of an anthropomorphic divinity, the life of whom in this world and in the world beyond this was typical of the ideal life of man [Footnote:  Le Livre dei Moris (Review in Museon, Tom. xiii. 1893).]—­this last divinity being, of course, Osiris.  But here again, as Dr. Wiedemann says, it is an unfortunate fact that all the texts which we possess are, in respect of the period of the origin of the Egyptian religion, comparatively late, and therefore in them we find these three elements mixed together, along with a number of foreign matters, in such a way as to make it impossible to discover which of them is the oldest.  No better example can be given of the loose way in which different ideas about a god and God are mingled in the same text than the “Negative Confession” in the hundred and twenty-fifth chapter of the Book of the Dead.  Here, in the oldest copies of the passages known, the deceased says, “I have not cursed God” (1. 38), and a few lines after (1. 42) he adds, “I have not thought scorn of the god living in my city.”  It seems that here we have indicated two different layers of belief, and that the older is represented by the allusion to the “god of the city,” in which case it would go back to the time when the Egyptian lived in a very primitive fashion.  If we assume that God (who is mentioned in line 38) is Osiris, it does not do away with the fact that he was regarded as a being entirely different from the “god of the city” and that he was of sufficient importance to have one line of the “Confession” devoted to him.  The Egyptian saw no incongruity in setting references to the “gods” side by side with allusions to a god whom we cannot help identifying with the Supreme Being and the Creator of the world; his ideas and beliefs have, in consequence, been sadly misrepresented, and by certain writers he has been made an object of ridicule.  What, for example, could be a more foolish description of Egyptian worship than the following?  “Who knows not, O Volusius of Bithynia, the sort of monsters Egypt, in her infatuation, worships.  One part venerates the crocodile; another trembles before an ibis gorged with serpents.  The image of a sacred monkey glitters in gold, where the magic chords sound from Memnon broken in half, and ancient Thebes lies buried in ruins, with her hundred gates.  In one place they venerate sea-fish, in another river-fish; there, whole towns worship a dog:  no one Diana.  It is an impious act to violate or break with the teeth a leek or an onion.  O holy nations! whose gods grow for them in their gardens!  Every table abstains from animals that have wool:  it is a crime there to kill a kid.  But human flesh is lawful food.”

[Footnote:  Juvenal, Satire XV. (Evans’ translation in Bohn’s Series, p. 180).  Led astray by Juvenal, our own good George Herbert (Church Militant) wrote:—­