The section of the pantheon that crumbled in the regard of the devoted Egyptians that hour was a broad and numerous company. No divinity of all the polytheistic company was very much more reverenced than Horus, the hawk-headed. He was called “the eye of Ra,” and was the god of the noontime sun. When the flaming heat of Ra was just overhead at the hour of midday, and when its light and heat were the most intense, Horus was in the ascendancy. When the deep darkness of the ninth plague hit the land, the hearts of the people were sick with fright. Believing that the sun was born anew every morning, and having an intense and well-thought-out system of deities connected with this rite, they must have thought that there had been wholesale slaughter and failure among the heavenly beings. But there still would smoulder in their deepest thinking, the dim hope that at noon the incomparable Horus would glow, as Ra was the omnipotent, and his _eye_ could not be dimmed. But not only did the noon pass in the same awful darkness, but two more noons followed each other in slow succession, and the feebleness of the once-revered Horus could no longer be doubted. So when they said, “Who is mightier than Horus?” the children of Israel could reply with grateful hearts, “Jehovah is; see, we have light in _our_ dwellings!” But like many other heathen and idolatrous people, the chief object of Egyptian worship was the sun itself. The natural mind can comprehend this, and there is a little of the Parsee in most modern men. So to the ancients the sun was a personification of beneficence and providence. The worship of the sun took many forms in Egypt, but the oldest and most general form of that worship was in the person of the god Ra, who appears in ancient records in many guises, and under many names. Perhaps the most common of these names is Amon-Ra. He was unquestionably the chief form of deity to the Egypt of Moses’ generation. [Illustration: Taueret] As far as it can be said that the Egyptians conceived of a god-principle, this was expressed in the person of Ra. He was the creator of earth and of heaven, and of all things therein. All other gods were parts of his person, and members of his body and substance. The pantheon was headed by Ra, and after him came the gods and goddesses who were parts of his body. One was his eye, another his ear, while still another was his foot. This quaint conception was carried out for every known section of the anatomy, which the Egyptians seemed to have known fairly well.