add, has ever, for so long a period of time, made men what
they were; for, from the time of Menes, at least, to that of Decius, it
had been doing this work.
At last a day came when life suddenly left the organism—for religion is
an organism of thought. It was dissolved into its primal elements; and a
new organism having been constructed out of them in combination with some
other elements recently accrued, the new took the place of the old. That
so much had been said and done on its behalf and in its name; that it had
borne so much good fruit; that it had had so grand an history; that it
had been believed in, and been the source of the higher life to a great
people for so many thousand years, were all powerless to save it.
But here the Muse of History whispers to us that it is not enough that
we have seen in the monuments the evidence of the existence, of the
greatness, and of the overthrow of this religion, but that we must also
endeavour to make out what it was that had maintained it, and what it was
that overthrew it; and then what are the lessons its maintenance and its
overthrow contain for ourselves.
It is useless to turn to the history of Egypt, or of any other country,
merely to satisfy an empty curiosity or to feed a barren—and often a
mischievous—love of the marvellous. The legitimate aim, and—if it be
reached—the precious fruit of such studies, is to enable ourselves to
make out the path along which some portion of mankind travelled to the
point it reached, and to see how it fared with them by the way; what
hindered, and what promoted, their advance; to ascertain what they did,
how they did it, and what effects the doing of it had: and all this in
order that haply thereby some serviceable light may be thrown on our own
path and position. This is the only way in which we can properly either
form opinions, or review the grounds of opinions already formed, on many
subjects in which we are most concerned: for these are subjects with
respect to which the roots of opinion are for us laid in history.
First then—What was the cause of this long life, this stability of the
religion of Egypt? The primary cause was that, as we have seen, it was
thoroughly in harmony with the circumstances and conditions of the
Egypt of its time. It had thoroughly and comprehensively grasped those
circumstances and conditions. It had, with a wise simplicity, interpreted
them, and adapted itself to them. But that was not all. In a manner
possible at that time it had made itself the polity and the social life,
as well as the religion, of the nation; and having done this—that is,
having absorbed and taken up into itself every element of power—it gave
to itself a fixed and immutable form. The physical characteristics, too,
of the country, while, as we have seen, they made despotism inevitable
in the political order, could not have been favourable to any kind of
intellectual liberty. Thenceforth, all fermentation, or disposition to
change, in political and social matters, and too in manners and customs,
and even in art and thought, became impossible: for all these things go
together. The natural condition, therefore, of Egypt became one of fixity
and equilibrium: there was no tendency to move from the _status quo_, or
even to do anything in a way different from that, in which men had done
it, or to feel in a manner different from that, in which men had felt
for, at least, four thousand years. What were now the instincts of the
people were all in the opposite direction. It appeared as if Egypt had
never been young, and could never become old; as if it had never had a
beginning, and could never have an end. Time could not touch it. Society
worked with the regularity of the sun and of the river.
This will show us, too, why it did not spread. This religion, and this
system, which were so admirably adapted to the existing conditions and
natural circumstances of Egypt, were not adapted to the conditions
and circumstances of other countries. If the world had been composed,
physically and morally, only of so many possible Egypts, so that the
discovery of new regions might have issued only in the addition of new
Egypts to those already known, then the temples of Abydos, Memphis,
Heliopolis, and Karnak would still be crowded with the devout worshippers
of the gods of old Egypt, and so would the temples of thousands of other
cities. The ideas in the minds of these worshippers would still be the
ideas which had existed in the minds of Sethos and Rameses, and the
Egyptians of their day—neither better nor worse—and they would have been
propagated, and would continue to be propagated, to the other Egypts of
the world. But, fortunately, the world is not a repetition of Egypts,
nor of anything else; and so an insuperable barrier existed, in the very
nature of things, to prevent the outflow of Egyptianism into other lands.
But what was it that overthrew it in its own home, where it was so
strong? We may infer that it will probably be something, not that was
spontaneously generated within, but that came from without. And so it
was. But what was that something? It was not force. That the Persians had
tried, and it had been powerless. Nor could the dominion of foreign laws
and customs at the summit of society overthrow it: that has, elsewhere,
sapped and undermined domestic institutions; but in Egypt it, too, was
powerless, as was demonstrated by ages of Greek and Roman rule.
Nor did the religion of old Egypt fall because it had aimed in a wrong
direction. By their religion I mean their philosophy of the whole,
their purposed organization of the entire domain of experience, and
observation, and thought, including in its range the invisible as well
as the visible world. Its object had been the moral improvement of man.
Though, of course, from this statement some very damaging deductions must
be made; for it had not aimed equally at the moral improvement of all,
that is to say, of every man because he was a man. It had failed here
because it had had another co-ordinate aim, necessary for those times:
the maintenance of the social, intellectual, and material advantages of
a part of the community at the expense of the rest. This was, though
necessary, immoral or, at all events, demoralizing. Still, however, it
made the present only a preparation for the higher and the better life.
