pressed, that sin, with all its horrors, has still been made the servant of God, been compelled against its will to minister to the divine purposes. But in Parsism no such accommodation is either implied or permitted. Sin stands out not only as the enemy of God, as it does in Judaism, but as a frustrator of the plan of God. A Jew would never have admitted that anything could frustrate God's plan; to him the wrath of the wicked itself was made to praise God. But to the follower of Zoroaster every evil deed was for ever outside the gates of the divine kingdom. The acts of human sin could never be made stones in the temple of holiness. The development of goodness could only be promoted by goodness; there was no possibility of things evil being made to work together for a higher goal. The stream which flowed from the fountain of wickedness was a stream which never mingled with the waters of the pure sea; it held on its desolating way independent and alone.

For it is the doctrine of Zoroaster that this universe is not the work of a single being; it is the work of two. It has come from the hands both of a Principle of good and of a Principle of evil. This world has been made by two agents, Ormuzd and Ahriman. Ormuzd is the principle of good. He is embodied in the light, which is at once His garment and His symbol. He is the source of all beauty, the fountain of all purity, the origin of all morality;

from Him cometh down every good and every perfect gift. Ahriman is the principle of evil. His embodiment is the darkness, and this also both clothes and symbolises him. He is the source of all deformity, the fountain of all vileness, the origin of every violation of moral law; from him ascend those foul vapours which disturb the atmosphere of the world. Between these two agencies the life of the universe is divided. There are angels of light, and there are angels of darkness-the one obeying the will of Ormuzd, the other following the behests of Ahriman. The creatures beneath the angelic line are not separated by so hard-and-fast a division. Some have more of Ormuzd in them, some have more of Ahriman-all have something of both. This world, therefore, instead of being a dream, is a stern, waking battle-field, in which two competitors contend for empire. It is in all its parts a struggle between light and darkness, in which light strives to expel darkness, and darkness labours to exclude light. The struggle reaches its climax in man. Man is the microcosm of the universe. In him the forces that elsewhere play on a large scale at once diminish their scale and increase their intensity. Here Ormuzd and Ahriman meet in their deadliest conflict. Man, like everything else, has in him something of both; but, because he is man, he has more of both than all other things. struggle in him is therefore at the fiercest.

The

One

part of his nature is overshadowed by the darkness, the other is basking in the light. His soul is the battle-field between two competitors, and night and day the struggle is maintained with alternating success and with unvaried fury.

What is man's own part in this conflict I shall consider in the next chapter. In the meantime I want to ask, What position does this doctrine hold. in the development of the religious consciousness? That it is unscientific is beyond a doubt. That this world is the work of two principles is an idea which was too crude even for Brahmanism, and which is incompatible with the modern standpoints of evolution; though, singularly enough, something very like it has been promulgated in our day by one of the greatest English thinkers-Mr J. S. Mill. Waiving, however, this point, and conceding the unscientific character of the system, the question remains, What is its moral bearing? At first sight it might seem to indicate a religious decline. When we hear of a God whose power is limited by another power, our earliest impression is that we stand in the presence of a low spiritual life. But if we look deeper, and specially if we consider the historical circumstances of Parsism, we shall, in this case at least, come to an opposite conclusion. We have been taught from childhood to praise the choice of Solomon-to admire that state of mind which could

1 See his posthumous essay on Theism.

prefer the treasures of wisdom to the treasures of wealth. But now imagine that this narrative had been presented to us in another form. Let us suppose that before the eyes of Solomon there had floated the alternative of a choice not between wisdom and wealth in the abstract, but between wisdom and wealth in the nature of God. Let us conceive that in some critical hour it had been revealed to him that the constitution of this universe could no longer be deemed compatible with the existence both of perfect power and of perfect love, and that it would be necessary for him to give up from his creed either the one or the other. Let us suppose that in these circumstances Solomon had decided to hold by the ideal of perfect love, whatever else might go; what would our impression be of such a choice? Would it not be that the man had displayed a wonderful amount of moral insight? Should we not deem that, in preferring morality to physical strength, he had, for an Eastern, reached a remarkable height of development, and a height which was altogether above the ordinary level of his nation-a nation which habitually measured a man's moral purity precisely by the ratio of his outward and physical prosperity ?

Now, the case of Zoroaster is exactly parallel to this. He lived in an age when men had come to realise the difficulties of human life and the arduousness of the struggle for existence. The problem of

divine Providence had pressed upon his soul. It had become clear to him that, with his present amount of knowledge, he must adopt one or other of two alternatives: he must either hold that the Author of the universe was imperfectly good, or that He was imperfectly powerful. It was the choice of Solomon repeated, but repeated in the nature of God. Zoroaster was asked not to choose between morality and wealth for himself, but between morality and wealth for his Creator. Without hesitation he chose morality. He had every Eastern incentive to do the contrary. He was the member of an empire whose tastes and aims were physical-an empire which had set before itself the ideal of outward conquest as the highest goal of kinghood, and which was prosecuting that ideal with unflinching pertinacity. Would it have been surprising if a man trained in such a school should have preferred the physical to the mental, and should have deemed that attribute most divine which expressed most of sensuous power? And when, in his hour of crisis, in which he was called to choose between God's omnipotence and His holiness, he made his choice in favour of the latter, what can we think of such a decision? What but that the man who made it was far advanced in the spiritual life above the measure of his contemporaries? Is not his choice a declaration that to him the grandest thing about God is not that which men have hitherto worshipped-that the thing which he