CHAPTER LX.

CONCLUSION.

Beatus qui intelligit.—_Book of Psalms_, VULG.

No one can see anything in Egypt except what he takes with him the

power of seeing. The mysterious river, the sight of which carries away

thought to the unknown interior of the great Continent, where solar heat,

evaporation, and condensation are working at their highest power, giving

birth abundantly to forms of vegetable and animal life with which the eye

of civilized man has yet to be delighted, and instructed; the lifeless

desert which has had so much effect in shaping, and colouring, human life

in that part of the world; the grand monuments which embody so much of

early thought and earnestness; the contrast of that artistically grand,

morally purposed, and wise past with the Egypt of to-day; the graceful

palm, and the old-world camel, so unlike the forms of Europe; the winter

climate without a chill, and almost without a cloud; all these are

certainly inducements enough to take one to Egypt; but how differently

are they seen and interpreted at the time by the different members of the

same party of travellers; and with what widely different after-thoughts

in each!

And just as many of us are dissatisfied with life’s journey itself,

if we can find no object in it, so are we with the travel to which a

fraction of it may have been devoted, if it be resultless. Should we,

when we look back upon it, be unable to see that it has had any issues

which reach into our future thought and work, it seems like a part of

life wasted. For, whatever a man may have felt at the time, he cannot,

afterwards, think it is enough that he has been amused, when the

excitement of passing through new scenes is over, and he is again in

his home,—that one spot on earth where he becomes most conscious of the

divinity that is stirring within and around him, and finds that he must

commune closely with it.

But as to particulars: that which is most on the surface of what Egypt

may teach the English traveller is the variety of Nature. It has not

the aspects of the tropics, in which the dark primæval forest, and

tangly jungle, are the predominant features; yet its green palmtufted

plain, and drab life-repelling desert, are a great contrast to our still

hedge-divided corn-fields, and meadows; to our downs, and heaths, and

hills, and streams; and so are its clear sky, and dry atmosphere to our

clouds and humidity. To see, and understand something about such things

ought, in these days, to be part of the education of all who can afford

the time and money requisite for making themselves acquainted with the

riches of Nature; which is the truest, indeed the only, way to make them

our own. In saying this, I do not at all wish to suggest the idea that

in variety, and picturesqueness of natural beauty, the scene in Egypt

is superior to what we have at home. The reverse is, emphatically, the

case. Every day I look upon pleasanter scenes than any Egypt can show:

scenes that please the eye, and touch the heart more. Nature’s form and

garb are both better here. So, too, is even the colour of her garb. To

have become familiar, then, with the outer aspects of Egypt, is not only

good in itself, as an addition to our mental gallery of the scenes of

Nature, but it is good also in the particular consequence of enabling us

to appreciate more highly the variety and the beauty of our own sea-girt

home.

Of course, however, the source of deepest interest in any scene is not

to be found in its outer aspect, but in its connexion with man. If we

regard it with the thought of the way in which man has used, modified,

and shaped it, and of how, reversely, it has modified, and shaped man,

how it has ministered to his wants, and affected the form, and character

of his life; or if we can in any way associate it with man, then we

contemplate it from quite another point of view, and with quite different

feelings. Indeed it would almost seem as if this was the real source of

the interest we take even in what we call the sublime and beautiful in

nature. Man was only repelled from snow-capped mountains, and stormy

oceans, till he had learnt to look upon them as the works of Intelligent

Mind akin to his own. Conscious of intelligence within himself, he began

to regard as grand and beautiful, what he had at length come to believe

Supreme Intelligence had designed should possess these characteristics.

This is, perhaps, the source of the sentiments of awe, and admiration,

instead of the old horror, and repugnance, with which we now contemplate

cold and inaccessible barrier Alps, and angry dividing Seas. To Homer’s

contemporaries, who believed not that the gods had created the visible

scene, but that, contrariwise, they were posterior to it, and in some

sort an emanation from it, the ocean was only noisy, pitiless, and

barren. And the modern feeling on these subjects has, of late, been

greatly intensified, and become almost a kind of religion, since men

have come to think that they have discovered that these grand objects

were brought into being by the slow and unfailing operation of certain

general laws which they have themselves ascertained. So that now, to some

extent, they have begun to feel as though they had themselves assisted at

their creation: they stood by, in imagination, as spectators, knowing,

beforehand, the whole process by which Alps and Oceans were being

formed. That they were able to discover the laws and the steps by which

Omnipotent Intelligence had brought it all about, alone and sufficiently

demonstrates the kindredness of their own intelligence. It is the

association of these ideas with natural objects that causes the present

enthusiastic feeling—almost a kind of devotion—they awaken within us,

and which would have been incomprehensible to the ancients, and even, in

a great measure, to our forefathers. They seem like our own works. They

were formed by what is, in human degree and fashion, within ourselves. We

know all about them; almost as if we had made them ourselves.

Regarded, then, in this way, it is not the object itself merely that

interests, but the associations connected with it. Not so much what is

seen, as what is suggested by what is seen. The object itself affects us

little, and in one way; the interpretation the mind puts upon it affects

us much, and in quite a different way. In this view there are reasons

why the general landscape here, at home, should be more pleasing to us

than it is in Egypt. It is associated with hope, and with the incidents

and pictures of a better life than there is, or ever has been, in Egypt.

I have already said that the natural features are not so varied and

attractive there as here; their value to us, in this respect, consisting

in their difference. But what I now have in my mind is the thought of the

landscape as associated with man; and in this other respect also I think

the inferiority of Egypt great.

The two pre-eminently grand and interesting scenes on this kind in Egypt,

where our Egyptian associations with man’s history culminate, I have

already endeavoured to present to the imagination of the reader. They are

the scene that is before the traveller when he stands somewhere to the

south-east of the Great Pyramid, looking towards Memphis, and commanding

the Necropolis in which the old Primæval Monarchy is buried, the green

valley, the river, and the two bounding ranges; or, to take it reversely,

as it appears when looked at from the Citadel of Cairo; and the scene,

for this is the other one, which is presented to the eye, again acting

in combination with the historical imagination, from the Temple-Palace

of the great Rameses at Thebes, where you have around and before you the

Necropolis, and the glories of the New Monarchy.

What, then, are the thoughts that arise in the mind at the contemplation

of these scenes? That is precisely the question I have been endeavouring

to answer throughout the greater part of the preceding pages. My object

now, as I bring them to a close, is somewhat different; it is to look at

what we have found is to be seen in Egypt from an English point of view;

with the hope that we may thus be brought to a better understanding,

in some matters, both of old Egypt and of the England of to-day. This

will best be done by comparing with the Egyptian scenes, which are now

familiar to us, the English scene which in its historical character,

and the elements of human interest it contains, occupies, at this

day, a position analogous to that which they held formerly. These are

subjects that are made interesting, and we may say intelligible, more

readily and completely by comparisons of this kind than by any other

method. Anatomical and philological comparisons do this for anatomy and

philology, and historical comparisons will do the same for history. We

shall come to understand Egypt not by looking at Egypt singly and alone,

but by having in our minds, at the time we are looking at it, a knowledge

of Israel, Greece, Rome, and of the modern world. Each must be set by the

side of Egypt.

We will come to ourselves presently. We will take Israel first. It

proposed to itself the same object as Egypt, that of building up the

State on moral foundations, only it had to do its work under enormous

disadvantages. Considering, however, the circumstances, it attained its

aims with astonishing success. We must bear in mind how in the two the

methods of procedure differed. So did their respective circumstances.

Egypt had the security which enabled it freely and fully to develop

and mature its ideas and its system. This precious period of quiet was

no part of the lot which fell to Israel. It had to maintain itself and

grow up to maturity under such crushing disadvantages as would have

extinguished the vitality of any other people, except perhaps of the

Greeks, the periods, however, of whose adolescence and manhood were

also very different from those of Israel. At those epochs of their

national life they had freedom, sunshine, and success. Israel, on the

contrary, had then, and almost uninterruptedly throughout, storm and

tempest; overthrows and scatterings. The people never were long without

feeling the foot of the oppressor on their necks. Still they held on

without bating one jot of hope or heart; and by so doing made the world

their debtors, just as did the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans.

Regarding the point historically, we cannot say that one did this more

than another; for, where all are necessary, it would be illogical to

affirm that one is greater or less than another. Neither the seeing nor

the hearing, we are told, can boast that it is of more importance than

the other; for, were it not for the seeing, where would be the hearing?

and, were it not for the hearing, where would be the seeing? In the

progress of man the ideas, and principles, and experience contributed by

each of these constituent peoples of humanity were necessary: and if the

contribution of any one had been wanting, we should not be what actually

we are; and that something that we should be then would be very inferior

to what we are now. We could not dispense with the gift of any one of the

four. Egypt gave letters, and the demonstration of the fact that morality

can, within certain limits, be deliberately and designedly shaped and

made instinctive. Greece taught the value of the free development of

the intellect. Rome contributed the idea of the brotherhood of mankind,

not designedly, it is true, but only incidentally, though yet with a

glimmering that this was its mission. Without Rome we might not yet have

reached this point. Israel taught us that, if the aims of a State are

distinctly moral, morality may then be able to maintain itself, no matter

how great the disadvantages, both from within and from without, under

which the community has to labour; and even when morality is unsustained

by the thought of future rewards and punishments: a lesson which has

thrown more light on the power the moral sentiments have over man’s heart

than perhaps any other fact in the history of our race.

I bow down before the memory of the old Israelite with every feeling of

the deepest respect, when I remember that he abstained from evil from

no fear of future punishment, and that he laid down his life for truth

and justice without any calculation of a future heaven. In this view

the history of the world can show no such single-minded, self-devoted,

heroic teachers as the long line of Hebrew Prophets. They stand in an

order quite by themselves. Socrates believed that it would be well with

him hereafter. They did not touch that question. Sufficient unto them was

the consciousness that they were denouncing what was false and wrong, and

that they were proclaiming and doing what was true and right.

We will now turn to the Greeks. The interest with which they contemplated

the antique, massive, foursquare wisdom of Egypt is well worthy of

consideration. It is true they did not get much from Egypt, either in the

sphere of speculation or of practice: still for them it always possessed

a powerful attraction. The reason why it was so is not far to seek. The

Egyptians had done great things; and they had a doctrine, a philosophy

of human life. This was that philosopher’s stone the Greek mind was in

search of. And they inferred from the great things done by the Egyptians

(and this was not a paralogism) that there must be something in their

doctrine. In fact, however, they learnt little from Egypt: for if it

was the cradle, Greece itself was the Holy Land of Mind. Nor was it

possible that they could learn much from it, for the two peoples looked

upon society and the world from quite different points of view. Greece

acted on the idea that in political organization, and in the well-being

of the individual, man is the arbiter and the architect of his own

fortune. Egypt acted on the supposition that these things rested on an

once-for-all heaven-ordained system. Greece believed that truth was to be

discovered by man himself, and that it would, when discovered, set all

things right; and that freedom, investigation, and discussion were the

means for enabling men to make the needed discovery. Egypt thought that

truth had been already communicated; and that freedom, investigation, and

discussion could only issue in its overthrow. What Greece regarded as

constructive, Egypt regarded as destructive. It could not therefore learn

much from Egypt.

Rome we will now set by the side of Egypt. It will bring the two into

one view sufficiently for our purpose, if we endeavour to make out

what Germanicus must have thought of old Egypt, when he was at Thebes.

He must often have compared it with Rome; in doing which he could, of

course, only view it with the eyes of a Roman. And the time for such a

comparison had arrived, for the work of Rome, and the form and pressure

of that work upon the world, were then manifesting themselves with

sufficient distinctness. What he was in search of was light that would

aid him in governing the Roman world. Probably he came to the conclusion

that the wisdom of Egypt could be but of very little use to him. The aim

of Egypt had been all-embracing social order, maintained by morality,

compacting the whole community into a single organism, in which every

individual had his allotted place and work, neither of which he could

see any possibility of his ever abandoning, or even feel any desire to

abandon. Egyptian society had thus been brought, through every class and

member, to do its work with the regularity, the smoothness, the ease,

the combined action of all its parts, and the singleness of purpose of a

machine. I need hardly repeat that they had understood that the morality

by which their social order was to be maintained must be instinctive,

and that they had made it so. The difference between them and other

people in this matter was, that they had understood distinctly both what

they wanted for their purpose, and how to create what they had wanted.

Germanicus must have been aware, if he had seen this point clearly, that

no government could frame the general morality of the Roman Empire; and

that the single moral instinct upon which he would have to depend, if

he could create it, must be the base and degrading one of obedience and

submission brought about by fear. No attempt could be made, in the world

he expected to be called to govern, to cultivate an all-embracing scheme

of noble and generous, or even of serviceable, morality. Much, indeed,

of what was best would have to be repressed, and stamped out, as hostile

and subversive; as, for instance, the sentiment of freedom, and the

consciousness that the free and full development of a mans inner being

(in a sense the Athenian and the Christian idea) is the highest duty. He

would have to provide not for what would encourage his future subjects

to think for themselves, and to make themselves men, but for what

would indispose them to think for themselves, and would make them only

submissive subjects. He had to consider how many abundant and virulent

elements of disorder, discontent, and corruption could be kept down:

under such a system an impossible task. These evil growths of society

had, each of them, been reduced to a manageable minimum, spontaneously,

by the working of the Egyptian system; but, under the circumstances

of the Roman world, they were inevitably fostered and developed. The

application, however, of the Egyptian system to that world was out of the

question and inconceivable. So, here, Egypt could give him no help. It

could not show him how he could eliminate or regulate these evils. He

would not be able to get rid of the elements of discord and discontent in

the Egyptian fashion, by creating such instincts of order and submission

as would dispose every man to accept the position in which he found

himself as the irreversible appointment of Nature. Nor, again, would he

be able to counteract social corruption, in the Egyptian fashion, by

making virtue the aim of the state, of religion, and of human life.

There were also two other problems to the solution of which he would have

to attend. How was the ring of barbarians that beleaguered the Empire

to be kept in check? and how was the enormous military force that must

be maintained for the internal, as well as the external, defence of the

Empire to be prevented from knowing, at all events from using for its own

purposes, its irresistible, unbalanceable power? For doing every thing of

every kind he had to do, he had but one instrument, and that was force,

law being degraded into the machinery through which that force was to

act; and being also itself at discord with much that was becoming the

conscience of mankind, that is, at discord with its own proper object. He

could make no use of the Egyptian instruments, those, namely, of general

morality, of religion, and of fixed social order. The task, therefore,

that was before him, however strong the hand and clear the head might be

which would have to carry it out, was ultimately hopeless. For one of

two things must happen: either men must rebel against the order he would

have to maintain, and overthrow it, or it must corrupt and degrade men.

For, in the long run, nothing but law and religion, both in conformity

with right reason, and aiming at moral growth, can govern men; that is

to say, government must aim at human objects, to be attained by human

means. Men, of course, can be controlled otherwise, as, for instance, by

armed force, the only means that would be at the disposal of Germanicus;

but then the product is worthless. Egypt, therefore, could give him no

assistance. It could only tell him that the task before him was to him an

unattainable one. It was not the one the Egyptians had taken in hand, nor

could it be carried out by Egyptian means. A great fight had to be fought

out in the bosom of Roman society, and under such conditions that its

progress and issue would be the ruin and overthrow of society, as then

constituted.

We all know that the man who, in a period of dearth, withholds his corn

for a time, is thinking only of himself, though it eventually turns

out that what he did was done unintentionally for the benefit of the

community: a law, above and beyond him, had been working through him,

and shaping his selfish act so that it should contribute to the general

good. So was it with the Roman Empire. It subjugated and welded together

all people merely to satisfy its own greed, but in so doing it had

further unfolded and advanced the world-drama of human history. When it

had played out its part, it was seen that that part could not have been

dispensed with, because, though so hard for those times, it was essential

to the great plot, for it was that that had given birth to, and brought

to maturity, the sentiment of the unity and brotherhood of mankind.

And now at last we come to ourselves. All, including Egypt, have become

teachers to us. We are the inheritors of the work of all. To us—and how

pleasant is it to know this—the wisdom even of old Egypt is not quite a

Dead Sea apple, something pretty to look at, but inside only the dust

of what had been the materials of life. We can feel our connexion with

Egypt, and that we are in its debt; and we shall not be unworthy of the

connexion, and of the debt (a true debt, for we are benefited through

what they did), if we so make use of them as that those who shall come

after us shall have reason to feel that they, too, are, in like manner,

debtors to ourselves. Inquiries of this kind enable us to discover what

are the historical, which means the natural and actual, bases of our own

existing civilization.

What we now have to do is to compare ourselves with old Egypt. Things of

this kind become more intelligible when made palpable to sense by being

taken in the concrete. We have looked on the scenes in Egypt which are

invested with an interest that can never die, because it is an interest

that belongs to the history of humanity. By the side of them we must set

the scene in the England of to-day, which holds the analogous position.

Of course it must be in London. And as it must be in London I know no

better point at which we can place ourselves than on the bridge over the

Serpentine, with our back upon Kensington, so that we may look over the

water, the green turf, and the trees to the towers of the old Abbey and

of the Palace of Westminster. The view here presented to us is one which

obliges us, while looking at it, to combine with what is actually seen

what we know is lying behind and beyond it. It is not a scene for which

an otiose glance will suffice, because it is precisely the connexion

between what is before the eye, and what is to be understood, that gives

it its distinguishing interest.

What is immediately before you, in its green luxuriance of turf and leaf,

is peculiarly English; you might imagine yourself miles away from any

city, and yet you are standing in the midst of the largest collection of

human beings ever brought together upon the earth: what is around you is

hardly more the capital of England than of the world. Strange is it to

find yourself in the midst of such an incomprehensible mass of humanity,

and yet at the same time in the midst of a most ornate scene of natural

objects—water, trees, turf. Just as in the Egyptian scenes, where the

interests of its history are brought to a focus, the preponderant objects

presented to the eye are graves and temples in the desert, which tell

us of how religious and sombre a cast was the thought of the Egyptians,

who could see nothing in the world but God, and could regard life only

in connexion with death; so here, too, we find, as we take our stand

in the midst of this English world-capital, that we can see nothing of

it; that it is hid from our eyes by the country enclosed within it.

This alone tells us something about the people. It intimates to us that

those who have built this world-wonder have not their heart in it; that

it is against the grain for them to be here: they do not love it: they

do not care to make it beautiful: that, unlike their Latin neighbours,

they are not a city-loving people; that the first and strongest of their

affections are for the green fields, the wavy trees, and the running

streams; and that they have, therefore, reproduced them, as far as they

could, in the midst of the central home of their political life, to

remind them of what they regard as the pleasanter and the better life.

But it is strange that this very fondness for rural life is one of the

causes that have contributed to the greatness of this city. It has been

the love of Nature, and the hardihood of mind and body the people have

acquired in their country life, which have disposed them to go forth

to occupy the great waste places of the earth; and so have helped in

enabling the Nature-and-country-loving English race to build up an

Empire, out of which has grown this vast, but from the spot where we are

standing in the midst of it invisible, city.

Each also of the two great buildings, whose towers are seen above the

trees, has much to tell us about ourselves. There is the old Abbey,

reminding us of the power religion has had and will ever have over

us, though not now in the Egyptian fashion of something that has been

imposed upon us, but rather of something that is accepted by us; and of

our determination that it shall not be constructed out of the ideas and

fixed for ever in the forms which belong to ages that, in comparison with

our own really older and riper times, had something to learn, and not

everything to teach. It is precisely the attempt to invest Christianity

with Egyptian aims and claims, fixity and forms, which is arraying men’s

minds and hearts against it; and, in some parts of Christendom, making

the action of society itself hostile to it. It is this attempt which

is in a great measure depriving it of the attractiveness and power it

possessed in its early days when it was rightly understood: though then

it was, necessarily, not only a private care, but one that had also to

strive hard to maintain its existence against the fierce and contemptuous

antagonism of the collective force of the old pagan form and order of

society. If men are now turning away from what they once gladly received,

it can only be because what is now offered to them has ceased to be what

it was then—the interpretation, and expression, and the right ordering,

of all that they knew, and of the aspirations of their better nature. The

phenomenon is explained, if we have reason for believing that men then

regarded Christianity as an honest organization of knowledge, thought,

and morality, for the single purpose of raising and bettering human

life, but now regard it as, in some measure, their priestly organization

for the purpose, primarily, of maintaining priestly domination, through

the maintenance of a system which was the growth of widely different

times and circumstances.

It cannot be seen too clearly, or repeated too often, that Christianity

did not originate in any sense in priestly thought, but was, on

the contrary, a double protest against it, first in its own actual

inception, which included a protest against priest-perverted Judaism,

and antecedently in the primary conception of the previous dispensation,

which included a protest against priestly Egyptianism; so that neither in

itself, nor in its main historical source, could it originally have had

any priestly or ecclesiastical, but only broadly human and honestly moral

aims.

This will, by the way, assist us in forming a right estimate of the

character of that _argumentum ad ignorantiam_ we have heard so much

of lately, that Protestantism is only a negation of truth, and an

inspiration of the Principle of Mischief. Looking back along the line

of our own religion, we find that Moses, speaking historically, was

the first Protestant; and that the Saviour of the World was, in this

respect also, like unto him. As, indeed, have been, and will be, more

or less, in the corrupt, but though corrupt, yet still, on the whole,

advancing currents of this world, all who are wise and good, and who

have the courage of their wisdom and goodness. It will also assist

us to understand that religion does not mean systematic Theology and

organized priestly domination, which are its degeneration, and into

which the ignorance and carelessness of the mass of mankind, and

the short-sightedness of some, and self-seeking of others, of its

constituted expounders are tending always to corrupt it; but that it

means, above all things, the ideal theory of perfect morality and virtue,

combined with the attempt to work it out practically in human life, so

far as is possible, under the difficulties and hindrances of this world,

supported by the good hope of its actual complete realization in a better

world to come.

The history of old Egypt is very much the history of the character,

working, and fate of the priestly perversion (as we must regard it

now) of religion, even when the attempt is made, as it was in that

case, honestly, and without any violation or contradiction of the

original principles and aims of the religion. As respects the modern

world, the lamentable and dangerous consequences of this perversion of

religion are to be traced, in some form or other, in the actual moral

and intellectual condition of perhaps every part of Christendom. We

see indications of them amongst ourselves in individuals, and even in

classes. The legitimate action of religion has been in many cases not

merely neutralized and lost, but directly reversed. It ought to generate

the instincts that contribute to the order, the unity, the building up

of society; whereas, by aiming at ecclesiasticism, and endeavouring

to retain what is at variance with its own true purpose, it has given

rise to unavowed repugnances, to fierce antagonisms, to repulsion of

class from class, and even among some of hatred to the very order of

Society; that is to say, it has produced instincts that contribute, and

that most energetically, to disorder, disunion, and the overthrow of

Society; proving the truth of the saying that nothing is so bad as the

corruption of that which is best. Religion is the _summa philosophia_

which interprets, harmonizes, systematizes, and directs to the right

ordering of Society, and of the individual, all knowledge from whatever

source derived, all true and honest thought, all noble aspirations, all

good affections. Development and growth ever have been, and ever must be,

a law of its existence: nothing else can maintain its continuity. And

as, notwithstanding this necessity of development, its end and aim must

all the while, and for ever, be one and the same, development and growth

do not and cannot mean the overthrow of religion, as some have told us,

and will continue to tell us, but, on the contrary, the enlargement and

strengthening of its foundations, and the better ordering and furnishing

of the superstructure.

The very name of the building before us—The Abbey—reminds us that, as

far as we ourselves are concerned, we have accepted and acted on the

principle of development, adaptation, and correction in our religion.

The old name, belonging to a past order of things, is evidence that this

principle has once been applied; and so it supplies us with a ground

for hope that it will be applied again, whenever a similar necessity

may arise. History, indeed, assures us that this must be done always,

sooner or later, for in all ages and places the religion of any people

has ever been, in the end, what the knowledge of the people made it;

but it makes a great difference whether what has to be done be done

soon, or whether it be done late. If the former, then the continuity of

growth and development is not interrupted. If the latter, then there

intervenes a long period of intellectual and moral anarchy, of religious

and irreligious conflict. The consequences and the scars of the conflict

are seen in what is established eventually. It is found that some things

that were good have perished; and that some that are not good have become

inevitable.

By the side of the old Abbey rise the towers of the Palace of

Westminster—a new structure on an old site. That which first occurs to

the beholder, who has old Egypt in his thoughts, is its inferiority in

artistic effect to the stupendous but simple grandeur of the Egyptian

Priests’ House of Parliament in the hypostyle Hall of Karnak, with its

_entourage_ of awe-inspiring temples, its vast outer court, and its lofty

propylons. In that hall he had felt that its great characteristic was not

so much its grandeur as its truthfulness to its purpose, of which there

is not one trace to be found in the home of our great National Council,

which one might survey carefully, both internally and externally, without

obtaining the slightest clue for enabling him to guess for what purpose

it was designed. But how grand, I hesitate to say how much grander,

is the history which the site, at all events, of the building we are

looking at brings into our thoughts. It has not indeed numbered the

years of the Egyptian Panegyries. They might have counted theirs by

thousands, while our Assembly counts its by hundreds. And we must also

remember that they assisted at the birth, and watched by the cradle, of

political wisdom. True they swathed the infant in the bands of a fixed

religious system; but, then, they could not have done otherwise; and

what they did, under the restrictions and limitations which times and

circumstances imposed upon them, was, notwithstanding, good and precious

work; and we comparing that work of theirs with much that has since been

done, and is now doing, see that, though it was crippled and distorted

at every step by their evil necessities, it was done wisely, and well,

by men who clearly understood what they wanted to do, and how it was to

be done. Our Parliament had to do its work under very different and even

opposite conditions. This island—indeed, this part of the world—was not

an Egypt where none but corporations of priests and despotic rulers

could be strong. We could not, on the contrary, be without chieftains’

strongholds, and strong towns, too. While, therefore, with us the armed

possessors of these strong places accepted religion, they could resist

and forbid ecclesiastical encroachments, and could thus save Society,

through saving the State, from ecclesiastical domination. They were

strong and free, and so could nurture freedom, instead of standing by and

looking on while it was strangled and buried out of sight. They were,

too, the heirs of Israelite, Greek, Roman, and German traditions; and

these they could keep alive, even without quite understanding them, until

the day came when they might be carried out more fully and harmoniously;

and more might be made of them than had been possible even in the days,

and in the countries, which had given them birth. That has been the

slow but glorious _rôle_ in human history of these English Parliaments,

of which that Palace of Westminster at which you are looking is the

shrine: a spot most sacred in human history, and which will be closely

interesting to the generations that are to come when time shall have

forgot the great Hall of the Panegyries of Egypt; for the History of the

freedom of Religion, of Speech, and of the Press, of Commerce, and of

political and almost of human freedom itself, is the History of these

English Parliaments.

The History, then, of these two buildings throws much useful light on

the history of the later phases of the progressive relations to each

other of the State and of the Church; and of the rights, the duties, the

proper field, and the legitimate work of each. The questions involved

in these points have been answered very differently at different times,

in accordance with the varying conditions of society: but the answers

given have, on the whole, been such as to assist us in understanding

two particulars of importance: first, that the character of the relation

of the two to each other among any given people, and at any given time,

is dependent on the conditions of society, then and there; on the point

knowledge has reached; the degree to which it has been disseminated;

and on the course antecedent events have taken. (The relation, at any

time established, does, of course, re-act on the conditions which gave

rise to it, and so has some effect in shaping, and colouring, their

character in the proximate future.) And, in the second place, that there

is observable, throughout History, if its whole range be included in our

view, a regular evolution and ever-growing solution of the great question

itself.

All the peculiarities, and particulars of the history, of these two

buildings, such, for instance, as that they stand side by side, and yet

are quite distinct from one another; that the Ecclesiastical building is

very old, very ornate, and imposing, and was very costly; and that the

Civil building is modern, but on an old site; that it too was costly, and

is very ornate and imposing, and in its ornamentation and aspects affects

somewhat the Ecclesiastical style; that they are in the hands of distinct

orders of men belonging to the same community; that the work carried on

in them is quite distinct, and yet that ultimately their respective work

is meant to contribute, by different paths, and with different sanctions,

to the same end, that is to say, the bettering of man’s estate—all this

symbolizes with sufficient exactness the history and character of the

conflicts, and of the relations, past and present, of the Church and of

the State amongst ourselves.

I am here taking the word Church in its widest, most intelligible, and

only useful sense—and which is the interpretation history puts on the

phenomena the word stands for—that of the conscious organization of the

moral and intellectual forces and resources of humanity for a higher

life than that which the State requires and enforces. It is untrue, and

as mischievous as untrue, to talk of Religion—that is, the effect on

men’s lives of the doctrine which the Church has elaborated—as if it

were something apart, something outside the natural order of things,

something up in the air, something of yesterday, which has no root in

man’s nature, and the history of which is, therefore, not coincident with

the history of man. Like every thing else of which we have any knowledge,

it is the result of certain causes. And in the case of this effect,

of which the Church is the personal embodiment, the affiliation is

distinct and palpable. Poetry and Philosophy are as much manifestations

of it, as what we call Religion, when we are employing the word in its

popular, restricted signification. They do, indeed, so entirely belong

to it that there could be no advance in Religion, I might almost say

no Religion at all, without them. And, conversely, Religion supplies

to the bulk of mankind all the Poetry and Philosophy that will ever be

within their reach. Poetry (which uses Art as one of its instruments of

expression), dealing with things both objectively, as they appear to

address themselves to us, and subjectively, as they are seen through

the medium of our own sentiments; and Philosophy, dealing with the

_ensemble_ of things as they are in themselves—the two, working in these

ways, and endeavouring to organize sentiment and knowledge, or, in other

words, human thought and the world of external facts, for the sovereign

purpose of nurturing and developing our moral being, if they do not give

rise to Religion, yet have, at all events, largely contributed towards

expanding, purifying, and shaping it. Every one can see how Philosophy

and Poetry contributed each its part to the construction of the Old

Dispensation. It is equally plain that Christianity originally rested

on a profoundly philosophical view of the Old Dispensation, considered

in connexion with the then new conditions of the world. And it was,

precisely, because the view taken was so profound, because it went so

completely to the bottom of all that then and there had to be dealt with,

that it was felt and seen to be thoroughly true. For the same reason it

was as simple as it was true. And it was because it was so entirely in

accord with man’s nature and history, and with the conditions on which

the world had then entered, that it was understood to be, and received

as, a Revelation from God. This was the internal evidence. And in the

old Classic world, which we can now contemplate _ab extra_, and without

prepossession, we see that the only teachers of Religion were first

Poetry, and then Philosophy: at first mainly the former, and afterwards

mainly the latter. And thus were they the means by which the outer world,

at all events, was prepared for Christianity.

If, then, we take the word Church in the sense I am now proposing (and

I am concerned here only with the interpretation History gives of the

phenomenon), it will help us to understand how it happens that every

Church, at certain stages in its career, comes into conflict with the

State, or the State with the Church; and, too, how it happens that, at

certain conjunctures, the action of the State, as it is, is to restrict

and to thwart the action of the Church, as it should be; and why it is

that, in the end, the latter must always carry the day. It will also

lead us to think that in the future the Clergy will not have the entire

decision of religious questions; but that, strange as it may sound to

us, the Poet, the Historian, and the Philosopher will, sooner or later,

be able to make their ideas felt in the discussion and shaping of these

matters. It has been so in the past; and we may suppose that it will be

so again in the future. Even now the lay Prophet has no insignificant

auditory, and it is one that it is growing rapidly in every element

of influence. We have no reason for believing that the world will be

content to leave, for ever, its own highest affair in the hands of those

only whose function, as understood and interpreted, at present, by the

majority of themselves, is to witness to what were the thoughts of their

own order, in an age when that order thought for mankind; and did so,

sometimes, not in complete accordance with the common heart, conscience,

and aspirations of mankind, certainly not with what they are now, but

rather with what the Church supposed would complete and strengthen its

own system; at all events, always in accordance with the insufficient

knowledge, sometimes even with the mistaken ideas, of times when the

materials supplied by the then existing conditions of society, and by the

then state of knowledge, for the solution of the problem, were not the

same as those supplied by our own day.

In old Egypt—under the circumstances it could not possibly have been

otherwise—the Church administered, and was, the State: the State was

contained within it. The distinction between things civil and things

religious had not emerged yet. This fact deeply modified the whole being

of the Church. Its resultant colour thus came to be compounded of its

own natural colour and of that of the State. This primæval phase can

never again recur. The increase and dissemination of knowledge; the

idea and the fact of civil as opposed to ecclesiastical, we may almost

say of human as opposed to divine legislation, and the now thoroughly

well ascertained advantage of the maintenance of civil order by civil

legislation, have made the primæval phase, henceforth, impossible among

Europeans, and all people of European descent. We may add, that it has,

furthermore, become impossible now on account of the higher conception

that has been formed of the duty and of the work of the Church itself.

The Middle Ages present to our contemplation the curious and instructive

picture of a long-sustained effort, made under circumstances in many

respects favourable to the attempt, and which was attended by a very

considerable amount of success, to revert to and to re-establish the old

Egyptian unspecialized identity of the two. This effort was in direct

contradiction to the relation in which the early Christian Church had

placed itself to the State; though, of course, it was countenanced,

apparently, by the early history of the Hebrew Church, which, like that

of Egypt, had necessarily embraced, and contained within itself, the

State, in the form and fashion that had belonged to the requirements of

those times. That it had been so with it, however, only shows, when we

regard the fact, as we can now, historically, that society, there and

then, was in so rudimentary a condition, that its two great organs of

order, progress, and life had not yet been specialized; the ideas and

means requisite for this advance not having been at that time, among the

Hebrews, in existence.

The State, here, amongst ourselves, had, throughout the whole of this

middle period, been asserting that it had a domain in which it was

supreme; that the Church had usurped a great part of this domain, and was

still endeavouring to extend its usurpations; and that there could be

no peace till the whole of this usurped ground had been recovered. At

last the State became sufficiently enlightened and strong to establish

its supremacy in the domain it claimed; and to estop the Church from its

usurpations. This was a great gain. The work, however, was very far from

having been completed. What was done, though much, was in truth only a

beginning. What further was required was that the State should forthwith

address itself to the discharge of the high and fruitful duties that

belonged to the position it had assumed. But the fact was that it did not

yet fully and clearly perceive either what had become its own sphere,

rights, and duties, or what had become the sphere, rights, and duties of

the Church. Some, indeed, of the conceptions it formed on these points

were entirely erroneous, as both the teaching of History—now better

understood—and the inconveniences, the evils, and the necessities of

our present condition have since demonstrated. The correction of these

errors is a very important part of the task of the present generation.

The unsettled character of the actual relation of the State and of the

Church to each other, and the resultant uneasiness and tenderness felt by

each, and the way in which, by these causes, each is at present crippled

for much good it might be doing, are to be attributed to these errors.

These are matters in which History is our only guide and interpreter.

A knowledge of the origin, nature, aims, and fortunes of this long

conflict in past times, enables us to understand its present position,

and to foresee its future course. We are at a certain point in a chain of

events: and nothing throws light on the events that are coming except the

events that have been now evolved.