The things that are now seen it regarded as the ladder, by which man
mounts to the things that are not yet seen, which alone are eternal
realities. Of these aims and doctrines of the religion every man’s
understanding and conscience approved. Without this approval the religion
could not have maintained itself.
Neither did it fall because the civilization of Egypt had at last, after
so many thousands of years, worn itself out. There were no symptoms of
the life within it having become enfeebled through time, or from anything
time had brought. The propylons, the enclosing wall, the monolithic
granite shrine, the mighty roof-stones, the sculptures of the Ptolemaic
Temple of Edfou, and the massive monolithic granite shaft of the pillar
raised at Alexandria to the honour of Diocletian, prove that, down to the
last days of this long period, they could handle, as deftly as ever their
forefathers had done, masses of stone so ponderous that to look at them
shortens our breathing; and which they sculptured and polished in the
same way as of old. The priests who explained the sculptures of Thebes
to Germanicus were lineally the descendants of those who had formed the
aristocracy, and had supplied the magistracy, and the governing body
of Thebes, and of Egypt, under Rameses the Great, under Cheops, under
Menes. Nor can we suppose that any such amount of moral, or intellectual
degeneration had been brought about, as might not easily have been
recovered by the restitution of the old conditions of the country. The
Egyptian system, which left so little to the individual, seemed to
provide, just as they had taken care that their great buildings should,
against whatever contingencies might arise. It still had in itself the
capacity for rising, Phœnix-like, into new life.
So would it have been had Egypt been able to maintain its old insulation.
The day, however, for that had gone by. It now formed a part of the
general system of the civilized world; and, looking at it in its
relations to other people, we discover in it elements of weakness,
immorality, and effeteness; and these precisely it was that, under the
then existing circumstances, caused its fall. The state of things that
had arisen could have had no existence during the four thousand years, or
more, it had passed through. What that state of things was, and how it
acted, is what we have now to make out distinctly to our thoughts.
If the mind of man had been incapable of advancing to other ideas, and
the heart of man incapable of higher moral sentiments, than the ideas and
sentiments that had been in the minds and hearts of Sethos and Rameses,
and the Egyptians of their day, then all things would have continued as
they had been. But such has not been, is not, and, we may suppose, will
never be, the condition of man on this earth. Ideas and sentiments are
powers—the greatest powers among men. And there were ideas and sentiments
yet to come which were higher generalizations than those of old Egypt,
and which, therefore, were instinct with greater power. Knowledge, and
corresponding moral sentiments, had been the power of old Egypt, but
now they were to be confronted by profounder knowledge, and more potent
moral sentiments. The Egyptians, however, had put themselves into such a
position that they could not add the new light to the old, or graft the
scion of the improved vine upon the old stock. The only result, then,
that was possible was that that which was stronger and better must sweep
away that which was not so strong or so good, and take its place. It must
be a case, not of amalgamation, but of substitution.
The old Egyptians, in order to perpetuate, and render available their
knowledge, and to bring out immediately, and fully, its working power,
had swathed both it, and society, in bands of iron. In doing this they
had seen clearly what they wanted, and how to produce it. They knew that
morality only could make and maintain a nation; and that within certain
limits morality could be created, and shaped, and made instinctive. They
knew precisely what morality they wanted for their particular purpose,
and how they were to create this, and shape it, and how they were to make
it instinctive. In this supreme matter they did everything they wanted to
do. This, this precisely, and nothing else, was the wisdom of Egypt.[8]
It was the greatest wisdom any nation has ever yet shown. It took in hand
every individual in the whole community, and made him what it was wished
and needed that he should be. If we do not understand these statements
the wisdom of Egypt is to us a mere empty phrase. If we do understand
them, the phrase conveys to us the profoundest lesson history can teach;
and at the present juncture, when the foundations of social order are
being shifted, a transference of political power taking place, new
principles being introduced, and old ones being applied in a new fashion,
and in larger measures, it is, of all the lessons that can be found in
the pages of history, the one that would be of most service to ourselves.
They knew that they could make the morality they required instinctive.
If they could not have done this the whole business would have been with
them, as it proved with so many other people, a more or less well-meant,
but still only a melancholy _fiasco_. They did, however, thoroughly
succeed in their great attempt, and this is what we have now to look into.
First we must get hold of the fact that morality is instinctive. The
moral sentiments are instincts engendered in our suitably prepared
physical and mental organization by the circumstances and conditions of
the life of the community; this is the spontaneous self-acting cause;
and then, secondarily,—this, however, has ultimately the same source and
origination—by the deliberate and purposed arrangements established by
governing mind, that is, by laws and religion, the formal embodiments
of that mind. They are instincts precisely in the sense in which we
apply the word to certain physio-psychal phenomena of the lower animals.
