CONCLUSION.

WE come now to the conclusion of our undertaking. With the aid of the new discoveries in Egypt, we think that we have shed some light upon various passages of the sacred annals, and that we have resolved, in a more satisfactory manner, certain difficulties which infidels opposed to their veracity. We have attentively examined the resources which the writings and monuments of Egypt afford, in the interpretation and defence of a religion, whose lot has been, in all ages, to meet with enemies, when it should have found only admirers and disciples. But the researches to which we have been attending very naturally, as we think, give rise to a thought consoling to the Christian.

Providence, whose operations are so sensibly exhibited in the whole physical constitution of the world, has not abandoned to chance the government of the moral or intellectual world. By means often imperceptible even to the eye of the man of observation, and which seem reserved for his own secret counsel, God directs second causes, gives them efficiency according to his will, and makes them serve, sometimes even contrary to their natural tendency, to accomplish his own immutable decrees, and to propagate and support that religion which he has revealed to us. It is in this way that, consistently with his own will, he delays or accelerates the march of human * intellect; that he gives it a direction such as he pleases; that he causes discoveries to spring up in their time, as fruits ripen in their season; and that the revolutions which

renew the sciences, like those which change the face of empires, enter into the plan which he traced out for himself from all eternity.

Does not this sublime truth, which affords an inexhaustible subject of meditation to the well instructed and reflecting man, but which needs for its development the pen of a Bossuet,-does it not apply with great force to the subject that we have been considering?

Since the studies of our age have been principally directed to the natural sciences, which the irreligious levity of the last age had so strangely abused to the prejudice of religion, we have seen the most admirable discoveries confirming the physical history of the primitive world, as it is given by Moses. It is sufficient to cite in proof of this fact, the geological labors of our celebrated Cuvier. Now that historic researches are pursued with a greater activity than ever before, and the monuments of antiquity illustrated by a judicious and promising criticism, Providence has also ordered, that the writings of ancient Egypt should in turn confirm the historic facts of the holy books; facts against which a systematic erudition had furnished infidelity with so many objections that were unceasingly repeated, though they had been a thousand times refuted. We cannot doubt that human knowledge, as it becomes more and more disengaged from the spirit of system, and pursues truth as its only aim, will still attain, as it advances, to other analogous results.

Thus, as has been often said, revealed religion has no greater foe than ignorance. Far from making it her ally, as men who deny the testimony of all ages have not blushed to assert, she cannot but glory in the advance of the sciences. She has always favored them, and it is chiefly owing to her influence, that they have been preserved in the midst of the barbarism from which she has rescued us.

Thus the progress of true science, the progress of light (to use a legitimate though often abused expression), far from being at variance with revealed religion, as its enemies have represented; far from being dangerous to it, as some of its disciples have appeared to fear; tends, on the contrary, each day to strengthen its claims upon all enlightened minds, and to prove, in opposition to the pride of false science, that this divine religion, confirmed as it is by all the truths to which the human mind attains, is the truth of the Lord which endureth forever (Psalm cxvii. 2).

APPENDIX.

[ A. p. 7. ]

Brief description of Anaglyphs.

THE peculiarity in the anaglyphs referred to by our author in this paragraph, is, that they are made to express ideas purely conventional. Champollion calls them (p. 348, Précis) "extraordinary compositions or fantastic beings," or even "real beings which have no connection with each other in nature, but which are related in a manner purely arbitrary." Letronne remarks of them (p. 426, Précis), that "they evidently contain the most secret mysteries of theology, the history of the birth or nativity, of the combats, and of the various actions, of mythic personages of all orders. Some express certain moral qualities attributed to God, the first principle of all things, or communicated by him to man; others are significant of physical phenomena." The Greek word 'avarhún signifies raised carving or engraving; exactly the bas-relief of the French. The mythic symbols called · anaglyphs, were usually executed only in this way. Our author adverts to them again, in the third chapter of the first part of this work.

It may be proper to remark here, that those anaglyphs which are so occult in their meaning as to be incapable of explanation, are few in number, when compared with the