CORRUPT DEVELOPMENTS. marks a new
development
religious
in
125
the
annals of
Egypt."
The custom
of preserving the
abundant use of amulets, the
body
as a
mummy,
the
identification of the deceased
the deposit of portions of the ritual, and engraving them on the stone sarcophagus which contained the coffin, the continual offerings of food to the dead, and
with
Osiris,
of
recital
prayers
their
for
happiness,
were
all
long
established.
There was a strange intermixture of revealed truths and "We have abundant wanderings of the imagination. on the monuments of that (twelfth) dynasty," writes Canon Cook, which agree with the intimations of notices
i
Speaker s Comm., I., p. 45.
VoL
"
proving, on the one hand, that the forms of wor ship were purely Egyptian; and, on the other hand, that the fundamental principles which underlie those forms, and
Genesis
;
which belong, as we may not doubt, to the primeval religion of humanity, were still distinctly recognised, although they were blended with speculation and superstitious errors they were moreover associated with a system which, on many essential points, inculcated a sound, and even delicate,
:
morality."
The
And
in a note the
same learned author adds
:
known
text of the seventeenth chapter of the Ritual belongs to the eleventh dynasty. It undoubtedly "
earliest
indicates the previous existence of a pure monotheism, of
which
it
retains the great principles, the unity, eternity,
and
unknown
Each age witnessed Deity. some corruption and amplification of the ancient religion, and corresponding interpolations of the old texts. The self-existence of the
very earliest has several glosses, and the text taken apart from them approaches very nearly to the truth as revealed in the Bible." M. Lefebure gives a curious specimen of development. He mentions a theory "that the heavenly .
a Melanges Eg., Vol.