Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/34

8 very features as the most palpable illustrations of the folly or the diabolical madness of heathen creeds. Yet the unintelligible always wields a strong attraction for the religious mind, and the appeals of the early Christian apologists to reason alone would scarcely have annihilated all faith in Isis and Osiris even outside the Nile valley, where that belief was not supported by the national traditions of many thousand years. The fact that the Egyptians themselves were so utterly unable to reduce their religion to a reasonable system seemed the best proof of its mystic depth to the Romans of post-Christian times and may still impress some persons similarly. Even after the science of the history of religion had developed, scholars did not examine the religion of Egypt with sufficient impartiality, but constantly sought to overrate it. Of course, the modern student will scarcely be inclined to treat all absurdities as wonderful mystic depths and to place the Egyptian religion at the acme of all religious systems simply because of its many obscurities. Yet scholars have hesitated to treat its crudities as real and have often tried to find more hidden meaning in them than was seen by the Egyptians themselves, so that considerable time elapsed before science dared to examine the religious "wisdom of Egypt" critically and to treat it as what it really was a bequest of most primitive ages and in great part a remnant of the barbarism from which the Egyptians had gradually emerged.

The earliest Egyptologists dared not venture to explain the Egyptian religion, whose hieroglyphic texts they under stood only incompletely. The first decipherers, J. F. Champollion and Sir J. G. Wilkinson, did little more than collect the pictures of the gods. R. Lepsius made the first feeble attempts at the investigation of special chapters of the texts. The earlier school of French Egyptologists, J. J. Champollion-Figeac, E. de Rougé, and P. Pierret, sought to explain the religion of the Pharaohs as a kind of monotheism, drawing this inference, strangely enough, from such epithets