When ideas, through their having been traditional for many generations,

have got a strong hold on men’s thoughts and feelings, it is impossible

to break away from them, and in some matters to face in the very

opposite direction, at a moment. Ideas grow, and decay: they are

not subject to instantaneous transformations, like the figures in a

kaleidoscope. This explains the partial acquiescence by the State in the

theory that the Church was only the State acting in another capacity: as

it were a committee of the whole House for some politically necessary

objects; and with an authority that must be maintained. There was merely

a colourable amount of truth in this. Practically, and relatively to

the condition society had reached, it was a mistake; and one that was

unworkable in every particular. The Church, whatever might have been the

case in the early stages of society, is not now the State in another

capacity. It has ceased to have now any directly political objects. It

has no authority in the sense in which the State has: the authority of

the State being such as can be enforced by pains and penalties, and by

physical constraints; whereas the authority of the Church is only that of

moral and of intellectual truth—as much as, and no more than, it claimed

eighteen hundred years ago. In this matter its present advantages are

that it has not to contend for existence against hostile established

religions, and a consequently hostile tone of morality and of society;

for what is now generally recognized, in the moral order, is precisely

its own principles.

The logical and practical issue of this mistake was the mischievous

conclusion that the teaching of all morality, including that which is

necessary for the order and well-being of modern societies, must be

left exclusively to the Church; and that the State must confine its own

action to the repression of crime, and to the protection of person and

of property; and this only by the way of punishment. Now each of these

two propositions has, in a certain sense, and from a certain point of

view, though not those belonging to these times, enough plausibility to

enable a kind of defence of it to be set up; but, at the same time, each

contains such an amount of real falsity to the existing circumstances and

conditions of society, as to issue in incalculable mischief both to the

State and to the Church; both in what it has caused, and is causing, to

be done, and in what it has hindered, and is hindering, from being done.

This was a mistake which assigned to the Church work, which what have

now become its constitution, its real objects, and the means and forces

at its disposal, incapacitate it from doing; and which led the State to

abdicate what is now its highest, and really paramount, function. It

put both the Church and the State in a wrong position, and on a wrong

path. It enfeebled, depraved, and shackled both. It brought them into

inevitable conflict with each other. It made them both aim at what

could never be more than very imperfectly attained by the means they

were respectively endeavouring to employ. Its results were confusion,

anarchy, and failure. Hence came about the neglect by the State of

national education. And hence the claims of the Church to educate the

nation. Hence the fierce contradictions to these claims, expressed in a

blind demand, as if that were the only way of effectually contradicting

them, for secular education, that is to say, for the exclusion of

morality from education, and its limitation to an acquaintance with the

instruments of knowledge, plus a little physical instruction. This would

make things far worse than they are at present. It would be prohibiting

the acquisition, by those who are now the depositories of power, of

the knowledge and sentiments requisite for its right use. It would be

creating, and setting at work, in the midst of us, the most efficient

machinery imaginable for the general demoralization of the community. It

would be going some way towards transforming the commonwealth into an

aggregation of wild beasts, but of wild beasts possessed of knowledge and

reason. The concession of this by the State would be the renunciation of

its first and most imperative duty. Hence, in short, all the imbroglio

and the evils of the present situation of this great question; and all

the misunderstandings and hot conflicts between those on the one hand,

whom logic, working with wrong data, has made secularists, but to the

exclusion of secular morality, the chief point of all, and, on the other

hand, those whose fealty to what is highest and best, and should be

supreme in man’s nature, even when regarded only as a political animal,

has obliged them to enrol themselves as supporters of (I am afraid we

must say internecine) denominational teaching in the education of the

people. It is obvious that, as it is the duty of the State to regard the

community as a single family, and to endeavour to bring its members to

act harmoniously together, it would be better, both theoretically and

practically, to exclude the inculcation of these differences from the

Schools of the State: that, if it must come, would come with less evil

from the denominations themselves.

But truth, reason, right, and History must in the end triumph. It is the

duty of the State, and we rigidly exact from it the performance of it,

to punish and repress crime: it must, therefore, be its duty, but this

we will not allow it to perform, to teach that kind of morality which

manifestly has a tendency to prevent the commission of crime. The evil

is done when the crime has been committed: _à fortiori_, then, it is

better to prevent than to punish it. It is the duty of the State, and

we energetically insist on its being discharged effectually, to protect

person and property: _à fortiori_, then, it must be its duty to teach

that morality which shall dispose men to respect the rights of person and

of property. It is the duty of the State to do what it can, within its

own sphere, to promote the well-being of its members; we may presume,

then, that it is its duty to teach that morality which shall have a

tendency, above every thing else the State can do, to secure this great

object. How can it be argued that the State does rightly and wisely in

neglecting the one means which stands first in the order of nature,

and which is emphatically the most efficient, for bringing about its

great paramount object? To deny that the means for doing this duty are

within its sphere, is to deny that it has any duty at all, except that

of punishing. Possibly such means may not be within the sphere, as some

define it, of the political Economist. But, though a Statesman ought to

be a political Economist, he ought to be something besides. And it may be

very bad political Economy to allow in these days the mass of the people

to be vicious. This may, in the highest degree, be destructive of wealth.

But, at all events, what the Statesman has to lay his measures for is

the well-being of the community, of which wealth is only one ingredient;

and which, too, may be so distributed, and so used, and productive of

such effects and influences, looking at the community generally, as on

the whole not to promote its well-being. At all events, man, even when

regarded in his social capacity exclusively, does not live either by, or

for, bread alone.

The present condition of society is never to be lost sight of. And the

two most prominent elements of its present condition are the general

diffusion, throughout all classes, of political power, which almost means

that the decision of political questions has been entrusted to the most

ignorant and uninstructed, because they are the most numerous, part of

the community; and the fact that every member of the community is now

required to think, and to act, and to take charge of, and to provide for

himself. Here are two reasons, which have made it as much the duty of the

State to teach, as to repress, and to punish; for knowledge, and this

means pre-eminently moral knowledge, has become quite as necessary to it

for self-preservation. Though, indeed, punishment is a mode of teaching,

and the policeman and the magistrate are a kind of teachers; but it is as

unreasonable, as suicidal, to have recourse to no other mode of teaching,

and to no other kind of teachers.

I think, then, that none but unstatesmanlike Economists will deny that

it is the duty of the State to see to the education of the whole people.

The Egyptian Priest, and the Hebrew Prophet, never made, nor could have

made, a mistake of this kind; to their apprehension the right training

of the people was the paramount duty of a Government—the very purpose

and object for which it existed. This must, amongst ourselves, be given

mainly in schools established everywhere. We have now at last got so far

as to attempt their general establishment. The schools, however, are only

machinery; and the great question is, what kind of work this machinery

is to do? and the State will not discharge properly its duty in this

all-important matter, if it does not take care that the schools shall

teach the morality indispensably required, under existing conditions,

for the well-being of society. This morality means the principles of

Justice, Truth, Temperance, Honesty, Manliness, Forbearance, Considerate

Kindliness, Industry, Thrift, Foresight, Responsibility. These are

political and social, and perhaps also economical, necessities of modern

communities. They are now the first great wants of society. Speaking

generally, they can be taught to the masses of the people, and to the

whole people, best, and, in fact, only by the State. Every one, I think,

must be ready to acknowledge, that if the State, during the last fifty

years, had seen to their having been taught, so far as schools and early

training could have taught them, to the population of this country, we

should be in a widely different position—all the difference being on the

right side—from that in which we are at this day.

It is just because the State has made, at best, only half-hearted

attempts to do any part of this work, and has even at times loudly

proclaimed that it saw that it was not its duty to undertake it, that is

to say that it was its duty to renounce its most important duty, that

that part of the community in which the moral instinct predominates,

has turned to Church organizations, and called upon them to undertake

it. And this is a reason why many of this class have been attracted

to that particular branch of the Church which advances, most loudly,

the most unqualified claims to the superintendence of the whole domain

of morality, not making any distinction between that which is social,

civil, and political, and that which belongs to the higher sphere of the

spiritual life. Had the State seen its duty in this great matter, and

endeavoured to act up to it, nothing of this kind would, or could, have

occurred. On the contrary: the wisest and best part of the community

would have supported it in carrying out what it had undertaken, with

their whole heart and soul.

Of course it is a mistake to look to the Church for this kind of work.

Neither the Church of Rome, nor any other Church, either in this, or in

any other, country, has the means necessary for enforcing this kind of

teaching, or even for bringing it home, generally, to the bulk of the

population, that is to say to the very part of it which most needs it.

Nor under any conjuncture of circumstances, which can be imagined as

possible, will they have the means for doing it. And even further, if

the powers necessary for the purpose could be conferred upon them, it

would be putting them in a false position to call upon them to undertake

this mundane, political work. Besides that, the false positions into

which events and circumstances have already, more or less, brought all

Churches, have so damaged their credit with large proportions of the

population, in all the foremost nations of the world, as that their

teaching of this kind would not, generally, be received, would even be

strenuously resisted; and it would still further weaken them, were they

to attempt to teach these things for these purposes. It would bring them

before the world as mere instruments of national police—a position that

is now so utterly and glaringly at discord with the purpose and idea

of a Church, that its assumption would go a long way towards obscuring

altogether in men’s minds that purpose, and that idea; far too much in

that direction having been done already. We know how disastrous an effect

the assumption, to some extent, of this position has had, in this and

other countries, on some branches of the Church. This is true now, and

will continue to be so, till the Church shall have become an organization

in which all of us, laity as well as clergy, women as well as men, who

shall be animated by the desire for the higher moral and spiritual life,

shall find ready for us places and work; and until, in this matter, the

first effort amongst us shall not be to secure this-world power, and

social and political position, which must always be accompanied by

separations and antagonisms, and is demoralizing, and destructive of the

very idea of a Church; but to reform and improve, and to lift above the

world; an effort which is actively and fruitfully moral, and of the very

essence of the work of a Church. This is truly spiritual work.

Taking things, then, as they are, any Church would be but a bad and

inefficient teacher of the political, we may even call it the secular,

kind of morality we are now thinking about. While every one can see

that, as it is an affair of the State, and comes within its sphere, and

is useful for its purposes; and as it is the duty, and the interest, of

the State to teach it; and as the State has, and alone has, the power

of teaching it, it might be well and properly taught by the State. But

it may also be remarked that no Church can afford to give to this work

of the State the first place in its thoughts and efforts. Every branch

of the Church, from the greatest down to the least, must be occupied,

primarily, by its own necessities. Self-preservation is the first law

of nature, in the case of Churches as well as of every thing else that

has life. The first care, therefore, as things now are, of every Church

must be to maintain and enforce its own system; and, as part of the same

effort, to weaken those whose systems are opposed to its own. This,

however disguised, must be a main object with all of them. That it is so,

is very disastrous for Churches; still it is a necessity of their present

position. And the efforts that arise out of this necessity can, at the

best, be only non-moral: in truth, one cannot but think that they must

generally be demoralizing, and even immoral: at all events, they can only

be made at the expense of the higher morality, which is the true domain

of the Church. But, however much this point may be controverted, the

other is an obvious fact, and incontrovertible, that no Church has the

power of teaching to the community, and this is especially true of the

most numerous and least instructed part of the community, that morality

which is now necessary for the well-being of political societies. In

this matter there is a wide difference between past and present times.

Formerly this teaching, however desirable it might have been, was not

indispensable under the old restrictive and paternal systems of society.

All that has now passed away. We have drifted from those moorings, and

out of those harbours. Our population has been agglomerated into large

masses; and these masses have been put into a position to exercise the

power which resides in numbers. Every one, too, is now called upon, and

this is a most important element in the consideration of what ought to be

done, to take care of himself. No class is now put in charge of another

class. The moral training, therefore, which these conditions require has

become the paramount object and first duty of the State; and, one way or

another, perhaps the highest personal mundane interest of every member

of the community; and all would do well to demand from the State the

discharge of this duty.