They are formed among mankind in the same way, with, as we have just
said, the additional cause of the foreseen and intended action of those
regulations, which are suggested by the working of human societies, and
which are devised, and designedly introduced, by an exercise of the
reasoning faculties. They are transmitted in the same way, act in the
same way, and are modified, extinguished, and reversed in the same way.
Whatever, for instance, may be predicated of the maternal instinct in a
hen may be predicated of the maternal sentiment in the human mother, and
vice versâ, due allowance having been made for modifying conditions, for
there are other instincts in the human mother, (for instance, that of
shame at the dread of the discovery of a lapse from virtue,) which may
enable her to overpower and extinguish the maternal sentiment—a state to
which the hen, through the absence of other counteracting instincts, and
from defects of reason, can never be brought. This is true of all the
moral sentiments from the bottom to the top of the scale. The necessities
of human life, and chiefly the working of human society, have originated
every one of them. This accounts for every phenomenon belonging to them
that men have observed and commented on, and endeavoured to explain; as,
for instance, for their endless diversity, and yet for their substantial
identity; for their universality; for their apparent foundation in
utility; for their apparent origination in the will of the Creator; for
their apparent innateness; and for their apparent non-innateness. They
are diverse, they are identical, they are universal, they are founded
on utility, they originate in the will of the Creator, they are innate,
they are non-innate, in the sense in which instincts generated by the
necessities of human life, and the working of human societies (everywhere
endlessly modified by times and circumstances, yet substantially the
same), must possess every one of these qualities. A volume might be
written on the enlargement and proof of this statement. The foregoing
paragraph will, however, I trust, make my meaning sufficiently clear.
By an instinct I mean an impulse, apparently spontaneous and involuntary,
and not the result of a process of reasoning at the time, disposing one
to feel and act in a certain regular manner. Observation and experience
have taught us that dispositions of this kind in any individual may have
been either created in himself, or received transmissively from his
parents, having in the latter case been congenital. On the ground of this
distinction instincts may be divided into the two classes of those which
have been acquired, which are generally called habits, and of those that
have been inherited, which are generally called instincts. This division,
however, has respect only to that which is unessential and accidental,
because that which brings any feeling, or act, into either class is that
it originated in an impulse that arises, on every occasion that properly
requires its aid, regularly, and without any apparent process, or effort,
of reason. It is founded on an apparent difference in origination, but
primarily the origination in both members of the division must have been
the same. In this particular these moral conditions may be illustrated
by an incident, or accident, of the property men have in things; an
estate is not the less property because its possessor acquired it, nor
is another the more so because he inherited it from his predecessors.
And just as we distinguish between the unessential circumstances that
a property has been acquired by a self-made man, or that it has been
inherited, so do we between these two divisions of instinct. It is,
however, clear that a habit is merely an acquired instinct, and an
instinct an inherited habit. That the thing spoken of should be habitual,
that it originated in a certain regular impulse, and not in a conscious
exercise of the reasoning faculties at the time; and that the impulse
to which it is attributable arises regularly whenever required, and
produces, on like occasions, like acts and feelings, are the essential
points.
How the dispositions were acquired in cases where they are not
hereditary, though a most interesting and important inquiry, and one upon
which the old Egyptians would have had a great deal to tell us, is not
material to the point now before us. In whatever way the dispositions
may have been acquired, the feelings and acts resulting from them are
instinctive. As a matter of fact, instincts may be acquired in many
ways, as, for instance, through the action of fear, hope, law, religion,
training, and even of imitation. A generalization which would include
far the greater part of these causes is one I have already frequently
used—that of the working of society. Perhaps still more of them may be
summed up in the one word knowledge. What a man knows is always present
to him, and always putting constraint upon him, disposing him to act in
one definite way, conformably to itself, and regularly, instead of in any
one of ten thousand other possible ways. This, sooner or later, issues
in the habit which is inchoate instinct, and at last in the instinct
which is hereditary habit. The hereditary habit, however, is still
reversible.
It was just because the Egyptians observed a multitude of these social,
family, and self-regarding instincts in the lower animals, who possessed
each those necessary for itself, without the aid of speech or law, or
other human manifestations of reason, that they made them the symbols of
the attributes of divinity.
That they had designedly studied the whole of this subject of instinct
carefully and profoundly, and that their study of it had been most
successful and fruitful, are as evident to us at this day as that they
built the Pyramids and Karnak. We see the attractiveness the study had
for them in the fact that they had trained cats to retrieve wounded
water-fowl, and lions to accompany their kings in war, and assist them
in the chase; and that they recorded in their sculptures and paintings
that they had thus triumphed over nature, obliterating her strongest
instincts, and implanting in their place what they pleased. This tells
us, as distinctly as words could, the interest they took in the subject,
and the importance they attached to it; and that they had formulated the
two ideas, first that instincts can be created and reversed, and then
that everything depends upon them. All this had been consciously thought
out, and worked out by them; and was as clear to their minds as the
axioms of political economy are to our modern economists.
