242 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



And now, bishop with lawn sleeves and gemmed 

 fingers, when you bury your face within those hands in 

 pious meditation, know that you are acting a lie of the 

 most pernicious character, and one which is producing 

 the greatest amount of human misery. And this 

 conventional lie of our civilization is the basis of 

 the structure of our social, political, and inter- 

 national institutions ! l And this lie is the product 



" The elevated moral code of the Todtenbuch is another proof of the 

 great antiquity of Egyptian civilization. Morality is a plant of slow 

 growth which has hardly an existence among rude and primitive 

 tribes, and is only slowly evolved either by contact with superior 

 races or by long ages of settled social order. How many centuries 

 did it take before the crude and ferocious ideas of the Hebrew tribes 

 wandering in the desert or warring with the Canaanites, Avere trans- 

 formed into the lofty and humane conceptions of the later prophets, 

 of Hillel and of Jesus ! And yet we find all the best maxims of this 

 later morality already existing 5000 years before the Sermon on the 

 Mount, in the Sacred Book of ancient Egypt. The prayer of the 

 soul pleading in the day of judgment before Osiris and the Celestial 

 Jury, which embodies the idea of moral perfection entertained by the 

 contemporaries of Menes, contains the following articles * I have 

 told no lies ; committed no frauds ; been good to widows ; not over- 

 tasked servants ; not lazy or negligent ; done nothing hateful to the 

 gods ; been kind to slaves ; promoted no strife ; caused no one to 

 weep ; committed no murder ; stolen no offerings to the dead ; made 

 no fraudulent gains ; seized no lands wrongfully ; not tampered 

 with weights and measures ; not taken the milk from sucklings ; 

 not molested sacred beasts or birds ; not cut off or monopolized 

 water-courses ; have sown joy and not sorrow ; have given food 

 to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothed the naked : I 

 am pure, I am pure.' " ("Human Origins," S. Laing, 1895, 

 p. 120.) 



How many of us, in the nineteenth century, can put our hands 

 to our breasts, bow the head and say, " I am pure, I am 

 pure " ? 



1 See Max Jordan's " Conventional Lies of our Civilization." 



