The Lesson Of The Obelisk.

side , this stood at the front of the temple , by the gateway ; ancl between the two rosy monoliths the worshippers entered . The obelisk in front of the temple at Luxor stood , and one now stands , on the summit of a low hill . The obelisk at Karnak stood inside the temple walls . There is no truth in the prevalent idea that obelisks should stand on plains . At Tanis ( Zoan ?) , the city of obeliskswhere fragments of ten or

, twelve remain in the ruins of one temple , it is probable that most of them stood within the temple courts . Ancl it may be taken as certain that every temple obelisk in Egypt stood on a mound above the reach of hi gh Nile at the time it Avas erected . Modern Egypt , after centuries of annual deposit of high Nile , is considerably above the ievel on which the ancient E gyptians lived . They Avere a people of as great civilization as the world has since known .

Probably in many respects their civilization was higher than ours . Elegance , refinement , splendour , characterised Heliopolis , and also Memphis , Avhich lay some fifteen miles distant across the Nile . The people , rich and poor , were educated . The prevalence of sculptured ancl painted inscri ptions on every wall

and stone shows that the whole people were expected to read and appreciate them . We know that they had an extensive literature , historians , poets , philosophers . The profound mysteries of modern thought , the vagaries of modern metaphysics , the doctrines of the skeptics , the evolutionists , all had their day in Egypt . They have had their day about once in every four centuries , with such regularity that it is a wonder some one does not discover that

philosophic science is like light and heat , undulatory—moving iu regular waves over or in the intellects of man . But Egyptian philosophy ancl faith never doubted that man derived his origin from God , never descended to find that ori gin among the beasts . They , like all other ancient civilizations , were proud to trace their ancestry up to the Divine . It was left for a later age of pigmies in philosophy to seek with human

senses the formation out of matter of the immaterial ancl immortal , and to imagine their souls born in the brains of monkeys . Drifting- away , age after age , from the primeval symplicity of monotheism , the Egyptian system of faith never to the death of the last Apis ceased to hold as its cardinal doctrine the supremacy of one God over all other gods , giver of all power and life to gods and to men .

Egypt had been settled , some centuries before the erection of this obelisk , by a colony who had come across the desert from Asia . The date of this settlement is still a subject of investigation . Egyptologists are the most modest ancl most judicious of all scientific workers . They argue in favour of their several theories , but they rarely insist that the theories are absolutely affirmed as truths . Of late years there has been a marked tendency on the

part of those who held the extreme antiquity of the settlement to accept a less remote date . We no longer hear Bunsen ' s B . C . 20 , 000 even hinted at . The extremists now reckon the immigration under Misraim at about B . C . 5000 , while a large body of careful students are assured that it was not so long ago as B . C . 3000 .

Longer or shorter , Egypt had , in her isolated position , cut off by seas and deserts from the rest of the world , grown to be a peculiar people , ivith peculiar customs and habits , peculiar religion . Here we find the oldest records of human faith in God outside of the sacred record . Asia has no such antiquity of recorded history . India ancl China have fables of an heroic age , myths which are vague dreams like the Greek stories of Perseus and Herakles .

These myths , like the Greek , do not profess to be connected with history until the time after this obelisk had been erected . Nowhere in the ivorkl are there any physical certainties proving human existence so old as in E gypt . Human arts are genealogical , and the genealogy carries us back iu nearly all of them to or through Egypt . And among human inventions , many forms of reli gion and faiths are to be ranked as works of art—of men ' s device . Some ignorant