In the preceding lectures I have endeavoured to bring before you the more salient points in the religion of the ancient Egyptians, in so far as they illustrate their conception of the divine. But we must remember that all such descriptions of ancient belief must be approximate only. We cannot put ourselves in the position of those who held it; our inherited experiences, our racial tendencies, our education and religious ideas, all alike forbid it. If the Egyptians of the Theban period found it difficult to understand the ritual of their own earlier history, and misinterpreted the expressions and allusions in it, how much more difficult must it be for us to do so. The most ordinary religious terms do not bear for us the same meaning that they bore for the Egyptians. The name of God calls up other associations and ideas; the very word “divine” has a different signification in the ancient and the modern world among Eastern and Western peoples. In fact, the more literal is our translation of an old religious text, the more likely we are to misunderstand it. And yet in one sense we are the religious heirs of the builders and founders of the Egyptian temples. Many of the theories of Egyptian religion, modified and transformed no doubt, have penetrated into the theology of Christian Europe, and form, as it were, part of the woof in the web of modern religious thought. Christian theology was largely organised and nurtured in the schools of Alexandria, and Alexandria was not only the meeting-place of East and West, it was also the place where the decrepit theology of Egypt was revivified by contact with the speculative philosophy of Greece. The Egyptian, the Greek, and the Jew met there on equal terms, and the result was a theological system in which each had his share. In Philo, we are told, we find Moses Platonising; but the atmosphere in which he did so was that of the old Egyptian faith. And what was true of the philosophy of Philo was still more true of the philosophy of Alexandrine Christianity. You cannot but have been struck by the similarity of the ancient Egyptian theory of the spiritual part of man to that which underlies so much Christian speculation on the subject, and which still pervades the popular theology of to-day. There is the same distinction between soul and spirit, the same belief in the resurrection of a material body, and in a heaven which is but a glorified counterpart of our own earth. Perhaps, however, the indebtedness of Christian theological theory to ancient Egyptian dogma is nowhere more striking than in the doctrine of the Trinity. The very terms used of it by Christian theologians meet us again in the inscriptions and papyri of Egypt.