A peculiar interest, indeed, attaches in the history of the human mind to the evolution of the gods of Egypt. Nowhere else in the world can we trace so well such a continuous development from the very simplest beginnings of religious ideas to the very highest planes of mysticism and philosophic theology. There are savage cults, it is true, which show us more clearly the earliest stages in the process whereby the simple ancestral ghost passes imperceptibly into the more powerful form of a supernatural deity: there are elevated civilised creeds which show us more grandly in its evolved shape the final conception of a single supreme Ruler of the Cosmos. But there is no other {156}religious system known to us in which we can follow so readily, without a single break, the whole evolutionary movement whereby the earlier ideas get gradually expanded and etherealised into the later. The origin of the other great historical religions is lost from our eyes among dim mists of fable: in Egypt alone, of all civilised countries, does our record go back to the remote period when the religious conception was still at the common savage level, and follow it forward continuously to the advanced point where it had all but achieved, in its syncretic movement, the ultimate goal of pure monotheism. I would wish, however, to begin my review of this singular history by saying, once for all, that while I make no pretensions to special Egyptological knowledge, I must nevertheless dissent on general anthropological grounds from the attitude taken up by Mr. Le Page Renouf in his _Lectures on the Religion of Ancient Egypt_. That learned writer’s work, indeed, is, scientifically speaking, half a century behind its time. It is written as though the doctrine of evolution had never been promulgated; and every page contains glaring contradictions of the most elementary principles of human development. Mr. Renouf still adheres to the discredited ideas that polytheism grew out of an antecedent monotheism; that animal-worship and other low forms of adoration are “symbolical” in origin; and that “the sublimer portions of the Egyptian religion are not the comparatively late result of a process of development or elimination from the grosser.” Such theories would of themselves be extremely improbable, even on the fullest and best evidence; but the evidence which Mr. Renouf brings forward to support them is of the flimsiest description. A plain survey of the Egyptian monuments in the Nile valley, and of the known facts about Egyptian religion, will lead any unbiassed mind, free from the warping influence of preconception, and accustomed to wide anthropological enquiry, to precisely opposite and more probable conclusions. For it must be carefully borne in mind {157}that on these subjects the specialist is the last man whose opinions should be implicitly and unhesitatingly accepted. The religion of Egypt, like the religion of Judæa or the religion of Hawaii, must be judged, not