“He has made all that is; thou alone art, the millions owe their being to thee; he is the Lord of all that which is, and of that which is not.”  A papyrus now in Paris, dating 2300 B.C., contains quotations from two much older records, one a writing of the time of King Suffern, about 3500 B.C., which says:  “The operation of God is a thing which cannot be understood.”  The other, from a writing of Ptah Hotep, about 3000 B.C., reads:  “This is the command of the God of creation, the peaceable may come and issue orders....  The eating of bread is in conformity with the ordinance of God; can one forget that his blessing rests thereupon?...  If thou art a prudent man teach thy son the love of God."[152]

Professor Ernest Naville, in speaking of this same subject in a course of popular lectures in Geneva, said:  “Listen now to a voice which has come forth actually from the recesses of the sepulchre:  it reaches us from ancient Egypt.

“In Egypt, as you know, the degradation of the religious idea was in popular practice complete.  But under the confused accents of superstition the science of our age is succeeding in catching from afar the vibrations of a sublime utterance.  In the coffins of a large number of mummies have been discovered rolls of papyrus containing a sacred text which is called ‘The Book of the Dead.’  Here is the translation of some fragments which appear to date from a very remote epoch.  It is God who speaks thus:  ’I am the Most Holy, the Creator of all that replenishes the earth, and of the earth itself, the habitation of mortals.  I am the Prince of the infinite ages.  I am the Great and Mighty God, the Most High, shining in the midst of the careering stars and of the armies which praise me above thy head....  It is I who chastise the evil-doers and the persecutors of Godly men.  I discover and confound the liars.  I am the all-seeing Avenger, ... the Guardian of my laws in the land of the righteous.’  These words are found mingled in the text, from which I extract them, with allusions to inferior deities; and it must be acknowledged that the translation of the ancient documents of Egypt is uncertain enough; still this uncertainty does not appear to extend to the general sense and bearing of the recent discoveries of our savans."[153]

Professor Flint as against Cudworth, Ebrard, Gladstone, and others, maintains that the Egyptian religion at the very dawn of its history had “certain great gods,” though he adds that “there were not so many as in later times.”  “Ancestor worship, but not so developed as in later times, and animal worship, but very little of it compared with later times.”  On the other hand, as against Professor Tiele, Miss Amelia B. Edwards, and others, he says:  “For the opinion that its lower elements were older than the higher there is not a particle of properly historical evidence, not a trace in the inscriptions of mere propitiation of ancestors or of belief in the absolute divinity of kings or animals; on the contrary ancestors are always found propitiated through prayer to some of the great gods; kings worshipped as emanations and images of the sun god and the divine animals adored as divine symbols and incarnations.”