I have not been idle, I have not been drunk, I have not been cruel, I have not famished my family, I have not been a hypocrite, I have not defiled my conscience for the sake of my superiors, I have not smitten privily, I have lived on truth, I have made it my delight to do what men command and the gods approve, I have given bread to the hungry and drink to the thirsty and clothes to the naked, my mouth and hands are pure.’  Now what strikes one with great force in this remarkable passage from the walls of the old sand-covered tombs is the wonderful scope and fulness with which the laws of right and wrong were stamped upon the Egyptian conscience.  There is here a recognition, not only of the great evils which man shall not commit, but also of many of those positive duties which his moral nature requires.  It matters not that these words are wholly exculpatory; they nevertheless recognize sin.”

But perhaps no one has depicted man’s sense of guilt and fear more eloquently than Dean Stanley when speaking of the Egyptian Sphinx.  Proceeding upon the theory that that time-worn and mysterious relic is a couchant lion whose projecting paws were long since buried in the desert sands, and following the tradition that an altar once stood before that mighty embodiment of power, he graphically pictures the transient generations of men, in all the sin and weakness of their frail humanity, coming up with their offerings and their prayers “between the paws of deity.”  It is a grim spectacle, but it emphasizes the sense of human guilt.  Only the Revealed Word of God affords a complete and satisfactory explanation of the remarkable fact that the human race universally stand self-convicted of sin.

There is also a tribute to the truth of Christianity in certain traces of a conception of Divine sacrifice for sin found in some of the early religious faiths of men.  All are familiar with the difference between the offerings of Abel and those of Cain—­the former disclosing a faith in a higher expiation.  In like manner there appear mysterious references to a divine and vicarious sacrifice in the early Vedas of India.  In the Parusha Sukta of the Rig Veda occurs this passage:  “From him called Parusha was born Viraj, and from Viraj was Parusha produced, whom gods made their oblation.  With Parusha as a victim they performed a sacrifice.”  Manu says that Parusha, “the first man,” was called Brahma, and was produced by emanation from the “self-existent spirit.”  Brahma thus emanating, was “the first male,” or, as elsewhere called, “the born lord.”  By him the world was made.  The idea is brought out still more strikingly in one of the Brahmanas where the sacrifice is represented as voluntary and all availing.  “Surely,” says Sir Monier Williams, “in these mysterious allusions to the sacrifice of a representative man we may perceive traces of the original institution of sacrifice as a divinely appointed ordinance, typical of the one great offering of the Son of God for the sins of the