Again, in the wisdom of his secret counsels, God is described as holding in reserve all that may happen in the future. “He is that which is, and that which is not,” says the Todtenbuch; “for that which is, is in my hand, and that which is not is in my heart.”
It has been necessary to dwell at some length on the Egyptian doctrines respecting the nature of God and his relation to the world before approaching another feature of exceeding interest in their theology—namely, the history and office of the Redeemer.
This mighty Liberator, the first hope of whom was given by God to our first parents, appears under various forms in the traditions of all the peoples of a distant antiquity, and among these traditions the most ancient and the most pure is certainly that of Osiris, whose noble and beneficent attributes raise him above all the divinities of other nations, represented as coming to bring succor to man. The Doctors of the church were themselves struck with admiration before this august figure, and did not hesitate to identify the name of Osiris with that of our Lord Jesus Christ,[[150]] being convinced that the belief respecting him was but an echo of the primitive revelation. It would indeed be difficult to explain otherwise its correspondence to the Messianic prophecies given later to the chosen people, or the analogies of the Osirian teaching with the accomplishment, in the life of our Lord, of the hopes which, during long centuries, it kept alive in the countless generations of Egypt.
The special attribute of Osiris is goodness; it is he who is Oun-Nofre the Good Being par excellence; it is he who, with Tum (or Phtah) and Thoth, partakes of the divine essence, and is called, like Ammon, Neb-oua—the Lord alone.
In the papyrus 3292 in the Hall of Tombs in the Louvre is the following passage: “Hail to thee, Osiris, ... the great eldest Son of Ra, Father of fathers,... King of immeasurable time and lord of eternity.... None knows his name; innumerable are his names in the cities and the nomes.[[151]]... Hail to thee, ... the one who didst rise from the dead. He is the lord of life, and we live by his creations; none can live without his will.” The second aspect of the life of Osiris is his sojourn upon earth in human form, his death, and passage into the land of the departed. Plutarch tells us that Osiris, lord of time, made himself man and reigned on earth, giving his people wise and holy laws; that he taught them agriculture and reverence to the gods, going through all the country to instruct his subjects, whose attention he won and whose manners he softened by the penetrating charm of his words and by music.[[152]]
Even according to the myths, however, righteousness does not long prosper upon earth. The Principle of Evil, enraged against him, compassed his painful death when his life upon earth had attained twenty-eight years[[153]]—often represented by twenty-eight lotus-flowers in the inscriptions, and fixed by the traditional age of the Apis.
But for Osiris, as for the true Saviour, the hour of death is the hour of victory. He rises again, and reigns henceforth, king of an eternal kingdom.
The priests and faithful of Osiris could not endure the attempts made by travellers and philosophers to find a resemblance between this pure and lofty divinity to any of their own disreputable gods, or to fix in the depths of the earth and the abode of the dead the dwelling-place of him who had “no kind of communication with substances subject to corruption and death.” No other god had in Egypt so many temples and worshippers as this the favorite deity of the country, since, besides its own local divinity, each of the nomes worshipped Osiris and Isis, and thus the “Protector of souls” was, from the Mediterranean to the cataracts, the god of all the Egyptians.
The anniversary of the death of Osiris[[154]] was every year observed with lamentations throughout the land, until the hour of his resurrection, which was hailed with joy, festivities, and triumph; this people, always so anxious and interested about the future beyond the tomb, having for the “Lord of the life to come” the most deep and tender devotion. For, of all the phases of his worship, that which occupied the largest place and exercised the profoundest influence on the religious life of this great nation is connected with the office of Osiris in regard to each separate soul. All the funereal inscriptions dwell upon this. Osiris was not only their saviour but their judge. In the paintings and sculptures, and the vignettes of the ritual, he is usually represented enthroned in the Hall of the divine Justice, where, enveloped, all but the face and hands, in the shroud which had enfolded him in the tomb, and holding in his right hand the hyk, or pastoral staff (not unlike an episcopal crosier), and in the left a double-thonged scourge, he awaits the soul of the departed. At his feet are the divine balances, wherein will be weighed the heart of the dead. At the threshold of the hall Maat, the symbol of justice and truth, receives the soul and presents it to the Judge.
The soul’s first words on being brought into the presence of its God were: “I am the Osiris [such a one],” giving his earthly name.[[155]]