If the question be asked—Why we do ourselves believe in a future life?—the answer is—That we believe in it for the same reason that Homer and Virgil, Cheops and Darius, Porus, Arminius, and Galgacus believed in it—that is to say, because our remote, but common ancestors, had passed out of the state in which thought is chaos, and had reached the state in which thought has begun to organize itself; and because the vertebral column of the form in which it had with them begun to organize itself was belief in a future state. None of all of us, whether dwellers on the banks of the Ganges, the Thames, or the Nile, could any more get rid of, or dispense with, or act independently of, that formative column of thought, than our animal constitution could of its formative column of bone. Belief in God, in moral distinctions, in personal responsibility, in the supremacy of intelligence—that is to say, that it is intelligence which orders, and co-ordinates God, the universe, and man, would all be powerless and unmeaning, were it not for this belief in a future life. These, and others beliefs may feed and support it; but it acts in, and through them, and gives them their chief value. It puts man in permanent relation with God, and the universe. Hitherto with us nothing else has done this. Without it these other beliefs would have been mere chaotic elements of thought. We must see this in order that we may understand the life, the mind, and even the arts of the ancient Egyptians. Nothing about them is intelligible if their belief in a future life is lost sight of; for this it was that made them what they were, and enabled them to do what they did. The connexion with it of their greatest achievement is close and evident. As an instrument of human progress, language, of course, takes precedence of everything. Nothing would be possible without it. But, if man had stopped short at the acquisition of language, not much would have been gained. Something more was needed, and that something was the art of writing, which is that extension of the uses of language, without which no serviceable amount of knowledge could have been attained, or retained. Without this little could have been done. With it everything became possible. The further we advance by its aid, the longer, and the broader, and the more glorious are the vistas that open before us. Now, of this we are certain, that the ancient Egyptians discovered this art. The idea of the possibility of speaking words to the mind through the eye, and rendering thought fixed, and permanent, and portable, and transmissible from generation to generation, of committing it, not to the air, but to stone, or, still better, to paper, first occurred to the Egyptians. And they were the first to give effect to the idea, which they did in their hieroglyphic form of writing, out of which afterwards grew the hieratic and demotic forms.