The Egyptian religious life was shared in by priestesses. Their pantheon contained goddesses, who were highly honored. Women were considered to have souls as well as men, and as great honor was paid them in the rites accorded to the dead. Sacred prostitution, which was so well known among the ancient Semites, was also practised in Egypt. Anthropomorphism was common there as elsewhere among early religionists. The gods were supposed to have their generation in the same manner as men. The male and female divinities therefore had their necessary part in the mysterious creations of nature. The female function in generation, however, was a purely passive one. Just as, according to the current ideas, the father was the sole parent of the child, the mother only furnishing carriage and nourishment for the infant, so the female principle in nature was receptive matter--"the lifeless mass in which generation took place." "Women," says Frederick Shelden, "are compounds of plain sewing and deception, daughters of Sham and Hem." This morsel of wit is not true of the women of Egypt in ancient days. The women of the Nile were, as a rule, remarkably faithful to their obligations to their gods, as they conceived them, and often to their households and to society. They were limited, to be sure, in their outlook upon life and service, yet religious to a fault, and sometimes moral. It has not been long since there was exhumed in Egypt,--which has proved indeed the most fruitful of all fields for the archæologist,--a remarkable prayer engraved upon the funeral shell of an Egyptian lady who lived in the age of the Ptolemies. It is a prayer, the sentiments of which show how some of the essential elements of a commonwealth life have been recognized by good men and women of all lands and of all ages. The prayer is as follows: "All my life since childhood I have walked in the path of God. I have praised and adored Him, and ministered to the priests, His servants. My heart was true. I have not thrust myself forward. I gave bread to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked. My hand was open to all men. I honored my father, and loved my mother; and my heart was at one with my townsmen. I kept the hungry alive when the Nile was low." Here godliness, support of religious ideals and services, truthfulness, humility, charity for the distressed, honor to parents, and good citizenship, are recognized as the true conduct and held worthy of the consideration and reward of the gods.