India and Persia, we have seen, left their Deity an abstruse and philosophical doctrine, a mere abstraction, “infinite and eternal Nothings.” Simple efforts of the mind and intellect, they were probably added by after-thought to perfect and complete the Pantheon. They were involved in the deepest gloom, whilst man’s vision was engrossed by the stars and other objective creations familiar to his eyes, and through them to his sensuous mind. The most ancient philosophers then theorized concerning an Almighty Creator, believed in him by stealth and theory, but in practice left him to oblivion and neglect. The vulgar bowed, not to a deity, but to deifications of his attributes, which they had rendered material and congenial. It is to be presumed that Egypt advanced a step beyond India and Persia, otherwise so many of her dogmas would not have been incorporated with the Mosaic Code. Doubtless Egyptian priestly seers made their Demiurgos not a mere being of the intellect, but a dominant idea in religious theory, whilst the grovelling Fetissism of the people received from them a mystic and abstruse interpretation. But herein lay their fatal error. The priests were not only ministers of religion, they were the repositories of every branch of useful knowledge, from medicine to philosophy. The king was by law a priest. If a member of the second or military caste was raised to the throne, he was at once initiated; for the “sons of God,” as the sovereigns were called, could belong to none but the holy order. The learned respected and revered as types and symbols what the vulgar worshipped and adored with heart and soul. But they kept to themselves the benefits of their reason, and invented mysteries and gnostic ceremonies--the purple robe of religion--to veil that Holy Truth the contemplation of whose unadorned charms belongs to mankind. They left their fellow-creatures, “the most religious of men,” utterly ignorant of divine knowledge, the abject worshippers of the Nile and the desert, of the ichneumon and the cat. True they secured to a caste the knowledge which is power amongst semi-civilized races. But an ecclesiastical order, even in the most extensive hierarchies, is only the fraction of a people; they divided therefore their brother-men into priests and slaves. Woe to him who thus bids the human mind go into darkness!