of ill instructed puritanic zeal have turned into caricature the marvels of a magnificently vast and inconceivably ancient series of empires, which have been indiscriminately jumbled into one unintelligible and contradictory hodge-podge of narrative, to square the circle of mythical traditions. These empires of Egypt possess a history almost undreamt of; their ages may be counted in cycles of scores of thousands, and no annals, if they could be recovered from beneath the waters of the great deluge of cosmopolitan oblivion, would so richly illustrate the conquests and the magnificence of the reign of those grand sacerdotal systems, one of which has erected its vast pyramidal altars to mark the site of the fierce sacrificial slaughter of those wretched races who so sheepishly surrendered their throats to the cruel knife of their priests. sword of one religious faith has here, as usual, smitten its serpent rival upon the head, so that the sacerdotalism which floated in oceans of blood, has its life taken by another system, which has in its turn to share the same sanguinary baptism. So truly is Egyptology the science of ecclesiastical blood-letting, that its entire history is that of conquerors, themselves subsequently conquered, and their exterminating wars throughout their entire course are one prolonged religious contest.

The

Egyptianism is stigmatised as "gross materialism," even by the clergy who are professed disciples of Paul, whose epistles evidence his unshaken faith in the reality, not of an immaterial breath, but of a necessary material organization, without which he acknowledges there is no possibility of any conscious individual existence.

The Egyptian sacerdotalism of Moses' day was not that of the sanguinary pyramidal sacrificial system, but one of a much later and more humane creed, but it is not easy at this day to obtain any but negative evidence of the precise scheme of theism, or polytheism, from which Moses was commissioned to extricate the descendants of the patriarchs.

Sacredness of locality was a great point with Egyptolian priests, for ancient tradition asserts that the moon is the locus standi of departed saints, and consequently the ladder of im

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mortality must have a chosen resting place upon earth; and where is this?

But the refined intelligence and science of Egyptianism was not participated by the mob. They worshipped Deity transmigrated from some great prophet into a lower animal, and each village had its favourite cat, and crocodile, or bull, to which they kotoued with all the energy peculiar to a superstitious people. With this idolatry the Israelites were impregnated, and the entire Mosaic economy, not even excepting the instalment upon the stone tables, evidences the barbarous condition of the nation for whom it was designed.

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What is Mosaism but a very hornbook of morality, the merest pot-hooks and hangers of religion, the A B C of true worship for active intelligence? Schoolmaster indeed! Truly it seems so. An infant schoolmaster, with lessons designed to inculcate the plainest principles of honesty, self-denial, truth speaking, and common decency. Paul stigmatised the Mosaic economy as "a system of weak and beggarly elements," and says truly, that the law upon stone tables, in ten precepts, was necessary because of transgression; and that so far from being the eternal word of life, or indeed any part of this eternal word or law, it is actually the law of death or condemnation! So that even if a man keeps all the ten commandments unbroken he is still not in the way of immortality, but is only keeping the law of death! for the law from Sinai makes sin apparent in the human mind, and the revelation of sin in the mind is opposed to the obliteration of it, by the knowledge of the law of eternal life from the only true God.

The law from Sinai, then, is not part of the divine word of eternal life, but on the contrary is the law of condemnation, for it was given because the consciousness of the Israelites had been so seared and deadened by Egyptian maxims of theology, that they were incapable of judging of the true from false motives. The forms and ceremonies of the Mosaic ritual were made as near to the religion of the land they had left, as it was prudent to shape them. Even the symbol of divine presence, with its outspreading wings, was

allowed to remain in the tabernacle, for so completely were their minds bound up to this symbolism of Deity, as witnessed in the temples of Osiris, that they could not conceive of God apart from some such manifestation. And so on throughout the entire system of incense burning, burnt offerings, sacrifices, priestly mediation, atonement, purification and separation of clean from unclean animals, that it is plain upon the very face of it, and from what later teachers say, that it was designed to wean mere infants from idolatry, a sort of feeding-bottle system to draw their minds from Egyptian rites and ceremonies. To take these people from their accustomed holy of holies, temples, priests, sacrifices, purification, moral precepts, and other paraphernalia, was to allow them without any mental standard of religion at all, or leave them to invent their own deities, which indeed they did the very moment their schoolmaster's back was turned, and they set up a sample of their favourite beef, in the shape of a bull calf, under Aaron's kind tutorship.