The Egyptians then deliberately undertook to make instinctive a sense
of social order, and of submission to what was established, and a
disposition to comply with all the ordinary duties of morality as then
understood, and which were set forth in the forty-two denials of sin the
mummy would have to make at the day of judgment. All this they effected
chiefly by their system of castes; and by the logical and practical
manner in which they had worked out, and constructed, their doctrine of
the future life; and had brought it to bear on the conduct, the thoughts,
and the sentiments of every member of the community: and they effected it
most thoroughly and successfully.
And now we must advance a step further, and note some of the incidents
that belonged to, and consequences that ensued on, what they did. We
must bear in mind that their times were not as our times. The means they
had to work with, the materials they had to work upon, and the manner in
which they were obliged to deal with their means and their materials,
necessitated the construction of an inelastic and iron system. This was
necessary then and there. Like all the oriental systems, it altered not,
and could not alter; and being thus inexpansive and unaccommodating, it
besides, in its institution of castes, involved injustice at home; and,
in its being for Egyptians alone, exclusiveness towards the rest of the
world, which was, in a sense, the denial of the humanity of all who were
not Egyptians. Being settled once for all, it abrogated human freedom. It
rejected and excluded all additional light and knowledge; it denied all
truth, excepting that to which it had itself already attained: that is
to say, however good it may have been for its own time, it eventually,
when brought into contact with a differently circumstanced, and advancing
world, made immorality, injustice, falsehood, thraldom of every kind,
and ignorance, essential parts of religion. This it was that caused its
overthrow.
Let us separate from the list just given of the elements of its eventual
weakness, one which was peculiar to those early times, and the history
of which is very distinct and interesting: it is that of national
exclusiveness. We can see clearly enough how this instinct of repulsion
arose. Those were times when the difficulties in the way of forming a
nation were great. Tribes and cities that had always been hostile to
one another, and populations composed of conquerors and the conquered,
were the materials that had to be compacted in a homogeneous body,
animated by one soul. Not cementing, but the most violently dissevering,
traditions alone exist. No community of interests is felt. The instincts
of submission to law have not been formed; every man is for doing what is
right in his own eyes, or at most in the eyes of the few, who feel and
think as he does. Communications are difficult. A common literature does
not exist to inspire common sentiments. It seems almost impossible, under
such circumstances, out of such elements, to form a nation: but unless
this be done, all good perishes. On no other condition can anything good
be maintained. This is the one indispensable condition. Here, then, is a
case in which the feeling of exclusiveness, if it can be created, will
go very far towards bringing about what is needed. It can bind together;
it is the sentiment of sundering difference from others, the corollary
to which is the sentiment of closest unity among themselves. It is then
good and desirable: it must by all means be engendered and cherished.
The governing and organizing mind of the community sees this. Efforts
therefore are made to establish it as a national instinct.
In Egypt these efforts were made with complete success. At first Egypt
had been a region of independent cities: the instincts that had arisen
out of that state of things had to be obliterated. A feeling also of
intense dislike to their Hyksos neighbours had to be created. All this
was done. They were brought to feel that they were a peculiar people,
separate from the rest of the world. That they were not as other people.
They had no fellow-feeling towards them. They shrank from them. They
hated them. It was quite agreeable to their feelings to ravage, to spoil,
to oppress, to put to the sword, to degrade, to insult, to inflict the
most cruel sufferings on, to make slaves of, to sacrifice to their
gods, those who were not Egyptians. This moral sentiment—in us it would
be destructive of morality—had originated in, and been fed by, their
circumstances; and had been shaped and strengthened by their institutions
deliberately designed for this purpose. It had become habitual. It was,
taking the word literally, an Egyptian instinct. We can imagine a very
different condition of the moral atmosphere of the world: such, indeed,
as it is about ourselves in the Europe of the present day. The sentiment
of nationality has everywhere been formed. It can maintain itself without
any assistance. What is needed is not something that will separate
peoples, but something that will bring them to act together. The instinct
of exclusiveness, of repulsion, will lead only to troubles, to hostile
tariffs, to wars. No good, but only evil, can come of it. Whatever will
promote friendliness and intercourse, and prevent their interruption,
must be cherished. The old instinct of exclusiveness has now become a
mistake, an anachronism, a nuisance, a sin. Everybody sees that what is
wanted is the sentiment of universal brotherhood. This, therefore, in its
turn, comes to be generally understood, and to some extent to be acted
on. That is to say, a moral instinct has been reversed: the old one,
which did good service in its day, is dying out; and that which has come
to be needed, and so is superseding it, is its direct opposite.
