An element of great value to the student of religions is, that the scarabæus symbol, is the earliest expression of the most ancient idea of the immortality of the soul after death that has reached our day, taking us back however to a period which may be considered as civilized and enlightened and yet, so encompassed with the mists of the past, that the mental eye of to-day cannot grasp that past with much tangibility, and giving us almost cause to think, that the doctrine of the immortality of the human soul was a remnant of an early divine revelation, or at least, an advanced instinct of early humanity; for it is a curious phase of archaic Egyptian thought, that the further we go back in our investigations of the origins of its religious ideas, the more ideal and elevated they appear as to the spiritual powers and the unseen world. Idolatry made its greatest advance subsequent to the epoch of the Ancient Empire, and progressed until it finally merged itself into the animalism of the New Empire and the gross paganism of the Greeks and Romans. We have not yet many religious texts of the Ancient Empire that have been fully studied and made known, but those that have been, exhibit an idealism as to the Supreme Deity and a belief in the immortality of the soul, based on the pious, ethical and charitable conduct of man, which speak highly for an early very elevated thought in religious ideas. There is however one thought which must strike the student of religions forcibly, that is the fact, that the idea of the re-birth and future eternal life of the pious and moral dead, existed among the Ancient Egyptians as an accepted dogma, long before the period in which Moses is said to have lived. Moses has been asserted both in the New Testament (Acts VII., 22), and by the so-called profane writers Philo and Josephus, to have been learned in all the wisdom and knowledge of the Egyptians of his time, yet we have not in the pages of the Pentateuch, which is usually by the theologians ascribed to him, any direct assertion of the doctrine of a future life or of an immortality of the human soul, or of a future reward or punishment in a future state of the soul. Ideas are therein set forth however, of a separation of the spiritual part of man into different divisions. It may be, that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was not accepted as a religious dogma, by the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings, an apparently Asiatic race, probably Semitic, of which we have not as yet very much knowledge. It is likely that it was under the Hyksos that the Hebrew, Joseph, was advanced to high honors in Egypt, and under their kings, that the influx and increase of the Hebrew population in Egypt began and prospered.