Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/168

 the immaterial part of man. We should be astonished at a person calling himself a Christian and yet denying the immateriality of the soul. Yet this belief was not always recognized by the defenders of Christianity as a true one. M. Guizot shows, in his sixth Lecture on the History of Civilization in France, that the earliest doctors of the Church were strongly impressed with the conviction of the material nature of the soul, and that it was only by slow degrees that the opposite opinion prevailed. God alone was thought to be immaterial by nature, and it was only as relative to gross matter that angels, spirits and souls were allowed to be called immaterial or corporal.

The disembodied personality of each individual was therefore supposed by the Egyptians to be provided with a material form and substance. The soul had a body of its own, and could eat and drink. We are unfortunately prevented, through want of materials, from accurately determining the relation between a man's soul and his ka. His shadow was also considered an important part of his personality, and was restored to him in the second life. The Book of the Dead treats the shadows as something substantial.

We shall not be surprised to find the belief in apparitions of the dead. There is a letter in one of the papyri of the Museum of Leyden in which a man