350 
and that the priests and wise men worshipped him esoterically. 
It may be found at length in the second volume of Records 
of the Past. The very same praises are paid to the river 
Nile in a hymn written in the nineteenth dynasty, in the time 
of Moses, or near it, translated by Canon Cook, and may be 
found in the fourth volume of the Records. The river is 
addressed by the names of Amen, and Ea, and Ptah. If one 
could forget that it was to be sung to a river, ho might imagine 
that Joseph had penned it to the honour of his father’s Cod. 
‘ ‘ He maketh his might a buckler. 
He is not graven in marble. 
As an image bearing the double crown 
He is not beheld. 
He hath neither ministrants nor offerings. 
He is not adored in Sanctuaries. 
His abode is not known. 
No shrine is found with painted figures.” 
This is noted as a relic of primeval monotheism. At first 
reading, it awakened my admiration, but I now cease to 
admire, and am gratified to find myself in accord with the 
learned translator, who, in the Transactions of the Society 
of Biblical Archaeology (ii. 365), truly says that it consists 
of little more than high-sounding epithets of the god, some 
of them containing allusions to mythological stories not very 
intelligible, and strung together without any obvious law of 
connection. In short, the cosmogony and the theosophy of 
Chaldea and of Egypt exactly agree in ascribing the birth 
of the gods to a sort of spontaneous generation from the 
water of the Great Deep. Many of us are familiar with the 
same notion, as repeated by Latin and Greek poets. W o have 
read it in the Theogony of Hesiod : — 
“ But chaos was first of all, then after chaos the wide-spread land, 
Firm dwelling for all the immortal gods” (1 1G-118). 
Here it was not the spirit of God moving on the face of the 
waters, where to complete the work of creation of heaven and 
earth previously begun, as the context in Genesis may imply ; 
or to revisit the emptiness and restore from the confusion a 
world once well ordered, but, like some ruined city, laid 
waste (compare the Hebrew text of Gen. i. 2, and Is. xxxiv. 
11) and without inhabitants. There was not in all those fig- 
ments any image of one eternal God and omnipotent Creator. 
Perhaps a more perfect exemplification of tho latent and re- 
sistless Pantheism of those mythologies cannot be found than 
in the celebrated Orphic hymn rendered as closely as possible 
