The destructive qualities of the sun were never referred to, and that pitiless orb under which Egypt sweats and groans for the summer months each year had nothing in common with the gentle Father conceived by Akhnaton. The Aton was “the Lord of Love.” He was the tender nurse who “creates the man-child in woman, and soothes him that he may not weep”; whose love, to use an Egyptian phrase of exquisite tenderness, “makes the hands to faint.” His beams were “beauteous with love” as they fell upon His people and upon His city, “very rich in love.” “Thy love is great and large,” says one of Akhnaton’s psalms. “Thou fillest the two lands of Egypt with Thy love;” and another passage runs: “Thy rays encompass the lands.... Thou bindest them with Thy love.”
Surely never in the history of the world had man conceived a god who “so loved the world.” One may search the inscriptions in vain for any reference to a malignant power, to vengeance, to jealousy, or to hatred. The Hebrew psalmist said of God, “Like as a father pitieth his children, even so is the Lord merciful”; and Akhnaton, many a century before those words were written, attributed just such a nature to the Aton. The Aton was compassionate, was merciful, was gentle, was tender; He knew not anger, and there was no wrath in Him. His overflowing love reached down the paths of life from mankind to the beasts of the field and to the little flowers themselves. “All flowers blow,” says one of Akhnaton’s hymns, “and that which grows on the soil thrives at Thy dawning, O Aton. They drink their fill [of warmth] before Thy face. All cattle leap upon their feet; the birds that were in the nest fly forth with joy; their wings which were closed move quickly with praise to the living Aton.”
One stands amazed as one reads in pompous Egypt of a god who listens “when the chicken crieth in the egg-shell,” and gives him life, delighting that he should “chirp with all his might” when he is hatched forth; who finds pleasure in causing “the birds to flutter in their marshes, and the sheep to dance upon their feet.” For the first time in the history of man the real meaning of God, as we now understand it, had been comprehended; and the idea of a beneficent Creator who, though remote, spiritual, and impersonal, could love each one of His creatures, great or small, had been grasped by this young Pharaoh. God’s unspeakable goodness and loving-kindness were as clearly interpreted by Akhnaton as ever they have been by mortal man; and the wonder of it lies in this, that Akhnaton had absolutely nothing to base his theories upon. He was, so far as we know, the first man to whom God revealed Himself as the passionless, all-loving essence of unqualified goodness.