"Your friend?" Millicent said eagerly; it pleased her that Michael should speak of the things nearest his heart. He was allowing her to approach him.
Michael laughed. "And yours, too, I hope?"
"Why?" Millicent's heart quickened.
"Because Akhnaton was the first man to preach simplicity, honesty, frankness and sincerity, and he preached it from a throne. He was the first Pharaoh to be a humanitarian, the first man in whose heart there was no trace of barbarism." [1]
"Really?" Millicent said. Michael's earnestness forbade levity. "How interesting! Do tell me more about him."
"He was the first human being to understand rightly the meaning of divinity."
"But what he taught didn't last. We owe nothing to his doctrines, do we? Did it ever spread beyond his own kingdom?"
"Like other great teachers, he sacrificed all to his principles. Yet there can be no question that his ideals will hold good 'till the swan turns black and the crow turns white, till the hills rise up and travel and the deeps rush into the rivers.' That's how Weigall ends up the life he has written of the great reformer. How can you say that we owe nothing to him? You might as well say that we owe nothing to any of the great men of whom we have never heard, and yet you know that thought affects the whole world. Akhnaton made himself immortal by his prophecies—they were the eternal truths revealed to him by God."
"By a prophet, do you mean that he was a prophet like Moses, Jeremiah,
Isaiah and so on?"
"I mean that prophets were the seers to whom God communicated knowledge. Prophets were the people to whom He made revelations; he enlightened their minds; He certainly revealed Himself to Akhnaton, or how else could he, in that age of darkness, have evolved for himself an almost perfect conception of divinity? Weigall says 'he evolved a monotheist's religion second only to Christianity itself in its purity of tone.' If God had not revealed Himself to Akhnaton as He did later on to Moses and Abraham, and as I believe He still does to our true reformers, how could he, as Weigall says, have evolved his beautiful religion 'in an age of superstition, and in a land where the grossest polytheism reigned absolutely supreme'?"