296 
while the other inculcates the fear of God, and the obedience 
ol His commandments, as the whole {duty) of man. It would 
f, 0t b ® ea !7 t( ? fiud a m ore detailed code of moral observances 
than the Institutes of Manu (unless, iudeed, the Talmudic 
regulations of the Sephardim Jews may be supposed to afford 
a parallel) , but the result of such a religious system is the gross 
licentiousness of modern Sivaism. The proverbs of Pthah-hotep 
ie oldest proverbs in the world * * * § (having been written before the 
j m Abraham ), express the highest reverence for sacred things 
and the language of the Ritual of the Deadf has no equal except 
m the Psalms of David. Yet who will not glory in the life of 
the upright men, many of such as whom Christianity has pro- 
duced and is producing, rather than in the remote practical 
morality which was the outcome of the Egyptian faith ? And 
finally, for it is simply as a prelude to this issue that these 
reflections have been introduced, scarcely any human phrase- 
ology could be found to convey a nobler idea of deity than the 
vocative addresses of the Myth of Ra, echoing, as they 'almost do, 
the tones of the harp of the Hebrew prophets in a lower octave • 
and yet, as we proceed to examine the logic of that myth in 
detail, we shall find its most glowing epithets to convey merely 
abstract ideas and the issue of its divine ascriptions to be a 
metaphysical Pantheism, without life, and without the power 
to become vivified, or even to save itself from that religious 
deciepitude which ends in practical atheism. 
T !m Myth of Ra is, perhaps, one of the oldest component 
parts of the national mythology of the Egyptians, since some of 
ie earliest events in the mythical history of the countrv are 
connected with it. It commences and permeates the whole of the 
leology of the Ritual of the Bead, and it was one of the last 
principles of the ancient faith which became lost in the Grecian 
and Perso-Grecian philosophies. The deity Ra was himself a 
ero and a god. As a hero he was a monarch of Egypt and 
rmgned for a thousand years while as a god he was the father 
of the deities Shu and Tefnu,§ and, by personal hypostasis, of 
Etude stir Ie Papyrus 
* Chabas, Lc plus Ancien Livre du Monde 
Prisse, Revue Arche'ologique, 1857. 
wWch is “ IW F„Uh, 
+ Birch ,<hddeto the Egyptian Vestibule, Brit. Mus n 7 
§ -Pierret, Dicttonnaire ArcMologique, in loco. ’’ F 
