What was the inward essence of the religion?  Was it simple sun-worship—­the adoration of the visible material sun—­considered as the ruling and vivifying power in the universe, whence heat and light, and so life, proceeded?  Of all the forms of nature worship this was the most natural, and in the old world it was widely spread.  Men adored the orb of day as the grandest object which nature presented to them, as the great quickener of all things upon the earth, the cause of germination and growth, of fruitage and harvest, the dispenser to man of ten thousand blessings, the sustainer of his life and health and happiness.  With some the worship was purely and wholly material—­the sun was viewed as a huge mass of fiery matter, uninformed by any animate life, unintelligent, impersonal; but with others, sun-worship was something higher than this:  the orb of day was regarded as informed by a good, wise, bright, beneficent Spirit, which lived in it, and worked through it, and was the true benefactor of mankind and sustainer of life and of the universe.  Sun-worship of this latter kind was no mean form of natural religion.  If not purged from the debasing element of materialism, if not incompatible with a certain kind of polytheism, it is yet consistent with the firmest belief in the absolute supremacy of one God over all others, with the conception of that God as all-wise, all-powerful, pure, holy, kind, loving, and with the entire devotion of the worshipper to Him exclusively.  And this latter form of sun-worship was, quite conceivably, the religion of the “Disk worshippers.”  “Aten” is probably the same as “Adon,” the root of Adonis and Adonai, and has the signification of “Lord”—­a term implying personality, and when used specially of one Being, implying absolute mastery and lordship, an exclusive right to worship, homage, and devotion.  It is not unlikely that the “Disk-worshippers” were drawn on towards their monotheistic creed by the presence in Egypt at the time of a large monotheistic population, the descendants of Joseph and his brethren, who by this time had multiplied greatly, and must have attracted attention, from their numbers and from the peculiarity of their tenets.  A historian of Egypt remarks that “curious parallels might be drawn between the external forms of the worship of the Israelites in the desert and those set up by the Disk-worshippers at Tel-el-Amarna; portions of the sacred furniture, as the ‘table of shewbread,’ described in the Book of Exodus as placed within the Tabernacle, are repeated among the objects belonging to the worship of Aten, and do not occur among the representations of any other epoch.”  He further notes that the commencement of the persecution of the Israelites in Egypt coincides nearly with the downfall of the “Disk-worshippers” and the return of the Egyptians to their old creed, as if the captive race had been involved in the discredit and the odium which attached to Amenhotep and his immediate successors on account of their religious reformation.