BOOK NOTICES, 639 
Discussing the priority of religions, he urges that faith in a primeval paradise, 
either terrestrial or celestial, or both, has been the universal heritage of man, 
recording itself not merely in uncial manuscripts, but in letters of stone and 
earth, big as pyramids and mountains, and perpetuated in arbitrary emblems and 
rites and sacrificial ceremonies, from age to age, among peoples the widest apart 
in locality, lineage and language; claiming, finally, that of all paradisaic legends, 
that of Moses is simplest, purest, most in accordance with good taste and most 
readily yields a consistent and lofty spiritual meaning under the application of the 
simple laws of analogy. It must be, therefore, presumptively the true one and 
studied with reverence as throwing light upon the mysterious question of the past 
history of the spiritual universe. 
In the body of the book are taken up and analyzed successively the Garden 
of Eden as an emblematic whole, the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge, the 
First Adam, the Second Adam, the Serpent, the Attack, the Examination, the- 
Sentence on the Serpent, the Sentence on Man and Woman, etc.; closing with 
the Eden Tabernacle, the Cherubim, the Four Rivers, Comparative Theology. 
It is a remarkably suggestive book and will be a world of consolation to doubting 
Christians and a source of gratification and pleasure to all scholarly readers. 
THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT Ecypr. By P. Le Page Renouf: 12mo. pp. 270: 
Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1880. $1.50. 
This work is made up of the Hibbert series of lectures for 1879, and is an 
account of the origin and growth of religion, as illustrated by the religion of 
ancient Egypt. The six lectures are on the following topics, viz: ‘‘The Sources 
of Information respecting the Ancient Egyptian Religion,” ‘‘ The Antiquity and 
Characteristics of Egyptian Civilization,” ‘‘The Gods of Egypt,” ‘‘Communion 
with the Unseen World,” ‘‘ The Religious Books of Egypt,” ‘‘ Henotheism, Pan- 
theism and Materialism ;” and no one can read them without being convinced 
that their distinguished author has given a vast amount of personal observation 
and study to the subject and has drawn conclusions that must be acceptable to 
the majority of thinkers. 
Beginning with the ancient heathen writers, he traces the religious beliefs of 
the Egyptians, through the hieroglyphic writings as deciphered and translated by 
Champollion and his successors, the monuments of the Rameses, the tablets of 
Abydos and SaqAra, the transcriptions of Manetho, and the moral code of Ameni. 
The conclusion seems to be that the religion of Egypt was not from the first 
the mere worship of brutes which strangers imagined it to be from its practices in 
the days of its decline; the worship of animals being a consequence only and not 
a foundation principle. The elements of it were a sense of the infinite and 
eternal, holy and good, governing the world, and upon which we are dependent 
—of right and wrong, holiness and virtue, immortality and retribution. 
The author fails to find the impress of Egyptian influences upon Hebrew 
