Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/20

Rh have but to remember the accounts of the Jewish religion and of its history which have been left us by heathen writers, and the judgments which the most enlightened of these writers passed upon Christianity in the earliest and purest days of its existence. Christianity was not only considered as an exitiabilis superstitio, but was popularly supposed to involve the worship of a brute animal. Do you think the prejudices of men holding such opinions would have been weakened had they accidentally heard of "the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world," or read in the Apocalypse of the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes who is the Lord of lords and King of kings, and represented as receiving the worship of the four beasts, the four-and-twenty elders, and innumerable angels?

A Roman soldier, according to the historian Diodoros, incurred the furious wrath of an Egyptian village by the slaughter of a cat. But the fury of a Mohammedan population may at this day be aroused by an attack upon its wild dogs; and there are, or till very