Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

And now we must follow this sentiment of national exclusiveness and repulsion into the neighbouring country of Israel. There we find that it had been quite as necessary, probably even more necessary than in Egypt. It had been engendered by the same process, and for the same purpose. Between these two peoples the feeling was reciprocated with more than its normal intensity. Their history accounts for this. But now it was to be abrogated in both, and its abrogation in Egypt was to come from Israel. And what we have to do here is to note the steps by which this great moral revolution was brought about.

Fifteen hundred years had passed since the night when the Hebrew bondman had fled out of Egypt, or, as the Egyptian annals described the event, had, at the command of the gods of Egypt, been ignominiously cast out of the land. They had ordered his expulsion, so ran the record, because he was the incurable victim, and the prolific source, of a foul leprosy. This was the evil disease of Egypt that bondman never forgot. Those fifteen hundred years, from the days of the making of the brick for which no straw had been given, and from the building of Pithom and Ramses, had been very chequered years. In that time the fugitive people had had to pass through many a fiery furnace of affliction. Their old task-masters had again, as others, too, had done, set their heel upon them.

During that long lapse of time what a stumbling-block to the Hebrew mind must have been the good things of Egypt: its wealth, its splendour, its power, its wisdom; even its abundance of corn and its fine linen: all that this world could give given to the worshippers of cats and crocodiles. Egypt must have occupied in the Hebrew mind much the same place that is held in the minds of many of ourselves by the existence of evil. It was a great fact, and a great mystery. Something which could neither be denied, nor explained, which it is unpleasant to be reminded of, and which had better be kept altogether out of the thoughts of the simple. The Hebrew “was grieved at seeing the Egyptian in such prosperity. He was in no peril of death. He was strong and lusty. He came not into misfortune, neither was he plagued like other men. This was why he was so holden with pride, and overwhelmed with cruelty. His eyes swelled with fatness, and he did even as he lusted. He spake wicked blasphemy against the Most High. He stretched forth his mouth unto the heavens, and his tongue went through the world. The people fell before him, and he sucked out from them no small advantage.” Such was the aspect in which the prosperity of Egypt presented itself to the mind of the Hebrew. “He sought to understand it, but it was too hard for him.” How grand, then, how noble, and for us how absolutely beyond all price, is the reiterated assertion of the Hebrew prophets, even in the worst and darkest times of this long and trying period, of the ultimate triumph of right; of a new heavens and a new earth, that is, of a time when mundane societies would be animated by diviner principles; and, pre-eminently, by those of universal inclusion and concord.

At last came a large instalment of what many preachers of righteousness had anticipated, and had desired to see, but had not seen. That they had anticipated it under such adverse circumstances, and had lived and died in the faith of it, is one of the chief contributories to the historical argument for natural morality. What they had anticipated came about, however, in a manner and from a quarter of which they could have had no foresight. Beyond the Great Sea in the distant West, a city, whose name Isaiah could never have heard, and which was not even a name in the days of Rameses, and for many centuries after his time, had grown into an empire, in which had come to be included the whole civilized world. All nations had been cast into this crucible, and were being fused into one people. Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, were each of them the children of a more ancient, and, in some respects, of a higher and better civilization; but they, like all the rest, had been absorbed into the world-embracing dominion, and were powerless within it, except so far as ideas give power. Every people was now being brought face to face with all other people, and into union and communion with them. The way in which the religions of the world were thus made acquainted with each other acted as a confutation of each in particular, or rather of its external distinctive mythology. We can form no adequate conception of what the effect must have been. They were all alike discredited. The exclusiveness of each was confuted by the logic of facts. It was out of this conjuncture of circumstances that arose the new idea and sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind. What had hitherto everywhere obscured the view of it was now falling into decay; and what must suggest it had been established.

And no people had been so thoroughly disciplined for receiving this idea as the Jews. They had been brought into closest contact with Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, and other oriental people; and it had been that kind of contact which obliges men to understand what other people think. And after they had received this hard schooling from their neighbours, they had been brought into the same kind of contact with Greek thought. They had been obliged to take into their consideration the knowledge, and the ways of thinking, of the Greeks. They had even been to a great extent compelled to learn their language. Some of the writers of the New Testament, it is clear, had been taught Greek, just as we may be taught French; and Homer, it is evident, had been the school-book employed in teaching them the language. And now, together with all the rest of the world, they had become members of the universal empire of Rome. All this would have led to nothing except obliteration and absorption, as it did elsewhere, if the Jews had been like other people. They were incapable, however, of succumbing in this way, because they had ideas and moral sentiments that were, in some important respects, truer, and stronger, and better than those of their conquerors and oppressors. Hence originated the idea of their conquerors that they were the enemies of the human race. It was, then, for this reason, because, being indestructible and unassimilable, they had been obliged to consider the meaning and worth of other peoples’ ideas, and of facts, that Jerusalem came to be the definite spot upon which the fruitful contact of the different integers of the East with each other, and of East with West, of Europe with Asia, actually took place. Here were collected, as into a focus, the knowledge and the circumstances which would engender the new sentiment that was to reverse the old one. The old one had been that of narrow exclusiveness. It could not have been otherwise. The only one that could be engendered by the new knowledge, and the new circumstances, was one of universal inclusiveness: not the idea of a peculiar people, such as the Egyptians had regarded themselves, but its very opposite, that of the universal brotherhood of mankind. We see the embryo of the thought endeavouring to assume form at Rome, at the very time that it was being preached with the sharpest and clearest definition at Jerusalem. But it never could have assumed its proper, clear, distinct form at Rome, because morality would always there have been hazy and corrupt, and inextricably entangled with ideas of self and dominion. In Jerusalem only, the one true home of single-purposed morality, could it assume its true shape, pure and undefiled. When the words were uttered, “Ye all are brethren,” the idea was formulated. That was the moment of its birth. It then took its place in the moral creation, a living form, with life, and the power of giving life; with power to throw down and to build up. This was the new commandment, the seminal idea of the new religion, and Jerusalem was the seed-bed, prepared for it by the long series of antecedent events, where it must germinate first. When that had been done, scions from it might be taken to other localities. But it is plain that, as moral instincts die hard, Jerusalem is also precisely one of the spots in which the new sentiment will meet with the most determined and violent antagonism; nor will it ever find there general reception, or, indeed, so much reception as among other races, where the instinct of repulsion had not been so completely and firmly established.

The new sentiment had to be evoked from man’s inner consciousness, as it was acted upon and affected by the new order of things. This could not be done until the authority of this inner consciousness had been recognized. This means a great deal. What it had come to regard as true and good was to be religion, as distinguished from written law, which is imposed by the State, has convenience and expediency for its object, and is limited in its purview by the necessities of its application, and by the ignorance and low sentiment of public opinion. The Christ-enlightened, God-taught, pure conscience is a better and higher and more searching rule of life than any legislation. That would only drag conscience and life down again to the common level. To make that religion would be making Cæsar God: an evil necessity that had, to some extent, inhered in the Old Dispensation. It would kill conscience, which aims higher, goes deeper, and sees farther than written statutes and enactments, however well meant, or wisely drawn. The new religion, therefore, stood aloof from, and placed itself above, all existing legislation, except in the sense of submitting to it, and obeying it as a social and political necessity. But though it submitted itself to, and obeyed, it could not receive, a written code as the rule of life. While, therefore, it recognized the rights and necessities of the kingdoms of this world, it found in man’s conscience the law of a kingdom not of this world. The polity it created was not of them. It was God’s kingdom among men. The kingdoms of the world might at some future time become the kingdoms of God, but at present Cæsar and God were distinct powers, and represented distinctly different applications of the principles of right. Cæsar’s application was partial only, and, moreover, full of corruption; God’s was all-embracing and incorrupt.

The day of trial had been long in coming, but it had come at last; and what we have been recalling to the reader’s mind was what the wisdom of Egypt had to confront now. It was the apotheosis of the ideas men could now attach to the words, Truth, Freedom, Justice, Goodness, Knowledge, Humanity. These were of God, and made man one with God. The time, then, had come for the Hebrew bondman to be revenged: for the Hebrew invasion of Egypt. We may contrast it with the old Egyptian invasions of Syria, and with the Hyksos invasion of Egypt. It was of a kind of which the organized wisdom of Egypt could have formed no anticipation; and against which the temples and the priesthood of Egypt were as powerless as heaps of stones, and dead men. It was an invasion of ideas which could now be understood, and of sentiments which could now be felt; and which were better than any the priests, and priest-kings of old Egypt had in their day felt or understood; and the feeling and the understanding of which would utterly abolish the system they had maintained. These ideas and sentiments had been proclaimed in the cities and villages of Judea and Galilee as the new commandment, as the fulfilment of all religion. The whole Roman world was ripening for their reception. They were carried down into Egypt in the thoughts and hearts of those who had received them. They spread from mind to mind, and from heart to heart. The fugitive bondman, the cast-out leper had returned; but he had now come to bestow a glorious liberty, to communicate the contagion of regenerating ideas and sentiments, and of a larger and better humanity. The Hyksos had again come down into the old Nile land; but this time they came not to oppress, not to exact tribute, but to break bonds, and to enrich, and to place men on a higher level than they had occupied before. This was an invasion to which Egypt, in all its thousands of years of national life, had never yet been exposed. Invasions of this kind can be very rare in the history of nations, and in the history of the human race; but if, when they do come, minds are prepared for them, they are irresistible. And so it was now with old Egypt. The old order of things passed away, and the new order of things came in its place. The priesthood, with all their lore, their science, their wisdom, their legitimacy of at least four thousand years, their impregnable temple-fortresses, their territorial supremacy, the awful authority with which a religion so old, that the memory of the world ran not to the contrary, invested them, passed away like a morning mist. The whole system fell, as the spreading symmetrical pine-tree falls, never to burst forth again into new life—the overthrow having killed the root, as well as all that had grown from the root. Even the very Houses of the Gods which, as the thought of the days of Rameses had phrased it, had been built for myriads of years, passed away with it, excepting the few which have been preserved to tell the history of what once had been.

All had been overthrown: but the Christian ideas and sentiments, which had done the work, were too grand and simple for Egypt, where the most inveterate of all instincts was for the mind to be swathed. And so the new revelation was soon obscured. The reaction came in the forms of asceticism and theology.

But asceticism and theology are not religion; or, at all events, not such religion as can inspire much nobility of soul, or which has any power and vitality, except under the circumstances which created it: and so this, too, fell; and the religion which superseded it—that of the Egypt of to-day—is, in its simplest expression, a reversion to the old oriental idea, which seems always to have been a necessity there, of authoritative, unchangeable legislation, combined, however, with the Christian idea of the brotherhood of mankind. The form in which the Christian idea has been incorporated into it is that of an universal religion, which gives no sanction to exclusive pretensions, either of nationality, or of caste.