Forlong - Rivers of Life

506
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
“the deified Pagan,” and dead men’s bones were besought by honest and honourable
women desirous of offspring, instead of the ancient Solar and Lunar Gods, whose
special and not inapt function it had been to assist in these matters.
But for Alexandria and its library, Egypt would no doubt have withstood a
change of faith; as it was, it early rejected Christianity, and its unbounded superstitions;
considering its “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” by no means so good as the old
creating God—his wisdom in Isis, and power and production in Horus and the loved
ancient memories connected with these. The masses, however, held the faith lightly,
and succumbed at once to the Arabian Iconoclast, who came proclaiming to her sternly
and clearly; “There is but one God, and I, though but a man, am his Prophet, and
am commanded to bear to you the tidings that ye worship and bow to Him alone.”
This was a return to the Theism which had in OM or ON, and ISIS, and the fertilizing
orbs of heaven, still breathed mysteriously of one great Creative Father—a Triune
God, it is true, but whom no cultured mind in Egypt ever believed could produce a son by
the agency of any mere woman. Though, indeed, he created all animal, fish, bird, and
vegetable life, yet he himself was held to be the great uncreated and Incomprehensible
Almighty One, which every idea, as in On, Am-On, Knef, or Phtha, only threw further
back into the lone and unfathomable depths of lnfinity. 1 Ancient amid the most
ancient Faiths, Egypt loved to look back, like the Hebrew, to her mythic representative
gods and god-like men, and though she now saw her great Father’s power
eclipsed for a time, and on his own Egyptian soil, yet so had this before occurred through
Typhon’s agency. Had not Ba-al and Nishrok, Zeus and Apollo, they said, to bend before
new Gods and ideas? Indra and Varoona had given place to Vishnoo and Lakshmi;
even great Vishnoo had been forced by evil ones to leave Swerga; and so feeble and
obscure a deity as Jaland-hāra had been permitted for a time to hide the great Narāyana
from man’s gaze. The eclipse was but to usher in a more glorious day.
In the fall of Serapis, however, wise Egyptians must have seen the last of a great
number of serious blows, which had been shattering the ancient fabrics. Their great
enemy now was not really the new faith, but Light, and that not of Sun or Osiris!
nay, but of that strange new shrine to which all were now flocking, “the Alexandrian
Library!” Libraries and Temples, Secular Readers and Priests, cannot agree, as all
churches and Eastern faiths have long acknowledged. Did not Omer, the great Arabian
Kalif, on his first advent, at once destroy the later Alexandrian Library? saying that
the Korán contained all that man required to know, and that “if these books contained
more or less, they were not only prejudicial to man but blasphemous in the sight of
God”! And would not even Protestant priests, and many well-meaning and so-called
pious Christian men amongst ourselves, burn the volumes of many of our historians,
critics and scientists, if they could? Rome, wherever possiblc, has insisted on “the
Faithful” reading no books but her own, and has very lately rejoiced at, if not urged
on, her faithful Canadians to resist the Queen’s laws, courts, and even arms, rather than
1 [This notion that ancient Egyptian religion was in general ‘essentially monotheistic’ is now regarded as
a delusion due to the prejudices of nineteenth-century writers and bad early translations. — T.S.]