Equally important for the moral ideal is it whether the civilization of which it forms one element is progressive or unprogressive; for changes in the moral standard are largely dependent on changes in the other elements of civilization. Where the intellectual life and the religious ideas remain unmodified, and where all political, social, and industrial institutions remain essentially unchanged, we need not look for fundamental changes in ethical ideas and convictions. How the history of conscience in ancient Egypt illustrates these truths we shall see a little further on. [Sidenote: The teaching that immortality is conditioned on righteousness] We have seen how potent an influence the notion of a life beyond the tomb exercised upon the conduct of the members of the primitive kinship group, giving birth to some of the noblest virtues of their simple code of morals. Now this idea of continued existence after death dominated the life of no other civilized people of antiquity so completely as it dominated the life of the Egyptians; and probably in the case of no other people ancient or modern has the belief exerted so profound an influence upon conduct. This was so for the reason that the conception was here early moralized and represented the blessed life in the hereafter as dependent upon rightdoing in the present life. No soul that had done evil was admitted to the bark of the ferryman at the Egyptian Styx. In this discrimination we find “the earliest traces in the history of man of an ethical test at the close of life.”[69] [Sidenote: The ethical qualities of the sun-god Ra] It is the sun-god Ra who in the remotest times is most intimately associated with these moral requirements for participation in the felicities of the celestial hereafter. The latest reading and analysis of the texts of the Pyramid Age has thrown new light upon the relations of the rival divinities Ra and Osiris to the development of the moral consciousness in ancient Egypt. In his latest work Professor Breasted says: “The later rapid growth of ethical teaching in the Osiris faith and the assumption of the rôle of judge by Osiris is not yet discernible in the Pyramid Age, and the development which made these elements so prominent in the Middle Kingdom took place in the obscure period after the development of the Pyramid Age. Contrary to the conclusions generally accepted at present, it was the sun-god ... who was the earliest champion of moral worthiness and the great judge in the hereafter.”[70]