may be bribed to do justice to a Christian. An honest Mussulman must enforce the Sacred Law of Islam, and that means the denial of justice to the Christian." "Well," said the Consul, after a pause, " if you put it in that way, you are quite right."

But let me not be misunderstood. An honest Mussulman can deal justice to Christian and Mussulman, provided that he is administering a non-Mussulman code, under the orders of a non-Mussulman superior. We have many such Mussulmans in our Indian Empire. But the more conscientious a Mussulman ruler is the less capable is he of doing justice to his non-Mussulman subjects. He is merely the Minister of a law which he believes to be divine and unalterable.

But is the Sultan likely to listen to any proposal aiming at giving selfgovernment, under a non-Mussulman Governor, to Armeria? On the contrary he is bound by the Sacred Law to resist such an encroachment on the domain of Islam until he has convinced himself that superior force will be employed to compel him. When that contingency is made plain to him the same imperative law which bids him resist up to that point commands him then to yield in the interest of Islam. The question therefore is, Have the Christian Powers made up their minds to enforce their demand for a non-Mussulman Governor of Armenia? If they have, the determination to use force will obviate the necessity of using it, as in the case of the Lebanon twenty years ago and of Dulcigno the other day. If the concert of Europe is not prepared to go that length, the only alternatives are to do nothing, or that England and Russia should come to an understanding to coerce the Porte. To do nothing is undoubtedly the surest method of placing Russia in permanent possession of Armenia at no distant date. If the Armenians are forced to make their choice between their present condition and annexation to Russia, they will certainly choose annexation to Russia; and they can and will materially help to bring it to pass. On the other hand, a quiet intimation to the Porte that Russian troops would cross the Armenian frontier by agreement with the other Powers, or even with England alone, would at once extort the submission of the Sultan and avert the eventual annexation of Armenia to Russia. The mobilized Russian Army on the Roumanian frontier was, Lord Salisbury declared in the House of Lords in 1877, "the motive power of the Conference" of Constantinople; and if the Turkish Government had believed that they would have been left alone to contend with that motive power, they would undoubtedly have accepted Lord Salisbury's programme. Midhat Pasha, who was then Grand Vizir, said so in so many words in an article published in this country.

The Blue Books appear to me to make it evident that if Lord Salisbury had been properly supported by the Cabinet, he would have succeeded at Constantinople. One of the absurd charges persistently made against him by one or two journals of influence was that he had gone to Constantinople as an emissary of a knot of fanatics, including my humble self, who were bent on bringing about a union between the Eastern and the English Churches. I have never heard that Lord Salisbury has at any time expressed or held any opinion upon that subject. Nor can I see any connection between the liberation of the

The Ottoman Empire is clearly doomed. The question for statesmen to consider is, whether the end shall come in a sudden crash, or slowly, through the gradual emancipation and political discipline of the subject populations. In the former case, there will be a hurried scramble over the spoils, leading, not improbably, to a general war. In the latter, the subject races themselves may quietly and, by degrees, take possession of the inheritance, as has been done in the provinces already liberated. Those, then, who desire to maintain, as long as possible, the material fabric of the Ottoman Empire, should be the first to advocate the gradual extension of semi-independent local administrative Governments, paying tribute to the Sultan, but managing their own affairs. But this can never be accomplished except by coercion through some, or all, of the Great Powers.

MALCOLM MACCOLL.

Eastern Christians and the union of the English and Eastern Churches. My belief is that the emancipation of the Eastern Christians, if it have any effect at all, is calculated to retard rather than promote any such union. At all events, my opinions on the Eastern Question have never been influenced in the very slightest degree by any such considerations.

ANCIENT EGYPT IN ITS COMPARATIVE

E

RELATIONS.

LECTURES DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION IN
FEBRUARY AND MARCH, 1881.

III.

ETHICS AND MANNERS.

GYPTIAN society lasted unchanged four or five thousand years, from the date of the oldest monuments to the fall of paganism. It is no idle inquiry to search into the causes of this earliest and most enduring form of settled life, and to try to portray it truthfully. Our endeavour should be to form a clear notion of the moral philosophy of the Egyptians, and of their family life, education, and customs. Thus, looking so far back, and across so vast a space, we shall enlarge our horizon; and if by more careful view we can discover how far this ancient nation anticipated, or in any respect excelled us in civilization, we shall gain a clearer insight into the comparative morals of mankind.

MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

The only ancient Egyptian philosophy we know was moral. How far the wise men of the colleges advanced in speculative philosophy is as yet dark. Apparently they were limited by religion, and confined themselves to those theories of the First Cause and the future state, which are traceable in the varying phases of the Egyptian religion. But speculation, such as we see it in the Greek schools, as to the nature of the Divinity, and the laws of the universe, appears to have been foreign to their studies. The only exception we at present know, in the whole range of Egyptian literature, is a document in demotic, recently explained by M. Revillout, in which a jackal and a cat hold high discourse as to the origin of life, immortality, and cognate subjects. This treatise belongs to the latest Egyptian age, when Greek and Persian influences (M. Revillout adds, perhaps Indian also) had materially altered the Egyptian modes of thought. ("Revue Egyptologique," i. pp. 143, 153.)

