breast and came out unscathed. The story probably starts from a literalistic perversion of his appeal to God's future judgement of the Molten Metal, which is to be poured out at the Regeneration.1 Darmesteter puts the sequel suc cinctly.2 The king announced that the true religion having manifested itself in a visible way any false religion would be tolerated no more. That great religious event must have taken place about the year 330, for the persecution of the Christians began in that year. It was about the time when the Fathers at Nicaea organized Christianity into an orthodox state religion. So two great religions started a new course of seeming triumph together, and before many generations passed were alike on the high road to that decadence which always follows when Force is called in to help religion. In both cases Force was destined to change sides, and true prosperity to return with the loss of that false and dangerous ally. It should be stated, à propos of the quotation of the great French Orientalist, that we have put forward some undeniable and some very probable facts on the authority of a conspicuously accessible and proportionately misleading work, Darmesteter's, written during the last year of his life. The student who turns for information to the Sacred Books of the East will be careful to remember that no other scholar ever accepted the doctrine about the lateness of the Gathas there set forth, as an inference partly from the admitted facts about the Avesta in the Sassanian Reform. We may complete this chapter by recording in summary form the latest events in the ancient history of Parsi religion. The Sassanian era closed in blood and fire with the coming of Islam. Fanatical hordes of savage Arabs, faithful disciples of a prophet of a very different order from Zarathushtra, swept over Persia and brought the usual categorical alternative. The larger part of the Avesta was finally lost, and 1 See above, p. 32. 2 S. B. E., iv2, p. xlvii. the bulk of the Parsis accepted perforce the sorry substitute of the Koran. But a faithful remnant fled over the seas to Gujarat, where they were kindly harboured. There began the new chapter, strangely different from the old, which we shall take up later. It rarely happens that Ancient and Modern History divide with so palpable and simple a barrier. CHAPTER 4 ZARATHUSHTRA IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD Such times have not been since the light that led TENNYSON. IT must be admitted at the outset, lest this chapter should raise expectations not destined to be realized, that its results will be almost entirely negative. We shall mostly be engaged in asking why fragrance was destined to be wasted on desert air. Our previous inquiries have satisfied us that the Avesta is really fragrant—in parts, and that the parts about which we cannot say this are at any rate neutral: the moralist has never occasion to hold his nose as he goes through. Which cannot be said of all 'sacred' literature ! There are two leading reasons why it is not enough to reduce this chapter to 'The Avesta has always been practically unknown in the outside world'. In the first place, scholars of repute-though never scholars whose reputation was made in the field of Avestan learning-have often asserted the contrary. And secondly, the fact that the Avesta has circulated mostly in a desert will prove to be very suggestive in our estimate of the Parsi religion in later days. Most of the attempts made to trace the influence of the Avesta outside Iran have been in connexion with the history of Judaism. There are some obvious points of contact between the two religions. Take the doctrine of Evil. There is no question that the post-exilic Judaism had a doctrine rather markedly different from the pre-exilic. In the latest books of the Old Testament there emerges a being called 'the Adversary' (Sātān), who ultimately came to occupy a position remarkably like that of Angra Mainyu (' enemy spirit') in the Later or Magian Avesta. In Zarathushtra's teaching, and in that of the Second Isaiah', the One God is the Creator of light and darkness alike. Later generations made physical evil the work of a fiend. By the envy of the devil death entered into the world,' says the Wisdom of Solomon;1 and similarly Angra Mainyu is conspicuously the author of death in the system of the Magi. In both systems 'The Enemy' has a host of minor demons serving under him, and in both the fight between Good and Evil is to end in the destruction of the latter. When it is added that the Jews were exiled to Babylon, where they certainly would be in contact with the Magi, the conjecture is easy that they learnt their new doctrine from them. Easy-at first sight, and then very difficult. For in both cases we can trace the genesis of an idea and not merely note the coincidence of a name. At the outset this history seems to heighten the suggestion of borrowing. The Enemy Spirit in the Gathas is the twin of the Holier' (or 'Kindlier'), and we remember, of course, that at his earliest appearance in Hebrew literature the Satan' figures among 'the sons of God'.2 But there any resemblance ends. Putting aside the question whether 'the Enemy', once named in the Gathas, is identical with Falsehood, the really prominent fiend there, we note that the one thing predicated of him is that in 'neither thoughts nor teachings nor wills nor beliefs nor words nor deeds nor selves nor souls' do he and the Holier Spirit agree. He is accordingly before all things the antithesis of Good all round. What is the Satan'? His origin is transparently clear, and is unmistakable in two at least of the three places where he is named in the Old Testament. He is an angel strictly subordinate to Yahweh, whose function it is to test men's pretensions to righteousness. He is no more necessarily malignant than the Examiner who plays the same essential part in the University system, testing claims to an intellectual 1 Wis. 224. 2 Job 16, 21. hall-mark. But an Examiner whose ruling passion is to plough his candidates is bound to grow suspicious and illwilled! It was therefore good psychology which led Jewish thought on towards a conception of the Devil as simply a fiend. A profound instinct which pictured Omniscient Goodness as ever searching for a soul of goodness in things evil, refusing to quench the smouldering wick or break off the cracked reed, developed also the, appalling figure of a Fiend incomparably blacker than Ahriman out of the angel who could see the soul of evil in the goodness of a Job. The analysis of the history of this idea leads us then to realize that while there are many similarities between the developed pictures of Ahriman and Satan, they started from widely distant points, and converged only by accident. And, after all, this is profoundly natural. Once let the problem of Evil be solved, or helped to its solution, by a belief that there is a stream of tendency, not ourselves, making for unrighteousness, and a large measure of agreement is inevitable. The names of the two fiends coincide-when we put them into English! But theology as well as comparative philology has need to recognize that a word in one language never is the complete equivalent of a word in another. The Satan' is still in the New Testament avтídiкos, the adversary at law', the Accuser of the brethren', in accordance with his history. Angra Mainyu, 'the Enemy Spirit,' is pictured rather from the battle-field. But even if the words were complete equivalents, it would be laughable to deduce a common origin for so obvious an idea as this, that a spirit that tries to tempt us to our ruin is an Enemy! And so in all the rest of the picture, while coincidences abound, we always find divergence in the first stage. We only come back to the palpable fact that thought is bound to hit on similar solutions of similar problems, just because the human mind is similarly constituted, and has similar data to work upon. There are far too many investigators—especially in Germany-who, when they discover in distant countries the first dawn of the belief that two |