Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

Observations of this kind enable one to see and feel more clearly what was in the minds and hearts of the old Orientals. This is true of the whole of Scripture, from the first page to the last; but in an especial manner is it true of the Psalms and of the Gospels. Before I visited the East I saw their meaning through the, to a certain extent, false medium of modern English thought. Elements of feeling and meaning, which before were unobserved and unknown, now stand out clear and distinct. I seem to be conscious of and to understand, in a manner that would have been impossible before, the depth and the exaltation of feeling of the Psalms, and their wonderful didactic beauty, the result, clearly, of the feelings that prompted them, rather than of the amount and variety of knowledge they deal with. The simplicity, the single-mindedness, the self-forgetting heartiness of the morality of the Gospel, also, I think, gains much from the same cause. I think, too, that I understand now, better than I did before, the fierce tone in which the Prophets denounced existing wrongs, and their unfaltering confidence in a better future.

And as it is in great matters and on the whole, so is it in small particulars. For instance, I heard a tall bony half-grey Syrian Arab, in whose mind I had but little doubt that the thought of God was ever present, cursing the God of the Christians. It had never crossed his mind that the God of the Christians was the same as the God of the Mahomedans. Here was the persistence to our own day of the old exclusive idea.

A poor native Christian at Jerusalem told me that he believed the holy places were not known now, because, in these days, men were not worthy of such blessed knowledge. The old idea again of the superior holiness of past times. And so one might go on with a multitude of similar instances.

I will here give a tangible and distinct example of the change in one’s way of looking at things, and of the consequent change in feeling, which travel in the East actually brought about in one’s mind, naturally and without any effort, just by allowing the trains of thought that spontaneously arose to take their own courses, and, in combination with pre-existing material, to work themselves out to their own conclusions.

Formerly I never read the account of the deception Jacob practised on his father at the instigation of his mother, and at the expense of his brother; or the imprecations of the 109th Psalm; or the account of the way in which David, for the purpose of appeasing God (Who was supposed to be terribly afflicting an innocent people for the mistaken zeal on His behalf of a deceased king), gave up seven innocent men, sons and grandsons of Saul, to be hanged by those whom Saul had sought to injure; without wishing, as I believe almost everybody does, every time he hears these passages read, that, by some process of beneficent magic, they could be made to vanish from the Sacred Volume, and be heard of and remembered no more for ever. But now they appear to me in quite a different light, and I regard them with quite different sentiments. Now I am very far indeed from wishing that they could be made to vanish away. I have been among people who are, at this moment, thinking, feeling, and acting precisely in the way described in those passages; and so I have come to regard them as containing genuine, primitive, historical phases of morality and religion, and as giving to the record, and just for this very reason, no small part of its value. This primitive morality, which has been kept alive all along, or to which men have again reverted, in the East, belongs to the stage in which subtilty, although it may, as in the instance before us, palpably mean deception, has not yet been distinguished from wisdom; when men think they are serving God by being ready to inflict any and every form of suffering, and even, if it were possible, annihilation itself, on the man who rejects, or who does not support, their ideas of morality and religion; and when the current conception of responsibility is made to include the family and descendants of the evil-doer. These very misconceptions and aberrations are in conformity to the existing sentiments and daily practice of the modern Oriental. With him deception is a perfectly legitimate means for obtaining his ends; nor, in his way of thinking, is any infliction too severe for misbelievers and blasphemers of the Faith; and in the custom of blood-feuds the innocent descendants of the man who shed blood are answerable for the misdeed of their forefather. These, then, and similar mistakes, the contemplation of which is so painful to us, were honestly made, and were even consequences of deliberate and careful efforts to act up to moral ideas under the conditions and in conformity with the knowledge of the times.

I have thus come to see that morality and religion,—and this includes my own morality and religion—are, in no sense, an arbitrary creation, but a world-old growth. Thousands of years ago they were forming themselves, in some stages of their growth, on the hill of Zion, as they had been previously in earlier stages on the banks of the Nile, and as they did subsequently in the grove of the Academy, on the seven hills of Rome, and in the forests of Germany. This has been brought home to me by actual acquaintance with people whose morality and religion are different from my own—the difference very much consisting in the fact that they are still in the early stage to which the ideas in the passages referred to belong. To associate and to deal with people who are mentally in the state, which the old historic peoples were in, is to have the old history translated for you into a language you can understand. What I now find in myself was once, in its earlier days, just what I find described in those passages. My morality and religion, which are my true self, have passed through that stage; that is to say they were once in the stage of the Patriarch and of the Psalmist. Virtually, I was in them. My more perfect condition, therefore, must share the blame which mistakenly appears—this is a mistake into which unhistorical minds fall—to belong only to their more imperfect condition. Both are equally parts of the same growth. I now look upon these earlier stages of my moral being as I do upon my own childhood. To speak of the ideas, or of the acts of the Patriarch, or of the Psalmist as, perhaps, I might have been disposed to speak of them formerly would, I now feel, be to blaspheme my own parentage. I look with a kind of awe on the failure—so shocking and so intelligible—of their efforts to find the right path upon which, through a long series of such efforts, I, their moral offspring, and heir, have at last been brought. Now I link myself to the past, and I feel the power and the value of the bond. Now I know that my religion and morality are not a something or other of recent ascertainable date; a something or other that has come hap-hazard; even that might, conceivably, never have been. They are something, I know, that appertains to man; that came into being with him, indeed that is of his very being; that has grown with his growth, and strengthened with his strength; and which accumulating experience and enlarging knowledge have, all along, ever been purifying, broadening, deepening. I see distinctly, now, that they rest on foundations in man himself, which nothing can overthrow or shake. A conviction is brought home to me that I am standing on an everlasting rock. Formerly there might have been some lurking germ of suspicion or misgiving that I was standing on ground that was not quite defensible. Universal history, rightly understood, dissipates these enfeebling misgivings, and generates that invaluable conviction. It is a conviction which nothing can touch, for it rests on incontrovertible facts and unassailable reasonings; and which are such as will justify a man in expending his own life, and in calling upon others to do the same, for the maintenance and advancement of morality and religion.

And this connexion with the past appears to give a prospective as well as retrospective extension to my being. If I am in the past, then, by parity of reason, I am equally in the future. As my moral and intellectual being was, in this way, forming itself before I was in the flesh, it will continue, in the same way, the same process after I shall have put off the flesh. The dissolution of the body will not affect what existed before the assumption of the body.

These thoughts I did not take with me to the East, or, if I did, they had at that time only a potential existence in my mind as unquickened germs. It was what I saw and felt in the East that gave them life and shape. At all events, I brought them back with me as recognized and active elements of my mental being.

I am aware that there are some on whom the sight of the diversities observable among different peoples in moral and religious ideas has an effect the very contrary to that which I have been describing. Instead of helping them to bring their knowledge on these subjects into order, and giving them solid foundations to rest the structure upon, it appears in them only to make confusion worse confounded, and to render more incapable of support what had in them little enough support before. But may not this arise from the fact that the true idea of history does not exist in the minds of these persons? For I suppose that just as true science infallibly generates the craving, and, as far as it reaches, the successful effort, to harmonize all nature, so does true history the craving, and, as far as it reaches, the successful effort, to harmonize all that is known of man. One man observes differences in moral ideas, and thence infers that it is impossible to arrive at any fixed and certain conclusions on such subjects. Another man observes the same differences, but observing at the same time that they are those of growth and development, thence infers that the principle of which they are the growth and development must be as real and certain as anything in the earth beneath, or in the heaven above.