How extremely alike ancient Egypt and India were to each other, not only in their political Institutions, but in their system of Idolatry, in their fundamental doctrines of belief, and in their general views of life, we have had ample opportunity of satisfying ourselves in the present age, when both these countries have been more accurately surveyed, and more closely investigated. In a remarkable expedition which occurred in our own times, this strong religious sympathy was strikingly displayed in a spontaneous and instantaneous burst of feeling. When, in the course of the French war in Egypt, an Indian army in British pay there landed, and, ascending up the country, came before the old monuments of Upper Egypt, the soldiers prostrated themselves on the earth, believing they had once more found the Deities of their native land. Great, however, as the resemblance between the two nations may be, they are still characterized by perceptible differences. On the one hand the Egyptian mind, so far as it has been delineated by the Greeks, appears to have been more deeply conversant and initiated in natural science: and on the other hand, the Egyptian idolatry was of a more decided cast, and was even more material in its fundamental errors than the Indian. The worship of animals, especially, was far more general, and was not confined to the god Apis, who may be compared to the Nandi, the bull sacred to Siva, but branched out into a variety of other forms. In the progress of Idolatry it needs came to pass that what was originally revered only as the symbol of a higher principle was gradually confounded or identified with that object and worshipped, till this error in worship led to a more degraded form of Idolatry; for it should be remembered that an error is not merely the absence of truth, but a false and counterfeit imitation of the truth, it has, like the latter, a principle of permanent growth and internal development. Several writers, who, in a general review of all heathen religions, have attempted to classify them after the manner of naturalists, assign the lowest place to the Fetish worship so called, which they rank immediately below the worship of animals. They make the essence of this Fetish worship to consist in the divine adoration of a lifeless, corporeal object; while they place on higher degrees, in this scale of Pagan error, the sensual Nature-worship--the apotheosis of particular men--and the adoration of the elements, the stars, and the different powers of Nature. However just and correct this view of the subject may otherwise be, it should be remembered that the question agitated is not only what were the objects of divine worship, but what were the views, intentions, and doctrines connected with that worship. For it is in these moral views we must look, either for the half-effaced vestige of ancient truth, or for the full enormity--the profound abyss of error. When we come to examine more closely the accounts of that Fetish worship