Delaware gazette and state journal. (Wilmington, Del.) 1883-1902, 1894-07-19
ANcfENr EerpT,s RELIaIox..
The Pantheisn Back ofthe Mummy an,
tho pyratnfd

tho Pyramid.
Rev. Francis Tiffany, in the Christian
Register, says: The religion of far away
Egypt seems to Inc to have been the
most literally materialized system of
pantheism that ever existed. There Is
such thing as poetic system of
pantheism that sees and feels Deity in
high and beautiful things--in sky,
mountains, lakes, noble aud beneticent
human lives--but which declines to in
dulge in the same deyout emotions over
chairs, tables, brooms caterpillars, cats
and rats-rather is secretly inclined to
the belief that, somehow OF other, the
devil had hand in them. This poetic sys-
tenn of panthesm believes, indeed, in the
body as the tabernacle of soul, especi-
ally when body takes the shape of
beautiful woman, or of the broad, medi-
tative brow of sage, hut feels little
spiritual interest in the liver, spleen
and ancreas--indeed, is inclined to
think, as Emerson put it, that we could
get on just as we'll without them. Ii it
dreams Of continued existence beyond
the earthly life, this same poetic system
Of pantheism yearns for such existence
in very etheralized shape-in state,
| indeed in which there shall be no more
buying and selling; no more marketing
for fish, flesh and vegetables, no more
pew rents for spiritual consolation; no
more doctors or apothecary shops.
Even Esculapius, it trusts, will find its
occupation gone, rs thoroughly as
Othello did. And yet, in the higher
realm, it would retain Beuah noun
teins and lakes, music beyond that Of
Beethoven and Mozart, inspirers rapt in
| the divine visions of an Isaiah or a st.
John at Patmos, for these things seem
all divine.
Not at all in this sublimated way,
however, do the ancient Egyptians APP.
| pear TO have felt. In the mass they were
the most prosaically imaginative people
| conceivable, shut up to warnings for
| sort of everlasting Dutch tulip garden
| and pipe, beside canal They wanted
| the body and the whole of THAR,
nails, skin entrails. No endearing little
eherubs for them, amputated from just
below the shoulders
| An Egyptians tomb was his spirit
house, in which his spirit needed his
body, his appetite, his bed, his three
meals a day, his servants. his farm, his
bath, his cat aud dog, his doctor and his
| pills. All these he could enjoy in a
strange spiritual material way, for
everything had its double. A chair
could be sat on equally well by live
man weighing 200 pounds and by a
spirit weighing nothing. The scent Of
sayory bit of broiled flesh could be
snutfed up with equal ecstasy by ma.
terial or by spiritual nostrils, and the
1 mn tnl
by material or by spiritual teeth and
allmentary canals. Everything, | re.
peat it, had its double, and without
realizing this to our minds after the most
literal and downright fashion, we shall
make no step of Roadway.
The body and its every organ thus had /,
TO the Egyptian mind, its exact counter
part of needs in the spirit. Consequently,
just as literally as any one of us would
be utterly nonpused and miserable who
should return to mis- home and find there
no chairs, no carpets, no cups and
saucers, no meat in the larder, no towels
and soap, no family to greet him, no
books to read, no Bridget in the kitchen,
exactly in the same way did the Egyp-
tian spirit feel about his tomb. In wrath
and evaporation world he haunt and
make uncomfortable the lives of the son
or daughter or wife who had subjected
him TO such intolerable privations. And,
while the minute and commonplace
fidelity to details with which all this
was believed in and carried out, often
strikes one in all irresistibly humorous
light, any neglect Of il would have
made an Egyptian spirit as downright
mad as would be the average American
householder on returning to such a
carpetleSs, bedless, meatless, Bridgetless
home as but now alluded to. ga fell
low feeling makes US wondrous kind"
and, therefore, if, instead of simply
smiling at the idiosyncrasies Of an
Egyptian spirit, we would try our best
to put ourselves in his place, it is after
some such familiar fashion as this that
we should have to set to work.
Body and spirit, then, are thus bound
up with one another, not alone in the
earthly life, but forever. The very
existence of the one depends upon the
continued existence of the other. 10
put il literally, no material body, no
spiritual; no material chair, no spiritual.
The pictures on the walls of the rooms
are not pictures. They are the spiritual
doubles of flowers and beasts and fields
and the Nile, corresponding as exactly
) with the enjoying capacities of spirit as
the material ones did with those of the
body Should they perish, just in Sc
, far would perish spirit life in and
, through them. Therefore they must no,
} perish. They must be projected on
walls hewn INTO the solid rock and then
Theoretically sealed. They are us the
very granaries that represent all that
| stand between a people and outright
! starvation. Likewise the body; 1t must
! never perish, lest with it perish all thai
| gives to spirit substantial validity. "WhC
steals my purse steals trash," but he
) who steals my body steals that which
beggars me eternally
: OF course there prevailed among The
, loftier minds of Egypt, beautiful ane
elevated conceptions of the immorta
life. But first and foremost, it is neces
sary for the hasty tourist in Egypt Il
/ grasp the primitive basic foundation il
I the minds of the average masses upol
which these loftier superstructures wert
reared. | want to make clear the infu
E ence Of what | have called the mos
literally materlalized system of panthe
{ ism the world ever saw--a pantheisn
| whose thorough going logic was startlet
t by nothing, from recognizing the diyin,
as much in crocodile as in an inspireC
i poet, as much in desccated mumm,
/ as in II risen Osiris. AT the same time
, do not for moment forget that Their
was people whose elect and initiated
a ones could sing OF absolute Dicty: I'll
/ is not craven in marble. He is not be
Q held. His abode is not known. N,
: shrine is found with painted figures o
. him. There is no building that cal
! contain him. His commence