In the process and continued subdivisions of polytheism, this great sacred Word,--for so the consecrated animals were called, [Greek (transliterated): ieroi logoi,]--became multiplied, till almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body, there the Egyptian sages predicated life and mind. Time, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the deity, and their holidays were their gods. The diversity between theism and pantheism may be most simply and generally expressed in the following 'formula', in which the material universe is expressed by W, and the deity by G. W-G=O; or the World without God is an impossible conception. This position is common to theist and pantheist. But the pantheist adds the converse-- G-W=O; for which the theist substitutes-- G-W=G; or that-- G=G, anterior and irrelative to the existence of the world, is equal to G+W. [2] 'Before the mountains were, Thou art.'--I am not about to lead the society beyond the bounds of my subject into divinity or theology in the professional sense. But without a precise definition of pantheism, without a clear insight into the essential distinction between it and the theism of the Scriptures, it appears to me impossible to understand either the import or the history of the polytheism of the great historical nations. I beg leave, therefore, to repeat, and to carry on my former position, that the religion of Egypt, at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews, was a pantheism, on the point of passing into that polytheism, of which it afterwards afforded a specimen, gross and distasteful even to polytheists themselves of other nations. The objects which, on my appointment as Royal Associate of the Royal Society of Literature, I proposed to myself were, 1st. The elucidation of the purpose of the Greek drama, and the relations in which it stood to the mysteries on the one hand, and to the state or sacerdotal religion on the other:-- 2nd. The connection of the Greek tragic poets with philosophy as the peculiar offspring of Greek genius:-- 3rd. The connection of the Homeric and cyclical poets with the popular religion of the Greeks: and,