Forlong - Rivers of Life

540
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
much, I say, as all these point to love and reverence for ancestors, yet they were not the
origin, but merely the development of that reverence or affection which nature early
implanted, though only after much religion of divers kinds had reached considerable
maturity. In the rich Karain Mausoleum—long one of the “seven wonders of the
world,” the temples and colossi of Bene-Hassan and Bamian, the Nekropolis of Thebes,
and tombs, statuary or mortuary, of all peoples, we see but a faith forming into something
higher, and treading very closely on hero-worship, which soon developed into
the worship of a great spiritual deity. It is clear to me that many of the wise who
devised or reared these great ancestral monuments, and placed the earthly trappings
of the dead within them, knew nearly as well as we do when we also so bury some of
our dead., that the earthly tenement broke up and dispersed; some portions passing
into new life, and others into gases, or the winds of heaven. Few of there ancients, I
think, expected that bodily resurrection—the outcome of a dogmatism which has
refused to listen to reason and science. Even of the spiritual resurrection pristine
man had a very faint conception. The most ancient Egyptians wrote above those
tombs of Memphis, which M. Mariette has recovered from the Lybian sands, such lines
as “Here he lives for evermore,” or “This is his everlasting home;” which does not
appear to coincide with the belief that “the dead were to come forth” and live in
kingdoms “prepared for them from the foundation of the world.” This was the
religious idea of the outlying or captive tribes of the empire.
From the depth in rock, or rock-like masonry at which the dead were entombed,
it is clear the Egyptian looked upon their repose being disturbed by anyone—Osiris or
other, God or man—as the veriest sacrilege; and if the soul were to rise, no doubt they
thought it would compromise it, if by any chance the body escaped. But I do not
think they believed in any such resurrection of the body, or that we are justified in inferring
that the Egyptians held the doctrine of Immortality from their practices of
embalming and entombing. Friends like to see a suitable tomb over their loved dead,
and undertakers—especially contractors or builders—have had, I think, much more to
do with these matters thanm the commandments of the Gods, or than people are generally
aware of. I can imagine a host of builders coming to visit the poor bereaved ones in
their hour of deepest distress, and then receiving large orders for embalming and entombing
of the deceased in a manner which they would carefully describe as befitting
his or her lineage and wealth. The Priests, as a matter of course, would be there to
dictate what was pleasing to the gods in the way of architecture and painting, and such
as would ward off demons; and as tombs usually required a little shrine, and some
clerical and other establishment, “the man of God” could scareely be an uninterested
party in the additional office and patronage which all respectable tombs yielded. I
cannot otherwise account for hundreds of the so-called religious structures of the world.
The Egyptians and Chinese are held to have been the earliest and most sincere
of ancestor-worshippers, but for the above reasons, and because we do not yet know