Says the learned Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, who has spent thirty years among Egyptian monuments and who has mastered their inscriptions, “Literature, the arts, and the ideas of morality and religion, so far as we know, had their birth in the Nile valley. The alphabet, if it was constructed in Phœnicia, was conceived in Egypt, or developed from Egyptian characters. Language, doubtless, is as old as man, but the visible symbols of speech were first formulated from the hieroglyphic figures. The early architecture of the Greeks, the Doric, is a development of the Egyptian. Their vases, ewers, jewelry and other ornaments, are copies from the household luxury of the Pharaohs.” The influence of Egypt on the Hebrew race has a profound interest for the whole Christian world. Let the time of Abraham be fixed at 1900 B.C. The Great Pyramid of Egypt, built by the first Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, had then been standing for 1500 years. Egypt had a school of architecture and sculpture, a recorded literature, religious ceremonies, mathematics, astronomy, music, agriculture, scientific irrigation, the arts of war, ships, commerce, workers in gold, ivory, gems and glass, the appliances of luxury, the insignia of pride, the forms of government, the indices of law and justice, 2000 years before the “Father of the Faithful” was born, and longer still before the fierce Semitic tribes of the desert gave forth their Hebrew branch, and placed it in the track of authentic history. In the Bible we read of the “God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob.” In the prayer of King Khunaten, dating long before any biblical writing, we find a clear recognition of one God, and a reaching out of the soul after him, embraced in a language without parallel for beauty of expression and grandeur of thought. Ages before the giving of the law on Sinai and the establishment of the Hebrew ceremonial worship, the “Book of the Dead,” with its high moral precepts, was in the possession of every educated Egyptian. The Jews went out of Egypt with a pure Semitic blood, but with a modified Semitic language. They carried with them in the person of their great leader, Moses, “all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” This is shown by their architecture, religious customs, vestments, persistent kindred traditions. Both Moses and Jesus were of the race whose early lessons were received with stripes from Egyptian masters. The hieroglyphical writings of Egypt contained the possibilities of Genesis, the Iliad, the Psalms, the Æneid, the Inferno, and Paradise Lost. In the thought that planned the Hall of Columns upon the Nile, or sculptured the rock temple of Ammon, was involved the conception of Solomon’s Temple, the Parthenon, St. Peters, Westminster Abbey and every sacred fane of Europe and America.