Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

We all know that the man who, in a period of dearth, withholds his corn for a time, is thinking only of himself, though it eventually turns out that what he did was done unintentionally for the benefit of the community: a law, above and beyond him, had been working through him, and shaping his selfish act so that it should contribute to the general good. So was it with the Roman Empire. It subjugated and welded together all people merely to satisfy its own greed, but in so doing it had further unfolded and advanced the world-drama of human history. When it had played out its part, it was seen that that part could not have been dispensed with, because, though so hard for those times, it was essential to the great plot, for it was that that had given birth to, and brought to maturity, the sentiment of the unity and brotherhood of mankind.

And now at last we come to ourselves. All, including Egypt, have become teachers to us. We are the inheritors of the work of all. To us—and how pleasant is it to know this—the wisdom even of old Egypt is not quite a Dead Sea apple, something pretty to look at, but inside only the dust of what had been the materials of life. We can feel our connexion with Egypt, and that we are in its debt; and we shall not be unworthy of the connexion, and of the debt (a true debt, for we are benefited through what they did), if we so make use of them as that those who shall come after us shall have reason to feel that they, too, are, in like manner, debtors to ourselves. Inquiries of this kind enable us to discover what are the historical, which means the natural and actual, bases of our own existing civilization.

What we now have to do is to compare ourselves with old Egypt. Things of this kind become more intelligible when made palpable to sense by being taken in the concrete. We have looked on the scenes in Egypt which are invested with an interest that can never die, because it is an interest that belongs to the history of humanity. By the side of them we must set the scene in the England of to-day, which holds the analogous position. Of course it must be in London. And as it must be in London I know no better point at which we can place ourselves than on the bridge over the Serpentine, with our back upon Kensington, so that we may look over the water, the green turf, and the trees to the towers of the old Abbey and of the Palace of Westminster. The view here presented to us is one which obliges us, while looking at it, to combine with what is actually seen what we know is lying behind and beyond it. It is not a scene for which an otiose glance will suffice, because it is precisely the connexion between what is before the eye, and what is to be understood, that gives it its distinguishing interest.

What is immediately before you, in its green luxuriance of turf and leaf, is peculiarly English; you might imagine yourself miles away from any city, and yet you are standing in the midst of the largest collection of human beings ever brought together upon the earth: what is around you is hardly more the capital of England than of the world. Strange is it to find yourself in the midst of such an incomprehensible mass of humanity, and yet at the same time in the midst of a most ornate scene of natural objects—water, trees, turf. Just as in the Egyptian scenes, where the interests of its history are brought to a focus, the preponderant objects presented to the eye are graves and temples in the desert, which tell us of how religious and sombre a cast was the thought of the Egyptians, who could see nothing in the world but God, and could regard life only in connexion with death; so here, too, we find, as we take our stand in the midst of this English world-capital, that we can see nothing of it; that it is hid from our eyes by the country enclosed within it. This alone tells us something about the people. It intimates to us that those who have built this world-wonder have not their heart in it; that it is against the grain for them to be here: they do not love it: they do not care to make it beautiful: that, unlike their Latin neighbours, they are not a city-loving people; that the first and strongest of their affections are for the green fields, the wavy trees, and the running streams; and that they have, therefore, reproduced them, as far as they could, in the midst of the central home of their political life, to remind them of what they regard as the pleasanter and the better life. But it is strange that this very fondness for rural life is one of the causes that have contributed to the greatness of this city. It has been the love of Nature, and the hardihood of mind and body the people have acquired in their country life, which have disposed them to go forth to occupy the great waste places of the earth; and so have helped in enabling the Nature-and-country-loving English race to build up an Empire, out of which has grown this vast, but from the spot where we are standing in the midst of it invisible, city.

Each also of the two great buildings, whose towers are seen above the trees, has much to tell us about ourselves. There is the old Abbey, reminding us of the power religion has had and will ever have over us, though not now in the Egyptian fashion of something that has been imposed upon us, but rather of something that is accepted by us; and of our determination that it shall not be constructed out of the ideas and fixed for ever in the forms which belong to ages that, in comparison with our own really older and riper times, had something to learn, and not everything to teach. It is precisely the attempt to invest Christianity with Egyptian aims and claims, fixity and forms, which is arraying men’s minds and hearts against it; and, in some parts of Christendom, making the action of society itself hostile to it. It is this attempt which is in a great measure depriving it of the attractiveness and power it possessed in its early days when it was rightly understood: though then it was, necessarily, not only a private care, but one that had also to strive hard to maintain its existence against the fierce and contemptuous antagonism of the collective force of the old pagan form and order of society. If men are now turning away from what they once gladly received, it can only be because what is now offered to them has ceased to be what it was then—the interpretation, and expression, and the right ordering, of all that they knew, and of the aspirations of their better nature. The phenomenon is explained, if we have reason for believing that men then regarded Christianity as an honest organization of knowledge, thought, and morality, for the single purpose of raising and bettering human life, but now regard it as, in some measure, their priestly organization for the purpose, primarily, of maintaining priestly domination, through the maintenance of a system which was the growth of widely different times and circumstances.

It cannot be seen too clearly, or repeated too often, that Christianity did not originate in any sense in priestly thought, but was, on the contrary, a double protest against it, first in its own actual inception, which included a protest against priest-perverted Judaism, and antecedently in the primary conception of the previous dispensation, which included a protest against priestly Egyptianism; so that neither in itself, nor in its main historical source, could it originally have had any priestly or ecclesiastical, but only broadly human and honestly moral aims.

