I need not remark that the idolatry of Egypt was universal. It ex- 
tended from the beetle to the crocodile, and covered almost every other 
intervening object. There certainly does not appear to be, at first sight, 
therefore, any probability that a religion like that of the Hebrews, which 
taught pure Monotheism and abjured idolatry, could have borrowed its 
sentiments from a source so diverse. If Hebrew theology did not copy the 
ideas of Egypt in that fundamental particular, it seems impossible, a priori, 
that it should have followed it in other particulars. There is a striking proof 
of this, I think, in the almost total absence from the Pentateuch of one 
great doctrine with which all Egyptian ideas were perfectly saturated — I 
mean the immortality of the soul. No one can read the Pentateuch without 
being forcibly impressed with the fact that it contains no reference whatever 
to a future life. All the sanctions given by Moses’s law to obedience were 
of a temporal nature. Every promise and threat was moulded into the 
shape of temporal rewards and punishments. The immortality of the soul 
and the sanctions which are derived from that doctrine do not appear at all 
in the Pentateuch. Bishop Warburton, as many no doubt will remember, 
published a large work on this subject, called “The Divine Legation of 
Moses.” We naturally ask, then, how it could be that He who made man 
and gave Moses a divine revelation, should have purposely omitted the 
doctrine of a future life, especially when the Egyptians were so well ac- 
quainted with it ? The reply is obvious. It was because the Egyptians had 
disfigured it and demoralized it by the hideous monstrosities of their Pantheon. 
It was on that account withheld from the Hebrews until they had been 
permanently emancipated from Egypt, lest it should tempt them to fall back 
into those idolatries with which it had been associated in former times. 
Here, however, is a strange phenomenon : for, while in Egypt, the Hebrews 
must have been familiar with immortality and a future life of joy or misery, 
yet, when Moses gave them God’s Law, it found no place in the revelation ! 
I ask, does that look as if Moses had borrowed his theology from the 
Egyptians ? On the contrary, does it not rather indicate a settled design 
to separate as far as possible from it ? 
In the next place, let me call your attention to a radical distinction which 
exists between the Scripture doctrine of a Redeemer from evil and this 
Egyptian Myth of Horus. No one can have carefully studied Mr. Cooper’s 
paper without feeling that, in some points, it does exhibit certain analogies 
between Horus and Christ. These, however, are just such as would naturally 
arise from the prolonged intermixture of truth and error in the transmitted 
recollections of primeval doctrine. At all events, the variation is as great 
as the analogy. Let me cite only one particular. You will find the Bible 
everywhere representing the Redeemer of men as a Being who was to come. 
In the Egyptian myth of Horus it is not so. This myth uniformly represents 
Horus as having trodden down the great Typhon and destroyed the evil 
spirit, and avenged his father Osiris before the creation of man. There 
is, therefore, so far, nothing of a parallel between them. Among the Egyptians 
