Toynbee expects to find in every civilization an analogy of the early Christian Church in the Roman Empire, and thus postulates for Egypt an “Osireian Church” as a “universal church created by an internal proletariat.”[27] Now, a “church” as an organized body of believers was not known in Egypt at any time (nor in Mesopotamia, for that matter). The worship of Osiris, always a main concern of the king, spread through all classes of the population, but merely as one among many devotions which filled the life of every Egyptian; the god was never honoured by one group more than by another. And, in fact, no section of the population of Egypt can be called a proletariat if this word is to remain applicable to imperial Rome or to modern times. If, elsewhere,[28] Toynbee describes the expulsion of the Hyksos invaders from Egypt as due to a “_union sacrée_ between the dominant minority of the Egyptiac society and its internal proletariat against the external proletariat as represented by the Hyksos” one can only say that the words, severally and in conjunction, do not apply. But he continues: for it was this reconciliation at the eleventh hour that prolonged the existence of the Egyptiac society—in a petrified state of life-in-death—for two thousand years beyond the date when the progress of disintegration would otherwise have reached its natural term in dissolution. And this life-in-death was not merely an unprofitable burden to the moribund Egyptiac society itself; it was also a fatal blight upon the growth of the living Osireian church ... for this _union sacrée_ ... took the form of an amalgamation of the living worship of Osiris with the dead worship of the official Egyptiac pantheon. Reading this, one would not suspect that the five centuries following the expulsion of the Hyksos are the most brilliant epoch of Egyptian history. One would also not assume that after about one thousand years of this “life-in-death,” religious texts glorifying Amon-Re were written which in profundity of thought and literary splendour belong to the greatest in Egyptian literature, and are its nearest approach to the majestic monotheism of the Old Testament.[29] Surely an “empirical” approach would have started from the fact that Egyptian civilization did actually retain its vitality over an unusually long period. Toynbee, however, declares that the Egyptian achievements in the second and first millennia B.C. are but illusions, for the scheme to which he is committed (although it is alien, and hence irrelevant, to Egyptian history) requires a “time of troubles” before the Middle Kingdom[30] which must be followed by a “universal church” with its two types of proletariat. Thus the confessed “empiricist” adheres to a preconceived system and disposes of the facts by proclaiming the Hyksos period “a date when the process of disintegration _would otherwise_ have reached its _natural_ term in dissolution.” (The italics are mine.)