This will, by the way, assist us in forming a right estimate of the character of that argumentum ad ignorantiam we have heard so much of lately, that Protestantism is only a negation of truth, and an inspiration of the Principle of Mischief. Looking back along the line of our own religion, we find that Moses, speaking historically, was the first Protestant; and that the Saviour of the World was, in this respect also, like unto him. As, indeed, have been, and will be, more or less, in the corrupt, but though corrupt, yet still, on the whole, advancing currents of this world, all who are wise and good, and who have the courage of their wisdom and goodness. It will also assist us to understand that religion does not mean systematic Theology and organized priestly domination, which are its degeneration, and into which the ignorance and carelessness of the mass of mankind, and the short-sightedness of some, and self-seeking of others, of its constituted expounders are tending always to corrupt it; but that it means, above all things, the ideal theory of perfect morality and virtue, combined with the attempt to work it out practically in human life, so far as is possible, under the difficulties and hindrances of this world, supported by the good hope of its actual complete realization in a better world to come.

The history of old Egypt is very much the history of the character, working, and fate of the priestly perversion (as we must regard it now) of religion, even when the attempt is made, as it was in that case, honestly, and without any violation or contradiction of the original principles and aims of the religion. As respects the modern world, the lamentable and dangerous consequences of this perversion of religion are to be traced, in some form or other, in the actual moral and intellectual condition of perhaps every part of Christendom. We see indications of them amongst ourselves in individuals, and even in classes. The legitimate action of religion has been in many cases not merely neutralized and lost, but directly reversed. It ought to generate the instincts that contribute to the order, the unity, the building up of society; whereas, by aiming at ecclesiasticism, and endeavouring to retain what is at variance with its own true purpose, it has given rise to unavowed repugnances, to fierce antagonisms, to repulsion of class from class, and even among some of hatred to the very order of Society; that is to say, it has produced instincts that contribute, and that most energetically, to disorder, disunion, and the overthrow of Society; proving the truth of the saying that nothing is so bad as the corruption of that which is best. Religion is the summa philosophia which interprets, harmonizes, systematizes, and directs to the right ordering of Society, and of the individual, all knowledge from whatever source derived, all true and honest thought, all noble aspirations, all good affections. Development and growth ever have been, and ever must be, a law of its existence: nothing else can maintain its continuity. And as, notwithstanding this necessity of development, its end and aim must all the while, and for ever, be one and the same, development and growth do not and cannot mean the overthrow of religion, as some have told us, and will continue to tell us, but, on the contrary, the enlargement and strengthening of its foundations, and the better ordering and furnishing of the superstructure.

The very name of the building before us—The Abbey—reminds us that, as far as we ourselves are concerned, we have accepted and acted on the principle of development, adaptation, and correction in our religion. The old name, belonging to a past order of things, is evidence that this principle has once been applied; and so it supplies us with a ground for hope that it will be applied again, whenever a similar necessity may arise. History, indeed, assures us that this must be done always, sooner or later, for in all ages and places the religion of any people has ever been, in the end, what the knowledge of the people made it; but it makes a great difference whether what has to be done be done soon, or whether it be done late. If the former, then the continuity of growth and development is not interrupted. If the latter, then there intervenes a long period of intellectual and moral anarchy, of religious and irreligious conflict. The consequences and the scars of the conflict are seen in what is established eventually. It is found that some things that were good have perished; and that some that are not good have become inevitable.

By the side of the old Abbey rise the towers of the Palace of Westminster—a new structure on an old site. That which first occurs to the beholder, who has old Egypt in his thoughts, is its inferiority in artistic effect to the stupendous but simple grandeur of the Egyptian Priests’ House of Parliament in the hypostyle Hall of Karnak, with its entourage of awe-inspiring temples, its vast outer court, and its lofty propylons. In that hall he had felt that its great characteristic was not so much its grandeur as its truthfulness to its purpose, of which there is not one trace to be found in the home of our great National Council, which one might survey carefully, both internally and externally, without obtaining the slightest clue for enabling him to guess for what purpose it was designed. But how grand, I hesitate to say how much grander, is the history which the site, at all events, of the building we are looking at brings into our thoughts. It has not indeed numbered the years of the Egyptian Panegyries. They might have counted theirs by thousands, while our Assembly counts its by hundreds. And we must also remember that they assisted at the birth, and watched by the cradle, of political wisdom. True they swathed the infant in the bands of a fixed religious system; but, then, they could not have done otherwise; and what they did, under the restrictions and limitations which times and circumstances imposed upon them, was, notwithstanding, good and precious work; and we comparing that work of theirs with much that has since been done, and is now doing, see that, though it was crippled and distorted at every step by their evil necessities, it was done wisely, and well, by men who clearly understood what they wanted to do, and how it was to be done. Our Parliament had to do its work under very different and even opposite conditions. This island—indeed, this part of the world—was not an Egypt where none but corporations of priests and despotic rulers could be strong. We could not, on the contrary, be without chieftains’ strongholds, and strong towns, too. While, therefore, with us the armed possessors of these strong places accepted religion, they could resist and forbid ecclesiastical encroachments, and could thus save Society, through saving the State, from ecclesiastical domination. They were strong and free, and so could nurture freedom, instead of standing by and looking on while it was strangled and buried out of sight. They were, too, the heirs of Israelite, Greek, Roman, and German traditions; and these they could keep alive, even without quite understanding them, until the day came when they might be carried out more fully and harmoniously; and more might be made of them than had been possible even in the days, and in the countries, which had given them birth. That has been the slow but glorious rôle in human history of these English Parliaments, of which that Palace of Westminster at which you are looking is the shrine: a spot most sacred in human history, and which will be closely interesting to the generations that are to come when time shall have forgot the great Hall of the Panegyries of Egypt; for the History of the freedom of Religion, of Speech, and of the Press, of Commerce, and of political and almost of human freedom itself, is the History of these English Parliaments.