"Strange, too, though it may appear, there is much in the outward ceremonial of the Levitical worship that indicates an Egyptian type. The fact need startle no one. For it is derogatory neither to the holiness of the Almighty nor to the inspiration of his delegate, that Moses should have borrowed from others rites which were good in themselves, and which became idolatrous only then, when employed in the worship of false gods. The most of external forms are in themselves indifferent and receive their determinate value from the feeling that prompts them, and the object to which they are directed: when given to God they are divine worship--when given to idols, they are idolatry. Nor is inspiration jeopardised because the material details may have come from a human source. Care and study and observation are not dispensed with in the mind that receives the divine communications; and Moses was instructed in all the wisdom and learning of the Egyptians for the very purpose of enabling him to use it to the best advantage ... as the Church consecrated to a higher purpose the temples and the rites and festivals found among the pagan populations at their conversion. We need not then be scandalised if we find the _ark of Jehovah_ to be the counterpart of the shrine of Amun. The resemblance strikes us at once on a glance at the woodcut token from Lepsius' Denkmäler, Ab. iii., Bl. 109." Let the reader refer to the engravings in Rev. W. Smith's Pentateuch, 291, 292. Dr Smith does not discuss the point further, only he says (p. 294), "In Egypt it is _the canopied boat_ in which the Deity is steered on the heavenly ocean; in Israel it is the covered chest, the form best adapted for holding the stone tables of the law." But if "the canopied boat" should have corresponded among the Egyptians to "the big canoe" among the Mandans, and the other similar memorials we have come upon, what more appropriate symbol could Moses have incorporated? Was not the ark of the covenant, in which the law was preserved in the widespread inundation of corruption, the counterpart of the ark in which mankind, in the persons of Noah and his family, were saved? and in carrying on and embodying the tradition, we may see a motive why there may have been an intentional alteration of the symbol--viz. in order to wean his people from the corruption into which the whole Egyptian ceremonial had sunk?[232] And why should it not have been so? Is there not a probability and fitness in the conjecture of some such commemorative sacrifices and memorials among mankind when they lived together before the dispersion in the times immediately following the Deluge?