religion tending towards pantheism and monotheism, are M. Maspero, Professor Tiele, Professor Lieblein (English readers may consult his pamphlet, _Egyptian Religion_, Leipzig, 1884), M. Edward Meyer, (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, Stuttgart, 1884), Herr Pietsch. mann (_Zeitschrtftfur Ethnologic_, Berlin, 1878, art. "Fetisch Dienst"), and Professor Tiele (_Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions_, Paris, 1880, and "_History of Egyptian Religion, English translation_, 1882). After this preamble let us endeavour to form a general working idea of what Egyptian religion was as a whole. What kind of religion did the Israelites see during the sojourn in Egypt, or what presented itself to the eyes of Herodotus? Unluckily we have no such eye-witnesses of the earlier Egyptian as Bernal Diaz was of the Aztec temples. The Bible says little that is definite about the theological "wisdom of the Egyptians". When confronted with the sacred beasts, Herodotus might have used with double truth the Greek saw: "A great ox has trod upon my tongue".* But what Herodotus hinted at or left unsaid is gathered from the evidence of tombs and temple walls and illuminated papyri. One point is certain. Whatever else the religion of Egypt may at any time have been, it struck every foreign observer as polytheism.** Moreover, it was a polytheism like another. The Greeks had no difficulty, for example, in recognising amongst these beast-headed monsters gods analogous to their own. This is demonstrated by the fact that to almost every deity of Egypt they readily and unanimously assigned a Greek divine name. Seizing on a certain aspect of Osiris and of his mystery-play, they made him Dionysus; Hor became Apollo; Ptah, Hephaestus: Ammon Ra, Zeus; Thoth, Hermes, and so on with the rest. The Egyptian deities were recognised as divine beings, with certain (generally ill-defined) departments of Nature and of human activity under their care. Some of them, like Seb (earth) and Nut (heaven), were esteemed elemental forces or phenomena, and were identified with the same personal phenomena or forces, Uranus and Gæa, in the Greek system, where heaven and earth were also parents of many of the gods. * Æschylus, _Agamemnon_, 37, (--------) ** Maspero, Musée de Boulaq, p. 150; Le Page Renouf, Hib. Led., pp. 85,86.