"
And thus was the mystery explained to him.
"Thou bowest down to a beetle," she went on without pausing. "Thou
worshipest a cat; thou offerest up sacrifice to an image and conservest
abominable and heathen rites. Thou art an idolater, and as such thou
art not for Rachel. And yet, this further: if thou canst become a
worshiper of the true God, thou shalt take her. Never have I seen an
Egyptian won over to the faith of Abraham, but there approacheth a time
of wonders and I shall not marvel."
To Egypt its faith was paramount. Israel in its palmiest days was not
more vigilantly, jealously fanatical than Egypt. Every worshiper was a
zealot; every ecclesiast an inquisitor. Church and State were
inseparably united; law was fused with religion; science and the arts
were governed by hieratic canons.
The individual ate, slept and labored in the name of the gods, and
national matters proceeded as the Pantheon directed by the
ecclesiastical mouthpiece.
Life was an ephemeral preface to the interminable and actual existence
of immortality. Temporal things were transient and only of
probationary value. The tomb was the ultimate and hoped-for, infinite
abiding-place.
To the ideal Osirian his faith was the essential fiber in the fabric of
his existence, to withdraw which meant physical and spiritual
destruction.
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