VIII. [PARTIALLY A REPRINT FROM THE 'TRANSACTIONS' OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY.] WHEN Egypt was conquered by the Macedonians, the native religion, and, with it, all learning declined. It was only after the introduction of Christianity that the national mind was again roused to intellectual effort, and that a literature was composed which has been handed down to us under the name of Coptic. According to Eusebius, the Evangelist Mark entered Egypt during the reign of Nero, and rapidly converted thousands of the mixed Greek, Jewish, and Egyptian population of the lower country. Anxious to invest their traditional ceremonies with a meaning acceptable to cultivated pagans, the Jews in those scholarly regions had become mystical Platonists; the Greeks had exhausted both religion and criticism; while, routed by foreign conquest and philosophy, the discomfited Egyptians no longer believed in their indigenous gods, but were still affected by all the ancient spiritual wants of their religious race. With the soil thus effectually prepared for its beneficent action, Christianity took the people by storm. Only seventy years afterwards Justin Martyr found the new religion almost universally predominant. Those who remained heathens turned their adorations principally to the god Serapis, the judge after death, exhibiting in the fashionable worship a significant anxiety to attain perfection during, and salvation after, their earthly life. The Egyptians being the first nation converted as a whole, their influence on growing Christianity was proportionately great. Having ever believed in the immortality of the soul and a certain triplet of gods, thanks to ancient associations and new enthusiasm, the men of the Nile now rose to be the leaders of the primitive church. Their voice dominated in all the councils of the Church; their separate African Council of Hipporegius was the model of that of Nice; and an Egyptian deacon, Athanasius, settled the consubstantiality of God and Christ against the Arian heresy. A Jewish colony near Alexandria, the Therapeutæ, invented monastic life; and the lost Gospel, according to the Egyptians, contained the praise of celibacy. Even before this, the Egyptians had been called Docetæ, because they thought that the Saviour had been crucified in appearance only. Together with the testimony of the Fathers and the Coptic literature, these circumstances sufficiently establish the fact that the Egyptians had a principal share in settling the first dogmas of Christianity. It is doubtful whether the preserved versions of the Coptic Bible are older than the third century. They certainly are not of later date. In many respects they evince so genuine a character, as to admit being used as a means for emendating the Greek canon. Round this new centre of the Egyptian mind the Gnostical philosophy composed its mystical writings, as a combination of Egyptian dogmatic subtlety with the pure and simple spirit of the new religion. Formerly known by the denunciations of the Fathers only, the first Coptic religious treatise was lately published from a manuscript in the British Museum, and created a sensation among learned theologians, hardly lessened by the mystic obscurity of part of the contents (Pistis Sophia, Opus Gnosticum edidit, latine vertit, &c., G. A. Schwartze). A vast number of similar religious works were written in the following centuries down to the Arabian conquest. Many books on various other subjects are extant, and the study that is now being bestowed on them will, we may hope, throw a new light on the first development of Christianity, and the still older culture of Egypt. As yet, a considerable portion of this literature is manuscript. Very valuable collections are preserved in London, Oxford, Paris, and Berlin. By far the most precious relics are deposited in the Library of the Vatican. The Catalogue raisonné of the Coptic books in his possession (Catalogus Bibliothecæ Borgianæ, ed. Zoëga) shows the Pope to have inherited the most important part of the New-Egyptian literature. When will the early traditions and legends of the Church, preserved in Egyptian at the Vatican, be published for the benefit of theologians and historians? The hope once entertained that much more might be discovered in the Coptic monasteries of Nubia, Abyssinia, and Jerusalem, has so far been disappointed. Hieroglyphic and Coptic literature together allow the Egyptian language to be investigated through a compass of over four thousand years. This is probably the only instance of so lasting a vitality all over the earth,—a áτağ λeyoμevov of philology. Chinese, and even part of Hindoo literature, may reach up nearly to the same age; but Chinese dates are still unexplored by European science, and Hindoo chronology evinces most strongly the characteristics of mythological confusion. Christianity and Christian literature were only transient phenomena in Egypt. When the Arabs conquered the country, the bulk of the inhabitants, being forced to turn Mussulmans, gradually forgot their native tongue. The reading and copying of religious books remaining, however, an obligatory rule in the Christian monasteries, Lower Egypt, by many MSS. of the tenth century, is proved not to have lost its language before the beginning of the eleventh. Arabic translations added to Coptic MSS. were introduced from and after this period. In Upper |