[65] Max Müller, Science of Religion.
[66] Take in illustration the symbols on any national flag. There is no intrinsic beauty in three coloured stripes, or in the grotesque figures of lions rampant. Yet for the sake of the nation of which they have become symbolic, men will die sooner than surrender the banners on which they are depicted. It is the same with the symbols of rival religions. How fierce the conflict waged by Saracen and Christian beneath the respective symbols of the Crescent and the Cross!
[67] The biographer of Apollonius of Tyana records the following conversation. ‘The beasts and birds,’ says Apollonius, ‘may derive dignity from such representations, but the gods will lose theirs.’ ‘I think,’ says his opponent, ‘you slight our mode of worship before you have given it a fair examination. For surely what we are speaking of is wise, if anything Egyptian is so; the Egyptians do not venture to give any form to their deities, they only give them in symbols which have an occult meaning, that renders them venerable.’ Apollonius, however, is not convinced: he admits that the mind forms to itself an idea which it pictures better than any art can do, but he complains that the Egyptian custom takes from the gods the very power of appearing beautiful either to the eye or to the mind. Porphyry also regards the worship as symbolic; he says that ‘under the semblance of animals the Egyptians worship the universal power which the gods have revealed in the various forms of living nature.’ These quotations and those in the text are taken from Le Page Renout’s Hibbert Lectures.
[68] We may, perhaps, except the Chinese.
[69] Recent investigation has identified Tel-el-Maschuta, a spot not far from the modern Ismailia, as the site of both the Pithom and the Succoth of the Old Testament; the former was the sacred, the latter the civil name of the city, which is thus shown to have been one of the store-cities built by the Israelites (Ex. i. ii), and also the first stage reached by them on their journey (Ex. xii. 37; xiii. 20). The word Ar, meaning storehouse, occurs in the inscription by which M. Naville first identified Pithom-Succoth.
[70] Generally supposed to have been a daughter of Rameses, but if Moses was eighty when he stood before the successor of that monarch, that would have been impossible.
[71] Ex. ii. 23. How well this incidental allusion coincides with the sixty-seven years’ reign of Rameses ii.!
[72] Such an investigation has been recently undertaken by the Egypt Exploration Fund. The extent to which it may be carried depends entirely on the means placed at its disposal.
[73] Sometimes supposed to have been the turquoise, but it is doubtful whether correctly so.
[74] The wording of the judgment seems to imply a judicial suicide.