That the State should awake to a sense of its duty in this matter, and

act up to that awakened sense, would be no encroachment on the domain

of the Church. In so doing, indeed, it would set free, and strengthen,

the Church for its own proper work. The State cannot do the work of the

Church, any more than the Church can do the work of the State. Each has

now, distinctly, marked out for it its own sphere, its own aims, its own

rights, and its own duties. The world is rapidly advancing to a correct

understanding of all this. Each should, properly, by attending to and

doing its own work, help the other. Each is necessary to the other. The

morality the State has charge of is that which, obviously, contributes

to the right ordering and prosperity of the commonwealth generally,

and of its members individually. It is such as can be expounded, and

made intelligible to all and acceptable to many. Much of it too can be

enforced on all. Not, of course, in the old Egyptian fashion, but in a

fashion which is in accord with the conditions of modern societies.

There can be few things more mistaken and ridiculous than to urge that

the Master of a School, because he is a layman, cannot teach such

morality as the State requires for its own maintenance, and for the

well-being of its members. He is just as capable as the Minister of

Religion, or as any body else, of learning his own proper work. The point

that really needs to be seen clearly is that the proper work of the State

School Master, and of the Minister of Religion, so differ, as that each

is incapable of teaching fully and rightly what ought to be taught by the

other. The Minister of Religion puts himself quite in a false position,

and contradicts the idea of his office, when he undertakes the work of

the State; and the School Master goes out of his way, and passes beyond

the work of the State, when he enters on the ground of the Minister of

Religion. From the time that civil societies existed, or that men had

come to act from a sense of duty, all well disposed Fathers of families,

not excluding Masters of Schools, have deemed themselves qualified to

teach, and have taught, with more or less success, to their children such

ethics as they themselves had attained to a knowledge of, and thought

desirable. Let any one refer to the duties I just now enumerated, as

socially and politically necessary in these days; and, when he has

considered what they are, will he be disposed to assert that a man of

ordinary intelligence, the business of whose life it is to teach, whose

attention has been particularly directed to this subject, and who has

studied it with the knowledge that he must teach it, will, after all, be

unable to teach it? Or would any teacher, with that list in his hand, say

that it never would be in his power to give lessons on each of the heads

it contains; and to see that the practice of the pupils corresponded

with what he taught? If the Clergy could do this, why not the Masters

of Schools? The fact, however, is that the Clergy cannot, and that the

Masters of Schools can.

Nothing else that is taught in Schools can be taught so naturally, so

easily, and so surely. Almost everything that occurs, or that is done,

supplies ground for a lesson on the subject. In nothing else that we

have to teach do we find a foundation laid for our teaching already, as

it is here, in the instinctive moral sentiments which have, some how

or other, come to be, or, if not, which may be made to be, a part of

the pupil’s nature. The discipline, too, of life here again aids the

teacher in a manner, which is not the case in anything else he has to

teach. The Ethics the State requires may be taught, as the occasion in

any, and each, case will suggest to the teacher, either practically,

or dogmatically, or scientifically; either with a reference at the

moment to the principle of utility, or to the voice of conscience, or to

experience. Lessons of this kind may also be set forth in Parables, or

illustrative stories: a large proportion of the reading lessons now used

in Schools have this aim. Nor would there be many who would object to

reference being made, in the teaching of the State School-Master, to the

Religious ground, that is to say, to the future life: though of course it

is manifest that this would belong rather to the teaching of the Church

and of the Minister of Religion. Practically, however, that is with

respect to the substance and form of the virtues taught, there would be

no antagonism between the two: for even with respect to Charity, which

Religion elevates above Justice, the layman would still have something

to say in the same sense, for he would show that the kindliness, and

consideration for others, he taught supplemented and went beyond Justice.

Indeed, what antagonism could there be, seeing that our ideas of the

several virtues, wherever they differ from what Aristotle or Cicero would

have taught, are what our Religion has made them to all of us alike?

The chief difference, indeed, I can make out would be a very small one,

for it would be the importance the lay-teacher would have to assign to

industry and thrift, secondary virtues of which popular Religion does not

take much notice: an oversight which, of course, arises out of popular

misapprehensions, such, for instance, as those we are all familiar with

in respect of the purpose and character of the present life, of the

meaning of faith, and of the teaching of Jesus Christ on the subject of

Divine interposition in the current affairs of life.

But, however, this little difference, though indeed it happens to be one

that must ultimately disappear, for it arises out of a misconception,

will help us to understand the difference between the morality the State

requires and that which the Church presents to us. The former is limited

to what is useful politically and socially, and for mundane purposes;

while that of which the Church has charge (there being ultimately no

real contradiction between the two) consists of the same principles,

only purified, elevated, and rendered more fruitful by the action of

higher motives. It is that which is in thought perfect; the morality of

the kingdom of God, that is of those who have been brought to understand

that they have a citizenship which is not of this world, and whose

conversation is above. It is that morality which is cast in the mould of

the ideas we endeavour to form of the moral attributes of the Deity; or

rather the application of that to our own present condition: its members

endeavour to form God within themselves. This cannot be enforced. The

idea of constraint contradicts its nature. Its motives are found in

men’s spontaneously engendered conceptions of moral perfection; and in

the hope of a future life, which alone can supply a stage and conditions

suitable for the complete realization of such conceptions. The rights of

the Church are those of humanity to complete freedom in its effort to

advance and purify its ideal of the moral and spiritual life. This has

been its work from the beginning, though in the early stages of society

it embraced the State, and has subsequently often, during the struggles

of the State to establish its independence, been in conflict with it:

sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both having been in the

wrong: all this History explains. Its true position is to be in advance

of the State. It elaborates and diffuses that interpretation of man’s

nature, and position, and of the knowledge man has attained to, those

conceptions of virtue and that morality which the State, following in

the wake of the Church, adopts in its own degree and fashion, and makes

in such degree and fashion the aims and principles of its legislation.

Every virtue, however elementary and indispensable, according to our

ideas, might once have been beyond the power and the ken of the State. We

can imagine such a condition of things, as that, during its continuance

the State would have been unable to enforce and inculcate the principles

of common honesty, and even of responsibility. It may once have been so

here, just as it is still, to this day, in Dahomey. Scientifically, the

condition of Dahomey is as much a part of the subject as the condition

of England. The question is, what has brought about the difference? The

answer is the Church—the Church that was in Egypt, that was in Israel,

that was in Greece, that was in Rome, that was in the forests of Germany,

that has been, and is, amongst ourselves. The Church has, all along, been

going before and shaping, little by little and step by step, higher and

clearer conceptions of right, and of duty, and of life; and the State has

followed, little by little and step by step, accepting and adopting what

the Church had made possible for it. Its position has generally been,

and _ex rerum naturâ_ it must be so, behind the Church. This is seen

distinctly in the early days of Christianity. The Church was then working

out, and diffusing, much that the State afterwards recognized and acted

upon. This is their true relation to each other. It is not merely that

the nation, organized for its immediate mundane wants, is the State, and

that humanity, organized for the needs of its higher life, is the Church;

but that, besides this, in the progress of society and of humanity, each

is indispensable to the other. Universal History tells us this: and from

universal History, in a matter of this kind, there is no appeal. And what

universal History tells us the History, as far as it goes, of the two

famous buildings before us confirms.

And now we must take off our thoughts from the two great organizations

of society, whose action and interaction have all along been at work

in shaping our political, social, and moral growth, and making us what

we are, symbols of which, in the two buildings before us, we have been

looking upon, and must turn our thoughts to the great million-peopled

city itself, of the existence of which we are reminded, at the spot

where we have taken our stand, chiefly by a few lordly mansions, glimpses

of which we catch, here and there, through the trees. What variety of

life is stirring within its widely differing regions! How much energy

and power, and how much waste of power, and neglect of opportunity, are

there! What principles are struggling into existence! What principles

are dying out! What a conflict of principles is going on! We shall think

not only of the lordly mansions environing the parks that are spread out

before us, but equally of the commercial city on the banks of the river,

and of the moiling and toiling, the rough and gin-drinking myriads of the

manufacturing quarters of this world-capital. We shall, in our thoughts,

set by the side of what is refined, and intellectual, and energetic, what

is frivolous and enfeebled, what is rough, and degraded, and vicious. We

shall become sensible of the uncertainties, as well as of the power, of

the great intellectual and moral organism that is at work all around us.

How much is there that is good and hopeful in all classes, and how much

in all that is evil, and evil enough almost to cause despondency! How

vast and complex is the whole! Your thought enables you to understand

that the railway and the telegraph have made the city in which you are

standing the centre of English business and life, in a manner that was

impossible formerly; and more than that, for the ocean steamers and

electric cables have made it the centre of the business of the world.

How does the imagination, when stirred by the suggestions of the scene,

picture to itself the fashion in which are peopled the decks and saloons

of the great steamships that are hurrying, outward and homeward, on

all seas and oceans, to carry out the plans that have been originated

and matured here! You think, too, of the countless messages that are

flashing to and fro, beneath those seas and oceans, every moment, for

the same purpose. Here is the heart of the world. The life-sustaining

blood, in the form of human thought, and which carries along in itself

the elements of construction as well as of life, is ever going forth from

this heart, and coming back to it again. How many tens of thousands of

steam-engines, in as many mines and factories, are throbbing and working

to supply the wants, and maintain the wealth, of this manifold Babylon

we have built. Of this wealth we see an exhibition here every day; for

this is the spot for the daily parade of one of its braveries. How have

the corn-fields and meadows of this island been solicited year by year

to yield more and more, and how widely have Australian and African

wildernesses been peopled with flocks and herds, for the enlargement

of this wealth. This has on its surface only a material aspect. It is

true that its first and most obvious result is to give wealth, and the

enjoyment of wealth; and that neither of these are necessarily and in

themselves good: for if wealth lead only to the self-bounded fruition of

wealth it is deadening, corrupting, and degrading: and of this there is

in the city around you much. But, however, this is not all its effect. It

has given to many minds culture and leisure, which they have devoted to

advancing the intellectual wealth of man; and it has produced many who

have devoted themselves, according to the light that was within them,

and prompted by the noblest impulses of our nature, to the improvement

of the moral condition of those with whom they come in contact. Which of

the two preponderate, the good or the bad effect of the sum of all that

is going on, we need not attempt to estimate here. But to whichever side

the balance may incline at the present moment, we believe that the bad

will perish, as it has done in past times, and that the good only will

survive—for only what is good and true is eternal.

And now we turn from the many who are wealthy to the greater many who are

poor, and are carrying on a painful struggle for bare existence, in this

vast assemblage of humanity: and here, too, we find mingled with what

there is of good much that is evil. Here, as with the wealthy, are aims

that are unwise, springing from misleading instincts which society has,

carelessly and ignorantly, allowed to be formed in its bosom, and which

tend in the individual to unhappiness and degradation, and in society

itself to disorder and subversion.

All this must be taken in by the mind in order that the scene before us

may be rightly understood. We could not interpret the scenes of old Egypt

till we had formed some conception of what old Egypt was, and we must

endeavour to do the same for our corresponding English scene. It is in

this way only that the study and understanding of old Egypt can be of any

use to us. It is only when we understand both that we are in a position

to ask the question whether old Egypt has anything to teach us.

It tells us that the aims of society must be moral; and that the morality

required can, within certain limits, be created and shaped, and made

instinctive, where society itself honestly wishes and intelligently

endeavours to do it. But as we look upon old Egypt we see that the

morality we need is not precisely what they imagined and established, and

that we are precluded from attempting to establish what we want in the

fashion of old Egypt. Theirs was a system of constraint, ours must be

a system of freedom. Theirs was a system that concentrated its highest

advantages on a few, ours must be a system that opens its advantages

to all. We must present what we have to offer in such a form that men

will voluntarily accept it for themselves and for their children, and

allow it to shape them. If we see distinctly what we have to do, and

the conditions under which we have to do it, this will be in itself the

achievement of half our work. Their method was to devise a system, in

strict conformity to the conditions of the problem as it then stood,

and place it as a yoke upon society. They could do that: we cannot. Our

method must be accepted freely by society, and by the individual. We,

too, must devise a system in strict conformity to the conditions of

the problem as it now stands; and it must be such as approves itself

to the understanding and the conscience of the men of these times. The

successful fulfilment of the first requirement will, probably, include

the second.

Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, each did the work that had been allotted

to it. What we have to do is not to repeat what any one of them did.

That, indeed, we could not do; and, if we could, it would be of no use

to us. Imitations at all times, but more particularly when circumstances

differ, are worthless and disorganizing. And yet what each of them did

was necessary for us. The work we have to do now is a great advance upon

theirs, and is to be done under very different conditions from theirs,

but is so connected with theirs that we cannot dispense with their

foundations, or with the principles they worked with. We need them all,

but we must use them in the way our work requires. When men came to build

with stone, they did not abandon all the principles of construction they

had worked out for themselves during the time they had built with wood.

Those principles were right as far as they went. They were not all bad,

and worthless, and inapplicable to the new material and its grander

possibilities. What had to be done was to incorporate the new principles

that were needed with those from among the old that would still be

serviceable. The purpose and object of building, whatever the materials

might be, continued one and the same. And so, now that we have come to

use glass and iron largely in architecture, the same process is again

repeated. Some new principles may be introduced, but we do not discard

all the old ones. Just so is it with the social fabric.

The great and governing differences in our case are that what we have to

do is to be done for all, and that this is accompanied with the condition

of not partial, but universal freedom. It never was so with any of the

old peoples. And though our work is new in some of its conditions, and

such as, in its reach and variety, was never dreamt of by the four great

teacher nations of antiquity, there is no more reason for our failing

in it than there was for their failing in theirs. That it is to be done

is, in some sort, proof that it may be done. Indeed, there is apparently

more reason for our success than there was for theirs. We have their

experience; and in the principles of universal freedom, and universal

justice, we have more to commend what ought to be done now to men’s

hearts and understandings then they had. Freedom, knowledge, truth,

justice, goodness; these must be our aims, our means, our statecraft, our

religion. We do not go off the old tracks. They all converge into our

path. And so we find that we are advancing, having history for guide,

through new conditions, into a richer and better life, placed within the

reach of an ever increasing proportion of the community.

The greatest, perhaps, of the advantages that will be found in our wealth

is that it will enable us to confer on every member of the community

such knowledge and such training as shall have an hopeful, perhaps a

preponderant, tendency towards making instinctive, at all events in the

minds of the greater number, a rational use of the freedom they already

possess, and the love and practice of truth, justice, and goodness.

Though, indeed, when we look at the educational efforts of Saxony, of

Switzerland, and of New England, we are almost brought to fear that

this great and necessary work will be undertaken more readily and

intelligently, and done sooner and better, among people, who have less of

the material means for carrying it out than ourselves. In saying this, I

do not at all mean that we should confine our efforts merely to what they

have done, for they have, to a great extent, omitted that morality which

I consider the main point of all; but that we should be much better than

we are, if we had done as much as they, with their very inferior means,

have already accomplished.

In Egypt submission and order; in Israel, though labouring under most

cruel disadvantage, during its better days belief in and devotion to

right, and during its latter days the determination to maintain at

any cost its morality and religion; at Athens the appreciation of

intellectual culture; in the Roman Empire, by the mere working of its

system, the idea of the supremacy of the law, and the sentiment of the

brotherhood of mankind—were made instinctive. Why should we despair

of doing as much for what we need? Our task, indeed, though so much

grander, and promising so much more fruit than theirs, does not appear

as hard as theirs. If it be beyond our powers, then modern society is

but a fermenting mass of disorder and corruption. It cannot be so,

however; for if it were, then the long course of History would now have

to be reversed. All the progress of the Past, and all its hard-won

achievements, would prove without purpose; and there would remain for us

only to despair of truth, of right, of religion, and of humanity itself.

FOOTNOTES

[1] This was written in 1871. It was in the following year, that is, in

the interval between the first and the second edition of this work, that

the Livingstone-search Commissioner of the ‘New York Herald’ found the

great African explorer.

[2] Some, I am aware, are disposed to answer the question of this Chapter

by ascribing to the Egyptians a Turanian origin. The following appear

to be the steps in the process, by which they endeavour to reach this

conclusion. There was, in remote times, on the banks of the Euphrates, a

Priest Class, which, on the supposition that in its sacred and literary

language, there are some traces of the early Turanian form of speech,

might have had a Turanian origin. (Though, indeed, a Priest Class is

rather an eastern Aryan, or even a Semitic, than a Turanian phenomenon.)

This Priest Class, thus conceivably Turanian, might, conceivably, have

had some ethnological connexion with the Priest Caste of Egypt. (There

is, however, nothing to lead us to suppose that its antiquity was as

great as that of the Priest Caste of Egypt.) Therefore the Egyptians

might have had a Turanian origin. To put the argument abstractedly:

We may imagine two presumable possibilities; the first of which

possesses little probability, and the second still less; and then by the

juxta-position of the two reach a desired conclusion. In other words,

some degree of probability will be the product of the multiplication

of the non-probability of a first assumption by the improbability of a

second. This is the form of argument by which probability is inferred

from the accumulation of improbabilities.

Of course, there is no saying what discoveries the future may have in

store; but, in the present state of knowledge, it seems an unlikely

supposition that Arts, Science, Law, Philosophy and Religion were,

aboriginally, Turanian.

[3] It is a curious fact that the inhabitants of the Lake-villages of

Switzerland cultivated, in the prehistoric period, as may be seen in the

Zurich collection of objects from the sites of these villages, the same

variety of wheat—that which we call Mummy, or hen-and-chickens wheat—as

the old Egyptians. Did the first immigrants into Europe, of whom we may

suppose that we have some historical traces, for the Etruscans may have

been, and the Laps, Finns, and Basques may still be, surviving fragments

of their settlements, bring with them this variety of wheat at the same

time that another swarm from the same Central Asian hive were taking it

with them to the Valley of the Nile.

[4] I am led to propound this conjecture from a desire to render

intelligible what Herodotus says of their hair and skin; for we know,

both from the old paintings and from the existing mummies, that the true

Egyptian’s skin was not black, and that there was no kink in his hair. It

is impossible then to take his statement as it stands; and I can imagine

no other way of correcting it.

The difficulty here I conceive to be of just the reverse kind to that

which meets us in his statement, that the circumference of Lake Mœris

was 450 miles; and which, therefore, in the chapter on the Faioum, I

endeavoured to render intelligible by just the reverse process, that is

to say, by suggesting that, while we suppose he is speaking of the Lake

only, he is really speaking of the whole of a vast system of artificial

irrigation, of which the lake was the main part. Here he is speaking of a

part of the Egyptian population, only he puts what he says in such a way

that we suppose that he is speaking of the whole of it.

I will take the opportunity of this note to propound an explanation of

Homer’s having sent Jupiter, and all the gods, to Oceanus, to feast, for

twelve days, with the irreproachable Ethiopians. We immediately ask, Why

with the Ethiopians? Why are they irreproachable? What have they got to

do with Oceanus? Why to feast? Why for so long a period? Why all the

gods? The light, in which things are viewed in this book enables us to

see an answer to each of these questions.

Homer, we know, was acquainted with the magnificence of Thebes. In

his time, and for many centuries before, the Phœnicians had, through

commercial intercourse, been closely connected with the Greeks;

having, during the whole of that time, been an autonomous dependency,

or dependent ally, of the Egyptians, who, in going to and from their

head-quarters on the Euphrates, had kept open a line of communication

through Phœnicia. The Phœnicians, therefore, must have had a great

deal to tell the Greeks about the marvellous greatness of Egypt, the

chief ingredient in which was the magnificence of Thebes. There was

plenty of time for all this to be thoroughly talked over. Sethos and

Rameses, the great Theban builders, had preceded Homer’s day by four

or five centuries. And, as such things never lose in telling, Homer’s

contemporaries must have had no very inadequate—we now know that they

could hardly have had exaggerated—conceptions of the temples and wealth

of Thebes. He mentions the great amount of its military population; its

hundred gates, which, as no traces of walls of fortification for the city

have been found, meant, probably, the propylons of the temples; and its

vast wealth. He knew probably that Egypt consisted of an Upper and of a

Lower Egypt, and that the inhabitants of the Upper country were darker,

and that in the extreme south, as then understood, the complexion became

quite black; and so, to distinguish them from the maritime Egyptians,

he calls them Ethiopians. He uses the same word as an epithet of dark

objects, as of wine and bronze. And here among these Ethiopians was the

wondrous Thebes. When the Phœnicians had told the inquisitive Greeks

of its mighty temples, and of its incalculable wealth, they must have

described its commerce, the source, to a very considerable extent, of

its greatness. For centuries it had been the emporium of the trade of

India, Arabia, and Africa. This, and its position in the supposed extreme

south, to Homer’s mind, connected it with the outer, world-surrounding

ocean. What was told to him, and to his contemporaries, of the tides and

monsoons of the Indian Ocean, suggested to them, and most aptly, only the

idea of a stream. They heard of tides on the Atlantic also; hence his

mighty stream of circum-ambient ocean. As to the trade of Thebes, all

international wholesale trade in those times, and in that part of the

world, was carried on in the courts and sacred enclosures of temples.

The greatness of the temples was, in some measure, an indication of the

greatness of the trade. The great festivals were, in substance, only

great fairs. Trade was then under the guardianship of Religion. Society

was not yet sufficiently organized for the protection of trade: for such

a purpose the civil power could hardly as yet be said to exist. Religion

alone had either the wisdom, or the power, to enforce fair dealing, or

to ward off violence. At the season, therefore, that the great annual

caravans arrived from the interior, and the easterly monsoons wafted the

merchandise and products of Arabia and India to Egypt, to be bartered

for those of Africa (and the caravans were doubtless so arranged as that

their arrival synchronized with that of the ocean-borne traffic), there

were great processions and feasts at the temples. Religion then put

on its most imposing aspect. We have now only to recall the number of

temples in the sacred enclosure at Thebes (this enclosure itself meant

order and protection), and then we shall have all the materials requisite

for enabling us to understand every particular of Homer’s statement.

Jupiter goes to the Ethiopians, because he was the chief god of Thebes.

But there are temples enough for all the gods, and so they all accompany

him. Here they meet, we see why, Oceanus. It is a great festival of

many days. This is intelligible. We see why these Ethiopians are

irreproachable. In an age of piracy and violence they enforce, with all

the authority of Religion, the order, fair dealing, and abstinence from

all kinds of violence, and ensure the security, necessary for trade; and

which had made the trade they were protecting and fostering the greatest,

at that time, in the world. Their singular irreproachableness might

be measured by their unparalleled prosperity, and their unparalleled

prosperity accounted for by their singular irreproachableness; and both

might be explained by their profound and all-embracing piety. This made

them irreproachable. This made them prosperous. This ensured the presence

of all the gods at their twelve days’ Feast.

[5] Throughout this chapter I distinguish between the idea, and the

doctrine, of a future life. There may be some traces of the idea in

the Old Testament; though I believe that they are not so numerous, or

so distinct, as many suppose. And what there may be of this kind is

certainly counterbalanced by the general tenor of the documents with

respect to this subject, and by some distinct statements in the opposite

sense. What I affirm is, that there is no trace of a doctrine of a future

life. A doctrine on such a subject is a categorical averment of it,

unmistakably announced, and unmistakably used as a motive for shaping

the whole life. Of such an averment, so used, I assert, and endeavour to

account for, the absence.

[6] It has been pointed out to me by a reader of the first edition of

this book, that there is a great similarity between the above paragraph

and a passage in Bishop Butler’s _Analogy_. But as I have not seen that

great work since my Oxford days, now thirty-two years ago, I think I may

be allowed to leave it standing with an acknowledgment of unconscious

reminiscence.