And now we must follow this sentiment of national exclusiveness and
repulsion into the neighbouring country of Israel. There we find that it
had been quite as necessary, probably even more necessary than in Egypt.
It had been engendered by the same process, and for the same purpose.
Between these two peoples the feeling was reciprocated with more than its
normal intensity. Their history accounts for this. But now it was to be
abrogated in both, and its abrogation in Egypt was to come from Israel.
And what we have to do here is to note the steps by which this great
moral revolution was brought about.
Fifteen hundred years had passed since the night when the Hebrew bondman
had fled out of Egypt, or, as the Egyptian annals described the event,
had, at the command of the gods of Egypt, been ignominiously cast out of
the land. They had ordered his expulsion, so ran the record, because he
was the incurable victim, and the prolific source, of a foul leprosy.
This was the evil disease of Egypt that bondman never forgot. Those
fifteen hundred years, from the days of the making of the brick for which
no straw had been given, and from the building of Pithom and Ramses, had
been very chequered years. In that time the fugitive people had had to
pass through many a fiery furnace of affliction. Their old task-masters
had again, as others, too, had done, set their heel upon them.
During that long lapse of time what a stumbling-block to the Hebrew mind
must have been the good things of Egypt: its wealth, its splendour,
its power, its wisdom; even its abundance of corn and its fine linen:
all that this world could give given to the worshippers of cats and
crocodiles. Egypt must have occupied in the Hebrew mind much the same
place that is held in the minds of many of ourselves by the existence
of evil. It was a great fact, and a great mystery. Something which
could neither be denied, nor explained, which it is unpleasant to be
reminded of, and which had better be kept altogether out of the thoughts
of the simple. The Hebrew “was grieved at seeing the Egyptian in such
prosperity. He was in no peril of death. He was strong and lusty. He
came not into misfortune, neither was he plagued like other men. This
was why he was so holden with pride, and overwhelmed with cruelty. His
eyes swelled with fatness, and he did even as he lusted. He spake wicked
blasphemy against the Most High. He stretched forth his mouth unto the
heavens, and his tongue went through the world. The people fell before
him, and he sucked out from them no small advantage.” Such was the aspect
in which the prosperity of Egypt presented itself to the mind of the
Hebrew. “He sought to understand it, but it was too hard for him.” How
grand, then, how noble, and for us how absolutely beyond all price, is
the reiterated assertion of the Hebrew prophets, even in the worst and
darkest times of this long and trying period, of the ultimate triumph of
right; of a new heavens and a new earth, that is, of a time when mundane
societies would be animated by diviner principles; and, pre-eminently, by
those of universal inclusion and concord.
At last came a large instalment of what many preachers of righteousness
had anticipated, and had desired to see, but had not seen. That they had
anticipated it under such adverse circumstances, and had lived and died
in the faith of it, is one of the chief contributories to the historical
argument for natural morality. What they had anticipated came about,
however, in a manner and from a quarter of which they could have had
no foresight. Beyond the Great Sea in the distant West, a city, whose
name Isaiah could never have heard, and which was not even a name in
the days of Rameses, and for many centuries after his time, had grown
into an empire, in which had come to be included the whole civilized
world. All nations had been cast into this crucible, and were being
fused into one people. Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, were each of them
the children of a more ancient, and, in some respects, of a higher and
better civilization; but they, like all the rest, had been absorbed
into the world-embracing dominion, and were powerless within it, except
so far as ideas give power. Every people was now being brought face to
face with all other people, and into union and communion with them. The
way in which the religions of the world were thus made acquainted with
each other acted as a confutation of each in particular, or rather of
its external distinctive mythology. We can form no adequate conception
of what the effect must have been. They were all alike discredited. The
exclusiveness of each was confuted by the logic of facts. It was out of
this conjuncture of circumstances that arose the new idea and sentiment
of the brotherhood of mankind. What had hitherto everywhere obscured the
view of it was now falling into decay; and what must suggest it had been
established.
And no people had been so thoroughly disciplined for receiving this idea
as the Jews. They had been brought into closest contact with Egyptians,
Assyrians, Persians, and other oriental people; and it had been that
kind of contact which obliges men to understand what other people think.
And after they had received this hard schooling from their neighbours,
they had been brought into the same kind of contact with Greek thought.
