But in this matter we may go much further than Greece. If we view all the Aryan religions collectively, we shall find that the one idea that was the life-giving principle in every one of the whole family was the belief in a future life. The Hindoo and the Persian, the Greek and the Roman, the Celt and the Teuton, all alike, as if by a common instinct, agreed in this. This, therefore, is distinctly Aryan, and no religion from which it is absent could belong to that race. How, then, and this is almost a crucial test, does the religion of old Egypt stand in this matter? Exactly as it ought to do, on the supposition that it had an Aryan origin. This was its central, its formative, its vital idea. It was this that built the thousand mighty temples in which the living might learn those virtues, and practise that piety, which would be their passport to the better world to come. It was this that embalmed the bodies of the dead, whose souls were still alive. Without it the religion of old Egypt could never have been a living force, nor anything but the merest mummy of a religion. At all events, without it, it could have had no origin in Aryan thought. Another point to be considered is that of artistic tastes and aptitudes. These are shown most conspicuously in the architecture of a people, and the subsidiary architectonic arts of sculpture and painting; they may be followed also into the arts which minister to the conveniences and embellishments of everyday life, and which are chiefly exhibited in the style of the dress of a people, and of the furniture of their houses. Here, again, I think the working of the Aryan mind is seen in old Egypt. Their ideas and tastes in these matters were singularly in harmony with the ideas and tastes that have in all ages developed themselves in the bosom of Aryan communities wherever settled. On the whole, our taste approves of what they did in these applications of man’s creative power, the necessary deductions having been made for the trammels which the fixity of their religious ideas imposed upon them; and for the fact that all that they did were but first unaided essays, uncorrected by comparisons with the arts of other people. When we consider what great disadvantages in this respect they worked under, we must come to the conclusion that no nation ever showed so much invention, or more native capacity for art. We cannot suppose that they borrowed from any other people the idea of the pillar with its ornamented capital; the arch; the ornamentation of buildings with the sculptured and painted forms of man, of animals, and of plants; the use of metallic colours; the art of making glass; the forms of their furniture; the art of embalming the dead; the art of writing; and a multitude of other arts which were in common practice among them in very remote times.