sacrificulus_, or _king-sacrificer_, with his _regina_ or _queen_, took rank in all the public pontifical dinners above the _pontifex maximus_ himself. The college of pontiffs in Rome, which had the supreme direction of all religious matters, was not a board of priests, but of laymen--or at least of laymen who, without any qualification but some inaugurating ceremony, might be assumed into the pontifical college; whence the title of _pontifex maximus_, which the emperors assumed, was no more of the nature of a usurpation than the title of _imperator_, which belonged to them as supreme commanders of the army. Who, then, were the priests, and what need of them, at all if the laity might legally perform all their functions? The answer is simple. Both in Greece and Rome there were priests and priestly families, as the _Eumolpidæ_ in Eleusis, specially dedicated to the service of certain local gods; but there was no order, class, or body of persons having the exclusive right to officiate in sacred matters over the whole community. No doubt the social position of priests in democratic Greece and monarchical Egypt was extremely different, but in one respect they were identical: in Athens Church and State were one as much as in Memphis. In Egypt there was a remarkably strong body or clan of priests enjoying the highest dignities and immunities; but there is no proof that they were a caste, in the strict sense of the word; and their virtues were so far from being incommunicable that, when the Pharaoh did not happen to be a born priest, but of the military class, he was obliged to be made a priest before he could be a king; and when once king he became _ipso facto_ the high priest of the nation, and took precedence of all priests in all great public acts of religious ceremonial. It must not be supposed, however, that, though he was supreme in all sacred matters and the actual head of the Church, to use our language, he could set himself, like our Henry VIII., to carve creeds for the people, and imprison or burn devout persons for refusing to acknowledge his arbitrary decrees. The exercise of sacred functions in the hands of the masterful Tudor and his Machiavelian minister was a usurpation tolerated by a loyal people as their readiest and most effective way of getting rid of the masterdom of the Roman Pope, which in those days pressed like an incubus on the European conscience; it was invoking one devil to turn out another, and was successful, as such operations are wont to be, in a blundering sort of way. But the worshipful "Sons of the Sun"--for so they were betitled--on the banks of the sweet-watered Nile, had no monstrous pretension of this kind, and could not even have dreamt of it. They did not sit on the throne to reform religion, but to maintain it. Neither in Egypt nor in Greece in those days was any such thing known as the rights of the individual conscience; but both kings and people received religious laws and