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eastern sky; the rejuvenated god steps into it, lesser gods attending. 
They hail him Horus Ra. The men of Thebes call him Amen Ra. He 
mounts aloft, and while he advances in dazzling majesty until he comes to 
the West again, he is addressed from hour to hour by various names, written 
in the Solar Litany, until, at night again, he is Osiris. On other accounts, 
and in various situations and relations, he has many names and epithets, and 
even mortals borrow names from him. Horus is one. But how Horus can be 
son of himself, it is not easy to imagine, yet the transformations of the Boole of 
the Bead, and its confusion of gods with men, and the whole maze of Egyptian 
mythology, seem just as unfathomable. Only by a rare union of industry 
and imagination could any one devise a resemblance of Horus to Him whom 
St. John declares to be the only-begotten of the Rather, full of Grace and Truth. 
Although I cannot regard this great solar God as a type of our Blessed 
Lord, I am nevertheless ready to believe that the Egyptians might sincerely 
honour him as an ideal Deliverer or an Avenger. No doubt they worshipped 
their gods in the sincerity of ignorance. They would be ready, in common 
with other men, to look for intercessors in heaven, or under the earth. They 
trusted for salvation, if trust it was, in the mere names of gods, especially 
Osiris, under which name every Egyptian was supposed to pass at last. And 
it is notable, as M. Lenormant shows, that the Accads and Chaldees did 
invocate one very gracious god whose office was to intercede with the other 
gods for sparing men from curses, or turning away their anger from the 
supplicants. Such a disposition in the very nature of man to seek help from 
some superior being, cannot but prepare the way in smitten consciences for 
the intelligence of One Mediator between God and man. This, however, is 
very different from any point of contact, or reason of resemblance, between 
Iiorus and Christ. 
And now I have but a few more words to say. If Horus was to the 
Egyptians the type of Christ, was that by Divine appointment ? Was Horus 
as much the type of mediation in Egypt as the lamb was type of atonement 
in Judea? Did it please God in merciful condescension that so it should be ? 
If Mr. Cooper thinks it did, for such an appointment might not be incon- 
ceivable, why did no good come of it to Egypt ? Why is it not found in their 
worship ? 
If the Horus myth represented a primeval revelation, and the fable and the 
sentiment originated with Him who is the only giver of revelation to mankind, 
why did He show so little favour to the religion and the gods of Egypt ? Why 
so terribly contend against their gods? And why might He not have raised 
a Pharaoh to shepherd His people in Egypt, as well as a Cyrus the Persian in 
Babylon ? 
But the resemblance elaborated so largely by Mr. Cooper may be made up 
of no more than casual and forced coincidences, in which case it fades as a 
shadow. Horus had no being, and the fancied analogy is nothing, and, 
contrasted with this nullity, is the sure foundation of historic fact in which 
Christianity is laid. 
Turn from Mr. Cooper’s hypothesis and his Horus myth to M. Volney’s 
