10 CEREMONIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



in- their creed, Oviedo, eliciting the fact that they confessed 

 their sins to an appointed old man, asks what sort of sins 

 thev confessed; and the iirst clause of the answer is &quot; we 

 tell him when we have broken our festivals and not kept 

 them. Similarly among the Peruvians, tk the most nota 

 ble sin was neglect in the service of the huacas &quot; [spirits, 

 cvc. ] ; and a large part of life was spent by them in pro 

 pitiating 1 the apotheosized dead. How elaborate the observ 

 ances, how frequent the festivals, how lavish the expendi 

 ture, by which the ancient Egyptians sought the goodwill of 

 supernatural beings, the records everywhere prove; and 

 that with them religious duty consisted in thus ministering 

 to the desires of ancestral ghosts, deified in various degrees, 

 is shown by the before-quoted prayer of Rameses to his 

 father Ammon, in which he claims his help in battle because 

 of the many bulls he has sacrificed to him. With the He 

 brews in prc-]Mosaic times it was the same. As Kuenen re 

 marks, the &quot; great work and enduring merit &quot; of Moses, was 

 that he gave dominance to the moral element in religion. 

 In his reformed creed, &quot; Jahveh is distinguished from the 

 rest of the gods in this, that he will be served, not merely by 

 sacrifices and feasts, but also, nay, in the first place, by the 

 observance of the moral commandments.&quot; That the piety of 

 the (I reeks included diligent performance of rites at tombs, 

 and that the Greek god was especially angered by non-ob 

 servance of propitiatory ceremonies, are familiar facts; and 

 credit wiih a god was claimed by the Trojan, as by the 

 Egyptian, not on account of rectitude, but on account of ob 

 lations made; as is shown by Chryses prayer to Apollo. 

 So too, Christianity, originally a renewed development of 

 the ethical element at the expense of the ceremonial element, 

 losing as it spread those early traits which distinguished it 

 from lower creeds, displayed in mediaeval Europe, a relative 

 ly large amount of ceremony and a relatively small amount 

 of morality. In the &quot;Rule of St. Benedict, nine chapters 

 concern the moral and general duties of the brothers, while 



