The aspect of the sun as it approached its mysterious setting exercised, perhaps, a still greater power over the thoughts of the Egyptians, and was personified by them in a deity, who, if not the most venerable, was the best loved of all their gods. Osiris was the name given from the earliest times to the kind declining sun, who appeared to men to veil his glory, and sheathe his dazzling beams in a lovely, many-coloured radiance, which soothed and gladdened the weary eyes and hearts of men, and enabled them to gaze fearlessly and lovingly on the dread orb from which during the day they had been obliged to turn their eyes. This was the god who loved men and dwelt among them, and for man’s sake permitted himself to be for a time quenched and defeated by the darkness--it was thus that the ancient people read the parable of the sun’s evening beauty and of his disappearance beneath the shades of night, amplifying it, as the needs of the human heart were more distinctly recognized, into a real foreshadowing of that glorious truth towards which the whole human race was yearning--_the_ truth of which these shows of nature were, indeed, speaking continually to all who could understand. The return of Osiris every evening into the under-world invested him also, for the ancient Egyptians, with the character of guardian and judge of souls who were supposed to accompany him on his mysterious journey, or at all events to be received and welcomed by him in Amenti (the realm of souls) when they arrived there. Osiris therefore filled a place both among the gods of the living and those of the dead. He was the link which connected the lives of the upper and the under worlds together, and made them one--the Lover and Dweller among men while yet in the body, and also the Judge and Ruler of the spirit-realm to which they were all bound. Two distinct personifications showed him in these characters. As the Dweller among men and the Sharer of the commonness and materiality of their earth-life, he was worshipped under the form of a bull--the Apis, in which shape his pure soul was believed constantly to haunt the earth, passing from one bull to that of another on the death of the animal, but never abandoning the land of his choice, or depriving his faithful worshippers of his visible presence among them. In his character of Judge of the dead, Osiris was represented as a mummied figure, of the sacred blue colour, carrying in one hand the rod of dominion, and in the other the emblem of life, and wearing on his head the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. In the judgment scenes he is seated on a throne at the end of the solemn hall of trial to which the soul has been arraigned, and in the centre of which stands the fateful balance where, in the presence of the evil accusing spirit and of the friendly funeral gods and genii who stand around, the heart of the man is weighed against a symbol of Divine Truth.