Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/27

 in achieving a state of high civilisation. From a period the remoteness of which it is unsafe to conjecture there had been established in Egypt an elaborate and splendid empire which, though it had not escaped revolutions, had suffered none which had caused organic changes there. It had strength, wealth, power, coherence, a vigorous monarchy, dominant and exclusive castes of nobles and priests, and a proletariat of slaves. Its cities, temples, and monuments are still, in their ruin, the admiration of engineers and the despair of architects. Original intellectual conceptions inspired its public buildings. Saved by situation, like China, from the intrusion of barbarians, it developed at leisure its own ideas, undisturbed from without; and when it becomes historically visible to us it was in the zenith of its glory. The habits of the higher classes were elaborately luxurious, and the vanity and the self-indulgence of the few were made possible—as it is and always must be where vanity and self-indulgence exist—by the oppression and misery of the millions. You can see on the sides of the tombs—for their pride and their pomp followed them even in their graves—the effeminate patrician of the court of the Pharaohs reclining in his gilded gondola, the attendant eunuch waiting upon him with the goblet or plate of fruit, the bevies of languishing damsels fluttering round him in their transparent draperies. Shakespeare's Cleopatra might have sate for the portrait of the Potiphar's wife who tried the virtue of the son of Jacob: