67 
the Holy Spirit, and whereby the souls of men are led, as 
Longfellow beautifully writes, to prove that — 
“ There are longings, yearnings, strivings, 
For the good they comprehend not, 
That the feeble hands and helpless, 
Groping blindly in the darkness, 
Touch God’s right hand in that darkness, 
And are lifted up and strengthened.”* 
Before I proceed to show how these Homs myths have 
influenced Christian thought, and in what way, I propose that 
the Christian should regard them as evidences for the truth ; 
ay, and more than the truth, the superiority and perfect 
fitness of that religion which philosophical scepticism would 
fain sneer us out of, — there are two other incidental charac- 
teristics belonging to the office of Horus, two characteristics 
not sufficiently distinct to be classified by themselves, as they 
are, in a manner, outgrowths of the preceding, and which yet 
must not be entirely overlooked in our examination of the mul- 
tifold divinity of Homs Ra. These two are Har-Hut, or 
Horus the good spirit, and Horus An-Mautef, or Horus 
the husband of his mother ; in other words, Horus the pro- 
ducer of the physical germ of life, a subject upon which there is 
little to be said, and that little must be still more briefly related. 
Both of these attributes, or minor deifications, are in the Ritual 
and Magical texts merged into the three greater hypostases. 
Since the Egyptian mythology resolved all material objects 
into one great whole, which was held together by an all-wise, 
all-pervading spirit, and since they regarded that all- wise and 
all-pervading spirit to be one and the same in its essence as 
the great soul itself, it was also natural to consider Horus in 
his character of the spirit of his father, as being also the spirit 
of all things and the preserver of the universe. In that attri- 
bute, therefore, they symbolized the Deity as a winged disk, the 
Agathodsemon of the Greek writers, furnished with wings to 
imply protection, and having dependent from it the sacred 
basilisks bearing the emblems of life and power. This was the 
mysterious figure which hovered over the entrance of every 
temple doorway, and which formed the finish of every funereal 
stele ; sometimes, though but very rarely, in lieu of the solar disk 
the Deity was represented with a human head, and occasionally 
in the solar orb was sculptured the life-creating eye of the 
divinity, an emblem which, however, was more usually placed 
below the wings, but immediately above the vignette which 
* Song of Hiawatha, canto I. 
v 2 
