In different parts of Egypt different animals were held sacred.  The animal sacred in one place was not so regarded in another district.  These sacred animals were embalmed by the priests and buried, and the mummies of dogs, wolves, birds, and crocodiles are found by thousands in the tombs.  The origin and motive of this worship is differently explained.  It is certain that animals were not worshipped in the same way as the great gods, but were held sacred and treated with reverence as containing a divine element.  So, in the East, an insane person is accounted sacred, but is not worshipped.  So the Roman Catholics distinguish between Dulia and Latria, between the worship of gods and reverence of saints.  So, too, Protestants consider the Bible a holy book and the Sabbath a holy day, but without worshipping them.  It is only just to make a similar distinction on behalf of the Egyptians.  The motives usually assigned for this worship—­motives of utility—­seem no adequate explanation.  “The Egyptians,” says Wilkinson, “may have deified some animals to insure their preservation, some to prevent their unwholesome meat being used as food.”  But no religion was ever established in this way.  Man does not worship from utilitarian considerations, but from an instinct of reverence.  It is possible, indeed, that such a reverential instinct may have been awakened towards certain animals, by seeing their vast importance arising from their special instincts and faculties.  The cow and the ox, the dog, the ibis, and the cat, may thus have appeared to the Egyptians, from their indispensable utility, to be endowed with supernatural gifts.  But this feeling itself must have had its root in a yet deeper tendency of the Egyptian mind.  They reverenced the mysterious manifestation of God in all outward nature.  No one can look at an animal, before custom blinds our sense of strangeness, without a feeling of wonder at the law of instinct, and the special, distinct peculiarity which belongs to it.  Every variety of animals is a manifestation of a divine thought, and yet a thought hinted rather than expressed.  Each must mean something, must symbolize something.  But what does it mean? what does it symbolize?  Continually we seem just on the point of penetrating the secret; we almost touch the explanation, but are baffled.  A dog, a cat, a snake, a crocodile, a spider,—­what does each mean? why were they made? why this infinite variety of form, color, faculty, character?  Animals thus in their unconscious being, as expressions of God’s thoughts, are mysteries, and divine mysteries.[170]

Now every part of the religion of Egypt shows how much they were attracted toward variety, toward nature, toward the outward manifestations of the Divine Spirit.  These tendencies reached their utmost point in their reverence for animal life.  The shallow Romans, who reverenced only themselves, and the Greeks, who worshipped nothing but human nature more or less idealized, laughed at this Egyptian worship