They had been obliged to take into their consideration the knowledge,
and the ways of thinking, of the Greeks. They had even been to a great
extent compelled to learn their language. Some of the writers of the New
Testament, it is clear, had been taught Greek, just as we may be taught
French; and Homer, it is evident, had been the school-book employed in
teaching them the language. And now, together with all the rest of the
world, they had become members of the universal empire of Rome. All
this would have led to nothing except obliteration and absorption, as
it did elsewhere, if the Jews had been like other people. They were
incapable, however, of succumbing in this way, because they had ideas
and moral sentiments that were, in some important respects, truer, and
stronger, and better than those of their conquerors and oppressors. Hence
originated the idea of their conquerors that they were the enemies of the
human race. It was, then, for this reason, because, being indestructible
and unassimilable, they had been obliged to consider the meaning and
worth of other peoples’ ideas, and of facts, that Jerusalem came to
be the definite spot upon which the fruitful contact of the different
integers of the East with each other, and of East with West, of Europe
with Asia, actually took place. Here were collected, as into a focus, the
knowledge and the circumstances which would engender the new sentiment
that was to reverse the old one. The old one had been that of narrow
exclusiveness. It could not have been otherwise. The only one that could
be engendered by the new knowledge, and the new circumstances, was one
of universal inclusiveness: not the idea of a peculiar people, such as
the Egyptians had regarded themselves, but its very opposite, that of
the universal brotherhood of mankind. We see the embryo of the thought
endeavouring to assume form at Rome, at the very time that it was being
preached with the sharpest and clearest definition at Jerusalem. But
it never could have assumed its proper, clear, distinct form at Rome,
because morality would always there have been hazy and corrupt, and
inextricably entangled with ideas of self and dominion. In Jerusalem
only, the one true home of single-purposed morality, could it assume its
true shape, pure and undefiled. When the words were uttered, “Ye all are
brethren,” the idea was formulated. That was the moment of its birth.
It then took its place in the moral creation, a living form, with life,
and the power of giving life; with power to throw down and to build up.
This was the new commandment, the seminal idea of the new religion,
and Jerusalem was the seed-bed, prepared for it by the long series of
antecedent events, where it must germinate first. When that had been
done, scions from it might be taken to other localities. But it is plain
that, as moral instincts die hard, Jerusalem is also precisely one of the
spots in which the new sentiment will meet with the most determined and
violent antagonism; nor will it ever find there general reception, or,
indeed, so much reception as among other races, where the instinct of
repulsion had not been so completely and firmly established.
The new sentiment had to be evoked from man’s inner consciousness, as it
was acted upon and affected by the new order of things. This could not be
done until the authority of this inner consciousness had been recognized.
This means a great deal. What it had come to regard as true and good
was to be religion, as distinguished from written law, which is imposed
by the State, has convenience and expediency for its object, and is
limited in its purview by the necessities of its application, and by the
ignorance and low sentiment of public opinion. The Christ-enlightened,
God-taught, pure conscience is a better and higher and more searching
rule of life than any legislation. That would only drag conscience and
life down again to the common level. To make that religion would be
making Cæsar God: an evil necessity that had, to some extent, inhered in
the Old Dispensation. It would kill conscience, which aims higher, goes
deeper, and sees farther than written statutes and enactments, however
well meant, or wisely drawn. The new religion, therefore, stood aloof
from, and placed itself above, all existing legislation, except in the
sense of submitting to it, and obeying it as a social and political
necessity. But though it submitted itself to, and obeyed, it could
not receive, a written code as the rule of life. While, therefore, it
recognized the rights and necessities of the kingdoms of this world, it
found in man’s conscience the law of a kingdom not of this world. The
polity it created was not of them. It was God’s kingdom among men. The
kingdoms of the world might at some future time become the kingdoms of
God, but at present Cæsar and God were distinct powers, and represented
distinctly different applications of the principles of right. Cæsar’s
application was partial only, and, moreover, full of corruption; God’s
was all-embracing and incorrupt.
The day of trial had been long in coming, but it had come at last; and
what we have been recalling to the reader’s mind was what the wisdom of
Egypt had to confront now. It was the apotheosis of the ideas men could
now attach to the words, Truth, Freedom, Justice, Goodness, Knowledge,
Humanity. These were of God, and made man one with God. The time, then,
had come for the Hebrew bondman to be revenged: for the Hebrew invasion
of Egypt. We may contrast it with the old Egyptian invasions of Syria,
and with the Hyksos invasion of Egypt. It was of a kind of which the
organized wisdom of Egypt could have formed no anticipation; and against
which the temples and the priesthood of Egypt were as powerless as heaps
of stones, and dead men. It was an invasion of ideas which could now be
understood, and of sentiments which could now be felt; and which were
better than any the priests, and priest-kings of old Egypt had in their
day felt or understood; and the feeling and the understanding of which
would utterly abolish the system they had maintained. These ideas and
sentiments had been proclaimed in the cities and villages of Judea and
Galilee as the new commandment, as the fulfilment of all religion. The
whole Roman world was ripening for their reception. They were carried
down into Egypt in the thoughts and hearts of those who had received
them. They spread from mind to mind, and from heart to heart. The
fugitive bondman, the cast-out leper had returned; but he had now come to
bestow a glorious liberty, to communicate the contagion of regenerating
ideas and sentiments, and of a larger and better humanity. The Hyksos had
again come down into the old Nile land; but this time they came not to
oppress, not to exact tribute, but to break bonds, and to enrich, and to
place men on a higher level than they had occupied before. This was an
invasion to which Egypt, in all its thousands of years of national life,
had never yet been exposed. Invasions of this kind can be very rare in
the history of nations, and in the history of the human race; but if,
when they do come, minds are prepared for them, they are irresistible.
