* Compare Maspero, _Hist, de l'Orient_., 4th edit., pp. 279- 288, for the priestly hymns and the worship of beasts. "The lofty thoughts remained the property of a small number of priests and instructed people; they did not penetrate the mass of the population. Far from that, the worship of animals, goose, swallow, cat, serpent, had many more followers than Amnion Ra could count." See also Tiele, _Manuel de l'Hist. des Rel._, Paris, 1880, pp. 46, 47. For the folk-lore of wandering gods see Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_, Paris, 1882, p. 17. It is impossible, of course, to write here a complete history of Egyptian religion, as far as it is to be extracted from the books and essays of learned moderns; but it has probably been made clear that when we speak of the religion and mythology of Egypt, we speak of a very large and complicated subject. Plainly this is a topic which the lay student will find full of pitfalls, and on which even scholars may well arrive at contradictory opinions. To put the matter briefly, where one school finds in the gods and the holy menagerie of Egyptian creeds the corruption of a primitive monotheism, its opponents see a crowd of survivals from savagery combined with clearer religious ideas, which are the long result of civilised and educated thought.* Both views may be right in part. * The English leader of the former school, the believer in a primitive purity, corrupted and degraded but not extinguished, is Mr. Le Page Renouf (_Hibbert Lectures_, London, 1879). It is not always very easy to make out what side Mr. Le Page Renouf does take. For example, in his _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 89, he speaks somewhat sympathetically of the "very many eminent scholars, who, with full knowledge of all that can be said to the contrary, maintain that the Egyptian religion is essentially monotheistic". He himself says that "a power without a name or any mythological characteristic is constantly referred to in the singular number, and can only be regarded as the object of that _sensus numinis_, or immediate perception of the Infinite." which is "the result of an intuition as irresistible as the impressions of our senses". If this be not primitive instinctive monotheism, what is it? Yet Mr. Le Page Renouf says that Egyptian polytheism, after closely approaching the point where it might have become monotheism, went off on a wrong track; so the Egyptians after all were polytheists, not monotheists (op. cit., p. 235). Of similar views are the late illustrious Vicomte de Rouge, M. Mariette, M. Pierret, and Brugsch Pasha (_Rel. und Myth, der Alien Egypter_, vol i., Leipzig, 1884). On the other side, on the whole regarding Egyptian creeds as a complex mass of early uncivilised and popular ideas, with a later priestly