[7] NOTE.—After the foregoing Chapter was in type, it occurred to me to

apply the light of the fact it accounts for to some prominent particulars

of the Old Testament. Here are a few of the results: Moses gives as a

reason for our first parents having been driven out of Paradise, that God

desired to preclude the possibility of their eating of the fruit of a

certain tree, whereof if they were to eat they would become immortal; and

that He afterwards carefully guarded the tree from them by Cherubims, and

a flaming sword that turned every way. This was to prevent their becoming

immortal. Previously, too, God had threatened that, if they disobeyed a

certain commandment, they should become incapable of immortality (for

the context shows that this was the meaning intended); and, on their

disobedience, God had passed on them the sentence that they should return

to the dust out of which they had been made. There can be no reasonable

doubt but that in this part of the introductory history a foundation is

designedly laid for the absence of the doctrine of a future life from the

dispensation; and objections to its absence answered by anticipation.

Popular hermeneutics, however, are incapable of explaining these

particulars, notwithstanding the significant prominency assigned them in

the narrative.

Again, on the theory of the popular interpretation, we can see no reason

why Isaiah should have placed the ultimate suppression of evil, and the

complete triumph of good, on this earth. That would be of no advantage

to the generation to which he had to address himself; and it would be

an arrangement that would give nothing to those who had borne the heat

and burden of the day, and everything to those who had done nothing.

The difficulty, however, vanishes, when we remember that he had no

doctrine of a future life, or of any other stage than this earth for man.

Everything, therefore, that was to be brought about, must be brought

about on this earth, and during this earthly life, which were all.

Our fact also accounts for the conspicuous, and otherwise inexplicable,

want of proselytizing zeal in the old Israelites. They quite believed

that the best thing for man was the knowledge of God; but they had no

disposition to communicate this knowledge. The reason was that the

advantages of this knowledge were temporal. Had, therefore, Jehovah been

brought to give protection, wealth, and strength to their neighbours,

with whom they were generally in a state of hostility, it would have been

a hurt to themselves. So soon as the objects of religion became moral

only, and not of this world, Israelites had abundance of zeal for making

proselytes among their neighbours.

Doubtless other particulars will occur to the reader, which, like those

I have just noted, are explicable only by the aid of the direct opposite

to that which the popular interpretation assumes, this direct opposite

being, in fact, the most prominent and distinctive of the peculiarities

of the dispensation.

[8] Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.—_Acts_ vii. 22.

[9] In ‘Land and Water,’ of February 3rd, 1872, may be found an

interesting account of the way in which D. (Lord Ducic) stalked, killed,

and ultimately secured the sunken carcass of one of the few stragglers

that may now occasionally be seen to the north of the cataract. It was

a full-grown specimen, and, as the evidence of its stomach proved, a

child-eater. _Jure occisus est._ The scene was 3° 32´ north of the

cataract.

[10] M. de Lesseps has lately raised these charges 50 per cent., having

made the discovery that the chargeable tonnage of a steamship includes

the space required for engines and fuel. As well might he, after having

charged a sailing vessel for its cargo-space, assess at so much more

the scantling of its spars, and the spread of its canvas. At all events

this method of charging is not after the fashion in which he himself

originally interpreted those terms of the concession, which fix the rate

at which ships using the Canal may be charged.

INDEX.

Abraham, his genealogy, 29.

At the Pyramids, 83.

At Heliopolis, 119.

Bargaining with Ephron, 337

Abydos, 97-104.

Ride to, 98.

Its Palace and Temple, 100;

its Tablet, 101.

Antiquity of its civilisation, 102-104

Acacia, 411

Achmed and Hodge, 396-401

Agriculture, Egyptian, favoured early civilization, 13-15.

Syrian, 245

Alexandria, 448-457

Alkali, Egyptians used, in washing, 367

Amasis, 277

Amenemha III., his register of risings of the Nile, 5, 114.

Engineered Lake Mœris, 114

American, an, on the Pyramids, 85.

The ⸺ pig, 433

Amunoph, 124.

His Colossus, 150

Apries, or Pharaoh Hophra, 277

Arabs sleep in the open air, 99.

Truthfulness and honesty of, 176.

Superstitions, 359-364

Arch, date of the, in Egypt, 142.

Why not used, 294.

Date of the pointed, 464

Art, style of Egyptian, 36

Arts, antiquity of useful, 44

Aryan ancestors of Egyptians might have come from the Persian Gulf,

38.

Date, 40.

Their belief in a future state, 35, 195

Ashdod, siege of, 275

Ass, the, 424

Assassef, 151

Assyrian Dynasty at Bubastis, 271.

They overrun Egypt, 272

Assouan, Governor of, 168.

Camel-riding at, 421

Astronomer Royal for Scotland on the Pyramids, 63, 65

Awe, its place in religion of Egypt, 127

Backsheesh, 45-51

Bahr Jusuf, 103, 106, 475

Bargaining, 337, 469

Basques, possible origin of, 40, 44

‘Beginning’ of 1st Ch. of Genesis, 264

Belief, travel and, 244-256

Belzoni, 138

Benihassan, 173

Bethany, girl of, 47-49

Bethlehem, women of, 50

Birds in Egypt, 436-440

Birket el Keiroon, 106, 111, 112

Bitter Lakes, 486

Bottled-up labour, Capital is, 59

Boulak Museum, wooden statue in, 72-74.

Chephren’s statue in, 74

Brotherhood, doctrine of, 318.

Overthrew Egyptianism, 320.

Its subsequent history, 322

Bubastis, 270.

Festival of, 278.

Canal of, 473, 475

Buffalo, the, 433

Builders, Orientals great, 467

Buildings, cause of disappearance of, 77.

Destruction of, in Egypt, 79.

In the Delta, 266-289.

Preservation of, in Upper Egypt, 290-298.

Why large, and constructed of large stones, 293

Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ 190

Cairo, 458-471

Caliphs, tombs of the, 467

Camel, 417-423

Canalization of the Isthmus, 472-493

Capital, what ⸺ is, and how it acts, 59.

What it will do for the East, 394

Caste, origin of, 34.

How used by the Egyptians, 311.

Survey of the phenomena of, 332-336

Christianity has no written law, 211, 213, 215, 217, 220, 229, 233,

318.

Why ⸺ triumphed in Egypt, 320.

Why ⸺ failed, 321.

Was a protest, 509.

What it dealt with, 516

Chronology, early, 75, 81

Church and State, 514.

Its relation to religion, 515.

Its conflicts with the State, 516.

Originally included the State, 517.

Its usurpations stopped, 519.

Who look to the, for the education of the people, 525.

Its inability to educate, 526.

Its sphere, 528.

What it should teach, 532

Civilization, early hindrances to, 13.

What it was before the date of the Pyramids, 52-56.

Anterior to Abydos, 102

Cleanliness, Oriental, 365-369

Cleopatra, 164, 286.

Needle of, 455

Climates, Egypt has the ⸺ of two zones, 15

Clothes pawned returned at sunset, 340

Colchis, Egyptian colony at, 160

Colossus of Memnon, 150

Communications easy in Egypt, 13.

In direction of latitude, 14

Conclusion, 494-540

Concrete, early thought, 259

Constantinople, 492

Contemporaneous, Egyptian documents, 94, 101

Copts at Thebes, 148

Cosmogony, Mosaic, how to be taken, 261

Crabs, their business, 145

Criticism, Biblical, 82, 257

Crocodiles, why worshipped, 109.

The last killed below the Cataract, 435

Custom, persistency of, 337.

Change of, an European characteristic, 340

Darius completes the Canal to the Red Sea, 477

‘Day’ of the 1st Ch. of Genesis, 263

Dead, Book of the, 186

Deceased, the, 103

Della, its dynasties, 266-284.

Overthrow and disappearance of its monuments, 266-289

Dendera, 286

Despotism, how nature aided, in Egypt, 18-20.

How formerly checked, 21

Dish, dipping in the, 340

Divorce, 378, 383

Doctrine differs from idea, 193

Dodecarchs, connexion of, with Labyrinth, 115

Dog, the, 428

Dôm Palm, 413

Donkey-boys, 170-176

East, can anything be done for the? 389-395

Edfou, 285

Education, the, which the State should undertake, 524

Egypt, how formed, 1-9.

Its agriculture made civilization possible, 13.

Has two climates, 15.

Its configuration and agriculture aided despotism, 12-20.

What hope for modern, 21.

Antiquity of its civilization, 26.

Its relation to Israel, 239.

Its prosperity under Amasis, 277.

What its history teaches, 536

Egyptians, how their character affected by nature, 12-20.

Hard lot of modern, 22-24.

Not mainly African, or Semitic, 27.

Mixed Aryan and Ethiopian, 32.

Their style of art, 36.

Aptitude for science and organization, 37.

Might have arrived by the Red Sea, 38.

Not Turanian, 41.

Resembled the Japanese, 42-44.

Their belief in a future life, 182-192.

Their wisdom and its fall, 299-322

England, how want of wood in Egypt affects, 408.

Advantage of the Canal to, 491

English thought practical, 120-123.

Language in Egypt, 171

Equus, why not Latin for horse, 263

Esbekeyeh, 464

Esné, 287

Established Churches, 214

Ethiopians, connexion with Egypt, 33.

Why irreproachable, 162 (note)

Etruscans, possible origin of, 40, 44

Evil eye, 360-363

Exclusiveness, national, 312.

Abrogation of, 318

Exodus, date of, 474

Faioum, 105-116.

Remoteness of its reclamation, 105.

How reclaimed, 106-112.

Why crocodiles were worshipped in, 109

Fellah, his hard case, 22

Festivals, at Bubastis, 278.

At Sais, 279

Finns, possible origin of, 40, 44

Free trade and independence, 43

French policy in Egypt, 480

Fuel, how manufactured in Egypt, 407

Future life, Egyptian belief in, 35.

Whence derived, 182.

Basis of Egyptian civilization, 184.

Why not a doctrine of the Mosaic Dispensation, 193-243.

Why necessary for Christianity, 211-220.

Why Moses could not have taught it, 221.

Logical basis of the doctrine, 238.

Buddhist doctrine of, 240.

Jewish morality unsupported by, 240, 500

Gardening in Egypt, 414-416

Genesis, 1st Ch. of, 261-265

Geese, ancient and modern, 438

Germanicus at Thebes, 164-167, 502

Girl of Bethany, 47-49.

At Thebes, 172.

At Benihassan, 173

Goats, 434

Gods, materials from which ⸺ were made, 290

Granite, why used, 267

Greece compared with Egypt, 501.

What it achieved, 539

Greeks keep pigs in the East, 431, 432

Hareem, the atmosphere of the, 387

Harrow, my young friend late from, 47, 51, 87, 91

Harvests, Egypt has two, 15

Hebrew Scriptures not primarily historical, 81-84.

Their chronology, 81.

Why ⸺ have no doctrine of a future life, 193-243.

How to be interpreted, 257.

Right of interpretation, 259

Heliopolis, 117-123.

The Holy Family at, 117.

The University of Egypt, 119.

Obelisk of, 119

Herodotus upon the formation of Egypt, 3.

Mentions a register of risings of the Nile, 5.

His account of Lake Mœris explained, 110.

Of Egyptian colony in Colchis, 160.

What he says of Bubastis, 270.

Of the Egypt of Amasis, 277.

Of Necho’s circumnavigation, 274.

Of feasts of Bubastis and Sais, 278

Herod’s temple and palace, 246

Hippopotamus, 435

Hodge compared with Achmed, 396-401

Homer acquainted with the greatness of Thebes, 124.

Why ⸺ sends the gods to the irreproachable Ethiopians, 160-162.

Mentions the Island of Pharos, 453

Homœopathy, 364

Hophra, or Apries, 276

Horse, the, in Egypt, 426

Houriism, 381-388

Ideas make men and women, 385.