And so it was now with old Egypt. The old order of things passed away,
and the new order of things came in its place. The priesthood, with
all their lore, their science, their wisdom, their legitimacy of at
least four thousand years, their impregnable temple-fortresses, their
territorial supremacy, the awful authority with which a religion so old,
that the memory of the world ran not to the contrary, invested them,
passed away like a morning mist. The whole system fell, as the spreading
symmetrical pine-tree falls, never to burst forth again into new life—the
overthrow having killed the root, as well as all that had grown from the
root. Even the very Houses of the Gods which, as the thought of the days
of Rameses had phrased it, had been built for myriads of years, passed
away with it, excepting the few which have been preserved to tell the
history of what once had been.
All had been overthrown: but the Christian ideas and sentiments, which
had done the work, were too grand and simple for Egypt, where the most
inveterate of all instincts was for the mind to be swathed. And so the
new revelation was soon obscured. The reaction came in the forms of
asceticism and theology.
But asceticism and theology are not religion; or, at all events, not
such religion as can inspire much nobility of soul, or which has any
power and vitality, except under the circumstances which created it:
and so this, too, fell; and the religion which superseded it—that of
the Egypt of to-day—is, in its simplest expression, a reversion to the
old oriental idea, which seems always to have been a necessity there,
of authoritative, unchangeable legislation, combined, however, with the
Christian idea of the brotherhood of mankind. The form in which the
Christian idea has been incorporated into it is that of an universal
religion, which gives no sanction to exclusive pretensions, either of
nationality, or of caste.
It is natural for the traveller to wish that he could behold Egypt in
its old world order and glory; but he must console himself with the
reflection that what perished was what deserved to perish—what had become
narrow and false; and that what was good, true, and wise, including the
lessons Egypt’s history teaches, survived the crash. Of all that we are
the inheritors.
* * * * *
The fortunes and the future of the Christian idea and sentiment of the
brotherhood of mankind, which gave the new doctrine so much of its power
to overthrow the wisdom of old Egypt, interests and concerns us all. From
the days of its first triumphs down to our own day it has been actively
at work in Europe. Through all these centuries it has been gaining
strength. The first logical deduction from it which, like its parent,
becomes a sentiment as well as an idea, is that of universal equality,
for if all are brothers, then none is greater or less than another. The
flower with which this offshoot blossoms is that of humanity. Under the
old exclusive systems, which placed impassable barriers between peoples,
cities, and tribes; and then between the classes of the same community;
and had therefore, said to human hearts, ‘So far may you go, and no
further; beyond this you need not—you ought not—to feel pity; beyond
this hatred and repulsion, the sword, the torch, the chain are only to
be thought of;’ the idea of humanity had been impossible: but when all
men are recognized as in essentials equally men, that which makes them
men assumes the definite form of this idea. ‘Honour all men’—that is, do
all in your power to elevate every one you may come in contact with, and
nothing that has a tendency to degrade any human being, whatever may
be his complexion, blood, caste, or position—was, we know, a very early
injunction.
The greatest outward and visible achievement of the idea and sentiment
of the brotherhood of mankind was the abolition of slavery and serfdom.
This was effected very slowly. We are, however, rather surprised that so
Herculean a labour should ever have been achieved by it at all. When we
consider the inveteracy and the universality of the institution; that
it was the very foundation on which society was, almost everywhere,
built; that it was everywhere the interest of the governing part of the
community, that is, of those who had power in their hands, to maintain
it; that, in the early days of the new idea, it never soared so high as
the thought of so great an achievement; and yet find, notwithstanding,
that the old institution has fallen everywhere; that no combination of
circumstances has anywhere been able to secure it; we begin to understand
the irresistible force of the idea. This was the greatest of all
political and social revolutions ever effected in this world.
The manifestations of the sentiment we are now thinking of have been
very various, in conformity with the circumstances of the times, and the
condition of those in whom it was at work. Some centuries ago it came to
the surface in Jacqueries and Anabaptist vagaries. Now for some three
generations it has been seen in volcanic operation in French outbreaks
and revolutions. It is the soul of American democracy. It is at this
moment working, like leaven in a lump of dough, in the hearts and minds
of all Christian communities. There is no man in this country but feels
its disintegrating, and reconstructing force. Every village school that
is opened, every invention and discovery that is made, every book,
every newspaper that is printed, every sermon that is preached, aids
in propagating it. Its continued growth and spread gradually deprive
governing classes of heart, thus betraying them from within, and of a
logically defensive position in the forum of what has now come to be
recognized as public opinion. It is at this day the greatest power among
men. The future, whatever it is to be, must be largely shaped by it.
