tions in the first three centuries of our era, and has been overlaid 
with a mass of pseudo-science and philology by the sceptical 
writers of the earlier part of this. There are, I take it, then, in 
all religions, and notably in the oldest, certain fundamental truths 
which were derived from a primeval revelation, — fundamental 
truths which have in some theologies been neglected, in others 
lost sight of, in a third misunderstood, and in a fourth perverted 
and corrupted. In the depths of His infinite mercy, we are 
told, that the Supreme Being left not Himself without witness 
in the world,* — such a witness, for example, as is afforded by the 
science of natural theology, — and He revealed to the earlier 
civilizers of mankind certain salvatory truths, the full elucida- 
tion of which He reserved for the ages to come. Hence it 
follows, that as in all ages there were those to whom He was 
pleased to reveal Himself and to teach His word, there must 
always have existed among the traditions of the human race the 
remembrance of those elementary doctrines which were derived 
*i 
from what was really the pre-patriarchal church ; but hence, 
also, it by no means as necessarily follows that those traditions 
should be based upon a revelation made known only to the 
Jews as the descendants of Abraham, since, if we were to require 
such a postulate, we should have to deduce our arguments from 
creeds which arose among nations having had subsequent contact 
with the Jews ; and that position in the case of the ancient 
Egyptians would be utterly untenable ; rather, instead, would I 
base my argument upon this hypothesis therefore, that long prior 
to the time of Abraham the cardinal dogmas of the Church 
were known to the nations of the world, and that it was reserved 
to the Father of the faithful and his descendants to hold and to 
transmit to us the whole of those dogmas in their integrity ; 
but that even to the Jews themselves the full import of their own 
articles of faith was not fully known, while isolated doctrines, 
which were held in common by them and by other nations, were 
expanded to a degree which the patriarchs never understood, 
and which in some points anticipated, so far as these expan- 
sions arose from the conscious yearnings of the soul after God. 
the tenets of Christian revelation. Ho not, I pray you, think, 
me tedious in these prefatory remarks, for, singular as some of 
the Egyptian doctrines are, which I shall presently examine, 
they were all held in the land of the Pharaohs centuries before 
the call of Abraham or the birth of Moses. Place the period ot 
Abraham where you may, that of the Xilth Egyptian Dynasty 
must precede it; the arrival of Jacob and his family cannot 
have been earlier than the XVIIIth, and the expulsion of the 