The undoubtedly native moral philosophy may be divided into the ethics of religion, and the ethics of the proverbial writers, which are markedly distinct.

Ethics of Religion.

As the central document of the ethics of religion, stands the famous Negative Confession, in chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, already noticed in the last paper, in which the moral code it contains was deferred for consideration as belonging to the present subject.

The Negative Confession, it will be remembered, is the list of the fortytwo deadly sins to which the deceased should plead not guilty at the time of the weighing of his heart before Osiris. He must address in turn. the forty-two witnesses or assessors, who form the jury of the final judgment, and each of whom takes cognizance of a particular sin. This is the moral centre of the whole collection of documents which form the Book of the Dead; it is the Egyptian definition of the responsibility which rules the future destinies of the soul.

The unwieldy number forty-two involves virtual, and even actual repetition, and the list varies in different texts. Thus, as M. Naville notices, the sins connected with the distribution of the water of the Nile over the land are sometimes wanting. (Congrès Provincial des

Orientalistes, Lyon, i. p. 257.)

An attempt has been made to explain the number forty-two, which is worth noticing. There were forty-two nomes, or provinces of Egypt, according to the ancient division. What more natural than that each of the witnesses represented a nome? But the abode of each witness, generally a city, is mentioned; and we find the same city repeated in more cases than one. Thus the nome theory fails; but we may conjecture that the priests collected the moral doctrine of the different temples, and so framed their code. This would, perhaps, account for the unsystematic character and iteration of the confession.

It has not been unnoticed, that the 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead, as given in the Turin papyrus, published by Dr. Lepsius, and translated by Dr. Birch, contains what may be called another, and less formal version of the Negative Confession. At the beginning of the chapter, after a general address to the assessors and Osiris, there follows a Negative Confession to the jury as a body, containing thirtysix items. This general confession, though covering the same ground as the particular one following it, yet agrees in scarcely any item. This is another evidence of the growth and composite character of the code.

Taking the two confessions together, we notice that the general one, though not strictly methodical, at least attempts to group together cognate offences; while the particular one, the Negative Confession, seems wholly without order. In the Papyrus of Setmes, which is of the time of the Empire, the general confession is limited to a few clauses.

This suggests that the fuller form of the far later Turin text indicates an afterthought. Taking the Turin Papyrus as representing the final form of the work, we observe that both confessions may be reduced to four classes, sin against the gods, against one's neighbour, against oneself, and against animals, the last two giving the code a special character. If we take the other simple division, sins of thought, word, and deed, we find the first class absolutely wanting, a circumstance most remarkable in a priestly code of great minuteness.

The details should be more carefully examined, as they give us the measure of Egyptian morals as laid down by the priests, or, in other words, their ethics of religion. The order should be that of the four classes above mentioned.

1. The Egyptians had no aversion to foreign gods as such. They even admitted some into their Pantheon. Consequently, there is no prohibition of apostasy, nor is there any more direct statement of monotheism, that what we should expect from the attempt to reduce the Pantheon to a First Cause, which characterizes the book. God and the gods seem to be used as convertible terms. There is no ground for reading a god" where the singular occurs; for although the indefinite article is unusual, if "any god" were intended, this would be definitely stated. Probably the singular or plural is preferably used, according to the needs of the clause; but no distinct line can be drawn. Apostasy being excluded, the sins against the gods are limited to blasphemy, robbery of offerings, injury to temple property and the mummies, and to the sacred quadrupeds, birds, and fishes. Injury to sacred buildings, whether temples or tombs, does not seem to be contemplated. So strong was the reverence for the sepulchre in the earliest time, that M. Mariette notices the extraordinary fact that, out of many hundreds of tombs of the ancient dynasties, ending with the Sixth, he found only two which had doors. (Rev. Arch., N.S., xix. p. 14.) This is a remarkable contrast to the Theban custom of closing the tombs, from the date of the Eleventh Dynasty, which we know from the judicial inquiry under the Twentieth, into the violation of tombs of kings and other persons. (Chabas, "Melanges," 3rd ser., i. p. 47 seqq.)

2. Sins against one's neighbour and oneself cannot always be separated, because sins against oneself are wrongs to society; but this idea would be foreign to the Egyptian mind. In the Egyptian code, active crimes against others are well defined. On the other hand, the mental conditions which are constructive of crime are left out of sight; no such abstraction as envy, jealousy, malice, is mentioned, just as throughout crimes of speech not of thought are contemplated. The sanctity of marriage is evident, from the fact that, in so large an enumeration, adultery, and corrupting others, cover the whole ground of sins against social morals. The humanity of the code is shown in the clause which protects the labouring man against the exaction of more than his day's labour, and that in each confession which forbids the calumniation of