4. Let us begin with the Egyptians, who are perhaps the most antient people of whom we have historical records. The manners and customs of this nation have been very minutely described by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, to whose work we are chiefly indebted for the following account. In the first place it appears that we must separate between what the priests believed and what was held by the great body of the people. The bulk of the nation were left by the priests to believe in a multiplicity of deities, and even to reverence animals as divine, while on the other hand the higher orders of the priesthood, who were initiated into the greater mysteries of their religion, appear to have acknowledged the unity of God. These believed in one Eternal God, from whom all other deities were produced, and whom they did not permit themselves even to name, far less to represent under any visible form. The Egyptians likewise believed in the existence of Dæmons or Genii, who were present unseen amongst mankind. 5. The earliest Egyptian records attest the belief of this nation in the immortality of the soul:—‘Dissolution, according to them, is only the cause of reproduction—nothing perishes which has once existed, and things which appear to be destroyed only change their natures and pass into another form.’[4] Anubis held in Egypt an office similar to that of Mercury among the Greeks, being the usher of souls in their passage to the future state. Amenti was the region to which the souls of men were supposed to go after death, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson notices the resemblance between this name and that of Ement ‘the West’—the west, where the sun was seen to sink, being looked upon as the end of the world. The guardian of the lower regions was called Ouom-n-Amenti, or the Devourer of Amenti. It had frequently the appearance of a hippopotamus, but was drawn sometimes with the head of a fanciful creature something between the hippopotamus and the crocodile. ‘The judgment of the soul was conducted by Osiris, aided by forty-two assessors, supposed to represent the forty-two crimes from which a virtuous man was expected to be free when judged in a future state, or rather the accusing spirits, each of whom examined if the deceased was guilty of the peculiar crime which it was his province to avenge.’[5] 6. As regards the fate of the soul when once the judgment had been passed upon it,—the Egyptians considered the souls of men to be emanations of the Divine soul, and each was supposed to return to its Divine origin when sufficiently pure to unite with the Deity. On the other hand, those who had been guilty of sin were doomed to pass through a series of torments ending in the second death.