Change slowly, 519

Imagination, its relation to history and religion, 461

Immortality, how the working of society confirmed the idea of, 17.

How the river and the sun, 18.

How Christ brought it to light, 211-234.

Why mankind not immortal, 243 (note)

Insects in Egypt, 443

Instincts, moral sentiments are, 306.

What are ⸺, 308.

Egyptian study of, 310

Interpretation, historical method of, 257-265

Isaiah, why ⸺ anticipated a new earth, 243 (note)

Iseum, 280

Ismailia, 483

Israel compared with Egypt, 499.

What it achieved, 539

Israelites, who they were, 29.

Their ethnology, 199.

Not unimaginative, 204.

Their moral heroism, 241.

When ⸺ built Pithom and Ramses, 474

Jacob’s deception, 250

Japan, Egypt compared to, 42-44

Jerusalem, aspect of the city, 246.

Only a Bible word, 256.

Pilgrims at, 357.

Camels at, 419

Jesus Christ, the situation to which His teaching was addressed, 207.

What He taught, 210-220.

Argumentative position of, 216, 229.

Why He taught a future life, 229.

Why He impugned the doctrine of immediate judgments, 239.

His doctrine, in part, a protest, 509

Jews, a mixed people, 29, 199.

Moral heroism of, 241.

Why not proselytisers, 243 (note)

Jezebel’s last toilet, 338

Joseph, story of, 338

Josiah defeated by Necho, 276

Kagabu, 339

Karnak, 125-132.

Hypostyle hall of, 129

Kêf, 95

Koran, 345

Labour, why squandered on Pyramids and Temples, 57-63

Labourer, English, why held to labour all the year round, 399

Labyrinth, 114-116

Lamps, Feast of, 279

Landlordism Eg., 328-331

Language, morality compared to, 242

Laps, possible origin of, 40, 44

Law, Semitic idea of, 31.

Separation of Municipal from Religion, 212-216.

General laws the same as particular Providence, 235

Legislatures, Orientals have no, 347, 371

Letters, discovery of, 184.

Results, 185, 391

Liberty, Oriental systems extinguish, 372

Library of Rameses, 146.

Of Alexandria, 455

Light, Symbol of the Divine Spirit, 280

Literature, effects of, 390-392.

Alexandrian, 451

Livingstone, 2

London, a contemplation of, 506, 534

Luncheon at the Pyramids, 92-96

Luxor, 124

Luxury, Oriental, 383

Mad, are all Orientals, 341

Mandeville, his account of the Pyramids, 64-66

Marriages, Oriental, 338, 374.

Why early in the East, 378

Master-mind, the, 122

Medinet Haboo, 148

Memnon, 150

Mendes, 266

Metaphysical solutions of physical problems, 3

Metaphysics, Hebrew, 261.

Early, 232

Mississippi compared with the Amazon, 15

Modern societies, prospects of, 540

Mœris, Lake, 108.

Abundance of fish, 110.

Herodotus’ account of, 110

Mohamed, 66, 342

Mohamed Adamanhoury, 470

Money not known at date of the Pyramids, 58

Monogamists, early Egyptians were, 37.

Nature made us, 379

Monuments, why disappeared in the Delta, 266-289.

Why not in Upper Egypt, 285-289.

Rationale of, 290-298

Moral being is a growth, 253.

Moral sentiments instincts, 306-310.

Aims of society must be, 536

Morality not dependent on future life, 240.

How congenital, 242.

Grounds of, 242.

Progressive, 251.

What should be taught by the State, 524.

What by the Church, 532

Moses, his wife, 168.

Aim of his legislation, 201.

First historical protestant, 509

Mosks of Omar, 246.

Of Cairo, 464.

Of Ebn e’ Tooloon, 464.

Of Hassam, 465.

Of El Azar, 466

Mosquitoes, 443

Mounds of old cities, 404

Mouské, 461

Municipal religion when impossible, 227

Nature, how ⸺ affected the Egyptians, 12-20.

What it presented to the Egyptians, 16.

Variety of, 495.

Intelligence seen in, 496

Necho, extends the Canal to the Bitter Lakes, 273.

Circumnavigates Africa, 274.

His Asiatic campaign, 275.

Extends the Canal of Rameses, 477.

Necropolis of Pyramid era, 91-95.

Of Thebes, 133-143

Nile, how the, formed Egypt, 1-9.

Three colours of its water, 9.

Contrast of past and present value of its work, 10.

Facilities for up and down traffic, 14.

Important that it flows in the direction of latitude, 14

Norfolk Island Pine, 415

Obelisk of Heliopolis, 119.

Of Luxor, 125.

Of Alexandria, 281, 455.

Were books, 298

Omar destroys the library of Alexandria, 456.

Re-opens canal to Red Sea, 479

Orientals, are they mad? 341.

Intellectual inferiority of, accounted for, 343

Originality of the Egyptians, 153

Osiris, temple of, at Abydos, 101.

Mysteries of his sufferings, 271

Ositarsen, first name at Karnak, 130.

At Tanis, 267

Ox, the, 434

Palace of Westminster, what it suggests, 512, 514

Palm-trees, tax on, 23.

Character of, 110

Paradise, Hebrew, 205.

Mahomedan, 381

Parliament, history of the English, 513

Paul, St., what he taught, 220

Pearls, real, 121

Pelicans, 437

Persian invasion, 163

Petamenap, his tomb, 141

Pharos, 453

Philæ, Great Pyramid looks down on, 70.

Ride to, 421

Physical Geography, bearing of, on national history, 12

Pigeons in Egypt, 437

Pilgrimage, 355-358

Pilgrims, Greek and Latin, at Jerusalem, 357

Pithom, 473

Platte, resemblance of valley of, to Egypt, 4

Pointed Arch, 464

Polygamy, 374-380.

The polygamic region, 376

Population, Commerce supports, 245

Pork, why forbidden in the East, 433

Port Saïd, 482

Post-Pharaohnic temples, 285-289

Prayer, Oriental, what it is, 349.

Connexion of, with morality, 351.

Variation in its object, 352.

Repetitions in, 354.

Women not taught, 374

Printing-press, its use to the East, 392

Progress, in arts, 137.

In religion, 231.

In moral being, 253.

Historical progress, 325.

Ordained by God, 233.

Rendered possible by letters, 184, 392

Property, value of security for, 389.

Exists amongst animals, 429

Prophets, the Hebrew, have no doctrine of a future life, 194.

Anti-Egyptian policy of, 276.

Their hopefulness, 315.

Their self-devotion, 500

Protestant, the first, 509

Providence, identity of particular, and general laws, 235

Psalm, the 109th, 250

Psammetichus, 272

Ptolemy Philadelphus re-opens the canal to the Red Sea, 478

Pyramids, contemporary civilization implied by, 52-56.

Why labour was squandered on, 57-63.

Why so formed, 63-69.

Sir J. Mandeville’s account of, 64-67.

Inscriptions on the Great, 65.

Great Pyramid higher than the Cataract of Philæ, 70.

Ascent of Great Pyramid, 85-91.

Luncheon at, 92-96.

Necropolis of Pyramid era, 94-95

Railway, a mid-European, 492

Rameseum, 146

Rameses II. at Luxor and Karnak, 125.

His temple-palace, 145, 146.

His library, 146.

His great expedition, 154-163.

His inscription in Syria, 162.

Cut the Pithom-Ramses Canal, 473

Rameses III., his tomb, 135.

His temple-palace, 148

Ramses, city of, 473

Rationale of the monuments, 290-298

Register of Nile risings, 5, 114

Religion, Aryan character of that of Egypt, 27, 35.

Aim of that delivered by Moses, 201.

A municipal, when impossible, 227.

A chapter in its history, 231.

Same as truth, 237.

Its great _rôle_ in Egypt, 299.

Why it did not spread, 302.

Its aims moral, 303.

Why it fell, 320.

Reverts in Egypt to Theocracy, 321.

An organism of thought, 341.

A distinction between Christianity and Mahomedanism, 342.

What it is, 515.

Its aims, 532

Republicans, why Orientals are not, 370-373.

Conditions disposing them to be, 370

Ritualists, where those, get their ideas, 465

Rome compared with Egypt, 502.

What it achieved, 539

Rooks, 439

Sais, its temple, 271.

Connexion with the Greeks, 271.

Festival of, 279

Sakia, 446

Sandstone-buildings long-lived, 289

Saul’s sons hanged, 250

Scarabs, 177-181

Scene, the, in England, 495.

Must be associated with man, 496.

In Egypt, 498.

The chief ⸺ in England, 506

Science, Egyptian aptitude for, 37

Scotchman’s opinion of Heliopolis, 120

Sebennytus, 280

Secession of military caste, 273

Semites, their monotheistic tendency, 30.

Their view of law, 31.

Not unimaginative, 204

Semnéh, Nile registration at, 5

Serpent-charming, 340

Sesortosis not first dresser of stone, 72-81

Sethos, his hypostyle hall, 129.

His tomb, 134, 138.

His temple-palace, 147

Shadoof, 445

Sheep, 434

Shoes taken off in holy places, 338

Shops, Eastern, 263

Silsiléh, Cataract once at, 7

Slavery, its abolition not contemplated by the first Christians, 234

Sluices of Lake Mœris, 108.

At Suez, 477, 478

Solanum, a handsome one, 416

Solomon’s Pools and Aqueduct, 50.

Has no doctrine of a future life, 194

Sparrows, 437

State, relation of, to Church, 513.

Stops the usurpations of the Church, 519.

Does not see its own duty, 520.

Neglected national education, 521.

What it should teach, 523.

Why it should enforce moral training, 528.

The sphere of the, 528.

Its ability to give moral training, 529

Statue, wooden, at Boulak Museum, 72-74.

Of Chephren, 74

Stone, date of building with, 75-81.

Why large stones used in building, 293

Street, the Royal, at Thebes, 151

Suez, 477, 478, 484

Superstitions, Arab, 359-364.

The evil eye accounted for, 360-363

Sycamore, 117

Tablet of Abydos, 101

Tacitus’ account of Germanicus’ visit to Egypt, 165

Tamarisk, 412

Tanis, 267.

Hyksos at, 269.

Connexion with the Exodus, 269

Tax on palm-trees, 23

Temples fortresses, 286

Testament, relation of New to Old, 235

Thebes becomes the capital, 125.

Sources of its wealth, 130.

Necropolis of, 133-143.

Its temple-palaces, 144-153.

Grandeur, 151

Theology and religion, 67.

Not religion, 321.

Of Alexandria, 451

This. _See_ Abydos

Tombs, pictures and sculptures of, 134-142.

Why larger in Egypt than elsewhere, 296.

Of the Memlooks, 467

Transmigration of souls, 188

Travel, effects of Eastern, on belief, 244-256.

An aid to understanding the Scriptures, 249.

Affects different minds differently, 253

Trees in Egypt, 410-413

Truth identical with religion, 237

Turanians, Egyptians not, 41

Turtle, how treated, 441

Unclean, the, animal, 431

Unconformable stratification of Nile mud, 9

Upper Egypt in post-Pharaohnic times, 289

Veil, the, 338

Venice, 492

Vertebrate skeleton, belief in a future life the ⸺ of thought, 183

Vespasian’s excise on scouring, 367

View from citadel of Cairo, 460.

In London, 506

Villages, wretched houses in the, 405

Wagtail, 436

Wall-space for records, 290-298

Warburton’s Divine legation, 238

Water-jars, 402-404

Wells, suggestion for, in Egypt, 459

Westminster Abbey, what it suggests, 508, 511.

What palace of, suggests, 512, 514

Wheat, mummy, cultivated by early settlers in central Europe, 44

Wife, an unfaithful, drowned, 384

Wisdom of Egyptians, 299-321.

In what it consisted, 306.

What overthrew it, 320

Women, Oriental, why frail, 386.

Water-carriers, 402

Wood, want of, in Egypt, 405-409

Woollen, why Egyptian priests did not use, 367

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