The Melchizedek Teachings in the Levant

95:3.1Al­though the cul­ture and re­li­gion of Egypt were chiefly de­rived from And­ite Mes­o­po­ta­mia and largely trans­mit­ted to sub­se­quent civ­i­liza­tions through the He­brews and Greeks, much, very much, of the so­cial and eth­i­cal ide­al­ism of the Egyp­tians arose in the val­ley of the Nile as a purely evo­lu­tion­ary de­vel­op­ment. Not­with­stand­ing the im­por­ta­tion of much truth and cul­ture of And­ite ori­gin, there evolved in Egypt more of moral cul­ture as a purely hu­man de­vel­op­ment than ap­peared by sim­i­lar nat­u­ral tech­niques in any other cir­cum­scribed area prior to the be­stowal of Mi­chael.

95:3.2Moral evo­lu­tion is not wholly de­pen­dent on rev­e­la­tion. High moral con­cepts can be de­rived from man’s own ex­pe­ri­ence. Man can even evolve spir­i­tual val­ues and de­rive cos­mic in­sight from his per­sonal ex­pe­ri­en­tial liv­ing be­cause a di­vine spirit in­dwells him. Such nat­u­ral evo­lu­tions of con­science and char­ac­ter were also aug­mented by the pe­ri­odic ar­rival of teach­ers of truth, in an­cient times from the sec­ond Eden, later on from Mel­chiz­e­dek’s head­quar­ters at Salem.

95:3.3Thou­sands of years be­fore the Salem gospel pen­e­trated to Egypt, its moral lead­ers taught jus­tice, fair­ness, and the avoid­ance of avarice. Three thou­sand years be­fore the He­brew scrip­tures were writ­ten, the motto of the Egyp­tians was: “Es­tab­lished is the man whose stan­dard is righ­teous­ness; who walks ac­cord­ing to its way.” They taught gen­tle­ness, mod­er­a­tion, and dis­cre­tion. The mes­sage of one of the great teach­ers of this epoch was: “Do right and deal justly with all.” The Egyp­tian triad of this age was Truth-Jus­tice-Righ­teous­ness. Of all the purely hu­man re­li­gions of Uran­tia none ever sur­passed the so­cial ide­als and the moral grandeur of this one­time hu­man­ism of the Nile val­ley.

95:3.4In the soil of these evolv­ing eth­i­cal ideas and moral ide­als the sur­viv­ing doc­trines of the Salem re­li­gion flour­ished. The con­cepts of good and evil found ready re­sponse in the hearts of a peo­ple who be­lieved that “Life is given to the peace­ful and death to the guilty.” “The peace­ful is he who does what is loved; the guilty is he who does what is hated.” For cen­turies the in­hab­i­tants of the Nile val­ley had lived by these emerg­ing eth­i­cal and so­cial stan­dards be­fore they ever en­ter­tained the later con­cepts of right and wrong—good and bad.

95:3.5Egypt was in­tel­lec­tual and moral but not overly spir­i­tual. In six thou­sand years only four great proph­ets arose among the Egyp­tians. Amen­emope they fol­lowed for a sea­son; Okhban they mur­dered; Ikh­na­ton they ac­cepted but half­heart­edly for one short gen­er­a­tion; Moses they re­jected. Again was it po­lit­i­cal rather than re­li­gious cir­cum­stances that made it easy for Abra­ham and, later on, for Joseph to ex­ert great in­flu­ence through­out Egypt in be­half of the Salem teach­ings of one God. But when the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies first en­tered Egypt, they en­coun­tered this highly eth­i­cal cul­ture of evo­lu­tion blended with the mod­i­fied moral stan­dards of Mes­o­po­ta­mian im­mi­grants. These early Nile val­ley teach­ers were the first to pro­claim con­science as the man­date of God, the voice of De­ity.