How modern theologians can see any precedent to guide them in this system is marvellous, when they must know, from their favourite Pauline epistles, that the Draconic code from Sinai is throughout a ministration of death, and not the gospel or glad tidings of the freely conceeded gift of immortality.

The whole system of Moses was blood for blood shed. It was eye for eye, blow for blow, life for life, in fact, a system of retaliation and expiation for mere men. Moses' was a police law for an ignorant, stiffnecked, rebellious people. It was obliged to wink at many enormities which he could not suppress, such as divorce on trifling pretexts, manslaughter, rape, &c., for in some cases money payment could expunge the crime, while it pursued with unrelenting severity and death many others, which shows us how man's consciousness of good and evil shifts with his intelligence, and what is a venial sin in one age is a deadly crime in another, and vice versa.

Moses did not attempt to eradicate the evil roots from the human mind, he could but weed the garden in which cropped up, so rank and luxuriant, the tares and rubbish of evil

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imaginations. He allowed the growth of these foul weeds as a lamentable misfortune, and endeavoured to keep them under if possible. So he promulgated a policy of retributive justice suited to men's infantile intelligences, and this system necessarily was made to square somewhat with the peoples' own conception of evil, but which to our ideas seems dreadfully disproportioned, one crime towards another; but this was the people's fault, not Moses'.

The human mind, which insists upon harbouring the knowledge of theological evil as a vital principle, instead of regarding pain or evil as a thing to be overcome and combated, and for MAN necessarily associated in nature with his good, will insist upon sacrifice of life as an atonement for sin, and without this life-sacrifice, will not be reconciled to its God.

All this was abolished by Jesus of Nazareth, who cuts down to the quick, by shewing that the fountain of moral evil is in the human mind itself. He counselled his disciples to ignore the very existence of evil, and said, never harbour revenge, never retaliate evil, never acknowledge it, but both theoretically and practically put it down, by combating the rising devil of revenge in your own minds, and submit for a time to what you consider injustice from others.

Do not hold to the pound of flesh; eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life; all this is for childish intelligence, you are something higher and must not know evil. Now if the fountain of moral evil is the consciousness of the human mind, and this perverted consciousness is cured, what need is there of atonement? If man is reconciled, shall God be estranged, who, his prophets say, knows nothing of man's knowledge of theological evil?

If the legion-headed dragon of evil is exorcised from the poor lunatic mind of man, and the creature sits clothed in a sound mental condition, will Deity demand a holocaust of swine, or any other creatures, after the demon of moral evil is driven out? It is the poor demented or lunatic mind of man that demands a sacrifice of swine before its cure, not when the possessed one has been relieved. Once convalescent the mind begins to apprehend the necessity of refusing to

harbour evil thoughts of others, and when this is done, and evil is never retaliated, but every where ignored, then the devil is finally chained up in the bottomless pit.

In the Mosaic dispensation, sacrifice of life for sin was provided by man, upon the assumption that God required, and was reconciled or appeased by such atonement of blood. But David, in the written law in his Psalms, declares very plainly that God does not require any such sacrifice of blood, nor any burnt offerings for evil, but that the religion of active obedience is his true sacrifice, and to do his will is the true burnt offering. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ was his own life upon the altar of faith, the offering of duty, of active obedience, as it was written of the Messiah, "In the volume "of the book of law it is said concerning me, Lo, I come to "do thy will, O God."

The conventional theory of Jesus' atonement supposes evil to be a principle, or force of sin in nature, opposed to God; whereas we are told in the Bible, that all power or all force is of God, who cannot see moral evil. Then it arises from the false position assumed by man in nature. The death of man is not the power of moral evil, for death is man's destiny, just as it is the destiny of cows and sheep. There is no God of cows and sheep, and there is no God of men in their condition of premature birth, for God is the Father of the full born only. The aspect of theological evil in nature is false perspective, arising from a usurped elevation by mankind of their place in nature. Man has invented God, and man's God is not the true God; no man knows or can ever know the true God, except he have the special gift of the image of the invisible from God himself; then he becomes more than man, and is an immortal, and he cannot accept sacerdotal evil, for, like Job, he sees nature from a higher elevation than his theistical comforters viewed it; and he takes pain as a necessary rod to rouse him to action, to be combated, and make him a resolute being. Job saw that what man calls theological good and evil are necessarily associated, like positive and negative electricity, to do certain work, and that man's view of nature, of his position in it, of his duties, are