About it were
scintillating clusters, single stars and faint streaks of
never-dissipated mists. Night after night that one brilliant point had
remained unmoved in its steady gaze from the uppermost, but the
clusters rotated about it; the single stars were westward moving; the
mists shifted. And a question began to trouble him: What hand had
marshaled the stars? Seb,[1] whom Toth had supplanted? Osiris, whom
Set destroyed? The young man put them aside. They were feeble.
Nothing so weak had created the mighty hosts of heaven. So he began to
weigh the question.
What hand had marshaled the stars? An accident? Since man must
worship something supernal, what more tremendous than the cataclysm, if
such it were, that evolved the stars. Had the same or a series of such
events brought forth the earth and man? Was the accident continuously
attendant? Did it spread the Nile over Egypt and call it again within
its banks every year? Did it clothe the fields and bring them to
harvest every revolution of the sun? Did it hang the moon like a
sickle in the west or lift it over the Arabian hills like a bubble of
silver every eight and twenty days?
If it were omnipotent, infinite and omnipresent, could it be an
accident? If it were, why not worship it and call it God?
The reasoning led him again in the direction of the gods, but he saw no
reason for a multiplicity of deities.
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