Believing then in a future state, where sin would be punished and virtue rewarded, and believing in it firmly and piously, the ancient Egyptians were a peaceful and comparatively moral people.  All writers admit their industry, their simplicity of life, their respect for law, their loyalty to priests and rulers.  Hence there was permanence to their institutions, for rapine, violence, and revolution were rare.  They were not warlike, although often engaged in war by the command of ambitious kings.  Generally the policy of their government was conservative and pacific.  Military ambition and thirst for foreign conquest were not the peculiar sins of Egyptian kings; they sought rather to develop national industries and resources.  The occupation of the people was in agriculture and the useful arts, which last they carried to considerable perfection, especially in the working of metals, textile fabrics, and ornamental jewelry.  Their grand monuments were not triumphal arches, but temples and mausoleums.  Even the pyramids may have been built to preserve the bodies of kings until the soul should be acquitted or condemned, and therefore more religious in their uses than as mere emblems of pride and power; and when monuments were erected to perpetuate the fame of princes, their supreme design was to receive the engraven memorials of the virtuous deeds of kings as fathers of the people.

The priests, whose business it was to perform religious rites and ceremonies to the various gods of the Egyptians, were extremely numerous.  They held the highest social rank, and were exempt from taxes.  They were clothed in white linen, which was kept scrupulously clean.  They washed their whole bodies twice a day; they shaved the head, and wore no beard.  They practised circumcision, which rite was of extreme antiquity, existing in Egypt two thousand four hundred years before Christ, and at least four hundred years before Abraham, and has been found among primitive peoples all over the world.  They did not make a show of sanctity, nor were they ascetic like the Brahmans.  They were married, and were allowed to drink wine and to eat meat, but not fish nor beans, which disturbed digestion.  The son of a priest was generally a priest also.  There were grades of rank among the priesthood; but not more so than in the Roman Catholic Church.  The high-priest was a great dignitary, and generally belonged to the royal family.  The king himself was a priest.

The Egyptian ritual of worship was the most complicated of all rituals, and their literature and philosophy were only branches of theology.  “Religious observances,” says Freeman Clarke, “were so numerous and so imperative that the most common labors of daily life could not be performed without a perpetual reference to some priestly regulation.”  There were more religious festivals than among any other ancient nation.  The land was covered with temples; and every temple consecrated to a single divinity, to whom some animal was sacred, supported a large body of priests.  The authorities on Egyptian history, especially Wilkinson, speak highly, on the whole, of the morals of the priesthood, and of their arduous and gloomy life of superintending ceremonies, sacrifices, processions, and funerals.  Their life was so full of minute duties and restrictions that they rarely appeared in public, and their aspect as well as influence was austere and sacerdotal.