The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-03-23
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN BELIEFS.
Influence of Magic on Their Lives
 Ideas of Heaven and Hell.

Influence of Magic on Their Lives
 Ideas of Heaven and Hell.
 No nation in the world devoted so much attention to the subject of the future life as the ancient Egyptians, and yet, strangely enough, with so lit- tie effect upon their daily life in this world. It had, however, no morbid effect upon him, for, unlike any other nation of antiquity, the Egyptian had fully convinced himself that this life was but the antechamber to life of eternity and everlastingness."
 Egypt was essentially the land of magic, and fully justified the Talmu die saying that when magic was creat- ed out of ten parts, nine were assigned to Egypt" It is in magic, says the London Globe, that we find the whole key to the Egyptian ideas of heaven and hell.
 The greatest work on the future state was that known as the Book of the Dead "a marvellous compendium of magic, religion and folklore. Its beginning is lost in the dark regions of the prehistoric age, for there is now no doubt that it had taken definate liter ary form long before the fourth dy- nasty, B. 0. 37O0, and was old by the time of the sixth, some centuries later
 The Egyptians ideas of future life were the outcome of his magical belief that everything material or immaterial had it's immortal double. The land it. self, the nile. the chief religious cities, the king, and the people, all had their their doubles in the next world Out of this grew the idea of life in the future state of perfect happiness, the best on earth, in the Fields of Peace. They can be no doubt that this re reigon of the blessed was regarded by the early Egyptian, and indeed, for long time by the common people, not as a celes- tial region, but as stituated in the fer tile and well watered reigons of the Nile delta in the northwest of Egypt where the blessed ever breathed the cool north wind.
 Here he lived an ideal form of his life upon earth. He ploughed his fields and grew the grain which supplied him with bread that grew not stale and beer that never became sour" Here was situated the duplicate of his earth Iy town or village, and Heaven would, indeed, be bome to him.
 The belief in ancestor worship, no doubt, was an important element in the religion of the Egyptlans-but woul the deceased meet and be recognized by those who had proceeded him? On this point Dr. Budge describes how the deceased meets and is recognized by all who are near and dear to him.
 As he truly remarks, it Is an exact picture of the return of a long absent wanderer to his native village, such as may be seen any day in the Nile valley. It explains, also, the reason why the funeral inscriptions make so strong a feature of the family and so- cial rectitude of the dead Thus the expression: q was one reverent to my father, favored of my mother, devoted to my brothers and sisters and united in heart with the people of my own town"
 The underworld was a fegion of fire, lakes of fire, rivers of fire, and the dam ed were treated as captlves, bound, be- headed, and each day brought to life to undergo fresh torture. Space will not permit us to deal with this subject here, but in these terrible pictures we have, no doubt, the source from which the early Christian writers drew their vivid degcrintions of the tortures of the wicked.