When treating of the sources whence civilisation flowed westward centuries before Greece and Rome appear, the historian turns to the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. For Egypt and Chaldea have meant so much to us all in our search after the chief influences on man's intellectual and spiritual history, and this with increasing warrant, because the more widely investigation is pushed, the more venerable is the past of both countries found to have been. In the case of Babylon we have seen that the art of writing--that index of culture--had passed the pictographic stage long before eight thousand years ago, while the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which probably came in with the dynasties, and therefore date from the reign of Menes, the first historical king, are some thirteen hundred years later, so far as their use in the Nile Valley is concerned. Hence the Babylonian script carries the palm in point of age. Fortunately the records of both these ancient civilisations are fairly continuous, of Babylonia to the downfall of the empire, and of Egypt to the present time. Assessing the contributions of each to human progress, the verdict appears to be in favour of Babylonia, and "we now know that, high as was the development of Egyptian civilisation in certain directions, it was by no means the fertile mother of other civilisations. All modern writers are agreed that religious cults and national customs are exactly what the Greeks did not borrow from Egypt, any more than the Hebrews borrowed thence their religion, or the Phœnicians their commerce." (Mr. Percy Gardner's _New Chapters in Greek History_, p. 193.) But if Egypt was no "house of bondage" to Israel, it has been the enslaver of Christendom. It fettered a faith, which had flourished in the freedom of the spirit, with Trinitarianism, Mariolatry, and Monasticism. Out of one or another of its triads emerged the dogma of the Christian Trinity, and in the child Horus, seated in the lap of Isis, we see the profound significance of the words, "Out of Egypt have I called my Son." The obelisk that fronts St. Peter's at Rome symbolises the historical fact that approach to the Christian Church is through the pronaos of the Egyptian temple.