Here was, if not the sublimest—for the mass and simplicity of the Great Pyramid may contest that—yet certainly the most magnificent architectural effort ever made by man. What prompted it? At what did it aim? Of course it was the embodiment of an idea, and that idea was, in its simplest expression, the same as the idea contained in the Greek temple, and the Christian cathedral. It was the glorification of the builders conception of the Deity. The difference in the structures, in their fashion and effect, arose out of the differences in the conceptions these people had respectively formed of the Deity. In the conception of the Egyptian awe was the predominant feature. Whatever else Deity might be, awfulness was its first attribute. Beauty, if at all, came in a comparatively low degree. With the Greeks and the Christians it was very different. The gods of the Greeks were connected with and took delight in Nature. The God of the Christians was the author of Nature. With them, therefore, the recognition, the creation, and the exhibition of what was beautiful, formed a part of the service of God. They felt that in religion a sense of, and the sight of, the beautiful dispose to love. The Egyptian beholder and worshipper was not to be attracted and charmed, but overwhelmed. His own nothingness, and the terribleness of the power and will of God, was what he was to feel. The soul of the Greek, and of the Christian, was to be elevated, not crushed; to be calmed, to be harmonized. One was the work of minds in which the instinct of freedom was operative; the other of minds which felt the powerlessness, the helplessness of man in the face of an unchangeable iron order alike of Nature and of society. Moreover, as we have already seen, in Egypt Nature herself did not originate and nurture the thought of beauty. In Egypt were no rocky, moss-margined streams, no hanging woods, no shady groves, no lovely valleys. The two paramount objects in Nature, as they presented themselves to the eye and the thought of the Egyptian, suggested to him absolute power on the part of Nature, and absolute dependence on the part of man. These two objects were a singularly dull and monotonous river, but without which the Egyptian world would be a desert, and the scorching sun, but without which all would be darkness and death. They did everything. Without them everything was nothing.