Here the study of the wisdom of old Egypt teaches us much. One most
useful lesson is that stability in human societies can be attained; but
that, as the constitution and sentiments of European societies are now
very different from the state of things to which the wisdom of Egypt
was applied, we must give to our efforts a form and character that will
be suitable to our altered circumstances. The method they adopted was
that of eliminating the elements of political and social change, by
arranging society in the iron frame of caste, and by petrifying all
knowledge in the form of immutable doctrine. We cannot do this, and
it would not be desirable for us to do it, if we could. The obvious
advantages of the Egyptian method were that, under the then existing
circumstances, it secured order and quiet; and that it assigned to
every man his work, and taught him how to do it. Its disadvantages were
that ultimately it repressed all higher moral progress, denied all new
truths, and consecrated what had become falsehood and injustice. It was
also worked, though with a great immediate gain of power, from thorough
organization, yet with a great waste of the highest form of power, for
it altogether overlooked natural aptitudes, and, quite irrespectively of
them, decided for every man what he was to be, and what he was to do.
We cannot suppose, on the one hand, that there are no other methods
of securing social order and stability than these; nor, on the other
hand, that American democracy and Chinese mandarinism have exhausted all
alternatives now possible. This, however, is a problem we shall have
to consider for ourselves. Here it will be enough for us to see that,
even if it were within our power to attain to stability by the Egyptian
application of the Egyptian method, the result would still be subject to
the limitation of the rise of new ideas, and even of the propagation,
more widely throughout the community, of existing ideas. These are
absolutely irresistible. There is nothing under heaven, especially in
these days of rapid and universal interchange and propagation of thought,
which can arrest their progress. Their elements pervade the moral
atmosphere, which acts on our moral being, just as the air, we cannot but
breathe, does on our bodily constitution.
We may also learn from this history that progress, about which there
has been so much debate—some glorying in it, some denying it,—is an
actual positive historic fact. What we have been reviewing enables us,
furthermore, to see precisely in what it consists. It does not consist
in the abundance of the things we possess, nor in mastery over nature.
We may continuously be overcoming more and more of the hindrances nature
has placed in our path; we may be compelling her to do more and more of
our bidding; we may be extorting from her more and more of her varied
and wondrous treasures; but all this, in itself, possesses no intrinsic
value. It is valuable only as a means to something else. The old Egypt of
the Pharaohs might, conceivably, have possessed railways, power-looms,
electric telegraphs, and yet the old Egyptian might have been, and might
have continued to be for four thousand years longer, very much what he
was in the days of Sethos and Rameses. The modern Egyptian possesses all
these things, and the printing-press besides, and yet is inferior, under
the same sky, and on the same ground, to his predecessors of those old
times. The end and purpose of material aids, and of material well-being,
are to strengthen, and to develop, that which is highest, and best, and
supreme in man—that which makes him man. Otherwise it is only pampering,
and rendering life easy to, so many more animals. The difference would
be little whether this were done for so many such men, or for so many
crocodiles and bulls. That which is supreme in man—which makes a man a
man—is his intellectual and moral being. If this has been strengthened,
enlarged, enriched, progress has been made; he has been raised to a
higher level; his horizon has been extended; he has been endued with new
power. History and observation show that without some amount of material
advancement, intellectual and moral advancement is not possible, and that
all material gains may be turned to account in this way. This is their
proper place—that of means, and not of ends. They are ever placing larger
and larger proportions of mankind in the position in which intellectual
and moral advancement becomes possible to them. That, then, to which they
contribute, and which they make possible, is their true use and purpose.
Whoever makes them for himself the end, dethrones that within himself,
the supremacy of which alone can make him a true man. Every one who has
done anything towards enriching, and purifying, and strengthening the
intellect, or the heart of man, or towards extending to an increased
proportion of the community the cultivation and development of moral and
intellectual power, has contributed towards human progress.
The greatest advance that has been made in the historic period was
the implanting in the minds of men the idea, and in their hearts the
sentiment, of the brotherhood of mankind. The idea and sentiment of
responsibility dates back beyond the ken of history. Our observation,
however, of what is passing in rude and simple communities, where social
arrangements and forces are still in an almost embryonic condition,
leads us to suppose that it is an instinct developed by the working,
the necessities, and the life of society. To our own times belongs
the scientific presentment of the idea of the cosmos, which, though a
construction of the intellect, affects us also morally. Who can believe
that even the oldest of these ideas is bearing all the fruit of which it
is capable, and—that it will have no account to give of even better fruit
in the future than it has ever produced in the past? How wide then is
the field, in the most advanced communities, for moral and intellectual,
the only truly human, progress! How impossible is it to foresee any
termination of this progress!