As Concerns Interpreting The Deity

This line of hieroglyphics was for fourteen years the
despair of all the scholars who labored over the mysteries of the
Rosetta stone: [Figure 1]

After five years of study Champollion translated it thus:

Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all
the temples, this upon pain of death.

That was the twenty-forth translation that had been
furnished by scholars. For a time it stood. But only for a
time. Then doubts began to assail it and undermine it, and the
scholars resumed their labors. Three years of patient work
produced eleven new translations; among them, this, by
Gr:unfeldt, was received with considerable favor:

The horse of Epiphanes shall be maintained at the public expense;
this upon pain of death.

But the following rendering, by Gospodin, was received by
the learned world with yet greater favor:

The priest shall explain the wisdom of Epiphanes to all these people,
and these shall listen with reverence, upon pain of death.

Seven years followed, in which twenty-one fresh and widely
varying renderings were scored--none of them quite convincing.
But now, at last, came Rawlinson, the youngest of all the
scholars, with a translation which was immediately and
universally recognized as being the correct version, and his name
became famous in a day. So famous, indeed, that even the
children were familiar with it; and such a noise did the
achievement itself make that not even the noise of the monumental
political event of that same year--the flight from Elba--was able
to smother it to silence. Rawlinson's version reads as follows:

Therefore, walk not away from the wisdom of Epiphanes, but
turn and follow it; so shall it conduct thee to the temple's
peace, and soften for thee the sorrows of life and the pains of
death.

Here is another difficult text: [Figure 2]

It is demotic--a style of Egyptian writing and a phase of
the language which has perished from the knowledge of all men
twenty-five hundred years before the Christian era.

Our red Indians have left many records, in the form of
pictures, upon our crags and boulders. It has taken our most
gifted and painstaking students two centuries to get at the
meanings hidden in these pictures; yet there are still two little
lines of hieroglyphics among the figures grouped upon the Dighton
Rocks which they have not succeeds in interpreting to their
satisfaction. These: [Figure 3]

The suggested solutions are practically innumerable; they
would fill a book.

Thus we have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries;
it is only when we set out to discover the secret of God that our
difficulties disappear. It was always so. In antique Roman
times