74 
to be considered, as indeed they soon became, heretics, by the 
Western Church. As Sharpe has well observed, albeit I cannot 
agree with his conclusions, “ Of the Pagan nations best known 
to us, the Egyptians were the most real believers in a resur- 
rection from the dead, in a day of judgment, and in a future 
state of rewards and punishments : through these doctrines a 
wide door was opened for the entrance of Christianity. Having 
been polytheists, they readily received Jesus as a god in the place 
of some of their own ; and that He should have been put to death 
by His enemies could present no difficulties to their minds, as they 
had always been taught that their own god, Osiris, had died by 
an equally cruel death. A dying god was one of the great facts 
in their religious philosophy, and though they rejected their old 
gods, they could by no means so easily reject their old opinions. 
However, the despised Egyptians, on owning themselves Chris- 
tians, and submitting to baptism, were at once received as equals 
into the society of the Greek Christians ; they were raised, not 
legally, but socially, from slaves to be free men. That any of the 
Greeks, their masters, should take the trouble to preach to them, 
to persuade them, to try to win them over to their ow r n views of 
religion, was an honour which they had never before received, 
and as they owed it to Christianity, they cannot but have been 
led to look upon Christianity with favourable eyes.”* 
When I last read a paper before you upon Egyptian serpent- 
w r orship, I cited then an Egvpto-Gnostic gem, which I must again 
bring forward to-night ; it bears no inscription and it has no 
indication of its double character other than the attitude of the 
central figure : look at it. There is a youthful male figure 
standing upon the back of a crocodile, and holding a fish above 
his head, around which there is an halo. The general idea is 
the same as that of the Horus cippi which I have previously 
described, but there are sevei’al points of detail in which it differs 
from them. The Christian Horus stands upon one crocodile 
only, but which does not revert its head. Hence the Egyptian 
mystical symbolism is lost sight of. On the other hand, the 
human figure holds a fish, the well-known ideogram for the 
sentence, “Jesus Christ the Son of God,” and the other hand, 
which ought to hold a serpent or a sceptre, is left free ; in fact, 
both theologies are improperly symbolized, and yet there can be 
no question which it was the intention of the artist to repre- 
sent : it is a capital illustration of the incomplete fusion of the 
two faiths (fig. 4).f 
Another Gnostic gem, probably of a still later period, and 
which is engraved by Montfaucon, is an intaglio head of our 
* Page 90. f Serpent Myths of Ancient Egypt, fig. 126, p. 71. 
