The amulets buried with the dead, the relics preserved in the temples, had originally been the fetishes of the earlier population of Egypt. They hardly changed their character when they became symbols endowed with mysterious properties, or relics of the State gods which still possessed miraculous powers. The peasant might be told in the ritual of Amon: in “the sanctuary of the god clamour is an abomination to him: pray for thyself with a loving heart, in which the words remain hidden; that he may supply thy need, hear thy words and accept thine offering”;(182) but it was a teaching that was far above him. When he entered the sanctuary it was to see the processions of the priests and the relics preserved in it, and it was in these relics that he still put his trust. It was not only in Ethiopia that there were moving and speaking statues which elected the king by taking him by the hand; in Thebes itself, under the priestly kings of the Twentieth Dynasty, we find wonder-working statues whose reality was guaranteed by the priesthood. One of them, it was said, was sent to Asia, where it delivered a king’s daughter from the demon that possessed her, and afterwards returned in a moment to Thebes of its own accord; while others answered the questions addressed to them by nodding the head, or even pronounced prophecies regarding the future.(183) Indeed, as we have seen, the old theory of the ka implied that the statue of the dead man could be reanimated in a sense by his spirit; and a text at Dendera speaks of the soul of Hathor descending from heaven as a human-headed hawk of lapis-lazuli, and uniting itself with her image. The peasant, therefore, might be excused if he remained true to the superstitions and traditions of his ancestors, and left the official religion, with its one ineffable god, to those who were cultured enough to understand it. Like the peasant of modern Italy, he was content with a divinity that he could see and handle, and about whose wonder-working powers he had no doubt. Materialism is the basis of primitive religion; the horizon of primitive man is limited, and he has not yet learnt to separate thought from the senses through which alone his narrow world is known to him. The simple faith of a child often wears a very materialistic form. Lecture X. The Place Of Egyptian Religion In The History Of Theology.