71 
Such, therefore, was the character, the office, and the 
filiation of the great benevolent deity of the Egyptians — 
of Horns, Only-begotten son of his Father, the God of God, the 
Anointed and the Deliverer. All the Egyptian literature bore 
testimony to him, all Egyptian life and art was moulded by his 
influence. Unlike the Hindu Khrishna, no puerile miracles or 
eccentric acts rendered his power ridiculous. No obscene lasci- 
viousness or violent passions made his divinity disreputable, or 
degraded his human character, ever obedient to the will of his 
father, ever energetic in the welfare of others, ever unswerv- 
ingly the antagonist of evil, ever triumphantly the vicarious 
redeemer and justifier of the righteous souls. Mysterious in 
his origin, noble in his performances, and eternally God in his 
future, such was II or us, rightly enough conceived by the 
Egyptians as the beloved of his father and the eternal Word. 
Contrasted even with the holy Saddarthra of Budhistic faith, 
his was no life of passive sanctity or apathetic self-control. 
Viewed in comparison with the fraudulent Cyllenius * of the 
Greek poets, how vast is the difference, and how splendid is 
the contrast. One deity and one alone surpasses him, and of 
him was Horus the highest type of unrevealed religion, and 
that one is the true Messiah and the Word of God, the only true 
Redeemer and the Prince of Peace. Beyond a certain point of 
contact with Christ and Horus, all real parallel fails, but that is 
solely because a special divinity hedged around the tenets of 
our faith, and preserved almost uncorrupted the books wherein 
those tenets were contained for us, who are the heirs of the ages 
in the latter days.f We cannot deny, and we must not ignore, 
the facts of Egyptian mythology, we must not be unduly 
alarmed ; and, still more, we must not be unwisely eager to 
explain them ; it is ours to wait and hope, to adore the mercy 
of that great Being, the common father of all mankind alike, 
who saved at all times certain great truths from oblivion, by 
the mercy of a transmitted tradition, and who has reserved for 
us the transcendant glories of a better and a perfect revelation. 
“ Before Abraham was I am, ;, J said our blessed Lord; and before 
Terah and Heber were born was there a patriarchal church, 
whose ruined but still beautiful stones we may now discover 
even in the debris of an Egyptian temple. Let us preserve 
those archaic fragments of divinity with reverent care, let us 
clear away the rubbish, let us bring their surfaces once again 
to light, and make even their scattered remnants strengthen 
the foundation of the Church of God. It is your province, 
as members of this Institute, founded for the elucidation of 
* See Homer’s Hymn to Mercury. Translated by Hole, 1310. 
f Rom. iii. 2. J J ohn viii. 58. 
