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that even when the god is most visible to mankind by his 
merciful dispensation, yet his form and likeness are wholly 
unknown, is worthy of an Old Testament prophet or a 
New Testament saint ; between the gods rejoicing in the 
triumphs of Ra Harmachis, and the sons of God shouting 
for joy at the creation of the world, according to the exqui- 
site passage in Job, there is much in unison. Especially 
deserving of notice is the circumstance that this hymn dwells 
with reiterating fondness on the theme of the love of the 
deity, and applies, if the translation of Lusliington is to be 
wholly trusted, the epithet of “ blessed ” to Ra, an epithet that 
would be ridiculously blasphemous if applied to Zeus, Diespiter, 
or Wodin. It was due to this exquisitely human sentiment in 
the worship of Ra that, together with the belief in Horus-Nets, 
the deliverer and redeemer, it survived nearly all those dynastic 
changes of Egyptian history which were so fatal to the worship 
of the local and Triadic divinities. The contest between good 
and evil, the apparent success of sin, the uncertainty attending 
the results of a life of virtue, were problems patent to all, and 
which defied the utmost energies of an uninspired philosophy to 
explain them away or to reconcile their existence with the 
government of an overruling and omnipotent spirit of good. As 
in many cases their premises were mere hypothetical assumptions, 
it followed that the arguments and expedients to which the 
priests had recourse to explain these mysteries were in them- 
selves illogical, and they were confuted by the more analytical 
reasoning of the infidel philosophers of Greece and Rome. But 
the yearning after a god, and still more a personal god, is 
ineradicable, and like a belief in the future state and the im- 
mortality of the soul, it is almost a psychical principle in the 
constitution of men. Judged as a whole, even to the eye 
of unassisted reason, the works of God are great, perfect, 
and beautiful, and He doeth them that men may fear Him, 
for Ci The generations of the world were healthful, and there 
is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death 
upon the earth, for righteousness is immortal.”* The idea 
of an eternal, self-created, incircumscribable t Being, without 
body, parts, or passions, J was too abstract a conception for 
mankind to grapple with ; but a god who was our father, and 
* Wisdom i. 14-15. . 
f It need hardly be remarked that this is the real meaning of the term 
ncomprehensible in the ninth verse of the Athanasian Creed. 
J 1st Article, C. of E. 
z 2 
