Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/131

 expression dear to the religious schools of ancient Egypt, "he creates his own members, which are themselves gods."

How should the science of comparative religion class this form of faith? Should it be called polytheism or pantheism? The answer is, perhaps, not of great importance, and this is hardly the place for its discussion. It is certain that, practically, the Egyptians were polytheists. The Egyptian priests, indeed, had, by dint of long reflection, arrived at the comprehension, or at least at the contemplation, of that First Cause which had started the river of life—that inexhaustible stream of which the Nile with its fertilising waves was the concrete image—in its long journey across time and space. But the devotion of the people themselves never succeeded in mounting above the minor divinities, above those intermediaries in whom the divine principle and attributes became personified and put on the tangibility of body necessary to make them intelligible to childish understandings. So, too, was it with artists, and for still more powerful reasons; as by forms only could they express the ideas which they had conceived. Even in those religions which are most clearly and openly monotheistic and spiritual, such as Christianity, art has done something of the same kind. Aided in secret by one of the most powerful instincts of the human soul, it has succeeded, in spite of all resistance and protestation, in giving plastic expression to those parts of our belief which seem least fitted for such treatment; and it has caused those methods of expression to be so accepted by us that we see nothing unnatural in the representation under the features of an old man, of the first Person of the Trinity,—of that Jehovah who, in the Old Testament, proscribed all graven images with such impartial rigour; who, in the Evangel, described Himself as "the Truth and the Life."

In Egypt, both sculptors and painters could multiply their images to infinity without coming into collision with dogma, without provoking the regrets or censures of its most severe interpreters. Doctrine did not condemn these personifications, even when it had been refined and elaborated by the speculative